• “Not skiing”

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    After two days of firefights, a marine packed the personal effects of 12 fallen comrades at the combat outpost in Ramadi on Thursday. [Maurizio Gambarini/European Pressphoto Agency]

    The President of the United States is on vacation again, but it’s OK — he’s not skiing. Emphasis mine in the quote below:

    Democrats criticized Bush for taking the Easter-week vacation while U.S. forces are struggling to put down an uprising in Iraq. Campaigning in Milwaukee, Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, said: “I notice President Bush is taking some days off down at Crawford, Texas, and I’m told that when he takes days off, you know, he totally relaxes: He doesn’t watch television, he doesn’t read the newspapers, he doesn’t make long-term plans, doesn’t worry about the economy. I thought about that for a moment. I said, sounds to me like it’s just like life in Washington, doesn’t it?”

    White House communications director Dan Bartlett retorted that Bush is “not skiing” in Texas, as Kerry did on a recent vacation in Idaho. He said Bush remains in contact with his military advisers and is spending Easter weekend with his family. “Most Americans will understand that,” Bartlett said.

    This is Bush’s 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

    233 days since January 2001, or almost 80 days per year? Yeah, he’s just a “regular guy.” U.S. workers take an average of 10.2 vacation days a year after three years on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    If I were President, I would probably not have continued with my month-long vacation after receiving a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

    [I found the image above on the NY Times web site, but there was no link to make it larger. If someone finds a better version of the image I will replace it.]

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    UPDATED: I realize now that the briefing discussed was given to Bush after he was already in Crawford, Texas for his month-long vacation.

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  • If Albert Speer had worked for Donald Trump

    … he might have done something like this. Actually, that’s not fair to Speer. He was a pretty good architect.

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    A look at the World War II Memorial from atop the Washington Monument as it nears the end of construction. (Ricky Carioti – The Washington Post)

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  • I hope the taxpayers didn’t pay for any of this trip

    From CNN/AP:

    HATTIESBURG, Mississippi (AP) — Two reporters were ordered Wednesday to erase their tape recordings of a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a Mississippi high school.

    Scalia has long barred television cameras from his speeches, but does not always forbid newspaper photographers and tape recorders. On Wednesday, he did not warn the audience at the high school that recording devices would be forbidden.

    During the speech, a woman identifying herself as a deputy federal marshal demanded that a reporter for The Associated Press erase a tape recording of the justice’s comments. She said the justice had asked that his appearance not be recorded.

    The reporter initially resisted, but later showed the deputy how to erase the digital recording after the officer took the device from her hands. The exchange occurred in the front row of the auditorium while Scalia delivered his speech about the Constitution.

    The deputy, who identified herself as Melanie Rube, also made a reporter for The Hattiesburg American erase her tape.

    …

    Last year, Scalia was criticized for refusing to allow television and radio coverage of an event in Ohio in which he received an award for supporting free speech.

    Scalia, who was appointed to the bench by President Reagan in 1986, told students that the Constitution’s true meaning must always be protected.

    “The Constitution of the United States is extraordinary and amazing. People just don’t revere it like they used to,” Scalia told a full auditorium of high school students, officials, religious leaders.

    He said he spends most of his time thinking about the Constitution, calling it “a brilliant piece of work.”

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  • RIP Keith Cylar

    Keith Cylar, co-founder of Housing Works, has died. I have never known of an organization that started out as a grass-roots activist organization and grew into something serving so many people while keeping its activist credentials. They have always helped the people — drug users, people with AIDS — that the other service and homeless organizations didn’t want to deal with.

    James has a post about him.

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  • Happy Tartan Day from Chelsea

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    Spotted on Eighth Avenue today. Happy Tartan Day!

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  • Adam Cvijanovic in Philadelphia

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    Adam Cvijanovic’s mural of Osage Avenue in “Ideal City” at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

    We have seen every almost every show in New York of Adam Cvijanovic‘s work since Richard Anderson first showed him in the early 90s. I think he is a very smart artist and great painter, and, like so many artists we know, is a sweet person who has managed to not be chewed up by the Art World. He has a show at the Academy of Find Arts in Philadelphia titled “Ideal City.”

    Roberta Fallon, of artblog fame, has a great interview with him on Artnet.com.

    His choice of thematic material for the show is interesting, playing off two aspects of Utopian thinking in Phildelphia history: the Quakers and MOVE.

    [photo from Artnet.com]

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  • Tim Hailand

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    Tim Hailand, Untitled (SLUT) 1996

    ¡Mira, mira! I didn’t know Tim Hailand had a website!

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  • The Horts, collectors

    I want to be like the Horts when I’m a grown-up collector. We own a few artists in common, and I like the fact that while they obviously have money, they’re spending it mostly on younger, emerging artists like Paul P. and Christian Holstad.

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  • Sports! I’m writing something about sports!

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    Marge Laszlo

    Well, sort of. Our friend Conrad Cummings, one of the most thoughtful and politically aware composers I have ever met, was part of a concert in January of sports-oriented music given by the Avian Orchestra in the 6th floor gym of the University Settlement on the Lower East Side. His piece, titled In Memorium Marge Laszlo is an hommage to the roller derby champion. She isn’t dead, just “retired” by the forces of capitalism. This is how Conrad describes the piece:

    Marge Laszlo was one of Roller DerbyÂ’s great players. The game was born on the West Coast and grew up with the early days of television. During its heyday in the 1960s a dozen teams bused all over the country. It was one of the first sports that women as well as men could make a living playing, and it provided a home and a livelihood for any number of outsiders.

    Roller Derby looked anarchic. Players smashed into each other, collided into huge heaps of bodies, threw each other over the ropes into the audience, screamed at each other constantly, pulled hair, and whenever possible beat up the umpires. The highlight move was the Whip, where five or six players would link wrists to propel the player at the end into the opposing team like a projectile. Bodies would fly everywhere.

    But behind all the chaos and apparent violence was actually a big extended family of players who lived and traveled together and worked out every pile-up, Whip, hair-pull, and fight sequence ahead of time. Despite the drama, athleticism, and the passionate loyalty of fans to individual teams and players, it came down to a companionable bunch of people gliding round and round the same oval track. My piece goes around its track four times.

    Marge Laszlo herself is alive and well, but the game, alas, is no more. It started to lose TV viewers in the early 70s and was done in by the energy crisis when the teams couldnÂ’t afford gas for the buses taking them from city to city. But Roller Derby lives on happily in my memory, and IÂ’d like to think that the end of my piece is MargeÂ’s farewell lap on her last game. Skate on, Marge!

    You can hear this work, plus all of the others on the program, via New Music Box through April 15.

    Go buy his CD Photo-Op. After hearing it we tracked him down and became friends with him. It is brilliant politically-aware music.

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  • Maybe I will re-subscribe

    I stopped my subscription to The Economist last year because I felt they were being intellectually dishonest with their unquestioning backing of Bush and the attack on Iraq. I always knew they were a relatively conservative news magazine, but I thought of them as principled, and a good source of non-USA news. I felt betrayed by their attitude towards the Bush administration.

    Things seem to be looking up on that front.

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    Updated: OK, once I actually read the article I decided to keep my money.

    As regular readers will know, The Economist endorsed Mr Bush in the 2000 election once he had beaten our preferred candidate, John McCain. That still looks the right choice for that election. Indeed, Al Gore served a handy reminder of his unsuitability and poor judgment by endorsing Howard Dean. This newspaper also supported Mr Bush’s most controversial action, the Iraq war—and despite the continuing instability in that country we do not regret that, either.

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