July 2013 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

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July 14 is the 195th day of the year (196th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 170 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1790, the citizens of Paris celebrate the constitutional monarchy and national reconciliation in the Fête de la Fédération.

The Fête de la Fédération of the 14 July 1790 was a huge feast and official event to celebrate the establishment of the short-lived constitutional monarchy in France and what people of the time considered to be the happy conclusion of the French Revolution, the outcome hoped for by the monarchiens.

The Fête de la Fédération in Paris was the most prominent event of a series of spontaneous celebrations all over France: from August 1789, Fédérations appeared in towns and countryside; on 5 June 1790, with lots of individual feasts to celebrate the new state of France, a constitutional monarchy. The National Assembly approved the suggestion by the Commune de Paris to organise a “general Federation”. Organised late, it was largely an improvisation. The idea was not to contest the legitimacy of the king Louis XVI, but to show the general will for stable institutions and a national reconciliation and unity. In the words of Jean Sylvain Bailly, astronomer and mayor of Paris: “We suggest that this meeting (…) be sworn on the next 14 July, which we shall all see as the time of liberty: this day shall be spent swearing to uphold and defend it”. Charon, President of the Commune of Paris, stated: “French, we are free! French, we are brothers!”.

The event took place on the Champ de Mars, which was at the time far outside Paris. The place had been transformed on a voluntary basis by the population of Paris itself, in what was recalled as the Journée des brouettes (“Wheelbarrow Day”).

Official Celebration

The feast began as early as four in the morning, under a strong rain which would last the whole day (the Journal de Paris had predicted “frequent downpours”).

14 000 Federated (Fédérés) came from the province, every single National Guard unit having sent two men out of every hundred. They were ranged according to their département under 83 banners. They were brought to the place were the Bastille once stood, and went through Saint-Antoine, Saint-Denis and Saint-Honoré streets before crossing the temporary bridge and arriving at the Champ de Mars. Deputies from other nations, “Swedes, Spaniards, Polacks, Turks, Chaldeans, Greeks, and dwellers in Mesopotamia,” representatives of the human race, “with three hundred drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings all over France, the highest recorded triumph of the Thespian art.”

A mass was celebrated by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun under the Ancien Régime. The very popular General marquis de La Fayette, as both captain of the National Guard of Paris and confident of the king, took his oath to the Constitution:

” We swear forever to be faithful to the Nation, to the Law and to the King, to uphold with all our might the Constitution as decided by the National Assembly and accepted by the King, and to protect according to the laws the safety of people and properties, transit of grains and food within the kingdom, the public contributions under whatever forms they might exist, and to stay united with all the French with the indestructible bounds of brotherhood[ ”

It is noticeable that at this time, the French Constitution of 1791 was not yet written; it would only take effect in September 1791. La Fayette was followed by the President of the National Assembly. Eventually, Louis XVI took his oath

” I, King of the French, I swear to use the power given to me by the constitutional law of the State, to maintain the Constitution as decided by the National Assembly and accepted by myself, and to enforce the laws. ”

The style “King of the French”, used for the first time instead of “King of France (and Navarre)”, was an innovation intended to inaugurate a “popular monarchy” which linked the monarch’s title to the people, not to the territory of France.

The Queen rose and showed the Dauphin, future Louis XVII, saying :

” This is my son, who, like me, joins in the same sentiments.[5] ”

With the permission of the National Assembly, a delegation of the United States of America, led by John Paul Jones, founder of the US Navy, joined the feast. It also included Thomas Paine, James Swan, Georges Howell, Benjamin Jarvis, Samuel Blackden, Joel Barlow and William Henry Vernon. The delegation arrived at the Champ de Mars with its flag, the first instance ever of a US flag flown outside of the USA, and was cheered by the people.

     The Tolpuddle Martyrs, condemned and harshly punished by the biased justice system of 19th century England, were very lucky. They not only lived through their ordeal, but also became enduring symbols of resistance whose story is celebrated even now.  Next weekend, union members and their families from all over the UK will gather at the little museum on the outskirts of Tolpuddle on July 19th – 21st for a festival of music picnics, and rallies. The magnificent union banners often seen on the streets of London during the recent protests will be paraded in a far different setting: the rolling agricultural land of Dorset. Though the Martyrs didn’t pay with their lives, their fate was dire enough, and the circumstances that caused them to be sent, first to the prison hulks of the Southwest coast and then across the world, were universal enough that they became a rallying point for resistance throughout the country.

What makes their story relevant, not only to British union history, but to the present circumstances that many working people find themselves in worldwide, is that their story, like ours, arose from a time of social and technological change, dislocation, changing class allegiances, long term conflict, and scarcity. English history has not been part of the American educational canon since before WWII, when my mother struggled with the intricacies of the Corn Laws in high school; so follow me below the fold to find out a little of what is not shown in the costume dramas that pass for our understanding of 19th century England.  

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Steve Kornacki: Joining Steve Kornacki at the table will be: Kasie Hunt, political producer, NBC News; Former Rep. Tom Perriello, (D) Virginia, president & CEO of Center for American Progress Action Fund; Former Gov. Jane Swift, (R) Massachusetts; Michael Brendan Dougherty, editor, TheSlurve.com; Former Gov. Douglas Wilder (D) Virginia; Liz Kennedy, counsel, Demos.org; Ken Gross, attorney, Skadden Arps; and Nick Acocella, writer, editor, publisher PolitiFax.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Sunday on “This Week” the guests are former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer; Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA); Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK); Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT); and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

Sitting at the roundtable are Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot; Politico senior political reporter Maggie Haberman; New York Times Magazine chief national correspondent Mark Leibovich, author of the new book “This Town“; and television and radio host Tavis Smiley.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL); Reps. Pete King (R-NY) and Mike Kelly (R-PA); and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL).

The Chris Matthews Show: This Sunday’s panel guests are Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent; Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent; Kelly O’Donnell, NBC News Capitol Hill Correspondent; and David Ignatius, The Washington Post columnist.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: This week’s MTP guests are : Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV); Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY); and Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR).

The guests at the roundtable are Rich Lowry, editor of National Review; Former Democratic Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson; President of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden; and Republican Strategist as well as former senior strategist to the McCain-Palin campaign Steve Schmidt.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests this Sunday are Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX); Gov. Pat Quinn (D-IL); Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-CA); Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA); and NAACP President Ben Jealous.

Syrian business owners who fled to Egypt give up on going back

Many Syrian industrialists and factory owners have relocated their businesses to Egypt, part of the economic and brain drain Syria’s civil war is causing.

By Raja Abdulrahim

REHAB, Egypt – As fighting in the Syrian city of Aleppo intensified last fall, Khalid Sabbagh decided it was time to move his business abroad.

He and his family had already fled months earlier to the safety of this palm-tree-lined Cairo suburb. But as Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial hub, descended further into the warfare that has ravaged much of his nation, Sabbagh finally decided to move his upholstery factory to Egypt and start anew.

Since antigovernment activists began their struggle to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2011, more than 1.6 million Syrians have fled the fighting, many to neighboring countries where they wait to return to their homes.

On this week’s segment of “What We Now Know,” Up host Steve Kornacki discusses what they have learned with guests Ana Marie Cox, political columnist, The Guardian; Blake Zeff, columnist & politics editor, Salon.com; Michelle Bernard, The Bernard Center for Women, Politics & Public Policy; and Rep. Robin Kelly (D-IL).

Rare film depicts Franklin Roosevelt in wheelchair

Published on Jul 10, 2013

Footage courtesy of the US National Archives.

A professor at an Indiana college says he has found film footage showing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt being pushed in his wheelchair, depicting a secret that was hidden from the public until after his death.

Ray Begovich, a journalism professor at Franklin College south of Indianapolis, said on Tuesday he found the eight-second clip while doing unrelated research in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The National Archives and the FDR Presidential Museum and Library could not say for certain if other such footage exists, but both said it is at least rare.

Florida Accidentally Banned All Computers, Smart Phones In The State Through Internet Cafe Ban: Lawsuit

When Florida lawmakers recently voted to ban all Internet cafes, they worded the bill so poorly that they effectively outlawed every computer in the state, according to a recent lawsuit.

In April Florida Governor Rick Scott approved a ban on slot machines and Internet cafes after a charity tied to Lt. Governor Jennifer Carroll was shut down on suspicion of being an Internet gambling front] — forcing Carroll, who had consulted with the charity, to resign.

Florida’s 1,000 Internet cafes were shut down immediately, including Miami-Dade’s Incredible Investments, LLC, a café that provides online services to migrant workers, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Sarah Palin Senate Poll Finds Few Want Her To Hold Office Again

The former Alaska governor said Tuesday on “The Sean Hannity Show” that she has “considered” a 2014 run for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska). [..]

But the chair of Alaska’s Republican Party has said that he has not spoken to Palin about a possible Senate run or any other topic.

Although many may not want her to win, poll respondents were evenly divided, 39 percent to 39 percent, on the specific question of whether Palin should run for the Senate next year.

SCHOOL DAZE

A 10-year-old boy fell onto the tracks at Yotsuya station while walking down the platform hunched over his cellphone. The kid was unhurt, but the mishap delayed about 23,000 commuters.

An expert panel appointed by the education ministry has compiled guidelines for high-school coaches advising them against “hitting and kicking” their students, as well as inducing “physical and emotional stress.”

Meanwhile, just 26 percent of junior high school teachers say they feel confident in their ability to “stop bullying if asked for help by students.”

A poll by Osaka Prefecture University has found that just 40 percent of school social workers have proper certification.

Welcome to the Health and Fitness NewsWelcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Apricots are an early summer fruit, and their short season is now. They’re worth buying, for the purposes of both taste and nutrition, only when you can find them ripe. You don’t want them so ripe that they bruise as soon as you put them into a bag – they should be slightly firm to the touch, as apricots ripen from the inside out – but if they were picked green they will have little flavor, and they’ll have that mealy texture that describes a bad apricot.

The fact that 95 percent of the apricots grown in the United States are from California doesn’t mean that you can’t find good ones that were picked at the right time if you live elsewhere. Whole Foods watches the crops carefully and sells all of the terrific varieties, like Blenheims, that we find out here in California in our farmers’ markets. I’m lucky to live in Southern California, where the apricot season is longer than in other parts of the state (mid-May to mid-August; it ends in mid-July in Northern California), so I’ve already had some time to work on this year’s apricot recipes.

~Martha Rose Shulman~

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

David Dayen: New student loan “fix” is a sham

Congress may claim its latest compromise will lessen your burden – but read the fine print and the truth comes out

or all the talk of Congress supposedly working to “fix” the student loan crisis, it’s actually on the verge of making the battle over the loans’ interest rates worse. A long-term compromise under discussion will allow the government to actually extract more money from borrowers over the long term – while doing nothing to reform the terrible terms of student loans, mitigate the crisis for current borrowers, or fundamentally overhaul the broken system of higher education finance. [..]

The point is that the student loan interest rate was really a tiny speck of the massive amount of work that needs to be done to end this perverse system, where 18-year-olds cannot make sensible plans for their own future without burying themselves in debt with no hope of escape. That Congress managed to botch even the interest rate issue does not bode well for tackling the broader problem. If any good can be drawn from it, however, it’s that a movement of student borrowers, aware of the unfairness of the current system, has been activated. Hopefully they can become loud enough that politicians can no longer avoid them.

New York Times Editorial Board: Missing: The Food Stamp Program

“We’ll get to that later.” That was the dismissive answer of Speaker John Boehner on Thursday, when asked if the House would restore the food stamp program it had just coldly ripped out of the farm bill. “Later,” he said, Republicans will deal with the nation’s most important anti-hunger program. “Later,” maybe, they will think about the needs of 47 million people who can’t afford adequate food, probably by cutting the average daily subsidy of $4.39. [..]

The choice made by the House in cutting apart the farm bill was one of the most brutal, even in the short history of the House’s domination by the Tea Party. Last month, the chamber failed to pass a farm bill that cut $20.5 billion from food stamps because that was still too generous for the most extreme Republican lawmakers. So, in the name of getting something – anything – done, Mr. Boehner decided to push through just the agriculture part of the bill.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge

July 13 is the 194th day of the year (195th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 171 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1930, the first two World Cup matches took place simultaneously on 13 July and were won by France and USA, who defeated Mexico 4-1 and Belgium 3-0 respectively. The first goal in World Cup history was scored by Lucien Laurent of France. In the final, Uruguay defeated Argentina 4-2 in front of a crowd of 93,000 people in Montevideo, and in doing so became the first nation to win the World Cup.

Previous international competitions

The world’s first international football match was a challenge match played in Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England, which ended in a 0-0 draw. The first international tournament, the inaugural edition of the British Home Championship, took place in 1884. At this stage the sport was rarely played outside the United Kingdom. As football grew in popularity in other parts of the world at the turn of the 20th century, it was held as a demonstration sport with no medals awarded at the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics (however, the IOC has retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and at the 1906 Intercalated Games.

After FIFA was founded in 1904, it tried to arrange an international football tournament between nations outside the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international football, and the official history of FIFA describes the competition as having been a failure.

At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, football became an official competition. Planned by The Football Association (FA), England’s football governing body, the event was for amateur players only and was regarded suspiciously as a show rather than a competition. Great Britain (represented by the England national amateur football team) won the gold medals. They repeated the feat in 1912 in Stockholm, where the tournament was organised by the Swedish Football Association.

With the Olympic event continuing to be contested only between amateur teams, Sir Thomas Lipton organised the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy tournament in Turin in 1909. The Lipton tournament was a championship between individual clubs (not national teams) from different nations, each one of which represented an entire nation. The competition is sometimes described as The First World Cup, and featured the most prestigious professional club sides from Italy, Germany and Switzerland, but the FA of England refused to be associated with the competition and declined the offer to send a professional team. Lipton invited West Auckland, an amateur side from County Durham, to represent England instead. West Auckland won the tournament and returned in 1911 to successfully defend their title. They were given the trophy to keep forever, as per the rules of the competition.

In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise the Olympic tournament as a “world football championship for amateurs”, and took responsibility for managing the event. This paved the way for the world’s first intercontinental football competition, at the 1920 Summer Olympics, contested by Egypt and thirteen European teams, and won by Belgium. Uruguay won the next two Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928. Those were also the first two open world championships, as 1924 was the start of FIFA’s professional era.

Due to the success of the Olympic football tournaments, FIFA, with President Jules Rimet the driving force, again started looking at staging its own international tournament outside of the Olympics. On 28 May 1928, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam decided to stage a world championship itself. With Uruguay now two-time official football world champions and to celebrate their centenary of independence in 1930, FIFA named Uruguay as the host country of the inaugural World Cup tournament.

The national associations of selected nations were invited to send a team, but the choice of Uruguay as a venue for the competition meant a long and costly trip across the Atlantic Ocean for European sides. Indeed, no European country pledged to send a team until two months before the start of the competition. Rimet eventually persuaded teams from Belgium, France, Romania, and Yugoslavia to make the trip. In total thirteen nations took part: seven from South America, four from Europe and two from North America.

World Cups before World War II

After the creation of the World Cup, the 1932 Summer Olympics, held in Los Angeles, did not plan to include football as part of the schedule due to the low popularity of the sport in the United States, as American football had been growing in popularity. FIFA and the IOC also disagreed over the status of amateur players, and so football was dropped from the Games. Olympic football returned at the 1936 Summer Olympics, but was now overshadowed by the more prestigious World Cup.

The issues facing the early World Cup tournaments were the difficulties of intercontinental travel, and war. Few South American teams were willing to travel to Europe for the 1934 and 1938 tournaments, with Brazil the only South American team to compete in both. The 1942 and 1946 competitions were cancelled due to World War II and its aftermath.

With Liberty and Justice For Some

Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.