“Lou Dobbs to Leave CNN - Daily Beast” plus 4 more

Lou Dobbs to Leave CNN - Daily Beast
Main Street Garden park sprouting in downtown Dallas - Dallas Morning News
Most people believe Friday the 13th is unlucky - Register-Herald
Tibetan Cultural Day Saturday - Ithaca Journal
An objection to judicial elections - Badger Herald

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Posted: 12 Nov 2009 08:01 PM PST

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The longtime anchor, whose views on immigration and the Obama "birther" movement caused controversy at the cable news network, announced Wednesday that he is departing CNN.

Lou Dobbs, the controversial prime-time populist, said on his show tonight that he's leaving CNN, to "engage in constructive problem-solving" at a destination unknown. "As for the important work of restoring inspiration to our great free society and our market economy, I will strive as well to be a leader in that conversation," said the longtime anchor, who has been a champion of immigration opponents and the "birther" movement, which questioned President Obama's citizenship.

Dobbs told his staff about the decision today, according to a source who attended the meeting. Although the anchor didn't say where he'd be going, there has been considerable speculation that he'd follow fellow popular conservative host Glenn Beck to the Fox News empire, perhaps as an anchor for the long-struggling Fox Business Network. Dobbs reportedly had lunch with Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes in September.

• The Daily Beast's Lloyd Grove asks, What Happened to the Real Lou?Dobbs, a former business anchor, reinvented himself as a cheerful nativist only in recent years, finding fame with his nightly rants about illegal immigration. He clashed openly with CNN President Jon Klein this year for giving credence to questions from some on the far right about whether Obama was born in the United States.

In July, Klein sent Dobbs' staff an email citing research that proved Obama was indeed born in Hawaii. "It seems this story is dead—because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef," he wrote, adding that he did not expect to see it on the show again. Shortly thereafter, openly flouting Klein's request, Dobbs returned to the birther story.

Since then, there has been speculation that Dobbs would leave CNN, perhaps for the friendlier airwaves of Fox News.

In recent weeks, Dobbs made headlines for another reason: A shot was fired outside his New Jersey home, which he attributed to left-wing rage. "My house has been shot and hit...," he said. "This shot was fired, with my wife not 15 feet away. It's part of life. The anger, the hate, the vitriol."

Rebecca Dana is a culture correspondent for The Daily Beast. A former editor and reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has also written for the New York Times, the New York Observer, Rolling Stone and Slate, among other publications.

For more of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

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Main Street Garden park sprouting in downtown Dallas - Dallas Morning News

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 08:58 PM PST

Even in its richest times, downtown Dallas was little more than a concrete jungle, with a few shining high-rises surrounded by moats of parking lots and smaller buildings that had seen better days.

Today, the city will take an important step away from that past.

Main Street Garden, a 1.7-acre park unlike anything Dallas has ever seen, will open to the public this evening on the once all but forgotten eastern edge of downtown. Though constant rain in September and October set back construction and parts of the park remain unfinished, a dedication ceremony is scheduled for 5:30 p.m.

The first of four planned downtown parks, Main Street Garden holds the promise of a maturing city anchored in a vibrant and urbane downtown.

"It has to do with making cities more livable and more attractive than the suburban model some of us in America ran to in the '60s, '70s and '80s," said Tom Balsley, the New York landscape architect who designed Main Street Garden.

The park centers on a vast lawn that stretches in front of the Municipal Courts Building on Harwood Street. All around its perimeter are spaces of activity.

There is a sandstone wading pool, where people can come and sit on ash-white marble boulders and dip their feet in the water.

There is a polished and padded playground for small children, a concrete run for dogs, a cafe and a series of little gardens that run in strips along Main Street.

Nowhere in Dallas is there such a modern park with so many different uses.

Many U.S. cities have watched their downtowns reawaken around similar parks, and backers of Main Street Garden expect it will have the same effect here.

"You can have a wonderful school system, a wonderful police department, and a wonderful fire department, and nobody's going to know. But they can see a park," said John Crompton, professor of park and tourism sciences at Texas A&M University.

"It's the visible clue you have to the quality of life in that area. That's why it's so important, because that's what people draw their clues from," he said.

For decades, really for downtown's whole history, too many of the powerbrokers behind it failed to recognize the importance of parks.

"In Dallas, real estate rules, and there was no appreciation of the significance of what parks could do," said Willis Winters, assistant director of the Dallas Park and Recreation Department.

There were attempts. Some important spaces, like Dealey Plaza and Ferris Plaza, emerged. But it was commerce, not culture, that defined the construction of downtown.

Tom Baker, chairman of the city's Park and Recreation Board, said that, ironically enough, it was economic interests that committed people to building new downtown parks.

He recalled the city's loss of Boeing's headquarters to Chicago in 2001 as a major turning point.

"It was a wake-up call for a lot of things," he said.

The quality of life, particularly cultural life, in downtown Dallas couldn't compare to Chicago. And the city's business benefits in terms of lower cost of living and cheaper workforce didn't close the gap.

Since the loss of Boeing, Dallas has made a lot of progress, most notably in the arts districts.

Now, with the opening of Main Street Garden, the parks piece is falling into place. Main Street Garden's opening will be followed with Belo Garden in 2011, the Woodall Rodgers Deck Park in 2012, and the still unfunded Pacific Plaza at a date uncertain.

For a relatively small and inexpensive park, the $18.5 million Main Street Garden is expected to accomplish quite a bit.

Not only does it have a variety of uses, but it also is intended to be an anchor for the future development of its piece of downtown.

The park is surrounded by important architecture, including the Municipal Courts building; the restored Mercantile complex; the former Hilton Hotel, which is now home to Hotel Indigo; and, most notably, the vacant and decaying former Grand Hotel.

The Mercantile and the Indigo have been turned around. And the Municipal Courts building – the Old City Hall – is set to be restored as the University of North Texas Law School.

But the Grand Hotel, also known as the Statler Hilton, remains a major drag on the area, along with lesser properties such as the Continental Building.

Main Street Garden, it is hoped, will change all that.

"We felt like by opening up the vistas to these buildings, it would make then more valuable," Winters said.

Balsley, the park's designer, has seen similar transformations across the country, particularly in the upper East and Midwest but also in the South and Southwest.

"These parks are the building blocks of the regeneration of our cities," he said.

In parts of New York, Cleveland and Houston where decline had set in, parks brought people back, he said.

The same thing will happen around Main Street Garden, he promised.

"This park is going to spark the change in the image in this part of downtown," he said.

Looking at it, full of trees and rich with granite, sandstone and benches of sustainably harvested Brazilian hardwood, it's easy to believe he's right.

And City Hall, along with the nonprofit business association DowntownDallas, is intent on seeing he is.

Often exaggerated worries about the homeless and panhandlers have kept many people out of downtown.

To answer that, Main Street Garden will see lots of foot and bike patrols from Dallas police and the private downtown safety patrol. It is also ringed on four sides with police cameras. It will close before midnight on most nights.

DowntownDallas also plans to keep it busy with concerts, festivals and other activities.

Constant use will make it feel safe even for the most skeptical residents, Crompton said.

"These are vibrant, attractive places. The homeless take over in doubtful areas where there isn't vibrancy and activity," he said.

If the vision of Main Street Garden comes to be, it will be busy from early morning well into the night, a place where law students come to study, office workers come for lunch and downtown residents come for evening walks.

"It's not going to provide an escape from the city. That's not what it's trying to do," Balsley said.

Instead, the park is very much of the city, growing and changing into something new.

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Most people believe Friday the 13th is unlucky - Register-Herald

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 08:51 PM PST

Published: November 12, 2009 11:48 pm

Most people believe Friday the 13th is unlucky

Point Blank

By John Blankenship

It's the unluckiest of days. People fear Friday the 13th for a variety of reasons, some logical and some illogical.

But the fact remains: Most people believe the day is unlucky, if for no other reason than for its own sake.

Some say the apprehension stems from two separate fears — the fear of the number 13 and the fear of Fridays.

Both fears have deep roots in Western culture, most notably Christian theology.

Thirteen is significant to Christians because it is the number of people who were present at the Last Supper (Jesus and his 12 apostles). Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th member of the party to arrive.

Christians also have traditionally been wary of Fridays because Jesus was crucified on a Friday.

Superstitions regarding the day, however, are perhaps more far-reaching than merely having religious significance.

In both North America and Europe, a sizable portion of the population behaves strangely on Friday the 13th.

Some people refuse to fly airplanes, host a party, apply for a job, get married or even go to work.

In the United States, roughly 8 percent of the population suffers from a condition known as "paraskevidekatriaphobia," commonly known as "fear of Friday the 13th."

Here are some related superstitions concerning the number 13:

- More than 80 percent of high-rises lack a 13th floor.

- Many airports skip the 13th gate.

- Airplanes have no 13th aisle.

- Hospitals and hotels regularly have no room number 13.

- Italians omit the number 13 from their national lottery.

- On the streets of Florence, Italy, the house between number 12 and 14 is addressed as 12 1/2.

- Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue.

- And if you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the devil's luck. Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all had 13 letters in their names.

- Any month's 13th day will fall on Friday if the month starts on Sunday. At most, it occurs only three times in a single year. This year, Friday the 13th occurred in February, March and November. The next instance of this will not occur until the year 2015.

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According to folklorists, there is no written evidence for a "Friday the 13th" superstition before the 19th century.

The earliest known documented reference in English occurs in an 1869 biography of one Gioachino Rossini who reportedly regarded Friday as an unlucky day and 13 as an unlucky number. It is remarkable that Rossini died on Friday, the 13th of November.

In numerology, meanwhile, the number 12 is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in the 12 months of the year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 hours of the clock, 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles of Jesus, 12 gods of Olympus — whereas the 13 is considered irregular, transgressing this completeness.

At the same time, Friday has been considered an unlucky day since the 14th century's The Canterbury Tales.

Black Friday has been associated with stock market crashes and other disasters since the 1800s.

The actual origin of the superstition appears to be a tale in Norse mythology.

Friday is named for Frigga, the free-spirited goddess of love and fertility.

When Norse and Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, Frigga was banished in shame to a mountaintop and labeled a witch. It was believed that every Friday, the spiteful goddess convened a meeting with 11 other witches, plus the devil — a gathering of 13 — and plotted ill turns of fate for the coming week.

For many centuries in Scandinavia, Friday was known as "Witches Sabbath."

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According to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, N.C., an estimated 17 million to 21 million people in the United States are affected by a fear of Friday the 13th.

Some people are so paralyzed by fear that they even avoid getting out of bed.

There are some conflicting studies, though, about the risk of accidents on Friday the 13th.

The Dutch Centre for Insurance Statistics on June 12, 2008 stated that "fewer accidents and reports of fire and theft occur when the 13th of the month falls on Friday than on other Fridays because people are preventatively more careful or just stay home."

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Top o' the morning!

— Blankenship is a columnist for The Register-Herald. Email: jabbb@suddenlink.net

Tibetan Cultural Day Saturday - Ithaca Journal

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 08:44 PM PST

The Tibetan Community of Ithaca will host its 17th Annual Tibetan Cultural Day from 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday at St. Paul's United Methodist Church, 402 N. Aurora St. The event will feature Tibetan food, religious performances, door prizes and more.

Tickets are available at 351-6257 or from the Tibet Store on The Commons.

A donation of $10 is suggested in advance, or $12 at the door.

Friends of Library annual meeting to be Sunday

The 2009 Annual Meeting of the Friends of the Tompkins County Public Library is 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday in the Borg Warner Room, Tompkins County Public Library, 101 E. Green St.

The agenda includes voting on the 2010 budget, election of officers, honoring new lifetime members, guest speakers Diana Riesman and Constance Bruce from The Ithaca Motion Picture Project.

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An objection to judicial elections - Badger Herald

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 08:51 PM PST

Opinion

An objection to judicial elections

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There are plenty of horrible politicians employed by the state of Wisconsin. Most lie, many are corrupt and at least some, according to several reports, are pathetically stupid.

You only have to look at the defense that former Assembly Speaker and convicted felon Scott Jensen used when appealing his charges on public misconduct — that he shouldn't be punished because everyone else was doing it — to realize that many Wisconsin pols aren't qualified to raise children (However, it wouldn't be so bad if Jensen's logic were applied to our nation's drug laws.)

But of all the awful politicians in our state, Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman is undoubtedly the absolute worst.

It's not that he's less honest or less competent than the scores of Senate and Assembly members who bring the intelligence of our electorate in to question every day. His presence in state government is simply illegal and serves as a reminder that our judiciary is a sham and cannot be taken seriously.

To summarize quickly: Gableman accused his opponent, incumbent Justice Louis Butler, of having secured the release of a child molester during his time as a public defender who later re-offended. Regardless of the horrible ramifications this kind of anti-constitutional rights mantra has for criminal justice in Wisconsin, the important part of the story is that it is completely untrue.

Although Butler did represent the felon (as he was legally required to), his advocacy did not directly result in the man's release. The guy was simply paroled several years later. Different attorney.

The Wisconsin Judicial Commission has charged Gableman with making false statements, which is a violation of the state Judicial Code of Conduct. The commission should rule that Gableman did make false statements (which he clearly did) and it should recommend his expulsion from the court. To do anything less is to accept that our judiciary is corrupt and incapable of reading laws, which is its sole function.

Realistically, this hope of mine will never materialize. The Judicial Commission is very reluctant to "disrobe" justices — even those who so obviously deserve it.

The only remedy for the disgrace brought by judges like Michael Gableman is the abolition of Supreme Court elections in Wisconsin.

Voters should have a right to elect liars to public office (I do it all the time), but judges should not have any incentive to lie to the public. If there should be any incentive to lie, it should be for the politicians who appoint them.

For instance: "Gov. Doyle, I assure you I will never rule against the teachers' union." Or, "Gov. Walker, I promise I will do whatever I can to advance the interests of the Wisconsin Family Alliance. Bible-thumping will be the beat to which I play judge."

This is a much better system than the current one, because judges could then disregard their promises to the governors and perhaps — just maybe — do their jobs correctly. That's the way the U.S. Supreme Court works. Think Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. Both were no doubt expected to toe the Republican Party line on the bench, but both nevertheless disappointed the right-wing activists who were counting on them in no time.

So gubernatorial appointment or appointment by committee is the way to go. But it's only part of the way. There are still some well-intentioned and misguided people who think appointments should be affirmed by a voter referendum. Nothing could be worse. For justice to rule legitimately, judges should have no reason to question their interpretation of the law by interpreting the political winds. We have to have one branch of government that is not held accountable to public opinion at all times. It is this quality of constitutional government that preserves rights and rule of law.

Wisconsin could even go further than the federal government and serve as an example for the country (as it should at all times). Rather than have justices serve for life, we should keep the terms at 10 years. This would decrease the very real problem of senility which frequently plagues government.

Not everything in government has to be credible. But the court is different. A credible court establishes a minimum expectation of good, legal government. And this is the foundation to a system that works — no matter how many degenerates and morons are included in the other parts.

Jack Craver is a senior majoring in history and the editor of The Sconz (Thesconz.com), a local politics and culture blog.

Cultural

Thursday, November 12, 2009