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[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2006 Dennis Myers.]]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

Update: Thursday, Nov. 30, 2006, 11:07 a.m. PST — On Nov. 30, 1835, Nevada reporter Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri; in 1861, the report of the commissioner of the U.S. General Land Office said "The surveyor general reports that the population of Nevada Territory is 17,000, mostly found in towns and mining districts; the latter possessing unlimited mineral resources, which are being largely developed."; in 1870, the Nevada State Journal defended local businesspeople against common talk that they were "narrow and illiberal in their business views, and that they do business in such a loose manner as to cause customers to pay a larger percent profit than the people of other places pay."; in 1887, three British physicians were in Reno for several days at the Depot Hotel to see patients (first visit free), with plans to come back through Reno every three months; in 1888, Ralph Hartley, Rhodes scholar, inventor of the Hartley circuit (electronic oscillator circuit) and the math Hartley transform, and pioneer of information theory, was born in Spruce, Nevada; in 1910, following the death of Mrs. Emma Ross, Reno physician F. Wichman was indicted for abortion and murder; in 1936, Death Valley borax mine manager W.W. Cahill said he would take his 20-mule team and wagon over Hoover Dam; in 1936, Las Vegas chief of police Dave Mackey warned dance hall operators to be careful about allowing juveniles in their establishments (just after midnight earlier in the day a 14 year- old was found in a saloon with his mother); in 1957, Governor Charles Russell said he would have Nevada Controller Peter Merialdo issue a $550 check to Assemblymember William Byrne, mayor of Henderson, closing out a two year dispute over Byrne's purchase of 600 acres of land long owned by the state school for wayward boys in Elko; in 1958, 16 Candles by the Crests was released; in 1967, U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy announced his candidacy for president; in 1967, Love Child by the Supremes hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1976, the Nevada MA-281, a cargo vessel, was delivered to the States Steamship Company by Bath Iron Works; in 1995, President Clinton became the first U.S. president to visit British occupied Ireland; in 1999, white supremacists threw a cement weight through a window of Reno's Temple Emanu-El and followed it with a Molotov cocktail.

Update: Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2006, 8:12 a.m. PST — On Nov. 29, 1859, the Walker River and Pyramid Lake Paiute reservations were established; in 1879, Western Union was planning to abandon large sections of the overland wire from Virginia City to Salt Lake City, including most of the wire from Austin to Salt Lake; in 1883, tribal shipments of pine nuts from Carson City on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad had reached 75,000 pounds and the harvest was believed to be only half finished, with San Franciscans a big market (the sale of pine nuts may have benefited from a report that they were good for lung trouble); in 1911, Nevada Mines Inspector (then still an elective post) Edward Ryan was spending several days in Las Vegas after visiting Searchlight; in 1939, Nevada Assemblymember Dewey Sampson, first Native American member of the legislature, said it was tribal members in western Nevada (not U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran, as some reports had it) who arranged the transfer of Indian Agent Alida Bowler from Carson City to Los Angeles: "You may not be aware of the fact that the Indians of Nevada and California have never favored the Indian bureau system and have tried to make it plain to those in power in Washington that they hope some day to be rid of the supervision of a body of white people who live at ease while the Indians sometimes suffer for the necessities of life."; in 1951, Las Vegas Mayor Charles D. Baker was recalled to military duty in the Army engineering corps; in 1959, the Reno chapter of Hoo Hoo, a lumber group, announced new officers and plans for a December party at Lawton's [Laughton's] Hot Springs; in 1961, Enos the chimp orbited the earth in a U.S. spacecraft (at his news conference, President Kennedy said "He reports that everything is perfect and working well."); in 1961, Barbra Streisand auditioned for the Broadway musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale (Elliott Gould was watching from the wings, asked her out and later married her in Carson City, Nevada); in 1964, changes in Catholic liturgy, including the use of English in the mass, went into effect in the United States; in 1965, Unsafe at Any Speed/The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader, named in 1999 as one of the 100 best works of journalism of the 1900s, was published by Grossman Publishers; in 1969, both sides of a Beatles single, Come Together b/w Something hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart, the first time such a thing had happened since Elvis' Don't b/w I Beg of You in 1958; in 1983, Ronald Reagan told Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir that he, Reagan, had been present at the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945 and had shot footage of the scenes, a claim he later also made to Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Rabbi Marvin Heir (Reagan never set foot outside the United States during the opening of the camps); in 1986, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975-85 hit number one on the Billboard album chart where it stayed for seven weeks; in 2001, George Harrison died.

Update: Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006, 2:31 a.m. PST — On Nov. 28, 1883, whites in the Mason Valley area addressed a request for arms and ammunition to Governor Jewett Adams when Native Americans suspected the poisoning by a local rancher of several tribal women, with the Carson Tribune reporting that "the Indians are assuming a very defiant and war like attitude against the whites"; in 1925, Nashville's Grand Ole Opry began broadcasting on the radio, inaugurating a run that would make it the longest running radio program in the United States (81 years so far); in 1936, the Las Vegas police department advertised for bids on its first police cars with two-way radios; in 1942, a fire at Boston's Cocoanut Grove nightclub killed 500 people; in 1949, syndicated Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler published a column attacking reporter/author Quentin Reynolds as a nudist, liar, defrauder, war profiteer and coward, provoking a landmark lawsuit that resulted in a then-record $175,000 libel judgment against Pegler and Hearst (the case inspired the Broadway play and television movie A Case of Libel); in 1960, author Richard Wright (Black Boy, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son) died in Paris; in 1962, Silver State Airlines officials explained their plans for service between Las Vegas and Carson City (with stops in Hawthorne and Reno) to members of the Nevada Public Service Commission; in 1962, the Washoe County Fair and Recreation Board rejected on a 3 to 2 vote a move to sell the Peckham/Kietzke site for a convention center; in 1962, Harrah's Lake Tahoe workers voted down affiliation with bartender and culinary unions; in 1964, Leader of the Pack by the Shangri Las hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1970, My Sweet Lord by George Harrison was released; in 1994, radical leader Jerry Rubin died in Los Angeles.

Update: Monday, Nov. 27, 2006, 7:44 a.m. PST — On Nov. 27, 1911, Mabel Hough of Portland, Oregon, and Heinrich Rousseau were married in Elgin, Illinois, apparently the only place where they could find someone (Police Magistrate George Thompson) willing to perform the wedding ceremony without using the term "obey" in it; in 1914, Boston suffrage leader and labor organizer Margaret Foley said of the successful 1914 Nevada ballot campaign in which she campaigned extensively: "It seems like a dream, a dime novel, a moving picture," but also said she "wouldn't go through it again for $1,000,000."; in 1919, Native Americans installing a pipeline for the Winnemucca Water and Light Company struck for fifty cents a day or more, and the contractor, D.O. Church, agreed to the raise for fear the ground would freeze (other details of the strike are lacking because the Silver State's report was mostly devoted to trivialize the incident and belittling the tribal members — "Heap Big Indian Union No. 1", etc.); in 1921, Alexander Dubcek, Czech leader who initiated "socialism with a human face" until the Soviet military invaded to crush the Prague Spring (in 1968), was born in Uhrovec, Western Slovakia; in 1931, Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which he composed as a commission from Paul Wittgenstein (a promising concert pianist whose right arm was amputated in World War One), was performed for the first time by Wittgenstein, who would become identified with the piece; in 1932, Senator Benigno Aquino, opposition leader to Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was born in Concepcion, Tarlac province; 1933, a lynch mob in San Jose broke two men accused of kidnap/murder out of jail and lynched them, drawing praise from California Governor James Rolph: "I am thinking of paroling any kidnappers in the state prisons to those fine, patriotic citizens of San Jose, who know how to handle such situations"; in 1936, the state convention of the Young Democrats of Nevada began in the Wigwam Room of the Sal Sagev Hotel in Las Vegas, with assistant U.S. attorney Thomas Craven mentioned as a leading candidate for president of the group; in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 8954 withdrawing public lands in Nevada from public use so it could be used by the War Department Nevada, the fourth such Nevada order Roosevelt signed during the year; in 1942, Jimi Hendrix was born in Seattle; in 1967, the first known gay bookstore, Oscar Wilde's in New York City, opened; in 1967, the album Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles was released in the United States (in England on December 8, as an EP instead of an LP); in 1970, All Things Must Pass by George Harrison was released; in 1970, Pope Paul VI was stabbed by a man disguised as a priest at the Manila airport in the Philippines; in 1978, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were murdered in city hall and former supervisor Dan White was arrested for the crime; in 1995, The Beatles Anthology I was released; in 2002, U.N. inspectors began a new round of inspections in Iraq that found no weapons of mass destruction, a conclusion George Bush and his administration refused to accept.

Update: Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006, 1:35 a.m. PST — On Nov. 26, 1942, President Roosevelt ordered nationwide gasoline rationing, beginning December 1. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

On Nov. 26, 1789, President Washington declared the first thanksgiving holiday, to give thanks for the U.S. Constitution; in 1859, the former Genoa newspaper Territorial Enterprise was revived in Carson City; in 1861, a convention at Wheeling met to write a constitution for the new state of Kanawha (which Congress gave the more ordinary name of West Virginia); in 1869, the Giant Powder Company, a dynamite manufacturer, blew up in Glen Canyon in San Francisco, destroying every building [EDITOR'S NOTE: Now that's a boomtown.]; in 1886, San Francisco's first arbor day was held under the sponsorship of Adolph Sutro; in 1936, the 20-mule team of the Death Valley borax mines was at the Furnace Creek Inn where a group of Las Vegans watched its arrival; in 1942, Casablanca premiered at the Hollywood Theatre in New York City, but was not released into theatres until 1943; in 1956, the Clark County Ministerial Association was launching an effort to get the Nevada Legislature to require blood tests before people could marry; in 1956, Merle Travis' mine worker song Sixteen Tons by Ernie Ford, the fastest selling single in history, hit number one on the Billboard chart where it remained for seven weeks; in 1968, after billionaire Howard Hughes had already acquired six Las Vegas casinos, the Nevada Gaming Control Board considered a regulation designed to prevent anyone from gaining too strong a hold on gambling in Nevada; in 1976, Bing Crosby, who never played Las Vegas before, gave a benefit concert there, raising $90,000 for a priest who had been assigned a parish in the Nevada city but had no church and had been doing mass in a topless bar; in 1986, One From the Heart, a Francis Ford Coppola movie filmed in a Las Vegas built in southern California for the film, was released (the movie never recovered its cost and bankrupted Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, becoming one of the legendary failures of motion picture history); in 1994, Hell Freezes Over by the Eagles hit number one on the Billboard album chart; in 1996, the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas was imploded.

Update: Saturday, Nov. 25, 2006, 2:41 a.m. PST — On Nov. 25, 1986, the Iran-Contra affair erupted as President Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese revealed that profits from secret arms sales to Iran had been diverted to Nicaraguan rebels. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Edward R. Murrow, narration over footage: This scene is not taking place in the Congo. It has nothing to do with Johannesburg or Cape Town. It is not Nyasaland or Nigeria. This is Florida. These are citizens of the United States, 1960. This is a shape up for migrant workers. The hawkers are chanting the going piece rate at the various fields. This is the way the humans who harvest the food for the best fed people in the world get hired. One farmer looked at this and said "We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them." (From Harvest of Shame, see below.)

On Nov. 25, 1874, Joe Gans, African-American boxer who won or retained (boxing scholars disagree) the world lightweight title in a 1906 fight in Goldfield and retained the title in a 1907 bout in Tonopah, Nevada, was born in Baltimore; in 1881, Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, was born in Sotto il Monte; in 1907, after the arrest of eleven alleged "hop heads" in Reno, the Rhyolite Daily Bulletin commented "The public has known for some time that something was wrong in Reno and this probably explains it. They have evidently been smoking a few "green‚ pills."; in 1936, Hawaii Territorial Attorney General William Pittman, brother of U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, was reported seriously ill with influenza and kidney trouble; in 1947, a day after the House Unamerican Activities Committee cited the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress for failing to answer questions about their political opinions, the Association of Motion Picture Producers agreed to blacklist the ten and any others whose opinions were suspect, setting off years of blacklisting that put hundreds of people out of work; in 1950, with the Korean war seeming nearly ended and MacArthur pushing toward the Chinese border against the advice of President Truman and other military officials, China sent 300,000 troops over the border, throwing U.S. troops into headlong flight south; in 1959, singer/actress Marie McDonald, known as "The Body" and famous mainly for being famous, agreed to replace El Rancho Vegas stripper Candy Barr, who was fired during a campaign by the Clark County commission to clean up the Las Vegas strip (light opera singer Nelson Eddy turned down the job before McDonald took it, saying that his act was probably too racy for the commission); in 1960, Harvest of Shame, the landmark Edward R. Murrow documentary about migrant farm workers in the United States was broadcast the day after Thanksgiving (after Murrow became director of the United States Information Agency in 1961, he tried to prevent the broadcast of Harvest of Shame by the British Broadcasting Corporation); in 1961, five of the nine Nevada counties created on November 25, 1861 — Esmeralda, Douglas, Ormsby, Storey and Washoe — marked their centennials (a sixth county created, Lake/Roop, no longer existed and no record has been found of Churchill, Humboldt and Lyon marking the centennial); in 1967, Incense and Peppermints by Strawberry Alarm Clock hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1971, in a story on the possibility of the United Farm Workers possibly expanding their labor organizing to the Midwest, the Associated Press used the term "invade" and the Reno Evening Gazette, in a headline over the story, used the term "invasion"; in 1971, a year after billionaire Howard Hughes left the state, the first sale of one of his Nevada properties — a ten acre parking lot next to Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas — was sold to J&B Scotch executive Abraham Rosenberg and local liquor distributor Stephen Wynn, who promptly sold it to Caesar's for a million dollar profit (Hughes Tool Company denied that the sale indicated that Hughes was dismantling his Nevada casino and mining holdings); in 1972, the Oakland Tribune reported that a federal investigation of Howard Hughes' Las Vegas operations had begun in the spring of '72 and that indictments could be returned by early '73; in 1986, President Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese shocked the nation and stunned Congress by admitting that $10 to $30 millions in profits earned from arms sold to Iran through Israeli agents had been turned over to Nicaraguan rebels; in 1998, the dueling pistols used in the 1859 Broderick/Terry duel (in which former California supreme court justice David Terry killed U.S. Senator David Broderick) were sold at auction for $34,500.

Update: Friday, Nov. 24, 2006, 2:50a.m. PST — On Nov. 24, 1904, the Nevada Transit Trolley Line officially opened in Reno. It ceased operating on Sept. 7, 1927. [Nevada Magazine calendar ]; in 1963, Jack Ruby shot and mortally wounded Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

On Nov. 24, 1859, Charles Darwin published On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle Of Life which, by some accounts, sold out immediately — which may be a surprise to anyone who has actually read its dense text; in 1877, the incessant truancy of U.S. Senator William Sharon of Nevada was becoming a problem for his Republican Party because of a dispute over whether a couple of senators would bolt the party, making Sharon's attendance needed for the GOP to hold onto its majority (Sharon rarely appeared in Washington after buying his U.S. Senate seat from the Nevada Legislature in 1875); in 1922, the Colorado River Compact, allocating the river's water, was signed by representatives of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming (and later approved by their legislatures); in 1924, a large group of Owens Valley men with weapons seized control of a gate on the aqueduct that was carrying Owens water away from the valley to Los Angeles and halted the outflow to the south; in 1933, former Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith published an attack on President Franklin Roosevelt in New Outlook magazine; in 1933, movie executive William Fox (20th Century Fox) told a congressional committee investigating his charges of business collusion that in December, 1929, Chase National Bank head Albert Winnin had responded to a request from President Hoover by telling the president to "mind your own business"; in 1934, Governor James Scrugham asked the National Park Service to set a Civilian Conservation Corps camp up at Fort Churchill to restore the fort and create a state park; in 1935, Oakland mayor and former U.S. Representative Ron Dellums was born in Oakland; in 1940, the Goshute people of Nevada and Utah incorporated as the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation; in 1947, in Las Vegas, 28 year-old student pilot Leonard McCullah had a hearing in justice court and then was jailed under a new state law prohibiting careless and dangerous operation of an aircraft after he flew low to the ground over Boulder City and Lake Mead ("Lots of us fly over the lake," he said. "We didn't consider it endangering anybody's life or property as there was nothing under us but water and sagebrush."); in 1958, The Kingston Trio hit number one on the Billboard album chart; in 1958, the Nevada Legislative Commission (one of two bodies that handled legislative business when the full legislature is out of session) heard plans for a correctional institution for female juveniles that faced some opposition because of its location at Red Rock Canyon 23 miles southwest of Las Vegas; in 1963, two days after the president's assassination, Las Vegas gambling figures John Gaughan, Benny Binion and Jack Binion had a conversation at a Las Vegas rodeo about Jack Ruby, according to an FBI report included in the Warren Commission report; in 1966, work began on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with seven and a half hours of effort on Strawberry Fields Forever (Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army shelter near John Lennon's childhood home in Liverpool) which, as it turned out, was dropped from Sergeant Pepper, though the version recorded this night is reputed (it has never been released) to be stunning; in 1971, a plane supposedly carrying Dan Cooper (popularly known as D.B. Cooper) landed in Reno minus the famous skyjacker, who had bailed out en route; in 1976, Elvis appeared at Reno's Centennial Coliseum; in 1976, the statue of limitations expired on the D.B. Cooper hijacking, though FBI officials claimed otherwise; in 1991, Reverend Little Richard Penniman married Cyndi Lauper and David Thornton at Friends Meeting House in New York City.

Charles Darwin / On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation of Favoured Races In The Struggle of Life: As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short and slow steps. Hence the canon of `Natura non facit saltum,' which every fresh addition to our knowledge tends to make more strictly correct, is on this theory simply intelligible. We can plainly see why nature is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation. But why this should be a law of nature if each species has been independently created, no man can explain.

Update: Thursday, Nov. 23, 2006, 2:41 p.m. PST — Nov. 23, HAPPY THANKSGIBLETING!
BARBWIRE SPECIAL WEB EDITION — A tale of two people: A Thanksgiving gift

December 11, 1621, letter from Edward Winslow to a friend in England, the only account of the original thanksgiving event, which was specifically a non-religious festival: Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king, Massassoit with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted. And they went out and killed five deer which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our Governor and upon the Captain and others.

On Nov. 23, 1872, a message from the U.S. Centennial Commission was published in Reno saying that unlike recent expositions in England and France which were supported by their governments, the U.S. Congress had not seen fit to fund the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia and therefore "The Commission looks to the unfailing patriotism of the people of every section, to see that each contributes its share to the expenses..."; in 1875, the Nevada State Journal reported "An attempt was made to take the life of Philip Klingonsmith at Mineral Park last Week. He is one of the Mormons who confessed the secrets of the Mountain Meadow massacre, and it is supposed that the attempt upon his life was made by Brigham's Destroying Angels."; in 1886, the dime novel Nevada Ned, the Revolver Ranger; or, The Young King of the Gold Mines. A Romance of a Border Boy's Life. By Prentiss Ingraham was published by Beadle's Half Dime Library; in 1906, the Nevada State Journal defended President Roosevelt's refusal to stop the discharges from the military — without hearing or trial — of the Brownsville soldiers (some of them twenty-year men nearing retirement, six of them Medal of Honor recipients) framed for murder; in 1910, what was reported as the first recorded divorce of a Native American couple in Nevada, District Judge Frank Langan granted a divorce to a couple whose name was given in a newspaper report only as Galbraith; in 1910, a 33-page booklet titled Reno Reveries by Leslie Curtis was published, a peculiar collection of legal matter, poems, anecdotes about divorce, etc. (an expanded version was published as a book by Reno's Armanko Stationers store in 1924); in 1914, Nevada railroad agent J.M. Fulton, having returned from Southern Pacific offices in San Francisco, said hundreds of men had to be laid off from the Sparks shops because traffic through the newly opened Panama Canal had drained off business from the railroads (twenty conductors who worked between Ogden and Oakland had also been laid off); in 1933, the Rotary Club in Ely asked a local high school teacher to describe what was happening in Germany under the Nazis; in 1936, Life magazine began publication; in 1936, the Las Vegas city commission heard a plan to move 50 Six Companies homes from Boulder City to Las Vegas where they would be sold to residents for from $850 to $1,250 (the proposal was referred to city engineer C.D. Baker for recommendation); in 1944, the U.S. War Department issued a casualty list of 1,896 soldiers including Edward O'Grady of Las Vegas, killed in the European theatre; in 1956, nineteen year old Louis Balint began a seven day sentence in a Toledo workhouse for bursting into a private hotel lounge and attacking Elvis Presley while yelling "my wife carries your picture but she doesn't carry mine." (In a court hearing, Balint said that none of his punches landed, but a police officer said "Presley's no slouch. He was really working over that guy. He knows how to handle himself real fine."); in 1960, Charles Chaplin was excluded from the new Hollywood Walk of Fame because its sponsors disapproved of his opinions; in 1960, as Nevada District Judge Jon Collins announced a decision apparently adverse to litigant Robert Williams in a courtroom in the Washoe County Courthouse, Williams pulled out a gun and started firing, killing two attorneys and wounding a third person; in 1964, I Feel Fine b/w She's A Woman by the Beatles was released in the U.S.; in 1968, the Vatican disclosed that it was receiving hundreds of letters each day asking that the late Pope John XXIII be made a saint; in 1968, Pyramid Lake Tribal chair William Abraham told the Nevada Indian Affairs Commission that the tribe was losing its lands and its water rights and that the reservation was constantly being plundered of gem stones and petrified wood; in 1971, U.S. Representative Walter Baring of Nevada, a long time hawk on Vietnam, said he was withdrawing his support from the war and had voted to cut off spending for it; in 1971, a news report said Elko had two new attorneys — Robert Manley and Byron (Bill) Bilyeu; in 1977, Washoe County Schools Superintendent Marvin Picollo said there was almost no way to avoid extended sessions or double sessions in schools because of overcrowding, in spite of the "long range damage academically" to students; in 1977, in Las Vegas, Elvis Presley, the biggest draw in the town's history, was named "male musical star of the year" three months after his death, an award for which he was never nominated while he was alive.

Update: Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2006 2:58 a.m. PST — BARBWIRE SPECIAL WEB EDITION: A tale of two people: A Thanksgiving gift

On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. Suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

On Nov. 22, 1633, between two and three hundred colonists set sail on the ships Ark and Dove to occupy Maryland; in 1861, John Reagan of Texas, member of the Confederate Congress, introduced legislation making Arizona a Confederate territory (it was approved and signed into law February 14, 1862, and the westernmost battle of the Civil War — won by the Confederates — was fought in Arizona); in 1873, the Oleomargarine Company of San Francisco began manufacture of a butter substitute; in 1884, Christopher Perry began publication of the Philadelphia Tribune, believed to be the oldest African-American newspaper in continuous publication in the United States; in 1894, the Elko Independent called for legislation to halt a practice of voters "transferring" from one jurisdiction in the state where, presumably, their votes were not needed, to another where they were — as in the case of some voters in the 1894 election who transferred from Humboldt and Elko counties to Wadsworth in Washoe County; in 1899, the Wisconsin State Journal carried the grisly reminiscences of a 74-year-old former hangman who said he was the executioner at the notorious mass hanging of 38 Santee Sioux at Mankato, Minnesota, on December 26, 1862, the largest mass execution in U.S. history; in 1906, a Reno newspaper reported that "Mrs. William Corey, who secured a divorce in this city from her husband, the steel king [president of the United States Steel Corporation], has now demonstrated that her residence in Reno was a temporary affair for the purpose of securing freedom from Corey. She has bought a home in Pennsylvania." (Laura Corey's publicized divorce is regarded by some as the birth of the quickie Reno divorce industry); in 1928, Bolero by Ravel debuted in Paris (told that a woman in the audience had declared him mad, Ravel responded that she understood the piece); in 1936, an air mail letter was received in Las Vegas forty one hours after it left Honolulu; in 1954, in Hong Kong, Clark Gable laughed at rumors of a romance between himself and Marilyn Monroe and in New York Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift attended the premiere of The Last Time I Saw Paris; in 1961, members of two striking unions returned to work at the Nevada atomic test site after agreeing to submit the strike issues to a mediator; in 1961, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller arrived in New Guinea and immediately joined the search for his missing son Michael, who had disappeared after his dugout canoe overturned near the mouth of the Eilanden River (Michael was never seen again); in 1962, Nevada gambling regulator (and former reporter) Ed Olsen protested what he considered misleading news coverage of a legislative audit of his agency and issued a point by point bill of particulars on Nevada State Journal coverage; in 1963, Aldous Huxley, John Kennedy and C.S. Lewis died; in 1964, members of a Cuban exile group said they tried to murder Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro (plus, apparently, many bystanders) in John Kennedy's memory by sending an old B26 bomber to bomb a stadium where Castro was speaking, but Cuban fighter planes prevented the bomber from reaching its target; in 1965, after declaring himself Christian redeemer against Muhammed Ali's Muslim faith ("...how much harm he has done by joining the Black Muslims. He might as well have joined the Ku Klux Klan."; "...the image of a Black Muslim as the world heavyweight champion disgraces the sport and the nation"), Floyd Patterson lost to Ali when the referee stopped the fight in the twelfth round; in 1967, Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie was released; in 1968, The Beatles by the Beatles (better known as the white album) was released in England (and in the U.S. on the 25th); in 1968, Harold Russell, the soldier who lost his hands when a defective fuse detonated an explosive device he was holding and went on to become one of only two non-professional actors to win an acting Oscar (best supporting actor in The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946), spoke in Reno at the state convention of the Association for Retarded Children; in 1971, Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) spoke to the Nevada Black Political Caucus in Las Vegas; in 1974, Nevada District Judge John Gabrielli heard arguments in the Reno Newspapers Inc. lawsuit to stop the City of Reno from participating in secret negotiations on landing fees at Reno International Airport; in 1974, representatives of U.S. senate candidates Harry Reid and Paul Laxalt held a negotiating session at which they agreed on the date (December 3d) for the start of their recount and then deadlocked on all other issues; in 1974, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced an investigation of Western Gold and Silver Exchange Corporation, including its Las Vegas office headed by American Independent Party candidate for governor James Ray Houston; in 1989, the Mirage casino opened in Las Vegas; in 2004, a Scottish firm released a video game that lets players assassinate President Kennedy; in 2005, the DVD was released of Cry of Battle, one of two films playing in the Texas Theatre when Lee Oswald was captured there.

Plaque placed in room s-214 of the U.S. capital building in 1902: IN THIS ROOM HENRY WILSON VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES AND A SENATOR FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS DIED NOVEMBER 22 1875 THE SON OF A FARM LABORER. NEVER AT SCHOOL MORE THAN TWELVE MONTHS. IN YOUTH A JOURNEYMAN SHOEMAKER, HE RAISED HIMSELF TO THE HIGH PLACES OF FAME, HONOR AND POWER, AND BY UNWEARIED STUDY MAKE HIMSELF AN AUTHORITY IN THE HISTORY OF HIS COUNTRY AND OF LIBERTY AND AN ELOQUENT PUBLIC SPEAKER TO WHOM SENATE AND PEPLE EAGERLY LISTENED. HE DEALT WITH AN CONTROLLED VAST PUBLIC EXPENDITURE DURING A GREAT CIVIL WAR, YET LIVED AND DIED POOR, AND LEFT TO HIS GRATEFUL COUNTRYMEN THE MEMORY OF AN HONORABLE PUBLIC SERVICE, AND A GOOD NAME FAR BETTER THAN RICHES.

Update: Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006, 7:16 a.m. PST — On Nov. 21, 1640, the Mayflower Compact was signed, pledging the signatories to "combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience"; in 1870, on the 21st or 24th, Ruel Colt Gridley, formerly of Austin, Nevada, who hauled a sack of flour around the nation selling and re-selling it to raise money for the Sanitary Fund (the Red Cross of its day) during the Civil War, died in Paradise City, California; in 1900, while visiting Fort Worth and staying at the Maddox Flat Apartments, six members of the Hole in the Wall Gang — including Harry "Sundance" Longbaugh and Butch Cassidy — had their group photograph taken at John Swartz's photographic studio (the photo turned out to be a major blunder by the outlaws — a Pinkerton man later spotted the photo in Swartz's display window, purchased it, and it was circulated by the Pinkertons throughout the nation and used on wanted posters and cards); in 1904, Coleman Hawkins, saxophonist who helped create jazz, was born in St. Joseph, Missouri; in 1933, a letter was made public in which U.S. Representative James Scrugham of Nevada said he would urge the federal government to establish national parks at Cathederal Gorge, the Lehman caves, the Pyramid Lake area and Whipple cave; in 1936, by a vote of 93 to three, members of the Pyramid Lake Indian Tribe ratified its corporate charter; in 1936 Boulder City Episcopal priest James Terry, reported dead by the Boulder City Journal, turned up alive; in 1959, disc jockey Alan Freed was fired from WABC radio for accepting payola, days before he also lost his job hosting the television program The Big Beat; in1960, Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1963, President Kennedy proposed that fifty million silver dollars be minted in 1964 and 100 million in 1965; in 1964, the Vatican II conference issued Unitatis Redintegratio (On Ecumenism) that said Christ "has been rousing divided Christians to remorse over their divisions and to a longing for unity" and that divisions were the fault of both Catholics and Protestants; in 1967, The Who Sell Out was released; in 1968, staffers at the Reno Housing Authority were instructed to stop talking to the press; in 1971, Lorenzo Jeffers of the Wampanoag tribe in New England commented on the previous year's Thanksgiving festivities during which American Indian Movement activists seized a replica of the Mayflower, criticizing "western Indians coming into our territory and doing these things"; in 1976, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan said he would not accept an appointment with the Carter administration (of course, he hadn't been asked, either); in 1977, nine weeks after U.S. Representative Jack Cunningham of Washington introduced legislation to void all treaties with Native American tribes, key committee chairs in Congress said the measure was going nowhere; in 1980, eighty-seven people died in the MGM casino/hotel fire in Las Vegas; in 1983, the first event held in Las Vegas' new pavilion, the Thomas & Mack Center, was a game between the UNLV Runnin' Rebels and a team from Victoria, Canada; in 1995, The Beatles Anthology (the album) went on sale, setting a first day sales record of 450,000 units, the same day that The Beatles Anthology (the three part television program) began broadcasting; in 1998, America's Most Wanted rebroadcast its segment on Eric Stein, who bilked 1,800 investors out of $34 million in his operation of the Sterling Group, a Las Vegas firm that used TV commercials to sell products directly to viewers but was, according to investigators, a Ponzi scheme (Stein, wanted by the Nevada secretary of state's office for racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, securities fraud, offer or sale of unregistered security, transacting business as unlicensed sales representative, was arrested in Chula Vista, California, and was indicted on federal charges while awaiting trial on Nevada charges).

Update: Monday, Nov. 20, 2006, 1:02 a.m. PST — The following bulletin to all affiliates from Nevada State AFL-CIO Executive Secretary-Treasurer Danny Thompson was distributed on Nov. 19, 2006.

SHOP UNION

Shopping at union establishments is important to all of us. The United Food and Commercial Workers are in the fight of their lives against the Wal-Marts and other non-union stores like COSTCO – yes, that's right, COSTCO is NOT UNION. Please remember that you do have alternatives. Food-4-Less and the other union grocery stores carry food and other items in bulk at excellent prices. This holiday season is a great time to remind everyone to shop union grocery stores.

SOUTHERN NEVADA
Albertson's
Food-4-Less
Rite-Aid
Smith's
Von's

NORTHERN NEVADA
Albertson's
Safeway
Sak 'n' Save
Scolari's
Smith's

On Nov. 20, 1945, 24 Nazi leaders went on trial before an international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1806, Baptist minister Isaac Backus, who battled the Massachusetts ecclesiastical tax imposed on residents for the support of the Congregational Church, died in Middleboro, Massachusetts; in 1859, the Imperial (North) claim in Gold Hill, now a portion of the Houston Oil and Minerals pit, was located; in 1877, Wm. P. Barclay of Virginia City, Nevada received patent number 197239 for an improvement in hydraulic and wire rope pumping system (and then received another patent for the same thing on October 8, 1878); in 1879, the name of Pizen Switch in Lyon County was changed to Greenfield (and still later would become Yerington); in 1871, Chester Arthur was appointed collector of the port of New York, one of the most desirable patronage appointments of the gilded age, by President Grant (President Hayes subsequently removed Arthur because of the rampant corruption at the port office, and Arthur was nominated for vice-president and became president after the assassination of James Garfield); in 1872, Win McCarthy was killed by James Woods in a dispute over a card game at Pioche (Woods was acquitted because McCarthy struck first); in 1874, the Nevada State Journal reported a rumor about the nuptials of Francis Newlands and the daughter of mining magnate William Sharon (shortly to be appointed U.S. senator): "It is stated that the sum of a million constitutes the gift of the father to [the] happy couple and that he fitted up their room for them in his own house at an expense of about $200,000."; in 1890, the Rapid City Journal reported, falsely, that Sioux were on the warpath, a report that led to several massacres, including Wounded Knee Creek, and the murder of Sitting Bull; in 1896, in the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson, which became the film Somewhere In Time starring Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve, actress "Elise McKenna" appeared on stage: "And in one of the cases is a program for a play performed in the hotel theater (wherever that was) on November 20, 1896; The Little Minister by J. M. Barrie, starring an actress named Elise McKenna. Next to the program is a photograph of her face; the most gloriously lovely face I've ever seen in my life."; in 1903, Tom Horn, cavalry Indian scout, rodeo steer wrestler, Pinkerton detective, cattle rancher‚ enforcer and hired killer, was hanged in Cheyenne for killing a 14 year-old boy; in 1907, the Rhyolite Daily Bulletin reported that Nevada Attorney General Richard Stoddard filed a brief with the Nevada Supreme Court arguing that labor radicals Morris Preston and Joseph Smith, convicted of killing Goldfield employer Joseph Silva, had no right to an appeal of their case (Smith and Preston were posthumously pardoned 80 years later after historians Sally Zanjani and Guy Louis Rocha uncovered new evidence showing the two men were framed); in 1904, Texas and Nevada crime and gambling figure Benny Binion was born in Grayson County, Texas; in 1914, George Wingfield confirmed his acquisition from the George Nixon estate of Reno's Nixon National Bank and Winnemucca's First National Bank (Wingfield already owned the John S. Cook Bank in Goldfield and the Carson Valley Bank in Carson City); in 1915, there were 25 motor vehicles in the Amargosa Valley — five cars in Beatty, ten in Rhyolite, four in Carrara, two in Pioneer, two in the county, plus two trucks, with Studebaker, Ford, Overland, Mets and Reos all represented; in 1925, Robert Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts; in 1936, in the case of a widow who requested $850 from her husband's estate so she could dress properly for the commonly observed two years of mourning, a judge ruled that Quebec law required only one year of mourning; in 1936, the Junior Chamber of Commerce and Las Vegas Review-Journal offered a ten dollar prize to whoever came up with the best name for the highway between Boulder Lake and Mt. Charleston; in 1936, the Las Vegas Townsend Club discussed the possibility of forming a second club in the city, something that could happen under the bylaws only when the first club reached 500 members (Francis Townsend's proposal for a California Old Age Revolving Pension Plan had resulted in 7,000 Townsend Clubs across the nation and helped fuel the drive for social security); in 1936, the Clark County caucus of the Nevada Legislature, headed by Lieutenant Governor Fred Alward, met for the first time since the 1936 election; in 1945, the trials of German Nazis at Nuremberg began; in 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Navajo Nation Reservation of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah the right to take part in a court case over division of Colorado River waters among Nevada and four other states after the U.S. Justice Department argued that it represented tribal interests adequately; in 1961, Stereo 35mm by Enoch Light and his Orchestra hit number one on the Billboard stereo album chart where it stayed for seven weeks (the recording was made on motion picture film instead of recording tape because Light believed it provided better sound quality); in 1969, Native Americans, including Nevada's Adam Fortunate Eagle, reclaimed Alcatraz Island (abandoned by the federal government) under an old treaty allowing return of surplus lands to tribes; in 1969, two Nevada delegates were in the majority at a national convention of the journalism organization Sigma Delta Phi (now the Society of Professional Journalists) when the convention voted to admit women to membership and when it voted to condemn Vice-President Spiro Agnew's criticisms of the press; in 1969, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published and CBS broadcast photographs of the village of My Lai 5 showing piles of bodies and wounded children crawling, making the massacre more difficult to downplay or misrepresent as the Pentagon had been trying to do (the photographs were sold to the media by former U.S. Army photographer Ronald Haeberle (see below), who failed to try to stop the massacre, failed to report it and failed to turn the photographs over as evidence but who continues to earn an income from them; publications like the New York Times have published the photos but refused to pay for them, contending that Haeberle's claim that they are his personal photos and not Army photos is invalid); in 1975, MGM announced it would build another Grand Hotel, this one in Reno, a project that became a turning point in the city's quality of life — and which, in a puffy and uncritical front page story, was portrayed by the Nevada State Journal as an unalloyed benefit to the city: "Plans which would make Cinderella's fairy godmother jealous — turning an ugly east Reno gravel pit into a glamorous hotel-casino"; in 2002, Washoe County Senator William Raggio underwent successful heart surgery; in 2004, acting under dubious open meeting and due process conditions, the Nevada Board of Regents fired Ron Remington as community college president and John Cummings as his consultant.

Prosecution Witness Ronald Haeberle/Direct Examination:
Q: You never told anyone in the chain of command about the atrocity and massacre?
A: No, sir.
Q: Weren't you shocked at what you'd seen? Weren't you upset by what you'd seen? Why didn't you report it?
A: I felt it was unusual but I wasn't the one to bring it up. We decided to keep quiet until someone came to us and not to start the ball rolling.
Q: Have you never heard of a MAC-V order of 1967 that says it is the responsibility of all military personnel to report to their commanding officer any war crime they know of, that they should make every effort to discover war crimes, report them and preserve the physical evidence?
A: I never heard of that regulation before.
Q: Do you know that it is a serious offense not to comply with a regulation, known or unknown?
A: No.
Q: Did you ever consider the impact of your failure to disclose that you had these pictures or information to your commander or senior commanders?
A: No, sir, I did not.
Q: You had no feeling that failure to disclose that information was a dereliction of duty?
A: I've heard that.

Update: Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006, 3:46 a.m. PST — On Nov. 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On Nov. 19, 1863, famed orator Edward Everett gave the principal address at the dedication of a new national cemetery at Gettysburg, followed by brief remarks from President Lincoln (later, Everett wrote to Lincoln: "I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes"); in 1878, noting that Nevada Surveyor General John Day, who served two and a half terms, had announced that he would leave the state after his just-elected successor took office, the Nevada State Journal observed "General Day has lived in this state nineteen years. When they get out of office they all leave us."; in 1888, Ohio's Lima Daily Democratic Times reprinted from the Indiana Letter a rare expression of regret for what was done to Native Americans: "Their names are on our bright streams and fertile plains — Sbenonee, Wenu, Wabash, Raccoon creek, Piahewahi, Miami, Tippecanoe, etc. — but of all the ten thousand or more Indians who once ranged the state, not five hundred representatives remain."; in 1907, posters appeared around Beatty announcing a meeting to protest activities in town of the Industrial Workers of the World, a meeting described by the Rhyolite Daily Bulletin: "Just what the I.W.W. was charged with doing the posters did not state, but at the appointed time some fifty residents of the town met at Rose & Palmer's hall and proceeded to resolute."; in 1936, seventeen labor unions and the Clark County Central Labor Council requested the city of Las Vegas to repeal its anti-picketing ordinance; in 1936, Las Vegas street commissioner H.P. Marble proposed moving cab stands off of Fremont Street onto side streets; in 1936, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce's newly formed committee to explore the possibility of starting a junior college met for the first time; in 1960, the U.S. Department of Justice instructed the FBI to investigate claims of voting fraud in the 1960 presidential election (Attorney General William Rogers was not available for comment on the probe because he was vacationing with Vice-President Richard Nixon); in 1966, You Keep Me Hanging On by the Supremes hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1969, antiwar leader David Harris was denied parole on his draft resistance sentence, apparently being penalized for forcing federal officials to pick him up for his prison term instead of turning himself in and for organizing a hunger strike among fellow prisoners; in 1978, newly elected state governors meeting in Buford, Georgia, participated in a seminar on how to conduct business in the open that was closed to the public and guarded by Georgia state police officers; in 1994, MTV Unplugged In New York by Nirvana hit number one on the Billboard album chart.

Update: Saturday, Nov. 18, 2006, 10:14 a.m. PST — On Nov. 18, 1976, Spain's parliament approved a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

On Nov. 18, 1095, Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont, called to plan the invasion of the Middle East — the first crusade: "All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. Oh what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ!"; in 1302, Pope Boniface VIII issued Unam Sanctam, a bull that says there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church: "Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic... outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins...There had been at the time of the deluge only one ark of Noah, prefiguring the one Church, which ark, having been finished to a single cubit, had only one pilot and guide...Furthermore, we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff." (Boniface is one of three popes Dante mentioned by name in The Inferno as being condemned to hell for corrupting his ecclesiastical office); in 1865, the officers and men of Company E of the First Nevada Territory Volunteer Cavalry were mustered out of service at Fort Churchill, Nevada; in 1877, petitions were being circulated in Gold Hill and Reno calling for the federal government to acquire the railroad portion of the checkerboard pattern of lands along the route of the railroad across the U.S.; in 1877, the Nevada State Journal complained about the boys in Reno: "One has but to stop beside a group of them a few moments to hear language fit only for the sulphurious regions of His Satanic Majesty...The trouble is that they are what society and their parents make them."; in 1890, the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel published a story identifying the ghost dance messiah as a Native American named Johnson on the Walker Lake reservation in Nevada, and in St. Paul, tribal reservation surveyor F.W. Pettigrew said the ghost dance represented a threat to whites: "The trouble all comes from the ghost dance...Troops will have a good effect on them, and it will take the presence of troops to break up these dances."; in 1924, "Jules Nicky" Arnstein, convicted in 1920 of the theft of $5,000,000 from Wall Street bond firms, was again indicted with five others for conspiracy to defraud in New Jersey (Arnstein was portrayed by Omar Sharif in Funny Girl); in 1936, Hitler and Mussolini extended diplomatic recognition to Spanish fascist forces while loyalist republicans still held the capital of Madrid; in 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt began a seven thousand mile sea voyage to attend a peace conference in Buenos Aires (where the U.S. agreed to submit all disputes from the Americas to arbitration — wink, wink); in 1936, work began on a power line between Hoover Dam and Pioche, described as the first southern Nevada development to come out of the construction of the dam; in 1942, gas rationing began in Reno as 120 school teachers, working in shifts of 22, distributed ration books at Billinghurst and Northside schools; in 1942, a wartime manpower committee was formed for Nevada, made up of businesspeople and labor union representatives; in 1942, the Nevada Highway Department announced that the Mount Rose highway was closed and, because it held no military importance and there was a wartime shortage of plow blades, it was closed for winter; in 1949, organized crime figure Lincoln Fitzgerald of Reno was gunned down at his Mark Twain Drive home just before midnight, shot from ambush in a mob-style hit that damaged his leg, kidneys and liver and left him reclusive for years afterward; in 1951, Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly's legendary television program See It Now debuted; in 1960, the Republican National Committee said it was sending investigators to Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Carolina and Texas to try to find evidence of voter fraud to overturn John Kennedy's victory in the presidential election; in 1969, Republican state senators Coe Swobe, Cliff Young, Archie Pozzi and James Slattery, as well as an array of Democrats in both houses of the Nevada Legislature, said they favored more liberal marijuana laws; in 1972, Catch Bull At Four by Cat Stevens hit number one on the Billboard album chart, where it stayed for three weeks; in 1976, Spain's parliament reinstated democracy after 37 years; in 1976, after the disclosure of secret meetings by the Sparks city council, the Nevada State Journal checked minutes of public meetings and found that the council "has been a remarkable agreeable group when voting on city council agenda items" — only three "no" votes since the current council took office (and in Carson City, mayor-elect Harold Jacobsen said he hoped that public but unpublicized meetings of the board of supervisors would be stopped); in 1977, Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted for his involvement in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham, Alabama's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four girls (Chambliss was convicted of murdering Denise McNair, one of the girls); in 1985, the quality of world culture took a sharp rise with the introduction of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes; in 1992, the film Malcolm X premiered; in 1994, recording artist (Minnie the Moocher), orchestra leader (Cab Calloway's Cotton Club Orchestra), club performer (Club Zanzibar, the Paramount), movie star (Stormy Weather, St. Louis Blues, The Blues Brothers, The Cincinnati Kid), author (Minnie the Moocher and Me) and Broadway performer (Porgy and Bess as Sportin' Life, Hello Dolly) Cab Calloway died in Hockessin, Delaware.

Update: Friday, Nov. 17, 2006, 8:10 a.m. PST — On Nov. 17, 1973, President Nixon told an Associated Press managing editors meeting in Orlando, Fla., that "people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.'' [New York Times/AP e-headlines] [EDITOR'S NOTE: The timing proved quite ironic, see below.]

On this date in 3 BC, Jesus was born, according to early church figure Clement of Alexandria, a Greek theologian and Christian convert; in 1907, a gunfight erupted in Beatty's Mayflower Saloon when John Scott entered with a pistol in each hand, whereupon bartender John Morris drew his own gun and fired twice, striking Scott, who was hit in the lung and back; in 1936, it was announced that the Notre Dame football team would stop in Las Vegas on their way back from a game with the USC Trojans and would tour Hoover Dam; in 1936, the Las Vegas chamber of commerce discussed whether to fund a booklet promoting the Lost City; in 1944 in Asheville, North Carolina, Reno pilot Dorothy Fowler received a commendation for her work in piloting weather service workers on military missions for the Army Air Force; in 1944, the Glendale (California) Ministerial Association asked President Roosevelt to apologize for saying "The goddamned thing won't work" about his voting machine at his Hyde Park polling place, and the Boston Catholic newspaper said Bob Hope's off color jokes ("artful filth") at military camps were leaving servicemen "unprepared for the reckoning" (Hyde Park town clerk Gladys Brower said that what Roosevelt actually said was "What's the matter?"); in 1944, Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of the John Mackay statue at the University of Nevada in Reno who was working on Mount Rushmore at the time of his death, was entombed at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles; in 1954, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations said that if the U.S. wanted Soviet participation in President Eisenhower's "atoms for peace" program (which promoted atomic energy for non-military uses), it would have to be closely linked with the U.N. Security Council where both the Soviets and the U.S. held vetoes; in 1954, Dawn Wells, later Miss Nevada in 1959 and "Mary Anne" in Gilligan's Island, was admitted to the Filibusters Club, Reno High School's public speaking group; in 1956, Salt Lake City FBI special agent Mark Felt announced that an alleged navy deserter, 19 year-old Frank Bacca, had been arrested in McGill, Nevada (Felt was later convicted of ordering black bag jobs during the Nixon administration and was Deep Throat of Watergate fame); in 1962, Big Girls Don't Cry by the Four Seasons hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1962, in a wire to a newspaper editor a week after his disastrous concession speech in the California governor's race, Richard Nixon said he had run his "last campaign for public office: and "What few disappointments have been my lot in the world of politics are as nothing compared to the mountaintop experiences which have been mine."; in 1968, in what became known as the Heidi Bowl, a fairly dull football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets ran on and on into other programming until NBC finally pulled the plug (with the Jets leading the Raiders 32 to 29) to start its showing of a new version of Heidi starring Jean Simmons and Jennifer Edwards, whereupon the game came to life and (unseen by viewers) Oakland came from behind in the last 42 exciting seconds to score two touchdowns and win 43-32 (the incident was dramatized in the Richard Benjamin film The Sports Pages, the Raiders have it on their web site as "the Greatest Game You Never Saw", and Heidi Bowl was voted the most memorable regular-season game in NFL history by a jury of sportswriters in a 1997 poll); in 1968, Carson City's new hospital opened several weeks early after a fire damaged the old hospital; in 1970, in what was described as his first major appointment, Democratic governor-elect Mike O'Callaghan said he wanted to keep Republican Addison Millard as state draft director (it wasn't actually an appointment but a recommendation to President Nixon); in 1970, after three weeks of climbing during which at one point they waved off a rescue team, Warren Harding and Dean Caldwell reached the last two hundred feet on the Dawn Wall AKA the Wall of the Early Morning Light on El Capitan at Yosemite (when they finally surmounted the top there was a media circus awaiting them; Harding repeated the climb at age 65 in 1989); in 1972, the November 23d edition of Rolling Stone hit the newstands with a cover story on Nevada brothel owner Joe Conforte (who cooperated with the story, but did not like the result and sued the Stone); in 1993, Nevada Weekly, a new Reno newspaper founded by Mike Norris, Bill Martin and Larry Henry, began publication (it is now the Reno News and Review).

Update: Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006, 12:41 a.m. PST — On Nov. 16, 1933, the United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations. President Roosevelt sent a telegram to Soviet leader Maxim Litvinov, expressing hope that United States-Soviet relations would "forever remain normal and friendly." [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On Nov. 16, 1875, the Nevada State Journal reported that for the first time in many years, the Central Pacific Railroad paid its annual taxes, "But they will please remember to remit that 83,000 and odd dollars due us for last year's."; in 1906, the Bullfrog Miner reported that the rails of the Las Vegas and Tonopah line would probably reach Rhyolite by December 1 and a $100,000 hotel was being built in the town, and C.O. Whittemore was a prime mover in both projects; in 1914, Roy Gorin, head of the U.S. Air Force accounting and finance center ("the guy who paid the air force") was born in Arden, Nevada; in 1933, the United States "recognized" the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, long after most other nations did so; in 1934, Nevada and California officials, including acting governors Morley Griswold and Frank Merriam, were invited to a November 18 ceremony to open the Bear Valley section of the Lake Tahoe/Ukiah highway; in 1934, after midterm elections in President Roosevelt's first term, business leaders swung behind the president, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce adopting a resolution pledging support to the New Deal and Chicago lawyer and Montgomery Ward chair Silas Strawn (who was finance chair for Herbert Hoover's presidential campaigns) telling reporters "The recent election proved conclusively that the people of this country overwhelmingly support President Roosevelt."; in 1934, Nevada Attorney General Gray Mashburn overruled the Lincoln County clerk and district attorney after the two officials refused to return the Caliente ballot box to the election board on the second day of counting on grounds that the board should have worked the first day until the job was completed, and Mashburn said not only should the board be allowed to continue the count but that it should handle any requested recounts; in 1956, Nevada Assemblymembers William Byrne and William Embry of Clark County asked that their names be removed from a grand jury report that criticized them but did not indict them, part of a report which recommended impeachment of Nevada Surveyor General Louis Ferrari over state land transactions; in 1959, Barbara Binion Fecher, daughter of Las Vegas casino owner and crime figure Benny Binion, was arrested for being a member of a robbery ring operating in California; in 1959, Mr. Blue by the Fleetwoods hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1960, Acting Governor John Koontz was serving in the chief executive's chair under an anomaly in the executive succession law — the governor and lieutenant governor were out of state, which passes power to the assembly speaker or senate president pro tempore but because legislators take office (and vacate their offices) on the day after the election and the new legislative officers are not named until January, there were no such legislative officers and Attorney General Roger Foley ruled that power should pass to the fourth in line, the secretary of state; in 1962, Deep Purple by April Stevens and Nino Tempo hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1966, Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard, model for the television and film (The Fugitive) character "Dr. Richard Kimble", was found not guilty in his second trial on charges he had murdered his pregnant wife, Marilyn, in 1954; in 1974, Walls And Bridges by John Lennon hit number one on the Billboard album chart; in 1974, urban Republican state assemblymembers from Clark and Washoe counties united to depose powerful rural legislators generally and former speaker Lawrence Jacobsen in particular and also forced one small county legislator, Virgil Getto, to accept the post of Republican floor leader; in 1976, Governor Mike O'Callaghan, who had earlier become perhaps the last Democratic leader in the United States to support the Equal Rights Amendment, renewed his lukewarm support for the measure by saying he wasn't sure he would ask the 1977 Nevada Legislature to approve it, and he also said he would forward the report of the Nevada Commission on the Status of People to the legislators but would not endorse its recommendations either; in 1990, President Bush the Elder signed the Fort Hall Indian Water Rights Act of 1990, a measure affecting Bannock and Shoshone water claims, while objecting that it "could be interpreted to allow the tribes to collect from the Claims and Judgment Fund monies (sic) that the act authorizes to be appropriated and paid to the tribe" instead of collected by the U.S. government "as trustee of the tribes‚ water rights"; in 2001, Congress approved a measure requiring that all airport security screening be a federal program rather than contracted out to private contractors, thus giving the nation the current smooth running, well oiled, idyllic system.

Update: Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006, 2:05 a.m. PST — On Nov. 15, 1969, a quarter of a million protesters staged a peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C., against the Vietnam War. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn./November 15, 1969: The record of history, I think, is clear. The cases in which political leaders out of misjudgment or ambition in ancient time and in modern times basing their action on the loyalty of their people, have done great harm to their own countries and to the world. The great loyalty of the Roman citizens moved the Caesars to war. The great loyalty of the French moved Napoleon to actions which should never have been taken. Let us in the United States take warning from that experience.

On Nov. 15, 1838, an "elegant chair" was manufactured in Philadelphia from a variety of historical materials, including a piece of the tree under which William Penn signed a treaty with Native Americans in 1682; in 1860, the presidential election returns, brought by the Pony Express as far west as Fort Churchill in Nevada, were telegraphed the rest of the way to Sacramento; in 1875, President Grant, without the permission of Congress and in violation of treaty, secretly opened the Black Hills to miners, causing war between the Sioux and whites; in 1885 or 1886, Kathryn L. Marbaker "Shotgun Kittie" Tubb — Death Valley , Ash Meadows and Beatty storekeeper, saloon woman, brothel operator — was born in Bradford County, Pennsylvania; in 1887, Georgia O'Keefe was born outside of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin; in 1910, Joseph F. O'Byrne of Contact, Nevada, was granted a patent for a gyroscope and sphere; in 1923, after Reno Indian Agency official J.E. Jenkins wrote that he was seeking $15,000 for a Native American industrial day school, Elko set about trying to become the site of the school; in 1939, the cornerstone was laid for the Jefferson Memorial; in 1950, the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, better known as the Kefauver Crime Committee, held a hearing in Las Vegas on Nevada gambling; in 1955, Sun Records owner Sam Phillips sold Elvis' recording contract to RCA for $35,000, a whopping sum at the time; in 1968, U.S. Catholic bishops adopted on a 180 to 8 vote a pastoral letter saying that couples who choose in good conscience to use birth control pills should not be cut off from the church's sacraments; in 1968, the Nevada state welfare board opposed a proposal that a representative of the poor be given a seat on the board; in 1969, 300,000 citizens protesting the war in Vietnam produced the largest demonstration in the history of the District of Columbia, with U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy telling the crowd that loyalty to country had helped cause the misguided war; in 1986, former Sparks resident Eugene Hasenfus was convicted in Nicaragua of delivering arms to the contras; in 1998, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) died in Guinea.

Update: Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2006, 7:30 a.m. PST — On Nov. 14, 1877, the Nevada State Journal reported that "Dr. Johnson has grown several inches since Monday. His better half, whom he has not seen for two years, arrived from the States on Monday, and will make Reno her future residence. We welcome her to our lovely town."; in 1879, the Nevada Board of Insane Commissioners was advertising for the construction of a fence around the Reno state prison grownds; in 1879, the Truckee and Steamboat ditch was reported to be six weeks from completion; in 1889, New York World reporter Elizabeth Cochrane, whose byline was Nellie Bly, set off to try to go around the world in fewer than 80 days (she made it in 72 days; "I'm particularly impressed that she beat a fictional record," said the West Wing's President Bartlet); in 1900, Aaron Copland was born in New York City; in 1908, two defamation suits were in Nevada courts, by Goldfield Stock Exchange broker F.O. Altinger against Goldfield Consolidated Mines owner George Wingfield for $70,000 for calling him a high grader in a speech to stock exchange members, and by "Diamondfield" Jack Davis against the Curtis Publishing Company for making him the villain of a story in the Saturday Evening Post; in 1915, African-American groups launched a boycott against the racist movie The Birth of a Nation (Booker T. Washington died the same day); in 1933, U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada urged President Franklin Roosevelt to take over the closed Nevada banks, most of them owned by former state political boss George Wingfield; in 1957, in Las Vegas, liquor industry spokespeople called for an end to an emergency tax on distilled spirits enacted during the Korean war; in 1960, Georgia On My Mind by Ray Charles hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart (On March 7, 1979, the Georgia Legislature specifically named the Charles rendition as the state song, and Charles performed it before a joint session); in 1962, a recount in the Nye County district attorney's race that reversed the result, making John Kelly the winner over William Beko, was rejected by the Nye county clerk, who asked Secretary of State John Koontz to look into it; in 1968, Nevada's state welfare policies were changed to eliminate investigations into the financial backgrounds of some welfare recipients — the blind, permanently and totally disabled and applicants for old age assistance; in 1968, after Elko deputies started ticketing drivers for speeding on the open highway (Nevada had no speed limit), the Reno Evening Gazette editorialized that they should wait until a speed limit was on the books before they started enforcing it; in 1969, the day after publication of Seymour Hersh's story disclosing the My Lai massacre, western newsmen visiting the site found it had been leveled and also found mounds believed to be mass graves; in 1978, Nevada state personnel office employee Nancy Frank resigned in protest after a governor's office worker who had applied for a management assistant III job flunked the test but Governor Mike O'Callaghan's office intervened to try to get her hired anyway; in 1978, Izetta Jewel Miller, feminist leader and Broadway actress (Sire, Victoria Regina) who was reportedly the first woman to second a nomination in a national party convention, the first southern woman to run for the U.S. senate, a founder of Actor's Equity, and the first actress to appear on television, died in La Jolla, California; in 1978, McDonald's fast food restaurants were using private detectives to try to track down the sources of rumors that McDonald's used worms as an ingredient in its hamburgers and gave money to a satanic church; in 1976, members of the Plains Baptist Church in Georgia, which had refused admittance to an African-American minister two days before one of its members was elected president of the United States, voted to admit blacks; in 1987, the Dirty Dancing soundtrack hit number one on the Billboard album chart and stayed there for twenty weeks.

Update: Monday, Nov. 13, 2006, 1:02 a.m. PST — On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws calling for racial segregation on public buses. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1882, newspapers published an account of the destruction by forces from the U.S. revenue cutter Thomas Corwin, the frigate Adams, and the commercial tugboat Favorite of a Tlingit tribal village at a place called Hockinso on the Alaskan coast, with at least six children suffocating from the burning of the dwellings (in 1982 the U.S. government paid the Tlingits $90,000 for the destruction); in 1908, the Searchlight Bulletin bewailed the fact that salespeople usually arrived on the morning train, made their sales, and left in the afternoon, and urged local businesses to make an effort follow Flagstaff's example and get the "knights of the grip" to stay overnight as a way of boosting the local economy; in 1914, President Wilson refused to continue a meeting with a delegation of African-American leaders after they stated their opposition to his policy of segregating federal workers, causing Wilson to say he had never been addressed in such a manner in the White House; in 1914, the Mackay Athletic Training Building at the University of Nevada was destroyed by fire, but students managed to rescue trophies; in 1922, Emporia, Kansas, editor William Allen White's trial for violating Kansas law by putting a pro-labor union poster in his office window was scheduled to start, but Attorney General Richard Hopkins refused to prosecute and Governor Henry Allen (who brought the charges) was rumored to be planning to ask for a postponement; in 1922, plans were underway to make agricultural inspections of cars entering southern California from the east (250 cars a day were reported entering the state); in 1940, Fantasia premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York City in "fantasound", a system designed for the film (the system was used only in New York because the federal government denied permission for war time production of the systems that would have been needed in theatres around the nation); in 1942, the cruiser USS Juneau went down in the strait between Guadalcanal and Florida Island after being hit with Japanese torpedoes, with five brothers named Sullivan among the dead, a devastating tragedy in one family that changed U.S. military policies on assignment of family members (the brothers' story was dramatized in the 1944 movie The Fighting Sullivans); in 1951, Patsy Charlie, a 110 year-old Shoshone believed to be the oldest Nevadan, died in Wells; in 1956, a group of White Pine County businesspeople voted in favor of television translators over cable to bring television to the area; in 1957, Nevada gambling regulators dropped planned action against Fremont Hotel owner Louis Lederer, accused author of a note in gangster Frank Costello's pocket when Costello was shot by gangland gunman Vincent Gigante, after Lederer sold his interest in the Fremont (the note, a slip of paper with the figure $651,284 on it, was found in Costello's pocket after the hit in an apartment house on Central Park West, and the figure turned out to be the gross profit for the Las Vegas Tropicana Casino's first 24 days of business); in 1961, The Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens was released [EDITOR'S NOTE: The song was stolen from South African Solomon Linda, whose impoverished family finally received token royalties many years after his death.]; in 1968, the motion picture Yellow Submarine was released; in 1968, the Nevada State Journal profiled the eight "co-ed" candidates for queen of the University of Nevada-Reno military ball: "White Pine Hall's representative is Frankie Sue Del Pappa [sic], a 19 year-old sophomore from Las Vegas. Frankie Sue is 5 feet 8 inches tall and has brown hair and dark eyes...Her favorite pastime is participating in student affairs and government, and she enjoys people and poetry."; in 1969, Vice-President Spiro Agnew denounced television news coverage in a Des Moines speech broadcast live by the television networks; in 1972, the FBI frightened passengers and angered hijackers when they tried to shoot out the tires on a hijacked airliner while it was on the ground in Orlando awaiting takeoff for Cuba; in 1972, there was an unusual scene in the state capital — rural Senator Warren "Snowy" Monroe, a champion of mining, called for controls on mining to protect against problems like cyanide leaking into the Owyhee River near Mountain City (probably a reference to Rio Tinto mining) while Washoe County Senator Thomas R.C. "Spike" Wilson, an environmentalist, urged caution; in 1974, in a major defeat for Israel and the United States, which defined Palestinians as refugees and refused to recognize them as a people, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat addressed the United National General Assembly: "The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. Whoever stands by a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist. Those who wage war to occupy, colonize and oppress other people are the terrorists....I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."

Update: Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006, 7:55 a.m. PST — On November 12, 1942, the World War II naval Battle of Guadalcanal began. The Americans eventually won a major victory over the Japanese. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On November 12, 1815, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born in Johnstown, New York; in 1825, the Cherokee national council chose Newtown, a town where they had been meeting at the confluence of the Coosawattee and Conasauga rivers on the site of the former settlement of Gansagiyi in Georgia, to be the Cherokee nation capital and named it New Echota, after the earlier capital of Chota destroyed by whites (New Echota became the home of the Council House and Supreme Court, and there were homes, a ferry, and the publishing offices of the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix, all of which came to an end with the expulsion of the Cherokee onto the trail of tears); in 1851, settlers in CarsonValley, Territory of Utah (which was later detached from Utah), held a meeting, creating the first known public record in Nevada history; in 1887, the day after Illinois Governor Richard Oglesby let four anarchists (whose guilt in the Haymarket Square bombing was very much in doubt) hang, the Nevada State Journal editorialized "He was undoubtedly placed in a very trying position — one that would have caused a less determined individual to give way before the clamor of those who used every influence at their command for a sweeping commutation. Anarchy is something that must be met by force, and not encouraged by mercy...Liberty of speech has never been denied in this country, but there is a limit to that liberty, particularly when it lead to incendiarism and murder."; in 1887, a newspaper reported that "Young Crow, who shot and killed "Curly" Hogan in Carson City on the 5th of July, 1880, is slowly but surely losing his reason — The shooting of Hogan was entirely justifiable, and young Crow was fully exhonerated; but the act has preyed upon his mind until it can stand the strain no longer, and it is only a question of a short time when he will become a mental wreck. In his rational moments his conversation is perfectly natural, but even then a wild or scared look is discernable."; in 1907, a freight train on the Las Vegas and Tonopah line derailed, sending the cars into a ditch alongside; in 1911, in the Chinese quarter of Reno, the flag of the Chinese revolution was run up ("it is a handsome banner," said one local newspaper) alongside the U.S. flag; in 1931, at least six men suspected of being communists were taken from their homes in Pontiac, Michigan, and whipped with bullwhips or beaten or both; in 1931, a meeting between Six Companies (the conglomerate formed to construct Hoover Dam) and state officials in Carson City on the state mine inspector's order against using gasoline trucks in small tunnels and bores (the trucks produced fumes that endangered the workers) ended without an agreement, and the company seemed headed to court, more interested in using the case to stop the state from collecting taxes on the dam reservation than in the truck issue; in 1938, German Minister Hermann Goring called a meeting of high ranking government and Nazi party officials at the Air Ministry where he told them Chancellor Hitler had directed plans to assure "the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another"; in 1947, Winston Churchill asked the Cinque Ports to drop a plan to put up a 200 foot statue of him smoking a cigar with red neon at the tip of the cigar to serve as a lighthouse; in 1947, U.S. Senator Glen Taylor of Idaho, traveling across the nation in a campaign against U.S. foreign policy belligerence, increased his pace to arrive in Washington for the start of the new congress; in 1947, Miles Pike, lawyer for the Haywood Sign Company, argued in a meeting of the chamber of commerce, Reno advertising club, and county planning board, that the new county ordinance requiring that all billboards not in commercial zones be removed within two years was unconstitutional; in 1962, Meredith Steel in Sparks was selling a do-it-yourself backyard fallout shelter kit; in 1966, Mellow Yellow by Donovan was released; in 1966, Poor Side of Town by Johnny Rivers hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1968, at a conference of California accountants, San Francisco CPA Jack Gabriel warned Nevada casino gamblers and California race track bettors that the Internal Revenue Service was using a new computer method of tracking winnings; in 1969, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel backed away from a proposal he had previously embraced (in a July meeting with governors Laxalt of Nevada and Reagan of California) to shrink the size of Pyramid Lake and promised "The rights of the Indians will be protected" (the lake is entirely within a Paiute tribal reservation); on the same day in 1969, a Department of the Interior task force toured Sutcliffe, Nixon, Marble Bluff and the Truckee River delta at Pyramid, and Derby Dam, the canal to Lahontan, Lahontan Reservoir, Swingle Bench and Stillwater; in 1978, long after the rest of the world had done so, the United States (in congressional testimony by deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian affairs Harold Saunders) signalled that it was softening its position that the Palestinians were refugees and not a people ("The Palestinians collectively are a political factor"), the first major statement the U.S. had made on Palestinians since the creation of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948; in 1985, former casino dealer and Nevada assemblymember and senator Mary Gojack died in Reno; in 1991 after a decade and a half of a conspiracy of silence by the U.S. press toward U.S.-supported repression in East Timor, the massacre of 250 people in a funeral march by Indonesian soldiers was reported by three journalists in attendance (Allan Nairn of the New Yorker, Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio and British filmmaker Max Stahl), forcing the story into the light; in 2000, Sally Zanjani and Bernard Schopen were inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and Nila NorthSun and Emma Sepulveda named Silver Pen Award recipients.

Update: Saturday, Nov. 11, 2006, 4:48 a.m. PST — On November 11, 1918, fighting in World War I came to an end with the signing of an armistice between the Allies and Germany. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

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 1831, rebel slave leader Nat Turner was put to death in Virginia; in 1873, the Portland Oregonian reported "Physically the Apaches are probably one of the handsomest of the Indian race, especially the females.The Apaches are decided pedestrians, and being accustomed to running and climbing feats from earliest infancy, are capable of great endurance in this direction."; in 1890, a Native American with Carver's wild west show, Red Cloud, arrived from Europe where he met with a U.S. military officer and told him that both William Carver and William "Buffalo Bill" Cody mistreated the Indians in their shows; in 1918, the armistice in World War One took effect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month; in 1918, Acting Governor Maurice Sullivan declared a public holiday in Nevada on the day the armistice in the world war took effect and hundreds gathered in the streets of Reno to celebrate and burn Kaiser Wilhelm in effigy; in 1935, New York columnist O.O. McIntyre reported that when Fanny Brice was "in despair" over the bail for her husband Jules "Nicky" Arnstein after his theft from Wall Street firms, mobster Arnold Rothstein "tossed $100,000 in her lap on the Midnight Frolic Roof"; in 1941, the Sky Ranch, a private airport on the Pyramid Lake highway about ten miles north of Sparks, began operation; in 1957, Peggy Sue by the Crickets was released; in 1957, the Young Democratic National Convention in Reno, during which young politicos hosted a generation of party leaders like Frank Church of Idaho, John Kennedy of Massachusetts, Stewart Udall of Arizona and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, ended after shouting matches and fights for the floor microphones during a fight for YD president; in 1961, United Press reported that President Kennedy had ordered 200 air force instructors and some B-26 bombers ("only a small number") to Vietnam while Kennedy pondered General Maxwell Taylor's proposals for greater commitments; in 1961, twenty people from Chicago arrived in eight cars at the hamlet of Searchlight, Nevada, to work a mine owned by one of them; in 1968, Pope Paul VI denounced liberal Catholics: "We are demanding of you total and generous faithfulness to the church, not certainly to an imaginary church which each would conceive and organize according to his own ideas, but to the Catholic Church as it is."; in 1968, a plane collided with a car in location filming at Olancha, California, during production of the California/Nevada movie Zabriskie Point; in 1972, a veterans parade was held in Reno and the Nevada State Journal's Walt Ryals surveyed people watching and reported that "it is indeed a silent majority‚ who supports the present [Nixon] administration's desire for peace with honor" (pro-war veterans refused to allow anti-war Vietnam veterans to be in the parade, which the Journal failed to report); in 1971, the Nevada Industrial Commission ruled in a Las Vegas case that long hair on firemen is not a safety issue; in 1978, Reno sportswriter Ray Hagar filed an assault and battery complaint against New York Yankees manager Billy Martin after Martin tried to take Hagar's notes and hit him in the face, breaking a tooth and opening cuts. [EDITOR'S NOTE: In his drunken stupor, standing over the cold-cocked Hagar in the bar of the Reno Centennial Coliseum, Martin muttered "violence never solved anything." Hagar later won a cash settlement from Martin. The late baseball legend's daughter, Kelly, worked in Reno as a cocktail server earlier in the 1970's when Billy Martin managed the Texas Rangers.]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

Update: Sunday, Nov. 10, 2006, 8:31 a.m. PST — On November 10, 1483, Martin Luther was born in Eisleben, Germany; in 1879, poet Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois; in 1875, shortly after soaking in the roman-style baths that were then located in the basement of the U.S. Capital building, Vice-President Henry Wilson was struck with paralysis (he died on November 22d); in 1878, the Nevada State Journal said no one in Nevada knew anything about an item that appeared in the Sacramento Bee: "In a gambling room in Nevada, the janitor, on opening the place in the morning found a man sitting dead at a table, with cards still in his hands. He had been shot at play by his adversary, who had fled."; in 1898, white supremacist Democrats in Wilmington, North Carolina, frustrated by their inability to dislodge the moderate city fusion government of Republicans and Populists (all of them white) by democratic means and led by white racist News and Observor publisher Josephus Daniels (navy secretary under Woodrow Wilson), launched the only known coup d'etat against a local government in U.S. history, with rioting, slaughter of an undetermined number of blacks, exile of more blacks, destruction of an African-American newspaper office, installation of white Democrats in office and later stripping of the vote from African-Americans (in 2005 an official state Wilmington Race Riot Commission said it had found abundant evidence of a carefully laid plot for the insurrection that was months in the making and involved statewide actions); in 1904, Nevada World's Fair Commission chief J.A. Yerington received, for forwarding to the Nevada Press Association, an invitation to the World Press Parliament to be held in May 1904 during the opening month of the St. Louis World's Fair; in 1933, the last Civilian Conservation Corps members at the Berry Creek camp in Nevada departed with all their gear for winter quarters at Moapa; in 1941, with war raging in Europe and U.S. officials threatening war against Japan, what one newspaper called "Nevada's first and only strike involving men employed in a defense industry" was settled by miners at Rio Tinto; in 1956, the cornerstone of the Blasdel Building, an ugly structure at one corner of the Nevada capitol grounds, was laid; in 1956, United Airlines President William Patterson informed Elko city officials that United was applying to the Civil Aeronautics Administration for permission to discontinue service to Elko and Ely; in 1958, It's Only Make Believe by Conway Twitty hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1967, Nights In White Satin by the Moody Blues was released; in 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a storm on Lake Superior; in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in Washington, drawing objections from older veterans' groups who demanded a more traditional statuary memorial (a second memorial was created, but the statues of three weary Vietnam buddies also displeased the groups).

The New York Times November 11, 1982 by Francis X Clines But it is already clear that the wall has touched a much more basic and human strain of response, the simple act of touching the wall as much as reading the names. Bearded veterans wearing old fatigue jackets and battle medals can be seen reaching toward the names of remembered dead warriors, running the fingers across the letters. Gray-haired women lean forward and reach and touch. ''I don't know what it is,'' said Kenneth Young, a Vietnam veteran who stood for two hours, staring at the wall, stepping away to think, stepping back to touch again the names he knew. ''You have to touch it. There's something about touching it.'' ...John Bender, a volunteer for the National Park Service, stayed late to hold a flashlight and help in the individual searches. ''Panel 43, line 13,'' a man said, reciting the instructions of the memorial's locator book, the size of a big-city phone book. The flashlight raked across the panels to number 43, then down to line 13. It showed the name of Jerry A. Beatty. The man, at the end of this simple search, touched it very quickly, then turned away and said not a word as he faced out to the night.... The memorial is a gradual V-shaped depression in the earth, with the names extended in chronological order of death. The names of the first dead move off from 1959 and the right flank of the wall, and the last of the dead come in from the left flank. The arrangement is such that the listing of the earliest and the latest of the deaths are closest together at the apex of the V, almost as if a circle was being closed... At the memorial, five veterans who had driven 20 hours straight from Green Bay, Wis., arrived and stepped up to search and touch the wall for what one of the group, Niles Delfosse, called ''these gentlemen.'' These veterans of the 25th Infantry Division stared and touched and began greeting others who, like themselves, wore old fatigue jackets. The names of the dead are without gilding, showing flat gray in the black stone in letters less than an inch high. The lists tally above the reach of visitors on the walls that reach a maximum height of 10 feet 1 1/2 inches, and extend in a gradually shrinking slope in two 246-foot stretches until they seem to disappear into the ground...

Update: Thursday, Nov. 9, 2006, 12:30 a.m. PST — On November 9, 1828, Peter Skene Ogden encountered the Humboldt River and named it "The Unknown River." [Nevada Magazine calendar]; in 1965, the great Northeast blackout occurred as several states and parts of Canada were hit by a series of power failures lasting up to 13 -1/2 hours. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] [EDITOR'S NOTE: Exactly nine months later, the patient loads of the affected region's maternity wards exploded.]

On November 9, 1759, Scotland's Edinburgh Chronicle published a report from a correspondent at Fort Niagara, which the British had recently taken from the French in the Seven Years War: "The Indians say, that, when birds come flying into this fog or smoke of the cataract [mist from the falls], they fall down and perish in the water; either because their wings are wet, or that the noise of the fall astonishes them, and they know not which way to fly, the light being excluded by the vapours."; in 1882, the New York Times report on the 1882 election ran under the headline The Republican Wreck; in 1883, the Nevada State Journal carried an optimistic report on the four year old Carlisle school for Native Americans in Pennsylvania, though it was full of patronizing language ("it is evident that some Indians can become thoroughly civilized"); in 1914, it became known that Washoe County officials had removed a leper from the county hospital, driven him over the state line into California, and abandoned him in the middle of the road (he next surfaced in Fresno); in 1932, a post-election demand for approval of legal beer was being made until full fledged repeal of the alcohol prohibition amendment in the U.S. Constitution could be accomplished, and two states (Oregon and California) repealed their state prohibition laws as U.S. Senator Huey Long promised "beer by Christmas"; in 1935, three hundred Civilian Conservation Corps boys were expected in southern Nevada to begin work on a lake rim highway at Lake Mead and to put the Boulder City airport into shape; in 1938, two days of Nazi violence against Jews in Germany began, with hundreds of synagogues burned, thousands of Jewish-owned businesses looted or gutted, 91 Jews killed, 3,000 Jews arrested, all while police stood by and watched (four days later the Jews of Germany were fined for the violence they had endured, which became known — because of the glass in the street from broken windows — as Kristallnacht, Crystal Night or the Night of Broken Glass); in 1960, the day after John Kennedy's election as president, Hohei Hanami, captain of the destroyer that cut Kennedy's PT boat in half in World War Two, said in Tokyo "For the second time I take my hat off before that brave fellow."; in 1960, the Nevada Gaming Control Board approved John Ascuaga's purchase of the Sparks Nugget; in 1961, Liverpool record store manager Brian Epstein visited the Cavern Club where he heard the Beatles for the first time and quickly resolved to become their manager; in 1965, Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives (which refused to seat him because its members disliked his opinion of the Vietnam war); in 1968, Reno Municipal Airport manager Joe Hicks said a new carrier, Skymark Airlines, would take over the ticket booth formerly used by Sierra Pacific Airlines; in 1974, the Army released William Calley without bail from Fort Leavenworth while it appealed a U.S. District Court decision overturning his conviction for murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians, and a U.S. District Judge in Ohio ordered the acquittal of national guard members for killing Allison Krause, Sandy Scheuer, William Schroeder and Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University on May 4, 1970; in 1974, Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal executive editor Warren Lerude defended his newspaper against defeated U.S. senate candidate Harry Reid's accusation of unfair news coverage; in 1989, the east German government threw open its borders and west and east Berliners passed through gates of the wall and then started tearing it down.

Update: Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2006, 3:14 a.m. PST — On November 8, 1960, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon for the presidency. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Click here for statewide Nevada election results

On this date in 1847, Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was born in Marino Crescent in Clontarf, Ireland; in 1864, after just eight days of statehood, Nevadans voted to reelect President Lincoln; in 1876, just after midnight at the end of election day, New York Times managing editor John Reid went from the Times offices to Republican headquarters in the Park Avenue Hotel and met with campaign official William Chandler and they began planning how to manipulate the vote to deprive Democratic presidential nominee Samuel Tilden of his election and get Republican candidate Rutherford Hayes (who lost both the popular and electoral votes) appointed by the electors or by Congress, a scheme that came to fruition on March 2, 1877, when Hayes was appointed president by the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1887, the Manitoba Daily Free Press reported "With reference to the claim of the Six Nation Indians to certain lands on the Grand River, the Privy Council has adopted a report declining to submit the claim to the judicial committee of the Imperial Privy Council, declaring it has no merits and does not deserve exceptional consideration."; in 1893, the dime novel The Down-East Detective in Nevada; or, The Sons of Thunder by Leon Lewis was released by Beadle's New York Dime Library; in 1894, Robert Frost's first poem My Butterfly/An Elegy was published in the Independent; in 1898, Nevadans voted against a consolidation of Douglas, Storey, Lyon and Ormsby counties and against splitting up Lincoln County; in 1903, a day after Nevada State University won the Pacific coast football championship, the headline in the Nevada State Journal was "CALIFORNIA'S PROUD COLORS LOWERED BY THE DOUGHTY ELEVEN FROM SAGEBRUSHDOM" and editors exulted "The N. S. U. football team has earned the championship of the Coast...November 7, 1903, will go down into history as the reddest letter day in the history of the Nevada State University, for recognition has at last been received of the athletic abilities of our boys, an ability which is [as] much mental as it is physical, for football is a game where brain counts for as much and more than brawn."; in 1904, Nevadans voted to amend the state constitution to provide for initiative and referendum; in 1938, Crystal Bird Fauset was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the first African-American woman to be elected to a state legislature; in 1938, Dewey Sampson of Washoe County was elected the state's first Native-American member of the Nevada Legislature; in 1957, a month after the Soviet launch of Sputnik I and five days after the launch of Sputnik II, President Eisenhower said he would not call Congress into special session and U.S. Defense Secretary Neil McElroy ignited interservice rivalry when he said the Army's Jupiter-C rocket would be used to put a satellite in orbit, a task which until them had been assigned to the Navy; in 1957, in a speech to the Young Democratic National Convention at the Holiday Hotel in Reno, Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts banged the drum for higher defense spending and criticized President Eisenhower for restraining such spending; in 1960, Nevada was one of only two states in the west to vote for John Kennedy for president; in 1969, Wedding Bell Blues by the Fifth Dimension hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1972, Native-American protesters left the D.C. headquarters of the Bureau of Indian Affairs after a six day occupation; in 1972, in the wake of Colorado voters' rejection of the 1976 winter Olympics, backers of a number of new sites, including 1960 site Squaw Valley, were gearing up to try to win the event; in 1994, Republicans won a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time since the early Eisenhower presidency.

Dubuque Daily Herald/November 8, 1898 — THE CREEK INDIANS. Dissatisfied with Their Treatment They Prepare to Establish Mexican Colony.      Dissatisfied with the provisions of a law enacted by the last session of congress which will destroy the tribal government the Indians of the Creek nation are about to remove to Mexico. Assistant Secretary of the Interior Ryan when asked if the government had taken any steps toward assisting these Indians in leaving the country replied that it was a matter with which the government had nothing to do. The Indians are free to go if they choose and the government would not regret their departure, as they are an expense and trouble to the government and the white people living near their reservations. The object of the law enacted by the last congress is to break up all tribal governments and gradually merge the Indians into the body politic and in time make them citizens. Indians of the Creek nation do not take kindly to this project and have sent a committee to Mexico to select lands for a new reservation for the tribe. Although the government will not interpose any obstacles, their departure is a long way in the future unless the Creeks surrender their lands to the secretary of the interior and leave empty handed. Their lands are held in common and before individual Indians can realize on them congress will have to allot the land in severalty. Then the Indians can dispose of their holdings and with the proceeds leave the country. Secretary Ryan says the Creeks are at liberty to go when they please, and the government would be glad to solve the whole vexatious Indian problem so easily.

Update: Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, 12:41 p.m. PST — The Mahatma sez to bring a broom and camera to your polling place and he'll make you famous. Go to MichaelMoore.com. Be well. Raise hell.

Update: Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2006, 12:51 a.m. CST — ELECTION DAY

Your vote is your voice.
Su voto es su voz
So vote!

On Nov, 7, 1637, Anne Hutchinson was exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because its rulers disliked her religious opinions (she was posthumously pardoned in 1987 by Governor Michael Dukakis); in 1837, Illinois editor Elijah Lovejoy was assassinated by a pro-slavery mob while trying to defend his fourth press (the other three had been thrown into the Mississippi by earlier mobs trying to stop Lovejoy's anti-slavery coverage, including his criticism of burning an African-American at the stake) [EDITOR'S NOTE: Elijah Lovejoy's son is buried near historic Fort Churchill in west central Nevada]; in 1867, there were newspaper reports that General Sherman had announced treaties with the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes and ordered commanders to end violence against them; in 1903, newspapers were telling a story about a Nevada mining company cabling its London headquarters "Shaft badly damaged. Must have new one" and getting the reply "Can't you buy a second hand one?"; in 1908, African-American Frank Price, shot by Reno's chief of police A.A. Burke while (Burke claimed) attempting to escape arrest, was found not guilty by a jury, shocking the chief who arrested Price again on a different charge as Price was leaving the court room; in 1917, Russia's Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1932, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction of the Scottsboro men for assault (in being attacked by a white mob) and for rape (in the subsequent retrial one of the two alleged rape victims testified for the defense); in 1932, President Hoover traveled from Washington (journalist William Allen White wrote of "how infinitely tired!" Hoover looked) to Elko where he made his last nationally broadcast speech of the campaign (see below), then continued on to Carlin where he was heckled, then passed over a bridge in Eureka County where a bomb had been found and defused, then on to Palo Alto where he voted (for some unknown reason, he returned to Washington by a different route); in 1933, wet forces swept delegate elections to state repeal conventions in Utah, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, but lost the Carolinas, the four wins putting repeal over the top (repeal of alcohol prohibition is the only U.S. constitutional amendment that was ratified by state conventions instead of state legislatures); in 1956, Nevada voters approved a state sales tax for education; in 1962, Republican candidate for governor of California Richard Nixon, after learning he lost the election, bitterly denounced the press (while praising broadcast journalism): "For sixteen years, ever since the Hiss case, you've had a lot of fun. Just think what you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you."; in 1967, in off-year and municipal elections, voters in Kentucky elected Louis Nunn as governor after he ran against the war on the slogan "Tired of the war? Vote Nunn" but voters in San Francisco rejected a ballot measure calling for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam (in Gary, Indiana, reformer Richard Hatcher was elected the city's first African-American mayor after Robert Kennedy sent his aides to help stop the Democratic machine from stealing the election); in 1974, Reno Evening Gazette reporter Bob Felton, describing the Watergate year election defeat of U.S. Representative David Towell, R-Nev., (who had first gotten elected in '72 by tying himself to Richard Nixon), wrote: "When he was elected in 1972 there were those who said Towell was swept into office on Nixon's coattails. It might be said he left office the same way."; in 1978, Clark County Sheriff Ralph Lamb was defeated for reelection after 17 years in office.

President Herbert Hoover/Radio Address to the Nation From Elko, Nevada/November 7, 1932: My fellow citizens, we have been through an arduous campaign. It has been almost unique as a campaign of education in the great domestic and international problems which have arisen out of events of the last 15 years. I have endeavored to place these problems before the people as I see them from the facts and experience that have come to me in these past years. I wished the people to realize more intimately the difficulties with which their Government has been confronted, the disasters which have been averted, and the forces which have been mobilized for their support and their protection. I hope from these discussions that the people will realize the great crisis that we have successfully passed and the unprecedented measures taken which have been designed solely that we might protect and restore the system of life and of government endeared to us over 150 years--a government that has given to us protection from distress and allayed the forces which would otherwise have wrecked our homes and our firesides. But more than that, I hope I have given an understanding of these measures that have been designed for counterattack upon this crisis. These measures are now demonstrating their strength and effectiveness not only at home but abroad, evidences of which are multiplying throughout the country in the return of more than half a million men to work monthly, and that we have again resumed the road toward prosperity. I might add that the figure which I have given during the last few days of the return of 1 million men to work since the adjournment of the Congress have been added to during the day today by the estimates of the American Federation of Labor which increased the estimates, which I have given to you, by nearly 300,000 men. I wish to emphasize the greatest function of the American citizen, the one which each of us should perform tomorrow. The ballot is that most sacred individual act which preserves the great system of self-government which we have inherited and which should carry forward at any cost. It is a direct opportunity for every man and woman to express their views in terms of equality with every other citizen as to the policies and kind of a government that they wish carried out in the next 4 years. And I have a deep feeling that the choice that you make now is more than the choice for another 4 years. There is great divergence in the philosophy of government between the parties which may affect events over a generation; a mistaken choice may hazard the welfare of our children and our children's children. I have been fighting that the wrong course may not be adopted, not by appeal to destructive emotion, but by truth and logic. I have tried to dissolve the mirage of promises by the reality of facts. I am a believer in party government. It is only through party organization that our people can give coherent expression to their views upon public issues. There is no other way except by revolution, but we in America have ordained that the ballot shall be used for peaceful determination and not violence. We are a nation of progressives. We wish to see our Nation march forward. We differ strongly as to the method to progress. I differ widely with the principles and views advocated by our opponents, but it is not my purpose to review them at this moment. I feel deeply that the Republican Party has been the party of progress in our history from the days of Abraham Lincoln. It has built the progress of the Nation upon the foundations of national principles and national ideals. We are a nation of homes from which the accomplishment of individuals is nurtured by the maximum freedom in an ordered liberty. The ultimate goal of our progress is to build for security and happiness in these homes where the inspiration of our religious faiths will implant in our children those principles of social order and idealism, and where our Government will contribute in safeguarding their future opportunity for them. The action of our Nation has been modified and benefited by the enfranchisement of women. They equally with the men bear the shocks from economic disaster. With them lies largely the guardianship of the fundamental ideals, because concentrated in their lives and their responsibilities is a solicitude for the preservation of the home and the inspiration for the future. And in these labors our Government can contribute to strengthen their accomplishment and their influence. Our women give with lavish hands, not only to childhood, but, as well, to the creation of those conserving customs upon which are builded all the blessings of our ordered Government. They thus give to government a large measure of the true strength of its foundations. It is but just that they receive back, in return, all that the Government can give them to assure them of security and the enlargement of the equal opportunity to their children and to themselves, to widen the field for the use of their own powers of mind and spirit. It is they who are mobilizing new public regard to our obligations to home and children of the future; it is they who are mobilizing the public opinion on the maintenance of peace in the world. The men of our country carry the frontline of battle through their initiative, their enterprise, their hopes, their courage. The immediate question before our country is in whose direction shall be the measures by which we shall emerge from our present difficulties. In the longer view our problems are the questions that the world should have peace; that the prosperity of the Nation shall be diffused to all, and that we shall build more strongly the ideal of equal opportunity amongst all our people; that we shall secure that obedience to law which is essential to assurance of life in our institutions; that honesty and righteousness in business shall confirm the confidence of our people in our institutions and laws; that our Government shall contribute to leadership in these matters. It is my deep conviction that for the welfare of the United States the Republican Party should continue to administer the Government. Those men and women who have supported the party over these many years should not be led astray by false gods arrayed in the rainbow colors of promises. They have but to review the performance and the sense of responsibility, the constructive action, the maintenance of national ideals by the Republican Party, in every national crisis including the present, always in opposition to the destructive forces of sectional and group action of our opponents. Election Day is more than a day set aside for casting of our several ballots. There is a solemnity in the feeling of that day, the sense of being in the presence of a great invisible power when the united people of a great nation give their final judgment on great issues. We cannot feel that any human power alone can give us such emotions; rather we must trust that we are sensing the movements of that Ruler of the universe in whose beneficence and in whose favor we have been blessed throughout our history. As a final word, I wish to convey my deep gratitude to the many hundreds of thousands of people who have come to stations and to meetings to welcome and encourage me during this past month and to the many millions more who have responded to me over the radio. I wish to express my gratitude to the young men and the young women who have organized their special movement to my support, for in them lies a special energy and idealism which drives and inspires the country; to the veterans' service leagues whose tested patriotism has supported me in this campaign; to the devoted women who, realizing the results at stake, have worked untiringly for the return of this administration; and to the organizations of men throughout the country who have been unceasing through this campaign in their presentation to the American people of the principles and ideals for which I have stood. Four years ago I stated that I conceived the Presidency as more than an administrative office: it is a power for leadership bringing coordination of the forces of business and cultural life in every city, town, and countryside. The Presidency is more than executive responsibility. It is the symbol of America's high purpose. The President must represent the Nation's ideals, and he must also represent them to the nations of the world. After 4 years of experience I still regard this as a supreme obligation.

Update: Monday, Nov. 6, 2006, 1:35 p.m. PST — Killer investigative reporter Greg Palast says the fix is already in. Read How They Stole the Midterm Election and what you you can do about it.

Update: Monday, Nov. 6, 2006, 1:47 a.m. PST — On Nov. 6, 1860, former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates for the U.S. presidency. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

George Bush/Bentonville, Arkansas/November 6, 2000: "They misunderestimated me."

On Nov. 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederacy; in 1888, Benjamin Harrison lost the election (but won the presidency by electoral appointment); in 1863, a large cheese being unloaded from a wagon in front of Fast Freight on Virginia City's Taylor Street was dropped by a teamster and rolled down the street, through standing water, around a corner to C Street and out of sight, knocking a small boy down along the way; in 1878, reporting on a description of the Little Big Horn battlefield where the remains of cavalry members were "exposed to the elements", the Nevada State Journal observed "The Indians, who are careful to guard their dead from the prowling wolf, either by placing the bodies on elevated platforms, or by burying them deep in the earth, must be astonished at such evidence of neglect on the part of people claiming to be their superiors."; in 1908, two bandidos died in a shootout with Bolivian police in San Vicente (22 years later the Elks Club Magazine started a story that the two were Harry "Sundance" Longbaugh and Butch Cassidy, though DNA testing of the bones in their San Vicente grave has cast doubt on that claim); in 1933, in Las Vegas, Union Pacific railroad lawyer Frank McNamee, former Lincoln County district attorney, dropped dead in a strategy conference that was planning the defense of Six Companies (the conglomerate that was building Hoover Dam) against a worker lawsuit; in 1941, Clark County Senator Archie Grant was appointed to the Nevada Planning Board; in 1944, PFC Jack Lichtenberg of Reno, a former Reno Evening Gazette employee missing in action in France since July 26, was reported to be a prisoner of war of the German government; in 1956, Paul and Lillian Omohundro obtained a Las Vegas divorce, as did Albert and Mabel Capps, after which Mrs. Capps married Mr. Omohundro and Mrs. Omohundro married Mr. Capps; in 1961, Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean on the Columbia label, a mine workers song, went to number one the Billboard magazine chart and stayed there for five weeks (because of his poor previous sales, Columbia had not renewed Dean's contract but the label's A&R division didn't get the word and released the song, so Columbia found itself with a monster hit on its hands with an artist it could lose; Columbia soon gave Dean a handsome renewal contract); in 1976, Elko General Hospital reluctantly complied with a state law requiring that "no smoking" signs be posted, by posting such a sign in Hebrew; in 1976, the Nevada Bicentennial Committee announced that it would file suit against Thomas Elgas and Stanley Paher to obtain the state's share of sales and advertising from the official Nevada bicentennial book produced by the two men under an agreement with the commission; in 2000, after it had been on the air for 12 years, the new owners of KPTL Radio in Carson City canceled the History for Lunch Bunch program hosted by Nevada state archives administrator Guy Louis Rocha; in 2003, responding to an October Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada resolution calling for naming state highways after Native American war heroes John Aleck and Ronald Smith, a state highway department spokesperson said the state had a policy of not naming highways after individuals, but a member of the state highway board spoke favorably of the idea.

Update: Sunday, Nov. 5, 2006, 11:43 a.m. PST — On Nov. 5, 1968, Republican Richard M. Nixon won the presidency, defeating Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey and third-party candidate George C. Wallace. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Woodrow Wilson: The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self preservation, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

On this date in 1838, the Adams Sentinel, a Pennsylvania newspaper, reprinted a report from the Cassville Pioneer on "Dreadful Mortality among the Indians: The Indians are still in camp, and dying daily. A gentleman has informed us that there has been at least 500 coffins made for the Indians at that place alone" and the Sentinel then observed, "These must be the Pottawatamies on the march West. The poor creatures seemed destined every where to a speedy destruction by sword and pestilence combined."; in 1863, the Nevada Constitutional Convention debated something over which it had no authority what to name the state, which had already been determined by Congress; in 1869, the New York Times, in an article entitled "Improving the Indian," approvingly described a coalition of U.S. military officers and the Society of Friends (Quakers) which was promoting assimilation as an alternative to extermination of Native Americans; in 1904, Democratic/Silver Party leader H.R. Cooke returned to Reno from a campaign trip to Winnemucca where he addressed an S/D rally, criticizing Republican U.S. Senate candidate George Nixon for failing to support the fellow servant bill (a measure requiring employers to be responsible for workplace injuries of their workers) [EDITOR'S NOTE: 102 years later, not much has changed. Sen. Maurice Washington, R-Sparks, would understand.]; in 1904, the Nevada State Journal opined "With nearly as much certainty as the sun will set this evening it can be said that John Sparks will be the next United States Senator from Nevada. From a careful and close poll of every precinct in the State, a conservative estimate gives him forty-two out of the fifty-six votes of the Legislature on joint ballot." (Sparks lost); in 1912, with the Republican vote split between incumbent William Howard Taft and former president Theodore Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected president, ushering in a calamitous eight year era of white supremacy (Wilson segregated the federal government), repression (hundreds of people were arrested, prosecuted, jailed or deported for political expression), and military aggression (Wilson invaded one country after another, including Mexico, Russia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, China, Cuba, Panama, Dalmatia, Turkey, Honduras and Guatemala); in 1916, five members of the Industrial Workers of the World, engaged in a strike that gave the eight-hour day to lumber workers, were murdered in Everett, Washington, in a wave of hysteria against political radicals during the Wilson administration's buildup to war; in 1935 in Las Vegas, Eddes Schofield became the first known woman to be chosen for a U.S. jury; in 1943, Catholic priest Father Bernhard Lichtenberg died on his way to Dachau after protesting the extermination of the Jews and preaching to his congregation about the evils of mistreatment of the Jews; in 1947, U.S. Senate investigators looking into Howard Hughes' wartime aircraft contracts, particularly his flying boat, found evidence of income tax irregularities as well; in 1955, Tonopah juveniles who terrorized a teacher and her child were charged with malicious destruction for throwing rocks into her windows for seven hours, a crime that aroused the town when the teacher resigned (District Attorney William Beko forced all young males to undergo fingerprinting); in 1956, ignoring a warning from Lord Mountbatten that "We'll be plastered round the world as assassins and baby killers", the British and French governments invaded Egypt at Port Said, dismaying U.S. President Eisenhower and causing Soviet Premier Bulganin to threaten the use of hydrogen weapons; in 1958, Las Vegas city commissioners enacted a resolution urging casinos not to hire women dealers; in 1963, Andrea McArdle, who originated the role of Annie on Broadway, was born; in 1966, Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1975, U.S. District Judge Bruce Thompson cancelled the attempted murder guilty plea of Earl Wheby, thus overturning his conviction and sentences, because Deputy District Attorney Mills Lane broke his plea bargain with Wheby by failing to go along with the probation report; in 1977, Attorney General Robert List's office announced that it would appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit a district court's two-time dismissal of efforts to gain control of the bed of Pyramid Lake, the lower Truckee River, and the Marble Bluff Dam and Fishway, all within the Pyramid tribal reservation; in 1999, Microsoft was legally declared a monopoly corporation.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2006 Dennis Myers.]]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    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 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006

Update: Saturday, Nov. 4, 2006, 6:26 a.m. PST — On Nov. 4, 1870, the first train robbery in the west took place at Laughton's Springs, east of Verdi. [Nevada Magazine calendar]; in 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist after speaking at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On Nov. 4, 1842, Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln married; in 1870, the New York Herald reported that "instead of the President [Ulysses Grant] receding in any particular from the execution of his avowed Indian peace policy, on the contrary he is more convinced of the propriety and wisdom of securing the aid of the religious element of the country in the work of subduing and civilizing the Indians, and he is determined to carry out his views in this matter to the fullest extent practicable"; in 1891, it was reported in Reno that Virginia City Miners Union President Thomas Smith was injured and narrowly avoided death when a rock weighing hundreds of pounds rolled against him in the Crown Point Mine; in 1891, another delegation of Native Americans from eastern tribes met with Paiute prophet Wovoka and Reno's Nevada State Journal belittled them; in 1908, the payroll of the Aramayo Mining Company of Tupiza, Bolivia, was robbed, reportedly by the bandidos Yanqui, Harry "Sundance" Longbaugh and Butch Cassidy*; in 1935, U.S. Postmaster General James Farley announced that the Boulder City post office cancelled 166,180 first day covers that bore 295,000 three-cent Boulder Dam stamps, generating $8,850 (the first day sales at the D.C. post office were 358,404, generating $10,752.10; no accounting was made for the missing two cents); in 1944, most of the 150 election bets placed so far at Reno's Bank Club were on the Roosevelt/Dewey presidential race, but more were starting to appear on the U.S. senate race between George Malone and Patrick McCarran; in 1944, the Reno Evening Gazette ran an editorial entitled The Fourth Term Issue that called for Franklin Roosevelt's defeat on the grounds that a fourth term would "entrench...the Roosevelt ideals, the Roosevelt waste, the Roosevelt indecision, the Roosevelt bungling, the Roosevelt deceit, and the Roosevelt lust for power so firmly in government that its effect will be felt for generations to come."; in 1952, for the first time, Nevadans voted for presidential candidates by name on the ballot instead of for their electors; in 1958, in a landslide vote, Nevada voters approved annual sessions of the Nevada Legislature (and, two years later, by another landslide, they repealed them); in 1968, Nevada Supreme Court Justice Frank McNamee, who had also held the posts of municipal court judge, justice of the peace and state district court judge, and who was never able to resume his official duties following a vicious beating in February, 1965, died in a Las Vegas rest home; in 1977, Ross Brymer, already on $250,000 bail in the murder of former heavyweight contender Oscar Bonavena at the Mustang Ranch brothel, was granted $10,000 bail on a charge of being an accessory to bank robbery; in 1979, Iranians seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held its occupants, precipitating the "hostage" crisis; in 1980, five Democratic senators — George McGovern, Frank Church, Birch Bayh, Warren Magnuson and John Durkin — were all defeated on a single day, throwing the U.S. senate to the GOP.

* CORRECTION: We previously published the wrong year for the latter Butch and Sundance escapade — 1908 is correct. We apologize for the error.

Update: Friday, Nov. 3, 2006, 2:35 a.m. PST — On Nov. 3, 1914, Nevada voters went to the polls and granted women the right to vote six years before ratification of The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Thank you Ann Martin and so many others. [BARBWIRE] On Nov. 3, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected (thank you, John L. Lewis) in a landslide over Republican Alfred M. ''Alf'' Landon. [New York Times/AP e-headlines + BARBWIRE]

On Nov. 3, 1860, the Territorial Enterprise, initially a Genoa and then a Carson City newspaper, began publication in Virginia City; in 1861, residents of McMarlin's Station AKA Chinatown decided to change the name of the town to Dayton; in 1865, the last surviving Mescalero Apaches escaped their reservation at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico (the Mescaleros stayed out of sight for several years; land was reserved for them in 1873); in 1871, Yaquina Head lighthouse on the Oregon coast began operating (it didn't last long because it was located in the wrong place and was later superseded by another lighthouse that was also built in the wrong place); in 1874, Pablo Laveaga of Humboldt County was elected Nevada's first known Latino state legislator (he also later served as Humboldt County treasurer and a Reno bar owner); in 1882 "NEVADA THEATER. ONE NIGHT ONLY! Friday Ev'ng, November 3d, 1882, THE EMINENT ACTOR MR. FRANK MAYO! SUPPORTED BY MISS CHARLOTTE BEHRENS And a Company of unusual merit, under the management of SHERIDAY CORBYN, In his delightful creation of Murdoch's charming backwoods idyl, DAVY CROCKETT!! (A Symphony in Leaves and Mosses.) Now in its 12th year of popular and unprecedented success. Presented here with New and Picturesque Scenery, all carried by the management. PRICES ARE AS FOLLOWS: Admission, - $1.00 No extra charge for Reserved Seats. Seats now on sale at Postoffice. The advisability of securing seats early is respectfully suggested."; in 1885, in Washington after months of vile racist coverage by the Tacoma Ledger and white supremacist rhetoric from business and labor leaders, a mob led by Mayor Jacob Weisbach drove the city's Chinese out of town (their property was confiscated); in 1892, in an interview reprinted in Reno from the Denver News, U.S. Senator John P. Jones of Nevada said the U.S. needed to return to a bi-metal standard for money of both silver and gold instead of "knuckling down to the Rothschilds" (attacks on that family were often code for attacks on the Jews): "The European monometallists are wedded to their idol and so long as the gold droppings of the golden calf drop into their coffers they will not favor silver."; in 1923, a group of Native Americans were scattered and two arrested by white game warden Frank Middleton for hunting deer in their ancestral lands of Ruby Valley; in 1956, Don't be Cruel b/w Hound Dog by Elvis and the Ken Darby Trio was replaced at number one on the Billboard chart with Love Me Tender, the only time in rock and roll history that an artist followed himself in the number one spot, though one group —the Beatles — also did it (authorship of Love Me Tender was credited to Elvis — who once said he couldn't write a song if his life depended on it — and Vera Matson, Darby's wife, but was actually written by Darby); in 1962, He's a Rebel by Darlene Love, Fanita James and Gracia Nitzche but released by Phil Spector under the name of the Crystals (Barbara Alston, Mary Thomas, Dee Dee Kennibrew, Merna Girard and Patsy Wright) hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1964, the Washoe Project (designed for the Truckee and lower Carson rivers to develop water supplies to meet additional needs by conserving runoff through construction of three dams and reservoirs and by saving water previously lost to "non-beneficial" uses and to use storage to regulate flows for flood control, fishery improvement, and power production) embodied in ballot measure 2 and voted on only by property owners in Washoe, Churchill and Ormsby counties and portions of Storey, Douglas and Lyon counties, was approved over the objections of the Pyramid Lake tribe and recreational users, who believed there were not enough protections for their needs; in 1964, U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada won reelection by defeating Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt in the closest U.S. senate race in U.S. history, 48 votes on election night that widened to 84 votes after Nevada's first statewide recount; in 1970, Marxist Salvador Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile; in 1979, Nazis and Klan members opened fire on an anti-Klan march in Greensboro, North Carolina, killing five people and wounding eleven (those charged were later found not guilty); in 1986, shortly after the Associated Press reported that President Reagan's administration had been illegally supplying the U.S.-created Nicaraguan rebel army, Ash Shirra of Lebanon published a report revealing that the U.S. was secretly selling arms to Iran in an effort to win the release of U.S. hostages; in 2002, the United States assassinated several men in a car in Yemen with a missile in order to kill one of them, reputed Al Qaida leader Salim Sinan al-Harethi, believed to be in the vehicle.

Update: Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006, 2:35 a.m. PST — On Nov. 2, 1976, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter defeated Republican incumbent Gerald R. Ford, becoming the first U.S. president from the Deep South since the Civil War. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1861, President Lincoln removed General John Charles Fremont (explorer and the first Republican presidential nominee) from command of the Army of the West in Missouri after Fremont declared martial law and issued an emancipation proclamation; in 1863, the first Nevada Constitutional Convention began; in 1880, the Nevada State Journal commented on the impending presidential election: "Every traitor who shot bullets at Union soldiers in the late war, will vote for [Democratic nominee Winfield] Hancock, and the loyal men who received them in their bodies, and who yet live will vote for [Republican nominee James] Garfield.; in 1889, Josie Kender of Paradise Valley, Nevada returned from the Exposition Universelle de 1889 in Paris; in 1907, the Bullfrog Miner reported that the Goldfield local of the Western Federation of Miners voted against a sympathy strike with striking Nevada California Power Company workers; in 1909, the Industrial Workers of the World began a free speech protest in Spokane, which had enacted an ordinance limiting street speech, by installing a soapbox and having speakers mount it to be arrested, with 500 being arrested in the first month, 200 of them hunger striking, four of them dying before the city repealed the ordinance; in 1933, the Nevada governor's office announced that, ten days after he returned from hospitalization in San Francisco, Governor Fred Balzar had secretly left Nevada for Rochester, Minnesota, where he was undergoing treatment at the Mayo brothers' hospital; in 1936, three days before the election, the massive Literary Digest poll came out, with Alf Landon leading Franklin Roosevelt 1,293,669 to 972,897 (the poll showed 1,003 Nevadans supporting Landon to 955 for Roosevelt); in 1947, Howard Hughes flew his Flying Boat (AKA the "Spruce Goose") for the one and only time it ever left the earth; in 1951, Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra were married in Philadelphia after what newspapers called a "stormy courtship" (much like the marriage); in 1956, less than a week after Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary with massive land and air forces to put down a popular rebellion; in 1963, the U.S.-backed dictator of south Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, was assassinated during a coup; in 1966, The Professionals starring Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster was released, the film that — of the many movies filmed there — best displayed the terrain of the Valley of Fire (it was also Abbie Hoffman's favorite movie); in 1982, Harry Reid of Las Vegas was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1983, President Reagan signed legislation making the birthdate of Martin Luther King a national holiday; in 1992, the Thomas and Mack Center, Las Vegas' largest public gathering site, banned smoking; in 1997, North Las Vegas Mayor James Seastrand died in Las Vegas; in 1999, Utah scientists Patrick Wiggins and Holly Phaneuf discovered the 80,180th known asteroid, which they later named Elko (for Wiggins' birthplace in Nevada) after the International Astronomical Union refused their first choice of naming it after discoverer Phaneuf.

Update: Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006, 2:02 a.m. PST — On Nov. 1, 1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb in a test at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Sparks GOP senator fails in attempt to censor opposition TV

SHORT AND VERY SWEET
All the reasons you'll ever need to vote for John Emerson over madcap Sen. Maurice Washington
Reno News & Review 10-26-2006