WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Ushering in what it is calling “a new era of civility in American political discourse,” the Republican leadership in Congress said today that from now on it would acknowledge that President Barack Obama was born “near America.”
There’s more at the Borowitz Report.
. . . is “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” sung by Iris DeMent.
You’ll need the soundtrack album to get that version, but you can pick up her 2004 version for 99¢ from iTunes.
Here she is with another song, “Let the Mystery Be,” with Russ Barenberg on guitar, Jay Ungar with the fiddle, Molly Mason on bass and Donal Lunny with the bouzouki (a Greek instrument similar to a mandolin).
You don’t have your address and phone number as part of your Facebook profile, do you?
Well, according to reports, Facebook is now sharing your address and phone number with its development partners.
… of Betty White. The character actress, who first appeared on television in 1949, and most famous now for The Golden Girls, is 89. Miss White has been nominated for 19 Emmy Awards, winning five times. I saw a promo during yesterday’s Jets-Patriot game that featured both Betty White and Steven Tyler (62). Ms. White looks by far the best of the two.
… of James Earl Jones. The voice of Darth Vader is 80. Jones has been in more than 130 films and appeared on more than 50 television programs. He was nominated for the 1971 best actor Oscar for The Great White Hope.
… of Muhammad Ali. The Champ is 69.
… of Bangle Susanna Hoffs, now 52.
… of Jim Carrey. The comedian is 49.
… of Kid Rock. Not so much the Kid anymore at 40.
And it’s the birthday of Al Capone, born in Naples, Italy, in 1899. Here’s some of the background from his obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1947 at the age of 48.
Alphonse (Scarface) Capone, the fat boy from Brooklyn, was a Horatio Alger hero–underworld version. More than any other one man he represented, at the height of his power from 1925 through 1931, the debauchery of the “dry” era. He seized and held in thrall during that period the great city of Chicago and its suburbs.
Head of the cruelest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War I hand grenade.
His infamy made international legend. In France, for example, he was “The One Who Is Scarred.” He was the symbol of the ultimate in American lawlessness.
Capone won great wealth; how much, no one will ever know, except that the figure was fantastic. He remained immune from prosecution for his multitudinous murders (including the St. Valentine Day Massacre in 1929 when his gunners, dressed as policemen, trapped and killed eight of the Bugs Moran bootleg outfit in a Chicago garage), but was brought to book, finally, on the comparatively sissy charge of evasion of income taxes amounting to around $215,000.
For this, he was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison–serving first at Atlanta, then on The Rock, at Alcatraz–and was fined $50,000, with $20,000 additional for costs. With time out for good conduct, he finished this sentence in mid-January of 1939; but by then he was a slack- jawed paretic overcome by social disease, and paralytic to boot.
. . . was born on this date in 1706*.
As one biographer, Walter Isaacson, states:
[Franklin] was, during his eighty-four-year-Iong life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and cleanburning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.
But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
__________
* Actually it was January 6, 1705, when Benjamin Franklin was born. The calendar was changed in the American Colonies in 1752, adding 11 days and making January 1st the beginning of the year.
Above by Benjamin Franklin.
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is 47 today.
“We should learn a lot from the new session of Congress. For example, how politicians define ‘civil.’ ”
From a hockey game in Norfolk. Worth watching through to the end. Trust me. (Except for one woman’s inexplicable laugh.)
“Not to be uncivil, Mr. President, but some of my fellow citizens are morons.”
Charles Pierce noting that a gun store near Knoxville, Tennessee, is having Shoot [former] Coach Lane [Kiffin]’s Bobble-Head Day this weekend.
“4. Get your insults right. There is, I believe, a fair bit of evidence against the hypothesis that I’m stupid. What you mean to say is that I’m evil.”
On January 13, 1833, President Andrew Jackson wrote Vice President Martin Van Buren expressing his opposition to South Carolina’s defiance of federal authority. He closed with the assertion, “nothing must be permitted to weaken our government at home or abroad.”
The Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 erupted the previous November when South Carolina nullified a federal tariff that favored Northern manufacturing over Southern agriculture. Complicating matters, Jackson’s vice president at that time, South Carolina native John C. Calhoun, firmly believed states had the right to overrule federal laws. South Carolinians agreed and planned to use armed force to prevent duty collection in the state after February 1, 1833.
Calhoun developed the idea of nullification—first put forth in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798—as a strategy for the South to preserve slavery in the face of a Northern majority in Congress. His support of the measure, disclosed midway through his term, was not shared by President Jackson who feared nullification’s power to split the Union. This difference of opinion permanently distanced the president and vice president.
The crisis was resolved without bloodshed in March 1833. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, who had left the vice presidency at the end of 1832 to serve South Carolina in the Senate, drafted a reduced tariff agreement that pacified South Carolina while allowing the Federal government to stand firm. On December 10, 1833, Jackson responded to South Carolina’s recalcitrance with a Proclamation to the People of South Carolina. Considered the greatest state paper of the era, Jackson promised to uphold the federal tariff and warned “disunion by armed force is treason.”
“It may be hard for most people to think of chewing gum as a remedy for anything other than a case of bad breath. But several studies in recent years have shown that it can in fact help alleviate the symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease, better known to most people as GERD or heartburn.”
Mr. Estes has made the correction.
The last of the Nelsons has died, David dead from colon cancer at 74. The show, “Ozzie and Harriet” was on the radio from 1946 and TV from 1952-1966.
“Ozzie and Harriet” laid the groundwork for other mild, family sitcoms like “Leave It to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best,” but it also had a weirdly postmodern and prescient aspect to it: the four Nelsons were, in some ways, television’s first reality stars.
The show was scripted, but the characters were based on the Nelsons themselves, named after the Nelsons themselves and, from 1949, when 12-year-old David and 8-year-old Ricky replaced the actors who had initially voiced their roles on the radio, played by the Nelsons themselves. Their actual Los Angeles home was used in filming, and a reproduction of its interior was built in the studio. When David and Rick married in real life, their wives were incorporated into the show.
David Nelson was probably the least prominent of the four characters, dully mature as a son, quietly sage as an older brother. (In one departure from reality, his character graduated from college and became a lawyer.) Ozzie was the know-it-all dad whose presumptions often got him into trouble and drove the story. Harriet was the wisely, teasingly understanding helpmeet, and young Ricky was the adorable one, the mischievous boy who mispronounced words, made wisecracks, grew up impossibly handsome and became a pop star.
Ozzie died in 1975, Harriet in 1994. Rick Nelson was killed in a plane crash in 1985. To anyone my age, losing a Nelson was losing a member of the family.
“You want to know who to put in charge of national security? It should be the people who run Disney World. Mickey and Donald and Goofy are nice, but if you cross them, they will make your family disappear in the middle of the night.”
Author Brad Meltzer quoted at USATODAY.com
In the case of our visit to the “Happiest Place on Earth” last month, the above is literally true.
Today is the birthday
… of Ray Price. Still for the good times at 85.
When Ray Noble Price was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996, many noted that the honor was long overdue. Such feelings weren’t based so much on the longevity of his career or on the number of major hits he has recorded, for in those regards Price was no different from many other deserving artists awaiting induction. More importantly, Price has been one of country’s great innovators. He changed the sound of country music from the late 1950s forward by developing a rhythmic brand of honky-tonk that has been hugely influential ever since. As steel guitarist Don Helms, a veteran of Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys once put it, “Ray Price created an era.”
… of Glenn Yarbrough. He’s 81.
… of William Lee Golden. The big, bearded member, but not the bass voice, of the Oak Ridge Boys is 72.
… of Smokin’ Joe Frazier. The champ is 67.
… of Cynthia Robinson. She’s dancing to the music at 67 (Sly and the Family Stone).
You might like to hear the horns blowin’,
Cynthia on the throne, yeah!
Cynthia & Jerry got a message they’re sayin’:
[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!
… of Kirstie Alley. She’s 60.
… of the most dangerous man in America, Rush Limbaugh. The audio-terrorist is 60.
… of Howard Stern. He’s 57.
… of broadcast journalist Christiane Amanpour. She’s 53.
… of actor Oliver Platt, 51.
… of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. The billionaire is 47.
… of Naya Rivera of Glee. The high school cheerleader is 24.
Jack London was born in San Francisco on this date in 1876. London wrote more than 50 books, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang (1906). His most unforgettable story may be To Build a Fire. London died at age 40. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor has a long profile from its archives.
John Hancock was born on this date in 1737. Hancock was President of the Continental Congress of the United States of America in the summer of 1776. He was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence.
“It’s a shame, really, that the grown-up snow day means working from home and periodically going out to shovel the front walk. If you were a sensible eleven-year-old, you spent blizzards playing outside or sitting in your pajamas watching daytime television (never mind that ‘working from home’ might mean the same thing).”
“One of the great ironies of the Tucson shootings is that the initial call for everyone in America to simply talk more civilly to one another has mainly resulted in everyone in America becoming angrier and crazier.”
Look closely at the crossing arms. Photo taken today from Virginia Railway Express train leaving Manassas.
“Glock sales soar after Arizona rampage”
Bloomberg reports that Arizonans are rushing to pick up the $499 semi-automatic. According to one store owner, “We’re at double our volume over what we usually do.” This was two days after the shooting.
Another stat: one-day Arizona Glock sales jumped 60 percent Jan. 10 compared with the corresponding Monday last year. And it’s not isolated to the Grand Canyon state, either.
It’s an atrocity.
There’s a difference.
“You know why I made the second basket? Because the first one felt so good.”
Kiley, age 8, after scoring 4 of her team’s 8 points in her first ever basketball game. Final score: 8-8 in OT.
