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After a successful launch of  Space Shuttle  Endeavour this morning  comes the latest video of what happened to the Challenger 24 years ago.  This video taken by an amateur  is truly a testament to the disaster that took place.  Gut-punch.  I was working in radio that day and will never forget the wall-to-wall coverage we provided, or the sick feeling we [...]

http://www.dane101.com/files/podcast/Film101_Episode_16.mp3

http://www.dane101.com/files/podcast/Film101_Episode_16.m4a

 

Episode 16 arrives after a delay due to technical issues. Apologies! You can finally hear our discussion of Sherlock Holmes and Avatar, a talk with professor Lea Jacobs of the UW Cinematheque, and a discussion of the movie industry going bankrupt. Thanks to Paul Mitch for music.

Tamar Lewin: Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College. When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home. There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years -- completely free. Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students -- a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees. Here, and at North Carolina's other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college. "We don't want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu," said Lakisha Rice, the principal. "We want the ones who need our kind of small setting."Once again, the MMSD and State of WI are going in the wrong direction regarding education. Much more on "Credit for non-MMSD courses.

Agreed. President Obama hasn’t held a full-scale news conference since July. Instead, he answered a dozen people’s questions last week on YouTube, most of them easily finessed and — extra bonus! — no annoying follow-ups of the kind posed by real, live journalists. It would be hard — impossible, actually — to argue that Obama hasn’t been [...]

Claire Heininger: Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers of both parties will unveil a series of sweeping pension and benefit reforms Monday that could affect every public employee in New Jersey while saving the state billions of dollars, according to four officials with direct knowledge of the plan. The proposals would require workers and retirees at all levels of government and local school districts to contribute to their own health care costs, ban part-time workers at the state and local levels from participating in the underfunded state pension system, cap sick leave payouts for all public employees and constitutionally require the state to fully fund its pension obligations each year. Details of the four-bill package to be introduced Monday were provided to The Star-Ledger on the condition of anonymity because the four officials were not authorized to speak in advance. The proposals go further than several past efforts at reining in taxpayer-funded pension and benefit costs, and if enacted would represent a major early victory for the new Republican governor and Democrats who control the state Legislature. But supporters anticipate an angry response from public employee and teachers unions that wield considerable power throughout the state -- though lawmakers argue rank-and-file workers would have safer pensions than before. Christie's office declined to comment, as did top Democrats and Republicans involved in crafting the bills. All sides had made their feelings clear last month, when Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) announced the upper house's intentions to fix a system that would otherwise "go bankrupt." Lawmakers of both parties pledged their support, with Christie saying "bipartisan action is critical to reforming a broken pension and benefits system."

More from Albany.  There are some speculating that this could be more than a sex scandal, and  might now include “a state deal he may be connected to.”  Governor David Paterson is talking privately with key Democratic leaders about his political future. Paterson campaign spokesman Richard Fife says the weekend calls were “routine re-election campaign calls.” But a [...]

Stick a fork in it, it's done. Over. Toast. Influential Nashville blogger Adam Kleinheider declared the tea party movement dead this weekend, hijacked by corporate interests, money-hungry opportunists, and Sarah Palin.

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

Who's Judson Phillips? He's a guy from Tennessee who's -- brace yourself -- a trial lawyer! This makes him evil incarnate. He's also a force behind the National Tea Party Convention that was held this week. Seems that some people saw charging $350 and up to attend a "grassroots" convention struck some as profiteering. Before the convention was even held, it was already generating controversy among the teabagger believers.



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Several teabagger organizations pulled out of the convention. Teabaggers set up a "guerilla press conference" in the hotel to protest the event "as inconsistent with the grassroots origins of the tea party movement." The misspelled signs equating President Obama with Hitler and Stalin were banned. Sarah Palin did her own cashing in, collecting more that one-hundred grand to give her standard "Boy howdy, does that Obama fella ever suck!" speech. She says she'll give the money back to "the cause," but you've got to wonder what cause? You'd be excused from guessing that "the cause" is her political action committee, which has basically been serving as a money-laundering operation to buy her own book.

Oh woe! The tea party movement has been taken over from the outraged masses! Gone is all that grassroots power, replaced by corporate interests and greedy users.

Mourn the death of that which never existed...

See, the tea party movement was an offshoot of the "town hall mobs" of last August. Those were astroturf, organized by Republican operatives and Washington lobbying groups.

This evolved into a more structured "tea party movement," which is astroturf organized by Republican operatives and Washington lobbying groups.

Paul Krugman, New York Times [the "Brooks Brothers riot" link is mine]:

[I]t turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.

But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

So, it isn't so much a case of a people's movement being taken over by special interests, as it is a special interests movement that people are starting to wake up to. Or sort of wake up to, anyway -- they still believe it was once a people's movement.

And let's face it, these people are slow learners. Some -- if not most -- will never wake up. After all, they're convinced that they need to save America from such scourges as affordable healthcare, an economy improving without accompanying inflation, and becoming world leaders in green energy markets. Let me repeat; these people have been trained by corporate interests to think these are problems -- i.e., they are chumps, gullible asses, or pigeons. Take your pick.

The tea party movement isn't dead and it hasn't changed. It is was it always was, a corporate PR stunt involving a whole bunch of talk radio-addled stooges. It's as organic and natural as a Potemkin village, complete with Potemkin villagers. The people being manipulated are well-intentioned, for the most part, but are victims of a con job. And, if there's one thing a con man counts on, it's that the mark will resist the realization that they've been conned.

So, instead of teabaggers realizing that this has been a corporate advertising campaign all along, they think it's being "taken over" by corporate interests. In the end, I don't think it matters much how realistic their own take on their history is. What matters is that they realize that the people leading them aren't really all that concerned with them.

-Wisco


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A state lawmaker's rhetoric about the volume of complaints he's received from innocent people whose lives have been hurt by an online court database doesn't match reality.

You didn't really think there wouldn't be an Edgewater post this morning, did you? Look at this, can you tell what we are paying $16m for? It's on page 49. This is in the "public space" section of their handout. This is what was in the TIF presentation about public space and what TIF would be paying for: First, it listed three components of the project with public space being one of them,

Last week I began reading The Birth of Time by English astrophysicist John Gribbin in which he describes how he and his fellow stargazers determined the age of the universe. I've been reading his book for many years now but a lot of people have started reading him thanks to Tiger Woods.



Mr. and Mrs. Tiger Woods' marital strife a couple months ago has inadvertently given a sales boost to one of Gribbin's back titles.

A series of pictures released by Florida police of Woods's wrecked SUV includes a shot of the back seat, complete with waterbottle, towel and furled umbrella. But there among the shards of tinted glass in the footwell sits a well-thumbed copy of a paperback with the golf-appropriate title clearly visible: Get a Grip on Physics.

This incidental role in Woods's domestic drama has been enough to create a rush to get hold of the book, with the title's sales rank on Amazon.com jumping from 396,224 earlier in the week to a high spotted yesterday by the Wall Street Journal of 2,268.

Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was "delighted that anyboy's reading my books. I just wish it was one that's still in print."

Is 22-degree weather too extreme to enjoy an entire day spent outdoors reveling in Badger red, playing flip cup in someone's snowy backyard and watching hockey played on historic Camp Randall Field? While we may have frozen our collective cruppers off, more than 55,000 Badger fans and I will tell you today--it certainly is NOT.

Now, granted, there was a world of difference between enjoying the spectacle of Saturday's Camp Randall Hockey Classic and the usual athletic events that draw crowds to the area. But it's the things that were just the same as a football Saturday in the fall that made the day special.

It certainly didn't hurt matters that both the Badger men's and women's hockey teams were in impressive form. In the opener of the double header, the women laid down a 6-1 drubbing on Bemidji State that kept the air horn howling so often, the Vilas Neighborhood Association will have enough gripes to keep them comfortably crotchety for the rest of the year. That was followed by a turnaround thriller between the Badger men and Michigan, a come from behind 3-2 victory that left hundreds of fans regretting their decision to leave early instead of risking frostbite and other more serious exposure-related ailments.

With all of the discussion about high speed rail between Madison and Milwaukee, I missed the report which identified the best place to locate the local station. I know there is lot of discussion about the Dane County Regional Airport. I also caught the suggestion that there be an alternative or additional stop at the tracks across East Washington and First Street. I assume that airport station has three advantages: It facilitates the train moving on to the Twin Cities...

On Saturday morning we ate like a Kaiser. I don't know why but I just felt like making Kaiserschmarrn or "Emperor Pancakes". It was fairly time-consuming but ultimately exceedingly tasty.

The pancakes are very thin like crepes and made with a goodly number of eggs. Here's one cooking away.



As I grilled the cakes, there was a whole lotta butter lurking in the background biding its time until it stepped into the limelight.



Once you've made all the pancakes, you melt a stick of butter. I added some dried currants and cinnamon.



Then you rip apart the pancakes into manageable sized strips and toss them in the butter along with some sugar.



And voila!



I don't want to brag but, if I didn't know any better, I'd say they were professionally made. Very rich and sweet. Next time I'd like to try serving them with less sugar and perhaps a fruit sauce or compote.

While I was in the German mode of cooking, I also made Rinderrouladen (Braised Beef Rolls) und Meerrettichkartofeln (Potatoes in Horseradish Cream Sauce) last night for dinner. Here's a photo.



Rouladen is simply a very thin slice of round stuffed with stuff and rolled up. It can be filled with pretty much whatever you like and I tend to like carrots, pickles, and onion with the onion sautéed in bacon fat. Bavaria Sausage on the southwest side has pre-made rouladen but they also carry the sliced beef alone which is handy. I braised mine in a mixture of beef stock and Capital Imperial Doppelbock. The beer, to my mind, was disappointing. I found it to be rather thin. Instead of a rush of sweet malty goodness, I found that the hops dominated. Bad batch? Had my palate been infected? I'm not sure. Regardless, I hope that Kirby gets this highly hopped bock thing out of his system.

The spuds were pretty tasty but could certainly have been better. For one thing, we only had 1% milk on hand when it really needed a fattier variety as the sauce cried out for a little more body. Secondly, more horseradish was in order. It didn't need a country ton. Just a smidgeon would have worked. Still, they weren't bad.