News
Radicals And Redhots
Today, as he does every day, Jonathan Movroydis has found and linked many of the most interesting journalism of the last 24 hours. Among them is Camile Paglia's monthly column in Salon. As usual, this is an omnibus affair covering a variety of topics and a multitude...
Armistice Day Plus 90
Orange High School Concert Choir at Veteran's Day ceremonies at the Nixon Library Today, Veterans Day, was originally established as a holiday to mark the day that World War I ended and, until 1954, went by the name Armistice Day. Ninety years have passed since...
Art Imitates Life
In honor of Veterans Day, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott devotes this week's "Critic's Choice" to Franklin N. Schaffner's 1970 masterpiece Patton. The film won seven Academy Awards --- including the Best Actor Oscar for George C. Scott. The canard widespread...
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)...