Konformist FeedBack: Happy Birthday Robalini!!! August 21, 2007 From one Dude to another . . . . Happy Birthday! Or Happy Day of your Birth, if you're not into that whole brevity thing. Man. Uncle Fats & Cousin Nick ***** Net Film of the Year: Zeitgeist Check it out at: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/ ***** Well, That and Negligible Thespian Skills... http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070817/en_nm/seagal_dc Seagal says FBI probe ruined career Fri Aug 17, 2007 Steven Seagal, whose action movies once were major box-office attractions, believes false allegations by FBI agents ruined his career, the Los Angeles Times reported on Friday. The comments in the Times are the first Seagal has made publicly about an investigation begun some five years ago by the FBI into accusations he intimidated a reporter and had ties to organized crime. The Times said Seagal is demanding an apology from the FBI. A spokesman for the actor was not immediately available on Friday. "False FBI accusations fueled thousands of articles saying that I terrorize journalists and associate with the Mafia," Seagal told the newspaper. "These kinds of inflammatory allegations scare studio heads and independent producers -- and kill careers." Seagal, 56, was once a major star of action movies such as 1992's "Under Siege," which earned $156 million at worldwide box offices, but now he makes straight-to-DVD releases such as "Flight of Fury and "Attack Force." The FBI investigation stemmed from Seagal's ties to former private detective Anthony Pellicano, who once was employed by many Hollywood stars, directors and producers, but is now in federal prison awaiting trial on wire-tapping and other charges. The Pellicano investigation dates to 2002 when a free-lance reporter for the Los Angeles Times found a dead fish, a red rose and a note saying "Stop!" on her car. At the time, the reporter was researching Seagal and a former business partner. Seagal told the Times that he and Pellicano had not been on speaking terms since the 1990s and the Times' story said his lawyers told FBI agents that by 2002, Seagal and Pellicano had become rivals in a bitter legal dispute. The actor said in October 2004, an FBI official told him that federal agents knew he had nothing to do with the Pellicano investigation. Still, Seagal claims they have not publicly exonerated him. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment "because of the ongoing nature of the investigation" and referred calls to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney noted Seagal has never been charged or accused of being involved in the incident that eventually led to Pellicano's arrest. The spokesman added that the office does not comment on talks it has with attorneys representing defendants, investigation targets or witnesses. ***** http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/157 Bush Administration Has Been Using Illegal Wiretapping and Spying Activity for Political Purposes. Doubt It? Submitted by mark karlin on Mon, 08/20/2007 A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL In an under covered trial in a California courtroom, a Constitutional drama of major significance is unfolding. It is a federal lawsuit filed by Americans who claim that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of AT&T, illegally spied on them. The Bush Administration has taken the Orwellian position that the trial must not be allowed to proceed because it would require the White House to reveal if they indeed have illegally monitored the plaintiffs – and that, the Bush Politburo argues, would violate "state secrets." Why do we sometimes think that we are living in the Soviet-era, Stasi run East Germany? Maybe that’s because a headline last week read, "US moves to use spy satellites for domestic surveillance." Or maybe, returning to the trial in California, that the White House refused to sign a document assuring the court that their "eavesdropping" was not being used domestically under the guise of claiming it was being used to stop terrorism: But the 9th Circuit judges were skeptical. They wondered why at least one key issue cannot be explored -- whether there was domestic spying on Americans without court approval, which civil liberties lawyers say violates the law. Judges Margaret McKeown and Michael Daly Hawkins, both Clinton appointees, cited public comments by President Bush and other administration officials denying any such warrantless domestic surveillance, and asked the government why it can't provide similar statements under oath in the court case. McKeown, who stressed that she didn't expect Bush himself to provide the sworn statements, questioned how such evidence would jeopardize national security. And when an AT&T lawyer later told the judges that Bush has already issued denials publicly, Hawkins said that public statements aren't the equivalent of statements under oath in court or in court declarations. "No court in the land would be satisfied with public statements, be it the president of the United States or the president of AT&T," Hawkins said. In short, we once again have the White House playing the game of we’ll talk with you, but we won’t testify under oath because then you can legally charge us with perjury because, of course, we’re going to lie. But this is about spying on American citizens. Reaching back into the recesses of our memory, we recall that in one of Alberto Gonzales’s farcical appearances before Congress – when the FISA illegal eavesdropping first broke in The New York Times (after they sat on the story for a year) – Gonzales was asked if the spying might have been used for domestic purposes other than terrorism. Gonzales responded, in essence, that he couldn’t say for sure. In a recent BuzzFlash editorial, we noted that the acquisition of domestic spying powers for political purposes was one of three key strategies in the Republican effort to achieve long-term control of the United States apparatus of government. With domestic spying powers just recently legally expanded by a Democratic Congress to include, according to The New York Times, certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans' business records, the Bush Administration now has legal authority to achieve what Nixon attempted to do illegally in the Watergate burglary. And if the Democratic Party were to sue over a modern day Watergate-style operation, the Bush Administration would tell the court that it can’t reveal why it conducted the spying operation on a political party because it would violate national security. This is not BuzzFlash idle speculation; it is what the Bush Administration, now enabled by the lack of caucus discipline in a Democratic Congress, has achieved. God help us all. ***** Konformist Five Second Movie Review: High School Musical & High School Musical 2 by Scott Rose Scottworld.com The people involved in this series need to be lined up and shot, one at a time. ***** http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070819/wl_nm/russia_vote_betting_dc Bookies back Ivanov to be next Russian president By Christian Lowe Sun Aug 19, 2007 Opinion polls make Sergei Ivanov favorite to be Russia's next president and now bookmakers -- renowned for being canny judges of form -- are backing him for the Kremlin top job too. Internet gaming operator Unibet has made First Deputy Prime Minister Ivanov its favorite, with odds of 2.2 to one, in the race to win the 2008 presidential election and replace outgoing President Vladimir Putin. Ivanov's fellow First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is his nearest rival with odds of 3.75 to one, according to the Maltese-registered bookmaker. The third favorite, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, trails well behind on ten to one. Some academics say betting on elections is sometimes better at forecasting the result than opinion polls. The reason researchers cite is that someone placing a bet has money riding on the result and so will tend to make a more sober choice than a respondent in an opinion poll. The latest poll by Russia's Levada Centre gave 31 percent support to Ivanov, a 54-year-old who like his boss Putin is a former Soviet spy from St Petersburg. The same poll put Medvedev on 27 percent. Ireland-based spreadbetting Internet site Intrade also has Ivanov as its clear favorite. It runs a virtual stock exchange where people can trade in possible outcomes of the Russian election. An Ivanov win is the most valuable stock, priced at 41 out of a possible 100. Medvedev trades at 17. Putin is third favorite on 15 -- even though he is barred by the constitution from seeking a new term and has said he will step down next year. Ivanov denies he has any intention of running for president, as do all the pro-Kremlin figures linked with the race. But that has not stopped feverish speculation about who will run and whom Putin will endorse to replace him. Many analysts discount the strong showing by Ivanov and Medvedev in the opinion polls. They predict that if the popular Putin throws his weight behind a third candidate, that person will quickly climb to the top of the polls. Only one Russian bookmaker is taking bets on the vote, the Noviye Izvestia newspaper reported last week. It said the bookmaker was not offering odds on would-be candidates but was instead taking bets on weekly fluctuations in runners' opinion poll ratings. ***** http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070820/ap_on_re_us/obit_helmsley 'Queen of mean' hotelier Helmsley dies By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer 8-20-7 Leona Helmsley, the hotelier who went to prison as a tax cheat and was reviled as the "queen of mean," died Monday at age 87. Helmsley died of heart failure at her summer home in Greenwich, Conn., said her publicist, Howard Rubenstein. Already experienced in real estate before her marriage, Helmsley helped her husband run a $5 billion empire that included managing the Empire State Building. She became a household name in 1989 when she was tried for tax evasion. The sensational trial included testimony from disgruntled employees who said she terrorized both the menial and the executive help at her homes and hotels. That image of Helmsley as the "queen of mean" was sealed when a former housekeeper testified that she heard Helmsley say: "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." She denied having said it, but the words followed her for the rest of her life. Helmsley clearly enjoyed the luxury of their private fortune, flying the globe in the couple's 100-seat jet with a bedroom suite. The couple's residences included a nine-room penthouse with a swimming pool overlooking Central Park atop their own Park Lane Hotel; an $8 million estate in Connecticut; a condo in Palm Beach; and a mountaintop hideaway near Phoenix. Their money supported charities, including NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and its affiliated Weill Cornell Medical College, which received tens of millions of dollars, including a $25 million gift in 2006 to improve its treatment of digestive diseases. Yet Helmsley nickel-and-dimed merchants on her personal purchases, stiffed contractors who worked on her Connecticut home and terrorized both menial and executive help at her homes and hotels, detractors say. When her husband died in 1997 at age 87, Helmsley said in a statement: "My fairy tale is over. I lived a magical life with Harry." Earlier this year, Forbes magazine ranked her as the 369th richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion. She was 51, with the good looks of a former model and already a successful seller of residential real estate in a hot New York market, when she married Harry Helmsley in 1972. He was 63 and one of the richest men in America. In 1980 he made her president of Helmsley Hotels, a subsidiary which at the time operated more than two dozen hotels in 10 states, including the Park Lane, St. Moritz and Palace in New York and the Harley Hotels. Harley was a contraction of Harry and Leona. For the better part of a decade, a glamorous Leona Helmsley smiled out of magazine ads dressed in luxurious gowns and tiara, advertising that the Palace was the only hotel in the world "where the Queen stands guard." The press portrayed them as an adoring couple, with Leona calling Harry "gorgeous one" and "pussycat." Friends and acquaintances described her as generous, charming, playful and having a good sense of humor. She threw parties on his birthdays at which guests wore buttons that said "I'm Just Wild About Harry" and he wore a button that said "I'm Harry." The couple would dance until dawn. On July 4, 1976, Harry Helmsley lit the Empire State Building in red, white and blue — a tribute not to the Bicentennial, but to his wife's birthday. It cost $100,000 — "less than a necklace," he said. But the Helmsleys' charmed life ended in 1988 when they were hit with tax-evasion charges. Harry's health and memory were so poor that he was judged incompetent to stand trial. His wife, after an eight-week trial, was convicted of evading $1.2 million in federal taxes by billing Helmsley businesses for personal expenses ranging from her underwear to $3 million worth of renovations to the Dunellen Hall estate in Connecticut. Sentenced to four years in prison, she tried to avoid jail by pleading that Harry might die without her at his side. Her doctor said that prison might kill her because of high blood pressure and other problems. (At a March 1992 hearing, the judge rejected that argument and even ordered her to surrender on April 15 — tax day.) Helmsley served a total of 21 months and was released in January 1994. She had 150 hours added to her 750 hours of community service because employees had done some of the chores for her. Several top executives at Helmsley companies said their firings coincided with her release. She maintained she couldn't have fired them because she had given up her management post — as a convicted felon she was barred from running enterprises with liquor licenses, such as hotels. The State Liquor Authority said it had no evidence that she was still in charge. In 1996, two longtime partners of Harry Helmsley's accused his wife of scheming to loot the main corporation, Helmsley-Spear Inc. They said she was stripping away company assets to avoid paying $11.4 million owed them and to make the company worthless, because Harry Helmsley had given them an option to buy Helmsley-Spear at a bargain price upon his death. After he died a few months later, the dispute with the partners was eventually settled and control of Helmsley-Spear was turned over to them. The settlement freed Leona Helmsley to sell off other assets. The Helmsleys' charitable gifts may have run to the tens of millions, but people who dealt with them spoke bitterly of being stiffed. One of them, a painting contractor, said Leona Helmsley wouldn't pay an $88,000 bill for work on Dunellen Hall because she was entitled to a "commission" for the $800,000 worth of other jobs he got in Helmsley buildings. After making a sales clerk rewrite a bill for earrings to save $4 in sales tax, she reportedly said: "That's how the rich get richer." Her lawyers suggested that the government came after her to make an example of someone with high visibility. Helmsley was born Leona Mindy Rosenthal on July 4, 1920, the daughter of a Manhattan hat maker. She left college after two years to become a model. She married a lawyer, Leo Panzirer, whom she divorced in 1959. Their only child, Jay Panzirer, later ran a Florida-based building supplies company that did extensive business with Helmsley properties. She later was briefly married to a garment industry executive, Joe Lubin. Before her son's death of a heart attack in 1982, she told interviewers she would not talk about him "because terrible things can happen to people these days." She evidently was referring to being knifed by robbers at her Palm Beach home in 1973. She was stabbed in the chest and suffered a collapsed lung, and Harry was wounded in the arm. After her son died, she sued the estate for money and property she said her son had borrowed, and an eviction notice was served on her son's widow, Mimi. Mimi Panzirer said afterward that the legal costs wiped her out and "to this day I don't know why they did it." Helmsley is survived by her brother and his wife, four grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced. ***** http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/sports/football/20cnd-vick.html?em&ex=1187755200&en=94856887d5458e8d&ei=5087%0A August 20, 2007 N.F.L.’s Vick Accepts Plea Deal in Dog-Fight Case By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT RICHMOND, Va., Aug. 20 — Michael Vick, the star quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons, has accepted a plea offer from federal prosecutors in a criminal case stemming from a dog-fighting ring that was run from a property Mr. Vick owned. Mr. Vick will probably face a sentence of at least a year in prison under the deal. His future in the National Football League appears bleak. Mr. Vick is expected to formally enter his plea on Aug. 27. The United States District Judge overseeing the case, Henry E. Hudson, announced the agreement at a status hearing in the case this afternoon. Billy Martin, one of Mr. Vick’s defense lawyers, said in a written statement: “After consulting with his family over the weekend, Michael Vick asked that I announce today that he has reached an agreement with federal prosecutors regarding the charges pending against him. Mr. Vick has agreed to enter a plea of guilty to those charges and to accept full responsibility for his actions and the mistakes he has made. Michael wishes to apologize again to everyone who has been hurt by this matter.” Mr. Vick has been barred by the league’s commissioner, Roger Goodell, from appearing at the Falcons’ training camp since the league began its own investigation of the matter on July 24, a week after Mr. Vick was indicted in the case. The N.F.L. said today in a written statement: “We are aware of Michael Vick’s decision to enter a guilty plea to the federal charges against him and accept responsibility for his conduct. We totally condemn the conduct outlined in the charges, which is inconsistent with what Michael Vick previously told both our office and the Falcons. We will conclude our own review under the league’s personal conduct policy as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have asked the Falcons to continue to refrain from taking action. pending a decision by the commissioner.” The government, in their prosecution of the case, put tremendous pressure on Mr. Vick to accept a plea deal and not take the matter to trial. On Friday, two of Mr. Vick’s co-defendants pled guilty in the case and agreed to testify against him. A third had pled guilty last month and agreed to testify, and prosecutors said they had three other cooperating witnesses. The charges in Mr. Vick’s indictment carry a possible maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The plea deal probably calls for prosecutors to recommend a lighter sentence as long as Mr. Vick cooperates with the government’s investigation. The two men who entered pleas on Friday, Purnell A. Peace and Quanis L. Phillips, signed lengthy statements which outlined Mr. Vick’s involvement in the dog fighting ring. Mr. Phillips said that he, Mr. Peace and Mr. Vick killed about eight dogs that did not perform well by hanging and drowning them at a facility that Mr. Vick owned in Surry, Va., in April. Both confirmed that the enterprise, Bad Newz Kennels, and the gambling associated with it were “almost exclusively funded by Vick.” They also described numerous times when all four co-defendants traveled across state lines to sponsor dogs in fights. Their pleas, along with that of Tony Taylor on July 30, prompted widespread speculation that Mr. Vick would accept a plea agreement. Mr. Vick was believed to have been given until last Friday morning to agree to accept the plea deal, but that deadline passed without an announcement from either side. The Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank, told The Associated Press on Friday night, “It seems to be a pretty clear indication there will be some sort of plea entered.” The government’s criminal case might not be on the only one Mr. Vick has to worry about. Gerald Poindexter, the state prosecutor for Surry County, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday that he plans to bring charges on Sept. 25 against Mr. Vick and others alleged to be connected to the dog-fighting ring. ***** http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2317.shtml My fellow Texan By Bill Moyers Online Journal Contributing Writer Aug 20, 2007 Like the proverbial hedgehog, Karl Rove knew one big thing: how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the Good Lord was speaking in a Texas accent. Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse, naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat -- a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions. Especially at gay people. It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber. And if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew in politics to bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion. At the same time he was recruiting an army of the Lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row -- twice in the Lone Star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles -- paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption. Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals now being investigated, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the Attorney General of the United States into a partisan sock puppet. Rove is riding out of Dodge City as the posse rides in. At his press conference last week. he asked God to bless the president and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism. He wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a secular skeptic, a manipulator. On his last play of the game, all Karl Rove had to offer them was a Hail Mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it. Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.