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Updated: 07/01/04



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Thursday, 01 July, 2004

I'm not the only one who picked up on Hillary Clinton's little tax increase yesterday. Scrappleface has a lovely take on the situation:

Publisher Revokes Hillary's Advance for Common Good

(2004-07-01) -- In the same week that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, told a San Francisco audience that future President John Forbes Kerry will take money away from wealthy Americans "on behalf of the common good", the former First Lady's publisher announced it would not pay the $5.3 million deferred advance it owes for her book Living History.

"To get the publishing industry, and our company in particular, back on track, we're going to cut that short and not give it to you," a spokesman for Simon and Shuster reportedly told Mrs. Clinton. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Mrs. Clinton's office released a statement saying she was "delighted to help cover the publisher's losses from unpopular books by other authors, bad management decisions and bureaucratic waste."

She suggested that her husband, who served with her in the White House during the 1990s, would like to do the same with his $10 million advance from Knopf.

[Heh.]

The Tall Ships are coming to Philadelphia for this weekend's "Welcome America" festivites. They were supposed to have arrived by Wednesday afternoon, so last night after dinner, we went out on the end of the pier to see if they had come in. What we saw was this:

Uss Laboon


Yeppers, right next to our pier, being pushed into place by a couple of harbor tugs. The USS Laboon is an Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer armed with the Aegis combat system and a multi-function phased radar. Five hundred and five feet long, 8,315 tons fully loaded, just sitting right next to Penn's Landing.

[I bet Willy Penn would have been impressed.]

Oh, yeah, and the tall ships were there too. We walked past three of them: two Polish vessels and our own home-town girl, Gazela. There were a couple of others across the water in Camden as well. There will be fourteen all together. They're all open for touring and it should be pretty neat . . .

. . . But we're leaving for the Jersey Shore tonight, so we'll miss out on them. But at least we got to see some. We took some pictures - if they come out OK, I'll try to post them next week.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!

[And many more!]


Quote du jour:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

-- The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

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