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Wednesday, November 30, 2011
A Little Night Music
This piece was the intro to the afternoon program Studio Sparks hosted by Eric Friesen on CBC Radio 2 until September 2008 when, for some unknown reason, they changed the format and cancelled the show.
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Stop That Noise!
Bye Bye Barney
Jon Stewart looks at the reaction to the news that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) is retiring.
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Keep A Civil Tongue
Ruth Marcus was not amused by Emma Sullivan's snarky tweet about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, even after he apologized for his staff over-reacting and demanding an apology.
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Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. (Dangerous sentence, I know: My daughters might agree.)As Balloon Juice commenter JD Rhoades notes in great detail, getting a lecture in civility from a conservative is like being criticized for bad table manners by an alligator.
If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smartalecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.
Also, that smartphone? The one you posed with, proudly displaying the tweet in which you announced that Brownback “sucked” and added the lovely hashtag #heblowsalot? Turned off until you learn to use it responsibly.
[....]
It is until we parents insist such language is not acceptable, explain that it is possible to disagree civilly — and insist on an apology when our children fall short.
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Mitt In Miami
Mitt Romney dropped by South Florida yesterday to suck up to the Cuban-American community, including Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers.
But hey, as long as he can sip a cafecito with los historicos and get his son to toss out a few words in Cuban, it's all good. So much for the minority outreach.
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The endorsements of the Miami Cuban-American leaders is a leading indicator that Romney is making a big push in Florida for one of its most crucial voting blocs in the state's Republican primary, scheduled for Jan. 31.Mr. Curbelo may like to think that, but not all Cuban-Americans are Republicans, and they don't represent all of the Hispanic communities in South Florida, and certainly not in the entire state. Mr. Romney's campaign chose to visit just about the only city where the Republicans have a foothold in the Hispanic community. Anywhere else, both he -- and the Cubans -- would be in a distinct minority.
“It’s a major boost for any candidate when the three of them get together and move in one direction,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Miami-Dade School Board member who has worked for the Diaz-Balart brothers but has endorsed Romney rival Rick Perry.
“They represent this community,” he said. “In Miami-Dade, their support is crucial.”
But hey, as long as he can sip a cafecito with los historicos and get his son to toss out a few words in Cuban, it's all good. So much for the minority outreach.
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Annals of Chutzpah
Mitt Romney's campaign is totally outraged at the DNC for their ad that compared Mitt Romney to Mitt Romney.
It takes a lot of guts to say that with a straight face.
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“That was a blatant misuse of quote,” Romney Communications Director Gail Gitcho said in a conference call featuring New Hampshire supporters of Romney. “Democrats were blatantly taking that quote out of context.”This from a campaign that ran an ad that not only used President Obama's words way the hell out of context, they even bragged about it and said that "it worked."
It takes a lot of guts to say that with a straight face.
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Quote of the Day
Rick Perry:
Sharp as a tack.
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Those of you that will be 21 by November the 12th, I ask for your support and your vote. Those of you who won’t be, just work hard, because you are going to inherit this and you’re counting on us to get this right.Just for the record, the election in 2012 will be on November 6, and the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972.
Sharp as a tack.
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Made It
Today is the last official day of the hurricane season in the North Atlantic. Here in South Florida we made it through it without a scratch, although you can't say the same for the folks along the East Coast and New England that got hit by Irene in August.
Click here to see the entire 2011 hurricane season via satellite in 4.5 minutes.
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Click here to see the entire 2011 hurricane season via satellite in 4.5 minutes.
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Short Takes
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is heading to Myanmar.
A mob in Tehran invaded the British embassy.
Los Angeles police deploy to clear out the Occupy L.A. encampment.
Herman Cain is "reassessing" -- That's usually a sign that a presidential campaign is on its last legs.
Oklahoma now has a sinkhole to go along with the earthquakes.
American Airlines files for Chapter 11 but keeps flying.
Three Heroes -- Teens rescue a toddler from drowning in a canal in Florida.
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A mob in Tehran invaded the British embassy.
Los Angeles police deploy to clear out the Occupy L.A. encampment.
Herman Cain is "reassessing" -- That's usually a sign that a presidential campaign is on its last legs.
Oklahoma now has a sinkhole to go along with the earthquakes.
American Airlines files for Chapter 11 but keeps flying.
Three Heroes -- Teens rescue a toddler from drowning in a canal in Florida.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Scott Faces "Relentless" Backlash
Florida college students are showing Gov. Rick Scott that they're not happy with his approach to higher education.
Via Think Progress.
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And don't get me started on what Gov. Scott and the legislature have already done to public education at the primary and secondary level.Across the state this week students at seven college campuses will gather to protest what they call a "relentless attack on higher education" by Gov. Rick Scott.
Scott has been a vocal skeptic of the liberal arts emphasis of traditional higher ed, instead calling for more of a focus on fields in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Last month he sent out a lengthy probe out to leaders of all 11 public universities, seemingly asking them to justify themselves by providing information about their costs, programs and graduates' chosen fields and salaries.
The rallies, at the University of South Florida, USF St. Petersburg, University of Florida, University of Central Florida Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and Florida State, are also meant to draw attention to 15 percent tuition hikes okayed by the Legislature a couple years ago, in addition to changes to the Bright Futures Scholarship Program.
Via Think Progress.
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A Glimmer of Hope
Some good news on the AIDS front.
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Medical researchers are again in pursuit of a goal they had all but abandoned: curing AIDS.To quote Andrew Sullivan, know hope.
Until recently, the possibility seemed little more than wishful thinking. But the experiences of two patients now suggest to many scientists that it may be achievable.
One man, the so-called Berlin patient, apparently has cleared his H.I.V. infection, albeit by arduous bone marrow transplants.
More recently, a 50-year-old man in Trenton underwent a far less difficult gene therapy procedure. While he was not cured, his body was able to briefly control the virus after he stopped taking the usual antiviral drugs, something that is highly unusual.
“It’s hard to understate how the scientific community has swung in its thinking about the possibility that we can do this,” said Kevin Frost, chief executive of the Foundation for Aids Research, a nonprofit group. “Cure, in the context of H.I.V., had become almost a four-letter word.”
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Newt's Big Ideas
Newt Gingrich is touted as a man with "big, bold ideas." Well, here's one that deals with drug abuse that's both big and bold, and also a pretty big violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
Aside from the constitutional implications -- something that the GOP never seems to worry about unless it's talking about the Second Amendment -- Mr. Gingrich doesn't say how the massive drug testing regimen would be paid for. After all, we're talking about testing everybody who receives federal aid. That's basically the entire country, including corporations that receive subsidies and every kid in every Title I school.
Kind of makes you wonder what kind of drug Mr. Gingrich was on when he came up with an idea like that.
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I think that we need to consider taking more explicit steps to make it expensive to be a drug user. It could be through testing before you get any kind of federal aid. Unemployment compensation, food stamps, you name it.Florida Gov. Rick Scott had the same idea, but ran into a roadblock from a federal court, which said that the new state law that mandated testing welfare recipients "implicates a 'far more substantial' invasion of privacy than in ordinary civil drug testing cases."
It has always struck me that if you’re serious about trying to stop drug use, then you need to find a way to have a fairly easy approach to it and you need to find a way to be pretty aggressive about insisting–I don’t think actually locking up users is a very good thing. I think finding ways to sanction them and to give them medical help and to get them to detox is a more logical long-term policy. [Emphasis added.]
Aside from the constitutional implications -- something that the GOP never seems to worry about unless it's talking about the Second Amendment -- Mr. Gingrich doesn't say how the massive drug testing regimen would be paid for. After all, we're talking about testing everybody who receives federal aid. That's basically the entire country, including corporations that receive subsidies and every kid in every Title I school.
Kind of makes you wonder what kind of drug Mr. Gingrich was on when he came up with an idea like that.
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Barney Frank Retires
This was a bit of a surprise.
And it looks like he's not going to go quietly, either.
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It’s the end of an era in Congress, with Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) heading for retirement, capping off 32 years in the House of Representatives as an outspoken voice for liberal Democrats.Unlike a lot of his fellow Democrats, Mr. Frank has never backed down from a fight, never kept his flaws and his charms from being very visible, and he was always willing to confront wrongs -- and idiots -- when he saw them.
The Boston Globe reports that Frank’s decision was spurred in large part by redistricting, with him having lost some key strongholds and gained some relatively more conservative areas. On the other hand, Dem sources point out that the redrawn district is still heavily Democratic, having voted 61% for Barack Obama in 2008. A Dem source in Massachusetts says that a potential candidate is Brookline Selectwoman Jesse Mermell, who is said to have been putting her name around in case of a possible Frank retirement.
And it looks like he's not going to go quietly, either.
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Another Cain Story
An Atlanta woman has come forward to say that she had an affair for thirteen years with Herman Cain. (Remember him? He was all the rage a few weeks ago. Tempus fugit.)
In the party that has serial adulterer Newt Gingrich as the frontrunner, that's a feature, not a bug.
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An Atlanta businesswoman is breaking her silence, claiming she has been involved in a 13-year-long affair with Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.I really don't care what two adults do behind closed doors unless they've made a big deal out of criticizing other people for what they do behind closed doors. The only reason I'm bringing this up is because Mr. Cain's lawyer had the presence of mind to release a statement basically saying that Mr. Cain did nothing wrong: this was not sexual assault, but an extramarital affair.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, FOX 5 senior I-Team reporter Dale Russell sat down with Ginger White, who had a story to tell.
“I'm not proud,” White told Russell. “I didn't want to come out with this. I did not.”
White was worried a political tsunami was headed her way. So, she decided to head it off, by confessing she was involved in a 13-year-long affair with presidential hopeful Herman Cain.
“It was pretty simple,” White said. “It wasn't complicated. I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship.”
In the party that has serial adulterer Newt Gingrich as the frontrunner, that's a feature, not a bug.
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Help A Friend
One of the blogs that I often check for pure snark and wit is Rumproast. One of their contributors, StrangeAppar8us, has some serious medical needs after a traumatic brain injury earlier this month. Stop by and lend support if you can.
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Short Takes
Egypt -- Voters are flocking to the polls.
Syria is not happy with the economic sanctions imposed against it by the Arab League.
The Euro crisis is making credit tight all over the world.
A federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between the SEC and Citigroup.
Occupy L.A. is still in the park.
Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) announces his run for the U.S. Senate.
Art Basel -- that's a show, not a person -- marks its tenth anniversary.
R.I.P. Lana Peters, 85, Josef Stalin's daughter; Ken Russell, 84, British film director known for some outlandish films, including Tommy.
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Syria is not happy with the economic sanctions imposed against it by the Arab League.
The Euro crisis is making credit tight all over the world.
A federal judge threw out a settlement agreement between the SEC and Citigroup.
Occupy L.A. is still in the park.
Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) announces his run for the U.S. Senate.
Art Basel -- that's a show, not a person -- marks its tenth anniversary.
R.I.P. Lana Peters, 85, Josef Stalin's daughter; Ken Russell, 84, British film director known for some outlandish films, including Tommy.
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Monday, November 28, 2011
Back To Work
Wow, that was fast; the first holiday weekend went by like it was in a hurry to get gone, despite my attempts to make it last as long as possible, with a trip to the Keys and two fantastic dinners with friends. All the leftovers are gone from my place, including the box of crackers that I got to go with the three cheeses (brie, cheddar, and Gouda) that I took to Saturday night's feast.
I topped off the weekend with an orgy of crosswords and the Lord of the Rings marathon on Encore. This time they ran the extended version, including scenes that were cut from the theatrical releases. And now that Comcast is pushing their HD channels, I really need to look at an HD TV. Gee, I wonder if they're on sale now. (Suggestions welcome; maximum budget is $300, and I'm looking for 32" so I can see it in my relatively small viewing area.)
This is Cyber Monday, so those of you with access to the net at work can do your shopping now. The best part is that you won't need pepper spray to ward off competitive shoppers.
Let the countdown begin: 14 working days until Winter Break.
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I topped off the weekend with an orgy of crosswords and the Lord of the Rings marathon on Encore. This time they ran the extended version, including scenes that were cut from the theatrical releases. And now that Comcast is pushing their HD channels, I really need to look at an HD TV. Gee, I wonder if they're on sale now. (Suggestions welcome; maximum budget is $300, and I'm looking for 32" so I can see it in my relatively small viewing area.)
This is Cyber Monday, so those of you with access to the net at work can do your shopping now. The best part is that you won't need pepper spray to ward off competitive shoppers.
Let the countdown begin: 14 working days until Winter Break.
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Quote of the Day
Charlie Pierce on Reagan-era warmonger Edwin Meese showing up to ask a question at the GOP foreign policy debate last week:
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It was like seeing Bela Lugosi turn up in the newest Twilight film.
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Poor Mitt
Now that the Manchester Union Leader, the biggest newspaper in New Hampshire, has endorsed Newt Gingrich, you have to wonder how many different ways can the Republican base tell Mitt Romney they really don't like him?
I think it's safe to say that the only way that Newt Gingrich will ever sit in the Oval Office is if he takes the deluxe tour of the West Wing, but even so, it's got to be a slap to Mr. Romney, who at one point actually lived next door to New Hampshire, can't get a nod from this bastion of Yankee conservatism.
The Union Leader is nothing if not consistent in endorsing outlier Republicans candidates. Their record includes endorsements of Pat Buchanan (1992 and 1996) and Steve Forbes (2000), so among a field of nothing but outliers, the only surprise is that they went for Mr. Gingrich instead of someone more along the lines of their hard-core beliefs, like Michele Bachmann.
But in a way, you have to have a little sympathy for poor Mr. Romney, who by now must be wondering, "Who do I have to f**k in this town to be loved?"
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I think it's safe to say that the only way that Newt Gingrich will ever sit in the Oval Office is if he takes the deluxe tour of the West Wing, but even so, it's got to be a slap to Mr. Romney, who at one point actually lived next door to New Hampshire, can't get a nod from this bastion of Yankee conservatism.
The Union Leader is nothing if not consistent in endorsing outlier Republicans candidates. Their record includes endorsements of Pat Buchanan (1992 and 1996) and Steve Forbes (2000), so among a field of nothing but outliers, the only surprise is that they went for Mr. Gingrich instead of someone more along the lines of their hard-core beliefs, like Michele Bachmann.
But in a way, you have to have a little sympathy for poor Mr. Romney, who by now must be wondering, "Who do I have to f**k in this town to be loved?"
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Thinskinned Brownback
Updated.
A high school girl in Kansas got caught tweeting snark about the governor, Sam Brownback (R), during a field trip to the capital.
The only reason this is news is because the governor's office was monitoring tweets, looking for nasty things people say about him. (By the way, the reason Ms. Sullivan is not happy with the governor, other than the fact that he's a total dork, is because he cut out the entire budget for the Kansas Arts Commission, which funds, among other things, the William Inge Theatre Festival. You go, girl!) This is how the people of Kansas want their tax dollars spent: tapping into tweets?
There are a couple of lessons here. The one for Gov. Brownback is something every high school teacher knows by heart: you can never win a public argument with a student. Even if you're totally right and they're totally wrong, you'll still lose in the court of public opinion, and it only makes you look mean and petty. The second lesson is that any governor's office that would rat out a teenager for writing a nasty tweet or Facebook posting has a lot of growing up to do. Oh, and there's that little thing called the First Amendment that they might want to check out, too.
Update: Gov. Brownback has apologized to Ms. Sullivan.
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A high school girl in Kansas got caught tweeting snark about the governor, Sam Brownback (R), during a field trip to the capital.
The Shawnee Mission East senior was taking part in a Youth in Government program last week in Topeka, Kan., when she sent out a tweet from the back of a crowd of students listening to Brownback’s greeting. From her cellphone, she thumbed: “Just made mean comments at gov. brownback,” and then specified what the comments were.Now the student, Emma Sullivan, 18, says she is not sorry for what she did and is refusing to write the letter.
She actually made no such comment and said she was “just joking with friends.” But Brownback’s office, which monitors social media for postings containing the governor’s name, saw Sullivan’s post and contacted the Youth in Government program.
Sullivan received a scolding at school and was ordered to send Brownback an apology letter. She said Prinicipal Karl R. Krawitz even suggested talking points for the letter she was supposed to turn in Monday.
The only reason this is news is because the governor's office was monitoring tweets, looking for nasty things people say about him. (By the way, the reason Ms. Sullivan is not happy with the governor, other than the fact that he's a total dork, is because he cut out the entire budget for the Kansas Arts Commission, which funds, among other things, the William Inge Theatre Festival. You go, girl!) This is how the people of Kansas want their tax dollars spent: tapping into tweets?
There are a couple of lessons here. The one for Gov. Brownback is something every high school teacher knows by heart: you can never win a public argument with a student. Even if you're totally right and they're totally wrong, you'll still lose in the court of public opinion, and it only makes you look mean and petty. The second lesson is that any governor's office that would rat out a teenager for writing a nasty tweet or Facebook posting has a lot of growing up to do. Oh, and there's that little thing called the First Amendment that they might want to check out, too.
Update: Gov. Brownback has apologized to Ms. Sullivan.
My staff over-reacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize. Freedom of speech is among our most treasured freedoms.Good for him.
I enjoyed speaking to the more than 100 students who participated in the Youth in Government Program at the Kansas Capitol. They are our future.
I also want to thank the thousands of Kansas educators who remind us daily of our liberties, as well as the values of civility and decorum.
Again, I apologize for our over-reaction.
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Zombie Presidents
Ross Douthat spent his Sunday column in the New York Times going after the Cult of the Kennedy presidency, declaring that even though he believes that John F. Kennedy was lousy president, he had the good fortune to die tragically so that he could be enshrined on the Mount Olympus of American history.
Mr. Reagan wasn't even dead before the movement began to name something in every county in America for him, from a school to a septic system, and all a presidential candidate had to do was invoke his name at every stop to get the audience to swoon like Justin Bieber fans. This is despite the fact that in the current climate in the GOP, Mr. Reagan and his record of tax hikes and his willingness to compromise with the Democrats in Congress couldn't get him into the 2012 primaries ahead of Gary Johnson. And what Mr. Douthat says about JFK -- "We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement" -- is applicable to the Reagan legacy as well.
And that's how a lot of people will choose the next one.
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In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)I think history has acknowledged that JFK's presidency did have its problems; even those of us that admired him for his ideals (and were only children at the time) know that his legacy has been framed by his murder. What's more interesting is that when it comes to mythologizing presidents, Ronald Reagan didn't even have to die in office for his legacy to be turned into the Greatest Presidency in the History of the Universe by the Republicans.
Mr. Reagan wasn't even dead before the movement began to name something in every county in America for him, from a school to a septic system, and all a presidential candidate had to do was invoke his name at every stop to get the audience to swoon like Justin Bieber fans. This is despite the fact that in the current climate in the GOP, Mr. Reagan and his record of tax hikes and his willingness to compromise with the Democrats in Congress couldn't get him into the 2012 primaries ahead of Gary Johnson. And what Mr. Douthat says about JFK -- "We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with genuine achievement" -- is applicable to the Reagan legacy as well.
And that's how a lot of people will choose the next one.
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Big Bucks
Bloomberg is reporting that the Fed was doling out cash like Christmas candy in 2008.
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The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.As digby notes, none of that money went to the average American dealing with their foreclosures, probably because you never can tell what those people would do with the money.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
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Short Takes
The Arab League has sanctioned Syria in order to pressure it to stop its suppression of demonstrators.
Iraq -- Eleven people were killed in a suicide bombing.
Afghanistan says they were attacked from Pakistan, which provoked the retaliation by NATO that killed 26 soldiers.
Newtmentum -- Gingrich gets the endorsement of a major right-wing paper in New Hampshire.
Black Friday led to a very busy shopping weekend.
Two earthquakes rattle Puerto Rico and the eastern Caribbean.
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Iraq -- Eleven people were killed in a suicide bombing.
Afghanistan says they were attacked from Pakistan, which provoked the retaliation by NATO that killed 26 soldiers.
Newtmentum -- Gingrich gets the endorsement of a major right-wing paper in New Hampshire.
Black Friday led to a very busy shopping weekend.
Two earthquakes rattle Puerto Rico and the eastern Caribbean.
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Sunday, November 27, 2011
Sunday Reading
Pre-Occupied -- In The New Yorker, Mattathias Schwartz profiles Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the activists behind the OWS movement.
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Thanksgiving with Grammy Hall -- Diane Keaton remembers Thanksgiving with her grandmother, the role model for the character in the film Annie Hall.Kalle Lasn spends most nights shuffling clippings into a binder of plastic sleeves, each of which represents one page of an issue of Adbusters, a bimonthly magazine that he founded and edits. It is a tactile process, like making a collage, and occasionally Lasn will run a page with his own looped cursive scrawl on it. From this absorbing work, Lasn acquired the habit of avoiding the news after dark. So it was not until the morning of Tuesday, November 15th, that he learned that hundreds of police officers had massed in lower Manhattan at 1 A.M. and cleared the camp at Zuccotti Park. If anyone could claim responsibility for the Zuccotti situation, it was Lasn: Adbusters had come up with the idea of an encampment, the date the initial occupation would start, and the name of the protest—Occupy Wall Street. Now the epicenter of the movement had been raided. Lasn began thinking of reasons that this might be a good thing.
Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of “a dark age coming for humanity” and of “killing capitalism,” alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood.
The magazine, which he founded twenty-two years ago, depicts the developed world as a nightmare of environmental collapse and spiritual hollowness, driven to the brink of destruction by its consumer appetites. Adbusters’ images—a breastfeeding baby tattooed with corporate logos; a smiling Barack Obama with a clown’s ball on his nose—are combined with equally provocative texts and turned into a paginated montage. Adbusters is not the only radical magazine calling for the end of life as we know it, but it is by far the best-looking.
Lasn was interrupted by a phone call about the Zuccotti eviction while in bed, reading Julian Barnes’s “The Sense of an Ending.” He rose and checked his e-mail. There was a message from Micah White, Adbusters’ senior editor and Lasn’s closest collaborator.
“Eerie timing!” White wrote. Earlier that night, Adbusters had sent out its most recent “tactical briefing”—a mass e-mail to ninety thousand friends of the magazine—proposing that the nation’s Occupy protesters throw a party in mid-December, declare victory, and withdraw from their encampments. A few hours later, officers from the New York Police Department began handing out notices stating that the park had become dangerous and unsanitary, and ordering the protesters to leave, so that it could be cleaned. Those who refused to go were arrested, and whatever they left behind was carried off by the Department of Sanitation, to a depot on West Fifty-seventh Street. After a long night of angry marches and meetings, the protesters were allowed back into Zuccotti, with newly enforced prohibitions on tents and on lying down. The protest continued, but the fifty-nine days of rude, anarchic freedom on a patch of granite in lower Manhattan were over.
[Photo by Ashley Gilbertson.]
Every Thanksgiving Mom and Dad and my siblings, Randy, Robin and Dorrie, and I piled into the station wagon and headed to Grammy Hall’s Spanish duplex on Rangeview Avenue in Highland Park, Calif. Dad pulled the car up the concrete driveway to the home of his mother, Mary Alice. Nobody knew where she got the money to buy a building, but she did. And she managed to hold on to her 3,000-square-foot stucco box until she and her sister, Sadie, died next to each other on hospital beds in the dining room, the same room where we ate our annual Thanksgiving dinner.Don't Quit Your Day Job -- Betsy Morais looks at what some writers did before -- and while -- they were writers.
When we opened the door it was always the same: a huge spread was ready to go. There were no prayers of gratitude, or chitchat. We ate. A lot. My favorite dish was Aunt Sadie’s special stuffing, filled with bacon bits, turkey giblets, and loaded with gooey bread steeped in plenty of butter. Oh, and salt; lots of salt. Combined with Ocean Spray canned cranberry sauce, it was the most delicious sweet, sour and salty combo ever. I’ll never forget the Tupperware bowls filled with dill pickles, sweet gherkins, and bean and cheese dip with saltine crackers, too. Grammy’s serving platters were piled high with mashed potatoes and gravy and string beans. The turkey was the centerpiece. It took up most of the table. Mom brought her famous tuna casserole made with mushroom soup, chow mein noodles, and cashew nuts. Dessert never changed. It was always German chocolate cake, and Mom’s pumpkin pie with vanilla ice cream, which Grammy conveniently forgot to put on the table year after year.
Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like "Accident Prevention in Quarries," and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. "Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life," he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. "So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process."Doonesbury -- On the nose.
T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. "This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian," British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian.
And then there were the young writers with unrealized ambition and bills to pay. Anton Chekov was a physician. Laura Ingalls Wilder taught a class of five students in a one-room schoolhouse, and later became secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan Association in Missouri. John Steinbeck spent the summer of 1928 giving tours of a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe, where he met his future wife. After losing that job in the fall, Steinbeck followed her to San Francisco, where he became a warehouseman at the Bemis Bag Company factory. Margarite Duras wrote technical reports as an assistant in the French Colonial Office, and then worked on publicity for French bananas and tea. Anne Sexton was a fashion model. At an evening writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell, she met Sylvia Plath, who was working by day as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. Harper Lee shelved books and rang up sales in a shop, and then got a gig as an airline ticket clerk—first for Eastern Airlines, then for the British Overseas Air Corporation. Unable to afford a real desk, she wrote on a door that she lay across two sawhorses.
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Short Takes
Pakistan demands that the U.S. give up the air base there after the deadly helicopter attack.
The three Americans arrested in Egypt are back in the U.S.
Amid fears of fraud and violence, the people of the Congo prepare to vote.
Red Rover -- NASA launched the Curiosity probe to Mars.
Wiped Out -- Three people are under arrest for a scam involving toilet paper.
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The three Americans arrested in Egypt are back in the U.S.
Amid fears of fraud and violence, the people of the Congo prepare to vote.
Red Rover -- NASA launched the Curiosity probe to Mars.
Wiped Out -- Three people are under arrest for a scam involving toilet paper.
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Saturday, November 26, 2011
A Little Night Music
If you grew up in Toledo in the 1960's you were torn between Michigan and Ohio State. I came down on the side of Michigan thanks to Woody Hayes being such a jerk. Therefore, here's to the victors valiant today.
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Black Friday Aftermath
I had a very nice trip to the Keys yesterday... calm, quiet, and a beautiful day...and I filled up the tank for $3.28 a gallon, which is about ten cents a gallon cheaper than on the mainland. Go figure.
So I didn't venture out to go shopping except to stop at the auto parts store for some injector cleaner for the Pontiac, and today I'm heading out early to do my weekly grocery-get. Hopefully Publix will be calm.
So, did you venture out? What was it like; did you have to fend off competitive shoppers with pepper spray?
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So I didn't venture out to go shopping except to stop at the auto parts store for some injector cleaner for the Pontiac, and today I'm heading out early to do my weekly grocery-get. Hopefully Publix will be calm.
So, did you venture out? What was it like; did you have to fend off competitive shoppers with pepper spray?
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Short Takes
At least Pakistani 25 soldiers were killed in an attack by NATO helicopters.
Occupy L.A. faces eviction on Monday.
Shipping out -- A record number of passengers are expected to board cruise ships in Fort Lauderdale today.
South Florida -- Tired Black Friday worker drives into a canal.
R.I.P. Tom Wicker, 85, journalist and columnist for The New York Times.
NBA owners and players have reached a tentative deal to end the lockout.
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Occupy L.A. faces eviction on Monday.
Shipping out -- A record number of passengers are expected to board cruise ships in Fort Lauderdale today.
South Florida -- Tired Black Friday worker drives into a canal.
R.I.P. Tom Wicker, 85, journalist and columnist for The New York Times.
NBA owners and players have reached a tentative deal to end the lockout.
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Friday, November 25, 2011
Black Friday
If the hype meets the reality, it will be a very busy day.
I think I'll avoid the rush and go down to the Keys.
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I think I'll avoid the rush and go down to the Keys.
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Short Takes
Egyptian activists stepped up their protests; three Americans held by authorities were freed.
The Occupiers celebrated Thanksgiving, too.
The debt crisis worsens in Europe.
AT&T is bracing for the T-Mobile merger deal to collapse.
The road to recovery in South Florida is through restaurant and hotel work.
The Dolphins lost in the last second to Dallas, and the Lions lost, too.
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The Occupiers celebrated Thanksgiving, too.
The debt crisis worsens in Europe.
AT&T is bracing for the T-Mobile merger deal to collapse.
The road to recovery in South Florida is through restaurant and hotel work.
The Dolphins lost in the last second to Dallas, and the Lions lost, too.
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Thursday, November 24, 2011
Thanks
If I don't say it often enough, it's not that I don't think of it. Thank you to all who read this little blog and make your contributions in thought, word, and deed.
If you're celebrating the holiday, be mindful of the things that you have and can appreciate as gifts from others and the spirit in which they are given. And also be mindful of the gifts you give to others, even if you don't know it.
Peace.
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If you're celebrating the holiday, be mindful of the things that you have and can appreciate as gifts from others and the spirit in which they are given. And also be mindful of the gifts you give to others, even if you don't know it.
Peace.
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Thanksgiving -- We Gather Together
I've been looking back through some of my Thanksgiving posts over the years for some inspiration and perhaps a perspective on the holiday. Taking a day off to express thanks and brace ourselves for the rest of the holidays is a good time to reflect and be grateful for some of the good things we have and the memories. The post below is from Thanksgiving 2007, when I was looking back at a special holiday weekend.
When I was a kid growing up outside of Toledo, we had some relatives in the area, and we also belonged to a local tennis and social club that served as a gathering place for a group of families like ours and we often went there for holiday dinners. It relieved my mom from cooking one of the two big meals at the holidays; if we had Thanksgiving at home, then we went to the club or another relative's place for Christmas, or vice versa. We also would have the Thanksgiving meal later in the day -- usually around the normal dinner time -- because we had season tickets to the Detroit Lions football team, and we would go up to Detroit to sit in the freezing cold bleachers to watch the Lions play their traditional Thanksgiving Day game, then come home to the dinner.
It's been a while since my family has gotten together for Thanksgiving. We've all moved on to different places and have our own families. It's been many years since my entire immediate family -- Mom, Dad, and my three siblings and their families -- were together for the occasion.
However, there was one Thanksgiving that I'll never forget: 1967. I was a freshman at St. George's, the boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island (and also alma mater of Howard Dean and Tucker Carlson). It was my first extended time away from home and I was miserable. My older brother and sister were also away at school; one in New Jersey, the other in Virginia. My parents made arrangements for us all to get together in New York City that weekend, and they booked rooms at the Plaza Hotel. We saw two Broadway musicals -- Mame with Angela Lansbury and Henry, Sweet Henry with Don Ameche -- and a little musical in Greenwich Village called Now Is The Time For All Good Men.... We went shopping in Greenwich Village, took hansom cab rides in Central Park, had lunch at Toots Shor's (and got Cab Calloway's autograph), dinner at Trader Vic's and Luchow's, and saw all the sights that a kid from Ohio on his second trip to NYC (the first being the World's Fair in 1964) could pack into one four-day weekend. Oh, and we had the big Thanksgiving dinner in the Oak Room at the Plaza with all the trimmings. That night we went down to the nightclub below the Plaza and listened to smoky jazz played by a trio and a lovely woman on piano...could it have been Blossom Dearie?
It was a magical weekend. To this day I still remember the sights and sounds and sensations, and the deep sadness that settled back over me as I boarded the chartered bus that took me back to the dank purgatory of that endless winter at school overlooking the grey Atlantic Ocean.
I've had a lot of wonderful and memorable Thanksgivings since then at home and with friends, everywhere from Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, and even one in Jamaica, but that weekend at the Plaza forty years ago will always be special.
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It's been a while since my family has gotten together for Thanksgiving. We've all moved on to different places and have our own families. It's been many years since my entire immediate family -- Mom, Dad, and my three siblings and their families -- were together for the occasion.
However, there was one Thanksgiving that I'll never forget: 1967. I was a freshman at St. George's, the boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island (and also alma mater of Howard Dean and Tucker Carlson). It was my first extended time away from home and I was miserable. My older brother and sister were also away at school; one in New Jersey, the other in Virginia. My parents made arrangements for us all to get together in New York City that weekend, and they booked rooms at the Plaza Hotel. We saw two Broadway musicals -- Mame with Angela Lansbury and Henry, Sweet Henry with Don Ameche -- and a little musical in Greenwich Village called Now Is The Time For All Good Men.... We went shopping in Greenwich Village, took hansom cab rides in Central Park, had lunch at Toots Shor's (and got Cab Calloway's autograph), dinner at Trader Vic's and Luchow's, and saw all the sights that a kid from Ohio on his second trip to NYC (the first being the World's Fair in 1964) could pack into one four-day weekend. Oh, and we had the big Thanksgiving dinner in the Oak Room at the Plaza with all the trimmings. That night we went down to the nightclub below the Plaza and listened to smoky jazz played by a trio and a lovely woman on piano...could it have been Blossom Dearie?
It was a magical weekend. To this day I still remember the sights and sounds and sensations, and the deep sadness that settled back over me as I boarded the chartered bus that took me back to the dank purgatory of that endless winter at school overlooking the grey Atlantic Ocean.
I've had a lot of wonderful and memorable Thanksgivings since then at home and with friends, everywhere from Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, Florida, and even one in Jamaica, but that weekend at the Plaza forty years ago will always be special.
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Holiday Schedule
It's going to be a little quiet around here for the rest of the week. If you have the time off, enjoy it.
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Short Takes
The president of Yemen has agreed to step down after 33 years.
Egyptian generals apologize for the violence against protestors.
The FBI says it has a new clue in the 40-year-old D.B. Cooper hijacking case.
The director of Florida A&M's band has been fired over the hazing death of a band member.
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Egyptian generals apologize for the violence against protestors.
The FBI says it has a new clue in the 40-year-old D.B. Cooper hijacking case.
The director of Florida A&M's band has been fired over the hazing death of a band member.
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Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Question of the Day
Home or away? Butterball or tofurkey? Lions or Cowboys?
I'm staying here in South Florida and sharing the big meal with friends at their home; I'm bringing the pie(s). Then I'm going to catch up on sleep and things around the house that have gone undone thanks to work (we love you, auditors) and other little incidentals.
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What are your plans for Thanksgiving?That is, of course, assuming you're in the United States. Anywhere else, it's Thursday.
I'm staying here in South Florida and sharing the big meal with friends at their home; I'm bringing the pie(s). Then I'm going to catch up on sleep and things around the house that have gone undone thanks to work (we love you, auditors) and other little incidentals.
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It's A Gift
Mitt Romney's first campaign commercial contains such a blatantly out-of-context quote from President Obama when he was a candidate in 2008 that PolitiFact rated it as "Pants-On-Fire" and Andrew Breibart should sue for copyright infringement.
The Romney campaign defended the ad by saying “He did say the words. That’s his voice.” Okay, if you want to play that game, ThinkProgress offers their version of Mitt Romney in his own words.
This is one of those ads that the campaign won't have to pay to air on any TV station. It gets attention by being so outrageous that it goes viral. Every campaign hopes for something like that -- it gets buzz for free -- but in this case, the buzz is that the Romney campaign's first ad is such a turd that it will backfire and make them look desperate. Not only that, it will make it hard for the campaign to try to backtrack and put out serious ads with a grown-up message later on. This is the one that will stick, and it's a gift to the Obama campaign.
I also have every confidence that today, true to flip-flop form, the Romney campaign will disavow any knowledge of the ad.
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The Romney campaign defended the ad by saying “He did say the words. That’s his voice.” Okay, if you want to play that game, ThinkProgress offers their version of Mitt Romney in his own words.
This is one of those ads that the campaign won't have to pay to air on any TV station. It gets attention by being so outrageous that it goes viral. Every campaign hopes for something like that -- it gets buzz for free -- but in this case, the buzz is that the Romney campaign's first ad is such a turd that it will backfire and make them look desperate. Not only that, it will make it hard for the campaign to try to backtrack and put out serious ads with a grown-up message later on. This is the one that will stick, and it's a gift to the Obama campaign.
I also have every confidence that today, true to flip-flop form, the Romney campaign will disavow any knowledge of the ad.
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We Were Stimulated
The Congressional Budget Office says the Obama stimulus plan worked.
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The economy would have been in much worse shape without the 2009 stimulus—-which increased employment in the third quarter of this year by as many as 3.3 million full-time jobs, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office.But, as we all know, the CBO is a "reactionary socialist institution," so take these results with a grain of salt. After all, facts have a well-known liberal bias.
[...]
The effects of the stimulus are fading after having peaked in the first half of 2010, the report noted.
However, the CBO estimates that the stimulus will raise GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.8 percent next year and employment by 200,000 to 1.1 million jobs.
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The Immigration Trap
Newt Gingrich really stepped in it at last night's GOP debate on foreign policy: he sounded reasonable on immigration.
Still, it's a pleasant surprise to hear Mr. Gingrich take up such a reasonable approach on immigration; it borders on humane.
That, or he's got an angle on putting the kids to work.
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I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who have been here a quarter century, who have children and grandchildren, who are members of the community, who may have done something 25 years ago, separate them from their families and expel them. I do believe if you’ve been here recently and have no ties to the U.S., we should deport you. I do believe we should control the border. I do believe we have various penalties for employers, but I urge you to look at the Krieble Foundation plan. The party that says it’s the party of the family is not going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families who have been here a quarter century. I’m prepared to take the heat for saying, let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.He was immediately pilloried by Michele Bachmann -- the "pro-family" candidate -- for being such a wuss by letting brown people stay in the country just to be with their family. Compassionate conservatism is so 2000.
Still, it's a pleasant surprise to hear Mr. Gingrich take up such a reasonable approach on immigration; it borders on humane.
That, or he's got an angle on putting the kids to work.
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Short Takes
Egypt -- The ruling council agreed to a speedier transition to a civilian government.
Syria's government is under increasing pressure from what allies it has left to resign.
Yet Again -- The GOP candidates held their 8,214th debate last night.
More accusations for Jerry Sandusky.
"Morally Wrong" -- Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber halts executions in his state.
Cheating -- More students have surrendered in the on-going scandal involving the SAT.
Stocks fell again on worries over Europe.
Tropical Update -- Hurricane Kenneth is in the eastern Pacific as a Cat 4, but is no threat to any land.
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Syria's government is under increasing pressure from what allies it has left to resign.
Yet Again -- The GOP candidates held their 8,214th debate last night.
More accusations for Jerry Sandusky.
"Morally Wrong" -- Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber halts executions in his state.
Cheating -- More students have surrendered in the on-going scandal involving the SAT.
Stocks fell again on worries over Europe.
Tropical Update -- Hurricane Kenneth is in the eastern Pacific as a Cat 4, but is no threat to any land.
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Tuesday, November 22, 2011
A Little Night Music
This is was the number one song on this day in 1963.
This song was playing on countless AM radios when this news bulletin interrupted it.
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This song was playing on countless AM radios when this news bulletin interrupted it.
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Quote of the Day
John F. Kennedy:
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If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people - their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad; if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."
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November 22, 1963
Friday, November 22, 1963. I was in the sixth grade in Toledo, Ohio. I had to skip Phys Ed because I was just getting over bronchitis, so I was in a study hall when a classmate came up from the locker room in the school basement to say, "Kennedy's dead." We had a boy in our class named Kennedy, and I wondered what had happened - an errant fatal blow with a dodgeball? A few minutes later, though, it was made clear to us at a hastily-summoned assembly, and we were soon put on the busses and sent home. Girls were crying.There was a newspaper strike at The Blade, so the only papers we could get were either from Detroit or Cleveland. (The union at The Blade, realizing they were missing the story of the century, agreed to immediately resume publication and settle their differences in other ways.) Television, though, was the medium of choice, and I remember the black-and-white images of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews, the casket being lowered, President Johnson speaking on the tarmac, and the events of the weekend - Oswald, Ruby, the long slow funeral parade, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" - merging into one long black-and-white flicker, finally closing on Monday night with the eternal flame guttering in the cold breeze.
I suspect that John F. Kennedy would be bitterly disappointed that the only thing remembered about his life was how he left it and how it colored everything he did leading up to it. The Bay of Pigs, the steel crisis, the Cuban missle crisis, the Test Ban Treaty, even the space program are dramatized by his death. They became the stuff of legend, not governing, and history should not be preserved as fable.
I never thought I'd be old enough to look back forty-eight years to that time. And according to NPR, sixty percent of Americans alive today were not yet born on that day. Today the question is not do you remember JFK, but what did his brief time leave behind. Speculation is rife as to what he did or did not accomplish - would we have gone in deeper in Vietnam? Would he have pushed civil rights? Would the Cold War have lasted? We'll never know, and frankly, pursuing such questions is a waste of time. Had JFK never been assassinated, chances are he would have been re-elected in 1964, crushing Barry Goldwater, but leading an administration that was more style than substance, battling with his own party as much as with the Republicans, much like Clinton did in the 1990's. According to medical records, he would have been lucky to live into his sixties, dying from natural causes in the 1980's, and he would have been remembered fondly for his charm and wit - and his beautiful wife - more than what he accomplished in eight years of an average presidency.
But it was those six seconds in Dealy Plaza that defined him. Each generation has one of those moments. For my parents it was Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the flash from Warm Springs in April 1945. Today it is Challenger in 1986, and of course September 11, 2001. And in all cases, it is what the moment means to us. It is the play, not the players. We see things as they were, contrast to how they are, and measure the differences, and by that, we measure ourselves.
Previously published, with minor edits, on November 22, 2003.
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That's A Know-No
According to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll, watching a certain "news" outlet will "make us less likely to know what’s going on in the world."
HT to Bob Cesca.
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For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.Well, there you have it, folks: proof that watching Fox News will make you even stupider.
HT to Bob Cesca.
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Laboring Children
Newt Gingrich, the newly-minted leader of the GOP pack, calls himself a historian. So perhaps he is harking back to the good old days a hundred years ago when children earned their keep and kept the economy humming.
I've heard some pretty wild ideas pour forth from Mr. Gingrich over the last thirty or so years, but this is seriously unbalanced, if not Dickensian. It's an idea so backwards that Congress passed laws against child labor in 1914. At the time, children as young as six were working in mines, factories, and textile mills. It prompted poet Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn to write:
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"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid," Gingrich said. "Saying to people you shouldn't go to work before you're 14, 16. You're totally poor, you're in a school that's failing with a teacher that's failing."Okay, so his plan is to take away a job from a janitor -- unionized or not -- who is probably taking care of a family and paying a mortgage to give a job to a ten-year-old kid at pittance wages in order to instill a sense of pride in his school?
Gingrich then proposed a system he said would help those students rise from poverty.
"I tried for years to have a very simple model. These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work; they'd have cash; they'd have pride in the schools. They'd begin the process of rising."
I've heard some pretty wild ideas pour forth from Mr. Gingrich over the last thirty or so years, but this is seriously unbalanced, if not Dickensian. It's an idea so backwards that Congress passed laws against child labor in 1914. At the time, children as young as six were working in mines, factories, and textile mills. It prompted poet Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn to write:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
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Not Falling For It
Now that the Supercommittee has failed to come to an agreement, guess who's getting the blame.
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In his most forceful language yet, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney today assailed President Obama, saying the president's lack of leadership will be to blame if the congressional Super Committee fails to generate a workable debt plan before Wednesday's deadline.Actually the reason Mr. Romney is so upset is because, as Greg Sargent notes, Mr. Obama didn't fall for the trap the Republicans set for him.
"What's most disappointing about that is that our president has had no involvement with the process," Romney said. "I find extraordinary that there would be set up a committee with such an important mission as finding a way to provide fiscal sanity in America and with the penalty if that fiscal sanity is not found of a $600 billion cut to our military."
Either Obama and Dems would have had to accept a deal that involved near-total capitulation by them, making Obama look weak and further angering his base. Or, if Obama had gotten more directly involved and the supercommittee failed, he would have ended up more directly associated with the profound dysfunction of Congress, whose numbers are at record lows. That would have reprised the dynamic of the health and debt ceiling fights — spattering Obama with Congressional mud — and would have complicated his reelection strategy of running against Congress and its failure to act on the economy.And, as Steve Benen reminds us, the Republicans asked the president to keep away from the negotiations.
At any rate, the White House seems to be preparing to use the supercommittee failure to continue aggressively contrasting the priorities of the two parties and hammering Republicans as protectors of the rich above all else. That wouldn’t have been as easy to do if Obama had taken the GOP’s bait and gotten drawn into the supercommittee muck, as Republicans clearly hoped he would.
[A]nother committee member, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on “Meet the Press” that President Obama and White House budget officials “were asked to be hands off.”Nice try, GOP. Next time, go with "Hey, your shoe's untied."
“The Republicans said, ‘Don’t let Obama come into this, because if he does, it will make it political,’ ” Mr. Kerry said, adding, “They’ve been intimately involved, but carefully so that they didn’t politicize it. I think they did the right thing.”
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Short Takes
Egypt's cabinet offered to resign as protests in the street get bigger.
The Dow fell 250 points after the Supercommittee announced it had failed.
President Obama signed the bill to provide tax credits for businesses that hire veterans.
Power Up -- FPL plans to spend $1 billion to upgrade the nuclear power plant in South Florida.
R.I.P. John Neville, actor and former artistic director at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Ontario.
The Tigers' Justin Verlander is the American League MVP and the Cy Young Award winner for 2011. (I told you he would be.)
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The Dow fell 250 points after the Supercommittee announced it had failed.
President Obama signed the bill to provide tax credits for businesses that hire veterans.
Power Up -- FPL plans to spend $1 billion to upgrade the nuclear power plant in South Florida.
R.I.P. John Neville, actor and former artistic director at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Ontario.
The Tigers' Justin Verlander is the American League MVP and the Cy Young Award winner for 2011. (I told you he would be.)
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Monday, November 21, 2011
A Little Night Music
The soloist at 0:56 is Dr. Grant Manhart. I worked with him at camp in Colorado in the 1970's, and he played a mean trumpet then, so imagine what he does now...
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Quote of the Day
Paul Krugman, quoting someone else, on Newt Gingrich:
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He's a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like.
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Question of the Day
Suggested by The Old Professor:
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Do you own a firearm?No, I don't. I don't have a problem with them per se; my father taught me how to use a shotgun when I was 12, and I learned how to use a .22 rifle at the camp firing range; I'm actually a pretty good shot. But I've never felt the need to own one. (That said, if they ever come up with a phaser like the ones from Star Trek with non-lethal settings like "stun" or "medium rare," then I'll reconsider.)
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Anything But That
In case you missed it in Sunday Reading yesterday, there was a terrific op-ed in the New York Times by Daniel Mendelsohn on one aspect of the Penn State story that so far has been avoided: the gender of the victim.
Assistant Coach Mike McQueary is in deep trouble for not reporting the crime when he saw it... and in some places he is being hounded for not keeping the code of silence.
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Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).The article makes the case that being gay -- or even being perceived as even sympathetic to gay issues -- is anathema in certain sports circles, including the hyper-butch arena of a highly-ranked college football locker room.
Mr. McQueary’s reluctance to treat what he allegedly saw as a flagrant crime, his peculiar unwillingness to intervene “physically,” the narrative emphasis on his own trauma (“distraught”) rather than the boy’s, the impulse to keep matters secret rather than provide rescue, all suggest the presence of a particularly intense shame, one occasioned less by pedophilia than by something everyone involved apparently considered worse: homosexuality.
After all, a guy is never so much a guy as when he’s playing a violent game or hanging with his teammates afterward in the showers and locker rooms, “horsing around.” The familiar ferocious anti-gay swagger many athletes affect is likely meant to quash even the faintest suspicion that anything tender or erotic animates naked playfulness between men.And with that comes the stigma of being the one who notices that something "funny" is going on. There is nothing worse than being the one who breaks the jock omerta; who reveals the torture and the hazing, or in this case, the rape.
Assistant Coach Mike McQueary is in deep trouble for not reporting the crime when he saw it... and in some places he is being hounded for not keeping the code of silence.
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That's Entertainment
Newt Gingrich is certain that the liberals are bent on passing laws that impose "secularism" on America.
Mr. Gingrich's solution? Pass laws that would impose his particular brand of religosity on America.
For all that, I have a better chance of winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama than Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, or Rick Santorum does of becoming president. So other than for the sheer gob-smacking entertainment value, why do we pay them any attention?
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A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have. Because we’ve in fact attempted to create a secular country, which I think is frankly a nightmare.The Constitution created a nightmare? Oh, my.
Mr. Gingrich's solution? Pass laws that would impose his particular brand of religosity on America.
To limit abortion, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the leading candidates in polls here, proposed a federal law defining “personhood” as starting at conception, similar to a provision backed by abortion opponents that was rejected earlier this month by voters in Mississippi.This wisdom was passed along at a forum this past weekend hosted by a megachurch outfit known as "The FAMiLY Leader" in Iowa, and Mr. Gingrich was there with the rest of the panderers, including Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Ron Paul. (Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman didn't show; they's Mormons, y'know.)
For all that, I have a better chance of winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama than Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, or Rick Santorum does of becoming president. So other than for the sheer gob-smacking entertainment value, why do we pay them any attention?
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Failure Is An Option
The headlines in various papers are telling of the failure of the Supercommittee to come up with an agreement to cut the budget by $1.2 trillion, which means that now all the dreaded draconian cuts to the budget will take place... in January 2013.
There are a number of economists, including Paul Krugman, who are actually rooting for the committee to fail and for the Congress to do nothing. If so, the Bush tax cuts would expire in a year and that would mean more money -- a lot more -- coming into the Treasury. That would probably be the best outcome, and since the one thing the Republican-led Congress has proved time and again is their amazing ability to do nothing, that seems like the best way to go.
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With the hours ticking away toward a self-imposed deadline, Congressional leaders conceded Sunday that talks on a sweeping deficit agreement were near failure and braced for recriminations over their inability to reach a deal.Nice try, but I'm not sure why anyone believed that this was ever going to work. To succeed, it would have required that the Republicans tolerate the idea of including tax increases, and we all know that was never going to happen. On the plus side, the Democrats stood their ground and didn't cave to the threats and demagoguery of the Republicans.
The stalemate was the latest sign of partisan deadlock in Washington, which members of both parties do not expect to lift until the 2012 election has clarified which party has the upper hand.
Barring an unexpected turnaround before Monday’s deadline, the failure of the special Congressional deficit committee will be the third high-profile effort to fall short of a deal in the last 12 months, including a bipartisan deficit commission and talks last summer between President Obama and Speaker John A. Boehner.
There are a number of economists, including Paul Krugman, who are actually rooting for the committee to fail and for the Congress to do nothing. If so, the Bush tax cuts would expire in a year and that would mean more money -- a lot more -- coming into the Treasury. That would probably be the best outcome, and since the one thing the Republican-led Congress has proved time and again is their amazing ability to do nothing, that seems like the best way to go.
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Stay Classy
Some NASCAR fans booed Michelle Obama at the Homestead-Miami Speedway.
She and Jill Biden were there to promote employment of veterans.
(If Michele Bachmann had shown up, the crowd would have gone wild, with at least one of the fans shouting "Show us your tits!")
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She and Jill Biden were there to promote employment of veterans.
(If Michele Bachmann had shown up, the crowd would have gone wild, with at least one of the fans shouting "Show us your tits!")
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Short Takes
Egypt -- Police clear Tahrir Square of demonstrators by burning their tents.
Spanish voters turn to right-wingers in the wake of their economic struggles.
"Lone Wolf" -- A man has been arrested in New York on suspicion of plotting to plant bombs.
The officers in the U.C. Davis pepper spray incident have been put on paid leave.
Fire crews are putting out hot spots in the Reno wildfires.
Tropical Update -- The tropical low is not going to come this way.
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Spanish voters turn to right-wingers in the wake of their economic struggles.
"Lone Wolf" -- A man has been arrested in New York on suspicion of plotting to plant bombs.
The officers in the U.C. Davis pepper spray incident have been put on paid leave.
Fire crews are putting out hot spots in the Reno wildfires.
Tropical Update -- The tropical low is not going to come this way.
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Sunday, November 20, 2011
That Old Car Feeling
This story, an extended version of a commercial from Chevrolet, begins to explain what the antique car collection hobby is all about.
Via SFDB.
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Via SFDB.
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Sunday Reading
The Next Level -- James Fallows of The Atlantic sees the pepper spray incident at U.C. Davis as what happens when we lose accountability.
Anything But That -- Daniel Mendelsohn asks a very important question about the assaults at Penn State: What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?
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In case you haven't yet seen the YouTube footage of what happened [Friday] at UC Davis, here it is. The first minute has the main drama:More below the fold.
Let's stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people's rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I'll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus -- and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.
I can't see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we'd react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We'd think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That's what I think here.
[...]
This Occupy moment is not going to end any time soon. That is not just because of the underlying 99%-1% tensions but also because of police response of this sort -- and because there have been so many similar videos coming from cities across the country.
Anything But That -- Daniel Mendelsohn asks a very important question about the assaults at Penn State: What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?
Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl? But the victim in this case was a boy, and so Mr. McQueary left and called his dad (who didn’t seem to think that it was a matter for the police either).The "Lazy" Lie -- Steve Benen on GOP perfidy.
Mr. McQueary’s reluctance to treat what he allegedly saw as a flagrant crime, his peculiar unwillingness to intervene “physically,” the narrative emphasis on his own trauma (“distraught”) rather than the boy’s, the impulse to keep matters secret rather than provide rescue, all suggest the presence of a particularly intense shame, one occasioned less by pedophilia than by something everyone involved apparently considered worse: homosexuality.
Mr. McQueary’s refusal to process the scene he described — his coach having sex with another male — was reflected in the reaction of the university itself, which can only be called denial. You see this in the squeamish treatment of the assaults as a series of inscrutable peccadilloes best discussed — and indulged — behind closed doors. (Penn State’s athletic director subsequently characterized Mr. Sandusky’s alleged act as “horsing around,” a term you suspect he would not have used to describe the rape of a 10-year-old girl.) Denial is there in the treatment of the victims as somehow untouchable, so fully tainted they couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be rescued. For Penn State officials, disgust at the perceived gay element seems to have outweighed the horror of the crimes themselves. (“Perceived,” because psychologists generally deny that pedophiles possess adult sexuality — something that can be described as “gay” or “straight” in the first place.)
The denial is hardly surprising. In a culture that increasingly accepts gay life, organized athletics, from middle school to the professional leagues, is the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment. Anecdotal and public evidence for this is dismayingly overwhelming.
There’s a fair amount of irony surrounding the Republicans’ favorite attack of the week.Doonesbury -- The pride of authorship.
President Obama told business leaders at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that U.S. policymakers have been “a little bit lazy” when it comes to attracting businesses to American soil. Republicans have taken this line and said the president called Americans “lazy.”
The GOP attack is an unambiguous lie. It’s been independently fact checked repeatedly and exposed as a complete sham, caused by taking a comment completely out of context to change its meaning.
[...]
The “lazy” smear matters because it’s a lie, and because Republicans have quickly become obsessed with a talking point they made up. But it’d be a shame if we also forget that it’s ironic — President Obama doesn’t think Americans are lazy; Republicans do.
We saw some of this in Romney’s own book, when he complained that Americans “have tended to avoid the hard work that overcoming challenges requires.” American workers keep giving more and getting less, but as far as the wealthy, elitist Republican frontrunner is concerned, we’re still unwilling to roll up our sleeves.
[...]
But that’s really just scratching the surface. Consider, for example, what House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said this week when talking about American competitiveness:“Part of it is the culture of people just having no work ethic…. Moral relativism has done so much damage to the bottom end of this country, the bottom fifth has been damaged by the culture of moral relativism more than by anything else, I would argue. If you ask me what the biggest problem in America is, I’m not going to tell you debt, deficits, statistics, economics — I’ll tell you it’s moral relativism.”So, in the mind of Paul Ryan, one of the most influential Republican leaders in the country, America isn’t getting ahead because Americans don’t work hard and have the wrong values.
In other words, it’s our fault. We’re lazy.
[...]
Obama never said Americans are lazy; Republicans did. And that’s what’s pathetic.
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Short Takes
Syrian rebels attack sites in the capital.
There will be an investigation into the use of pepper spray on peaceful protestors at U.C. Davis.
Wildfires have burned 32 homes in Reno.
Oops -- A booklet outlining security arrangements for President Obama's trip in Australia was found in a gutter in Canberra.
Sob Stories -- GOP candidates blub it up at a Christian forum in Iowa.
Three people drowned when a car went into a canal in Pompano Beach, Florida.
Tropical Update -- This might be the last one of the official hurricane season.
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There will be an investigation into the use of pepper spray on peaceful protestors at U.C. Davis.
Wildfires have burned 32 homes in Reno.
Oops -- A booklet outlining security arrangements for President Obama's trip in Australia was found in a gutter in Canberra.
Sob Stories -- GOP candidates blub it up at a Christian forum in Iowa.
Three people drowned when a car went into a canal in Pompano Beach, Florida.
Tropical Update -- This might be the last one of the official hurricane season.
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Saturday, November 19, 2011
Party Prep
The reason things have been quieter than usual here today is because I'm hosting a party here at Chez Mustang tonight and I've been cleaning and shopping and all those things you do when you're entertaining sixty people.
I'm not doing the whole thing. The car club has an annual progressive dinner -- no, it's not a bunch of liberals getting together over tofu and granola. It's a dinner where the guests go from one house to another for each course. Bob and The Old Professor are hosting the appetizer course, I'm doing salad, and a third couple is doing the dinner. I just got back with several large shopping bags filled with all the good stuff for a nice basic salad: lots of greens and toppings such as carrots and diced peppers and cherry tomatoes, and a great selection of dressings. The house has been cleaned within an inch of Martha Stewart, and I even had the lawn guys come an extra time to get the yard in shape. This being Florida, the dining will be al fresco.
Now all I have to do is get everything washed -- including myself -- and chill the salad forks.
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I'm not doing the whole thing. The car club has an annual progressive dinner -- no, it's not a bunch of liberals getting together over tofu and granola. It's a dinner where the guests go from one house to another for each course. Bob and The Old Professor are hosting the appetizer course, I'm doing salad, and a third couple is doing the dinner. I just got back with several large shopping bags filled with all the good stuff for a nice basic salad: lots of greens and toppings such as carrots and diced peppers and cherry tomatoes, and a great selection of dressings. The house has been cleaned within an inch of Martha Stewart, and I even had the lawn guys come an extra time to get the yard in shape. This being Florida, the dining will be al fresco.
Now all I have to do is get everything washed -- including myself -- and chill the salad forks.
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Short Takes
Egyptians are getting impatient with the military council that replaced Hosni Mubarak.
One of Qaddafi's sons has been arrested, according to Reuters.
Euro-Crisis -- Now it's time to worry about selling those bonds.
Nowhere Fast -- The Supercommittee is not reporting any progress. The deadline is Wednesday.
Newt Gingrich made a lot of money through lobbying over healthcare.
A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit over a Coral Gables school stabbing that killed one student.
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One of Qaddafi's sons has been arrested, according to Reuters.
Euro-Crisis -- Now it's time to worry about selling those bonds.
Nowhere Fast -- The Supercommittee is not reporting any progress. The deadline is Wednesday.
Newt Gingrich made a lot of money through lobbying over healthcare.
A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit over a Coral Gables school stabbing that killed one student.
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Friday, November 18, 2011
Random Moment of Irony
Driving home from work the other day I passed a car pulled off to the side of the road. It was a large Lincoln with a flat tire. The driver, a man of advanced years and apparent wealth (he was in a very nice suit and tie), was standing by the car and watching as a young man in work clothes, who had pulled up behind him in a late model compact, was in the process of changing the tire for him. "Well," I thought to myself as I drove by, "that was a nice thing for that guy to do."
It wasn't until I was almost past the Lincoln when I saw a bumper sticker on it: I AM JOHN GALT.
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It wasn't until I was almost past the Lincoln when I saw a bumper sticker on it: I AM JOHN GALT.
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Quote of the Day
Herman Cain:
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We need a leader, not a reader.In order to be the first, you need to be the second.
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Just Beginning
Yesterday was the Day of Action by the Occupy contingent, which included marches and demonstrations in all sorts of places, including Miami. It was to commemorate the two-month anniversary of the first demonstration. The Rude Pundit notes that it's just beginning.
You do not have to be political to get the meaning of what the Occupy gatherings are saying. It's not as much a political agenda as it is one of assessment: look around and see what has happened not just to you or to people you know but to others who may be your polar opposite in terms of who you vote for, but who struggle with bills or finding a job. The 1% worry about keeping up with the Joneses; the rest of us worry about keeping up with the mortgage.
And it's not something that requires the use of pepper-spray.
HT to Annie Laurie and digby.
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We are two months into this and everyone in the media is clamoring for closure. It took years for the civil rights movement to get laws changed. It took years for the anti-Vietnam War movement to get through the thick skulls of the majority of Americans. This is just starting. Welcome to the real occupation…The one thing that strikes me about the Occupy movement is that it is not dedicated to punishing the 1% for having all of their money and privilege. It's not a demand for them to give it all up and turn it over to the rest of us; it's about not pulling up the ladder after you've made it to the top. Sitting on a hoard of cash doesn't do anything; the only way a capitalist system works is if the capital is working, and there seems to be plenty of it that is not.
The march this morning wasn’t going to do anything, despite the hopeful rumors that the stock market opening bell had been delayed (it wasn’t). No, the point was, like the rallies for Obama before them, that there is power in numbers. And that power needs to be exhibited and enacted.
When the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United decision, said that corporations are people with First Amendment rights and affirmed that money is the equivalent of speech, it essentially was saying that some people have more speech than others. The wealthy and the corporations can never be matched in terms of the speech effect of their dollars. But they can be matched and overcome by the sheer volume of people. That’s why we say we are the 99%.
You do not have to be political to get the meaning of what the Occupy gatherings are saying. It's not as much a political agenda as it is one of assessment: look around and see what has happened not just to you or to people you know but to others who may be your polar opposite in terms of who you vote for, but who struggle with bills or finding a job. The 1% worry about keeping up with the Joneses; the rest of us worry about keeping up with the mortgage.
And it's not something that requires the use of pepper-spray.
HT to Annie Laurie and digby.
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Short Takes
Taking the Burma Road -- The United States is set to open a dialogue with Myanmar.
The Supercommittee's progress is stuck on taxes.
The man who shot at the White House on November 11 is being charged with trying to kill the president.
Jobless claims fell to their lowest level since April.
Cold Case -- Thirty years later, police are re-opening the case of the death of Natalie Wood.
The Justice Department will investigate Miami police shootings.
Occupy Miami marched down to the financial district. In New York, over 200 people were arrested for marching on Wall Street.
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The Supercommittee's progress is stuck on taxes.
The man who shot at the White House on November 11 is being charged with trying to kill the president.
Jobless claims fell to their lowest level since April.
Cold Case -- Thirty years later, police are re-opening the case of the death of Natalie Wood.
The Justice Department will investigate Miami police shootings.
Occupy Miami marched down to the financial district. In New York, over 200 people were arrested for marching on Wall Street.
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Thursday, November 17, 2011
Concealed Agenda
Gail Collins notes that the House has passed a bill sponsored by the NRA that would require states with strict gun regulations to honor concealed carry permits from other states.
I saw a tweet on Facebook last night from someone in Connecticut, where same-sex marriage is legal: "I'll abide with Texas's concealed gun laws when Texas abides with Connecticut's marriages laws." Nice shot.
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Here’s an example of the way the House plan would work. California has very strict limits on who can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, involving extensive background checks by local law enforcement. Utah, on the other hand, is really mellow about the whole thing. You don’t even have to live there to get a Utah permit. Just ask the 215,000 non-Utah folks who’ve gotten one. And, in Florida, “it is so easy that a staffer in one of our offices was able to complete the form in less than 30 minutes,” said Representative Alcee Hastings, a Florida Democrat.What's interesting about this law is that it would seem to be a pretty flagrant violation of the idea of states' rights, something very dear to the heart of conservatives. After all, that's all they talk about when it comes to things they don't like such as Roe v. Wade or voting rights; it's the jack-boots of the guvamint forcing them to comply with them East Coast commie-pinko librul gun laws. These are the same folks who demanded and passed the Defense of Marriage Act, which basically says the several states do not have to honor the laws of other states when it comes to recognizing marriage. So how is it different when it comes to concealed weapons laws?
Under this bill, California’s strict rules on gun permits are now expanded to include anybody who drives into the state waving a Florida or Utah permission slip.
I saw a tweet on Facebook last night from someone in Connecticut, where same-sex marriage is legal: "I'll abide with Texas's concealed gun laws when Texas abides with Connecticut's marriages laws." Nice shot.
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Conservative Humor
And another attempt at right-wing humor craters.
Well, the Secret Service might want to have a little chat with Ms. Pierce; they have no sense of humor whatsoever, and in their case that's a good thing. Second, anyone who supported George W. Bush has forfeited the right to call anyone else the "WORST president we've EVER had!"
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Hours after Pennsylvania State Police arrested a 21-year-old Idaho man for allegedly firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House, the top student official for the College Republicans at the University of Texas tweeted that the idea of assassinating President Obama was “tempting.”Conservatives really don't get the concept of humor. They seem to think that making fun of the weak and children (hello, Rush Limbaugh) or joking about shooting the president is pure comedy gold.
At 2:29 p.m. ET, UT’s Lauren E. Pierce wrote: “Y’all as tempting as it may be, don’t shoot Obama. We need him to go down in history as the WORST president we’ve EVER had! #2012.”
Pierce, the president of the College Republicans at UT Austin, told ABC News the comment was a “joke” and that the “whole [shooting incident] was stupid.” Giggling, she said that an attempted assassination would “only make the situation worse.”
“Insofar as she’s a representative [of the College Republicans], maybe it shouldn’t be said, but she’s made a positive statement in a way, ” said Cassie Wright, the group’s vice president.
“I don’t really see anything wrong with it,” Wright added. “It’s just a personal comment, not representative of any group. Just freedom of speech, you know?”
Well, the Secret Service might want to have a little chat with Ms. Pierce; they have no sense of humor whatsoever, and in their case that's a good thing. Second, anyone who supported George W. Bush has forfeited the right to call anyone else the "WORST president we've EVER had!"
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This Is Rich
Newt Gingrich has been demonizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as being the only reason the housing market collapsed in 2008. It turns out that Mr. Gingrich might have a few reasons to know what goes on at those agencies. In fact, he might have 1.6 million reasons.
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Self-proclaimed housing historian Newt Gingrich had two contracts with mortgage company Freddie Mac and was paid between $1.6 million and $1.8 million in consulting fees, two sources familiar with the agreements have told Bloomberg.A $1.6 million historian? Nice work if you can get it, and it takes the sting out of being a flaming hypocrite.
Mitchell Delk, Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist, was Gingrich’s key contact. But Delk told Bloomberg that Gingrich — who was paid a monthly retainer of $25,000 to $30,000 between May 1999 until 2002 — “did not do any lobbying” and was instead provided counsel on public policy issues.
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