When the deficit was $400 billion and unemployment 5.4%, the Treason Media told us that Dubya and the Stupid Party were reckless spendthrifts and it was a "jobless recovery."

We now have $1.4 TRILLION deficits and 10% unemployment - actually higher when you factor in those who've given up looking - and we're told that a new Golden Age of Wonder has dawned and no matter what the Chinese and those lending us money say, the only thing that will truly save us is Cap & Tax and ObamaCare on top of what's already been done..

What media bias?

I'm sorry. I do recaps for a movie forum and my movie blog (DirkFlix) and part of my shtick is to refer to characters by nicknames or previous roles the actors have had - e.g. "Regis" because the actor playing the Arab leader was the Regis Philben character in Slumdog Millionaire' "Bubba Gump" because Myklti Williams was Bubba in Forrest Gump, Lifetime Starbuck for Katee Sackoff's woeful character, etc.

Yes, Bill Buchanan was good, but how many times are people going to doubt Jack after all he's done. You'd think by now, the President and her lackeys would say, "Oh, goodie! Jack Bauer's on the case. We is saved. Order sandwiches!"

24 used to be the TV show I'd rearrange my life around to see. "Gee, Angelina Jolie, while I appreciate that you've left the kids with Brad and wish to take me out for pizza followed by hours of ferocious lovemaking, it's 8:55 pm and the Jack Bauer Power Hour is coming on. You're welcome to watch it with me and then take me out." However, this season has been just awful and it's depressing to have to say that after Jack saves the country again, they should just let him go be Grandpa and let 24 fade away.

The fundamental problem is that almost every plot line is either boring or annoying. Lifetime Starbuck's abusive boyfriend problem is the worst. She's in a bunker where Buford from Asthmatic Goat, WV can't get into. HANG UP ON HIM! Sure, he could squeal on you, but the greater question is how is it that CTU still can't seem to run a basic background on its employees? That the director, Bubba Gump, is an idiot goes without saying. Wouldn't it be nice for a change to see a boss on this show who was at least as smart as the lowly analysts moving drones and looking after the servers?

The whole Prez Cherry and Slumdog Regis thread is a snore. Jeez, she was strong enough to throw her traitor daughter in jail and lose her wimpy husband, but she's still yammering on about treaties and blah-blah-woof-woof? Yawn. Regis' mistress, evil brother, angry wife, and his crackdown at home are all boring. The Russians are another dead end. The boss and his sons was predictable and the lower level ones Renee is involved with are low-rent.

This leads to the really big problem: What is the major threat this year. With the Regis assassination thwarted, what we're left with is Renee's nihilism and some nuclear fuel rods being sold. Wow! I hope my heart can take the excitement! (Ahem.) Even if the deal goes down, what's the menace? They were going to go to the brother to nuke-power his coup, but with him on the run and Regis locking down his country, even if all the bad guys do their best, it's a problem for ages down the road, not in the next 18 hours.

After the lame Season 6 which was like Mad Libs of previous seasons, Season 7 was at least entertaining, if not realistic. (Even by the standards of the 24 universe.) Sure, we had to swallow that African commandos could seize the White House, Blackwater would launch a cruise missile attack on our soil to prove a point, and all the craziness around the familiar "the threat has been averted, no, wait, there's another threat, but after that's stopped, the REAL real threat will surface" structure, but at least it was FUN. There's no fun to be had right now. Seriously, other than Jack axing the hit men in Hour 2 and Renee sawing the thumb off in Hour 4, what has happened that was a topic around the water cooler on Tuesday?

When Joel Surnow left and it was announced that 24 would be taken in a more "liberal" direction, they should've specified that they meant the "boring, derivative, creatively lackluster" version of liberalism, not the self-hating, anti-American version which thankfully hasn't manifested and turned 24 into "Michael Moore's 24."

While I thought the script was woefully thin and could've been easily improved to provide a less Manichean scenario, I find the level of discourse here at Big Hollywood pathetic. From John Nolte's misleading and hate-filled review to the knuckle-dragging comments of the posters, it's given me a reminder why I rarely remember to check out Big Hollywood when a site like this should be right up my alley: The correct response to ignorant, hateful liberal bias isn't ignorant, hateful conservative bias. Article after article and comment after comment is little more than "Them Hollyweird libtards is bashing on us and they can all burn in Hell and die!!!" Yeah, real deep insight there. It's hard to argue against the stereotype of conservatives as revanchist killjoys when they seem to be just that here.

Spike has also done alright with scripts by other writers like "The 25th Hour" and "Inside Man" had him making Jodie Foster into a genuinely hot, sexy babe in a movie. If you trim the bookends off "Malcolm 10" - the King beating and "I am Spartacus" ending - and you have a great biopic that would've won Denzel Washington an Oscar if Spike could've kept his retarded mouth shut and not infamously spouted off in the Esquire article entitled, "Spike Lee Hates Your Cracker Ass."

That a guy who can afford floor seats to the Knicks to grouse about American racism is ludicrous. (Note correct spelling.) Maybe that's why he's so angry: he's paying top dollar for the KNICKS! The scene that really puts the lie to the idea that Spike is a purely dishonest race player is the scene where the corner men talk about the Korean grocer and how he has become successful from nothing:

"Look at those Korean [Oedipus]s across the street. I betcha they haven't been a year off da [Oedipus]ing boat before they opened up their own place. A [Oedipus]ing year off the A [Oedipus]ing year off the [Oedipus]ing boat and got a good business in our neighborhood occupying a building that had been boarded up for longer than I care to remember and I've been here a long time. Too long! Too long. Now for the life of me, I haven't been able to figger this out. Either dem Koreans are geniuses or we Blacks are dumb."

BTW, any praise for DTRT has to be shared with Ernest Dickerson for his stunning primary color cinematography and swooping camera.

When Wall-E came out, I saw an opinion piece that posited that while the liberals were dancing around thinking it was an anti-capitalist (especially Walmart) movie, it was actually a slam on what will happen when people have everything done for them by an all-providing government, thus turning them into overgrown baby-people incapable of independent function. How far are we from this vision of the future as we spend out lives looking at little screens instead of the world around us? "There's a pool?", summed things up nicely, methinks.

Pixar is the new Disney with only one really awful movie on their CV. ("Cars" was utter crap, other than it being about a world straight from Al Gore's nightmares.) They're the rare outfit whose product gets better on subsequent viewings; I left "Finding Nemo", "Monsters Inc.", and "The Incredibles" in theaters feeling favorably toward them, but not enamored, only later to really love them. "Ratatouille" and "Wall-E" never quite got to the "love it" stage, and "Cars", as mentioned, was rusty, clumsy, stupid claptrap.

I wish I could go see this in 3D, but my girlfriend can't see the effect due to her eyesight, so it'll have to suffice in 2D. However, if the storytelling is sound, the lack of eye candy won't be too badly missed, as with the weird little gem, "Coraline."

The ignorance in this story is the lazy, fact-challenged author who is so invested in her thesis that she doesn't even know or care that Green Day was a huge commercial success a full decade before her twisted history implies. That the herd of equally ignorant followers cheerfully echo her opprobrium for Wal-Mart, Green Day or whoever - I stopped reading the article in the first sentence when I realized that facts were tossed in favor of fury - merely reinforces the Left's stereotype that conservatives don't think and lie all the time. Way to fail there, folks!

It doesn't matter that the Left has a free pass to lie and distort; freedom-loving conservatives need to be beyond reproach in their arguments or else they will be disqualified on the gross errors. It's hard to accurately portray your target when you can't get the simple facts right. If you want to make an example of Angelina Jolie's refusal to marry the father of her children, you wouldn't start your editorial by saying, "she never really got famous until her sex tape boosted her into a role on Baywatch."

I just saw an editor of mine post that he was "glad, once again, that we elected the right guy. What a refreshing change to have a leader the world respects again."

We're the same age with very similar tastes, but politically he is the polar opposite, believing in ManBearPig and other crazy stuff. As a result, I am forced to bite my tongue (via my keyboard) and cannot reply, "If by 'leader the world respects' you mean, 'feckless punk who the world can slap around like an asthmatic 12-year-old and take his lunch money," then, yeah, we elected the right guy."

It's ironic that I have to endure the stomach ache and worry for my position lest the self-proclaimed "tolerant" and "diverse" folks catch wind of my views.

Thank you. One comment I left out (but have noted elsewhere) is that as awful as "Poop" was, it at least had some verve to it. "No Bars" is just sleepwalking banality. There isn't a single moment as stirring as the modulation at the end of "Walk On" that slingshots the song into the outro.

The Rolling Stones fizzled out in the mid-Eighties as their comfy lifestyles sedated them into irrelevance, but U2's decline has been more distressing, partially because they were the "Great Band" for my Gen X cohort, but also as recently as 2002 they still had some juice in them. While some may resent Saint Bono globetrotting Third World hellholes with his $150 D&G shades on, that's not what's behind my disappointment in this album; it's lameness is.

U2 was one of the few acts I would still schlep down to the Beast Buy to plunk down my Hamilton to blind (deaf?) buy their latest on the day it came out. When the album leaked a couple weeks early, I decided to try before I bought and I am so glad I didn't waste a farthing for this turgid bore of an album.

Background: I've been a fan of theirs since 1980 when a high school pal had a t-shirt for their "Boy" album. My band covered "I Will Follow" at our annual Big 80s show last year. I have all their albums except for "Poop" (as I call it), which was such half-baked mess due to their having to push it out the door in time for the already-planned tour. (I gave that to my girlfriend with whom our first real date was a Zoo TV concert in 1992.)

I thought "All That You Can't Leave Behind" was the sound of a band with nothing to prove casually rebounding from their self-inflicted irony overload and delivering a solid album. I call "How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb" a "Wonderbra album" because what was up front - the sublime "Vertigo" - was just a tease because what came after was a flat experience that sounded like the Edge scrolling thru his guitar effect presets of classic tones.

Where "No Bars on the Verizon" (heh) flops is that the laziness and distractedness of the lyrics are only compounded by the lackluster music. Larry is playing the same beats; the best lick in the title track is the one Edge nicked from "The Fly"; every song is a slow to mid-tempo dirge except "Get On Your Boots" which serves as a midpoint wake-up nudge more than an exciting and memorable song.

Most critics are just rubber-stamping 5-star/A+ reviews for this thing like they automatically award the latest loaves pinched by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, or any act that bashed Dubya. Fans who can't cope with the idea that their beloved band could fail are happy-talking, too. But for those still able to see whether the monarch dressed for the day or not, "No Bars" is the sound of a band that should decide whether they want to save the world or save their musical reputations.