As we endure our worst president ever I’m into remembering some of the greats who guided the nation. George Marshall led the unprecedented rebuilding of our former enemies, was too modest to run for office and deserves more credit for winning World War II than he ever got or wanted.
“Go right straight down the road, to do what is best, and do it frankly and without evasion.” – – George Marshall
I invite you to raise up others who helped make our country what it is.
“I invite you to raise up others who helped make our country what it is.”
some who have helped point the way:
Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Pelosi…..
There is something nice about Biden considering a republican veep on the ticket. Nice for some alternative universe. Nice for someone who is a republican. His team should have prepped him to instantly respond to the question with “I would never consider anyone who is not a member of the Democratic Party”. It should be a strong and immediate response. No hesitation.
Unfortunately for Uncle Joe, he is caught up in another cycle of “What He Meant Was”. It is a major negative that others are required to explain his humor, sarcasm, or misunderstood quotes.
U.S. embassy in Mideast deja vu all over again
wapo:
BAGHDAD — Hundreds of angry supporters of an Iranian-backed militia shouting “Death to America” attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on Tuesday, trapping diplomats inside in response to U.S. airstrikes that killed or wounded scores of militia fighters.
President Trump responded angrily Tuesday to the protesters’ action, charging that Iran was behind a deadly militia attack that led to the airstrikes and blaming Tehran for the embassy siege.
“Iran killed an American contractor, wounding many,” Trump tweeted from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “We strongly responded, and always will. Now Iran is orchestrating an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq. They will be held fully responsible. In addition, we expect Iraq to use its forces to protect the Embassy, and so notified!”
A spokesman for the Kataib Hezbollah militia said the demonstrators intend to besiege the embassy until the facility shuts down and U.S. diplomats leave Iraq.
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more from wapo story:
But the angry demonstrators defied appeals delivered over loudspeakers by the group’s leaders not to enter the embassy and smashed their way into one of the facility’s reception areas, breaking down fortified doors and bulletproof glass and setting fire to the room.
American guards inside the embassy fired tear gas to keep the militia supporters at bay. U.S. troops could be seen nearby and on rooftops, their weapons drawn, but they did not open fire. Embassy civil defense workers just inside the gates attempted to put out the fires with water hoses.
The protesters also smashed security cameras, set two guardrooms ablaze and burned tires. They made a bonfire out of a pile of papers and military MREs (meals ready to eat) found in the reception area, where guards normally search visitors. Kataib Hezbollah flags were draped over the barbed wire protecting the embassy’s high walls.
The embassy’s sirens wailed continually as dense black smoke billowed into the air.
Iraqi security forces, who had initially made no attempt to prevent the demonstrators from attacking the embassy, took steps to prevent them going farther inside the facility only after an Iraqi army commander arrived and ordered them to do so. By early afternoon, the Iraqi security forces had formed a buffer between the demonstrators and the embassy guards.
The embassy compound lies inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, which is normally off limits to ordinary people. But earlier in the morning, thousands of people walked unimpeded into the zone to join the demonstrations, as many Iraqi security forces simply mingled with the crowd.
Their chants of “Death to America” carried echoes of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, when Iranian students seized control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and detained American diplomats and other personnel there for 444 days.
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Sometimes Twitter gets very weird. You don’t know whether or not one of our lurkers lifted a quote or great minds had a similar thought. I typed the bit above here about Biden and less than four minutes later read the following on Twitter
not a good day to be at any u.s. embassy today. this latest is ominous to say the least and could easily spread beyond Iraq.
craig, were you at WH during the irani hostage taking in ’79? you can imagine the chaos this morning at today’s WH and for the DOD & DOS staff.
meanwhile, the twit tweets on like a deranged nero fiddling whilst the fires rage.
Even with the fires: Happy New Year Australia
Patd, the Shah was still barely hanging on when I was there. In fact got my first taste of tear gas thanks to him, when he visited the South Lawn and the WH was surrounded by protesters.
Abraham Levitt, the “inventor” of tract housing.
jaime44 – It is possible that someone looked at that and decided it was good stuff. I have felt the same a couple of times, not on Twitter though. I could see someone using an application or bot to pull in references to “Uncle Joe” anywhere they appear.
bink, mr. levitt’s “invention” and the unforeseen consequences
Speaking of Levittown and its attendant rampifotations
bet becky & chuck still wasted money on the requisite gown, rented tux and outrageously expensive reception
the hill:
A British Supreme Court decision allowing heterosexual couples to enter a civil partnership rather than a marriage took effect Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan, whose legal challenge led to the ruling last year, were among the first couples to make their partnership official under the ruling, according to the AP.
Steinfeld, who formed the partnership at central London’s Kensington and Chelsea Register Office, said the moment she and Keidan made their partnership official was “a unique, special and personal moment for us” that had been “rooted in our desire to formalize our relationship in a more modern way, focus on equality and mutual respect,” according to the AP.
Under the Supreme Court ruling, the civil partnerships grant heterosexual couples similar benefits as marriage such as exemption from inheritance taxes and joint parental responsibility for children, and will likely appeal to couples who want a union without a religious aspect. Same-sex couples have had the right to such partnerships in the U.K. since 2005, according to the AP.
Same-sex couples have had equal marriage rights in England, Scotland and Wales since 2014 and will have them in Northern Ireland beginning in early 2020, according to the AP.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/31/couple-who-won-battle-to-open-up-civil-unions-register-partnership
Nope, patd, they wore street clothes.
I’d like to name the firsts in space exploration.
Alan Shepard… first space flight
John Glenn… first to orbit the earth
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin… first to walk on the moon
While I often enjoyed the leftist folk singer music, I am often amused with songs like “little boxes” which helped express the ideas of their rich patrons all the time the singers were pretending to be for the common man.
I guess all those post WWII families were supposed to stack themselves up in apartment buildings and slums.
Jack
Did a “leftist” poop on your lawn or something, recently?
Your comments just make me laugh because you’re a sweet man who is more concerned with caring for loved ones, cultivating beauty and making a positive difference in your community especially for disadvantaged children of color than chasing personal wealth- in this culture, that makes you a “leftist”, and i’m glad for it!
Well, I’ve always thought state sanctioned civil partnerships was the only way the state could officially sanction marriage, as marriage is so entangled with religion.
But when it come to religion, I’m mostly neutral. My attitude toward church is much the same as my attitude about pickleball bars. I know people go out and get drunk while playing pickleball, I just don’t understand why.
But, when looking for supplemental medicare insurance the cheapest option only sold insurance to Christians. So, WTF if it saves me a hundred bucks, yeah I’m a Christian. If you want to convert me offer me a better deal.
Jack
All the time Bink, all the time. It is the hazard of living in a poor neighborhood.
Jack
But we are skilled at taking shit and growing flowers
Jack
Bink… I thought the same thing when reading Jack’s comment about Little Boxes. But then… I thought of one of my all-time favorite movies… It’s A Wonderful Life. Just saw it for the umpteenth time this past Xmas Eve. He has a point. Remember the speech that George Bailey gives the board of directors as they are voting on whether to keep the Bailey’s Savings and Loan open after the death of George’s father. He talks about how long it takes a working man to save $5000… and don’t they deserve the dignity of their own home… and how it makes them better customers for all the business people in town. Those “little boxes” could be Bailey Park.
Omg and now you’re colloquially expressing Buddhist philosophy!
Yeah, that is my favorite movie of all time, RR- a true masterpiece.
I wasn’t making a value-judgment on tract-housing: people sure seem to like it. It’s not environmentally sustainable and is poisoning our air and waterways, though. Alternatively, it provides high-quality homes that are less poisonous, individually, than those arsenic and lead-lined tinderboxes of the early 20th century.
Good original post, Mr. C.
Happy New Year, all.
tent cities, trailer parks, tenements, levittowns, high density cities have a lot in common – mainly too many people living in too small an area to support them. however, through rigid rules and strict adherence to duties and responsibilities individuals in similar conditions can thrive successfully – for instance, anthills, bee hives…
always thought the better alternative to mass housing was sherman’s promise after the civil war (that was never kept) of 40 acres and a mule to each family unit.
it (or should I say sh*t) begins
WASHINGTON, Dec 31 (Reuters) – The United States is expected to temporarily send additional Marines to its embassy in Baghdad following violent demonstrations outside the compound, U.S. officials told Reuters on Tuesday.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it would be a small number and would be coming from the region.
Protesters and militia fighters enraged by American air strikes on Iraq staged a violent demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, torching a security post and hurling stones as security forces and embassy guards hit back with stun grenades and tear gas.
Doesn’t matter, in the end it’s just garbage and sewage. My cheery thought for the new year.
I getting ready to write a “success story”. Success stories are little positive pieces where, if you do them right, you give your “patron” donor a feel good connection to the recipient of his largest. It also gives me a chance to nudge those folks in a direction to better serve our neighborhood.
Right now I’m playing with buzz words. One that is popular is “generational wealth”. In our world tract housing allowed those young families to own a piece of property and build their wealth. To educate their children and watch them do better then they did.
In some ways we are a victim of our success. For old working class neighborhoods you find that those with “get up and go” got up and went. So we have a large proportion of the population who don’t have either the ability or skills to be property owners. (I’m not talking about my immigrant neighbors here, different population different problem) How do we help these people build generational wealth? An interesting question. I’m not sure of the solution but I do suspect there is no one big ” solution ”
Enough on that,
Jack
Levitt an interesting choice, Bink. Maybe some downsides but his idea put the American Dream of your own home within reach of many who might not have been able to afford it.
Yes, RR, just about any astronaut is worthy. And PatD, glad you brought some women into the mix.
Accompanied a friend to a county-wide garbage dump last fall. Truck and trailer, my first time there. There was a mountain and it was a very large mountain of garbage and spreading from it were foothills of more garbage being shoved around by massive bulldozers. The smell was like straight from the bathrooms in the worst filling-station bathroom you’ve ever encountered times 10. It was, in a word, horrid. I have a friend who travels over the country servicing boilers at govt and other installations. When I mentioned having gone to that dump for the first time, he launched into a tirade about all the notorious garbage dumps like it all around the country.
BTW, on the subject of the day.
The Marshall plan and the ideas behind it are a great success story. And I’m not certain it gets told often enough. Right now we seem to be determined to undo all that those folks accomplished *sigh*
Jack
Well Sturge, I’ve seen a few of those mountains and contributed my share to them. A 1000 yrs from now what will the folks think of our middens pile?
Jack
Oh, how about Anita Hill, for helping to shift cultural mores towards more frank and public expression of sexual abuse and harassment?
Today’s “#metoo” movement has roots in her testimony, and possibly all of our workplaces’ contemporary sexual-harassment standards, which help foster a more equitable and productive business environment.
Global population in 1950: 2.5 Billion
Thanks to medical and technological advances: Global population in 2020: 7.6 Billion
We can no longer kill off enough people with disease and war to keep the garbage from growing exponentially.
AI is wiping out employment. Refugees are mounting. Animal habitat is shrinking as we kill off more and more species.
Basically the human race at the top of the food chain ladder is destroying the ladder. At some point either nature or something nuclear will solve the problem unless we figure out how to count backwards in a great big hurry because human beings are tribal and the tribes are getting way too close together.
Geeez Jamie… talk about a party pooper.
Well… with that…. I’ll just bid you all a Happy New Year!
Sorry Renee,
The posts about the mounting trash got to me. All the racists crawling out from under their rocks are getting to me as well. It makes me grouchy. I’ll go drink some champagne and ignore it all for a while.
If it helps, Berkeley Breathed has done a beautiful version of It’s A Wonderful Life
https://www.facebook.com/berkeleybreathed/
Jack, you nailed my reason for bringing up Marshall. Of all Trump’s disasters one of the worst is trying to dismantle our role in Europe begun by Marshall to thwart Russia.
Jamie
Yet there has never, in all of history, been a better time to be born. A child born today has a better chance to live to old age, acquire wealth and make a positive contribution to the world, than any child born at anytime in history. All of your pessimistic problems are trending downward.
Simple fact, the pessimists have been consistently wrong all my life. Also, I see no evidence that they aren’t wrong now.
When I visited my sister the other day we finally went through the boxes of pictures my mother left behind. 4 generations of pictures going back to shortly after the civil war. What the pictures drove home was how tough life was back in “the good old days”, Their best Sunday, take a picture dress up, wasn’t much. The things they were proud of look pretty pitiful from the 100 years later perspective. Life was hard.
Jack
BTW there were a lot of pictures of cars, those folks were proud of their cars. obviously if they had a car they were somebody.
Jack
intriguing discussion of glass half full half empty when the contents of the glass may be of questionable quality nevermind the quantity.
Be careful out there tonight. It’s amateur night!
Jack
I know full well that all of the advances have made life better in a physical sense. My great grandmother had 13 children and 9 of them got to adulthood. My grandmother had nine children and 8 of them got to adulthood. All of my cousins are healthy without a loss in the bunch.
What I’m saying is that the sheer level of population means that there is no longer any place on the planet that you can’t find human garbage as the levels of clean air and water diminish. The sheer weight of numbers are increasing the levels of terrorism globally.
The developed nations are holding their own thanks to wealth, but it’s getting dicey for all of them due to refugees and terrorism.
Bird young don’t do well when their parents feed them plastic and cigarette butts
happy Hogmanay, jamie!
wiki:
Hogmanay (Scots: [ˌhɔɡməˈneː];[1] English: /ˌhɒɡməˈneɪ/ HOG-mə-NAY[2]) is the Scots word for the last day of the year and is synonymous with the celebration of the New Year (Gregorian calendar) in the Scottish manner. It is normally followed by further celebration on the morning of New Year’s Day (1 January) or, in some cases, 2 January—a Scottish bank holiday.
The origins of Hogmanay are unclear, but it may be derived from Norse and Gaelic observances. Customs vary throughout Scotland, and usually include gift-giving and visiting the homes of friends and neighbours, with special attention given to the first-foot, the first guest of the new year.
[continues]
happy new decade, trail mixers!!!
If the HIV epidemic had hit 15 years earlier, we probably would have topped out at 4-5 billion and then subsided.
Only nuns, lesbians and a few male CPAs would be left. Scientists (women) would be frantically seeking the secret to parthenogenesis, because the only alternative to keep the human race going would be, ugh, those CPAs.
Within two generations uninfected males would be raised as drones. Losers of the Global Lottery would be forced to bear CPA-derived offspring.
Eventually the planet would heal itself, but not before all the birds, whales and sharks had succumbed to plastic gastric ulcers. On the good side : no more bird flu.
In my youth we had party lines. Today we have tweeting, etc. Nothing has changed.
It’s my recollection that FDR, recognizing the competition between his senior generals, awarded General of the Army Marshall his 5th star shortly before awarding the equivalent rank to our other most important military leaders. By doing that, his position as the nation’s most senior military decision maker was ratified by military custom and he was unambiguously in-charge of the likes of MacArthur.
patd
Remember you need a “first footer” dark haired man to knock on your door carrying coal, bread, and a wee dram of the good stuff and a coin.
http://jdurward.blogspot.com/2009/12/for-midnight-1231.html?m=0
XR
HIV cost us a generation of incredible talent as well as just normal wonderful human beings.
Ms Pat,
Thanks for the John Held, Jr Roaring 20s dancers. Held has been on my mind lately.
I haven’t a clue why.
The Petting Green
Don’t you love those ‘Oxford’ trousers ?
Just coming up for air for a few minutes. Joe could have said something like “I’d consider a repug for Veep, but the only repugs who will be at the Dem convention are RW media types and they ain’t gonna be anyone I would consider, so it’ll be a democrat” because that’s what’s going to happen. He’s specified that he’d like to have someone of color and/or a female in the veep spot if he’s nominated, naming specifically Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren as two he’s considered. So let’s not make a bigger deal of this than it is, shall we?
I lived in a WWII tract home for a while when I was in grad school – small but pleasant – better feeling than the somewhat upscale apartment I lived in before that IMHO.
Well, I’m headed home soon to avoid being on the road with people who think they drive better after having a few.
And SFB’s Iraq stupidity – godwhatanidiot.
Happy New Year to all.
We lost good friends.
If Biden promises Sen collins a spot on his ticket if she’ll author two resolutions :
1. to replace Moscow mitch with willard rmoney as Speaker; 2. to have an anonymous vote on trump’s guilt,
would it be illegal, or would it just be normal political maneuvering ? Would it be illegal to offer lisa murkowski the next spreamcort appointment, if she goes along with these maneuvers ?
That’d leave trump’s removal up to pence . . . .
snicker
If mrs pence had to choose between being the first lady or flushing trump down to hell, which do you think she’d demand ?
snicker, gufFAW !
Just to kick off the new year on a good note, we still have Willie. Pick A Year/
1961
1997
Happy New Year y’all!
This is one of the weirder ones. No dancing this night. Bed is sleeping in a recliner.
Full video, including the nice 45# piece of steel which did the damage. At least it is not damaged.
OW!
Ms Bronc,
I second Ms Jamie’s OW !
Nice boot BB. Got a pair of em?
NY minus 2.5 hrs. here. No fireworks yet- or gunshots into the air. Thassa good thing here. Dog isn’t freaking the fuck out … yet. But it’s early.
🕛🎊🎉😉
!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR 2020 !!!
Best wishes to all, except ….
[That’s SFB behind bars]
Happy New Year
BB, silver lining is that your poor foot wasn’t hit by the pointy end of that 45# steel thingy. hope you keep off it and elevated as much as possible. have a speedy recovery.
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