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November 14, 2015
On all Humanity: Pluralist Paris, November 13, 2015.
Our best thoughts tonight with all those who live/work/play in Planet Earth's hands-down best city. One hundred and forty nine dead when I last looked up at the news at 2:30 am Paris time. Look, President Obama is not my favorite president. As an internationalist American president, however, he has had no peer, is not likely to ever have one and broke new ground as a transformational global seer. He was right tonight. Modern Paris is a kind of uber-human zoo and living library of old verities and new truths. It picked up and stood sentry over everything fine and good to be salvaged from the spirit-shattering middle ages; it keeps adding more. An attack on Paris, the West's best face, and where the entire world reposes mankind's best thoughts, hopes, work and art, is indeed an attack on all humanity. Pierre Rousselin Haywood Wise Richard Nahem Philip Jenkinson. Lucy Andre. Joseph Andre. Hope you guys are okay.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:50 PM | Comments (0)
Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt (1918-2015)
Helmut Schmidt, German father figure and Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, died on November 10. He was 96. Schmidt was a brilliant, rude, savvy far-out mother. RIP, old man. See in this week's The Economist his obituary in Smoke and fire, as only TE can do one. Excerpts:
Helmut Schmidt did not just find fools tiresome. He obliterated them. The facts were clear and the logic impeccable. So disagreement was a sign of idiocy.
He was impatient, too, with his own party, which failed to realise the constraints and dilemmas of power. It wanted him to spend money West Germany did not have, and to compromise with terrorists who belonged in jail. He was impatient with the anti-nuclear left, who failed to realise that nuclear-power stations were safe, and that the Soviet empire thrived on allies’ weakness. And he was impatient with post-Watergate America, which seemed to have lost its will to lead.
In good causes and in bad he was imperious. His addiction to nicotine trumped convention and courtesy. He smoked whenever and wherever he felt like it, even in non-smoking compartments of railway carriages. “Can you ask Mr Schmidt to put his cigarette out?” a passenger asked the conductor. “Would you mind telling him yourself?” came the timid reply.
Yet his brains, eloquence and willpower were unmatched in German politics. They brought him through the Nazi period, thrown out of the Hitler Youth for disloyalty but with an Iron Cross for bravery. He was one-quarter Jewish, which he concealed when he married his wife Loki and needed to prove his Aryan background.
In post-war West Germany he flourished, making a successful career in Hamburg’s city government. By commandeering army units to deal with the floods of 1962 he broke a taboo, and the law, but gaining a deserved reputation as a doer.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2015
November 1993
The Internet now even reaches back and records things like "no comment" I dutifully said to Los Angeles Times reporters 22 years ago covering a U.S. Department of Justice Public Integrity Section investigation of a client the same age as my own father. See "Grand Jury Targets Wife of Former Congressman; Lee M. Anderson is named in court documents revealed during a hearing for an aide to her husband, Glenn M. Anderson".
We represented the congressman's Washington, D.C. Administrative Assistant, Lynn, Massachusetts native Jeremiah Bresnahan. For reasons I never quite understood, Bresnahan, a much-admired, much-loved educator and former Long Beach schools superintendant, agreed to work for Rep. Glenn Anderson in Washington, D.C. for a few years. At the time of the investigation, Rep. Anderson was suffering from dementia and was not of any help to me, the FBI and DOJ lawyers.
Bresnahan died in Martha's Vineyard in October of 2002. An ex-Marine who fought in the Inchon and Chosen Reservoir campaigns of the Korean War, Jeremiah was one of most courageous, unselfish, charismatic, funny, poised and witty humans I've known. While this was a 'good result' for him, I and others hated watching him go through it. I was very fond of him and still miss him. See the LA Times article and read between the lines. A (Yankee) fish out of water. Wrong DC job at the wrong time for the wrong family of California pols.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 09, 2015
395 years
On November 9, 1620, 102 mainly English puritans first caught sight of the shoreline of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, eventually anchoring in the fishhook of Plymouth (later Provincetown) Harbor. The boat called the Mayflower was about 110 feet long and 25 feet across at its widest point. About 25 crew accompanied them. Called Pilgrims, the 102 settlers were from one of the many sects of alienated Protestant "separatists" in England and Europe at the time. However, the Pilgrims were unique in one important respect. They would brook no union of church and state.
Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall (1882)
Posted by JD Hull at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2015
GOP/Dem nightmare as SNL humanizes Donald Trump and Dr. Carson unmasked as ditzed-out old lying turd.
The 2016 presidential election game has changed. Trump might win this thing. With an assist from Larry David mockingly calling Trump a racist on SNL last night, Donald Trump just humanized himself. Nicely done. Not that funny? Not the point, Campers. Plus Dr. Ben Carson's West Point and "growing up angry" revelations paint Carson at best as a kindly, talented and lying ditzed-out old turd. Watch for a huge Trump bump. Is this a great election cycle or what?
Posted by JD Hull at 09:18 AM | Comments (0)