Pun Salad

So I was going to crack wise about this letter from New York Times editor Bill Keller, in which he responds to readers complaining about his decision to publish information on the government's secret program to examine international records for terrorist-financing activity. But then Paul at Wizbang summed it all up by providing a much shorter version:

Dear Reader:

1. We have no reason to believe the program was illegal in any way.

2. We have every reason to believe it was effective at catching terrorists.

3. We ran the story anyway, screw you.

Bill Keller

Also good on this issue is Soxblog:

I'm convinced that we'll look back at the New York Times' latest choice to reveal a classified program for battling terrorism as the left's bridge too far. In a way, this is unfair to the left. Being a religious reader of the liberal blogs (and what a week it's been on that front!), I've found nary a word of support for the Times' chosen course of action this time around. Normally these are people who relish trumpeting the Bush administration's purported trampling of our civil liberties; this time, they've been curiously mum.

BILL KELLER ISN'T VERY BRIGHT, or else he thinks you aren't.

On a totally unrelated matter (via Poor&Stupid), Malcolm Gladwell, is pretty put out with a recent NYT article on drug prices:

The Times' lead read: "Prices of the most widely used prescription drugs rose sharply in this year's first quarter." Wrong, wrong, wrong. It should have read: "Prices of the most widely used prescription drugs fell last year."

Correction, anyone?

And then there's this:

Maybe the problem will fix itself soon enough.

Things worth noting:

• The IMDB trivia notes: "This is a movie based on a play based on a movie about a play." Heh.

• Holy cats, it's long. One hundred and thirty-freakin-four minutes. Lots of funny stuff, but they could have cut out a good 30 minutes without losing any of it. (The original Producers clocked in at 88 minutes.)

• Nathan Lane is great, of course, but I kept thinking: if only the young Groucho Marx could somehow be brought back … he would have been beyond perfect in the role of Max Bialystock. Maybe in 20 years some kid will be able to do that on his desktop on a whim: sample Groucho's image, voice, and mannerisms from the Marx Brothers digital archive, and just plug him into Nathan Lane's part here.

  Or maybe that could happen next week. What do I know? What I do know is, I'd like to see it.

• Uma Thurman remains very easy on the eyes, and is pretty funny to boot.

• Ernie Sabella turns up in a deleted scene; as noted by the IMDB trivia (again), this is a reunion for Simba, Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King. Very cool!

• The DVD outtakes are marred by (I approximate) 536 scenes where Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane are giggling at each other. They could have cut that down a bit.

• Stay to the end of the credits to see Mel.