Pun Salad

• Sad news: Dean Barnett has passed away. I only knew him through his blogging, initially at Soxblog, then over at Hugh Hewitt's, and finally the Weekly Standard. He was insightful and witty, and he will be missed.

• The awesome Bill Whittle comments on the newly-discovered audio of Barack Obama expounding candidly on the redistribution of wealth to a Chicago public radio station in 2001. Mr. Whittle gets the coveted Pun Salad Read the Whole Thing Award for today.

  I'm thinking about programming one of my keys to enter the string

  You can't say you weren't warned

  when pressed. That will save a lot of time and keystrokes over the next four years or so.

• Both David Boaz and Ann Althouse point out a fundamental problem for McCain pointing the "socialist" finger at Obama, however well-deserved. When you support the bailout, when you were against Bush's tax cuts because they were too tilted toward the "wealthiest Americans", when you're pressuring the government to buy troubled mortgages from homeowners… you're just not very credible or coherent on the "socialist" issue.

• Or, for that matter, this.

• If you're looking for political hagiography for your little one, Shawn Macomber mercilessly reviews Barack [Ages 4-8] and Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope [Ages 9-12]. As one Amazon reviewer puts it: they're also appropriate for middle-aged Democrats.

• Need a laugh? Here you go.

I enjoyed this silly over-the-top movie quite a bit more than the critics did (34% Tomatometer) or the IMDB masses (5.7/10).

Adam Sandler plays the title character; he's an Israeli commando with semi-super powers: indestructibility, super-strength, and mad parkour skills. But he's tired of fighting Palestinian terrorists; when he captures them, they just get traded back for captured Israelis. And he's always had this dream of styling hair. So he fakes his own death, stows away on a New York-bound jet, and tries to make it in the mad world of the Manhattan beauty industry.

It kept me laughing all the way through, which is pretty good. Adam Sandler employs a lot of his buddies from Saturday Night Live in various-sized roles: Chris Rock, Kevin Nealon, Rob Schneider, Robert Smigel. Shelley Berman plays Zohan's father; I'm proud to say that I recognized him pretty quickly. He's 82, and IMDB says he's working pretty regularly. Good for him.

It might seem extra-tricky to have a comedy that touches on terrorism; Zohan deals with that by keeping the fantasy element high, not actually showing anyone getting killed, and pretending that all we need is for the politicians to get out of the way because us normal people can get along just fine, blah, blah, blah. This requires switching off certain brain functions for a bit; if you can manage that, you'll be fine.

But maybe we can all be brought together by Mariah Carey singing the national anthem at a Israel/Palestine hacky sack tournament. All I know is, it seemed plausible in the movie.