I found Tarantino's list interesting enough that I took the trouble to find it online and transcribe his comments (if any). For your enjoyment:

Number 1: “Battle Royale” (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000). “If there is any move that has been made since I started making movies that I wish I had made, it is that one.”

The rest of the list is alphabetical, because he liked them all more or less equally:

“Anything Else?” (Woody Allen, 2003).

“Audition” (Takashi Miike, 1999). “True masterpiece if ever there was one.”

“The Blade” (Tsui Hark, 1995).

“Boogie Nights” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997).

“Dazed and Confused” (Richard Linklater, 1993). “Maybe the greastest—along with Rio Bravo—the greatest hangout movie ever made... If you watch it every three years or four years, the characters are like your friends, and it’s like you’re hanging out with them again.”

“Dogville” (Lars von Trier, 2003). “Maybe one of the greatest scripts ever written for film, and I actually think if he had done it on the stage he would have won a Pulitzer prize.”

“Fight Club” (David Fincher, 1999).

“Friday” (F. Gary Gray, 1995).

“The Host” (Bong Joon-ho, 2006). “Absolutely wonderful Korean monster movie.”

“The Insider” (Michael Mann, 1999).

“Joint Security Area” aka “JSA” (Park Chan-wook, 2000).

“Lost in Translation” (Sophia Coppola, 2003).

“The Matrix” (Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, 1999). “There was a time that I actually would have considered Matrix the official Number 2, after Battle Royale. However, I have to say that time was before Matrix 2 and 3 came out. ... But [Matrix 2 and 3] didn’t obliterate it entirely. It still has to be on the top 20 list.”

“Memories of Murder” (Bong Joon-ho, 2003). “One of the most interesting and complex films on this entire list is the Korean serial killer / police procedural Memories of Murder.”

“Police Story 3” aka “Supercop” (Stanley Tong, 1992). Jackie Chan movie. “A movie that I think probably contains the greatest stunts, and that’s even including Buster Keaton, the greatest stunts ever included in any movie ever. Look no further than Michelle Yo jumping a motorcycle onto a speeding train—and actually not quite pulling it off in the outtakes.”

“Shaun of the Dead” (Edgar Wright, 2004). “Hands-down my favorite British movie that has come out since I’ve been making movies.”

“Speed” (Jan De Bont, 1994). “And that’s even discounting the last 20 minutes of the movie. Basically, once the bus blows up, the movie’s over. It might be easy to take Speed for granted now, but if you remember when Speed came out, what it was like to sit in the movie theater, that bus was going down the road, there really [have] been few exhilaration movies quite like it.”

“Team America: World Police” (Trey Parker, 2004).

“Unbreakable” (M. Night Shyamalan, aka Shamalamadingdong, 2000). “It not only has Bruce Willis’s best performance on film that he’s ever given, it also is a brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology.”

...arguing about whether "‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy," in the words of the headline to Michael Lynch's op-ed in the NYT this morning. I suppose you saw it and will have a comment later today.... Just who is this Michael Lynch, anyway, and what (other than being paid by oil companies) gives him standing to opine about the future of world oil reserves?

When MLK was alive and giving speeches and leading the poor, the right wing of this country denounced him as a Communist, a Socialist, a Bolshevik. It took years after his death for them to calm down enough to allow a holiday to be named in his honor (and even so, McCain's Arizona and a couple other states refused at first to follow suit).

Now that MLK has been safely turned into an all-American icon, the people who quote him most often ("not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character") are precisely the ones who were most opposed to his positions back then -- and who remain most opposed to his legacy today.

Seems they've learned their lesson. The GOP started "MLK"ing Ted Kennedy from the minute he died. Soon we'll see his face in GOP attack ads against Obama.

And so's your proofreading!

Thanks for fixing. You have to admit that it was a funny misprint, though!

I noticed an NPR story this morning on the so-called "Tea Party Express" movement -- a couple of buses traveling from California to DC and exciting crowds of a couple hundred apparently all-white crowds in towns along the way. The NPR reporter described these crowds as "appear[ing] to be folks who work pretty hard for a living" -- code language, anyone?

A comment posted on the NPR web page for this story (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112377549) makes the racial/welfare angle explicit:

"Tea Party Express" participants are modern Rosa Parks' fighting the injustice of paying for people who refuse to pay for themselves. OBAMA would have sent her to the back of the bus while Nancy Pelosi shouted her down as unAmerican.

So people who have no insurance or inadequate insurance because that is what their employers offer, or because they lost a job, or because of preexisting conditions, are now being described as "people who refuse to pay for themselves." Incredible, but there's your fullblown welfare-queen rhetoric in all its glory.

$1,361 billion = $1.361 trillion. That is, if you follow the US convention of using commas as dividers and periods (full stops, dots, points) to mark the decimals.

Sorry I haven't read through all the comments, so I don't know if this has already been addressed, but there is a major typo in the opening quote that makes it hard to scan. You have:

Here's a sampling of the same questions that Goodling:

That Goodling what?, I wondered, so I looked up the original in TPMMuckraker, which has:

Here's a sampling of the same questions that Goodling asked those being considered for political positions:

Ah, yes.