Michael Douglas looks really good and said he found out last week the tumor is gone, he's cancer free. Catherine Zeta Jones looks great.

Angelina is gorgeous is a green Versace. Love it. Lots of dark green tonight.

• Eva Longoria
• Nicole Kidman
• Natalie Portman (with baby bump)
• Julianne Hough

[ More...]

45,000 fans turned out last night at Ford Field in Detroit to help Kid Rock celebrate his 40th birthday.

I liked the part of the clip (at 2:33) when a fan puts something on the stage, he bends down to pick it up, looks at it, and puts in his back pocket. Doesn't miss a beat. At 2:42, he asks the crowd how they feel, and he yells back, "I feel f**cking great" and then launches back into "All Summer Long" -- "We were trying different things, we were smoking funny things...Sweet home Alabama." (Thanks to MLive for not blocking censoring it.)

Kid Rock is a great personal ambassador for the city. But in their day, so were the MC5 (Kick out the Jams); Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Bob Seger, Commander Cody, and even Alice Cooper.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Update: Miss Nebraska, who answered a question about Wikileaks, calling it espionage and saying that government security is more important than the public's right to know, wins. Need we say more?

I really had no intention of watching Miss America. It's a cringe-inducing, fake imitation of a Norman Rockwell America.

But I turned it on by accident during the first 15 minutes (in the midst of the introductions, complete with corny one liners for each state, blinding white teeth and overblown hair. ) It's the proverbial train wreck you can't turn away from. I don't think I've ever seen so many unattractive women in the show (although I've probably never watched one from start to finish.) So many had crooked smiles, uneven eyes or noses, and overly long faces. And what was the big deal about the bald contestant, since she wore a wig the whole time?

The swimsuit competition: Three or four had stunning bodies and knew how to move them, but so many looked like a commercial for breast implants, and one had thighs so out of proportion to her body it was embarrassing to watch. She looked like a linebacker. [More...]

Matt Yglesias seems to be saying that the significance of the political debate in America is overstated:

What should be avoided is the tendency to dramatically overstate the ideological stakes in our political debates. The choice between Democratic candidates and Republicans ones is important and has important consequences. But in the grand scheme of things, you’re seeing what’s basically a friendly debate between two different varieties of the liberal tradition. I think efforts to elide the difference between the religiously inflected populist nationalism of George W Bush and the religiously inflected populist nationalism of Mullah Omar are really absurd, as are the efforts by Glenn Beck to elide the difference between the progressive income tax and Joseph Stalin.

(Emphasis supplied.) Yglesias is doing two things here. The first is saying that in the "grand scheme of things," there is not much to choose from between Republicans and Democrats. I think that is absurd at this point in time. As regular readers know, I have had a lot to criticize regarding the Obama Administration, but the idea that there are not fundamental differences of governing philosophy with the Bush Administration strikes me as one of the dumber things written in some time. More . . .

(Just click on the "close" to get rid of the ad."

Jon Stewart mocks the partisian media criticism of the Tucson Memorial Service. Mediaite's description:

Stewart takes the high road and allows the words of his subjects damn themselves with partisan sniping completely at odds with what seemed to be the whole point of Obama’s speech.

Don't miss Stewart's blast of Michelle Malkin.

Glenn Greenwald documents the latest in the Media's continuing war on Wikileaks:

Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson [. . .] pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks in which American diplomats revealed that Tsvangirai, while publicly opposing American sanctions on his country, had privately urged their continuation as a means of weakening the Mugabe regime[. . . .] This accusation against WikiLeaks was repeated far and wide. In The Wall Street Journal, Jamie Kirchick [. . .] wrote under this headline: "Julian Assange's reckless behavior could cost Zimbabwe's leading democrat his life." [. . .] The Atlantic's Chris Albon [. . echoed the same accusation[.]

There was just one small problem with all of this: it was totally false. It wasn't WikiLeaks which chose that cable to be placed into the public domain, nor was it WikiLeaks which first published it. It was The Guardian that did that.

In an update, Greenwald writes:

Mahablog links to Michelle Malkin whining about "criminalizing conservatism." I'm not sure what Malkin is talking about, but if I were a conservative, I would not want Malkin leading the charge on this issue. Here's one reason why:

Right now, [Michelle Malkin] is happily wrapped in one of her typical controversies: a crew of students at UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater, protested some military recruiters, and Malkin got hold of a press release with their personal contact information -- a poorly conceived inclusion on the students' part, but then, these are undergraduates, not trained media flacks. Rather than calling and speaking to them herself, which is what members of the press are supposed to use such releases for, Malkin published their personal information on her website, prompting her hordes of orcish mouth-breathers to brandish their pitchforks and inundate the unsuspecting students with death threats [. . .] When the students frantically called on Malkin to remove their numbers, she posted their contact information again.

(Emphasis supplied.) If I was a conservative, I would not be choosing Malkin as my lead advocate on this issue right now.

Speaking for me only

Good piece from Gail Collins:

Today, the amazing thing about the reaction to the Giffords shooting is that virtually all the discussion about how to prevent a recurrence has been focusing on improving the tone of our political discourse. That would certainly be great. But you do not hear much about the fact that Jared Loughner came to Giffords’s sweet gathering with a semiautomatic weapon that he was able to buy legally because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004 and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it.

Read the whole thing, which includes this story -- "In 2009, Gabrielle Giffords was holding a “Congress on Your Corner” meeting at a Safeway supermarket in her district when a protester, who was waving a sign that said “Don’t Tread on Me,” waved a little too strenuously. The pistol he was carrying under his armpit fell out of his holster."

Talk Left almost certainly disagrees with the views expressed in this post, thus I am speaking for me only.

Via rikyrah:

Bryan Cranston, the Emmy Award winning lead on AMC's "Breaking Bad" (where he plays a high school chemistry teacher who runs a meth lab while in remission from cancer) has a new series, available only on the web, called "The Handlers."

He plays a well-meaning politician running for state senate, who gets some really wacky advice from his incompetent handlers. The segments are only 3 minutes, and they are really funny. There will be 8 episodes in all, available on Atom TV. Here are the first two:

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American journalists, unlike many of their foreign counterparts, have a strong commitment to objectivity and nonpartisanship. - Newsweek

Glenn Greenwald discusses Peter Maas' New Yorker piece on "Armed Forces Media" (the Establishment Media) and how the Media is subservient to the interests of the American government. Glenn's piece is good and in a postscript, he pointed to the Newsweek article I quote at the top of this post. A laughable statement of course, but more than that, what's missing is even a feigned commitment to reporting the truth. The fact is the Wikileaks situation has been an exposing moment for "journamalism." I'll explain why I think so on the flip.

Stanley Fish writes about the latest bout of handwringing from the usual suspects about the "anonymous" Internet. The centerpiece of his discussion is a new collection of essays edited by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum titled The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy and Reputation.

According to Fish (I have not and will not buy the book at $23), Nussbaum asks "“what can be done about irresponsible information” spread by the Internet, a medium that allows slander to “be done with a few keystrokes, with complete anonymity, and . . . with no fear that the Internet provider on whose website the slur is found will somehow be held responsible for incorrect . . . or defamatory statements”? " Before Nussbaum and her cohorts answer that question, perhaps they can deal with the problem of irresponsible information spread through respectable outlets by named persons that recklessly lead us to wars, irresponsible tax policy and nonsensical public discourse, like this volume and Fish's column. More . . .