Back in September I stayed at two hotels in Manhattan, The Benjamin and Doubletree Suites. Both were notably expensive.

The Doubletree flat out sucked, and the Internet access I paid $10.00 a day for was beyond useless. I lost several posts I’d put a lot of time into. I did the angry guest routine, which isn’t me at all unless I become really peeved, and they credited me the money I’d spent on web access. Whooptie Doo! That’s enough, I needn’t go into the prices of items, even snack foods that cost a buck or two, in the minibar.

The suite I had at the Benjamin was beautiful, but again, the web access was iffy and a room service breakfast of sausages, eggs, potatoes, toast, orange juice, milk and a pot of coffee cost me $52.00 or thereabouts, a steak dinner with dessert and milk and a glass of brandy some $20.00 over a C-note.

Room service waiters in Manhattan must be required to take a course on how to look someone straight in the eye when presenting the check, exchange pleasantries and depart without gleefully shouting, “Sucker!”

But it is New York, after all, and according to AP writer David B. Caruso, A Night In New York Costs More Than Ever.

Hotel prices set wallet-busting records in New York City in 2005 after a long, slow recovery from the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The average daily price of a room in the city hit $292 in November, according to the hospitality industry analysis firm PKF Consulting. Figures for December weren’t yet available, but the city is a lock to break its previous record yearlong average of $237 per night, set in 2000.

Prices were high in every corner of town, from the noisy motels jammed into industrial neighborhoods near Kennedy Airport to the palaces near Central Park.

They’ll leave the light on for you…

I am a serious coffee afficionado, one for whom awakening or finishing a delicious meal, or simply hanging out are all synonymous with a good cup o’ java, but this is just a bit much.

Would you pay $175 for a pound of coffee beans which had passed through the backside of a furry mammal in Indonesia?

Apparently, some coffee lovers wanting to treat themselves to something special are lapping it up.

Kopi Luwak beans from Indonesia are rare and expensive, thanks to a unique taste and aroma enhanced by the digestive system of palm civets, nocturnal tree-climbing creatures about the size of a large house cat.

I love Jamaican Blue Mountain and during the limited time each year the crop is being harvested have no qualms with spending $40.00 a pound(for maybe 5 lbs., which I refrigerate and treat like gold), but I’m definitely not gonna drink coffee from beans that have been processed as turds.

Ewwww!

And a well written viewpoint by Kathleen Parker,

“The president has authorized a domestic spying program without court approval” sounds like Big Brother is breathing down all our necks. “The president has authorized national security agents to wiretap suspected terrorists” sounds like common sense.

Thus, try as I might, I can’t muster outrage over what appears to be a reasonable action in the wake of 9/11. As a rule, I’m as averse as anyone to having people “spying” on me. I’m also as devoted to protecting civil liberties as any other American.

But the privilege of debating our constitutional rights requires first that we be alive. If federal agents want to listen in on suspected terrorists as they plot their next mass murder, please allow me to turn up the volume.

Meanwhile, unless I start placing calls to Peshawar using phrases such as “I want my 72 virgins now,” then I figure I’m safe to make my next hair appointment without fear of exposure. OK, fine, so I highlight.

Read the entire column here.

Wesley Pruden’s got some good ideas on why Hollywood isn’t doing as well at the box office these days.

…the idea is dawning on the little minds of Hollywood that maybe the great gullible moviegoing public is fed up with junk — the endless car chases, the mechanical sex, the gore and guts, the mindless plots and maybe even the relentless sneering at red-state values. Hollywood has forgotten how to tell a story, or to recognize one. One screenwriter who must remain anonymous so he can continue to lunch in this town says that’s why there are so many remakes.
“No one has any confidence in what they’re doing. So if someone suggests remaking ‘Titanic’ for the fourth time, everyone says, ‘Yeah, great, that one always makes money.’ Or they’ll pay a lot of money for a book and only use the title, because they figure if someone in New York thinks the story was good enough to put in a book it must be OK.”

I can’t say as I feel all that bad about Hollywood’s misfortunes, seeing as the film industry’s taken such an adversarial position towards everything even remotely patriotic, or anything at all construable as American for that matter.

The European observers — responsible for monitoring the crossing and ensuring the terms of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement are upheld — fled the area, fearing the situation was getting out of control, the officials said.

So what we’re talking here is fleeing Europeans.

As to those who run, let them run… We don’t need cowards and we need appeasers even less.

Bye bye, Eurofux…

For most of this year, I’ve wondered about the abrupt absence, which commenced in January, of one of my favorite all-time bloggers, the Dissident Frogman. I seriously missed his posts.

Checking my email a few minutes ago, there he was!

YES!!!!

So…

ATLANTA - At the end of a losing battle during the past legislative session, Georgia state Rep. Alisha Thomas Morgan burst into the civil rights anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” to protest the passage of a law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls.

W, as they say, TF!!!?

In the next session starting Jan. 9, the 27-year-old black Democrat says she will not be moved in her fight to get the law repealed.

“It’s whatever it takes,” Morgan said. “I’m putting on the armor. Nothing they can do will fix the bill. It’s a bad law and it needs to be repealed. We’re not going backwards.”

Thomas and other black lawmakers know they are in for a battle as Republicans stand determined to defend the law, which requires voters who do not have a driver’s license to buy a state-issued ID card for as much as $35 — a fee critics say hurts the poor, the elderly and minorities.

The entire article is here.

First, to establish something we know in advance will be blown up into a racial event{look for appearances by the usual suspects, like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and perhaps even Louis Farrakhan}, this is not a racial issue, and the very idea that low income folks are so poor that they cannot somehow produce enough money for the onetime purchase of state I.D. is ludicrous. I’d also like to point out that there are a whole lot of dirt poor white families in both rural areas and major cities, I happen to have met both examples, so this law does not only require low income minorities to produce picture I.D. at the polls.

I refer you to California; I recently moved from there to the east coast, but I’ve voted numerous times in San Francisco. My polling place, as a matter of interest, was a Honda dealership at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Market Street, which was once the site of Bill Graham’s Fillmore West. I used to own a live double album, on vinyl, recorded there by the Allman Brothers’ Band.

There, in the lap of the liberal capital of this solar system, I was required to produce both my voter’s registration card and… California picture I.D.

Times have changed since the days when you could write a personal check at a store you’d never been to before on the strength of merely producing a checkbook.

Today, the country plays host to millions of illegal aliens who would simply love the opportunity to vote for political candidates sympathetic to their illicit cause(essentially that of allowing them the same rights as documented citizens while allowing them to remain “off the books”), and without adequate identification requirements, a single illegal could make the rounds of every poll in his or her city and vote in every one.

There’s also the fact that anyone else could do the same — vote several times under several different names using identifiers like Social Security cards and utility bills that don’t have photos on them.

It’s bad enough that each state has its own voting authority that isn’t linked to the other forty-nine. Back when Bush defeated Gore in the 2000 election, the Mainstream Media made a big deal about hanging chads in Florida and so forth, accusing Bush of “stealing the election,” but they totally ignored the issue of many thousands more liberals from New York, having moved to Florida, voting at polls in Florida while also voting by absentee ballot in New York.

So can the race card, Alicia T. Morgan, the law requiring showing valid picture I.D. at the polls is perfectly justified.

Raven has the latest scoop on U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

Michael Yon’s latest post is a short piece that links to a CNN report which actually talks about one of the many positives by our troops in Iraq that the MSM usually makes a point of ignoring. The post is titled News That Boosts Morale.

Mr. Ogre’s got some more reasons why I’m going to find adjusting to my new state’s(I just bought a house in Charlotte, NC) liberal political make-up something of a challenge, LOL, with Education Money Myth and Prohibition Continues In NC.

Pat’sRick addresses the 6th Circuit’s conclusion{a resounding slap in the face for the Marxist scumbag traitors of the ACLU}, that the Constitution does not demand a wall of separation between Church & State.

And speaking of enemies of the state, Michelle Malkin’s got a great post on her site about The Do-Nothing ACLU.

Have a good read.

Nathan Tabor, in Human Events Online, goes streamlined and point blank with If Spying Works, Let’s Do It.

We all see the blatantly, often ridiculously politically correct scripting of today’s Hollywood output, much of this going so far beyond the boundaries of reality(at least for most of those of us who don’t write for, direct, produce or act in the film industry) that one has to wonder how far afield from the rest of America and the world these denizens of the lower left coast have actually migrated.

But the above only scratches the surface of goings-on in an industry that seems to have lost its soul — today’s movies, even those meant for thirteen year olds, are filled with material that was once rated a firm “R”. It seems Hollywood feels the kids need some generous helpings of world class sexual demonstration and profoundly graphic violence in order to develop into proper modern adults.

And there is an increasing anti-American, leftist element being worked into scripts as the almost entirely anti-war, Bush hating liberal contingent that rules the roost in Hollywood uses its “art” as a vehicle for pushing political agendas that not too many decades ago would have seen them lynched by vast crowds of patriotic Americans.

Victor Davis Hanson is spot-on in a column titled Hollywood’s Misunderstood Terrorists.

When terrorism goes to the movies in the post-Sept. 11 world, we might expect the plots, characters and themes to reflect some sort of believable reality. But in Hollywood, the politically correct impulse now overrides all else. Even the spectacular pyrotechnics, beautiful people and accomplished acting cannot hide it.

Instead, moviegoers can anticipate before the opening credits that those characters who work for the American government or are at war with terrorists will likely be portrayed as criminals, incompetents or people existing on the same moral plane as killers.

Too true.

Take this fall’s “Flightplan,” in which the U.S. air marshal on board and a flight attendant turn out to be the true terrorists. Meanwhile, four Middle Eastern males are unfairly put under suspicion in the lynch-mob atmosphere on the plane.

The film warns us that the real threat after Sept. 11 is certainly not young Middle Eastern males on planes who might hijack or crash them into iconic American buildings. No, more dangerous in Hollywood’s alternate universe are the flight officials themselves — who in reality on Sept. 11 battled terrorists only to have their throats cut before being blown up with all the passengers.

Read it all.

Max Boot has more to say on the subject.

…for 60 years, Hollywood has had no problem making movies that depict World War II as a struggle of good versus evil. Rightly so. Because for all the Allies’ faults, they were the good guys.

For some reason, Hollywood can’t take an equally clear-eyed view of the war on terrorism. The current conflict, pitting the forces of freedom against those of Islamo-fascism, is every bit as clear cut as World War II. Yet fashionable filmmakers insist on painting both sides in shades of gray, as if Israeli secret agents or American soldiers were comparable to Al Qaeda killers. Two of the most serious holiday flicks — “Syriana” and “Munich” — are case studies in mindless moral relativism and pathetic pseudo-sophistication.

Keep reading.

What gets me is that even though film revenues are off because Americans have grown tired of seeing our way of life and those who defend it being perpetually demeaned at the movies and out of the mouths of Hollywood celebrities in their endless barrage of Bush bashing, these clueless, anti-American morons continue to sabotage their own collective source of income.