Target Centermass

Month: April 2005

  • ‘Monday Night Football’ Heading to ESPN

    So ends one of the supposed constants of my entire football-watching life, as Monday Night Football departs from ABC.

    “Monday Night Football,” a television institution that over 35 years has helped transform the NFL into a prime-time ratings draw, is leaving ABC and moving to ESPN beginning with the 2006 season.

    The NFL’s new broadcast deal also brings football back to NBC for the first time in six years. NBC will take over the Sunday night games currently broadcast on ESPN.

    The “Monday Night Football” move to cable is expected to cost ESPN $1.1 billion per year over eight years, two sources familiar with the deals told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

    NBC will get the Sunday night package for $600 million over six years, according to the sources. The network will also get the Super Bowl in 2009 and 2012 as part of the deal, one of the sources said.

    The move will leave ABC as the only major network without NFL football. “Monday Night Football” has been a pillar of ABC since the games began on prime-time in 1970, when Howard Cosell anchored the show. “Monday Night Football” stands as the second-longest running prime time network series, trailing CBS’ 60 Minutes by two years.

    Perhaps it’s also time for 60 Minutes to move to another network, perhaps one with a credible news division.

    The move to ESPN keeps the Monday Night Football brand within the umbrella of The Disney Company. Disney owns both ESPN and ABC.

    “From the Disney perspective, it was a smart move for ABC by moving out of football and having ESPN move into Monday nights,” said George Bodenheimer, president of ESPN and ABC Sports.

    The NFL will continue to show all cable games on free, over-the air television in home markets. That means local stations will carry ESPN’s Monday night games in the cities of the teams involved.

    Last month, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said that the Monday night move was a strong possibility. ABC, which has been losing money on the package despite high ratings, had been balking at the NFL’s asking price.

    […]

    The NFL is still considering an eight game late-season package of Thursday and Saturday night games on cable and satellite. Tagliabue has said the NFL’s own new network could show some or all of those games.

    It’s bad enough that Disney has opted to kill off the ABC-MNF tradition. The NFL is pushing the limits of stupidity with its consideration of expanding to even more Thursday and Saturday night games, risking over-exposure and increased competition with the superior product that is college football.

  • Grad Student Sentenced for SUV Arson

    Caltech — home of the fightin’ Radical Environuts.

    A graduate student was sentenced Monday to more than eight years in prison and ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution for firebombing scores of sport utility vehicles.

    William Jensen Cottrell, 24, was convicted in November of conspiracy to commit arson and seven counts of arson for an August 2003 vandalism spree that damaged and destroyed about 125 SUVs.

    Prosecutors estimated the total damage was about $2.3 million.

    U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner sentenced Cottrell to 100 months and ordered him to pay $3.5 million in restitution. Cottrell hung his head upon hearing the sentence.

    Vandals who targeted dealerships and homes in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles set the vehicles on fire and used spray-paint to deface them with slogans such as “Fat, Lazy Americans,” “polluter,” “smog machine” and “ELF,” an acronym for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group.

    Cottrell, a doctoral candidate in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was acquitted of using a destructive device – Molotov cocktails – in a crime of violence. That was the most serious charge he faced and it carried a sentence of at least 30 years in prison.

    Defense lawyers argued that Cottrell had agreed with two friends to spray-paint vehicles, but was surprised when they began to hurl Molotov cocktails.

    Federal prosecutors have identified former Caltech students Tyler Johnson and Michie Oe as “fugitive co-conspirators” in the case. It is believed that both have fled the country.

    Prosecutors also alleged that Cottrell tried to minimize his role and place the blame on Johnson and Oe.

    Cottrell was arrested in March 2004 after authorities tracked e-mails that Cottrell, using an alias, sent to the Los Angeles Times. He told the newspaper in the e-mails that he was involved in the SUV attacks and affiliated with the Earth Liberation Front.

    Methinks Cottrell will quickly develop a new respect for private property rights when his ass goes up on the prison commodity market.

    For some reason, this story brings to mind the opening lines of my favorite poem, W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming.

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    I expect more such occurences, as the radical, overly-passionate leftist groups like ELF spiral ever more towards extremism, letting slip any last tenuous hold on the realities of society.

  • An Anniversary Sadly Marked

    Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the discovery by British troops of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the site where Anne Frank spent her final days.

    Thanks to Alan at Petrified Truth for the reminder and this set of relevant links.

  • A Particular Soldier’s Letters Home

    The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s David M. Shribman has the tale of letters from a certain World War II soldier, letters that are just now surfacing.

    The sad thing about our time is that war letters have become a genre. We’ve all read them. They’re in books, they’re online. They’re also in our own homes. In this country, in this age, is there a family that does not have a file of letters from a soldier, sailor or aviator tucked away in the closet or the attic? In some of our homes, those files get thicker every day.

    Right now there’s a new set of war letters circulating. Not exactly new, it turns out; they’ve been around for 60 years. But almost nobody knew about them, including the fellow who wrote them. They have been hidden away, until now.

    They are the war letters of an Army grunt named Robert Joseph Dole, and the people who first looked through the trove inevitably described them as “extraordinary.” But they aren’t extraordinary at all. They’re ordinary, which in the end makes them even more extraordinary.

    Yes, that Robert Dole. Former senator, vice-presidential and presidential candidate.

    Go read more about the words from the pen of a great man, and how those words are just now reaching the public as the man confronts adversity again.

  • General Predicts Taliban’s Demise

    The U.S. commander in Afghanistan has predicted that the Taliban would cease to even resemble a cohesive military threat shortly. Surprisingly, the Taliban agrees.

    The top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan predicted Saturday that the Taliban militia would collapse as a viable fighting force over the next several months as rank-and-file members accept a reconciliation offer from the Afghan government.

    Lt. Gen. David W. Barno warned, however, that remaining Taliban extremists financed and trained by al Qaeda allies may attempt to compensate by staging a high-profile attack in Afghanistan within the next six to nine months.

    “As these terrorists’ capabilities grow more and more limited, the hard-core fanatics will grow more and more desperate to try and do something to change the course of events in Afghanistan,” Barno said at a news conference in Kabul, the capital. “I expect they will be looking … to garner media publicity and to try and score some type of propaganda victory.”

    Yes, matters are progressing, but they are not safe. Things are not secure by a long shot when the enemy knows that there are headlines yet to be grabbed. But now, on to the interesting part of the story.

    Earlier Saturday, a senior Taliban official said in an audio tape released to the Reuters news agency that militia leaders were planning to shift from guerrilla warfare to terrorist-style attacks.

    Maulvi Abdul Kabir, who is considered second in the Taliban hierarchy, said the group was training suicide bombers to target government officials, foreign forces and aid workers in major cities and to infiltrate various security forces.

    “The change of tactics is an easy way for us to have a longer-term war of attrition and would also not cost many lives for us,” Kabir reportedly said on the tape.

    Please allow me to translate for you:

    Dear Reuters,

    That great spring offensive we’ve been threatening? Forget about it.

    We took a headcount recently and decided it was time to think outside the box. Outside the killzone, actually. First, we repeatedly got our asses handed to us on the battlefield by forces that were generally only assisted and supported by the Americans. After that series of failures swept us from our cruel, despotic rule, we bravely switched to guerrilla tactics. Okay, so our record was dismal in that, as well, and we were unable to dent the growing legitimacy of the new government or severely harm the Americans. Oh yeah, we were also getting shredded. That tends to harm morale, we admit.

    Now, we have bravely decided to become the thugs and terrorists the world already knew us to be. In this, we may be able to kill more innocents while bravely saving some of our own asses.

    Sincerely,
    the Taliban

    And just how good is the Taliban at terrorism? Well, of course they’re a threat, but they’ve still got some things to work on before their reign of terror can really take hold.

    Several incidents have also been reported in Kabul in the past several days, including the discovery of a small amount of TNT on a trash truck attempting to enter the U.S. military headquarters compound Thursday.

    Lt. Cindy Moore, a military spokeswoman, said the explosive material, which was stuffed in the well of a headlight and detected by a bomb-sniffing dog, was very degraded and not attached to a detonating device. Moore said she did not know the driver’s nationality or whether that person had been detained.

    Foreign workers in the capital have been on edge since last Sunday, when armed assailants seized a U.S. citizen and forced him into the trunk of a car. According to U.S. Embassy officials in Kabul, the man used a lug wrench to unlock the trunk from the inside and jumped out of the vehicle while it was speeding away. Afghan investigators have arrested three suspects in the incident.

    Oops! It’s good to see that in terrorism, as in so many other matters, the devil is in the details.

    Now, back to that amnesty program.

    Neither Barno nor Afghan officials would disclose how many Taliban members have accepted President Hamid Karzai’s reconciliation offer, which seeks to bring in members hiding in Afghanistan or in other countries. Under the arrangement, Taliban members must recognize the legitimacy of the elected government in exchange for assurances that they will not face arrest by foreign or Afghan forces.

    Human rights groups and some Afghans say they fear the offer will enable many former Taliban members to escape justice for past wrongdoing.

    Members of Karzai’s administration have stressed that the offer does not constitute a permanent amnesty program and does not extend to roughly 100 top Taliban leaders implicated in serious crimes. A commission charged with determining the exact details of the program has progressed slowly, but some Taliban members have already begun negotiating with U.S. military commanders and Afghan officials.

    And here’s the money shot.

    Barno said he believed that large numbers of the Taliban force, which once numbered in the thousands, would eventually accept the offer.

    “More and more Taliban realize they don’t want to be in this fight that goes against the tide of history here in Afghanistan any longer,” he said.

    It’s good to have news of progress for the good guys confirmed by both sides.

  • Quote of the Week, 17 APR 05

    Well, we did not build those bombers to carry crushed rose petals.

    —General Thomas S. Power

  • Iraq Kidnap Reports May Be Exaggerated

    Stories of mass kidnappings in a small, divided Iraqi town flew through the media Saturday. Now, one day later, it looks as if reports of huge numbers of hostages among the residents of Madain were overblown, if not almost entirely fictional.

    Iraqi security forces backed by U.S. troops had the town of Madain surrounded Sunday after reports of Sunni militant kidnappings of as many as 100 Shiite residents, but there were growing indications the incident had been grossly exaggerated, perhaps an outgrowth of a tribal dispute or political maneuvering.

    The town of about 1,000 families, evenly divided between Shiites and Sunnis, sits about 15 miles south of the capital in what the U.S. military has called the “Triangle of Death” because it has become a roiling stronghold of the militant insurgency.

    An AP photographer and television cameraman who were in or near the town Sunday said large numbers of Iraqi forces had sealed it off, supported by U.S. forces farther away outside Madain.

    The cameraman said he toured the town Sunday morning. People were going about their business normally, shops were open and tea houses were full, he said. Residents contacted by telephone also said everything was normal in Madain.

    And American military officials said they were unaware of any U.S. role in what had been described as a tense sectarian standoff in which the Sunni militants were threatening to kill their Shiite captives if all other Shiites did not leave the town.

    […]

    The confusion over Madain illustrated how quickly rumors spread in a country of deep ethnic and sectarian divides, where the threat of violence is all too real. Poor telephone communications, and the difficulty of traveling from one town to the next because of daily attacks on the roads make it difficult even for government officials to establish the facts.

    National Security Minister Qassim Dawoud warned Parliament on Sunday of attempts to draw the country into sectarian war and said three battalions of Iraqi soldiers, police and U.S. forces were sent to Madain. He said the Iraqi military was planning a large-scale assault on the region by week’s end.

    […]

    Iraq’s most influential Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, urged government officials to resolve the crisis peacefully, his office said.

    […]

    Also on Sunday, Sheikh Abdul Salam al-Kubaisi, a spokesman for the Association of Muslim Scholars, an organization of Sunni clerics, denied hostages had been taken in Madain. “This news is completely untrue,” he told al-Jazeera television.

    Even al-Quida in Iraq, a group oh so eager to claim part in any or all hardship, has denied involvement and called the reports of mass hostages fabrications.

    Whatever happened in Madain began Thursday when Shiite leaders claimed Sunni militants seriously damaged a town mosque in a bomb attack. The next day, the Shiites said, masked militants drove through town, capturing Shiites residents and threatened to kill them unless all Shiites left.

    Shiite leaders and government officials had earlier estimated 35 to 100 people were taken hostage, but residents disputed the claim, with some saying they had seen no evidence any hostages were taken.

    Security forces began raiding sites Saturday in search of those abducted, Dawoud said.

    The story does illustrate the confusion of war-time reporting, especially when the media seem all too willing to report troublesome rumors as certain news.

  • Taxes Complete

    … but work isn’t. Looks like any additional blogging will be late, if at all.

  • April 15

    The Titanic.

    I’d like to suggest you start with And Rightly So‘s Raven here and her rivet-counting friends of the Titanic Historical Society. After that, let the net carry you where you will.

  • A Request of My Readers

    If anybody gets bored, feel free to leave me a comment reminding me to do my taxes.

    Seriously.

    In case I miss the Post-It note I left for myself in my cube.