The good life

From the article mentioned in the next entry:

Just this last year [Stewart Udall] rafted down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry — named for Udall’s grandfather — and, with a grandson, trekked from the floor of the Grand Canyon up Bright Angel Trail some 7,000 feet to the South Rim. His family had cautioned against it, and he rejected a Park Service offer of a mule. “They wouldn’t have liked it if I hadn’t made it,” he recounted, “but what a way to go.” Once at the South Rim, Udall marched straight to the bar at the Tovar Lodge and ordered a martini.

Wilderness

A profile of The West’s defender of wild places, Stewart Udall, from the Los Angeles Times. It begins:

On a late spring day, with streambeds roaring and the sun breaking through the thin mountain air, Stewart Udall has just crossed a calf-deep creek, rushing with late-season snowmelt from the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico. His corduroy pants are drenched at the cuffs, his sneakers muddied and soaked. Udall is on the Rio en Medio Trail, a popular and well-watered seven-mile hike a good half hour out of Santa Fe.

Udall, who turned 85 in January, has slowed down in recent years. Age, the death of his wife and a degenerative eye condition have contributed, but once on the trail, he gamely sloshes ahead, grasping drooping branches and, if needed, an outstretched hand.

“This is good wilderness,” he says, his somber voice lightening up. “Any time you have to struggle a bit to cross a stream you’ve got good wilderness.”

Good wilderness. That’s what Udall can boast about. As secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations — and one of the architects of the Wilderness Act — he is perhaps the politician most responsible for the public lands you hike, the rivers you kayak, the mountains you climb and the wilderness you contemplate. And it is this legacy that he is most fearful will be lost.

Best line of the day, so far

“Costco has managed to remain competitive while providing its workers with the highest wages and best healthcare plans available anywhere in the US retail industry.”

Financial Times via Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal

“First and foremost, it’s the right thing to do,” says [Costco CFO] Galanti. “And long-term, we know it pays dividends.”

41! Amazing

Bobby Abreu of the Phillies his 41 homeruns tonight to win the Major League Baseball All-Star Homerun Derby. His first round was 24, breaking the old single round record of 15. His total of 41 beat the old record of 27.

Abreu is from Venezuela. Each of the eight players tonight represented their native country.

The Rove Plame-out

If you’d like to understand what’s going on with Karl Rove and the Valerie Plame leak, The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin has a great summary as of this afternoon.

Smoke ‘em if You Got ‘em

Saddam Hussein isn’t thrilled about being cooped up in jail — who would be? — but at least the deposed Iraqi dictator isn’t being denied one of his supreme pleasures: a fine Havana cigar. Saddam receives his cigars from his daughter, Raghad, who sends them through the International Red Cross. The irony, of course, is that Saddam can smoke like a chimney while incarcerated at a U.S. military base but he’d be busted for hawking one on the streets of New York, since the economic embargo against Cuba makes selling the cigars illegal on American soil.

Wired News

Ray gun

Rich Garcia is proud of his two-second record.

That’s how long the test subject, a Kirtland Air Force Research Laboratory spokesman, lasted when an ultraviolet beam boiled the water molecules in the top 1/64th layer of his skin.

It’s not the top time - that’s more like three seconds - but it was a good record for withstanding the pain of a new nonlethal weapon being developed by his lab, the Department of Defense, Raytheon and Sandia National Laboratories, Garcia said.

“It’s excruciating,” Garcia said. “For a moment you feel heat; then it gets unbearably hot. I did it four times. The first time, I jumped out of the beam almost immediately, but then I thought to myself, `You wimp. It doesn’t damage the skin.’ So on the second, third and fourth time, I lasted a little longer. The fourth was my record: two seconds. Nobody made it past three.”

The weapon, cryptically called the Active Denial System, beams ultraviolet waves at a target, penetrating only the top layer of skin, which conveniently houses most of the body’s pain receptors, said Steve Scott, a Sandia engineer.

“It’s been described to me as wrapping your body around a hot light bulb,” Scott said. “The reaction is very similar to the involuntary response you have when you touch a hot object. You want to get out of the beam fast.”

It leaves no permanent skin damage, and the pain goes away almost immediately after the subject steps out of the beam, Scott said.

The Albuquerque Tribune

I know God has a plan and all …

but why is this kind of thing a part of it?

Authorities planned an autopsy today for a man who fired repeatedly at neighbors and police, and for his 17-month-old daughter whom he used as a shield before police stormed his apartment.

… early reports indicated that the suspect “continuously had that baby in front of him while he was firing at officers.”

Los Angeles Times

The Founding Sachems

Did the Founding Fathers Really Get Many of Their Ideas of Liberty from the Iroquois? is a brief essay by Professor Jack Rakove of Stanford in a response to a July 4th op-ed piece in The New York Times.

He thinks not.

Guns, Germs and Steel

PBS begins a three-part series on Guns Germs, & Steel this evening.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, the Rhone Poulenc Science Book Prize, along with three other international literary prizes, Guns, Germs and Steel has been translated into 25 languages and has sold millions of copies around the world.

Dennis is “sinned” spelled backwards

Just hours after Hurricane Dennis made landfall across the Florida Panhandle yesterday, Governor Jeb Bush asked a state prosecutor to investigate possible links between the category 3 storm and Michael Schiavo. In a statement to reporters, Mr. Bush noted that the issue of Mr. Schiavo’s involvement in the strongest hurricane to develop this early in the Atlantic storm season “remains unsettled.”

The Swift Report: Jeb Bush: Hurricane Dennis Could Be Fault of Michael Schiavo

Seems right to me

Joshua Marshall on Karl Rove’s attorney:

Yep, you heard that right. Luskin got paid more than $500,000 of his attorney’s fees in gold bars from his client who was trying to appeal his conviction on charges that he laundered drug money through precious metals dealers. Who woulda thought that was drug money?

Luskin insisted that he “never have, and never would, knowingly accept a fee that was the proceeds of illegal activities.”

But when federal prosecutors finally got a chance to depose Luskin and Saccoccia’s other lawyers, they found that their lawyers’ fees had come in forms “such as gold bars, cash that was dropped off at hotels and trunks of cars, and money transfers from Swiss bank accounts.”

Eventually, in 1998, Luskin came to a settlement with the government in which he agreed to cough up $245,000 of the money he’d gotten from Saccoccia.

Talking Points Memo