Observations:
is 39 today. She’s the author of the Harry Potter books — and has an intriguing web site.
Three images from the World War II Memorial in Washington taken by NewMexiKen today. The first is an overview of the south or Pacific side of the monument. The second is of a bas relief honoring American troops in the Atlantic theater. Lastly, the New Mexico pillar with the Washington Monument at left behind (several hundred yards east).
Among Hispanic Voters:
Kerry 69%
Bush 19%Among Southern Voters:
Kerry 48%
Bush 46%Among Young Voters (18-29) :
Kerry 53%
Bush 33%Among Single Voters:
Kerry 69%
Bush 19%In the Red States:
Kerry 46%
Bush 48%In the Blue States:
Kerry 50%
Bush 38%Among People Who Did Not Vote in 2000:
Kerry 50%
Bush 25%
Just in case your news source doesn’t tell you the “rest of the story” —
President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger — who’d been accused of stealing classified material from the National Archives — has been cleared of all wrongdoing.
The National Archives and the Justice Department have concluded nothing is missing and nothing in the Clinton administration’s record was withheld from the 9-11 Commission.
The Wall Street Journal reports archives staff have accounted for all classified documents Berger looked at.
In the words of William Saletan at Slate:
In his determination to unite the right, Bush hasn’t just united the left. He has lost the center. Look at last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll of registered voters. “Do you think the result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq or not?” Fifty-nine percent say it was not. “Which do you think is a better way to improve the national economy—cutting taxes or reducing the federal budget deficit?” Fifty-eight percent say reducing the deficit. “When it comes to regulating the environmental and safety practices of business, do you think the federal government is doing enough, should it do more, or should it do less?” Fifty-nine percent say more.
And that’s why we need Clinton on the campaign trail this fall: as this week’s convention demonstrates, a publicly visible Bill Clinton, talking pleasantly and self-deprecatingly about his tax cut and John Kerry’s courage, will cause roughly 3.6 million wingnuts’ heads to explode by November 2 (margin of error plus or minus 3 percent). In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Florida, that could make all the difference.
Kerry-Edwards: for a stronger America.
Clinton-Obama: for wingnut-skulls-a-poppin’.
Print This Post
or read it, you will remember the harrowing story Quint (Robert Shaw) tells of surviving the sinking of the cruiser Indianapolis. It was on this date in 1945 that the ship, which had carried the Hiroshima atomic bomb, was torpedoed by the Japanese. According to the U.S. Navy:
The ship capsized and sank in twelve minutes. Survivors were spotted by a patrol aircraft on 2 August. All air and surface units capable of rescue operations were dispatched to the scene at once, and the surrounding waters were thoroughly searched for survivors. Upon completion of the day and night search on 8 August, 316 men were rescued out of the crew of 1,199.
Shark attacks began with sunrise of the first day and continued until the survivors were removed from the water almost five days later.
The Navy web site includes oral histories with Indianapolis Captain McVay and Japanese submarine Captain Hashimoto. The Discovery Channel has a wealth of material.
The site dedicated to the Indianapolis is perhaps the best source.
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford
Oddly enough, the man who said history was more or less bunk established one of the great historical museums — the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.
was born on a farm in Dearborn, Michigan, on this date in 1863. Though a tinkerer, Ford’s claim to fame is not for inventing the automobile but, as the Library of Congress tells us, for the mass production of them.
From the time he was a young boy, Ford enjoyed tinkering with machines. Farm work and a job in a Detroit machine shop afforded him ample opportunities to experiment. He later worked as a part-time employee for the Westinghouse Engine Company. By 1896, Ford had constructed his first horseless carriage which he sold in order to finance work on an improved model.
Ford incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903, proclaiming, “I will build a car for the great multitude.” In October 1908, he did so, offering the Model T for $950. In the Model T’s nineteen years of production, its price dipped as low as $280. Nearly 15,500,000 were sold in the United States alone. The Model T heralds the beginning of the Motor Age; the car evolved from luxury item for the well-to-do to essential transportation for the ordinary man.
Ford revolutionized manufacturing. By 1914, his Highland Park, Michigan plant, using innovative production techniques, could turn out a complete chassis every 93 minutes. This was a stunning improvement over the earlier production time of 728 minutes. Using a constantly-moving assembly line, subdivision of labor, and careful coordination of operations, Ford realized huge gains in productivity.
In 1914, Ford began paying his employees five dollars a day, nearly doubling the wages offered by other manufacturers. He cut the workday from nine to eight hours in order to convert the factory to a three-shift workday. Ford’s mass-production techniques would eventually allow for the manufacture of a Model T every 24 seconds. His innovations made him an international celebrity.
“I like John Edwards (how can you not like Opie, all grown up and running for vice president?)”
“Illinois senatorial candidate Barak Obama, he’s the new rising star of the Democratic party. He gave the keynote address at the Democratic convention. When they told President Bush about Obama, Bush said, ‘Isn’t that the guy we can’t find? Why don’t we grab him? He was right there!’”
Jay Leno
Bob Somerby spells it out:
APPLE PIE: At the Times, hapless Johnny Apple knows the script too. How does an earth-born human being manage to get this inept?
APPLE: Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam heroism may be a much easier sell than his views on the war in Iraq, if only because it is more clear-cut. Having cast several votes on several aspects of the current conflict, he is easy to portray as a straddler, a flip-flopper or a hair-splitter. Having said he would have taken a more international approach to the Iraqi problem, he finds Mr. Bush moving the same way.Readers, did you follow the logic? According to Apple, Bush is moving in Kerry’s direction—but Kerry is somehow the flipper, the straddler! Johnny Apple knows the script. And he’s too fat and lazy not to type it.
All of Thursday’s Daily Howler is excellent.
From AP via Yahoo! News:
The FBI warned police in California and New Mexico that it received information about possible terrorist activity in their states. However, the warning wasn’t specific about particular targets or a method of attack, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday.
The FBI decided to pass along the threat information but warned that it was considered unsubstantiated and uncorroborated, said the official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Link and emphasis via Quirky Burque.
(The problem with the crying wolf analogy of course, is that Aesop’s story has an unhappy ending.)
Dave Pell at Electablog faces the sad realities of life:
I was riding high [after appearing on CNN Headline News]. But just moments later, out the of the corner of my eye I saw a small group gathering around someone. When I got closer, I realized that it was Omarosa. It only took a quick once over of her arena credentials (which at the Fleet serve as public resumes and status billboards) for me to realize that Omarosa had way better access than me. Welcome back down to the rung of humanity a notch or two below disliked reality television participants.
From Wired News Furthermore:
IT folks used to advise leaving computers on all the time to avoid wear and tear. But components are much more reliable now, and new research shows there’s no reason not to go green and turn PCs off when not in use. Tests at the University of Waterloo in Canada indicate that current computers use about 110 watts of electricity while booting up and 60 watts when idle; a 17-inch CRT monitor uses about 75 watts. PCs in sleep mode draw about 35 watts, roughly equivalent to three clock radios. Multiplied by hours of standby time and millions of PCs worldwide, that adds up to a big drain. Infineon Technologies estimates that a 1 percent decrease in U.S. standby power use would save 360 megawatts — equivalent to a medium-size power plant.
From Wired News:
When was the last time you saw John Kerry on his knees before world leaders, clad in S&M gear and with a ball gag in his mouth? Or eyed President Bush looking sheepish in a red dunce cap?
Chances are it was sometime this past week on national TV and maybe 10 times before that on the Internet, thanks to JibJab, a site that is posting animators Evan and Gregg Spiridellis’ latest creation, This Land.
The film features Kerry and Bush dissing each other like boys on a playground to the tune of Woody Guthrie’s classic song, “This Land Is Your Land.” It’s made it around the world, with enthusiastic viewers commenting about the film on the site’s blog from as far away as the Netherlands, New Zealand and Guam, and its historical value has been noted by the Library of Congress, which on Tuesday e-mailed the Santa Monica, California-based Spiridellises asking to add the animated short to its archives.
But while about 25 million viewers have been clogging JibJab to chuckle at the film’s South Park-like Flash animation and juvenile insults (Bush labels Kerry a “liberal sissy,” and Kerry responds by calling Bush a “right-wing nut job”), the Spiridellises aren’t exactly laughing their way back to the drawing board.
In the wake of their short’s popularity, which began soon after its July 9 Web release and has been punctuated by appearances and mentions on almost every major U.S. news show, the brothers found themselves in a legal skirmish with Ludlow Music, which, Ludlow attorney Paul LiCalsi said, owns the copyright to Guthrie’s famous tune.
Read more from Wired.
From news reports:
As many as 195,000 people a year could be dying in U.S. hospitals because of easily prevented errors, a company said on Tuesday in an estimate that doubles previous figures.
The findings would make medical mistakes the third-leading cause of death in the country, behind heart disease and cancer.
Here’s the report from Reuters.
Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly tells us about Lance’s victory:
It was pudding, this sixth Tour de France win for Lance Armstrong. Easy as a Sunday ride with your arthritic aunt. He could’ve won it while doing his taxes.
Except when spectators were spitting on him.
Except when they were flipping him off with both hands, cussing him, mooning him, throwing their beer and water at him, slandering his girlfriend, screaming at him, “Dopé!” (Doper) and “Trucier!” (Cheater).
In stage 16, over the most famous mountain in cycling, Alpe d’Huez, the French, Germans and Basques did all that and more, flapping flags in his face, donning grotesque animal masks and daring him to run them over, scrawling four-foot-high insults in chalk on the pavement he had to cover.
“It made me sick,” said Armstrong’s girl, rocker Sheryl Crow, who rode in the chase car directly behind him that day. “I wanted to jump out and spank some of these people. It was just hateful. Here is the greatest athlete of our generation competing in the hardest sporting event in the world, and they act like that?”
They do — more than ever.
*****But swallowing the Tour de France whole is not why Armstrong will be back for seven, if not eight. He will be back because he beat 14 tumors and 4-in-10 odds of surviving, and now he flies up Alps and gives people hope. He’ll be back because he’s the poster boy for living. He’ll be back because the gift is not his bracelets, the gift is him.
So if you think it’s a damn shame that one of the five greatest athletes in American history performs eye-bulging feats in front of almost none of his countrymen, then go to Alpe d’Huez next summer. Go and line that mountain with 10 times the countrymen Armstrong has ever seen there.
Then we’ll see how much spitting goes on.
The whole column is available, but requires subscription.
“and the needle of destiny tightened its stitch and shuttled on.”
From The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
Barack Obama, Tuesday night:
When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return, and to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace, and earn the respect of the world.
“In a country where fewer than 50 percent of the citizens even bother to cast a vote, you’ve got a much bigger problem with your democracy than haggling over which kind of voting machine to use.”
Correspondence to David Pogue, The New York Times
NewMexiKen has been gone from New Mexico for nearly two weeks. Please send green chiles.
Thank you.
And some posole.
Powerful stuff from Rivka at Respectful of Otters. She will make you think in yet another way about abortion.
Link via Michael Bérubé.
The folks at Landover Baptist Church impart some wisdom about raising heterosexual little boys. Here is the item on potty training, for example:
A boy must not sit on a toilet unless he is having a bowel movement. Standing straight up, not hunched over while urinating, is a sign of manliness. Squatting on a toilet seat (especially if he hovers to avoid the urine of others or prissily wipes the seat with a square of toilet tissue) to pee is not only effeminate but a sign of shame! It is a secret hobby that homosexuals use in their daily lives. It is a scientific fact that when needing to use the restroom, a male is called upon to engage in the unpleasant undertaking of extruding a poopy in only 1 out of every 3 visits. But homosexuals use all three visits to practice squatting, to limber the cheeks of their bottom in preparation for even the most enormous (Negro) penises. Such calisthenics are neither necessary nor advisable for men who have no intention of squatting over an engorged penis. As soon as your child is able to walk on two feet, you must make that sure he is taught to stand proudly in front of a private or public toilet seat, and to speak not a word, especially in response to the coy whispers of Catholic priests in the next stall.
Link via Jesus’ General.
Excerpt from the speech of Barack Obama Tuesday:
For alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we’re all connected as one people.
If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.
It is that fundamental belief, it is that fundamental belief, I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.
E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
“As you know Teresa Heinz Kerry has been taking criticism for telling a reporter to ’shove it’ the other day … Can you blame Teresa Heinz Kerry, really? I mean what’s the point of having a billion dollars if you can’t tell someone to ’shove it’?”
“It’s now being reported that John Edwards’ younger brother, Wesley, turned himself in to the state of Colorado for a warrant relating to a 1993 DUI arrest … This proves Edwards is presidential. Have you noticed that most presidents have embarrassing brothers? Bill Clinton had Roger Clinton; Jimmy Carter had his brother, Billy Carter. You know the embarrassing brother in the Bush family? George.”
Jay Leno
to the United States Constitution was ratified on this date in 1868. The first section of the Amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
that is, Sally Struthers, is 56 today.
was born 75 years ago today.
“It gets really humid down at sea level in the summer!”
From Northern Virginia, NewMexiKen can only add, Amen!
“I wouldn’t urinate down his throat if his heart was on fire.”
James Carville, referring to independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader (quoted by Eric Alterman)
Jesus’ General writes a letter to Army Inspector General Mikolashek.
(Photo from Jesus’ General.)
Al Gore:
I’m going to be candid with you. I had hoped to be back here this week under different circumstances, running for re-election. But you know the old saying: you win some, you lose some. And then there’s that little-known third category.
But I didn’t come here tonight to talk about the past. After all, I don’t want you to think that I lie awake at night counting and recounting sheep. I prefer to focus on the future, because I know from my own experience that America’s a land of opportunity, where every little boy and girl has a chance to grow up and win the popular vote.
Peggy Fleming is 56 today. Miss Fleming won her medal at the 1968 Winter Olympics.
made his first featured appearance in a cartoon released on this date in 1940, A Wild Hare.
the Department of Foreign Affairs (which became the Department of State), was established by Congress on this date in 1789.
“Let’s make sure that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, and that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court.”
Al Gore
1 Comment | Show Comment | Print This Post
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Powered by WordPress.
