Best line of the day, so far

All the major Democratic candidates say they are eager to end this war, and they all say they don’t believe there is a military solution in Iraq. Why, then, do they maintain that we must leave an indefinite number of troops behind for an indeterminate amount of time to work hopelessly towards a military solution everyone says doesn’t exist?

It is time to get a straight answer from all the other candidates: how many troops would you leave behind? For how long?

Bill Richardson for President

What’s this all about?

At LAX yesterday:

I walked from the arrival gate towards baggage claim, and when I was about halfway there, all of a sudden about a dozen or more TSA personnel and private security staff appeared, shouting STOP WHERE YOU ARE. FREEZE. DO NOT MOVE. Not just at me, but all of the travelers who happened to be wandering through the hallway at that moment.

Some of the TSA guards then backed up against walls in the hallway, and sort of barked at anyone who tried to move a few feet away from their “spot,” like towards chairs to sit down or whatever.

…

After 30 minutes, the TSA people said, okay, you may leave now.

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing

30 minutes! That’s too long for a game of statue.

One way to keep the high school dropout rate low

Don’t have any high schools.

“The first class of 33 students at the Territorial Normal School in 1886 was greeted by its first teacher and principal, Hiram Bradford Farmer. This initial student body included 16-year-old students with no high school education, since there were no high schools in the Arizona Territory.”

The New ASU Story

The Territorial Normal School evolved into Arizona State College in 1945 and Arizona State University in 1958.

University of Arizona fans still refer to ASU as Tempe Normal. 1-2-3, Beat Tempe.

August 30th

Ted Williams is 89 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 Bill Daily. He was the goofy other guy on I Dream of Jeannie, and the neighbor on The Bob Newhart Show. Daily is 80 today.

… of the other Buffet, Warren. The one who’s not wasting away again in Margaritaville. The billionaire is 77.

… of Peggy Lipton. The Mod Squad member is 60.

… of Lewis Black. The comedian, and regular on The Daily Show, is 59.

… of basketball hall-of-famer Robert Parish. He’s 54. Parish played in 1,611 NBA games, the record.

… of Cameron Diaz. Princess Fiona is 35.

… of Andy Roddick. He’s 25.

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.

Our (not so) private Idahos

An interesting piece by David Ehrenstein in the L.A. Times explains the signalling thing that lead to Larry Craig’s arrest. Craig’s objectives were clear.

Ehrenstein also includes this:

To get there, let’s climb into the Wayback Machine and return to Oct. 7, 1964. That’s when Walter Jenkins, one of the most senior aides in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, was arrested for soliciting sex in the men’s room of a Washington YMCA. Being that it was three weeks before the election, LBJ suspected some kind of Republican foul play, but the GOP chose not to exploit the incident.

The Jenkins affair put “homosexuality” on the nation’s front pages in a way it hadn’t been since Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s famous report in 1948.

Jenkins, of course, had to quit the White House after his arrest. Some well-placed observers believe that his leaving was a significant loss to the nation. Jenkins was the one person who understood LBJ well enough to say “no” to the man. Some believed he could have kept the president from his worst excesses including unlimited escalation in Vietnam. Most likely not, but still the whole Jenkins business was sad.

Comcast Rage

Former Albuquerque Mayor Jim Baca is unhappy with the ugliest utility.

Have you received your Comcast Cable bill this month? That little monopoly has raised rates again on just about everything. …

Oh, and if you want to talk to a live person at Comcast they now charge you for it. So if they provide bad service and you need help, they now charge for it.

NewMexiKen pays Comcast $65 a month JUST for internet service. There’s a $15 penalty because I don’t have television service — but if I wanted to add television I’m not eligible for any discounts because I’m an existing customer. That’s Comcast having their cake and eating it too I’d say.

Baca had a good piece the other day on the likely demise of Albuquerque’s afternoon newspaper The Tribune — Grab the Funnies. The surviving newspaper, The Albuquerque Journal, has the world’s most unappealing website. And, to my taste, the dead-tree version is about as equally ugly.

Stuff about Stuff

Speculation is that new iPods will be introduced next Wednesday so don’t go out and buy one this weekend. People are guessing they’ll have full-size screens like the iPhone.

Though we are less certain of the specifications for the new sixth generation iPod, it may closely resemble the iPhone (without calling features). Specifically, we expect the sixth gen iPod to be a widescreen device with multitouch technology. It may also have Wi-Fi capability and the capacity could be as high as 160GB.

AllThingsD

Test Your Internet Speed. The test said my download speed was 6.03 Mbps and my upload speed 2.08 Mbps.

Four Hands Guitar.

All-Time Great College Football Quotes. Example: “Football is not a contact sport-it is a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.” — Duffy Daugherty, Michigan State.

The HubbleSite has a nice feature about Tonight’s sky. It’s a short film each month on what to look for among the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and events. And I learned about the Teapot.

Been Readin’

NewMexiKen finally got around to finishing Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West last night. I had started it when it first came out last year, but set it aside about a 100 pages in and just got back to it.

Despite that personal experience with it, I do recommend this book. As Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote in his review:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

It is a fascinating and important story well told. Surely anyone with any abiding interest in New Mexico and Arizona history should read it. I must say, however, that I found the episodic mixed chronology in the first third of the book terribly annoying. And Sides does let some anachronism float into his text — I don’t think Matthew Brady used flash bulbs, for example — and some lapses of fact. It’s not, in other words, a dry encyclopedic narrative. He tells a good story fervently and fairly.

The book I began before I was interrupted by my interest in Kit Carson — and will take up again today — is Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Childs, who grew up and lives in the southwest, takes a personal look at the Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloan) ruins across the Four Corners area (Chaco, Aztec, Mesa Verde) as well as southeast Arizona and Mexico, and speculates about the people who lived there 700-1000 years ago and what happened to them and their magnificent cultures.

August 29th

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.

PBS – JAZZ A Film By Ken Burns

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.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Sir Richard Attenborough is 84 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 72 today. He won for The French Connection; he was nominated for The Exorcist.

Senator John McCain is 71 today.

Oscar nominee Elliott Gould is 69 today. He was nominated for a supporting role in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Today is the birthday of Michael Jackson. He’s 49. Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001.

Actress Rebecca DeMornay is 48. That was her opposite Tom Cruise in Risky Business and most famously as the twisted nanny in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.

Quick thinking

A Florida senior citizen drove his brand new Corvette convertible out of the dealership. Taking off down the road, he pushed it to 80 mph, enjoying the wind blowing through what little hair he had left.

“Amazing,” he thought as he flew down I-75, pushing the pedal even more. Looking in his rear view mirror, he saw the state trooper behind him, blue lights flashing and siren blaring. He floored it to 100 mph, then 110, then 120.

Suddenly he thought, “What am I doing? I’m too old for this,” and pulled over to await the trooper’s arrival. Pulling in behind him, the trooper walked up to the Corvette, looked at his watch and said, “Sir, my shift ends in 30 minutes. Today is Friday. If you can give me a reason for speeding that I’ve never heard before, I’ll let you go.”

The old gentleman paused. Then said, “Three years ago, my wife ran off with a Florida State Trooper. I thought you were bringing her back.”

“Have a good day, Sir,” replied the trooper.

Another example of how our public discourse is worthless

Among others, former governors Huckabee and and Romney are advocating the “Fair Tax,” which is pretty much Steve Forbes’s “Flat Tax” renamed. It would, according to them, and according to commentators such as George Stephanopoulos, “eliminate all those [federal taxes], and replace it with a 23 percent sales tax.”

That is, it would be a national sales tax that replaces the federal income tax and some other taxes, like that pesky “death tax.”

23%.

Want to know how they get that figure?

According to Bruce Bartlett, a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy under Reagan and Bush I, writing in The Wall Street Journal, the actual rate in the proposal is 30%.

Say something costs a dollar. You will pay (not counting state sales tax) $1.30.

But, you see, 30 cents is only 23% of $1.30. So they call it a 23% “Fair Tax.”

That is intellectual dishonesty at a level that just leaves me aghast.

(Not to even get into the fact that the proposal would tack the 30% on everything — new houses, tanks and airplanes the government buys, school buses and school books, new cars, clothes, food, medical care!

I gleaned all this from the Daily Howler.

The Unpolitical Animal

Louis Menand wrote an excellent primer on American voters for The New Yorker in 2004. Among the fascinating insights:

Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that “2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet” as a consequence of that year’s weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.

If you want to understand the phenomenon of the next 14 months, I suggest you read this essay.

August 28th is the birthday

… of German author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt on this date in 1749. Goethe said, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

… of Mother Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, the first American-born saint, born in New York City on this date in 1774.

… of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, born near Tula on this date in 1828.

… of ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson, born in Jamestown, New York, on this date in 1908.

I have a dream

The conclusion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in Washington 44 years ago today (and worth reading every year).

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. And this will be the day, this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring — from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

Let freedom ring — from the mighty mountains of New York.

Let freedom ring — from the heightening Alleghenies of
Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring — from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

Let freedom ring — from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that.

Let freedom ring — from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring — from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring — from every hill and molehill of Mississippi,
from every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual,

“Free at last, free at last.

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”