U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) will announce tomorrow that he will not run for reelection next year.
Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post broke the story today at 2:30 MT.
Domenici was first elected to the Senate in 1972.
Interesting fact NewMexiKen did not know. Domenici’s parents were immigrants — from Italy.
Standing behind a woman in a checkout line this afternoon, I notice as she punches a speed dial number on her cell phone, then tells the person who answers, “She’s in surgery. Say lots of prayers. Say lots of prayers.”
NewMexiKen isn’t big on the prayer thing, but I feel some empathy for the woman’s anxiety and, to myself, wish well to both the woman and the patient she is so obviously concerned about.
The line moves up.
“How are you?” the cashier asks.
“Fine,” says the woman. “Well, except my dog is having surgery.”
NewMexiKen realizes how people feel about their dogs and their gods. But isn’t praying — that is, soliciting God’s favor — loathsomely self-centered when it’s your pet?
NewMexiKen ordered Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
Nice.
“Television characters live with the constant worry of being written out of the plot, turned evil or – even worse – killed off. These twelve weren’t so lucky. Honor the memories of television’s fallen legends by testing yourself on their causes of death.”
“There was a comment made tonight that [Mayor Chavez] was offering an olive branch. He needs to bring the whole tree.”
Councilman Brad Winter quoted in the Albuquerque Tribune.
“There are some things that must be entrusted to government and some things that must be entrusted to private enterprise.”
“My estimate is that the financial sector takes $560 billion a year out of society. Banks, money managers, insurance companies, certainly annuity providers. They’re all subtracting value from the economy.”
Bill Moyers talks with John Bogle, the man who created The Vanguard Group in 1974. Vanguard is one of the two largest mutual fund organizations in the world. Bogle also developed the index mutual fund. In other words, he’s a foremost capitalist. Fortune named him one of the investment industry’s four “Giants of the 20th Century.”
You can view the video or read the transcript at Bill Moyers Journal.
Bogle has an article in Dædalus — Democracy in corporate America.
“These excesses in executive compensation, and the directly related machinations of financial statements, reflected the erosion in the conduct and values of our business leaders during the recent era, when something went wrong with American capitalism.”
Interesting and informative stuff.
“President Bush, in a sharp confrontation with Congress, on Wednesday vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children’s health insurance.”
Gore Vidal is 82 today.
Steve Reich is 71. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross in The New Yorker explain Reich’s compostitions:
In this sense, “Different Trains,” for recorded voices and string quartet, may be Reich’s most staggering achievement, even if “Music for 18” gives the purest pleasure. He wrote the piece in 1988, after recalling cross-country train trips that he had taken as a child. “As a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period, I would have had to ride very different trains,” he has said. Recordings of his nanny reminiscing about their journeys and of an elderly man named Lawrence Davis recalling his career as a Pullman porter are juxtaposed with the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors. These voices give a picture of the dividedness of twentieth-century experience, of the irreconcilability of American idyll and European horror—and something in Mr. Davis’s weary voice also reminds us that America was never an idyll for all. The hidden melodies of the spoken material generate string writing that is rich in fragmentary modal tunes and gently pulsing rhythms.
The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.” Here’s that report. (RealPlayer)
Chubby Checker is 66. His version of “The Twist” was number one in both 1960 and 1962.
My daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
Yeah daddy is sleepin’ and
mama ain’t around
We’re gonna twisty twisty twisty
‘Til we turn the house down
My good senator, Jeff Bingaman, is 64 today.
Roy is 63.
In their three-plus decades in Las Vegas, Siegfried & Roy have performed for more than 25 million people. Through the years, they have seen many changes in the city’s entertainment scene, some of which they were personally responsible for. The illusionists opened the door to family entertainment, setting a standard in stage extravaganzas that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the world.
Lindsey Buckingham is 58. For years I thought Lindsey was Stevie and Stevie was Lindsey.
Dave Winfield is 56.
A true five-tool athlete who never spent a day in the minor leagues, Dave Winfield played 22 seasons, earning 12 All-Star Game selections. At six-feet, six-inches, he was an imposing figure and a durable strongman with the rare ability to combine power and consistency. In tours of duty with six major league teams, Winfield batted .283, hit 465 home runs, and amassed 3,110 hits. He was a seven-time Gold Glove winner and helped lead the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Championship in 1992.
Dennis Eckersley is 53.
Dennis Eckersley blazed a unique path to Hall of Fame success. During the first half of his 24-year big league career, Eck won over 150 games primarily as a starter, including a no-hitter in 1977. Over his final 12 years, he saved nearly 400 games, leading his hometown Oakland A’s to four American League West titles and earning both Cy Young and MVP honors in 1992. The only pitcher with 100 saves and 100 complete games, Eckersley dominated opposing batters during a six-year stretch from 1988 to 1993, in which he struck out 458 while walking just 51.
Donna Moss is 38. That’s Janel Moloney of The West Wing.
Not only is Gwen Stefani not a “Hollaback Girl,” at 38 one might say she’s not even a girl.
A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
Cause I ain’t no hollaback girl
I ain’t no hollaback girl
(A hollaback girl is a girl who lets boys do whatever, then waits for them to call, to holler back. Originally it meant a cheerleader who echoed the lead cheerleader’s call. The song uses both meanings well.)
John Ross was born on October 3rd in 1790.
He spent his early life trying to design a new government for the Cherokees, based on the U.S. government, with a constitution and three separate but equal branches and democratically elected leaders. He respected the American justice system so much that when the state of Georgia tried to force Cherokees off their land, John Ross chose not to go to war, but instead took Georgia to court. It was the first time that an Indian tribe had ever sued the U.S. over treaty rights, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The case was decided in 1832, and Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in his opinion that the state of Georgia did not have jurisdiction over Cherokees and therefore could not force the Cherokees to leave their land. But President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the decision. He said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Six years later, 15,000 Cherokees were forced out of their homes at gunpoint by American soldiers, gathered together in camps and then forced to walk to the new “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi, an event that became known as The Trail of Tears. The camps had horrible hygienic conditions, and an epidemic of dysentery killed an estimated 8,000 Cherokees, including John Ross’s wife.
It doesn’t matter the car, I just love reading L.A. Times auto critic Dan Neil:
VERILY, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a chubby eighth-grader to wriggle into the back seat of most four-door, three-row crossovers. Here is the functional impasse of vehicles like the Mazda CX-9, Volvo XC90 and Acura MDX: The opening for the rear doors cannot be made large enough for passengers to readily ingress the third row. Widening the rear-door openings results in something like the Mercedes-Benz R-Class, whose huge rear doors spread to the wingspan of a U2 spy plane, or the ears of Alfred E. Neuman.
What buyers of these vehicles really want is a minivan, a seven-passenger vehicle with large and convenient sliding doors on the sides. Oh, but heaven forfend! If you drove a minivan people might think you’re a . . . you know . . . parent or something! It seems to me the whole crossover segment is driven by a single, neurotic imperative to deny family status. Trust me, people: If you’re driving a big honking crossover with child car seats in the back, you’re not fooling anyone. You are soooo married.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Glenn Greenwald quotes Adam Smith from Wealth of Nations:
The ordinary expense of the greater part of modern governments in time of peace being equal or nearly equal to their ordinary revenue, when war comes they are both unwilling and unable to increase their revenue in proportion to the increase of their expense. They are unwilling for fear of offending the people, who, by so great and so sudden an increase of taxes, would soon be disgusted with the war; and they are unable from not well knowing what taxes would be sufficient to produce the revenue wanted.
The facility of borrowing delivers them from the embarrassment which this fear and inability would otherwise occasion. By means of borrowing they are enabled, with a very moderate increase of taxes, to raise, from year to year, money sufficient for carrying on the war, and by the practice of perpetually funding they are enabled, with the smallest possible increase of taxes, to raise annually the largest possible sum of money.
In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.
230 years have passed since Smith wrote, but his seems a apt assessment of the U.S. today. The country is overwhelmingly opposed to the continuation of our current effort in Iraq, yet Washington seems unwilling — indeed unable — to do anything about it.
Jon Stewart doesn’t really like Chris Matthews’ new book, Life’s a Campaign — Stewart calls it a “self-hurt book.”
Pointer via Eschaton.
Speaking of happiness, the same authors mentioned in the previous post had an op-ed piece in Saturday’s Times: Divorced From Reality. It includes this:
The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those marriages that do occur are increasingly more stable. For instance, marriages that began in the 1990s were more likely to celebrate a 10th anniversary than those that started in the 1980s, which, in turn, were also more likely to last than marriages that began back in the 1970s.
Why were so many analysts led astray by the recent data?
Click the link above for the explanation.
Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt raised some interesting questions Monday.
In addition, Stevenson and Wolfers released a new study, “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” that is bound to generate a great deal of controversy. By almost any economic or social indicator, the last 35 years have been great for women. Birth control has given them the ability to control reproduction. They are obtaining far more education and making inroads in many professions that were traditionally male-dominated. The gender wage gap has declined substantially. Women are living longer then ever. Studies even suggest that men are starting to take on more housework and child-raising responsibilities.
Given all these changes, the evidence presented by Stevenson and Wolfers is striking: women report being less happy today than they were 35 years ago, especially relative to the corresponding happiness rates for men. This is true of working women and stay-at-home moms, married women and those that are single, the highly educated and the less educated. It is worse for older women; those aged 18-29 don’t seem to be doing too badly. Women with kids have fared worse than women without kids. The only notable exception to the pattern is black women, who are happier today than they were three decades ago.
Follow the link above to read Levitt’s speculation about why.
Follow this link to read about the reaction to the paper or especially here to see how Stevenson and Wolfers themselves respond.
The Daily Show is calling its continuing coverage of next year’s presidential election “Clusterf@#k to the White House.”
Albuquerque’s city council election was yesterday and though NewMexiKen doesn’t live in the city, I had posted an item or two here about the goings on.
You may remember the mail-order college degrees candidate. She got 18.6% of the vote in her district.
Indeed all the candidates endorsed by Mayor Marty seem to have lost. Maybe a few more pandas and a few more red-light cameras Marty, and your popularity will take off.
Or maybe, just maybe, being mayor isn’t about you. Maybe it’s about us.
“The presidential campaign ritual in this country has obviously devolved into a deeply flawed phenomenon, one that tends to produce incompetent or inappropriate leaders and fails to really touch the population on any level anymore beyond disgust and resentment.”
Matt Taibbi in his campaign blog: “Year of the Rat.”
Six-year-old plays piano.
Thanks to Debby for the pointer.
This article in the Wall Street Journal is getting a lot of attention today: GOP Is Losing Grip On Core Business Vote. The article, free today, begins:
The Republican Party, known since the late 19th century as the party of business, is losing its lock on that title.
New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party’s identity — what strategists call its “brand.” The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs, which could alter U.S. politics in the 2008 elections and beyond.
It seems fiscal conservatives are finding the GOP isn’t so grand after all.
Typically the news reports for the housing slump report comparisons between this year and last. But, as Paul Krugman points out, the drop was already underway a year ago. The more meaningful comparison is with two years ago.
According to Census Bureau, via Krugman, new home sales are off 21% from August of 2006 to August of 2007.
But they are off 38% from August of 2005 to August of 2007.
NewMexiKen has always wondered about this annual comparison business. Car sales are reported the same way. I’ve always thought that the way to properly report these kinds of statistics would be to say sales are up or down against the preceding five-year average.
“Bush 33 – Congress 29 — It’s not GOLF people, you want a higher score.”
FARK.com commenting on newest polls.
Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx was born on this date in 1890.
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”
“I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.”
“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
“Room service? Send up a larger room.”
“I intend to live forever, or die trying.”
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them — well, I have others.”
Maury Wills is 75 today. Wills stole 104 bases in 1962 to break Ty Cobb’s 47-year-old record. So far, that hasn’t been enough to get him into the Hall of Fame.
Don McLean is 62.
Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and grey,
Look out on a summer’s day,
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.
Shadows on the hills,
Sketch the trees and the daffodils,
Catch the breeze and the winter chills,
In colors on the snowy linen land.
Now I understand what you tried to say to me,
How you suffered for your sanity,
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they’ll listen now.
Photographer Annie Leibovitz is 58.
Gordon Sumner is 56. You know, Sting.
I dream of rain
I dream of gardens in the desert sand
I wake in vain
I dream of love as time runs through my hand
I dream of fire
Those dreams that tie two hearts that will never die
And near the flames
The shadows play in the shape of the man’s desire
This desert rose
Whose shadow bears the secret promise
This desert flower
No sweet perfume that would torture you more than this
Lorraine Bracco is 53.
Graham Greene was born on October 2nd in 1904.
Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just 500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. And at that pace, he managed to publish 26 novels, as well as numerous short stories, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and travel books. He said, “We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.”
Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2nd in 1869. Groucho Marx was born on October 2nd in 1890. Coincidence? I think not.
Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as Supreme Court Justice 40 years ago today. Marshall made the successful argument before the Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. He was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President Kennedy, and as Solicitor General and then to the Supreme Court by President Johnson.
Click here to see how political cartoonist Paul Conrad depicted the loss when Marshall died in 1993 (two years after retiring from the Court).
Did you ever learn that someone you worked with and think of primarily as a disingenuous BS-er has gotten an incredibly important job upon which thousands of people’s lives might depend every day?
Ken, official oldest child of NewMexiKen, called to express his exasperation with NPR. He reported that NPR news at 10 a.m. MT began with:
“A New York jury has convicted New York Knicks head coach Isaiah Thomas of sexually harassing a former female senior executive with the team.”
It’s a civil case folks, not a criminal case. You don’t get “convicted” in a civil case.
Individual reporters get the facts wrong all the time, but this displays an ignorance of fundamental concepts by a whole news organization.
(NewMexiKen verified the exact lead sentence as quoted above.)
