PNAC – an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

PSoTD

It’s hard to imagine, all that weight they must carry. How often they’ve been wrong, on practically everything, as they supported Bush and the Republican Congress the past 4 years. And all the evidence that piles up, from almost everything related to the long-term disaster we’re in called Iraq, to Iran, to North Korea, to global warming, to national debt, to bad economic signs, to election results. The rest of the world says they’re wrong. Many of them still say the rest of the world is wrong. How very heavy that must be.

They really need a vacation, a long vacation, from blogging. For their own good. It has to be so much harder to blog when you know so much that you’ve said in the past has been disproved or is in the process of being disproven. It must be heavy. It must be sad. It must be tiring.

So… it’s time for America to recommend that many take a break. Instapundit, time to put away the blog for a few months. Althouse, time to write a book or something. Power Line… bon voyage. Take a break. Lift the weight.

Firedoglake – Firedoglake weblog » Today’s Rationale?:

And what about those kids left behind when their parents are dragged off without access to counsel for…well, for more than 24 hours now in a number of cases? (Never mind that a lot of these folks likely have English issues and were pressured to sign off on documentation without the advice of legal counsel which will be difficult to revoke now.) Authorities in Texas, at least, appear to think it’s not their responsibility to help out:

Late Tuesday in Dallas, agency spokesman Carl Rusnok, asked about delays in getting the workers access to lawyers, said agents at the scene “still have to process the people they have arrested.”

The union also had located at least 35 children in the nearby communities of Dalhart and Stratford whose parents were in custody. Mr. Rodriguez did not know how many children were stranded in Cactus and Dumas, a city about 15 miles from the plant.

Any of the children born in the United States are U.S. citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

In neighboring Randall County, Sheriff Joel Richardson said he was prepared to hold about 50 federal detainees for up to six months. “I just brought an extra person into booking,” he said. “Otherwise, we were ready.”

Under a contract, the U.S. government pays the county $47.73 daily for each federal inmate.

Federal agencies hadn’t asked Texas officials for help with the workers’ children, said Greg Cunningham, a spokesman for Texas Child Protective Services in Amarillo. “It’s our understanding that there’s a mechanism in place with the federal officials to take care of these types of situations,” he said.

So, let’s see what we have here: a meat-packing company with a history of skating immigration laws (and allegations of them having some sort of scheme to import illegal workers from Guatamala) skates out of this scot free thus far.

Meanwhile, a mere nine days away from Christmas, these kids get the present of their parents being seized and hauled away, unable to contact them to let them know they are okay — with no time to make arrangements for their children’s care.

And, in one case, a mother who was nursing her child is dragged off and cannot be located, while the child is left to deal with the consequences of being weaned against it’s will by governmental agents. Which, as someone who has breastfed a child, is not something that should be done aburptly — and can have serious health consequences for the child, considering those first few months of breastfeeding provide the best portion of immunity protection and DHA for the child’s developing brain. It can be incredibly difficult to get a nursing child to switch to a bottle — which can result in very adverse health consequences for the baby at a time when nutrition is crucial. Plus, if the mother and child are not reunited, and soon, the mom’s milk will dry up — not exactly an easy, pain-free process, let me tell you, when you have to deal with an abrupt change like this — and the potential for her being able to even nurse her child after a few days of this goes down substantially. Stress can also have substantial adverse consequences.

Family values party, my ass.

If they were truly concerned with these childrens’ welfare, they would have coordinated with local authorities and social services supervisors so that mechanisms were in place for temporary foster care placements and other service implementation, including the mound of paperwork that will now need to be processed to get these kids medical cards, temporary food and clothing assistance and other help — because they are US citizens and CHILDREN, and ought not be simply left standing outside their homes with no one to care for them. That is unconscionable and yet another example of piss poor planning by the DHS. Heckuva job, Mikey!

Beyond that, though, background checks, priors checks and other considerations will need to be taken into account for adults who are, at least temporarily anyway, caring for these children who have been left behind. The last thing you want is for these kids to be taken in by some seemingly caring adult…who happens to have a long history of pedophelia or violent tendencies or what have you. (Yes, I have been down this road before in abuse and neglect cases…and you do not even want to know what can happen to children in a placement that turns out to be a nightmare.)

That authorities in Texas are saying “Not my problem. The Feds are going to have to deal with this.” is frightening — because the Feds are likely passing the buck right back to the locals. Which means the kids have had to scramble to find an adult to care for them on their own…and that can often lead to the very thing that no child should ever — EVER — have to survive.

And that is just for starters. According to the Dallas article, Texas authorities have no idea how many children may actually be stranded and/or affected by this. Well, that’s encouraging, isn’t it?

I have very little patience for folks who violate the law — and that includes the meat packing plant which clearly has a “don’t ask, just git to work” policy when it comes to its own hiring practices. But it is apparently too much to ask that the Federal authorities at the Department of Homeland Security stop and say to themselves, “Should we make an utter wreck of these children’s lives a mere nine days before Christmas without making some provision for these families somehow — some show of decency and compassion to ease things a bit for all of these children?”

Apparently so.

The next person in the Bush Administration who parades around their compassionate conservative “Christian” values is in for a serious bout of shit from me. Ebenezer Scrooge had nothing on these people.

Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia – New York Times:

December 1, 2006
Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia
By KAREN W. ARENSON

Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and all the more so in a course about ethics.

Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the journalist from legal, historical, ethical, and economic perspectives,” with a focus on ethics.

Nicholas Lemann, dean of the journalism school, said that students had to sign on to a Columbia Web site to gain access to the exam, and that once they did, had 90 minutes to write a couple of essays. But he was unwilling to detail how the cheating might have occurred.

Mr. Lemann said that no student had been formally accused of any violation, but that the issue had become “Topic A” at the school.

The situation was reported yesterday by RadarOnline.com.

The course was taught by Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at the school who also contributes columns on education and religion to The New York Times. Mr. Freedman confirmed yesterday evening that “there are allegations of cheating.”

“We are looking into them,” he said, adding that he did not want to comment further because of privacy concerns.

Students in the course, which is required of all students in Columbia’s basic journalism master’s program, have been told they must attend a specially scheduled additional session of the course today in connection with the exam. About 200 students took the course this fall.

“We have encountered a serious problem with the final exam, and will not register a passing grade in the course for anyone who does not attend,” David A. Klatell, vice dean at the school, wrote in an e-mail message, which was forwarded to a reporter by a student. Mr. Klatell did not respond to several telephone and e-mail requests for comment.

Mr. Lemann said that he was surprised that students might have been concerned about how they scored on the pass-fail exam, and that exams and grades at the school were rare.

“We are not a very grade-intensive institution,” he said. “Our school is run on a pass-fail basis.”

“Our students are strivers,” he added. “But they are striving to get good clips. It is not like law school, where fine differences in points make all the difference in the world.”

The Uncovered War: Permanent Bases in Iraq:

Liberation and liberal democracy were never the real reasons for the war to begin with. Those were just inserted in as throw enough mud to the wall and see what sticks policy. Let’s go through the litany, shall we?

1. Weapons of Mass destruction 3. America was in imminent danger from attack by Iraq (unmanned arial vehicles) 3. Ties to terrorists groups, namely Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda 4. Alleged ties to the Sept 11 War against Terror 5. Remake the Middle East 6. Fight them there so we don’t fight them here 7. Liberate Iraqis from Saddam Hussein 8. Establish Democracy in Iraq 9. Stop terror groups from getting their hands on the oil in Iraq 10. Stop the Iranians from taking control of Iraq 11. Establish safety for the state of Israel

Must we go on? I am quite sure that there are about 100 more rationales rolled out since last night for this war on Bush’s list that I have forgotten to mention……………

Dan Burton, Bob Dornan, John Cornyn, Tom Delay, Jean Schmidt, Rush Limbaugh, David Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michael Reagan, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, John Gibson, Neil Cavuto, Sean Hannity, Oliver North, Bob Novak, Cal Thomas, Glenn Beck, Mancow, John Fund, Peggy Noonan, Larry Kudlow, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson, Kate O’Beirne, Rich Lowry, Byron York, Chris Wallace, Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer…and on and on.

Company – Theater – Review – New York Times:

THEATER REVIEW | ‘COMPANY’
A Revival Whose Surface of Tundra Conceals a Volcano
By BEN BRANTLEY

Fire flickers, dangerous and beckoning, beneath the frost of John Doyle’s elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of “Company,” which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. This visually severe, aurally lush reinvention of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s era-defining musical of marriage and its discontents from 1970 is the chicest-looking production on Broadway.

One glance at the symmetry, the starkness, the midnight-black palette that dominates the stage, and you feel like putting on a sweater. It’s surely no coincidence that the clear modules that serve as furniture resemble ice cubes. What could be more appropriate for a musical with a passive, willfully unengaged leading man (wearing black Armani, natch), who is almost never seen without a defensive drink in his hand?

But if Bobby the bachelor, embodied with riveting understatement by Raúl Esparza, at first comes across as a man of ice, it becomes apparent that he is in a steady state of thaw. Given the subliminal intensity that hums through Mr. Esparza’s deadpan presence, you sense that flood warnings should probably be posted.

Mr. Doyle is the inspired British director who last year gave New York the most unsettling, emotionally concentrated production on record of another Sondheim musical, the macabre “Sweeney Todd.” In that show, for which Mr. Doyle won a Tony Award, the cast members doubled as musicians, a device repeated in this “Company.”

This “I-am-my-own-orchestra” approach probably shouldn’t be used ad infinitum. Mr. Doyle applied the same stratagem to Jerry Herman’s “Mack and Mabel” in London last summer to underwhelming effect.

But there’s something about Mr. Sondheim that allows Mr. Doyle to find a new clarity of feeling through melding musicians and performers. It is, after all, the person who controls the music in a Sondheim production — in which there is usually a sophistication gap between the songs and the relatively pedestrian book — who has the best chance of finding the show’s elusive but resonantly human heart.

Mr. Doyle’s “Company,” first staged at the Cincinnati Playhouse earlier this year, isn’t the unconditional triumph that his “Sweeney Todd” was, partly because the show itself is less of a fully integrated piece and partly because much of the acting is weaker. Only a few of the 14 ensemble members — playing the couples who are permanent fixtures in Bobby’s life and his strictly temporary girlfriends — seem at ease dispensing Mr. Furth’s brittle, uptown, shrink-shrunk dialogue.

But they all blossom as musicians and singers of wit and substance. As soloists they’re more than adequate, but it’s their work as a team that sounds new depths in “Company” in ways that get under your skin without your knowing it.

Mr. Doyle and his invaluable music supervisor and orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, have shaped “Company” into a sort of oratorio for the church of the lonely. The choral passage that opens the show — a litany of variations on Robert (a k a “Bobby, baby”), the name of the central character, about to celebrate his 35th birthday — is performed in near darkness a cappella, sounding like liturgical chant.

The effect is not flippant. The voices — belonging to “those good and crazy people, my married friends”— seem to echo through Bobby’s head like elements of some beautiful but arcane ritual that he can observe only from a distance. Watching is what Bobby does. His outsider’s status is confirmed with pointed eloquence when it registers that Bobby is the only person onstage who isn’t playing an instrument.

The production gets astonishingly diverse theme- and character-defining mileage out of this discrepancy. Bobby’s failure to pick up an instrument and join the band becomes a natural-born metaphor for his refusal to engage with others. Yes, he sings soulfully. But as the other cast members circle the lone Mr. Esparza, playing their instruments, it is clear they possess talents for connecting that Bobby lacks, fears and longs for.

Watching the couples carp and bicker in black-out vignettes — practicing karate, experimenting with pot, visiting a discothèque — you may wonder why Bobby would ever be envious of them (which has always been a problem with “Company”). It’s when they make music together that you understand.

Mr. Doyle’s staging repeatedly and ingeniously echoes this isolating difference. Mr. Esparza is often found climbing onto the top of a Steinway or one of those transparent cubes as others crowd him. Sometimes he stands at a skeptical, uneasy remove as different groups serenade him: the married men with the haunting “Sorry-Grateful”; three girlfriends, all playing saxophones as if they were assault weapons, in a scintillating version of “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.”

The seamlessness of these motifs lends a fresh coherence to “Company,” which was originally structured as a cabaret of urban neurosis. Stand-alone crowd pleasers like “Getting Married Today” (performed by a too-grounded-seeming Heather Laws as the skittish Amy) and “Another Hundred People” (warmly sung by Angel Desai) now blend into a general musical fabric of anxiety in search of reassurance.

Even the fabled character number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” sung by the worldly, much-married Joanne (a fierce Barbara Walsh), feels less like a show-stopping appendage than it usually does. Instead, building to a climactic repeated note that suggests what Edvard Munch’s silent scream might sound like, it becomes the perfect preface to Bobby’s breakthrough breakdown at the end of the show.

If Ms. Walsh doesn’t erase the memory of Elaine Stritch, who created (and will probably always own) the part, she handles her vodka-stinger-flavored dialogue with a vintage Manhattan suaveness, which is more than can be said for many of the others.

Bruce Sabath, though, is touching and credible as Joanne’s patient husband. And Elizabeth Stanley is absolutely delicious as April, the ditzy airline stewardess, who sings “Barcelona” (the best one-night-stand song in musicals).

The sense that ambivalence and confusion are not unique to Bobby is enhanced by the cold, austere glitter of David Gallo’s set and Thomas C. Hase’s superb lighting. But it’s Mr. Esparza who is the top expert on ambivalence here, giving “Company” the most compelling center it has probably ever had. In previous productions, Bobby has registered principally as a wistful window onto other lives.

But Mr. Esparza is anything but a cipher. Though his Bobby can seem as laconic and drolly unresponsive as Bob Newhart, you are always aware that this is a man in pain. As anyone who saw him in “Cabaret” or “The Normal Heart” knows, Mr. Esparza is generally a pyrotechnic actor, sending sparks and smoke all over the place.

In keeping the lid on such volcanic energy, he makes Bobby’s climactic explosion inevitable. Though he sings beautifully throughout — in ways that define his character’s solipsism — he brings transporting ecstasy to the agony of the concluding number, in which Bobby finally joins the band of human life.

For much of Mr. Sondheim’s career, directors have approached his work as if “keep your distance” were woven into the copyright. More recently, a new generation of artists have heard an altogether different directive: “Come closer.” Mr. Doyle and Mr. Esparza make it clear that there are infinite rewards to be had in accepting that challenge.

COMPANY

A Musical Comedy

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by George Furth; directed by John Doyle; musical staging by Mr. Doyle; musical supervision and orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting by Thomas C. Hase; sound by Andrew Keister; hair and wig design by David Lawrence; make-up design by Angelina Avallone; associate director, Adam John Hunter; production stage manager, Gary Mickelson; resident music supervisor, Lynne Shankel; general manager, Richard Frankel Productions and Jo Porter; production manager, Juniper Street Productions, Inc. Presented by Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel, Steven Baruch, Ambassador Theater Group, Tulchin/Bartner Productions, Darren Bagert and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

WITH: Raúl Esparza (Robert), Keith Buterbaugh (Harry), Matt Castle (Peter), Robert Cunningham (Paul), Angel Desai (Marta), Kelly Jeanne Grant (Kathy), Kristin Huffman (Sarah), Amy Justman (Susan), Heather Laws (Amy), Leenya Rideout (Jenny), Fred Rose (David), Bruce Sabath (Larry), Elizabeth Stanley (April) and Barbara Walsh (Joanne).

Spinach-Artichoke Dip

Chop and drain two 10 oz. packages of frozen spinach. Add a chopped can of artichokes. Add a jar of commercial Alfredo sauce. Add a little tabasco and lemon juice. Stir it up good. This will make three soup bowls full. Freeze one and cover the other two with parmesan and bake them. Serve wid salsa, sour cream and tortilla chips. It’ll take you two days to eat both bowls but it’s best on the second day.

Shrimp Enchilada

Clean some shrimp and put them in a bowl with a can of Mexican Rotel. Put lemon or lime juice on it and a few sliced green olives or some green onions. Throw the southwest seasoning to it. Add some chopped bacon and dip your flour tortillas in the bacon grease. Put your tortillas in a baking dish and spoon the shrimp and Rotel mixture onto the tortillas. Wrap up the tortilla, top with cheese and bake.

Blackened Tilapia

Put a little balsamic vinagrette and lemon juice on some Tilapia filets. Let ’em sit in the fridge for at least an hour. Dip the filets in melted butter and cover ’em up with blackened redfish seasoning. Cook on your George Forman grill. If you cook ’em in a black iron skillet, you’ll make a mess. I don’t think it’s worth it.

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