WSJ: Newspaper War Disturbs the Peace In a Summer Haven

 

Remember how the Reagans and Bushes vacationed at their own homes and worked around the yard?

Please, don't submit us again to the ridiculousness of political celebrity and all its detritus.

P.S.  Richard Reston, son of  The New York Times' late Scotty Reston, owns the Vineyard Gazette.  It's one of the country's best papers.

"The Vineyard Gazette, a coffee-table-sized broadsheet, welcomed the president with a 16-page special section headlined: "From Our Island to Our President."

"In a front-page open letter to the president, Gazette editor Julia Wells wrote: "There is promise, Mr. President, that you may actually get ... downtime with your family, at Blue Heron Farm in Chilmark, a town that still counts its ballots in a wooden hand-cranked ballot box. A town that voted overwhelmingly for you."'

"The tabloid Martha's Vineyard Times teed off on its competitor. In a column titled "Obama Beat: Why Democrats find Martha's Vineyard, oh, so special," the paper's managing editor, Nelson Sigelman, wrote: "The press has adopted a story line of an Island inhabited by happy, clam-raking yeomen." He singled out the broadsheet's editor by name, saying Ms. Wells "led the navel-gazing pack."'

"The journalistic trash-talking reflects long-standing friction on an island where wealthy people vacation, and the less-wealthy people make a living mainly by servicing them. The island's seasonal occupants earn twice as much, on average, as its permanent ones, according to a local survey."

A dynasty?

The extent and nature of the media coverage of Ted Kennedy's funeral over the weekend was long and fawning.  But was it really about dynasty as many have written?

It's clear the funeral plans were made well ahead of time to ensure Ted got as close to the Presidential treatment as possible.  More cleverly, it was engineered as a prime time greasing of the American public to put on rose-colored glasses and rally behind what may soon be called the Kennedy Healthcare Bill.  When Kennedy threw his support to Obama last year in Iowa he changed the trajectory of the campaign, channeled money and endorsements, checkmated Hillary, and anointed Obama as the nominee.  Obama & Co know this and that they should never miss a chance to exploit a good death.

Fortunately, some saner heads prevailed in print.

Andrew Sullivan's "Tainted, flawed and the maker of a president" from The Times of London.

Howie Carr's "Ted Kennedy’s legacy not as heroic as some might think" from the Boston Globe.

57% Say Replace Entire Congress

 

According to Rasmussen Reports, 57% of Americans would vote to replace the entire Congress and start all over again.

"One reason for this attitude may be that most voters say they understand the health care legislation better than Congress. Just 22% think the legislature has a good understanding of the issue."

"Three-out-of-four (74%) trust their own economic judgment more than Congress’."

"Just 14% give Congress good or excellent review for their overall performance, while only 16% believe it’s Very Likely that Congress will address the most important problems facing our nation."

"Seventy-five percent (75%) say members of Congress are more interested in their own careers than they are in helping people. On the brighter side, just 37% say most in Congress have extramarital affairs."

Atomic Force Microscopy

 

Another IBM first.  Microscopy images of a molecule at one millionth the diameter of a grain of sand.

Would it run on Windows?

OK, lots of recent headlines about Bill Gates filing a patent about pumping cold water from the ocean's depths to the surface to thwart hurricanes. 

First, the patent was filed by Intellectual Ventures, the patent trolling firm run by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold.

Second, would you trust the weather to run on Windows?

As the classic margarine ad said, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

Ed Rondthaler - RIP

Rondthaler was 104 and said his longevity was due to a daily cold shower.

“Foenetic speling wil maek reeding and rieting neerly automatic for evrybody,” Mr. Rondthaler wrote in SoundSpel, in a passage quoted by The New York Times in a 1977 profile.

Headline Math

 

The Jerusalem Post has an online story with the Orwellian headline "4% of Israeli Jews: Obama pro-Israel."

Wouldn't it be more accurate, not to mention better writing, to use this headline instead?

96% of Israeli Jews: Obama anti-Israel

Thunderstorms

Apropos today.  A cover of Toto's Africa by Perpetuum Jazzile, an a cappella jazz choir from Slovenia. The start to the song is ingenious.

Vineyard Memories

The arrival of Tropical Storm Danny has come with a predicted 3" of heavy rain and wind today.

The perfect chance to post some pictures from the past week of friends at the house and island and the many memories made.  Namaste.

 

Charlie

 

Once again, you can't make this stuff up.

From The Wall Street Journal.

"When you're a powerful Congressman and working diligently to increase tax rates to pay for President Obama's health-care plan, we suppose it's easy to lose track of one of your checking accounts. That would be the one at the federal credit union with a balance somewhere between $250,001 and maybe as high as $500,000. And when you're crunched for time and pulling together bills to pass in a rush, we guess, too, that you might overlook several other investment accounts, even if some of them are sizable, such as the ones Mr. Rangel missed at JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer and BlackRock."

Good thing (for President Obama) Teddy wasn’t that good a senator

From a good friend and the good mind of Chuck B.

If Teddy Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer 30 months ago instead of 15, and if he had been successful imposing an Obama-care-type government health care reform—with its free-market, free-choice defeating “public option”—earlier in his career, as he had been trying to do for more than 30 years, then President Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois.

It was Senator Kennedy’s forceful (nearly strident) introduction and support of the novice senator at the beginning of the 2008 Presidential election cycle that vaulted Obama from footnote to first place in Iowa and beyond.

Unfortunately (or not, depending on your political viewpoint), had Mr. Kennedy been a more successful senator, and had had his way with nationalized health care, he would not have been around to help jump start the Illinois upstart.

As per the rules of the game under nationalized medicine (as in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and other countries), complicated and expensive treatments of the kind administered to Mr. Kennedy in the last 15 months would not have been available to someone his age—and in the case of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, perhaps not available to anyone of any age.

It is through rationing, committees, and across the board cost-cutting that the health services in all of these nationalized countries—all of which are running deficits in the billions of dollars—prevent running deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars.

This assumes that U.S. senators would not receive extra special care—despite their age—that would not be available to the ordinary tax payer, the very people who work hard to pay for the salaries and extra-special care for government employees.  Such a system would be similar to what we saw in the heyday of the Soviet Union, where citizens received an average level of care, and senior party members and their families and friends received an above-average level of care.

Fortunately for Barack Obama, no such system was in place at the beginning of the last Presidential election cycle; Mr. Kennedy became ill 15 months ago, not 30; and the senator from Massachusetts had easy access to the world’s finest medical care—a pool of talent and state-of-the-art resources that, despite considerable government meddling and interference, grew out of an imperfect, rag-tag collection of free-market, free-choice, mostly profit-oriented options.

Ted and Danny

The Obama's are cutting their vacation short to attend Ted Kennedy's funeral tomorrow in Boston and to fly out before the arrival of Tropical Storm Danny on Sunday.

The buzz here on the island has been good: some rounds of golf at Farm Neck, a sight-seeing trip to the Gay Head Lighthouse, the kids frolicking at Blue Heron Farm and The Arcade, drinks at Valerie Jarrett's OB house (a Northfield Mount Hermon '74 classmate), followed by dinner at The Sweet Life.

Meanwhile, the usual weird news factoids:

• A disabled golfer at Farm Neck complained the Obama entourage took every golf cart. They did.
  
• Cindy Sheehan brought her tired Camp Casey schtick to the island, saying "There's no vacation from body bags." 
  
• Senator Robert Byrd and House Leader Nancy Pelosi said the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 healthcare bill will re-emerge soon with the Kennedy name attached to it.  Never let a timely death go to waste.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Danny is heading up the coast, expected to drop three or more inches of rain with gale force winds.

Profile in Courage?

I imagine there will be a lot of people venturing out today to Dike Bridge over Poucho Pond on Chappaquiddick.  It was just over 40 years ago that Ted Kennedy and five other married men took six single women, campaign aides and interns known as the "boiler room girls", out for a night of drinking on the beach.  The incident at Dike Bridge became one of history's worst examples of the personal abuse of power and privilege.

Investigative reporter Jack Anderson dug into the facts, as did hundreds of others, and the  mea culpa Ted gave to the public was as legalistic and self-protecting an admission of error as ever made where a death was involved.  The speech was crafted by the crack Kennedy team, known as The Best and the Brightest, including Robert McNamara, Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen.

Watch and read the speech here.

Ted's Dead - RIP

 

Sometimes an obituary can be a minor writing classic.  This one, by John Brodeur at The New York Times, has some moments.

"He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy."

"When Edward was born, President Herbert Hoover sent Rose a bouquet of flowers and a note of congratulations. The note came with 5 cents postage due; the framed envelope is a family heirloom."

"It was at Harvard, in his freshman year, that he ran into the first of several personal troubles that were to dog him for the rest of his life: He persuaded another student to take his Spanish examination, got caught and was forced to leave the university." 

“The deaths and tragedies around him would have led others to withdraw. He never quits, but sails against the wind.” 

Menemsha Bight

Thomas Hart Benton
Menemsha Bight, 1928

Bo Arrives

Bo, the first dog, arrives on the Vineyard, President and Secret Service in tow.

According to this tweet, the hot t-shirt on the island is The Black Dog's Bobama shirt.

Roar on the Shore

When all the fireworks go off all at once at the very beginning can you still call it a finale?

Esteban Diácono's Let Yourself Feel

Rob RIP

My best friend. Left us one year ago.

Yankees 20 - Red Sox it doesn't matter

How sweet it is!

Best record in MLB
7.5 game lead on Roid Sox

Man's Inhumanity to Aliens

District 9 is a clever allegory about internment and dehumanization. Make that dealienation. From director Peter Jackson. Powerful, weird and very good.

Predator Drones - Justice from Above

Remember the movie Syriana with George Clooney and the scene at the end where a Predator Drone was launched by CIA operatives in the United States using GPS telemetry while sipping coffee? Well, Obama's DOD has really stepped this practice up since January. Good for them. Too bad they didn't take out Libyan al-Megrahi when he deplaned in Tripoli yesterday. That would have been divine justice.

P.S. I bought the movie Syriana for $1 on a sidewalk in Shanghai one week after it was released in the U.S. Ain't piracy grand?

Lassitude and Lobster Rolls

Had dinner last night with Vineyard friends and writers, Walter and Meryl. Here's a link to Walter's latest column, Of Lassitude and Lobster Rolls: Obama Heads for Vineyard Vacation, on politicsdaily.com. Spot on and very funny.

Meryl's latest effort is her best-selling book, Mrs. Astor Regrets.

"Meryl's riveting account of the legendary life and sad final days of Brooke Astor is an American epic. It's all here -- high society, big money, blue blood, family feuds and criminal charges."
— Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation

Lockerbie Lunacy

Compassion? In case you thought the recent disarmament and openness by Libya and Gaddafi means Libyans now respect and like Americans, think again. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi received a hero's welcome upon landing in Tripoli.

And it wasn't about compassion, it was all about oil.

Obama: GOP conspiracy out to kill health reform

Oh my, there's something on Obama's watch that is going badly that he can't say he inherited! With a super-majority in the House and filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, how can the GOP be blamed? Instead of accepting responsibility for his party's poorly thought through health care policy reforms, he blames a GOP conspiracy. How predictable. I guess the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are showing up at the state level to voice their concerns about health care reform and the federal debt are co-conspirators? The Independents are bolting.

Perhaps someone in his administration can recall the reaction and demise of HillaryCare and explain to the President that reform that is not in the interest of the public is DOA.

Hurricane Bill

Uh oh, Hurricane Bill is coming up the coast. And just in time for the Obamas' arrival on the Vineyard. Bummer.

140th Grand Illumination

Thousands came out to sing and enjoy the 140th Grand Illumination in Cottage City. Fun.

Of the people, for the people and by the people?

If this is how Frank talks to his constituents imagine what he's like with his enemies. Let's hope this is his last term. His elective office and the public deserves much more.

Novak RIP

From today's WSJ opinion page.

"He was attracted to LBJ, but over time he became increasingly skeptical of the political class and its habit of accruing power to itself. He was a staunch anti-Communist and became an advocate for supply-side economics. His column probably reached the apex of its influence during the Reagan years, as he chronicled the battles between the Gipper's true believers and the GOP establishment that sought to defeat them. He preferred the believers."

Me too.

Reality Bites

The campaign's tagline: "Catch It, Bin It, Kill It."

Except now, according to the Daily Mail, McCusker has been diagnosed with swine flu.

"It was a shock when I found out," McCusker told the paper.

"I quarantined myself and I've been getting lots of [grief] from mates," he said. "I was supposed to 'Catch It, Bin It, Kill It' but instead I've been shivering, shaking and spreading it."

Meanwhile, a 26-year-old otherwise healthy man died here on Martha's Vineyard of H1N1 virus/swine flu on Monday.

Swine flu, lyme disease and tularemia, to name a few of the risks here on the island. Very scary. In 2002, I spent a week at Martha's Vineyard Hospital on an intravenous IV of antibiotics after contracting the tick-borne disease erlichiosis.

DNA Origami

Amazing . . .

From the IBM press release.

"Today, scientists at IBM (NYSE: IBM) Research and the California Institute of Technology announced a scientific advancement that could be a major breakthrough in enabling the semiconductor industry to pack more power and speed into tiny computer chips, while making them more energy efficient and less expensive to manufacture.

The utility of this approach lies in the fact that the positioned DNA nanostructures can serve as scaffolds, or miniature circuit boards, for the precise assembly of components – such as carbon nanotubes, nanowires and nanoparticles – at dimensions significantly smaller than possible with conventional semiconductor fabrication techniques. This opens up the possibility of creating functional devices that can be integrated into larger structures, as well as enabling studies of arrays of nanostructures with known coordinates."

Derek Jeter, Derek Jeter

Man, he is good. Consistently so good and always understated.

According to The New York Times, "With a .338 average, he is second in the American League to Minnesota’s Joe Mauer. He has the best on-base percentage on the Yankees, at .415, and has a better average with runners in scoring position than Boston’s David Ortiz.

Jeter is hitting .373 with runners in scoring position, compared to .300 for Ortiz, who will try to help the Boston Red Sox wrest first place from the Yankees in this weekend’s five-game series at Fenway Park. Ortiz may be the leading candidate for the A.L.’s Most Valuable Player award, but Jeter is in the discussion.

“He’s definitely been our guy,” said the hitting coach Don Mattingly, who won the award in 1985. “He’s been as consistent as anybody, and he’s done everything you can to win games. So I don’t think there’s any question you can make a case for him.”

Jeter’s home runs are down this season — he has only 10 — but he leads the team in doubles and is on pace for 97 runs batted in. He has 26 steals, 6 shy of his career high. Before his error on Thursday, an ugly one in which he collided with Rodriguez on a pop-up, he had a better fielding percentage (.980) than he did last season, when he won his second Gold Glove at shortstop."

soupnazi

No, not the Seinfeld soup vendor. This soupnazi is the online name used by Albert Gonzalez who Seth Kosto, an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who specializes in computer fraud, called "a very important player in a sophisticated ring that has real results at the street level of bank, retail, debit- and credit-card fraud."

According to The Wall Street Journal, "The indictment, interviews and recent court documents in the cases pending against Mr. Gonzalez paint him as a rising star in the cyber underground. He launched what he called 'operation get rich or die tryin,' targeting Fortune 500 companies with his data-theft operations, according to a sentencing memo filed in federal district court in Massachusetts in the TJ Maxx matter. These documents say he threw himself a $75,000 birthday party and at one point lamented he had to count more than $340,000 by hand because his money counter had broken.

Such large sums, primarily in $20 bills allegedly stolen from ATMs, proved tough to manage, the sentencing memo says. He was considering investing in a club, but told one of his co-conspirators in the TJX heist that he would only be able to pull together $300,000 in a'legitimate appearing form' like a check, according to the documents."

Late summer night's dream

Last night's final concert in the Martha's Vineyard Chamber Music Society summer series was sublime. Cellist Antonio Lysy played with violinist Roger Wilkie and pianist Dolores Stevens.

My favorite piece was Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly's Duo for violin and cello, op. 7.

Lysy plays a Carlo Tononi cello made in Bologna in 1700.

Dopamine and Seeking

From slate.com . . . interesting hypotheses.

"It is an emotional state Jack Panksepp tried many names for: curiosity, interest, foraging, anticipation, craving, expectancy. He finally settled on seeking. Panksepp has spent decades mapping the emotional systems of the brain he believes are shared by all mammals, and he says, "Seeking is the granddaddy of the systems." It is the mammalian motivational engine that each day gets us out of the bed, or den, or hole to venture forth into the world. It's why, as animal scientist Temple Grandin writes in Animals Make Us Human, experiments show that animals in captivity would prefer to have to search for their food than to have it delivered to them.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

The juice that fuels the seeking system is the neurotransmitter dopamine. Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

Twitter Twaddle

I'm eating a salmon wrap and artichoke salad for lunch today.

"Research carried out by Pear Analytics was designed to take a snapshot of what people actually used the booming social networking site for.

They delved into the endless steam of tweets every 30 minutes between 11 am and 5 pm Central Standard time on weekdays over two weeks to collect a total of 2,000 messages.

They then grouped the messages into one of six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those with pass-along value.

Messages classed as babble included such gems as “I’m having a sandwich,” Pear Analytics said.

Only 8.7 percent of messages were found to have pass-along value. Pointless babble was the largest category with 40.5 percent. Conversational tweets were 37.5 percent, but self promotion and spam only grabbed 5.9 percent and 3.8 percent respectively."

Grand Illumination

The Grand Illumination, or what's now known better as Illumination Night, is this Wednesday in Oak Bluffs. It's a more than century-old tradition.

The following day marks the beginning of the annual, since 1859, 2009 Agricultural Society Fair, aka Ag Fair, in West Tisbury. Both are not to be missed.

Chelsea Clinton Wedding

The Vineyard rumor mill is buzzing! Word has it Chelsea Clinton will marry Marc Mezvinsky the last week of August at Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen's house in Chilmark during the Obama's vacation here. Bill and Hillary Clinton's publicists, and Danson, still deny it. My friend Meg says the VTA bus chatter is that in addition to the Clintons and Obamas, both Bush presidents are coming, as well as Carter. Sounds like bipartisanship to me. I wish them all the best.

Rahmbo the "Pile Driver"

A White House chief of staff with this much power will be the first to go when things go bad. Intereresting fact in this NYT article: The Valerie Jarrett cover story in the Times magazine section a couple of weeks ago upset Emanuel.

From the NYT: "But when a New York Times Magazine profile of Ms. Jarrett last month explored the old scratchiness between Emanuel and Jarrett, White House officials said the normally calm Mr. Obama erupted with anger. An informal edict went out: no more cooperating with staff profiles. As a result, Mr. Emanuel declined a formal interview for this article."

Must be a messy sandbox.

Going for a bike ride

Thomas Hart Benton
Bicyclers, 1961

Seeds: Nature's Microchips

Brilliant.

"In the last 10 years, Americans have grown exquisitely attuned to issues of nutrition and food safety. Their increasing insistence on food quality—optimally nutritious, fresh, flavorful and safe—is well-founded. The vegetables and fruit bought at the supermarket are picked prematurely, spend weeks in trucks and warehouses exposed to carbon monoxide and other contaminants, and are frequently gassed to boost their colors. To purchase supermarket produce is to compromise on flavor, nutrition, texture and safety."