Where there's enough smoke . . .

Over and over and over again, through the years and in a torrent the past month, Omahans in the rougher parts of town have complained that police have a brutality problem.

Over and over and over again, through the years and in a torrent the past month, the Omaha Police Department has responded that there's no problem, officers followed procedure . . . move along, nothing to see here.

And the public moves along. Probably because folks don't want to get the hell beat out of them by a cop.

You know, once or twice, you can blow off complaints of police brutality as a miscreant trying to blow smoke to cover up his own misdeeds. The trouble in Omaha is that the smoke is getting so thick, you have to assume there's a fire somewhere.

I READ STUFF like this in the Omaha World-Herald today, and I'm thinking something's rotten at the Omaha cop shop:

A woman said Thursday that she saw Omaha police officers hitting and kicking a 12-year-old boy as they held him on the ground.

Police officials, however, continue to say they have no evidence that officers did anything other than sweep Reinaldo Rodriguez's legs out from under him when he refused to stop for police and show his hands.

Janice Hazard spoke at a press conference Thursday called by Ben Salazar, publisher of Nuestro Mundo, a Spanish/English newspaper in Omaha. State Sen. Ernie Chambers also attended to demand that appropriate disciplinary action be taken against the officers involved.

Salazar provided photos of the boy, Reinaldo Rodriguez, that were taken at Children's Hospital several hours after police confronted him. The photos show scrapes on Reinaldo's face near one eye, on one cheek and on his forehead.

A medical report prepared by Dr. Alan Fuss at Children's Hospital states that Reinaldo also suffered multiple bruises on his head. Reinaldo's family took the boy to the hospital several hours after the incident.

Police Chief Thomas Warren said the injuries to Reinaldo's face resulted from when officers placed Reinaldo on the ground against his will.

"I wouldn't describe it as the result of a punch," Warren said. "I would describe it as more of a welt or abrasion."

The officers were in Reinaldo's neighborhood, near 27th and Harrison Streets, on Oct. 30 investigating a report of a boy walking down the street with a rifle. Reinaldo and several other boys ran from officers when they approached.

Reinaldo has said officers pushed him to the ground when he told them he wasn't doing anything wrong. They then punched his face three times, he said.

Hazard, a grandmother of another boy who was with Reinaldo that evening, said she tried to stop officers from punching and kicking Reinaldo by saying she knew he had done nothing wrong.

"They were beating him, hitting him, kicking him," she said. "I knew he was hurt because they hit him so many times."

The officers told her to get away and accused her of obstructing them, Hazard said. She stayed, she said, because she wanted to witness what was happening.

Warren said Reinaldo refused to stop or show his hands to prove he didn't have the rifle.

The officers also had no way of knowing whether Reinaldo potentially had discarded the weapon somewhere, Warren said.

Reinaldo was taken to his mother's apartment later, and he did not receive a ticket.

According to Salazar, the officers explained to the mother what had happened to Reinaldo by saying, "He was acting stupid." They did not apologize or seek help for Reinaldo, he said.

The family has not made a formal complaint at the Police Department. Reinaldo's mother told Salazar that she was scared and had no one to help her, Salazar said.

"When I went to see her . . . she was still in fear," he said.

Paul Landow, Mayor Mike Fahey's chief of staff, said the internal affairs unit would begin an investigation into Rodriguez's claims after the family filed a complaint.

NOT TO MENTION stories like this, also in the World-Herald today:

Jerome Clark Sr. asked a mayoral aide Thursday to look at his son's raw, battered face.

"He was arrested Tuesday night," Clark said of his son, 19-year-old Alejo Clark. "He was arrested and beat up."

Police Chief Thomas Warren said the injuries to Alejo Clark, who was arrested on suspicion of being a minor in possession of alcohol, occurred when Clark tried to run away. The arresting officers followed proper procedures, Warren said.

Clark said he did nothing to provoke the officers.

Clark was accompanied by his parents, Jerome and Marie Clark, to Police Headquarters on Thursday to file a formal complaint. They then went to the Mayor's Office, where Chief of Staff Paul Landow assured the south Omaha family that the complaint would be investigated.

Alejo Clark said he was with five friends about 9 p.m. Tuesday in a car parked at Brown Park near 15th and V Streets when a plainclothes officer approached on the driver's side and asked him for his license and registration.

"When I was handing it to him, he grabbed the registration," Clark said. "He then opened the door and pulled me out of the car and threw me to the ground for no reason."

Clark said the officer "stomped me on the back of my head" on the concrete, causing cuts and bruises. He said he was then arrested for obstruction of justice and resisting arrest, "but I never did anything wrong."

Warren said the two plainclothes officers approached the car to investigate why the occupants were hanging out at the park. The officers saw open containers of alcohol inside and asked the occupants to get out.

"Several of the people cooperated, but Alejo Clark did not," Warren said. "He tried to evade officers and physically had to be restrained."

It would be proper procedure, Warren said, for an officer to take down a suspect by "using a knee in the back to establish or maintain control."

Clark also said the officers threatened to beat him up on the way to jail. The officers, he said, pulled over in an alley and asked him if he wanted the handcuffs on or off when they beat him up.

Clark said he was scared for his life and asked to go to jail, which officers did without further incident.

SEN. ERNIE CHAMBERS can be a pain in the butt a lot of the time. But he nailed it during Thursday's press conference on the Reinaldo Rodriguez case: It's time to bring in the FBI.

There's been too much smoke billowing out of the Omaha police headquarters for too long. And where there's smoke. . . .

Take that, Crunchy Guy!

Over at Crunchy Con, my friend Rod Dreher is nonplussed that his inner European is Swedish, not French. Sucks to be him!

I took the same test, and . . .

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

BEING THAT my mother's side of the family came to Louisiana from Paris and Canada in the 1700s, I'm not surprised. And this is a rare instance of a Gallic victory over les Allemands . . . the triumph of my French side over my dad's German-Dutch-Scots-Irishdom.

Or, as I tell folks, I'm quick to anger and then I carry it out with ruthless efficiency.

To be honest about the quiz, though, my dream car actually is a '65 Pontiac GTO or a 1964-and-a-half Ford Mustang. Since those weren't among the choices, I figured a classic Citroen would be kind of cool.

C'est la vie!

My reminder

This is my personal reminder.

It's a chunk of the basketball court in the Baton Rouge Magnet High School gymnasium, and I pocketed it from -- for lack of a better term -- a pothole, an indoor pothole on the floor where high school students attempt to carry out such activities as gymnastics, volleyball, physical education and . . . basketball.

This sits in my home recording studio, on a counter, atop a paperweight. I see it every day . . . many times every day. It doesn't let me forget how little some people in some communities in the richest nation in the world care for their children.

It reminds me that if we can physically abort our children while they're still fetuses, we sure as hell can civically abort them, politically abort them, educationally abort them and emotionally abort them long after they emerge from the womb unscathed.

THIS CHUNK of the Baton Rouge High gym floor -- where long ago I did calisthenics, played basketball and danced The Bump with a pretty redhead -- reminds me that while I take pride in my home state, I also am deeply, deeply ashamed of it.

This chunk of 57-year-old hardwood -- still painted Bulldog green, scoured loose by water from an ever-leaking roof -- reminds me of when my alma mater was still a really pleasant place to spend several years of your adolescence. When we never worried that we might be knocked silly by a falling ceiling tile in the middle of American history.

It reminds me of when BRMHS was the crown jewel of the city's schools physically as well as academically. Of when there was at least one school the perpetually lousy East Baton Rouge Parish school system didn't manage to taint in some way.

Funny, isn't it, that such an ordinary chunk of debris holds such meaning for a middle-aged man three decades removed from his glory days? Yes, but I imagine you have your totems, too.

But here it is, a new one of mine. A chunk of wood pilfered from a fetid gym as I took damning photographs and held back tears for what had become of my old school.

My totem. It reminds me that we can do so much better, but usually don't.

Forgive us, children, for we have sinned.

Not even a crumb from the rich man's table

I'm not going to comment on the following story about the East Baton Rouge (La.) Parish school system's huge budget surplus this past fiscal year. If I did, there wouldn't be a word fit for an even minimally family-friendly blog.

And if it were a movie, it'd probably get an NC-17. But I will run some pictures with this post -- pictures of the parish's "flagship" school, Baton Rouge Magnet High.

That ought to be comment enough.

FOR YOU FOLKS down in Baton Rouge, you poor souls who haven't fled the Gret Stet . . . yet . . . here is your government at work, as reported by Charles Lussier of The Advocate:

The East Baton Rouge Parish school system is still reaping the benefits of the post-hurricane economy and in the process amassing one of its biggest surpluses ever, according to its annual audit released Wednesday.

The school system finished fiscal 2006-07, which ended June 30, with $66.1 million in undesignated money left in the bank. That’s $8.6 million more than it had left over the previous fiscal year.

New revenue grew by 2.3 percent last year, barely outpacing spending, which grew by 2.1 percent for the same period.

The annual audit was conducted by the firm Postlethwaite & Netterville and was presented Wednesday to the School Board’s Finance Committee.

The auditors gave an unqualified high opinion, finding no material weaknesses in the system’s internal controls. They gave special credit to the finance staff, which, year after year, wins awards for the quality of its accounting work.

Mike Schexnayder, a partner in the firm, said the big surplus, or fund balance, is especially good news.

He noted the surplus equals 20 percent of the system’s general operating expenses. Just four years ago, the system had only the equivalent of 5 percent in reserve. The state Department of Education recommends that the school district keep the equivalent of 10 percent in reserve.

Later in the meeting, the committee recommended immediately dipping into the surplus to finance a midyear, across-the-board pay raise for all employees.

The higher surplus, however, makes the parish system a bigger target for lawyers from the new Central school district, which began operating July 1. Central claims it deserves 5 percent of the parish’s surplus, but State District Judge Wilson Fields rejected that argument last month. The case is on appeal.

The conclusion of the audit means the lawyers will have precise numbers to argue about rather than projections, and the actual numbers are much larger than those projections.

UPDATE: For those of you new to the Baton Rouge High Story, here are some links to the full ugliness of what the East Baton Rouge Parish school system hath wrought:

Home is where the heartbreak is

More scenes from 'America's next great city'

Disbelief in Omaha, or No Frame of Reference

When we let our kids' schools deteriorate into dumps, is it a human-rights violation?

That's a lot of money for something you poop in

Revolution 21 does not have a $23,000 crapper.

Revolution 21 does not have a $230 crapper.

Revolution 21 has two crappers, and we might get $23.00 for both of them as scrap. But they do the job.

Revolution 21 does not understand why anyone, much less an alleged servant of God, would need much more than your basic, white $99.95 crapper.

BUT IF YOU walk into the offices of any "ministry" and find a $23,000 crapper after excusing yourself to use the facilities, be assured of this -- those folks are, first and foremost, ministering to themselves. With other people's money.

And God is not pleased. A-tall.

OF COURSE, when you're talking $23,000 commodes -- and the document did say "Commode with Marble Top" -- chances are you could be talking about this:

That's very different. But it's no less obscene an expenditure for a ministry headquarters, an expenditure made with other people's money in the name of a Savior who had no home to lay His head.

Rich dessert would be an understatement

This is so wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to start a decent rant.

Let's just suggest that the Serendipity 3 restaurant in New York -- of course -- serve up a good $3.98 chocolate sundae and encourage those of its patrons who have more money than sense to donate $24,996.02 to the poor.

Or AIDS research.

Or the homeless.

Or cancer research.

Or toward renovating a crumbling public school.

BUT THEY WON'T, so read this instead and puke. But not after eating a $25,000 dessert:

A day after New York City came up with a $1,000 bagel, a local restaurateur unveiled a $25,000 chocolate sundae on Wednesday, setting a Guinness world record for the most expensive dessert.

Stephen Bruce, owner of Serendipity 3, partnered with luxury jeweler Euphoria New York to create the "Frrozen Haute Chocolate," a blend of 28 cocoas, including 14 of the most expensive and exotic from around the globe.

The dessert, spelled with two Rs, is infused with 5 grams (0.2 ounces) of edible 23-karat gold and served in a goblet lined with edible gold. At the base of the goblet is an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds.

The sundae is topped with whipped cream covered with more gold and a side of La Madeline au Truffle from Knipschildt Chocolatier, which sells for $2,600 a pound.

It is eaten with a gold spoon decorated with white and chocolate-colored diamonds, which can also be taken home.

"It took us a long time to experiment with all the ingredients and flavors, and more than three months were needed just to design the golden spoon," Bruce told Reuters.

CAN ANYONE think of a more insane waste of money and resources? It boggles the mind. The Bolshevik Revolution happened for a reason, you know.

Writing checks today that tomorrow can't cash

You're looking a little sleepy.

Oil prices hit a record high of $97 a barrel on Tuesday, but the next generation of consumers could look back on that price with envy. The dire predictions of a key report on international oil supplies released Wednesday suggest that oil prices could move irreversibly over the $100 a barrel threshold in the not too distant future, as the global economy faces a serious energy shortage.

SO REPORTS Time magazine. All awake now?

Good. Here's what else the piece says:

This gloomy assessment comes from the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based organization representing the 26 rich, gas-guzzling member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The agency is not known for alarmist warnings, and its World Energy Outlook is typically viewed by policy wonks as a solid indicator of global energy supplies. In a marked change from its traditionally bland, measured tones, the IEA's 2007 report says governments need to make urgent, bold decisions on energy policy, or risk massive environmental and energy-supply crises within two decades — crises and shortages that could spark serious global conflicts.

"I am sorry to say this, but we are headed toward really bad days," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol told TIME this week. "Lots of targets have been set but very little has been done. There is a lot of talk and no action." .

The reason for the IEA's alarm is its expectation that economic development will raise global energy demands by about 50% in a generation, from today's 85 million barrels a day to about 116 million barrels a day in 2030. Nearly half that increase in demand will come from just two countries — China and India, which are electrifying hundreds of cities and putting millions of new cars on their roads, most driven by people who once walked, or rode bicycles and buses. By 2030, those two countries will be responsible for two-thirds of the world's carbon gas emissions, which are the primary human activity causing global warming .

India and China have argued against enforcing strict emission controls in their countries, on the grounds that these could hinder their economic growth and prompt a global economic slowdown. But the new IEA report says working with China and India on alternative energy sources and curbing emissions is a matter of global urgency.

The bad news is not only environmental. As the world scrambles to boost energy supplies over the next two decades, an ever-greater percentage of its supplies of oil and gas will come from a dwindling number of countries, largely arrayed around the Persian Gulf, as the massive North Sea and Gulf of Mexico deposits are finally exhausted. That will leave the industrialized countries far more dependent on the volatile Middle East in 2030 than they are today, and the likes of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran will dictate terms to companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron, which increasingly operate as contractors to state-run oil companies in many producer nations.

"Most of the oil companies are going to be in an identity crisis, and need to redefine their business strategies," Birol says. The soul-searching may have already begun, as oil executives begin sounding the alarm about the supply crunch that lies ahead. Last week, Christophe de Margerie, CEO of the French oil giant Total, told the Financial Times that even the target of 100 million barrels a day is an optimistic one for an industry that currently produces 85 million — far short of the 116 million barrels a day the IEA projects will be needed by 2030 to fuel the global economy.

And in a sharp departure from the usually reassuring comments offered by Big Oil executives, De Margerie said companies and governments now realize that they have overestimated the amount of oil that could be extracted from places difficult to reach and costly to explore. "It is not my view, it is the industry view," he said. In other words, the message is that the current sky-high oil prices may not be a temporary burden on the world economy.

IF YOU'RE not much worried, try reading what Georgetown professor Patrick Deneen has to say. And remember, it's his job to study this stuff:

Declining oil production does not solely imply more costly commutes; indeed, when considering the profound effects of higher energy costs (i.e., less net energy in the world), higher commuting costs seem to be of comparatively negligible importance. The effects of peak oil throughout the economic system (including in the most obvious form of higher transportation costs) have far-reaching and world-altering consequences.

First, declining amounts of energy raises serious questions about the viability of “globalization.” This phrase, taking the descriptive form of a process, implies an apparently inevitable and irreversible set of actions that no human activity can resist or prevent....

Globalization, simply put, describes a world in which ever-greater interpenetration of culture and peoples has occurred as a result, at base, of economic expansion and interconnections. These economic interconnections themselves have been the consequence of the spread of free market economic system worldwide, a system that has depended essentially upon thoroughgoing mobility and ease of transportation. The current form of global capital rests on a worldwide labor market in which low-cost markets produce goods for more wealthy high-cost labor markets, which in turn trade for developments in technology and what Robert Reich has called the “products” of “symbolic analysts.” We inhabit a world almost unthinkable, if nevertheless attributable at least in theory, to Adam Smith, in which extremely low cost markets, producing goods largely made of plastic and chemical derivatives (i.e., petroleum), supply high-labor markets with products produced more cheaply than if those same products were produced in the same town as the consumer. The low cost of the raw materials (forms of petroleum) and the overall low cost of bulk transport (shipping and air-freight, propelled by petroleum), result in the cheap production of a nearly unimaginable array of products, all of which rest significantly on a platform of cheap and ample fossil fuels. Peak oil implies higher costs. However, higher prices are themselves a signal of a more fundamental phenomenon, namely less overall energy and less overall material. To the extent that the material form of globalization rests upon this base, the arrival of peak oil means that this basis of globalization will begin to unwind.

“Symbolic analysts” and hence advanced modern economies will be also adversely affected. In the simplest form, declining energy (as was evidenced in 1971) will result in less overall economic activity. A contraction of the economy will occur, and with it, the basis of many of the jobs that now result from an economy based upon growth. Much of the financial services industry will unravel; indeed, banking itself will come under extreme stress as fiat currencies loose value worldwide, and inflation makes existing and future loans increasingly worthless and dries up sources of investment. Material and technological development itself will stall as there is less overall investment, and the basic platform of modern high-tech communication and computing – electricity – will become increasingly expensive. High electrical costs may be forestalled with the increased reliance upon nuclear energy, but that very increased reliance will quickly manifest itself in the form of higher prices due to limited worldwide supplies of uranium.

Movement of products and people will become more difficult and less frequent. There is significant question about the future viability of commercial aviation. Once exclusively the privilege of a wealthy elite, it is likely that commercial aviation will again become the province of the very well-off and a rare experience for a middle-class that has come to take it for granted – but only after significant contraction in the number of existing carriers and, accordingly, flight routes. Many parts of the country and the world that were once isolated will find themselves again less accessible, and less easily departed from. Inasmuch as globalization has particularly rested on the long-term expansion of aviation, with the imminent arrival of peak oil, its future is deeply in question.

Domestically, the national economic system depends extensively upon trucking. This industry will become increasingly strained with the arrival of peak oil, most immediately in the form of higher energy costs which will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services. The interstate highway system will come under stress, inasmuch as the primary ingredient of pavement – petroleum – will make repairs on roads more costly and therefore rare. Higher prices will mean less ability to afford even what have come to be regarded as the necessities of civilization. These include not only “necessities” such as labor-saving devices, pharmaceutical products (many of which are themselves based on petroleum products), household items and the like, but perhaps most importantly of all, food. Indeed, the implications of peak oil upon food costs, and food production itself, border on the apocalyptic.

The imminence of peak oil directly and adversely impacts our ability to grow and transport sufficient quantities of food. The amount of fossil fuels used to grow basic agricultural commodities, and hence, to provide feedstock and ultimately fill our supermarkets, in the form of fertilizers, fuel for farm equipment, refrigeration and food transportation, is enormous. It is estimated by some that it takes approximately the fossil fuel equivalent of ten calories to put one calorie of food on our tables – significantly higher if one considers a meat diet. Another way of considering this equation: the equivalent of approximately 300 gallons of petroleum or its derivatives are necessary to produce our annual diet. Still another way to consider this fact: our daily diet would require the equivalent of 111 hours, or three weeks, of human labor. With the arrival of peak oil, our capacity to continue to produce adequate food supplies for a planet of 6 billion people will increasingly come into question. Already it has been noted that the demand for corn for the processing of ethanol has led to a steep increase in food costs, particularly given the extent to which corn lies at the root of much of the modern industrial world’s diet. Some of the gloomiest prognosticators of the peak oil phenomenon foretell the horrors of a global “die off.”

THE PARTY'S OVER, people, and we're going to wake up to one hell of a hangover.

We, particularly in the United States, have been living like there's no tomorrow, what with all our obnoxiously huge houses in obnoxiously far-flung "communities" from which we commute to our jobs in obnoxiously large SUVs.

In our land of the everlasting today, we no longer can distinguish between "want" and "need." We have a choice: We can stop the madness, or we can continue on like there's no tomorrow. But if our self-indulgent lifestyles keep writing checks today that our futures can't cash tomorrow, there's this one little problem.

Tomorrow.

Let's all 'pull a Rose' for America

What if an entire country "pulled a Rose" this week?

Would that be it? Would America fall apart, descend into chaos, plummet into an economic death spiral?

Or would we regain a slight semblance of national sanity for the first time since, oh . . . about 1938.

SO, WHAT'S "pulling a Rose"?

This is "pulling a Rose" -- Jim Rose being the now-former radio play-by-play announcer for Nebraska football and baseball -- as reported by the Lincoln Journal Star:

Jim Rose spent Saturday at home with his family, watching the Nebraska-Kansas game on TV.

It was strange, yet it wasn’t, he said.

He missed announcing the game on the radio, but relished the time he had with his wife and two children, ages 11 and 7.

“I enjoyed it … really enjoyed it” the “Voice of the Huskers” said Tuesday.

In the end, it was his family and his health that prompted Rose to give up his “dream job.”

Rose, 44, resigned after six years as play-by-play announcer for the Nebraska football team, citing personal reasons.

“I think the demand of the job, of six years of getting up at 4:30 in the morning and working until late at night … it was beginning to take its toll on me,” Rose said. “I wasn’t feeling very well.”

Rose made the announcement on Omaha radio station KFAB, where he co-hosts a morning show.

Greg Sharpe replaced Rose on Saturday’s Nebraska-Kansas football broadcast and also handled Rose’s duties as host of Sunday’s televised Bill Callahan Show.

“Last week, it got to the point that there was really something tragically wrong with me,” Rose said. “I had to stop everything and figure out what it was.

“I wasn’t ready for the KU broadcast. I put in the time, but I wasn’t ready.”

Sharpe will handle Rose’s duties for the rest of the season, said David Witty, vice president and general manager of the Husker Sports Network.

(snip)

Rose will remain with Husker Sports Network in the sales department. He also will continue to co-host the KFAB morning show.

He has given up all his on-air responsibilities for the network. In addition to calling Husker football games, he appeared on various pre- and post-game shows and handled play-by-play for the Nebraska baseball team.

(snip)

Adrian Fiala, who worked with Rose as a color analyst, said he understood Rose’s decision.

“His health and well-being is much more important than the sports things we’re talking about,” he said. “I told him last night he needs to get some balance back in his life and get better.”

Rose called his time as Nebraska’s announcer rewarding and exciting.

“But I was always doing a little of this and a little of that,” he said. “There always was a phone call coming in, an interview to do, a banquet to emcee …”

“I loved doing that stuff. It wasn’t work for me. I just regret the toll it was taking on me and my family.”

GOOD ON JIM ROSE. Our status-obsessed and materialistic American culture tells us -- told him -- that he's losing money, losing prestige, losing the chance to climb to greater "heights."

Even now, the Nebraska rumor mill is debating what really caused Rose to walk out on a sweet gig. That very conventional "wisdom" says Jim Rose switched on his mic this morning, then lost face.

I guess you could look at it that way. Even if you do, good on Jim Rose.

And I think that great quartet of philosophers -- John, Paul, George and Ringo -- will back me up on that. In a seminal work on the socio-psychological underpinnings of Western anomie amid great material wealth and professional achievement, the four opined in "Can't Buy Me Love" that absent spiritual and emotional fulfillment, great wealth and achievement -- to use the rather crude American vernacular here -- "ain't all it's cracked up to be." To wit:

Can't buy me love, love
Can't buy me love

I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I'll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
'Cause I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

I'll give you all I got to give if you say you love me too
I may not have a lot to give but what I got I'll give to you
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

Can't buy me love, everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love, no no no, no

Say you don't need no diamond rings and I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

Can't buy me love, everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love, no no no, no

Say you don't need no diamond rings and I'll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of things that money just can't buy
I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

Can't buy me love, love,
(Can't buy me) love

THE WORLD SAYS Jim Rose: Husker Play-by-Play Guy, threw away a great job. I say Jim Rose: Husband and Dad regained a better family.

You want the truth? Oh, look at the time . . . time for you to go. Thankyoucomeagain!

Click on respective photos for video.

Boy did MSNBC's Keith Olbermann just tee off on the Bush Administration over its torturing ways in the War on Terror. This, from ABC News, is why:

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

The administration at the time was reeling from an August 2002 memo by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, which laid out possible justifications for torture. In June 2004, Levin's predecessor at the office, Jack Goldsmith, officially withdrew the Bybee memo, finding it deeply flawed.

When Levin took over from Goldsmith, he went to work on a memo that would effectively replace the Bybee memo as the administration's legal position on torture. It was during this time that he underwent waterboarding.

In December 2004, Levin released the new memo. He said, "Torture is abhorrent" but he went on to say in a footnote that the memo was not declaring the administration's previous opinions illegal. The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.

But Levin never finished a second memo imposing tighter controls on the specific interrogation techniques. Sources said he was forced out of the Justice Department when Gonzales became attorney general.

AFTER ALL, if your war is on a concept, terror, and you've decided to fight fire with fire -- or abject evil with yet more abject evil -- doesn't that make fire/evil/terror the winner by default?

And when the government of the United States subverts the legal system of the United States to do just that, doesn't that make George Bush's Amerika a fascist state?

I'm just sayin'. But Olbermann, in Monday night's "Special Comment" on Countdown, says it so much better:

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn't a problem if you don't care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn't interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution,

Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He'll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you "flew" onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you'd won in Iraq.

Now if that's what this is all about, you tortured not because you're so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you're smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction — well, then, you're going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn't just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

Thus the master tumblers turn, and the lock yields, and the hidden explanations can all be perceived, in their exact proportions, in their exact progressions.

Daniel Levin's eminently practical, eminently logical, eminently patriotic way of testing the legality of waterboarding has to vanish, and him with it.

Thus Alberto Gonzales has to use that brain that sounds like an old car trying to start on a freezing morning to undo eight centuries of the forward march of law and government.

Thus Dick Cheney has to ridiculously assert that confirming we do or do not use any particular interrogation technique would somehow help the terrorists.

Thus Michael Mukasey, on the eve of the vote that will make him the high priest of the law of this land, cannot and must not answer a question, nor even hint that he has thought about a question, which merely concerns the theoretical definition of waterboarding as torture.

Because, Mr. Bush, in the seven years of your nightmare presidency, this whole string of events has been transformed.

From its beginning as the most neglectful protection ever of the lives and safety of the American people ... into the most efficient and cynical exploitation of tragedy for political gain in this country's history ... and, then, to the giddying prospect that you could do what the military fanatics did in Japan in the 1930s and remake a nation into a fascist state so efficient and so self-sustaining that the fascism would be nearly invisible.

But at last this frightful plan is ending with an unexpected crash, the shocking reality that no matter how thoroughly you might try to extinguish them, Mr. Bush, how thoroughly you tried to brand disagreement as disloyalty, Mr. Bush, there are still people like Daniel Levin who believe in the United States of America as true freedom, where we are better, not because of schemes and wars, but because of dreams and morals.

YES, THERE ARE STILL people like Daniel Levin left, but our overseers are hopeful that what waterboarding and political smears can't deal with, whiskey/sexy/stuff just might.

Bubba to bombardier . . . Bubba to bombardier

This was staggeringly stupid, especially in the six years since 9/11 -- three idiot North Carolina teen-agers in a rented plane buzzing a football game near Charlotte.

I keep wondering, in an age where we're constantly fretting over the moronic things adolescents do to get themselves and others killed in cars, why the hell are we letting them fly planes, contraptions that would allow someone as stupid as this 17-year-old pilot to do some real damage?

I shake my head. I imagine the Charlotte Observer reporter was shaking his head, too:

A 17-year-old Hopewell High student was apparently acting on a dare when he did a fly-over prank at a Hopewell High football game Friday, at one point dipping below the stadium lights.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officials said Sunday that the teen pilot and two teen passengers flew the length of the field three times around 8 p.m. The plane reportedly came within feet of a flag pole.

On the final pass, a pair of tennis shoes and a football dropped from the single-engine Cessna 172 into the end zone, officials said.

The pilot, who apparently broke multiple federal aviation laws, is being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration, Huntersville police and CMS.

“My immediate reaction was that we were going to have a terrorist act of some sort,” said Vincent “Bud” Cesena, head of CMS law enforcement, who was among the 4,000 people in the stands.

“Then, as he circled, you saw that it was kids in the plane, and I was hoping it that it was just some kind of prank. I was thinking to myself: ‘Should I empty the stands and risk someone being trampled or see what happens?’ I knew for sure someone would get hurt if I emptied the stands.”

Witnesses say the plane came within 75 feet of an embankment at the field at the school on Beatties Ford Road in Huntersville.

I MEAN, good God Almighty! These young fools are lucky no one got rattled enough about a potential terrorist attack that he tried shoot that plane down with whatever firearms happened to be handy.

FEMA: Putting the 'hell' in 'help'

If you were among the working poor and owned your own modest home in New Orleans prior to Aug. 29, 2005, chances are it's not there anymore. Or that it's ruined, and that Louisiana's "Road Home" program hasn't delivered any cash to un-ruin it.

IF YOU WERE one of New Orleans' many working poor and rented a modest apartment before Aug. 29, 2005, chances are it's not there anymore. And that what apartments remain available might well be in a neighborhood so dangerous you dare not go there.

Or -- if there's somewhere you can hang your hat without a slug tearing through your head -- the rent is probably double what you can afford. Not a good situation for a city needing workers to drive its recovery from the Great Federal Flood, which other Americans remember as Hurricane Katrina.

In fact, a sane government might consider the lack of housing that workers can afford to be something of a crisis situation.

We are not governed by sane people.

IN FACT, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has taken a different approach to the lack of affordable housing for the working poor. It's closing the FEMA-trailer sites in Orleans Parish and elsewhere along the ruined Gulf Coast and throwing residents, in effect, out into the streets.

Quite frankly, I'd say that was probably worth a good insurrection. But, also quite frankly, the folks being tossed out on their figurative ears probably are too tired and too beat down to even muster a good picket line.

Which is exactly what vermin like the GOP party hacks deadheading at the throttle of the Capitalismfodder Express count on. Not that the Democrats are any better, of course.

Down in Uz New Orleans, the Book of Job Times-Picayune covers the outrage of the day:

Shirley Hitchens took a few deep breaths.

Sitting inside her FEMA trailer, worry consumed her. The walls started to close in. So she walked outside to get some fresh air. Her feet crunched on the gravel driveway of her trailer park. She took a seat on a well-worn kitchen chair just past the entrance.

Hitchens, 59, fretted because she doesn't know where she and her son will be living next month. Now they're living in Central City, at A.L. Davis Park at Washington Avenue and LaSalle Street. But in mid-October, she found a notice on her trailer door from FEMA headlined, "A.L. Davis Playground Temporary Housing Site Is Closing November 18, 2007."

Basically an eviction notice, it offered the services of a caseworker and two apartment-search Web sites, both of them nonfunctional.

Shifting to another FEMA park was not an option.

"It is recommended that your next move is into permanent housing since all parks will be closing," the note said.

Neither the city nor FEMA has publicly announced any park closures in New Orleans. But during the past few months, the agency has quietly delivered eviction notices to residents at nearly half the city's parks.

Since August, FEMA has mothballed more than 800 trailers in New Orleans. More than 550 more will be emptied in the current round of eviction notices. But the agency's efforts to phase out the trailer parks, always intended to be temporary housing for hurricane victims, might leave many departing residents in unstable living situations, largely because of the city's steep post-Katrina rents.

Typically, residents have been given between 30 and 60 days to find new housing, but they say that's often not enough time, given the acute shortage of affordable housing in New Orleans. Most people still in trailers are working-poor renters who have clung to the temporary solution for a lack of other viable options in their now high-rent hometown, where the $500 rents that were once the norm are now a rarity.

The low-key efforts to shutter New Orleans FEMA parks contrast starkly with neighboring areas. In St. Bernard and Jefferson, parish officials have loudly advocated the parks' closure, mostly for aesthetic reasons. In Mississippi, FEMA officials announced recently that they hope to close all of the state's so-called "group sites" by the end of this year.

But New Orleans officials said they aren't pressuring FEMA to close its remaining 38 sites, which hold 1,447 trailers and are home to about 3,000 residents.

"This was driven by FEMA mandate," said Anthony Faciane, deputy director of neighborhood stabilization for the city's Office of Recovery Development and Administration. Faciane said the city's main concern was to see trailer occupants in stable housing once their parks were closed.

(snip)

Thomas said FEMA has no firm timeline to close all parks. "There is no set date," he said.

But even FEMA's in-house information on the closures seemed incomplete. The agency first listed 12 sites that had received notice recently. Then, when trailer occupants in other parks produced their eviction notices, FEMA added those parks to the list. In the end, Thomas said that within the past 45 days, FEMA had posted eviction notices at nearly half the city's remaining sites: 16 of 38 parks.

A.L. Davis Park was one of them.

At first, said Hitchens, some A.L. Davis residents didn't take FEMA's deadline seriously. Since Hurricane Katrina, the agency has continually delayed housing deadlines, sometimes on its own, sometimes upon court order.

In April, federal officials, including Powell, announced that on March 1, 2008, Gulf Coast trailer residents would begin paying rent. So trailer residents assumed that the parks would continue through at least March.

Hitchens said that her son had been looking for apartments, but he hadn't yet found anything suitable. "Do you think FEMA will throw us out if we don't find a place?" she asked.

Maybe.

Ask the municipal employee who used to live in a Gentilly FEMA trailer, near the Elysian Fields overpass on what used to be the city-run Perry Roehm Stadium. Before the storm, he and some co-workers had helped groom the park's ball field.

But on Tuesday morning, he drove away from it in a car piled high with his belongings. The apartment he had rented wasn't available until Nov. 6, he said, and his extended family was still in Houston. So he might rent a motel room. Or he might end up sleeping in his car.

He couldn't stay in his trailer. His FEMA caseworkers told him no, he said.

The man didn't want his name used because he didn't know what role his employer, the city, played in emptying the trailer park.

Thomas, the FEMA spokesman, said the mayor's office had "a specific desire to see those sites occupying playground and recreational areas to be deactivated as soon as possible," a contention city officials deny.

As FEMA decommissioned its trailer sites, the city asked the agency to put municipally owned parks at the top of the list so that recreational programs could reopen, said Faciane from the Office of Recovery Development and Administration. But the city didn't instruct FEMA to vacate the park land within any specific time frame, he said.

Two Perry Roehm residents, Wayne Williams, 45, and his neighbor Vickie Thomas, 34, met up last week at the trailer park's metal mailboxes for the last time. All of their belongings were packed up, they said, and the trailer keys were on the counters. Both of them are moving in with relatives, a common scenario for departing trailer-park residents.

Williams, a longshoreman, was one of the vital workers brought back to New Orleans about a year ago and housed in a trailer. He said he wished he could return to his home on Tennessee Street in the Lower 9th Ward. But he's still waiting for money from the Road Home program.

Thomas said FEMA officials believed that it was time for Gulf Coast families to "take full advantage of the resources being offered," including rental referrals and an offer to relocate trailers to occupants' own lots.

"The time is now, and we, FEMA, will be here to assist," he said.

Williams said he had tried to tap into that offer of transitional help. He told his FEMA caseworker that his home wasn't ready yet and that his lot was too small to accommodate a trailer. So his caseworker said he could get into another trailer -- in LaPlace.

"Too far," Williams said.

So he looked at the FEMA-referred apartments. But the places he could afford were in what he considered sketchy blocks in Central City and eastern New Orleans, where he said he would "have to sleep with one eye open."

Other rentals were in poor condition.

"There are apartments, and then there are apartments," he said.

Instead, Williams will be staying with family, sleeping on a couch.

"I'm just living day by day, and waiting for a door to open," he said.

Vickie Thomas and her 65-year-old mother are moving to her uncle's house. The two of them have been rehabbing the family house near the London Avenue Canal levee break with the help of Road Home money received in May. Thomas, who works in Tulane's ophthalmology clinic, estimates that the house will be habitable in about two months. But every apartment they looked at required a six-month lease.

Also, she said that most "decent" one-bedroom apartments are renting for at least $1,000 -- too much, on top of the flooded house's mortgage and insurance, which they're still paying.

"People think we're living here for free," she said. "But they don't think about those payments."

At first, Thomas hoped that maybe they could stay the extra two months. She explained their situation to FEMA staff, hoping they would extend their deadline. "They were not budging," she said.

Across the street from the A.L. Davis trailer park at the Friendly Super Market, longtime store employee Mike Pilot has heard endless fretting about the park's closing.

"A lot of people don't know what they're going to do or where they're going to go," he said as he stocked a cooler with soft drinks.

Pilot said he doesn't blame Road Home for his neighbors' current situation. "Most of them are not homeowners, only renters. They're making the same little money they're always made, but now they're up against high, high rents," he said.

The power of the arts

From The Associated Press:

An empty intersection. A tree surrounded by hurricane debris. Ruined houses still untouched since they were flooded by roof-deep water. Now they've been joined by an outdoor stage, with actors and an audience.

The city's darkest corner, the flood-flattened Lower 9th Ward where few people have rebuilt their homes 26 months after Hurricane Katrina, has been turned into a theater presenting a series of symbolic and poignant free performances of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."

The performances are capturing the zeitgeist of a city waiting impatiently for Katrina's aftershocks to subside. So many people showed up for Friday's opening night performance, even those who'd never heard of Beckett before, that hundreds were turned away because seating was limited to 500. Some arrived with babies in their arms, others still in their blue work coveralls, others from the wealthiest parts of town.

Like the two tramps looking for Godot in Beckett's 1949 masterpiece, New Orleanians know about waiting.

"We waited for Red Cross. We waited for George Bush. We waited for rescue. We waited for housing. We waited in line for FEMA vouchers," 53-year-old Tyrone Graves said as he swatted mosquitoes in the warm twilight before the start of Friday's performance.

Katrina destroyed his home and drove him to Houston; he returned only recently, but still relies on friends and family to house him while he works with demolition crews.

"Waiting. I can tell you about waiting," he said.

(snip)

So then, "Waiting for Godot" and its stark flirtation with insanity and bouts of existential doubt speaks the language of the people here.

But the play is not purely gloomy. It is a vaudevillian tragicomedy, and this production seeks to point out the awfulness of Katrina while illuminating a place lacking in light.

"It's a form of resistance to a landscape that does not seem to be fertile to develop any sort of art," said Paul Chan, an activist artist who came up with the idea of doing the play in scarred New Orleans.

Death: It's the solution to everything!

Murder, human experience has shown, generally is a poor method of problem solving.

Unfortunately, the medical profession never got the memo. So, with doctors being a bit thick when it comes to these things, sometimes the Almighty has to resort to a figurative bitch slap to get the message across.

NATURALLY, "stunned" medical professionals can't explain why nature was so uncooperative about acting like it was supposed to. The Daily Mail in London has the "Cheerio! Pip pip, and all that rot!" details of "Yes, we did unsuccessfully try to kill you for your own good in the womb, but it seems to have all worked out in the end":

They say twins share a strong bond - but the one between Gabriel and Ieuan Jones was unbreakable.

When doctors found that Gabriel was weaker than his brother, with an enlarged heart,and believed he was going to die in the womb, his mother Rebecca Jones had to make a heartbreaking decision.

Doctors told her his death could cause his twin brother to die too before they were born, and that it would be better to end Gabriel's suffering sooner rather than later.

Thriving: Gabriel, right, with his twin brother Ieuan, is now a healthy 12lb 6oz at seven months

Mrs Jones decided to let doctors operate to terminate Gabriel's life.

Firstly they tried to sever his umbilical cord to cut off his blood supply, but the cord was too strong.

They then cut Mrs Jones's placenta in half so that when Gabriel died, it would not affect his twin brother.

But after the operation which was meant to end his life, tiny Gabriel had other ideas.

Although he weighed less than a pound, he put up such a fight for survival that doctors called him Rocky.

Astonishingly, he managed to carry on living in his mother's womb for another five weeks - until the babies were delivered by caesarean section.

Now he and Ieuan are back at home in Stoke - and are so close they are always holding each other's hand.

Mrs Jones, 35, a financial adviser whose husband Mark, 36, is a car salesman, said: "It really is a miracle. Doctors carried out an operation to let Gabriel die - yet he hung on.

"It was unbelievable."

LOOK AT THE PICTURE of those sweet children. Now, which one was supposed to be better off dead, again?

They're not bothering to can the guy because it's the Apocalypse, right?

KUSports.com

"Again, all I would tell you is I have done
an excellent job in every area. It's hard for
the media to know. But what we've done
off the field and what we did on the field,
it's well-documented. We did some positive
things. We haven't sustained it this year."

-- Nebraska Coach 'Excellent' Bill Callahan

He's STILL the coach? Damn!

"Again, all I would tell you is I have done

an excellent job in every area. It's hard
for the media to know. But what we've
done off the field and what we did on
the field, it's well-documented. . . ."

-- Nebraska Coach Bill Callahan

You mean Callahan's still the coach? It's been hours since the game ended.

“I’ve done an excellent job in every area.”

-- Nebraska Coach Bill Callahan