1. "Resignations and Assignations": Gonzales and Craig... TWO WILD AND CRAZY GUYS!!!!

["Dramatic enough in itself, the announcement Monday morning that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had resigned also set the stage for what may be one of most contentious confirmation hearings since the Senate rejected John Tower as defense secretary in 1989. ...

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who has voted against gay marriage and opposes extending special protections to gay and lesbian crime victims, finds his political future in doubt after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges stemming from complaints of lewd conduct in a men's room."]

["Over at Bully's comics blog, there's an interesting discussion thread on the relative merits/demerits of "decompressed" comics, i.e., those which contain relatively little dialogue per page, stretch their narratives out across an arc of several issues, and use the space of a monthly "floppy" comic to only delineate a small amount of time passing. It's initially very tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's a more serious point underlying it, which is: what do we expect from our entertainment (or, indeed, any form of communication)?"]

["This show looks like a million dollars (before inflation). Everything is oh sooo perfect. That's the problem."]

["Here I go again with another meta-movie list! The phrase "breaking the fourth wall" has been around for over a century. Though as a concept it's been around since before Shakespeare the phrase itself originates from the theater of Bertolt Brecht. It simply meant that a character makes an aside to the audience. Through the invisible wall those watching are addressed, acknowledged and made to feel a little more "in on the joke" so to speak. It's a device used a lot more in television than on film. In the 80's it even became fairly fashionable on such shows like Moonlighting and It's Garry Shandling's Show—a show that had as its entire premise comedian Shandling talking directly to the studio audience and the viewers at home. The Marx Brothers may have pioneered the concept in cinema with Groucho's many knowing winks but Bob Hope really nailed it in the seminal road movies he made with Bing Crosby which is where we'll begin.]

["In a way, 2007 is shaping up as the year of director William Friedkin. At least in New York, anyway: In addition to May's unsettling paranoiac melodrama Bug, the coming weeks promise theatrical revivals of his Oscar-winning 1971 cop thriller The French Connection (opening this Friday at Film Forum) and his controversial 1980 leather-bar detective epic Cruising (opening Sept. 7 before finally arriving on DVD Sept. 18). The turbulent backstories of each film—the former shooting live car chases in front of unwitting passers-by in Brooklyn, the latter enduring the wrath of the city's gay community while filming in the West Village—bespeak only a few of the legends accompanying Friedkin's work, a 40-year canon as rigorous, challenging and demanding of its viewers as its haunted inhabitants onscreen."]

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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.