Top 10 Girls performances last night. Recaps and breakdown after the jump.

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Top 10 Guys performance last night. Recaps and breakdown after the jump.

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The first 12 guys and girls results are in. Two of each going home this week. The verdict after the jump.

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American Idol Season 9 featured the Top 12 guys performing. Follow the action after the jump…

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American Idol Season 9 opened tonight with the Top 12 girls performing. Follow the action after the jump…

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Derek “Chief” Brigham, at Freedom Dogs, has been tallying up blogger “leanings for Republican Governor candidate endorsement.”  He has some interesting observations. Definitely worth a look.

Derek puts my own opinion into the (surprisingly) rare “Uncommitted” tally, but he doesn’t seem sure about it. So just to clear things up… Make that a definite uncommitted opinion. I hope whomever wins the endorsement makes a fine candidate in the general, and an even finer governor thereafter. But I’m too cynical to get caught up in all the primary hoopla this time around.

I sometimes wonder if Mitch realized what kind of co-blogger he was getting when he added me to SITD. My own late and unlamented blog was a bit all-over-the-place, veering from politics to pop culture to media fisking to wine & food. I’m pretty sure he was okay with all of that.

But then there was the less… usual… stuff. Like the time I faked my own death and came back as a gigantic mutant godzilla-like creature. Or the time I appointed a cute puppy as my ombudsman to deflect scandalous political fallout for an entirely made up political office. Not really sure Mitch intended that stuff to make the ol’ SITD transition. As of yet, I’ve not pushed the envelope to find out.

But if there’s one thing Mitch knew darned well he’d be getting when he signed me on to post over here its…
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Paul Krugman doesn’t like Republicans very much. This is not a recent development. However the extent of his loathing often takes him along truly unique rhetorical paths. Such as the notion that Republicans are dooming America into non-existence, just like what happened to Poland a couple of centuries ago.

Lest you think I’m taking his words out of context, here’s how Krugman says it himself:

Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.

A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.

Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison.

What this comes down to (surprise, surprise) is that cursed forty-first vote Republicans picked up in the Senate with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts to fill the former “Ted Kennedy seat.” Apparently once this happened Republicans devised a clever new scheme, never attempted before by any other Senatorial minority, to use to their advantage a bizarre and little understood Senatorial procedure called… get ready for this, it’s a pretty obscure one… the “filibuster.”

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I heard about this from – I kid you not – NPR yesterday.  (Allah also bumped it today.) Insanely entertaining and yet still relevant.

The irrepressible Dennis the Peasant examines the results of Tuesday’s Massachusetts’ Senate election, and declares it more like Imperial Japan’s experience in the 1942 Battle of Midway, than the more common metaphor of Napoleon’s Waterloo.

The third and final type of failure is catastrophic failure, and it is also a complex failure. For catastrophic failure to occur, the failures of learning, anticipation and adaptation must all be present at the same time. As one would suspect, catastrophic failure is nearly always as wide in scope as it is irredeemable. A perfect example of catastrophic failure would be the defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Midway in 1942. (See Parshall and Tully’s superb Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway for a detailed application of Cohen and Gooch’s methodology.)

Although Cohen and Gooch never suggest so, it seems obvious to me that their methodology has an obvious application in the analysis of political – as opposed to military– failure. Here’s my stab at just an analysis of the defeat of Obamacare in 2010.

This is one of those read the whole thing times.

In timely fashion, Monckton presents the most definitive cross examination of a Global Warming Alarmist zealot ever. Points to both participants for the civility. But wow… Global Warming Alarmism doesn’t come out smelling so fresh in this one.

(H/T to the always excellent Global Warming Hoax Weekly Roundup, at the Daily Bayonet)

I came across this quotation allegedly by Newt Gingrich today:

“I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials.”

Hah, hah. It’s funny cuz it’s true, etc. etc. That’s not really my point.

My point is that I cannot for the life of me find any source cited for the quotation, even though it’s easy to find it repeated all over the Internet. It’s always attributed to Newt, but never linked to any source. This lack of sourcing is pretty unusual for a modern quotation in Internetland. And that bugs me.

So I’ve done a little more digging and it looks like I may have found the original source of the quote. Emphasis on the “may” here.

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It’s Friday – the official day in the blogosphere when you don’t have to apologize for posting about frivolous stuff (Friday “cat blogging” comes to mind), even on supposedly “serious” blogs. To help SITD keep up with that glorious tradition, here is a post that has nothing to do with politics, elections, the economy, or geo-politics. This post is about the media equivalent of junk-food – television sit-coms!

I’m not the world’s biggest television junkie. In fact I go through long periods when I hardly watch the thing. However with the advent of online television show viewing I’ve actually been able to keep up with a few of this season’s shows. Here’s my mid-season report on some current sit-coms I’ve been following. Follow along if you care.
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I’m currently (okay, not currently, but I wrote this during lunch – ed.) watching big fluffy flakes of an entirely-localized weather phenomenon which should not be considered indicative in any way of the global climate trend (ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT) fall from the sky. By my reckoning this is about the fourth such ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT this month. In this part of Minnesota it would be unusual (though not unprecedented) to have even one such ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT before November. Four ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCTs is pretty notable, and just serves as a vivid reminder how much colder than normal most of this year – especially this month – has been.

Which probably goes a long way toward explaining this…

Survey Says: Americans Not Worried About Global Warming

A new poll out today on Americans’ attitudes about climate change presents sobering findings for those that favor aggressive action to curb U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, fewer respondents also see global warming as a very serious problem; 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

The survey also points to a decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity. Just 36% say that currently, down from 47% last year.

The thing is, I am perfectly and contentedly aware that those fluffy white flakes outside my window truly are a local phenomenon and that they do not tell me anything about the global climate. But then I also think the same whenever some hot-headed alarmist points to a single melting glacier, stranded polar bear, or Australian drought as part of the global warming “evidence all around us.” If you’re going to invest so much time and energy fashioning a petard, you ought to be aware about the dangers of hoisting is my point.

It’s entirely possible I’m totally wrong in my views about global warming (it’s natural) and mankind’s role in it (negligible). But even if I’m wrong about that I’m certainly not going to make the foolish argument that the snow flying around outside my window at the moment proves my point. I am, however, going to engage in a little shadenfreude as the fluffy white flakes of ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT help to put a very real chill on the attempted panic of public opinion regarding global warming and the “evidence all around us.”

[note: It’s probably a good idea to note that the above was written by Bogus Doug and not Mitch.  In the site’s recent technical issues, we seem to have lost the post-author thingy.]

[Mitch adds:  The “author name” thing will be fixed this weekend.  Especially if it’s too rainy for yard work]

For about forty years the greatest scientific experts in the world were in broad agreement that the evolution of the human species included a critical phase involving a large brained but otherwise ape-like creature known as Eoanthropus dawsoni, or, more colloquially “Piltdown Man.” Piltdown man was discovered by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson in a gravel pit in the village of Piltdown, in East Sussex, England. Dawson subsequently presented his find to the Geographical Society of London in 1912.

So broadly accepted was the existence of this creature as a critical step of human evolution that it was cited by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow in perhaps the most famous event in in the popular mind involving evolutionary theory since Darwin – the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1926. However in 1953 the world was stunned to discover that, far from being a critical step in human evolution, Piltdown Man had never existed at all. The fossil which lead to this belief was, in fact, a hoax.

But despite its notoriety there are useful lessons we can draw from the Piltdown hoax. One of the central lessons is that whenever a scientific problem beckons for a solution there is a predisposition within the scientific community to accept a certain kind of solution: the kind of solution which neatly fits the prevailing assumptions.

Piltdown was accepted readily despite flaws which were apparent from the start because it fit. It was not some groundbreaking revelation which caused scientists to rethink their assumptions about human evolution. Far from it. It was the very fulfillment of those assumptions. It was the long sought after “missing link” between man and the ape, and it looked exactly like they assumed it would – a big-brained ape. Mankind, so the thinking of the time went, first developed intelligence and afterward learned to walk upright and make tools and use language and the like. That was the story of human evolution as science was trying to tell it. Piltdown looked like it could have walked right out of that story book.

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The latest chapter of the left’s carefully reasoned and mature dialogue on public policy comes from the UK Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland:

Anyone who cares about the survival of our planet should start praying that Barack Obama gets his way on reforming US healthcare. That probably sounds hyperbolic, if not mildly deranged: even those who are adamant that 45 million uninsured Americans deserve basic medical cover would not claim that the future of the earth depends on it. But think again.

Got it. If President Obama doesn’t get “his way” on health care we’re all gonna die!!! This is exactly the kind of cool, dispassionate reason we’ve come to depend on from the left, and why we take their warnings about overheated rhetoric coming from the right so seriously.

Anyway, I sure hope the president gets around to deciding what “his way” on health care is supposed to be, and letting the Democratic leadership in Congress know. Is he going to get working on that right after this next round of speeches or something? Now that we know the planet is doomed without his stamp of approval on some kind of actual health reform thingy, can he maybe shift his schedule around to get cracking on this?

Because I, for one, can’t wait to see the kind of super-human focus and bipartisan coalition he brings to bear on < superhero-theme-music > saving the planet < /superhero-theme-music > after his dazzling performance on health care… insurance… whatever… reform.

A couple of weeks back we noted Chef Lenny Russo’s urgent complaint about an impending Saint Paul city ordinance related to restaurants. Russo was so alarmed by the ordinance that he announced plans to move his restaurant out of the city.

This weekend, Russo posted an update.

A lot of people in both Minneapolis and St. Paul have been watching as those of us in the St. Paul hospitality industry have been working toward defeating a proposal by St. Paul City Council Person Melvin Carter III that would, among other things, require all restaurants and caterers to maintain and provide for their guests upon demand an allergen handbook listing all of the ingredients in each and every dish they serve.

Some weeks back, I blogged about this and about how such an ordinance would inevitably drive our restaurant, Heartland, from the environs of St. Paul. I also gave an interview on that topic to Patrick Reusse for his KSTP AM radio show. Soon thereafter, I received an email from Council Person Carter requesting a meeting. We had that meeting at Heartland last Tuesday.

Four or five years ago this might be spun as a “David versus Goliath” victory for the humble little blogosphere, what with a simple little blog post doing what the city’s paid media failed to do in bringing visibility and response to this issue. But we’re really past that point. Russo’s blog is part of the Star Tribune website, for gosh sake. David and Goliath are no longer so easy to distinguish.

In any case, the gist of the story is that they all sat down at a table and talked out Russo’s objection… at which point Councilman Carter had a metaphorical “D’oh!” moment a la Homer Simpson.

As our conversation progressed, I found him to be quite receptive to understanding how restaurants of Heartland’s ilk operate and how his proposal would stifle our ability to succeed in St. Paul while actually making people less safe. He expressed that his intention was not to do so. In addition, it rapidly became clear to him that an allergen handbook such as the one he put forth in his most recent draft was not the best way to address his concerns. … Consequently, it took Melvin about forty five minutes to declare that the idea of an allergen handbook is off the table.

Whether you own a restaurant in Saint Paul or eat in one (guilty! – ed.) that’s good news. And there’s a lot more about it in Russo’s post which I would encourage you to read – especially if you read his previous post on the topic.

In the wake (or afterglow, if you work for MSNBC) of Obama’s latest prime-time grabbing foofarah, I’m noticing a telling disconnect between those who examine what comes next in concrete terms from those who just want to bask in how awesomely terrific our dreamy president appeared. Let’s start by examining the latter, and what better example could there be than noted pant-crease fetishist David Brooks…

On Wednesday night, Barack Obama delivered the finest speech of his presidency. The exposition of his health care views was clear and lively. The invocation of Teddy Kennedy was moving and effective. The rumination at the end about the American character and the role of government was the clearest summary of Obama’s political philosophy that he has yet given us.

It’s not often you can summarize an ostensibly conservative columnist’s opening paragraph about a Democratic president’s call to socialize medicine as, “Squeeeee!!!” But this is hardly the first time Brooks has been enraptured by Obama. The telling part begins to show next, but Brooks doesn’t seem to register the significance even as he makes note of it.

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I watched bits and pieces of the latest Great Obama Oration (henceforth, “GOO”) last night, mostly because the alternative television programming between seven and eight on Wednesday evening turns out to be about as entertaining as the extended director’s cut of Gigli. Also because “So You Think You Can Dance” had to cut to an occasional commercial break.

I was struck by the fact that someone I am assured is one of the most electrifying speakers of our time sounds so monotonous, repetitive, and stuck on his old campaign trail script. As God is my witness, at one point he actually said, “I won’t stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are.” Didn’t he use that same line in the GOO he delivered at the Ankeny, Iowa Lion’s Club back on the campaign trail in 2007? And the GOO at the Rutland, New Hampshire “Sun Up Cafe”? And the GOO at the Newberry, South Carolina VFW? Etc. etc. etc. I suppose such a fervent adherence to recycling (in this case of speech lines) probably wins extra support from the environmental lobby, but it didn’t seem quite suited to the moment.

I was also struck by how the post GOO analysis remained nearly perfectly split along partisan lines. It’s not so surprising that the Democratic backers confessed themselves smitten over the stunning power and unexpected (?!!) effectiveness of the GOO. That’s the same script they follow every time Obama fails to impale himself on his teleprompter while simultaneously being caught on tape cursing out a troop of cub scouts. No, that much I knew would be coming.

The striking thing was how the media-proclaimed post-partisan president seemingly did little more than rally his own partisans in, once again, campaign-like fashion. Why, I’ll bet if they had to vote for president tomorrow they’d vote for him again!! Take that, naysayers!

The problem is I’m not sure that particular outcome added anything new or significant to the health care insurance mumble… mumble… reform situation. What exactly was this speech supposed to do? Lay out a clear compromise to break the Congressional stalemate? He didn’t offer one. Win over independents or votes across the aisle? Didn’t seem much attempted. Come down one way or the other on a “public option”? He once again played both sides of the fence.

So anyway, near as I can tell, yet another GOO has passed and once again nothing has really changed.

The world’s oldest sophomore, Tom Friedman, has discovered the wondrous advantages of one-party autocracy over our current system of government. No, I am not exaggerating.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

If you’re new to Friedman’s writing, or perhaps still nostalgically influenced by his presumably serious position as a columnist for the New York Times, you might think this is merely an attention grabbing opening lede which will be smoothly integrated into an otherwise sensible opinion piece as he develops his thoughts on this. You possibly also still believe in the Easter Bunny.

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With Mitch already holding the title of the Twin Cities blogosphere’s best feminist, I feel it incumbent upon me to fill the role of the post-modern, liberal, lesbian, iconoclast on this blog. Or at least to emulate the television viewing habits of Camille Paglia…

I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy — I never saw a single minute of any of it.

I have a feeling our respective definitions of “old movies” differ quite a bit (for example mine would include the earlier Harry Potter movies which seem to broadcast every other weekend on the ABC Family channel and can be viewed with clear conscience without shooing the kiddies from the room). But otherwise that television watching description is uncannily like mine.

Anyway, Camille has a few other thoughts this week, including a rather extended smackdown of her fellow Democrats over their fumbling of the health care issue. It’s worth checking out.

Labor Day weekend is supposed to be a sleepy time removed from the normal grind of days. It’s to be a time of camaraderie with family and friends and escape from the workaday routine. It denotes the symbolic end of another summer idyll and the return of less frivolous pursuits, foreshadowing the imminent return of less frivolous weather as well. This is what Labor Day weekend is supposed to be.

Instead this Labor Day Weekend was all too full of politics as usual. It started, as most things do in the era of Hopenchange, in the White House.

The sordid details follow the jump…

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One of the best restaurants in the city of Saint Paul is Heartland. That’s a true statement by popular and critical affirmation as well as from personal experience. Heartland’s chef-owner, Lenny Russo, writes one of the “community voice” blogs at the Star Tribune website, via which he delivered a bombshell today:

Heartland to St. Paul: “So long. It was great while it lasted.”

Another victim of the wretched economy, you might think. Just another casualty in the cut-throat restaurant industry which has seen so many closings already this year, perhaps you assume.

But that’s not the story here. Heartland is doing fine. Saint Paul, however, might be broken.
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The sixth season of Top Chef continues tonight. I would have given warning a week ago, but I was caught off guard when the initial episode appeared last week. Good thing I had already prepared to watch the Top Chef Masters finale that night, otherwise I would have been stuck watching one of the twenty seven re-runs of the first episode between its initial broadcast and next week’s show. Nightmare scenario narrowly averted!

Anyway for those who’ve missed it so far, this season the producers chose a slightly more mature and accomplished field of cheftestants than they have in the past. The average age seems to have risen by five or six years – and when that’s the difference between 25 and 30, it makes a big difference in experience and confidence. Also there are no “culinary students” and only one “caterer” in the bunch. These are all chef owners, executive chefs, and sous chefs, some of whom have worked for some of the biggest names in the business.

My personal favorites at the moment (though admittedly it’s too early for it to mean much) are Jennifer Carroll, the hyper-competent and accomplished Philadelphia chef with very little tolerance for BS, and Kevin Gillespie, a jolly looking Atlanta chef with a beard like a rhododendron bush who aced the first elimination challenge in the hyper-competitive field. Michael Isabella, a Washington D. C. chef is looking very strong while thus far getting the Top Chef producers’ full-out villain edit (boo! hiss!). Could make for some good foodie drama in the coming weeks.

Lest I tempt the patience of the readership here, I’ll not go into much detail on the cheffy goings on from week to week. But I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one here tuning in, so it might get mentioned from time to time. For more detailed reviews, the best blog hands down is Dom Armato’s Skillet Doux.

Apparently tired of letting Western millionaires have all the fun bashing the world’s leading economic nations while demanding huge sacrifices of their wealth as payment for ruining the planet, the nations of Africa decided to jump into the game. Being new to this particular shakedown racket you’ll forgive them for their embarrassing directness:

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 25 (IPS) – An African Union proposal demanding billions of dollars in compensation for the impacts of climate change is taking shape.

It is time for Africa to aggressively engage with climate change negotiations to ensure its interests are met in the designing of global responses, said African Union (AU) Commission chair Jean Ping. AU officials say the lack of a coordinated stance on global warming by African governments has placed serious limitations on Africa’s ability to negotiate in the past. To put this right, a meeting to formulate a common stand ahead of the Copenhagen meeting has just concluded in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

African experts on climate change and high-level representatives of AU member states have recommended Africa demand between $67 billion and $200 billion annually in compensation.

There’s something almost refreshing in the directness here. No attempt to get rich on the sly via some hard to understand “cap and trade” scheme, or misdirected funds or grants with earth-friendly names. Their message is simple: Pay. Up.

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