News
11 November 2008
A POTUS And FLOTUS By Any Other Name
In the days before communications could be encrypted, code names were required to provide at least a minimal mask for the identity of the POTUS and FLOTUS and members of the first families. Now they're mostly an anachronistic habit with no serious security function...
HAPPY 233rd
20 Years Ago: The Wind Of Change
Twenty years ago today ---9 November 1989--- the German Democratic Republic finally read the writing on the wall (literally and figuratively) and announced that open travel would be permitted between East and West Berlin and East and West Germany. This was the...
Last Press Conference/First Press Conference
I found it fascinating that on the 46th anniversary of RNs "last press conference", the Governor of Alaska gave her first national press conference without handlers. Something else that I found interesting was that while both press conferences protrayed the...
A White House Butler Remembers
Today's Washington Post has a front-page feature by Wil Haygood, the biographer of Sammy Davis Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell, which tells the story of Eugene Allen, an octogenarian resident of Northwest DC who, from 1952 to his retirement in 1986, was a butler at the...
MoreOftheSame.gov
Critics accused the Old Man of sometimes using government resources for political purposes. The practice did not exactly start in 1969, nor did it end in 1974. The President-elect has now taken it into the Internet Age. His official transition website (change.gov)...
1968: Lyndon, Dick, and Billy
Forty years ago, in the wake of the hard-fought 1968 presidential election, the nation faced what many assumed would be a turbulent transition. But it did not turn out that way. Whatever happened later, the country moved from what had been the one of the most divisive...
No More Calls Please — We Have A Winner
After a great deal of discussion and speculation, we finally have the answer: Barack Obama is the New Nixon. The clincher? I'll let Anthony Holden tell you in his own words from today's Daily Beast: Among the countless blessings conferred by the election of Barack...
Newsprint’s Last Hurrah?
It's hardly news that print media has been in steady decline ever since the moment that the ball came down in Times Square on December 31, 1999, and the world realized that these newfangled computers were not going to all crash and were here to stay. This morning,...