Puts my mind “goin’ through some changes.”
Buddy Miles, the rock and R&B drummer, singer and songwriter whose eclectic career included stints playing with Jimi Hendrix <…> has died. He was 60.
Rest in peace.
For those who might be wondering what exactly happened with John McCain and the Keating Five, this Boston Globe article is for you. Or perhaps you would just like to stroll down memory lane. [via MicCheck]
Amid McCain’s new status, old scandals stir Critics wonder what he learned from Keating 5 [Boston Globe]
“I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage,” said [former senior federal savings and loan regulator William K.] Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln’s bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.
The story of how the “Keating Five” senators allegedly pressured regulators to lay off a failing Arizona S&L became a major scandal, and marked a turning point in McCain’s life - the near-death of his political career followed by his eventual rebirth as a crusader for campaign finance reform.
The events of 1987, when McCain met with regulators, and 1991, when the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he used “poor judgment” in the matter, are only dimly remembered by many.
But McCain’s emergence as the likely GOP nominee, combined with the rising volume of anti- lobbying rhetoric in the presidential campaign, has brought renewed attention to the Keating Five case, prompting questions about what McCain learned from it, what he’s accepted was wrong, and whether he now is stepping back from some of his own scrutiny of his past errors.
William F. Buckley was emblematic and iconic for the non-wild eyed and spittle flecked faction of the Right wing for nearly 50 years. He was usually the height of lucidity, regardless of whether or not you agreed with him, and he was arguably a giant.. Firing Line became a joke after he departed. Political discourse in general from the Right has.
William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82 [NY Times]
William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,” Mr. Buckley said.
Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, “National Review.”
He also found time to write at least 55 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and to edit five more. His political novel “The Rake” was published last August, and a book looking back at the National Review’s history in November; a personal memoir of Barry Goldwater is due to be publication in April, and Mr. Buckley was working on a similar book about Ronald Reagan for release in the fall.
The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed him “the scourge of liberalism.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — “without the wrapper.”
“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.
“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
William F. Buckley Jr. Dies at 82 [AP]
William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.
Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of Firing Line, harpsichordist, transoceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor’s race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.
Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent’s discomfort with wide-eyed glee.
“I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. “I asked myself the other day, ‘Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.” <…>
Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down Firing Line after a 23-year run of guests ranging from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. “You’ve got to end sometime and I’d just as soon not die onstage,” he told the audience. <&133;>
Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it.” Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft.
Well, crap. I liked No Depression. I was not aware of the effects of last year’s 2nd Class postage hike. [Ward Berlin via Rafé]
NO DEPRESSION MAGAZINE TO CEASE PUBLISHING AFTER MAY-JUNE ISSUE
No Depression, the bimonthly magazine covering a broad range of American roots music since 1995, will bring to an end its print publication with its 75th issue in May-June 2008. [more]
Just a few things, noted at The History Channel.
1815
Napoleon escapes from Elba.1848
Marx and Engels publish A Communist Manifesto.1919
The Grand Canyon was designated a national park under President Woodrow Wilson.1929
The Grand Tetons were designated a national park under President Calvin Coolidge.1970
National Public Radio incorporates as a non-profit corporation.1991
The first web browser is introduced.1993
The World Trade Center is bombed, killing 6 and injuring over a thousand people.
Here is the Sunday article from the Las Vegas Sun concerning our non-convention convention.
Convention ends in chaos, so Dems need a do-over [LV Sun]
The Clark County Democratic Convention turned into a fiasco Saturday, with a host of problems that were entirely predictable but blithely ignored by county party leadership.
The convention was supposed to elect delegates to this spring’s state convention in Reno, where delegates will be selected for the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Instead, county party leaders, with the annoyed assent of the campaigns of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, suspended voting and moved to reconvene at some future date to vote on state delegates, who will ultimately determine whether Obama or Clinton wins a majority of Nevada’s 25 pledged delegates at the national convention.
Although more than 7,000 delegates to the county convention had been elected at the Jan. 19 caucuses, the county party booked a room at Bally’s with a capacity of 5,000.
Few people expected the 7,000 elected delegates to show, but it was entirely unsurprising that the Clinton and Obama campaigns, locked in a tight delegate battle that could go all the way to the national convention, would call their supporters and tell them to show up at Bally’s so they could be alternates to replace the no-shows.
Sure enough, that’s what happened. There were 6,000 people in the hall when the fire marshal intervened, and Bally’s management estimated 4,000 people in the hallway outside. <…>
Erin Bilbray-Kohn, a spokeswoman for the county party, tried to put a good face on the event, marveling at the massive turnout. She said the was organized by volunteers who’d worked their hearts out and didn’t deserve to be castigated with mean-spirited attacks.
Still, state party officials fumed, having tried to persuade Clark County Democratic Chairman John Hunt to postpone the county convention to ensure it was well organized. He refused.
The Democratic National Committee, monitoring Saturday’s convention, called state party officials and told them to get county leadership to clean up the process or risk losing delegates to the national convention.
The campaigns and influential Democrats not affiliated with the county party were furious.
“This is a disgrace,” said D. Taylor, head of the Culinary Union, which endorsed Obama and had a few hundred delegates at the convention. Taylor said many Culinary shift workers had to leave and so didn’t get their votes counted.
“There should not be a disconnect between the Democratic Party and competency,” Taylor said.
State Sen. Dina Titus, a co-chairwoman of Clinton’s Nevada campaign, fielded complaints outside the convention ballroom, which she said reinforced the need for legislation she has introduced to switch the state to a primary nominating contest. That would preclude the need for using conventions to select delegates because delegates would be chosen simply and automatically based on a proportion of votes won in the election.
Delegates were irate. [</understatement> Heh! –ed.]
And we have a do-over “not be less than 30 days prior to the State Convention and at least two weeks from February 23, 2008.”
The website for the Clark County Democratic Convention is back to its base template as I’m sure they plan how they’re going to address this.
Our local Las Vegas Gleaner weighs in as well.
Outside of casino operations and a very few elected and civic folk, local, county and state officials seem to want to run things as though it were still 1952 and there are only about 20,000 people in Las Vegas and maybe 50,000 statewide. Meanwhile, we’ve got > 2.3 Million people in the Las Vegas Metro area alone. No wonder things have been and will remain broken until the Clue Stick gets used some more..
Well, I guess it did get worse. It’s kind of hard to imagine screwing up a large get together this royally in a town where large meetings are their bread and butter. Unless you’re like, idiots or something.
Democrats do indeed suspend convention [LV Sun 4:59 PM]
The Clark County convention wrapped around 4 p.m., after supporters from both campaigns voted to suspend the presidential delegate vote.
When convention chair Bill Stanley initially moved to suspend voting earlier in the afternoon, the assembled delegates revolted and voted the motion down. The campaigns then met with supporters in separate rooms to explain why suspending the vote was necessary.
The lights are up, the balloons are coming down and a horde of angry Democrats have left the building. The Sunday Sun will tell you what went wrong.
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