February 2011 archive

Hardly any premiers.  Over the Hedge.  Austin City Limits has Willie Nelson

Oh. Well, a few years back, Oprah said some shit on her show about beef. You know, Mad Cow Disease or some shit. Anyway, the beef industry didn’t exactly find that shit amusing. They figured they’d send a crew of armed Texans to teach Oprah a lesson. Ex-Marines, ex-Texas Rangers, rouges, that kinda shit. But Oprah had hired Bushido Brown as her personal boydguard. Apparently, only one dude managed to actually lay a hand on Oprah’s office door. They say… Bushido Brown kept that hand.

• ABC Family– Titanic (have I mentioned this is the most over rated movie ever?)
• AMC– For a Few Dollars More
• Animal Planet– Pit Boss x 2 (premiers)
• Bravo– House marathon
• E!– The Princess Diaries
• ESPN– College Hoopies, Illinois @ Michigan State
• ESPN2– College Hoopies, George Mason @ Northern Iowa, Utah State @ St. Mary’s
• Food– Triple D marathon
• FX– Wanted
• History– Top Shot (1st and 2nd episodes of Season 2)
• Lifetime– Glass House: The Good Mother, Deadly Honeymoon
• Nick– House of Anubis (1 hour Season Finale)
• Oxygen– The Pacifier (again), While You Were Sleeping
• Sci Fi– Anaconda 3: Offspring, Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid (Snakes.  Why does it always have to be snakes?)
• Spike– The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior
• TBS– Bedtime Stories, Just Married
• Turner Classic– Gigi, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (a little recent)
• TNT– Pre All Star Hoopies
• Toon– George of the Jungle, God, the Devil and Bob
• Vs.– Bullriding x 2
• VH1– Purple Rain

Oprah Winfrey taps directly into the emotions, beliefs, buying habits and summer reading patterns of billions of women all over the world! Oprah Winfrey has the power to lay waste an entire industry with a mere utterance! She’s a completely invincible, unstoppable force of nature and with her under our control… nobody would be able to stop us!

Later-

Could you tell the court what it is that you do? You’re a type of magician?

Well, if you must call me that, yes. But, if you are after mere parlor tricks, you will be sorely disappointed. For if I reach behind your ear, it will not be a nickel I pull out, but your very soul!

• ABC Family– Under the Tuscan Sun
• AMC– The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
• E!– The Soup (yesterday’s)
• ESPN2– College Hoopies, Montana @ Long Beach State
• Oxygen– Shall We Dance?
• Sci Fi– Anacondas: Trail of Blood, Sea Snakes
• Spike– Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball
• Turner Classic– The Last Emperor
• TNT– The Longest Yard (not the good 1974 version)

SNL– from 12/11/10

Boondocks– Let’s Nab Oprah.  The Venture Brothers– Trial of the Monarch

Hey, just because we don’t know anyone tryin’ to stop us, don’t mean ain’t nobody out there tryin’ to stop us. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 42 Top Stories.

1 Libyan regime hits back with deadly crackdown

AFP

2 hrs 12 mins ago

Regular Daily Features:

• Saturday starts with Good Vibrations in Late Night Karaoke, mishima DJs
• Six Brilliant Articles! from Six Different Places!! at Six in the Morning!!!

Essays Featured Saturday, February 19^th:

• Talk turns to The Splendor of Risotto in patric juillet‘s latest edition of Tales from the Larder.
• Saturday Open Thoughts are a little blurry from Alma. 🙁
• A new piece of Saturday Art! from mishima‘s talented hands.
• davidseth is in Solidarity with Wisconsin Union Workers. Are you?
• Firefly Memories 1.0 is where (normally)Alma takes a look back at some of the Brilliant essays of our first years posts, highlighting those which exemplify our firefly-dreaming spirit and mission. Alma has an eye problem so Dreamer is filling until she’s better.
  
  Today:happy birthday papa
• Dreamer takes a look at the Mindless Eating concept. (at 7pm)

join the conversation. come firefly-dreaming with me….

CHOWING DOWN

 

The Japan Food Service Association said that sales at restaurants around the nation rose by 0.5 percent in 2010.

Overall, the number of customers at restaurants around the country dropped, but sales per customer increased.

Thanks to discount promotions, sales at fast food restaurants increased 2.1 percent, but earnings at izakaya and family restaurants dropped.

A trio of Japanese food companies announced a joint effort to sell processed meats in Vietnamaimed at middle- and upper-class consumers. The firms hope to sell ¥300 million worth of goods by 2013.

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.

“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”

Warning: While I disagree with Mr. Milbank that Medicare is a “major driver” of our debt crisis. the rest of his column is, well, both hysterically funny and ironically saddening. That said Do Not Eat or Drink While Reading

One other short comment, today’s Pundits were prolific and prophetic. The decision who to put above the fold was not easy

Dana Milbank: Serious budget cutting? The House has other fish to fry.

To say that our lawmakers are carping at trifles gives them too much credit. In fact, they are carping at carp.

“Asian carp [are] one of the world’s most rampant invasive species,” Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, proclaimed on the House floor, 35 hours into the debate over budget cuts. “Weighing up to 100 pounds, spanning over six feet and eating half their body weight daily, Asian carp have the ability to decimate fish populations indigenous to the Great Lakes.”

That certainly stinks for Great Lakes fish and Great Lakes fishermen. But if you think the federal budget will be balanced on the backs of the Asian carp, you’re all wet. And that’s what makes Camp’s carping emblematic of the current debate over budget cuts. The whole exercise is less about improving the nation’s fiscal balance than about parochial concerns and political volleys.

FSM, I wish this was snark. It’s not

Michael Winsap: Across the US, GOP Lawmakers Build States of Denial

Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.

One of them related the story of how Governor Richards was approached by the ACLU, which was disturbed by the presence of a Christmas crèche on the grounds of the state capitol in Austin. “You know,” she replied, “that’s probably as close as three wise men will ever get to the Texas Legislature, so why don’t we just let them be.” . . . . .

This comes to mind in the wake of this week’s release of “Texas on the Brink,” a pamphlet published annually by the Texas Legislative Study Group, a group of Democratic state lawmakers. According to their research, much of it corroborated by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Texas Legislative Budget Board, in 2011, “Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured children in the nation. Texas is dead last in the percentage of residents with their high school diploma and near last in SAT scores. Texas has America’s dirtiest air… Those who value tax cuts over children and budget cuts over college have put Texas at risk in her ability to compete and succeed.”

Over the years, such statistics and other damned shenanigans have led many to debate whether Texas is indeed the rightful landlord of the nation’s worst statehouse. As someone with a mother’s Lone Star blood flowing through his otherwise anemic northeastern veins, I write this with no small amount of perverse pride. But in the last couple of weeks a lot of other states have been giving Texans a run for their money.

John Nichols: ‘First Amendment Remedies’: How Wisconsin Workers Grabbed the Constitution Back From the Right-Wing Royalists

When Democratic members of the Wisconsin State Senate walked out on Capital on Thursday – denying the Republican majority quorum that was necessary to pass the legislation — they were attacked by Walker and his cronies.  The governor called the boycott a “stunt” and claimed the Democrats were disrepecting democracy.  

After all, Walker’s backers noted, the governor and his Republican allies won an election last Novembe  

That is true.  

But Wisconsin’s greatest governor, Robert M. La Follette, declared: “”We have long rested comfortably in this country upon the assumption that because our form of government was democratic, it was therefore automatically producing democratic results. Now, there is nothing mysteriously potent about the forms and names of democratic institutions that should make them self-operative. Tyranny and oppression are just as possible under democratic forms as under any other. We are slow to realize that democracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. It is only as those of every generation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachments of its enemies that the ideals of representative government can even be nearly approximated.”  

La Follette’s point, apparently lost on Walker, is that democracy does not end on Election Day. That’s when it begins.  Citizens do not elect officials to rule them from one election to the next. Citizens elect officials to represent them, to respond to the will of the people as it evolves.

(emphasis mine)

Please read below the fold, there is so much more to consider

One of the things about Juries is that they are ‘finders of fact’.  After a Jury has determined the ‘facts’ of a case you can pound the table all you want, but it better be about the law, otherwise you’re just pounding the table.

So upon his conviction we can say that it’s factually true that former Juvenile Court Judge Mark Ciavarella took $997,600 from prison developer Robert Mericle, which he also failed to report on his financial disclosure forms or pay taxes on.

Now Ciavarella’s attorneys claim this is a mighty ‘victory’ for their client since he was not found guilty of actually ‘Extorting’ the money and intend to appeal and, like the abusers of Bonasera’s daughter, he walked out of the courtroom free pending.

What prosecutors chose not to make an issue of is exactly what ‘services’ Mark Ciavarella provided for nearly $1 million.

He sentenced hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent children to prison ruining their lives and those of their families.

Now on the bribery, failure to disclose, and tax evasion counts, Ciavarella is technically liable for up to 157 years of hard time and he’s already been ordered to forfeit the money, but even if he loses his appeal he’s unlikely to serve more than 12 or 15 years.

I personally think that’s too good for someone who’s systemically perverted our justice system and the rule of law from a position of public trust, privilege, and power.  He should rot in Spandau for the rest of his long, long miserable life and die alone, despised and forgotten.

Oh, you want to know about the all mobbed up thing.

Pa. judge guilty of racketeering in kickback case

Associated Press

6 hours ago

Officials disclosed for the first time Friday that they were led to the judges by the reputed boss of a northeastern Pennsylvania Mafia family. William D’Elia – who regularly met for breakfast with Conahan – became a government informant after his 2006 arrest on charges of witness tampering and conspiracy to launder drug money.

“D’Elia led us to Judge Conahan,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Zubrod. “From there we began to focus on them, the financial dealings between Judge Conahan, Judge Ciavarella, Mericle, Powell.”

I said that I would see you because I had heard that you were a serious man, to be treated with respect. But I must say no to you and let me give you my reasons. It’s true I have a lot of friends in politics, but they wouldn’t be so friendly if they knew my business was drugs instead of gambling which they consider a harmless vice. But drugs, that’s a dirty business.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

February 19 is the 50th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 315 days remaining until the end of the year (316 in leap years).

On this day in 1942, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of any or all people from military areas “as deemed necessary or desirable.” The military in turn defined the entire West Coast, home to the majority of Americans of Japanese ancestry or citizenship, as a military area. By June, more than 110,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to remote internment camps built by the U.S. military in scattered locations around the country. For the next two and a half years, many of these Japanese Americans endured extremely difficult living conditions and poor treatment by their military guards.

The Order

The order authorized the Secretary of War and U.S. armed forces commanders to declare areas of the United States as military areas “from which any or all persons may be excluded,” although it did not name any nationality or ethnic group. It was eventually applied to one-third of the land area of the U.S. (mostly in the West) and was used against those with “Foreign Enemy Ancestry” – Japanese.

The order led to the internment of Japanese Americans or AJAs (Americans of Japanese Ancestry); some 120,000 ethnic Japanese people were held in internment camps for the duration of the war. Of the Japanese interned, 62% were Nisei (American-born, second-generation Japanese American and therefore American citizens) or Sansei (third-generation Japanese American, also American citizens) and the rest were Issei (Japanese immigrants and resident aliens, first-generation Japanese American).

Japanese Americans were by far the most widely affected group, as all persons with Japanese ancestry were removed from the West Coast and southern Arizona. As then California Attorney General Earl Warren put it, “When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field.” In Hawaii, where there were 140,000 Americans of Japanese Ancestry (constituting 37% of the population), only selected individuals of heightened perceived risk were interned.

Americans of Italian and German ancestry were also targeted by these restrictions, including internment. 11,000 people of German ancestry were interned, as were 3,000 people of Italian ancestry, along with some Jewish refugees. The Jewish refugees who were interned came from Germany, and the U.S. government didn’t differentiate between ethnic Jews and ethnic Germans (jewish was defined as religious practice). Some of the internees of European descent were interned only briefly, and others were held for several years beyond the end of the war. Like the Japanese internees, these smaller groups had American-born citizens in their numbers, especially among the children. A few members of ethnicities of other Axis countries were interned, but exact numbers are unknown.

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was responsible for assisting relocated people with transport, food, shelter, and other accommodations.

Opposition

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment, not on constitutional grounds, but because he believed that the most likely spies had already been arrested by the FBI shortly after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was also opposed to Executive Order 9066. She spoke privately many times with her husband, but was unsuccessful in convincing him not to sign it

Post World War II

Executive Order 9066 was rescinded by Gerald Ford on February 19, 1976. In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed legislation to create the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). The CWRIC was appointed to conduct an official governmental study of Executive Order 9066, related wartime orders, and their impact on Japanese Americans in the West and Alaska Natives in the Pribilof Islands.

In December 1982, the CWRIC issued its findings in Personal Justice Denied, concluding that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity. The report determined that the decision to incarcerate was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” The Commission recommended legislative remedies consisting of an official Government apology and redress payments of $20,000 to each of the survivors; a public education fund was set up to help ensure that this would not happen again (Public Law 100-383).

On August 10, 1988, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, based on the CWRIC recommendations, was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. On November 21, 1989, George H.W. Bush signed an appropriation bill authorizing payments to be paid out between 1990 and 1998. In 1990, surviving internees began to receive individual redress payments and a letter of apology.