Wow, Harriet the Spy would love to live in my apartment. Many of the people in the big fancy building across the street don't believe in covering their windows and you can see right inside. I guess they are proud of their apartments or whatever, but I think it's kind of weird. Also I own a pair of binoculars and it's very tempting...
In the Democrats’ weekly radio address, Mr. Obama said he would direct his economic team to craft a two-year stimulus plan with the goal of saving or creating 2.5 million jobs. He said it would be “a plan big enough to meet the challenges we face.”
Mr. Obama said he hoped to sign the stimulus package into law soon after taking office on Jan. 20. He is already coordinating efforts with Democratic leaders in Congress, who have said they will begin work next month.
Advisers to Mr. Obama say they want to use the economic crisis as an opportunity to act on many of the issues he emphasized in his campaign, including cutting taxes for lower- and middle-class workers, addressing neglected public infrastructure projects like roads and schools, and creating “green jobs” through business incentives for energy alternatives and environmentally friendly technologies.
Heavens to Mergatroyd! Snagglepuss was on SNL last week!
(He uses the tag phrase from whence this blog gets its name too!)
The last half of this clip is the best - with "Skokiaan" playing and then the guy throws... well, just watch it!
All indications are that the new administration will offer a major stimulus package. My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion.
So the question becomes, will the Obama people dare to propose something on that scale?
Let’s hope that the answer to that question is yes, that the new administration will indeed be that daring. For we’re now in a situation where it would be very dangerous to give in to conventional notions of prudence.
The President has called for swift passage of the Safeguards
for a New Economy (S.A.N.E.) bill. The omnibus economic package
includes a federal maximum wage, mandatory “True Cost Accounting,” a phased withdrawal from complex financial instruments, and other measures intended to improve life for ordinary Americans. (See highlights box on Page A10.) He also repeated earlier calls
for passage of the “Ban on Lobbying” bill currently making its way
through Congress.
Treasury Secretary Paul Krugman stressed the importance of the bill. “Markets make great servants, terrible leaders, and absurd religions,” said Krugman, quoting
Paul Hawken, an advocate of corporate responsibility and author
of “Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came
into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming.”
“At this point, the market is our leader and our religion. No won-
der the median standard of living has been declining so much for so
long.”
Krugman said that the new Treasury bill seeks to ensure the
prosperity of all citizens, rather than simply supporting large cor-
porations and the wealthy. “The market is supposed to serve us.
Unfortunately, we have ended up serving the market. That’s very
bad.”
I just discovered a really neat fact about the new Manhattan neighborhood I'm moving to - Louise Fitzhugh, the author of Harriet the Spy lived on the very block I will be living on, at the time she wrote Harriet, and Harriet's neighborhood will be mine.The cook put cake and milk in front of her.It was also illustrated by Fitzhugh and her drawings are classic.
"What you always writing in that dad-blamed book for?" she asked with a sour little face.
"Because," Harriet said around a bit of cake, "I'm a spy."
"Spy, huh. Some spy."
"I am a spy. I'm a good spy, too. I've never been caught."
Cook settled herself with a cup of coffee. "How long you been a spy?"
"Since I could write. Ole Golly told me if I was going to be a writer I better write down everything, so I'm a spy that writes down everything."
"Hmmmmmmmph."
Harriet knew the cook couldn't think of anything to say when she did that.
"I know all about you."
"Like fun you do." The cook looked startled.
"I do too. I know you live with your sister in Brooklyn and that she might get married and you wish you had a car and you have a son that's no good and drinks."
"What do you do, child? Listen at doors?"
"Yes," said Harriet.
"Well, I never," said the cook. "I think that's bad manners."
"Ole Golly doesn't. Ole Golly says find out everything you can cause life is hard enough even if you know alot."
"I bet she don't know you spooking round this house listening at doors."
"Well, how am I supposed to find out anything?"
"I don't know" - the cook shook her head - "I don't know about that Ole Golly."
"What do you mean?" Harriet felt apprehensive.
"I don't know. I just don't know. I wonder about her."
Ole Golly came into the room. "What is it you don't know?"
Cook looked as though she might hide under the table. She stood up. "Can I get you your tea, Miss Golly?" she asked meekly.
"That would be most kind of you," said Ole Golly and sat down.
Harriet opened her notebook:
I WONDER WHAT THAT WAS ALL ABOUT. MAYBE OLE GOLLY KNOWS SOMETHING ABOUT COOK THAT COOK DOESN'T WANT HER TO KNOW. CHECK ON THIS.
"What do you have in school this year, Harriet?" asked Ole Golly.
"English, History, Geography, French, Math, ugh, Science, ugh, and the Performing Arts, ugh, ugh, ugh." Harriet rattled these off in a very bored way.
"What history?"
"Greeks and Romans, ugh, ugh, ugh."
"They're fascinating."
"What?"
"They are. Just wait, you'll see. Talk about spies. Those gods spied on everybody all the time."
"Yeah?"
"'Yes,' Harriet, not 'yeah.'"
"Well, I wish I'd never heard of them."
"Ah, there's a thought from Aesop for you: 'We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.'"
Ole Golly gave a little moo of satisfaction after she had delivered herself of this.
"I think I'll go now," Harriet said.
"Yes," said the cook, "go out and play."
Harriet stood up. "I do not go out to PLAY, I go out to WORK!" and in as dignified a way as possible she walked from the room and up the steps from the kitchen.
Bush Aides Say Religious Hiring Doesn’t Bar Aid
In a newly disclosed legal memorandum, the Bush administration says it can bypass laws that forbid giving taxpayer money to religious groups that hire only staff members who share their faith.
The administration, which has sought to lower barriers between church and state through its religion-based initiative offices, made the claim in a 2007 Justice Department memorandum from the Office of Legal Counsel. It was quietly posted on the department’s Web site this week.
The statutes for some grant programs do not impose antidiscrimination conditions on their financing, and the administration had previously allowed such programs to give taxpayer money to groups that hire only people of a particular religion.
But the memorandum goes further, drawing a sweeping conclusion that even federal programs subject to antidiscrimination laws can give money to groups that discriminate.
DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. (AP) -- Democrat Barack Obama came up a big winner in the presidential race in Dixville Notch, N.H., where the nation's first Election Day votes were cast and counted early Tuesday.
Obama defeated John McCain 15-6. Independent Ralph Nader was also on the ballot, but received no votes.
The first voter, following tradition established in 1948, was picked ahead of the midnight voting and the rest of the town's 21 registered voters followed suit in Tuesday's first minutes.
Town Clerk Rick Erwin says the northern New Hampshire town is proud of its tradition, but says the most important thing is that the turnout represents a 100 percent vote.
President Bush won the vote in Dixville Notch in 2004 on the way to his re-election.
One of the fun things about our NYCPlaywrights fundraiser readings is that actors often get to play very different roles in the same evening. That was the case with me when I filled in for sick/missing actors - I got to play a British executive assistant named Mindy in a play about a corporate Peter Pan, and the ghost of a TAROT READER's bubby with a Yiddish accent. I also got to play an old hard-of-hearing lady, but the clip I used doesn't have me in it, a successful business woman, but again, don't show me, and I got to play the evil adulterous wife in my own play HAPPILY MARRIED but alas, the damn camcorder battery died before my performance.
Richard Schrader, a senior staff member for a national environmental organization, lives in Amherst, Mass., where politics start liberal and traipse left. He is fairly liberal, but his neighbors worry that he does not worry nearly enough. "They wake up, drink that pot of coffee and hit the polling Web sites," Mr. Schrader said. "Too much good news has to be a lie."
Recently he sat down with a friend who was sweating about Minnesota.
"Minnesota?" Mr. Schrader told his friend. "What, are you kidding me? Obama's up 14 points there."
The friend shook his head sadly. Take off seven points for hidden racial animus. Subtract another five for polling error. It is down to two points, and that is within the margin of error in sampling, and that could mean Mr. Obama might be behind.
"It was perversely impressive," Mr. Schrader said.
Every year, no matter what, my play TAM LIN must be performed in NYC for Halloween. Just so Edward Einhorn knows he hasn't killed the play in spite of the fact that the US Copyright office has not yet cancelled his UNAUTHORIZED derivative "blocking and choreography" script registration. It WILL be compelled, eventually, even if I have to spend the rest of my life to do it."My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."
Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
I don't know what kind of nasty bug has been going around, but it has been playing havoc with my casting choices. I thought I had the NYCPlaywrights Autumn fundraiser finally cast just right, when Ann came down with this virus and had to bail out the very morning of the show. Luckily I had just the night before made the acquaintance of a very good young female actor and she filled in... for the most part.Frustrated by what they describe as difficulty in getting their work produced, enough female playwrights to make a standing - room - only crowd are planning to attend a town hall meeting on Monday night to air their grievances with representatives of New York's leading Off Broadway and nonprofit theaters.
The gathering was organized by the playwrights Sarah Schulman and Julia Jordan, who have rallied their colleagues to the cause, contending that their male counterparts in the 2008-9 season are being produced at 14 of the largest Off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women are. More than 150 playwrights appeared at a meeting last month to discuss the issue, and all 90 seats at New Dramatists, the playwriting center where Monday night’s meeting is scheduled, are already spoken for, and there is a long waiting list.
At least he’s admitting that he got something wrong. That’s actually rare these days, especially among the people Greenspan associates with.
That said, praise also to Steve Goldstein at Marketwatch for this memorable line:
For a man who was once remarkably hard to decipher, Alan Greenspan is now as clear as an empty Lehman Brothers office.
Andrea Mitchell talked about a "remarkably negative" Obama ad -- negative because it shows McCain bragging about how often he sided with George Bush.
In 2000 there was a lot of yapping about the limited involvement of Bill Clinton in Al Gore's campaign. (In fact we've had some of that this year about both Clintons' limited involvement in Obama's.) Yet nobody finds it remarkable that the Republican Presidential candidate is running, actively and like hell, from the sitting President from his own party. In fact, they cluck over Obama's bad taste in bringing it up.
Well if you want to get technical, my acting debut was playing an elf doing the A-B-C dance in the Our Lady of Fatima first graders' Christmas pageant. So this is my adult debut - not counting the Brick Playhouse's Night of a Thousand Plays. OK, so this isn't my acting debut - except it's the first time I will perform in public in one of my own plays. I play the adulterous wife in my HAPPILY MARRIED in next week's NYCPlaywrights fundraiser. Which should be fun - playing bad guys is fun. OK, so it's only a reading. But still, it should be interesting. Rehearsal yesterday went pretty well. I am playing a few other parts too - for some reason most of our female actor members are very busy lately (or out of town at a film fest) and I had to fill in. Luckily it's minor parts and stage directions. I think I can handle that. It will be videotaped, so that should be amusing to watch.Oh wow! For years I have maintained that in a fair fight between a Polar bear and a Siberian tiger, the tiger would win. And yet not a single person I've asked: "Polar bear vs. Siberian tiger?" has agreed with me.
Well check it out - a little old COUGAR fights off a Grizzly bear - which is much closer in size to a Polar bear than a cougar is to a S. tiger. And look who wins bitches!
Bernanke also said there were now risks to the global financial system from unregulated credit default swaps. These are insurancelike products that allow big investors to hedge against potential losses. The market for swaps is thought to total $55 trillion, yet it's a "dark market," unregulated and without transparency, amounting to nothing more than contracts between two sophisticated parties.
"Credit default swaps are not traded on an exchange. They aren't traded through a central counterparty, which means if one of those firms fails, among the consequences would be that the banks and others who had purchased credit insurance would be forced to write down tens of billions of dollars of value," Bernanke said.
I need to expand my horizons eh? Condescend much?
If I had known you found *mildly* dissenting opinions objectionable I would have never contributed here. I had this delusion your were hip liberal dude.
Luckily, I have my own blog and am not a prisoner of your moderation purgatory.
You're welcome to come and debate me on my own blog any time - I have no plans to censor you - I don't need to - I can out-debate you on any of these topics, any time.
...I'm going to close the comments now because I think this is a meaningless argument and I've got better things to do. Luckily for you, you've got the entire rest of the internet to tell everyone what a big ol' Nazi I am. Keep on sticking it to the man!
Let me start this off by saying, I would object to this sideshow whichever political party it involved. Having vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin drop the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers' opener Saturday night was problematic not because it was Palin — Flyers owner Ed Snider’s decision under the flimsy excuse of "honoring" hockey moms — but because it is injecting politics in a place it should not be.Ah Philly, my old home town.
The biggest problem: when Palin came out onto the Wachovia Center ice Saturday night — greeted by resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd.
Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.
"I've got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying," Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.
Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of "Treason!" and "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
... what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist." He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is "not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.
By the time McCain asks the crowd "Who is the real Barack Obama?" it's no surprise that someone cries out "Terrorist!" The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama's middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers's Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.
That's a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. "Barack Obama's friend tried to kill my family" was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed "patriotic" martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.
George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives “because we don’t really understand how they work.” Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential "hydrogen bombs."
And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”
One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives — exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street. “What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so,” Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003. “We think it would be a mistake” to more deeply regulate the contracts, he added.
In 1997, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading, began exploring derivatives regulation. The commission, then led by a lawyer named Brooksley E. Born, invited comments about how best to oversee certain derivatives.
Ms. Born was concerned that unfettered, opaque trading could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it," she said in Congressional testimony. She called for greater disclosure of trades and reserves to cushion against losses.
Ms. Born's views incited fierce opposition from Mr. Greenspan and Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury secretary then. Treasury lawyers concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market. Mr. Greenspan warned that too many rules would damage Wall Street, prompting traders to take their business overseas.
"Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn’t know what she was doing and she’d cause a financial crisis," said Michael Greenberger, who was a senior director at the commission. "Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street."
In early 1998, Mr. Rubin's deputy, Lawrence H. Summers, called Ms. Born and chastised her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis, according to Mr. Greenberger. Mr. Summers said he could not recall the conversation but agreed with Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin that Ms. Born's proposal was "highly problematic."
Ms. Born pushed ahead. On June 5, 1998, Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Levitt called on Congress to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations. Mr. Levitt says he now regrets that decision. Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin were “joined at the hip on this,” he said. “They were certainly very fiercely opposed to this and persuaded me that this would cause chaos.”
Ms. Born soon gained a potent example. In the fall of 1998, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed, dragged down by disastrous bets on, among other things, derivatives. More than a dozen banks pooled $3.6 billion for a private rescue to prevent the fund from slipping into bankruptcy and endangering other firms.
Despite that event, Congress froze the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s regulatory authority for six months. The following year, Ms. Born departed.
So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this [this being women's less success careers in science and engineering] is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.
In November 1999, senior regulators — including Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin — recommended that Congress permanently strip the C.F.T.C. of regulatory authority over derivatives.
Mr. Greenspan, according to lawmakers, then used his prestige to make sure Congress followed through. "Alan was held in very high regard," said Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican who led the House Banking and Financial Services Committee at the time. "You've got an area of judgment in which members of Congress have nonexistent expertise."
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless - because I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace!
It took Charlotte months to persuade Emily to publish her work.No, not really. I can understand if a dramatist exaggerates in a play in order to make a point, but she should get it right in her introduction. According to Charlotte's own "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell":
My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.
Sonnet 15
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
Sonnet 17
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.
Sonnet 18
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 19
Yet, do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Sonnet 38
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
Sonnet 54
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover's eyes.
Sonnet 60
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Sonnet 63
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.
Sonnet 71
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Sonnet 81
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen -
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Sonnet 107
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
Circus of Heaven
The day the Circus of Heaven came to town
Local folks lined the streets in a Midwestern town
Waiting anxiously for the parade to begin all around
On the very last day
A unicorn headed the mystical way
Surrounded by what seemed a thousand golden angels at play
Behind were Centaurs, elves, bright fairies all in colours of jade
On the very final day
For what seemed only just a moment in time
Seven solemn flying silvered regal horses rode by
Seven golden chariots in tow, a wonder to behold
The Seven Lords of the Mountains of Time
There then arose where nothing really stood there before
A giant tent rising one thousand feet high frofrom the floor
Towns people flocked inside with their eyes all amazed
To greet the Seventh Lord of the seventh age
A fanfare rang out in an incredible sound
Bringing out the strangest visions perfect harmony round
Any dreams he asked would they like to have seen
>From historical or mythical scenes
Then there above their heads just as vivid as life
Each vision transported multitudes inventing light
Grecian galleons, the sack of Troy, to the Gardens of Babylon
A play of millions roared along
The gigantic dreams of Alexander the Great
Civil wars where fbrothers fought and killed their friendship with hate
All seen by Zeus performing scenes in the magical way
The day the circus came to town
Outside great animals as tame as the trees
Angels high in starlight dancing streets
Turning their colours with indigo and gold
Dropping violet, red and emerald snow
As the circus finally changed its invisible course
A new world to be found
On the dreamy ground we walked upon
I turned to my son and said
"Was that something beautiful, amazing, wonderful, extraordinary
beautiful?"
"Oh, it was OK. But there were no clowns, no tigers, lions or bears,
candy-floss, toffee apples, no clowns."
