Category Archives: History

December 11, 2010 · 10:48 am

Morrison pardon doesn’t change The Doors’ history | Raw Story

I’ve always been fascinated by Jim Morrison and the Doors.  Love their music…Stopped by his grave in Paris…

But, still, can’t politicians find better ways to use their time????

Pardon of Jim Morrison can’t change The Doors’ history or answer a slew of ‘What ifs?’

A hot, frenzied night in Miami changed life for Jim Morrison and The Doors. That’s something the late singer’s pardon on indecent exposure and profanity charges can’t correct.

“It made him realize he was no longer in the graces of the gods, that things could go wrong,” said Ray Manzarek, the band’s keyboard player. “Jim had a great line — in that year we had a great visitation of energy. We had the mandate of heaven. And I think at that moment, he lost the mandate of heaven.”

An arrest warrant was issued for Morrison four days after a March 1, 1969, concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium. He turned himself in, was tried the next year and convicted on two charges. Gov. Charlie Crist and Florida’s Cabinet members pardoned Morrison of those convictions Thursday.

But forgiveness can’t change history. Morrison, worried about prison time, was distracted. Other cities, worried about The Doors, canceled concerts. Morrison ended up dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971 while appealing the convictions. Would he have died if the Miami incident never happened?

 

“It was one of the many things that contributed to his death. I don’t give it any more credence than any of 10 other things,” guitarist Robby Krieger said. “If it had never happened, would he never have died at that time? Maybe not. It didn’t help.”

 

More:   Morrison pardon doesn’t change The Doors’ history | Raw Story.

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December 11, 2010 · 10:32 am

New drafts of Eisenhower’s farewell address : The New Yorker

Fascinating…

From The New Yorker:

One core idea dominates every version: the first draft described “the conjunction of a large and permanent military establishment and a large and permanent arms industry.” Policing it would require “all the organizing genius we possess” to insure “that liberty and security are both well served.” It added, “We must be especially careful to avoid measures which would enable any segment of this vast military-industrial complex to sharpen the focus of its power.” Through scores of revisions, that idea persisted. As delivered, the speech memorably read, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

More:   New drafts of Eisenhower’s farewell address : The New Yorker.

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December 10, 2010 · 10:49 pm

Chapter 45: The Help | My Southern Gothic Life

Yet another new post is up on my other blog.

Here is the beginning and a link to the full post:

I can’t encourage you enough to read the book “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett.  If you haven’t read it, put it on your Christmas Wish List.  If you have read it, give it to your friends.

I’ve never read a truer book about the interaction between black women who worked as Maids in the early 1960′s and their “white ladies.”

Although the book is set in Mississippi, it could very well have been set in Danville, Virginia.  I remember those days too well.

People seem to already be forgetting that the South in those days, from Richmond to Mobile, was like South Africa under Apartheid.  I was in South Africa in 1997 and felt just like I did in Virginia in 1965.

Everyone had a place and stayed in it.  But the times were beginning to change…

In the 1960′s, the bus line ran near our house.  The corner of Brook Drive and Lansbury Drive was a major stop for the Maids.  Six or seven women would get off the bus around 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. and walk back down there to go home around 6:00 or so.  Some of them wore their bedroom shoes to work as their feet were so tired and broken down from standing all day, all they could wear were scuffs.

Most of the White Ladies in Temple Terrace had maids.  They didn’t have jobs, but they had Maids.  I remember our “car pool” for Miss Touchstone’s Kindergarten, our Mothers would throw a London Fog all-weather coat over their pajamas to take us to “school” and only get dressed and made up around 4:30 before our Fathers came home from work.  I don’t know what they did in the meantime…

MORE:   Chapter 45: The Help | My Southern Gothic Life.

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December 7, 2010 · 11:28 pm

Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace

Great Tribute from a reporter, Melinda Henneberger, who traveled with Elizabeth on the campaigns.

 

The most disarming, beloved and beleaguered woman in the American political arena died of cancer Tuesday, at age 61, at the Chapel Hill estate that Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards once told me she’d built in part to compensate for the succession of modest homes she’d lived in as a Navy brat.

“From years of living in military housing, I like a big room,” the wife of then-presidential hopeful John Edwards said in an interview in front of her hotel lobby-sized Christmas tree three years ago. Because some of the bedrooms she’d had as a kid were so dinky you couldn’t fit the bed in and still close the door, “my dream was to turn in circles if you wanted to.” The 28,000-square-foot result was just one of the ambitions Elizabeth willed to life, brick by brick, along with a few heartfelt myths and the clear understanding that she did not want to be remembered as anybody’s cuckold, or some modern-day female Job.

Before their 16-year-old son Wade’s Jeep was blown off the road in a freak storm in 1996, John and Elizabeth “had the storybook life and the storybook marriage,” his former law partner David Kirby told me as Edwards was preparing for his second presidential run. But like most pre-Disney fairy tales, it also included some dark and confusing turns in the woods. On the campaign trail, Edwards’ favorite fallback phrase was “It’s not complicated!” — but the years they lived in public certainly were. For most of us, her story really only began on the worst day of her life, when the state troopers came to the door to say Wade had been killed and she promised herself that if her husband ever had to hear bad news again, it wouldn’t be from her. I’ve often wondered if any of what followed — his political career, the birth of their two younger children, her breast cancer, which was advanced even when she discovered an egg-sized lump six years ago, and his affair with Rielle Hunter, who bore him a daughter — would ever have happened if Wade had stopped for a Coke instead of being where he was, when he was.

Link to complete Article:  Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace.

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December 7, 2010 · 9:11 pm

Elizabeth Edwards Op Ed – Bowling 1, Health Care 0 – NYTimes.com

Just to remember a phenomenal woman, I wanted to post this excerpt from an op ed Elizabeth Edwards wrote for the New York Times back in 2008.

She not only was the classier, more honest one in her marriage to John Edwards, I think she was the smartest one.

We were enriched to have her voice as part of the public debate.  She will be missed.

I’ll let her words speak again…

Here is the excerpt with a link to the full article at the bottom:

 

Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates’ priorities, policies and principles — information that voters will need to choose the next president — too often did not make the cut. After having spent more than a year on the campaign trail with my husband, John Edwards, I’m not surprised.

Why? Here’s my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

It is not a new phenomenon. In 1954, the Army-McCarthy hearings — an important if painful part of our history — were televised, but by only one network, ABC. NBC and CBS covered a few minutes, snippets on the evening news, but continued to broadcast soap operas in order, I suspect, not to invite complaints from those whose days centered on the drama of “The Guiding Light.”

The problem today unfortunately is that voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.

Did you, for example, ever know a single fact about Joe Biden’s health care plan? Anything at all? But let me guess, you know Barack Obama’s bowling score. We are choosing a president, the next leader of the free world. We are not buying soap, and we are not choosing a court clerk with primarily administrative duties.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Bowling 1, Health Care 0 – NYTimes.com.

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December 5, 2010 · 3:03 pm

What Else Would $60 Billion Buy? – NYTimes.com

$60 Billion: The approximate amount that extending the Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000 a year — which Congress seems on the verge of doing — will cost a year, in inflation-adjusted terms. On average, the affluent households that benefit from these cuts will save $25,000 annually. What else might that $60 billion a year buy?

•As much deficit reduction as the elimination of earmarks, President Obama’s proposed federal pay freeze, a 10 percent cut in the federal work force and a 50 percent cut in foreign aid — combined.

•A tripling of federal funding for medical research.

•Universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, with relatively small class sizes.

•A much larger troop surge in Afghanistan, raising spending by 60 percent from current levels.

•A national infrastructure program to repair and upgrade roads, bridges, mass transit, water systems and levees.

•A 15 percent cut in corporate taxes.

•Twice as much money for clean-energy research as suggested by a recent bipartisan plan.

•Free college, including room and board, for about half of all full-time students, at both four- and two-year colleges.

•A $500 tax cut for all households.

via What Else Would $60 Billion Buy? – NYTimes.com.

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December 4, 2010 · 6:37 pm

Cleopatra’s Guide to Good Governance – NYTimes.com

I somehow think this is similar to how Hillary might have done it…

Great article on many levels…

Excerpt and link to full article at the bottom…

LET’S say you can’t readily lay your hands on “Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun” or those of Winnie the Pooh. And let’s say the political mood around you is bleak; gridlock is the order of the day. Why not turn to a different management guru, a woman who left some 2,000-year-old teachable moments, each of them enduring and essential?

At 18, Cleopatra VII inherited the most lucrative enterprise in existence, the envy of her world. Everyone for miles around worked for her. Anything they grew or manufactured enriched her coffers. She had the administrative apparatus and the miles of paperwork to prove it.

From the moment she woke she wrangled with military and managerial decisions. The crush of state business consumed her day. Partisan interests threatened to trip her up at every turn; she observed enough court intrigue to make a Medici blush. To complicate matters, she was highly vulnerable to a hostile takeover. Oh, and she looked very little like the other statesmen with whom she did business.

Herewith her leadership secrets, a papyrus primer for modern-day Washington:

Obliterate your rivals. Co-opting the competition is good. Eliminating it is better. Cleopatra made quick work of her siblings, which sounds uncouth. As Plutarch noted, however, such behavior was axiomatic among sovereigns. It happened in the best of families.

The royal rules for dispensing with blood relatives were as inflexible as those of geometry. Cleopatra lost one brother in her civil war against him; allegedly poisoned a second; arranged the murder of her surviving sister. She thereafter reigned supreme.

Does this suggest by extension that a family business is a bad idea? It does.

Don’t confuse business with pleasure. The two have a chronic tendency to invade each other’s territory. But what were John Edwards, Mark Hurd, Mark Sanford and Eliot Spitzer thinking?

If you’re going to seduce someone, set your sights high. Cleopatra fell in with the most celebrated military commanders of her day, sequentially allying herself and producing children with her white knights, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. As she demonstrated, the idea is to kiss your way up the ladder. Along the same lines, there was an ancient world equivalent of the hire-an-assistant-of-whom-your-spouse-can’t-be-jealous wisdom. Cleopatra surrounded herself with eunuchs. They got into less trouble than did other aides, or at least different kinds of trouble.

Appearances count. As President Obama has learned and unlearned, theater works wonders. You may campaign in poetry, but you are wise to govern in pageantry. Deliver carnivals rather than tutorials; a little vulgarity goes a long way. Just wear the flag pin already.

More:   Cleopatra’s Guide to Good Governance – NYTimes.com.

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December 4, 2010 · 6:30 pm

All the President’s Captors – NYTimes.com

Frank Rich’s Column for tomorrow’s New York Times is up on line…

And it’s a good one…

THOSE desperate to decipher the baffling Obama presidency could do worse than consult an article titled “Understanding Stockholm Syndrome” in the online archive of The F.B.I. Law Enforcement Bulletin. It explains that hostage takers are most successful at winning a victim’s loyalty if they temper their brutality with a bogus show of kindness. Soon enough, the hostage will start concentrating on his captors’ “good side” and develop psychological characteristics to please them — “dependency; lack of initiative; and an inability to act, decide or think.”

This dynamic was acted out — yet again — in President Obama’s latest and perhaps most humiliating attempt to placate his Republican captors in Washington. No sooner did he invite the G.O.P.’s Congressional leaders to a post-election White House summit meeting than they countered his hospitality with a slap — postponing the date for two weeks because of “scheduling conflicts.” But they were kind enough to reschedule, and that was enough to get Obama to concentrate once more on his captors’ “good side.”

And so, as the big bipartisan event finally arrived last week, he handed them an unexpected gift, a freeze on federal salaries. Then he made a hostage video hailing the White House meeting as “a sincere effort on the part of everybody involved to actually commit to work together.” Hardly had this staged effusion of happy talk been disseminated than we learned of Mitch McConnell’s letter vowing to hold not just the president but the entire government hostage by blocking all legislation until the Bush-era tax cuts were extended for the top 2 percent of American households.

The captors will win this battle, if they haven’t already by the time you read this, because Obama has seemingly surrendered his once-considerable abilities to act, decide or think.

More:   All the President’s Captors – NYTimes.com.

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December 3, 2010 · 8:43 pm

Flashback: 1941’s Top Earners Taxed as Much as 73%

Sounds good to me…

“To those to whom much is given, much is expected.”

Especially when today’s top earners at Hedge funds, etc aren’t even creating anything….

Drawing on IRS data recently made public in the National Archives, the New York Times created an amazing infographic  showing that in “the good old days” of 1941, upper-income Americans paid far more in taxes than they do today, with some top earners paying as much as 73% of their adjusted gross income in taxes:

Keep in mind that in 2008, people who earned more than $1,000,000 paid 24.1% of their adjusted gross income in taxes. Compare that to some of the numbers in the Times’ infographic:

The head of Bethlehem Steel had an adjusted gross income of $336,953 and paid $222,051 in taxes — 66%.

The head of MGM Studios had an AGI of $202,408 and paid $130,174 in taxes — 64%.

The head of IBM had an AGI of $476,029 and paid $329,666 in taxes — 69%

Gun makers Carl and Hulda Swebilius had an AGI of $893,593 and paid $650,389 in taxes — 73%

Remember, these rates weren’t a result of a war surtax — although World War II began in 1939, the United States didn’t declare war until December 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. Yet even though we’ve been fighting two wars for the last decade, and even though today’s tax rates on top earners are a fraction of what they were in 1941, the GOP’s top legislative priority is to keep those top tier tax rates low. And for the most part, even though the polls on their side, Democrats aren’t fighting back.

More:   Daily Kos: State of the Nation.

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December 1, 2010 · 10:29 pm

AMERICA–HE’S YOUR PRESIDENT FOR GOODNESS SAKE! BY WILLIAM THOMAS « The Way of Love Blog

Great blog post my friend Kirk pointed me to….

America – He’s your President for Goodness Sake!

By William Thomas, October 1st, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/2u7jokf

There was a time not so long ago when Americans, regardless of their political stripes, rallied round their president. Once elected, the man who won the White House was no longer viewed as a Republican or Democrat, but the President of the United States. The oath of office was taken, the wagons were circled around the country’s borders and it was America versus the rest of the world with the president of all the people at the helm.

Suddenly President Barack Obama, with the potential to become an exceptional president has become the glaring exception to that unwritten, patriotic rule.

Four days before President Obama’s inauguration, before he officially took charge of the American government, Rush Limbaugh boasted publicly that he hoped the president would fail. Of course, when the president fails the country flounders. Wishing harm upon your country in order to further your own narrow political views is selfish, sinister and a tad treasonous as well.

Subsequently, during his State of the Union address, which is pretty much a pep rally for America, an unknown congressional representative from South Carolina, later identified as Joe Wilson, stopped the show when he called the President of the United States a liar. The president showed great restraint in ignoring this unprecedented insult and carried on with his speech. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was so stunned by the slur, she forgot to jump to her feet while clapping wildly, 30 or 40 times after that.

Last spring, President Obama took his wife Michelle to see a play in New York City and republicans attacked him over the cost of security for the excursion. The president can’t take his wife out to dinner and a show without being scrutinized by the political opposition? As history has proven, a president in a theatre without adequate security is a tragically bad idea.

Remember: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

via AMERICA–HE’S YOUR PRESIDENT FOR GOODNESS SAKE! BY WILLIAM THOMAS « The Way of Love Blog.

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