Edwards — the beginning of the end

Electablog* has a good assessment of Senator John Edwards:

Edwards, if anything, hurt himself during the debate. He is, as I’ve discussed here, remarkable on the stump. Less so during debates (except for those times when he can verbally work his way back into that stump-speech script). The guy simply makes a better lawyer than a defendant.

Much of the evening’s focus was on who between Kerry and Edwards is more electable in more states. Differences were established in the areas of trade, the death penalty and lobbyist’s donations. Kerry often brought things back to Vietnam while Edwards continued to focus on the Mill closing of his childhood (at this point I’ve never been so depressed about a company shutting its doors and I’m not even entirely sure what happens at a mill).

When satire goes too far

Earlier, and very briefly, NewMexiKen posted a link to a website, currently popular among blogs, where several photos of the President can be morphed into photos of apes with similar facial expressions. It’s moderately clever and somewhat amusing. After some reflection however, I decided the ape site was in poor taste and removed the link.

Now NewMexiKen is no admirer of Mr. Bush, as numerous posts elsewhere on this site make abundantly clear. However, I am an admirer of the office of President of the United States and I do believe its occupants, past and present, deserve respect. Criticize his actions, call him a liar if that’s what you believe, but let’s leave the apes out of it.

N. Scott Momaday…

is 70 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice profile.

It’s the birthday of Kiowa poet, novelist and memoirist N(avarro) Scott Momaday, born in Lawton, Oklahoma (1934). One of the first books Momaday published was a collection of traditional Kiowa narratives about the sacred Sun Dance doll of the Kiowa tribe. While working on the project, Momaday had a chance to view the doll, which is kept in a rawhide bundle and has not been displayed since the Sun Dance of 1888. Seeing it made him feel for the first time that he had a connection to his heritage. He said, “I became more keenly aware of myself as someone who had walked through time and in whose blood there is something inestimably old and undying. It was as if I had remembered something that had happened two hundred years ago.”

He tried to write a book of poems based on the experience, but Wallace Stegner helped him turn the poems into fiction, and the book became House Made of Dawn (1969), about an Indian veteran of World War II named Abel who doesn’t fit in with mainstream America or the Indian reservation where he lives. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and it helped spark an American Indian literary renaissance. Momaday has gone on to write many more books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. His most recent book is In the Bear’s House (1999).

Momaday was instrumental in the production of the PBS series The West, whose website includes this biographical background.

Momaday has always understood who he is. “I am an Indian and I believe I’m fortunate to have the heritage I have, ” he says, speaking as a Kiowa Indian who defines himself as a Western Man. But that sense of identity didn’t evolve without difficulty. “I grew up in two worlds and straddle both those worlds even now,” Momaday says. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life. I’ve been able to deal with it reasonably well, I think, and I value it.”

Momaday was born in 1934 and spent his childhood on the Navajo, Apache and Pueblo reservations of the Southwest. “I had a Pan-Indian experience as a child, even before I knew what that term meant,” he recalls. Eventually, after enduring the job-scarce rigors of the Depression, the family settled in New Mexico, where Momaday’s parents, both teachers, taught for 25 years in a two-teacher Indian day school. Momaday’s father was also a painter and his mother a writer. “I grew up in a creative household and followed in my mother’s footsteps, to begin with,” says Momaday, who later became a painter, as well, and has extensively exhibited his work here and abroad. “I was interested in reading and writing early on.”

Those literary interests led to a lifelong love affair with American and English literature. After getting his BA at the University of New Mexico, Momaday earned an MA and Ph. D. at Stanford University. During the 35-plus years of his academic career, Momaday’s reputation as a scholar who specializes in the work of Emily Dickinson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, as well as in Indian oral tradition and concepts of the sacred, has resulted in his receiving numerous awards. These include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Premio Letterario Internationale Mondello, Italy’s highest literary award.

Momaday has also had tenured appointments at the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses of the University of California, Stanford University and the University of Arizona. He developed his first course in Indian oral tradition in 1969 while he was at Berkeley and “I’ve been teaching it every year since.” In addition, Momaday has been a visiting professor at Columbia and Princeton; was the first professor to teach American literature at the University of Moscow in Russia; and holds 12 honorary degrees from various American universities, including Yale.

Momaday is the author of 13 books, including novels, poetry collections, literary criticism, and works on Native American culture. His first novel, House Made of Dawn, won the Pulitzer Prize, but his favorites are The Ancient Child, his most recent novel, because “it is a greater act of the imagination,” and The Way to Rainy Mountain, because “it presents a good, accurate picture of Kiowa culture in its heyday.”

Birthdays today

Academy Award winning actress Joanne Woodward is 74 today. Miss Woodward won the best actress Oscar for The Three Faces of Eve (1957). She was nominated for best actress three other times. Woodward and Paul Newman have been married 46 years.

Two-time Academy Award winning actress Elizabeth Taylor is 72 today. She won best actress Oscars for Butterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Miss Taylor is probably best known, however, for being the voice of Maggie on The Simpsons.

Breaking promises

slacktivist tells a not too apocryphal story.

So in this story you have an old uncle who lives in a mansion outside of town.

Your uncle owns the valuable mansion outright, but has little else in the way of assets and income.

He proposes a deal. If you will provide him with money to live on, a percentage of your wages, you will be allowed to move into the mansion when you retire and he will leave the grand old house to you.

It seems like a good arrangement.

The cash for your uncle — 11.7 percent of your wages — takes a pretty big chunk out of your paycheck. But you’re glad to know that you’re ensuring the economic security of your older kin. And in return you have received a sacred promise that you, too, will have economic security in your retirement years.

For years the arrangement goes smoothly. Eventually your uncle discovers that the pipes in the basement of the mansion need to be replaced, and you increase your payments to 15.3 percent. Your contributions to your uncle’s care now take a bigger chunk of your wages than even income tax does, but you still consider this a wise investment in both your uncle’s well-being and your own future security.

Then one day you receive a letter from your uncle.

He confesses that he never actually had the pipes in the basement repaired. The resulting water damage has rendered the building unlivable and it has been condemned. He also tells you that he no longer owns the mansion. It now belongs to DiTech, which repossessed the building after he defaulted on the second and third mortgages he had taken out on the mansion. The cash from that refinancing is all gone — your uncle used all that money to pay his living expenses while he squandered all the payments you had been sending on lavish parties for his rich friends.

Your uncle thanks you for looking after him all those years and tells you not to worry about him — he’s moved into the mansion of one of those rich friends and will be able to live well and party on for the rest of his days.

The letter concludes:

Best wishes and good luck with your future.

Your loving uncle,

Alan Greenspan

Getting it right

NewMexiKen has long been troubled by the innaccuracies and misunderstanding found in even the presumed best news sources. CJR Campaign Desk does a good job of pointing them out, as least for the campaign. This report from Brian Montopoli is a good example.

One of the oldest rules of journalism is the hoary maxim given to green reporters by crusty city editors everywhere:

“No matter who said it, check it out; if your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

And each election year, that maxim is duly ignored by political reporters scrambling to make deadline. So it is that already, with snow still on the ground, partisan talking points have begun to find their way, unchallenged, into the reports of the mainstream campaign press. Writing on “Tapped,” Nick Confessore points out that Associated Press reporter Lolita Baldor essentially regurgitated a GOP press release in a story criticizing John Kerry’s defense voting record. Confessore also noted that Slate’s Fred Kaplan did his research on the same issue and got the facts right.

Baldor’s piece is almost completely devoid of context — relying on Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson, she writes that Kerry voted “against spending on weapons systems that have proven invaluable in the Persian Gulf, including the F-16 and F-15 fighter aircraft” — implying that Kerry serially voted down one weapon system after another.

Baldor is not alone. WendellGee points us to a nearly identical case on CNN last night, where Judy Woodruff, in an interview with Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), goes through most of a Republican-generated list of “something like 13 different weapons systems that they say the record shows Senator Kerry voted against” — apparently unaware that all of the systems were in the same defense appropriations bill. That’s exactly the mistake Baldor made.

As Kaplan points out:

Kerry was one of 16 senators (including five Republicans) to vote against a defense appropriations bill 14 years ago. He was also one of an unspecified number of senators to vote against a conference report on a defense bill nine years ago. The RNC takes these facts and extrapolates from them that he voted against a dozen weapons systems that were in those bills. The Republicans could have claimed, with equal logic, that Kerry voted to abolish the entire U.S. armed forces, but that might have raised suspicions.

Baldor and Woodruff found it easier to regurgitate partisan rhetoric than to research the nuances.

Reporters should resist the urge to lean on storylines crafted by political operatives. Whether RNC or DNC, they’re selling a political pitch, not a database.

And away we go

Jackie Gleason was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1916.

One of the greats of early TV, known primarily now for his portrayal of bus driver Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners. He was in a number of films and received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in The Hustler. Gleason also won a Tony Award.

“And away we go” was one of Gleason’s stock lines. It is also the inscription at his grave site.

Speeding in Albuquerque

Channel 4’s speeding survey continues. Tonight they showed a Bernalillo county sheriff’s detective doing 66 in a 35 zone. He was on duty, but in an unmarked car and not in a emergency situation. NewMexiKen has long contended that Albuquerque-area law enforcement vehicles are rarely seen not exceeding the posted speed limit.

The first great recording artist

The most famous operatic tenor of all time, Enrico Caruso (nee Errico Caruso) was born on February 25, 1873 (not on February 27, as given in many reference books). He was the third child of his relatively poor parents — not the eighteenth, as is often repeated in popular myth. He began serious vocal studies with Guglielmo Vergine in 1891 and later studied with Vincenzo Lombardi. In 1895, he made his debut in L’amico Francesco by Domenico Morelli. That fall in Cairo he sang Cavalleria rusticana, La Traviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, La Gioconda, and Manon Lescaut, all in less than four weeks.

His international fame began when he sang Loris in the premiere of Giordano’s Fedora in 1898. In the following seasons, he sang at St. Petersburg, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Milan, Monte Carlo and London. Arturo Toscanini conducted his Teatro alla Scala debut when he sang Rodolfo in La Bohème. Nellie Melba was his partner at his London debut in Rigoletto.

After making his very successful debut at the Metropolitan Opera as the Duke in Rigoletto, Caruso made the United States his primary operatic home. He spent the major part of each year singing there and usually had the honor of singing opening nights. He also took part in the annual Metropolitan Opera tour of the U.S., and in 1906 was caught in the great San Francisco earthquake right after his performance in Carmen. It was at the Metropolitan Opera that he sang the premiere of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West.

As he aged, Caruso began to take on heavier roles including Samson, Eleazar in La Juive, and Vasco in L’Africaine. After the tour each season, Caruso would travel to South America and/or Europe to sing and vacation. He never sang in his native city of Naples after 1902 because of a particularly nasty reception to his performances of Massenet’s Manon. In 1920, he underwent several operations for pleurisy, but his health continued to decline afterwards. He returned to his native Naples, where he died in 1921.

Caruso’s voice had a warmth, and an almost baritonal quality, which was different from the bright, ringing sound favored by most of the colleagues. The voice was extremely beautiful and he had an excellent feeling for the shape of a phrase. His sound recorded very well which helped to make his recordings among the most popular of his time; many of these selections have been available in one format or another since they were first issued. He was for many years the best selling classical performer in America.

Known as a generous colleague as well a great practical joker on stage, Caruso was welcome everywhere. He was a firm believer in good food, good wine and a good cigar. However whenever a friend was in a difficult situation, he was the first to offer help. One evening in Philadelphia when a colleague playing Colline became hoarse during a performance of La Bohème, Caruso sang the bass aria for him to save the performance. During World War I, he sang in many benefit concerts to raise money for the war effort. To this day Caruso is imprinted in the imagination as the archetypal operatic tenor.

— Richard LeSueur
All Classical Guide

Despite the surface noise on his nearly century-old acoustic recordings, listening to Caruso remains an emotional experience. The album Caruso 2000 removed the noise and introduced new orchestration, but with mixed results.

The real agenda behind the huge deficits

Reducing taxes for the wealthy and reducing entitlements for the rest of us:

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Congress Wednesday to take quick action to fix the nation’s swollen budget deficit — including measures that could cut some future Social Security payments — to avoid even bigger problems for the nation’s economy down the road.

The central bank chairman also repeated his assertion that recent tax cuts should be made permanent and said cutting spending was a better way to fix the deficit than tax increases.

From CNN Money
[Emphasis added by NewMexiKen]

An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario

Consultants to the Pentagon last year produced a report on climate change that suggested possible drastic scenarios. The Oakland Tribune has a good summary of the report and the commotion surrounding it.

In a dire look at a hypothetical hothouse world, consultants for the Pentagon see nations warring over water, food and whom to blame for greenhouse warming. (Hint: It’s you and your sport utility vehicle.)

“Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” two Emeryville-based futurists concluded in a report late last year for the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment.

Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall were drafted for an unclassified, worst-case look at climate change. But the echo chamber of Internet news and opinion transformed their thought exercise into a top military secret or the ultimate comeuppance for a fossil-fueled executive or a Bush conspiracy to hide the WMDs of the natural world.

As if the report itself wasn’t fantastic enough….

“There’s nothing secret about it, there’s nothing Pentagon about it and there’s no prediction in it,” Randall said.

It’s full of predictions, actually, but all start from a premise of abrupt climate change that is highly uncertain and outside the consensus of mainstream scientists.

Greenpeace has posted (as a pdf file) the complete report: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security.

The Executive Summary of the consultants’ report:

There is substantial evidence to indicate that significant global warming will occur during the 21st century. Because changes have been gradual so far, and are projected to be similarly gradual in the future, the effects of global warming have the potential to be manageable for most nations. Recent research, however, suggests that there is a possibility that this gradual global warming could lead to a relatively abrupt slowing of the ocean’s thermohaline conveyor, which could lead to harsher winter weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture, and more intense winds in certain regions that currently provide a significant fraction of the world’s food production. With inadequate preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human carrying capacity of the Earth’s environment.

The research suggests that once temperature rises above some threshold, adverse weather conditions could develop relatively abruptly, with persistent changes in the atmospheric circulation causing drops in some regions of 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade. Paleoclimatic evidence suggests that altered climatic patterns could last for as much as a century, as they did when the ocean conveyor collapsed 8,200 years ago, or, at the extreme, could last as long as 1,000 years as they did during the Younger Dryas, which began about 12,700 years ago.

In this report, as an alternative to the scenarios of gradual climatic warming that are so common, we outline an abrupt climate change scenario patterned after the 100-year event that occurred about 8,200 years ago. This abrupt change scenario is characterized by the following conditions:

  • Annual average temperatures drop by up to 5 degrees Fahrenheit over Asia and North America and 6 degrees Fahrenheit in northern Europe
  • Annual average temperatures increase by up to 4 degrees Fahrenheit in key areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa.
  • Drought persists for most of the decade in critical agricultural regions and in the water resource regions for major population centers in Europe and eastern North America.
  • Winter storms and winds intensify, amplifying the impacts of the changes. Western Europe and the North Pacific experience enhanced winds.

The report explores how such an abrupt climate change scenario could potentially de-stabilize the geo-political environment, leading to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints such as:
1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production
2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts
3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess

As global and local carrying capacities are reduced, tensions could mount around the world, leading to two fundamental strategies: defensive and offensive. Nations with the resources to do so may build virtual fortresses around their countries, preserving resources for themselves. Less fortunate nations especially those with ancient enmities with their neighbors, may initiate in struggles for access to food, clean water, or energy. Unlikely alliances could be formed as defense priorities shift and the goal is resources for survival rather than religion, ideology, or national honor.

This scenario poses new challenges for the United States, and suggests several steps to be taken:

  • Improve predictive climate models to allow investigation of a wider range of scenarios and to anticipate how and where changes could occur
  • Assemble comprehensive predictive models of the potential impacts of abrupt climate change to improve projections of how climate could influence food, water, and energy
  • Create vulnerability metrics to anticipate which countries are most vulnerable to climate change and therefore, could contribute materially to an increasingly disorderly and potentially violent world
  • Identify no-regrets strategies such as enhancing capabilities for water management
  • Rehearse adaptive responses
  • Explore local implications
  • Explore geo-engineering options that control the climate.

There are some indications today that global warming has reached the threshold where the thermohaline circulation could start to be significantly impacted. These indications include observations documenting that the North Atlantic is increasingly being freshened by melting glaciers, increased precipitation, and fresh water runoff making it substantially less salty over the past 40 years.

This report suggests that, because of the potentially dire consequences, the risk of abrupt climate change, although uncertain and quite possibly small, should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.

Just wondering

[Florida] elections officials banned any attempt to recount votes cast on touch-screen voting machines Friday, reversing an earlier decision as counties prepare for the presidential primary less than a month away.

What’s going to happen when all the polls going into the election show the Democrat leading, and all the exit polls show the Democrat winning, and then the voting computers whirr, the software does its magic, and out comes Bush?

Passionate jewelry

From the official “Passion Jewelry” page of the Mel Gibson movie website:

The “Nail” pendants come in two sizes and feature Isaiah 53:5 inscribed on the side. The 20″ cord has a Nail pendant that is 1 7/8″ in length and the 24″ cord has a Nail pendant that is 2 5/8″ in length.

Just $12.99 or $16.99. Check out the jewelry, “Witnessing Tools” and other gifts at the website of official licensed products for Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

[As] the late, great comedian Bill Hicks probably said it best when he commented, “A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a f–in’ cross? It’s kind of like going up to Jackie Onassis with a rifle pendant on.”

Quoted in “The Morning Fix” by Mark Morford (email from SFGate.com).

Federal Marriage Amendment idiocy

Doesn’t the draft amendment prevent all new marriages?

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

that marital status…be conferred upon unmarried couples

What does that mean?

And for that matter, shouldn’t the language be neither this Constitution nor the constitution…?

Who wrote this soup?

And to think that the people responsible for suggesting that this abomination be added to the United States Constitution consider themselves patriots.

Debby Buchanan…

was born in Detroit on this date in 1952. She is co-author with her husband of children’s books including Lizards on the Wall and It Rained on the Desert Today.

John Foster Dulles…

was born on this date in 1888. Dulles was Secretary of State under Eisenhower from 1953 until April 1959. He is the person for whom Washington Dulles International Airport is named.