Mach 3.

The new trailer for Blade: Trinity arrives. Ok, they stole the music and slo-mo from The Matrix and the whole Parker Posey-in-the-desert-fortress bit from Hellboy, but I’m still quite looking forward to this. The first two Blades were both surprisingly fun popcorn flicks, and I expect nothing less from David Goyer’s outing, since he was both screenwriter and consigliere to Stephen Norrington and Guillermo del Toro the first two times.

When did the Hugging Incident come up?

In a salacious document dump of Ken Starr-like proportions, the Vail Daily News received the transcript of Kobe’s police interview yesterday. I must say, I’m sure he was very flustered at the time, but what with the lying, the backpedaling, and the constant fretting about “my career and my image,” Kobe comes across as both thoroughly unlikable and exceedingly guilty here. He’s fortunate this never went before a jury.

Zero Intelligence.

“‘Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration — what I call the “dancing in the street crowd,” that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,’ [Republican Richard] Lugar said. ‘The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.'” A new intelligence report declares that, despite Dubya’s dog-and-pony show, things are looking worse in Iraq. “At worst, the official said, were ‘trend lines that would point to a civil war.’” Bang-up job, Dubya, as usual. “‘It’s beyond pitiful, it’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous,’ said Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska,” referring to the administration’s disbursement of reconstruction money thus far. After getting us into this fiasco, the least the Bushies could have done was try to manage it properly. We must get these fools out of office already.

Let’s Talk About Sex.

The full trailer for Bill Condon’s Kinsey biopic is now up, and while Laura Linney still has a huge debt to pay for her last film on academia and sex (The Life of David Gale), it looks like Liam Neeson will nevertheless be backed up by solid character work from Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker…and Chris O’Donnell?

(Draft)-Dodged Another Bullet.

Well, even Dan Rather is backing away from the Killian memos at this point, which obviously does not bode well for their authenticity. And as for the larger questions about where Dubya spent all those post-drug-test AWOL months in 1972…well, I’m sure the mainstream press will get to those in due time, aren’t you?

That’s My President.

“He showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that.” Harvard Business School professor Yoshi Tsurumi remembers young Dubya, and, yes, even back then he was a profile in character and courage. “[H]e was such a bad student that I asked him once how he got in. He said, ‘My dad has good friends.'”

Back to the Grassy Knoll.

Forty years after publication of the Warren Report, Salon editor-in-chief David Talbot makes the case (again) for a conspiracy that felled Kennedy. A somewhat shrill and Oliver-Stone-like piece, to be sure, but, if nothing else, Talbot has amassed a few quotes from doubters in high places — RFK, LBJ, Nixon — that I hadn’t seen before.