NoCalMike

Wladimir is a different fighter. Emmanuel Stewart is the best thing to ever happen to Wladimir. He is so much more of a complete fighter now. Without Emmanuel in his corner, I am not sure he survives the Peter fight. This was Wlad's best performance against a "top" heavyweight since destorying Lamon Brewster for 5 rounds before gassing out. A lot of people point to Wlad's chin, but I kind of disagree. I don' t think it is necesarily his chin, because it never looks like Wlad is actually hurt, I think he just would panic and forget what to do in the ring. With Emannuel Stewart in his corner though, he has shown that he can come back from being knocked down(IE: The Peter Fight) On a sidenote: Byrd thinking he was as strong as Wlad was about the dumbest thing ever. I could understand if his OWN ego told him so, but the fact his cornermen and trainers went with that for his training is fucking absurd.

This new chick at work drives from Modesto to Sacramento everyday and back, however she just got the job and is looking for residence here in Sac.

The final scene, as written, was supposed to show that Videodrome was a weapon and had so completely mutated Max's body and mind that he was now batshit insane and kills himself to "fully become the new flesh". That said, the original script for Videodrome (dramatically altered due to the fact that SFX at the time made a lot of the stuff impossible to pull off/were cut because it would never get past the censors) was that after Max shoots himself, he awakes on the set of Videodrome's torture studio with Debby Harry's character and the Bianca Oblivion character waiting for Max. Both women have stomach vaginas like Max, which they are fingering with their hands to pleasure themselves. They start to finger Max's stomach vagina with it implied that Max's mind has merged with the videodrome signal when Max killed himself. Of course, this only makes sense in the original script, which had a scene cut from the final draft where Bianca and Debby Harry's character are revealed to be aspects of Videodrome that have invaded the real world and are trying to stop the government from using Videodrome to murder people with Max's help...... Awesome.

Sometimes people forget this nation isn't even 300 years old yet. Who is to say what being an "american" is, has even been clearly defined in a way that can stand the test of time yet. Our nation has been evolving from the very start, and has no signs of stopping. I don't particularly agree or approve of all the illegal immigration, but goddamn if some of the pundits on tv don't sound like a bunch rich white men in fear of losing their majority power status one day.

Would be nice to be living close to Philly right about now.

Last night was a good episode, and you can see by the scenes for next week that something big is going down by the end of the season....the slow build is very good tv.

With Oz I'd say the midpoint to season 2 - Adebesi's death was the best period of the show. Season 1 was good, but 2,3,4 were easily better.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060415/ap_on_...icans_checklist By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 28 minutes ago WASHINGTON - Protection of marriage amendment? Check. Anti-flag burning legislation? Check. New abortion limits? Check. Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority. In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush's approval ratings below 40 percent, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted. "It seems like for only six months, every two years — right around election time — that we're even noticed," said Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council. "Some of these better pass," he added. "You notice when it's just lip service being paid." Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer agreed that the effort matters. "If they get to these things this summer, which we expect that they will, that will go a long way toward energizing the values voters at the base of the Republican Party," said Bauer, head of Americans United to Preserve Marriage. GOP leaders long have known that the war and merely riding the coattails of a second-term president could disillusion their base. If there was any doubt, conservatives issued a concise warning last month. Four groups representing evangelical Christians said an internal survey found that 63 percent of "values voters" — identified as evangelical Christians whose priorities include outlawing abortion and banning same-sex marriage — "feel Congress has not kept its promises to act on a pro-family agenda." The Family Research Council, which headlined the survey, also announced it would hold a "Values Voter Summit" in September to "raise the bar of achievement for this Congress." At the top of the agenda could be a call for new leadership in Congress if those in power have not acted on social conservatives' issues. Some leaders read the warning signs early. The House has approved an amendment to the Constitution to outlaw flag burning and passed a bill to crack down on the practice of minors' crossing state lines for abortions to evade legal limits in their own states Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and a possible presidential candidate in 2008, announced early this year that the Senate would consider those and the anti-gay marriage amendment that has failed in both chambers despite Bush's endorsement. "When America's values are under attack, we need to act," Frist told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. Those were sweet words to Bauer's ears. "The marriage amendment is in a class by itself because of what's at stake," Bauer said. House Republican officials close to the scheduling process said the marriage amendment is headed for a House vote in July. Sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan., also a possible presidential candidate, the measure would have the Constitution define marriage as the union between a man and a woman — in effect rescinding a 2004 Massachusetts law that made gay marriage legal. Sending the proposed amendment to the states for ratification may not win the two-thirds majority required in the House and Senate. But committing to a vote in June is a gesture of good faith that would resonate with social conservatives, Bauer said. The amendment banning flag desecration, a perennial vote and favorite of some conservatives, would need the same majority for ratification. Frist has promised to bring it up in June. The amendment was ratified by the House last year but was not brought to a vote in the Senate after 35 senators declared their opposition. The bill to curb abortions among minors has long been on Frist's list of legislative priorities. Legislation imposing penalties on anyone who helps a minor cross state lines to obtain an abortion won easy passage in House last year. Frist has promised to bring a similar bill to the Senate floor before the year is out. Not on the Senate's schedule, however, is a bill allowing taxpayers to underwrite human embryonic stem cell research, a science still in its infancy that could lead to cures for many diseases. Social conservatives, including Bush, say that the process by which the cells are derived is morally akin to abortion because the fertilized egg is destroyed. Frist, a surgeon who enraged many in the GOP base last year when he supported a House-passed bill to fund the process, had planned a Senate vote on the matter by Easter. Congress adjourned for the holiday this month without such a debate anywhere on the Senate's calendar. --So it looks like another round of partisan squabbling is coming up, on issues that aren't going to get any attention post-election, all in the name of rousing up one's base......Don't you just LOOOOOOOOVE election years?

I think, naturally with any new show, in the first season they have to concentrate on character building and slowly introduce new characters to the show. I mean I don't really remember any HBO series where the 1st season was the best.

I agree in principal. The problem is that the amount that actually does want to do something about it are in the vast minority. I mean if the entire democratic party was unified, I am sure they could convince some republicans to come over to their side for Censure or more, however when hald the democrats are scared of doing something.....then nothing is going to get done.

Something tells me the that (OMG CONSPIRACY2006LOL) Bush won't get rid of them because he wasn't the one who played a big part in putting them in their positions in the first place.

I watch it every week. I think it is solid. I think they are slowly building up for something big for the season finale.

Today's Immigration Battle - Corporatists vs. Racists (and Labor is Left Behind) by Thom Hartmann The corporatist Republicans ("amnesty!") are fighting with the racist Republicans ("fence!"), and it provides an opportunity for progressives to step forward with a clear solution to the immigration problem facing America. Both the corporatists and the racists are fond of the mantra, "There are some jobs Americans won't do." It's a lie. Americans will do virtually any job if they're paid a decent wage. This isn't about immigration - it's about economics. Industry and agriculture won't collapse without illegal labor, but the middle class is being crushed by it. The reason why thirty years ago United Farm Workers' Union (UFW) founder Caesar Chávez fought against illegal immigration, and the UFW turned in illegals during his tenure as president, was because Chávez, like progressives since the 1870s, understood the simple reality that labor rises and falls in price as a function of availability. As Wikipedia notes: "In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valley to the border of Mexico to protest growers' use of illegal aliens as temporary replacement workers during a strike. Joining him on the march were both the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and U.S. Senator Walter Mondale. Chávez and the UFW would often report suspected illegal aliens who served as temporary replacement workers as well as who refused to unionize to the INS." Working Americans have always known this simple equation: More workers, lower wages. Fewer workers, higher wages. Progressives fought - and many lost their lives in the battle - to limit the pool of "labor hours" available to the Robber Barons from the 1870s through the 1930s and thus created the modern middle class. They limited labor-hours by pushing for the 50-hour week and the 10-hour day (and then later the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day). They limited labor-hours by pushing for laws against child labor (which competed with adult labor). They limited labor-hours by working for passage of the 1935 Wagner Act that provided for union shops. And they limited labor-hours by supporting laws that would regulate immigration into the United States to a small enough flow that it wouldn't dilute the unionized labor pool. As Wikipedia notes: "The first laws creating a quota for immigrants were passed in the 1920s, in response to a sense that the country could no longer absorb large numbers of unskilled workers, despite pleas by big business that it wanted the new workers." Do a little math. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 7.6 million unemployed Americans right now. Another 1.5 million Americans are no longer counted because they've become "long term" or "discouraged" unemployed workers. And although various groups have different ways of measuring it, most agree that at least another five to ten million Americans are either working part-time when they want to work full-time, or are "underemployed," doing jobs below their level of training, education, or experience. That's between eight and twenty million un- and under-employed Americans, many unable to find above-poverty-level work. At the same time, there are between seven and fifteen million working illegal immigrants diluting our labor pool. If illegal immigrants could no longer work, unions would flourish, the minimum wage would rise, and oligarchic nations to our south would have to confront and fix their corrupt ways. Between the Reagan years - when there were only around 1 to 2 million illegal aliens in our workforce - and today, we've gone from about 25 percent of our private workforce being unionized to around seven percent. Much of this is the direct result - as Caesar Chávez predicted - of illegal immigrants competing directly with unionized and legal labor. Although it's most obvious in the construction trades over the past 30 years, it's hit all sectors of our economy. Democratic Party strategist Ann Lewis just sent out a mass email on behalf of former Wal-Mart Board of Directors member and now US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. In it, Lewis noted that Clinton suggests we should have: "An earned path to citizenship for those already here working hard, paying taxes, respecting the law, and willing to meet a high bar for becoming a citizen." Sounds nice. The same day, on his radio program, Rush Limbaugh told a woman whose husband is an illegal immigrant that she had nothing to worry about with regard to deportation of him or their children because all he'd have to do - under the new law under consideration - is pay a small fine and learn English. The current Directors of Wal-Mart are smiling. Meanwhile, the millions of American citizens who came to this nation as legal immigrants, who waited in line for years, who did the hard work to become citizens, are feeling insulted, humiliated, and conned. Shouldn't we be compassionate? Of course. But there is nothing compassionate about driving down the wages of any nation's middle class. It's the most cynical, self-serving, greedy, and sociopathic behavior you'll see from our "conservatives." There is nothing compassionate about being the national enabler of a dysfunctional oligarchy like Mexico. An illegal workforce in the US sending an estimated $17 billion to Mexico every year - second only in national income to that country's oil revenues - supports an antidemocratic, anti-worker, hyperconservative administration there that gleefully ships out of that nation the "troublesome" Mexican citizens - those lowest on the economic food-chain and thus most likely to present "labor unrest" - to the USA. Mexico (and other "sending nations") need not deal with their own social and economic problems so long as we're willing to solve them for them - at the expense of our middle class. Democracy in Central and South America be damned - there are profits to be made for Wal-Mart! Similarly, there is nothing compassionate about handing higher profits (through a larger and thus cheaper work force) to the CEOs of America's largest corporations and our now-experiencing-record-profits construction and agriculture industries. What about caring for people in need? Isn't that the universal religious/ethical value? Of course. A few years ago, when my family and I were visiting Europe, one of our children fell sick. A doctor came to the home of the people we were staying with, visited our child at 11 pm on a weeknight, left behind a course of antibiotics, and charged nothing. It was paid for by that nation's universal health care system. We should offer the same to any human being in need of medical care - a universal human right - in the United States. But if I'd applied to that nation I was visiting for a monthly unemployment or retirement check, I would have been laughed out of the local government office. And if I'd been caught working there, I would have been deported within a week. Caring for people in crisis/need is very different from giving a job or a monthly welfare check to non-citizens. No nation - even those in Central and South America - will do that. And neither should the United States. But if illegal immigrants won't pick our produce or bus our tables won't our prices go up? (The most recent mass-emailed conservative variation of this argument, targeting paranoid middle-class Americans says: "Do you want to pay an extra $10,000 for your next house?") The answer is simple: Yes. But wages would also go up, and even faster than housing or food prices. And CEO salaries, and corporate profits, might moderate back to the levels they were during the "golden age of the American middle class" between the 1940s and Reagan's declaration of war on the middle class in the 1980s. We saw exactly this scenario played out in the US fifty years ago, when unions helped regulate entry into the workforce, 35 percent of American workers had a union job, and 70 percent of Americans could raise a family on a single, 40-hour-week paycheck. All working Americans would gladly pay a bit more for their food if their paychecks were both significantly higher and more secure. (This would even allow for an increase in the minimum wage - as it did from the 1930s to the 1980s.) But what about repressive régimes? Aren't we denying entrance to this generation's equivalent of the Jews fleeing Germany? This is the most tragic of all the arguments put forward by conservatives in the hopes compassionate progressives will bite. Our immigration policies already allow for refugees - and should be expanded. It's an issue that needs more national discussion and action. But giving a free pass to former Coca-Cola executive Vincente Fox to send workers to the US - and thus avoid having to deal with his own corrupt oligarchy - and to equate this to the Holocaust is an insult to the memory of those who died in Hitler's death camps - and to those suffering in places like Darfur under truly repressive regimes. There is no equivalence. It's frankly astonishing to hear "progressives" reciting corporatist/racist/conservative talking points, recycled through "conservative Democratic" politicians trying to pander to the relatively small percentage of recently-legal (mostly through recent amnesties or birth) immigrants who are trying to get their relatives into this country by means of Bush's proposed guest worker program or the many variations thereof being proposed. It's equally astonishing to hear the few unions going along with this (in the sad/desperate hope of picking up new members) turn their backs on Caesar Chávez and the traditions and history of America's Progressive and Union movements by embracing illegal immigration. Every nation has an obligation to limit immigration to a number that will not dilute its workforce, but will maintain a stable middle class - if it wants to have a stable democracy. This has nothing to do with race, national origin, or language (visit Switzerland with it's ethnic- and language-dived areas!), and everything to do with economics. Without a middle class, any democracy is doomed. And without labor having - through control of labor availability - power in relative balance to capital/management, no middle class can emerge. America's early labor leaders did not die to increase the labor pool for the Robber Barons or the Walton family - they died fighting to give control of it to the workers of their era and in the hopes that we would continue to hold it - and infect other nations with the same idea of democracy and a stable middle class. The simple way to do this today is to require that all non-refugee immigrants go through the same process to become American citizens or legal workers in this country (no amnesties, no "guest workers," no "legalizations") regardless of how they got here; to confront employers who hire illegals with draconian financial and criminal penalties; and to affirm that while health care (and the right to provide humanitarian care to all humans) is an absolute right for all people within our boundaries regardless of status, a paycheck, education, or subsidy is not. The Republican (and Democratic) corporatists who want a cheap labor force, and the Republican (and Democratic) racists who want to build a fence and punish humanitarian aid workers, are equally corrupt and anti-progressive. As long as employers are willing and able (without severe penalties) to hire illegal workers, people will risk life and limb to grab at the America Dream. When we stop hiring and paying them, most will leave of their own volition over a few years, and the remaining few who are committed to the US will obtain citizenship through normal channels. This is, after all, the middle-class "American Dream." And how much better this hemisphere would be if Central and South Americans were motivated to stay in their own nations (because no employer in the US would dare hire them) and fight there for a Mexican Dream and a Salvadoran Dream and a Guatemalan Dream (and so on). This is the historic Progressive vision for all of the Americas... http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0329-21.htm

...so yeah I just watched the flick for the first time in ages. Bought the Criterion Collection 2-disc DVD. So was the final scene trying to say that Max ended up being a pawn for Videodrome in the end, and that Videodrome was still out there and bigger then just the two main bad guys? A lot of times it was hard to decipher halucinations from reality...but of course that was the entire point of the movie.

Since RVD is cashing in the MITB pretty soon, I don't think he should be losing any major matches, especially on PPV, prior to ONS. I don't know how serious Vince is about having Cena or HHH job the title at ONS, but if there is even an .000001% chance of it actually happening, then RVD needs to be built up, and I would actually start having him Interrupt all these Edge/HH/Cena Promos, and explaining how he will always ultimately be the #1 contender now matter who wins or loses because of the briefcase. If RVD jobs to Shelton at Backlash, it better be for a good reason, not something as juvenile as "The Return of Shelton's Mama WHOAAAAA DOWN GOES RVD, DOWN GOES RVD" That would be seriously lame, screwjob aside. I wouldn't mind seeing RVD win the I-C Title, and hold until his opponent at ONS is SET FOR SURE, and then someone he loses it in a screwjob from a run-in by HHH/Cena.

The closest thing I did that could be considered dining & ditching, was one year at the state fair, I used a ten to buy a corndog for me and my gf, and the guy gives me back change as if I gave him a twenty. I realized this and said "oh well his bad" and grabbed my gf and took off through the crowd fast.

The Horror Channel is pissing me off. They were supposed to launch Halloween '05, by piggybacking on The Men's Channel for 2 hours every saturday night. The Debut was going to be the original NOTLD. So everything was a go, and then ON THE NIGHT OF THE LAUNCH suddenly they claim that the Men's channel had aprehension because the movie was being shown uncut....umm excuse me, there is nothing Gory by today's standards about NOTLD, nothing at all....so fast foward to today and whenever you try to post a msg on the horror channel's board about when the fucking launch is coming, you get the same stupid generic "we are working really hard, it is gonna be soon" response.

http://www.myspace.com/discothekidrules

Maybe if the guy didn't suck Donkey balls on the mic they wouldn't keep the music on If that is your best reasoning, then there needs to be entrance music played over a LOT of wrestler's promos.

MSG is played out as far as getting over soley based on being MSG. It is still a great venue for live events, but it's not like it makes a crappy event any better.

I know it is about three years late to say RVD is being systematically held down, but seriously. He wins the MITB match at WM, and last week he gets ten seconds of tv time, and this week the BEST they can come up for him is wrestling Rob Conway? Oh and how about them playing own theme music OVER HIS PROMO......WTF?

I am going tonight.

Cotto is still very raw, not ready for Floyd. Floyd vs. Hatton is what people want to see.

Charcoal is better. Easily.

Japanese Sci-Fi/Zombie flick. Heard it was really good. Just bought the 2-disc special edition and will be watching it sometime today, probably in the next hour or so after the A's game finishes.