Month: October 2008

Best line of the day, so far

“The Democrats are terrified. They’re convinced something terrible is going to happen because something terrible always happens. . . .

“It’s like the curse of the Bambino. The Democrats fear they’re under a jinx because they committed some sin, the political equivalent of trading away Babe Ruth. If so, it probably started with nominating Joe Lieberman for vice president.”

Gail Collins

In any country with its priorities straight

… today would be a holiday.

It’s Chuck Berry’s birthday. He’s 82.

While no individual can be said to have invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry comes the closest of any single figure to being the one who put all the essential pieces together. It was his particular genius to graft country & western guitar licks onto a rhythm & blues chassis in his very first single, “Maybellene.” Combined with quick-witted, rapid-fire lyrics full of sly insinuations about cars and girls, Berry laid the groundwork for not only a rock and roll sound but a rock and roll stance. The song included a brief but scorching guitar solo built around his trademark double-string licks. Accompanied by long-time piano player Johnnie Johnson and members of the Chess Records house band, including Willie Dixon, Berry wrote and performed rock and roll for the ages. To this day, the cream of Berry’s repertoire—which includes “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Rock and Roll Music” and “Roll Over Beethoven”—is required listening for any serious rock fan and required learning for any serious rock musician.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

Levi Stubbs, Four Tops Singer

DETROIT – Levi Stubbs, the gravelly voiced, plaintive lead singer of the Motown group the Four Tops, the group’s front man in 1960s pop classics like “Reach Out (I’ll Be There),” and “Bernadette,” died Friday at his home here. He was 72.

The New York Times has an interesting article about Stubbs and the Tops.

“His voice was as unique as Marvin’s or as Smokey’s or as Stevie’s.”

They adopted the name in 1954 and were together until the first member died in 1997. One member, Abdul “Duke” Fakir, survives.

A billion here a billion there

You know that $700 billion that John McCain and Barack Obama say we’re sending to “tyrants and dictators” because of our dependence on foreign oil? It doesn’t exist. In fact, it appears that Boone Pickens made it up.

I only know this thanks to the A.P.’s H. Josef Hebert, who just did a tremendous piece on the mythology behind the $700 billion number. Pickens seems to have come up with the number by simply multiplying the number of barrels of petroleum products we import every year by $145, which happens to be oil’s peak price this year (and it’s peak price of all time, for that matter).

The Balance Sheet

The actual amount we send to our “enemies” for oil is more likely less than $100 billion. Click on the link to learn why.

Buy American. I Am.

Warren Buffett is bullish on America. He writes why, beginning with:

The financial world is a mess, both in the United States and abroad. Its problems, moreover, have been leaking into the general economy, and the leaks are now turning into a gusher. In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary.

So … I’ve been buying American stocks.

ABC News: McCain Acorn Fears Overblown

Citing a Republican former Department of Justice lawyer, ABC concludes the voter fraud charges are meaningless.

But McCain’s voter fraud worries – about Acorn or anyone else – are unsupported by the facts, said experts on election fraud, who recall similar concerns being raised in several previous elections, despite a near-total absence of cases.

“There’s no evidence that any of these invalid registrations lead to any invalid votes,” said David Becker, project director of the “Make Voting Work” initiative for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Becker should know: he was a lawyer for the Bush administration until 2005, in the Justice Department’s voting rights section, which was part of the administration’s aggressive anti-vote-fraud effort.

“The Justice Department really made prosecution of voter fraud of this sort a big priority in the first half of this decade, and they really didn’t come up with anything,” he said.

ABC News

Other Republicans have made similar remarks — Florida Governor Crist among them.

In NewMexiKen’s opinion, trying to take away a person’s vote is about as low as politicians can go.

October 17

Arthur Miller, the playwright (The Crucible, Death of a Salesman) and one-time husband of Marilyn Monroe, was born on this date in 1915.

n the period immediately following the end of World War II, American theater was transformed by the work of playwright Arthur Miller. Profoundly influenced by the Depression and the war that immediately followed it, Miller tapped into a sense of dissatisfaction and unrest within the greater American psyche. His probing dramas proved to be both the conscience and redemption of the times, allowing people an honest view of the direction the country had taken.

American Masters

Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth was born on this date in 1918.

Montgomery Clift was born on October 17 in 1920. Clift was nominated for the best actor Oscar three times and supporting actor once. He played Prewitt, the bugler who won’t box, in From Here to Eternity.

It’s also the birthday

… of Jimmy Breslin. The columnist is 78.

… of Margot Kidder. Lois Lane is 60.

… of George Wendt. Norm is 60.

Sam: What’ll you have Normie?
Norm: Well, I’m in a gambling mood Sammy. I’ll take a glass of whatever comes out of that tap.
Sam: Looks like beer, Norm.
Norm: Call me Mister Lucky.

… of country singer Alan Jackson; he’s 50.

… of golfer Ernie Els, 39.

And of Marshall Mathers, better known as Eminem. He’s 36.

Early Action

A fun essay from Joel Stein on early voters. One excerpt:

But I was interested less in which candidate Hamilton County will vote for than in finding out what kind of person votes a month before the election. To my shock, none of them told me they were voting early “to avoid old people.” Equally surprising, no one found that question to be strange. The voters were, however, dubious about my professionalism when I asked whether “people sometimes call them anal”–though 36% said yes. Also, 36% had already done some Christmas shopping and their taxes, 44% applied early admission to college, and one-third had stamps on them. Two even said they don’t carry stamps because they pay all their bills online. One woman was saving her I VOTED sticker so she could wear it on Election Day. If all Americans were like early voters, we’d have a perfectly run country that would get beat up by all the other countries.

Read it all and be sure to read his results, too.

Uh oh

It appears the McCain campaign didn’t vet Joe the Plumber any more than they did Sarah the Hockey Mom.

Update: Last item found to be incorrect. Same name, no relation.

Insightful

From a John Stewart interview with Bill Moyers on NOW July 2003:

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.

16 October

Angela Lansbury is 83 today. Lansbury was 36 when she played 34-year-old Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate. For that alone she deserved the Academy Award nomination she received; it was her third supporting actress nomination.

Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass is 81.

Suzanne Somers turns 62 today. (No NewMexiKen’s kids, you’re still not allowed to watch Three’s Company.)

Tim Robbins is 50 today. Robbins won a supporting actor Oscar for Mystic River and received a best director nomination for Dead Man Walking. Hard to beat his portrayal of Andy Dufresne, though.

John Mayer is 31 today.

Nobel and Pulitizer Prize winner Eugene O’Neill was born on October 16th in 1888.

Eugene O’Neill was one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity. O’Neill’s disdain for the commercial realities of the theater world he was born into led him to produce works of importance and integrity.

American Masters

John Brown began his famous raid on this date in 1859:

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.

Library of Congress

Marie Antoinette’s head became estranged from the rest of her body on this date in 1793.

A U-shaped recession — that’s the good news

Nouriel Roubini was on Charlie Rose Tuesday.

Roubini, the NYU economics professor, has been proven correct so far in his forecasts of financial doom. In February he laid out 12-steps to financial disaster — and we’ve gone through all 12!

Roubini believes the radical actions taken over the past week have avoided a catastrophe. Instead of an L-shaped recession (10 years to recovery, like Japan), we will have a severe, “long and protracted” U-shaped recession “lasting at least two years.” Hundreds of banks are going to go belly-up. “Very, very painful.”

Swell.

The interview is about 8-minutes and quite interesting, though requiring attention due to Roubini’s Turkish accent and the details of the matters at hand.