Confession – I used to hang out at Elaine’s once in a while in the early 2000s, and I met one of my myriad girlfriends there. Talked with Elaine a couple times – always a gracious host. And they could cook risotto right – the true test of a restaurant.

(AP) – Elaine Kaufman, the colorful restaurateur whose East Side establishment, Elaine’s, became a haven for show business and literary notables, died Friday at the age of 81.

Ms. Kaufman died at a Manhattan hospital of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and pulmonary hypertension, according to a statement issued by the restaurant’s representative.

Her restaurant, featured in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, is the oldest of the old school on the island.

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Don’t know where to get Jezebel’s version of this video, but you can watch it here. Pallin’s crew basically turns the music back on to avoid questions from a CNN reporter. I also think I heard: “get them out of here.”

[ CNN Flash video not available. ]

Can she hide forever and still get elected again?

“The Library of Congress has blocked access to the Wikileaks site on its staff computers and on the wireless network that visitors use, two sources tell TPM.”

Need another sign that this country is headed off a cliff? The ascendence of Birthers, Tenthers, Thirteenthers, and other GOP imbeciles not enough for you?  Check out this bit of revisionism:

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Remember Sarah Palin’s infamous death panels lie which was intended to derail the Health Care Reform Act? The charge was that under so-called “Obamacare” government burocrats would have authority to determine which needy patients live and die based on an economic calculus that weighs those individuals’ potential benefit to society against the cost of their treatment. The lie grew out of a dishonest representation of the President’s call for comparitive effectiveness studies on medical treatments that would save the government money by identifying and steering patients towards the most effetive treatments for their ilnesses. The theory was that ineffective treatments are simply a waste of money, and patients will most likely benefit from avoiding them. The death panel lie was so outrageous yet so pervasive that it was crowned Politifact’s Lie of the Year for 2009.

Well, fast-forward a year and guess what: we’ve finally got those death panels Sarah Palin warned us of. But don’t expect Palin, the GOP leadership or Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks to raise a fuss. That’s because these death panels are in Arizona and are a result of the GOP led legislature deciding that discontinuing Medicaid funding for certain organ transplants –even though this would mean almost cetain death for some 100 indigent patients–  was well worth the $4.5 million a year savings it would bring:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQ2vqFJvpA

One of the enduring frustrations of our childhood is that we could never get the damn Hot Wheels track to work. We now recognize that this was a monumental failure of imagination.

Chris Burden’s latest project “a portrait of LA” [Kottke]

This is the most sensible thing I’ve read so far on L’Affaire Assange:

The main reason why Wikileaks causes so much anxiety with our journalists is that they haven’t really faced the fact that the watchdog press they treasured so much died under George Bush. It failed, and instead of rushing to analyze this failure and prevent it from ever happening again, instead of a truth-and-reconciliation-commission-style effort that would look at how could this happen, mostly what our journalists did, with a few exceptions, was they just went on to the next story. The watchdog press died, and what we have is Wikileaks instead.

jump to watch Jay Rosen’s video:

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