I thought I’d comment on a few random stories in the news today. . .

Paul Ryan To Go Up With Television Ads For His House Seat

HUDSON, Wis. — Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan plans to begin airing ads in Wisconsin as he asks voters to elect him to an eighth House term that he hopes to never serve.

Contracts formalized Tuesday with at least one Milwaukee television station show that Ryan’s congressional ads will start airing Wednesday morning and go initially for two weeks. The Ryan congressional ads start in the same week as presidential ticket mate Mitt Romney’s commercials went on air in Wisconsin, although the cost for the two sets of ads are drawn from different campaign accounts.

Wisconsin law allows Ryan to seek both offices simultaneously but only serve in one if he wins the pair. His Democratic opponent in the state’s 1st District is Rob Zerban, a former county official.
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I have to say that I don’t agree with this option of running for re-election for one office while simultaneously running for election to a higher office. I swear, this is NOT a partisan opinion, I know that Ryan is not the only politician to have done this, and that many from all parties have done it (I think Joe Lieberman did the same in 2000, when he ran for re-election to his Senate seat while also running for Vice President with Al Gore). But I would say the same exact thing if this were any other politician. I believe that ever State should have the right to set their own rules about this but, in my opinion, if you want to seek a higher office and it happens to be coming up during the same time your current office is expiring, then you should have to make a choice. One or the other. But you shouldn’t be able to seek both. And, frankly, if I were Mitt Romney, I’d want Ryan to quite the congressional race, just from a PR standpoint it would show that Ryan has more confidence in their ability to win the Presidency. This makes it look like Ryan’s hedging his bets. Not cool.

A ‘nickel-and-dime’ crime almost 50 years ago gets 68-year-old employee fired

Sometimes life can turn on a dime. Just ask Richard Eggers, a former Wells Fargo employee. The 68-year-old Eggers was fired by the company’s home mortgage division in West Des Moines, Iowa, in July for a petty crime he committed nearly 50 years ago. He got caught using a cardboard cutout of a dime to run a laundromat washing machine when he was 19. Officially, the crime is called operating a coin changing machine by false means, court records from 1963 say.

“It was silly and stupid,” Eggers told CNN affiliate KCCI-TV. “I am not terribly proud of it, but, it doesn’t warrant a termination a half a century later.”

Wells Fargo says it’s following federal laws laid down by the Federal Deposit Insurance Act (FDIC). They’re designed to weed out employees guilty of identity theft and mortgage fraud.
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Good grief. This reminds me of my comments about Mitt Romney the other day, with folks attacking him over something he did as a teenager. Even if Wells Fargo is technically correct here, this is still absurd. The article doesn’t say how long he worked for them, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just some excuse the company was using to get him out so they could hire some much younger employee to do his job for a lot less money. Or maybe by getting rid of him now they don’t owe him a pension or retirement package or something like that. It just smells fishy to me.

‘Independence Day’ Sequels Get Rumored Titles, 3D Conversions, Different Tones

With director Roland Emmerich currently filming White House Down, there’s not a lot of working going on with the sequels to Independence Day. Producer Dean Devlin has gone on record saying he and Emmerich have cracked the idea for the films and continue to work on them, but it’s not a daily thing. No matter; that doesn’t stop tiny bits of news from leaking about the still hypothetical back-to-back sequels to the hit 1996 film, which gets a 3D re-release next year.

The pair are still referring to the films as ID Forever Part One and ID Forever Part Two and, in a new interview, Emmerich they’ll likely be shot in 2D and up-converted to 3D.
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If they’d made a sequel to this a decade ago, I’d be all over it. But now I’m not sure it’s such a great idea. I saw ID4 in the theater when it came out and loved it to death. I bought the DVD as soon as it came out and must have watched it a hundred times. I even bought two of the tie-in novels. To this day I’m still liable to watch it for a bit if I’m home flipping channels and it’s playing.

Still, the movie’s flaws have been dissected so much since then, Cracked.com has several hilarious articles about it, things that didn’t bug me @ the time like Vivica A. Fox’s improbable survival in the tunnel or, especially, the computer virus solution, would be hanging over any sequel. They would have to make sure the story is frakkin perfect and completely logical. I can still suspend my disbelief for the first one but don’t know if I could do that again. I’d rather it be left to stand on its own, like the first Matrix should’ve been left alone. Not every blockbuster needs a sequel.

If the have to make a sequel to a previous movie, I think I’d be more interested in seeing Emmerich & Devlin’s own take on a Stargate film sequel, which they’ve discussed before. I’d be curious to see how different it would be from the TV shows (which they were not involved with).