Johnson Administration - presidency of Lyndon Johnson, 1963-69; "johnson administration" - something Brett Favre doesn't do well.

On Thursday New Mexico Gas Company officials reported nearly 32,000 customers statewide were without gas causing Governor Susana Martinez to declare a state of emergency.

The primary areas affected by the outages include Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Espanola, Otero County, Taos, Red River, Questa, Silver City, Santa Clara Pueblo, Okway Owingeh Pueblo and portions of San Ildefonso Pueblo.

"If I die," he added, "this is for my country."

Anyone's favorite San Francisco restaurants, hang out spots, attractions, off the beaten track gems, etc., and other Bay Area stuff too, would be much appreciated.  We'll be living in Millbrae, a stone's throw from the SF airport.  That's one good thing about this move: retaining easy and quick airport access, which I've been spoiled on here in San Diego, with our tiny airport ten minutes away.

Politics Daily has learned that the Palin family lawyer, Alaska attorney Thomas Van Flein, has filed applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark "Sarah Palin®" and "Bristol Palin®."

"More than 70 buildings, mostly flat-roofed commercial structures, have had their roofs partially or completely collapse under snow and ice accumulation, or have been evacuated because of concerns over structural damage"

Link

and this is just in MA.

Shockingly, no one has been seriously injured.  More snow coming this weekend.

Now they are suggesting that Omar Suleiman replaces Mubarak. Suleiman has not only organised torture. The sadistic criminal Suleiman was personally torturing people.

http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#113756175348882886

Justice SCALIA delivered the opinion of the Court:

This case presents a question of the scope of Congress's power under the commerce clause. To simplify and clarify our commerce clause analysis, we have consolidated two cases in which petitioners challenge the constitutionality of two federal laws that allegedly exceed Congress's power to regulate commerce - (1) a law banning local possession of marijuana; and (2) a law criminalizing violence against women. Applying our new standard, we find the marijuana law constitutional and the other one, well, not so much.
...
In light of this criticism, the Court today announces a new clear standard to guide lower courts in their application of the commerce clause. This new standard will govern when a law exceeds Congress's power under the commerce clause and when it does not. The new standard is this - a law passed pursuant to the commerce clause is constitutional if Justice Scalia likes the law and unconstitutional if he does not. Similarly, if the law is regulating things that Justice Scalia wants regulated, it is constitutional. If it does not, it is not.

[Update 2:53 p.m. in Cairo, 7:53 a.m. ET] Amre Moussa, the Arab League's secretary-general and a veteran Egyptian diplomat, joined protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square on Friday, state-run Nile TV reported. Time magazine has described him as "perhaps the most adored public servant in the Arab world."

Here's my favorite part:

Conditions at the embassy were so bad that a handful of staffers requested transfers to Iraq and Afghanistan, the report said, and other staff still working there were considering ways to move elsewhere. In some cases, the inspector general "knows for certain that these early departures are because of the ambassador's management style."

Stroum created "a climate of acute stress" that was "especially evident among of?cers and local staff who have been here more than 3 or 4 months," inspectors found. In the report, they suggested that medical professionals be sent to the embassy "to evaluate morale and stress levels of staff" and assess the mental health of people who worked for Stroum.

Obama Botches Bible Verse at Prayer Breakfast

from Media Matters

5 Reasons the Muslim Brotherhood Won't Turn On Israel

There's a special on Egypt on the Discovery Channel every three or four days. Ancient Egypt is one of the few non-European societies we all seem to know about; in fact we often treat it as part of Western history. Countless tourists visit Egypt every year. The Egyptian economy is deeply dependent on tourism of the Pharaonic and Islamic varieties, and cannot long survive alienated from the world.  

Aggressive national policy will accomplish nothing for Egypt and the many Egyptians whose jobs depend on the tourist sector. That's worth keeping in mind when people ask if a new Egypt will be a pro-Hamas Egypt.

Also

Any post-Mubarak regime will have to incorporate not only the military's interests, but reward the military (assuming the revolution succeeds, it'll only succeed with military support). The same Egyptian military that gets $1.3 billion from the United States in aid every year doesn't want to jeopardize that aid--for which reason it will look very suspiciously on any political agenda that wants to antagonize Israel and threaten a major source of its funding.

I would think that just about any actor would be quick to answer the call to work if the person on the was Werner Herzog. Looks like Naomi Watts is the latest to get the call, and the film Mr. Herzog reportedly has in mind is no small thing. It is called Queen of the Desert, and Naomi Watts would play Gertrude Bell in a film that could easily become a companion piece to Lawrence of Arabia.

Some at the time surmised that the desert epic would be the Gertrude Bell story, and it looks like that's the case. She's a great subject, too: a writer, traveler, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist who explored, mapped, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making in the middle east. She was a contemporary and colleague of T.E Lawrence, the subject of Lawrence of Arabia, and was part of the imperial colonialist effort that, for better or worse, established what became the modern states of Jordan and Iraq.

Werner Herzog isn't exactly your typical establishment-supporting mythmaker, so I'm very curious to see what he's doing here.