Equinox

Spring in the northern hemisphere begins tonight at 11:48 PM Mountain Daylight Time (your time may vary).

New NewMexiKen poll (well it started out that way)

A reader has written offline to ask that NewMexiKen delete a comment — “It’s not adding anything at all to anything, and it’s just ruining a nice post.”

As a blogger who encourages comments (and requires medication whenever comments are too few), I am troubled at the thought of deleting comments — though I do reserve the right to do so and have, on occasion, done so. (Rather arbitrarily I might add.)

I thought maybe I should ask you, my seven readers, what you think. Do you come to this website seeking diversity of discussion, or do you visit here because it is a sanctuary for correct, intelligent political thinking?

Update: I decided I wasn’t comfortable with the personalization of the poll and have deleted it. I think the comments to this post have been unusually good though, and hope there will be more. Sorry about the change of heart.

Best line of the day, so far

“Hillary ████████ to release █████████ of when she was a █████████ lady”

FARK.com

Guess who?

Who do you think said this?

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

The answer is Mike Huckabee on “Morning Joe.” Transcript via Daily Kos.

Peddlers win

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

These results would vary, of course, depending on exactly what kind of car you’re using and what kind of food you eat (or, if you’re going by pedicab, what kind of food your cabbie eats). Michael Bluejay, who’s done some number-crunching at BicycleUniverse.info, says that walking is actually worse than driving if you replace the calories with food in the standard American diet and if the car gets more than 24 miles per gallon. He calculates that bicycling is a win for the environment because it’s 117 percent more efficient (in calories expended per distance) than walking is, but he’s assuming one cyclist on a regular streamlined bike, not a cabbie pulling two other people in a pedicab dealing with lot more friction and air resistance.

TierneyLab

Pointer via Freakonomics.

More Leno (and Letterman, too)

‘Cause it’s good to have the writers back.

There’s some hope, though. According to the San Gabriel Tribune, because of the high price of crude, drilling for oil in LA is profitable. Once again, Los Angeles could see oil wells popping up all over the place. A lot of people say the oil wells would be an eyesore. But, they say not to worry because they’re going to disguise them as cell phone towers.

No, they say Los Angeles could become a major oil-producing region, just like the Middle East. Only, of course, more violent.

And the Department of Homeland Security deported 280,000 illegal immigrants last year. And listen to this. They’re getting tough. They’re threatening to deport them again this year.

Hey, I’ve been watching that John Adams miniseries on HBO. Boy, it’s really good. You know, it’s fun to see all the Founding Fathers. They’re all in it. John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John McCain.

— Jay Leno

There’s a quiz that you can take to tell if your spouse is cheating. Question No. 1: Is your spouse a governor?

Vice President Dick Cheney. You know where he is right now? He’s in Baghdad. He visited there. While he was in Iraq, he said it’s a “successful endeavor.” At least I think that’s what he said. It was hard to hear over the explosions.

How about the economy? George Bush earlier today reassured the country about the economy. He said, “I’m on top of it,” and I said to myself, well, that’s good enough for me.

— David Letterman

Exactly!

“Today, Barack Obama addressed some of the more controversial comments made by his longtime minister, Jeremiah Wright. The guy said some crazy stuff, like, gays caused 9/11, Hurricane Katrina was God’s revenge for our sins. Oh, I’m sorry. That’s Pat Robertson. That’s the other side’s nutball minister.”

Jay Leno

Crazy Muslim or crazy Christian?

I’ll let this play out before I render judgment on this issue, but it really puts Obama’s smear merchants in a bind — do they push false rumors that he’s a secret Muslim bent on delivering America to Al Qaida, or is he a member of an intolerant and radical black Christian church?

kos

Let’s hope it’s a case of two negatives being a positive.

Though some (including a frequent commenter here at NMK) are capable of holding contradictory thoughts.

March 19th

Bruce Willis is 53 today, Glenn Close is 61 and Ursula Andress is 72.

Philip Roth is 75 today.

Roth’s novels often feature smart, middle-class, fiercely honest Jewish characters. Perhaps Roth’s best-known character is Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in nine of his novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral (1997 ) and his most recent novel, Exit Ghost (2007). Zuckerman, like Roth, is a novelist, and Roth has noted that the books featuring Zuckerman are like “hypothetical autobiographies” — ideas of what Roth might be doing. However, Roth has said that Exit Ghost will be the final appearance of Nathan Zuckerman. In an interview with The New Yorker after the book’s release, Roth said of Zuckerman’s departure, “Will I miss him? No. I’m curious to see who and what will replace him.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Congress approved Daylight Saving Time on this date in 1918. Word hasn’t reached Arizona.

Bob Dylan’s first album, titled Bob Dylan, was released 46 years ago today.

Wyatt Earp was born on this date in 1848. He died in 1929, age 80. Larry McMurtry had an essay on Earp, Back to the O.K. Corral in The New York Review of Books three years ago. (You can read the whole article for $3.)

I am talking, of course, about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which, for starters, wasn’t fought in the O.K. Corral—the shooting occurred across the street in a vacant lot adjacent to the local photographer Camillus Fry’s rooming house. Some say the shooting only lasted fifteen seconds; others give it twenty seconds, or even thirty. Local estimate was that some thirty shots were fired, at close if not quite point blank range. Three men were killed and three wounded. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was neither more nor less violent than a number of shootings that had occurred in Tombstone or its environs in the few short years of the community’s existence. It solved nothing, proved nothing, meant nothing; and yet, 123 years later, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is reenacted every day in Tombstone, Arizona, to paying customers—lots of paying customers.

The most recent O.K. Corral movie stars Kevin Costner as Wyatt; the next most recent, released a few months earlier, stars Kurt Russell as Wyatt, with Val Kilmer as Doc. There are so many gunfight-at-the O.K.-Corral movies that they constitute a kind of subgenre of the western. In the most lyrical version, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp.

What I’m wondering is why, in this day and time, anyone should care about Wyatt Earp, or any Earp, or the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, either. The Battle of the Little Bighorn at least offers heroism, spectacle, and mass, whereas the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was merely a bungled arrest. Virgil Earp, not Wyatt, was the peace officer in charge that day. How do we get from a bungled arrest to Henry Fonda, Hugh O’Brian, Burt Lancaster, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, and all the other movie land Wyatts? I’d like to know.

Three-time Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States, “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan was born on March 19th in 1860. Bryan is known most for his “Cross of Gold Speech,” which got him the nomination in 1896, and at the Scopes evolution trial in 1925, where his dogmatic views were seen by some as indicative of American ignorance and anti-intellectualism.

Best line of the day

“Molly Ivins once wrote that she didn’t support gun control because she hated guns, but because she just liked to see knife fights.”

Earl Warren

… was born in Los Angeles on this date in 1891.

Among the decisions the Supreme Court made under Warren as Chief Justice were those that:

• Outlawed school segregation.
• Enunciated the one-man, one-vote doctrine.
• Made most of the Bill of Rights binding on the states.
• Curbed wiretapping.
• Upheld the right to be secure against “unreasonable” searches and seizures.
• Buttressed the right to counsel.
• Underscored the right to a jury trial.
• Barred racial discrimination in voting, in marriage laws, in the use of public parks, airports and bus terminals and in housing sales and rentals.
• Extended the boundaries of free speech.
• Ruled out compulsory religious exercises in public schools.
• Restored freedom of foreign travel.
• Knocked out the application of both the Smith and the McCarran Acts–both designed to curb “subversive” activities.
• Held that Federal prisoners could sue the Government for injuries sustained in jail.
• Said that wages could not be garnished without a hearing.
• Liberalized residency requirements for welfare recipients.
• Sustained the right to disseminate and receive birth control information.

(Source: The New York Times)

Warren’s parents were born in Norway (father) and Sweden (mother). Elected governor of California three times (1942, 1946, 1950), Warren was so popular he won both the Democratic and Republican primaries in 1946. The darkest mark against Warren’s public service was the wartime internment of Japanese Americans.

President Eisenhower appointed Warren chief justice in 1953; he retired from the Court in 1969. NewMexiKen considers Warren the most significant historical figure I’ve ever seen in person (briefly at the 1964 New York World’s Fair) — and I’ve seen five presidents.

The Speech

So what do you think? Was it a good speech? Did it serve Obama well? Did it serve the country well?

Did you even watch it, or part of it, or read it? Why? Why not?

Here’s the text.

Here’s the video (37 minutes, 39 seconds).

Uh oh

The entire premise of Barack Obama’s candidacy is built upon the opposite assumption — that Americans are not only able, but eager, to participate in a more elevated and reasoned political discourse, one that moves beyond the boisterous, screeching, simple-minded, ugly, vapid attack-based distractions and patronizing manipulation — the Drudgian Freak Show — that has dominated our political debates for the last two decades at least.

Glenn Greenwald

Can aspiring to our better angels succeed in 2008 America?

Here’s someone who thinks it might.

Meanwhile, liberals are shrill

It was going to be so easy.