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George H.W. Bush and the Imagined Moderate Republicanism of 1989

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By Erik Loomis / Lawyers, Guns & Money

We are going to see a lot of liberal lament for Bush now that he is gone. Heck, we even see that for his terrible son now that Trump is president.

But let’s not forget that Bush Sr was part and parcel of the move of the Republican Party to the right. His actions were not as extreme as that of his son or Trump, but they helped pave the way for what is today an undemocratic party flirting with fascism.

I don’t find Bush a despicable or contemptuous figure, but there’s a lot unsavory aspects to the man and his policies that need to be remembered as so many liberals long for the Republican Party where Lee Atwater could race bait Bush into the White House.   [Read more…]

Visiting North Sentinel – An Island Untouched For 55,000 Years | More Video Worth Watching

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And here’s something for the weird and wonderful category. There are, indeed, still places on this planet that have little or no contact with the rest of the world. Here’s a brief look at the history of one of those places: North Sentinel Island. It has a reputation for being the “most dangerous” island in the world. After watching this video, you should get a sense of how it has earned that reputation. (h/t to Annie L.)   [Read more…]

Swimming With The Sharks: Or, Crime Does Pay (Big) in New York’s Gilded Age | Part II

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By Mel Freilicher

Some of Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum’s “little chicks,” as she called her pack of master criminals, cultivated after the Civil War, were themselves declasse bluebloods, like Charlie Bullard, boarding school educated and classically trained, with ancestors reaching back to the Mayflower. With long, nimble fingers, ”Piano Charlie” played the instrument like a professional, was an expert safecracker, and one of the city’s most skilled and daring burglars.

The invaluable Bullard entertained her dinner guests, playing anything from Beethoven’s “Sonata in C sharp minor” to the popular “Little Brown Jug” on the white baby grand that adorned Marm’s extravagant dining room. His skills as a butcher also provided the finest cuts of meat for her dinner parties.   [Read more…]

Swimming With The Sharks: Or, Crime Does Pay (Big) in New York’s Gilded Age | Part I

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By Mel Freilicher

As the city’s premier fence, Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, a German-Jewish immigrant, accumulated more money and power than any woman in the Gilded Age, inconceivable for any woman engaged in legitimate business. A July 1884 New York Times article called her “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City.”

Her quite infamous career began as purveyor of stolen wares to dry goods merchants, legitimate commercial establishments, and many individuals, some in the underworld: first as a pushcart peddler, then out of a storefront on the lower east side, connected to a warehouse chock full of purloined merchandise of all kinds. It’s believed she herself never stole anything, but worked strictly as a fence.   [Read more…]

The True Origins of Black Friday | Video Worth Watching

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From the Now This website:

Black Friday used to be a term to describe pedestrian and car traffic In the 1950s, police in Philadelphia always saw a ton of chaos the day after Thanksgiving Hordes of people would head into the city that Friday ahead of the huge Army-Navy football game held annually on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Philly police called that chaos Black Friday. They could never take that day off and worked extra shifts because of how congested it was.

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Thank Abraham Lincoln For Thanksgiving | Video Worth Watching

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From the MSNBC website:

Joy Reid looks back at the 1863 presidential proclamation by Abraham Lincoln that set the last Thursday of November as a day of thanksgiving for citizens in every part of the United States.

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1968 in Black, White, and Gray – Part Two

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For starters the old joke ain’t true. If you remember the ‘60s you actually mighta been there. As far as 1968 by itself goes (as opposed to being short hand for the ‘60s’) except for Tigers fans of a certain age the revolutionary significance of the year has left deeper marks in France than the U.S. While the immediate inspiration for the French students may have been their American counterparts in Berkeley, by the spring of ’68 it really did look like a coalition of students and workers might take down the Fifth Republic. On this side of the pond all the radical movements put together were never even close.
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1968 in Black, White, and Gray – Part One

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Like a kid who pauses halfway up a tree and is surprised to see how far away the ground has gone it’s disconcerting, and 50 years later a little comical, to see childhood memories as bit players in the broader dramas of receding History. Though I’ve never been 61 years old before, I’m assuming these feelings of vertigo and bemusement are perennial and widespread among kids who survive long enough to feel them.   [Read more…]

The Ups and The Downs | My Reporter’s Life, Part Three

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By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.

Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.

On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in its approach path to Lindbergh Field, leaving 144 dead, most of them the airliner’s passengers. The first call sent all of us to the east windows of the Copley Building, where we could see the white smoke towering over North Park.

I forced myself to ask to go to the scene but the city editor told me to stay and take the reports from the staff sent to the scene, the two of them so horrified I recommended they do what I’d done at less bloody scenes: locate the fireman in a yellow hazard suit or a plainclothes suit and walk toward either or both, looking neither left nor right. They’d have the answers.   [Read more…]

Some Big Developments | My Reporter’s Life, Part Two

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I didn’t know that the police beat was one of the tests normally applied to newcomers until the San Diego Evening Tribune editors released me from it after six months and, to my surprise, had me cover the County Board of Supervisors.

Developers had been pumping out two-story stuccoes amidst the chapparaled and original Spanish land grants to the east and the north of the city. The collapse of C. Arnholt Smith’s US National Bank was at this time the largest bank failure in US history, so I was a bit surprised to be assigned to cover the Board of Supervisors; after having been in town only 12 months or so I figured I didn’t know f-all about the county.

The Union had a former Associated Press guy covering the Supervisors, a veteran not easily excited or cowed by the job, and he helped me out, as if I were his kid brother, maybe 15 years younger.

Don’t worry, he’d tell me, nothing really happens here. You’ll be fine. Something like that.   [Read more…]

Pain and Suffering at the SDPD | My Reporter’s Life, Part One

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I worked for the San Diego Evening Tribune for approximately eight years and 11 months.  I was just 13 months short of being vested in the retirement program when I quit. That’s okay.  

If I’d stayed on at the paper I might have gone fully crazy.  

I was 28 when the Trib hired me out of a small-town daily in New Jersey’s rural northwest. I think somewhere I still have a picture of myself at the Sussex County Fair — taken by the staff photographer who’d accompanied me — as I tried to milk a Holstein. Standard stuff for small-town dailies back then.

I asked the wise guy Italian Assistant Managing Editor named Larry Lusitana why he’d hired me, and he said: “We’ve had good luck with people from New Jersey.”  It was only after I’d left the paper that I found out Lusitana was from that state.   [Read more…]

Memories of a Doctor on the ‘Front Lines’ During Chicago 1968

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By Jeoffry B. Gordon, M.D. / OB Rag

Fifty years ago this week, I was in Chitown.

Having just finished my medical internship and working several years with the famous pediatrician Dr. Ben Spock on anti-war issues, I was in a white coat among the checkered blue caped and the robins-egg blue-helmeted police and real people.

I will never forget walking along the lines of scared, sweating teenage national guardsmen with fixed bayonets, trying to calm them down by talking about how we were all brothers, and now remembering Kent State – I think, Thank God, there was never a charge by them.   [Read more…]

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