Best line of the day, so far

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot. This will make it tough for Mickey Mouse, even if registered, to vote, no matter how big, round, or black his ears. Likewise, members of the Duck family (Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) who turn up at the polling place will have a hard time getting into the voting booth. (Uncle Scrooge might be able to bribe his way in, but he’s voting Republican anyway.)

Hendrik Hertzberg, who has more, including this:

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that despite all the hysteria, from 2002 to 2005, only twenty people in the entire United States of America were found guilty of voting while ineligible and only five of voting more than once.

October 15th

Today is the birthday

… of Lee Iacocca. The former Ford executive and Chrysler chairman is back on television in ads at 84.

… of Barry McGuire. The rock/folk singer is 73. NewMexiKen suspects the “Eve of Destruction” is even closer at hand.

… of Linda Lavin. Television’s “Alice” is 71.

… of Penny Marshall. The actress turned director is 66.

… of Jim Palmer. The baseball hall-of-famer is 63. We don’t see him in those underwear ads as often anymore. Palmer won World Series games in three decades (1966, 1970 and 1971, 1983).

… of Richard Carpenter. Karen’s brother is 62.

… of Emeril Lagasse. The TV chef is 49.

… of Sarah Ferguson. She’s 49.

… of Dominic West, foremost of The Wire, 39.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith was born 100 years ago today. Galbraith once wrote a speech for President Lyndon Johnson. Galbraith was a very prominent economist and not a speech writer, but he worked diligently on the draft and was impressed with what he produced. It was given to LBJ who, out of respect for the economist, told him personally what he thought. “Ken,” LBJ said. “Writing a speech is a lot like wetting your pants. What feels warm and comforting to you can just seem cold and sticky to everyone else.” Galbraith died in 2006.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was born 91 years ago today. By the time of his death in 2006 Schlesinger had become a celebrity — a person known mostly for being well-known — but he was the winner of two Pulitizer Prizes in history — The Age of Jackson and A Thousand Days.

Before Schlesinger, historians thought of American democracy as the product of an almost mystical frontier or agrarian egalitarianism. The Age of Jackson toppled that interpretation by placing democracy’s origins firmly in the context of the founding generation’s ideas about the few and the many, and by seeing democracy’s expansion as an outcome of struggles between classes, not sections. More than any previous account, Schlesinger’s examined the activities and ideas of obscure, ordinary Americans, as well as towering political leaders. While he identified most of the key political events and changes of the era, Schlesinger also located the origins of modern liberal politics in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and in their belief, as he wrote, that future challenges “will best be met by a society in which no single group is able to sacrifice democracy and liberty to its interests.”

Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Seems pertinent enough today.

Mario Puzo was born on October 15th in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac told us this in 2004:

[Puzo is] best known as the author of the novel The Godfather (1969), which was made into a movie in 1972. People had written novels and made movies about the mafia before, but the mafia characters had always been the villains. Puzo was the first person to write about members of the mafia as the sympathetic main characters of a story. The son of Italian immigrants, he started out trying to write serious literary fiction. He published two novels that barely sold any copies. He fell into debt, trying to support his family as a freelance writer. One Christmas Eve, he had a severe gall bladder attack and took a cab to the hospital. When he got out of the cab, he was in so much pain that he fell into the gutter. Lying there, he said to himself, “Here I am, a published writer, and I am dying like a dog.” He vowed that he would devote the rest of his writing life to becoming rich and famous. The Godfather became the best-selling novel of the 1970s, and many critics credit Puzo with inventing the mafia as a serious literary and cinematic subject. He went on to publish many other books, including The Sicilian (1984) and The Last Don (1996), but he always felt that his best book was the last book he wrote before he became a success – The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), about an ordinary Italian immigrant family.

Puzo died in 1999.

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson was born on October 15, 1872. The 59-year-old president and widower Woodrow Wilson married the 43-year-old widow Mrs. Galt in 1915. (Michael Douglas was 51 and Annette Benning 37 when they played a fictional “first couple” in the 1995 film The American President.)

[President Wilson’s] health failed in September 1919; a stroke left him partly paralyzed. His constant attendant, Mrs. Wilson took over many routine duties and details of government. But she did not initiate programs or make major decisions, and she did not try to control the executive branch. She selected matters for her husband’s attention and let everything else go to the heads of departments or remain in abeyance. Her “stewardship,” she called this. And in My Memoir, published in 1939, she stated emphatically that her husband’s doctors had urged this course upon her.

The White House

Mrs. Wilson lived until 1961.

Not yet anyway

Name the major league teams that have never been to a World Series.

Washington Senators/Texas Rangers (48 seasons)

Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals (40 seasons)

Seattle Mariners (32 seasons)

Tampa Bay Devil Rays (11 seasons)

Go Rays!

(The Rockies left this list last year in their 15th season.)

Make-Believe Maverick

In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

From Tim Dickinson’s terrific profile of McCain in Rolling Stone.

Capital gains?

NewMexiKen is trying (somewhat at least) to learn more about this economy thing, but I still confess to a lot of ignorance.

Even so, I have a question.

  • Housing prices are down and most experts expect them to drop some more
  • Stocks are way down across the board, Monday’s boom notwithstanding
  • Businesses are facing a serious downturn — fewer Christmas hires an indication in one story I saw

A major part of McCain’s economic recovery plan is to reduce the tax on long-term capital gains to 7.5 percent from 15 percent for 2009 and 2010.

Where exactly are these capital gains going to be coming from in 2009 and 2010?

List of National Book Awards Finalists

American conflicts — from slavery to the Civil War to the war on terror — dominated the non-fiction finalists for the National Book Awards, which were announced on Wednesday.

“The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, a chronicle of the Bush administration in the post-9/11 era by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was joined by Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” a historical account of that war’s massive death toll; Annette Gordon-Reed’s “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a biography of the slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson; and Jim Sheeler’s “Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives,” adapted from his Pulitzer Prize-winning work in the Rocky Mountain News about soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The category was rounded out by Joan Wickersham’s personal memoir “The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order.”

The finalists in the fiction category offered a mixture of veterans and new authors. The five nominees include “Home: A Novel,” the third novel by Marilynne Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for her 2004 novel “Gilead”; “Shadow Country,” by Peter Matthiessen, a founder of the Paris Review; and “The Lazarus Project,” by the Bosnian author Aleksandar Hemon. They are joined by Rachel Kushner’s debut novel “Telex From Cuba” and “The End,” the first novel by Salvatore Scibona.

The New York Times

Winners will be announced November 19th.

An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

So begins Michael Pollan in a lengthy — but very worthwhile — article in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

Pollan is the author of the must-read The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006) and this year’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

Best late night line

“And yesterday, at a rally in Virginia, they played the theme to ‘Rocky’ as John McCain walked out on stage. Does John McCain look like Rocky to you? Doesn’t he look more like the Burgess Meredith character?”

Jay Leno

Leno continued:

“Why would McCain want to be like Rocky? Didn’t Rocky get the hell kicked out of him by the black guy? Hello?”

Best paragraph of the day, so far

Tell me you’re not ashamed to put this gigantic international financial Krakatoa at the feet of a bunch of poor black people who missed their mortgage payments. The CDS market, this market for credit default swaps that was created in 2000 by Phil Gramm’s Commodities Future Modernization Act, this is now a $62 trillion market, up from $900 billion in 2000. That’s like five times the size of the holdings in the NYSE. And it’s all speculation by Wall Street traders. It’s a classic bubble/Ponzi scheme. The effort of people like you to pin this whole thing on minorities, when in fact this whole thing has been caused by greedy traders dealing in unregulated markets, is despicable.

Matt Taibbi to Byron York of National Review.

York seemed not to know even what a credit default swap (CDS) is. More from Taibbi:

Do you even know how a CDS works? Can you explain your conception of how these derivatives work? Because I get the feeling you don’t understand. Or do you actually think that it was a few tiny homeowner defaults that sank gigantic companies like AIG and Lehman and Bear Stearns? Explain to me how these default swaps work, I’m interested to hear.

Because what we’re talking about here is the difference between one homeowner defaulting and forty, four hundred, four thousand traders betting back and forth on the viability of his loan. Which do you think has a bigger effect on the economy?

Best line of the day, so far

“Money … has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), quoted today by Tom Friedman.

The Republican voter fraud hoax

Barack Obama and the Democrats are stealing the election. Massive voter fraud is being carried out, even as we speak, by their henchmen, known by the innocuous sounding Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now, or Acorn. Clever bastards.

The only problem? Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of “Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states” as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it’s true. None of it.

. . .

You’ll hear that Donald Duck, Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy, Mickey Mouse and (new this year) the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team have all had fraudulent registrations submitted in their names. That’s true. And we know this, why? Because Acorn told officials about it when they followed the law and turned in those registrations, flagged as fraudulent.

What you won’t hear is that federal law requires anybody who does not register to vote in person at the county office to show an ID when they go to vote the first time. So, unless Donald Duck shows up with his ID, he won’t be voting this November. You needn’t worry, no matter how much even John McCain himself cynically and dishonourably tries to mislead you.

If it quacks like a duck, in this case, it’s likely another Republican Acorn voter fraud lie. They haul it out every two years.

Brad Friedman – guardian.co.uk. There’s more.

MRSA

Infections like this patient’s are caused by a nasty bug we call Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. The bacteria, and the infections they can cause, used to be confined mostly to surgical wounds in hospitals and chronic wounds in nursing homes. But now the same tough-to-kill bacteria are occurring in the community, and I’m seeing a lot more of them.

About 85% of MRSA infections can be traced back to a hospital stay and two-thirds occur after a patient has arrived back home. But 15% of the infections can’t be linked to a hospitalization. That was the case for my construction worker.

. . .

The basics of MRSA prevention are hand washing, wiping down surfaces and covering cuts. Keeping personal care items separated from others also helps. For more information on MRSA and how to prevent its spread, see this report from the Mayo Clinic.

MRSA spreads easily in close quarters like classrooms, locker rooms and lunch rooms. I’ve seen several cases from tanning beds. Athletes should shower right after practice. The same goes for anyone using shared equipment at the gym.

The CDC has voiced concern that antibacterial cleaning products may be making the situation worse by spurring the resistance of germs.

Around the office, we’re relying on disinfectants like bleach more than antibacterial cleaners. We’re washing hands and wiping down surfaces after each visit.

Benjamin Brewer, M.D. – WSJ.com has more.

What Your House Says About Your Politics

I’m not talking big house vs. small house — that’s too easy, and simplistic. A new study in The Journal of Political Psychology looks at the state of your house — are you messy or a neatnik? — and what that says about your politics.

mental_floss Blog has the story. Here’s the underlying report from Scientific American.

NewMexiKen was mostly attracted to this whole thing by the discussion we once had here and the Berenstain Bears book cover.

Obama Wins

It’s official. At least for the kids! The Scholastic Presidential Election Poll results are in: Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama won with 57 percent of the vote, to 39 percent for Republican nominee Senator John McCain.

The poll was open to kids from grades 1 to 12 in Scholastic News and Junior Scholastic magazines. Almost 250,000 (a quarter of a million) kids voted by paper ballot or online at www.scholastic.com/news. The poll closed on October 10.

Since 1940, the results of the student vote have mirrored the outcome of the general election all but twice: In 1948, kids voted for Thomas E. Dewey over Harry S. Truman. In 1960, more students voted for Richard M. Nixon than for John F. Kennedy.

Scholastic.com

The Obama Effect?

At another panel at the Time Warner Summit, TechPresident co-founder Andrew Rasiej, talking with his fellow panelists about the recent coverage given to the Bradley Effect, made a prediction. “What we’re going to see is the Obama Effect,” he said: Obama over-performing because of people who secretly wanted to vote for him, but were afraid to say so.

CJR