Saturday, October 16, 2004
Tim McCarver …
is 63 today. Do you suppose there’s any chance we’ll get lucky and he’ll retire from baseball announcing sometime soon?
Archive for October 16, 2004
Not one to complain, but …
AAA tells us the average gallon of unleaded regular in the U.S. yesterday was $1.989. It also says the record price was $2.054 a gallon in May.
In May crude oil sold for around $40 barrel. Today it is near $55 a barrel.
Why hasn’t the price at the pump kept pace with the price of crude?
How much do you think gasoline will cost after the election?
Diesel fuel prices are at a record high by the way — $2.136 yesterday.
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Filed under Energy & Gasoline Prices on October 16, 2004
Just for the record
Did you know?
[Third debate moderator] Schieffer’s younger brother, Tom Schieffer, is a former president of the Texas Rangers baseball team and is now President Bush’s ambassador to Australia.
From the Dallas Morning News via The Daily Howler.
Did Kerry blow the election?
Bob Somerby fears he did with the Mary Cheney remark:
Please don’t say: But Kerry was right. If you want to be right, go back to college. Theoretically, Kerry is trying to get elected. With cable and talk radio banging away, that comment may have screwed the whole deal.
Looks like Rio Rancho
Albuquerque readers need to check out the Nob Hill photo at Albloggerque.
Jon Stewart for President
From July 2003 interview with Bill Moyers on NOW:
STEWART: No. They vote… less than 50 percent of the country. The country is, look, the general dialogue is being swayed by the people who are ideologically driven.
The five percent on each side that are so ideological driven that they will dictate the terms of the discussion. The other 90 percent of the country have lawns to mow, and kids to pick up from schools, and money to make, and things to do. Their lives are, they have entrusted… we live in a representative democracy.
And so, we elect representatives to go do our bidding, so that we can get the leaves out of the gutter, and do the things around the house that need to be done. What the representatives have done over 200 years is set up a periphery — I think they call it the Beltway — that is obtuse enough that we can’t penetrate it anymore, unless we spend all of our time. This is the way that it’s been set up purposefully by both sides. In the financial industry, as well. They don’t want average people to easily penetrate the workings because then we call them on it.
More Jon Stewart
More NOW with Bill Moyers
From Bill Moyers’ interview with Jon Stewart, July 11, 2003:
MOYERS: I do not know… I have a confession.
STEWART: Alright.
MOYERS: I do not know whether you are practicing a old form of parody and satire.
STEWART: Uh-huh.
MOYERS: Or a new form of journalism.
STEWART: Well then that either speaks to the sad state of comedy or the sad state of news. I can’t figure out which one. I think, honestly, we’re practicing a new form of desperation. Where we just are so inundated with mixed messages from the media and from politicians that we’re just trying to sort it out for ourselves.
Boo!
Want to get in the mood for Halloween? Want to be scared? Read Ron Susskind’s article about the President in Sunday’s New York Times.
“This is why [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. “He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.”
Incisive
Video of John Stewart on Crossfire — he’s awesome.
To say that Crossfire is about debate — “that’s like saying pro-wrestling is a show about athletic competition.”
145 years ago tonight
From the Library of Congress:
Late on the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one armed followers stole into the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as most of its residents slept. The men–among them three free blacks, one freed slave, and one fugitive slave–hoped to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an “army of emancipation” to overturn the institution of slavery by force. To these ends the insurgents took some sixty prominent locals including Col. Lewis Washington (great-grand nephew of George Washington) as hostages and seized the town’s United States arsenal and its rifle works.
The upper hand which nighttime surprise had afforded the raiders quickly eroded, and by the evening of October 17, the conspirators who were still alive were holed-up in an engine house. In order to be able to distinguish between insurgents and hostages, marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee waited for daylight on October 18 to storm the building.
…
For his actions, Brown was quickly tried and convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state and sentenced to death by hanging. The simplicity and sincerity of Brown’s address after his sentencing astounded listeners on both sides of the issue. While awaiting his fate in the Harper’s Ferry jail, he received a sympathetic letter from Massachusetts writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “I think of you night and day,” she wrote, “bleeding in prison, surrounded by hostile faces, sustained only by trust in God and your own heart. I long to nurse you–to speak to you sisterly words of sympathy and consolation.”
Brown declined her offer, asking instead that she contribute to the financial support of his surviving family which included two daughters-in-law whose husbands had been killed in the raid. “Would you not,” he wrote, “as soon contribute fifty cents now, and a like sum yearly, for the relief of those very poor and deeply afflicted persons, to enable them to supply themselves and their children with bread and very plain clothing, and to enable the children to receive a common English education?”
There’s much more.
