Best line of the campaign, so far
All across America there are quiet storms taking place. There are lives of quiet desperation. People who need just a little bit of help. Now, Americans are a self-reliant people, we’re an independent people. We don’t like asking somebody else to do what we can do ourselves but you know what we understand is that every once in a while somebody’s going to get knocked down. Every once in a while somebody’s going to go through some hard times. When we least expect it tragedy may strike. And what has always made this country great is the understanding that we rise and fall as one nation, that values and family, community and neighborhood, they have to express themselves in our government. Those are national values. Those are values that we all subscribe to. And so that the spirit that we extend today and in the days to come as we monitor what happens on the Gulf that’s the spirit that we’ve got to carry with us each and every day. That’s the spirit that we need in our own homes and it’s the spirit that we need in the White House. And that’s why I’m running for president of the United States of America.
Because if there’s a poor child out there, that’s my child. If there’s a senior that’s having trouble, that’s my grandparent. If there’s a guy who’s lost his job, that’s my brother. If there’s a woman out there without healthcare, that’s my sister. Those are the values that built this country. Those are the values we are fighting for.
Barack Obama, Milwaukee, September 1, 2008
3 cents
Canadian airline Jazz Air thinks the answer to that question must be less than 3 cents. The airline recently announced that they were removing life vests from their airplanes in order to save on fuel costs. They can get away with using seat cushions as flotation devices since their flights mostly stay within 50 miles of the shore.
How much will this move save them on fuel costs? The life vests weigh about one pound apiece. I don’t know how long their average flight is. Let’s say it’s 1,000 miles. Using a fuel cost per pound to fly 1,000 miles of 3 cents, based on this online exchange, and then removing the life vests saves the airline 3 cents per seat per flight — not exactly big money.
Staggeringly irresponsible
In this particular case, there are two huge problems with what McCain did.
The first is the most obvious: in choosing a Vice Presidential nominee, McCain is choosing someone who might well end up taking over as President. This would be true for anyone, but it’s especially true in McCain’s case, since he is a 72 year old cancer survivor. Anyone who “puts country first”, as McCain is fond of telling us he does, would have taken care to ensure that that person was up to the job, and had no unpleasant secrets like, oh, past membership in a fringe secessionist organization. Not bothering to do the most basic due diligence before naming her as his running mate is staggeringly irresponsible.
The second is that McCain was willing to take a huge gamble not just with our country, but with his own political interests. As I said earlier, gambling with the country is worse, but gambling with your own interests is a different kind of bad judgment, and worth noting in its own right. If you are selfish enough to put your own interests above the interests of your country, that’s awful. But it doesn’t move you into the realm of the wholly unpredictable, the people from whom you truly never know what to expect. (It’s like being one of those dictators who are nonetheless rational enough that things like deterrence can work with them: you are bad, but bad in a way that makes it possible to anticipate what you might do next.)
Being willing to take a huge and reckless gamble with your own interests is not like that. It’s not cool and collected selfishness that leaves room for some hope that if your interests and the interests of your country align, you might end up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. It’s sheer impulsive stupidity: an unwillingness to think, in even the most basic ways, before you act. That’s a terrible trait in a President.
Best line of the day, so far
“McCain has been running for president for ten years! Ten years! He has had ten years to do due diligence on His running mate! Yet here we are!”
The Second of September
Hall of fame basketball coach John Thompson is 67 today. Funny how things stick in your memory. I can remember a photo of Thompson in a basketball magazine when he was a player at Providence College. It was one of those silly posed photos — they had him with a basketball in each hand, held like a pair of softballs.
Terry Bradshaw is 60, Mark Harmon 57 and Jimmy Connors 56 today.
Harmon’s father was “Old 98,” Tom Harmon, a football great at Michigan and for the L.A. Rams. Mark himself played quarterback at UCLA, where he graduated cum laude.
Keanu Reeves is 44.
And Salma Hayek is 42. Ms. Hayek received a best actress Oscar nomination for Frida.
It was on the morning of September 2, 1945, that the Japanese officially surrendered to Gen. Douglas MacArthur aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. MacArthur signed the articles at 9:07 am Tokyo time, ending World War II. President Truman declared Sunday, September 2nd V-J Day in the U.S.
Or maybe it is about Sarah Palin
In a way Sarah Palin HAS put her own personal life in play. The religious right she strongly represents claims an abiding interest in the conception of everyone else’s children, the sanctity of marriage, abstinence education and so on.
In my opinion that opens Palin to scrutiny for moral hypocrisy, a character trait that should be found unacceptable in a national leader.
It’s not about Sarah Palin
And it’s certainly not about her family.
It’s about John McCain’s failure to either vet her properly or, if as the campaign claims, they did vet her, than it’s about their failure to do it well or to understand what they found.
McCain has, and has always had, poor judgment. That’s the whole point. He is not mentally stable enough to be president of the United States.
Best line of September, so far (but there should be many to come)
“McCain’s selection of the first secessionist VP candidate since Jefferson Davis tapped Alexander Stephens”
The last day of August
Broadcast journalist Daniel Schorr is 92 today.
One of just 13 men to win baseball’s triple crown (with Baltimore in 1966), Frank Robinson is 73 today. A few of the others: Cobb, Hornsby (twice), Foxx, Gehrig, Williams (twice), Mantle. The last, Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. Robinson won the MVP award with Cincinnati in the National League and with Baltimore in the American.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Van Morrison is 63 today.
A paragon of blue-eyed soul, Van Morrison has been following his muse for four decades. His travels have led him down pathways where he’s explored soul, jazz, blues, rhythm & blues, rock and roll, Celtic folk, pop balladry, and more, forging a distinctive amalgam that has Morrison’s passionate self-expression at its core. With a minimum of hype or fanfare, working with a craftsman’s discipline and an artist-mystic’s creativity, Morrison has steadily amassed one of the great bodies of recorded work in the 20th century. His discography numbers roughly thirty albums, among them the deeply poetic song cycle Astral Weeks, the warm, pop-soul classic Moondance and such spiritually minded later works as the ambitious double-disc set Hymns to the Silence. At one extreme, Morrison has made raw, angry blues-rock with the British Invasion-era group Them. At the other, he has produced some of the most transcendent, even-toned soul music of the modern era as a solo artist. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)
Violinist Itzhak Perlman is also 63 today. Perlman did an album with André Previn, Joplin: The Easy Winner and Other Ragtime Music, that I just love, especially The Entertainer.
Richard Gere is 59. No Oscar nominations for Gere, but his actual middle name is Tiffany.
Five time Oscar nominee for best actor, two time winner, Frederic March was born on the last day of August in 1897. March won for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931 and The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946.
Radio and television performer Arthur Godfrey was born on the last day of August in 1903. Godfrey, seemingly forgotten now, was one of the biggest stars of early television.
The esteemed New Yorker editor William Shawn was born on the last day of August in 1907. His actual name is William Chon. Before The New Yorker, Shawn worked briefly at the Las Vegas, New Mexico, Optic.
Four days before he died in 1992, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, “He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and … made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said ‘the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.’ He changed it to read, ‘remains unique and as fresh as ever.’ ‘There are no degrees of uniqueness,’ Mr. Shawn said politely.”
— The Writer’s Almanac( 2006)
The lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was born on the last day of August in 1918.
He teamed up with a composer named Frederick Loewe and after a few moderately successful productions, they came out with Brigadoon (1947), about a two Americans who discover a mythical Scottish town that disappeared in 1747 and only returns to life for one day each century. One of the Americans falls in love with a girl from the town, and has to decide whether to stay with her and give up the modern world. Brigadoon was a big hit, and it contained Lerner and Loewe’s first hit song, “Almost Like Being in Love.”
But Lerner and Loewe’s biggest success was a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion: My Fair Lady, which premiered on Broadway on March 15, 1956. In that musical’s most famous song, Professor Henry Higgins teaches Eliza Doolittle to properly pronounce the phrase “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” Lerner spent six weeks working on most of the songs in the musical, but he wrote “The Rain in Spain” in 10 minutes.
— The Writer’s Almanac (2007)
Princess Diana died 11 years ago today.
Heavenly Father
If you pray for a torrential downpour to disrupt the acceptance speech of a candidate you do not support, but the night of the speech is clear and pleasant.
But then speeches in favor of the candidate you do support are altered by a massive storm more than a thousand miles away.
Then don’t you have to take that as a message from God? How could one be an answer to prayers and not the other?
Labor Day
The first observance of Labor Day is believed to have been a parade of 10,000 workers on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City, organized by Peter J. McGuire, a Carpenters and Joiners Union secretary. By 1893, more than half the states were observing a “Labor Day” on one day or another, and Congress passed a bill to establish a federal holiday in 1894. President Grover Cleveland signed the bill soon afterward, designating the first Monday in September as Labor Day.
Who Are We Celebrating?
154.5 million
Number of people 16 and older in the nation’s labor force in May 2008, including 82.6 million men and 71.9 million women.
Our Jobs
Americans work in a variety of occupations. Here is a sampling:
employees28%
Percentage of workers 16 and older who work more than 40 hours a week. Eight percent work 60 or more hours a week.
4
Median number of years workers have been with their current employer. About 9 percent of those employed have been with their current employer for 20 or more years.
$42,261 and $32,515
The 2006 annual median earnings for male and female full-time, year-round workers, respectively.
Maybe it’s just me
… but isn’t it intolerably condescending of the political commentariat to keep talking and writing about whether Hillary Clinton’s supporters will switch to McCain because he selected a woman as his running mate? The two women, Clinton and Palin, agree on almost nothing.
I am not aware that women make political choices based solely on gender without regard to the issues.
Update: No, it’s not just me.
Doing Your Part
As an American, you have an obligation to support your presidential candidate (Obama or McCain). So, every day until Election Day, when you drive, show who you will vote for:
If you support the policies and character of Barack Obama, please drive with your headlights on during the day.
If you support John S. McCain, please drive with your headlights off at night.
Spread the word.
Fort Bowie National Historic Site (Arizona)
… was authorized on this date in 1964. According to the National Park Service:
Fort Bowie commemorates in its 1000 acres, the story of the bitter conflict between the Chiricahua Apaches and the United States military. For more than 30 years Fort Bowie and Apache Pass were the focal point of military operations eventually culminating in the surrender of Geronimo in 1886 and the banishment of the Chiricahuas to Florida and Alabama. It was the site of the Bascom Affair, a wagon train massacre, and the battle of Apache Pass, where a large force of Chiricahua Apaches under Mangus Colorados and Cochise fought the California Volunteers. The remains of Fort Bowie today are carefully preserved, the adobe walls of various post buildings and the ruins of a Butterfield Stage Station.
Visiting Fort Bowie requires a three mile round trip hike — unless you use the handicap entrance, which they keep a secret until you show up after walking a mile-and-a-half on a July afternoon with a daughter eight months pregnant and a two-year-old grandson.
Turn on the lights, the summer’s over
Here in Albuquerque we have two minutes less daylight each day now in our headlong rush for the equinox in three weeks (September 22). There’s more than three minutes less light in Portland, Oregon, today than yesterday; two-and-a-half minutes less in Washington; about two minutes, 20 seconds, less each day in Louisville; and three minutes less daylight each day in Leland, Michigan.
Oh, and in Fairbanks, there’s six minutes, 44 seconds, less daylight today than yesterday.
Oh, and there’s no 90s in the forecast. Fall IS here. (Officially Albuquerque reached 97º four times during the summer, last on August 1st. In the past five years we’ve gotten to 100ºF just one time officially.)
Antietam National Battlefield (Maryland)
… was established as a national battlefield site on this date in 1890. It was redesignated a national battlefield in 1978.
23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after twelve hours of savage combat on September 17, 1862. The Battle of Antietam ended the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s first invasion into the North and led to Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
It was the bloodiest day in American history. Among the battlefields I’ve visited, Antietam is my favorite, perhaps because it less congested and monumented-up than Gettysburg. It retains, it seems, more of its 1862 feel.
Cleo
According to an item at The Writer’s Almanac in 2005:
It was on this day in 30 BC that Queen Cleopatra of Egypt killed herself with a snake she had smuggled into her chamber where she was held captive by Octavian, formerly the political rival of her lover Mark Antony. Octavian had defeated Cleopatra and Antony at the Battle of Actium and had taken Cleopatra prisoner. When Cleopatra learned that Octavian planned to parade her as part of his triumphant return to Rome, she planned her own suicide. For centuries, it was assumed that the snake she used was an asp, but it is now thought that the snake was an Egyptian cobra.
Other sources say it was August 12, not August 30, so I guess those Writer’s Almanac folks got 30 BC and August 30 mixed up. Whatever.
Cleopatra was Greek, the last queen of Ptolemaic Egypt. When she was 17-18, Cleopatra and her 12-year-old brother/husband inherited the throne from their father. They fought over who was really the ruler, with Ptolemy XIII emerging as victor until Julius Caesar showed up. And the rest, as they say, was history.
Cleo was the mother of four children, one with Julius Gaius Caesar (31 years her senior) and three with Mark Antony (14 years her senior). Cleopatra was 39 when she died.
Of course, Titus Pullo really fathered her oldest child, right viewers of Rome?
August 30th
Ted Williams is 90 today. Again as he has in recent years, Williams is planning to spend the day hanging out and just chillin’.
It’s also the birthday —
… of Ellen Muriel Deason, known to us as Kitty Wells, and famous for “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”
It wasn’t God who made Honky Tonk angels
As you said in the words of your song
Too many times married men think they’re still single
That has caused many a good girl to go wrong
… of Bill Daily. He was the goofy other guy on I Dream of Jeannie, and the neighbor on The Bob Newhart Show. Daily is 81 today.
… of the other Buffet, Warren. The one who’s not wasting away again in Margaritaville. The billionaire is 78.
In February 2008, he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world, worth about $62 billion. Despite his massive wealth, he lives relatively frugally, still residing in the home he bought in 1958 for $31,500, driving his own car, and allotting himself an annual salary from his investment company of about $100,000.
… of Peggy Lipton. The Mod Squad member is 61.
… of Lewis Black. The comedian, and regular on The Daily Show, is 60.
… of basketball hall-of-famer Robert Parish. He’s 55. Parish played in 1,611 NBA games, the record.
… of Cameron Diaz. Princess Fiona is 36.
… of Andy Roddick. He’s 26.
Fred MacMurray was born on this date in 1908. MacMurray required that all his scenes for My Three Sons be filmed at one time. After MacMurray was done, the rest of the cast started filming the shows in the normal sequence. IMDb has MacMurray saying: “The two films I did with Billy Wilder, ‘Double Indemnity’ and the ‘The Apartment’ are the only two parts I did in my entire career that required any acting.” It showed Fred, it showed.
Oscar-nominee Raymond Massey was born on this date in 1896. Massey received the nomination for Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Massey, related to the Masseys of Massey-Ferguson (tractors and such), was in a lot of westerns and did a lot of TV.
Best actress Oscar-winner Shirley Booth was born on this date in 1898. Booth won the award for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sadly, she’s probably better known for playing the maid Hazel on the sitcom.
Prime time
Barack Obama’s audience for his acceptance speech likely topped 40 million people, and the Democratic gathering that nominated him was a more popular television event than any other political convention in history.
More people watched Obama speak from a packed stadium in Denver on Thursday than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final “American Idol” or the Academy Awards this year, Nielsen Media Research said Friday. …
…
Through four days, the Democratic convention was seen in an average of 22.5 million households. No other convention — Republican or Democratic — had been seen in as many homes since Nielsen began keeping these records for the Kennedy-Nixon campaign in 1960. There weren’t enough television sets in American homes to have possibly beaten this record in years before that.
Yahoo! News
I had the strangest dream
I woke up this morning after the strangest dream. The whole thing was like a made for TV movie; a comedy. Some totally unqualified small state governor — amiable, attractive, intelligent, but just not prepared — gets selected to be vice president in a crazy effort to win the election. The governor has a household full of kids, eats mooseburgers, and her husband is — get this — a professional snowmobile racer she calls “First Dude.” The whole thing was just wacky.
I woke up before the dream turned from comedy into nightmare.
Best line of the morning
“In England, an elderly Swedish tourist lay down on the luggage conveyor belt, after her suitcase, believing that was how she was told to board her plane. Confused? Or prophetic?”
When is a party not a party?
Aidan, who will be five next month himself, attended a birthday party today at Chuck E. Cheese. The party included no extra game tokens, no pizza and no drinks.
Or, as one mom put it, why not just send out an address where we could drop off the gifts.
Best line of the day, so far
“I’ve heard of trophy brides before, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of a trophy vice presidential candidate.”
NewMexiKen
Happy Birthday
Senator John McCain is 72-years-old today.
Seven-time Oscar nominee for best actress, Ingrid Bergman was born on this date in 1915. She won the award three times: Gaslight, Anastasia, Murder on the Orient Express. No, she was not nominated for Casablanca. Ms. Bergman’s last role was as Golda Meir in 1982. She died that same year on her birthday, August 29.
Charlie Parker was born on this date in 1920.
Charlie Parker was one of the most influential improvising soloists in jazz, and a central figure in the development of bop in the 1940s. A legendary figure in his own lifetime, he was idolized by those who worked with him, and he inspired a generation of jazz performers and composers.
Parker died in 1955.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Ruth Jones was born on this date in 1924.
Dinah Washington skirted the boundaries of blues, jazz and popular music, becoming the most popular black female recording artist of the ’50s.
She changed her name from Ruth Jones upon joining jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s band in 1943. After leaving Hampton in 1946, she began her own recording career, leading to Top 10 R&B hits in “Baby Get Lost” (No. 1, 1949), “Trouble in Mind” (No. 4, 1952), “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” (No. 4 R&B, No. 8 pop, 1959), and “This Bitter Earth” (No. 1 R&B, No. 24 pop, 1960).
In 1960, Washington also sang two No. 1 R&B duets with Brook Benton, “Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes)” (No. 5 pop) and “A Rockin’ Good Way” (No. 7 pop).
Washington died in 1963 after mixing alcohol and pills.
Sir Richard Attenborough is 85 today. Attenborough won Oscars for best director and best picture for Gandhi. He’s acted in several dozen films, most notably as Roger Bartlett in The Great Escape and Mr. Hammond in the Jurassic Park films.
Two-time Oscar nominee for director, William Friedkin is 73 today. He won for The French Connection; he was nominated for The Exorcist.
Oscar nominee Elliott Gould is 70 today. He was nominated for a supporting role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
Today is the birthday of Michael Jackson. He’s 50. Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.
Actress Rebecca DeMornay is 49. That was her opposite Tom Cruise in Risky Business and most famously as the twisted nanny in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.