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Monday, June 14, 2004

Shrek 2 Dethrones Nemo as BoxOffice King of Animated Films
The jolly clever ole story of an ogre who journeys to meet his in laws and fight off the beauty-obsessed antics of Fairy Godmother and her son Prince Charming, better known as Shrek 2 has just dethroned Disney's Finding Nemo ($339.71)as the biggest animated boxoffice hit ever.  Shrek 2 took in another $25 million over the weekend to jump past its competitor in less than a month since release, for a grand total of $356 million.

Disney has to be spitting nails about this today. The first Shrek film ($267.65), which mocked Disney and made by rival DreamWorks, not only beat out Disney's film Monsters, Inc ($255.83) at the boxoffice but went on to win over Monsters for the Best Animated film Oscar. It's so hard being Disney.

Shrek 2 also surpassed Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers ($341.75) in this weekend's haul. Shrek 2 will surpass the #8 biggest grossing film Jurassic Park ($357.07) most likely by the end of business hours Monday and should easily dethrone this year's top-grossing smash hit The Passion of the Christ ($369.34) over Father's Day weekend. (Let's see how long it takes for the Christian Right to cry foul and bemoan how evil Hollywood and America is for allowing a story of a green ogre to be more popular than Jesus being beaten senseless, tortured, and crucified. My bet is as soon as I post this.)

It is highly possible that Shrek 2 could surpass Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($376.96). I find this most surprising, to say the least. I'm sure the Hobbitses wouldn't be too thrilled about that, either!

The remaining top grossing films of all time include the following:

1 Titanic, released on 12/19/1997 $600.79 m

2   Star Wars, released on 05/25/1977 $461.00 m

3   E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, released on 06/11/1982 $434.97 m

4   The Phantom Menace, released on 05/19/1999 $431.09 m

5   Spider-Man, released on 05/03/2002   $405.85 m

6   LOTR: The Return of the King, released on 12/17/2003   $376.96 m

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Cheney's $7 Million Dollar Gift to Halliburton

It's about freakin' time someone is taking the bull by the horns and drilling down to investigate how Cheney's Halliburton picked up such cushy contracts! Our Army was sent to war with far too few of numbers than requested by the Army; soldiers were under-protected; their vehicles were under-protected; and many battalians have seen their deployment extended and over-extended. If there was anything "planned" about this war, I'm sure it had too much to do with the corporate gains aspect of it than it did mobililizing and sustaining an efficient army.

Here is the beginning of the article reported by Move.On that originated from The Los Angeles Times:

Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and other Bush administration political appointees were involved in a controversial decision to pay Halliburton Inc. to plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq's oil sector, a Democratic lawmaker said yesterday.

The decision, overruling the recommendations of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the award of a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton, which Cheney ran for five years before he was nominated for vice president.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., who was briefed by Pentagon officials last week, issued a letter to the vice president yesterday demanding full disclosure of the top-secret process that led to awarding the contract to the Houston-based oil services company.

"To help clarify these important matters, I urge you to disclose all contacts between your office and the Defense Department relating to the Halliburton contracts," Waxman wrote in his letter.

Waxman's account of the Pentagon briefing - along with recently released internal Pentagon memos obtained by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch and a draft General Accounting Office report obtained by the Los Angeles Times - offers the most complete picture to date of the unusual procedures behind the decision to award the contract without the competitive bidding process usually required to protect taxpayer dollars.

7:32:23 PM   | COMMENT [] | TRACKBACK []