A date which will live in infamy turns 70 today. The New York Times has an interesting portrait of Admiral Yamamoto, the reluctant architect of the attack:
From 1926 to 1928 he served as naval attaché in Washington; while in
America, he journeyed alone across the country, paying his way with his
own meager salary, stretching his budget by staying in cheap hotels and
skipping meals. His travels revealed the growing power of the American
industrial machine. “Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit
and the oil fields in Texas,” he would later remark, “knows that Japan
lacks the national power for a naval race with America.”
He argued against the alliance with the Axis and against war with the USA. However, when it became unavoidable, he argued for the sneak attack that devastated the Pacific Fleet.
The school that Obama's kids attend is serving Japanese food today. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids
are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for
condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer
miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school
board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good
relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness
to dialogue and willingness to listen.
And his thoughts about the test?
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section
had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to
guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In
our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a
double block of reading instruction.
He knew the answers to NONE of the math questions? I mean, seriously?
Something Dumb from the New York Times
What a shock, right? An economics blogger talks about the surprising (to her) result of a poll:
Two of my colleagues have alluded to a recent Pew Research Center report on American exceptionalism, paying particular attention to the fact that Americans are more likely to say their culture is superior to others than are people in Germany, Spain, Britain or France.
Well, sounds like the residents of all five countries are correct. US culture is superior.
One finding of the report that received little attention, however, was about cultural attitudes toward success. Of the five nationalities polled, Americans were least likely to believe that success in life was determined by forces outside our control.
But she points out a flaw in this worldview:
These findings are particularly interesting when juxtaposed with a separate report from the Pew Economic Mobility project. That report, which examined economic and social mobility in 10 Western countries, found that Americans actually appear to have less control over their success in life than their counterparts do.
In particular, the educational attainment of a person’s parents — a factor usually determined before that person’s birth — seems to matter more for mobility in the United States.
No surprise, she looks at it from the standpoint of "the glass is half empty". The other way to look at it is that if you want your kids to be a success, you should go to college. But the big laugh comes at the end:
As Richard Wilkinson suggested in a recent TED Talk, if you want to live the American dream — and have greater control over your own likelihood of success — you should probably move to Denmark, where the poor have a better chance of moving up in the world.
I do have a couple of questions about that:
1. How many poor families have the option of moving to Denmark?
2. How do the Danes feel about taking in the poor?
Brent Budowsky Tries to Puff Up Ron Paul
This is hilarious:
There are now multiple polls that show Ron Paul has gained support and has a legitimate chance to come in first or second in Iowa and New Hampshire. I would now call Ron Paul one of three front-runners in both Iowa and New Hampshire alongside Mitt Romney and a third candidate, currently Newt Gingrich. If Ron Paul wins Iowa, which he might, all bets are off. Also, most analysts miss the fact that many states have open systems where independents, and in some cases Democrats, can vote for a Republican nominee. This could give a further boost to Paul.
It is now time to give Ron Paul the attention he deserves in debates and throughout the political community.
Budowski's a liberal hack, and all he's trying to do here is monkey-wrench the Republicans. Paul gets little respect because his support is the reverse of the Rio Grande: a mile deep and an inch wide. His supporters are undoubtedly committed; most folks would say they should be.
Paul won't win Iowa, and he won't win New Hampshire. Budowski wants him to make a third party run because he sees that as about the only way Hopey McChange can win a second term.
The base will not forgive Rick Perry his immigration sins. In fact,
that has hurt him far more than his debate performances, but his debate
performances have hurt him badly. Perry, who came out principled and
fiery with a record others could only envy, has left others with the
impression that he’s a poor man’s version of the village idiot, which in
the SEC we call “Aggies”. Maybe he can turn it around.
Newt Gingrich will not be the nominee because, despite his daughter’s
rebuttals to the horror stories of how Gingrich divorced his first of
three wives, Jackie Gingrich told the Washington Post on
January 3, 1985, “He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to
Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery.
The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he
come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the
divorce while I was recovering from the surgery.”
Gingrich went on to cheat on the second wife with the third.
Regardless of the actual facts or even the spin, he won’t win women.
Herman Cain won’t be the nominee because he can’t win women either.
Regardless of what you think of the Politico story, Cain’s handling of
the story has been an epic disaster. He’s down at least 10 points with
women in Iowa. He’s falling even further and doesn’t even realize it.
He’s largely been emboldened by a conservative media that is so used to
standing by its men that too few are telling Herman that he is now at
the point where he must actually sit and answer questions whether he
wants to or not and whether he feels maligned or not and whether I think
he should have to or not. If he loses women by as big as he is
starting to lose the women, he cannot win.
Reasonable points, all. I do think that Gingrich is starting to get a second look, now that the Cain implosion is in full swing, with the steady drip drip drip of harassment allegations.
The obvious conclusion is that Mitt Romney is the last man standing, which Erickson concedes:
So Mitt Romney will be the nominee. Conservatives will not rally
together with the least of the bad alternatives and Romney, like John
McCain before him, will run up the middle to the nomination.
But:
You’d think that given the economy, jobs, and the present angst about
the direction of the country that the GOP would have an easy path to
victory. You would be wrong.
You forget the electoral college. The vote is coming down to a
handful of states and Barack Obama still maintains the advantage of
incumbency and not terribly terrible polling in those swing states.
"Not terribly terrible"? Just moderately terrible? Slightly terrible?
I’ve been reading the 200 pages of single spaced
opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There
is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides.
He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled. The
man has no core beliefs other than in himself. You want him to be
tough? He’ll be tough. You want him to be sensitive? He’ll be
sensitive. You want him to be for killing the unborn? He’ll go all in
on abortion rights until he wants to run for an office where it is not
in his advantage.
Most of us read that opposition research in 2008. You know, that year that everybody like Erick thought John McCain was an unacceptable candidate because of "his immigration sins"?
That is precisely why Mitt Romney will not win in 2012. But no worry,
once he loses, Republican establishment types will blame conservatives
for not doing enough for Mitt Romney, never mind that Mitt Romney has
never been able to sell himself to more than 25% of the GOP voters.
It’s not his fault though, it is the 75%’s fault.
Why, how could anybody possibly think that Erick Erickson will not do enough for Mitt Romney? You know how it is, Erick will spend the next 11 months trashing Romney, and then the last month exhorting the troops to vote for him. And if he loses he'll go right back to trashing him.
Look, I'm far from enamored with Mitt Romney, just as I was not a blind-eyed McCain supporter in 2008. But politics is all about getting the best deal you can, given reality. If the "real" conservatives want a better candidate in 2016 or (I hope) in 2020 when Mitt Romney ends his second term, then it's up to them to find him, vet him carefully, be sure he's got the fire in the belly (no repeats of the Fred Thompson fiasco) and push him over the finish line.
I’ve got some new numbers for you that illustrate this in fresh detail:
They reveal that the surtaxes would be paid by an infinitessimally small
percentage of American taxpayers, and that the surtaxes themselves
would constitute an infinitessimally tiny percentage of the income of
the wealthy.
Tiny times tiny, doesn't add up to much, right? Let's remember what this tax is supposed to fund:
The plan would create a national infrastructure bank and would invest
$50 billion in upgrading highways, rail, and bridges, with the goal of
putting construction workers across the country back on the job and
revitalizing our infrastructure and economy. It would be paid for by a
0.7 percent surtax on income in excess of $1 million.
Okay, here's Sargent's numbers:
* If the new infrastructure proposal were enacted, the surtax on
millionaires would impact a grand total of 345,532 taxpayers nationwide —
or 0.2 percent of American taxpayers.
* If the new infrastructure proposal were enacted, the 0.7
percent surtax would amount to all of $13,457 on average for the
millionaires that would pay it. Given that their average income is
$2,923,000, this means they would be paying on average an additional
1/217 of their overall income, or just over an additional 0.4 percent.
That’s less than one half of one percent.
Okay, so 345,532 taxpayers, paying an additional $13, 457 totals how much kiddies? Answer: About $4.6 billion. To cover $50 billion in new spending.
A hilarious send-up of Ira Glass' This American Life:
If you've ever listened to NPR (and I haven't in years, but that's the beauty of NPR; it never changes), you'll get some of the terrific inside jokes.
When Will Obama Apologize to the Germans for Liberating the Concentration Camps?
The apologist-in-chief tried another goofy theya culpa:
In September 2009, US Ambassador to Japan John Roos reported to the Obama administration that the Japanese government did not think it was a good idea for President Obama to visit Hiroshima to apologize for the US having dropped an atomic bomb on that city, a secret cable published by Wikileaks revealed.
Roos wrote the cable after his August meeting with Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka, reporting to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Japanese government felt “the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘non-starter.’
The Congressional Budget Office on Friday confirmed that President
Obama’s jobs bill would be fully paid for over ten years and also gave
its seal of approval to Senate Democrats' version that includes a surtax
on millionaires.
The CBO said that the original Obama stimulus
bill would involve $447 billion in tax cuts and new spending—the same
estimate given by the administration. It said the bill would raise $450
billion over ten years. The result is a $3 billion decrease in deficits
over ten years.
What are they missing? Oh, yeah, there's this little bit:
The CBO did say that the original bill would increase the short term budget deficit in 2012 by $288 billion.
Translation: They're going to spend a lot now, and they promise pay it back years from now. Say you want to buy a new car. But because you put a lot of miles on your car every year, it will only last you two years, at which time it's basically a junker. And you want the bank to stretch your payments out over ten years.
Todd Rundgren had a couple of monster hits in the early 1970s, with Hello It's Me:
And I Saw the Light:
He popped up again on the charts about a decade later with the novelty song Bang on the Drum All Day:
But before, during and after this phase Rundgren had an incredible career as a hard rocker, phenomenally successful record producer, and musical innovator. As an example of his hard rock chops, consider these two selections from his initial band, The Nazz:
Rundgren produced the phenomenally successful Meatloaf album, Bat Out of Hell, which currently ranks as the fifth best-selling album of all time. And in the mid-1970s he created the innovative synthesizer band, Utopia, which later became a more conventional rock band. Here's Part I of the Ikon from the first Utopia album:
Utopia's Singring and the Glass Guitar was something of a Lord of the Rings for rock and roll:
I particularly like the opening to part II of this song, especially the drumming:
Be sure also to catch the ending of that track, starting around 6:45. Granted, the narration tying the segments together gets annoying, but the music is terrific.
Rundgren's politics were pretty consistently leftist, although there are only a few songs here and there where the message overwhelms the music. He is definitely one of the few musicians of the rock era where the label "genius" seems appropriate.
I was never a fan of his swaggering, cock of the walk persona. I recognize that some of that was an image that he cultivated; many of his former teammates have said that he was not arrogant when the camera was off him.
He certainly has a resume that sounds like a Hall of Famer:
Eight-time Pro Bowl selection (1991-94, 1996-99) Six-time first team All-Pro selection Two-time Super Bowl champion (XXIX, XXX) AP Defensive Player of the Year (1994) Two-time NFC Defensive Player of the Year (1993-94)
When you add in the bits about most returns for a touchdown ever, and his helping to get the Niners over the hump in 1994, then going to Dallas and helping get them back over the hump, you have a pretty strong case.
But in the comments on the CBS sports article, you can also see some of the criticisms:
I like this class a bunch except for Deion Sanders. His aversion to contact made him a good returner, but to be HOF'd as a defensive football player in the same class as Chris Hanburger and Richard Dent just seems wrong.
I bet Tim McCarver is thrilled Deion made the hall. "You're a real man Deion." I do remember Deion being an amazing coverage corner, an amazing return guy and a guy so talented that he could play WR too. But he was pretty soft when it came to delivering punishment or even tackling for that matter.
That 1993 Defensive Player of the Year award has always bugged me. Deion held out for the first five games, which the Falcons lost. He came back and Atlanta closed out the season 6-5. So the theory goes that if Deion had been there all year, Atlanta would have made the playoffs. Of course, that kind of undermines the argument that he helped his team; by holding out he kept them back.
In 1993, the Falcons gave up the most points in the league. Now, it's true that they gave up about 30 points per game when Deion was out and only 21 when he was there. But what about 1992, when Deion played 15 games? The Falcons gave up the most points in the league that year as well.
And check out what happened in 1994, when Deion went to San Francisco. The Falcons, despite losing the DPOY improved relative to the league, ranking 24th in points allowed (although they gave up exactly the same number of points). And the 49ers? They did improve from 16th in total points allowed to sixth, despite allowing 1 more point in 1994, but... it's mostly a statistical glitch, as the 49ers in 1993 had a lot of teams just barely beat them in fewest points allowed.
And in 1995? Deion left SF for Dallas. The Niners improved to 2nd in the league in points allowed, while Dallas went from third to third.
So overall, the evidence that Deion substantially improved the defenses that he played on is lacking. There is no denying that he was an exciting player, but it is hard to see that he was an effective player.
You gotta love the plan for a "prolonged occupation of Washington, DC". More details here. The "famous" people who've signed on are the usual far leftist nutbars:
Bill Moyer, Bob Fitrakis, Chris Hedges, Cynthia McKinney, David Lindorff, Howie Hawkins, Larisa Alexandrovna, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Sibel Edmonds and Ted Rall. Where's Cindy Sheehan?
When I speak to people in the city (which in fact does happen, since I do live here, reporting aside), they often see the fact that new development occurs in the same places at times when housing costs are spiking. Consequently, they often reach the conclusion that new development is causing price increases and that the best way to moderate price increases is to moderate the pace of new development. These charts indicate, I think, that this is a mistake.
You think? And you need a chart to tell you what to think?
This is Economics 101. Housing prices rise in response to demand. As the prices rise, it becomes economically sensible for developers to build to fill that demand.
Jane Fonda was not an opponent of the Vietnam War. She supported our troops in that effort. That famous photo of her sitting on an anti-aircraft gun? She was preventing the North Vietnamese from shooting down one of our pilots!
Or at least that's what you might believe if you just read Fonda's latest post.
Bottom line, this has gone on far too long, this spreading of lies about me! None of it is true. NONE OF IT! I love my country. I have never done anything to hurt my country or the men and women who have fought and continue to fight for us. I do not understand what the far right stands to gain by continuing with these myths.
Hundreds of bars, restaurants and stores across Minnesota are running out of beer and alcohol and others may soon run out of cigarettes -- a subtle and largely unforeseen consequence of a state government shutdown.
The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.
In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".
Who are these experts?
The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.
Their website is here. Curiously, they don't have an "about us" page listing the members. But their mission statement is edifying:
The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) was established by scientists with the aim of saving the Earth and all life on it.
What do you think the odds of a group with that agenda reporting that the ocean(sic) was fine and getting better? Fortunately they have an easy solution:
"We have to bring down CO2 emissions to zero within about 20 years," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg told BBC News.
They couldn’t have been nicer. I was relying on that too — the individual niceness of conservatives. They are almost always very nice when you get to know them personally.
I did have to chuckle at this bit:
This refers to Malkin’s infamous defense of internment camps and racial profiling going back to 2004. Ugh. Self-hatred is sad to experience live.
Self-hatred? I guess her point is that all those Asians should stick together in solidarity; never mind that the Japanese invaded the Philippines and treated the Filipinos (Malkin's ancestors) horribly. I suppose that in Ms Contees world, the residents of Nanking stand in solidarity with their Japanese brethren.
I hate living in the suburbs. No, really, I hate it with a white hot passion. It’s because of the soccer moms. Of course, not all moms in the suburbs are soccer moms. Some of them are into LaCrosse. They might be working or stay at home. They run around in plush minivans and Lexus SUVs.
Read it all; she comes off like the woman in Main Street. It just goes on and on, and one part in particular caught my attention:
Is it wrong for an adult male to talk to a girl of 17 on the internet? A suburban soccer mom will tell you yes. Unequivocally. It is wrong for anyone who the parent does not personally know to talk to their children.
You know how it is; the relative ages matter. Is it wrong for an 18-year-old guy to talk to a high school girl? Nope. Is it wrong and creepy for a 47-year-old guy to be chatting up bobby-soxers? You bet your life.
And that's where, amazingly, she's going with this. All that sophomoric I hate suburbia angst is leading up to a defense of Anthony Weiner:
Oh, please, Nancy. Lay off already. Haven’t you done enough damage to women by tolerating the disgusting and over the top misogynism of the 2008 presidential campaign? Please, don’t do us any more favors. The suburban security frenzy is way out of control and ruining our children’s childhoods. Don’t add more fuel to the fire with these ridiculous calls for Weiner to resign. He’s an immature guy who needs some behavioral modification. He’s not a fricking predator.
The Haddad children of Middletown, Md., have a lot on their minds: school projects, SATs, weekend parties. And parents who believe the earth will begin to self-destruct on Saturday.
Thousands of people around the country have spent the last few days taking to the streets and saying final goodbyes before Saturday, Judgment Day, when they expect to be absorbed into heaven in a process known as the rapture. Nonbelievers, they hold, will be left behind to perish along with the world over the next five months.
It does raise the opportunity for some awesome pranks. The kids could tell their parents that a couple of heathen families down the block did disappear on Saturday; looks like Mom and Dad are going to be "Left Behind".
To offer a policy observation, higher density helps reduce street crime in an urban environment in two ways. One is that in a higher density city, any given street is less likely to be empty of passersby at any given time. The other is that if a given patch of land has more citizens, that means it can also support a larger base of police officers. And for policing efficacy both the ratio of cops to citzens and of cops to land matters. Therefore, all else being equal a denser city will be a better policed city.
There are two things wrong with Matt's theory: 1. Crime is higher in high-density areas. 2. Passersby are less likely to intervene to stop a crime.
But Common is the dude in the Gap ad. His mother is a teacher. Shirley Sherrod is a victim of white supremacist terrorism, who lectures black people on seeing their own prejudice. Eric Holder went to Stuyvesant. Michelle Obama's mother was a homemaker. Her parents forfeited a full athletic scholarship to send Michelle Obama's brother to Princeton. They used to watch the Brady Bunch together.
If Common is disturbing, Shirley Sherrod wants to discriminate against white people, MIchelle Obama is obsessed with Whitey, and Barack Obama has a hatred of white people, then the rest of us are in real trouble. When you talk about "nonthreatening" this really is the best we've got.
Well, then we might as well accept that there is no such thing as nonthreatening blacks, then. As a reminder, Common wrote a sympathetic song about a woman who murdered a cop in cold blood.
From the brief era where Bill Connors was with the band. Obviously not the most famous incarnation of the band, but the album this came from (Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy) was a huge seller for a fusion combo. Some very tasty licks and a young-looking Chick Corea.
Donald Trump's strategy of spurring interest in his presidential campaign by flirting with discredited theories about President Barack Obama's birthplace is stirring a growing backlash among prominent African-Americans, who are protective of the first black president and, in some cases, concerned that Trump is making a coded racial appeal.
Now I think the Birthers are morons, and Trump is a fool for courting them. But something like 99% of blacks are going to vote for Obama anyway. So this won't cost him anything with black voters.
In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent.
It's the usual bit of limousine socialism from VF. That's not too surprising. But what I do love is the bit in the sidebar: Err, how many of the people in that "A-List" crowd were from that evil 1%?
It's easy and relatively painless to be a wealthy socialist these days. You know that nobody's going to take us back to the days of 90% marginal tax rates; at the worst the Democrats might bump it up a couple percent. So why not be one of the "good" rich people; the ones who moan about the poor from their penthouse suites?
A Chinese newspaper man who thinks Charlie's dad was once president:
He ignored his own father's advice to keep quiet, who was once the president of the US. Sheen is a disgrace, unfilial to his father and his fatherland.
Caldera was a terrific jazz/fusion band of the late 1970s. Here are a couple of their better songs:
As you can hear, they combined a Latin beat with fierce guitar work (Jorge Strunz) and complex arrangements. Here's the title track from their second album, Sky Islands:
Diane Reeves is the singer on that one. I like the way they blend Carolyn Dennis' vocals with the instruments on this song from their debut album:
Here's a taste of their final album, 1979's Dreamer:
Although Caldera never hit it big as a group, the members have gone on to very successful careers. Strunz teamed with Ardeshir Farah as an acoustic guitar duo; they've released a dozen or more albums. Here's a live performance:
Drummer Carlos Vega went on to play with everybody from Teddy Prendergast to the Bangles to Kenny Rogers. Ditto with keyboardist Eduardo Del Barrio who has credits with Earth Wind and Fire, Stan Getz and Herb Alpert.
Although they were nowhere near as famous as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds were much more talented instrumentally than the former and more influential than the latter. These days, about the only song of theirs that gets much airplay is Shapes of Things to Come, but their catalog includes many terrific songs.
This version of Train Kept A-Rolling (retitled Stroll On apparently to avoid copyright issues) from the 1960s movie Blow-Up features Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Beck is the guy who gets annoyed at his amplifier, while Page does the later guitar solo:
Obviously Beck's antics were inspired by Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing performances. The extras seem like zombies, with almost no toe-tapping or head nodding going on during the performance.
If having Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in their lineup seems an embarrassment of riches, consider that the original guitarist for the band was Eric Clapton. Probably the biggest hit for the band during this era was For Your Love:
However, that song is not really typical of the Clapton years; they focused more on blues standards like this (Yardbirds song starts about 20 seconds in):
Clapton wanted to stay with the blues and following the success of For Your Love, he left for a brief stint with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, then when on to form Cream with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. Beck joined, followed shortly by Page who was originally a bassist, then a rhythm guitarist, and (mostly after Beck's departure) lead guitarist. Here's Beck on the instrumental version of What Do You Want:
And the version with lyrics:
The best album of the Beck era is Over Under Sideways Down, with the title track:
Here's an oddball little tune called Hot House of Omargarashid. Be sure to listen to the guitar work building in the background starting at about 1:00 in and leading to Beck's scorching solo:
Beck left the band in 1966 ostensibly retiring from music. He returned a few years later with a couple of albums featuring Rod Stewart on vocals. The Page years were not very successful for the band; they released an album called Little Games with a notably weak title song:
Although Think About It still holds up:
The band was stronger in their live performances. Here they are doing an early version of Dazed and Confused, which of course became a monster hit for Page's next band:
After the band dissolved, Page briefly formed a group called the New Yardbirds to fulfill some contractual obligations; the band was renamed in late 1968 to Led Zeppelin.
Ultimately, the band became better known for the groups it spawned afterwards. Clapton with Cream, Derek and the Dominoes and his solo career has arguably been the most durable. Beck, who released several terrific fusion albums in the mid-1970s was the most experimental. And Page was the most commercially successful with Led Zeppelin being the colossus of arena rock in the 1970s.
Singer Keith Relf went on to form the initial incarnation of the band Renaissance along with Yardbirds' drummer Jim McCarty, although that band had much more success in the mid-1970s with a completely different lineup featuring Annie Haslam on vocals. Rhythm/bass guitarist Chris Dreja went on to become a professional photographer; his photo of Led Zeppelin appears on the back cover of their first album. Paul Samwell-Smith, the original bassist of the group, moved into record producing and worked on Cat Stevens' most successful albums.
