A lot has changed in 12 years.
No, MLK Was Not In The GOP
“Most people don’t talk about the fact that Martin Luther King was a Republican.” That’s a quote from Ada Fisher, a Republican National Committeewoman from North Carolina, that was published without qualification or correction this week by ABC News. Fisher is wrong on two fronts. First, many people talk about the “fact” that King was a Republican. It is asserted incessantly … Read More
Dream Still Pending
50 years ago, but worth another read: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great … Read More
12 Years Ago Today
12 years ago today was the infamous August 6 PDB (or Presidential Daily Briefing) which said, in really big letters: BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S. After listening to the briefer who told him this on Bush's ranch, Bush reportedly replied, "All right. You've covered your ass, now." We know what happened a month later. Which led to a war … Read More
English Baby Born
Perhaps at the turn of the next century, Baby ________, born today to Prince William and Kate Middleton, will finally become King of England at the ripe old age of 87. And perhaps someone will do some researching back in time to see what people were saying on the day the once and future King of England was born. That … Read More
Happy 84th Birthday, Anne
This footage, discovered within the last decade, was originally shot on July 22 1941. It shows the wedding of a person living at Merwedeplein 39, Amsterdam. For a few brief seconds, the camera shows a young girl looking down from the second floor at the events transpiring below her. This is the only known footage of Anne Frank.
45 Years Ago Today
I often wonder how different the world would have been had it not been for June 5, 1968. No President Nixon. An earlier Vietnam withdrawal. An all-out effort to end poverty and starvation. Different lessons learned. Probably a much kinder nation.
Oldest Concentration Camp Survivor Dead At 107
AP: VIENNA (AP) — An Austrian organization that tracks the fate of Nazi concentration camp inmates says the oldest known survivor of such a camp has died aged 107. The Mauthausen Committee said Thursday that Leopold Engleitner died April 21. After refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness, he survived three concentration camps and forced labor between 1939 and 1945. He weighed just 28 kilograms — about … Read More
A Little Late, Sandy
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the conservative retired justice who provided the fifth vote to install George W. Bush as president, is now having second thoughts about that decision: Looking back, O’Connor said, she isn’t sure the high court should have taken [Bush v. Gore]. “It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” O’Connor … Read More
9/11 Landing Gear Found
Wow. More than eleven years after the fact, surveyors found part of the landing gear of the one of the planes which crashed into the World Trade Center. It was wedged between two buildings.
Listen To Alexander Graham Bell
Nobody today knows what Bell, the inventor of the telephone, sounded like — until recently. Alexander Graham Bell worked with sound, tinkering with gadgets to help his wife, who was deaf, communicate. He is known as the inventor of the telephone. He gave the Smithsonian more than 400 discs and cylinders of his audio experiments, but until recently there was … Read More
RIP Margaret Thatcher
Well, put me down as "not a fan", but you can't deny her impact. I lived in England for a year under her reign, and boy did that woman polarize her people. The mother of modern conservatism, she deregulated the hell out of the country and fostered in a decade of selfishness, which took root here in the United States … Read More
Relics From The Dawn Of The Space Age
Jeff Bezos and team have recovered from the Atlantic some of the Saturn V rocket engines that powered the Apollo missions back in the day. Take a look.
Ten Years Later And I Get To Say “I Told You So”
Ten years ago today, President Skippy McNumbskull announced that we were going to war with Iraq. They said Iraq had WMDs. I said the administration had no evidence of WMDs in Iraq. I said the UN inspectors who were, you know, there, hadn't found any evidence of WMDs, or even the precursors necessary to create WMDs. They said we would … Read More
I’m Back
Went to NYC with the girl, and saw some good shows, but missed several things. The Patriots losing for one, which I could have missed anywhere. And the inauguration. Inauguration speeches, particularly those for a second term, often become historical (or, at least, a line or two does). And Obama is a good orator, so I thought maybe there … Read More