Author: NewMexiKen

Obtaining Cheney Rally Ticket Requires Signing Bush Endorsement

From the Albuquerque Journal:

Some would-be spectators hoping to attend Vice President Dick Cheney’s rally in Rio Rancho this weekend walked out of a Republican campaign office miffed and ticketless Thursday after getting this news:
Unless you sign an endorsement for President George W. Bush, you’re not getting any passes.

The Albuquerque Bush-Cheney Victory office in charge of doling out the tickets to Saturday’s event was requiring the endorsement forms from people it could not verify as supporters.

Bush camp solicits race of Star staffer

From the Arizona Daily Star:

President Bush’s re-election campaign insisted on knowing the race of an Arizona Daily Star journalist assigned to photograph Vice President Dick Cheney.

The Star refused to provide the information.

*****

Journalists covering the president or vice president must undergo a background check and are required to provide their name, date of birth and Social Security number. The Star provided that information Thursday for Popat and this reporter.

“That’s all anybody has been asked to provide,” said Hayt, adding that this is the first time in her 26-year career that a journalist’s race was made an issue.

Help is on the way

From Zogby via Eschaton:

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%

Berger cleared

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.

Source: KYW News via Atrios

Why NewMexiKen thinks Kerry will win

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.

Best line of the day, so far

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’.

Michael Bérubé

If you saw Jaws…

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.

Henry Ford…

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.

Leno

“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

Having it both ways

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.

Terror level: Wolf

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.)

The great chain of being

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.

Save juice

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.

What would Woody do?

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.

Bring on the trial lawyers

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.

Anyone else have plans for next July?

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.

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