Monthly Archives: May 2008

Saturday, May 31, 2008

Short Takes

I’m busy with making moving preparations, but here are some interesting things I came across this morning to read while I’m out looking for a new house.

– Speaking of paying the mortgage…

Newly delinquent mortgage borrowers outnumbered people who caught up on their overdue payments by two to one last month, a sign that nationwide efforts to help homeowners avoid default may be failing.

– Hard Line Lunacy on Cuba: Eugene Robinson evaluates the US stand on “that imprisoned island.”

For nearly five decades, the United States has pursued a policy toward Cuba that could be described as incredibly stupid.

– John McCain vs. YouTube:

The video lasts just more than three minutes. But that’s long enough to raise some nasty doubts about John McCain’s reputation as a straight talker.


“This is another example of the generation gap that the Republicans are facing. And that gap is morphing into a chasm,” said Frank Luntz, a veteran GOP pollster. Yes, many of the young video viewers are already committed to Obama, but watching and even making the short films has turned the merely amused into the deeply committed.

– The party is over for the Detroit Pistons.

It all fell apart Friday night. Everything. The game. The series. The Pistons’ championship hopes. Maybe even these Pistons as we knew them.

The maintenance crew hoped to sweep confetti off the Palace floor at the end; instead, all that was left were little pieces of the Pistons’ swagger.

– The Tigers beat Seattle in Seattle.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Shorter David Brooks

Here’s his explanation about why dealing with Iran is problematic for both John (“Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran”) McCain and Barack (“Let’s talk”) Obama:

We don’t understand the Iranians because the Iranians don’t understand themselves.

Why don’t we just send Dr. Phil over there and let them hold him hostage? That would make everybody happy: he could help them with their issues, and we wouldn’t have to watch him any more.

Real Estate Realities

The news has been full of stories about the real estate slump and how it not only effects homeowners who can’t pay their mortgages, but people who rent from landlords who can’t pay the mortgage and face eviction. I can report first-hand on that latter part of that story.

Four years ago, I moved into this nice little house here in Coral Gables. It was owned by a friend of mine and it had been sitting empty for several months, and he was happy to have someone he knew renting it. I was happy to move into a nice neighborhood that was seven miles from my office versus my apartment that was 20 miles from my office.

But two years ago my friend decided to sell the house; Miami was at the peak of the housing boom, and he got a very good price for it. He sold it to a man who went by the name of D’Angelo __________*, a real estate speculator who was also in the process of buying several other properties in the area. The arrangement was that I could stay in the house for a small increase in rent, and everything seemed to be going well.

Then, last October, I got a knock on the door. It was a process server. D’Angelo had not paid a penny on the mortgage since the previous June, he was in default, and I, as the “unknown tenant,” was listed on the foreclosure papers. I immediately contacted my lawyer, who wisely counseled me to stop paying the rent and put it in escrow pending the outcome, and he would work with the bank’s attorneys to see if I could work out a deal to buy the house on a short sale.

Long story short: all those efforts have been to no avail, and I will be out of here a week from today. I have a great realtor who is finding me a lot of really nice places for rent to look at this weekend. Ironically, the nicest — and most affordable — are literally across the street from my old apartment complex.

Meanwhile, D’Angelo has vanished. All attempts by me, my lawyer, the bank’s attorneys, and apparently several private investigators to locate him have come up empty. The last I heard — in November — was that he was either in Las Vegas or Spain. Frankly, I hope he’s in Turkish prison and married to the guy with the most cigarettes.

So, if my blogging seems sporadic for the next couple of days, you’ll know why. And if you have any leads for rental property in Miami (ideally I’d like a 2 BR house with a garage) that’s not in East Naples or Key Largo, drop me an e-mail.

*I’m keeping his full name out of the story; with my luck, he’ll come out of hiding to sue me for defamation.

Alexander Courage – 1919-2008

You may not know the name of Alexander Courage, but I’ll bet you know his most famous piece of music.

Alexander “Sandy” Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic “Star Trek” TV show, has died. He was 88.

Courage died May 15 at the Sunrise assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades, his stepdaughter Renata Pompelli of Los Angeles, said Thursday. He had been in poor health for three years.

Over a decades-long career, Courage collaborated on dozens of movies and orchestrated some of the greatest musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, including “My Fair Lady,” “Hello, Dolly!” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “Gigi,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

But his most famous work is undoubtedly the “Star Trek” theme, which he composed, arranged and conducted in a week in 1965.

“I have to confess to the world that I am not a science fiction fan,” Courage said in an interview for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation’s Archive of American Television in 2000. “Never have been. I think it’s just marvelous malarkey. … So you write some, you hope, marvelous malarkey music that goes with it.”

Courage said the tune, with its ringing fanfare, eerie soprano part and swooping orchestration, was inspired by an arrangement of the song “Beyond the Blue Horizon” he heard as a youngster.

“Little did I know when I wrote that first A-flat for the flute that it was going to go down in history, somehow,” Courage said. “It’s a very strange feeling.”

Courage said he also mouthed the “whooshing” sound heard as the starship Enterprise zooms through the opening credits of the TV show.

Go boldly, Mr. Courage.

(HT to Petulant.)

Friday Blogaround

Another very busy week. Let’s see what the LC has to say about it.

– A Blog Around The Clock: it all started with plants.
– archy: silly people.
– Bark Bark Woof Woof explains the Kool-Aid effect.
– Bloggg: goodbye to Feak.
– Collective Sigh: Memorial Day.
– Dohiyi Mir: the verdict.
– Echidne Of The Snakes: what to wear to the donut shop.
– Florida Progressive Coalition Blog: lots to read.
– Iddybud Journal: cartoon break.
– Left Is Right: Friday fun, including a cheap gas finder.
– Musing’s musings: eating in public.
– Pen-Elayne on the Web: update those jokes for the internet.
– Rook’s Rant: Rook may be right about Scott McClellan.
– rubber hose: permanent bases.
– Scrutiny Hooligans: Liddy Dole runs left, right, wherever…
– SoonerThought: ET caught on tape?
– Speedkill: Of Note.
– Steve Bates, The Yellow Doggerel Democrat: voter suppression in Texas.
– Stupid Enough Unexplanation: balancing act.
– The Invisible Library: the rest of the story.
– WTF Is It Now?? off the Iraq.
– …You Are A Tree: Hillary and the full Monty.

I can predict that this coming week I’ll have a very moving experience.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Harvey Korman – 1927-2008

From CNN:

Comic actor Harvey Korman has died at 81, according to the UCLA Medical Center.

Harvey Korman’s death comes after complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

Korman died at the center four months after suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.

“It was a miracle in itself that he survived the incident at all. Everyone in the hospital referred to him as ‘miracle man’ because of his strong will and ability to bounce right back after several major operations,” said Korman’s daughter, Kate Korman. “Tragically, after such a hard-fought battle, he passed away.”

Korman was a regular on “The Carol Burnett Show” from 1967 through 1978, for which he won Emmy awards in 1969, 1971, 1972 and 1974. He also won a Golden Globe for his work on the series.

The lanky Korman also appeared in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles” (as the sneering Hedley Lamarr), “High Anxiety” and “History of the World, Part 1.”

What an amazing talent, what a wonderful comedian, and what a loss. I used to watch Carol Burnett just to see if she could crack him up, and I loved him in all of Mel Brooks’ movies.

God speed, Hedy Lamarr. (“That’s Hedley!”)

Tigers Update

The Tigers won in Anaheim 6-2. They get the night off then head to Seattle, where I hope my brother gets to see them play.

By the way, I hope none of the players ate any of the food from the vendors at Anaheim stadium. When I was out there a couple of weeks ago, I heard a report that the stadium was cited for over 700 health code violations. Yuck.

Here We Go Again

Sunday is the official start of the you-know-what season in the Atlantic, but that doesn’t mean that a tropical depression has to wait for June 1, especially if the season starts in the Pacific on May 15; all they have to do is work their way across Central America and stumble into the Atlantic.

That explains Tropical Depression One-E.

Gas Prices Explained

Gasoline prices went over $4.00 a gallon here in South Florida without even stopping to look.

Average prices for regular gas broke records Wednesday, topping the $4-per-gallon mark for the first time in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties with Broward not far behind, according to the American Automobile Association.

Palm Beach County had the highest average price in the area, at $4.03 for regular gas, followed by Miami-Dade at $4.01 and Broward at $3.97.

Statewide, the average price has jumped 70 cents since March to an all-time high of $3.94 — the national average, too. Just a year ago — on May 16, 2007 — Florida topped the $3 per gallon mark for the first time.

The price is hitting records five days after Florida Agriculture Commissioner Charles Bronson urged the White House and Congress to launch an investigation into the increases as Memorial Day weekend marked the beginning of the summer travel season.

Andrew Leonard explains what you’re paying for when you cough up $4.09 (in California) for a gallon of gasoline.

On Tuesday gas prices hit record highs in the United States for the 21st day in a row. Many Americans are understandably upset and angry. Partisans on both sides of the political aisle believe they know why this is happening. The left blames greedy, customer-gouging oil companies; the right pillories environmentalists for blocking the construction of new refineries, preventing offshore oil development and opposing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

But there’s much more going on here than good old greed or restrictive environmental regulations. Explaining the high price of gasoline at my local pump requires taking into account surging demand for oil in China and India, the falling value of the dollar, the impact of commodity price speculation by energy traders and a whole constellation of factors exerting steady downward pressure on supply. Those include the Iraq war, political instability in Nigeria and anti-American intransigence in Venezuela and Iran. There’s also the ever-popular peak oil thesis: As the production of existing oil fields in Russia, Mexico, the North Sea and possibly Saudi Arabia inexorably declines, discovery and exploitation of new sources of oil are becoming steadily harder and more expensive.

[…]

Sound complicated? It most certainly is, which is one reason why we should avoid the temptation to simply blame greedy oil companies or radical environmentalists. But it’s also strangely simple — the world, and its manifold dilemmas, can be seen in a single gallon of California gas.

Read the rest and you’ll realize that even if we were to find oil as abundant as sea water we’d still end up paying more for it than we ever did before.

One Small Step

New York Gov. David Paterson has instructed state agencies to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

In a directive issued on May 14, the governor’s legal counsel, David Nocenti, instructed the agencies that gay couples married elsewhere “should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union.”

The revisions are most likely to involve as many as 1,300 statutes and regulations in New York governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses.

In a videotaped message given to gay community leaders at a dinner on May 17, Mr. Paterson described the move as “a strong step toward marriage equality.” And people on both sides of the issue said it moved the state closer to fully legalizing same-sex unions in this state.

This is the way that same-sex marriage will become the law of the land: not by some landmark legal decision handed down by the Supreme Court, but in incremental and manageable steps like this, city by city, state by state. It’s less dramatic and it takes longer, but it also makes it harder for the opponents of equality for the gay and lesbian community to fight back; it’s like playing Whack-A-Mole. It’s also ironic; this is the same modus operandi that the Religious Reich used to win support for their agenda thirty years ago: infiltrate at the state and local level, the momentum will build from below. We learned, more’s the pity, that it worked for them. Now it’s our turn.

Who Wants Kool-Aid?

The reaction to Scott McClellan’s tell-all book has been loud if not predictable. The White House took the high road, calling it “sad” and “puzzling,” and they got that talking point out to all the surrogates to the point that you could run the clips of Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Dana Perino side by side and they were all in sync. (Mr. Bartlett got a bit het up, calling it total crap, but he had cooled off by the time he got on TV.) This does prove that while the Bush White House can’t get their act together to come to the rescue of a city destroyed by a hurricane, they can muster the troops to defend their boss and exact political revenge with all the force and efficiency of the Delta Force. Suddenly Scott McClellan, who was praised as a great press secretary and defended to the end by the entire White House, is now painted as “disgruntled” and “out of the loop,” and there’s an air of mystery as to whether or not this is the same man who stood at the podium in the press room all those years, and there’s whispers that the FBI is checking the White House basement for pods.

The right wing blogosphere has gone into full blast mode, accusing Mr. McClellan of everything from treason to indecent conduct with barnyard creatures, and there is probably some faction of the Orcosphere that is busily trying to figure out a way to blame this on the Clintons or Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The big question that everyone on both sides is asking is why Mr. McClellan waited until two years after he left the White House to come forward? Why, if he had qualms about the way the White House sold the case for the Iraq war, or torpedoed the Plames, or ran a permanent election campaign out of the West Wing, did he keep silent? Why didn’t he speak truth to power when he had the chance?

The answer is pretty simple: Mr. McClellan knew what would happen. He had seen — and participated in — the trashing of those who had left the Bush White House and ratted them out to an eager press. He had seen what had happened to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and security adviser Richard Clarke. So it’s no surprise that he waited until he had all his defenses ready and his publisher behind him (not to mention the advance check in the bank). I also can’t help but think that there’s a personal vendetta at work here. Mr. McClellan will undoubtedly say that he came forward now because he felt the country deserved to know the truth, but this is also someone who worked in the Bush administration and with people like Karl Rove even before they came to the White House in 2001, so he learned that the first thing you look out for is yourself and get the maximum revenge when you can. Mr. McClellan’s clumsily-engineered “resignation” from the White House in April 2006 at the behest of Chief of Staff Josh Bolten probably still rankles, so this is personal payback. The rest is just icing on the cake.

The Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to do what they can to tie this all to John McCain. That shouldn’t be too hard; after all, he fell hard and fast for the propaganda about the Iraq war and he’s still out there selling it. As much as Sen. McCain tries to delicately extricate himself from the Bush web — happy to have the president fund-raise for him as long as no one knows about it — he’s probably bracing himself for the excerpt from the book where the White House staff chortles about having suckered Mr. McCain into being their complete toady.

In the historical perspective, every White House generates these kinds of books. The right wingers were all over the books from disgruntled FBI agents who served in the Clinton White House, and there’s a library of books going back to the point where someone wrote a disgruntled insider’s account about the life of George and Martha Washington. I still think that Mr. McClellan’s book and the surrounding tempest will be forgotten by the Fourth of July: to update Andy Warhol, everyone will be famous for 30 gigabytes. If it’s not, I hope that the focus will be not on the personal quirks and foibles — we all know that Mr. Bush is shallow and concerned only with his legacy — but on the legacy of incompetence and cynicism that comes when the only thing a president or his administration cares about is getting into power and keeping a hold on it rather than serving the whole country.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Straight from the Horse’s Ass

From CNN:

Former White House counselor Dan Bartlett lashed out at Scott McClellan in a telephone interview Wednesday, saying the allegations that the media was soft on the White House are “total crap,” adding that advisers of President Bush are “bewildered and puzzled” by the allegations in McClellan’s new book.

Having Bush enabler Dan Bartlett call your book “total crap” is like getting a rave from the The New York Review of Books; when it comes to shoveling crap, no one’s a better expert than the Bush White House.

Tipping Over

Howard Kurtz has a piece of work up at the Washington Post about how liberal MSNBC has gotten and what a scandal it is.

MSNBC, which bills itself as “the place for politics,” is being pummeled by political practitioners.

“It’s an organ of the Democratic National Committee,” says Steve Schmidt, a senior strategist for John McCain’s campaign. “It’s a partisan advocacy organization that exists for the purpose of attacking John McCain.”

Ed Gillespie, President Bush’s counselor, says there is an “increasing blurring” of the line between NBC News and MSNBC’s “blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann.”

Oh, set it to music. And I suppose CNN, with Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck isn’t tilting right? And if anyone is too thick to discern the difference between MSNBC and NBC News, even with their reporters and Tim Russert stopping by, then there’s not a lot of hope for them. For one thing, MSNBC is on cable, while NBC News is a broadcast network. Oh, and MSNBC has two more letters in its name: M and S.

And it’s not like MSNBC is selling themselves as a paragon of objectivity by using some catchphrase like, oh, “Fair and Balanced,” or “We Report, You Decide.” They say, “The Place for Politics.” That doesn’t imply anything other than you’re going to get a lot of politics; no promises of evenhandedness. And if there aren’t a lot of conservatives on MSNBC, maybe it’s because the righties are all at FOX because they like being in an echo chamber and where no one calls them on their bullshit. (Alan Colmes doesn’t count. He’s like the token team that plays against the Harlem Globetrotters.) Or maybe MSNBC’s standards are high enough that people like Bill O’Reilly, John Gibson, Michael Savage, and Tucker Carlson can’t cut it. (How many networks has Tucker been fired from for trying to be the poor man’s George F. Will? Two? Three?)

I don’t particularly care that MSNBC has become the liberal counterpart to the rest of the cable channels. I’m over 21 and eligible to vote, so I think I can come to my own conclusions and decide what’s bullshit and what isn’t without the RNC, the DNC, and the presidential campaigns getting all wound up about it. I really think there are more important things to think about in a presidential election than whether or not a cable channel leans left, right, or is just tipping over.

Question of the Day

In honor of Ian Fleming’s centenary today, a two-parter:

What’s your favorite James Bond movie? And who was your favorite portrayer of Bond on the screen?

For me, Goldfinger, and Connery… Sean Connery.

On This Date


May 28, 1908: Ian Fleming was born, and martinis, Aston Martins, and bosomy women in tight dresses carrying sidearms took on a whole new meaning, as well as introducing the genre of suave secret agents with a license to kill and a whole array of catchphrases like “Bond. James Bond,” and “Shaken, not stirred.”

And without Ian Fleming, there would have been no Get Smart.