Monday - September 22, 2008

Yankee Stadium hosts last baseball game.  (strictly speaking, this isn’t exactly the same house)

Okay guys.  Correct me here, and oh boy I’m sure someone will.

Back in the early 1970’s I attended (with our station’s sports guy) what was the last game played at Yankee Stadium before the renovation.
There were these posts, I guess that’s what they were, that dated from the original and if your seat was behind one, you were always on the mover left,right,left,right, trying to see around the thing.  (fortunately, we were in a media section) Anyway, in a strict sense this isn’t the same house Ruth built because that one was ripped apart to make possible the stadium they are now taking down.
Yeah .... pick,picky,picky.

I don’t generally post stuff from the USA because I always assume you ppl already know even before I do here.
But ... gee.  What the heck.  I haven’t followed baseball in so many years I can no longer count em.
I recall the days at KFI in LA, which was a Dodger station.  But I also remember the old Bums in Brooklyn and the move west. Now you wanna talk about sad.
Hey .. is anyone playing today that has the flash of Pete Rose of yor?  I really don’t know.

Something nasty happened to baseball over the years. Don’t mean to start any arguments among friends but ... both owners and players somehow lost somethin’ called loyalty.  I don’t know exactly how to put it. Maybe you do.  Hey, does anyone else remember The Boston Braves?  Don’t know what suddenly made me think of them.
Warren Spahn ......  He once showed a small group of us kids how to throw a baseball.

Ah, wait.  I think this was supposed to be about Yankee Stadium.  Did you know that the word ‘stadium’ originally was a unit of measure. Yeah, it was.
But I can’t remember if it was Roman or Greek. ??  No, I think it was a Roman measure of distance. 
Just an old goat’s musings ..... ignore me.

I think I was very lucky in the ppl I met, even if I only met em once in passing.
For example ... at that last Yankee game I told you about, after the game there was a small reception and I met and shook hands with this guy.

Phil Rizzuto.  He was already an older guy and retired from playing when I met him.  But I remembered his grip after we shook hands for a very long time.
Man was that guy strong.  A grip like steel. And a nice guy too I do remember. No airs and no ego role playing. Just a hell of a nice man. 

Yankee Stadium hosts last baseball game
The Yankee Stadium has hosted its last baseball game, closing an illustrious chapter in American sporting history with all the razmataz of a Broadway show.
By Tom Leonard in New York
Last Updated: 7:31AM BST 22 Sep 2008

America’s most famous sports venue, the so-called House That Ruth Built in the Bronx, New York, was graced on Sunday night with a pre-game parade of veteran players and actors in replica costumes portraying such famous Yankees as Joe DiMaggio and Lou Gehrig.

The 57,545-seat stadium has been the home to the New York Yankees since it opened in 1923, but it is to be demolished and replaced with a new $1.3 billion ballpark across the road.

“I’m sorry to see it over, I’ll tell you that,” the Yankee veteran Yogi Berra told the capacity crowd as the 83-year-old joined the celebrations wearing a vintage baseball outfit.

The venue has also hosted Masses celebrated by three Popes, various landmark boxing matches and a rally for Nelson Mandela after he was released from prison.

“This place has been part of our history. Not just baseball but our country,” said Joe Girardi, the Yankees manager.

Derek Jeter, the team’s captain, said playing at the stadium was “kind of like performing on Broadway — the lights are a little brighter.” The Yankees won their final match at the stadium 7-3 against the Baltimore Orioles but both teams are languishing in the league so it was really a night to celebrate past glories instead.

An extra 2,000 security staff were drafted in for the final game to prevent fans tearing up the stadium and make off with souvenirs such chairs and cupholders. Guards had to repeatedly warn fans not to rip up handfuls of grass.

Fans began pouring into the stadium seven hours before the game, some of them welcoming the move to a more comfortable ground but others bemoaning the new ballpark’s emphasis on luxury treatment for high paying ticketholders.

The stadium earned its nickname after Babe Ruth, the baseball superstar who inaugurated the stadium.

On Sunday, Julia Ruth Stevens, his 92-year-old daughter, threw out the ceremonial first pitch.

“I’m very, very sad to think that the Yankee Stadium is not going to be in existence any longer,” she said.

“I wish it could have remained as a New York landmark, but I guess like all things it has come to its final days as we all do.”

Her bittersweet emotions were shared by the players and fans. “I am going to miss Yankee Stadium. I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t,” said Derek Jeter, the team’s captain.

Lou Giordano, a fan from Brooklyn, said he had been going to watch games there since he was a child and recently took his grandfather, another Yankees fan, back there.

“It’s not distinctive in size or architecture and the amenities are terrible,” he said. “There’s nothing great about it other than the aura and history that surrounds it.”

“The Yankees have been an integral part of New York. Just as the city is larger than life, so are they in baseball.”

Jim Garthwaite, a 15-year-old Yankee fan, was one of the first people to get into the stadium on Sunday.

“I’m sure there will be tears for everybody,” he said. “But I’ve been to a lot of ballparks and I understand why they’re doing it. It’s motivated by money. It’s just a little sad to see it go.”

Next April, the Yankees will open the new stadium. Envisioned as a luxury hotel with a ball field in the middle, it will include luxury corporate boxes, a martini bar and art gallery.

The stadium was not only used for baseball — three Popes have appeared there, including Pope John Paul II in 1979 and, in April this year, Pope Benedict XVI.

Muhammad Ali famous beat Ken Norton at the stadium in 1976 over a 15 gruelling round boxing fight. In 1938, another black boxer, Joe Louis, famously defeated the German Max Schmeling in a fight that attracted the attentions of Hitler and was hailed as a blow against Nazism.

(uh huh but ... Max Schmeling won the first fight. This was the second fight.)

Nelson Mandela made his first international stop there for a celebration rally in 1990 after being released from prison.

(Yeah well I wouldn’t brag about that.  He belonged in prison. He was a freedom fighter like OBL is a peacenik)

In September 2001, thousands of New Yorkers gathered there for Prayer for America, a post 9/11 prayer service.

Ruth memorably returned to the stadium in 1947 to say farewell to fans.

Stricken with throat cancer, the Yankee player told sobbing fans: “The only real game, I think, in the world is baseball.” Just over a year later, he died and 100,000 fans paid their respects as his body was laid out at the stadium’s entrance.

http://tinyurl.com/3hndj6

   Wednesday - August 27, 2008

250-year-old journals reveal fears for C of E and ISLAM.

Charles Wesley’s 250-year-old journals reveal fears that Church of England could split.
The 300,000-word journals of Charles Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist movement, have finally been decoded after a nine-year project to unravel the hidden messages within his complex personal shorthand.

By John Bingham
Last Updated: 11:05PM BST 26 Aug 2008

Rev Prof Kenneth Newport, pro vice-chancellor of Liverpool Hope University, has deciphered more than 1,000 pages written 250 years ago between 1736 and 1756.

He has uncovered details of Wesley’s anxieties over the possibilities of a split from the Church of England, his younger brother’s plans to marry and even over the growing influence of Islam.

He used a handwritten transcription of the four gospels made by Wesley as a guide to deciphering the journals themselves.

Wesley’s concerns over the prospect of the newly founded Methodist Societies splitting from the Church of England echo the Anglican Church’s current debate over the consecration of gay clergy and the threat of schism.

According to his journals, the hymn writer - who is best known for “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” - was vehemently opposed to any move toward a formal break.

“He was very much opposed to separation, he saw the Methodist Societies as within the established church and anything that smacked of separation was something he took a very strong view of,” Rev Prof Newport said.

“At one point in the journal he is talking to the society at Grimsby and goes into block capitals and says ‘I told them I would remain with them as long as they remained with the Church of England but should they ever turn their back on the Church they turn their back on me’.”

Wesley’s opposition to the split is disclosed despite his older brother John, with whom he co-founded the Methodist Church, being widely credited with setting the process in motion.

It was John Wesley who ordained clergy to lead the movement in America and who set up the structures which would ultimately replace those of the established church.

The whole debate echoes that within the Anglican Church of today, which is threatening to forge another lasting split. The Evangelical wing of the Anglican Communion boycotted the recent Lambeth Conference and set up the rival Global Anglican Futures Conference (Gafcon) group in protest over the ordination of the gay Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson.

Charles Wesley’s volumes also detail his fears over the possible “encroachment” of Islam into western society and contain passages outlining his opposition to his brother’s plans to marry Grace Murray, because she had once been engaged to another man.

“He (John) is insensible of both his own folly and danger, and of the divine goodness in so miraculously saving him,” Wesley wrote.

Rev Prof Newport studied the journals from copies of the originals held at Manchester’s John Rylands Library.

Much of the writing is in an idiosyncratic personal shorthand which has never been decoded before.
Rev Prof Newport’s used a handwritten transcription of the four gospels made by Wesley as a guide to deciphering the journals themselves.

http://tinyurl.com/6atgpo

   Friday - July 04, 2008

Happy 4th of July !!

Get out there and party today people, but don’t forget what it’s all about. If I had kids, or was at a BBQ with loads of them, I’d drag out the old Declaration and have them read it aloud. There would be questions later too. After the sack races, hotdog snarfing contests, and backyard baseball game, but before slathering on the mosquito repellent and heading off to see the fireworks.

We’re off to see the relations, and it just might rain. So we’ll make the best of it. If your crowd gets stuck in the house today, or if you can’t locate your copy of the document, try this link that Rancino provided ... go over here and your kids can “sign” the Declaration of Independence themselves. Then visit the home page, where you can download copies of the Declaration and the Constitution, or print them out. Plus there are lots of bits of history and the understanding thereof that you can pull up. It’s a nicely done site.

For the rest of us lucky enough for good weather - and not devastated by flooding - here’s some fun. This is what happens when talent meets too much barbeque sauce. (Like there’s such a thing as too much barbeque sauce. That’s like saying there’s too much lobster. Or the beer’s too cold. That just don’t happen!)

Party on people. Be careful with the blackpowder entertainments. See y’all tomorrow.

   Wednesday - July 02, 2008

Battle of Trafalgar log offers insight into Nelson’s victory

Wish I could own that log.  Hate to see the price as low as it is.  I guess maybe this bit of history means more to me.  I hope a foreigner doesn’t buy it.  It should stay in England.

Can you imagine that generation playing the silly ass games they do today.  I mean for example, apologizing for everything any Brit ever did and making nice to ppl who are sworn to kill em.  Man, that was an England to be proud of warts and all.

Battle of Trafalgar log offers insight into Nelson’s victory
by Nick Britten
Last Updated: 3:26PM BST 02/07/2008

Describing the scene in the hours ahead of the battle, Hargood noted the fight would take place in “light airs and hazy weather, with heavy swell”.

He later wrote: “At daylight we saw the enemy’s fleet bearing east nine miles, consisting of 33 sail of the line, five frigates and two sloops.

“5.40: Answered the general signal to form the order of sailing. 6.00: Answered the general signal to bear up and sail large and prepare for battle.

“Made all sail, bearing down on the enemy. Answered the general telegraph signal from Lord Nelson that England expected every man to do his duty.”

Of the actual battle, he kept his entries brief and clinical.

He wrote: “12.08: commenced fire on the enemy. 12.10: Cut the stern of a Spanish 80-gun ship.

“1.30: Heavy fire on both sides. Our ship became totally unmanageable. Most of the sails and rigging being cut away.

“3.15: One of our ships passed our bow and took the fire of an enemy’s ship. 3.25: The Swiftsure passed our stern and cheered us.” Describing the end of battle, which claimed 449 British fatalities, including Nelson, he wrote: “The action ceased. People were employed securing the guns, cleaning and pumping ship. Strong gales and squally at the end.”

The Belleisle was second into battle, closely following the flagship HMS Royal Sovereign into enemy lines, and in the very thick of the action, at one time firing at the Fougueux and the Santa Ana simultaneously.

Despite capturing the Argonauta, the Belleisle was eventually dismasted with 33 dead and 93 wounded, but kept flying her flag for 45 minutes until other vessels came to her rescue.

Hargood, the son of a humble purser, survived the battle and was later made an admiral to cap a distinguished naval career.

The log, dated October 21 1805 and verified by the National Manuscripts department at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, will be auctioned later this month and is expected to fetch £800.

http://tinyurl.com/45l3t4

   Monday - June 23, 2008

History will say that we underestimated George W Bush

I haven’t a clue if that’s correct and won’t be around to find out. But this fellow believes it to be so.
He’s a noted historian and writer, so maybe he has something valid here.  I hope so.  Some do argue with him however, as you may note from the comments that follow his remarks in the link below.

By Andrew Roberts
Last Updated: 11:01pm BST 21/06/2008

Read comments: link below

As he leaves the White House at the end of his second term, the President has a poll rating of only 23 per cent, and is widely disliked and even despised. His foreign policy has been judged a failure, especially in view of the long, painful, costly war that he declared, which is still not over.

History may place President Bush in a far better
light than he currently enjoys

He doesn’t get on with his own party’s presidential candidate, who is clearly distancing himself, and had lost many of his closest friends and staff to scandals and forced resignations. The New Republic, a hugely influential political magazine, writes that his historical reputation will be as bad as that of President Harding, the disastrous president of the Great Depression.

I am writing, of course, about Harry S Truman, generally regarded today as one of the greatest of all the 43 presidents, and the man who set the United States on the course that ended decades later in the defeat of Communism.

If the West wins the modern counterpart of that struggle, the War Against Terror, historians will look back in amazement at the present unpopularity of George W Bush, and marvel at it quite as much as we now marvel at the 67 per cent disapproval rates for Truman throughout 1952.

Presidents are seldom remembered for more than one or two things; the rest slip away into a haze of historical amnesia. With Kennedy it was the Bay of Pigs and his own assassination, with Johnson the Great Society and Vietnam, with Nixon it was opening up China and the Watergate scandal, and so on.

advertisementGeorge W Bush will be remembered for his responses to 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq, but since neither of those conflicts has yet ended in victory or defeat, it is far too early categorically to assume - as left-wingers, anti-war campaigners and almost all media commentators already do - that his historical reputation will be permanently down in the doldrums next to poor old Warren Harding’s.

I suspect that historians of the future will instead see Bush’s decision to insist upon a “surge” of reinforcements being sent into Iraq, combined with a complete change of anti-insurgency tactics as configured by General Petraeus, as the moment when the conflict was turned around there, in the West’s favour.

No one - least of all Bush himself - denies that mistakes were made in the early days after the (unexpectedly early) fall of Baghdad, and historians will quite rightly examine them. But once the decades have put the stirring events of those years into their proper historical context, four great facts will emerge that will place Bush in a far better light than he currently enjoys.

The overthrow and execution of a foul tyrant, Saddam Hussein; the liberation of the Afghan people from the Taliban; the smashing of the terrorist networks of al-Qa’eda in that country and elsewhere and, finally, the protection of the American people from any further atrocities on US soil since 9/11, is a legacy of which to be proud.

While of course every individual death is a tragedy to the bereaved families, these great achievements have been won at a cost in human life a fraction the size of any past world-historical struggle of this magnitude.

The number of American troops killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is equivalent to the losses they endured - for a nation only a little over half the size in the mid-Forties - capturing a single island from the Japanese in the Pacific War.

British losses of 103 killed over seven years in Afghanistan bears comparison to a quiet weekend on the Western Front in the Great War, or the numbers the Army loses in traffic accidents in peacetime. History can lend a wider overall perspective to what are nonetheless, of course, immeasurably sad events.

History will also shine an unforgiving light on those ludicrous conspiracy theories that claim that the Iraq War was fought for any other reason than to implement the 14 UN resolutions that Saddam that had been flouting for 13 years.

The CIA and MI6 believed, like almost every other intelligence agency in the world, that Saddam had WMD, and the “Harmony” documents seized and translated since the fall of his regime make it abundantly clear that he was also supporting almost every anti-Western terrorist organisation imaginable.

Historians will appreciate how any War Against Terror that allowed Saddam to remain in place would have been an absurd travesty.

When the rise of al-Qa’eda is considered by historians like Philip Bobbitt and William Shawcross, it will be President Clinton’s repeated refusal to act effectively in the 1990s, rather than President Bush’s tough response after 9/11, that will be held up as culpable.

Judging by the rise in the value of the Iraqi dinar, the huge drop in the number of Iraqi deaths in the insurgency, the number of provinces now cleansed of al-Qa’eda, and the level of arms confiscations by the Iraqi Army in Sadr City, the new American “clear and hold” tactics have succeeded far better than the cynics ever thought possible even 12 months ago.

Give Iraq five, ten or twenty years, and Bush’s decision to undertake the surge - courageously taken in the face of all bien pensant and “expert” opinion on both sides of the Atlantic - will rank alongside some of Harry Truman’s great decisions of 1945-53.

If that happens, the time will come when George W Bush will be able to say what Lord Salisbury called the four cruellest yet sweetest words in the English language: “I told you so.”

http://tinyurl.com/3rjps6

   Friday - June 20, 2008

Looking Back: Interesting things that happened on this day, from various sources

Notable events that happened on this day

• West Virgina admitted as the 35th State.

  On June 20, 1863, West Virginia became the thirty-fifth state in the Union. The land that formed the new state formerly constituted part of Virginia. The two areas had diverged culturally from their first years of European settlement, as small farmers generally settled the western portion of the state, including the counties that later formed West Virginia, while the eastern portion was dominated by a powerful minority class of wealthy slaveholders. There were proposals for the trans-Allegheny west to separate from Virginia as early as 1769. When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, the residents of a number of contiguous western counties, where there were few slaves, decided to remain in the Union. Congress accepted these counties as the state of West Virginia on condition that its slaves be freed. “Montani semper liberi,” “mountaineers always freemen,” became the new state’s motto.

  This snippet courtesy of the Library of Congress, keepers of public knowledge for the free use of the public.


• President Andrew Johnson announces purchase of Alaska. June 20, 1867, Known at the time as Seward’s Folly, the US purchased Alaska from the Russian Tsar Alexander II for about 1.9¢ per acre. Thirty years later, during the Klondike Gold Rush just over the border in Canada, gold discovered in the beaches around Nome Alaska yielded nearly a third of that amount in one summer alone.


• For our British friends, today marks the day that Queen Victoria ascended the British throne after the death of her uncle King William IV. She ruled for 63 years, reigning over one of the greatest periods in the British Empire.


• June 20, 1840: Samuel Morse patents the telegraph, taking the very first step of the modern Information Age. Later called “the Victorian Internet” the telegraph changed the world.


• It could be said that the Civil Rights Movement in America started today. On this day in 1942 the Congress of Racial Equality was formed in Chicago. Deeply influenced by Ghandi’s non-violent forms of protest, CORE began by using sit-ins to protest segregated schools.
  
• Today also marks the 65th anniversary of the Great Detroit Race Riot. 35 died. Overcrowding, inequitable rents, segregation, police indifference were all causes. It took the Army to stop the mobs.


• The movie Jaws hit theaters on this day, way back in 1975. It was the breakthrough blockbuster for boyish director Steven Spielburg. Starring Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and a rubber shark named Bruce, the film scared the piss out of us, and did it without any CGI at all. Don’t go in the water!!


• 451 AD - Battle of Catalarinische Fields in eastern France. Roman and Germanic Visigoth armies combine to defeat Attila The Hun, saving Europe and Christianity. Thanks guys!

There are thousands of Daily History web sites out there, all perfectly happy to add their bits of data to the free source of worldwide knowledge that is the internet. And that’s the way it should be.

   Thursday - June 19, 2008

Happy Juneteenth!

UPDATE: The vast majority of this post has been REDACTED. What I posted was, I thought, an email sent to me. Apparently the author, MICHAEL ZAK is most adamant about not having more than a single sentence of his work pasted up anywhere else. His blog recieves perhaps 100 hits a day, and I have now been told in no uncertain terms TWICE not to use more than a single sentence of his stuff. This time I was instructed to make these corrections WITHIN THE HOUR. Plus instructions to permalink to his website, instructions to link to Amazon for his book, instructions to display a picture of his book, etc. Becuase he gets 100 hits a day thank you, and people pay him money to come and talk about the history of the Republican Party. Really. Who? And why?

I don’t think there will be any more History of the GOP posts. And I think that’s all I’ll say for now. And no, I won’t be bothering to do a review on his book. It’s nearly a decade out of date anyway.

   Sunday - June 15, 2008

Today in GOP History

Absolutely Nothing Happened



Sorry. We can’t have teh big excitement every day ya know. Ok, it’s actually Trinidad Romero’s birthday, but I’ve never heard of him. Maybe he was the very first Republican from New Mexico or something.



However, I did get Zak’s book, Back To Basics For The Republican Party, and it’s quite a read. It’s history, and lots of it. It’s like being back in 10th grade Social Studies, only this time without the sugar coating. He’s got about 800 references in the bibliography, so it’s pretty obvious he can back up whatever he says. And it’s quite interesting. I’m only 80 pages into it at this point, but so far the concept is that the slavery question was a huge thorn in America’s side since the very beginning. It didn’t just pop up one day and there was civil war over it the next. But the people who were against it, even during the Revolution, were the people would form a political outlook that would eventually become the Republican Party. And the people that were for it were the Democrats. Always. Always.

Some interesting things in there too, as little factoids.

Do you know who hillbillies really are? I didn’t. Everybody knows that during the Civil War the southern soldier was ubiquitously called “Johnny Reb”, the same way a British soldier was Tommy Atkins during WWI. But less widely known is that “Johnny Reb” was fighting “Billy Yank”. And that the “northern” and “southern” attitudes were not universal; New York City was strongly “reb”, and parts of the south - many parts of the south - were pro-Union. As an aside, this often got people killed; 44 folks in Texas were hung from the same tree at one time for their loyalty to the union. Texas Governor Sam Houston was kicked out of office for opposiing secession. There were Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi regiments in the Union Army during the war. So things weren’t exactly homogenous. And one place they weren’t was up in the mountains of Appalachia, in the border states. So the Billy Yanks who lived up in the hills ... were hillbillies. I did not know that. Course, that was long before NASCAR.

Let me get another few days of reading done on this one, and I’ll put up a review. No question that this is a history book, but it is a good bit more interesting than what we got in school.

   Friday - June 13, 2008

Today in GOP History

What, the Democrats have a guy running for President, and he’s half black? Shucks, that ain’t nothing.
The Republicans had that one beat ... 80 years ago!

Senator Charles Curtis (R-KS), Vice President under Herbert Hoover, was 3/4 Native Amercian, and grew up on a reservation. Read a little bit more about it. Curtis was the first, and so far the only “non-european” to get elected to one of the Top Two positions in DC. Go here, and read a lot more about him.

When Curtis was a Senator, he and fellow Kansas Congressman, Republican Daniel Anthony, Jr, introduced the first attempt at an Equal Rights Ammendment. In 1923.

Curtis is also the guy who invented the five day work week, as a way to reduce unemployment at the beginning of the Great Depression.

Wake up Republicans. This is our history. This is who we are.
There is NOTHING good that the Democrats can try and claim credit for that the GOP didn’t do first. Integration? Equal Rights? Desegregation? Minorities in high office? Worker safety? Human rights? Phooey. We’ve got them beat by a landslide on each and every issue. All we have to do is remember our history and fight their lies.

   Thursday - June 12, 2008

A watershed day in GOP history

Today in GOP History: June 12, 1987 - Ronald Reagan (pbuh) speaks at the Brandenburg Gate in West Germany. At that point the United States was well on it’s way to finally winning the Cold War, after decades of useless detente, appeasement, and pretending to “hold firm”. President Reagan went against all “common wisdom” and decided to win the “war” once and for all. And he did. Recall though, that the MSM and the Democrats considered him to be nearly insane, and we were all going to die in our beds from a nuclear attack from the Soviets. At the time, Democrats and their media allies ridiculed “Ronaldus Magnus” for suggesting that communist domination of the area would not be eternal. Democrats, Always with the cranial-anal condition. Always.

Ronald Reagan: actual leadership.

A little reminder about who we are and who we were, so that with hope we can be that way again, courtesy of Grand Old Partisan.

   Monday - June 09, 2008

Today In GOP History

On this day in 1964, Everett Dirksen (R-IL), the Republican Leader in the U.S. Senate, condemned the
Democrats’ 57-day filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Leading the Democrats in their opposition to civil rights for African-Americans was Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). Byrd, who got into politics as a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, spoke against the bill for fourteen straight hours. Democrats still call Robert Byrd “the conscience of the Senate.”

In his speech, Senator Dirksen called on the Democrats to end their filibuster and accept racial equality.

   Sunday - June 08, 2008

Today in GOP History

On this day in 1866, the U.S. Senate passed the 14th Amendment,
guaranteeing due process and equal protection of the laws to all citizens. 
All Democrat Senators voted against it.
Nearly all Republican voted in favor, while the few who abstained did so because they believed the amendment did not go far enough. 
The principal author of the 14th Amendment was Rep. John Bingham (R-OH).

Remember that one. When given a chance to stand up for equal rights under the law, not a single Democrat voted in favor. Not. One.

brought to you via Grand Old Partisan.

   Friday - June 06, 2008

Today in GOP History

On this day in 1956, judge Frank Johnson, along with another judge, ruled in favor of Rosa Parks and struck down the Democrats’ “blacks in the back of the bus” law in Montgomery, Alabama.

Judge Johnson decided in this case, Browder v Gale, that the shortcomings of Separate But Equal found in Brown v Topeka Board of Education to apply to schools, also applied to public transportation.

Johnson had been Eisenhower’s campaign manager in 1952. At some point after the election Eisenhower appointed him to the federal bench.

Frank Johnson “the judge who shaped Civil Rights”

At the height of the civil rights struggle, there was one place in the Deep South where African Americans fighting the region’s oppressive system of racial segregation could count on sure, impartial justice: Frank M. Johnson’s courtroom. With unblinking moral courage, Judge Frank M. Johnson upheld the Constitution and the law, insisting that all Americans be treated equally, regardless of color.

Judge Johnson’s fidelity to the Constitution did not endear him to his neighbors. The judge was denounced and threatened. His neighbors burned a cross on his lawn, his wife and children were ostracized and harassed, but Frank Johnson would not back down, even after the Ku Klux Klan bombed his mother’s house.

A native Alabaman, Frank M. Johnson served as a federal judge for 44 years and lived to see centuries of oppressive customs overturned, and the state and the region he loved transformed. Segregation is now an almost unbelievable chapter of America’s past, thanks to the efforts of thousands of brave men and women who fought for civil rights, and a handful of courageous public servants like Frank M. Johnson. At the height of the civil rights struggle, there was one place in the Deep South where African Americans fighting the region’s oppressive system of racial segregation could count on sure, impartial justice: Frank M. Johnson’s courtroom. With unblinking moral courage, Judge Frank M. Johnson upheld the Constitution and the law, insisting that all Americans be treated equally, regardless of color.

Judge Johnson later fought the KKK in court, and ordered the first desegregation of bus depots, and later schools.

Rosa Parks and Judge Johnson

So we have another landmark case that added momentum to the whole Civil Rights movement decided by a Republican. How is it again the the Democrats have a lock on the Black Vote? 

HABSBURG EMPIRE, LAST ARMY VETERAN …..  A REBUTTAL

Although this was posted under comments a day or so ago, I thought there were some points raised, many I was unaware of, and points I hope I have answered in the Summary.

I have no intention of re-fighting WW1 or even getting into the politics of the era.  But the person writing this apparently knows something about the history of the period, and I thought it should be posted here in this format.

OK, Pieper, I hate to say this to you, but just because someone opposes the EU does NOT mean they are on our side. For the love of God, please know who the person is BEFORE you link about them, because you will get taken in otherwise.

This article is something that smells of Hapsburg Royalist bias to me. The article conveniently “forgets” several facts. For one, the reason the US (and indeed, the rest of the old WWI Western Allies) “shamefully” opposed Karl I’s attempt to take the Hungarian Throne in favor of Horthy (who, admittedly was little but a scumbag dictator)in 1921 was not because the mean Allies decided to pick on pwoor wittle Kawl because of what his father (the infamous Franz Joseph) did.

It was because Karl I came to Hungary in 1921 with the STATED INTENT of recreating some vestige of A Habsburg Empire , and the fact remains that he was more than willing to do so. And with the Hungarian military (which lagged behind the Western Allies during the interbullum, but was perhaps the best regional military during the 20’s, and was a foe that could not be ignored) , rallied to his banner, he was capable of doing so as well.

His mere act of ascending the throne was likely to spark a war with the “Little Entente” of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, who were fearful of the territorial claims Karl had on them, and how eager he was to seize them, if necessary by force of arms. In addition, just across the border from Hungary was Austria, the ancestral home of the Habsburgs. A dynastic revival in Hungary would likely have emboldened the none-too-weak Royalist part of the Austrian populace, and it is VERY likely that Karl would have eventually turned his Habsburg Hungarian military on Austria to try to reunify the heartland of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. And it was NOT on in the interests of the Allies to have a w war going on that was started by someone who was your sworn enemy only three years ago who was trying to resurrect an empire that Hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks, British, French, and Serbs (to say nothing about the pre-Revolution Russian losses, which were, if anything, higher) gave their lives to dismantle.

Say what you will about Horthy, but he at least did not start his saber rattling until sixteen years later, after he made an alliance with Hitler. And there was no way the Allies of 1921 could have known that.

As it was, Horthy was able to disperse Karl’s supporters with relatively little blood after a mobilization by the “Little Entente”, thus avoiding the likelihood of a regional war igniting. I am no Wilson apologist for his muddeling of Versailles, but even I have to admit that he made more than a few correct calls on the situation.

Also, contrary to Europe’s grandest days being under the “Glittering monarchies of the Bourbons and Habsburgs”, Europe was largely under the heel of backwards royal despotism during that period, where the state and the crown are quite literally God on Earth, and woe be to anyone who disagrees. Remember, you cannot see the glitter if you are but a lowly pleb, and that would be 98+% of of us.

In fact, if anything, Europe’s zenith was in the 1920’s,where (in spite of underlying issues), Imperial imperfect Democracies such as Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, and Holland had colonial empires that spanned the world.

Other than that, I must say that, even if he was on the side of the Hapsburg Monarchy and its tyrannical German Cousin, it it is sad to see him go. We are almost at the centennial mark of WWI, and the final veterans are not even in the ground while our dear “Friends” in the Left are spinning an alternate history regarding WWI, with “Gems” like Oh What a Lovely piece of Grandstanding C*** by Littlewood, which conveniently ignores the fact that the Kaiserreich was not and had never been a beacon of Enlightenment.

Why? Because WWI was a true quagmire (especially on the Western Front) where millions perished, and it serves the idea of these more rabid Leftists who try to give the idea that no war is a good war, while conveniently ignoring the military breakthroughs that allowed the Western Allies to total the Central Powers in 1918, and that the victory was over a group of militaristic and authoritarian nations that had never shied away from heinous crimes. If they can turn WWI into a “meaningless, fruitless war”, than they can start to turn others on their head to suit their agenda by using it as a precedent.

Ultimately, I would have to say I am writing this long rant is this: I get what you are doiy: honoring the passing of the last of a country’s generation, who served with honor in a nightmarish conflict, even if it was at the behest of a truly unsavory regime. However, I can practically imagine some scumbag at DKos or HuffPo taking this out of context to say that the Neocons endorse the absolutist regime of the Habsburgs. So please, I beg of you to issue a statement repudiating the Pro-Habsburg sentiment in this article, while still respecting the “Emperor’s Last Soldier.”

PS: Sorry for the Rant
Posted by Turtler United States 06/06/2008 at 01:26 AM

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