Blake Edwards, director of many screwball comedies, died today* of pneumonia.  His movies included Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther, and Victor/Victoria, starring his wife, Julie Andrews.

Enjoy “The Pink Flea” and some Henry Mancini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36JbQcZkYMQ

*Update/Clarification thanks to the LA Times: Early today for the East Coast, he actually died last night (10:30 PST) in Santa Monica. Damn Gray Lady and her East Coast centrism.

[NYT]

Jim DeMint recently had some choice words for Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. Incensed at Reid’s plan to keep congress in session until several key spending bills and an arms control treaty had passed, DeMint noted just how un-Christian a thing this was to do:

We shouldn’t be jamming a major arms control treaty up against Christmas; it’s sacrilegious and disrespectful,” he told POLITICO. “What’s going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did the same thing last year – they kept everybody here until [Christmas Eve] to force something down everybody’s throat. I think Americans are sick of this

As logically unassailable as DeMint’s brilliant analysis of the sacreligious underpinnings of Reid’s move is, we think his most salient and insightful revelation is just how sick the American people are of Jim DeMint being forced to go to work right on up to Christmas Eve itself. This new insight piqued our interest and made us wonder: what other things does Jim DeMint think that the American people are sick of? So we did a little research and came up with the following. After the jump:  Five Things the American People are Sick of (according to Jim DeMint) Read more »

Is Fox defecting on the “War on Christmas”? [Media Matters]

In October, Fox News launched “Fox News Latino,” a site dedicated to attracting Latino readers. And within two months, they managed to find a way to insult their audience in an article about Spanish actress  Penélope Cruz’s announcement that she will have her baby in Los Angeles with an article entitled “Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem Are Having an Anchor Baby.”

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First Baptist Dallas is collecting casualty statistics from the War on Christmas. A few samples:

• “Even though the restaurant has put up Christmas decorations, if you’re an employee and answer the phone, we have been told to say ‘Happy Holidays.'”
• “Employees would only respond with ‘you too’ when wished a Merry Christmas.”
• “Excessive use of ‘holiday’, no mention of Christmas. With a name like American Airlines, come on.”
• “They refuse to allow the admissions offices at any site to put up anything that may be offensive to those seeking information about the university. That is anything of a Christmas nature.”
• “Though I am a frequent flyer with Delta they did not mind offending me, a Christian, with an email stating ‘Happy Holidays From The Delta Family’.”

Surely somebody can come up with better horror stories than that…

Grinch Alert

“Clay Duke, the man who opened fire on a Florida school board Tuesday, posted a ‘last testament’ on Facebook decrying the wealthy and linking to a slew of progressive sites including theprogressivemind.info and MediaMatters.org.” [TheBlaze]

Our guest columnist is Amazon reviewer loosenut, writing presciently in 2005.

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!” But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

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