The racist hate-mongers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference threaten to "shut down" Kansas City.

Charles Steele Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Tuesday that the organization would make its point economically if Frances Semler, a member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, remained on the park board.

Steele said that Mayor Mark Funkhouser’s appointment of Semler, an opponent of illegal immigration, was part of a pattern of racial insensitivity.

“We are asking all civil rights organizations to stay out of Kansas City. We are going to shut you down,” Steele said. “… We will take all the monies away from here. … Nobody should come to Kansas City.”

The boycott would include marches, Steele said, but beyond that, “I believe in the element of surprise.”

I dunno, but bald threats do not strike me as a particularly Christian approach to conflict resolution.

So, you ask, what is the intolerable atrocity for which these good Christians want to shut down a city?

Here it is:  one member of the municipal parks board thinks that people who come into this country should follow the law in order to do so.  This is enough to bring the SCLC to decidedly un-Christian thoughts.

Yeah, there's racial insensitivity going on here, and if Mr. Steele wants to start rooting it out, he should start with a good long look at the guy in the mirror.

Oprah Winfrey getting her own TV network:

Discovery Communications and Winfrey announced a deal Tuesday where the Discovery Health network will be turned over to Winfrey next year, becoming OWN — the Oprah Winfrey Network.

What happened to Oh!  Or was it Oxygen? 

Ah!  NBC-Universal bought it last October from The Oprah for a cool $925 million.

His media schedule for today:

WHAT: Fred Thompson Participates in Live Television Interview with Megyn Kelly on FOX News Channel’s America’s Newsroom
WHEN: 10:10 am ET
WHERE: FOX News Channel.

WHAT: Fred Thompson Participates in Live Radio Interview on The Glenn Beck Program
WHEN: 11:05 am ET
WHERE: Syndicated Nationally
NOTE: Listen live.

WHAT: Fred Thompson Participates in Live Radio Interview with Keven Cohen on The Afternoon Drive
WHEN: 3:05 pm ET
WHERE: WVOC, Columbia, SC
NOTE: Listen live.

WHAT: Fred Thompson Participates in Live Interview with Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on FOX News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes
WHEN: 10:00 pm ET
WHERE: FOX News Channel.
NOTE: Senator Thompson will appear between 10:00-10:30 pm ET.

Here's Fred's bus tour schedule for today:
Yup, that Fred Thompson.  I kinda like what he says, but I've heard that he doesn't have the fire in the belly, and that he's kinda lazy.  But tell ya what, you go out and do eight different public appearances in one day, starting at 8 a.m. and ending some time after 10:30 p.m. and find out what "lazy" means.

Cue the X-Files music:

Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.

"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal," Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy."

Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

Quick, somebody send a reality TV show crew out to Texas!

As if they didn't have enough problems, Big Entertainment is starting to cancel writers' contracts for developing next year's TV series:

January is usually the beginning of pilot season, when networks order new scripted shows. But the strike leaves networks without a pool of comedy and drama scripts from which to choose.
. . .
"I didn't see it coming," Barbara Hall, a writer and producer whose credits include former CBS series "Joan of Arcadia" and "Judging Amy," told the Times, which said ABC executives gave her the news Friday. "I am not entirely sure what their strategy is, all I know was that I was a casualty of it."

What it means, Ms. Hall, is that the networks have figured out that they can make more money with reality TV shows, game shows, and sports than they can with dramas and sitcoms.  Sucks to be you, eh?

Yeah, we all thought it was "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll" but it turns out that you can replace Rock and Roll in that classic formulation with food and aggression:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 15, 2008) — New research from Vanderbilt University shows for the first time that the brain processes aggression as a reward - much like sex, food and drugs - offering insights into our propensity to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and football.

“Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics, said. “We have found that the ‘reward pathway’ in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.”

That explains both hip-hop and, strangely enough, the Creepy Burger King.

Well, almost.

Joel Hodgson has gotten the band back together and formed Cinematictitanic.com, where Joel, Josh, Trace, Frank, and Mary Jo come together to do what they do naturally--riff on really, really bad movies.

No, as far as I know there's no Gizmonic Institute, no Crow T. Robot, no Tom Servo, but hey!  You can't have everything.

Meanwhile, the "other guy," Mike Nelson, is still going strong with his Rifftrax.

Double the pleasure, double the fun.  Buy!  Buy!  Consume!  Consume!

That would be the credit rating of the U.S. Government - - you know, that one with all of the "rock-solid, guaranteed Treasury Bonds?"

Why is that, you ask?

Because we're mindlessly pouring money down the trough of entitlement programs, according to the report in Financial Times:

In its annual report on the US, Moody’s signalled increased concern that rapid rises in Medicare and Medicaid – the government-funded healthcare programmes for the old and the poor – would “cause major fiscal pressures” in years to come.

Unlike Moody’s previous assessment of US government debt in 2005, Thursday’s report specifically links rises in healthcare and social security spending to the credit rating.

“The combination of the medical programmes and social security is the most important threat to the triple-A rating over the long term,” it said.

Steven Hess, Moody’s lead analyst for the US, told the Financial Times that in order to protect the country’s top rating, future administrations would have to rein in healthcare and social security costs.

“If no policy changes are made, in 10 years from now we would have to look very seriously at whether the US is still a triple-A credit,” he said.

That we're going to turn Anbar Province over to the Iraqis in March.

In a telephone interview from Iraq, Marine Maj. Gen. Walter E. Gaskin, commander of the roughly 35,000 Marine and Army forces in Anbar, said levels of violence have dropped so significantly—coupled with the growth and development of Iraqi security forces in the province—that Anbar is ready to be handed back to the Iraqis.

Thus far, nine of 18 Iraqi provinces have reverted to Iraqi control, most recently the southern province of Basra in December. The process has gone substantially slower than the Bush Administration once hoped, mainly because of obstacles to developing sufficient Iraqi police and army forces. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that he expects the process to continue.

This, to some people, constitutes "losing in Iraq."  You know who you are . . .

Culture-jamming for our generation:

My goal as a political opinion poll dancer is to take up as much of his time as possible by giving misleading, long-winded and totally inaccurate answers to survey questions in hopes of one day producing an outcome — not a Hillary Clinton victory, per se, just a result that defies the pollsters — like the one produced last night in the “Live Free or Die” state. And, while I would like to take sole credit for the results in New Hampshire, I know I must share credit with others like me.

Not sure I approve.  Pretty sure I don't disapprove.