Sunday, June 01, 2003

Departed this week

Having grown up near Philadelphia, I was particularly taken by the death this week of Willard Rouse at age 60.  Bill Rouse changed the face of the city I knew, constructing its current skyline in the last 20 years or so.  Rouse had the tenacity, the vision, and the financing to take on the hidebound city fathers, breaking the longstanding gentlemen’s agreement that no building could reach higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall.  His Liberty Place project ushered in Philly’s boom and its recent revitalization.  Nephew of uber-developer James Rouse, whose Rouse Company built dozens of shopping malls all over the country, as well as planned communities such as Columbia, Maryland, Bill Rouse quit smoking in 2001, too late to prevent the lung cancer that took his life.

Widow of Sir Michael Redgrave, mother of Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, grandmother of Natasha and Joely Richardson, Rachel Kempson, 92, was a splendid actress on stage and screen.  Though never a major leading player, she appeared in such films as The Captive Heart (1946), Tom Jones (1963), Georgy Girl (1966), and Out of Africa (1985).

One of the enduring images of corporate conformity, the rise of suburbia, and the influence of Madison Avenue advertising in the 1950s is “the man in the gray flannel suit”.  Less well known is that this emblematic image is actually the title of a best-selling novel written by Sloan Wilson, who died this week at 83.  Wilson wrote another novel, A Summer Place, which was made into a movie known more for its syrupy theme song (or perhaps as the film debut of Troy Donahue) than anything else.

Just a few months after Paul Newman starred as The Stage Manager in a Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s classic Our Town, the woman who originated the role of the doomed bride Emily in the play’s initial Broadway run in 1938 died this week.  Martha Scott, 88, was also nominated for the best-actress Academy Award when she recreated the same role in the 1940 film adaptation of Our Town.  Scott played Charlton Heston’s mother in both The Ten Commandments (1956) and Ben-Hur (1959).

This was definitely a week for literary and cinematic deaths.  The sprawling English Restoration romance novel Forever Amber was a sensational bestseller when it was published in 1944, and it was a sensation all over again when the spicy movie version, starring Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde, was released in 1947.  The novel was banned in Boston, the rest of Massachusetts, and 13 other states for its then-shocking references to intercourse, pregnancy, abortion, and the Hays Office tried to keep the movie from reaching the public as well.  Nothing else written by Kathleen Winsor, who was only 25 years old when Forever Amber was published, enjoyed anything close to the success of her one big hit.  Married four times (oft-wed bandleader Artie Shaw was #2), divorced three times and widowed once, Ms. Winsor was 83 years old when she died.

Recently nominated to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, federal District Court Judge Jay Waldman, 58, died of cancer.  A longtime aide to fellow Pittsburgher Dick Thornburgh, Waldman had been appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1988.

Thursday, May 29, 2003

Post of the day week month ... year!!

Here’s the problem with being out here on the left coast and working diligently all day.  You end up being the last guy on the block to point to

billmon’s What a Tangled Web We Weave . . .,

a devastatingly detailed timeline of the WMD deception perpetrated by the Bushies.

Read it, and then read it again.  The progression of overstatements, subterfuge, bluster, lies, propaganda, and sleight-of-mouth—fully documented and sourced—paints a powerful picture of the utterly shameless slime that is running our country and our world into the ground.  After reading the post, look closely at the many comments generated by billmon’s blog entry.  There’s a great deal more material peppered through those comments by which Dubya, Rummy, Ari, Colin, and the whole sick crew can be held accountable for their callously misleading lies.

Will a “real” commentator ever put together such a compendium and wave it before the American people?  If the mainstream media were really “liberal”, or even responsible, would we have to even ask such a question?

The header of billmon’s post is, of course, quoted from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion.  In response, I hope that sometime soon, when discussing the collapse of Dubya’s cabal, we will be able to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act III, Scene iv):

Hoist with their own petard!

Wednesday, May 28, 2003

Arrrgggh, life keeps getting in the way...

...which is my primary excuse for not posting very often these days. 

My excuse for not posting the week’s necrology is that, frankly, nobody interesting died last week.  Or at least, no one even close to interesting enough to tickle my fancy.  I suppose that makes it a good week in some respects.

Anyway, I’ll be back with more entries when I get the opportunity.

Sunday, May 25, 2003

Bush the environmentalist

Why does George W. Bush hate America?  Well, I wouldn’t want to get inside his squinty little head to try to answer that one, but there’s certainly a plethora of evidence that he does hate America’s natural legacy.  Here are some excerpts from example number 83617 in support of that proposition, Seth Borenstein‘s front page story in Sunday’s Seattle Times (emphasis added, where appropriate):

• On Sept. 13, 2000, presidential candidate George W. Bush posed before the Cascades in Washington state and warned that national parks were “at the breaking point.” He vowed to eliminate a $4.9 billion backlog in deferred maintenance.

  Nearly 1,000 days later, the repair budget at Mount Rainier National Park, the tallest and most visited part of the Cascades, was cut 40 percent. That means that two of the park’s most urgent problems—a heavily used footbridge that’s rotting and a historic cabin that’s falling apart—will go unrepaired.

• The Bush administration has increased spending on park-system maintenance and construction above what it inherited by $321 million over three years. But it still has provided only 15 cents for every dollar that it said was needed to repair long-overdue maintenance problems. The maintenance backlog may now be as high as $6 billion, according to the General Accounting Office, Congress’ auditing arm.

• Roger Kennedy, national parks chief under President Clinton and a Smithsonian museum director under the first President Bush, put it another way.

  “They are treating the National Park Service as if they are custodians of parking lots and tourist destinations, not as if they are custodians of our most precious places,” Kennedy said.

• The budget for repairs at Western parks overall was slashed 28 percent this month, in part to pay for a study, criticized by National Park Service Director Fran Mainella, to determine if park workers should be replaced with low-bid private contractors.

• Parks professionals are alarmed by another plan announced this spring. It would turn over 1,708 federal positions in the National Park Service to private contractors, mostly jobs involving maintenance or security. In an internal memo last month, park service Director Mainella said this switch would cost $3 million just to study and that that would come at the expense of other park-service priorities.

  Park-service budget documents also show there will be 101 fewer rangers next year than in January 2001, a drop of about 1 percent.

• In addition, President Bush has done less to expand the national-park system than any president in more than 100 years, a Knight Ridder analysis found. The president’s father, as president, once added four parks in one six-day period; his son has added three in a little over two years.

  Last year, he created the Flight 93 National Monument in Pennsylvania and the 3,500-acre Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historic Park in Virginia. He also split off 410,000 acres from an existing park in Idaho and named it Craters of the Moon National Preserve.
  
  Total space in national parks last year shrank by 187,000 acres, a loss of park space roughly equal to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. Park service spokesman Al Nash said he couldn’t explain how that happened, nor could three other officials contacted.

Just another couple of words about one of Bush’s pitifully few “new” National Park Service properties.  Craters of the Moon National Monument was designated by President Coolidge in 1924.  The original Monument was augmented by 5360 acres in 1962 (by Kennedy), and a Craters of the Moon Wilderness was designated (by Nixon) in 1970.  President Clinton expanded the National Monument by 661,000 acres, a 13-fold increase in size (though all added land was already federally-owned), just after the 2000 election.  Under Bush, the expanded portion was almost immediately redesignated as a Preserve, managed by the Bureau of Land Management rather than the NPS.  In a Preserve, unlike a National Monument, activities such as livestock grazing/herding and hunting are permitted.  In other words, the very same area “upgraded” by Clinton in 2000 was returned to its previous “lower” status by Dubya just a year later. 

Thus, one of Bush’s “new” properties is, in actuality, more of a subtraction from the portfolio of NPS lands than an addition.  Still another, ummm, creative piece of language manipulation by those masters of obfuscation in the current administration.

These monsters must be removed from power as soon as possible.

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Really supporting the troops

Over at The Watch, Natasha and Mary ask us to participate in today’s “virtual march” to support the troops by reminding our congresscritters of the Bush administration’s assault on the benefits of our veterans and of the dependents of both veterans and active military.

I’m probably too late in posting this, for which I apologize, but a continuing presence in the eyes and ears of our representatives probably wouldn’t hurt.  Here’s the gist of how we’re running this march (stolen directly from Natasha’s post):

What you can do: Tell everybody, make a phone call.

Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

For local numbers, you can look them up at Congress.org. You can always call local offices when the main DC numbers are busy.

My own representatives, who don’t need much (if any) prodding on these issues, are Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and Representative Jim McDermott, Democrats all.