NevadaLabor.com: Breaking News, Bulletins & Almanac

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' daily Poor Denny's Almanac [PDA]. Items highlighted in blue are of interest to labor in particular and seekers of justice in general. Red means war. Copyright © 2007-2015 Dennis Myers. More Myers.]]

Hope you and yours enjoyed enthralling Thanksgibleting &
Happy High Holly Days
¡Feliz año nuevo!
César Chávez Celebration XIII / Celebración de César Chávez XIII
Tuesday 31 March 2015 / Martes 31 de Marzo 2015
Circus Circus Reno

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All the news you never knew you needed to know—>TOP SECRET, HUSH HUSH!

7-COME-11!
Barbwire wins 7th Nevada Press Association award
Je Suis Charlie

Corporate media: Thou shalt censor thyself
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 1-6-2015 Sparks Tribune

Dastardly dirty deeds done dirt cheap
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 12-30-2014 Sparks Tribune

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

Hopeful High Holly Days: Heroes big and small
Big Daddy Chuck Harper, 1934-2014
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 12-23-2014 Sparks Tribune

FREEBIE ALERT: FREE MOVIE WEDNESDAY NIGHT, DEC. 17

ONE-TIME SHOWING, part of a coast-to-coast tour: Shadows of Liberty reveals the extraordinary truth behind the news media: censorship, cover-ups and corporate control.

FEATURING Danny Glover, Julian Assange, Dan Rather, Amy Goodman, David Simon, Daniel Ellsberg, Norman Solomon, Janine Jackson, Dick Gregory, Roberta Baskin, Jeff Cohen, Robert McChesney, John Nichols, Chris Hedges, Kristina Borjesson and many more.

Northern Nevada Labor Temple
1819 Hymer Ave. / Sparks NV 89431
Wednesday, Dec. 17, 7:00 p.m. PST

Shadows of Liberty reveals the extraordinary truth behind the news media: censorship, cover-ups and corporate control. Filmmaker Jean-Philippe Tremblay takes an intrepid journey through the darker corridors of the American media landscape, where global conglomerates call the shots. For decades, their overwhelming influence has distorted news journalism and compromised its values. In highly revealing stories, renowned journalists, activists and academics give insider accounts of a broken media system. Controversial news reports are suppressed, people are censored for speaking out, and lives are shattered as the arena for public expression is turned into a private profit zone. Tracing the story of media manipulation through the years, Shadows of Liberty poses a crucial question: Why have we let a handful of powerful corporations write the news?

OFFICIAL SELECTION: IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, HotDocs, Vancouver Intl. Film Festival, DOKFILM, Bergen Intl. Film Festival, Canberra Intl. Film Festival, Leeds Intl. Film Fest, Docs DF, London Intl. Documentary Festival, Open City Documentary Festival

WATCH THE FILM'S TRAILER ON YOU TUBE

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
Debra Brown, U.S. Outreach Coordinator
Shadows of Liberty
720-917-4900

Barbano on statewide Nevada Newsmakers TV show
KRNV TV-4 Reno/KENV TV-10 Elko 11:30 a.m. PST Tuesday, 12-16-2014
Andrew Barbano and Sam Shad for an entire program
(About damn time after 22 freakin' years)
Psychically cynical but nonetheless newsworthy political proctology, peerless professional prognostication and epic poetic proselytizing promiscuously promised.
TV and radio re-run times and dates + view online

12-9-2014: Barbano and Gammick actually agree on something. Check hell for snowfall.
Host: Sam Shad
Guest: State Senator James Settelmeyer, R-Minden, Capital Senate District
Pundits: Jesse Gutierrez, Former Executive Director, Nevada Hispanic Services
Dick Gammick, Washoe County District Attorney
Andrew Barbano, Editor, NevadaLabor.com

Watch this website or get on the Barbwire e-mail list for future shows.

Breaking Bad 5: Machine Gun Michele and the good ole boys
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 12-16-2014 Sparks Tribune

Breaking Bad 4: Ira & his ammosexuals flip us the finger

BREAKING BAD
Walter White and some other white guy

Who's,,,	...Who?

Hansen places his puppets in top slots but still controls the lower house.
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 12-9-2014 Sparks Tribune

Station Casinos Workers to Deliver Coal to Company at Its Flagship Casino Dec. 11

Sen. Heller: No hope for jobless benefits extension
By Amber Phillips / Las Vegas Sun 12-2-2014

Breaking Bad 3: Ira, the guv and the dragonslayers
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 12-2-2014 Sparks Tribune

Nevada Lawmaker Ira Hansen Is Forced From Leadership Post Over Remarks on Minorities
By KIMBERLEY McGEE and ADAM NAGOURNEY / The New York Times / 11-24-2014

Breaking Bad Part Deux: Ira blames the Tribune
Barbwire by Barbano / Submitted for publication 11-21-2014 / Expanded from the 11-25-2014 Daily Sparks Tribune

IRA ON TV-4 11-24: I'm not a racist, I just play one on TV

On 11-24-1874, barbed wire was patented.

BREAKING NEWS 11-23-2014—>Hansen resigns as Nevada State Assembly Speaker

Speaker-elect Hansen bigot, racist, homophobe
BARBANO REMARKS ON STATEWIDE NEVADA NEWSMAKERS TV PROGRAM
KRNV TV-4 Reno / KENV TV-10 Elko / 11:30 a.m. PST Tuesday, 11-18-2014
Re-run times and dates + view online
Host: Sam Shad
Guest: Ray Hagar, Reno Gazette-Journal
Pundits: Michael Hackett, Alrus Consulting
Jesse Gutierrez, charter school operator and former Executive Director, Nevada Hispanic Services
Andrew Barbano, Editor, NevadaLabor.com
Related item: Follytix '15: From Topless Campaign to Breaking Bad
Barbwire by Barbano / Sparks Tribune 11-18-2014

BREAKING BAD
Walter White and some other white guy

Who's,,,	...Who?

The documented racism and bigotry of incoming Nevada State Assembly Speaker Ira Hansen
Barbwire by Barbano / Sparks Tribune / 11-18-2014

I hope you will do all you can to get the Republican Party to repudiate this bigoted legislator. He is a disgrace to Nevada and a disgrace to democracy. The onus here needs to be placed on the Republican Party. Are they going to continue to harbor this man and treat him as a responsible human being or expose him as the scoundrel he really is? Can he continue in this position of responsibility or should he be made to step down? Make them choose! — Julian Bond, NAACP Chairman Emeritus, 11-20-2014

Reno-Sparks NAACP calls on Assembly Republican Caucus to replace Hansen
11-20-2014

Reno News & Review 11-20-2014: Republican leader left a trail

SMOKING GUNS: The Ira Hansen Files

Poor Denny's Almanac for Armistice Day, 11-11-2014

John Kennedy/Arlington National Cemetery/November 11 1961: No man who witnessed the tragedies of the last war, no man who can imagine the unimaginable possibilities of the next war, can advocate war out of irritability or frustration or impatience.

On this date in 1620, the Mayflower compact was signed, pledging its signatories to “combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid”; in 1865, civilian Mary Walker, surgeon and prisoner of war, received the Medal of Honor for her services to the Union, the only woman to receive the medal; in 1907 future state legislator, county assessor and sheriff, state Republican chair and governor Fred Balzar was married to Idelle Edna Sinnamon; in 1918, the armistice in World War One took effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and hundreds gathered in the streets of Reno to celebrate and burn Kaiser Wilhelm in effigy; in 1918, at the moment of the armistice the 369th Infantry Regiment, an African-American U.S. unit fighting in French uniforms and under French colors (President Woodrow Wilson's administration frowned on black U.S. units) was in the Vosges Mountains enduring its 191st consecutive day under fire—the longest in U.S. history—and poised to cross the Rhine into Germany, which it subsequently did, the first unit to do so (500 of its members received the Croix de Guerre but other U.S. soldiers were instructed not to salute them at home); in 1918, Acting Governor Maurice Sullivan declared a public holiday on the day the armistice in the world war took effect; in 1919 on the first anniversary of the world war armistice, a mob from the new American Legion invaded a Centralia, Washington, Industrial Workers of the World union hall to attack members and four Legion members were killed after which several union members and their lawyer were arrested and jailed, whereupon one of the prisoners was turned over to the Legion mob which tortured and castrated him before lynching him; in 1941, the Sky Ranch, a private airport on the Pyramid Lake highway about ten miles north of Sparks, began operation; in 1961 after already covertly violating the Geneva agreement on Indochina by sending more soldiers to Vietnam than permitted by the agreement (685), President Kennedy ordered that the agreement be officially violated by sending thousands of soldiers, along with massive materiel—armored personnel carriers, helicopters, bombers, mines and weapons (the weapons turned out to be a godsend to the NLF, southern Vietnamese rebels against the Saigon regime, because Saigon soldiers had a habit of dropping the weapons as they ran from combat), a commitment that made it more difficult for Kennedy’s successor to easily exit Vietnam; in 1971, a Nevada Industrial Commission ruled in a Las Vegas case that long hair on firemen is not a safety issue; in 2006 at the United Nations, the United States used its Security Council veto to block a majority-supported resolution condemning Israel’s Gaza strip military offensive, the second time in 2006 the U.S. vetoed on Israel’s behalf; in 2008, sculptor and actor Tony Dow (Leave it to Beaver) was chosen to have one of his pieces—a bronze of a woman titled Unarmed Warrior—displayed in the Louvre as part of an exhibition of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

Voting, gloating, loathing and scapegoating
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 11-11-2014 Daily Sparks Tribune

Reno PD identifies taxi driver killed in second weekend robbery incident
How many more need to die before in-cab cameras are mandated?
KRNV TV-4 / 11-10-2014

Coroner identifies road construction flagger killed by 21 year-old drunk driver on Nov. 7
Marilyn Rouse was 49
Las Vegas Review-Journal / 11-8-2014
More road construction and job safety news

Sen. Virgil Getto, R-Fallon, 6-19-1924/11-6-2014

I first met Virgil during my maiden voyage at the Nevada Legislature in 1973. I saw a lot of him during the federal court water wars of the 1970s when I did media work for the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District.

My most vivid memories of the good senator lie in his plain-spoken manner.

Once, he came out of a Reno federal court hearing fuming — at the irrigation district's lawyers for their self-protective, weasel worded language. He didn't care who heard him. I surely did and I remember four decades down the road.

During the 1981 legislative session, Virgil came up to me and offered his sympathies after finding out that I was stuck putting up with some of his cliquish fellow lawmakers and their good ole boy club.

My late wife, Betty, liked Virgil, once noting that in the senate he was a farm boy surrounded by city boys, an onion in a field of flowers.

I think he would have found that a compliment coming from a woman who married another onion.

Sometimes onions get noticed and do great things, occasionally bursting into beautiful flowers themselves.

Such was the life of Virgil Michael Getto. I remember him warmly and with great respect.

Andrew Barbano, Reno

Posted to Legacy.com 11-11-2014

Get Outta Dodge, Part Deux
ToljaSo Dept.—> Evil twin school bosses Pedro Martinez and Heath Morrison get axed in the same week. Read the latest dispatches about The Music Man scoring tar and feathers in the Tar Heel country of North Carolina, then remember how Morrison created a climate of fear in these parts.
Bully boys run out on a rail
Take special note of the Barbwires of 5-13 and 5-20-2012

If you voted early, this will make you regret it
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 11-4-2014 Daily Sparks Tribune

Former Reno-Sparks-Washoe school boss Morrison gets outta Dodge. Again.
Morrison leaves Charlotte Mecklenberg two days after his Nevada replacement packs up
Charlotte Observer / Lakeview Pilot 11-3-2014

Virginia City's next scary sexy Hollywood movie
Barbwire by Barbano / Special Nevada Day Edition 10-31-2014

Follytix '14: Year of the Topless Campaign
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-28-2014 Sparks Tribune

Happy 150th Birthday, Ms. Nevada
Nevada Day Required Reading
The Lady in the Red Dress
The Barbwire's classic Nevada Day column written in 1983
The compleat history of the Silver State in 500 words
SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Sparks Tribune 10-31-2013 and previously

Barbwire: Nevada not really a state
No, we were not Battle Born in Kenya
Top 10 reasons Nevada lives in the 19th Century
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-17-2013 Sparks Tribune

Poor Denny's Almanac for October 31, 2014

New York Tribune
Tuesday, November 1, 1864

FROM WASHINGTON.
Special Dispatch to the N.Y. Tribune.
Washington, Monday, October 31, 1864

NEVADA.
Copies of the Constitution and Ordinances of Nevada were sent to the President by telegraph, at a cost of over four thousand dollars.
The ambitious young State deemed the investment warranted, thereby securing three electoral votes.

On this date in 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg; in 1805, Lewis and Clark saw Beacon Rock on the Columbia River and Captain Clark called it Beaten Rock in his journal; in 1864 in the high point of his presidency, President Lincoln ratified Nevada’s admission to the union (previously approved by Congress), which is now observed around the world by costumed children going door to door for candy; in 1882, the Nevada State Journal wrote “Last evening was Hollow Eve, and yet the people were so absorbed in political and other matters that few were aware of the fact.”; in 1918, the Nevada Highway Department received word that the federal government had approved $54,230 for construction of a concrete or asphalt road from Reno to Huffakers, to link up with the already approved highway from Huffakers to Washoe Valley (the money, however, would not be available until the world war was over); in 1922 in admission day remarks to Sparks high school students, former governor Emmet Boyle said that turning the Spanish Springs Valley into an irrigation reservoir and building the Boulder dam project would build up the state; in 1933 as repeal of prohibition neared, U.S. District Court Judge Frank Norcross issued a report claiming that Nevada had the nation’s best record of enforcing alcohol prohibition; in 1949, a collection of musical and jewelry memorabilia that once belonged to Carson City jeweler (and amateur weatherman) Charles Friend was put on display for Admission Day in the state capital (the collection had been purchased at auction by Republican Party figure and “Home Means Nevada” composer Bertha Raffetto); in 1953, the Nevada Day Committee sponsored as part of the admission day entertainment in Carson City, “Dat So La Lee/An Indian Legend” with a cast of 200 Native Americans, plus “the mysterious and beautiful Puberty Dance”, and “Battle of the River of the Washoe-Paiute War”; in 1953, some Reno folks found a way to make children hate admission day—the usual Saturday morning programs at movie theatres and the county library were cancelled; in 1964, “Baby Love” by The Supremes, their biggest hit and the second of five straight hits, went to number one on the Billboard magazine chart (the song was used as a protest against police brutality in Purple Haze aka More American Graffiti) and this was the first week’s top 100 chart not to feature a Beatles song since January; in 1965, the only Sunday Nevada Day parade was held, never repeated because of objections from Christians; in 1992, after thirteen years of study, and 359 years after the event itself, a Vatican panel recommended that the heresy conviction of scientist Galileo Galilei (for arguing that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the other way around) be lifted, a recommendation John Paul II accepted, saying, “One day we may find ourselves in a similar situation...”—but the church failed to apologize; in 1997, “Star Wars/The Magic of Myth”, an exhibit that included 200 props, costumes and art from the film, opened at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Poor Denny's Almanac for October 27, 2014

Betty J. Barbano
2-7-1941 / 12-27-2005

On this date in 1875 there were two major fires in Nevada — one swept Reno’s main street (Commercial Row), the other decimated Virginia City (see below); in 1880 the day before O.K. Corral, the Reno Evening Gazette ran a story on the rising Arizona boomtown of Tombstone and reported that two former Reno businesspeople were operating there; in 1909 Nevada superintendent of schools Orvis Ring, a former Reno school official, was leading in a public straw ballot on what to name new and old schools in Reno; in 1925, the Reno Evening Gazette wrote: “KLAN FIERY CROSS BURNS ABOUT TzOWN Four fiery crosses of the Ku Klux Klan burned in four sections about Reno last night, one near the big N northeast of the university, one at Sparks, one on the Virginia road and the principal one on a raft in the Truckee river near Wingfield Park. According to several connected with the organization, there was no significance in the demonstration other than a desire to remind everyone that the Klan was “very much alive and active.”; in 1950 in Boulder City, Republican candidate for governor Charles Russell declared he was opposed to any additional taxes, a pledge that bound him when he took office and caused the state to lose four years in dealing with the impact of the baby boom on schools; in 1962 U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson presented photographic evidence of the presence of nuclear missiles in Cuba, but failed to produce any evidence of their illegality under international law; in 1965 after sitting on it for a while to make Nevada’s right wing U.S. Representative Walter Baring crazy, President Johnson signed legislation enacting the Southern Nevada Water Project; in 1983 without provocation, the United States of America (population 230,000,000) invaded Grenada (population less than 100,000), successfully diverting attention from the deaths of 299 Marines in the Beirut barracks bombing two days earlier and resulting in the death of 160 Grenadians, 71 Cubans and 19 U.S., though the Reagan administration later “adjusted” the casualty figures downward; in 1985, according to the Back to the Future canon, Marty McFly traveled back in time to 1955 in a DeLorean DMC-12; in 1991 in the wake of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in which he was unable to take a prominent role in scrutinizing the sexual harassment charges against Thomas, U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy apologized to the people of Massachusetts for the troubles in his private life that had undercut his effectiveness as their senator: “I am painfully aware that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than honest disagreements with my positions, or the usual criticism from the far right. To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings—the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them. ... I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too.” (some news outlets like the New York Times still faulted his failure to use his remarks to publicly specify his past mistakes); in 2002, Democratic U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was killed in a plane crash.

October 27, 1875
Territorial Enterprise
Virginia City Rocked by Fire.
NIL DESPERANDUM.
The Enterprise is not quite full size this morning. Only by the courtesy of some kind friends are we permitted to put in any appearance at all to day. There was a convulsion in Virginia City yesterday. A breath of hell melted the main portion of the town to ruins. Our eyes are still dazed by the lurid glare; our ears are still ringing with the chaos of sounds of a great city passing away on the whirlwind of a storm of fire. As the sun arose yesterday morning it turned to purple and gold the smiling features of the most prosperous city on earth. Before the sun set, last night, the greater portion of that city had disappeared; and men and women and little children, by hundreds and thousands, knew not where to get a morsel of food, or where to lay their heads. The catastrophe is appalling. Men give and receive cheerful salutations as they meet, and brave women smile out of countenance the hard fate that has overtaken them; but the heartaches are sore, nevertheless. We know our people will rally from this blow; that, though houses have disappeared and vaults have been rent open by the fire, away down under the ruins there is a treasure safe which will rebuild our city more staunch and fair than it was before. But that promise of the future does not make lighter the suffering of the awful present, and we beseech from this generous coast a full measure of their sympathy for our poor. Those who yesterday would have gladly helped them are poor themselves to-day. An inclement winter is close upon us; there are many hundreds here who have neither houses nor food. They are a strong, brave race, and if California can furnish work for them, they will give a better return for their wages than any other people on earth. Meanwhile, for our people generally there is nothing to do but to go to work. The calamity looks at its worst to-day. Millions of dollars above ground will back the millions below. The shafts to the great mines are uninjured; many of the wrecked engines can be wakened, and in a few weeks the old harmonious clamor will again be heard, and prosperity will come back to us. The whole coast will be more or less affected by this catastrophe. Our mine owners understand this, and will strain every nerve to as swiftly as possible bridge this chasm which has opened at our feet. There is nothing to despair about, and we have not been in this desert for years without learning something of the virtue which suffers without complaining. The winds and the flame conspired against our city yesterday, but neither tempests nor fire can prevail against steadfast souls, and all the scars of yesterday can be erased.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
JOHN SHIPLEY, President
Local 368 A.F.M.
775/329-7995 office
775/219-9434 cel
RenoMusicians.com

MUSICIANS OF THE RENO PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA RATIFY NEW 4-YEAR AGREEMENT WITH RENO PHILHARMONIC ASSOCIATION

John Shipley and Keith Burrowes, President of the Reno Philharmonic Association, holding the just-signed contract.

RENO, Nev. (Oct. 26) — In secret balloting on Sept. 16, members of the Reno Musician's Union Local 368 ratified a new four-year agreement with the Reno Philharmonic Association.

The earlier four-year contract expired on June 30. The new four-year deal is retroactive to July 1 and includes improvements to employee wages and a guaranteed number of performances during the concert season.

The Reno Philharmonic began in 1969, with the first public performance on August 3rd at the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts and now is a resident company of the Pioneer Center in Reno, Nevada.

The Reno Philharmonic is northern Nevada's largest performing arts organization with something for all tastes from Classical to Pop. The orchestra is made up of over 60 professional musicians. They perform in Reno, Carson Valley, and the Lake Tahoe Region in various outdoor and indoor venues.

Local 368 of The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) has represented musicians in the Northern Nevada since it was chartered on January 1, 1917. Members of Local 368 can be seen performing throughout northern Nevada, eastern California and the Tahoe basin.

The first collective bargaining agreement between AFM Local 368 and and the Reno Philharmonic was signed in 1979 and the union has had a contract with the association ever since.

Travus T. Hipp
Feb. 20, 1937 — May 18, 2012

BREAKING NEWS 10-24-2014: Travus and Lynne Hughes' longtime home, the old church in Silver City, has burned to the ground with the loss of one life. Say a prayer and treasure the memories. Sean Laughlin promises to rebuild. Victims were Travus' first wife and her dog.

The Bullfrog Times-Picayune
Sticky Stones: Last blast from the past

Love ain't free: Evelyn Kerr's remembrances of the life and times of Travus T. Hipp from the pages of TimeMazine (CD available)

At Last: Journalist Myers deconstructs what happened the day school boss Martinez melted down
Nevada attorney general succumbs to Reno paper's reprehensible rabble-rousing

Words from God on Nevada ballots and Ebola
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-21-2014 Sparks Tribune

In Memoriam

Assemblymember Pete Livermore, R-Carson City, dies at 73
4th Nevada State Assembly veteran (+Peggy Pierce, Jeffrey, Hogan) to die in the past year
By Sean Whaley / Las Vegas Review-Journal Capital Bureau 10-20-2014

Assemblymember Joe Hogan, D-Las Vegas, a strong voice for justice, dies from aftereffects of stroke at age 77
By Laura Myers/ Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-17-2014

Former Nevada State Assembly Majority Leader Jack Jeffrey, D-Las Vegas, dies
NevadaLabor.com / U-News 10-10-2014

10-20-2014 —>Teamsters 986 demonstrates at Las Vegas Elantra — Valets at the Elara Hilton Grand Vacations have been trying to form a union. The company has done the usual thing: Broken the law, including illegally firing workers. Demonstrations are scheduled for Monday, Oct. 20, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT and 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 PDT at 80 E. Harmon Avenue, Las Vegas 89109. Show up and march in solidarity.

Poor Denny's Almanac for October 20, 2014

October 20/ 50 years ago: The Beatles in Las Vegas
Date: Mon, 20 Oct. 2014 00:08:21

On this date in 1819 (Muharram 1 1235 A.H.), the Báb was born in Shiraz, Persia; in 1890, Indian Agent Daniel Royer at the Pine Ridge Agency, feeling threatened by the ghost dance that had spread from Nevada across the nation, requested six to seven hundred troops, setting in motion the tragedy at Wounded Knee Creek; in 1914 Fayard Nicholas, eldest of the renowned tap dancing duo the Nicholas Brothers who had a long movie and Broadway career in films like Sun Valley Serenade (the two danced up the walls in 1942’s Orchestra Wives, nine years before Fred Astaire did it in Royal Wedding) and performed for nine presidents of the United States and troops in Vietnam, was born in Mobile, Alabama (Nicholas married Dorothy Dandridge); in 1934 Western states American Federation of Labor (AFL) organizer Leo Flynn, speaking in Ely, called for a six hour work day as a Depression measure to combat joblessness by distributing work hours more widely; in 1943 two hundred African-American workers at the Basic Magnesium plant near Las Vegas struck the plant with a demand that separate white and black restrooms be abolished (management blamed it all on labor organizers); in 1951 in a game between Drake and Oklahoma A&M, Oklahoma players—particularly defensive tackle Wilbanks Smith—kept attacking Drake’s African-American halfback John Bright (the nation’s leading ground gainer) after Bright had already passed or handed off, battering him and breaking his jaw, a pattern of brutality exposed the next day in a series of a dozen photographs taken from overhead by Don Ultang and John Robinson and published in the Des Moines Register and Tribune and later in Life magazine, winning the Pulitzer Prize, after which Drake withdrew from the conference and severed all ties with Oklahoma A&M, and the NCAA made illegal hits grounds for suspension and also mandated facemasks and mouth guards for all players (Bright played most of the game injured, recovered from his injuries, and later passed up a draft into the NFL in favor of the Canadian Football League, where he spent a great career); in 1956 National Guard contracts were let for the construction of new armories in Las Vegas and Reno at a cost of $425,000; in 1964 at the height of Beatlemania on the second stop of their first U.S. tour, The Beatles performed two shows in Las Vegas, playing the first show before a crowd of 8,408 in a convention center with a legal capacity of 7,000, while at their hotel—the Sahara—their safety on the casino floor was thought at risk, so two slot machines were sent up to their suite, and Liberace—who had spent time with Elvis during his first, 1956 Las Vegas appearance—now hung out with The Beatles, too. (It was in Las Vegas that the four learned their upcoming September 11 Jacksonville appearance would be segregated and they decided that, if so, they would not play it—Paul McCartney: “You can’t treat people like animals”—and the Jacksonville promoters later backed down and threw the concert open to all); in 1971 Senator Edward Kennedy, the nation’s most prominent Irish-American, demanded that the British leave Northern Ireland and called for an end to repression of the Catholic minority (he later joined with two other congressmembers in sponsoring a resolution calling for an end to “the knock on the door, the violent entry, the arrest in the dark of night…”); in 1977 three members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a plane crash; in 2004, the New York Yankees became the owners of the biggest choke in sports history (on Google the next day, a search for the combined terms “Yankees” and “choke” produced 12,700 hits, and the sports blogosphere went nuts: “the biggest choke team money can buy”, “I hope the over-paid chokers burn in hell for having the greatest collapse in sports history. Against the Red Sox, no less.”, “This morning someone got to my blog via Google by searching for ‘Yankee choke pictures’ “).

IN MEMORIAM: Nevada Assemblymember Joe Hogan, D-Las Vegas, dies from aftereffects of stroke at age 77
By Laura Myers/ Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-17-2014

Former Culinary Union Local 226-Reno business representative Bill Russell dies
Reno Gazette-Journal 10-16-2014

Guy Richardson
Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame

The true test of a Hall-of-Famer: His Work Lives On
Guy Richardson named Paul Revere "The Last Madman of Rock 'n' Roll"
Steve Timko / Excerpted from the Reno Gazette-Journal 10-16-2014

Raiders frontman Revere dies at 76: Popular performer played often in Reno

"...Revere was known as The Last Madman of Rock and Roll.

"Reno Gazette-Journal entertainment writer Guy Richardson said he gave Revere that nickname.

"This is what Richardson wrote in a 1998 article:

"Somewhere in the middle of the 1970s — the exact date has fled my mind with most of that wretched decade — I put Paul Revere on the cover of our entertainment section. I wanted a punchy headline. So with my wild-eyed photo of Revere, I ran type a couple of inches high screaming 'The Last Madman of Rock and Roll!'

"When Revere read the line, his eyes flowed like an insane cyborg in a cheap horror movie. At that instant, he morphed. He's now introduced to audiences coast-to-coast as 'The Last Madman of Rock and Roll.'

"If the name was apt them, it's more apt now. An orchestra-load of those wild old geezers have died, y'know. Paul Revere rides on, smokin' Geritol. And by the way, Paul Revere is his real name.

"This is a man well over a half-century old who pistol-whips a mechanical monkey on stage. A man who threatens the band with a whip. A man who says 'You can tell who are the people in the audience my age. They're the ones in back with napkins stuffed in their ears.'"
_____________________

BARBANO REMEMBERS: Revere asked for $25,000 or $15,000 or less to bring his band to a live gig, save for Reno, where he asked $50,000 because he enjoyed such a wild, mass following in these parts. I got that info from local talent agent Mark Ashworth's hotsheet circa 1987 when I was looking for Reno Autorama acts. Got the Kingsmen instead. "Don't Louie Louie without Dewey Dewey." (Per Autorama vice-impresario Jim Sullivan after some long-forgotten Joe and John Morrey-distributed wine cooler named Dewey Somesuch.) The pansy drink is long-disremembered. The magnificent men — never.

Judge rules Las Vegas Democratic assembly candidate ineligible but sole valid opponent can still lose
By Ben Botkin / Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-16-2014

Cheap thrills: Sex banned in Gomorrah South
How to intimidate Nevadans from registering to vote — by a Democrat, no less
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-14-2014 Sparks Tribune

UPDATE: Jeffrey memorial service in Henderson Friday, October 17

10 October 2014

VISITATION: Friday, Oct. 17, 2014 8:30-10:30 a.m., Palm Mortuary, 800 S. Boulder Highway; Henderson, Nevada

MEMORIAL SERVICE: Friday, Oct. 17, 11:00 a.m., St. Peter's Catholic Church, 204 S. Boulder Highway @ Lake Mead, Henderson [Editor's note: We were originally informed that the service was at 11:00 a.m., changed to 12:00 noon then back to 11:00 a.m. We hope this is the final schedule. Sorry for any inconvenience.]

RECEPTION: 1:00 p.m. Friday, Oct. 17, Henderson Convention Center, 200 S. Water Street, Henderson

In Memoriam

Former Nevada State Assembly Majority Leader Jeffrey, D-Las Vegas, was a longtime legislative colleague of former Acting Governor, Senate President Pro-tem and upper house Minority Leader Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas.

Statement from Sen. Neal: "Jack was one of my favorite people at the Legislature. When Gov. List wanted to take the fire sprinkler law away from me in 1981, Jack made a trip to the Senate to ask me about it, noting that the governor wanted to substitute his bill for mine. I told Jack to take all the good things from the governor's bill and put them into mine."

The resulting legislation, passed over gambling industry objections in the wake of the 1980 MGM Grand fire and the 1981 Las Vegas Hilton conflagration, became the toughest high-rise fire safety law in the world.

"In one of my first sessions, either in 1973 or 1975, some racists hassled me at a Carson City Basque restaurant. I told Jack about it," Sen. Neal remembers.

"Jack said 'next time that happens, you come get me.'

"The last time I saw him was at the Henderson history event last year. Jack was there with his wife (Betty)," Neal said.

Jeffrey was a longtime union member. He died of cancer which metastasized from his lungs. Jack smoked.

More information and remembrances will be posted here as they arrive.

Heartfelt condolences to his friends and family.

From a Facebook posting by Sen. Mark Manendo, D-Las Vegas

Sad to hear the passing of my friend today. RIP Jack.

Jack Jeffrey served in the Nevada State Assembly representing District 22, which encompasses Boulder City, part of Henderson and the Moapa Valley area. Having served previously as Henderson City Councilman and Mayor Pro-tem, Jeffrey was first elected to the Assembly in 1974. While in the Assembly, he chaired the Commerce Committee and the Economic Development and Natural Resources Committee, and served on the Ways and Means, Government Affairs, Agriculture, Labor and Management, and Environment and Public Resources Committees. He also served as both majority leader and assistant minority leader of the Assembly.

8:57a.m. PDT Oct. 11 2014 Update from Sen. Manendo: That was very nice of you, thank you so much sir. Was just a sad day. I saw him a few weeks ago at a luncheon we both usually attend. I gave him a hug. Thanks again, Mark

Jack Jeffrey (2003-02-01) video oral history and transcript, part 1 of 2 - Henderson Memories

Jack Jeffrey moved to Henderson in 1943 after his father got a job helping to construct BMI (Basic Metals, Inc., a titanium processiong plant). He describes downtown Henderson in the early years and recalls that his Basic High School graduating class comprised only 97 kids. Watch it or read it here.

From former Assemblymember Bob Price, D-North Las Vegas
Forwarded by former University System Regent Nancy Price

"I am sad to hear about the death of my friend Jack Jeffrey. Jack and I served together in the Nevada Assembly for many years. We served on committees and shared a labor background. My heart goes out to his wife Betty and the family. The people of the State of Nevada benefit from Jack's hard work as a legislator."

For decades, Bob Price and Jack Jeffrey were members of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 357/AFL-CIO in southern Nevada.

Formal obituary from the Las Vegas Review-Journal

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., praises Jeffrey on the occasion of his 2001 retirement
U.S. Senate transcript / 7-24-2001

Education Dysfunction Part L—>
True confessions from the back of the bus
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 10-7-2014 Sparks Tribune

Culinary rally coincides with opening of downtown Summerlin
By Howard Stutz / Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-7-2014

Culinary Union demonstrates against Station Casinos during Summerlin downtown grand opening
Culinary Local 226 / 10-7-2014

Wal-Mart cuts health benefits for some part-timers
Associated Press 10-7-2014

LVRJ Poll: Hutchison leads Flores for light-guv / Dead Heats: Teachers' gross profits tax initiative, secretary of state and attorney general races
By Laura Myers / Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-2-2014
The newspaper did not disclose who paid for the poll. Longtime reporter Myers also editorialized that the tax initiative is "headed to defeat." The story headline says "margins tax failing." From her own reportage, the poll in question does not support those assertions, showing a statistical dead heat with 23 percent undecided. This underscores the decades-long taxophobic, anti-union bias of the state's largest newspaper.

Why we call it Gomorrah South

Accused pimp held on $1 million bail for almost beating enslaved hooker to death
A Las Vegas pimp accused of beating a prostitute for months until her injuries required an amputation and skin grafts will not have his bail lowered, a judge ruled.
By Mike Blasky / Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-1-2014

Las Vegas hooker's treatment far worse than a dog's
By John L. Smith / Las Vegas Review-Journal 9-28-2014

Police: Woman's Vegas 'dream' smashed by sex industry torture
By Mike Blasky / Las Vegas Review-Journal 9-25-2014

Education Dysfunction Part XLIX—>
We don't need no education: Leaks R Us
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-30-2014 Sparks Tribune

LA Times 9-28-2014: Nevada overstating economic benefits of Tesla factory

Federal judge refuses to stop Nevada fracking
By Scott Sonner / Associated Press 9-27-2014

46th of 50: Nevada 4th least-educated state. Whadya expect?
24/7Wall St.com / 9-27-2014

–>9/23 Teamsters OK new contract with Reno-Sparks-Washoe transit system

–>9/23 Washoe School Superintendent Pedro Martinez out as Barbwire alone predicted last week

Waiter sues upscale Las Vegas Strip restaurant over tip-sharing
Apparently, Steve Wynn does not own this restaurant or the peon wouldn't dare
By Carri Geer Thevenot / Las Vegas Review-Journal 9-25-2014

Can megaresorts scam Tesla-style freebies?
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-23-2014 Sparks Tribune

FIRE METERS IN A LONG, HOT SUMMER
As with the bright, shining lies of the Washoe and Clark County School Districts' graduation rates, the Reno Gazette-Journal is again two years behind the Barbwire (11 October 2012) regarding NVEnergy's combustible "smart meters." It ain't news unless the legit media find it first, right?

Education Dysfunction Part XLVIII—>
St. Elon, Lord Pedro and Gov. Veto El Obtúsè
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-16-2014 Sparks Tribune
9-23 CRYSTAL BALL UPDATE: The above column accurately predicted Martinez's departure one week in advance

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

Barbwire-nominated candidate Guy Richardson wins election to the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame on first try

Support Dondero next

7-COME-11!
Barbwire wins seventh Nevada Press Association award

BRONZE 2016
4-28-2015
11-24-2015
1-19-2016

6-pack: BRONZE 2014
Hopelessly trying to win an earthquake / 4-18-2013

The 2013 Loony Tunes Legislative Lexicon / 5-30-2013

The politics of media ga-ga boosterism / 3-20-2014

GOLD HAT TRICK
Barbwire wins third straight Nevada Press Association first-place award

The 2009 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners
Tony the Tiger & the flaky NFL
Barbwire / 11-30-2008
Deregulation is never having to say you're sorry
Barbwire / 8-3-2008
Nevada: A good place to visit, but do you want to live here?
Barbwire / 6-15-2008

The 2008 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners
The price of a piece/6-17-2007
Boxing Pandora/9-23-2007
The Lady in the Red Dress
10-28-2007

Barbwire.TV
Support the new community TV channel

Suing for Schools

Click here for on-demand re-runs from the 2009 and 2011 legislative sessions

(775) 882-8255
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Barbwire.TV:
15-year overnight success
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008

The Barbwire's Greatest Hits
Highlights from radio days
mp3 file

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UPDATED 11 SEPT. 2014 19:54:23 PDT—> On this date in 1882, the federal Star Routes scandal trial (in which government officials were accused of accepting bribes to create unnecessary mail routes or to grant contracts for existing routes) in Washington ended with the principal accused conspirators acquitted; in 1906 at a mass protest meeting in Johannesburg, Indian attorney Mohandas Gandhi publicly embraced for the first time the method of satyagraha (truth force), the assertive nonviolent resistance that he later used in India, Ghaffar Khan used in what is now Pakistan, and Martin Luther King used in the United States; in 1912 in despair and isolated as a result of being ostracized by both blacks and whites, Etta Duryea Johnson—wife of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson—committed suicide in the apartment above his Café de Champion in Chicago; in 1934 the day after agonized Tiger Hank Greenberg chose to play on Rosh Hashanah against the Boston Red Sox and his second home run won the game for Detroit, the Detroit Free Press ran the headline “Happy New Year, Hank” in Yiddish (ten days later, Greenberg sat out a World Series game that fell on Yom Kippur); in 1941 in Des Moines, Charles Lindbergh carried his opposition to war across a line that offended many: “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.”; in 1953 the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee claimed that 600 clergy across the United States were communists and that “infiltration” of U.S. churches was “successful beyond even communist expectations”; in 1963 the Nevada Gaming Control Board issued a formal complaint against Frank Sinatra, half owner of the Cal Neva Lodge at Crystal Bay and owner of nine percent of the Sands casino in Las Vegas, because Sinatra allowed organized crime figure Sam Giancana to stay at the Cal Neva and because the singer defended his action to the board’s chair in “foul and repulsive language which was venomous in the extreme”; in 1971 the Ford Pinto, a car so badly designed and so recklessly rushed into production that Ford executives were indicted for homicide, was unleashed on the world; in 1995 Houston woke U.S. astronauts with the theme from Rin Tin Tin; in 2001 2,749 citizens of the United States died in one day, including UNLV graduate Karen Wagner, who was working in the Pentagon; in 2001 an estimated 35,615 people died worldwide of starvation, most of them (30,273) children; in 2009 Crystal Lee Sutton, portrayed by Sally Field in the movie Norma Rae, died of brain cancer after a battle with her health insurer, which withheld treatment until after the cancer had taken hold.

Crystal Lee Sutton: "How in the world can it take so long to find out [whether the health insurer would cover treatment] when it could be a matter of life or death? It is almost like, in a way, committing murder."

Tinkle-down economics: testing Tesla's testes
Tesla and the hospital thieves:
Theft of Washoe Med/Renown provides cautionary tale
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-9-2014 Sparks Tribune

Top Gun mechanics at NAS Fallon vote to strike
Contract negotiations may be nearing impasse between IUE/CWA Local 89119 and L-3 Vertex Aerospace of Naval Air Station, Fallon.

Fallon, NV (September 09, 2014) — The support personnel who maintain the fighter aircraft and helicopters assigned to the Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center, NAS Fallon, have voted to authorize a strike against the Contractor L-3 Vertex Aerospace over what they deem an unfair contract proposal by L-3.

Contract negotiations have been taking place at the Holiday Inn Express in Fallon since August 11 between the Local 89119 and L-3. The current 5 year contract expires 12 September at midnight. On 06 September 2014, a strike authorization vote was held at the IUE/CWA Local 89119 Union Hall in Fallon. The overwhelming majority of the membership unanimously voted to authorize a strike, if an agreement cannot be reached on a new contract. The membership consists of 187 mechanics and support personnel for NSAWC F/A-18 A/C/E/F/G, F-16A/B aircraft, and SH-60/S helicopters.

Were the Local to strike, there would be a negative ripple effect throughout the entire U.S. Navy. The Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center (NSAWC, pronounced "EN-SOCK") at Naval Air Station Fallon is the center of excellence for naval aviation training and tactics development. NSAWC provides service to aircrews, squadrons and air wings throughout the United States Navy through flight training, academic instructional classes, and direct operational and intelligence support.

Top Gun flies thousands of sorties every year with an excellent safety record. That fact alone speaks volumes about the quality of maintenance the Local performs on these aircraft. Without the support of the local, Top Gun would be forced to ground its aircraft and its pilots.

“While we regret any imposition a strike would cause to the United States Navy, our membership insists that L-3 return to the table and bargain in good faith,” said Jeff Martens, President IUE/CWA Local 89119, explaining that “a strike is not being taken lightly by our membership but neither is an unfair contract.”

The local is scheduled to have a formal ballot box vote on acceptance or rejection of L-3’s contract offer on Wednesday, 10 September at the union hall. But expectations remain low as the company has made no concessions to the membership's concerns of an unfair contract.

IUE/CWA Local 89119
447 Court Street
Fallon, NV 89406
775-423-9119
Contact: Ed Johnson
Secretary, 89119
775-835-1676

UPDATED 7 SEPT. 2014 12:02:58 a.m. PDT, 07:02:58 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> On this date in 1867, German stage and screen actor Albert Bassermann, who appeared as “Van Meer” in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, whose last screen appearance was in the Powell-Pressburger classic The Red Shoes (as Sergei Ratov), and who held the Iffland Ring (reserved for the world’s greatest German-speaking actor) from 1911 to 1935, was born in Mannheim, Germany; in 1896, Nevada State University President Joseph Stubbs issued a public statement: “To the public—The report that Miss. Neila M. Butler of Gold Hill was expelled from the University is not true and is very unjust to her…”; in 1923, the International Criminal Police Commission (better known as Interpol) was formed in Vienna (contrary to its name, it is actually a private organization rather than a government agency); in 1936, Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holley was born in Lubbock, Texas; in 1941, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told his private secretary, “If we must have preferences let me whisper in your ear that I prefer Arabs to Jews.”; in 1954, Nevada Governor Charles Russell asked President Eisenhower to authorize federal drought aid to the state; in 1967, in the latest instance of the U.S. belief that U.S. technology could solve all problems, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in recognition of the failure of bombing to destroy Vietnamese industry and impede the flow of products south, announced an electronic field of cleared ground 600 to 1,000 meters wide laced with barbed wire, watchtowers, 540 million mines, and 20,000 listening devices stretching from the South China Sea to Laos at a cost of $800 million a year and additional research and development to stay ahead of technology to combat the McNamara Line, raising the annual cost to approximately $100 million (and the Vietnamese just went around it); in 1972 on the first day of school, Clark County superintendent of schools Kenny Guinn was forced to cancel elementary school “until further notice” after a group of parents won a court order halting implementation of an integration plan, Nevada Attorney General Robert List and school district lawyer Robert Petroni melodramatically flew to Washington to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the integration plan, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund entered the case against List and Petroni, and protest marches were held on the Las Vegas strip, at the county courthouse, and in the downtown casino district; in 1974, the second amendment to the Pakistan constitution became effective, declaring Ahmedi (Ahmadi) Muslims to be “non-Muslim” and a minority, eliminating official religious tolerance and triggering widespread violence against the Ahmedis that continues today, causing some to go into exile for safety; in 1998, Roger Maris’s home run record fell to Mark McGwire after Maris held it longer than Babe Ruth; in 2002, George Bush claimed that the International Atomic Energy Association had issued a report asserting that Iraq was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon, which was false, though journalism helped covered up the lie (the Washington Post reported it in the 21st paragraph of its story and MSNBC posted it on its web site but then quickly removed it). [PDA]

Teamsters reach new tentative agreement with Washoe mass transit contractor
U-News / 9-5-2014

Door-to-door salesmen and stoner stores
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 9-4-2014

Taxpayers taken for teslacide demo ride
The latest shrift & shred on Tesla Fever
2-29-2016: A mighty leap on Leap Day
Nevada workers strike megabucks battery plant

Fix Tesla First: Workers Protest Faraday Corporate Giveaway
Sen. Bernie Sanders decries corporate welfare
12-27-2015

Can megaresorts scam Tesla-style freebies?
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-23-2014 Sparks Tribune

Tesla rewrites history to chisel worker paychecks
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 4-21-2015 Sparks Tribune

Robbing Peter to pay Paul: $70 million for Tesla roads fast-tracked by a year
The Nevada Transportation Department will develop a state highway in northern Nevada a year ahead of schedule
to provide better access to the industrial park where the $5 billion Tesla battery gigafactory will be built.
By Richard N. Velotta / Las Vegas Review-Journal 10-13-2014

LA Times: Nevada overstating economic benefits of Tesla factory
By Chris Kirkham / Los Angeles Times / Sunday 9-28-2014
In the 9-28 Reno Gazette-Journal, Anjeanette Damon compiles serious questions from area public officials about Tesla's impacts.
The LA Times analysis answers some of those questions and the results ain't pretty.

Can megaresorts scam Tesla-style freebies?
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-23-2014 Sparks Tribune

Elon Musk: Pseudo-green plantation overlord and union buster

Education Dysfunction Part XLVIII—>
St. Elon, Lord Pedro and Gov. Veto El Obtúsè
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-16-2014 Sparks Tribune

Nevada Gets Musked: Politicians Thoroughly Fleeced
Wall Street Journal Lead Editorial / 9-16-2014

Tesla to put strain on Nevada in short term
Parks, schools, roads, police & fire protection will be spread even thinner
RACE TO THE BOTTOM: Tesla will not pay prevailing area standard construction wages
Laura Myers & Sean Whaley / Las Vegas Review-Journal 9-14-2014

Shakedown: Tesla wants to build a plant with other people's money
Didn't Gregory Peck and Danny DeVito make a movie with the same name?
Among many other revelations, it calls into question Tesla's green commitment other than to the color of money.
Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review / 9-11-2014

Tesla deal hiring assurances sought by lawmakers
Sean Whaley / Las Vegas Review-Journal / 9-11-2014

Former Senator Sheila Leslie: Betting on the Come Line
Reno News & Review / 9-11-2014

Prevailing wages up for grabs at legislative TeslaFest
Cy Ryan / Las Vegas Sun / 9-10-2014

Tinkle-down economics: testing Tesla's testes
Tesla and the hospital thieves:
Theft of Washoe Med/Renown provides cautionary tale
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 9-9-2014 Sparks Tribune

Legislators need a backbone in probing Tesla
Dennis Myers Blog / Reno News & Review 9-9-2014

Roads add nearly $100 million to Tesla deal
Sean Whaley / Las Vegas Review-Journal / 9-8-2014

Nevada state controller: Double-check Tesla deal
Laura Myers / Las Vegas Review-Journal / 9-8-2014

Stock drops, analyst calls Tesla sales projections 50 percent overstated
Nevada gigafactory production will not appreciably lower price of new models
USA Today / 9-5-2014

Tesla deal ties Chrysler for largest auto industry subsidy in U.S. history
Cy Ryan & Ryan Frank / Las Vegas Sun / 9-4-2014

Nevada’s tax deal for Tesla would be one of the largest in U.S. history
Ryan Frank / Las Vegas Sun / 9-4-2014

Nevada's share of Tesla plant could hit $1.3 billion
Las Vegas Review-Journal / 9-4-2014

6,500 JOBS: Tesla picks Storey County, Nev., for $5 billion battery factory
Press conference Sept. 4 / Gov. may call special legislative session / Half a billion in corporate welfare?
Las Vegas Review-Journal / 9-3-2014

Hey, Tesla! Nevada's got a fair deal for you
Steve Sebelius / Las Vegas Review-Journal / 8-13-2014

A cold shower for the NY Times Tesla gusher
40 years in the wilderness: Study says Silver State on downhill slide since 1970
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 7-10-2014 Sparks Tribune

Tesla plants PR slants to get into the public's pants
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 6-19-2014 Sparks Tribune

UAW still working on "not a high priority" Tesla California assembly plant
Tesla: unionization a risk to its business
By David R. Baker / San Francisco Chronicle / 2-24-2014

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

Barbwire-nominated candidate Guy Richardson wins election to the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame on first try

Support Dondero next

7-COME-11!
Barbwire wins seventh Nevada Press Association award

BRONZE 2016
4-28-2015
11-24-2015
1-19-2016

6-pack: BRONZE 2014
Hopelessly trying to win an earthquake / 4-18-2013

The 2013 Loony Tunes Legislative Lexicon / 5-30-2013

The politics of media ga-ga boosterism / 3-20-2014

GOLD HAT TRICK
Barbwire wins third straight Nevada Press Association first-place award

The 2008 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners
The price of a piece/6-17-2007
Boxing Pandora/9-23-2007
The Lady in the Red Dress
10-28-2007

Barbwire.TV
Support the new community TV channel

Suing for Schools

Click here for on-demand re-runs from the 2009 and 2011 legislative sessions

(775) 882-8255
[882-TALK]

Barbwire.TV:
15-year overnight success
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-10-2008

The Barbwire's Greatest Hits
Highlights from radio days
mp3 file

Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential

Happy Labor Day
On Sept. 1, 1907, labor leader Walter Reuther, named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, was born in Wheeling, West Virginia. [PDA]
Be well. Raise hell.

Southern Nevada rally for good jobs at Boulder Station Aug. 29

Labor Day 2014: Red, white and screwed
Silver State Lining: Nevada union membership 10th-highest in the nation
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 8-28-2014

UPDATED 22 AUGUST 2014 01:07 a.m. PDT, 08:07 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> On this date 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. (Courtesy Dennis Myers' daily Poor Denny's Almanac [PDA] © 2014)

OCTOBER, 1969 — César Chávez, right, and Walter Reuther, center, at the dedication of the United Farm Workers' new headquarters in Delano, Calif. The buildings were dedicated to Reuther's late younger brother, Roy. The Reuther-led United Auto Workers were instrumental in acquiring the land and funding for the "The 40 Acres," as the site was known. The man at left was on a picket line for five years and may or may not be a Chávez relative. Anyone who can identify him, please contact me. A character resembling him appeared in many scenes of the 2014 major motion picture César Chávez. (Photo courtesy of George Nelson, UAW Local 2162 Retirees.)

Sexy scandals, whitewashes & black towers
Media overlook federal sex/race/ethnicity investigation into Washoe County School District
Meanwhile, big money is spent strictly on abstinence
State panel to review militarization of police departments
In Nevada visit, new Veterans Administration boss proves all jobs require training
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 8-21-2014

Reno Aceholes and other minor league baseball teams accused of slavery in treatment of players
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 8-21-2014

105 + 285 layoffs at Las Vegas area's only public hospital called necessary
Las Vegas Sun / 8-21-2014

Study Shows the Madness of States Refusing to Expand Medicaid
Joshua Holland / Bill Moyers.com / 8-14-2014

HANDS UP! Moment of Silence for slain Mo. teen Aug. 14, Reno & Carson City

Education Dysfunction Part XLV—>
Bringing serious heat well into the night
Nevadans host moment of silence for Missouri police shooting victim Michael Brown
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 8-14-2014

UPDATED 10 AUGUST 2014 04:33 PDT, 23:33 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>

TEAMSTERS VOTE DOWN CONTRACT WITH RTC WASHOE TRANSIT OPERATOR

Education Dysfunction Part XLIV—>
Pots and Kettles: Can't we all get along?
BREAKING NEWS: WCSD Board of Trustees Vice-President Dave Aiazzi has announced that he has been diagnosed with leukemia and will be resigning by the end of September. Remember him with healing thoughts and prayers.
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 8-7-2014

College President: Race an issue in l'affaire Martinez

RENO (4 Aug. 2014) — On today's Nevada Newsmakers program on KRNV TV-4/Reno and KENV TV-10/Elko, Truckee Meadows Community College President Maria Sheehan stated "I cannot tell you that race is not a factor" with respect to the suspension of Washoe County School Superintendent Pedro Martinez.

Her statement came in response to a question from host Sam Shad.

The full interview, which comes in the first segment of the program, will be available by about 6:00 p.m. PDT at NevadaNewsmakers.com/ It may also be viewed this evening at 9:30 on Charter Cable Channel 190 and 24/7 via Charter Cable On Demand. Click here for the full statewide re-run schedule.

The Barbwire of July 31 first decried the injection of race into an already tense situation.

Stay tuned.

Playing the race card: Suspicions linger
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 8-28-2014

Education Dysfunction Part XLIII—>
Playing the race card for profit and peril
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 7-31-2014

Education Dysfunction Part XLII—>
We don't need no education or Pedro, either
Reno-Sparks-Washoe school boss fired and unfired
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the Sparks Tribune / 7-24-2014 / UPDATED

Nevada education ranks dead last in nation for third year running
Dismal placements in children’s health, education, economic security, state of families and community
Las Vegas Review-Journal / 7-22-2014

ADMISSION FREE
Nevadans premiere live concert and film at Artown

8-1-2014 — A tentative agreement has been reached with the operators of the Reno-Sparks-Washoe transit system and Teamsters Local 533. Members will take a ratification vote on August 10.

Happy Birthday, Medicare

From longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' daily Poor Denny's Almanac: On July 30, 1965, after defeating the bitter opposition of the American Medical Association in one of the monumental legislative battles of the 20th century, Medicare was created by Congress.

How to assassinate Medicare and Medicaid
Health Savings Accounts: The insurance industry's Trojan Horse
Andrew Barbano / Reno Gazette-Journal / 7-19-2014

Las Vegas cancer center drops Obamacare patients
Culinary Union is part of cancelled co-op
Las Vegas Review-Journal / 7-17-2014

Waste Mismanagement
Unappealing: Local governments turn monopolies loose on public without grievance process
By Dennis Myers / Reno News & Review 7-17-2014

Migrant laborers: Your folks and refugee kids
What do broke Baby Boomers and Central American refugee children have in common?
The future of the U.S. workforce.
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 7-17-2014 Sparks Tribune

A cold shower for the NY Times Tesla gusher
40 years in the wilderness: Study says Silver State on downhill slide since 1970
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 7-10-2014 Sparks Tribune

Ask Hobby Lobby to take in refugee kids
So five uptight old Catholic guys in grim reaper robes don't like contraception.
Wonder if they thought that way back in college?
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 7-3-2014 Sparks Tribune

Sign Rep. Barbara Lee's petition against a 3rd US-Iraq War
Barbara Lee: The latter-day Jeannette Rankin
More about Congressmember Lee

Get ahead of corporate-influenced news—>Subscribe to Barbwire Confidential

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

Barbwire-nominated candidate Guy Richardson wins election to the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame on first try

Support Dondero next

7-COME-11!
Barbwire wins seventh Nevada Press Association award

GOLD 2017
Don't ask Renown Med for marijuana to help your chemo
10-4-2016
We Don't Need No Education
Toxic turf threat ignored
12-13-2016
Kate Smith & Lady Gaga
2-14-2017

Bronze 6-pack
In the Uber-Nevada legislature, words can kill
4-28-2015
On artificial turf, don't breathe unless absolutely necessary (above)
11-24-2015
Leading questions, lead-headed leaders
1-19-2016

Hopelessly trying to win an earthquake
4-18-2013
2013 Loony Tunes Legislative Lexicon
5-30-2013
The politics of media ga-ga boosterism
3-20-2014

GOLD HAT TRICK
Barbwire wins third straight Nevada Press Association first-place award

The 2008 first-place Nevada Press Association award winners
The price of a piece/6-17-2007
Boxing Pandora/9-23-2007
The Lady in the Red Dress
10-28-2007

Barbwire.TV
Support the new community TV channel

Suing for Schools

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Building Trades Council responds to GOP misrepresentation
Sen. Dean Heller attempts to stage an illegal political rally at federally-subsidized housing complex

RENO, Nev. (27 June 2014) — The Building & Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO today responded to Republican Party pressure after a partisan event was improperly scheduled on council-managed property.

This morning, KRNV TV-4 reported and posted this story on the station's website: "Senator Dean Heller will be attending a patriotic picnic Friday, along with several other Washoe county leaders, to honor our Veterans. The 'meet and greet' is a chance to get up close and personal with some of the areas (sic) Republican candidates and legislators and is being sponsored by Washoe Republican Women. The picnic will be held at the Carville Apartments 1244 Carville Drive in Reno."

TODD KOCH

Council President Todd Koch stated that "the Building Trades Council manages the property for a non-profit 501 (c) (3) corporation. Partisan political activity is thus prohibited by law.

"Apartment complex management was not accurately informed of the character of this event, only that it was something for the veterans who live at the facility," he added.

"An operative for Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., passed out cards for people who wanted to issue complaints through his office about the political rally's cancellation," Koch said.

"It is illegal to stage partisan events at this facility. We find it quite ironic that Sen. Heller, R-Nev., who has consistently voted to defund HUD-subsidized housing, was trying to stage a rally for Republican candidates at a complex that the Dept. of Housing and Urban Development underwrites," Koch noted.

"Republican Washoe County Commissioners have cut senior services but the GOP and the Republican Women's Club apparently think nothing of proselytizing for votes at Carville Park.

"Union labor built the complex in the late 1970s after the Building & Construction Trades Council secured funding. The council has managed the facility on behalf of the non-profit corporation since that time," Koch stated.

"This incident has been an intrusion and an inconvenience to our veteran tenants and an insult to all the union workers who built and maintain this much-needed community asset.

"Allowing such events could result in loss of tax exemption and qualification for government programs, thus jeopardizing the future viability of Carville Park, resulting in the loss of housing for hundreds of senior citizens," Koch concluded.

Teamsters contract with Washoe transit system expires Monday, extension possible
JUNE 30 UPDATE: Current contract extended through July 31, 2014.
6-29-2014 Update: Strike authorization passed overwhelmingly.
8-1-2014 — A tentative agreement has been reached with the operators of the Reno-Sparks-Washoe transit system and Teamsters Local 533. Members will take a ratification vote on August 10.

Graveside memorial service for former Teamsters Local 533 leader Lou Martino

UPDATE: A good friend honored one of Lou Martino's last requests, that one of his karaoke pals sing Paul Anka's "My Way," the standard made famous by Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. The gentleman performed it a capella at graveside.

Organized labor was represented by Local 533 Secretary-Treasurer and Principal Officer Debbie Calkins, former Local 533 Business Agents Dan Montgomery and Ross Steffner (who arrived on his boss Harley), longtime member Mona Marmolejo (UPS) and Andrew Barbano, member of Communications Workers of America Local 9413/AFL-CIO.

Brothers Steffner and Barbano said a few words in memory of their old friend and colleague. Sister Calkins and Barbano placed hands on Bro. Martino's casket before they left.

ALWAYS LOOKING SHARP. One person remembered that among his other talents, Lou was an accomplished sharpshooter. Sister Marmolejo noted that Lou Martino was always the best-dressed man in the room. His silver/black/gray casket was as dapper as ever he was.

All attended a reception at Reno's The Point restaurant following the ceremony. It is a local favorite karaoke bistro often attended by Bro. Martino.

A toast was proposed by Bro. Barbano in honor of Lou's memory

RENO, Nev. (6-23-2014) — Former Teamsters Local 533 leader Louis E. Martino, Jr., will be laid to rest in a graveside memorial service at 10:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, June 24, at Mountain View Cemetery, 435 Stoker Ave., in northwest Reno. Martino died at home on June 17 after a long battle with cancer. He was 67.

"He led the union during turbulent times, including successful strikes against several major employers," stated current Local 533 Secretary-Treasurer and Principal Officer Debbie Calkins.

LOU

"The union is stronger today for his two decades of leadership," she added. In 2011, Calkins became the first woman to head the local since its 1934 chartering.

"He was the one union leader that supported our strike against the Reno Hilton many years ago," remembered Gene McConville, President Emeritus of Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America (SPFPA).

"Please send my condolences to his family," McConville stated.

SPFPA won the first security guard election in Nevada history at the Reno Hilton, which stonewalled negotiations. The fabled 1996 Hot August Strike at Hot August Nights made national news as Teamsters drivers turned their trucks around rather than cross union picket lines. The Beach Boys were not amused and performed despite being members of three unions. SPFPA members eventually became the Silver State's first unionized security guards when Hilton signed a contract after a long legal battle.

Martino was born in New York, New York, on January 28, 1947. He grew up attending performances of future soul/rock superstars at Harlem's legendary Apollo Theater and worked as an elevator installer in New York high rises. Upon moving to Nevada, he became an operator for the Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County transit system. As a Citifare driver in the late 1980s, he led the successful campaign to unionize the system.

His first major labor confrontation came with the national strike against UPS in 1997.

His former wife, Lorraine, was interred at Mountain View in 2004. He leaves two daughters, Adrian and Dorian, a sister in New York, and other family members in Nevada and New York.

Comments and memories may be sent for posting at NevadaLabor.com, where a complete history of Martino's tenure may be accessed. E-mail <barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us>

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
Debbie Calkins, Local 533 Secretary-Treasurer (775) 348-6060
Gary Watson, Local 533 President (775) 348-6060

Lou Martino memorial service Tuesday, 24 June 2014

1947-2014

UPDATE 6-23-2014 — Louis E. Martino, Jr., will be laid to rest in a graveside memorial service at 10:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, June 24, at Mountain View Cemetery, 435 Stoker Ave., in northwest Reno. His former wife, Lorraine, was interred at Mountain View in 2004. Born in New York on January 28, 1947, he was 67. Please forward any and all information or comments (see below) for inclusion in a formal obituary.

RENO — (4:48 p.m. PDT 6-20-2014) —IBT 533's Lou Martino passed away Tuesday, 17 June 2014

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

Teamsters Local 533 leaders Debbie Calkins and Gary Watson informed me today of the passing of former Teamsters Local 533 Secretary-Treasurer Lou Martino.

The Washoe County Coroner's Office confirmed that he passed away Tuesday, June 17, while under home hospice care.

I have been trying to contact his family, particularly his daughters, Adrian (Nuñez) and Dorian, in order to develop information for an obituary as I did for their mother, Lorraine, in 2004.
Thus far, I have run into legal stone walls since I'm not a family member.
I have also left messages in several other places asking that the family contact me. I have tried several old personal phone numbers for Lou, but they are no longer in service.
Anyone with information about Brother Martino's family or any memorial service, please forward it.
My personal condolences and respects to his family.
In Solidarity,
Andrew Barbano
NevadaLabor.com
Barbwire.TV
(775) 786-1455

REMEMBERING OUR FRIEND AND BROTHER

Search NevadaLabor.com for Louis E. Martino, Jr.

Andrew: Sorry to hear of Lou's passing. He was the one union leader that supported our strike against Reno Hilton many years ago.Please send my condolences to his family.
Gene McConville
President Emeritus
Security,Police and Fire Professionals of America.
{SPFPA}

Andrew, I will check with the Local leaders and see what they know and a few people that are in the Bay Area, but who were close to Lou.
Rome Aloise
Joint Council #7 President

Dear Andy,
To say I was shocked upon hearing of Brother Martino's passing would be an understatement. I had the pleasure of being a member of Local 533, and a great pleasure of serving as a business agent with Lou. We became very good friends, and Lou "took me under his wing", and was my "rabbi" so to speak.
We had many laughs together and a lot of good memories shared. Towards the end of his tenor as Sec./Treas. at Local 533, a lot of stress from the job finally caught up with him, and his health went into decline, which he hid from all of us.
I will miss my friend and co-worker, we shared many stories and he did give me a glimpse into his personal life and background growing up, and working in New York City.
Should you be able to find out any information on services, etc. please let me know. My Home Phone is local 849-1114. You do have my e-mail address.
Thank you.
In Brotherhood and solidity,
Ross Steffner, Teamster, Retired

LATE BREAKING NEWS: Twila "LaDawn" Kulhanek Tutrow, 52, former office manager of Painters & Allied Trades Local 567 and significant other of retired Ironworkers Local 118 Business Manager John Rafter, passed away on June 14. Remembrance/gathering at 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, in E. Nicolaus, California. Obituary and details.

The Status Quo Ante versus the Status Quo Uncle
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 6-26-2014 Sparks Tribune

Barbano on statewide Nevada Newsmakers show

Tesla plants PR slants to get into the public's pants
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 6-19-2014 Sparks Tribune

We've lost our brother James Brown. A retired member of the United Food Commercial Workers Union and President of the Nevada Alliance for Retired Americans Douglas County Chapter, James was a relentless advocate for Nevada’s working families and senior citizens. Our condolences to the Brown family.

Please send cards to:
Jo Etta Brown
225 Autumn Hills Road
Gardnerville, NV 89460

Please send flowers to:
Saint Gall Catholic Church
1343 Centerville Lane
Gardnerville NV 89410

Church Phone: (775) 782-2852

Memorial Services
Friday, 13 JUNE 2014, 9:15 Rosary, Memorial at 10:00 a.m.
Saint Gall Catholic Church

Reception immediately following in the Pastoral Center.

Dear NARA Leadership (6-2-2014): I have just received some very sad limited information of the passing of Bill Birkman. Bill was in Reno Saint Mary's Hospital intensive care unit and passed away. His cremated remains have been sent to family in New York.

Bill was a Communications Workers of America retiree. Years ago, he served as a NARA vice-president representing all CWA retirees in our state. He was also our first Alliance/NARA Organizer/Consultant, serving two years. Bill did a outstanding job and I know CWA was very proud of him. He will be missed by all of us who knew and worked with him. I will keep you informed of any arrangements or new developments. — Scott Watts, President, Nevada Alliance for Retired Americans

On this date in 1866, Decoration Day, later called Memorial Day, was commemorated for the first time; in 1908 “The large attendance at the baseball game last Sunday testifies to the grip the national game is getting on the citizens of Rawhide [Nevada]” (Rawhide Rustler); in 1910, by signing presidential proclamation 1043, President Taft designated Ranbow Bridge, a religious site to Hopi, Navajo and other Southwestern tribes, to be a national monument; in 1941, the British invaded Iraq to overthrow the government of Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani because it was considered sympathetic to Germany; in 1957, a Navy dirigible arrived at Yucca Flat from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey for use in the “Franklin” atomic detonation on June 2, 1957; in 1966, eastern Nigerians formed the Republic of Biafra, sparking civil war that resulted in Biafra being wiped out, many of its people dying of starvation (Richard Nixon campaigned for president as a Biafra supporter but failed to change the U.S. policy of indifference after he took office); in 1989, Chinese students constructed a “goddess of liberty” in Tiananmen Square; in 2006, a Department of Homeland Security official announced plans to cut counter-terror funding to New York and D.C. by forty percent because D.C. is a low risk city and New York doesn’t have the kind of national icons that would attract terror (alleged terror targets like Omaha, Charlotte, Jacksonville and Louisville received increased funding). [PDA]

Keep chipping. Pretty soon, you've got a sculpture —> and lots of arrowheads!
LV unions get deals with all 9 holdout hotels
Golden Gate caves. No strike.
GG was most recent Gomorrah South property struck (2002)

On this date in 1887, Beadle’s New York Dime Library released the dime novel Volcano, the Frisco Spy; or, The Secret of the Secret Seven. A Wild Tale of a Nevada Mine. by Howard Holmes; in 1914 members of the Eagles lodge gathering in Reno for their state convention were told by Reno Mayor Fred Shair that “they could go as far as they liked” (as one news report put it) and Police Chief John Hillhouse and Sheriff A.A. Burke cautioned their deputies against making arrests; in 1931, a former U.S. House member selected to lease properties in the Boulder City reservation said he would make the town the antithesis of Reno—only U.S. citizens permitted, applicants judged on character, fitness, and personality, gambling or other prohibited activities grounds for revocation of leases; in 1943, Szarajowka in Poland joined a macabre list, villages punished for their resistance by being completely wiped off the face of the earth by the SS (others included Socky, Kitow, Oradour sur Glane, and—most notoriously—Lidice); in 1957 in the District of Columbia, Atomic Energy Commission member Willard Libby said rain that fell in the district earlier in the week was hot with radiation but was “not dangerous and nothing to be frightened about” (he also said the radiation was from Soviet tests; the U.S. at that time had detonated 88 atomic tests, 50 of them in Nevada); in 1967,The New York Times disclosed the 22 year effort by the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission to suppress film footage shot in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (by classifying it secret) in order to shield the public from knowledge of the effects of atomic radiation; in 2003, Les Miserables closed after a 16-year Broadway run (6,680 performances).

Poor Denny's Almanac for May 17, 2014

On this date in 1889, Benjamin Harrison, appointed president by presidential electors after he lost the election, made a flurry of appointments, including John W. Whitcher as U.S. attorney of Nevada (recommended by U.S. senators William Stewart and John P. Jones of Nevada); in 1911, Lisa Fonssagrives, considered the first supermodel, was born in Sweden; in 1923, the director of the U.S. Mint informed the Nevada Mine Operators Association that silver purchases required under the Pittman Act had been reduced to ten million ounces and that mine owners better get their tenders in fast; in 1943, one of the amphibian “flying boat” planes being developed by Howard Hughes took off from the Boulder City airfield with Hughes as pilot and crashed into Lake Mead, killing one of the passengers, Civil Aeronautics Administration inspector William Morrison Cline; in 1954, in a case argued before the court by an African American attorney representing blacks and a former Democratic presidential nominee representing white supremacy, the United States Supreme Court overturned its 1896 ruling that said public facilities for races can be segregated if they are equal, now finding that separate schools are “inherently unequal” and ordering nationwide desegregation (see below); in 1968, Robert Warren Andrews, Jr., of Reno died in Kien Phong Province, Vietnam (panel 24w, row 29 of the Vietnam wall); in 1977, the Reno Evening Gazette editorialized on the “sorry sight” of Muhammad Ali “in the late stages” of his career (five months later, Ali regained the heavyweight title); in 2003 the Ottawa Citizen’s Norman Provencher revealed a transcript of John Lennon’s 1969 closed door testimony before Canada’s Le Dain Commission on legalization of marijuana as an alternative to harder drugs sold by “pushers in the schoolyard...This is the opportunity for Canada to lead the world...Canada is America without being American, without that...’We-are-the-mighty-whatever scene’.”

Unanimous opinion/Oliver Brown, et. al., Appellants, vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kansas, et. al.: "Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does... Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system... We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment."

On this date in 1797, only 16 years after France won the American Revolution for the rebellious colonists, President John Adams delivered a message to Congress demonizing France (while tilting in favor of England) that set off the first “wag the dog” war started by a U.S. president, a message described by Thomas Jefferson as “nearly insane” (the message elevated national disagreements capable of diplomatic resolution into matters of national pride that led to the French/U.S. naval war of 1798-1800): “Such attempts ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France and the world that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.”); in 1905, film giant Henry Fonda (The Ox-Bow Incident, Fail Safe, Young Mr. Lincoln, Mister Roberts, The Grapes of Wrath, 12 Angry Men) was born in Grand Island, Nebraska; in 1929, the first film Academy Awards were given with Sunrise/A Song of Two Humans winning Best Picture/Artistic and Wings winning Best Picture/Production (there were then two best picture awards); in 1940, the Nazis launched a month-long effort to annihilate the entire Polish intellectual community—teachers, professors—apparently considering it a rich source of resistance leaders (the operation, which involved summary executions in the Kampinos forest and in a prison in Warsaw, was called the “Extraordinary Pacification Operation”— Ausserordenliche Befriedungsaktion) while also trying to wipe out Poland’s distinctive culture by destroying universities, museums, schools, libraries, and laboratories; in 1956, after obtaining an April 27 divorce in Ely, North Las Vegas Police Chief W.C. Pool (who was under investigation by the FBI for police brutality) secretly married North Las Vegas Mayor Dorothy Porter in Elko (when news of the May 16 marriage broke, Pool’s wife or exwife contacted the Clark County district attorney about having the Ely divorce set aside); in 1966, Pet Sounds, which was partly inspired by Rubber Soul and would help to inspire Sgt. Pepper, was released; in 1977, the landing gear on an idling helicopter on the famed helipad atop the PanAm building in New York City collapsed, causing the blades to detach and slice through waiting passengers and fall to the street below, killing five people and injuring others; in 2002, Assembly Speaker Joe Dini announced his retirement from the Nevada Legislature. [PDA]

On this date in 1786, Saint John Vianney, patron saint of draft dodgers, was born near Lyon (in 1808, he hid in the mountain community to avoid service with the French Army on the Spanish lines and was able to return to his home town after Napoleon granted amnesty to deserters and others in 1810); in 1897, Nevada sheepman William O’Brien, seriously injured by a gunshot wound in the head, said his mistress Orena Loek accidentally shot him in the room in Reno’s Tremont Hotel where they had been living; in 1927, Nevada State Treasurer Ed Malley was arrested and jailed for embezzlement of $516,322.16 ($6,425,307.67 in 2010 dollars) from the state treasury, his arrest following the May 7 jailing of his alleged confederates, former state controller George Cole and former Carson Valley Bank cashier H.C. Clapp; in 1943, Mordecai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was executed by the Nazis (he wrote that he would die happy, knowing that after centuries of the Catholic Church forcing Jews into ghettos, “I have lived to see Jewish resistance in the ghetto in all its greatness and glory”); in 1950, President Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, was meeting with the French in Paris about his plans to get the U.S. involved in the Indochina war; in 1970, eight days after the U.S. government attacked Cambodia and four days after students were shot and killed by National Guard troops at Kent State, about 200 construction workers from the World Trade Center site and other New York construction sites joined by white collar Wall Street workers rioted during an antiwar protest at Wall Street and Broadway, beating protestors and chasing them to Pace University and City Hall while 150 police officers watched without interfering (President Nixon honored the construction workers to the White House); in 1972, the day before his victory in the Oregon primary, U.S. Senator George McGovern, D-S. Dakota, campaigned in Klamath Falls, at one point greeting campaign worker Dennis Myers; in 2000, Germany removed the name of Wehrmacht Chief of Air Defence Gunther Rudel, a veteran of both world wars, from a military base and renamed it for Sgt. Anton Schmid, who saved more than 250 Jews in the Vilnius ghetto from the Nazis.

President Kennedy/United Auto Workers convention/May 7 1962: " Last week, after speaking to the Chamber of Commerce and the presidents of the American Medical Association, I began to wonder how I got elected. And now I remember."

On this date in 1860, white men at Williams Station on the Carson River kidnapped Native American girls, provoking an attack by tribal members who burned the station to the ground, whereupon a white force attacked the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe to defend the right of white men to molest tribal children (their ignorance of the tribes among whom they lived is indicated by the fact that they were probably attacking the wrong tribe, since the attack on Williams Station was likely made by the Bannocks); in 1915, two years before U.S. entry into World War One, the British passenger and munitions ship Lusitania was sunk by the German submarine U-20 (Lusitania was carrying artillery shells and fuses and millions of rounds of ammunition); in 1930, the United States Senate voted 41 to 39 to reject President Hoover’s nomination of racist John Parker to be a justice of the Supreme Court (Nevada’s Tasker Oddie voted for Parker, Key Pittman voted against him), a victory that projected the NAACP — which had led the fight — into the political big leagues; in 1945, German Chancellor Karl Doenitz ordered an unconditional surrender to Allied forces, ending the European war; in 1948, red baiting caused one of its most dramatic wrongs — Robert New, Jr., a supporter of Progressive Party presidential nominee Henry Wallace, was murdered in Charleston, South Carolina, by Wallace opponent Rudolph Surreo (attorney and former Charleston mayor Thomas Stoney said he would defend Surreo by putting the victim on trial: “At the trial I will prosecute Bob New for raising unrest among the colored people of the south. I will prosecute him also as the chairman of the Wallace Committee and as [one of] the despicable, slick, slimy communists prowling the waterfront.”; in 1955 in a track meet at Mackay Stadium in Reno, San Francisco State’s John Mathis — later famous as a singer — broke a stadium high jump record (breaking at 6 feet, 5.5 inches) that had been set the previous year at Mackay by Bill Russell, later the basketball great; in 1962, President Kennedy urged delegates to a United Auto Workers convention to hold down their wage demands, telling them that unjustified wage increases are as much a threat to the economy as unjustified profits; in 1983 on the television series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, the famous investigator solves the murder of a Reno lawyer in an episode called “Nevada Gas” (the title refers to a car built to be a gas chamber); in 1999, the University of Nevada-Reno held opening ceremonies for its fire academy in Carlin (design flaws and groundwater contamination associated with the facility later came to light, prompting the university to default on payments for the construction, the facility becoming a $40 million white elephant by 2009).

On this date in 1886, the Central Pacific Railroad was selling off 10,820 acres it owned in the area of the big bend of the Carson River near abandoned Fort Churchill at an asking price of $13,000; in 1927 in the 1926-27 Mississippi River flood that lasted more than a year, a week after levees were dynamited to divert flood waters from New Orleans, other parishes were devastated and newspapers reported an astounding 323,837 victims; in 1933, a Continental Congress for Economic Construction was held in Washington, with delegates cheering speakers U.S. Senator Lynn Frazier of North Dakota (“I have occasional opportunities to speak to what is called the higher branch of Congress, but I am sorry to say they do not represent the people as you do.”) and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (“There must be no government aid for banks except the government own the banks; no government coordinators to save the railroads save as the workers own the railroads.”); in 1935, the first Nevada Pulitzer Prize was awarded to California’s Sacramento Bee for its investigation of judicial affairs in Nevada (the Reno Evening Gazette ran the news on page 7 and then—18 days later—denounced the award in an editorial); in 1943, captured Japanese newsreels showing the Pearl Harbor attack from the air were released by the Office of War Information into U.S. theatres; in 1952, Reno bookies sued the Nevada Tax Commission to halt proposed state regulation of bookmaking; in 1969, Attorney General John Mitchell met secretly with Chief Justice Earl Warren, offered to drop an investigation of Justice Abe Fortas’ relationship with a foundation started by Las Vegas casino figure Louis Wolfson if Fortas would resign, and Warren agreed to help force Fortas off the court (Fortas resigned on May 14); in 1982, eleven weeks after actors Ed Asner and Howard Hesseman announced a fund raising drive for medical aid to victims of the El Salvador junta supported by the Reagan administration, CBS cancelled their television series Lou Grant and WKRP, both of which had high ratings; in 1992, Mikhail Gorbachev spoke at Fulton College (where Winston Churchill had made his iron curtain speech in 1946) and faulted both east and west for their pointless adversarial postures and failing to use common sense to end the cold war.

On this date in 1893, a panic on Wall Street set off a crippling depression (three weeks later, operations at the Carson City Mint were halted) that lasted four years; in 1904, Boston pitcher Cy Young threw a perfect game against Detroit, the first perfect game since 1880; in 1931, Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann accused the Yugoslav government of assassinating Croatian scholar Milan Sufflay in Zagreb and called for protection for the people of Croatia; in 1941, Emperor Haile Selassie returned to his Ethiopian capital after five years of occupation by Italy; in 1955, West Germany became a sovereign state and the U.S. stopped calling its occupation an occupation; in 1967, San Francisco by Scott McKenzie, anthem of the flower children, first appeared on the music charts; in 1970, Lloyd Willner Jackson, a 22 year-old Native American from Austin, Nevada, died in Thua Thien province, Vietnam (panel 11w line 124 of the Vietnam wall); in 2008, one of the more unusual crossover collaborations in television history was broadcast, combining the Malibu sex comedy Two and a Half Men with the violent Las Vegas crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in an episode called Fish in a Drawer; in 2012, at Barrio Logan, the Navy cargo ship U.S.N.S. César Chávez was christened.

On this date in 1626, Peter Minuit purchased Manhattan Island from tribal members for $24 (in 1800s dollars, not 1600s) in trade goods, a transaction often portrayed as a case of white men besting natives—except that Minuit bought the island from people who were traveling through the area and did not own the land, and he had to purchase it again later from the actual occupants; in 1888 in San Francisco, Sutro Tunnel shareholders heard the annual report, including the news that a total of $237,258.33 ($4,869,747.39 in 2005 dollars) in royalties was paid by Comstock mining companies to the tunnel company for the use of the tunnel; in 1923, the New York Legislature voted to end state enforcement of federal alcohol prohibition, which was expected to free about a thousand police officers in New York City alone for other duties and to save about $5,000,000 annually (the equivalent of $63,317,700.74 in 2010 dollars); in 1934, Manhattan Melodrama with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy was released (it became enduringly famous as the movie John Dillinger saw in Chicago before exiting the theatre to be shot dead by FBI agents); in 1942, deportation began of more than 10,000 Jews from Lodz, Poland to the Chelmno death camp (six Jews killed themselves over four days rather than be deported); in 1956, Gene Vincent recorded Be Bop A Lulu; in 1970, four antiwar protesters on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio were shot and killed by National Guard soldiers; in 1988, a fire in a rocket fuel factory in Henderson, Nevada, caused detonation of thousands of pounds of chemicals, demolishing the factory and damaging nearby structures; in 2009, it was reported that in March, the 99-year-old U.S. Capitol power plant had ended its use of coal to generate hot water for heat and hot water in congressional buildings (it had been the last coal-burning facility in D.C.).

Ohio by Neil Young: "How can you run when you know?"

Faculty member Seymour Baron, urging Kent State students to leave the campus after National Guard troops killed four students/May 4 1970: "There are too many of you who are too damned good to die in this stinking field here."
[PDA]

Mayday!
Taxes smolder while citizens do slow burn
May Day in Reno, D-Day for teachers' union tax petition
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded and Updated from the 5-1-2014 Sparks Tribune

On this date in 1886 a strike was begun in Chicago for an eight hour day, a challenge to economic power that later became International Workers Day and gave May Day its workers’ name, and it took place in a period of economic brutality and robber barons, and on the same day Boston plumbers and carpenters issued a strike threat against the Master Building Association unless an eight hour day was allowed, brewers at a Philadelphia firm struck, a building trades strike was scheduled in the District of Columbia, a labor mass meeting was held in San Francisco, furniture makers and cigar makers unions in San Francisco imposed an eight hour day without bothering to ask employers, the Baltimore Sun agreed to an eight hour day for carpenters it employed, St. Louis carpentry employers agreed to an eight hour day, and business and journalism throughout the country tried to play workers off against each other, particularly against Chinese workers (two days after the first May Day, Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers, killing four people and wounding many more); in 1886 at a labor union rally reportedly held in Milwaukee, the first known use was made of the labor slogan “8 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for what we will”; in 1903 there were strikes of launderers in Chicago; of carpenters and horseshoers in Bloomington, Illinois; of teamsters, building trades, hotel and restaurant workers and their sympathizers in Omaha, and strikes of mechanics, laborers, and marine engineers in New York were averted; in 1905 in a teamsters strike, something called the Employers Teaming Company in Chicago was importing a thousand teamster strikebreakers from St. Louis and arming them with Winchester rifles and the police commissioner said he would not interfere (the same company also brought James “Strikebreaker” Farley from New York); in 1908 California physician S.A. Ellis, who had mining investments at Searchlight, said he believed the town would make a good health resort and sanitarium because “I know of no better place for people affected with lung troubles”; in 1915 young songwriter Jerome Kern, who was supposed to sail for England with Broadway producer Charles Frohman, missed the RMS Lusitania when it sailed because he was up late the night before; in 1916 six hundred envelopes containing the ashes of executed labor organizer Joe Hill that had been sent to Industrial Workers of the World locals around the nation were opened and scattered across the country; in 1957 a committee established by the U.S. Senate and chaired by John Kennedy of Massachusetts to select the five greatest senators in history to be honored with portraits in the capital announced its choices: Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Robert La Follette, and Robert Taft (actually, these were not the committee’s choices—Nebraska’s senators Carl Curtis and Roman Hruska had threatened to halt senate business in protest if the committee’s top choice, George Norris of Nebraska, was selected); in 1965 “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” by Herman’s Hermits hit number one in the U.S., later spawning a movie of the same name. [PDA]

On April 20, 1971, the United States Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.

On April 15, 1861, after Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for three months service; in 1884, the dime novel Deadwood Dick Sentenced; or, The Terrible Vendetta. A Nevada Tale. by Edward L. Wheeler (Deadwood Dick story No. 28, set in Camp “Nowhere,” Nevada) was published by Beadle’s Half Dime Library; in 1918, the Woodrow Wilson administration succeeded in convicting filmmaker Robert Goldstein under the Espionage Act because he put Britain in a poor light by making a film—Spirit of ’76—about the American Revolution, a prosecution that bankrupted Goldstein, put him in prison, and then later forced him—a Jew—to move to Germany during the rise of the Nazis to try to reestablish his career; in 1933 in a sharp break from past federal policies toward Native Americans, President Roosevelt nominated John Collier, a social worker and champion of tribal rights, to be U.S. Indian Commissioner; in 1936, Price Johnson, serving time in an Arizona prison for polygamy (technically “open and notorious cohabitation”) told the Associated Press that his cult was making plans for a polygamous community at Short Creek on the Arizona/Utah border (the community—now Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona—still exists and is a reclusive community in chronic conflict with officialdom; in 1954, the income tax deadline was April 15 for the first time (it was initially March 1, then March 15); in 1959 the Nevada personnel advisory committee approved a ten percent hike for 2,300 state workers to bring state salaries closer to those paid by private businesses; in 1967, 175 men burned their draft cards at a massive peace rally in Central Park in New York City; in 1979 the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas was founded; in 2001 in an anti-Semitic Easter B.C. comic strip, cartoonist Johnny Hart portrayed a menorah’s candles burning out and the menorah breaking apart until only the shape of a burning cross remained (two years earlier, Hart had said publicly, “Jews and Muslims who don’t accept Jesus will burn in Hell”); in 2004, citing health concerns, Nevada Chief Justice Deborah Agosti announced her retirement from public life. [PDA]

IMPORTANT NOTICE: I am very sad to report that Martha Elliot, Walt Elliot’s beloved wife, has passed.
Memorial service: April 16, 2014
1:00 p.m. PDT
St. Elizabeth Seton Church
1811 Puebla Vista Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89128
Martha was a wonderful woman who shall be missed by her loving family.
Our hearts go out to them.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Bro. Elliot served as longtime president of Bartenders Local 165 in Las Vegas.]

On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, famously remarking "We have lost the south for a generation."

On this date in 1876, the Silver State of Winnemucca, Nevada, reported that “Several Chinamen are now engaged in rafting on the Humboldt. Firewood is scarce in this vicinity and the Chinese do not care to pay the price which it commands in the markets; willows are plenty up the river and the provident Celestials cut and trim them and tie them in bundles which they fashion into a raft and float down the river to this point”; in 1927 in keeping with a town ordinance, Sparks officials ordered all slot machines in town confiscated; in 1959, University of Nevada President Charles Armstrong announced that Carl Sandburg would speak at the June 7 graduation; in 1967 at the urging of Governor Paul Laxalt, the Nevada Athletic Commission joined the blacklist of Muhammad Ali, cancelling a Muhammad Ali/Floyd Patterson bout it had previously approved, with Laxalt claiming his reason was that he thought a second Patterson/Ali matchup would be a poor fight, a judgment that was supposedly the province of the allegedly independent commission (sportswriter Roy McHugh: “If Patterson doesn’t belong in the same ring with Clay, who does?”); in 1981, Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen married; in 2009, after the audience and judges on a television program called Britain’s Got Talent reacted with skepticism or rudeness when a frumpy Scot named Susan Boyle walked out on stage, her powerful rendering of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables brought them to their feet in a tremendous ovation, and video of the appearance went up on the internet to be viewed tens of millions of times world wide. [PDA]

On April 10, 1947, Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey announced he had purchased the contract of Jackie Robinson from the Montreal Royals.

On this date in 1896, Nevada Governor John Jones died and Lieutenant Governor Reinhold Sadler became acting governor; in 1912, the Titanic put to sea, most of its 1,317 passengers (709) made up of lower income third class, and third class passengers were destined to die in greater numbers (a higher percentage of first class section men survived that of third class children); in 1940, J.C. Penney president Earl Sams testified against legislation sponsored by populist U.S. Representative Wright Patman to curb chain stores; in 1957 in “Rick the Drummer,” an episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Ricky Nelson performed a cover version of Fats Domino’s hit, “I’m Walkin’ “, launching Ricky’s singing career; in 1965, Nevada gambling lobbyist Gabriel Vogliotti said that a circulating initiative petition to increase gambling taxes “would end the industry—not hurt it, wreck it”; in 1971, Jeannette Rankin, the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry in both world wars, led a protest march on the Pentagon by 8,000 women against the war in Vietnam; in 2002, David Hajdu’s book Positively 4th St. was published and contained an interview with Bob Dylan in which he said, “I never saw myself as a folksinger. They called me that if they wanted to. I didn’t care. I latched on, when I got to New York City, because I saw [what] a huge audience there was. I knew I wasn’t going to stay there. I knew it wasn’t my thing. ... I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow. ... Folk music is a bunch of fat people.”; in 2008, Ani DiFranco performed at Lawlor Events Center in Reno.[PDA]

UPDATED 5 APRIL 2014 08:54:15 PDT, 15:54:15 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1890, the Silver State of Winnemucca reported on northern Nevada flooding: “Several dams up the river have been washed out. In some instances the water has cut a new channel, leaving the dam high and dry”; in 1915, the U.S. sent a diplomatic note to England saying that its reasons for the anti-German Allied blockade of both belligerent nations and of neutrals were a pretext and that England should be prepared to pay reparations, and meanwhile the collector of the Port of New York said he would place evidence before a grand jury showing that English ships operating off the U.S. coast were violating U.S. neutrality by offloading fuel and supplies from ships that brought them from New York; in 1931, the Carson Opera House burned down; in 1941, Reno’s Overland Hotel, recently repossessed by Reno National Bank, was purchased by Washoe County rancher Nick Sorge for $70,000; in 1956, after he wrote columns critical of mob influence in labor unions, columnist Victor Riesel was blinded by acid thrown in his face by an unknown attacker [EDITOR'S NOTE: Undeterred, Riesel went on to write labor columns for decades thereafter, carried regularly by Hank Greenspun in the Las Vegas Sun]: ; in 1962, after several weeks delay caused by smoke damage from a February fire, a move by the Nevada Fish and Game Commission (now the Nevada Wildlife Department) into its new building at 1100 Valley Road was reported by the Nevada State Journal to be imminent; in 1997, The Body Electric, a new episode of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman offered an unusual story line for a family western — whether Quinn and her family and friends could accept homosexuality, in the form of visiting poet Walt Whitman and his lover (Brokeback Mountain was still nine years away).[PDA]

On April 4, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn.

UPDATED 31 MARCH 2014 00:19:15 PDT, 07:19:15 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> Poor Denny's Almanac for César Chávez Day 2014

On this date in 1492 in Granada’s Alhambra Palace, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain signed an “edict of expulsion” ordering all Spanish Jews to leave the nation and giving them three months to dispose of their homes, property and assets, usually at a fraction of their value (Isabella said it was not their decision, it was God’s); in 1874, Reno’s Nevada State Journal went daily after three years as a weekly; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal wrote: “The world is full of material that will be used to make bombs for the destruction of protection to labor. Organized capital, for the illegitimate purpose of enslaving labor in manifold form, is forcing the conflict that will in due time culminate in a severe conflict. Capital at the present time holds the fort and its guns are directed against the rights of labor.”; in 1927, César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona; in 1945 at the Ravensbruck women’s death camp, a Russian Orthodox nun and poet (see below) named Elizabeta Skobtsova but known as Mother Maria who had aided and rescued Jews in France, was gassed; in 1955 in what Groucho Marx (in a wire to Judy Garland) called “the biggest robbery since Brinks”, Grace Kelly won the best actress Academy award for The Country Girl over Garland in A Star is Born; in 1961, what was reported to be Reno’s first sit-in was staged by African Americans at the Overland Hotel’s café while elsewhere in the downtown a picket line was thrown up at the Nevada Bank of Commerce; in 1965, a massive airborne offensive began in Vietnam, with a hundred U.S. planes pouring tons of napalm, phosphorus bombs, and fuel oil on a 19,000-acre section of Vietnam; in 1971, a court martial board sentenced Lt. William Calley to life at hard labor for murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai (after President Nixon intervened on Calley’s behalf, the sentence was later reduced to 20 years, then ten, and he ended up serving just three and a half years in his Fort Benning quarters); in 1982, a massive avalanche hit Alpine Meadows ski resort, killing seven and entombing chairlift operator Anna Conrad, who was trapped under a bank of lockers buried in ten feet of snow (she was found alive in a hollowed-out ice cave five days later); in 1995, Latina star Selena was shot and killed in Corpus Christi; in 2014, César Chávez Day will be celebrated with a large gathering at the Circus Circus Hotel in Reno. [PDA]

NEW! Assemblymember Lucy Flores, Chávez alumna Maria Zamora & Sen. Joe Neal headline César Chávez Day 2014
NEW! 1960s Northern Nevada Chávez work disclosed

UPDATED 25 MARCH 2014 06:33:48 PDT, 13:33:48 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>

On this date in 1896, a measles epidemic in Lincoln County was hitting Native Americans particularly hard, with six of them dead in a week; in 1928, a Catholic organization in Rome called Friends of Israel that opposed Vatican anti-Semitism and urged better treatment of Jews was ordered suppressed by the Inquisition; in 1939, with war talk common, the Nevada Bureau of Mines was doing a study of the prospects for development of strategic war minerals in the state; in 1965, shots fired from a car carrying four Klansmen—one of them an FBI informant—killed civil rights activist activist (and Freedom Rider ) Viola Liuzzo on a highway between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama; in 1976, Assembly budget committee chair Don Mello, D-Sparks, complained about alleged cronyism between Governor Mike O’Callaghan and favored classified employees like state printer Pat Brady; in 1977, former Washoe County superintendent of schools Earl Wooster, who counted the 1944 shutdown of the Washoe Indian school and integration of Native Americans into the white Orvis Ring School among his most important achievements, died in Reno; in 2011, Florida Representative Scott Randolph, a Democrat, used the word uterus on the floor of the Florida House, prompting Republican leaders to tell him not to mention body parts in the hall and generating a uterus Facebook, pink uterus buttons, Twitter postings, a uterus website, talk of a U-PAC, and doubts that the Republican leader knew what a uterus is (Randolph’s remarks on an anti-labor union bill: “It’s easy to practice an ideology of convenience. If my wife incorporated her uterus, you all would say hands off. If my friends incorporated their bedroom, you’d say hands off. But now we’re standing here and we’re saying we’re going to increase regulation on a specific type of membership organization. And that’s unions.”). [PDA]

UPDATED 24 MARCH 2014 07:38:04 PDT / 14:38:04 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>

Robert Kennedy/March 24, 1968: "Our brave young men are dying in the swamps of Southeast Asia. Which of them might have written a poem? Which of them might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read? It is our responsibility to let these men live. ...it is indecent if they die because of the empty vanity of their country."

On this date in 1693, John Harrison, a self-educated English clockmaker and inventor of the marine chronometer, a long-sought device used to solve the problem of establishing the longitude of a ship at sea, thus revolutionizing and extending the possibility of safe long-distance sea travel, was born in Foulby, West Yorkshire; in 1886, the Reese River Reveille said that lobbyists were costing the state of Nevada thousands of 1886 dollars: “If such a thing were possible there are at least half a dozen men in Nevada who should be quarantined for sixty days every two years.”; in 1927, U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie of Nevada told President Coolidge that it would be better if Interior Secretary Hubert Work left office and that Work’s decision to withdraw from public use 100,000 acres in Secret Valley, California, after the Senate had provided for an ammunition depot at a different location (Hawthorne, Nevada) was “a piece of high-handed interference” by Work; in 1940, University of Nevada freshman left halfback Marion Motley killed an elderly Japanese man, Tom Bobori, in a car accident and was charged with negligent homicide; in 1956, U.S. Navy officials confronted Lt. Thomas Dooley, famous for his humanitarian work in Indochina, with the results of an investigation into his sexuality and forced him to resign his commission; in 1960, Harold’s Club general manager Raymond I. Smith resigned as secretary-treasurer of the All American Society, a McCarthy-era group he founded to warn against “creeping communism” whose officers included American Legion official Thomas Miller and former U.S. representative Cliff Young; in 1977, on the anniversary of the coup that brought the military dictatorship to power, Argentine investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh published “Open Letter From A Writer To The Military Junta” on the torture, disappearance, and murder of thousands of Argentinians, and was assassinated the next day; in 1980, a month after Catholic Bishop Óscar Romero wrote to President Carter asking that the U.S. stop supporting the El Salvador junta’s repression and murder and Carter refused, Romero while saying mass was shot and killed by members of a death squad led by former Salvadoran army Major Roberto D’Aubuisson; in 2002, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the best-acting Oscars.

UPDATED 23 MARCH 2014 00:42:33 PDT, 07:42:33 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>

Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple/House of Lords/March 23, 1943: "We are confronted, as all your Lordships know, with an evil the magnitude and horror of which it is impossible to describe in words. There has, I suppose, never been so great a manifestation of the power of sheer cruelty and of the determination to wreak upon a helpless people what is not vengeance, for there is no offence, but the satisfaction of a mere delight in power such as is to be witnessed on the continent of Europe at the present time. … We know that Hitler near the beginning of the war declared that this war must lead to the extermination of either the Jewish or the German people… He is now putting that threat into effect, and no doubt we are to a very large extent at present powerless to stop him. We are told that the only real solution is rapid victory. No doubt it is true that if we could win the war in the course of a few weeks we could still deliver multitudes of those who are now doomed to death. But we dare not look for such a result, and we know that what we can do will be but little in comparison with the need. My whole plea on behalf of those for whom I am speaking is that whether what we do be large or little it should at least be all we can do. … We know of course that the German government will not give exit permits. What matters is that we should open our doors irrespective of the question whether the German door is open or shut, so that all who can may come. … My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind. ... The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days. ... We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity, and of God."

On this date in 1775, Patrick Henry supposedly told the Virginia Convention, “I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death”, but in fact he never said it; in 1918, trial began of 101 labor leaders indicted for “espionage” (opposing U.S. participation in World War One), among them Bill "Big Bill" Haywood, who at age 15 worked in a mine in Nevada’s Humboldt County; in 1923, Chollar Mine worker Andy Antunovich lost an arm on the job as rumors circulated of a miners strike on the Comstock; in 1943, twenty-nine Jewish children from the La Rose Orphanage in France, and their adult caretaker, were gassed at Sobibor death camp; in 1956, in her newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “There must be great pride, not only among the Negroes but among white people all over the country, in the remarkable restraint and courage shown by the Negroes in their struggle for their rights in Montgomery, Ala., and other places in the South. Never before has such a peaceful but determined movement taken place. It is inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers in India and calls for remarkable fortitude and perseverance. Dr. Luther King, in his insistence that there be no hatred in this struggle, is asking almost more than human beings can achieve. Yet there has not been one single word of praise from any member of the [Eisenhower] administration.”; in 1964, John Lennon’s In His Own Write was published; in 2002, longtime Reno High School teacher Rex Daniels, who took the first master’s degree in journalism from the University of Nevada and put the compiler of this mailing on the road to journalism, died in Reno; in 2003, Donald John Cline Jr.of Sparks, Nevada and Frederick Pokorney Jr. of Nye County, Nevada and Michael Williams of Yuma, who was born in Reno, died in Nasiriyah, Iraq, and on the same day, the Institute for Policy Studies in D.C. reported that, according to the U.S. State Department’s own human rights survey, many of the members of the Bush administration’s Iraq “coalition of the willing” were themselves terrorist states (Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Macedonia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey, and Uzbekistan). [PDA]

2014 Nevada Press Association Award Winner
We Don't Need No Education XXXVIII—>
The politics of media ga-ga boosterism
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 3-20-2014 Sparks Tribune

UPDATED 9 MARCH 2014 01:29:59 PDT, 08:29:59 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: Largest Nevada newspaper confirms Barbwire investigative series about Clark and Washoe County school districts' phony graduation rates.

RENO, NEV. (3-7-2014) — PAUL MCKENZIE, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the Building & Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO, filed to run for the Reno City Council 4th Ward seat currently held by term-limited Councilman Dwight Dortch.

WE LOVE LUCY! As political junkies and others of questionable character (which describes most of my fans) learned before the rest of the great unwashed in the Barbwire of Feb. 20, Assemblymember Lucy Flores, D-Las Vegas, will declare her candidacy for Nevada lieutenant governor at 2:00 p.m. PST Saturday, March 1, at the College of Southern Nevada Cheyenne Campus. Does the date imply Lucy is coming in like a lion? Well, she is woman, hear her roar. She will address Washoe Democrats on Tuesday evening, March 4, at DemoHQ, 1465 Terminal Way in Reno. Be well. Raise hell. Esté bien. Haga infierno.

UPDATED 24 Feb. 2014 06:03:02 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Feb. 24

On this date in 1821, Mexico declared its independence from Spain, making it easier for the U.S. to later seize most of Mexico (525,000 square miles) by force; in 1836 on the same day, U.S. Representative John Quincy Adams began his seven hour argument before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the African passengers of La Amistad, and William Travis, leader of the pro-slavery Mexicans rebelling against the prohibition of slavery in the new Mexican constitution, sent a plea for help from the Alamo; in 1900, the Coconino Sun of Flagstaff carried a report on a scheme by a Missouri banker to increase the number of U.S. senators from Pacific coast states (“The Pacific has six senators, the Atlantic thirty-six!”) by increasing the number of Pacific coast states (California, Arizona and Nevada would be reconfigured with southern California attached to Arizona to create one state and northern California attached to Nevada, with northern California and Nevada split on east/west lines to create two more states for a net gain of four senators); in 1917, Woodrow Wilson made public the decoded Zimmerman telegram sent from the German foreign secretary to the German ambassador in Mexico, offering Mexico restoration of land (including Nevada) seized by the U.S. in the Mexican war if Mexico entered the First World War on Germany’s side; in 1944, Soviet troops systematically rounded up 400,000 Ingush and Chechens and shipped them by rail to the east (about a third died on the way); in 1965, District 1199 Health Care Workers in Wisconsin became the first known labor union to oppose the war in Vietnam (1199 came out against the Iraq war on October 22d 2002); in 1969, twenty workers on the Nevada (nuclear) Test Site were stranded on Pahute Mesa (4071 feet low elevation to 7575 feet high elevation) in a blizzard; in 1983, the Reagan administration announced that it had classified three Canadian environmental documentaries (including the Oscar-winning If You Love This Planet) as “political propaganda” whose distribution in the United States would be “monitored” by the Justice Department; in 2003, John Darren Smith of an undisclosed Nevada community, died in Kuwait. [PDA]

We Don't Need No Education XXXVI —>
Education: The cure spawns an even worse disease
ALSO: Nevada Assemblymember Lucy Flores, D-Las Vegas, will declare for lieutenant governor in early March
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 2-20-2014 Sparks Tribune

UPDATED 12 Feb. 2014 12:01:12 a.m. PST/ 08:01:12 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> Poor Denny's Almanac for Feb. 12

On this date in 1837, Thomas Moran, expedition artist on the 1870s U.S. Geological Survey of the Territories, whose paintings and sketches of the west helped introduce U.S. citizens to the beauty of the little known west (including Nevada’s Ruby Mountains), was born in Bolton, England; in 1895, the dime novel Deadwood Dick, Jr.’s, Double-Decker; or, Center-Fire, the Self-Cocker. by Edward L. Wheeler, a tale of hydraulic mining in Nevada (and number 82 in the Deadwood Dick series), was published by Beadle’s Half Dime Library; in 1900, Lift Every Voice and Sing by James Weldon Johnson, now considered the black national anthem, was performed for the first time by a choir composed of schoolchildren at segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville, where Johnson was principal; in 1924, with Sousa and Rachmaninoff in the audience, the now-beloved American Rhapsody (known to us as Rhapsody in Blue for Jazz Band and Piano) was performed for the first time in Aeolian Hall in New York City, conducted by Paul Whiteman, with piano by its composer George Gershwin, a performance that was broadcast on radio. (Disbelief that the 26-year-old Gershwin could have written the stunning symphony led to rumors that the great composer Ferde Grofé, who did the orchestrations for the Rhapsody’s first performance, had actually written it.); in 1937, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes approved an agreement among Washoe County, the federal government, and Sierra Pacific Power Company on the operation of the proposed Boca Reservoir; in 1953, Jeanette Flack, daughter of a Las Vegas school official, was found guilty in federal court of marijuana possession; in 1963, President Kennedy held an unprecedented White House reception for more than 1,500 leading African Americans but spoiled its impact by becoming upset when he saw Sammy Davis, Jr., and his Swedish wife May Britt and trying to have them removed (“What’s he doing here? … Get them out of there.”), angering Jacqueline Kennedy, who nearly absented herself from the event; in 1997, The Washington Post reported on China funneling money to the Democratic National Committee in a probable effort to influence Clinton administration policies; in 2008, a 15 year-old gay boy named Lawrence King, who was kicking around in the foster care system as an abused child, was murdered by a fellow student in a school lab in Oxnard, California.

From Lorraine C. Miller, NAACP Interim President and CEO: The date was February 12, 1909. A diverse group of Americans gathered in New York City for a frank discussion on racial justice, motivated by the horrors of the Springfield Race Riot that occurred one year earlier in Illinois. In doing so, they left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement that is still felt today. On that day, 105 years ago, they founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Celebrate Founders Day by watching our video honoring the founders of the NAACP, and the path of activism they began all those years ago. [PDA]

UPDATED 31 Jan. 2014 12:03:14 a.m. PST/ 08:03:14 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —> Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 31

On this date in 1876, the deadline for Native Americans who were off their reservations to (by the order of U.S. Indian Affairs Commissioner Edward Smith) return or a “military force would be sent to compel them” passed at midnight; in 1900 in Reno, members of a medical group met and decided to circulate a petition among physicians to be sent to Nevada members of Congress asking them to vote against a pending measure abolishing vivisection in the District of Columbia; in 1931, federal legislation was approved providing $20,000 for the purchase of a tribal village site, construction of homes, and installation of sewer and water systems for Native Americans in Elko, Nevada; in 1945, near Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines in France, Eddie Slovik was shot and killed at 10:04 in the morning by a military firing squad, the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion since the civil war (there were 21,000 U.S. deserters in World War II alone); in 1961, Federal Communications Commission chair Frederick Ford reported that $14,650,000 was spent on television and radio advertising in the 1960 campaign ($7,500,000/Republicans, $6,750,000/Democrats, $400,000 others); in 1970, Donald Lloyd Swanson of Reno died in Thua Thien province, Vietnam (panel 14w, row 87 of the Vietnam wall); in 1974, CBS broadcast the film of Ernest Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman with a single commercial; in 1998, Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Steve Van Zandt and Southside Johnny performed at a benefit for the family of New Jersey police sergeant Patrick King (the concert later showed up on bootleg). [PDA]

UPDATED 30 Jan. 2014 10:55:11 a.m. PST/ 18:55:11 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 30

On this date in 1870, the new year celebration began in Carson City’s Chinatown, where the Appeal reported that “feasting and destroying firecrackers will be on the programme...”; in 1918, the Esmeralda County draft exemption board was trying to figure out what to do with several Serbians whose origins were apparently in the German “lost provinces” of Alsace and Lorraine and who wanted to volunteer for U.S. war service; in 1933, WXYX in Detroit and several other Michigan radio stations began broadcasting a new radio show, The Lone Ranger, starring Brace Beemer as the ranger and John Todd as Tonto; in 1946, filming began in Reno on Margie, starring Jeanne Crain, Hattie McDaniel and Hobart Cavanaugh (a Virginia City native); in 1957, an explosion at the Titanium Metals plant in Henderson seriously injured two men and ten others were also hospitalized; in 1968, coordinated attacks by 80,000 troops against U.S. forces swept dozens of cities and towns across Vietnam, launching the Tet offensive; in 1971, Tapestry by Carole King was released, going on to become one of the most successful albums in recording history, charting longer than any other album by a female singer, winning four Grammys, selling more than 10 million copies and going diamond, getting rave reviews from critics, still often placing on album charts (it appeared on the Billboard album chart for 200 of the 300 weeks from its release to 2011), the lead single (“It’s Too Late” b/w “I Feel the Earth Move”) hitting number one for five weeks, another track (“Where You Lead”) becoming the theme for Gilmore Girls (a 1995 tribute album by other singers, Tapestry Revisited/A Tribute to Carole King, itself went gold); in 2003, former South Africa president Nelson Mandela spoke out against George Bush’s seeming determination to attack Iraq: “It is a tragedy what is happening... What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust.” [PDA]

OUR GOVERNMENT IN ACTION: On Jan. 30, 1798, the first brawl in the U.S. House of Representatives took place. (From CJ Hadley's Range Magazine calendar.)

DENNIS MYERS RESPONDS: From my master list —>January 30, 1798: After a dispute on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives between Representatives Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold, Lyon reportedly spat on Griswold (who two weeks later again attacked Lyon with a hickory stick and Lyon fought back with hot fire tongs).

I’m not sure I buy that it’s the first brawl, though. That probably happened on the first day of the first Congress. Our government inaction.

Take care.

UPDATED 29 Jan. 2014 09:13:59 a.m. PST/ 17:13:59 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 29

On this date in 1802, John Beckley was appointed the first librarian of Congress; in 1863, a U.S. Army unit led by Colonel Patrick Connor rode down a Shoshone village at Boa Ogoi in Idaho and massacred 350, almost twice the death toll of Wounded Knee Creek and Sand Creek, and became known as the Bear River Massacre (O’Connor was promoted to brigadier general); in 1915, the widow of U.S. Senator George Nixon took over operation of one of his holdings, the Reno Evening Gazette; in 1929 in Las Vegas, plans were under way for a prize fight to celebrate the Boulder Dam construction; in 1959, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson reported that defeated Nevada U.S. senator George Malone, who had left office but whose mailing privilege would continue until June, was using that privilege to promote American Mercury, a once-distinguished publication that had evolved into a fascist, anti-Semitic, white supremacist magazine; in 1968 at Cummins State Prison Farm in Arkansas, an elderly African American inmate led Warden Thomas Murton to a line of unmarked graves and three bodies—one missing the head—were exhumed, setting off an explosive scandal over conditions and brutality at the prison and leading to the firing of Murton for causing political problems (in the ensuing cover-up, the remaining graves were never investigated and conditions were never investigated—indeed, a county grand jury called the exhumations a “publicity stunt” and recommended return of use of four foot leather straps on inmates); in 1993, new President Clinton ordered officials to prepare an order ending the ban on gays in the military (he later caved in and the order was never issued); in 2008, it was reported that Israel, 43 years after canceling a Beatles concert because of concerns it would “corrupt” Israeli youth, had invited the two surviving Beatles to perform—but had not apologized for the original cancellation. [PDA]

LV ACTION ALERT: Feb. 4 Picket at St. Rose Dominican Hospital Siena Campus-Henderson

UPDATED 27 Jan. 2014 06:47:20 a.m. PST/ 14:47:20 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 27

On this date in 1781, after more than 200 colonials whose enlistments had ended prepared to leave for home and George Washington forced them back into military service, he then forced several members of the group to serve as a firing squad and kill their leaders. (“This was a most painful task, and when ordered to load, some of them shed tears,” reported a unit physician); in 1909, a terrible fire in the vital Sutro Tunnel (which drained the Comstock Lode mines) was being battled in shifts by miners, some of whom were overcome by gas and not expected to live, and nearby towns were doing without electricity so it could be diverted to pumps and other equipment for the firefighting (Comstock mining corporations lost half their value on the San Francisco exchange); in 1926, television was first demonstrated by a Scottish inventor; in 1953 at the Commodore Hotel in New York City, Ralph Ellison received the National Book Award for Invisible Man, which he called his “not quite fully achieved attempt at a major novel…”; in 1965, the actors who would play Tarzan and Jane in the new Tarzan movie, Tarzan ‘65, were announced—Rams linebacker Mike Henry and actress Sharon Tate, who would later be murdered by the Manson Family (the name of the movie was changed to Tarzan and the Valley of Gold and Jane ended up being played by Nancy Kovack [editor's note: the future wife of internationally renowned conductor Zubin Mehta); in 1986, the day before the Challenger shuttle tragedy, Morton Thiokol engineers warned about the impact of cold on their gear and recommended caution, prompting NASA solid rocket booster project director Lawrence Mulloy to reply, “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch, next April?”; in 2005, a California jury awarded $15.6 million to the guy whose photo had appeared on the Taster’s Choice label for several years without his consent (he’s apparently not a coffee drinker; he didn’t notice it until 2002). [PDA]

UPDATED 23 Jan. 2014 12:27:05 a.m. PST/ 08:27:05 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 23

On this date in 1892, a U.S. Census Bureau report on pauperism in the United States reported the number of paupers in almshouses in California was 2,600, in Washington 71, in Oregon 99, and in Nevada 20; in 1920, it was reported that the body of Nevada Haywood, wife of Industrial Workers of the World head William ["Big Bill"] Haywood, who died at her home in Denver, would be brought by her daughter to Winnemucca for burial; in 1941 the U.S. Army Air Corps leased the former Western Air Express airfield from the City of Las Vegas; in 1958, Maybe Baby by The Crickets was released; in 1968, North Korea captured the spy ship U.S.S. Pueblo (reservists in Nevada were called to active duty and sent to the Pacific) and held it for eleven months until U.S. officials apologized for its spying; in 1983 the Pasteur Institute in Paris identified a retrovirus it called LAV (lymphadenopathy), now called HIV, becoming the first to discover the cause of AIDS; in 2002, U.S. forces attacked the village of Hazer Qadam and killed friendly Afghanis under the impression it was an Al Queda outpost, releasing 27 imprisoned and brutalized survivors after learning it was an anti-Taliban village. [PDA]

UPDATED 22 Jan. 2014 08:22:11 a.m. PST/ 16:22:11 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 22

On this date in 1879, the epic Cheyenne outbreak led by Chief Dull Knife came to an end with remaining escaped Cheyenne killed or captured; in 1920, Nevada Adjutant General (and Lieutenant Governor) Maurice Sullivan, as part of closing out war work in the state, had all the paperwork bound in two volumes for donation to the Nevada State Historical Society, from a May 1 1917 communication that draft plans were being made by federal officials for Nevada to an April 23d 1919 order that all war-related government property in the state be sold off (meanwhile, returning servicemembers were being helped with undelivered liberty bonds and retention of their insurance policies); in 1936, a U.S. senate committee approved $100,000 for construction of a veterans hospital in Reno; in 1944, with victory for the U.S. in the war looking more likely, the 14,000 acre Keystone Ordnance Works in Geneva, Pennsylvania, near Meadville, ended its operations, though its 1,530 male and 330 female workers would be phased out gradually; in 1950, auto executive Preston Tucker was cleared of all fraud charges against him in the manufacture and marketing of his innovative Tucker automobile, a not-guilty finding that came too late to save his company and the car; in 1966 at Gold Star Studios, three days of work began—the next two days were done at Columbia—on the Beach Boys song Wouldn’t It Be Nice, which became the lead-off track on Pet Sounds and the title of Brian Wilson’s memoirs and the title of a 2005 documentary on the band, prompted a lawsuit over lyrics credit between Mike Love and Brian Wilson, was released as a single on July 18 (backed by God Only Knows), hit the Billboard chart on July 20 and stayed there until September, and was featured in 50 First Dates, Roger & Me, Shampoo and I Could Never Be Your Woman (and God Only Knows was used in Boogie Nights, My Life Without Me, Scooby Doo, the finale of Love Actually, the opening credits of the television series Big Love, and the video game Bioshock Infinite); in 2010, The Washington Post disclosed files it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act indicating that broadcast columnist Paul Harvey submitted his scripts to the FBI for approval.

UPDATED 21 Jan. 2014 08:09:19 a.m. PST/ 16:09:19 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 21

On this date in 1880, the U.S. Senate’s Committee on the Colored Exodus, investigating the movement of African Americans from the south, heard testimony from Emigrant Aid Society President O.S.B. Wall, who testified that North Carolina is “a poor, God forsaken country with a soil that won’t sprout black eyed peas” and that blacks would do better in the west and Indiana; in 1903, plans for a hot springs spa were being floated in Elko County, with a Boston physician named Beecher and a Denver investor named Mayhem taking an interest; in 1919, a westbound train derailed in a tunnel west of Truckee, with fourteen cars pitched off the rails; in 1944, The New York Times reported that because of high production goals, inadequate training, and poor workplace safety, 37,500 war workers had died since the start of the war—7,500 more than had died in the war itself; in 1966, Time and Newsweek covered the Trips Festival, a three-day event of music (Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company), drugs (the Merry Pranksters and their Psychedelic Symphony, Ken Kesey) and culture (Native American food and flowers, open theatre), all “programmed live from stimuli provided by a pinball machine”, putting the San Francisco flower child scene into the national spotlight; in 1988, Gov. Richard Bryan released a U.S. Department of Energy report supporting the state’s contention that nuclear waste cannot safely be stored in Yucca Mountain and said the report had been suppressed a month before a key congressional vote on the dump site; in 2003, the Bush administration notified Texas Tech University that the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department had opened an investigation of the college for employing a professor (Michael Dini) who wrote letters of recommendation for post-grad studies only for students who accepted evolutionary theory. [PDA]

UPDATED 17 Jan. 2014 08:46:09 a.m. PST/ 16:46:09 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 17

On this date in 1893, the U.S. Navy, acting on behalf of sugar planters led by Sanford Dole, invaded the Kingdom of Hawaii, overthrew Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani, and installed Dole as head of a new government (the U.S. went through several years of wringing its hands and condemning the planters’ provisional government but never doing anything to reverse the events of 1893, and on July 4 1898 Congress approved legislation sponsored by U.S. Representative Francis Newlands of Nevada “legally” seizing the islands; on November 23d 1993, the U.S. Congress enacted Public Law 103-150, a formal apology to Hawaii for U.S. conduct and its impact on the health, economy and culture of Hawaiians); in 1929, Popeye made his first appearance in the comic strip Thimble Theatre; in 1931, President Hoover’s public lands committee recommended that federally managed lands be turned over to the state governments, a proposal Hoover was expected to endorse and forward to Congress the next day (the states organized to oppose the transfer of lands); in 1939, the German Reich barred Jews from practicing chemistry, dentistry, and veterinary medicine; in 1960, direct dialing on long distance calls began in Bell Telephone Company of Nevada territory; in 1963 at a ceremony in Reno’s Powning Park, Governor Grant Sawyer lit an old fashioned gas lamp, marking the arrival of natural gas as a power source in the valley; in 1978, President Carter met with U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada and members of Cannon’s rules committee staff on the new year legislative agenda; in 1992, U.S. Navy pilot Michael Speicher was shot down over west-central Iraq, believed to be the first casualty of the first U.S. war against Iraq (18 years later, Bedouins led U.S. troops to Speicher’s burial plot, saying he was dead when found, disproving MIA/POW activists who claimed he was captured alive and imprisoned). [PDA]

UPDATED 15 Jan. 2014 07:56:47 a.m. PST/ 15:56:47 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 15
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s actual birthday

On this date in 1844, the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Indiana was chartered; in 1870 for the first time, cartoonist Thomas Nast used a donkey to represent the Democratic Party; in 1896, U.S. Representative Francis Newlands of Nevada was appointed to a commission to establish the boundary line between Canada and the U.S. and also a committee to inquire into the imprisonment of U.S. Consul to Madagascar John Waller (France conquered Madagascar that year and sentenced Waller to twenty years in prison on grounds that he gave military information to the patriot government to try to prevent the French conquest); in 1901, two boxcars of Porto Rican workers were sidelined in Wadsworth, Nevada (no one was allowed to approach them) until the cars could be sent out at night to eventually make connections with a Hawaiian steamer that would take them to the islands to be sugar plantation slaves; in 1929, Michael King was born in Atlanta (when he was five years old his father would change both their names to honor Martin Luther); in 1942, Lt. (jg) John Kennedy was transferred from the D.C. headquarters of the Office of Naval Intelligence to a desk job in Charleston, South Carolina because of his affair with suspected German operative Inga Arvad; in 1957, Archie Grant of Las Vegas, the new chair of the Nevada Board of Regents, opposed the expansion of the board from five to nine members, declined to take a position on the McHenry report’s proposal that the board be made appointive, and called for an increase in southern Nevada members; in 1968, five thousand members of the Jeanette Rankin Brigade (named for the Montana congressmember who voted against 1916 and 1941 declarations of war) marched in Washington—led by 87 year old Rankin—in protest against the Vietnam war; in 1978, tyrant Reza Pahlavi fled Iran an hour ahead of the posse; in 1990, Luke Alan Olsen, one of human history’s three most nearly perfect humans, was born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Reno. [PDA]

UPDATED 13 Jan. 2014 07:33:28 a.m. PST/ 15:33:28 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 13

On this date in 1842, William Brydon arrived at Jalalabad, the only survivor of a contingent of 4,500 British soldiers and 12,000 aides and camp followers wiped out by Afghan patriot forces during British aggression against Kabul; in 1913, there was a fire at the Thanhouser Studio in New Rochelle, New York, one of the notable silent-film era studios, and the studio immediately turned it into story material, releasing When the Studio Burned less than a month later, on February 4; in 1938, a Churchill County physician, two Washoe County physicians, and a group in Clark County described by newspapers as the Cheney gang were arrested on federal narcotics charges; in 1944, staffers at the U.S. Treasury delivered to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau a Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews, which Morgenthau passed along to President Roosevelt; in 1964, a U.S. Air Force B-52D Strato-Fortress carrying two thermonuclear bombs and flying from Massachusetts to Georgia broke up in heavy turbulence and severe winter storm over Pennsylvania and eastern Maryland, killing three of the five crew members (the wreckage landed in mountains in Maryland and the bombs were recovered); in 1981, residents of Nevada’s Lyon County were shocked by the arrests and jailing on federal extortion charges of two of its county commissioners (including lifelong resident, farmer, and AARP chapter “Man of the Year” John Poli) for allegedly accepting bribes from brothels; in 2002, The Fantasticks ended its mammoth 42-year run off Broadway with the 17,162th performance. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Try to remember.] [PDA]

UPDATED 13 Jan. 2014 01:30 a.m. PST/ 09:39 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac for Jan. 12

On Jan. 12, 1894, Native Americans at Pyramid Lake said that they considered the territory between Wadsworth and the lake was still tribal property since the federal government had never supplied the $20,000 worth of cattle that was supposed to compensate the tribe for relinquishing that portion of land; on this date in 1935 on the eve of a plebiscite in which residents of the Saar Basin (a coal rich region administered by France under the Versailles treaty since the end of the world war) voted to return to German control, Jews in the region said they had been told by Nazis to leave the Saar for Germany until after the vote; in 1945, the Battle of the Bulge ended; in 1954, Reno city officials said they found little interest in attracting bids to operate a cigarette/news/car rental/information stand in the newly acquired municipal airport; in 1970, Biafra’s war for independence ended with surrender to Nigeria; in 1998, Gene Vincent, Lloyd Price, Allen Toussaint, Jelly Roll Morton, the Mamas and the Papas, Santana, the Eagles, and Fleetwood Mac were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. [PDA]

Former Nevada Assemblyman Bernie Anderson dies
Funeral 10:00 a.m. PST Saturday 1-18-2014 @ Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Sparks
San Francisco Chronicle / Associated Press 1-10-2014

January 11
Saturday, 11 Jan. 2014 07:42:58 PST / 15:42.58 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT

On this date in 1891 just days after the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, a report was circulating that settlers in remote parts of Nevada were nervous because the ghost dance was still being practiced among the state’s tribes; in 1907 Under Southern Skies, a play about a “poor girl suspecting that there is a negro taint in her blood because of vague insinuations by Steve [who] sacrifices herself for her family’s sake…”, was playing at Reno’s McKissick opera house; in 1920 in a dispute over plans by state highway officials to put the Carson/Reno highway on the east side of Washoe Lake, the firing of highway director W. B. Alexander by Governor Emmet Boyle was followed by the resignation of a second of the three directors, George Elder; in 1937 General Motors security guards and Flint Police Department officers attacked striking workers at the Flint, Michigan, General Motors plant; in 1956 U.S.-backed Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem issued Ordinance No. 6, providing for internment of his political enemies in concentration camps; in 1968 Jack Webb, who revived his Dragnet television series in order to preach against the 1960s, had his “Joe Friday” deliver a lengthy lecture to a Timothy-Leary-like character: “Marijuana is the flame. LSD is the fuse. Heroin is the bomb. ... Marijuana is a narcotic. It never did anybody any good.” (Webb, a heavy smoker and drinker who peddled cigarettes in advertising for Fatima and Chesterfield, died of a heart attack in 1982; in 1976 the Reno Repertoire Club and the Reno Banjo Club held a bicentennial concert (preceding a performance by the Utah Symphony) to raise money for John Carrico’s Tahoe Music Camp; in 1988 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an effort by 1,200 downwinders to hold the U.S. government financially responsible for the people it killed or contaminated with nuclear tests; in 2007 U.S. military forces raided an Iranian diplomatic mission in Arbil (Erbil), Iraq, in a reckless attempt to kidnap two senior Iranian officials (who were visiting the area to meet with Iraq officials to try to improve Iraq/Iran relations) but abducting five junior diplomats instead, the second U.S. kidnapping of Iranian officials in a period of weeks, leading to the April 2007 retaliatory capture of British sailors by Iran in disputed waters.

January 10
Friday, 10 Jan. 2014 08:31:52 PST / 16:31:52 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT

On this date in 1776 Tom Paine published Common Sense anonymously (“written by an Englishman”), fueling the demand for colonial independence; in 1848 Nevada Governor Reinhold Sadler was born in Czarnikau, Posen, Prussia; in 1920 Metal Mineworkers Union secretary Mike Moriarity and Industrial Workers of the World delegate Mickey Sullivan were arrested in Tonopah for union organizing activities under Nevada’s “syndicalism” statute, with Sullivan accused of signing up three new union members (O.E. Stone, Harry Olen, and Rasmus Malde) and District Attorney Harry Atkinson pledging to get every IWW member out of the Tonopah and Divide mining districts; in 1940 two days after the FBI said it had investigated and found no evidence of a rumored sabotage plot against Hoover Dam, U.S. Representative Charles Kramer said he was considering calling for a congressional investigation of the rumored plot; in 1957 a boy scout troop in Ely spent the day gathering discarded Christmas trees and hauling them to Gilford Canyon for use in building “brush dams” in a wash to prevent erosion; in 1972 Hubert Humphrey, who had previously said “a wonderful adventure it is!” about Vietnam, criticized President Nixon for taking longer to withdraw from the war than it took to defeat the Nazis; in 1978 Acting Governor Robert Rose criticized California Governor Jerry Brown for cutting funding for the bi-state Tahoe Regional Planning Agency; in 2009 the Silver Club hotel/casino in Sparks closed at midnight, throwing 200 people out of work.

January 9
Thursday, 9 Jan. 2014 09:15:50 PST / 17:50:50 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT

On this date in 1892 the telegraph line between Tuscarora and Elko, which had been inoperative because of snow, was in working order again; in 1914 in New York, eugenicists were offering a $500 prize ($10,748.86 in 2010 dollars) to the woman selected to be the wife in a eugenics marriage they were trying to arrange so they could “study the issue of such a marriage”; in 1934 New York Times: “The 1,000,000th cubic yard of concrete has been poured into Boulder Dam.”; in 1941 Joan Baez was born in Staten Island; in 1955 an episode of Tales of the Century (the first western television series to win an Emmy) titled “Apache Kid” contained the narration, “Reared as a scout in the U.S.Army, this well mannered young Indian suddenly became a stalking werewolf with a blood lust, the most terrifying hunter of human beings in all Apache-infested territory of Arizona.”; in 1960 U.S. Representative Edith Green of Oregon announced that she would propose legislation awarding former Navy physician Tom Dooley the Medal of Honor for his work with Indochinese refugees (Dooley, who was also being considered for Catholic sainthood, had been quietly cashiered from the Navy because he was gay); in 1960 a groundbreaking was held for the new University of Nevada library in Reno, later named after mining executive Noble Getchell; in 1979 K Mart stopped selling Steve Martin’s album Let’s Get Small because the corporation considered it tasteless; in 1984 John Lennon’s “Nobody Told Me” was released; in 1997 the Union Bank of Switzerland was caught by its security guard Christoph Meili destroying archival records on the lost assets of Holocaust victims (Meili secured the records and he and his wife turned them over to the Israeli Cultural Association but had to flee the country. [PDA]

Can Amazon drones deliver healthy cigarettes?
Lotsa laughs, César Chávez Celebration XII, Jello Biafra, 3 obits, the campaign to elect Don Dondero
to the Nevada Press Assn. Hall of Fame + Barbwire.TV. What's not to like?
Barbwire by Barbano / Expanded from the 1-9-2014 Sparks Tribune

UPDATED 8 Jan. 2014 08:29:12 a.m. PST/ 16:29:12 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

John Lennon: You know, you went to see those movies with Elvis, when we were still in Liverpool, and they’d all scream when he came on the screen. So we thought, “That’s a good job.”

On this date in 1877, six months after he led his warriors into battle at Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse fought his last battle at Wolf Mountain on the Tongue River in southern Montana, with General Nelson Miles using wagon-mounted howitzers against the outnumbered and ammunition-poor tribal forces, who fought the soldiers in a blizzard to allow the women and children to escape and then slipped away themselves; in 1921, after conferences between Governor Boyle and local alcohol prohibition officials, there were reports that the state would shift enforcement from the state police to local police because the state fund for the purpose had become depleted; in 1935, Jesse Garon and Elvis Aron Presley were born in Tupelo, Mississippi, only Elvis surviving alive; in 1941, as part of his effort to destroy the commercial prospects of Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst forbade all his newspapers from accepting movie ads for it; in 1960, the City of Reno asked Nevada District Judge Clel Georgetta to lift a temporary restraining order against construction of a chamber of commerce hospitality center in Powning Park, the land for which had been donated to the city on condition that it be used only as park space; in 1967, three Vietnamese villages between the Thi-Tinh and Saigon rivers that governed themselves as a socialist enclave presented such a challenge to the U.S. that a major action (“Operation Cedar Falls”) was mounted, with residents cleared out of the villages and into internment camps, the villages razed, vegetation and agriculture destroyed, and the site leveled with 720 Vietnamese and 72 U.S. killed; in 1973, plans for a $3 million hotel at Third and West streets in Reno were announced; in 1999, the New York Times reported falsely that Iraq had expelled weapons inspectors, the first of seven times during the year it repeated the lie, only one of which was corrected by the newspaper (the weapons inspectors actually fled Iraq because of a spy scandal—the U.S. had planted an agent among the inspectors—and because of an impending bombing attack by the Clinton administration). [PDA]

UPDATED 7 Jan. 2014 07:46:42 a.m. PST/ 15:46:42 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1896, Fannie Farmer’s cookbook was published; in 1901, U.S. General Arthur MacArthur had several Philippine patriot generals, who were leading the fight against U.S. conquest, deported from their own nation, a technique previously used by the Spanish occupiers; in 1919, a special election was held in Storey County to elect a replacement for deceased Senator John Dewar, and Democrat John Kenney was elected over Republican George Drysdale by a 72-vote majority; in 1954 at Chess Records in Chicago, Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon began working together, and Waters recorded Dixon’s Hoochie Coochie Man, named number 225 on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time compiled by representatives of the music industry and press; in 1959, the Eisenhower administration announced it was recognizing the new Cuban government headed by attorney Fidel Castro; in 1960 at Gray Reid’s department store in Reno, Bell Telephone Company of Nevada began three days of demonstrations of direct dialing on long distance calls, which would begin in BTCN territory on January 17; in 1969, California Governor Ronald Reagan called on the legislature to “drive criminal anarchists and latter-day Fascists” (his description of free speech advocates) off college campuses; in 1979, Vietnamese troops, who invaded Cambodia while other nations dithered over the mass murder taking place there, took control of the capital of Phnom Penh, ending the vicious regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge—over the objections of the United States, which had helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power with its secret bombing of Cambodia; in 1998, an estimated 47,000 pounds of explosives blew apart a Sierra Chemical Company explosives plant in Kean Canyon, several miles east of Sparks, killing 10 of the 11 workers on site, creating a 60 by 40 foot crater up to 6 feet deep, and causing a 2.0 temblor felt 20 miles away (the workers were Spanish-speaking but were given plant procedures and safety materials in English); in 2005, Daniel F. Guastaferro of Las Vegas died in Ar Ramadi, Iraq. [PDA]

UPDATED 6 Jan. 2014 08:10:30 a.m. PST/ 16:10:30 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

Todd Gitlin, in interview with Dennis Myers: "Journalists are commonly embarrassed by the breakdown of the professional creed that they thought they had signed up for in the first place. Those who stay do so by telling themselves that they’re improving the situation by staying, that it would be worse if they left. They tell themselves they have mortgages to pay, they tell themselves that there are no alternatives. And they more or less make peace with themselves. But do they do so with sublime indifference to the consequences? In general, not. They agree to surrender their professional initiative. They don’t see an alternative, in general."

On this date in 1883, Kahlil Gibran was born in Lebanon; in 1919, Nye County Senator Wesley Stewart died of influenza in San Francisco (but his seat was not filled for the 1919 Nevada Legislature); in 1936, the character of Porky Pig was introduced in the Warner cartoon Gold Diggers of ‘49; in 1943, Students for a Democratic Society president Todd Gitlin, now a communications professor at Columbia University, was born in New York City; in 1945, the wartime Reno Air Base News, edited at the Reno Army Air Base and printed and distributed by the Nevada State Journal, marked the start of its third year, publishing an edition that featured a drawing by comic strip artist Milton Caniff inscribed to “the gang at 3d OTU, Reno, Nevada...” and a headline reading: “We Dislike Any More Birthdays”; in 1950, a day after withdrawing its recognition from the Chiang regime as the government of China, England extended diplomatic recognition to the new government of China; in 1960, Reno citizens were organizing against a plan to build the new convention center in Wingfield Park, a large park on Bell Isle in the Truckee River; in 1968, Buckminster Fuller visited Reno for the dedication of the Pioneer Theatre Auditorium, which featured a geodesic dome of the kind Fuller invented; in 1972, Joko Films Ltd. was formed by John and Yoko (it was dissolved in 1979); in 1983, President Reagan signed one of the highest priority measures in his legislative program—a five cent a gallon gas tax hike that produced billions in new revenue, one of repeated tax hikes that characterized his administration. [PDA]

UPDATED 5 Jan. 2014 12:40:05 a.m. PST/ 08:40:05 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1882, President Arthur reserved territory in Utah for the Uncompahgre tribe; in 1914, a University of Nevada professor named Frandsen gave a speech to the Reno Civic Health League on “The Law of Heredity and Eugenics”; in 1933, George Thatcher, lawyer for Nevada political boss George Wingfield, returned from a money-seeking trip to California saying he had the money to reopen the twelve closed Wingfield banks; in 1940 on the Hidden Well Ranch in Clark County, Life With Father and Thin Man movies star William Powell was married to “recent find at the MGM studios” Diane Lewis; in 1959, Coral Records released It Doesn’t Matter Anymore by Paul Anka, Buddy Holly’s last record during his lifetime; in 1961 on the NBC program Bat Masterson, the episode Tempest at Tioga Pass dealt with road building between Nevada and California; in 1968, William Sloane Coffin, Benjamin Spock, Marcus Raskin, Mitchell Goodman, and Michael Ferber were indicted for “conspiracy to counsel, aid and abet resistance to the military draft”; in 1981, mountain man wannabe Claude Dallas killed two Idaho game wardens, execution style; in 1999, Washoe deputy sheriffs swept through television and newspaper newsrooms on orders from District Attorney Richard Gammick under authority of search warrants obtained from Justice of the Peace Edward Dannan to obtain unpublished notes and tapes dealing with interviews with supposed freeway sniper Christopher Merritt, seizing KOLO videotapes, all in violation of the Nevada press shield law (“No … employee of any … television station may be required to disclose any published or unpublished information obtained or prepared by such person in such person’s professional capacity in gathering, receiving or processing such information to the public … in any … trial … before any court”) and the federal 1980 Privacy Protection Act (shielding “work product” or “documentary materials” held by journalists). [PDA]

UPDATED 4 Jan. 2014 4:22:11 a.m. PST/ 12:22:11 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1642, at the head of a group of military men at arms, Charles I personally entered the British Parliament uninvited to arrest for high treason five members of the House of Commons (who had been forewarned) and, failing to see his targets, he said, “I see the birds have flown”—and then turned to Speaker William Lenthall and asked where the five were, and Lenthall knelt and courageously replied, “May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your majesty's pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this is to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.” (the English civil war was triggered by the incident); in 1896, after a constitution outlawing polygamy was approved by Utahans, the state was admitted to the union; in 1920, Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Andrew Foster formed the Negro National Baseball League; in 1935, the Reno city council approved a resolution supporting U.S. Senator Key Pittman’s bill to transfer title of the old post office building and site on Virginia Street in Reno to the city; in 1945, U.S. Senator James Scrugham of Nevada was hospitalized in Maryland, his condition described as “only fair”; in 1960, a Kansas prosecutor said Richard Hickok, awaiting extradition from Las Vegas, had confessed to the murder of the Clutter family in Garden City, Kansas, a case that would become famous in Truman Capote’s mix of fact and fiction In Cold Blood; in 1987, renowned Spanish classical guitarist Andres Segovia began his last tour of the U.S. (his eyesight was so poor that in Reno he walked off the edge of the stage); in 2005, Barack Obama was sworn in as a United States senator. [PDA]

UPDATED 3 Jan. 2014 12:19:53 a.m. PST/08:19:53 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1868 after several months of civil war and the renunciation of Shogun Keiki, a new royal Japanese government was formed with the young Emperor Mutsuhito at its head, ending the shogunate; in 1926, Nevada Governor Emmet Boyle, the first governor born in the state, died in Reno; in 1932, construction on an expansion of the two-year-old Pair o’ Dice casino in Clark County began; in 1947 at a reception at the National Press Club in D.C. for veterans elected to Congress, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon met for the first time (it was also the day of their swearing-in for their U.S. House seats); in 1958, an Oakland Tribune photo published around the nation showed an Alameda County detective standing with hand and gun extended as he shot Louis Silva dead while Silva was charging him with a knife and rifle (the photographer was not credited); in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated; in 2000, New York Times reporter David Sanger claimed in a news story that the Clinton war in Serbia “largely halted ethnic bloodshed” when, in fact, ethnic bloodshed rose sharply during and after the Clinton bombing campaign. [PDA]

UPDATED 2 Jan. 2014 12:45:17 a.m. PST/08:45:17 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1870 or ‘71, boxing promoter Tex Rickard, who brought several fights to Nevada, was born in Kansas City, Missouri; in 1928, an early instance of the movie industry tampering with the writer’s story was released by MGM—Love, starring Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina and John Garfield as Vronsky, which was made available with two different endings for use by theatre owners depending on whether they thought their audiences would prefer a happy ending or not; in 1945, the U.S. Post Office reported rankings of local post offices according to the amount of postal business and Las Vegas ranked 384th; in 1974, President Nixon signed legislation to deny federal highway funds to states which do not lower speed limits to 55 miles per hour within 60 days, an action later repudiated by his own Republican Party’s national convention, notwithstanding Nixon’s claim that the law would save 200,000 barrels of fuel a day; in 2003, Cy Ryan and Judy Odierna reported in the Las Vegas Sun that Nevada pharmacists routinely funneled information on patients who receive prescription painkillers or other prescribed addictive drugs to police agencies (state substance abuse task force lawyer Louis Ling said blandly, “This is not used as a law enforcement tool”). [PDA]

UPDATED 1 Jan. 2014 1:18:42 a.m. PST/09:18:42 ZULU/GMT/SUT/CUT —>Poor Denny's Almanac

On this date in 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves to be free without actually freeing them, so members of Congress—knowing the proclamation had no legal standing or effect—continued their efforts to actually free the slaves; in 1877, serialization of Off On a Comet by Jules Verne began in Magazine d’Éducation et de Récréation; in 1917, the Adamson Act, enacted in September 1916 to avert a national railroad strike by limiting workdays to eight hours, took effect; in 1937, in a major lobbying triumph for the lumber and liquor industries and a setback for the medical lobby, marijuana was made illegal in the United States over the objections of the American Medical Association, which had long listed the substance in the Pharmaecopia (list of prescribable medications); in 1940, Las Vegas’ entry in Pasadena’s Tournament of Roses parade, a float with a Hoover Dam theme, won second prize in its division; in 1955, snowfall halted a test of television in Fallon and Hawthorne that used a transmitter atop Mount Grant; in 1959, after three years of insurgency, U.S.-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and hundreds of his cronies fled to the Dominican Republic and the United States and the Sierra Maestra revolutionary movement led by attorney Fidel Castro took power; in 1964, in Texas, there was an incident that helped shape Lyndon Johnson’s overbearing image—when he was about to depart and was walking to the wrong helicopter, a military airman pointed to a different craft and said, “Mr. President, that’s your helicopter there,” whereupon Johnson replied, “Son, they’re all my helicopters.”; in 1970, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, filmed in Nevada’s Valley of Fire, was released; in 1981, Reno’s new year celebration turned into a riot, characterized by anti-Iranian sentiments; in 2001, forty eight minutes into the new year, the new century, and the new millennium, three arsonists—one of them wearing a shirt bearing a cross—torched Temple Emanu-El in Reno. [PDA]

Happy New Year / Feliz Año Nuevo
May you and yours enjoy a peaceful and prosperous time