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.

You need multiple DVR's to catch all the TV on tonight. There's new episodes of Showtime's Homeland, HBO's Boardwalk Empire, The Good Wife, Pan Am and the Next Iron Chef. And Desperate Housewives and the World Series.

Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Has anyone seen "Margin Call"? Even though it just opened in theaters, it's also available on On Demand. I watched it last night. It was good but I wouldn't call it a "thriller" or "harrowing" like some. No one commits a crime, no one dies, no one is a hero. It's just about executives from a single company who, upon learning their numbers don't hold up, rationalize their decision to dump their over-leveraged real estate mortgages on other companies and create economic chaos. The only suspense, and it's mild, is whether the other top brass will go along.

It's getting great reviews. The New Yorker says it "is one of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made."

Some say it's Kevin Spacey's best work. I'd hardly call it that. Also, there was way too little background provided on the major characters, e.g., Demi Moore. It almost felt like walking into a movie in the middle. [More...]