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May, 2003 |
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May 30, 2003 - It is Bob Hope’s 100th Birthday and to celebrate George W. Bush is taking his show on the road. The President will visit with Jacques Chirac in Evian and visit Warsaw for a pep talk to Old and New Europe. From there it is off to Amman where he will give Sharon and Abbas a Trip-Tik to go with the roadmap he mailed to them earlier. One place that he won’t be visiting is anyplace near the 100,000 or so American Troops in harms way in Iraq and Afghanistan.....click here for entire article May 28, 2003 - On May 1, 2003 the President of the United States donned a flight suit, climbed into the cockpit of a Navy jet to commence the grueling 30 mile flight from a California airbase to the deck of an aircraft carrier idling offshore. Landing on the carrier in calm seas and a friendly wind he alit from the plane to shake the hands of the crew and captain. The purpose of his dangerous mission in a plane piloted by one of the nation’s most experienced naval aviators was to announce the end of combat operations in the Second Iraqi War. This delicate mission, recognizing the sacrifice of 139 British and American soldiers in the pursuit of a safer more congenial Iraqi regime, was emblematic of the bravery of a great leader. He spoke for the television lens with the vast deep ocean for a backdrop, all the time looking past the cameras to the California shoreline slipping slowly from right to left. The speech was as genuine as the peace that it ushered in....click here for entire article May 26, 2003 - On Sunday of the long Memorial Day weekend Team Penske won the Indianapolis 500. An American soldier died in what was called an accidental explosion at a storage site for captured Iraqi munitions located outside of Baghdad. On Monday, Memorial Day while President Bush was making the annual visit to the Unknowns at Arlington one American Soldier died in an ambush 100 miles north of the Iraqi capitol and another died when the Humvee in which he and his team mates were patrolling struck an homemade land mine on the Baghdad Airport road. With these three added to the official count published on Saturday the dead from the Second Iraqi War now number 199...click here for entire article May 26, 2003 - It is almost Memorial Day. For some of us old fogies that occasion doesn't come until May 30th. This Monday we celebrate one of the modern days off that substitute for what we used to celebrate on holidays that had been set aside for a purpose. Now we have three-day weekends sprinkled about the calendar to serve the need of the retail trade and travel industry to encourage unrestrained spending lest the balloon deflate. On May 29th in the evening we would get ready for Decoration Day, which was what we called it then. General John Logan, the first National Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, conceived of the idea of setting aside a spring day to decorate the graves of the men who had fallen in the War of the Rebellion. He promulgated General Order 11, calling on the GAR to bring flowers to the National Cemeteries on May 30th, 1868. By the turn of the century most of the Northern States had made Decoration Day an official holiday to be observed on May 30th...click here for entire article May 23, 2003 - It was thirty years ago this week that the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee set out on the journey that would transform Senator Sam Erwin from an erudite Harvard Law graduate into the epitome of a simple Country Lawyer albeit one who could draw an appropriate passage from Shakespeare to illustrate any point and whose knowledge of Constitutional Law was encyclopaedic. Along the way Senator Baker of Tennessee would pose the question to John Dean that would define the committee’s course, “What did the President Know and when did he know it?” It was a time when both sides of the Senate aisle were populated by Giants who put the nation before partisan advantage...click here for entire article May 20, 2003 - Well, we may know where the Bush Administration plans its next Splendid Little War. It seems it will be a “Back to the Future” excursion to the Southern Philippines. On May 19th President George W. Bush announced that we are ready to send troops to assist President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in her fight against Islamic insurgencies. We already have 300 troops there “advising” in the fight against the Abu Sayyaf guerrillas numbering about 250. In February the Pentagon announced that it would send 1700 Marines to help root out the terrorists. But then someone realized that the Philippine Constitution did not permit the deployment. Mrs. Arroyo’s government also faces the 12,000 strong Moro Islamic Liberation Front that is waging a guerilla war in Mindanao and the southern islands of the archipelago nation ..click here for entire article May 17, 2003 - In 1895 Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World had created a circulation boosting sensation with its publication of the first color comic strip, The Yellow Kid. William Randolph Hearst had come to town from California that year, bought the New York Journal, and immediately started a circulation war with Pulitzer. In January 1896 he induced Richard Felton Outcault, the artist who created the comic strip to leave Pulitzer and come to work for the Journal. Pulitzer hired George B. Luks to continue the strip and both papers were publishing their own version of The Yellow Kid. At the height of the circulation war between Hearst and Pulitzer the New York Press published an editorial deriding both of the contending papers as engaging in “Yellow Journalism”. The derisive term stuck and entered the language. One of the ironic aspects of the contest was that Hearst modeled his paper after the World’s style and was trying to go Pulitzer one better. Soon the competing papers were not just reporting news – they were creating in from a fabric woven of fact, fiction and plagiarism. At one point Hearst planted a story about the death of a fictional Spanish Colonel, Reflipe W. Thenuz. Pulitzer took the bait and The World published its own story, dressing it up with imagined detail and datelines. Hearst revealed that the name was a scrambled anagram of the phrase, “We pilfer the news” ..click here for entire article May 16, 2003 - “All politics is local”, Tip O’Neill used to remind neophyte politicians who had grabbed the Congressional Brass Ring. Never has that epigram been truer than in Illinois in the 2004 election. Republican Freshman Senator Peter Fitzgerald announced that he was retiring to his private life as a millionaire banker after completing just one term. His maverick conservatism was growing in popularity among the voters, both liberal and conservative. In the short time of his sojourn in Washington he had proved to be incorruptible, compassionate and if not a social liberal at least embodied the brand of conservatism to which the Republican establishment gives lip service..click here for entire article May 14, 2003 - There is an old fable that I
learned too long ago in elementary school: May 13, 2003 - Two more American soldiers were killed in an Iraqi ambush near Tallil Airfield in southern Iraq. With the five Americans who died last week, 3 in a Black Hawk crash and two shot in the Baghdad streets, it brings the Allied death toll to 182. Apparently not everyone heard the President’s Mayday speech from the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln. In Afghanistan the tempo of attacks on Americans is increasing. That is the forgotten war that Secretary Rumsfeld declared was over the day following the President’s Top Gun extravaganza...click here for entire article May 12, 2003 - Your balance sheet does not show it but you owe the government $22, 256.00 plus accumulating interest. So does your spouse. So does each one of your kids. That is the amount of each American man, woman and child’s share of the national debt. That is not an imaginary figure. It represents that amount of taxes that will have to be paid in the future to pay off the national debt as it exists today..click here for entire article May 09, 2003 - A draft resolution to be introduced by the United States, Britain and Spain on Friday morning lifting economic sanctions against Iraq calls for the Security Council to endorse American and British control of Iraq's political development and financial resources for at least 12 months. Under the resolution, new Iraqi oil revenues and at least $3 billion in the current United Nations-controlled escrow fund would be transferred to a new Iraqi Assistance Fund to be "disbursed at the direction of" the United States and Britain — referred to as the "provisional authority" — in consultation with the interim government to be formed in Iraq. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/09/international/worldspecial/09DIPL.html ..click here for entire article May 6, 2003 - Make no mistake about it, America is in the throes of class warfare and it is more far reaching than just the Bush Administration’s push to shift the primary burden of income taxation to the working class by cutting the highest marginal tax rate and making dividend income tax free. There is a Bill pushed by the House Republicans which will permit American corporations to cut their funding of employee’s pensions. The premise upon which the Bill rests is that Blue Collar workers die younger than do white collar workers. On the surface the logic behind the Bill seems sound..click here for entire article May 5, 2003 - That ultra-liberal anti-capitalist Warren Buffet, a man who knows more about investment income that any of the rest of us combined with the possible exception of Bill Gates, addressed what has come to be known as “The Woodstock of Capitalism” this weekend. Speaking to the 10,000 Berkshire-Hathaway shareholders assembled in Omaha he denounced the Bush Tax-cut plan as “unfair” and said that it would benefit only the very rich. He joins other ultra-liberal anti-capitalists, America’s central banker, Alan Greenspan, and Bill Gates father, in opposition to the plan. Meanwhile The President is continuing to push his plan to purchase the loyalty, support and contributions of his target audience, the Enron Class of Investors, stumping in the states with Senators who had supported the first installment of the re-election purchase plan but can’t seem to stomach the second payment...click here for entire article May 3, 2003 - My daughter got a letter today from the local school district. It directed her to select which of five racial classifications fit her children. The choices were White, Black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian. Until this year she had selected no racial classification on the schools registration forms or had marked “Other” and filled in the blank with “human”. You see my grandchildren’s ancestry on their mother’s side is primarily centered in Scotland with an admixture of English adventurers, French Huguenot refugees, Silesian Pietist exiles, and Dutch traders. Her ancestors helped establish the first permanent settlements in Virginia and New Netherlands. We have had less success tracing their father’s genetic heritage other than the obvious African origin together with his family tradition that claims the addition of Cherokee and Creek genetic contributions. My grandchildren are descended from both slaves and slave owners. Until this year my daughter had avoided the impossibility of pigeon holing her children into one of the several threads of their genetic fabric and her election not to do so was respected by the school...click here for entire article May 1, 2003 - The National Rifle Association is always quick to remind us that the right to keep and bear arms is essential to the maintenance of liberty. Gun control is always the first step to an oppressive dictatorship. Registration of guns and gun owners is just one step on the slippery slope to tyranny. Take away a man’s handgun or assault rifle and you take away his right to defend against an oppressive government usurping the legitimate power of Constitutional government. Take away our guns and you deprive us of our right to defend our homes and families. A disarmed populace is an oppressed people...click here for entire article |
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