H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken

… essayist and editor, was born on September 12th in 1880. I’ve posted many of these before, but Mencken has some great lines that I never tire of reading:

  • Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
  • A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
  • It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
  • The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
  • It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
  • Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
  • No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
  • Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
  • I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Magic Marker Strategy

Live along the Texas coast and don’t want to evacuate? Consider this.

Instead of relying on a “Good Samaritan” policy – the fantasy in New Orleans that everyone would take care of the neighbors – the Virginia rescue workers go door to door. If people resist the plea to leave, Mr. Judkins told The Daily Press in Newport News, rescue workers give them Magic Markers and ask them to write their Social Security numbers on their body parts so they can be identified.

“It’s cold, but it’s effective,” Mr. Judkins explained.

Reported by John Tierney in 2005.

Beneath the veneer

Palin doesn’t have the foggiest idea what the Bush Doctrine is. Literally, not a clue about the guiding U.S. foreign policy principle of the last seven years. When she tried to fudge it, her ignorance on the issue was even more glaring.

Second, she really didn’t want to answer an important question about U.S. strikes in Pakistan. It’s not like this was a curveball — the issue was in yesterday’s New York Times. Eventually, after trying to wiggle out of the question, Palin eventually seemed to support unilateral strikes, which contradicts the stated McCain policy.

Third, Palin believes Russia was “unprovoked” in its military incursion against Georgia. That’s just wrong.

Fourth, instead of waving off hypothetical questions about wars with massive nuclear powers, Palin openly suggested it “perhaps” would be necessary to go to war with Russia.

Steve Benen, The Washington Monthly

Why it matters

James Fallows explains what Sarah Palin’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine (in her interview with Charles Gibson) reveals. This is an excerpt from a longer piece worth reading in full.

Each of us has areas we care about, and areas we don’t. If we are interested in a topic, we follow its development over the years. And because we have followed its development, we’re able to talk and think about it in a “rounded” way. We can say: Most people think X, but I really think Y. Or: most people used to think P, but now they think Q. Or: the point most people miss is Z. Or: the question I’d really like to hear answered is A.

Here’s the most obvious example in daily life: Sports Talk radio.
 
Mention a name or theme — Brett Favre, the Patriots under Belichick, Lance Armstrong’s comeback, Venus and Serena — and anyone who cares about sports can have a very sophisticated discussion about the ins and outs and myth and realities and arguments and rebuttals.

. . .

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Gasoline price status report

According to AAA, the cost of a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline nationwide averages 10.8% less than the record high price in mid-July.

The price today is still 30% higher than it was a year ago.

Average for unleaded regular September 11, 2008: $3.671.

The price of a barrel of crude oil is down 31% since July.

HOWEVER, this from AP:

The wholesale price of gasoline ranged from $4 to nearly $5 a gallon at the U.S. Gulf Coast on Thursday, said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst of the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, N.J. That was up significantly from about $3 to $3.30 a gallon on Wednesday, Kloza said.

“We’re looking at the highest wholesale prices ever for a huge swath of the country,” he said. “People understand that regardless what happens with Ike, it’s going to shut down the biggest refining cluster for a period of five, six, seven days.”

The wholesale price of gasoline is what refineries charge retailers. Retailers then mark up those prices for the customer so they can make a profit — so if these wholesale prices hold, it could mean that pump prices for U.S. drivers easily break through the July 17 record of $4.114 a gallon.

September 11

Two immortal football coaches share this birthday. Paul “Bear” Bryant was born on this date in 1913. Tom Landry was born on this date in 1924.

Musician Leo Kottke is 63.

One-time Oscar nominee Amy Madigan is 58.

Sportscaster Lesley Visser is 55. Visser was the first woman to receive the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award.

Oscar nominee for best supporting actress for her performance in Sideways, Virginia Madsen is 47.

Kristy McNichol is 46.

Harry Connick Jr. is 41. He grew up in New Orleans where his father was D.A.

Ludacris is 31.

William Sydney Porter was born on this date in 1852. We know him as O. Henry. According to The Writer’s Almanac last year, “He wrote his most famous story, ‘The Gift of the Magi,’ in three hours, in the middle of the night, with his editor sleeping on his couch.” NewMexiKen had posted that story in its entirety. Another particular favorite is The Ransom of Red Chief.

McCain’s Health Care Tax Increase

John McCain wants to tax your employer-provided health care benefits. He wants to replace those benefits with an insufficient tax credit–$2500 for individuals and $5000 for families (the average cost per family is for health insurance is $12000).
. . .

Obama campaign has let things go this far without pointing out that McCain–who opposes the energy bill because it would increase taxes on oil companies–is actually proposing a tax increase on health care benefits for American workers. But that is precisely what the Senator from Arizona is doing.

Joe Klein

Best line of the day, so far

“General Petraeus kept saying, ‘Things are going to be worse before they get better.’ . . . He wasn’t trying to sell anything. He was very adamant about telling it like it is: ‘Don’t put lipstick on the pig.’”

From “The General’s Dilemma” in last week’s New Yorker. Quoting Petraeus is his executive officer, Peter Mansoor.

Primer on deficit and debt

What’s the difference between the federal deficit and the federal debt?

The federal deficit is the amount the federal government goes in the red during each fiscal year (October 1 through September 30). This fiscal year it is expected to be around $407,000,000,000 (that’s $407 billion).

The federal debt is the total amount from all the deficits (and surpluses, such as FY 2000) over the years. It gets higher most years because the deficit is greater than the amount of debt that is paid off during the year. The debt at present is about $9,650,000,000,000 (that’s $9.65 trillion).

To whom is the debt owed?

About half is owed to the government itself. The Social Security Trust Funds, for example, hold about $2.24 trillion (23%) of the federal debt.

About a quarter of the federal debt is owed to foreign governments and institutions, foremost Britain ($280B), Japan ($584B) and China ($504B). And we owe Ecuador, Venezuela, Indonesia, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Gabon, Libya, and Nigeria about $170B combined. (Guess where they got that money to invest in our Treasury securities.)

The remaining quarter is owed to the American public through mutual funds, pension funds, banks, insurance companies, etc., in the form of treasury securities — treasury bills, bonds, notes. If you are in a money market mutual fund or have savings bonds, you are carrying part of the federal debt.

Interest paid all those creditors this fiscal year is about $455 billion.

The rats are beginning to jump ship

In the end, [McCain’s] final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country’s safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country’s national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain – no one else – has proved it.

Andrew Sullivan

Why can’t the mainstream media get this right?

The Daily Howler tells what happened in five sentences.

In the summer of 2005, Congress directed Alaska to build the bridge using federal funds. After Hurricane Katrina hit in September, this use of federal funds turned into a political firestorm. In November 2005, Congress rescinded its order—but Alaska was allowed to keep the federal money that had been earmarked for the bridge; the money could now be used for any purpose the state saw fit. One year later, in her campaign for governor, Palin said she still favored building the bridge. She finally dropped the idea in September 2007—specifically saying that Congress wouldn’t give the state any more money for the project.

BEFORE Palin became governor Congress had dropped the bridge, but not the money. During her 2006 campaign and at first in 2007 while governor, she SUPPORTED the bridge. Two years after Congress had abandoned the bridge, Governor Palin abandoned it because the state would have to pay for it.

She never told Congress “Thanks, but no thanks.” That’s a lie.

John Smith

John Smith was elected president of Jamestown 400 years ago today.

A brash and boldly self-confident figure, Smith brought years of soldiering experience to the Virginia venture. While fighting the Turks in Transylvania, he was wounded, captured, and sold, he claimed, into slavery in Turkey. Smith reported that he eventually escaped with the assistance of a Turkish woman who had fallen in love with him. All this before his adventures in America!

Whether or not Smith’s reportage was accurate, his version of his role in the survival of the Jamestown colony was accepted as fact by subsequent generations of Americans. In Virginia, Smith led the settlers’ resistance against frequent raids by the Algonquin Indians who made their homes in the Chesapeake region. He also ventured into surrounding territory to forage for food, negotiate with Native Americans, and trade trinkets with them in exchange for corn.

In December 1607, Captain Smith was captured and brought before Algonquin Chief Powhatan. In a book written much later, Smith described how Pocahontas, the chief’s young daughter, saved his life by throwing herself between him and the warriors ordered to execute him.

The tale of Smith’s rescue by the Indian princess Pocahontas first appeared in his own Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, published in 1624. The event, now part of our national mythology, was probably romanticized by Smith. However, Pocahontas’s intervention appears to resemble a ritual familiar to many Native American groups.

Library of Congress

Smith left Virginia a year later. He explored the coasts off Maine and Massachusetts Bay in 1614 and coined the term “New England.”

Mountain Meadows

On this date 151 years ago today.

In 1857 a group of pioneers were taking cattle from Arkansas to California and made the mistake of stopping to let their herd graze in Utah, where the Mormons had settled after being forced from the East. A group of Mormons and Paiute Indians surrounded the party and, after offering to ferry them to safety in exchange for their guns, killed some 140 people—everyone except for a few children under the age of seven. Shortly before the massacre President James Buchanan sent the U.S. Army, because the sect was forming an independent government, and McMurtry surmises that this left the Mormons feeling particularly vulnerable. They were also probably eager to get their hands on the Arkansans’ valuable cattle. The victims’ bodies were left in a pile, stripped of their clothes and jewelry, and the cattle were divided. But as McMurtry’s writes, “the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood—in time, and, often, not that much time—will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency.”

A group of men passing through the meadow a few weeks later found the bodies, and news quickly spread. The Mormons concocted a story to blame the carnage on the Indians, but an investigation by the superintendent of the Utah territory found that tale to be flimsy at best. The survivors, children now in the custody of Mormon families, began telling their version of events. Eventually the church offered up a scapegoat, John Doyle Lee, to deal with the mounting public pressure. Lee was sentenced to die, and he requested to be shot, by firing squad, on the site of the massacre.

The taint of the murders has remained on the Mormon church ever since. As recently as 1999 bones were uncovered at the site of a Mountain Meadows memorial, and forensic scientists were able to disprove the Mormons’ claim that the Paiutes alone were responsible for the deaths of women and children.

AmericanHeritage.com / Remembering the Massacres of the Great West

The above from a review of Larry McMurtry’s thin volume Oh What a Slaughter. The classic account remains Juanita Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Mark Twain wrote about it in Roughing It in 1872.

9-10 a big fat hen

Today is the birthday

… of Arnold Palmer. Arnie is 79 today.

… of Jose Feliciano. He’s 63. Feliciano was one of the first to stylize The Star Spangled Banner, giving it a Latin touch at Tiger Stadium during the 1968 World Series.

… of Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Bob Lanier. He’s 60.

… of Amy Irving. She’s 55. Ms. Irving was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her performance in Yentl.

… of future Baseball Hall of Fame inductee Randy Johnson. He’s 45.

And it’s the birthday of Roger Maris, born on this date in 1934. The following is from The Official Roger Maris Web Site:

Roger and teammate Mickey Mantle entertained baseball fans throughout the summer of ’61 as the two New York Yankee sluggers chased the record many called the most cherished in all of sports. Mickey dropped out of the home run race early due to an illness, but finished with a career high 54 home runs. Roger tied Ruth on September 26, hitting his 60th home run. He then hit his 61st home run on the final day of the season, October 1, 1961, against the Boston Red Sox to set a new record. The Yankees won the game, 1 to 0, and later went on to win the World Series.

Roger was voted the Most Valuable Player in the American league for the second straight year, as he led the league in home runs and RBI’s. He was also named the 1961 Associated Press’ Male Athlete of the Year.

During his career, Roger Maris played in seven World Series and seven All-Star games. He hit 275 career home runs and won the Gold Glove Award for outstanding defensive play. The New York Yankees retired his number “9” in 1984.

It was on September 10, 1813, that Oliver Hazard Perry sent the message, “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.” The enemy was a British fleet. Perry’s fleet had defeated it in the Battle of Lake Erie.

On the Trail

But I’m not sure there is a mask when it comes to Barack Obama. It sounds crazy, but he might actually be this guy, this couldn’t-possibly-exist guy, inside and out. I heard Joe Lieberman talk about his middle-class dad, I heard Hillary plaster every corner of Pennsylvania with talk about her grandfather’s sojourn in the lace factory, I heard John Edwards tell everyone who would listen, and even some who wouldn’t, about what being the son of a millworker meant to him, and in every case I could feel the cold hand of political calculation crawling up my shirt as they spoke.

Then I hear Obama tell audiences about his grandmother and her time working on a bomber assembly line during World War II. Intellectually I know it’s the same thing — but when you actually watch him in person, you get this crazy sense that these schlock ready-for-paperback patriotic tales really are a big part of his emotional makeup. You listen to him talking about his grandfather waving a little American flag on the Hawaiian beach as he watched the astronauts come in to shore, and you can almost see that these moments actually have some kind of poetic meaning for him, and that he views his own already-historic run as a continuation of that pat-but-inspirational childhood story — putting a man on the moon then, putting a black man in the White House now.
. . .

As I watch Obama on the campaign trail, I know I’m listening to the Same Old Shit, delivered by a candidate who could cross the Atlantic on a bridge constructed entirely from Wall Street cash culled for him by party hacks and insiders. But I suddenly don’t care. It’s not just that the alternative is four years of the madman John McCain. It’s that, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to find out, at long last, if there really can be something truly different about someone who sounds so much the same.

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

From a longer piece.

What does the lie say about the person telling the lie

Reporters don’t have to play along with this nonsense.  They can refuse to report the McCain camp’s false attacks.  Or they can use their coverage to make clear that this is the latest in a long line of false smears from McCain, and indicative of the kind of campaign he is running, rather than pretending there is some open question about whether Obama called Sarah Palin a pig, or behaving as though the important question is “will the attack work” rather than “what does the lie say about the person telling the lie.”

County Fair

Apology Not Accepted

Back in 2000, after John McCain lost his mostly honorable campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he went about apologizing to journalists–including me–for his most obvious mis-step: his support for keeping the confederate flag on the state house. Now he is responsible for one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won’t abet its spread by linking to it, but here’s the McClatchy fact check. I just can’t wait for the moment when John McCain–contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat–talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

Joe Klein

Ungovernable

McCain, in his overwhelming desire for office, is unloosing forces that are likely to make the country only barely governable no matter who wins. This would be very bad juju at any time, but George Bush has so seriously weakened the country over the course of his administration that we don’t have a lot of room for error left if we want to avoid losing the war on terror for good and turning America into a banana republic while we’re at it. We need to start turning the ship around now.

Kevin Drum