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Yesterday, today and tomorrow
NEWS BULLETIN & ALMANIACAL ARCHIVES
Also see NevadaLabor.com's Statewide U-News RoundupClick here to get on our news & bulletins mailing list...
But before you do so, please read this note. —AB[[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.]]
Breaking News
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., ready to join legal action against Charter Cable
Fight Back!
WE WIN ROUND ONE — As the Barbwire show scooped the state on Friday, Aug. 22: Charter has caved in and postponed the execution date for 90 days. Thanks for bringing the heat. See the Barbwire in the Sunday Sparks Tribune for all the inside baseball. Be well. Raise hell. AB
SPARKS, WASHOE, CARSON AND DOUGLAS CABLE CUSTOMERS URGED TO CONTACT LOCAL OFFICIALS
ReSurge.TV may broaden legal action to include ratepayers
and program producers outside of Reno
8-25-2008, Updated 8-28-2008Donate to the cable ratepayer legal defense fund
The evil empire eats its appetite
Community television wins a 90-day stay of execution
Barbwire / Sparks Tribune / 8-24-2008Reno city council votes unanimously to sue Charter Communications to keep community TV accessible
Resurge.TV will also fileBandwidth bandidos admit to their greed
Barbwire / Sparks Tribune 8-17-2008The people vs. Charter's pirate ship
Time to sue the bastards
Barbwire / Sparks Tribune 8-10-2008Charter cable attempts to kill community TV
Deregulation is never having to say you're sorry
Bad news for cable subscribers, good news for Hug High School
Barbwire / Sparks Tribune 8-3-2008
Donate to the cable ratepayer legal defense fund
2:00-4:00 p.m. PDT, 21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUTUPDATE FRIDAY 8-31-2008, 10:28 a.m. PDT, 17:28 GMT/CUT/SUT —
George Bush / viewing Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One / August 31, 2005: It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground.
On this date in 1835, during an abolitionist mail campaign, President Andrew Jackson illegally prohibited the delivery of anti-slavery mail to the southern states (he also invited mob action by demanding the public disclosure of the names of recipients of such literature and by saying senders "should atone with their lives", triggering riots in several southern cities); in 1837 in a speech to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke some of the most powerful words ever penned: "They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." (see below); in 1878, the Storey County Republican Central Committee voted to require that Republican voters would be permitted to vote in the party primary election only after averring "that he voted for...[Republican presidential nominee Rutherford] Hayes...in 1876, or would have done so had he been a qualified elector."; in 1907, Augustus "Gus" Hawkins, 30-year veteran of the California Legislature and the first African-American member of Congress from the west, was born in Shreveport; in 1908, William Randolph Hearst's political organization, the Independent League, opened a headquarters in Reno with George Cole and J.L Eighols in charge; in 1916, the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce chaired by U.S. Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada began a series of hearings on the prospect of a nationwide strike in support of an eight hour work day; in 1920, Loyd Alvia "Dutch" Myers was born in Cozad, Nebraska; in 1921, the Nevada Board of Regents voted to spend $1,000 to pave the road into the University of Nevada grounds from the gate to the Orr Ditch; in 1936 in Washington, the U.S. Indian Bureau announced it was acquiring 2,100 acres of land on the south fork of the Humboldt River in Nevada for fifty Native Americans family homesites; in 1939, to provide a rationale for an attack on Poland, SS troops wearing Polish uniforms staged an invasion of Germany and an attack on a radio station at Gleiwitz and left behind several dead Germans in Polish uniforms; in 1939, three days after the Las Vegas Review-Journal carried an editorial headlined "War is not probable", its front page headline was "WAR IS MATTER OF HOURS"; in 1946, George McGowan of Yerington, who was imprisoned by the Japanese in the Philippines for two years and then escaped and aided guerrilla forces on Luzon, was awarded the Bronze Star; in 1951, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called for diplomatic recognition of mainland China, setting off an angry debate in Congress (about him, not about his proposal); in 1960, acting on a complaint by the Nevada Board of Regents, the Nevada Planning Board removed Lemke Construction from the job of building the Church Fine Arts Building at the University of Nevada in Reno before it was completed and said it would withhold payments of $127,000 while alleged faults in the construction were investigated; in 1975, United Press International carried a story about how the U.S. would soon go metric so everyone should learn it; in 2002, Lionel Hampton, who played vibes in the Benny Goodman Quartet and later led the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, died in New York; in 2005 at Sparks High School, Jim Gibbons announced he was running for governor.Ralph Waldo Emerson/August 31, 1837: Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. ...
The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, that we have come up with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another; we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever. The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier on any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and, now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men. ...
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is, the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to insulate the individual — to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state — tends to true union as well as greatness."I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. ...
The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.UPDATE FRIDAY 8-29-2008, 12:29 a.m. PDT, 07:19 GMT/CUT/SUT —
George Bush / August 29, 2002: There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide.
On this date in 1844 in a letter written around August 25, President Tyler, the candidate of the Democratic Republican Party in a three-way election campaign, withdrew from the race and thus assured James Polk's election over Henry Clay (Polk and Tyler shared the same position on statehood for Texas, and Tyler won passage of a Texas statehood bill after the election); in 1878, Storey County superintendent of schools E.J. Pasmore and Virginia City Grammar School No. 2 principal James Bray (later state school superintendent) had a fist fight in front of the International Hotel over Bray's alleged conduct with several young women during an outing at Emerald Bay; in 1910, the Student Record, student newspaper at the University of Nevada in Reno, changed its name to The U. of N. Sagebrush; in 1921, a committee of the Reno chamber of commerce to support the Victory Highway (a coast to coast highway) was formed; in 1941, the NBC Radio program Death Valley Days #563 was a radio play titled The Homeliest Man In Nevada; in 1950, Reno physician Kenneth Elges and Jules Golding of Redwood City, California, charged with providing abortions in Reno, were taken into custody by the Washoe County sheriff after the Nevada Supreme Court denied habeas corpus (a Stanford University student, Clara Messerve, had earlier testified that she did not receive an abortion from Dr. Elges, but the case was pursued on the basis of hearsay testimony by District Attorney Harold Taber that Messerve told him Elges had provided her with an abortion); in 1960, Jordanian Prime Minister Hazza Majali, described by Time as "one of the west's best friends in the Arab world" was murdered by a bomb in his office (his obit appeared in an issue of Time that had on the cover another of the west's "best friends" — Reza Pahlavi of Iran); in 1962, President Kennedy said that as a result of growing public concern over pesticides, which he attributed to "Miss Carson's book", his administration's health and agriculture agencies were taking a closer look at pesticide use; in 1966, The Beatles performed in public for the last time (not counting the January 30, 1969, rooftop concert) at Candlestick Park south of San Francisco — John took photographs of the group and himself; in 1996, Isaac Hayes demanded that presidential candidate Robert Dole stop using his Soul Man composition as a campaign theme: "I'm A Dole Man"; in 2006, Cable News Network morning anchor Kyra Phillips was chatting with a friend in the bathroom during a George Bush speech, unaware that the control room had the mike she was wearing open, and her words (praising her husband and calling her sister in law a control freak) were going out over the Bush speech.Rachel Carson: For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan, or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in the stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. . . . We spray our elms and following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elmleaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life-or-death that scientists know as ecology.
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21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUTThe 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.
UPDATE THURSDAY 8-28-2008, 2:37 p.m. PDT, 21:37 GMT/CUT/SUT —
Thomas Jefferson / August 28, 1807: In war, they [Native Americans] will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.
On this date in 1894, the faculty of Nevada State University met with the new president, Joseph Stubbs; in 1908, Acting Governor Denver Dickerson said he would not allow his name to go before the Democratic state convention for nomination to the U.S. senate seat held by Francis Newlands, and would in fact aid Newlands in winning reelection; in 1921, federal alcohol prohibition agents traveled 210 miles from Reno to Paradise to bust two saloons that were selling whiskey; in 1936, a well sunk by the Works Progress Administration in Austin, Nevada, was two hundred feet deep and nearly complete; in 1944, Paris' beautiful airport, Le Bourget Airdrome, was in ruins after a German unit made a suicidal stand at the site; in 1951, A Place in the Sun, starring Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor and filmed at Lake Tahoe, was released; in 1953, California Attorney General Edmund (Pat) Brown announced that the fight against marijuana was "showing marked results."; in 1955, fourteen year-old African-American Emmitt Till of Chicago who was visiting Money, Mississippi, was lynched by being dragged from his bed, beaten to death, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his confessed killers acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, an event that helped spark the civil rights movement and became a touchstone for a generation of student radicals; in 1961, Please Mr. Postman by The Marvelettes was released by Tamla Records; in 1968, the year's major street protests in Warsaw, Rome and Paris were joined by those at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police rioted in the course of quelling the protests, protests that helped shatter the unhealthy bipartisan consensus on U.S. cold war policies since the Truman administration; in 1975, Ethiopean emperor Haile Selassie was reported by the military junta to have died as a result of complications in surgery, a claim his surgeon denied; in 1988, Margaret Wheat, Native American scholar and author of Survival Arts of the Paiutes (the all time best seller of the University of Nevada Press) died; in 2007, California Catholic Daily published an article claiming that Attorney General Jerry Brown had filed a legal brief with the state supreme court that argued that marriage is a "constitutionally insignificant label", which turned out to be untrue — Brown's filings did not contain the term.UPDATE THURSDAY 8-28-2008, 4:39 a.m. PDT, 11:39 GMT/CUT/SUT — Dominic Jeter Donlevy, 10th grandchild of Betty Joyce Luffman Donlevy Barbano, was born (seven pounds, 11 ounces) to Sheldon Stewart Donlevy and Heather Vanslager at Renown (Washoe) Regional Medical Center in Reno, Nevada. Grandpa Reno remains both stoked and awestruck.
UPDATE WEDNESDAY 8-27-2008, 9:34 a.m. PDT, 16:34 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1875, a day after the Bank of California experienced a run and had to close its doors, founder William Ralston, who had ruled Nevada's Comstock Lode with an iron hand and also squandered the bank's funds, went for a swim in San Francisco Bay and his body later washed ashore; in 1883, a volcano on Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait erupted in one of the most violent explosions ever recorded (heard 2,891 miles away and over one thirteenth of the globe), destroying most of the island, leaving nearby islands barren, dropping debris on Madagascar, causing a tidal wave that killed nearly 40,000 people in Sumatra and Java, and changing the earth's climate for years: winters came sooner and stayed later, temperatures were lower (the eruption became the subject of the 1969 film Krakatoa East of Java, and after the movie was released someone noticed that Krakatoa is west of Java); in 1900, physician James Carroll allowed an infected mosquito to feed on him in order to contract yellow fever and prove how the disease is transmitted; in 1915, newspapers reported "important advantages gained by [Allied] troops" in the grisly Gallipoli campaign, which was not true; in 1932, the death of U.S. Senator Charles Waterman of Colorado threatened to create a senate evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with Senator Henrick Shipstead of Minnesota, a Farmer Labor Party senator, holding the balance of power; in 1936, Utah Democratic Party chair Calvin Rawlins assured Democratic national chair James Farley that his state was safe for President Franklin Roosevelt (who won the state by 39 percentage points) and Nevada Democratic chair Ed Clark gave the same assurance about his state (which Roosevelt won by 46 points); in 1952, Robert Dwyer was installed as Catholic bishop of Nevada; in 1954, Washoe County Democratic Party chair Tom Cooke, commenting on the party's treasury of $1,140 compared to the county Republican treasury of $18,000, said "Our work will have to surpass Republican dollars" and Nevada Democratic chair Keith Lee announced that U.S. representatives Hale Boggs and Sam Rayburn would campaign in the state for the Democrats during the '54 campaign; in 1959, fifty-four year old Beatrice Workman of a Chicago suburb, one of a group of women known as the "radium girls" and the "Society of the Living Dead" — workers who painted the radium on watch dials in the 1920s, many of whom died young or suffered if they survived — died in Illinois and an autopsy put the cause of death as radium poisoning; in 1970, Dracula meets Frankenstein: U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew met in Saigon with dictator Nguyen Van Thieu; in 1971, Pyramid Lake tribal chair Charles Renda informed the Pyramid Lake Task Force that the tribe was considering rejoining the task force; in 1971 in Chicago, Lil Hardin Armstrong died as she completed playing St. Louis Blues in memory of her husband Louis in Chicago's Civic Center Plaza; in 1980, a 1,500 bomb planted at Harvey's casino at Lake Tahoe exploded during a robotic attempt to defuse it by separating the fuse mechanism from the bomb with a small explosion, the blast causing $12,000,000 worth of damage to the hotel; in 2001, Israeli agents murdered Palestinian leader Mustafa Zibri; in 2005, Joseph Martinez of Las Vegas died in Tal Afar, Iraq.
UPDATE TUESDAY 8-26-2008, 7:04 a.m. PDT, 14:04 GMT/CUT/SUT —
Charles DeGaulle, entering a free Paris amid sniper fire by Nazi collaborators / August 26, 1944: There are moments that go beyond each of our poor little lives. Paris! Paris outraged. Paris broken. Paris martyrized. But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and the help of the whole of France, of France that is fighting, of France alone.
On this date in 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted by the French National Assembly; in 1875, there was a run on the Bank of California in San Francisco, whose economic power had allowed it to rule Nevada's Comstock Lode, and it closed its doors without being able to meet depositor demands, ending its dominance of the Comstock; in 1908, G.M. Reading of Wellington arrived in Carson City with news of a discovery of "surface gas" (natural gas) in the Wellington oil fields and said he was on his way to Reno with samples to test before a group of oil executives; in 1921, a two-day meeting to organize a Nevada farm cooperative began at the Reno chamber of commerce; in 1936, an American Bar Association committee criticized the conduct of the judge, jurors and defense attorneys in the trial of Bruno Hauptmann; in 1939 at the New York World's Fair, a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn was broadcast on station W2XBS (now WNBC) with Red Barber doing play by play, the first major league game televised; in 1941, the Army announced plans to air condition with swamp coolers Camp Sibert in Nevada; in 1963, the New York Herald Tribune began publication of a series of articles designed to counter unfavorable news coverage by U.S. journalists on the scene in Vietnam, written by Marguerite Higgins, a war correspondent in World War Two and Korea who became a red-baiting propagandist (virtually every point made by the Higgins series was discredited, most of them within months, leading to Higgins' eclipse on the newspaper and in journalism); in 1968, the Democratic National Convention began in Chicago after presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy asked his supporters to stay away and protesters gathered in city parks by the tens of thousands; in 1978, Albino Luciani of Venice was elected pope, taking the name John Paul I; in 1980, a 1,500 bomb was discovered in Harvey's casino at Lake Tahoe with an extortionist's note promising the instructions for defusing in exchange for $3,000,000; in 2007, U.S. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois visited his ancestral village in Kenya, Nyangoma Kogelo, from which his father emigrated to the United States; in 2008, the next presidential term of office begins in 147 days.UPDATE MONDAY 8-25-2008, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 07:01 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1835, the New York Sun began the publication of a series of six articles reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science reporting that British astronomer Sir John Herschel, had "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions" discovered a "new theory of cometary phenomena", planets in other solar systems, and life on the moon which the article described in detail (Herschel enjoyed the misuse of his name in the hoax); in 1875, the construction of a flume from Lake Tahoe to the Truckee Meadows was providing temporary prosperity to Reno, with 570 workers employed ("No Chinamen" the Nevada State Journal assured readers) and a $50,000 monthly payroll; in 1883, the French conquest of Vietnam became official with the signing of the Treaty of Hue, after which the French eliminated the nation's name, carved it up into three "protectorates" called Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China (much of the population of Tonkin was exterminated), all of which prompted China to occupy Tonkin; in 1921, Young's hotel in Sparks was raided by alcohol prohibition agents; in 1923 after six years in a mental hospital following his conviction for attempting to assassinate U.S. Senator Charles Henderson of Nevada, former Nevada rancher Charles Grock was seeking release, which would mean he would go to prison for the crime; in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized with A. Philip Randolph as president; in 1936, white squatters on the Pyramid Lake reservation, including the Ceresola, DePaoli and Garaventa families, were supposed to meet with tribal leaders about eviction notices issued on June 2d that gave the squatters until September 30 to vacate the tribe's land, but the meeting was postponed until September 1; in 1945, eleven days after the end of the Pacific war, a patrol of U.S. soldiers still in China and led by OSS Captain John Birch was stopped by a Chinese patrol and Birch was killed after he refused to surrender his gun and a scuffle ensued; in 1962, The Loco-motion by Little Eva hit number one and Sherry by The Four Seasons appeared on the charts, starting at number 91 (it eventually hit number one); in 2006 on MSNBC, retired General John Batiste, former commander of the First Infantry division in Iraq, said "Donald Rumsfeld is still at the helm of the Department of Defense, which is absolutely outrageous. He served up our great military a huge bowl of chicken feces, and ever since then, our military and our country have been trying to turn this bowl into chicken salad. And it's not working."; in 2006, conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan released a column that likened illegal immigrants to the Goths, the Germanic tribes who ravaged the Roman Empire in the centuries preceding the collapse of its western half, which he said would be "how America ends".
UPDATE SUNDAY 8-24-2008, 10:54 a .m. PDT, 17:54 GMT/CUT/SUT —
Abraham Lincoln / August 24, 1855: I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty.
On this date in 1814, a group of British troops under a flag of truce, in D.C. to negotiate terms, was attacked by U.S. forces, after which the British burned the capital; in 1862, Alexi Von Schmidt and his crew were in Verdi working on the survey that produced the Nevada/California border that became known as the Von Schmidt line; in 1878, the daughters of Washoe County Senator William Martin (among his daughters was Anne, who would one day become Nevada's principal suffrage leader), visited Virginia City and toured the Consolidated California and Virginia mine to its lower level in company with the sons of the mine's superintendent; in 1900, a Bryan and Stevenson Club was formed in Reno to support the Democratic national ticket and U.S. Representative Frank Newlands spoke; in 1900, the Elko water company prohibited lawn watering because of a severe shortage of water; in 1927, Guy Dewey, operator of an existing bus service between Reno and Gardnerville, said he would be opposing before the Public Service Commission a Virginia and Truckee Railroad plan to create a competing bus service along the route; in 1932, U.S. Representative Samuel Arentz condemned Hoover Dam contractor Six Companies Inc. for issuing scrip instead of money in paying its workers, saying that it could only be sold at a large discount or used at a Six Companies store in Boulder City, and the Nevada State Journal editorialized that Six Companies was "dodging taxes, ducking state laws [designed] to protect the workers, paying in scrip instead of cash, crushing the life out of independent merchants and generally acting as czar in the Boulder City neighborhood" and said the Hoover administration "has accomplished the following to clean up the mess:" followed by several inches of blank space; in 1935, Congress approved a $250 million soak-the-rich measure, including estate taxes, a graduated corporation income tax, an excess profits tax, and others; in 1936 at a rally for Republican presidential nominee Alfred Landon in Conneautville, Pennsylvania, a sheriff ran through the crowd firing shots in the air while chasing an alleged pickpocket; in 1936 for the eighth year in a row, children in a Reno Baptist Sunday school mailed off Christmas presents for the children of Holstensborg, Greenland, the native town of Nevada snow scientist James E. Church, with the four cartons costing nearly ten dollars ($149.62 in 2007 dollars) to mail; in 1939, the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, better known as the Hitler/Stalin pact, was signed in Moscow (though dated August 23d), stunning the west and giving communists around the world fits as they tried to rationalize it; in 1952, Reno police showing off a procedure for photographing traffic violations to the Nevada State Journal photographed a police car making an improper u-turn; in 1963 at the Palace Hotel in Bournemouth, Robert Freeman took the black and white half-shadow photograph that became the iconic cover of With the Beatles; in 1966, Clark County District Attorney Edward Marshall said he was prepared to prosecute federal officials for violating state wiretap laws in their investigation of skimming in casinos; in 1969, Company A, 3d Battalion, 196th Light Infantry Brigade refused to obey an order from its commander, Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr., to continue an attack on well-entrenched enemy positions in the Song Chang valley, 30 miles south of Da Nang, the first of a number of combat refusals that joined a growing number of expressions of rage (fraggings, desertions) at the pointless war (see below); in 2000, Nevada billboard companies filed a SLAPP ("Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation") suit against Citizens for a Scenic Reno and the City of Reno in an effort to have CSR's anti-billboard initiative ballot measure removed from the general election ballot; in 2006, the International Astronomical Union, which apparently owns the galaxy, demoted Pluto, declaring that it is not a planet (we had nine planets before Bush became president).
Radio traffic / August 24, 1969
Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr.: I am sorry, sir, but my men refused to go . . . We cannot move out.
Lieut. Colonel Robert C. Bacon: Repeat that, please. Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?
Schurtz: I think they understand, but some of them simply had enough — they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Viet Nam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.
UPDATE SATURDAY 8-23-2008, 7:16 p.m. PDT, 02:16 8-24-2008 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1861, Secret Service director Allan Pinkerton arrested D.C. society belle Rose O'Neal Greenhow as a Confederate spy (she was imprisoned but continued getting information to the Confederacy from prison until she was deported, and she died before the war ended); in 1864, with one of his ships already hit by a mine (then known as a torpedo) at Mobile Bay, Admiral David Farragut responded to a sailor's call of "Torpedoes ahead" with "Damn the torpedoes" and continued into the bay; in 1874, the Reno band traveled to Poe City on Peavine Mountain where it played several selections and were well treated by the Poe City band; in 1887, Stanislaus County (California) District Attorney John Kittrell, a former attorney general of Nevada, was bedridden with eczema and "doubts are entertained of his recovery"; in 1910, a thousand people gathered in Ely for the last Democratic rally of the campaign before the primary, with U.S. senate candidate Key Pittman and Acting Governor Denver Dickerson as principal speakers (state treasurer candidate Jack O'Sullivan sang The Wearing of the Green); in 1919, U.S. Senator Charles Henderson of Nevada wired Clark County Clerk Harley Harmon that Postmaster General Albert Burleson had authorized star route mail service between Searchlight and Nipton starting September 8; in 1924, a day after Democratic presidential nominee John Davis denounced the Ku Klux Klan, Republican vice-presidential nominee Charles Dawes did the same, and in Texas anti-Klan candidate Miriam Ferguson won the Democratic nomination for governor, which was tantamount to election; 1963, side by side on its front page, The New York Times ran two stories flatly contradicting each other preceded by an editor's note acknowledging the contradiction, both stories giving accounts of a Saigon crackdown on Buddhists, a slap at the Times' reporter on the scene that was unprecedented (the accurate story, smuggled out of Vietnam during a government blackout, credited the invasions of Buddhist pagodas and executions of leading monks to U.S.-supported Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, was written by David Halberstam and came from his sources there, and the inaccurate story, which said the Saigon military was behind the crackdown, was written by Ted Szulc and came from Washington sources); in 1963, Vu Van Mau, foreign minister of the Saigon regime, resigned in protest against the southern dictatorship's treatment of Buddhists; in 1972, the Republican National Convention in Miami chose Spiro Agnew as its candidate for vice-president over George Romney, whose name was placed in nomination by Nevada GOP state chair George Abbott; in 1990, as the elder George Bush came closer to taking the U.S. into the Kuwait war, the Dow plunged more than 75 points; in 2006, Austrian teen Natascha Kampusch, who had been kidnapped at 10 and kept in a windowless basement in Vienna for 8 years, escaped from her alleged captor and abuser Wolfgang Priklopil, who committed suicide within hours.
UPDATE FRIDAY 8-22-2008, 10:16 p.m. PDT, 05:16 GMT/CUT/SUT —
Breaking News: Obama picks Biden for VP according to AP and CNN
A PROUD LABOR MAN ADDRESSES NEVADA LABOR — Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., addresses the Nevada State AFL-CIO convention at the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno on August 21, 2007. Sen. Obama, meet Mr. Durocher
Barbwire / Sparks Tribune / 8-31-2008UPDATE FRIDAY 8-22-2008, 7:57 a.m. PDT, 14:57 GMT/CUT/SUT —
George Bush/August 22, 2002: President Musharraf, he's still tight with us on the war against terror, and that's what I appreciate. He's a — he understands that we've got to keep Al Qaeda on the run, and that by keeping him on the run, it's more likely we will bring him to justice.
On this date in 1851, in the first race for the ugly British Royal Yacht Squadron Cup, now known unofficially as the America's Cup, the schooner America defeated the Aurora; in 1878, the Silver Party of Nevada held a primary election to elect delegates to the party's nominating convention; in 1920, independent U.S. Senate candidate Anne Martin spoke from her automobile to a street gathering in Las Vegas, giving an address titled "Profiteers of the People"; in 1922, Irish revolutionary leader, government minister and diplomat Michael Collins was assassinated; in 1936, second week balloting for the queen of the Comstock's upcoming three day Labor Day celebration moved Dorothy Muckie into the lead over Mary Clark, the first week's winner; in 1956, the Nevada delegation's votes put both Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon over the top in the balloting on their nominations for president and vice-president, with delegation chair Kenneth Dillon announcing both votes: "Nevada is proud to cast the twelve votes which give the nomination to President Eisenhower" and "Nevada, the birthplace of Mrs. Pat Nixon, proudly casts the twelve votes which assure the nomination of Richard Nixon"; in 1959, at a "fly-in" in Reno of sheriff's aero squadrons from around the west, Miss Nevada Dawn Wells greeted the arrivals; in 1966, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, now the United Farm Workers of America (UFW), was formed from a merger of the National Farm Workers Association and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and became a powerful tool for the advancement of Latinos under the leadership of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta.
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21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUTThe 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.
UPDATE THURSDAY 8-21-2008, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 07:01 GMT/CUT/SUT — The Nevada State AFL-CIO convenes its state convention today at Luxor Las Vegas.
UPDATE WEDNESDAY 8-20-2008, 8:41 a.m. PDT, 15:41 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1862, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley published a fiery editorial demanding that President Lincoln declare emancipation for slaves (in Union territory), an editorial that was widely reprinted (the following January, Lincoln proclaimed the emancipation of slaves, in Confederate territory only, but it had no legal effect); in 1909, the Nevada State Journal editorialized "Reno made a great mistake when it failed to send a full delegation of boosters to the Trans-Mississippi Commercial congress, in session this week at Denver."; in 1918, the 40th Division, known as the Sunshine Divison and made up of guardsmen from Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and California, arrived in France two months before the armistice; in 1921 Chicago, Aug 20: "Wrist watches, popularized by the world war, have joined the dodo bird. In a few years they will be entirely extinct, Chicago jewelers, called before the Cook county tax board of review, predicted. Even now they have no sale."; in 1921 in Paris, theosophist, birth control advocate and suffragist Annie Besant of England said she was rushing back to India to save "her" Indians from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: "Gandhi is getting desperate and likewise losing his head and I must get back to my people as quickly as possible. They have great confidence in me and I am sure I can, in a huge measure, lead them away from the radical, vicious teachings of Gandhi."; in 1927, the Nevada State Journal reported that the Reno Traction Company had applied to the Nevada public service commission to abandon the city's last streetcar line, a route between Reno and Sparks; in 1932 at a huge mass labor meeting in Las Vegas, U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie, a critic of Hoover Dam contractor Six Companies for making "exorbitant profits" while workers "are making barely enough to pay for their food and lodging," said he was finished trying to get President Hoover's secretary of the interior to deal with the problem and would take it to the senate committee on irrigation reclamation; in 1942, Isaac Hayes was born in Covington, Tennessee; in 1951, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner were photographed at dinner at Reno's Riverside Hotel where he was performing while establishing residency for a divorce (he married Gardner on November 7, days after his divorce from Nancy Sinatra was granted); in 1953, the Nevada Tax Commission denied Frank Sinatra a gambling license to own two percent of the Sands in Las Vegas until he cleaned up his income tax and alimony obligations; in 1956, President Eisenhower personally denied passports to three reporters seeking to travel to report on mainland China; in 1958, white residents of the Notting Hill section of London attacked a Swedish woman who was married to a West Indian man, triggering an attack later that night by a 300-strong white mob on the homes of West Indian residents and another 16 days of white rioting; in 1964, The Beatles appeared in concert at the Las Vegas Convention Center, playing an afternoon show at 4 and an evening show at 9, with prices ranging from balcony for $2.20 to $5.50 for floor seating in front (8,408 attended — the arena held 7,500, so some fans were put backstage to get around fire laws — and The Beatles were paid a flat $25,000, no percentage of the gross); in 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to destroy Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face"; in 1973 as President Nixon and his entourage entered a New Orleans convention hall for a speech to the VFW, Nixon grabbed press secretary Ron Zeigler by the shoulders, spun him around, and shoved him violently forward while snapping out angry words, all in front of a CBS camera, after which Nixon gave a rambling, stuttering speech, raising public doubts about his stability during the Watergate investigation; in 1998, President Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan under the claim that it was a chemical weapons factory — but Clinton later refused to produce the evidence when the factory's owner hauled the U.S. into court, and the U.S. released the company's impounded assets rather than defend the case.
UPDATE TUESDAY 8-19-2008, 2:18 p.m. PDT, 14:18 GMT/CUT/SUT — As broadcast on Barbwire.TV and webcast:Nevada State AFL-CIO Arnold-Jones-Evans Scholarship winners announced: All from northern Nevada. Good job, brothers and sisters and Barbwire listeners, viewers and readers.The awards will be presented at the Nevada State AFL-CIO Convention Aug. 21-23 at Luxor Las Vegas. Each winner will receive $3,000. Stay tuned to NevadaLabor.com for publication of the three winning essays.
The envelopes, please
Timothy A. Darney, Reno
Elise M. Sala, Carson City
Maureen T. Choman, Sparks
Congratulations!
$9,000 FREE
HENDERSON, JULY 28 — 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.
UPDATE TUESDAY 8-19-2008, 7:12 a.m. PDT, 14:12 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1782, nearly a year after the French won the American Revolution for the colonials at Yorktown, the last battle of the war was fought in Kentucky at the Licking River (the British force of 350, made up mostly of Native American allies of the British, won against the colonials); in 1814, British troops landed at Benedict, Maryland, on the shores of the Patuxent River, poised to march on D.C., which they burned on the 24th; in 1886, the Paiute tribe at the Duck Valley reservation paid $10.75 for eight dozen pair of children's and misses' woolen hose; in 1895, gunfighter John Wesley Hardin was killed in a saloon in El Paso by a police officer who walked up behind Hardin, who was throwing dice at the bar, and shot him in the head; in 1900, silent movie star Colleen Moore, who made The Sky Pilot in Truckee (see below), was born in Port Huron, Michigan; in 1927, six members of the 1926 University of Nevada Wolf Pack football team — Max Larsen, Jim Bailey, Max Lawlor, Reynold Hansen, Max Allen and Robert Cooley — were featured in Spalding's Official Football Guide 1927; in 1943, Nevada highway engineer Robert Allen said two new highways that would speed up war industry travel in the state were completed and open (one was from Reno to Gabbs Valley and the new route was 33 miles shorter, and the other was the Basic Magnesium plant near Las Vegas to the Three Kids Manganese plant to Lake Mead); in 1951, at a time when traditional barriers were falling in baseball, one of the most renowned practical jokes of all time was played by St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, who sent a 3-foot-7 little person named Ed Gaedel (wearing elf slippers and a one-eighth figure on his uniform) out to bat against the Detroit Tigers, which he did after the umpire demanded proof he was really under contract (Gaedel was walked to first, where he was replaced by pinch runner Jim Delsing); in 1953, the United States and Britain engineered a coup d'etat against the elected government of Iran, overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installing Reza Pahlavi, who for a quarter century then presided over one of the world's horrific dictatorships; in 1953, news reports said mummies of early inhabitants of north America had been found buried with the bones of horses and camels in Pershing County, Nevada; in 1960 in Las Vegas, western AFL-CIO official Daniel Flanigan called on Nevada labor union members to ignore the religious issue and support Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts against Vice-President Richard Nixon, who he described as "anti-labor"; in 1961, FBI agents were reported to be gathering a report on mob infiltration of Nevada casinos for U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy; in 1967, The Beatles' All You Need Is Love hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1971, U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada said he supported President Nixon's wage and price controls and said he thought that President Johnson should have imposed them at the start of the war; in 1971, Nevada Lieutenant Governor Harry Reid announced he would not run against U.S. Representative Walter Baring in the 1972 Democratic primary election; in 1991 in the racially diverse neighborhood of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, a seven year old Guyanese boy was hit by a car and killed, the car being part of a motorcade for a prominent rabbi, after which African-American residents beat driver Yosef Lifsh, who also died, leading to three days of anti-Jewish rioting that left another man dead as well as damage to Jewish homes and businesses; in 1997, Teamsters locals approved an agreement with United Parcel, ending a 15 day nationwide strike.
Movie director King Vidor: Across the railroad tracks from the village of Truckee we had constructed the main street of a frontier town, complete with saloons and gambling dens. We had both summer and winter scenes to film. We had arrived in late fall, and the non-snow scenes had progressed as scheduled, though we still had two days of shooting without snow. The next morning, I was shocked to find it had been snowing all night with little sign of letting up for a day or two. Then panic overtook me. The end of the script called for the buildings to be burned down while deep snow covered the ground. We obviously could not set fire to them during the present snowfall because they were background for summer scenes still be to photographed.
UPDATE MONDAY 8-18-2008, 7:22 a.m. PDT, 14:22 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1590, Roanoke Island colonial Governor John White returned from a trip to England to discover he no longer had a colony — every colonist had vanished, never to be seen again; in 1769, in what may have been the most lethal lightning strike in history, a lightning bolt struck a tower gunpower magazine in Brescia, Italy, destroying a third of the city, damaging all the buildings in town, and killing three thousand residents; in 1876, the Carson Opera House was dedicated with celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher in attendance; in 1879, a strike by Nevada charcoal workers ended when a Eureka County sheriff's posse opened fire on a camp of about a hundred Italo-American workers at Fish Creek, killing five; in 1906, the Tonopah Bonanza ran a story, Lady Broker in Town, about Bird Wilson, Nevada's seventh female attorney; in 1917, William Townsend received a deferment from war service and went to South America to sell Bibles, an experience that inspired him to create an organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, that has translated the Bible into thousands of local dialects around the world, sometimes creating written forms for languages in order to do it; in 1919, the movie Deliverance, a dramatization of the life of Helen Keller with Keller playing herself, opened at the Lyric Theatre in New York City (Keller failed to attend the premiere because the theatre was being struck by Actors' Equity and she refused to cross a picket line, instead attending a show thrown for the strikers); in 1927, a car bringing Mineral County Senator John Miller, Rear Admiral Luther Gregory and naval Commander Myron Baker back to Reno from an inspection of the proposed site for a U.S. munitions depot near Hawthorne went off the road and rolled over three times, injuring both navy officers; in 1937, local Machinists Union leader Philip Drury objected to a proposed anti-picketing law in Sparks; in 1953, Reza Pahlavi fled to Rome after trying, and failing, to depose Iran's civilian government (the U.S. and Britain would do the job for him, allowing him to return to Iran to impose a quarter-century long reign of terror); in 1960, Las Vegas Mayor Oran Gragson called for the firing of just-indicted City Manager Al Kennedy and Police Chief Ray Sheffer, but City Commissioner Reed Whipple said the two men were entitled to a presumption of innocence (Whipple prevailed, with the two men suspended until their court fate was resolved); in 1962, Sherri Finkbine, known in Phoenix as the Miss Sherri who hosted the local version of Romper Room, who with her husband had fled Arizona to try to obtain a legal abortion after learning that the drug she had been taking (thalidomide) caused deformities in fetuses, underwent an abortion in Stockholm (on her arrival in Sweden, Vatican Radio broadcast an attack on her; the obstetrician who performed the abortion later said the fetus had no legs and only one arm and would not have survived outside the womb, and Finkbine continues to endure attacks from anti-abortion groups such as Concerned Women of America which published an article in 2003: "No one would kill her baby in Arizona, so she flew to Sweden, which of course was "up-to-date" and had her baby killed there. ... Essentially, Finkbine had her baby killed because he was disabled. It was inhuman."); in 1962, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger's If I Had A Hammer by Peter Paul and Mary was released by Warner Brothers Records; in 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was taken prisoner in a poorly planned coup attempt that fell apart in three days but also left Gorbachev weakened, reformer Boris Yeltsin strengthened, and led to the end of the Soviet Union, exactly the opposite intent of the plotters (see below); in 1995, sports columnist Bill Lyon called the upcoming Mike Tyson/Peter McNeeley bout in Las Vegas the "Return of the Rapist", "the illusion of a fist fight" in "a city built on illusions", Don King's "most shining larcenous achievement yet", and "consumer fraud" (the fight lasted less than two minutes); in 2007, on a field with no bleachers and with a large crowd of parents, supporters, journalists and the governor on hand, Virginia City's Muckers fielded a football team for the first time since 1943.
BBC: Russian president ousted Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev has been overthrown after a coup by Communist hardliners. Mr Gorbachev is reported to be under house arrest at his holiday home in the Crimea. News of the coup was broken in an announcement on state radio earlier on Monday. It said Mr Gorbachev was "unable to perform his presidential duty for health reasons". Soviet television has since been broadcasting regular condemnations of Mr Gorbachev's policies. The new leaders, headed by former vice-resident Gennady Yanayev have declared a state of emergency. In a televised broadcast, the eight coup plotters, who include the heads of the army, the KGB and the police, said they were saving the country from a "national catastrophe".
'New reign of terror'
Tanks are now patrolling the streets of Moscow but in spite of their presence thousands of people have come out to demonstrate against the takeover. They included the president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin. Mr Yeltsin climbed on to a tank outside the Russian parliament building to confront the troops and appeal to the army not to turn against the people. He said the coup was a "new reign of terror" and called for civil resistance. Despite a ban on demonstrations, several hundred demonstrators gathered outside the Kremlin calling for the reinstatement of the legal government. Nearby troops made no move to break up the demonstration but the army is reported to have warned hospitals to be ready for "casualties". US President George Bush has called the coup a "disturbing development" and cut short his holiday to return to the White House.UPDATE SUNDAY 8-17-2008, 8:20 a.m. PDT, 15:20 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1776, fifteen years before the first amendment, the Continental Congress declared it a "wise policy of these states to extend the protection of their laws to all those who should settle among them of whatever nation or religion they might be, and to admit them to a participation of the benefits of civil and religious freedom"; in 1872, a newspaper to support Horace Greeley's presidential candidacy was being started in Pioche, using the equipment of the defunct Elko Chronicle; in 1907, a public market came into being in Seattle more or less by happenstance when some peddlers and farmers congregated at Pike Place and First Avenue (Pike Place Market still exists and was given protection in 1971 by voters who approved an initiative petition); in 1915, Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew convicted of murder in a prosecution so dubious that the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, was removed from a prison camp by a mob and lynched at Frey's Mill in Georgia (the Frank case led to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union and the 20th century Ku Klux Klan, originally called the Knights of Mary Phagan, for the victim in the Frank murder case); in 1935, talks began in Reno between the Reno Employers Council and the Bartenders and Culinary Workers Union after their contract expired at midnight; in 1940, the last presidential nomination notification ceremony in U.S. history was held for Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee, in Elwood, Indiana (for many years presidential candidates did not accept their nominations at the party conventions but instead were "notified" of their nominations in ceremonies weeks after the conventions, a tradition broken by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 when he flew to Chicago to accept his nomination in front of the convention); in 1951, a string of nine microwave stations across Nevada was scheduled to begin carrying telephone calls, and to begin carrying television signals on September 30; in 1953, in an editorial, the Reno Evening Gazette said Eleanor Roosevelt "still consider[s] herself a sort of dowager empress..."; in 1954, President Eisenhower was faced with a veto decision after the U.S. Senate enacted a bill sponsored by Hubert Humphrey making unpopular opinion a crime by stripping the Communist Party of legal protections and making party membership a criminal offense publishable by prison and heavy fines (a less punitive version of the bill passed by the house was criticized by Humphrey as a "powder puff" measure); in 1954, Jose Cortinas of Cuba gave up an attempt to swim the length of Lake Tahoe after 11 hours and 31 minutes; in 1956, Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore was born in Carson City; in 1956, the Democratic National Convention nominated Estes Kefauver for vice-president on the second ballot, with the Nevada delegation supporting John Kennedy (Kennedy 11, Kefauver 2, Robert Wagner 1 on the first ballot, Kennedy 13-and-a-half to Kefauver one-half on the second ballot); in 1956, Judge Joseph Butler dismissed charges of scalping tickets to the Democratic National Convention against Ben Mitchell of St. Louis on the ground that the ticket scalping law applied to places and events of amusement and the convention was not one; in 1960, The Beatles began a three-month gig at the Indra Club in Hamburg with their new drummer Pete Best (they had desperately coaxed him into joining them when it became clear they would lose the engagement if they could not come up with a drummer); in 1960, the list of particulars in the Soviet indictment of U.S. spy plane pilot Gary Powers included his three years of training at an alleged spy training center at Indian Springs, Nevada; in 1985, Hormel workers went on strike after the company, enjoying record profits, cuts wages and benefits, a strike that was eventually broken in part because the local union was undercut by national union leaders who objected to the modern media methods used by the local; in 2008, there are 156 days remaining until the next president of the United States takes office.
UPDATE SATURDAY 8-16-2008, 11:51 a.m. PDT, 18:51 GMT/CUT/SUT — Barbano on Face the State
NevadaLabor.com Editor Andrew Barbano will appear on CBS affiliate KTVN TV-2's longrunning public affairs program Face the State this Sunday, Aug 17. (Also on Charter cable channel 782)3:40-4:10 a.m. PDT
6:30-7:00 a.m. PDT
3:00-3:30 p.m. PDTAlso: 3:00 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. PDT Saturday, Aug. 23.
Elvis Presley/January 17, 1971: When I was a child...I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.
On Aug. 17, 1868, U.S. Representative Charles David Carter, a Choctaw who served ten terms in the U.S. House from 1907 to 1927, was born near Boggy Depot, Oklahoma; on this date in 1872, William Sharon withdrew as a candidate for appointment to the United States Senate (he would run again in 1874 and be appointed by the 1875 Nevada Legislature); in 1896, Stick Tribe member Keish or his brother in law George Carmack (accounts differ) discovered gold in the Klondike River in Canada's Yukon Territory; in 1906, the second national conference of the Niagara Movement, formed by African-American leaders the previous year in Ontario to break away from Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach toward whites, took place at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, site of John Brown's raid at the federal arsenal (see below); in 1912, the U.S. government sued Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company, a criminal cartel of the holders of most motion picture equipment patents that allowed only its licensees to make movies and enforced its will with gangs of thugs; in 1919, the Clark County Review reported that large Nevada water users who had for six years been frustrating implementation of state water law by getting local court injunctions were finally trumped by the Nevada water engineer and state attorney general, who won an order from the Nevada Supreme Court telling district judge Thomas Hart to stop issuing such injunctions or appear before the justices on September 1 to explain himself, a procedure that also faced other local judges; in 1920, Yankee pitcher Carl Mays hit Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman in the head, killing Chapman, though it was not immediately clear what happened — the ball bounced back and Mays caught it, throwing Chapman out at first (in 2007, a memorial plaque to Chapman that had been removed at some point was found in a storage room under an escalator and reinstalled at Cleveland's ball park); in 1940, at a hearing he demanded before U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee chair Martin Dies, Humphrey Bogart denied being a contributor to the communist party, a charge made against him by a former party member testifying before a Los Angeles County grand jury; in 1940, Reno Mayor August Frohlich recommended former state district judge, Lander County district attorney and Nevada legislative bill drafter Antonio Maestretti to the Reno city council to be a municipal court judge; in 1945, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright IV, left behind as commander of the U.S. Philippine forces after MacArthur left for Australia and taken prisoner by the Japanese, was freed by Soviet forces from a Manchurian POW camp; in 1951, North Las Vegas City Attorney George Franklin told the city council that he had the authority under new state law to shut down Roxie's, a well known brothel, but that Nellis air base officers "want it open"; in 1953, a sign of the times: Las Vegas meat market owner William Bernard, just returned from a two week vacation around the west, woke early in the morning stricken by something, was checked into the hospital at 6:30 a.m., diagnosed with polio by noon, placed in an iron lung, and died about four in the afternoon; in 1954, Federal "trust" supervision of the Klamath tribe of Oregon ended; in 1955, the U.S. government's refusal to allow civil rights leader Paul Robeson to leave the country by denying him a passport renewal was upheld by a federal judge; in 1956, Adlai Stevenson was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention, with the Nevada delegation voting for Averell Harriman over Stevenson 7 to 5; in 1962, without telling him that the group had just gotten a major recording contract, Beatles manager Brian Epstein informed Pete Best that the other members of the group had decided to drop Best as drummer (Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall, Best's friend, decided to quit in solidarity with him); in 1964, Duong Van Minh, known as Big Minh and regarded as willing to pursue accommodation with Hanoi, was ousted as Saigon chief of state by General Nguyen Khanh, prompting Vietnamese student demonstrations against the war and in support of Minh; in 1966, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee held a hearing on its theory that antiwar activists were hard core communists who were providing aid and comfort to the Vietnamese National Liberation Front; in 1977, Elvis died; in 1978, Xerox was fined $25.6 million and forced to share its photocopy technology with other companies for forcing Smith Corona out of the field; in 2003, as a section of the Hood Canal Bridge between Kitsap Peninsula with the Olympic Peninsula was being rebuilt in Washington, workers came across a tribal midden, which led to discovery of human remains and artifacts and the mostly intact Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen beneath decades of industrial rubble, one of the most significant finds Native American archeological finds in history (Tse-whit-zen had existed at the site for 2,700 years until white "civilization" intruded).
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/SUTThe 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.
W. E. B. DuBois/August 16, 1906: The men of the Niagara Movement coming from the toil of the year's hard work and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily bread turn toward the nation and again ask again, in the name of ten million, the privilege of a hearing. In the past year the work of the Negro-hater has flourished in the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man's ballot has progressed and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation's capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies. Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights! We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America! The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth, the land of the thief and the home of the slave, a byword and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments. Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow citizens born and bred on it soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness, the new American creed says: "Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white." And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ! The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice. In detail, our demands are clear and unequivocal. First, we would vote; with the right to vote goes everything: freedom, manhood, the honor of your wives, the chastity of your daughters, the right to work, and the chance to rise, and let no man listen to those who deny this. We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever!
UPDATE FRIDAY 8-15-2008, 6:42 a.m. PDT, 13:42 GMT/CUT/SUT —
George Bush/August 15, 2001: The suicide bombings have increased. There's too many of them.
George Bush/August 15, 2006: The United States of America is engaged in a war against an extremist group of folks.
On this date in 1057, Malcolm Canmore III or Máel Coluim (accounts differ) killed King Macbeth, last Celtic king of Scotland, in the battle near Lumphanan; in 1846, the Californian, first known newspaper in California, began publication at Monterey; in 1872, the Susanville stage was robbed about a mile from Reno; in 1925, a highway between Incline Village and Glenbook was completed on the east side of Lake Tahoe, closing the last gap in a road around the lake; in 1933, Helen Petit obtained a Reno divorce from novelist John O'Hara; in 1935, actress Abby Dalton (Hennesey, The Joey Bishop Show, Falcon Crest) was born Marlene Wasden in Las Vegas; in 1945, the crew of a U.S. B-29 bomber on its way to bomb Kumagaya, Japan, listened to a radio report of President Truman's announcement of the Japanese surrender followed by news coverage of street celebrations in San Francisco and hoped for orders to return to base, but no such orders were received and they were forced to complete the bomb run (a New York Herald Tribune report of the mission by Homer Bigart, who was on board the plane, won the Pulitzer prize); in 1947, England "granted" independence to India, but in a particularly virulent form — carving it up into mostly Hindu India and mostly Moslem Pakistan, pitting the two religions against each other and insuring instant war that left hundreds of thousands dead; in 1947, University of Nevada electrical engineering professor Irving Sandorf told the Reno Kiwanis Club that half-minute thawing and heating of frozen foods was already being done by "high frequency tubes", and that television could be used for child care; in 1958, a groundbreaking interracial marriage: Maria Elena Santiago and Buddy Holly were married in Lubbock; in 1965, The Beatles, flying in a helicopter toward a landing in Shea Stadium, saw the flash of innumerable flashbulbs aimed skyward and reportedly heard, over the helicopter blades, the roar from the largest concert crowd in human history — 56,000 fans who, at promoter Sid Bernstein's insistence, paid a maximum of $5.65; in 1967, the Chicago Picasso (unnamed) was unveiled in Civic Center; in 1969, the Woodstock festival began in Bethel, New York; in 1971, in a step that shocked his conservative supporters, President Nixon unilaterally withdrew from the Bretton Woods system, stopping the convertibility of the United States dollar to gold, imposed wage and price controls, and imposed a 10 percent import surcharge; in 2001, scientists announced the first discovery of another solar system.UPDATE THURSDAY 8-14-2008, 8:17 a.m. PDT, 15:17 GMT/CUT/SUT —
George Bush/August 14, 2001: One of the interesting initiatives we've taken in Washington, D.C., is we've got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone.
George Bush/August 14, 2002: I love the idea of a school in which people come to get educated and stay in the state in which they're educated.
On this date in 1834, nineteen year old Richard Henry Dana began two years as a seaman on board the Pilgrim and the Alert, which provided material for his book Two Years Before the Mast; in 1848, Congress created the Oregon Territory (now Oregon, Idaho, Washington and parts of western Montana and Wyoming); in 1869, the White Pine Water Company's three mile pipeline to bring a water supply to Hamilton from Illipah Springs began operation; in 1908, two days of race rioting by 2,000 whites began in Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, leaving two African-Americans dead and 40 black homes and 12 black businesses destroyed by fire, for which 75 white rioters were indicted and one convicted on a minor offense, all of which inspired Theodore Roosevelt to introduce the ultimate tokenism — the Lincoln penny — in order to shift attention to a more positive racial message (the riot led to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as a reaction against the accommodationist approach to race relations of Booker T. Washington and the growing violence in the north against blacks); in 1918, twelve soldiers, the latest group drafted to meet Clark County's draft quota, were sent to Reno for training; in 1935 in justice court, John McGuire of Las Vegas was ordered to repay $15 to Esther Underhill after he sold three of her small buildings to E.O. Cook, who moved them to another location; in 1940, conservative leader Robert Taft, U.S. senator from Ohio, blasted supporters of a draft law for generating hysteria in order to create an unnecessary large standing army; in 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S President Franklin Roosevelt signed the "Atlantic charter" foreswearing the use of aggression, territorial aggrandizement, territorial sovereignty and other principles that their two countries would freely violate in the post war years; in 1947, United Nations Secretary General Trygve Lie said the greatest problem facing the world organization was the veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council; in 1950, an Edward R. Murrow broadcast from Korea warning that the war would be longer that the public had been told and was being handled disastrously by the U.S. was censored by CBS management and never aired; in 1954, the Nevada Board of Regents issued a statement announcing it would hold a meeting in southern Nevada soon, in response to requests from that area, but also denying that it had purchased a site for a "Nevada Southern" campus; in 1973 in a rare instance of Congress asserting itself over a president, Richard Nixon obeyed legislation ordering an end to the illegal bombing of Cambodia and denounced Congress; in 1977, Michael Widman, Jr., the nearly forgotten leader of the successful effort to unionize the Ford Motor Company in 1941, died in Silver Spring, Maryland (Widman: "A magnificent victory for democracy."); Ford's Harry Bennett: "A great victory for the Communist Party, Governor Murray D. Van Wagoner and the NLRB."); in 1994, French agents kidnapped Illich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos the Jackal) in Khartoum and smuggled him out of the Sudan, an act illegal under international law.UPDATE WEDNESDAY 8-13-2008, 9:25 a.m. PDT, 16:25 GMT/CUT/SUT —
DOUBLE TALK FROM DUBYA:
George Bush/August 13, 2001: My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen.
George Bush/August 13, 2001: There's a lot of people in the Middle East who are desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And — but first things first. The — these terrorist acts and, you know, the responses have got to end in order for us to get the framework — the groundwork — not framework, the groundwork to discuss a framework for peace, to lay the — all right. [discussing George Mitchell's peace shuttle in the Middle East]
George Bush/August 13, 2002: I firmly believe the death tax is good for people from all walks of life all throughout our society.
George Bush/August 13, 2002: The trial lawyers are very politically powerful. But here in Texas we took them on and got some good medical malpractice.
George Bush/August 13, 2002: There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again.
George Bush/August 13, 2002: Tommy (Thompson) is a good listener, and he's a pretty good actor, too. [confusing his cabinet member with Sen. Fred Thompson]
George Bush/August 13, 2002: I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here.
George Bush/August 13, 2004: I hope you leave here and walk out and say, What did he say?On this date in 1591, Hernando Cortez brought European civilization to the Aztecs by destroying Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), including the magnificent aqueduct and canal system; in 1890, Nevada State Treasurer Tufly George resigned; in 1908, the Churchill County Eagle reported that W.W. Williams had contracted for construction of a new home that he intended to give his daughter and son in law as a wedding gift; in 1935, Anna Boettinger, daughter of President Franklin Roosevelt, said in Las Vegas that she expected that her father "probably will visit Boulder dam on his vacation trip to the west coast"; in 1946, President Truman signed the Indian Claims Commission Act, passed by Congress because of the uncomfortable parallel between U.S. extermination of Native Americans and German genocide of the Jews, but also allowing the federal government to retroactively buy already expropriated tribal lands at prices set by the purchaser, not the unwilling sellers; in 1947, vandals cut down or damaged some of the Japanese cherry trees that lined the Truckee River along Riverside Drive in Reno; in 1954, federal prosecutors in San Francisco dropped charges against French Gulch postmaster William Shuford, accused of embezzling $3,434, after a 31-year search failed to locate him; in 1954, the U.S. Coast Guard station at Lake Tahoe ordered a halt to Lake Tahoe swims that had lately become trendy (the Guard acted after an abortive 33-minute attempt to swim the 23-mile length of Lake Tahoe by 20 year-old Dominic Sposeto of Oakland); in 1966, Longview, Texas, radio station KLUE announced a bonfire of Beatles albums in reaction to John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" comment, and its transmission tower was struck by lightning that night; in 1967, the Daughters of the American Revolution, offended by the antiwar views of Joan Baez, denied the use of Washington's Constitution Hall for a Baez concert; in 1973, Reno police chief James Parker fired Captain Don McKillip for allegedly accepting improper loans and using city property for personal purposes; in 1982, the bull market of the Reagan years, fueled by deficit spending, began with a stock market uptick that would eventually raise the Dow from 776.92 to more than 3,000 before the 500-point crash of October 1987 ended it (the deficits were paid off after Reagan left office, mostly during the Clinton years); in 1998 in Las Vegas, Garth Brooks began four concerts over four days, each sold out and with a cumulative audience of 72,076.
UPDATE TUESDAY 8-12-2008, 6:54 a.m. PDT, 13:54 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1874, the Nevada State Journal recommended an article from the Sacramento Union that said the people of Nevada should stop tying their fortunes to the mining industry — "of all aristocracies the most hoggish, heartless and insolent"; in 1881, a party that included John Muir became the first known white men to set foot on Wrangell Land, an island north of Siberia; in 1906, Nevada assemblymember, assembly speaker, U.S. senator, and U.S. representative Berkeley Bunker was born in Clark County; in 1933, famed bank robber and prison escapee Harvey Bailey, who had shown up at a criminal hideout ranch near Paradise, Texas, at the same time it was being used by George "Machine Gun" Kelly's gang after their kidnapping of Oklahoma oil executive Charles Urschel, was arrested along with them when the FBI tracked the kidnappers to the ranch and they were sent to prison for the crime, though he had nothing to do with it; in 1935 from Aklavik, North West Territory, Will Rogers wrote in his newspaper column "Get your map out and look this up. The mouth of the McKenzie river, right on the Arctic ocean. Eskimo are thicker than rich men at a save the constitution convention.' This is sent from one of the most northerly posts of the northwest mounted police. We are headed for famous Herschel island in the Arctic. Old Wiley [famed pilot Wiley Post] had to duck his head to keep from bumping it as we flew under the Arctic circle."; in 1940, six highways through Nevada were designated as being of "strategic importance" in national defense, which meant they could be in line for improvement; in 1942, Wycliffe Bible Translators was incorporated in Glendale, California; in 1944, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., was flying a dangerous mission for the British Naval Command (piloting a radio-controllable Liberator bomber loaded with 21,000 pounds of explosives until two control planes took remote control of it, then bailing out) when his plane exploded; in 1947 residents of the Pyramid Apartments protested to the Sparks City Council after the U.S. Office of Price Administration lifted price controls on the apartments and the landlady went to higher daily rents than the monthly rents had been; in 1947, the south shore of Lake Tahoe pulled tourists from the more popular north end of the lake when 5,000 people attended a festival at Bijou that included boat races, acquatic exhibitions, a bathing beauty contest, dancing and entertainment; in 1953 in a mutual accounting of prisoners of war by the U.S. and Korea, the Nevada families of Sgt. Robert Rounds (Las Vegas) and PFC Chester Roper (Reno) were informed that the men had died in prison camps; in 1961, the traditional exemption of young men in St. Pierre and Miquelon from the French military draft was revoked (St. Pierre and Miquelon is a tiny island colony of France northeast of Maine); in 1964, a 42-day strike of Nevada and New Mexico facilities of Kennecott Mining was settled on issues of wages, job security, vacations, sick leave and health benefits; in 1997, as part of its ongoing effort to draw away from its southwestern roots, NASCAR added Las Vegas to the Winston Cup circuit.
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21:00-23:00 GMT/CUT/SUTThe 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.
UPDATE MONDAY 8-11-2008, 6:35 a.m. PDT, 13:35 GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 1253, Clare of Assisi, one of two sisters in a wealthy family who became disciples of Francis, died (she was made a saint by Alexander IV and the patron saint of television by Pius XII, who recalled a story about her being sick on Christmas eve but still participating in midnight mass by "seeing" it from a distance); in 1602, the play Thomas Lord Cromwell was registered with London's Stationers‚ Company and a subsequent quarto publication of it identifies the author only by initials "W.S."; in 1879, hundreds of Nevada carbonari (charcoal workers who burned hard wood until it was ready for use in mining smelters) marched in Eureka in protest against a cut in price paid by mill owners; in 1900, four or five year-old Edna Purviance, later silent movie star and Charles Chaplin's leading lady in thirty films, sang a duet with Helen Smith at the Ladies' Aid Society in Lovelock; in 1908, a post office was opened at Al Tahoe; in 1918, Lenin issued a brutal order (see below) to party officials in Penza for the hanging of a hundred kulaks (affluent peasant farmers) as an example to those resisting the new order; in 1943 in Sicily, General George Patton cursed as a "yellow bastard" and physically attacked hospitalized field artillary Private Paul Bennet, who — wishing to return to his unit — had earlier begged doctors not to evacuate him; in 1944, there was a Reno newspaper reported published that actress Frances Farmer was staying with her aunt Mrs. Alex Castaing for a month at Nevada Hot Springs in Lyon County (her biographer wrote that she was actually there for six months, though she made attempts to escape); in 1947, Bonanza Airlines was advertising flights from Hawthorne to Tonopah for $5.75, from Reno to Las Vegas for $22.50 (a flight took about two hours), from Reno to Hawthorne for $5.88, from Las Vegas to Hawthorne for $16.63, from Reno to Tonopah for $11.63, and from Las Vegas to Tonopah for $10,87; in 1954, peace came to Vietnam, after a century of French colonization and repeated insurgencies, with the 8 a.m. cessation of hostilities between the Vietnamese and the defeated French (war would soon return with the entry of the U.S.); in 1
