Who's going home on The X-Factor? Last night I thought the judges were done voting and it was just the viewers vote that count. Not so. The 10 contestants with the highest viewer votes are safe. The bottom 2 will sing again and the judges will decide which one stays and which one goes home. Kind of odd -- would any one of these judges vote off a contestant in his or her group? I think Leroy Bell will be in the bottom two. He's got a great voice, but he's 59 and I doubt his fans voted 50 times each for him.

Update: So glad I was wrong about the bottom two. I totally agree with the viewers' votes. I'll be back after the show has aired on the west coast (to not spoil it) as to why I think the bottom two got the lowest votes. I'm surprised I didn't think of it before, but I didn't. [More...]

Busy day at work today. BTD - me too.

Closing arguments are today in the Dr. Conrad Murray manslaughter trial.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

I'm swamped still. But read this:

I don't think it's too strident to demand at this point that David Brooks be hauled up before a jury consisting of everyone else in America and forced to defend himself against several million counts of being an insufferable twat in a public place. In today's episode of Missing the Point So I Don't Miss a Meal, Our Mr. Brooks informs us that he once again has placed us all under close inspection beneath his monocle and discovered that some of us are very angry, not because some thieves in nice suits pillaged the national economy and then held the scraps for ransom. Oh, no, that isn't it at all, and he's got some wholly arbitrary ad hoc sociological categories to prove it.

Yep. Charles Pierce.

Open Thread.

Our earlier open thread is just about full.

We've got a blizzard starting. Frontier Airlines has already canceled flights for the morning.

I'm reading the U.S. Sentencing Commission's new report on mandatory minimum sentences and its recommendations to Congress. It doesn't recommend they be abolished, but it does point out they are too severe and applied inconsistently. One really good recommendation it makes is for Congress to expand the Safety Valve to apply to non-violent offenders with 2 or even 3 criminal history points. Overall, it says: [More....]

I've got court this afternoon. Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Who dressed up? Who went trick or treating? Who turned off the lights and pretended not to be home?

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Got caught by the weather yesterday. Traveling today, though on a delayed basis. Still busy too.

Open Thread.

It's the finale of Project Runway. The guest judge is L'Wren Scott (who is also the long-time girlfriend of Mick Jagger.)

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

It's a snowy, busy day here in Denver.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

President Obama and Air Force One just landed in Denver. He'll attend two fundraisers and then speak tomorrow at the Auraria campus. He's just in time for the start of our first major snow storm. 6 to 12 inches will fall between tonight and tomorrow afternoon. It was 80 degrees yesterday.

Steven Tyler fell in the shower in Paraguay and lost two (false) teeth and had to postpone Aerosmith's concert until tomorrow night:

Tyler had been dehydrated and was suffering gastrointestinal problems. A man who identified himself as Gustavo Perez, a bellboy at the Bourbon hotel near Asuncion, told local radio that Tyler slipped when he was taking a shower and "had a nasty fall."

He was hospitalized, had emergency dental surgery and is now back at his hotel. I wonder if he slipped on one of those rubber mats.

Busy again. Open Thread.

Busy again. Open Thread.