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[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac [PDA]. Items highlighted in blue are of interest to labor in particular and seekers of justice in general. Copyright © 2008 Dennis Myers.]]

UPDATE FRIDAY 8-1-2008, 1:02 p.m. PDT, 20:02 GMT/CUT/SUT —

For Immediate Release
August 1, 2008

For More Information:
Steve Redlinger
(702) 271-5248

Statement from Southern Nevada Building and Construction Trades Council Secretary/Treasurer Steve Ross Regarding the Financial Reorganization of Boyd Gaming’s Echelon Project

Las Vegas, Nevada - Today, Boyd Gaming announced a financial reorganization of Echelon which will have the effect of delaying the construction timeline of the project by about a year. [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Echelon project is a major development at Las Vegas Blvd. South and Convention Center Drive on the site of the venerable Stardust Hotel-Casino which was destroyed to make way for the new resort. The project is about one-quarter complete and will be delayed until at least 2011. Stoppage of the $4.8 billion project may idle as many as 800 skilled construction workers.]

Boyd contacted me to inform me that due to the difficult environment in today's capital markets, as well as weak economic conditions, that they have decided to delay their Echelon project on the Las Vegas Strip. They relayed to me an expectation to resume construction in three to four quarters, assuming credit market conditions and the economic outlook improves.

The credit crisis on Wall Street continues to have devastating ramifications on Main Street. Working families in Southern Nevada are facing the biggest housing crisis in a generation, at the same time that energy and food costs are skyrocketing, and now, thousands of good paying jobs with benefits are in jeopardy.

We will be spending the next couple of weeks looking to find new jobs for displaced workers in Southern Nevada. If any displaced worker has any questions, I urge them to contact their union halls directly, or to call the Southern Nevada Building and Construction Trades Council at (702) 452-8799.

Samuel Adams/August 1, 1776: Driven from every corner of the earth, Freedom of Thought and the Right of Private Judgment in matters of conscience direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum.

On Aug. 1, 1861, at the head of a force of 250 men, Confederate Captain John Baylor defeated a larger union force and took Fort Fillmore in New Mexico Territory, claiming New Mexico south of the 34th parallel, declaring a Confederate Territory of New Mexico and establishing a capital at Mesilla where he governed as military governor; in 1873 in Pioche, Nevada, Morgan Courtney and B.H. Kistle were both killed in separate incidents, with both killers acquitted — even George McKinney, who ambushed Courtney and shot him in the back; in 1876 as the nation celebrated the centennial of the revolution, Colorado was admitted to the union, becoming known as the Centennial State; in 1887, someone upriver from Reno or possibly at Lake Tahoe was changing the flow of the Truckee, undercutting the generation of electric power by the Electic Power Company for Reno; in 1908, Nevada Democratic chair John Considine launched an initiative petition drive to abolish the anti-labor state police; in 1914, four days after Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Europe tumbled into war in an appalling display of power politics that led to a lethel and pointless world war — Germany and Russia declared war on each other, Germany invaded Luxembourg as a first step toward invading France (in a few days France, Belgium and England all added declarations of war against Austria, Hungary and Germany and Germany invaded Belgium); in 1931 in Washington, the U.S. Treasury Department awarded the contract for construction of a federal building in Las Vegas to Plains Construction Company of Pampa, Texas on its bid of $337,000; in 1939, Las Vegas chamber of commerce members were upset to hear rumors that gas station owners in Cedar City, St. George, and Mesquite were issuing "dire warnings" to Las Vegas-bound drivers about the desert heat in order to get them to buy dry ice, water bags, and "cooling machines" for their cars; in 1942, Jerry Garcia was born, in San Francisco, naturally; in 1944, Anne Frank wrote in her diary "[I] keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would like to be, and what I could be, if...there weren't any other people living in the world", after which the diary went silent and she was never heard from again, dying at Bergen-Belsen at age 15; in 1953, U.S. Senator George Malone of Nevada gave President Eisenhower a money clip with a silver dollar stamped at the Carson City Mint in 1890, the year of Eisenhower's birth; in 1960, The Twist by Chubby Checker was released; in 1961, the amusement park Six Flags Over Texas opened in Arlington, Texas; in 1962, President Kennedy urged women to check their medicine cabinets for baby-deforming thalidomide and to turn in any supplies they found, and he urged Congress to enact pending legislation that "will allow for immediate removal from the market of a new drug where there is an immediate hazard to public health"; in 1962, Utah scientist Robert Pendleton charged the Utah Health Department with not acting quickly to prevent distribution of milk tainted by fallout from Nevada atomic testing; in 1964, Vietnam (accurately) accused the U.S. and the Saigon regime of attacking northern coastal and island installations, prompting Vietnam to retaliate on August 2 against the U.S. destroyer Maddox, a retaliation that President Johnson falsely described as a provocation in order to (successfully) obtain authorization for war from Congress; in 1971 in one of the major natural disasters of the 20th century, Vietnam's Red River flooded, killing 100,000 people, a weather event that got little attention because the war prevented its study by world scientists (it is on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration list of the most important 20th century climate events); in 1972, George Bush was suspended from flying by the Texas National Guard for failing to attend a medical exam, much like the rest of his national guard service; in 1973, American Graffiti, a George Lucas movie with an astonishing cast of future stars (Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Cindy Williams, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips, Bo Hopkins, Harrison Ford, Kathleen Quinlan, Terry McGovern, Debralee Scott, Joe Spano, Kay Lenz, Susan Richardson, Suzanne Somers, but not Mark Hamill, who answered a casting call for the film) that had been rejected by 20th Century Fox, Paramount, American International, Columbia and United Artists before Universal accepted it, was released into theatres, going on to earn 90 times its $1,250,000 budget (the original director's version was nearly twice as long as the film released into theatres); in 1995, Westinghouse purchased CBS and the business-friendly Clinton administration raised no antitrust objections; in 1997, Boeing purchased McDonnell-Douglas, a deal the Clinton administration eventually approved (President Clinton threatened trade sanctions against the European Union if it moved against the acquisition — he made clear that he was prepared to put the full weight of the Government behind the Boeing Company's $14 billion takeover of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation," reported The New York Times, something he never did for workers); in 2002, a special session of the Nevada Legislature, called to deal with medical malpractice issues after doctors at a Las Vegas trauma center went on strike, ended at 4:27 in the morning.

UPDATE THURSDAY 7-31-2008, 9:15 p.m. PDT, 04:15 GMT/CUT/SUT August 1, 2008 — On this date in 1684 by some accounts, a conference was held in Albany to negotiate differences between whites and Cayugas, Oniedas, Mohawks and others about white intrusions into Native lands; in 1878, the Sacramento Bee suggested that with the growth of farming along Nevada rivers, "In a few years it may be that Nevada will be independent of California in this line. She can do nothing, of course, without irrigation, but she is bending her energies rapidly in that direction."; in 1905, a "phenomenal find", "easily the richest gold strike ever made in the state of Nevada, and one the story of which reads like a tale of the Arabian nights" was made in Olinghouse canyon; in 1912, unable to stomach the distribution of more films of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson beating white boxers, Congress outlawed the interstate shipment of fight films; in 1915 in Santa Monica, California, police said a son in law of former U.S. Senator John Jones of Nevada, a prominent banker whose name they declined to release, had been threatened by the Black Hand; in 1919, chemist, Italian resistance fighter, Auschwitz prisoner 174517, author, and poet Primo Levi was born in Turin (see below); in 1920, it was reported that the Santa Fe Railroad had applied to railroad commissions in California and Nevada to discontinue service between Goffs, California, and Searchlight, Nevada; in 1922, the Nevada Board of Regents appointed Laura Ambler to be an English instructor, in which position she launched the University of Nevada's first journalism instruction; in 1942, the Japanese, which a year earlier had occupied Indo-China and obtained a lease from the collaborationist colonial Vichy regime for a base at Haiphong, reached agreement with Vichy for additional bases; in 1942, what may well have been the first photograph of Vietnam to appear in a Reno newspaper was printed in the Nevada State Journal, an aerial view of Haiphong where the Japanese were building a base under a lease from the Vichy collaborationist government of France (which had colonized Indo-China); in 1968, The Beatles began three days of work on recording Hey Jude, their first recording at Trident studio; in 1975, former Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa vanished, never to be seen again; in 2002, John Paul II canonized (conferred sainthood on) 16th century Nahuatl farmer Juan Diego, though there is substantial uncertainty about whether Diego ever existed: "Religious and indigenous scholars also reject the existence of Juan Diego, saying the church's official version is not supported by any documentary evidence. According to [Mexican theologian Jorge] Erdely and other experts, the Vatican has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote Juan Diego's canonization in order to preserve the centerpiece of its strategy for the Americas. Though Juan Diego is not the first imaginary person to be made a saint, previous cases date to earlier times when the process of canonization was less strict." (St. Petersburg Times).

Monday

Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it's supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There's nothing sadder.

Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
And unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.

And a man? Isn't a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.

Primo Levi
January 17, 1946

UPDATE THURSDAY 7-30-2008, 12:46 a.m. PDT, 07:46 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1863, six months after the Bear River Massacre in Idaho, in which a U.S. Army unit massacred 350 people in a Shoshone Village, the Treaty of Box Elder was signed to insure that "a firm and perpetual peace shall be henceforth maintained between the said bands and the United States" (several years later, the U.S. encouraged the tribe to move onto the Fort Hall reservation in violation of an 1869 treaty reserving it to the Bannocks); in 1903 in response to anger in Reno, Floriston Pulp and Paper Company exec B.J. Bither said his company was not polluting the Truckee River and would not do it again; in 1922, Reno had a new isolation hospital for treatment of infectious diseases, located alongside the county hospital on Mill Street; in 1931, several days after Murch Brothers Construction of St. Louis made the low bid on a contract for construction of a federal building in Las Vegas, another bid which had been postmarked by the deadline but long delayed in the mail arrived from Plains Construction Company of Pampa, Texas; in 1939, former Massachusetts governor James Curley (who as a legendary mayor of Boston became known as the "Purple Shamrock" and entered folk culture as the thinly disguised main character of Edwin O'Connor's novel The Last Hurrah) arrived in Winnemucca on a two-week trip to inspect his holdings in the Ashdown mine (owned by the Curley Lucky Gold Corporation) in northern Humboldt County; in 1944, the 370th Regimental Combat Team, an African-American unit, disembarked at Naples, Italy; in 1957 on his second night as Tonight show host, Jack Paar introduced a new regular, Dody Goodman, who was so deft and witty and became so popular that he dropped her the next year (he said he felt "like the announcer on The Dody Goodman Show"); in 1966, Chip Taylor's Wild Thing by The Troggs hit number one on the Billboard chart (another version of the song, an oddball rendering by a Robert Kennedy imitator, was also released in 1966 by "Senator Bobby"); in 1990 at a Nevada Board of Regents meeting, after the regents approved leasing 493 acres of university land in Churchill County to the Fallon Mining Company for mining, UNR student president Jason Geddes asked that the money earned be used for internships for mining students; in 1996, the Atlanta Journal Constitution unskeptically used a leak from a law enforcement source that named Richard Jewell as a suspect in the 1996 summer olympics bombing, aiming at Jewell a media firestorm that convicted him in the court of public opinion.

UPDATE TUESDAY 7-29-2008, 06:45 a.m. PDT, 13:45 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1874, Carson City's Appeal theorized that fish were dying in Washoe Lake because a Reno newspaper editor had walked across the bridge over the lake; in 1878, newspaperman Don Marquis, who created "archy", the newspaper office cockroach who used the typewriter to write poetry after hours (but wrote all in lower case because he could not operate the shift key) and "mehitabel", an alley cat who was Cleopatra in a past life, was born in Walnut, Illinois; in 1901, the Washoe County Medical Association was founded; in 1905 Clara Bow, the actor who was the archetype of the 1920s flapper, who later married cowboy actor Rex Bell and lived on his Searchlight, Nevada ranch, was born in a Brooklyn tenement; in 1914, U.S. Secretary of War Lindley Garrison ordered the deportation of Newspaper Enterprise Association reporter Fred L. Boalt, who had reported that a U.S. naval officer had applied the "law of flight" to Mexican prisoners (shooting prisoners while "escaping"), which the army claimed was inaccurate; in 1919 at McGill and Ruth, Nevada, members of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Western Federation of Miners struck the mines; in 1934, the Willows night club on South Main Street near Fifth in Las Vegas was destroyed by fire; in 1944 after a night in jail in Antioch, California, where she was arrested for "hanging around" town, actress Frances Farmer departed with her father for Nevada Hot Springs in Lyon County, Nevada; in 1952, the U.S. Army announced that because Reno businesses refused to serve African-American soldiers stationed at Stead Air Force Base, the army was starting bus service between Stead and Sacramento for black soldiers to use for R&R; in 1952, the U.S. Reconstruction Finance Corporation (a federal agency created during the Hoover administration to provide loans and credit to businesses) ordered the sale at auction of the Tahoe Biltmore at Crystal Bay; in 1959, after presiding over the Colorado River Commission proceedings, Governor Charles Russell relaxed by traveling to Elko for the celebration surrounding the premiere of local rancher Bing Crosby's movie Here Comes the Groom, which was also attended by U.S. Senator George Malone and U.S. Representative Walter Baring; in 1963, Blowin' In The Wind by Peter, Paul, and Mary was released; in 1968, Light My Fire by The Doors hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1975, President Ford visited Auschwitz; in 2004, Arlo Guthrie appeared in concert at the Bartley Ranch in Reno.

UPDATE MONDAY 7-28-2008, 8:13 p.m. PDT, 03:13 TUESDAY 7-29-2008 GMT/CUT/SUT — Nevada AFL-CIO Executive Secretary-Treasurer Danny Thompson has put out an emergency call for last-minute entries for the 2008 Arnold-Jones-Evans Scholarship Essay Contest. Three $3,000 scholarships are at stake for 2008 high school graduates who are children of current union members and plan to attend an accredited school this fall. Click here for complete info and entry forms. Hurry — deadline is August 1.

UPDATE MONDAY 7-28-2008, 6:44 a.m. PDT, 13:44 GMT/CUT/SUT —

George Bush/July 28, 2003: And the other lesson is that there are people who can't stand what America stands for, and desire to conflict great harm on the American people.

On this date in 1864, the second Nevada constitutional convention ended (it was just barely the 28th — five minutes past midnight; the convention actually completed its work on the 27th); in 1868, Secretary of State William Seward proclaimed the ratification of the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, imposing constitutional limitations on state governments, insured a single type of citizenship, and prohibiting denial of rights without due process, an amendment so sweeping that it has been called the second U.S. Constitution (for several decades, the U.S. Supreme Court voided much of its impact, then began reversing itself and let it take effect); in 1903, an Elko constable notified law officers in Madera, California, that he had located Madera fugitive Jack Barnes working on a local ranch and could apprehend him if the Californians wished (Barnes was arrested and returned to California after Madera County promised to pay the expenses); in 1906, marketing specialist Simon Litman of the University of California said in Philadelphia that San Francisco would not again be destroyed by earthquake because new structures were being made earthquake proof; in 1930 in Reno, Cecil Creel — appointed to be one of the members of a federal appraisals panel — said appraisal would soon begin in St. Thomas, Moapa Valley, and other regions of the land that would be flooded when Boulder Dam was built; in 1935, Joseph Neal Jr., who has served as Nevada Senate majority floor leader, president pro tempore, acting governor, and at his retirement was tied for longevity of service as a Nevada state senator, was born in Mounds, Louisiana; in 1945, in heavy fog, a U.S. Army B-25 bomber was piloted by an experienced pilot down Manhattan's 42d Street, banked onto Fifth Avenue, dodged several skyscrapers, and plowed at an estimated 200 miles an hour into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, exploding inside the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, killing 14 people (two women whose elevator dropped more than 70 floors survived; one of the plane's engines came out the other side of the building and landed on a 12-story building); in 1956, Elvis' I Want You, I Need You, I Love You hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1967, President Johnson established the National Commission on Civil Disorders (whose report, submitted on February 29 1968, he ignored); in 2002, on a trip to Toronto for a youth conference, John Paul II failed to apologize for the clergy sex abuse scandal, saying only "The harm done by some priests to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame, but think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests whose only wish is to serve and do good."

Live Streaming Barbwire.TV Monday thru Friday Reno-Sparks-Washoe Charter cable ch. 16 2:00-4:00 p.m. PDT 21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUT The Dean's List    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites. RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006

UPDATE SUNDAY 7-27-2008, 10:24 p.m. PDT, 05:24 7-28-2008 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1916, German officials in Belgium executed Captain Charles Fryatt of Britain after a strange court martial in which Fryatt was prosecuted and convicted of using his ship to defend against the German u-boat that was attacking him; in 1923, John Dillinger of Mooresville, Indiana (later a famed bank robber), joined the U.S. Navy in an effort to escape the consequences of making off with a car from his Quaker church, serving on the U.S.S. Utah for about a month before walking off the ship and never returning; in 1933, the World Economic Conference in London (the U.S. had several delegates, including U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada) collapsed after the new U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, issued an intemperate message on the conference; in 1934, Minnesota Governor Floyd Olsen declared martial law in Minneapolis in response to police opening fire on unarmed union pickets and to a rejection by employers of a strike settlement accepted by teamsters, imposing limited press restrictions and a ban on parking in the business district while milk, ice, and grocery trucks were under guard; in 1939, Las Vegas associates of Frontier and 91 Clubs owner (and former Los Angeles police officer) Guy McAfee denied a report in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner that he had gone broke in Las Vegas and would withdraw from the gambling city; in 1954, the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, elected with a 1951 landslide of 65 percent of the vote, was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries, leading to four decades of vicious military juntas that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents; in 1960, Vice-President Richard Nixon was nominated for president by the Republican National Convention in Chicago; in 1974, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that the House of Representatives impeach President Nixon; in 1992, a $7.5 million renovation of the Thomas/Mack Center at UNLV was announced.

UPDATE SATURDAY 7-26-2008, 12:34 p.m. PDT, 19:34 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1775, a year before independence, Congress created the Post Office; in 1906 at a board of directors meeting in Boston, the Guggenheims gained control of the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company and its railroad, the Nevada and Northern Railway Company; in 1921, masked men entered a public dance pavilion at Spring Lake Park in Texarkana and kidnapped Gordon Harrison, the African-American orchestra conductor; in 1921, the Rio Grande, boundary between Mexico and the U.S., kept changing its course, and on this day El Paso's Acting Mayor R.C. Semple led a search party to find the river and failed; in 1938, the U.S. Public Works Administration was holding up funding for construction of an engineering building, an arts and sciences building, and a gymnasium at the University of Nevada until the state took some required legislative actions, which raised a question of whether a special session of the Nevada Legislature was needed; in 1944, PFC Jack Lichtenberg of Reno was missing in action in France (in November his family would be notified that he was a German prisoner of war); in 1948, President Truman desegregated the U.S. military; in 1952, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson and other party leaders chose segregationist John Sparkman to be the vice-presidential nominee; in 1952, the Howard Hughes organization announced its continuing interest in building a plant in the Red Rock canyon area west of Las Vegas as soon as a land transfer could be arranged; in 1956, Egyptian President Nasser reclaimed the Suez Canal from British management, causing Israel, France and Britain to launch a war against Egypt, but the British public revolted against their government's action, forcing British Prime Minister Anthony Eden to call off the military adventure and later resign; in 1959, the first U.S. nuclear reactor meltdown took place at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a Boeing facility 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, after a reactor on July 13 underwent a power "excusion" or "criticality accident", was first shut down, then was restarted without a determination of what caused the problem, and was permitted to operate for several weeks, was shut down again, and collected radioactive material was slowly released into the atmosphere (from 260 to 459 times the amount released at Three Mile Island) without danger levels being monitored, possibly exposing nearly two thousand people to radiation; in 1963, the Las Vegas Review-Journal devoted two full pages to a map of 28 new housing developments around the valley; in 1968, a day after he organized the six losing Saigon presidential candidates into a political group, Truong Dinh Dzu — who as a peace candidate came in second in the "election" to Nguyen Van Thieu — was sentenced to five years at hard labor for currency violations and bad check charges (he was released after five months because of public protests); in 1969, a two-day strike and lockout at 12 Las Vegas casinos ended with an agreement between the casinos and the Operating Engineers and Teamsters; in 1997, President Clinton announced at Lake Tahoe that the Forest Service would return 350 acres to the Washo tribe for a cultural center; in 2005, Margaret Goodman of Las Vegas resigned as chief ringside physician for Nevada state boxing regulators in protest against the state's failure to adopt stringent safety procedures for the ring.

Live Streaming Barbwire.TV

2:00-4:00 p.m. PDT, 21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUT
Charter cable channels 16 & 216 Reno-Sparks-Washoe

UPDATE FRIDAY 7-25-2008, 11:17 a.m. PDT, 18:17 GMT/CUT/SUT —

George W. Bush/July 25, 2003: Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace.

On this date in 1861, the Crittenden Resolution, defining the purpose of the Civil War as preservation of the union rather than the abolition of slavery, was passed by Congress; in 1866, an expedition was formed at Fort Churchill, Nevada under the command of Major R.S. Williamson to explore little-known areas of Nevada, Idaho, southern Oregon and northern California; in 1868, Henry Worthington of Nevada was appointed U.S. minister (ambassador) to Uruguay; in 1934, Nazis began the Juliputsch (July Putsch) in Austria, assassinating fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and in Germany Hitler rushed to the Austrian border, but the coup failed in part because Mussolini assembled troops on the Italo-Austrian border to attack any German units that invaded Austria; in 1949, Civil Aeronautics Authority official William Howard met with Yerington officials about plans to improve the airfield so it could handle Bonanza Airlines and other carriers‚ planes; in 1952, Democratic party bosses terrified by the prospect of the presidential nomination of economic populist Estes Kefauver, who had swept the presidential primaries (including defeating President Truman in the New Hampshire primary), managed to swing the nomination to Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot; in 1952, Nevada highway officials announced a plan to reconfigure the Las Vegas/St. George highway to cut nearly an hour off the travel time; in 1963, a Sacramento firm purchased Sundown Town, an amusement park in the hills between the Mount Rose highway and Washoe City that was built by Buster Keaton, Jr., and later burned down; in 1972 at Fillmore East, Neil Young appeared with Crosby Stills Nash for the first time; in 1970, 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago, a song about the difficulty of writing a song, was released; in 2001, a London bound American Airlines jet out of Los Angeles made an emergency landing safely in Las Vegas after the pilot suffered a midair heart attack (the pilot was hospitalized and survived); in 2005, Sony BMG agreed to a $10 million fine for payola to radio stations to boost airplay, the first success in an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer that was then expected to turn to Vivendi Universal, the Warner Music Group and the EMI Group after Spitzer subpoenaed records of Clear Channel Communications, Emmis Communications, and other radio chains.

UPDATE THURSDAY 7-24-2008, 12:15 a.m. PDT, 07:15 GMT/CUT/SUT —

University of Nevada Regent and film critic Howard Rosenberg on Barbwire.TV Friday, July 25. Tune in, turn on and tell a friend.

BREAKING NEWS: Nevada Supreme Court upholds term limits, boots Rosenberg and Woodbury

More in the Sunday Barbwire: Vote for Rosenberg anyway, dammit

On July 24, 1783, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Ponte Palacios y Blanco was born in Caracas on the continent where he would lead the fight for liberation of the nations now called Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, Venezuela and Bolivia (this last named for him); on this date in 1873, a crowd, including Governor Charles Stevenson, gathered at the State Insane Asylum to see the start of use of an electric generating plant (Alf Doten: "The Asylum building, as well as the residences of the Superintendent and family, glowed brilliantly with numerous incandescent electric lights, many of the glass shades of which being of different colors, gave a very beautiful and pleasing effect."); in 1911, archeologist Hiram Bingham discovered Machu Piccu, though its location was not a secret to the inhabitants of the region; in 1931, the earliest known tornado to touch down in Nevada, where they are very rare, was seen in Humboldt County; in 1936, law enforcement officials were preparing to drain Honey Creek Mill Pond near Pinckney, Michigan, to try to find the bodies of more murder victims of the Black Legion, a right wing terrorist group that operated in the middle west; in 1939, thirty-seven days before Hitler invaded Poland, the lead story on the front page of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was a United Press dispatch headlined across eight columns: "EUROPE TO DODGE WAR FOR 1939, EXPERTS SAY"; in 1938, Artie Shaw recorded Cole Porter's (Don't Let Them) Begin the Beguine (the Beguine was a Caribbean dance); in 1943, British bombers began nighttime firebombing of Hamburg, Germany, specifically designed to cause civilian casualties, resulting after several days in firestorms that left 50,000 civilians dead and a million homeless; in 1951 with Las Vegas Review-Journal publisher Don Reynolds taking a vacation around the world, the newspaper's staff was forced to publish their boss' banal observations on world affairs, such as today's commentary on the Korean truce talks; in 1952, as Democratic Party bosses gained ground in their effort to stop the presidential candidacy of Estes Kefauver by promoting Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada said that "when you check into the Stevenson reports you find they don't have any basis in fact" and argued that the Stevenson movement was losing momentum; in 1956, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed in public for the last time, at the Copacabana in New York City; in 1959 in a debate in the kitchen of a model U.S. tract home on display at an exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon was verbally slapped around by Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, with Nixon at one point telling Khrushchev that the USSR might be ahead of the US in rocket development, but the US was ahead of the USSR in color television (John Kennedy: "Mr. Nixon may be very experienced in kitchen debates. So are a great many other married men I know."); in 1959, the Nevada Legislative Commission named Reuben Zubrow of the University of Colorado to head what would turn out to be an influential study of the state's tax structure; in 1959, two thousand Little League players, parents and fans gathered for a breakfast in the parking lot of Washoe Market at the corner of Vine and Fifth Streets in Reno; in 1963, in an effort to prevent the embarrassment of a civil rights march against Las Vegas' segregated casinos, the Sahara broke the solid phalanx among casinos and agreed to talks with the local NAACP chapter headed by Marion Bennett; in 1967, Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane went gold; in 1969, eight years after John Kennedy set the goal "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth", the first men on the moon returned to earth where, on board the USS Hornet, President Nixon engaged in hyperbole that offended religions around the world and amused historians: "I was thinking, as you know, as you came down, and we knew it was a success, and it had only been 8 days, just a week, a long week, that this is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation"; in 1971, John D. Loudermilk's Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian) by The Raiders hit number one on the Billboard chart and went on to become the biggest selling single in the history of Columbia Records; in 1984, the body of a nine year old girl, Dawn Hamilton, was found in Rosedale, Maryland, leading to the prosecution, conviction (based on the identification of two teen boys), imposition of a death penalty, and imprisonment of a 23 year-old man, Kirk Bloodsworth, who spent nine years in prison (during which he was repeatedly assaulted — hit in the head with a sock filled with batteries, stabbed in the calf, and hit and fractured in the clavicle), tried a second time and again convicted, until being exonerated by DNA testing and pardoned, with prosecutor Ann Brobst making a point of refusing to apologize (the real killer was serving in the same prison with Bloodsworth and later pleaded guilty to the Hamilton murder); in 1990, the Judas Priest trial, in which the rock band was sued by the parents of two boys who attempted suicide (one of who died) got underway in Reno, dominated by junk science and Judge Jerry Whitehead's claim that subliminal messages (in this case, imaginary ones) are not protected by the first amendment.

Nevada State Journal/July 25, 1896:
SILVER CONVENTION.
Senator Stewart Makes a Rousing Speech.
BRYAN AND SEWALL.
The Convention Nominates Them by Acclamation.

ST. LOUIS, July 24 — It was 10:11 o'clock when Chairman St. John called the Silver Convention to order. Rev. Dr. Court led in prayer.... By invitation Senator Stewart of Nevada addressed the convention. He said that Wall street was represented by a powerful lobby at the Chicago Convention, but could do nothing with the honest Democratic patriots. He made a plea for harmony among the silver forces and predicted victory. He said he went to Chicago with little hope that a silver platform would be adopted, but he was agreeably disappointed. There never was a more patriotic band of men on earth than the delegates who controlled the Chicago convention. The Wall street corporation money was no use there. At the mention of Bland's name, the delegations arose, cheered, shouted and flourished umbrellas and flags.

The Senator said that Bryan's convention speech was the greatest oration in history. "I know William J. Bryan," he said, "he believes what we believe. He is as true to his principles as the needle to the pole."

...Under the resolution adopted yesterday the roll of States was called to find out how many old soldiers occupied seats as delegates. The poll showed 109 Union veterans, 18 Confederate veterans, and 4 Mexican war veterans.

... Judge Scott of Omaha was called to the platform. He said, „Oh God send pestilence and disease and vermin and war and famine among us if you will, but in thy good providence, Oh God, deliver us from another four years of oppression under Grover Cleveland."

He called for three cheers for Bryan, which were given.... The convention adjourned until 3:30 p.m. when the rules were suspended and Bryan nominated by acclamation. Sewall was also nominated by acclamation for Vice President.

Live Streaming Barbwire.TV Monday thru Friday Reno-Sparks-Washoe Charter cable channels 16 and 216 2 :00-4:00 p.m. PDT 21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUT The Dean's List    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites. RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006

UPDATE WEDNESDAY 7-23-2008, 12:55 p.m. PDT, 19:55 GMT/CUT/SUT — Tahoe Shakespeare Festival musicians haven't been paid after termination. Non-union rats imported from New York City.

The Musicians' Union Local 368 in Nevada entered into a Collective Bargaining Agreement with the Shakespeare Festival last May for performing an original play called Cambio.

Following Monday's performance, Jan Powell the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Festival fired the band even though the contract did not allow for this and offered the band one day's pay in compensation for the firing. Please realize that all of the players involved have more than 30 years of professional experience and collectively have played 1000's of shows.

The cast consisted of only one professional and a few that had graduated college recently. For the most part, the actors are amateurs. The gentleman that composed the music only had a copy of the CD to present as music so the conductor was hired to score the music from the CD. Currently the musicians have not been paid for rehearsals and the conductor has not been paid for the arrangements. They claim the checks are in the mail as of last Thursday but the musicians have yet to see a check for the date that was performed. 

I have called these folks and sent letters. Only two musicians have been paid thus far. We are in touch with the International Board of Executives and are currently working with a labor law attorney. 

Thanks for all that you do and take care.

Paul M. January
Secretary-Treasurer
American Federation of Musicians
Local 368, Reno Nevada
P.O. Box 7398 * Reno, NV 89510
(775) 329-7995 * Fax (866) 539-1871

UPDATE: Thursday, July 24, 2008, 12:45 p.m. PDT, 19:45 GMT/SUT/CUT —

The Shakespeare Festival's Attorney, Geno Menchetti, (says) they want to settle this today if possible. I am going to go up to the Festival and pick up the checks hopefully this afternoon. I will stay in touch. Also I received a call from the Local Stagehands Union and if we picket, they will honor the line. Great folks as far as I am concerned!

Thanks again for all that you do. Take care and I'll talk to you soon.

Paul M. January
Secretary-Treasurer
American Federation of Musicians Local 368

UPDATE: Thursday, July 24, 2008, 6:01 p.m. PDT; 01:01 Friday, July 25, GMT/SUT/CUT —
SHAKESPEARIAN FARCE: Tentative resolution to musicians beef with Tahoe festival
From the front page of the Friday, July 25, Daily Sparks Tribune

July 23, 2008, 11:06 PDT, 18:06 GMT —

George W. Bush on Vladimir Putin/July 23, 2001: You saw the president yesterday. I thought he was very forward-leaning, as they say in diplomatic nuanced circles.

On this date in 1866, Congress enacted legislation creating the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit consisting of California, Oregon, and Nevada; in 1915 Reno's evening hours downtown became quieter when saloons complied with the city council's new prohibition on music in barrooms.; in 1934 a Colored Democratic Club was formed in Clark County; in 1934 Franklin Roosevelt campaign manager and U.S. Postmaster General James Farley dedicated Reno's new federal building and praised U.S. senators Key Pittman (lavishly) and Senator Patrick McCarran (minimally); in 1935 Las Vegas and Reno casino operators were hoping they would gain business from southern California after the Mexican government shut down border casinos in Agua Caliente; in 1952 amid a nationwide heat wave, Las Vegas had the highest recorded temperature in the nation at 110˜and a major water shortage, with angry residents protesting Desert Inn Golf Course watering, the Las Vegas Land and Water Company predicting ten remaining days of water supply, and state water engineer Hugh Shamberger considering mingling sewer water with domestic supply; in 1957 the Nevada Supreme Court removed four regents (Cyril Bastian of Caliente, Grant Sawyer of Elko, N.E. Broadbent of Ely, and William Elwell of Las Vegas) from office because they were appointed by legislators in violation of the separation of powers, but did not overturn the law expanding the board of regents from five to nine members and said the governor could fill the vacancies, and Governor Charles Russell was expected to reappoint the four; in 1959 the Federal Communications Commission in Washington approved a change of ownership for Reno's KDOT Radio; in 1968 three days after they shut down the Pioneer Club in Las Vegas, state gambling regulators filed charges against the club for allegedly deceiving customers; in 1989 after overnight news reports declared Laurent Fignon the winner of the Tour de France on the assumption that no human could close the 50-second gap between Mignon and second placer Greg LeMond in the 15.5 miles still to run from Versailles to Paris, LeMond astonished television viewers around the world by finishing eight seconds ahead, his second Tour win (LeMond made the race with 37 shotgun pellets in his body, the aftermath of a 1987 hunting accident in which he was shot in the chest, putting him out of action for two years); in 2003 Josh Byers of Norwalk, California, former student body president at Reed High School in Sparks, died east of Baghdad in Iraq; in 2007 U.S. astronaut Clayton Anderson said "Our spaceship Earth is a beautiful place" during a space walk in which he dumped more than a half ton of debris into orbit over the earth.

July 22, 2008, 06:47 PDT, 13:47 GMT —

George Bush/July 22, 2001: I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe, I believe what I believe is right.

On this date in 1793, British explorer Alexander Mackenzie's expedition reached the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver, the first transcontinental crossing by a European that preceded Lewis and Clark by a decade; in 1868 the tracks of the Central Pacific reached Wadsworth, Nevada; in 1915 a flash flood caused by a cloudburst in the hills swept down near Dayton, Nevada, washing away a Native American encampment, irrigation ditches, and a railroad bridge abutment; in 1921 Susan Roop Arnold, daughter of Nevada provisional territorial governor Isaac Roop for whom the town of Susanville is named, died, probably in Susanville; in 1923 John Dillinger of Mooresville, Indiana enlisted in the U.S. Navy to escape a car theft charge; in 1933 a Saturday night dance at the Boulder City Legion Hall featured the Blue Cloud Colored Orchestra; in 1934 Manhattan Melodrama starring Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Clark Gable achieved a trivia benchmark when bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead in the street near Chicago's Biograph Theatre after seeing the movie; in 1939 Alan LeMay, later author of The Searchers and The Unforgiven, was married to Arlene Hoffman in Las Vegas with movie producer Jesse Lasky and his wife as witnesses; in 1946 Jewish terrorists bombed a wing of Palestine's King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing a hundred people (a two-day Israeli "celebration" of the bombing in July 2006 was protested by the British government because it glorified "an act of terrorism which led to the loss of many lives" ); in 1953 Nevada's first television station, KLAS in Las Vegas, went on the air; in 1963, after a seven month battle over the efforts of Reynolds Electrical and Engineering and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to alter pay practices at the Nevada Test Site, a federal court ruled in favor of the labor unions protecting the workers at the site; in 1981, former Clark County superintendent of schools Kenny Guinn was selected to serve on the new Metropolitan Police Committee on Fiscal Affairs; in 1987 Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in an impressive reversal of position, said he was willing without conditions to negotiate a ban on intermediate-range nuclear missiles, opening the way for the intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty; in 2002 Mississippi jazz singer Marion Montgomery, who sang in Las Vegas lounges early in her career and became a familiar British television performer, died near London.

July 21, 2008, 06:56 PDT, 13:56 GMT — On this date in 365, an earthquake in or around Crete generated a massive tsunami that caused Mediterranean shorelines to drop and rivers to flow backward, causing ships to run aground until the water levels returned and, when the tsunami reached shores, killing 5,000 Greeks and 700 Alexandrians (it is possible that another earthquake south of Spain caused a second tsunami, one that threw ships over buildings in Malaga [the date is probable, based on ancient records]); in 1864 Nevada supreme court justices George Turner and John North wired U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase in D.C.:
"Constitution defeated yesterday for purely local reasons people overwhelmingly loyal." ; in 1865 in a dispute over a gambling debt, Bill Hickok and Dave Tutt faced off in a gunfight in the street in Springfield, Missouri and Hickok killed Tutt; in 1878, the great workers song Eight Hours was published (see below); in 1918 German submarine U-156, offshore of Orleans, Mississippi, surfaced in view of sunbathers and began shelling a tug and barges, sinking the tug (U.S. planes that arrived on the scene dropped hand tools like screwdrivers and hammers on the sub); in 1934 Willis Ocker of Redding, California arrived in Beatty after walking 43 miles across Death Valley, reportedly the first person to have achieved the feat; in 1950 PFC Raymond Yoss of Nelson, Nevada was captured in Korea and held until after the armistice in 1953; in 1954, the "Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference" was approved providing for reunification of Vietnam and free elections, and U.S. observer Walter Bedell Smith promised the U.S.
"declares with regard to the aforesaid agreements and paragraphs that 'it will refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb them'" and the U.S. then quickly invented the "nation" of South Vietnam to use force to prevent reunification and free elections; in 1965 to create the impression that he was considering all options, President Johnson began a week-long Vietnam policy review with civilian and military officials and other advisors on whether to escalate, though records and transcripts later disclosed that during the review he coaxed advisors into (in the words of historian Larry Berman) "giving him what they thought he wanted, rather than the truth" and that he placed "the burden of proof only on those who sought a way out of, and not into, the war"; in 1973 Jim Croce's Bad Bad Leroy Brown went to number one on the Billboard chart; in 2003 The Nevada Legislature, after a long stalemate in regular session and two special sessions, approved a $836 million tax increase by a 17-2 vote in the Senate and a 28-14 margin in the Assembly.

Eight Hours
Lyrics by I.G. Blanchard, music by Rev. Jesse Jones

We mean to make things over, we are tired of toil for naught
With but bare enough to live on and ne'er an hour for thought.
We want to feel the sunshine and we want to smell the flowers
We are sure that God has willed it and we mean to have eight hours;
We're summoning our forces from the shipyard, shop and mill

Chorus:
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest
Eight hours for what we will.

The beasts that graze the hillside, and the birds that wander free,
In the life that God has meted, have a better lot than we.
Oh hands and hearts are weary, and homes are heavy with dole;
If our life's to be filled with drudgery, what need of a human soul.
Shout, shout the lusty rally, from shipyard, shop, and mill.

Ye deem they're feeble voices that are raised in labor's cause,
But bethink ye of the torrent, and the wild tornado's laws.
We say not toil's uprisnig in terror's shape will come,
Yet the world were wise to listento the monetary hum.
Soon, soon the deep toned rally shall all the nations thrill.

From factories and workshops in long and weary lines,
From all the sweltering forges, and from out the sunless mines,
Wherever toil is wasting the force of life to live
There the bent and battered armies come to claim what God doth give
And the blazon on the banner doth with hope the nation fill:

Hurrah, hurrah for labor, for it shall arise in might
It has filled the world with plenty, it shall fill the world with light
Hurrah, hurrah for labor, it is mustering all its powers
And shall march along to victory with the banner of Eight Hours.
Shout, shout the echoing rally till all the welkin thrill.

July 20, 2008, 11:20 a.m. PDT, 18:20 GMT/ CUT/SUT —

Newsboys strike leader Kid Blink: Ain't ten cents worth as much to us as it is to Pulitzer and Hearst, who are millionaires? Well, I guess it is. If they can't spare it, how can we?

Live Streaming Barbwire.TV Monday thru Friday Reno-Sparks-Washoe Charter cable ch. 16 2:00-4:00 p.m. PDT 21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUT The Dean's List    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites. RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006

On this date in 1878, Boston Corbett, the former soldier who claimed to have killed John Wilkes Booth, was reported to have attended a Pacific Coast Pioneers picnic at Bowers mansion; in 1899, prompted by a ten-cent price hike (50 to 60 cents) for a 100-newpaper bundle against the child labor newspaper sellers force, the Newsboys Strike of 1899 began against competitors Hearst and Pulitzer, driving newspaper circulation down by two thirds, spreading across the northeast and midwest, and resulting in an agreement for the newspapers to buy back unsold newspapers (these events were dramatized in the Christian Bale/Ann Margret musical Newsies); in 1918 the Churchill County Republican and Democratic parties held a joint meeting to try to see if a unified War Ticket could be formed in order to avoid "all discord and distraction incident to a partisan campaign when our united energies should be devoted to winning the war"; in 1926 the case of former Nevada alcohol prohibition director J.P. Donnelly, convicted for covering up the seizure of a truckload of booze, reached the U.S. Supreme Court; in 1933 the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on economic development in Clark County: "One hundred twenty five 'girl entertainers,' neither licensed nor under any sort of supervision, are established along the Boulder dam highway, according to a survey made recently."; in 1936, a five-night Federal Theatre Project run of Macbeth, produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles with an all-African-American cast, opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut; in 1952, a drive-in church on the Boulder highway outside Las Vegas held its first Sunday service; in 1963, Surf City by Jan and Dean hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1968 a near riot erupted in Pasco, Washington, when police chief A.L. McKibbin kicked a group of young African-Americans out of city hall after they had been invited by police officers; in 2007 a blue-nosed Washington Post column by a Robin Givhan was devoted to something that few others saw — U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton "display[ed] cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hor d'oeuvres" during a Senate floor speech, a display that escaped the notice of most others who saw only the normal conservative dress Clinton always wears (a relatively high cut blouse under a jacket), and the article created a firestorm of criticism of the Post (the Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, seemed to support Givhan, calling Clinton's outfit "provocative" and justifying the article's publication because "It was the most viewed story on the Web site all day.").

UPDATE SATURDAY 7-19-2008, 12:07 a.m. PDT, 07:07 GMT/CUT/SUT —

George Bush to a British child who asked what the White House is like / July 19, 2001: It is white.

On this date in 1799, the Rosetta stone, a transcription in one Greek and two Egyptian languages of a Ptolemaic decree, was located in the Nile delta by French Army officer Pierre-François Bouchard, who found it as part of a wall that was being dismantled, and it was stolen by the French instead of being turned over to Egyptian officials (it was later seized from the French as war booty by the English, its return was demanded by Egypt in 2003 and negotiations for the return are now going on); in 1864 President Lincoln received a wire from Nevada: "Received constitutional amendment yesterday abolishing slavery our legislature ratified it immediately only two 2 dissenting [signed:] H G Blasdell Gov Nevada"; in 1878 a delegation of Piute chiefs that traveled to San Francisco to meet and sup with General Irwin McDowell, presumably at the Army's new Presidio facility, were back in Nevada; in 1879 in the street outside his Las Vegas, New Mexico, saloon, Doc Holliday and a former army scout named Mike Gordon had a gunfight, Gordon reportedly getting off the first shot, followed by Holliday, who killed Gordon;  in 1899 U.S. Land Commissioner L.H. Wise reported that 788 allotments of eighty acres of farm land or 160 acres of grazing land had been allotted to Native Americans in Nevada, principally in Humboldt, Douglas and Churchill Counties; in 1918 U.S. servicepeople in Europe read in Stars and Stripes about the U.S. Senate campaigns of two women — Jeanette Rankin of Montana and Anne Martin of Nevada, both Republicans (though Martin ended up running on an independent line after failing to win GOP support).; in 1919 the London Cenotaph designed by Edwin Lutyens was unveiled in Whitehall, constructed of stone and replacing an earlier wood and plaster Cenotaph (the structure is still the site of the annual official British ceremony on November 11, Armistice Day); in 1922 former U.S. representative, Food for Peace director, U.S. senator, Democratic presidential nominee, and U.S. ambassador George McGovern was born in Avon, South Dakota; in 1933 a shipment of Sierra Beer was received at Sewell's Market in Las Vegas, which the grocery store claimed was the first time Nevada-made beer was sold in the city (Tahoe Beer had not yet made an appearance); in 1953 the Oakland Tribune carried a full page report on Las Vegas subheaded "Lowdown on Vegas — It's Fairly Pure"; in 1964 on National Shame Day (a holiday created by the Saigon regime to commemorate the July 21 1954 Geneva agreement that Saigon and the U.S. violated by refusing to hold free elections), Charles de Gaulle and Ho Chi Minh were burned in effigy and a French war memorial was vandalized while at a rally military chief of state Nguyen Khanh called for an invasion of the north, upsetting U.S. officials who thought they had an agreement that Saigon officials would not make such proposals without consulting them (and also it might blow the cover on U.S. provocations in the north); in 1980 Billy Joel's It's Still Rock and Roll To Me hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1991 boxer Mike Tyson raped Miss Black America contestant Desiree Washington of Rhode Island in an Indianapolis hotel room (it became very chic for rich white men like Bob Guccione and Donald Trump to defend Tyson on the rape); in 1993 President Clinton announced regulations to implement his "Don‚t Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding gays in the military and said the policy would end harassment and witch hunts (it actually led to a rise in the number of investigations and discharges every year for the rest of the Clinton administration, but such harassment then declined under Bush); in 2006 St. Leonards Primary School in Devon, Exeter in England censored John Lennon's Imagine from an end of term show after students had spent weeks rehearsing it.

Franklin Roosevelt / radio speech to the Democratic National Convention accepting the presidential nomination for a third term/July 19 1940: There have been occasions, as we remember, when reactions in the march of democracy have set in, and forward-looking progress has seemed to stop.

But such periods have been followed by liberal and progressive times which have enabled the nation to catch up with new developments in fulfilling new human needs. Such a time has been the past seven years. Because we had seemed to lag in previous years, we have had to develop, speedily and efficiently, the answers to aspirations which had come from every State and every family in the land.

We have sometimes called it social legislation; we have sometimes called it legislation to end the abuses of the past; we have sometimes called it legislation for human security; and we have sometimes called it legislation to better the condition of life of the many millions of our fellow citizens, who could not have the essentials of life or hope for an American standard of living.

Some of us have labeled it a wider and more equitable distribution of wealth in our land. It has included among its aims, to liberalize and broaden the control of vast industries˜lodged today in the hands of a relatively small group of individuals of very great financial power.

But all of these definitions and labels are essentially the expression of one consistent thought. They represent a constantly growing sense of human decency, human decency throughout our nation.

This sense of human decency is happily confined to no group or class. You find it in the humblest home. You find it among those who toil, and among the shopkeepers and the farmers of the nation. You find it, to a growing degree, even among those who are listed in that top group which has so much control over the industrial and financial structure of the nation. Therefore, this urge of humanity can by no means be labeled a war of class against class. It is rather a war against poverty and suffering and ill-health and insecurity, a war in which all classes are joining in the interest of a sound and enduring democracy.

I do not believe for a moment, and I know that you do not believe either, that we have fully answered all the needs of human security. But we have covered much of the road. I need not catalogue the milestones of seven years. For every individual and every family in the whole land know that the average of their personal lives has been made safer and sounder and happier than it has ever been before. I do not think they want the gains in these directions to be repealed or even to be placed in the charge of those who would give them mere lip-service with no heart service.

Yes, very much more remains to be done, and I think the voters want the task entrusted to those who believe that the words "human betterment" apply to poor and rich alike.

And I have a sneaking suspicion too, that voters will smile at charges of inefficiency against a Government which has boldly met the enormous problems of banking, and finance and industry which the great efficient bankers and industrialists of the Republican Party left in such hopeless chaos in the famous year 1933.

But we all know that our progress at home and in the other American nations toward this realization of a better human decency — progress along free lines — is gravely endangered by what is happening on other continents. In Europe, many nations, through dictatorships or invasions, have been compelled to abandon normal democratic processes. They have been compelled to adopt forms of government which some call "new and efficient."

They are not new, my friends, they are only a relapse — a relapse into ancient history. The omnipotent rulers of the greater part of modern Europe have guaranteed efficiency, and work, and a type of security.

But the slaves who built the pyramids for the glory of the dictator Pharaohs of Egypt had that kind of security, that kind of efficiency, that kind of corporative state.

So did the inhabitants of that world which extended from Britain to Persia under the undisputed rule of the proconsuls sent out from Rome.

So did the henchmen, the tradesmen, the mercenaries and the slaves of the feudal system which dominated Europe a thousand years ago.

So did the people of those nations of Europe who received their kings and their government at the whim of the conquering Napoleon.

Whatever its new trappings and new slogans, tyranny is the oldest and most discredited rule known to history. And whenever tyranny has replaced a more human form of Government it has been due more to internal causes than external. Democracy can thrive only when it enlists the devotion of those whom Lincoln called the common people. Democracy can hold that devotion only when it adequately respects their dignity by so ordering society as to assure to the masses of men and women reasonable security and hope for themselves and for their children.

We in our democracy, and those who live in still unconquered democracies, will never willingly descend to any form of this so-called security of efficiency which calls for the abandonment of other securities more vital to the dignity of man. It is our credo-unshakable to the end — that we must live under the liberties that were first heralded by Magna Carta and placed into glorious operation through the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.

The Government of the United States for the past seven years has had the courage openly to oppose by every peaceful means the spread of the dictator form of Government. If our Government should pass to other hands next January-untried hands, inexperienced hands˜we can merely hope and pray that they will not substitute appeasement and compromise with those who seek to destroy all democracies everywhere, including here.

I would not undo, if I could, the efforts I made to prevent war from the moment it was threatened and to restrict the area of carnage, down to the last minute. I do not now soften the condemnation expressed by Secretary Hull and myself from time to time for the acts of aggression that have wiped out ancient liberty-loving, peace-pursuing countries which had scrupulously maintained neutrality. I do not recant the sentiments of sympathy with all free peoples resisting such aggression, or begrudge the material aid that we have given to them. I do not regret my consistent endeavor to awaken this country to the menace for us and for all we hold dear.

I have pursued these efforts in the face of appeaser fifth columnists who charged me with hysteria and war-mongering. But I felt it my duty, my simple, plain, inescapable duty, to arouse my countrymen to the danger of the new forces let loose in the world.

So long as I am President, I will do all I can to insure that that foreign policy remain our foreign policy.

All that I have done to maintain the peace of this country and to prepare it morally, as well as physically, for whatever contingencies may be in store, I submit to the judgment of my countrymen. We face one of the great choices of history. It is not alone a choice of Government by the people versus dictatorship. It is not alone a choice of freedom versus slavery. It is not alone a choice between moving forward or falling back. It is all of these rolled into one.

It is the continuance of civilization as we know it versus the ultimate destruction of all that we have held dear˜religion against godlessness; the ideal of justice against the practice of force; moral decency versus the firing squad; courage to speak out, and to act, versus the false lullaby of appeasement.

But it has been well said that a selfish and greedy people cannot be free.

The American people must decide whether these things are worth making sacrifices of money, of energy, and of self. They will not decide by listening to mere words or by reading mere pledges, interpretations and claims. They will decide on the record˜the record as it has been made˜the record of things as they are.

The American people will sustain the progress of a representative democracy, asking the Divine Blessing as they face the future with courage and with faith.

UPDATE FRIDAY 7-18-2008, 12:11 a.m. PDT, 07:11 GMT/CUT/SUT —

George Bush on the probe into how CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity was outed / July 18, 2005: The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who's spending time investigating it.

On this date in 64 the great fire of Rome began, blamed by Christians on emperor Nero who "fiddled while Rome burned" (his biographers report he was in Antium when the fire started and that he actually returned to organize fire fighting and arrange emergency housing and food for victims); in 1863 during an assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston, South Carolina, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Sergeant William Carney, a former slave, was wounded three times and during a retreat brought the flag back to Union lines (before radio communications, the pennant could help keep units together), actions for which he became the first African-American to receive the Medal of Honor; in 1877 directors of the Meat Shipping Company picked out twenty acres of land near the new Reno state prison site for the location of their new operation; in 1901 the Washoe County Commission, sitting as the Reno Town Board, voted to pave the town's streets; in 1925 volume one of Mein Kampf was published, and it spelled out Hitler's plans for dictatorship, war with France and Russia to create "living space", the elimination of racially "inferior" groups; in 1927 Ty Cobb achieved his 4,000th hit; in 1933 singer, comedian and Broadway actor Hannah Williams and boxer Jack Dempsey married in Elko, then departed for Dempsey's Reno home; in 1952 a sign was installed on the Nevada side of Boulder Dam (facing Arizona) reading "You are now entering the state of Nevada/Drive safely"; in 1960 Ronnie Self and Dub Albritton's I'm Sorry by Brenda Lee hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1960 production began on The Misfits, the Arthur Miller film set in Nevada; in 1965 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara personally assisted in launching a bombing run on Vietnam aboard the U.S.S. Independence; in 1970 Willie Mays became the tenth player in baseball history to hit 3,000 hits when he singled in the second inning of a game against the Expos; in 2004 with the pungent scent of sagebrush (brought from Carson City) permeating the church during mass, Washington National Cathedral held a Nevada State Day.

Live Streaming Barbwire.TV Monday thru Friday Reno-Sparks-Washoe Charter cable ch. 16 2:00-4:00 p.m. PDT 21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUT The Dean's List    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites. RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006

UPDATE THURSDAY 7-17-2008, 7:19 p.m. PDT, 02:10 7-18-2008 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1863 at Honey Springs in the Indian Territory, the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment was part of a force that encountered many Confederate troops, and the black soldiers fought fiercely for two hours, advancing to within fifty feet of the Confederates, who finally broke and ran; in 1914 the Irwin Brothers' wild west show began two days of performances in Reno; in 1927 with Nicaraguan patriot forces surrounding a U.S. Marine garrison in Ocatal, U.S. occupation forces used six or seven aircraft from Marine Observation Squadron 1 for an aerial dive-bombing attack, killing and injuring more than 300 Nicaraguans, the first known aerial bombing of a civilian population by the U.S.; in 1933 Elliott and Elizabeth Roosevelt, son and daughter in law of the president, were divorced in Minden, Nevada, and news reports said it was the first case of divorce in a U.S. "first family"; in 1935 the opening of a new Federal Emergency Relief Administration playground with supervised play for children at Robert Mitchell School in Sparks was announced (FERA was a New Deal agency); in 1935 Nevada Indian Affairs superintendent Alida Bowler presented to "sportsmen" fish hatchery plans for Pyramid Lake; in 1936 the Spanish civil war began with fascist uprisings against the Republic; in 1953 Stanley David Osborne of Reno died in Korea; in 1963 in a rare instance of legislators standing up to executive arrogance and an even rarer instance of public policy concern for the time for an issue of gender discrimination, a U.S. House subcommittee held hearings on why NASA recruited 13 women astronauts and then dumped them from the program; in 1966 Gomer and Sergeant Carter went to Las Vegas on the latest episode of Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.; in 1968 The Beatles attended the premiere of their film Yellow Submarine at the London Palladium; in 1984, in a powerful speech to the Democratic National Convention that some party leaders called the greatest speech ever made at a party convention, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson apologized for his comments about Jews, said he was still learning and growing, and invoked the tragedies of the 1960s and African-American history to call for similar growth and learning by the Democratic Party (the television audience grew steadily as he spoke, rising to 33 million viewers by its conclusion; see below); in 1984 a study by the Center for the Study of Social Policy reported that while African-Americans had made political gains in the previous quarter century, they made no economic gains at all; in 2004 in Las Vegas, after she expressed support for Michael Moore and his film Fahrenheit 9/11 during her show at the Aladdin Casino, the management had Linda Ronstadt escorted off the property.

Jesse Jackson / July 17, 1984: This is not a perfect party. We are not a perfect people. Yet, we are called to a perfect mission: our mission to feed the hungry; to clothe the naked; to house the homeless; to teach the illiterate; to provide jobs for the jobless; and to choose the human race over the nuclear race. ... My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised. They are restless and seek relief. They've voted in record numbers. They have invested faith, hope and trust that they have in us. The Democratic Party must send them a signal that we care. I pledge my best to not let them down. ...

Only leadership - that intangible combination of gifts, the discipline, information, circumstance, courage, timing, will and divine inspiration - can lead us out of the crisis in which we find ourselves. The leadership can mitigate the misery of our nation. Leadership can part the waters and lead our nation in the direction of the Promised Land. Leadership can lift the boats stuck at the bottom. I've had the rare opportunity to watch seven men, and then two, pour out their souls, offer their service and heal - and heed the call of duty to direct the course of our Nation. There is a proper season for everything. There is a time to sow, a time to reap. There is a time to compete, and a time to cooperate. ...

Throughout this campaign, I've tried to offer leadership to the Democratic Party and the Nation. If in my high moments, I have done some good, offered some service, shed some light, healed some wounds, rekindled some hope, or stirred someone from apathy and indifference, or in any way along the way helped somebody, then this campaign has not been in vain. For friends who loved and cared for me, and for a God who spared me, and for a family who understood, I am eternally grateful.

If, in my low moments, in word, deed or attitude, through some error of temper, taste or tone, I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain or revived someone's fears, that was not my truest self. If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart. My head - so limited in its finitude; my heart, which is boundless in its love for the human family. I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.

This campaign has taught me much; that leaders must be tough enough to fight, tender enough to cry, human enough to make mistakes, humble enough to admit them, strong enough to absorb the pain and resilient enough to bounce back and keep on moving. ... Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow - red, yellow, brown, black and white - and we're all precious in God's sight. America is not like a blanket - one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt. Even in our fractured state, all of us count and all of us fit somewhere.

We have proven that we can survive without each other. But we have not proven that we can win and progress without each other. We must come together. From Fannie Lou Hamer in Atlantic City in 1964 to the Rainbow Coalition in San Francisco today; from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we have experienced pain but progress as we ended American apartheid laws, we got public accommodation, we secured voting rights, we obtained open housing, as young people got the right to vote. We lost Malcolm, Martin, Medgar, Bobby, John and Viola. The team that got us here must be expanded, not abandoned.

Twenty years ago, tears welled up in our eyes as the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were dredged from the depths of a river in Mississippi. Twenty years later, our communities, black and Jewish, are in anguish, anger and pain. Feelings have been hurt on both sides. There is a crisis in communications. Confusion is in the air. But we cannot afford to lose our way. We may agree to agree; or agree to disagree on issues; we must bring back civility to these tensions. We are co-partners in a long and rich religious history - the Judeo-Christian traditions. Many blacks and Jews have a shared passion for social justice at home and peace abroad. We must seek a revival of the spirit, inspired by a new vision and new possibilities. We must return to higher ground. We are bound by Moses and Jesus, but also connected with Islam and Mohammed. These three great religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, were all born in the revered and holy city of Jerusalem.

We are bound by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, crying out from their graves for us to reach common ground. We are bound by shared blood and shared sacrifices. We are much too intelligent; much too bound by our Judeo-Christian heritage; much too victimized by racism, sexism, militarism and anti-Semitism; much too threatened as historical scapegoats to go on divided one from another. We must turn from finger pointing to clasped hands. We must share our burdens and our joys with each other once again. We must turn to each other and not on each other and choose higher ground. Twenty years later, we cannot be satisfied by just restoring the old coalition. Old wine skins must make room for new wine. We must heal and expand.

The Rainbow Coalition is making room for Arab Americans. They, too, know the pain and hurt of racial and religious rejection. They must not continue to be made pariahs.

The Rainbow Coalition is making room for Hispanic Americans who this very night are living under the threat of the Simpson-Mazzoli bill and farm workers from Ohio who are fighting the Campbell Soup Company with a boycott to achieve legitimate workers' rights.

The Rainbow is making room for the Native American, the most exploited people of all, a people with the greatest moral claim amongst us. We support them as they seek the restoration of their ancient land and claim amongst us. We support them as they seek the restoration of land and water rights, as they seek to preserve their ancestral homelands and the beauty of a land that was once all theirs. They can never receive a fair share for all they have given us. They must finally have a fair chance to develop their great resources and to preserve their people and their culture.

The Rainbow Coalition includes Asian Americans, now being killed in our streets, scapegoats for the failures of corporate, industrial and economic policies.

The Rainbow is making room for the young Americans. Twenty years ago, our young people were dying in a war for which they could not even vote. Twenty years later, young America has the power to stop a war in Central America and the responsibility to vote in great numbers. Young America must be politically active in 1984. The choice is war or peace. We must make room for young America.

The Rainbow includes disabled veterans. The color scheme fits in the Rainbow. The disabled have their handicap revealed and their genius concealed; while the able-bodied have their genius revealed and their disability concealed. But ultimately, we must judge people by their values and their contribution. Don't leave anybody out. I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than Reagan on a horse.

The Rainbow includes small farmers. They have suffered tremendously under the Reagan regime. They will either receive 90 percent parity or 100 percent charity. We must address their concerns and make room for them.

The Rainbow includes lesbians and gays. No American citizen ought to be denied equal protection from the law. ...

To be strong leaders, we must be long-suffering as we seek to right the wrongs of our Party and our Nation. We must expand our Party, heal our Party and unify our Party. That is our mission in 1984. ... Jesus said that we should not be judged by the bark we wear but by the fruit that we bear. Jesus said that we must measure greatness by how we treat the least of these. ...

The big corporations and rich individuals who received the bulk of a three-year, multibillion tax cut from Mr. Reagan are recovering. But no such recovery is under way for the least of these. Rising tides don't lift all boats, particularly those stuck at the bottom. For the boats stuck at the bottom there's a misery index. This Administration has made life more miserable for the poor. Its attitude has been contemptuous. Its policies and programs have been cruel and unfair to working people. They must be held accountable in November for increasing infant mortality among the poor. In Detroit- in Detroit, one of the great cities in the western world, babies are dying at the same rate as Honduras, the most underdeveloped Nation in out hemisphere.

This Administration must be held accountable for policies that have contributed to the growing poverty in America. There are now 34 million people in poverty, 15 percent of our Nation. Twenty-three million are White, 11 million Black, Hispanic, Asian and others. By the end of this year, there will be 41 million people in poverty. We cannot stand idly by. We must fight for change now. ...

When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, the Reverend Sample used to preach ever so often a sermon relating to Jesus and he said, "If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." I didn't quite understand what he meant as a child growing up, but I understand a little better now. If you raise up truth, it is magnetic. It has a way of drawing people. With all this confusion in this Convention, the bright lights and parties and big fun, we must raise up the single proposition: If we lift up a program to feed the hungry, they will come running; if we lift up a program to start a war no more, our youth will come running; if we lift up a program to put America back to work, and an alternative to welfare and despair, they will come running. ...

No lie can live forever. Our time has come. We must leave the racial battle ground and come to the economic common ground and moral higher ground. America, our time has come. We come from disgrace to amazing grace.

UPDATE WEDNESDAY 7-16-2008, 7:31 a.m. PDT, 14:31 GMT/CUT/SUT —

George W. Bush / July 16, 2003: Our country puts $1 billion a year up to help feed the hungry. And we're by far the most generous nation in the world when it comes to that, and I'm proud to report that. This isn't a contest of who's the most generous. I'm just telling you as an aside. We're generous. We shouldn't be bragging about it. But we are. We're very generous. [Sweden, Luxembourg, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, UK, Belgium, Austria, France, Finland, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Portugal, and Italy all provide higher portions of their GDP for foreign assistance, and about 20 percent of what funding the U.S. does provide goes to two affluent nations, Egypt and Israel.]

On this date in 1769, Junipero Serra started the first Catholic mission in Alta California, and called it San Diego de Alcala; in 1863 nothing ever changes: At a time when U.S. forces were needed in the civil war between north and south, the frigate USS Wyoming was in Shimonoseki Strait in Japan attacking vessels in a Japanese civil war; in 1863 in the Battle of Sol Legare Island, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry participated in repelling an attack on James Island, South Carolina, winning praise on both sides of the national borders but also taking terrible casualties (the African-American unit's story was told in the movie Glory); in 1936 U.S. Farm Security Administration photographer Walker Evans took a leave of absence to accept an assignment from Fortune magazine to chronicle, with writer James Agee, life among Alabama sharecroppers, though Fortune later turned down their work (it was published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was named in 1999 as number 14 on a list of the hundred greatest works of journalism of the 1900s); in 1945, the first atomic explosion was detonated near Alamogordo at 5:30 in the morning (atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer, witnessing the blast, thought of two verses from the Bhagvad Gita: "Of a thousand suns in the sky if suddenly should burst forth the light, it would be like unto the light of that Exalted One." XI/12, "Death am I, cause of destruction of the worlds, matured and set out to gather in the worlds there" XI/32; in 1945, New York Times reporter William L. Laurence was the only reporter permitted to be present at the explosion of the first atomic device in Alamogordo (on September 12 1945 Laurence wrote a story misrepresenting the event in order to help the government combat reports of radiation sickness at Hiroshima: "This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity."); in 1952 Nevada delegates departing for the Democratic National Convention in Chicago were split among Richard Russell, Averill Harriman, Adlai Stevenson, Estes Kefauver and Robert Kerr for the presidential nomination; in 1952 The Captive City starring John Forsythe, filmed in Carson City and Reno and endorsed by U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, opened at the Fremont Theatre in Las Vegas; in 1962 Assemblymember Maude Frazier of Clark County resigned from the Nevada Legislature to become lieutenant governor of Nevada, appointed by Governor Grant Sawyer after the death of Lieutenant Governor Rex Bell; in 1966 Summer In The City by The Lovin' Spoonful was released and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich's Hanky Panky by Tommy James and the Shondells hit number one on the Billboard chart (Tommy James: "I don't think anybody can record a song that bad and make it sound good."); in 1970, Governor Paul Laxalt, invited by a labor leader on July 13 to intervene in a strike at the atomic test site, announced that members of Operating Engineers Local 12 would return to work; in 1979 Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq; in 1979 at 6 a.m., 93 million gallons of radioactive water breached the south side of United Nuclear Corp.'s earthen tailings dam near Church Rock, New Mexico, and entered the Puerco River, carrying with it 1,100 tons of uranium tailings and other heavy metals across the Navajo nation, through downtown Gallup, N.M., across the whole width of Arizona and into Lake Mead, the largest discharge of liquid radioactive material in U.S. history (Native American groups are now battling efforts to reopen uranium mining in the same region); in 1992 after an acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention whose principal device — the "New Covenant" — fell flat and was quickly forgotten, Bill Clinton's presidential nomination was celebrated in the convention hall (Madison Square Garden) not to the traditional Happy Days Are Here Again but to Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop; in 1999 the Sparks Nugget agreed to pay a $250,000 fine and pay the costs of state gambling regulators for years of acceptance of messenger bets (it was one of the largest ever imposed against a Nevada casino to that time); in 2006 during a break at a summit meeting in St. Petersburg, George Bush came up behind German Chancellor Angela Merkel and started massaging her shoulders, causing her to hunch over, grimace, and flail her arms in surprise (the sequence was one of those incidents largely ignored by the mainstream media that set the internet afire, with the four second tape clip posted on hundreds of sites, forcing the story into the mainstream).

U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater / acceptance speech / Republican National Convention / San Francisco / July 16, 1964: During four futile years, the administration which we shall replace has distorted and lost that faith. It has talked and talked and talked and talked the words of freedom. Now, failures cement the wall of shame in Berlin. Failures blot the sands of shame at the Bay of Pigs. Failures mark the slow death of freedom in Laos. Failures infest the jungles of Vietnam. And failures haunt the houses of our once great alliances and undermine the greatest bulwark ever erected by free nations - the NATO community. Failures proclaim lost leadership, obscure purpose, weakening wills, and the risk of inciting our sworn enemies to new aggressions and to new excesses. Because of this administration we are tonight a world divided - we are a nation becalmed. We have lost the brisk pace of diversity and the genius of individual creativity. We are plodding at a pace set by centralized planning, red tape, rules without responsibility, and regimentation without recourse.

Rather than useful jobs in our country, people have been offered bureaucratic "make work," rather than moral leadership, they have been given bread and circuses, spectacles, and, yes, they have even been given scandals. Tonight there is violence in our streets, corruption in our highest offices, aimlessness among our youth, anxiety among our elders and there is a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material success for the inner meaning of their lives. Where examples of morality should be set, the opposite is seen. Small men, seeking great wealth or power, have too often and too long turned even the highest levels of public service into mere personal opportunity.

Now, certainly, simple honesty is not too much to demand of men in government. We find it in most. Republicans demand it from everyone. They demand it from everyone no matter how exalted or protected his position might be. The growing menace in our country tonight, to personal safety, to life, to limb and property, in homes, in churches, on the playgrounds, and places of business, particularly in our great cities, is the mounting concern, or should be, of every thoughtful citizen in the United States.

Security from domestic violence, no less than from foreign aggression, is the most elementary and fundamental purpose of any government, and a government that cannot fulfill that purpose is one that cannot long command the loyalty of its citizens. History shows us — demonstrates that nothing — nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.

Now, we Republicans see all this as more, much more, than the rest: of mere political differences or mere political mistakes. We see this as the result of a fundamentally and absolutely wrong view of man, his nature and his destiny. Those who seek to live your lives for you, to take your liberties in return for relieving you of yours, those who elevate the state and downgrade the citizen must see ultimately a world in which earthly power can be substituted for divine will, and this Nation was founded upon the rejection of that notion and upon the acceptance of God as the author of freedom.

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. And, so help us God, that is exactly what a Republican president will do with the help of a Republican Congress.

Yesterday it was Korea. Tonight it is Vietnam. Make no bones of this. Don't try to sweep this under the rug. We are at war in Vietnam. And yet the President, who is Commander-in-Chief of our forces, refuses to say - refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory. And his secretary of defense continues to mislead and misinform the American people, and enough of it has gone by.

And I needn't remind you, but I will; it has been during Democratic years that a billion persons were cast into Communist captivity and their fate cynically sealed.

Today in our beloved country we have an administration which seems eager to deal with communism in every coin known - from gold to wheat, from consulates to confidence, and even human freedom itself.

I believe that we must look beyond the defense of freedom today to its extension tomorrow. I believe that the communism which boasts it will bury us will, instead, give way to the forces of freedom. And I can see in the distant and yet recognizable future the outlines of a world worthy our dedication, our every risk, our every effort, our every sacrifice along the way. Yes, a world that will redeem the suffering of those who will be liberated from tyranny. I can see and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world. This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.

I can see this Atlantic civilization galvanizing and guiding emergent nations everywhere. I know this freedom is not the fruit of every soil. I know that our own freedom was achieved through centuries, by unremitting efforts by brave and wise men. I know that the road to freedom is a long and a challenging road. I know also that some men may walk away from it, that some men resist challenge, accepting the false security of governmental paternalism.

And I pledge that the America I envision in the years ahead will extend its hand in health, in teaching and in cultivation, so that all new nations will be at least encouraged to go our way, so that they will not wander down the dark alleys of tyranny or to the dead-end streets of collectivism. My fellow Republicans, we do no man a service by hiding freedom's light under a bushel of mistaken humility.

I seek an American proud of its past, proud of its ways, proud of its dreams, and determined actively to proclaim them. But our example to the world must, like charity, begin at home.

I seek an American proud of its past, proud of its ways, proud of its dreams, and determined actively to proclaim them. But our example to the world must, like charity, begin at home.

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