October 2013 archive

Time to put up the rally squirrel-

The Cardinals are in a bad way.  With the Pirates’ 7 – 1 victory on Friday at Busch Stadium they gained home field advantage and that puts them in position today to close out the Series at PNC Park.

Friday Gerrit Cole threw 99+ mph fireballs into the 6th inning with the sole blot a solo shot by Yadier Molina in the 5th and a meaningless 1 Out Double by Beltran in the 1st.

On the other hand the Cards sucked early and often starting in the 2nd when Cole helped his own cause with an RBI Single.  The Pirates scored again in the 3rd with a 2 RBI Homer by Alverez and added 2 more runs in the 5th on back to back 1 Out Doubles that chased Lynn and an RBI Single off Marness.  They completed their scoring with a 2 Out RBI Single in the 7th and a solo shot in the 8th.  7 – 1 Pirates, Series tied at 1.

Sunday at PNC Park Pittsburg got off to an early 2 – 0 lead in the 1st with a 1 Out Walk, a Single, a runner advancing error, and a 2 RBI Single.  The Cards tied it up in the 5th with a Single, a Walk, a 2 Out Double Steal, and a 2 RBI Single.  The Pirates took the lead again in the 6th witha lead off Walk, a meaningless 1 Out Double, an intentional Walk, and an RBI Sacrifice.  The Cards tied it up again in the 8th with a solo shot, but the Pirates put it away in the Bottom of the 8th on a Double, a 1 Out Walk, and 2 RBI Singles.  5 – 3 Pirates who lead the Series 2 – 1.

Today it’s win or go home for the Cardinals away at PNC Park.  They will be sending Michael Wacha (4 – 1, 2.78 ERA R) who almost threw a No-No against the Nationals in his last start against Charlie Morton (7 – 4, 3.26 ERA R).  In his last start against the Cardinals he injured his left foot.

This game will be broadcast at 3 pm ET on TBS.

Rule #1- Never take untested equipment on the road.  It will fail and you won’t have the tools you need to fix it in the field.

So what do we know after this weekend?  Detroit got a split in Oakland  which is a bigger deal than it seems because they now have home field advantage, needing only 2 games at Comerica Park to advance to the Junior League Championship Series.

At that it could have been better. In Game 1 Max Scherzer looked pretty unbeatable until Yoenis Cespedes hit a 2 RBI Home Run in the 7th.  Detroit’s damage was already done with 3 runs in the 1st (Leadoff Double, HBP, RBI Single, Double Play (runner advances), RBI Double).  Some people say Oakland threatened to tie it up in the 8th, but a 1 Out Walk does not a threat make.  Detroit 3 – 2, 1 – 0 in the Series.

Everyone expected great things from Justin Verlander (only 20 game winner in the Majors this seaon) but he got trapped in a boring Pitcher’s Duel with the unheralded rookie Sonny Gray.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But he got pulled for Smyly in the 8th and in the bottom of the 9th Smyly loaded them up and was replaced by Porchello who promptly gave up the walk off, game winning RBI Single in what was a ‘must win’ for the Athletics.  Oakland 1 – 0, Series tied at 1.

Today Anibal Sanchez (14 – 8, 2.57 ERA R) faces Jarrod Parker (12 – 8, 3.97 ERA R) in the 1 pm ET game which will be carried exclusively on MLB Network which kind of sucks if you’re a fan and don’t get it.  The best I can offer you is the New York Times Gameview as a poor substitute.

“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 thea Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: The Boehner Bunglers

The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party. As Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it last year in their book, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

But there’s one more important piece of the story. Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect – the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence – reigns supreme.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Republicans Discover Government, Promptly Convene ‘Imperial Congress’

Picture a lone Republican running through the darkened hallways of power, paraphrasing Soylent Green‘s climactic line as he shouts the news to his peers:

“It’s people! The Federal government is people!”

That insight seemed to strike Hill Republicans last week, if only briefly: Our government is made up of people helping other people. But don’t count on seeing a new era of conciliation or a new embrace of democratic processes. Instead Republicans seemed to renew their commitment to the principle that only one branch of government — their branch — should control it.

Call it the Imperial Congress, and this week it tried to invent a new form of governance.

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.

October 7 is the 280th day of the year (281st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 85 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1955, Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg reads his poem “Howl” at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco.

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation, an anarchic group of young men and women who joined poetry, song, sex, wine and illicit drugs with passionate political ideas that championed personal freedoms. Ginsberg’s epic poem Howl, in which he celebrates his fellow “angel-headed hipsters” and excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States, is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation  The poem, dedicated to writer Carl Solomon, has a memorable opening:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by

madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn

looking for an angry fix…

In October 1955, Ginsberg and five other unknown poets gave a free reading at an experimental art gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg’s Howl electrified the audience. According to fellow poet Michael McClure, it was clear “that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases.” In 1957, Howl attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in which a San Francisco prosecutor argued it contained “filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.” The poem seemed especially outrageous in 1950s America because it depicted both heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. Howl reflected Ginsberg’s own bisexuality and his homosexual relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Howl was not obscene, adding, “Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?”

In Howl and in his other poetry, Ginsberg drew inspiration from the epic, free verse style of the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman. Both wrote passionately about the promise (and betrayal) of American democracy; the central importance of erotic experience; and the spiritual quest for the truth of everyday existence. J. D. McClatchy, editor of the Yale Review called Ginsberg “the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon.” McClatchy added that Ginsberg, like Whitman, “was a bard in the old manner – outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era’s psyche, with all its contradictory urges.”

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist, the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, founder of the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University at Boulder, Colorado. At Trungpa’s urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started a poetry school there in 1974 which they called the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics”. In spite of his attraction to Eastern religions, the journalist Jane Kramer argues that Ginsberg, like Whitman, adhered to an “American brand of mysticism” that was, in her words, “rooted in humanism and in a romantic and visionary ideal of harmony among men.” Ginsberg’s political activism was consistent with his religious beliefs. He took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs. The literary critic, Helen Vendler, described Ginsberg as “tirelessly persistent in protesting censorship, imperial politics, and persecution of the powerless.” His achievements as a writer as well as his notoriety as an activist gained him honors from established institutions. Ginsberg’s book of poems, The Fall of America, won the National Book Award for poetry in 1974. Other honors included the National Arts Club gold medal and his induction into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, both in 1979. In 1995, Ginsberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992.

Sacramento Kings fans rejoice! The California State Legislature has passed and Governor Brown has signed a measure paving the way for a new downtown Sacramento Arena, potentially keeping the Kings from high-tailing it to Seattle!

What does this have to do with sustainable transport? More than someone would think who only read the headlines. The bill as passed involves several changes to the evaluation of projects that will benefit sustainable transport projects, including:

Provisions of SB 743 will:

 

–Remove parking and aesthetics standards as grounds for legal challenges against developments in urban infill areas near transit stops.

 

–Modernize the statewide measurements against which traffic impacts are assessed and resolved, allowing developers to offset the impacts by building near mass transit stations.

 

–Expand an exemption from CEQA litigation for mixed residential/commercial projects located within transit priority areas where a full environmental impact review has already been completed.

The first of these three reforms reduces the opportunity to block a project on the grounds that it does not provide sufficient subsidy to motorists in the form of parking. The third of the three reforms reduces one of the disadvantages that mixed-use Transit-Oriented-Development faces compared to greenfield sprawl development.

But it is the second of the three reforms that is the real lede: within a half mile of a transit service that meets a quality of service threshold, it is no longer necessary to prove that the project maintains the same “Level of Service” to automobiles alone as an aspect of “Environmental Quality”.

Today we are fortunate to have a diary describing the current condition of domestic workers in Mexico. This is an issue which has received increasing attention in the last three years. A long-time activist in the Domestic Worker Movement, Irene Ortiz Rosen,  is the Co-Founder  and Director of Collectivo Atabal,  an organization of activists and  feminists formed to defend the rights, dignity and demands of domestic workers in Mexico City. She is also the Co-Author of “Así es, Pues” a socio-economic study of domestic workers in Cuernavaca. A recent emigrant from Mexico, she approaches the subject from a global perspective which emphasizes the class and anti-imperialist aspects of the struggle as well as its patriarchal nature.

In the world of labor, a large group of women whose work is the maintenance of the homes of others is largely ignored-domestic workers. According to the ILO, there are more than 52 million domestic workers in the world.

In almost all countries, domestic workers share the following characteristics:  1) invisibility; 2) migration; 3) low levels of education; 4) gender, ethnic and racial discrimination; and 5) the informality of their labor. These are all products of poverty.



Domestic workers make up an invisible workforce because their work is carried out in the private sphere, that is, the homes of their employers. Their contract is verbal, their work is isolated, and their mobility is common.

Generally they are migrants, usually, within their own countries. This is the case for indigenous women  and women who come from rural areas in Latin America.  And as the gap in inequality grows throughout the world, in the poorest countries the phenomenon of migration (usually without papers) is growing beyond borders.  That is how they arrive to United States and Canada, by informally working as House Cleaning Personnel, Nannies and Home Attendants. In New York alone, we are talking about more than 200 thousand people who are working under disadvantaged conditions due to their Undocumented status.



Their discrimination is shared with nearly all women, and its logic corresponds to the subordination of women in a patriarchal culture. Within the patriarchal view of the traditional role of women, their work is an extension of the reproductive role, which is considered natural for their gender.  

We should not forget that women in general, as housewives and mothers, perform domestic work without any pay whatever. Consequently, their work is not considered part of the national economy despite the fact that it makes up about 20% of the GDP. If a woman looks for waged work, she enters the labor market in a disadvantaged way; forty-five percent of women domestic workers receive salaries that are 10% lower than salaries received by men for the same work.

Global economic policies that have impoverished the majority of the world´s population have brought women in all countries into  the public sphere. The women working in the public sphere then need to hire a domestic worker to care for their children and home. However, because they, themselves, are not paid well, they are unable to pay a fair  wage, even if they value the services being performed by domestic help.

Pasta giant Barilla won’t portray a gay family for its commercials, but Lewis Black isn’t buying the whole family values argument.

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.

October 6 is the 279th day of the year (280th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 86 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1927. The Jazz Singer makes its debut in New York City.

The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the “talkies” and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, the movie stars Al Jolson, who performs six songs. Directed by Alan Crosland, it is based on a play by Samson Raphaelson.

The story begins with young Jakie Rabinowitz defying the traditions of his devout Jewish family by singing popular tunes in a beer hall. Punished by his father, a cantor, Jakie runs away from home. Some years later, now calling himself Jack Robin, he has become a talented jazz singer. He attempts to build a career as an entertainer, but his professional ambitions ultimately come into conflict with the demands of his home and heritage.

The premiere was set for October 6, 1927, at Warner Bros.’ flagship theater in New York City. The choice of date was pure show business-the following day was Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday around which much of the movie’s plot revolves.  The buildup to the premiere was tense. Besides Warner Bros.’ precarious financial position, the physical presentation of the film itself was remarkably complex:

   

Each of Jolson’s musical numbers was mounted on a separate reel with a separate accompanying sound disc. Even though the film was only eighty-nine minutes long…there were fifteen reels and fifteen discs to manage, and the projectionist had to be able to thread the film and cue up the Vitaphone records very quickly. The least stumble, hesitation, or human error would result in public and financial humiliation for the company.

None of the Warner brothers were able to attend: Sam Warner-among them, the strongest advocate for Vitaphone-had died the previous day of pneumonia, and the surviving brothers had returned to California for his funeral.

According to Doris Warner, who was in attendance, about halfway through the film she began to feel that something exceptional was taking place. Jolson’s “Wait a minute” line had prompted a loud, positive response from the audience. Applause followed each of his songs. Excitement built, and when Jolson and Eugenie Besserer began their dialogue scene, “the audience became hysterical.”  After the show, the audience turned into a “milling, battling, mob”, in one journalist’s description, chanting “Jolson, Jolson, Jolson!” Among those who reviewed the film, the critic who foresaw most clearly what it presaged for the future of cinema was Life magazine’s Robert Sherwood. He described the spoken dialogue scene between Jolson and Besserer as “fraught with tremendous significance…. I for one suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight”.

Critical reaction was generally, though far from universally, positive. New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall, reviewing the film’s premiere, declared that

   

not since the first presentation of Vitaphone features, more than a year ago [i.e., Don Juan], has anything like the ovation been heard in a motion-picture theatre…. The Vitaphoned songs and some dialogue have been introduced most adroitly. This in itself is an ambitious move, for in the expression of song the Vitaphone vitalizes the production enormously. The dialogue is not so effective, for it does not always catch the nuances of speech or inflections of the voice so that one is not aware of the mechanical features.

Variety called it “[u]ndoubtedly the best thing Vitaphone has ever put on the screen…[with] abundant power and appeal.” Richard Watts, Jr. of the New York Herald Tribune called it a “a pleasantly sentimental orgy dealing with a struggle between religion and art…. [T]his is not essentially a motion picture, but rather a chance to capture for comparative immortality the sight and sound of a great performer.” The Exhibitors Herald’s take was virtually identical: “scarcely a motion picture. It should be more properly labeled an enlarged Vitaphone record of Al Jolson in half a dozen songs.” The film received favorable reviews in both the Jewish press and in African American newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier. The headline of the Los Angeles Times review told a somewhat different story: “‘Jazz Singer’ Scores a Hit-Vitaphone and Al Jolson Responsible, Picture Itself Second Rate.” Photoplay dismissed Jolson as “no movie actor. Without his Broadway reputation he wouldn’t rate as a minor player.”

“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: Guests had not yet been posted.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on ” This Week” are  House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH); Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY); and Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC).

THe guests for the roundtable debates on all the week’s politics are: with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl and Cokie Roberts; Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Paul Gigot; Starfish Media Group CEO Soledad O’Brien; and former Lead Auto Adviser and Counselor to the Treasury Secretary Steven Rattner.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew; Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX); and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Joining him for a panel discussion are PBS’ Gwen Ifill; The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank; POLITICO‘s Jim VandeHei; and CBS News Political Director John Dickerson.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: The guests on this week’s MTP are Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

Guests for the panel discussion are Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH); Republican strategist Mike Murphy; Host of NPR’s Morning Edition, Steve Inskeep; and editor of the National Review, Rich Lowry.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’a guests are Treasury Secretary Jack Lew; and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Joining her for a panel discussion are Rep. Donna Edwards, Rep. Steve King, CNN crossfire host Stephanie Cutter and CNN Political Commentator Ross Douthat.

US commando raids target Islamist leaders in Africa

6 October 2013 Last updated at 04:47 GMT

 BBC

US special forces have carried out two separate raids in Africa targeting senior Islamist militants, American officials say.

In Libya, US commandos captured an al-Qaeda leader accused of the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Anas al-Libi was seized in the capital Tripoli.

And a leader of the al-Shabab group was targeted in southern Somalia, but that raid appears to have failed.

The al-Shabab leader – who has not been identified – is suspected of involvement in last month’s attack in the Westgate shopping centre in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, which left at least 67 people dead.