Tonight on Arizona Public Media's AZ Illustrated Politics: Senate President Andy Biggs travels from Phoenix to join a panel that includes state Sen. Linda Lopez and former lawmakers Paula Aboud and Jonathan Paton. On the agenda: Gov. Jan Brewer's call for an expansion of AHCCCS (aka Arizona's version of Medicaid) to 133 percent of the federal poverty level; the latest firearms legislation at the Capitol; and this week's federal court ruling tossing a state law that would have prohibited any healthcare funding from going to Planned Parenthood or other healthcare providers that offer abortion services.

The show airs at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 6 and repeats at 12:30 a.m. We'll have it posted here at The Range as soon as we can.

Stephen Colbert takes a look at Sheriff Joe Arpaio's plan to use armed volunteers to keep schoolchildren safe. Says Colbert as he watches a clip of the posse members undertaking a drill while a student hides beneath a table: "Arizona has some great schools. Those are just eighth-graders, but they're clearly being traumatized at the 12th-grade level."

Don't worry, the undead aren't walking the earth, attacking people in Montana. The moaning, shambling figures you see are simply Montanans who are struggling through the winter.

From the Great Falls Tribune:

Cindy Paavola, the University of Northern Michigan spokesperson, said that through the investigation so far, authorities believe they know where the source is coming from and that it is international. Right now the assumption is that they are cases in Montana and Northern Michigan are all connected, but it has not been confirmed.

According to Cynthia Thompson of ABC 10 in Northern Michigan, the party responsible for the attack in Montana — and what appears to be an identical hoax in northern Michigan — has been identified by law enforcement. It was determined that a “back-door” attack allowed the hacker to access the security of the EAS equipment, Thompson said.

It is unknown at this time if the suspect — or suspects, possibly — have been charged.

...

Great Falls police Sgt. Bryan Slavik said throughout the day he’s received calls from the BBC in London, newspapers in Australia and Canada, the New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, as well as TV and radio stations around the world. The questions are all the same, and his response has been that Great Falls is taking it as the joke that it is, although if the perpetrators decided to make it more serious, then the hoax would not funny(sic).

Indeed. Though, truth be told, it is kinda funny. Hopefully though, this marks the death-knell for the zombie craze (The Walking Dead not included, because that show is fantastic). This business has gone on too long, dammit.

All right, I know I promised that I would give you weekly updates of Girls, but it’s torturous. This week’s episode started—and I swear I am not making this up!—with the main character kicking out her gay roommate because he slept with a woman. He wants to take a chair with him, but she sits on the chair, sans underwear, and marks her territory by getting vagina all over it. Then she hosts a dinner party where the main topic of conversation is butt plugs. At the end of the episode, she takes a bath with a woman who is probably the skankiest character in the history of television. They end up splashing each other because the skanky one snotted in the bath water. All things considered, one of the better episodes.

As for television that’s worth watching:

—The Super Bowl was okay, I guess. I really liked the half-hour of dead air after the lights went out. Some blamed Beyonce, others thought it might be a terrorist attack, while still others remembered that New Orleans is a giant dump of a city and it’s surprising that only half the lights went out.

I didn’t want Baltimore to win, not so much because Ray Lewis is a clod (which he is), but mostly because they shouldn’t have gotten out of the first round. That ridiculous last play against Denver never should have happened. Then, San Francisco choked when they had first-and-goal late in the game.

I skipped the halftime show for about the 20th year in a row. I just don’t understand the whole thing about Beyonce. Put her in another era (say, the early '70s) with Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Carole King, and Roberta Flack and Beyonce would be a backup singer for a Vegas lounge act. Hell, compared just to Adele, Beyonce is a lounge-act back-up singer.

Quick quiz: Who performed at halftime of the first-ever Super Bowl? None other than Tucson-based Up With People and the University of Arizona Marching Band. That halftime show I watched because I was there.

The Super Bowl, which wasn’t even called that until the fifth game in the series, was just a match-up of the NFL and AFL champions. It was still a couple years before the merger that created the modern NFL. Interest in the game was so minimal that both NBC and CBS televised it and commercials went for about a buck-and-a-half.

The L.A. Coliseum, which seated around 100,000 back in those days, was maybe half full. They had gone around to the parks in all the ghetto areas of L.A. and given away free tickets. We rode from Pacoima Park to the Coliseum in this raggedy old bus and went to our seats in the end zone. By the end of the first quarter, we were all sitting around the 30-yard line, about halfway up. These days, in order to get those seats, you’d have to have a bank account on the same island as Mitt Romney.

—I watched Vegas, which stars Dennis Quaid as a folksy 1960s-era sheriff and the outstanding Michael Chiklis as a mob-marinated casino head. It’s all right, but by no means great. There are some soapy elements to it that I could do without, but the danger seems real enough. I really like the authenticity of early Las Vegas, but the show was heading into Generic-ville until an episode from a couple weeks ago.

The mob guys were moving in on another casino and they needed legitimate financing to make the deal. So they leaned on a straight-arrow bank official. The two mob guys go the banker’s house, where they are set upon by a bunch of old white guys who all look like Wilford Brimley. Turns out it’s the legendary Mormon Mafia which has been keeping things peaceful and Caucasian in the valley for more than a century. It’s a nice twist I didn’t see coming.

—Did you happen to see Fox News’ Chris Wallace rip Wayne LaPierre a new one on the Sunday interview show? If not, look it up. It’s brilliant.

—30 Rock went off the air, but Two Broke Girls is still on. Explain it.

AZ Illustrated Politics—the program formally known as Arizona's Illustrated Political Roundtable—will return to the airwaves tonight.

I'll be back in the host's seat and we'll have Democratic strategist Rodd McLeod, former Pima County Democratic Party chairman Jeff Rogers and former state lawmakers Frank Antenori and Paula Aboud as our guests.

We'll be talking about background checks on gun shows; President Barack Obama's call for a new ban on semi-automatic weapons and extended magazines; what kind of gun laws we can expect to see at the Arizona Legislature this year; the future of comprehensive immigration reform; whether Gov. Jan Brewer can persuade lawmakers to extend health-care coverage to low-income Arizonans as part of the federal Affordable Care Act; and, if we have time, the settlement between Tucson and the Rio Nuevo board.

Tune in at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 6. And if you haven't check out the rest of the new AZ Illustrated lineup, you can see what it's all about here.

I grew up watching Boy Meets World: Laughing at Eric Matthew's (Will Friedle) cocky personality, gaining inspiration and critical life lessons from Mr. Feeny's (William Daniels) daily lectures, and watching Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) and his best friend Shawn Hunter (Rider Strong) struggle with growing up and his feelings for the weird girl named Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel).

News began to spread in November all over the internet about a possible spin off coming to Disney Channel titled Girl Meets World.
Entertainment Weekly reported on Monday that Rowan Blanchard was chosen to play Cory and Topanga Matthew's daughter in the new series. You may have seen Blanchard in Spy Kids: All the Time in the World 4D and The Back-Up Plan.

Production of the pilot will begin next month, according to Alternative Press Magazine.

After the latest massacre (the one right before Christmas), the public outcry was so intense that the guys at the NRA were actually forced to peek out from their bunker and (ahem) go on the offensive. Chief phlegm-wad Wayne LaPierre has basically been on the how-can-I-top-my-previous-stupidity tour ever since. His message is simple: Gun violence has nothing to do with guns; it's just that liberals put the word "gun" in there to mess with people's minds.

No, the blame lies elsewhere...and everywhere. LaPierre pointed the finger in all sorts of directions. A poor mental-health system. The breakdown of the American family. Gangs. Drugs, illegal and prescribed. Rock and roll. Gun-free zones. And violent video games, television shows, and movies.

It would be easy to dismiss everything that LaPierre says because he's a narrow-minded moron. But that last thing kinda nags at me.

I grew up in an incredibly violent neighborhood. We had 42 kids in my sixth-grade classroom (yes, 42; it was the height of the Baby Boom, plus everybody was moving to Southern California). By the time we got out of high school, 12 of those 42 kids were dead, including two girls. I've never been a big fan of violence on the screen. I like a good action movie (like Die Hard), but I never fancied myself the action hero. I like it when good triumphs over evil, but I don't get a particular visceral jolt when the villain takes an ass-whuppin'.

However, many people do get such a jolt and, in most cases, it's all in good, relatively clean fun. Then, there are those for which it is not just fun, but some kind of juice. (I'm not going to discuss video games here. I don't like them, I don't understand them. I haven't played a video game since Tetris and the only thing that died then was my belief that I had an infallible ability to recognize spatial configurations.)

If violent images are creating little monsters, what responsibility do we have as a society to rectify the situation? If we are asking responsible gun owners to give up certain weapons because a handful of knuckleheads use them to shoot up schools and shopping malls, should we also ask responsible TV viewers to forego certain types of programs because those shows have an adverse effect of a small portion of society? Maybe we do.

Okay, okay, I get it. A week after I ripped the gruesome HBO series Girls, it wins the Golden Globe for Best Comedy Series. But, please note, these are the Golden Globes, not the Oscars or Emmys. The Golden Globes are a bit more…interesting. Remember, former Golden Globe top acting awards have gone to such luminaries as Linda Blair, Sasha Baron Cohen, and (gulp!) Pia Zadora. I understand that some people are enthralled with the different-ness of Girls, but different doesn’t always mean better, even in television. Seinfeld was different, but so was My Mother, The Car.

I urge you to watch the show for yourself, just to see how gratingly annoying it is. But, if you don’t have HBO or the time to watch the show, I’ll provide weekly updates of it along with the other TV topic(s) of the week, just to keep you updated.

This past week, responding to public pressure that the show was too white, writer/producer/director/idea person Lena Dunham found another guy to get naked with on screen. And whaddya know, he’s black. Donald Glover, from the show Community and the guy whose alter ego is rapper Childish Gambino, falls for our leading lady and chases her around a bookstore, complaining that he is having trouble “running with a boner.” Somewhere, Oscar Wilde is weeping at not having been alive in the 21st century, wherein he would have had the opportunity to make fail-safe erection jokes.

For those who grew up with cable in the late 1990s, Dexter's Laboratory was one of those great shows that fueled the imagination of creative kids while keeping enough slapstick and silliness to make everyone happy. Plus, the main character was a pint-sized mad scientist before those were cool (I'm looking at you, Stewie Griffin).

But, as with seemingly every show back then, there were episodes that were produced, then shelved, after the network found them inappropriate for the intended audience—even though, somehow, Rocko's Modern Life skirted the lines of good taste on a constant basis.

"Dexter's Rude Removal" is one of those episodes—and thanks to the magic of [adult swim], Cartoon Network's adult-humor brand, the episode is now on Youtube for your enjoyment.

And...it's severely underwhelming.

Honestly, I couldn't make it through the seven minute clip of constant bleeping and characters acting like douchebags.

The bottom line: It's nice seeing a new Dexter's Lab, but it just isn't as charming or entertaining as Dexter's Lab should be.

If, however, that didn't deter you from wanting to see the episode, head below the jump to sate your desires. Enjoy.

If you’re like me, you may use the Golden Globe Awards as a way to figure out what movies are worth spending an outrageous $10 a ticket on to see, and what television shows are worth attempting to cram into your busy schedule.

For those of you who didn’t have time to watch the awards, here is a breakdown of who won and what's worth your time.

On Sunday night, the best of the best in the television and movie worlds gathered at the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey hosted the awards, making the room full of laughter and fun every time they were on stage.