July 2010 archive

It’s a very good country for the rich man. Chauffeurs, servants, big houses. The question is, who is suffering? The common man.

This is the tax policy that DC elites, Republicans and Democrats, want to see adopted.

I on the other hand favor moderate, mainstream, FDR tax rates of 90% on marginal income; and if corporations have the right to speak like individuals they have the right to be taxed like them too.

Who wants to be long on a July weekend anyway sucker?

1 Moody’s downgrades Ireland debt rating

AFP

2 hrs 2 mins ago

Ireland has gladly adopted a strong austerity policy.  This is what happens.

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

I suppose I should try to avoid  any sentence that starts- “What really happened yesterday…” especially when it comes to Le Tour because I really don’t have any special insight except that which comes from watching each stage about 16 times in preference to the crap that normally infests my TV, particularly the Sunday Morning Beltway Bozo Shows.

It is a shame that I will take to my grave that I ever thought they made me better informed and worse that my persistent addiction infected my parents who have yet to recover.

But back to professional bicycle racing which, even with doping, is so much more legitimate than Wrestling, Roller Derby, or Politics.

Yesterday’s subtext is that Astana, Alberto Contador’s team, is going to try and drop every other contender by pushing the Peloton.  Schleck and Saxo Bank are keeping up so far, but Lance and Team Radio Shack have nothing to race for but pride.  My prediction is that unless Saxo Bank puts an a move (which will be quite difficult if Astana stays aggressive), Contador leaves the Pyrenees seconds behind and counts on a blistering Time Trial the penultimate stage Saturday.

Or there could be flaming hunks of twisted metal, that’s why you watch anyway isn’t it?

Stage 15, Pamiers to Bagnères-de-Luchon, is 117 miles ending with a Kute Kuddly Kitty Kat Klimb.  If Astana is serious, and there is no reason to believe they aren’t, the Peloton will again be 10 or more minutes ahead of its expected pace before that final climb even begins.

On this day in 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.

snip

Several scholars, including Englishman Thomas Young made progress with the initial hieroglyphics analysis of the Rosetta Stone. French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), who had taught himself ancient languages, ultimately cracked the code and deciphered the hieroglyphics using his knowledge of Greek as a guide. Hieroglyphics used pictures to represent objects, sounds and groups of sounds. Once the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were translated, the language and culture of ancient Egypt was suddenly open to scientists as never before.

The Rosetta Stone has been housed at the British Museum in London since 1802, except for a brief period during World War I. At that time, museum officials moved it to a separate underground location, along with other irreplaceable items from the museum’s collection, to protect in from the threat of bombs.

• AMC– The Mummy.
• ESPN– Phillies @ Cubs.
• E!– Independence Day
• ABC Family– Revenge of the Bridesmaids
• History– Ice Road Truckers (premier), Top Shot
• Nick– Adventures in Babysitting
• TBS– Shrek the Third
• Turner Classic– Beauty and the Beast
• Discovery– Powering the Future, Mythbusters
• Toon– Children’s Hospital

Later-

• Turner Classic– King Kong, Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Adult Swim– Boondocks : “Mr. Medicinal”, Squidbillies  : “America: Why I Love Her”, Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole : “Heal Hitler”, Moral Orel : “Omnipresence”

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 BP hopes cap can stay on for good

by Allen Johnson, AFP

Sun Jul 18, 3:53 pm ET

More of what digby says:

If you have not had a chance to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ coverage of the NAACP/Mark Williams story this week, then I urge you to do it. His beautiful writing expresses the fundamental issue better than anyone.

For instance, answering those who immediately criticized the NAACP, he wrote this:

   

Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they’re wrong for making it. But they’re only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.

   It is the Founders claiming all men are created equal while building a democracy on property in human beings. It is Confederates crying tyranny, while erecting a country based on tyranny. It is Sherman discriminating against black soldiers, while claiming that his superiors are discriminating against whites. It’s Ben Tillman justifying racial terrorism, by claiming that he’s actually fighting against terrorism. It is George Wallace defending a system built on bombing children in churches, and then asserting that the upholders of that system are “the greatest people to ever trod this earth.”

   Those who employ racism are not in the habit of confessing their nature–inversion is their cloak. Cutting out the cancer means confronting that inversion, means not wallowing in on-the-other-handism, in post-racialism, means seeing this as more than some kind of political game. Someone has, indeed, failed here. It is not the NAACP.

206 Stories served.  29 per day.

This is actually the hardest diary to execute, and yet perhaps the most valuable because it lets you track story trends over time.

• Sunday
• Monday
• Tuesday
• Wednesday
• Thursday (diary 100 BTW)
• Friday
• Saturday

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Today could be the end, or the beginning of the end, if either Contador or Schleck break down.

The 4 Pyrenees stages are the last places on this year’s Tour that large chunks of time are likely to be available.  Contador is counting on his time trial superiority for some fractions of a minute in the next to last stage, but it shouldn’t come to that and we may know everything by the time the Peloton mounts Port de Pailheres, one of those Kute Kuddly Kitty Kat Klimbs.

I don’t expect Leipheimer or Sanchez to put on much of a move but they are positioned, you can make arguments for others and many will.  Climbs like this can produce 15 minute deltas (for the quants).

There is that recovery day Wednesday and then one more of climbing and then it’s sprinters to the Champs Elysees.

It’s still more exciting than golf even at The Royal & Ancient because of the flaming hunks of twisted metal.  When was the last time you saw someone break a bone in a pot bunker?

Today is 115 miles from Revel to Ax 3 Domaines.  Only 2 climbs, the last one is just a category 1.

On this day in 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who first took office in 1933 as America’s 32nd president, is nominated for an unprecedented third term. Roosevelt, a Democrat, would eventually be elected to a record four terms in office, the only U.S. president to serve more than two terms.

Roosevelt was born January 30, 1882, in Hyde Park, New York, and went on to serve as a New York state senator from 1911 to 1913, assistant secretary of the Navy from 1913 to 1920 and governor of New York from 1929 to 1932. In 1932, he defeated incumbent Herbert Hoover to be elected president for the first time. During his first term, Roosevelt enacted his New Deal social programs, which were aimed at lifting America out of the Great Depression. In 1936, he won his second term in office by defeating Kansas governor Alf Landon in a landslide.

snip

n 1944, with the war still in progress, Roosevelt defeated New York governor Thomas Dewey for a fourth term in office. However, the president was unable to complete the full term. On April 12, 1945, Roosevelt, who had suffered from various health problems for years, died at age 63 in Warm Springs, Georgia. He was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman. On March 21, 1947, Congress passed the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which stated that no person could be elected to the office of president more than twice. The amendment was ratified by the required number of states in 1951

The Dime is a commemoration to FDR and all victims of Polio. The “March of Dimes” was started in 1937 by entertainer Eddie Cantor to keep the facilities for Polio victims at Warm Springs, running. Despite FDR’s generous donation the spa was running very short of funds, Cantor asked everyone to send a small dime to the White House to keep the spa open. The White House was overwhelmed with letters containing a dime. On January 30 in 1946, the first Roosevelt dimes were issued by the US mint and they have been issued ever since.

Sigh . . .

This web site on the ol’ blogosphere isn’t fulfillin’ my hopes and dreams for America anymore.  I’ve been a member for 47 minutes now but it just ain’t workin’ out.  Ya don’t believe me?  Look at all the problems this so-called “Stars Hollow Gazette” hasn’t fixed yet: