July 15th

Today is the birthday

… of Clive Cussler, 80.

… of Alex Karras, All-American, Heisman runner-up (and he was a lineman), Outland Award winner, NFL star (1958-1971), Monday Night Football sportscaster, TV sitcom actor and — most notably — Mongo in Blazing Saddles. He’s 76 today.

… of Tucson’s favorite daughter, Linda Ronstadt, 65 today. Miss Ronstadt has sold more than 66 million albums worldwide. The session band behind her on her third album became The Eagles.

… of Arianna Stassinopoulos, 61. Born in Greece, educated at Cambridge, wealthy by her marriage to Michael Huffington, she is an actress, commentator, author of a dozen books, re-born liberal and founder of the Huffington Post.

… of Jesse “The Body” Ventura, 60, professional wrestler and governor of Minnesota. Is this a great country, or what?

… of Forest Whitaker, 50. Whitaker has been in more than 60 films and television productions, most notably Good Morning, Vietnam, The Crying Game and as Charlie “Bird” Parker in Bird (which earned him best actor at Cannes). He won the best actor Oscar, of course, for portraying Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

… of Ray Toro, guitarist with My Chemical Romance, is 34.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was born in Leiden, Netherlands, on this date in 1606.

Maybe she is a wizard

In September of 2006, following a desperately sad childhood that saw both drug-addicted parents murdered and the care of her younger siblings left in her hands, 16-year-old Sacia Flowers decided to write to J. K. Rowling. In her heartfelt letter…she spoke of her love for the Harry Potter series and the empathy she felt for Harry given their upbringings; mentioned the bullying she experienced throughout school and her inability to make friends due to her insecurities; and then thanked the author for “lending me your hero and his world” during such a tough time, adding, “He is my hero, and you are my heroine.”

Below is Rowling’s encouraging repsonse.

Letters of Note: I will treasure your letter

There is a link to Sacia’s letter as well.

A rare moment of TV poignancy

Ken Levine answers some questions. An excerpt:

Your final writing credit for MASH was “Goodbye Radar”, apparently written as the 7th season finale but held back (at the network’s request) till the 8th season. Did Gary Burghoff or anyone have special requests for the episode in terms of storyline or particular scenes? And by the time the episode was produced you and David were no longer the head writers, did the new regime tinker with your script at all? Any other tidbits?

No one had any special requests, but David and I were very adamant that we didn’t want a sappy ending. That’s why we constructed the final sequence so that all of the final goodbyes were during triage and the farewells had to be quick and on the run.

I’m a big fan of “little touches”. Hawkeye discovering Radar’s teddy bear on his bed says more about how Radar matured from the MASH experience than any speech could have ever done, no matter how eloquently it was written.

. . .

Yes, a great moment in TV history. Thanks for writing that, Ken and David.

All you really need to know

“The United States pays close to twice as much for its drugs, its doctors, its medical equipment as people in other wealthy countries. As a result, our per person health care costs are more than twice the average of other wealthy countries, even though they all enjoy longer life expectancies. If we paid the same amount per person for our health care as people in other wealthy countries, then we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits.”

Dean Baker

Best line of the crisis, so far

BUFFETT: I can— I can— I can end the deficit in five minutes.

BECKY: How?

BUFFETT: You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than 3 percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Yeah. Yeah. Now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right? So it’s capable of being done. And they’re trying to use the incentive now we’re going to blow your brains out, America, you know, in terms of your— of your— in terms of your debt worthiness over time, and that’s being used as a threat. A more effective threat would be just to say if you guys can’t get it done, we’ll get some other guys to get it down.

Warren Buffett on CNBC July 7, 2011

July 14th

Kelly Leak is 50 today. That’s Jackie Earle Haley who played the athlete/juvenile delinquent in the Bad News Bears movies. Haley was also Moocher in Breaking Away and more recently the pedophile Ronnie McGorvey in Little Children, for which he received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination.

Sue Sylvester is 51 today. That’s Jane Lynch of Glee.

Joel Silver the movie producer is 59 today. He has been associated with Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, the Matrix, etc. More importantly he is considered the co-creator of Ultimate, the Frisbee team sport.

William Hanna, the Hanna of Hanna-Barbera, was born 101 years ago today. The team gave us The Flintstones, The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, The Smurfs and Yogi Bear. Yabba dabba doo!

The 38th President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford was born 98 years ago today. He was born Leslie Lynch King Jr. in 1913. He took the name Gerald Rudolff Ford Jr. when adopted by his stepfather as a small child (later using Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr.). When Ford died in 2006 he had lived longer than any president (93 years, 165 days), passing Ronald Reagan, who died at age 93 years, four months. John Adams and Herbert Hoover both lived to be 90.

Billy the Kid, aka Billy Bonney, aka William Antrim, actual name Henry McCarty, was killed 130 years ago tonight. Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett located his escaped prisoner at Pete Maxwell’s ranch, waited in a dark bedroom, and shot him twice when he saw him outlined in the opened bedroom doorway. The Kid died without knowing who had killed him. He was 21 years old.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie

… was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, 99 years ago today. We, of course, know him as Woody Guthrie.

A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it, or it could be whose hungry and where their mouth is, or whose out of work and where the job is or whose broke and where the money is or whose carrying a gun and where the peace is—that’s folk lore and folks made it up because they seen that the politicians couldn’t find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job of work.

Bastille Day

July 14th is Bastille Day in France, a national holiday. Even Google gets in on the act (google.fr, that is).

The people of Paris rose up and decided to march on the Bastille, a state prison that symbolized the absolutism and arbitrariness of the Ancien Regime.

The storming of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789, immediately became a symbol of historical dimensions; it was proof that power no longer resided in the King or in God, but in the people, in accordance with the theories developed by the Philosophes of the 18th century.

On July 16, the King recognized the tricolor cockade: the Revolution had succeeded.

For all citizens of France, the storming of the Bastille symbolizes, liberty, democracy and the struggle against all forms of oppression.

Embassy of France

Face Time

According to this article by Farhad Manjoo at Slate Magazine, Google has software that can identify your face most of the time if there are as few as 17 photos of you online. If there are 50, they can identify almost every time.

And all the other software giants have this same capability. They’re just waiting for the tipping point on public acceptance.

Manjoo believes that time is almost here: the technology has gotten so good, cameras are ubiquitous, and Facebook has diminished our sense of privacy.

The police officer that stops you won’t need your driver’s license anymore. He or she will just take your photo and the computer will tell them everything there is to know about you.

Oh, and if you ever look up at the sky, be sure to smile. You’re on candid camera.

The Debt Ceiling

The debt ceiling dispute is not about spending more federal money.

It is rather, whether to authorize the Treasury to borrow more money to pay for expenditures already approved by Congress.

What is happening at the moment is that certain politicians are using the debt ceiling mandate to force longer-term issues; issues that cannot be won on their merits through the normal democratic process.

We all can argue whether federal expenditures should be cut, which ones, when, and by how much, and whether revenues should be raised or not. But using a non-negotiable statutory requirement as political leverage is demagoguery. Indeed, it is worse than demagoguery — it is extortion.

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(The debt ceiling was raised seven times under George W. Bush, five times under Bill Clinton, five times under George H.W. Bush, 16 times under Ronald Reagan. It has already been raised three times under Barack Obama.)

Greed, Excess and America’s Gaping Class Divide

Matt Taibbi has some thoughts on American inequality. An excerpt:

For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, a trip to Europe once a year, what’s the big deal? They’d be right, were it not for the relative comparison — for the fact that out there, in that thin little ithsmus between the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, things are so fucked that public school teachers and garbagemen making $60k with benefits are being targeted with pitchfork-bearing mobs as paragons of greed and excess. Wealth, in places outside Manhattan, southern California, northern Virginia and a few other locales, is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all. Any kind of retirement plan, or better-than-minimum health coverage, is also increasingly looked at as an upper-class affectation.

That the Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It’s not just that the rich don’t know the poor exist, and genuinely think a half a million a year is “not a lot of money,” as one “compensation consultant” told the New York Times after the crash.

It also works the other way — the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. . . .

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Kulaks were the peasants who emerged with some affluence once Russia emancipated the serfs. Under the Soviets, kulaks were considered enemies of the people. Lenin called them “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers”. They were repressed and killed under Stalin.

This Time It Clanks

Posnanski has some thoughts on the All-Star Game and you need to go read them all. But here are some teasers:

Of course it’s not perfectly fair — nothing on this earth is perfectly fair except for the slice-and-choose method of dividing pie*.

*One person slices the pie, the other gets to choose which piece she wants, That — along with 90 feet between bases, grilled corn on the cob, Thunder Road and “the sea was angry that day my friends” Seinfeld — are the closest man has come to perfection.

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*And for crying out loud, TV announcers, I’m not qualified to tell you how to do your jobs, but PLEASE STOP TELLING ME HOW MUCH INTENSITY THERE IS OUT THERE. Just stop it. Stop telling me that they want to win. Stop telling me that they’re really into this. I was out there. I know exactly how much intensity was out there. If you could harness all the intensity from All-Star Weekend and turn it to battery power, it would not start a single Coleco handheld football game.

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Most of all: Stop telling us that the All-Star Game counts. It doesn’t count. That’s important, too. Everyone tries to romanticize the past, but the All-Star Game has NEVER counted. Pete Rose did not run over Ray Fosse because the game mattered more then. Pete Rose ran over Ray Fosse because he’s a jerk.*

Interesting line of the day

“5 of the 19 companies getting the lowest scores on the American Customer Satisfaction Index are pay TV providers. In 3rd, it’s Time Warner, 4th, Comcast, 5th, Charter, 17th, Cox, and 18th, Dish.”

The Consumerist

The Consumerist thinks it is because these companies are monopolies (or near monopolies). I agree, but also think the dissatisfaction is in part because for many of us we now are expected to pay $100 a month for something that used to be free.

But then I would. I don’t pay for TV.

Best line of the day

“In the latest gambit in the debt limit talks, the GOP has figured out a way to make Obama take all of the blame for keeping interest rates down, paying Social Security recipients on time, and continuing to pay soldiers. No, wait. That wouldn’t be blame, that would be credit. We’re so confused.”

Newsdroppings

July 13th

Today is the birthday

… of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Patrick Stewart is 71.

… of Bob Falfa. That’s Harrison Ford. He’s 69. And yes, Ford, who at one time had been in seven of the ten top grossing films of all time, has an Oscar nomination — for best actor in Witness.

… of Roger McGuinn, an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Byrds. He’s 69.

As Roger McGuinn once said of the Byrds, “It was Dylan meets the Beatles.” The Byrds combined the upbeat, melodic pop of the Beatles with the message-oriented lyrics of Bob Dylan into a wholly original amalgam that would be branded folk-rock. If only for their harmony-rich versions of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” drenched in the 12-string jangle of McGuinn’s Rickenbacker guitar, the Byrds would have earned their place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yet the group continually broke ground during the Sixties, creating revelatory syntheses of sound that were given such hyphenated names as space-rock (“5D [Fifth Dimension]”), psychedelic-rock (“Eight Miles High”) and country-rock (their Sweethearts of the Rodeo album). At a time when rock and roll was exploding in all fronts, the Byrds led the way with an insatiable curiosity about the forms and directions pop music could take. In so doing, they became peers and equals of their mentors, Dylan and the Beatles.

… of Pedro de Pacas. Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin is 65.

… of Tony Kornheiser. He’s 63.

… of Almost Famous Cameron Crowe. The Oscar-winner (for writing Almost Famous) is 54.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was born on July 21st in 1821. This from his 1877 obituary in The New York Times:

In an article published in The New-York Times immediately before the close of the war, the characteristic types of the soldiers of the South were sketched. It was pointed out that while Virginia, and what might be called the “old South,” produced gallant soldiers and dignified gentlemen, the South-west, the rude border country, gave birth to men of reckless ruffianism and cut-throat daring. The type of the first was Gen. Robert E. Lee; that of the latter, Gen. Bedford Forrest. At the date this article was written, (March, 1865,) Forrest seems to have been considered by many as the most formidable cavalry commander then in the Armies of the South; but he was so essentially guerrilla-like in his methods of warfare, and withal was so notoriously bloodthirsty and revengeful, that it was thought he would, when the other Southern commanders surrendered, an event then seen to be inevitable, collect around him all the desperate and discontented elements of the Southern Armies and maintain a guerrilla warfare on the South-western borders. This expectation was not realized, for when the crash came, everything went down in the grand ruin, and Forrest had had more than enough fighting to satisfy him.

Forrest rose through the ranks from private to general. After the war he was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

How the bubble destroyed the middle class

There are a hundred different ways of looking at the economy, and a million different statistics. But if you wanted to focus on just one number that explains why the economy can’t really recover, this is the one: $7.38 trillion.

That’s the amount of wealth that’s been lost from the bursting of housing bubble, according to the Federal Reserve’s comprehensive Flow of Funds report. It’s how much homeowners lost when housing prices plunged 30% nationwide. The loss for these homeowners was much greater than 30%, however, because they were heavily leveraged.

. . . But, on average, American homeowners lost 55% of the wealth in their home.

Most middle-class families didn’t have much wealth to begin with — about $100,000. For the 22 million families right in the middle of the income distribution (those making between $39,000 and $62,000 before taxes), about 90% of their assets was in the house. Now half of their wealth is gone and it will never come back as long as they live.

Excerpted from Rex Nutting – MarketWatch