November 2010 archive

Well, it’s that holiday time of year again when all you want is some mindless entertainment to spare you from dealing with your relatives and TV programmers screw with you by replacing all your familiar favorites with sappy specials and marathons of your least liked shows made more inpenetrable by the one line crawl of uselessness that TV Guide channel has become.

Thank goodness kindly uncle ek is here to highlight a few moments of blessed distraction as well as some of the potential pitfalls to be avoided.

I look on it as a public service.

My job is made a little easier because of a neat little network ‘day at a glance’ feature of Zap2it TV Listings.  Click on the channel name.  I’m going from my last diary to Paid Programming.  I’m putting the main meat below the fold because the table is too long for the Front Page.  It’s arranged by time and marathons (4 half hour episodes, 3 hour episodes, double features, themes, and Instapeats) may be noted earlier than you expect, but they do also include the running time so you know when they end.

Nothing like watching A Christmas Story 25 times in a row.

Today is the last day of your special 24 hour Holiday coverage.  Prime Time tomorrow as usual.  I’m rolling publishing again because it’s much easier.  Right now this covers until noon.  Expect an update.

Update: Good until 6 am.

N. Korea preps missiles amid U.S. war games

Pyongyang warns of ‘merciless’ assault if further provoked as joint naval drills begin

msnbc.com news services

YEONPYEONG ISLAND, South Korea – The sound of new artillery fire from North Korea just hours after the U.S. and South Korea launched a round of war games in Korean waters sent residents and journalists on a front-line island scrambling for cover Sunday.

None of the rounds landed on Yeonpyeong Island, military officials said, but South Korea’s Defense Ministry later ordered journalists off the island.

Union Drops Health Coverage for Workers’ Children

One of the largest union-administered health-insurance funds in New York is dropping coverage for the children of more than 30,000 low-wage home attendants, union officials said. The union blamed financial problems it said were caused by the state’s health department and new national health-insurance requirements.

Just squeezed out.

The union fund faced a “dramatic shortfall” between what employers contributed to the fund and the premiums charged by its insurance provider, Fidelis Care, according to Mitra Behroozi, executive director of benefit and pension funds for 1199SEIU. The union fund pools contributions from several home-care agencies and then buys insurance from Fidelis.

“In addition, new federal health-care reform legislation requires plans with dependent coverage to expand that coverage up to age 26,” Behroozi wrote in a letter to members Oct. 22. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible, and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”

And the hits just keep on coming.  

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Bluefin tuna gets scant relief at fisheries meet

by Marlowe Hood, AFP

1 hr 22 mins ago

It was announced at Daily Kos on Friday that a good blog friend and a courageous spirit, exmearden, has died of complications from cardiac angiosarcoma in a Seattle hospital at age 52. Her daughters were at her bedside.

Through the veil of tears, the Wheel turns

May the Goddess guide her on her journey to the Summerlands. May her family and her many friends find Peace.

Blessed Be

There are two beautiful tributes to her posted at Daily Kos where she was a front page contributor, one from Meteor Blades and today’s from Laurence Lewis (Turkana) a fellow Portlaner.

FROM THE INTERNATIONAL DESK

A kids’ book written by a 34-year-old Tokyo housewife about the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Miyazaki Prefecture has become an internet hit, being downloaded approximately 2,600 times since late September. Sounds positively uplifting.

Kenya’s Daily Nation reported that a former ambassador to Japan was questioned by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC) over dubious dealings regarding the purchase of land in Tokyo. Not a terribly interesting story, but we just had to get that acronym in there.

Virgin Atlantic Airways and Mori Building City Air Services have started free helicopter shuttles from Ark Hills in Akasaka to Narita Airport for high-end travelers from Tokyo to London.

A few weeks after getting busted in Chiba with cocaine in his pocket, Aussie pro golfer Wayne Perske was banned for the rest of the season by the Japan Golf Tour Organization.

Perske’s problems came on the heels of Kiwi golf pro David Smail’s sex scandal, when his former Japanese girlfriend sent compromising photos and videos to the media after the married Smail tried to break up with her. Man, talk about putting it in the wrong hole!

A female desk clerk at a hotel in Aichi held a press conference to draw light to her situation after a male guest called her to his room to “apologize” over some issue with an escort service. The horny old dude then tried to jump her, “unbuttoning her clothing and touching her lower body.”

Welcome to The Stars Hollow Health and Fitness weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Thanksgiving may be over but these recipes for pumpkin can be used throughout the winter. Like all winter squash, pumpkin is an excellent source of vitamin A, in the form of beta carotene, and a very good source of vitamin C, potassium, dietary fiber and manganese.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Glenn Greenwald: The US of A breaks the Soviet Record

Even for the humble among us who try to avoid jingoistic outbursts, some national achievements are so grand that they merit a moment of pride and celebration:

US presence in Afghanistan as long as Soviet slog

   The Soviet Union couldn’t win in Afghanistan, and now the United States is about to have something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.

   On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state.

It seems clear that a similar — or even grander — prize awaits us as the one with which the Soviets were rewarded.  I hope nobody thinks that just because we can’t identify who the Taliban leaders are after almost a decade over there that this somehow calls into doubt our ability to magically re-make that nation.  Even if it did, it’s vital that we stop the threat of Terrorism, and nothing helps to do that like spending a full decade — and counting — invading, occupying, and bombing Muslim countries.

Johann Hari: There Won’t Be a Bailout for the Earth

Why are the world’s governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday’s apocalypse. Didn’t somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn’t it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn’t Al Gore get fat, or something?

Alas, the biosphere doesn’t read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn’t do bailouts.

Bruce Fein: Congresswoman Harman’s Afghan Delusions

To paraphrase British sage Samuel Johnson, Congresswoman Jane Harman’s generalship over the Afghanistan war is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Harman’s November 17, 2010, column for Politico (“Take the Lisbon deal, Mr. President”) is exemplary, but not exhaustive. There, the Congresswoman applauds a NATO timetable to exit Afghanistan militarily by 2014, a wretched idea which she egotistically attributes to herself. But why claim an authorship no more promising than General George C. Custer’s strategy at the Battle of the Little Bighorn? The deadline guarantees victory by the Taliban and Al Qaeda. They will temporarily scale back their attacks and then return in full force in 2014 to overrun the incorrigibly inept, corrupt, and popularly reviled Karzai administration.

I started writing this diary on July 20, put it in draft. It was based on Richard Haass’ cover story in Newsweek on July 18 of this year. It is still very relevant in that the war in Afghanistan has taken on a different aspect than when it start over nine tears ago. As pointed out by Glenn Greenwald at Salon, the US of A Breaks the Soviet Record this past week and still has not recognized waste and the futility of the effort.

It seems clear that a similar — or even grander — prize awaits us as the one with which the Soviets were rewarded.  I hope nobody thinks that just because we can’t identify who the Taliban leaders are after almost a decade over there that this somehow calls into doubt our ability to magically re-make that nation.  Even if it did, it’s vital that we stop the threat of Terrorism, and nothing helps to do that like spending a full decade — and counting — invading, occupying, and bombing Muslim countries.

This is Mr. Haass’s appearance on “Morning Joe” on July 19, 2010. It is still very pertinent

While I strongly disagree with Mr.Haass on the use of drone and missile attacks, as well as air strikes, what he says about the ground troops is very true. There are far better ways to make the US safe from terrorist attacks than invading a country, destroying property and infrastructure as the US did in Iraq and killing innocent civilians. The actions of the US and her allies  steeled the resolve of the terrorists and given them recruits and support. It is fairly obvious that the Obama administration is not thinking and has learned nothing from the 20th century Russian adventures or from the English in the 19th century.