Have you been watching Ken Burns documentary War on public television? He’s done a great job of making the program interesting as well as informative and it’s a pleasure not to have to endure commercials. How horrible war really is and how real World War II was to me even though I was child. We lived through World War II. I remember the Sunday when Pearl Harbor was bombed and what I was doing. I was six years old and…
Paul Terhorst has written an interesting article in International Living magazine in which he discusses what people have done with their riches. He discusses Henry Ford, who at forty years of age, located eleven investors to bankroll the Ford Motor Company with an original total $28,000 investment. One of them, a lawyer named John Wendell Anderson, wrote his physician father asking to borrow $5000 to invest in the company. Having secured the loan from his reluctant father he invested in…
Arianna Huffington has written in her blog about Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The rise of Disaster Capitalism, compares it to Alan Greenspan’s book, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World. Huffington joins the many other critics of Greenspan’s spin of history in order to cover his compliancy in the disastrous Bush economic policies. She refers to his book tour as the "Greenspan embarrassment tour" and goes on to say: "Greenspan’s book is another in the…
Carl Muecke (pronounced Mick-ee) died this week in Flagstaff, Arizona. He was 89 years old and a retired federal district court judge. He had been born to German immigrants in New York and had worked in the Roosevelt WPA before he joined the marine corps. As a result of his experiences in the war and his background, he became a strong civil libertarian. After his discharge he moved to Phoenix to work as a newspaper reporter. When the paper folded…
I saw a tee shirt I thought I should buy for myself. It read: "To err is human..To forgive is Devine…Neither are my policy." There were two letters to the National Catholic Reporter by women that were responding to an article about women in the Catholic Church. One referred to the "stained glass ceiling" in talking about the Catholic church and its policies against women. Another letter to the editor expressed the complaint: "…the Church, …endlessly preaches about abortion and…
Mark Frost has written a national best seller, a true story, The Greatest Game Ever Played. The book was also made into a motion picture. It’s the true story about the 1913 U.S. Open when a twenty year old amateur player defeated the U.S. Open champion, Harry Vardon. The book has been described by Travel & Leisure Golf Magazine as "one of the best golf books ever written." I enjoyed the movie, but the book is very superior to the…
I admire Arianna Huffington’s clarity of expression, use of apt metaphors and her ability to go to the heart of issues. In her latest blog entry she discusses the ad Moveon.org ran about the testimony of General Petraeus regarding Iraq. The ad spells out clearly the concealment of facts and the false representations made at the time of his testimony. As a result, Rudy Giuliani was up in arms for "character assassination on an American general who is putting his…
Terry Gross has been the host of the NPR program Fresh Air for a long time. She conducts interviews and has conversations with writers, actors, musicians and artist’s. She collected her most interesting interviews in a book she titled All I Did Was Ask. It is an entertaining summary of conversations with people over the years of her radio work which I enjoyed reading. When she interviewed the actor Michael Caine he said some things I thought were informative. I…
Jane Wyman died last Monday. She was 93 years old. She was married to Ronald Regan in 1940 and they later divorced, which explains the bumper sticker during Regan’s campaign for the presidency: "Jane Wyman was right." What I admired about her was her refusal to say anything negative about Regan with the media after he was in politics. She was quoted as saying "…It’s bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives… Also, I don’t know a damn thing…
I’ve written before about this administration’s dishonest use of doublespeak in order to give information in a false manner.(See posts of 11/29/06 & 1/13/07) Their use of political framing, with the advice of Karl Rove and Frank Luntz, is best illustrated by the infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner following our invasion of Iraq. Now General Petraeus has coined the word "ethnosectarian" instead of "civil war"to put the reality of civil war deaths in Iraq in a false light. The reality is…
