2008 was a tough year for America’s Governor, Illinois superstar Rod Blagojevich. After being arrested for trying to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat on December 10th and putting on a series of intricate press conference shows where he recited poetry and put black people on wheelchairs in public display (“Is that an impeachable offense?”), we really expected to watch the off-beat politico lose heart and fade away. He did anything but.

For having the most impressive head of hair in politics, giving us the best Senator in history, and outdoing New Jersey in its outrageous corruption to the point that our state felt compelled to breed both a disgusting Rabbi-black-market-kidney-Peter-Cammarano scandal AND an MTV reality tv show, we commend 2009 Winner Rod Blagojevich! He may have been through some murky waters in 2008, but he had nothing but sunshine hanging over him this year!

Maafa21 : New film exposes Eugenics and Black Genocide from Abortion

Some claim that the abortion issue is about choice, privacy, women’s rights, or reproductive freedom.

But that’s just marketing hype.

In reality, the legalization of abortion was about EUGENICS.

And now, a stunning new movie lays it all out with incredible documentation.

The film is called Maafa 21 and it exposes a plan to create “racial purity” that began 150 years ago and is still being carried out right now.

It’s about the ties between the Nazis, the American eugenics movement and today’s “family planning” cartel.

It’s about elitism, secret agendas, treachery and corruption at the highest levels of political and corporate America.

Maafa 21 will show you things the media has been hiding and politicians don’t want you to know.

So if you’re ready to see the real agenda behind “choice,” fasten your seatbelts …

IT’S SHOCK AND AWE TIME!

Maafa21 www.maafa21.com

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After three years of research, Life Dynamics, located in Denton, Tx, has produced a documentary which exposes the racist roots of abortion called: Maafa21.

Maafa21 meticulously chronicles the links from slavery to colonization to Darwin to Eugenics to sterilization to birth control and finally to abortion. Maafa 21 shows, without exception, how African-Americans are the targets of the social elite. You’ll learn that civil rights leaders in the 1960’s gave a clear warning that abortion and population control was a tool of Black Genocide. You will see the links between racism, eugenics, and Planned Parenthood’s effort to market abortion to the African American Community. Maafa 21 emotionally chronicles the story of an African American woman who was eugenically sterilized at the age of 14, a riveting testimony guaranteed to render the audience speechless. Photos, newspaper clippings, documentation, and direct quotes make Maafa 21 highly credible.

In the few months since Maafa21 has been released, there have already been two showings of Maafa21 to Congress. Even some members of the Black Caucus have viewed this documentary.

Shocking fact:

In a recent New York Times interview , Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Emily Bazelon that, “…I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

The “Populations” Ginsburg referred to in that interview is clearly defined in, Maafa21.

Please watch the trailer for Maafa21 here:

http://www.maafa21.com/

I’m willing to bet that President Obama’s Christmas address this week will shine with religious significance about as bright as his unusually short Thanksgiving Proclamation, which gave a token reference to God via a quote from George Washington.

Even in Obama’s superstar Christmas interviews with Oprah and Gloria Estefan, there were discussions about Santa, Christmas trees, ornaments, gingerbread houses and even their dog’s Christmas stocking. Obama even gave a Christmas shout-out to all Hispanics. But there was not one discussion of religion or a hint of the real reason for the season.

Gone are the days when presidents and most politicians publicly rejoice in the birth of Christ.

But things were not always this way. As with many of you, I still remember a day even in Washington when Christ was central to Christmas. It was an America that was far less politically correct – an America that wasn’t afraid to stand up for its belief in the babe who was born in Bethlehem.

Here’s a small sample of that America represented in personal and public presidential Christmas proclamations and events, as documented in presidential library archives, at WhiteHouseChristmasCards.com and by historian David Barton in his treatise “Christmas with the presidents.”

On Christmas Day, 1795, President George Washington celebrated Christmas with members of Congress at his Mount Vernon estate, complete with a fox hunt, feast including “Christmas pie,” music, dancing and visiting that at times continued for a solid week.

America’s second president, John Adams, was the first to hold a White House Christmas party.

Thomas Jefferson loved celebrating Christmas, from his youth considering the day as a time of “merriment” and “The day of greatest mirth and jollity.” He threw elaborate parties at the White House and his Monticello estate for family and friends, played his violin, sang his favorite Christmas song, “Adeste Fideles” (“Oh Come All Ye Faithful”), and even gave his slaves a few days off each year to enjoy the holiday due to his abolitionist leanings.

(And let’s not forget, when at the White House during the eight years of his presidency, Jefferson attended church where he did each week in the Capitol building – something that continued through the Civil War – in 1867 it was the largest church in Washington with 2,000 people attending weekly.)

During the 1835 Christmas season, President Andrew Jackson sent out invitations and cards (of sorts) to local children inviting them to an event in the East Room on Christmas Day, in memory of a boy who had never heard of Christmas, never knew his father and whose mother died at a young age. That boy was Jackson himself.

President John Tyler also enjoyed hosting Christmas parties for children.

After a chaotic political season in December 1848, in which intense debate ensued over issues relating to slavery and expanding U.S. territory, President James K. Polk described Christmas Day as “perhaps the most quiet day of my presidential term,” despite apparently not accompanying Mrs. Polk and the children to church on that particular day.

President James Buchanan, a devout Presbyterian, would have his southern Pennsylvania estate extravagantly decorated at Christmas for the community to enjoy (a tradition that is still done to this day).

President Abraham Lincoln read the Bible throughout his life and attended services at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church on a regular basis, including at Christmas time. During the Civil War, he and his wife would visit hospitals on Christmas to help care for the wounded. During one political campaign, he declared “I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general. … I do not think I could myself be brought to support a man for office whom I knew to be an open enemy of … religion.”

In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law the bill that made Christmas Day a national holiday.

Being credited with establishing the tradition of posting a Christmas tree in the White House (the first occurrence being with President Franklin Pierce), President Benjamin Harrison was also a deeply devout Christian, who wrote to his son Russell in 1887, “I hope you will renew your Christian faith and duties. It is a great comfort to trust God – even if His providence is [at times] unfavorable. Prayer steadies one when he is walking in slippery places – even if things asked for are not given.”

In 1898, two years before his assassination, the New York Times wrote of the encouragement that President William McKinley and his ailing wife received from these words in their pastor’s Christmas Day sermon: “God’s Christmas gift of freedom has come to the suffering and wronged through the agency of a nation that was obedient to His call, and helpfulness sent forth form angelic lips – ‘Goodwill toward men.’”

Each year on Christmas Eves, President Theodore (“Teddy”) Roosevelt traveled to Christ Church in Oyster Bay, N.Y., and, following the pastor’s sermon, gave one of his famous “sermonettes” on the meaning of Christmas. The service would end with his favorite hymn, “Christmas by the Sea.”

In 1927, in every major newspaper across the land, a Christmas admonishment from President Calvin Coolidge was published in his own hand about “the real spirit of Christmas – if we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us all will shine a star-sending its gleam of hope to the world.”

President Herbert Hoover wrote to the Nation’s Christmas Trees Association on Dec. 25, 1931: “Your annual Christmas service … is a dramatic and inspiring event of national interest. It symbolizes and vivifies our greatest Christian festival with its eternal message of unselfishness, joy, and peace.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared in his Christmas address to the nation on Dec. 24, 1944 (the first Christmas after D-Day), “Here, at home, we will celebrate this Christmas Day in our traditional American way – because of its deep spiritual meaning to us; because the teachings of Christ are fundamental in our lives; and because we want our youngest generation to grow up knowing the significance of this tradition and the story of the coming of the immortal Prince of Peace and Good Will. [FDR then prayed for the troops.] We pray that with victory will come a new day of peace on earth in which all the Nations of the earth will join together for all time. That is the spirit of Christmas, the holy day. May that spirit live and grow throughout the world in all the years to come.”

President Harry Truman gave these words during his Christmas Eve national broadcast on Dec. 24, 1949, “Since returning home, I have been reading again in our family Bible some of the passages which foretold this night. … We miss the spirit of Christmas if we consider the Incarnation as an indistinct and doubtful, far-off event unrelated to our present problems. We miss the purport of Christ’s birth if we do not accept it as a living link which joins us together in spirit as children of the ever-living and true God. In love alone – the love of God and the love of man – will be found the solution of all the ills which afflict the world today.”

President Dwight Eisenhower publicly proclaimed on Dec. 23, 1960, “Through the ages men have felt the uplift of the spirit of Christmas. We commemorate the birth of the Christ Child by the giving of gifts, by joining in carols of celebration, by giving expression to our gratitude for the great things that His coming has brought about in the world.”

It’s well known that President John Kennedy was a Catholic. What’s not so well known is that, in 1957, then Sen. Kennedy disclosed at the National Conference of Christians and Jews Dinner what he believed would remedy the ills in society: “Upon what can we rely? Where can we compete? In what can we find hope for the future? The answer, I believe, lies ultimately in the very principles which we honor tonight – the principles of our Judaic-Christian heritage.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson publicly declared on Dec. 22, 1963, “We were taught by Him whose birth we commemorate that after death there is life. … In these last 200 years we have guided the building of our Nation and our society by those principles and precepts brought to earth nearly 2,000 years ago on that first Christmas.”

President Richard Nixon was a Quaker and hosted church services in the East Room of White House while he was president, initiated on his first Sunday in office by none other than Rev. Billy Graham.

President Gerald Ford publicly declared on Dec. 18, 1975, “In our 200 years, we Americans have always honored the spiritual testament of 2,000 years ago. We embrace the spirit of the Prince of Peace so that we might find peace in our own hearts and in our own land, and hopefully in the world as well.”

President Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation on Dec. 15, 1977, “Christmas has a special meaning for those of us who are Christians, those of us who believe in Christ, those of us who know that almost 2,000 years ago, the Son of Peace was born to give us a vision of perfection, a vision of humility, a vision of unselfishness, a vision of compassion, a vision of love.”

President Ronald Reagan repeatedly affirmed his and the nations’ Christian faith at Christmas time, like these words on Dec. 16, 1982, “In this holiday season, we celebrate the birthday of One who, for almost 2,000 years, has been a greater influence on humankind than all the rulers, all the scholars, all the armies and all the navies that ever marched or sailed, all put together. … [I]t’s also a holy day, the birthday of the Prince of Peace, a day when ‘God so loved the world’ that He sent us His only begotten Son to assure forgiveness of our sins.”

President George H. W. Bush stated to the nation on Dec. 18, 1989, “At Christmas, we, too, rejoice in the mystery of God’s love for us – love revealed through the gift of Christ’s birth. Born into a family of a young carpenter and his wife, in a stable shared by beasts of the field, our Savior came to live among ordinary men. Yet, in time, the miraculous nature of this simple event became clear. Christ’s birth changed the course of history, bringing the light of hope to a world dwelling in the darkness of sin and death. Today, nearly 2,000 years later, the shining promise of that first Christmas continues to give our lives a sense of peace and purpose. Our words and deeds, when guided by the example of Christ’s life, can help others share in the joy of man’s Redemption.”

President Bill Clinton addressed the nation on Dec. 21, 1999, with these words, “Saint Matthew’s Gospel tells us that on the first Christmas 2,000 years ago, a bright star shone vividly in the eastern sky, heralding the birth of Jesus and the beginning of His hallowed mission as teacher, healer, servant, and savior.”

And President George W. Bush spoke in his Christmas message on Dec. 21, 2007, “During the Christmas season, our thoughts turn to the source of joy and hope born in a humble manger on a holy night more than 2,000 years ago. Each year, Christians everywhere celebrate this single life that changed the world and continues to change hearts today. … Christmas is a time to rejoice and remember the birth of Jesus Christ.”

Will President Obama’s Christmas address rival those Christian confessions of past presidents? Or will his yuletide cheer be another politically correct concoction that has already adorned the first year of his presidency?

Based upon President Obama’s first year’s utter disregard for America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and promotion of a secular-progressive agenda and pro-Islamic platforms, the only white Christmas I would count on at the White House is a continued whitewashing of religious tradition in Washington. But does America really need another version of “Away with the Manger”?

First, even during his campaign for the presidency, Obama sarcastically belittled America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and degraded its adherents with trite remarks typical of any atheistic antagonist: “Whatever we were, we are no longer a Christian nation”; “The dangers of sectarianism are greater than ever”; “Religion doesn’t allow for compromise”: “The Sermon on the Mount [is] a passage that is so radical that our own defense department wouldn’t survive its application”; and “To base our policy making upon such commitments [as moral absolutes] would be a dangerous thing.” (See the YouTube video: “Barack Obama on the importance of a secular government.”)

Second, President Obama has already denied America’s rich Judeo-Christian heritage before the eyes and ears of other countries, as he publicly declared in Turkey on April 6, 2009, for the whole world to hear: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” (Who are the “we” to whom he refers? Would our former presidents agree with his “we”?)

Third, quite contrary to Obama’s negative tone and sentiments about Judeo-Christian belief, in countless speeches over the past year he has sympathized and supported pro-Islamic theology and practice. Just recently, he encouraged Americans “not to jump to conclusions” about the Fort Hood shooter being a Muslim extremist. And he refused to say anything when the Muslim extremist and president of Iran publicly accused the U.S. of actively planning and plotting to stop mankind’s real savior: i.e. Mahdi, the imam that Muslims believe will be the ultimate savior of mankind.

Fourth, President Obama has enabled an anti-Christian agenda unlike any former president by revising America’s religious history, minimizing the role of religion today, passing secular-progressive legislation and turning a blind eye to issues like atheists’ lawsuit to remove the national motto (“In God We Trust”) off of the walls of the new Capitol Visitors Center in Washington, D.C., or the ACLU’s disposal of Veteran memorial crosses in the Mojave Desert and at Mount Soledad. Every time President Obama has had an opportunity to stand for Christianity in any way, he has not only denied it but disdained it.

A grave manifestation is Obamacare’s incorporation to use federal funds to pay for abortion and thereby force people of conscience who are pro-life to pay for the terminations of life in the womb across the country. (What a tragic piece of legislation to pass in the shadow of the day when we celebrate the birth of the world’s savior, Jesus Christ.)

What President Obama, like many other liberal politicians, needs is a paradigm shift – a new way of seeing America, which is really an old way. It’s the way our founders viewed America, and it incorporates a good ol’ fashioned Christmas proclamation of Christ’s birth. That America is the one I outline in my new (January 2010) paperback expansion of my New York Times best-seller, “Black Belt Patriotism,” which is ironically the same Christmas gift I’m sending to the president!

And there is one gift that I propose the president give this nation. Since Obama prides himself on being the technological president, in lieu of his Christmas proclamation this year, I suggest that he just send out across the nation the online link to a YouTube video that I had posted under the title, “Ronald Reagan Christmas Address (12/23/81).”

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=119611

http://josephsreviews.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/that-was-the-year-that-was/

A review of 1960 – LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidents by David Pietrusza.

Are you old enough to remember the 1970s? I have to admit that I remember the ‘70s quite well, though I’m not sure I took as much interest in world affairs as I do now. Perhaps that’s just as well, as I might have been rather worried by what was happening in various parts of the world. In his book Strange Days Indeed [Fourth Estate, £18.99 9780007244270], journalist Francis Wheen takes a look back at all the shenanigans of that decade. Over in the States, Trickie Dicky was caught out by the Watergate scandal, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. He thought everyone was out to get him so he, along with Henry Kissinger and cronies, was out to get them first. Over here Harold Wilson thought that “they” were out to get him, but it was never clear who “they” were, although in a strange way, he was right. Then there were the various guerrilla groups causing mayhem around the world – the Tupamaros in South America and the Baader-Meinhof gang for example – who seemed to want revolution for revolution’s sake. It was also the decade of the three day week and when Uri Geller started bending cutlery and meeting extra-terrestrials  and the most populous country in the world was governed by “a pair of raging hypochondriacs”. For more revelations to whet your appetite, have a look at the three short videos of Francis Wheen on the Amazon website, or read the review in the Guardian.

On reading this book, you are inclined to think “thank goodness things have changed”, but has this decade, which is about to end, been any better? Find out for yourself by reading this captivating and occasionally funny book (yes, we can laugh about it now). I didn’t manage to read it all as it was needed back at the library for another request. I’ll have to request it again or buy it. Or, should I wait for the paperback due in April 2010?

Now to a very different book. If anyone can be described as a “national treasure”, then in my humble opinion, it is Sir David Attenborough. I have watched just about every wildlife series on TV which he has made and I’ve bought several of the books. In fact the book I have my eye on at the moment is Life by Martha Holmes and Michael Gunton, the book of the series which is narrated by Sir David. Life Stories by Sir David Attenborough [Collins £20, 978-0007338832] is rather different. In 2009 Sir David was asked by BBC Radio 4 to write and read a series of short  (10 minute) pieces about any subject he cared to mention. If you were able to catch these talks, you will know how beautifully crafted they were. It isn’t easy to write pieces to fit into a fixed time span, especially if the time allowed is only ten minutes. Sir David seems to manage this task with ease and the stories reproduced in the book are delightful to read. At the end of each story there are photographs specially chosen by him to accompany the talk.

Those of you who like good value for your money may be a little disappointed at the amount of white space in this book as well as the larger than normal type face for each of the stories. The illustrations are not printed on glossy paper, which detracts from their appeal. Having said all that, the book in every other respect is superb, providing as it does numerous snapshots of Sir David’s life filming the natural world.

Finally I’ll mention two books in passing; in Betjeman’s England [John Murray £18.99 9781848540910] edited by Stephen Games, we have the scripts of over sixty television films produced by John Betjeman about the ever changing English countryside. The films were shown about fifty years ago, so the book provides a snapshot as seen by Betjeman of countryside and buildings which might have now have vanished or changed completely. Stephen Games has edited several other collections of Betjeman’s writings.

A spot of trivia to end with; some of the minutiae of world history can be quite amusing if you know where to find it. Now Ian Crofton has collected it for us by compiling History without the Boring Bits [Quercus £7.99 978184243744]. In its edifying pages we can discover that the poet William Wordsworth had the job of Distributor of Stamps for the County of Westmorland, why custard powder was invented and why a dead pope was dug up and put on trial in AD 897. Lots of useless facts to impress your friends at parties?

There’ll be one more posting before the end of the month, so in the meantime, very best wishes to everyone for the festive season.

Chapter Two

GLENDIVE

The owner of the smallest TV station in America sent me a gift.  It was a money clip made from a 1921 silver dollar.

It arrived in the early fall of 1988, a few weeks after I paid a visit to the station in Glendive, Mont., in the far eastern part of the state about 30 miles west of North Dakota.  The station, KXGN-TV, was considered the nation’s smallest TV station because it served the least-populated television market in the entire country – an area measuring some 18,000 square miles and containing just 30,300 TV households.  KXGN’s service area was ranked dead last – 212^th – in the list of U.S. TV markets identified by A.C. Nielsen Co.

In the summer of 1988, an editor of mine thought it would be clever to send a reporter up there to gather material for a feature story on how the only TV station in the nation’s 212^th-ranked market conducted its business.  I quickly volunteered, seizing possession of an assignment I felt was rightfully mine anyway.  In those days, local broadcasting – both TV and radio – was as close to a regular “beat” as I could claim to have had at this particular publication.

It was one of about a dozen such trade publications – magazines, newspapers and newsletters – that served the broadcasting industry in an era long before the immediacy of the Internet rendered such print pubs – weeklies, biweeklies and even monthlies – obsolete.  This one was a weekly called Electronic Media, a title chosen by its creators at Crain Communications Inc. (the Chicago-based, family-owned publisher of Advertising Age and other publications) for its elasticity.  Though the mag was launched primarily to cover the TV business, its title did not contain the words “TV” or “broadcasting” in the manner of some of its older competitors – titles such as Broadcasting and TV/Radio Age.

Electronic Media was so named in order to appear more modern and inclusive than its competition.  The title was devised to signal that the businesses covered by Electronic Media were not limited to traditional, over-the-air broadcasting, that EM (as it came to be nicknamed) would accommodate developments in any new “electronic” media that came along.  Of course, in those days, the only other “electronic” medium anybody in the TV business knew or cared about was cable TV, a business that was growing but had not yet made significant inroads in drawing audiences away from traditional TV stations and the Big Three networks – ABC, CBS and NBC.

Moreover, cable TV was not considered “broadcasting.”  For one thing, cable’s reach in those days was hardly “broad” enough to be on par with the old broadcast networks, which still accounted for three-quarters of all TV viewing in the United States and were available to anyone in possession of a TV set anywhere in the U.S.  For another, cable TV didn’t reach its audiences with the traditional over-the-air signals that had defined “broadcasting” since the first commercial radio stations and networks emerged in the 1920s.  Cable TV was connected to subscribers’ homes via dedicated wires – like telephones.  To get cable TV, you had to pay for it, something millions of Americans were still unwilling to do in 1988 just to watch television.

For most of the 1980s, few of those who owned and operated TV stations, or ran the New York- and L.A.-based networks, were terribly concerned about cable TV.  In those days, as in decades past, the possession of a TV- or radio-station license was like successfully laying claim to a gold mine, “a license to print money” is how more than one broadcasting exec described it to me back then.

Even Lewis Moore, the man from tiny Glendive who owned the only TV station in the nation’s smallest TV service area and who gave away silver-dollar money clips, was wealthy enough to look forward to a style of retirement at age 68 that was common among TV executives then – a life of leisure in a warm climate, in his case a house beside a golf course in Palm Desert, Calif.

His station was so small that its news department consisted of one guy, a 23-year-old who served as reporter, anchor and camera-operator.  In 1988, KXGN was primarily a CBS affiliate, but as the only station in the entire area, it carried a handful of NBC shows too.  Back then, to help get its far-flung viewers through the isolation of winter, the station aired afternoon bingo games five days a week.

A year after my story ran on the front cover of Electronic Media in August 1988, Lewis Moore sold the station for a million dollars – which wasn’t bad for a TV station whose top price for commercial time was $130 a minute and whose viewership at any given moment amounted to a couple of thousand people.

In those years long before the Internet, no other media – not cable TV, not home video, not videogames – had grown big enough to challenge over-the-air TV and radio for people’s time and attention.  All of that would soon change, but for the time being, the value of broadcast properties had nowhere to go but up.

Radio and TV stations which had been held for decades by the same owners began to change hands at a furious pace.  Each week brought news of fresh deals for individual stations and groups of stations, usually at record prices.  The frenzy fueled the rise of a new class of broadcast industry players – free-wheeling station brokers who brought potential sellers together with prospective buyers and then took percentage commissions in the millions of dollars from every deal.  In those days, station brokering was such a competitive business that one swashbuckling radio broker offered to reward me with a Rolls Royce if I ever passed him information, no matter how trivial, leading to the sale of a radio station.  I knew this guy well enough to know he wasn’t kidding.  I said no on ethical grounds, but also because, really, where was I going to park a Rolls Royce in New York City?

Everyone I met was rich.  And some of them didn’t mind at all letting you know it.  One radio station owner, Nelson Lavergne, proprietor of a Spanish-language AM station in New York, WADO, had his chauffeur drive us to lunch one day in 1986 in the station owner’s personal stretch limousine.  The distance from the radio station to our destination, the Marco Polo Club at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, was about three blocks if you walked, about seven blocks if you drove (due to the one-way directions of the nearby streets).  When the car drove up to pick us up, I noticed something unusual about it: It was probably the first stretch limo I had ever seen whose windows were not tinted for privacy.  I asked the station owner why that was.  He said, “If the windows are tinted, how is anybody going to be able to see you inside?  I want people to see me.”

One producer of TV shows had the biggest desk I have ever seen.  The desktop seemed to have been hewn from a single, immense piece of wood.  It belonged to Al Masini, the creator of “Entertainment Tonight,” whose name can still be seen in the end-credits of “ET.”  I was visiting his office on Third Avenue some time in 1990 to learn about his newest creation, a syndicated series called “Preview: The Best of the New.”   The show, hosted by Robin Leach, was styled as some sort of nightly showcase of the world’s most expensive luxury items and destinations.  It was short-lived.

I remember almost nothing about the show or that visit to Masini’s office, even though I’m sure he tried his damnedest to get me to believe that “Preview” was the greatest new TV show that had ever been produced.  I only remember that desk.  It was so expansive, perhaps five or six feet wide and something like 20 feet long, that it had to have been fashioned from a giant redwood or some fat 200 year-old oak tree.  If memory serves, Masini told me the desk, or at least the top of it, was too big to be brought up in the office building’s freight elevator, and had to be lifted and placed in his office from outside, with a crane.  Viewed from above, the desktop was shaped vaguely like a boomerang or a crescent moon.  In his spacious office, Masini had the desk positioned opposite a long wall made up entirely of mirrored, bi-fold closet doors.  The mirrored wall was long enough to capture the reflection of the entire desk and the man seated behind it – which seemed to be the purpose of this arrangement.

I was an observant young reporter back then – observant enough to recognize Mark Goodson, the game-show king, when I found myself standing beside him, completely by happenstance, on a Fifth Avenue street corner one afternoon.  I was waiting for the light to change.  He was waiting for something else.  I saw him nod his head almost imperceptibly and suddenly, a limousine shot out from a side street across Fifth Avenue, turned and rolled to a stop right in front of us.  It was a navy-blue stretch Bentley, the only one I had ever seen and possibly the grandest automobile I had ever laid eyes on.  Goodson got in it and the car drove off.  And I noticed something else about this car: Its windows were not tinted.

The captains of the broadcasting business wanted to see themselves and their companies portrayed glowingly in the trade press.  So I was constantly being invited to lunch at expensive midtown restaurants, steakhouses mostly – Smith & Wollensky, 21, Christ Cella, The Palm and Sparks, the restaurant on East 45^th Street made famous in December 1985 by the assassination of a Mafia chieftain, Paul Castellano, on the sidewalk outside by members of John Gotti’s gang.

Sometimes, they would take you to these private dining clubs hidden away on the upper floors of office buildings or secreted inside luxury hotels down corridors far away from the crowds of tourists milling about in the lobbies.  Here, the waiters and maitre d’s greeted them by name and ushered us to their regular tables.

Still other execs had private dining rooms of their own, adjacent to their offices, where waiters in white jackets trod softly on wall-to-wall carpet, entering quietly to take your order and then returning a short time later with your lunch arranged elegantly on a white China dinner plate and covered with a silver dome.  I remember one such lunch at CBS headquarters with the president of the CBS Radio Division, who schooled me in the ways of radio air personalities.  I asked him what he thought of Howard Stern, who was then in the first years of his growing notoriety as the nation’s foremost practitioner of what would soon be labeled “shock radio.”

“Children,” this executive said dismissively, frowning between bites of his lunch.  “Air talent – they’re all children.  And that’s how you have to treat them.  Like children.”

There was plenty of time for leisurely lunches in those days.  There was no Internet, which meant there were no demands for the kind of daily, minute-by-minute filing of stories that takes place today.  Electronic Media was a weekly that landed on the desks of TV executives every Monday morning, which meant you worked hardest on Thursdays and Fridays, when deadlines loomed.  The rest of the week was spent, at least in part, conducting “research,” which sometimes involved grand 2½- or three-hour lunches, frequently a gigantic steak, preceded by a martini, or maybe two, and accompanied by beer or wine.  These meals could be so gluttonous that I would return to the office on East 42^nd Street around 2:30 or 3 o’clock wanting nothing more than to stretch out somewhere and sleep.

It was the 1980s, and midtown Manhattan was filled with men (it was almost always men) in the advertising and media businesses who had been taking clients, colleagues and journalists to steak-and-martini lunches at least since the 1960s.  I was an impressionable 26 years old when I started work at Electronic Media in 1986, and I was stunned at the hold that lunch had on these people.

The midday meal had attained mythic importance for the movers and shakers of the broadcasting business.  When they weren’t going out to lunch at restaurants, they were throwing banquets for each other.  I was always attending banquets in hotel ballrooms – luncheons at the Waldorf, the Roosevelt or Marriott Marquis.  I would cover the after-lunch speeches by industry leaders or take in the entertainment.   One time it was Patti LaBelle at the Waldorf.  Another time, I was surprised to learn that Bo Diddley would perform after a radio-industry luncheon at the Marriott.  While the luncheon-goers in their suits and ties enjoyed coffee and dessert, I stood there, not 10 feet away from Diddley as he played his famous “cigar-box” guitar accompanied by a band that rocked so loudly that the ballroom’s floor and walls vibrated.

I learned early on that, as a profession, you couldn’t beat journalism for opening doors and throwing you into unexpected situations where you would find yourself in close proximity with the rich and famous, even though you, the lowly journalist, was neither.  I would have these experiences that, to me, were otherworldly.

To this day, I can still feel the dry roughness of Don King’s hand.  It was gigantic, like a bear’s paw, and I shook it at a small event I attended at an east side bar, Runyon’s, in February 1987 that was held to promote a new syndicated TV talk show about sports called “Sports Pros and Cons.”  I engaged in a brief conversation with King, who seemed to tower over me with his famous Buckwheat-inspired hairdo.  Today, I have no idea what I might have discussed with Don King, but I do know it was one of those times when I would have these almost out-of-body experiences, like I was standing off to the side watching myself, wondering how this young reporter came to this point in his life, where he walks into a bar and finds himself in conversation with one of the world’s most controversial figures – a man considered by many to be a notorious scoundrel, and to many others an inspiring, American success story.  And here he was, talking to me for some lost reason.

Another time, CBS convened a press event at the Friars Club on East 55^th Street in 1988 to promote an upcoming made-for-TV movie and I found myself in an oak-paneled reception area on the second floor, the Joe E. Lewis Room, with about two dozen reporters, a smattering of CBS executives and publicists, and the movie’s three co-stars – Milton Berle, Sid Caesar and Danny Thomas.  The movie was called “Side by Side” and these three legends of television had been persuaded to play three retirees who go into business together manufacturing a line of designer clothing for senior citizens.

Berle, then 79, was the most outgoing of the three.  He stood up in front of the group of reporters, who were seated on folding chairs, reached into an inside pocket of his jacket, and withdrew the biggest cigar I have ever seen.  He lit it theatrically and then cheerfully answered a handful of questions.  Afterward, he mingled with the reporters, entertaining small groups of them with chit-chat, throwaway lines and stories about show business.

Thomas, 74, and Caesar, 65, were less loquacious.  After the brief news conference, Thomas took a seat at a small corner table, where he sat imperiously frowning for the remainder of the event, perhaps waiting for reporters to come to him.  Few did.

Caesar, notoriously shy, positioned himself along a wall near the entrance to the room.  He was so unassuming that I forgot he was there.  At one point, while I was engaged in a conversation with a reporter friend of mine, we suddenly realized that Sid Caesar, this legend of TV’s first decade and one of the biggest stars in the entire history of television, was standing quietly right behind us.

I had first been exposed to Caesar in 1973, the year 10 sketches from his old TV show of the 1950s, “Your Show of Shows,” were packaged into a movie called “10 from Your Show of Shows” and released in theaters.  At age 13, I came away from the experience of seeing this movie mesmerized by Caesar and the all-out recklessness of his physical comedy, particularly in the sketch that spoofed another old TV show, “This is Your Life.”   Caesar played a man sitting innocently in the studio audience whose name is suddenly called (by co-star Carl Reiner in the role of the show’s host) to participate in the show and then tries desperately to escape, throwing his overcoat at Reiner and then  assaulting everyone who blocks his path.

In 1988, standing in the Friars Club chatting amiably with Sid Caesar, I was again struck by the same questions that often occurred to me in such situations: How is this possible? I would ask myself.  How am I standing here in 1988 talking with Sid Caesar, the imposing giant from that manic black-and-white TV show, “Your Show of Shows,” the guy from the 1950s who tore recklessly through a TV studio in a “This is Your Life” sketch and who drove me to convulsions with his talent for nonsensically mimicking foreign languages?

I had the same reaction another time, when I actually witnessed Caesar do his dialect routine, with Imogene Coca standing alongside him, at yet another TV industry banquet, this one a fund-raising dinner at the Pierre Hotel thrown by the Museum of Broadcasting.

It was another one of those experiences where I found myself rubbing elbows with the high and mighty of the broadcasting business, though I had nothing whatsoever in common with them.  They were there because their companies were supporters of the museum.  Their banquet tables cost their companies thousands of dollars, while my seat at this sumptuous event cost me absolutely nothing.  In a very general sense, that’s what journalism is, especially “beat” journalism in which you dedicate your efforts to covering a single subject or industry, in my case the television business.  I was invited, of course, because my hosts expected repayment in some sort of publicity – for themselves, their new shows, their museum.  But I rarely paid off.  Steak lunches, elaborate banquets, conversations with Milton Berle and Sid Caesar – these strange and serendipitous experiences never cost me a dime – either in real money or publicity.  And I never stopped being invited, which was a good thing too because I was having a good time, while learning the TV business from the inside out.

It was the 1980s and the old guys were still around.  One of them, Walter Cronkite, had relinquished his CBS anchor chair to Dan Rather in 1981, but I got an opportunity to watch Cronkite work one day a couple of years later, in a small studio at New York’s public TV station, WNET, where Cronkite was videotaping some intros and other material called “wraparounds” for a PBS documentary.  I had been invited up to the station to see him and, standing a few feet away from him while he worked, I learned about the art and effort of broadcasting.

Cronkite, then in his 70s, sat in a chair a few feet away from a large television camera, and recited some copy.  I don’t recall if he read from a TelePrompTer (a device usually positioned just under the lens of a TV camera), but if he did, it didn’t seem to draw his eyes away and distract him from his keen concentration on that camera lens.  He leaned forward in his chair and peered so intently into that lens that he literally seemed to strain physically to do it.  It was as if he wanted to dive into it bodily.  I realized that this was the method Cronkite must have adopted as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”   He must have believed that if he could focus his unwavering gaze directly through a point at the very center of the camera lens, then viewers at home could literally make eye contact with him.  The method evidently worked since it made him the most trusted man in America in his heyday as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”  I learned that day that broadcasting – real broadcasting – takes effort and study and work.  And I never forgot it.

The big broadcasting companies still had people on their payrolls in the 1980s who had been there since the dawn of television.  I’d meet people like Bob Wogan, who worked in affiliate relations for NBC Radio when I met him in 1986, but had worked at NBC since starting as a page in 1943.  Among his responsibilities in his long career: Babysitting J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee who became a star of NBC’s “Today” show in the 1950s.  Bob told me the chimp virtually lived for a time in his office and particularly enjoyed playing and napping in Bob’s wastebasket.

The TV business in those days was still traditional enough that those who had worked in it in decades past would likely still have recognized it.  CBS stationery was still printed according to a template established by Frank Stanton, formerly the long-time president and then vice chairman (under William Paley), who had last held that position in 1973.  And yet, a tiny, nearly invisible dot, decreed by Stanton and printed on the same spot on every piece of CBS letterhead, still showed typists where the salutation on every letter was to begin.

The TV networks seemed to relish their traditions, or at least they pretended to.  Such was the case in May 1987, when top executives at CBS wheeled one of the company’s most enduring symbols into a news conference.  It was Paley himself.

Accompanied by CEO Laurence Tisch and Broadcast Group President Gene Jankowski, the wheelchair-bound, 85 year-old chairman and founder of CBS was there to “help” announce the network’s new shows for the coming fall (the network’s new shows included “Wiseguy,” “Jake and the Fatman” and a new drama about the Vietnam War, “Tour of Duty”).

Paley’s presence was likely meant to show the press that CBS was united under Paley and Tisch, who had bought his way into the company and was dismantling it by selling the record and publishing divisions, among other assets.  The two apparently clashed behind the scenes, but at this news conference in a small meeting room at CBS headquarters on Sixth Avenue, the two more or less relaxed in each other’s presence for the sake of the dozen or so reporters assembled there.

Well, maybe “relaxed” isn’t the best word for it.  Basically, Paley slumped in his wheelchair while Tisch, then a vigorous 64 years old, stood nearby grinning, and occasionally addressed Paley in the patronizing way many people address an infirm, diminished grandparent.

Though Paley exercised little power at CBS by the time he died in October 1990, CBS nonetheless saluted him with a one-hour documentary of his life and times that aired in prime time with no commercials.  A few weeks after his death, I covered a memorial service for Paley at a New York City synagogue, Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue.  From my seat in a pew somewhere in the middle of this spacious sanctuary, I could see the many luminaries who had gathered there.  I was interested to see Richard Nixon seated just across the middle aisle and a few feet away from Carl Bernstein, the journalist who, along with Bob Woodward, helped bring down Nixon’s presidency.  Henry Kissinger and Walter Cronkite delivered eulogies to a packed house of TV stars, broadcasting executives, socialites and Rockefellers.

And once again, I was left to wonder: What on earth am I doing here?

I was learning about the broadcasting business, and how so much of it was just smoke and mirrors.  I was shocked to be informed one day that one of the best-known slogans in the history of radio – the one for the all-news radio station in New York, 1010 WINS-AM – was essentially meaningless.  It’s the one that goes: “Give us 22 minutes and we’ll give you the world,” which was meant to promote the station’s non-stop approach to news – a “news wheel” divided every hour into thirds.

Well, guess what’s wrong with this picture.  For this slogan to make sense, 1010 WINS would have to give you 20 minutes – not 22.  For the “22 minutes” claim to be true, a standard hour would have to be a preposterous 66 minutes, though few, if any, of the millions who have heard this slogan over the years seem to have detected anything wrong with it.  I still remember the head of Westinghouse’s radio division, owner of WINS at the time, chortling when he told me the story of how someone came up with the slogan years ago, and it was decided that “22” basically sounded better than “20,” so “22” was chosen despite the fact that it was nonsense.

The accumulation of such tales would help me develop a trait that would prove indispensible in the years to come – skepticism.  Eventually, I grew to question almost everything anyone in the TV or radio business told me, although it took me a while to get to that point.  I clearly was not there yet when I flew to Chicago in September 1988 to spend the better part of a day with Paul Harvey, then 70 years old and the highest-paid radio personality of his era, whose daily five-minute programs on the ABC Radio Network had an audience of more than 20 million listeners per week.  Harvey had a craggy face and a head of reddish-orange hair combed straight back that looked like they belonged on Mount Rushmore.  But the great head of hair wasn’t his, as I learned while eating lunch with him, along with his wife Lynne (who he called “Angel” and who managed his career), at a private dining club in an office building high above Michigan Avenue.

I was sitting close enough to Harvey to observe how his toupee was lined with a kind of netting that had been plastered to his head.  By lunch time, it was becoming detached around the edge of his forehead that was closest to me.  I tried not to let this discovery distract me as Harvey waxed on and on about the greatness of America, where a ragged little boy from Tulsa – him – could grow up to become rich and famous, marry the girl of his dreams and live in harmony across the street from his son and daughter-in-law, whose household was also the picture of domestic perfection.

He told me the story of how dejected he felt as a poor boy.  “When I saw the liveried chauffeurs of the oil-rich Tulsans passing by, for the first time I felt sorry for myself, resentful of those who had so much more,” he said, his eyes half-closed as he reminisced.

But a schoolteacher named Miss Harp set him straight.  “ ‘Paul,’ she said, ‘don’t ever resent those who have more than you.  Just do all you can to preserve this wonderful land in which everybody who is willing to stay on his toes can reach for the stars.’ . . .  Miss Harp, bless her heart, had much to do with shaping my philosophy at a formative time in my life,” Harvey said.

This story might well have been true, but a more mature journalist might have at least felt a little bit doubtful about a story in which a schoolteacher’s life lesson imparted to a boy of 11 or 12 is quoted directly nearly 60 years after it happened.  When I pondered it years later, I realized the philosophy this Miss Harp supposedly articulated to the young Paul Harvey sometime in the 1920s was eerily similar to a quotation made famous by the only other radio personality then working in the 1980s who enjoyed an audience and salary on par with Harvey’s – Casey Kasem, who ended every broadcast of his “American Top 40” radio program, also heard for years on ABC Radio (up until 1988), with this admonishment to his listeners, “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars,” a quotation that would have made Miss Harp proud.

A few weeks after my feature story on the life of Paul Harvey ran on the cover of Electronic Media, I ran into a man who knew him well, the former president of the ABC Radio Network, Ed McLaughlin, at a radio industry convention held later that same month in Washington.  In my story, I had even quoted Ed, who gave me some harmless statement about Harvey’s talent as a writer of his own material.

“Did you see my story about Paul?” I asked McLaughlin when I encountered him in the convention’s exhibit area.

“Yep, sure did – he sure pulled one over on you,” McLaughlin said.

Crestfallen, I asked him how, and McLaughlin told me that at least part of what I had been told by Paul Harvey, who happened to be one of the most trusted men in America, was bunk.  McLaughlin listed a couple of examples, but the one that stands out in my memory was Harvey’s claim of harmonious coexistence within his family.  According to McLaughlin, the domestic life of Harvey’s son, Paul Jr., was hardly harmonious at the time, and Paul Sr. knew it.

Paul Harvey might have sugar-coated his life story, but his devotion to broadcasting tradition – in which the cleanest possible copy was read on the air in the clearest possible baritone – was absolute.  I got to watch him work too.  He was so fastidious that he wore a jacket similar to a physician’s lab coat while working in his studio, which had been specially built for him by ABC in an office building on Chicago’s Wacker Drive.  And he maintained his traditional way of delivering his self-styled newscasts until his final years (he died in February 2009 at age 90).  He was the last of his kind, but the traditions he upheld had begun to erode long before he uttered his last “Good . . . day!”

In the 1980s, broadcasting traditions – which had their roots in standards and practices in place for decades – were giving way to a much more permissible atmosphere.  The change began initially on radio with a new generation of air personalities intent on shattering taboos and bursting through the industry’s self-imposed boundaries of free expression.   Howard Stern is probably the best-known of these “pioneers” and he was clearly one of the first and also one of the most extreme.  But in the 1980s, his style of anything-goes radio, whether introduced by him or not, was widespread.

Stern had been fired by WNBC-AM in September 1985 for an accumulation of offenses, including one recurring segment called “Bestiality Dial-a-Date.”  But that same year, a morning radio team in Indianapolis came under fire from local watchdogs when it was learned that “The Bob and Tom Show,” hosted by Bob Kevoian and Tom Griswold on WFBQ-FM – a program not unlike Stern’s – was being played aloud on local school buses.

That same year, the Florida chapter of the NAACP complained about a morning show on WRBQ-FM in Tampa whose hosts Cleveland Wheeler and Terrence McKeever produced two recurring comedy bits called “Tales of Tanequah” and “Johnson the Maintenance Engineer,” whose title characters spoke in exaggerated African-American dialect.

A feature story I wrote in September 1986, with the headline “Blue radio is red hot,” included these examples of controversy on the radio, along with about a half-dozen other comedy bits and segments from around the country that had been characterized by their detractors as offensive.  The following year, the FCC announced a crackdown on so-called “shock radio.”  At a news conference in Washington, the official who made the announcement – James McKinney, chief of the FCC’s Mass Media Bureau, the unit that was supposed to oversee all of U.S. broadcasting – was asked why the commission had decided then to turn its attention to the antics of FM morning shows.  McKinney told reporters he acted after being made aware of these shocking developments in an article he read in Electronic Media.  When I learned this, from an account of the news conference in the Washington Post, I remember wondering, Why on earth is this guy learning all this from a story I wrote in a lowly trade publication?  Isn’t he already supposed to know what’s going on in the business he’s supposed to be regulating?  Apparently, he wasn’t.

Another FCC official gave me one of the most priceless quotes I ever had the opportunity to use.  He was a government attorney and I interviewed him on the phone in October 1986 about a meeting he had held recently with other FCC officials and their counterparts in the Justice Department.  They were discussing an action then being taken by the commission against a small, listener-supported radio station in Los Angeles – KPFK-FM – for airing excerpts of a sexually explicit, two character play called “Jerker,” about homosexuals who masturbated on the telephone together.

So what was the purpose of your meeting with the Justice Department? I asked this official who was then embroiled in a controversy involving a play about masturbation.

His solid-gold answer: “I wanted to make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.”

Government intervention or not, the cat was out of the bag.  In the late 1980s, broadcasting came to seem like a free-for-all.  Radio personalities were putting their feet in their mouths all over the place.  Some would get fired, such as Steve White, a talk show host on WKRI-AM in Providence, R.I., who referred on the air to drug dealers in South Providence as “niggers” and “spics.”  In an unrepentant interview after his firing in December 1987, he told me the words “niggers” and “spics” were taken out of context.  He then vowed to pursue a career in politics.

Earlier that year, in September, another AM radio talk show host, Ed Tyll of WGST-AM in Atlanta, averted dismissal after he referred to a black congressman as “Buckwheat.”  But by December, Tyll was fired for “repeated violations,” according to the station’s general manager.

Tyll conceded in an interview that his material was probably too controversial for WGST, though he didn’t sound as if he had any plans to censor himself should he ever get hired elsewhere.  He felt that one of the last straws for station management was a three-hour discussion he had led recently on his show about the legal ramifications of a murder trial in Huntsville, Ala., in which a man had been charged with murder for choking a woman to death during oral sex.  “The phones rang for three days after that one,” Tyll told me.

In perhaps the most infamous racially charged radio incident of the era, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht of WWDC-FM in predominantly black Washington, D.C., kept his job even after driving away the station’s advertisers when he suggested on the air one day in March 1986 that if a one-day holiday could result from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., then killing four more black people would create four more holidays.  Within a few weeks, the sponsors had returned.  Why?  Because The Greaseman’s ratings had increased in the wake of the controversy.  “All the self-promotion in the world couldn’t have generated this much publicity,” one sponsor told me.

Television also seemed newly chaotic and increasingly unrestrained.  Suddenly, brawls were breaking out on Geraldo Rivera’s afternoon talk show and Morton Downey Jr.’s controversial evening talk show.   “Despite a brawl in which Geraldo Rivera’s nose was broken, officials of his talk show say there is no need to beef up security,” read the dry lead sentence of a story I wrote in November 1988.

Rivera wound up in the middle of the donnybrook and was struck in the face by a flying chair, but he was not technically a participant in the melee.  It started when one of the show’s guests, black activist Roy Innes of the Congress of Racial Equality, confronted one of the other guests, John Metzger, a 20-year-old member of a group known as the White Aryan Resistance Youth, who had called Innes an Uncle Tom.  For his part, Rivera maintained his professionalism.  “After getting off the floor in the middle of the melee,” I reported, “Mr. Rivera, his nose smashed and bleeding, turned to a camera and said, ‘Take a break.  We’ll be right back’.”

If anyone could be called a pioneer of the new confrontational talk-show style, it was Downey, whose eponymous show was so unpredictable that he himself was charged with assault in December 1987 after he appeared to slap one of his guests.  The charges were dismissed at a trial four months later.  Downey’s utterings were so outrageous that stories about him proved irresistible to a reporter with an innate sense of how a humdrum story about the TV business could be enlivened by the innocent insertion of a shocking quote from Downey’s show, such as this gem straight from the host’s mouth: “Any prisoner who sodomizes [another prisoner] ought to have his testicles cut off and fed to him!”   That quote was the second sentence of the first story I ever wrote about Downey in November 1987.

Later in the story, at a point where I perceived the piece was growing dull, I inserted another one, from the same on-air conversation about sexual predators in prisons.  “On the same program in which he offered castration as a cure for sodomy in prisons,” I wrote, “Mr. Downey, who said he once spent 61 days in jail, asked his guest, ‘Have you ever gone to bed at night with the fear that while you’re sleeping, some guy is going to jump you and bunghole you?’!”  That was probably the only time the word “bunghole” ever appeared in that particular TV industry trade mag.

I found myself gravitating toward stories about excess, controversial program contents and lapses in judgement.  One example of the latter occurred in January 1987, when a Pennsylvania official, R. Budd Dwyer, the state treasurer who was awaiting sentencing after being found guilty in a kickback scandal, placed the barrel of a .357 Magnum revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing his brains out during a news conference in Harrisburg.  It happened to be a snow day and some small children were home watching TV when local stations in Pennsylvania interrupted the shows the kids were watching at 11:45 a.m. – shows such as “Webster” on the ABC affiliate – to air the bloody videotape of Dwyer’s suicide in its entirety, drawing complaints from parents.  One official of a Pittsburgh TV station drily offered this rationalization for airing the video.  “He was a public official, and it was a very historic event,” I quoted him as saying.

In September 1989, MTV slapped comedian Andrew Dice Clay with a “lifetime ban” for uttering an obscenity when he joked about “an unnatural sex act with a 600-pound woman” (according to my story on the ban) on the live telecast of the “MTV Music Video Awards.”

Standards were changing.  Among those who came forward to criticize TV’s newfound permissiveness: Ted Bundy, the serial killer who had confessed to more than 30 murders in which he either bludgeoned or strangled his victims.  “What scares and appalls me is what I see on cable TV – some of the movies, some of the violence that comes into homes today,” Bundy told a radio interviewer, according to an item I wrote in January 1989.  Bundy, then residing on Florida’s death row, was executed later that month.

Concerns about shock radio personalities, talk-show brawls and obscene comedians were the farthest things from my mind when I flew from New York to Billings, Mont., in August 1988.  Picking up a rental car at the airport, I headed east to Glendive, 220 miles away down an interstate highway with no speed limit.  It was hot and the sky was blue and also big, just like it was supposed to be in Montana.  I passed cows and grain elevators at 95 miles per hour until I reached Glendive, where I checked into the finest hotel in town, the Best Western Holiday Lodge, home of the Range Lounge and Disco.

I spent the next day hanging around KXGN, the TV station that was considered the nation’s smallest.  I dutifully interviewed the general manager, a man named Dan Frenzel, and Terry Kegley, the 23 year-old who worked as the station’s one-man news department.  I left after a few hours because the truth was, there wasn’t a lot going on at the nation’s smallest TV station, though I eventually made about a 50-inch story out of it.

More memorable to me was the time I spent away from the station.  I roamed around the town, shot some photos of grain elevators and visited a nearby state park, Montana’s largest, called Makoshika (it supposedly means “badlands” in the language of the Lakota Indians).  Somehow I learned of a county fair then under way about an hour’s drive north of Glendive, where a rodeo would be taking place that evening.  I arrived at dusk and found a booth made of unpainted plywood where a farmer sold sandwiches of homemade bratwurst.  I took a seat in the sparsely populated grandstand and watched some cowboys rope calves and ride bucking broncos in the dry dusty infield lit by floodlights mounted on tall poles.

I wore sneakers, a pair of green shorts and a Flintstones T-shirt.  As I surveyed my surroundings, it dawned on me that I was a grown man dressed like a boy in a world where even the smallest boys dressed like men, in dungarees, long-sleeved shirts of denim or flannel (despite the oppressive heat), cowboy boots and cowboy hats.  All alone up in that grandstand, I realized that I was as far away from the world I knew as I had ever been in my entire life.  I have long remembered that moment as one of the most sublime that I have ever experienced, and I had journalism to thank for it.  It was one of only a few such moments I ever had in the practice of my profession.

It also happened to be the last.

# # #

Another year is coming to an end and one thing on the back of everyone’s mind is who will win Time Magazine’s coveted “Person of the Year” cover?  Okay, maybe that’s not exactly on everyone’s mind, but it is something the newshounds among us tend to take notice of each year.   Whether it be a newly elected President (with the exceptions of Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Gerald Ford, every POTUS has won the spot since 1927) or the American Soldier (awarded in 2003, the year the Iraq war began), the winner always makes us think about why they won and who we would have chosen instead. 

Well, after looking over this year’s finalists, I’m kind of left wondering if the “Person of the Year” award is kind of becoming like the Nobel Peace Prize or the B plus…absolutely worthless.   

Don’t get me wrong, some of this year’s finalists seem pretty worthy.  General Stanley McChrystal, our current Commander of Forces in Afghanistan made the list.  Apple CEO Steve Jobs made the cut and I guess he’s had a pretty big year.  Jamaican gold medalist Usain Bolt and  Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman, are both finalists which led me to believe pickings were pretty slim this year.  And maybe that’s why the next three people and/or collection of people made the list.  

President Barack Obama is on the list after winning last year’s award.  While last year’s cover was understandable, seeing as how he was the newly elected president, there’s absolutely no reason for him to be on this year’s cover, as well.  What has he done exactly?  Made it through eleven months in office?   Picked out a new pet?  Even that seemed to take months – don’t get me started on sending troops to Afghanistan.  If Obama wins the cover again this year, Time magazine will be dead to me (and trust me, it’s already in a coma, waiting on me to pull the plug).  

On the plus side, Richard Nixon is the only other person in history to have been awarded the cover in two consecutive years.  If Obama wins, maybe we’ll have his premature resignation to look forward to.  Just a thought.

Also on the list is the Chinese worker, which according to Time, has become an influential international economic power.  Not the American worker, though I can’t blame Time for that, there aren’t exactly a lot of us left in the country, but come on, do we really need to praise the Chinese?  We already owe them like a gazillion trillion billion dollars!  Why don’t we just bend over, pull our pants down and invite them to expand their communist empire to include all 3,536,278 square miles of this great nation?  

And the final person on the list?  You’ll love this one.  Speaker of the House and Botox aficionado, Nancy Pelosi.  No, seriously.  I’m not sure what Pelosi has accomplished aside from calling people Nazis or carrying on about Astroturf, but Time managing editor Richard Stengel made it clear that he thinks the Congresswoman is the bee’s knees on NBC’s “Today” show,

“Look, she’s the first woman Speaker of the House. She’s the strongest Speaker of the House in decades.  She had piloted what is probably the most important legislation in decades through the House. She’s a really, really pivotal lawmaker.”

Go ahead, I’ll give you a minute to laugh.  Nancy Pelosi.  That’s who Time Magazine feels “for better or for worse, …has done the most to influence the events of the year.”  I’ll give them the “for worse” part, but somehow I doubt that’s what they’re thinking.  Time Magazine is officially worthless and just another example of why the mainstream media is becoming extinct.

I’m a (pop) psychology junkie, and I love to classify and categorize people around me. The enneagram system, for those who don’t know, asserts that people fall into nine basic personality types, represented by the numbers one through nine. Some people are sort of mixes, and have “wings” from adjacent types- Fours can have Five or Three wings for example, and Sevens can have Six or Eight wings- but many only fit the one, pure type. In this post, I’ll give a rundown of each number: basic qualities, strengths and weaknesses, examples of famous people with the personality type. I’m a 4 (and a Myers-Briggs INFJ, not that it’s really related). Which type are YOU?

TYPE 1: THE REFORMER
My dad is this type, and I always find myself unconsciously thinking of it as “Type 1: The Perfectionist.” Ones tend to have defined principles and strong senses of purpose; and while dedicated to their ideals, they are generally realists.
Strengths: can be noble, judicious, principled, consistent, and moderate
Weaknesses: can be judgemental, close-minded, uptight, and self-righteous
Examples: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gandhi, Sandra Day O’Connor

TYPE 2: THE HELPER
Twos are people-pleasers, which, can be a good or bad thing. Twos have the potential to become doormats, losing their senses of identity as they yield to others’ wishes; but they can also be generous and sincere, well, helpers. Their basic desire is to be loved.
Strengths: can be empathetic, kind, unselfish, and nurturing
Weaknesses: can be presumptuous, can play the martyr, sometimes fall into “helping” in order to feel or be wanted/needed
Examples: Ann Landers, Alan Alda, Mother Teresa

TYPE 3: THE ACHIEVER
Apparently a lot of celebrities are threes (according to my old therapist), because threes tend to be very image-focused. They are driven, charismatic, and capable, but they can sometimes have problems with their senses of self-worth. Their vanity can get out of control at times; for instance, a friend of mine, who is a three, won’t let me tag pictures of her on Facebook unless I send them to her first for Photoshop and approval (most don’t make the cut), and there are days when she won’t leave her apartment because she feels everyone she sees judges her for being fat.
Strengths: can be highly productive, assured, gracious, composed, and social
Weaknesses: can be narcissistic, overly competitive, jealous, arrogant, and “fake”
Examples: Oprah Winfrey, Barbra Streisand, Barack Obama (he strikes me as more of a one actually, but the enneagram institute website lists him as a three. Whatevs.)

TYPE 4: THE INDIVIDUALIST
The drama queens! As with other types, fours’ basic qualities- sensitivity, self-awareness, and emotionality- can work both for or against them. Fours tend to be personal and empathetic, and are sometimes highly creative. Driven by a desire to express themselves and integrate emotional inner life with outward experience, fours can become moody, clingy, self-conscious damsels in distress in times of stress.
Strengths: can be emotionally honest, self-revealing, creative, inspired, and compassionate
Weaknesses: can be “precious” about feelings, withdrawn, self-pitying, alienated. Fours are also quite prone to depression, delusions, and substance abuse.
Examples: the ultimate example of an unhealthy four is Blanche DuBois (from Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire). Ingmar Bergman and Virginia Woolf are other examples.

TYPE 5: THE INVESTIGATOR
Fives tend to be isolated, cerebral, and sincerely curious about the world around them. Their basic desire is to be incredibly knowledgeable, and therefore competent, in at least one field. This means that they can be innovative leaders, but it also means that they often withdraw quickly from things at which they feel they fail, without necessarily giving it a fair effort. Their desire for knowledge can also serve as a way to protect themselves by figuring out threats from their environment.
Strengths: can be independent, very disciplined, innovative/inventive, and perceptive
Weaknesses: can be detached, self-absorbed, and nihilistic. Fearing conflict, they will sometimes reject others before they can be rejected themselves.
Examples: Emily Dickinson, Nietzsche, Lily Tomlin

TYPE 6: THE LOYALIST
Sixes are driven by a need to feel safe, secure, and stable, and tend to be good problem=solvers. They’re big on harmony, but when things get conflicted and stressful, they can become anxious, withdrawn, or sometimes rebellious. They can have issues with trust- both with themselves and others- but they can get over it with reassurance and support.
Strengths: can be responsible, cooperative, affectionate, generous, courageous, and emotionally strong
Weaknesses: can be anxious, rebellious, passive aggressive, and suspicious to the point of paranoia, needing constant reinforcement.
Examples: Princess Diana, Richard Nixon, Julia Roberts

TYPE 7: THE ENTHUSIAST
Sevens, at their most easygoing, are like puppies. They tend to be adventurous, outgoing, and multitalented. Their enthusiasm can lead to impulsive or rash behavior, however, which can get them into trouble sometimes. They are good at living in the moment, they fear pain, and their freedom is very important to them. Underneath it all, they sometimes feel like they will never find what they truly want in life, but they try everything anyway in an effort to fulfill themselves.
Strengths: they can be sophisticated, joyful, practical, uninhibited, and social.
Weaknesses: they can be reckless, indulgent, and slightly manic. Escapist tendencies make them especially prone to drug addiction, and they can be demanding and insensitive.
Examples: Elizabeth Taylor, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bette Midler

TYPE 8: THE CHALLENGER
Full disclosure: some type eight people scare me. They can be aggressive, dominating, egotistical, and combative. Conversely, however, they also tend to be independent, disciplined, confident, and courageous. Their behavior is largely driven by a desire to feel in control and invulnerable, and their control issues can extend beyond themselves. They can be caring and inspiring at their best, and have a general lust for life. Many dictators are/were eights.
Strengths: can be confident, self-possessed, noble, and principled. Forceful and direct tendencies make them great leaders.
Weaknesses: can be arrogant, dictatorial, hardened, and immoral. Will mow opposition over by force.
Examples: Barbara Walters, Fidel Castro, Courtney Love

TYPE 9: THE PEACEMAKER
Nines tend to be selfless, adaptable, and stable. They’re big on harmony, and can have anxiety about separation and conflict. Nines can be too unassuming, to the point where they start to lose their senses of self, but they can also swing the other way, becoming stubborn and “stuck.” They are ultimately driven by a desire to connect and be in synch with others, and the world at large.
Strengths: can be calm, reassuring, accepting, patient, and kind. Good at conflict resolution.
Weaknesses: can be detached, too accommodating, unresponsive, and repressed. Wanting to avoid conflict, they can sometimes minimize their or others’ problems or feelings.
Examples: Whoopi Goldberg, Abraham Lincoln, Marge Simpson.

For more on enneagrams, including information on type compatibilities, spirituality, and health problems by type, visit www.enneagraminstitute.com.

Which type are you?

The word “character” like the word “President (of the United States of America)” holds intrinsic yet abstract meaning. Despite historical evidence of deeply flawed personalities guiding the country, we the people continue to initially conjure the honorable aspects of the two words and link them together. Robert A. Wilson’s Character Above All:  Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush perpetuates that traditional perspective.

Spanning sixty years (1932-1992), Character offers a rather balanced assessment of ten presidencies. The essays, one per President, are penned by historians, biographers, and journalists. Different approaches include definitions, saintly comparisons, varying measures of criticism and praise, and shared experiences, but each one likens strong character to greatness. The benefits and strengths of such a diverse collection reside in the juxtaposition while the consequential weakness rests in lack of uniformity. Several authors have penned much larger, richer accounts of Presidents, making these snapshots (suited for such a collection) often feel restrained and incomplete. For what it is, the collection presents a good overview of the relationship between character and leadership; it provides a starting point for the historically curious.

Robert A. Wilson, editor
Doris Kearns Goodwin on Franklin D. Roosevelt
David McCullough on Harry S. Truman
Stephen E. Ambrose on Dwight D. Eisenhower
Richard Reeves on John F. Kennedy
Robert Dallek on Lyndon Johnson
Tom Wicker on Richard Nixon
James Cannon on Gerald Ford
Hendrik Hertzberg on Jimmy Carter
Peggy Noonan on Ronald Reagan
Michael Beschloss on George Bush

Presidents FDR and Barack Obama

We are now at the end of year two of the Great Recession (December 2007-2009). To those who asked me after the near meltdown in September of 2008, I guessed that the bleeding of jobs probably wouldn’t end before this December. The bleeding has been slowing in recent months with the “good news” being that fewer jobs are being lost each month than were lost the month before. 

A friend in Detroit recently wrote me: “I have survived five downsizings at Chrysler, and I think I’ll be here for a while. The Obama task force did a masterful job, and the Italian guy from Fiat is doing well so far… I think we’ll be good for a while, but if the economy and car sales don’t begin to climb more substantially in the next six months to a year then things could get dicey again.” If jobs continue to be lost, those car sales aren’t going to happen. 

Since a jobless recovery is virtually no recovery at all, it is hard to understand why President Barack Obama and his administration have not focused more on job growth. They don’t even need to be as creative as they were in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. (It was probably all those incentives for 21^st century green technology that was the real cause of those Republican apoplectic fits over the stimulus package.) The Obama administration could reinstate three tried and tested programs that we know will work. That’s a conservative approach, by the way. 

One is Franklin Roosevelt’s most noble achievement: the Civilian Conservation Corps, which created 250,000 jobs in 1933 and rose to 2 million jobs by the time the U.S. entered WWII at the end of 1941. The CCC employed young men between the ages of 18 to 25 at $30 per month with most of the money going home to their families. Their activities included reforestation, flood control, national parks, and much more. 

CCC boys at a experimental farm in Maryland

The National Park Service will be celebrating its 100^th anniversary in 2016. What better time than now to begin eliminating the backlog of repairs and renovations that has been piling up over the years, especially since the anti-park Reagan Era. Even the pro-environment, pro-park Clinton administration couldn’t get the necessary funding from a hostile Republican Congress in the 1990’s. The largest number of unemployed is the 16 to 24 age group (18 %, Sept. 2009). An updated version of the former CCC could do wonders for jobless young men and women and for our national parks. It would be far more constructive than Obama’s plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. And it would be a wonderful birthday gift to us and to our future generations.   

CCC boys digging a trench

The second project is a national highways and waterways infrastructure program. We’ve been waiting for it ever since Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast and ever since that Interstate highway bridge fell in Minnesota: There are several highway projects in Obama’s original stimulus bill but not nearly enough. Probably every state has specific projects that never seem to get accomplished. 

Here in South Arkansas, we know what’s needed. Highway 167 needs to be four-laned from Ruston, LA, to Little Rock. There are several stretches where no work has even begun. The projected Interstate 69 (the NAFTA Highway that will stretch from Canada to Mexico) has “future corridor” signs up, but that’s all. El Dorado, Camden, and Magnolia would greatly benefit from that highway and so would the impoverished delta region of eastern Arkansas.  Highway 82 should be, at the very least, three-laned with continuously alternating passing lanes all the way from Texarkana to Greenville, MS. The time for action on all these projects is now. They will create jobs today and economic growth now and in the future. 

Richard Nixon (President 1969-1974)

Thirdly, we should resurrect Richard Nixon’s successful program called “revenue sharing.” Not known for caring anything about domestic issues, Nixon surprisingly recognized that the federal government was very efficient at raising money and the state governments were more efficient at spending it. The states knew best what they needed, so the federal government should share in helping them fund their important programs. 

Many states are now facing crises in revenue shortfalls due to the Great Recession. As a consequence, to maintain constitutionally-mandated balanced budgets, they are laying-off teachers and other state employees. That’s the worst thing they could be doing. Unemployment begets less spending, which begets more unemployment, which begets further losses of tax revenues, which begets more government layoffs; and the downward spiral continues. Bringing back Nixon’s excellent “revenue sharing” program could prevent additional layoffs and allow the states to rehire those victimized by the crisis. 

Ronald Reagan (President 1981-1989)

You have to remember that all of these programs were successful before the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who championed the concept that government was the problem. Reagan cut taxes on the upper income brackets thereby limiting the federal government’s ability to raise money; he cut funding for the national parks; he cut funding for highway infrastructure; and he eliminated Nixon’s “revenue sharing.” His philosophy was that states should raise taxes at the local level if they needed or wanted new programs or projects or wanted to continue old ones. The result has been a steady 30-year deterioration of the nation. 

CCC boy planting a tree

The creation of jobs through a modernized CCC, a major national infrastructure program, and a new revenue sharing program would go a long way in bringing about a lasting recovery. Government spending for paychecks is preferable to government spending for welfare checks.  

The danger is that President Obama will make the same mistake that Franklin Roosevelt made in 1937. The New Deal had been so successful from 1933 through 1936 that FDR hoped the recovery would continue without the government’s deficit spending. It didn’t work, and the country slipped back into recession in 1937-38.  Deficit spending went against everything that FDR had ever believed, so he was never comfortable with it. However, he should have waited until the Great Depression was clearly over to try to end it. 

Mr. Obama has seemed to have the same reservation, which would be good in normal times but not now. The bailouts of the banks and the auto industries ended the panic and the probable total economic meltdown. The stimulus package has been quite helpful, even though much of it is not scheduled to kick in until 2010. Consequently, President Obama appeared to become more concerned with the deficit than with job growth – until this December. Hopefully, pressure from the Democratic Congress, recent bleak job forcasts from the Federal Reserve, and the president’s recent forum on job creation have gotten him back on track. If not, the Great Recession may still become the 2^nd Great Depression. Hopefully, he will utilize these lessons of history. 

by David Offutt
A version of this essay was published December 12, 2009, in the El Dorado News-Times as a letter to the editor.

wednesday December 9, 2009 9:40 pm

for some reason i can’t get the move “gotcha!” out of my head.  it has been playing inside my brain on a perpetual loop since i taught the 15 year old girls on monday night.  we were talking about the berlin wall, and i asked them if they could tell me what the berlin wall was, and they started telling me about berlin, and i said, no the berlin wall and they said yes yes, because they don’t like to be wrong and don’t want me to tell them things.  so i drew a diagram, a circle that is berlin intersected by a line that is the berlin wall and we talked about communism and then the beatles and then Richard Nixon.  miming what Richard Nixon had done wrong was the absolute most fun i’ve had all week, until i pretended to break into the floor to ceiling windows and realized how shaky our building really is, and imagined myself plummeting to the sidewalk below.

oops.

anyway, they were learning the past continuous, and they were looking at pictures of famous events, and that was what brought up the berlin wall, and thoughts of such things, aside from the fact that we are just past the 20^th anniversary of all of that, and i am in eastern europe, and i left prague the night before the big celebration, and … well, yeah.

and i keep thinking of that scene in “gotcha!” (fine piece of cinema that it is) when Anthony Edwards has finally gotten out of the communist-occupied territory and he sees a mcdonalds in … let’s say france, and he says “thank god!” or something to that effect.

that, and linda fiorentino, speaking a version of Russian that may or may not be true, are the highlights of that wonderful thing that i will condescend to call a movie.

and, well, you can’t go wrong with linda fiorentino.  ever.  oh god, never.

anyway, here are some fun facts about this country that i have decided to (kinda) call home, which you may or may not know, which may or may not be true (apologies to gabe.  he may not know why.  that’s fine).

almost all of the buildings in poland are made of brick and stone and concrete.  this is due to the fact that the country has no lumber to speak of.  even the telephone poles are made of two long “poles” of concrete formed into an inverted V shape, so they can stand.  maybe i will have a picture of this.  maybe.

concrete telephone pole

the first few times i was in Poland, i couldn’t look at the skinny trees in the thin thin forest without thinking about people trying to hide in there, and failing, and terror.

that feeling is passing, now.

the polish language only has three tenses (past, present, future), but a whole bunch of “cases.” cases are used to show if an action has been completed or not, to show who is speaking, and to whom, to show if the sentence is a command or not, etc, etc, things i don’t even know.  verbs, nouns, adjectives, subjects, objects, all of these have different endings, depending on the case.

yikes.

if you are dining, and you drop a spoon, you will be visited by a woman.  if you drop a fork, you will be visited by a man.  if you drop a knife, you will have an unpleasant or violent visitor.

i can’t remember if you need to drop the knife in conjunction with the fork or spoon, so that you know which visitor will be unpleasant.

what if you have a ton of visitors?  how can you possibly prepare?

the Russians, apparently, are assholes.  as are the germans.  apparently with good cause.

poles have a saying, that “a guest in the house is god in the house.”  apparently even if that guest is a russian or a german.  if you are ever lucky enough to be invited into a polish home, bring flowers, but only an odd number, because even numbers are for funerals.  there are certain flowers you shouldn’t bring, as well, but i am failing in my knowledge right now, so you will just have to fend for yourself.  like carnations, to me, always mean that you did wicked awesome in the school play, some flowers mean “funeral.”  so, watch out.

and, sure, bring some booze and some cake, as well.

oh, yeah, and they will feed you and feed you and feed you, and they will not be able to stop feeding you, but they will not sit down, and they will not eat, and they will not stop feeding you.

that is what they are supposed to do.  but, only the women.

so, there you go.

uck.

anyway, what else?

if you are ordering anything for you and a friend, you do not say “two beers/coffees/whatevers.”  you say “dwa razy piwo.”  that means “two times beer,” like “two occasions” or “two occurrences.”  if you say “dwa piwo,” there will be confusion.

two occurances of beer.  like a magical event.

some women still drink their beer through a straw.  this seems to make my mom physically ill.  i can’t understand it, myself, but if they want to do that, they should.

the man on the train to toruń told us that the storks are only in the south, and now that i think about it maybe i only saw them down south.  but, if you are ever in down south Poland any time but in the winter, look for the chimneys with the storks sitting on them.  it is incredibly good luck to have a stork build a nest on your chimney.  some people build crazy-looking concrete platforms for the storks to build their nests on, so they are still on their property but they don’t have to deal with the craziness of trying to light a fire with a stork on your chimney.  we asked father leszek what happens in the winter, and he said that the storks fly to Asia (huh), but i meant what happens to their nests, and there was no answer to that.

incredibly good luck.

if you ask a pole why, oh why, they leave the monuments that the communists built, the buildings that the communists built, the things built by other occupiers over the centuries, they will shrug and say “history.”  there is no concept of erasing history, it all sits in layers upon layers upon layers, all on top of each other, with the latest galleria (mall-type-hipermarket) sitting right on top.

oh, yeah, if a pole mentions the “galleria” or “gallerie,” they do not mean a “gallery.”  there is no art there, to speak of.

yeah, and they have the most amazing cheese here.  and brie costs less than a dollar.  and the vodka is … oh god, there are no words.

so, yeah, things are good.

i should tell the saga of the lawyer.  do i have the stamina?  i will try.

the very first day in town, when i had to run down hill for ten minutes to get to the correct site of the school i work for, from the incorrect site, there was a woman who showed us the way.  mom, who i had happened to find again, had asked her where the school was, and she showed us, and then she went her separate way, and … i expected to never see her again.

i will mention that she was in the building where my school used to be, chatting with some man on the stairs.  she is round-shaped, and round of face, and wears an incredibly distinctive hat, and therefore is pretty noticeable, if you’re not freaking out about your fucking job and needing to run and are actually looking at her long enough to remember her hat and her face and her roundness.

she is also nondescript, in that she looks like any lady on the street, though she is round, and her hat is pretty distinctive.

so, when mom told me last week that she had seen this woman in my neighborhood, halfway across town from the place where she had helped us, i couldn’t picture her, so i just assumed she wasn’t as memorable as all that, and my mom was seeing someone else who looked kinda like her.

then, monday, i forgot my PIN number.  i mention this, again, because it meant that i had to run back to my neighborhood and try to catch my mom before she got on a bus to get on another bus to meet my second cousin so they could talk about the fact that maybe we own some land here in Poland that is currently being used by someone who we don’t even know.

you see why i need stamina?

ok, here’s the relevant fact about polish law.  due to the Nazis, and then the Soviets, taking everything and renaming everything and generally being jerks, and due to a lot of Jewish families losing their properties to the Nazis, and due to Poland having been the country with the highest Jewish population in Europe, Poland has this little fun fact part of its property law, which basically states that anyone who can prove that something belonged to them before WW2 can have that thing back, regardless of who thinks they have it now.

phew.

this means that if my mom can prove that my grandmother left some land in her brother’s care, and he illegally gave it to the wife he abandoned, and then she signed it over to some guy we maybe met once, then she can get it back from that guy, who just happens to be a local with friends and family, wearing camo gear and driving a pickup truck full of guns.

for reals.

i can’t even begin to tell you how fucked up all of this makes me feel.

so, i wanted to see if my mom would loan me coffee money, and i caught her at the bus stop, and she said “is that the woman who told us where the school was?  that’s the woman i saw the other day here, i swear that is her.”

i didn’t know.  so, she asked the woman.

and, after a few minutes of confusion, the woman looked up and saw me, and put a few things together, and said “ah yes!” (but in polish) and then talked to my mother for a long time.

during which time she disclosed that she happens to be a property lawyer, and will give my mom free advice on the case.

for reals.

what?  really.

and so my mom went to see her yesterday, and had very little information, as her cousin is kinda useless with the information aspect, and they need to do more research, but it seemed like, yes, it would be entirely possible to wrest the property from the locals with the guns.

and then what are we going to do with it, i ask?

i dunno.

that just took what little stamina i had.

i will take a short minute here to say that my mom is leaving tomorrow evening, and as someone who needs solitude like i need air, i am going to be refreshed, but as someone who thinks my mom is pretty awesome, it will be sad to see her go.

we will meet up again over Christmas at sara’s in germany.

but still

this also all means that i will have to start speaking Polish to people in stores and things.

fuck.

which also means that this blog is about to get a hell of a lot more interesting.

10:44 pm

Senator Edmund S. Muskie was the clear frontrunner in the 1972 Democratic presidential primary, when he committed a gaffe now known among politicos simply as the “Muskie moment”. In one of the classic meltdowns in campaign history, Muskie broke down and cried in front of reporters after allegations that his wife drank too much and swore in public.  Muskie tried and failed to convince the voters that they weren’t tears, but melted snowflakes running down his cheeks.

He was responding to a particularly vicious political attack published in the Manchester Union-Leader, accusing the Senator’s wife of using foul language and drinking while on the campaign trail. Publisher William Loeb had been printing editorial attacks on Muskie, including the “Canuck Letter” which accused Muskie of a bias toward Americans of French-Canadian descent. (These were allegedly written by the incumbent president Richard Nixon’s aides). In response, Muskie gave an emotional speech in the New Hampshire snow defending his wife, and several journalists reported that Muskie cried during the speech. As he vehemently defended his wife, Muskie’s speech broke three times as he rubbed his face and tried to regain his composure.

Muskie claimed that he did not cry, and journalists merely saw as melted snow on his face. Previously known as a calm, reasonable candidate, this moment made Muskie appear weak and emotional to voters. While Muskie went on to win the New Hampshire primary, it was not be by nearly as much as expected, and this moment more than any other lead to the nomination of George McGovern by the Democratic Party.

]]> http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/gold-and-silver-why-they-are-important-and-why-they-are-often-manipulated/ Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:38:35 +0000 pakalert http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/gold-and-silver-why-they-are-important-and-why-they-are-often-manipulated/ http://onemansthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/anatomy-of-a-failed-presidency/ Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:19:46 +0000 One Man's Thoughts http://onemansthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/anatomy-of-a-failed-presidency/

The following is an interesting article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt. Dr. Hunt is a social and cultural anthropologist.  He has had nearly 30 years experience in planning, conducting, and managing research in the field of youth studies, and drug and alcohol research. Currently Dr. Hunt is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Scientific Analysis and the Principal Investigator on three National Institutes on Health projects. He is also a writer for American Thinker.

Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we’ve seen several failed presidencies–led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ.  Failed presidents have one strong common trait– they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party.  Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China 20.

But, Barack Obama is failing.  Failing big.  Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed.  Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.

But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of unprecedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall.  In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage.  This truly is unbelievable.  What’s going on?

No narrative. Obama doesn’t have a narrative.  No, not a narrative about himself.  He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn’t connect with us.  He doesn’t have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us.  All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are.  Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don’t align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.

But not this president. It’s not so much that he’s a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task–all contributory of course.  It’s that he’s not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn’t command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don’t add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don’t make sense and don’t correspond with our experience.

In the meantime, while we’ve been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he’s dissed just about every one of us–financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: ”For those of you I offended, I apologize.  For those of you who were not offended, you just didn’t give me enough time; if only I’d had a second term, I could have offended you too.”

Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state–staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive.  An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there’s always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.

Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them.  The coyotes howl but the wagon train keeps rolling along.

The elites are targeting Africans here and abroad. They took Blacks as slaves…now they target Blackneighborhoods with pills and potions that will kill.

Get a copy of the film- Maafa21. www.maafa21.com

Maafa21 : New film exposes Eugenics and Black Genocide from Abortion

Some claim that the abortion issue is about choice, privacy, women’s rights, or reproductive freedom.

IT’S SHOCK AND AWE TIME!

Watch Maafa21 and get more on Black Genocide in 21st Century America: www.maafa21.com
(Short Clip:)

On June 11,1970, The Black Caucus issued a statement of withdraw from the First National Congress on Optimum Population and Environment, It read: “ The Black Caucus has withdrawn from the First National Congress on Optimum Population and Environment because of unmistakably clear evidence that the purpose of this conference is to use these delegates invited to legitimize a preconceived vicious plan of extermination. This plan is one of systematic reduction of a specific population, namely Blacks, other non-whites, the American poor and certain non-white and ethnic immigrants.” The statement was presented to a Press Conference by Felton Alexander, National Urban League and chairman of the Black Caucus and Dr. Alyce Gullattee, Psychiatrist from Washington D.C. ( SOURCE: Black Caucus Statement in withdrawing from the First National Congress on Optimum Population and Environment : June 11,1970, located in the Planned Parenthood Federation Papers, Black Attitudes from 1962, copied from the Sophie Smith Collection, Sophie Smith College , Box 107/Folder 11:)

The birth control pill was introduced at a time when scientists such as Arthur Jensen and William Shockley were promoting genetic explanations of racial differences in intelligence-test scores. During the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of poor black women were coercively sterilized under federally funded programs. Women were threatened with termination of welfare benefits or denial of medical care if they didn’t “consent” to the procedure. Southern blacks claimed that black women were routinely sterilized without their consent and for no valid medical reason—a practice so widespread it was called a “Mississippi appendectomy.” Teaching hospitals in the North also performed unnecessary hysterectomies on poor black women as practice for their medical residents. During this period, state legislators considered a rash of punitive sterilization bills aimed at the growing number of blacks receiving public assistance. .. Black concerns about family planning had arisen decades earlier during Margaret Sanger’s crusade for birth control. As Sanger allied herself with the burgeoning eugenics movement, the call for birth control veered away from its radical, feminist origins to include programs to regulate the poor, immigrants and blacks, based on theories of genetic inferiority and social degeneracy. Some blacks of the period, including the nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, opposed birth control as a form of “race suicide.” ( SOURCE: Alan Guttmacher, Family Planning Perspectives, Volume 32, Number 2, March/April 2000 :Forum: Black Women and the Pill, By Dorothy Roberts )

Dr. Alan Frank Guttmacher, president of the ‘Planned Parenthood World Population Federation’, attended the session on the family and specified the real differential between white and non-white fertility rates. He made what appears to be a flippant comment that nevertheless, reflected his worries about the ‘wrong’ people having too many children: “You can’t make a person take contraception. Unfortunately.” (SOURCE: The Historical Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1 ( Mar., 1998) pp. 259-282, The 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights, by Kevin L. Yuill, quoting transcript records of the WHCCR)

1965- At the White House Conference on Civil Rights sponsored by Lyndon Johnson, Cecil Moore made this attack on population control, “ And I have noticed that every time that we talk about population and planned parenthood, the only country I find that wants to limit poverty by limiting the poor- they always want to do it in Africa and South America and Asia , but I never heard them talk about doing it in Paris or England. Then I hope I am not belaboring the point, but don’t take that away from Negroes because we don’t have much else.” ( SOURCE: The Historical Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1 ( Mar., 1998) pp. 259-282, The 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights, by Kevin L. Yuill, quoting transcript records of the WHCCR)

1968- William “Bouie” Haden and other Negro militants have accused the [ Planned Parenthood] clinic of propagating “black genocide.” It is operated by Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit international family planning agency…”The idea,” says Dr. Charles E. Greenlee, a Negro physician and a member of Haden’s group, “is to make less niggers so they won’t have to build houses for them.” Greenlee is chairman of the Health Committee is the Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP On December 4th of Last Year, He and Pittsburgh NAACP President, Byrd Brown , a Negro attorney, charged at a news conference that Planned Parenthood was keeping the Negro birth rate down. Greenlee and Brown also charged that the clinics were a not sanitary and lacked privacy. They said the agency was soliciting Negro women to take the Pill. Planned Parenthood denied the charges. ( SOURCE: The Problem of Black Birth Control THE TITUSVILLE HERALD, TITUSVILLE, PENNA, PAGE SEVEN: OCTOBER 7,1968)

1970- Julian Bond, in a commencement speech at Syracuse University. Bond had become the director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which he helped found. At the time of the speech, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Southern Conference Education Fund, of the Advisory Board of the proposed Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, and of the Executive Committee of the Atlanta NAACP. Bond suggested that the intense interest in the ‘population bomb” could lead to genocide of black Americans and other poor people. Bond begins, ”If Mother Nature don’t get you, then Father Time will.” Now Dr. Ehrlich hastens to assure us that in spite of the fact that some of the white people who are talking up population control do mean population control of blacks, or the poor, or the Indians, like most racist plots this one is incompetent. …Do we, as black people, have legitimate cause for alarm? Has genocide ever been tried before? Yes it has. Has the United States government demonstrated its commitment to the defense of the interests of Black people? It has not. Do we have legitimate cause for alarm? I believe we do.” ( SOURCE: Transcript, Commencement address delivered at Syracuse University by Julian Bond on June 6,1970)

In a recent New York Times interview , Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Emily Bazelon that, “...I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

The “Populations” Ginsburg referred to in that interview is clearly defined in, Maafa21.

David Paradine Frost was somewhat of a precursor to Jon Stewart. A TV phenom in Britain during the 1960s, Frost had an entertaining weekly show of satire towards the Establishment called That Was the Week That Was. In 1975, Frost, then a successful businessman whose television stardom itself had faded, embarked on a journalistic adventure of a lifetime, to interview Richard Nixon.

Disgraced and debt-ridden, Nixon did not want any of the well-known U.S. journalists as Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley to interview him. Frost made Nixon an offer ($500,000 for four shows), and the president agreed. “Nixon can, of course, refuse to answer questions,” Frost mused, “But then I am able to film his refusing to answer.” The tapings were done north of San Clemente, California from 23rd March to 20th April 1977 in the home of a Nixon friend and ran over 12 days, and 28 hours of tapes.

For both parties, the interviews were a success. It covered a full range of topics from Nixon’s presidency, and although after the interviews, 72% of those who watched still believed Nixon was guilty of Watergate, the ex-president redeemed himself as a great statesman who accomplished many diplomatic achievements. As for Frost, it gave him international exposure, and hefty profits.

After the Nixon interview, Frost went on to interview seven more American presidents and six British prime ministers. He was knighted in December 1992, and currently hosts the Al Jazeera English program, Frost Over the World. In 2006, a play about the interviews – titled Frost/ Nixon – premiered; it was written by Peter Morgan.

]]> http://sarahpalintruthsquad.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/going-rogue-review-sarah-palin-shows-she-knows-how-to-hate-needs-injection-of-pinocchio-serum/ Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:07:58 +0000 sarahpalintruthsquad http://sarahpalintruthsquad.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/going-rogue-review-sarah-palin-shows-she-knows-how-to-hate-needs-injection-of-pinocchio-serum/

Outgoing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (2nd L), her husband Todd (C) look on as incoming Governor Sean Parnell (2nd R) is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Daniel Winfree (L) during the annual Governor's Picnic July 26, 2009 at Pioneer Park in Fairbanks, Alaska. Parnell' wife Sandy held the bible for the ceremony. Craig E. Campbell was sworn in as the new Lieutenant Governor.

Last July in Fairbanks, with Todd smiling at her side and Piper sitting in her lap, Sarah Palin watched Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell take the oath to fill out her term in office as Governor of Alaska. Then she vanished. For the past four months the Forty-Ninth State has seen neither hide nor hair of the woman. No speeches at chambers of commerce luncheons. No sightings on the street. No Sarah cheering on the sideline at Wasilla Warriors girls basketball games. No Sarah sitting in the pew on Sunday worshiping at the ChangePoint and Anchorage Baptist Temple evangelical mega churches. She’s been gone. Disappeared.

It now turns out that while Alaskans were hunkering down for winter Sarah was in San Diego working for a woman named Lynn Vincent, the ghostwriter HarperCollins hired to cobble together Going Rogue: An American Life, Sarah’s first person account of her it-only-would-happen-in-America rise from small town mayor to small state governor to Republican Vice Presidential candidate to popular culture icon.

Since Tuesday when Going Rogue was released nationwide copies of the book have been flying off the shelves at Barnes & Noble in Boise and Grand Rapids and not flying off the shelves in San Francisco and Seattle.

Since I already have enough to read, I had intended to give Going Rogue a pass until I had time this weekend to motor over to the Anchorage Barnes & Noble and give Ms. Vincent’s word-smithing a skim. But on Monday I learned that I’m in the book. Not surprisingly, that piqued my interest. And then yesterday a friend lent me a copy.

I’ve now read it. Here’s the review.

I usually begin reading a book that purports to be nonfiction by reading the index. But Going Rogue doesn’t have one. So I started with the acknowledgments section at the back of the book. In the first paragraph Sarah explains to her readers: “I’m very glad this writing exercise is over. I love to write, but not about myself. I’m thankful now to have kept journals about Alaska and my friends and family ever since I was a little girl. That practice allowed an orderly compilation over the past weeks and let me summarily wrap up at least some of my life so far.”

Sarah then thanks thirty-seven people (all but four only by his or her first name so that none of the rest of us have a clue who they are) before she thanks Lynn Vincent “for her indispensable help in getting the words on paper.”

If all that is read quickly, it leaves the veneer impression that Sarah wrote her book. But if read carefully that’s not what it says. “Help in getting the words on paper?” Too coy by half.

Decide for yourself when you do your own skim at your own local Barnes & Noble. But start to finish Going Rogue reads to me like Sarah sitting on the sofa in Lynn Vincent’s condo in San Diego, school girl diaries in her lap, talking hour after hour in her you-betcha patois into a computerized tape recorder like the ones court reporters use to record depositions. Then each afternoon when Sarah went off on her jog, Ms. Vincent would begin her real workday sitting at her computer editing and cut and pasting that day’s transcript of Sarah’s ramblings into a narrative.

I can’t prove that. But someone should ask Sarah if that’s how she “wrote” Going Rogue. Lynn Vincent would be a more reliable source. But, no surprise, her contract with HarperCollins contains a non-disclosure provision. Adam Bellow, Sarah’s editor at HarperCollins, also would know. But he for sure is not telling. At least until he has too much red wine during dinner at Elaine’s some night and lets the secret slip.

The book itself is a prosaic hagiography divided into three parts. Part one is Sarah’s autobiography from her birth in Sandpoint, Idaho, to her selection by John McCain as his running mate. Part two is Sarah’s story of her life on the road during the 2008 presidential campaign. Part three is a sanguinolent settling of accounts for the torment to which she was subjected in Alaska after the election – a torment so awful that it brought the operation of the entire executive branch of the government of the State of Alaska to a gridlocked halt and left Sarah no choice but to abandon her governorship in order to earn $5 million in four months talking into Lynn Vincent’s tape recorder.

If that three-part narrative has a unifying theme, the theme is that everything – and I mean everything – that has ever gone wrong for Sarah Palin was someone else’s fault.

Sarah’s lackluster performance during her interview with Frank Murkowski when she somehow made the short-list of candidates to succeed Frank in the U.S. Senate? That was Frank and his Attorney General, my friend Gregg Renkes’s, fault. The Troopergate scandal? Walt Monegan and the Democratic members of the Alaska Senate pulled that mean-spirited prank on a blameless Sarah. The nationally televised interview with Katie Couric that branded Sarah Palin as an ignorant and uneducated laughingstock? Katie sandbagged her. The fabulously disastrous Thanksgiving television interview when Governor Palin pardoned a turkey while in the background unpardoned turkeys were having their heads shoved down a funnel and their throats slit? Sandbagged again. That time by a local TV news cameraman.

Don’t take my word for it. Thumb through Going Rogue on your own. Page after page after page. It’s always someone else’s fault.

When discussing George Herbert Walker and Barbara Bush, Richard Nixon is reported to have said that George was a nice guy. “But his wife. That woman knows how to hate.” Since Dick meant that as a compliment, he would be impressed with Sarah’s penchant for settling scores. Because scattered throughout its content Going Rogue contains an enemies list as long as the list the nation’s Thirty-Seventh President and his henchmen compiled during the run-up to Watergate.

Sarah trashes Nick Carney (the Wasilla city councilman who recruited Sarah into politics), John Stein (Sarah’s predecessor as mayor of Wasilla), Anne Kilkenny (a Wasilla resident whose viral email educated the nation to Sarah’s lackluster record as mayor), an unnamed City of Wasilla librarian, Frank Murkowski (Sarah’s predecessor as Governor of Alaska), Gregg Renkes (Frank’s Attorney General), Lyda Green (the former President of the Alaska Senate), Hollis French (the chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the Alaska Senate), Steve Schmidt (John McCain’s campaign manager), an unnamed KTUU television cameraman [Scott Jensen], Walt Monegan (Sarah’s Commissioner of Public Safety), Randy Ruedrich (the chairman of the Alaska Republican Party with whom Sarah worked at the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission), Bill Allen (the corpulent head of the oil field services company VECO, a odious scum bag whose reputation as the bag man for Big Oil in the state capitol had been a matter of common knowledge in Alaska for a generation when Sarah went with her hand out to Bill for the campaign contributions she used to launch her statewide political career), Mike Wooten (Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law), unnamed executives of the Exxon-Mobil, British Petroleum, and Conoco-Phillips oil companies, Pete Rouse (a former Alaskan who was Senator Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Rahm Emanuel (President Barack Obama’s chief of staff), Kim Elton (a former member of the Alaska Senate who is Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s Special Assistant for Alaska), unnamed members of the McCain campaign staff who prepped Sarah for her television debate with Joe Biden, John Bitney (Governor Palin’s liaison to the Alaska Legislature), Levi Johnston (the hockey-playing, Playgirl modeling impregnator of Bristol Palin).

That’s not the complete list. There’s no index and I’m tired of typing.

Of all the individuals on the Going Rogue enemies list, the two firsts among equals are Andrew Halcro and Andree McLeod.

Halcro is a former Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives who ran as an independent candidate against Sarah Palin in the 2006 Alaska gubernatorial election. After the election he started a website that he used to become one of Governor Palin’s most articulate and factually well-informed critics.

It was Andrew Halcro who broke the story that Governor Palin had fired Walt Monegan, her Commissioner of Public Safety, because Walt had refused to fire Mike Wooten, Sarah’s ex-brother-in-law, from his union job as an Alaska State Trooper. That news led to the Troopergate investigation of Sarah (and Todd) Palin’s misuse of the Office of the Governor. In the Troopergate report that Sarah touts as clearing her of wrong-doing, the investigator, a former prosecutor with whom (unlike the Legislature’s investigator) Sarah cooperated, implies that during his investigation either Walt Monegan committed criminal perjury or Sarah Palin committed criminal perjury. But the Legislature had no stomach during the remainder of Sarah’s tenure as Governor to determine whether she was the felon.

In Going Rogue Sarah describes Andrew Halcro as “a wealthy, effete young chap who had taken over his father’s local Avis Rent A Car, and he starred in his own car commercial. He would go on to host a short-lived local radio show while blogging throughout the day, all of which were major steps up from a previous job as our limo driver at Todd’s cousin’s wedding.”

Andree McLeod is where I come in.

I am an attorney by trade and an historian of modest reputation by avocation. In 1987 I briefly convinced an Alaska Superior Court that it was a violation of the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions for the State of Alaska to have a campaign finance system that allows individuals who are not eligible to vote for a candidate to influence the candidate’s election by making campaign contributions. In 1998 I came within one vote of convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to uphold the constitutionality of an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would have mandated a similar result. Over the years since, I have frequently represented individuals for a reduced fee or no fee in cases in which I think the public policy benefits merit my effort.

For that reason, I was not surprised in September 2008 when a friend called to ask if I would have a cup of coffee with a woman named Andree McLeod. By that date, I had been active in Alaska’s (small state) political life for thirty years. But my answer to that query was, “Who’s Andree McLeod?” But I went for coffee and discovered that Andree McLeod is a quite amazing woman.

Short, smart, politically committed, and tenaciously energetic, Andree McLeod is a Republican political activist of Armenian heritage who had once been a personal friend of Sarah Palin’s, who Sarah had endorsed when Andree ran in the Republican primary for a seat in the Alaska House of Representatives.

When I went to her home in east Anchorage to have my cup of coffee I found Andree sitting at her dining room table surrounded by two-foot-high stacks of paper print-outs of several thousand emails that the Office of the Governor had given to her in July in response to a request she had filed in June pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The request had asked for emails that had been sent to or received by employees of the Office of the Governor who Andree suspected had been engaging in partisan – i.e., Alaska Republican Party – political activities during their public employee workdays. Andree submitted her public records request three months before anyone other than those of us in Alaska had ever heard of Sarah Palin.

The reason I had been invited to meet with Andree was that one of the things she had discovered by reading the emails was that when Governor Palin assumed office she had set up a private back-channel email system so that she and her senior staff could communicate with each other about state business without the content of their communications being “captured” by State of Alaska computer servers, and hence being available for public inspection pursuant to the Alaska Public Records Act. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other national media would later report that story.

After researching the Alaska Public Records Act I concluded that, for reasons not worth detailing here, the private back-channel email system that Sarah had created was a violation of the Alaska Public Records Act. As a consequence, representing Andree McLeod, on October 1, 2008 I filed a lawsuit against Governor Palin in the Alaska Superior Court, the purpose of which is to obtain an order prohibiting state officials from using private email accounts to conduct state business.

The month after the McCain-Palin ticket lost the presidential election, again representing Andree McLeod, on December 8, 2008 I filed a second lawsuit against Governor Palin when a further review of the emails that Andree had been given revealed that the Office of the Governor had given to Todd Palin, a private citizen who was an employee of British Petroleum, copies of emails that it was withholding from public inspection on the ground of deliberative process privilege.

That litigation is ongoing. The legal questions of first impression that they present for decision are important enough that my expectation is that both lawsuits will end up in the Alaska Supreme Court.

What does any of that have to do with me and Going Rogue?

Prior to me agreeing to represent her in the two lawsuits above-described, Andree McLeod had begun filing what became a series of complaints against Sarah Palin with the State Personnel Board that alleged ethical transgressions unrelated to the lawsuits. Other Alaskans did the same thing. According to Going Rogue, those ethics complaints have driven Sarah Palin flat-out full-crank nuts.

After trashing Andree McLeod at page 354 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin moves on to me. Here’s what Lynn and Sarah say:

We always suspected that someone was funding and directing
Andree’s efforts. During the spring of 2009, she was actually still
begging my administration for a job and led others to believe she
hadn’t worked for a couple of years. Yet somehow she had enough
time or money to turn harassment of the governor’s office into a
full-time vocation. Over time, the wording of her ethics complaints
became more and more sophisticated, and we later found out why:
prominent liberal attorney Don Mitchell was advising her. As early as September 2008, weeks before the presidential election, Mitchell had already detailed the ethics attack strategy in an article in the Huffington Post. Later he sat with Andree as her counsel at one of her hearings.

I wish my late mother was still alive. Because I know how proud she would be that I made the Going Rogue enemies list and have been mentioned by name in a book whose first printing is 1.5 million copies. (Because he is not named, the mother of the KTUU cameraman who posed Sarah in front of the turkeys can take no such pride.)

But my number is listed in the Anchorage telephone book. If that failed, Lynn and Sarah could have googled “Donald Craig Mitchell.” And if that had failed, since Meg Stapleton, the increasingly strange combination of Sancho Panza and Odd Job who works for Sarah, and I have mutual friends, Meg could have found me quite easily.

Had Lynn Vincent, Sarah, or Meg called me before Lynn had finished writing Going Rogue, I would have told her that in a single paragraph Lynn/Sarah got almost every one of their facts about me, other than that I am an attorney, wrong.

While I probably once was, I haven’t been a “prominent” attorney in Alaska in years. While I am a registered Democrat, my personal politics are hardly “liberal.” To the extent anyone cares, I am a social libertarian who is an Eisenhower era deficit hawk who agrees with Teddy and Frank Roosevelt that the principal responsibility of government is to save capitalism from itself. And while during the presidential campaign several of my ‘Governor Girl Reports‘ were posted by individuals other than me on the Huffington Post and Atlantic Monthly web sites, none of those musings “detailed an ethics attack strategy.”

But most importantly, not only have I never advised Andree regarding her ethics complaints, to the best of my recollection I have never read an Andree McLeod ethics complaint. Had Lynn, Sarah, or Meg called me, I also would have told them that neither Andree McLeod nor I have been paid a nickel by anyone for anything (although if I win either of my lawsuits I intend to send the Office of the Governor a bill for my attorneys fee, which under Alaska law I am permitted to do).

It is true, however, that, as Going Rogue reports, because she asked me to, I did accompany Andree to her interview with Tim Petumenos, the former prosecutor the State Personnel Board hired to investigate both the complaint Sarah filed against herself regarding the Troopergate affair and a complaint Andree filed against Sarah and Frank Bailey, Sarah’s Director of Boards and Commissions, for violating state civil service rules in order to give one of Sarah’s campaign supporters a job for which he was not qualified. Again to the best of my recollection, I have never read either complaint. And if he is asked, I think Tim will say that during his interview with Andree I pretty much just sat there.

It also is worth mentioning that the State Personnel Board found the ethics complaint that Andree McLeod filed against Frank Bailey meritorious.

Why should anyone care about any of that? The reason they should care is that if Lynn Vincent aka Sarah Palin got as many of the facts, asserted and implied, about me in Going Rogue as wrong as she did, what does that say about the validity of the many other, much more important, “facts” in Sarah’s book?

It’s fully fine by me that billions of federal tax dollars are being spent annually to invent an AIDS vaccine. But it is just as important to someday invent a Pinocchio serum.

If the world had one, before a faux celebrity like Sarah Palin writes a book, doctors from the CDC could roll up the celebrity’s sleeve and inject him or her with a jolt of the serum. And a serum also would have other important uses.

For example, on page 214 of Going Rogue Lynn Vincent reports that when the McCain campaign vetted Sarah, she confessed to Steve Schmidt, the manager of the campaign, that “the one skeleton I’d kept hidden in my closet” (my emphasis) was that she had gotten a D in a college course.

Had Sarah been shot up with Pinocchio serum prior to the vetting, the immediate growth of the length of her nose would have tipped off Schmidt that the more truthful answer to the one skeleton in the closet question would have been, as The National Enquirer subsequently reported with no push back from Team Sarah, “cuckolding Todd when he was working on the North Slope by hooking up with Brad Hanson, Todd’s business partner in the Polaris snow machine sales business Brad and Todd owned in Wasilla.”

Once perfected, Pinocchio serum also would be useful to find out whether Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell really supports health care reform and, before the United States sends more troops there, whether Hamid Karsai really is committed to rooting out corruption in Afghanistan. But before a Pinocchio serum can be widely used, the FDA would need to conduct a clinical trial. Shooting up Sarah while she’s still on her book tour would be a good first test of the potion’s efficacy.

Donald Craig Mitchell
The Huffington Post

Gracias al USHistoryBlog.com, me entero de la existencia de “100 Great Moments in American History You Can Catch on YouTube”, un recurso que podría resultar de gran ayuda para quienes estén interesados o involucrados en la enseñanza de historia norteamericana.  Publicado por OnlineSchool.com, 100 Great Moments in American History You Can Catch on YouTube es una lista de vínculos a  cien vídeos procedentes de YouTube relacionados al desarrollo histórico de los Estados Unidos.

La lista que compone 100 Great Moments in American History está subdividida en ocho categorías. La primera es titulada Inauguraciones presidenciales y recoge vídeos de la inauguración de varios presidentes estadounidenses, entre ellos, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon y Barack Obama. Vínculos mundiales, la segunda categoría, recoge vídeos  de eventos de historia norteamericana de trascendencia mundial como el ataque a Pearl Harbor, el caso Watergate y el 11/9. La tercera categoría –Asesinatos históricos–  está dedicada al tema  de los asesinatos políticos y destacan aquí los vídeos relacionados a la muerte de Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Martín Luther King, Robert Kennedy y John Lennon. La cuarta categoría es titulada Discursos históricos y recoge los famosos “fireside chat” de Franklin D. Roosevelt y discursos de Malcom X, Ronald Reagan y George W. Bush, entre otros. La quinta categoría es titulada Momentos fuera de este mundo y agrupa vídeos asociados a la carrera espacial (el lanzamiento del Sputnik, el alunizaje, el desastre del transbordador Challenger, etc.). La sexta categoría  nos lleva al mundo cultural, pues agrupa vídeos relacionados a la historia musical estadounidense como la llegada de los Beatles a los Estados Unidos, Woodstock, las presentaciones de los Jackson 5 y los conciertos de Black Sabbath. La penúltima categoría atiende un elemento muy importante de la cultura norteamericana: los deportes. Aquí encontramos vídeos de la pelea de Cassius Clay y Sonny Liston, la victoria del equipo de hockey norteamericano sobre el soviético en las Olimpiadas de  Invierno de 1980 y la participación de Michael Phelps en las Olimpiadas de 2008. La última categoría –Momentos televisivos– agrupa vídeos relacionados con la historia de la televisión estadounidense: I Love Lucy, Star Trek, Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show, MTV,  The O´Reilly Factor, Survivors, etc.

A pesar de que la selección de algunos vídeos podría ser cuestionada, 100 Great Moments in American History You Can Catch on YouTube constituye una herramienta útil para la enseñanza y el estudio de la historia de los Estados Unidos.

Norberto Barreto Velázquez,

Lima, Perú, 29 de noviembre de 2009