The unanswered question in all this is: Has anyone told the president? As recently as last week, a White House spokesperson reiterated Bush's "full confidence" in the troubled bureaucrat, stating that the president believes Wolfowitz "has done a very good job at the World Bank." Maybe compared to the Iraq debacle, but not in the eyes of World Bank staffers, who depicted a leadership in distress even before the current scandal blew up.

The Blog | Robert Scheer: Heck of a Job, Wolfie | The Huffington Post

I was going to post about this "full confidence" quote and tie it up to saying that of course Bush has "full confidence" in Wolfowitz - he's done a "heck of a job" both in Iraq "planning" in finding corruption at the World Bank. ("I is in ur bank, paying my gurlfriendz.") Besides, name *one* instance of Bush changing his opinion on anybody based on facts. He doesn't need facts - he has both a gut AND a higher father!

Sadly, while I was trying to find the news story with the best combination of direct Bush quote and being site-reasonably-likely-to-not-be-denounced-as-partisan I realized I had been beaten to the punch. Dang. (And for the record, no I don't consider Huffington Post a site-reasonably-likely-to-not-be-denounced-as-partisan, but this is the link that directly connects the two concepts, so there you go.)

technorati tags:Wolfowitz, WorldBank

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Last night I watched the series pilot for Sci-Fi channel's new show: Painkiller Jane. It wasn't terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't good either. I'm not familiar with the comic book, but the world-building seemed shallow to me - all "Neuros" (the mutants of the show) were up to no good. There was some technobabble about how this was because the mutation affected the brain's ability to tell right from wrong, but that's weak sauce and it justifies the overly simplistic black/white division into secret government organization (the good guys) fighting the mutants (the bad guys).

Throw in Kristanna Loken's wooden delivery and it's not a winner (in Terminator 3 her delivery made sense - she's a terminator. When she's a (presumably human) DEA agent it's less believable). The worst part of it the only time she showed any plausible emotion is when she was in pain - but wait, I thought she was immune to pain? Throw in the terrible writing of the voiceovers  and it's not a winner - the line where she says "I didn't just overcome pain - I murdered it." was especially awful but not unique. It took me a couple of episodes of Dresden Files to decide it wasn't going to get better, but I'm ready to give up on this one after the pilot.

But hey, Eureka comes back in July, and Heroes finally resumes next week (yay!). So the short-term prognosis for televised sci-fi ain't that bad!

technorati tags:SciFi, Television, PainkillerJane

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