Star One Smart Blog's

Meet me in Chattanooga for TRON: LEGACY !

Flood waters from the 2010 Tennessee floods in early May reportedly reached as high as 10 feet inside the mall, and forced the closure of the facility temporarily. The entire property was remediated.

As of September 2010, restoration work has been halted while litigation over insurance claims plays out in court, and many of the mall's retailers have sought locations elsewhere in the area, either permanently or until the mall is restored and reopened. The initial reopening date was set for August 2011, but that is now in doubt due to the litigation.

There is speculation that Simon Malls may not reopen the mall at all, due to Simon Malls' choice to stop renovations to the mall during litigation. Simon Malls denies that it has plans to close the mall permanently. The Bass Pro Shops store reopened October 14, 2010 separate from the rest of the mall.

' Edge Ling the Elf ' as TRON Guy !

Michelle the Maharani: Glamorous Ginormous First Lady is an Indian queen at lavish state dinner

Great job, DNC. You've chosen a "D" with a target circle around it.

Allow me to assist...

Democrats.org's new logo. But there's still that jackass, I see...

This year, Shannyn Moore, a lefty Palin-hater in Alaska, wins the coveted "Gilly" Award. Why Shannyn Moore, I wonder? Read on...

This 'Gilliard Grant' was created in honor of dead liberal blogger Steve Gilliard (whose only claim to fame was his vituperative rants against President Bush, his support of anything advancing socialism and increasing social welfare, oh, and of course Gilliard achieved nationwide fame (or infamy if you will) for attacking and photoshopping Michael Steele, the then Lt. Governor of Maryland and now RNC Chairman.

Why not give this award to Linda Kellen Biegel, the 'Celtic Diva', that lefty Alaskan blogger-DNC-operative famous for photoshopping Trig Palin?

Wouldn’t it have been a hoot if Linda had won "The Gilly, an award ‘honoring’ a lefty blogger whose only claim to fame was photoshopping Michael Steele?

...from these sorts of hints, it's definitely not Hillary...

"Netroots Nation"--formerly known as the Yearly Kos Convention--is a splendid affair (I'm sure) that's been going on all weekend, July 17-20, 2008. Featuring the creme de la creme of the nutroots: the 'elite' of the leftist bloggers (and their leashed politicians); and over-the-top BDS sorts of all stripes (although mostly those with a yellow stripe running right down their backs...) Just about everything you can imagine that's counter to what's Conservative in America is on display.

Air America finally gets a captive audience. Maybe now they can claim more than 10 listeners.

Al Gore couldn't miss his chance to see his constituents, and beg for more Global Warming activism...

"Thank you for the movement that you have created," Mr. Gore said. "I can't tell you how important I think it is that you continue what you are doing."

"The end could be in sight," she said to cheers from the audience. "This will not happen without the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States."

"But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

...

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the "urban heat island" effect: urban areas encroaching on thermometer stations warm the micro-climate around the thermometer, due to vegetation changes, concrete, cars, houses. Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. NASA reports only land-based data, and reports a modest warming trend and recent cooling. The other three global temperature records use a mix of satellite and land measurements, or satellite only, and they all show no warming since 2001 and a recent cooling.

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

"In the incident that brought him the most infamy, Gilliard acidly attacked Michael Steele, the black Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland in 2006, as a traitor to his race. Black conservatives like Steele infuriated Gilliard, who couldn’t understand how any African-American could support a party that exploited racial prejudice. “I’s Simple Sambo and I’s Running for the Big House,” read Gilliard’s caption, below a doctored photo of Steele as a minstrel. Only after the post earned him headlines in major newspapers and recriminations from politicians of both parties did a lot of readers come to understand that a white man hadn’t written it — although, for Gilliard’s critics, that hardly made it less offensive."

I ran across this couple-day-old "Past Deadline by Ray Richmond" post while googling a while ago. This picture caught my trained eye...remarkably poignant, not the 'Hannah Montana' vapid-hyped look I'm used to seeing at all. There's something else here, something Anne Leibovitz captured, the 'innocence wronged' look. Just...wrong.

I'll admit not having paid much attention to the 'Hannah Montana' craze (my teenage daughter is past that stage, having moved on the more nuanced college age-craze bracket) but I have noticed (who could miss it?) the massive marketing hype for this Disney product; the vapid images that show up just about everywhere, on towels and toys at Targets, Wal-Marts, and anywhere else kids spend their parent's cash.

A great photo, Annie's, but nearing evil. Something furtive, Annie, you've done. Something wicked this way comes.

Even that jaded Hollywood Reporter dot com blogger picks up on it, some, in his alligator-predator sort of way...

"It pained me to hear that Miley Cyrus, tween superstar and hero of Disney Channel's "Hannah Montana," had apologized for the photo she posed for in the June issue of Vanity Fair. I wanted to reach out, put my arms around her (in a consoling way, of course) and say, "Miley, it wasn't your fault. You have nothing to be sorry for."

"In the end, though, Miley is the one who suffers. After working so hard to cultivate a puritanical, impossibly wholesome, implausibly religious image -- and overcoming Internet photos to the contrary (right) -- she now has to beg forgiveness from all those people who are offended by the site of a bare back.

"I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen," she said."I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about."

I blame Dan.

Background: you'll have to read Darleen Click's post "Ray Nagin, the Vagina-Friendly Mayor" at PW, or my cross-post at the PW Pub.

I can't do a 2007 Year in Review, after reading dAVe barry's syndicated column here. He's hit every high and low with teh funny. Just a sample...

"It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history.

In short, 2007 was a year of deep gloom, pierced occasionally by rays of even deeper gloom. And as is so often true of bad years, it began with ...

January

... when Democrats, having won the November elections, take control of both houses of Congress with surprisingly little loss of life.

Upon taking power, the Democrats, who campaigned vigorously against the war in Iraq, and who hailed their victory as a clear voter mandate to get the troops out of Iraq, immediately get down to the business of being careful to not do anything that might actually result in the removal of troops from Iraq, in case that might turn out to be a bad idea. This is fine with President Bush, who calls for a "troop surge," based on his understanding of the comprehensive Iraq Study Group Report, as interpreted for him by aides equipped with 20,000 G.I. Joe action figures.

As the debate over Iraq intensifies, the eyes of a worried nation turn to another trouble spot: New York City, where Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell are locked in a bitter high-stakes battle to determine who is the bigger horse's ass.

In sports, a Los Angeles team signs glamorous British soccer star David Beckham to a $250 million contract. This raises eyebrows, both because of the amount of money and because the team is the Dodgers. But Beckham's glamorous presence quickly boosts ticket sales; within days the Lakers sign Angelina Jolie.

Sports remains in the news in ...

February..."

~*~

Allan C. Kelly
1949-2007
R.I.P.

In one of the Skipper's final posts, he described his pending back surgery, and left these thoughts:

"Meanwhile, while you slept a few thousand more Mexicans crossed the border last night, Wal-Mart built six more stores somewhere, the trade deficit with China increased by a few billion dollars, the North Koreans and Iranians came up with seventeen more plans to prove they are barking mad and several thousand more non-Muslims were murdered in Darfur by followers of the Prophet For Profit.

"Then again, you already know all this and just need a place to get together and figure out what we’re all going to do when the roof caves in - and make no mistake, the rafters are crumbling. Depressing? Sure, but what are we going to do?

"We can start to fix our government eighteen months from now in the 2008 elections. The interim is going to be dicey as somebody out there decided in the last election to install a whole bunch of really crazy people in the Congress and Senate. That was not my fault, by the way - and neither was it George Bush’s fault.

"As for the rest of the sitrep, we can wall ourselves off from the rest of the world and experiment with isolationism again or we can continue to muddle our way through the minefield of international relations - and that is where the problem comes in. We’re just no damn good at realpolitik. Not this administration, the whole country has never been real good at the devious games diplomats play. We haven’t been at this game long enough to understand all the rules.

"All I can really tell you is (a) keep a firm grasp of right and wrong, (b) stay involved in government and watch the bastards in Washignton every minute, (c) use every legal means to make sure you can defend yourself in the event of real internal trouble, and (d) keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere."

Damn, he was succinct, and unnervingly right on the money. And that last paragraph is....knowing.

From Karl at Protein Wisdom, a link to a New York Times Magazine story on Steve Gilliard, liberal blogger who's early death is much lamented in Progg world. I remember clearly the weekend Gilliard died, as I was much saddened by the death of The Skipper, Allan Kelly of BMEWS, who passed the day before. Of course, death isn't pleasant to behold, and both saddened me. And, of course, today, I'll say I miss The Skipper much more than...Steve Who?

Gilliard's death set off a chain of events in blogworld...a week long kerfuffle. If Smantix of Six Meat Buffet hadn't made that unfortunate post mocking Gillard (a bit early in my estimation; should've waited a couple weeks), and Britteny hadn't picked up on Smantix's post and aggregated it to Nashville is Talking, and that sorry piece of shit J.C. Christian at Jesus' General hadn't come to town to feast on Brittney (who was also liberal, but in his feeding frenzy, General Azzclown didn't stop to check to see what was really was going on...he's such a pussrag...) then NIT might still be active and not a den of ghosts. Brittney may not have had to flee to San Francisco (well, given the liberal atmosphere there, she's probably better off).

And I would still wholeheartedly miss The Skipper.

And you would not have to look at this photochop of Jesus' General's Short-Sighted Staff of Bloggers who eat their own (damn, this is an early effort; I might have to revisit this...)

"Let’s dig up his skeleton and f*ck his eye-sockets."