the wei

Stacey rides a tribute to her father, who died 24 days before this show. This beautiful performance shows horse and rider sharing complete mutual feeling and understanding.

Casting for Recovery is physical therapy for women after breast removal surgery. Fly-fishing requires the same range of motions traditional therapy offers to strengthen and develop muscles in the upper arm and body. CFR operates in the United States, Great Britain and Canada.

More info at Casting for Recovery.

Fox effectively fired Montel Williams after he stated during a televised interview that we ought to be at least as concerned about the 28 boys of ours who have died in Iraq since January, as we are about Heath’s death. He also shared the idea that the media community shouldn’t be discussing Ledger as an object in order to drive up ratings. This “young man . . . has not even been buried yet,” Williams admonished. He was, “somebody’s child, somebody’s father.”

When Montel refused to be guided by three colleagues back into a discussion on Ledger, one of the interviewers interrupted him, saying, “More Montel after this commercial break.” But, Montel wasn’t brought back after the break. Next, four days later CBS Television Distribution announced that “The Montel Williams Show” will not be back in production this year. Stations are being offered 52 weeks of the “Best of Montel” reruns to replace the live episodes.

Nellie Andreeva, of the Hollywood Reporter, quotes Williams: “After spending the last 17 years as a talk show host and 22 years prior in the military, I’m looking forward to the opportunities the next 17 years bring.”

See more at
Daily Kos
Blackvoices.com
Variety Magazine

Youtube video of Montel during the Fox interview

Fair Lawn, Dec. 9 - An 8-foot-tall menorah has been placed in a yard across from Borough Hall, but even after all its electric candles are lighted, it will not outshine the Borough Hall and its tree, which have hundreds of lightbulbs.

A sign on the menorah - symbol of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which began Tuesday night - reads, “There will be liberty and justice for all when I am across the street.” Rabbi Levi Neubort of the Anshei Lubavitch Outreach Center in Fair Lawn has erected what he calls a “defiant menorah” on private property facing the municipal building, because borough officials have consistently refused to allow the menorah on town property.

I found this story so delightful! My family happens to know personally the “rabbi who beat borough hall,” but we didn’t know all that his fight entailed. Eventually, the rabbi was able to begin lighting a Chanukah menorah on city hall grounds in 2006. And The Wei family was there for the first lighting!

Jump to full Beliefnet article. Originally appeared in The Record.

I wanted to read a Salon article today that I bookmarked a while back, and was disappointed to find that there’s no more free lunch in the Salon.

Today, Salon allows me to choose to give one of 100 companies sponsoring its website, my personal contact information plus credit card information. And after a few days, I’ll qualify for premium membership, valued at $29.99.

In the mean time, my personal information will have been bought and sold between major retailers at least 100 times. I_couldn’t_bring_myself_to_do_it. Eventually, I’m going to have to think about shelling out the $29.99 fee. I know my privacy’s worth at least that much. I just need to figure out whether Salon is.

Thursday, 01/03/08
Data loss shakes voter trust. Facility guarded half-time on weekends

By MICHAEL CASS, Staff Writer

The Metro Nashville building from which thieves stole two computers containing sensitive voter data does not have security guards on duty for half of the day on weekends, and it has no alarm system or video surveillance.

The Metro Office Building on Second Avenue South has had one guard on duty 12 hours a day on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays for about 10 years, said Velvet Hunter, Metro General Services’ assistant director for administration. She declined to specify the hours, citing concerns that publicity could make the facility more vulnerable.

Hunter said city officials decide how to secure buildings based on “a risk assessment of all factors.” She said the Metro Office Building, which is on Second Avenue South near Howard School Office Building, had never been burglarized until the laptops were stolen around Christmas.

But the area around the building, which is just off Interstate 40, has had problems with crime. Four homicides were committed within a half-mile of the facility in 2007, and seven homicides within a mile of it, according to a Tennessean analysis of Metro police data.

The two Dell Latitude laptops, one of which needed repairs, contained Social Security numbers for 337,000 voters. Police said Wednesday that a computer router also stolen in the break-in at the Davidson County Election Commission offices “went offline” at 9:45 p.m. Dec. 24.

Jump to full Tennesean article

by Star Ledger Staff and wire reports
January 02, 2008, 5:07 PM

California sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today for denying its first-in-the-nation greenhouse gas limits on cars, trucks and SUVs, challenging the Bush administration’s conclusion that states have no business setting emission standards.

New Jersey joined the lawsuit and other states were expected to follow. The legal challenge was anticipated after the EPA on Dec. 19 denied California a waiver it needs under the federal Clean Air Act. The lawsuit was filed in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson denied California the waiver, saying new federal regulations would be more effective than a patchwork of state laws. At least 16 other states had been expected to follow California’s lead and adopt the state’s tougher emission limits.

New Jersey and the other states cannot act without EPA approval.

“We need the waiver enabling California’s proposed greenhouse gas emission standards for new motor vehicles, which are vital to the health and well being of New Jersey residents,” state Attorney General Anne Milgram said.

Jump to full Star Ledger article

Paul Krugman writes

Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

And there you have the core of Mr. Bush’s philosophy. He wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.

This sounds like a caricature, but it isn’t. The truth is that this good-is-bad philosophy has always been at the core of Republican opposition to health care reform.

Jump to full New York Times op-ed piece

The family of a California teenager plan to sue her health insurer which refused to pay for a liver transplant until hours before and she died on Thursday night.  

Her family . . . will ask the Los Angeles district attorney to press murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare, arguing that the firm “maliciously killed” Nataline Sarkisyan by its reluctance to pay for her treatment. Although she was fully insured and had a matching donor, Cigna refused to pay . . . . 

The company recently posted figures for its third-quarter performance this year, which showed profits up 22%. Next year it expects to earn an income of up to $1.2bn.

Jump to full Guardian article.

The myth is simply this: that if an individual will work hard, follow the rules, and be patient that they can be successful. . . The truth is that in accumulating wealth hard work plays a very small role . . . no group has worked harder than the slaves that built this country, the Chinese that built the railroad, or the Mexicans that continue to do the menial labor that drives our information society.

Today, as Tim Wise writes in “The Mother of All Racial Preferences” white baby boomers are benefiting from the largest transfer of wealth in American history as they inherit their parents’ estates. Some of that wealth dates back to the years of slavery, when Blacks were forced to work for free while their white owners and the American economy accumulated the benefits of their toil. Another large category of the transferred wealth is land, much of it stolen by the American government from Native Americans and Mexicans and sold for a pittance to white settlers. For the average white family, however, some of the largest sources of wealth are the result of racial preferences in government policies that were started in the 20th century.

. . . it was a fact that I worked the hardest on the jobs that paid me the least . . . How can we in good conscious claim that the person[s] working for minimum wage or working two menial jobs is not working hard enough and are therefore responsible for their lack of wealth?

Critics of affirmative action lean heavily on the myth that people make it on their own in the United States based on hard work and individual effort. They also maintain that government intervention in the wealth creation process is not just unprecedented, but un-American. Simply put, they ask: Why should the beneficiaries of affirmative action be the recipients of preferential governmental policies when whites acquired their wealth through hard work? The answer is simple: in reality governmental policy has played an absolutely crucial role in determining the racial character of the haves and the have nots in America.

. . . The majority of personal wealth in America is based on home ownership, if governmental policies provided funds for one group and not all groups equally then that is favoritism. With the government condoning and encouraging “red-lining” in mortgage loans by the FHA, it allowed whites to receive low interest loans on their mortgages thus providing them with the needed equity to begin the process of wealth accumulation. This is just one of many government policies that helped to decide who was going to be well-off in America and who wasn’t.

Jump to full article