Sherry Chandler

Via By the Fault, this clip from a speech by Dr. Paul Krugman at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco from October 30, 2007 on the subject of income inequality in the United States.

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And then there’s this:

During its weeklong deliberations, Congress made many changes to the Bush administration’s original proposal to bail out the financial industry, but one overarching aspect of the initial plan that remains is the vast discretion it gives to the Treasury secretary.

The draft legislation, which will be put to a House vote on Monday, gives Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and his successor extraordinary power to decide how the $700 billion bailout fund is spent. For example, if he thinks it wise, he may buy not only mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, but any other financial instrument.

To be sure, the Treasury secretary’s powers have been tempered since the original Bush administration proposal, which would have given Mr. Paulson nearly unfettered control over the program. There are now two separate oversight panels involved, one composed of legislators and the other including regulatory and administration officials.

Still, Mr. Paulson can choose to buy from any financial institution that does business in the United States, or from pension funds, with wide discretion over what he will buy and how much he will pay. Under most circumstances, banks owned by foreign governments are not eligible for the money, but under some conditions, the secretary can choose to bail out foreign central banks.

Under the bill, the Treasury is to buy the securities at prices he deems appropriate. Mr. Paulson may set prices through auctions but is not required to do so.

Rarely if ever has one man had such broad authority to spend government money as he sees fit, with no rules requiring him to seek out the lowest possible price for assets being purchased.

I am very dubious about this. The Bush administration really likes this idea of the strong man but it doesn’t seem to have worked out all that well for you and me. Also, they don’t have a real good record with no-bid contracts.

Another one of my constant themes: checks and balances. (And I don’t mean blank checks either.)

A Granddaddy Confrontation

Photo by TR Williams

Here is the NYTimes obit.

This grieves me. The icons of my life and times are leaving me.

Avedon has some nice links.

at the 2007 Poet’s Forum from the American Academy of Poets:

The goldenrod, one of the last showy blooms of summer, is Kentucky’s state flower, and it might interest you to know that wikipedia excuses the flower from its reputation as a major allergen:

Many species are difficult to distinguish. Probably due to their bright, golden yellow flower heads blooming in late summer, the goldenrod is often unfairly blamed for causing hay fever in humans. The pollen causing these allergy problems is mainly produced by Ragweed (Ambrosia sp.), blooming at the same time as the goldenrod, but is wind-pollinated. Goldenrod pollen is too heavy and sticky to be blown far from the flowers, and is thus mainly pollinated by insects.

On the other hand, goldenrod makes a pretty decent honey and, as a companion plant, hosts beneficial insects and repells some pests.

Also, a reminder that September 21 is the International Day of Peace:

The United Nations’ International Day of Peace - marked every year on September 21 - is a global holiday when individuals, communities, nations and governments highlight efforts to end conflict and promote peace.

Established by U.N. resolution in 1982, “Peace Day” has grown to include millions of people around the world who participate in all kinds of events, large and small.

For 2008, this new Web site makes it easy to find and promote Peace Day events anywhere in the world. Just click on “Participate!” to locate an event or post information. And explore the rest of the site to learn more about Peace Day and how to get involved.

May Peace Prevail On Earth!

I note this with a certain sadness, but I hope your day has been a peaceful one.

My spouse, the guitar player in the family, says he has found George Harrison’s song-writing to have more staying power than some of the flashier Lennon/McCartney stuff. Vicki Genfan brings a poignancy to this performance of “Norwegian Wood” from the Soave Guitar Festival.

This video is compliments of Ro. Who is this Vicki Genfan you ask. Here’s an answer:

It’s the guys who usually take center stage, but not with someone like Vicki Genfan around. Last weekend, she was the only woman out of 10 finalists to compete for Guitar Player magazine’s Superstar 2008. Judges included guitar gods Steve Vai (Whitesnake, Frank Zappa) and Elliot Easton (the Cars). …At the end of the evening, Genfan was announced as the winner, taking home more than $12,000 in prizes.

And this quote if for Jack:

Judge Easton joked that maybe she was “too good” for this competition, with Vai adding that maybe she should run for vice president. (I’m thinking yes, but only if she can see Russia from her house.)

A friend sent me a link to this article in Newsweek, also about John Alford’s study of the biology of politics, Spiders, Maggots, Politics, from which I glean this remark (emphasis mine):

The results seem to suggest that our ideas about the world are shaped by deep, involuntary reactions to the things we see. As evidence, the study found that greater sensitivity to the images was linked to more fervent support for a conservative agenda—including opposition to immigration, gun control, gay marriage, abortion rights and pacifism, and support for military spending, warrantless searches, the Iraq War, school prayer and the truth of the Bible. In other words, on the level of physiological reactions in the conservative mind, illegal immigrants may =s piders = gay marriages = maggot-filled wounds = abortion rights = bloodied faces. Before liberals start cheering, however, they don’t come off much more noble or nuanced. They were less sensitive to the threatening images, and more likely to support open immigration policies, pacifism and gun control. But according to the research, that’s hardly desirable, since it suggests that liberals may display mammal-on-a-hot-rock languor in the face of legitimate threats. “They actually don’t show any difference in physical response between a picture of a spider on someone’s face and a picture of a bunny,” Alford tells NEWSWEEK.

This guy obviously hasn’t watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Seriously, though, spiders are helpful predators and it’s only a few that are harmful to humans. Bunnies, on the other hand, are given to eating my lettuce. As for maggots, physicians still use them to debride festering wounds. So it may be that this researcher’s prejudices are a little bit naïve.

He also says this:

All combined, they show us that there are roughly three influences on political opinion. One is a biological predisposition. Our study is a small window into that. Another is traditional socialization, such as the fact that I grew up during the depression, was in a lower middle-class family, and my parents were Republicans. The last is adult experience, reasoning power, or what’s traditionally called free will.

So he’s a Republican in all probability. Maybe that’s why he thinks spiders are threatening.

I haven’t said much about movies lately. It isn’t that I’ve quit watching. Just that I haven’t had much to say about the movies I have watched.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is not a film I feel competent to review. It didn’t give me any new information but it gave me old information in a way that made me both sympathetic to the young soldiers involved and outraged at the lack of moral direction that seems to have marked the “War on Terror” from the very beginning. Is it a good documentary? I don’t know. It’s painful to watch but I think every citizen of the U.S. should watch it.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno) is also painful to watch but I do not hesitate to call it an excellent movie. It tells an edge-of-the-seat story of totalitarianism and resistance in Fascist Spain in 1944, remarkable perhaps because most of the resistance is in the hands of women and girls. It is visually gorgeous and, for once, computer animation is used imaginatively.

Ridicule is French, what can I say? It takes place in Versailles just before the Revolution, so there is plenty of decadence. But there is also sweet young love and idealism. Like I said, it’s French.

The Three Penny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper) is a black and white film of Bertoldt Brecht’s stage play of the same name, with music by Kurt Weil. It was filmed in Germany in 1931. It is dark and cynical and brooding. A masterpiece.

To understand why audiences didn’t like Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in 1948’s The Pirate, you probably have to watch the pair in 1942’s For Me and My Gal, which audiences loved.

For Me and My Gal is Busby Burkeley’s recruiting poster, complete with vaudeville romance and hummable tunes. Garland’s voice lends strength to Kelly’s somewhat reedy tenor and the two harmonize oh so sweetly. Sweet being the key word. Nothing here to push either star. Garland is the dewy-eyed, stage-struck girl next door, her stock part. And Kelly obviously isn’t challenged by any of the dance routines.

The Pirate, on the other hand, is one long Hollywood injoke. Once again Kelly is a travelling performer but he mugs and rolls his eyes and does take-offs on those great swashbucklers Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn. Garland is once again wide-eyed and stage-struck but she is also lusty and smart, revealed to be more torch singer than girl next door. (She would have been even torchier but the censors said no.) Vincente Minnelli let Kelly have a free hand with lavish choreography, including one long pirate ballet with leaping flames that he parodies a few years later in The Bandwagon. Kelly’s costume in this dance is patterned on the one Fairbanks wore in The Black Pirate. The film is deemed a failure but it fails in an interesting way.

Butterfield 8 just fails. Its moral seems to be: If you bring a woman of easy virtue into your home and sleep with her in the marital bed, it is of course your wife’s fault for being rich and giving you a cushy job. It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen on several levels. Performances wooden. Not a spark between Liz and Laurence Harvey and Eddie Fisher’s chubby cheeks are just too dull. The story is silly. And of course any woman living wild and free has to be punished.

You can make your own Picasso head here.

You can view mine here. I’ve always been a bit of a minimalist and anyway, this is how I feel this morning.

View the gallery here, all 752,597 of them, and there will be more by the time you get there.

Send me your links. It’ll be fun to see.

Mr. Picassohead was created by Ruder Finn Interactive, I found it via the Lynch-Bustin Art Room.

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This masterpiece was created by Ro.

The clay around here is all pretty much yellow. One excellent potter uses it: Greg Seigel.

This video is Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. It’s for Ro.