The Charlotte News

Friday, December 30, 1949

THREE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that the President met with the Cabinet for more than two hours to discuss in detail his State of the Union message, to be delivered to Congress the following Wednesday.

It was believed, according to an unnamed White House source, that the President would ask Congress to turn rent control over to the states, thereby to reduce Congressional opposition to other parts of the housing program.

The U.S. was reported to be formulating a new policy for Asia to block the spread of Communism, with a beefed-up Asiatic fleet and possibly a military mission to be sent to Formosa, the island bastion of the Chinese Nationalists.

The State Department warned U.S. shipping lines that the entrances to Shanghai Harbor had been mined by the Nationalist forces. The head of Isbrandstsen lines, practically the only shipping company still operating in the area and whose ships had been attacked twice by the Nationalists, sent a wire to the State Department urging a strong protest of the blockade of the Communist-held port.

India recognized Communist China and severed diplomatic relations with the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek. It was the second country outside the Soviet sphere, after Burma, to do so and the first within the British Commonwealth. Informed sources said that the recognition was based on lack of significant opposition to the Communists by the Chinese people, that the Communists controlled nearly all of China, and the fact that it appeared the Communist regime would abide by China's established international obligations.

In Paris, the Government of Premier Georges Bidault won a vote of confidence in the National Assembly by 302 to 265, specifically regarding the question of raising taxes a percent on industrial production, favored by the Cabinet and opposed by the Gaullists.

France recognized the new United States of Indonesia.

Also in Paris, a violent explosion blew off the door of the chancellery of the Polish Embassy, slightly injuring a night watchman. The Embassy, itself, was not damaged. The apparent motive, attributed to Poles who opposed the Polish Government, was the tension between France and Poland regarding the arrests and expulsion of Poles from France and French from Poland, plus the conviction in Poland of four Frenchmen for spying.

Future chief of Naval operations, Captain Arleigh Burke, who had headed the controversial "Operation 23", responsible for anti-unification propaganda, had been nominated for promotion to rear admiral despite reports that the President had sought to waylay the recommended promotion.

Republicans appeared to agree that the Administration's spending policies would be their chief target in the 1950 mid-term elections campaign.

In Negaunee, Mich., a college instructor employed by Jones & Laughlin Ore Co., a subsidiary of the steel company, to prospect for uranium deposits, had discovered a deposit in the northern Michigan location in the form of pitchblende or uranite. It had not yet been determined whether it was of sufficient quantity or quality to warrant mining.

You just wait. They'll have us an atomic-powered car, first thing you know. It'll go around the world faster than a bullet.

Senator Clyde Hoey of North Carolina urged to the Shelby, N.C., Rotary Club that action should be taken by Congress to "put the quietus" on UMW head John L. Lewis.

In Goffstown, N.H., a young doctor was charged with murder in the euthanasia of a long-suffering cancer patient by administering air into her veins. A medical referee, however, declared at the inquest that the amount of air set forth in the charge was insufficient to cause death but that more air actually had been injected by the doctor. An assistant to the county solicitor said that death might have come anyway from cancer within a few hours of the injection. The woman's brothers said that they held no malice toward the doctor for his act of mercy.

In Columbus, Miss., a woman told police of killing her husband after catching him in the arms of another woman. She had hidden in the back of his car with a gun and when the two rendezvoused in a secluded area and then kissed, she arose from the backseat and fired four times. She was under armed guard at a hospital, admitted for hysteria.

Charlotte's building volume increased by six million dollars over the previous record level of 1948, to 23.4 million. The report tells of the various major projects.

A group of Baptist ministers and laymen were urging the Southern Baptist Convention to establish a seminary in Charlotte.

In Burlington, Wis., a fish story unanimously won first prize in the annual contest of the Burlington Liars' Club. The winner related that he had single-handedly caught a trout on a cane pole in Colorado but that in his excitement, forgot about his landing nets and gaff hooks, thus reeled the fish in with a pole so long that he could not reach the fish, so stuck the butt of the pole into the ground, drew his hunting knife, climbed up the pole and stabbed the fish to death.

He should have just strangled it.

Honorable mention went to a man who told of a fish which towed his boat so fast that he blacked out, was told when he awakened in the hospital that he had been traveling so fast that motorboats could not catch him, escaped death when friction burned a hole in the bottom of the craft and he fell into the lake.

He should have jumped.

Another honorable mention recipient told of the mercury dropping so low in his town that it fell through the bottom of the thermometer and was three bricks below zero.

Why not three stories below zero? There's nothing worse than a stupid liar.

The previous year's champion, who had told of 2,000 postholes being blown out of the ground and over cactus until they were so full of holes that they would not hold dirt, related that the first champion liar had been a Russian, Ivan Bullshensky, in 1920. Judges responded that Mr. Bullshensky would have been a professional liar and so was not qualified under Burlington's rules.

This year's winner in 2016 would have to be, small hands down, the guy who thinks he is going to be President and told some real whoppers, including a fish-grabbing story, along the way. His latest story, a real side-splitter, is the praise he gave to Vladimir Putin today for not retaliating against President Obama's sanctions imposed for Russian state-sanctioned hacking of the U.S. election process. And this guy thinks he is going to be President of the United States. That is the most laughable lie ever imagined by a human being. The Russians love a liar and thus love this guy. We will gladly part with him any time so that he can lead Russia. It will save the expense of impeachment for treasonable acts. They can rename him Bullshensky II.

Quite seriously, can you imagine an incoming President complimenting a foreign dictator for not retaliating against a justified policy of the present Government regarding something as sacrosanct as the integrity of the American election process? Of course, no one should expect anything different, given the cheap, tawdry and treasonous campaign this reprobate ran.

Impeach him on January 21. No one will protest but a bunch of racist idiots who have placed their stock in him to revive slavery. And that is not a fish story.

Patricia Capella, a Detroit-born dancer married to Jacques Capella, French classical dancer, cabled five world leaders, President Truman, Premier Stalin, King George VI, and President Vincent Auriol of France, urging them to make the world a safe place again in which to have babies. She said that she and other married women wanted children but were afraid to bring them into the world for the purpose of becoming "cannon fodder".

On the editorial page, "Slums and Slum Dwellers" finds that many objected to public housing and slum clearance on the notion that the slum-dwellers would just revert to old habits and soon have the new housing looking like a slum. It suggests that while there might be some truth in that sentiment, it was also the case that many slum-dwellers in Charlotte took great pains to make their surroundings appear nicer, even if rudely accomplished through limited means.

It concludes that it was likely that slum-dwellers could do much better for themselves and become more productive for others if they lived in decent housing with proper sanitary facilities.

"Problems of Security" tells of a plan proposed by Bernard Baruch to increase Social Security payments and also end inflationary policies. Private pension plans, he offered, made it hard for workers to change jobs, encouraged retirement at a too early age when the individual still could be productive, discouraged hiring of middle-aged and old men, and advantaged only those working groups strong enough to force pensions on employers, running up consumer costs of goods in the process.

The piece agrees with Mr. Baruch and his means to achieve better old-age security for everyone.

"Churchill Honored" finds Time's naming of Winston Churchill as Man of the Half-Century to be appropriate, even if other names readily came to mind, as FDR, Gandhi, or even Hitler or Stalin, for their impact on world events. Mr. Churchill, while often found wanting as a Conservative politician, was deserving of honor for his having steered the ship of state during the war and done so eloquently, inspiring confidence and trust in the process all over the Allied world, including in the United States. He had become during the war "the spirit and and heart of free people everywhere" and succeeded as much as any individual in protecting freedom for everyone.

A piece from the Hickory Record, titled "Truman's Winning Smile", tells of a Gallup poll indicating that the President was the most admired man in the world by Americans. The result had been the same a year earlier.

While one might not like his policies, it ventures, one had to admire the President's smiling confidence with which he approached the many problems of the country. It asserts that it was a chief reason for his continuing popularity.

Drew Pearson tells of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and Secretary of State Acheson having differences over some issues, notably sending steel mills to Yugoslavia, favored by Mr. Acheson, occupying Formosa with U.S. troops, opposed by Mr. Acheson, and the general American policy in the Far East, with Mr. Johnson having favored support of Chiang Kai-Shek.

Mr. Acheson was peeved about Mr. Johnson's denial of access to the President's plane for use to attend the foreign ministers conference the previous November. While he was offered the old plane of the President, Mr. Acheson wound up renting a special plane for the trip at a cost of $12,000 to the taxpayers.

If one of the men left the Administration, it would likely be Mr. Johnson because, despite doing a good job in cutting the military budget and effectively encouraging unification, he had occasionally irritated the President and his stances were inimical at times to the desires of the military brass. The result had been a steady stream of anti-Johnson propaganda transmitted to the President, including the rumor of the potential that Mr. Johnson would run for the presidency in 1952. The President had said recently that one day he would "get rid of that so-and-so."

At present, however, both Mr. Acheson and Mr. Johnson had relented from their loggerheads.

Mr. Pearson quotes from a letter he received from a man who said that he had fought in the war and had no love, therefore, for the German adults, but after reading Mr. Pearson's column on the American Legion effort to send toys through CARE to German children at Christmas, he was enclosing a check.

Marquis Childs tells of at least one person in the country having good reason to celebrate Christmas. Juan Trippe, head of Pan Am, had received word of recommendation by an examiner operating at the behest of the Civil Aeronautics Board that the proposed merger between Pan Am and American Overseas Airlines be approved, a merger which would give Pan Am a virtual monopoly on foreign routes. CAB could reverse the recommendation or the President could veto it. But that was unlikely, as the way for the merger had been prepared by Mr. Trippe through much lobbying pressure.

At the conclusion of public hearings on the merger, public counsel had filed a brief offering that it would result in a monopoly with greater powers than the Government. If the merger were allowed, then only TWA remained as a competitor on the north Atlantic route. But TWA had complained that it could not withstand the competition from a merged Pan Am and AOA.

Moreover, CAB had allowed Pan Am to supplement TWA's heretofore exclusive operation into Rome on the rationale of increased numbers of tourists and pilgrims traveling to Rome during the Holy Year. TWA charged that Pan Am was perpetrating a hoax in taking a share of this traffic from TWA temporarily, and that once established, it would turn into a normal route.

The taxpayers subsidized the private airlines and so had a stake in the outcome. Furthermore, the development of civil aviation was related to military security. Former air transport officers of the Navy and Air Force were pushing for a bill in Congress to provide for an air merchant marine, whereby the Government would pay to build cargo planes and lease them to the airlines. It would augment the carrying capacity of the nation in the event of an emergency such as the 1948 Berlin airlift.

But the big airlines and the Air Transport Association opposed the measure on the ground that it would bring the airlines closer to government ownership.

Yet there was a far greater danger in the creation of a monopoly in the airline industry. The Government could easily take over such a single airline operating along foreign routes. Nationalization tended toward worse service and bureaucratic indifference; but so, too, he concludes, did private monopoly.

Robert C. Ruark, in Kona, Hawaii, tells of the hangover seeming to be more prevalent than it had once been, especially among Republicans and the rich because of increasing taxes.

He describes different types of hangovers, the suicidal, from mixing drinks, the guilty hangover following a night of revelry, the locale-specific hangover, a Pullman hangover or an airplane hangover, the latter especially bad during turbulence. A London hangover was particularly frightful, with the air gray and foggy, the pubs closed.

Yet, he finds, the topper was an Hawaiian hangover, rendering the pleasant sights of the island at once repulsive. He admits at the outset that he had experience with the hangover, especially around the holidays, but concludes by insisting that his observations were strictly the result of non-subjective, diligent research on the subject in pursuit of his "constant search for truth": "Aloha oh. Which means I wish I was dead."

A letter writer praises Senator Frank Graham for his stances on reorganization of the Government to eliminate waste, soil and forest conservation, Federal aid for education without control over local public education, the elimination of monopolies over basic resources by individuals or groups, the minimum wage, rural electrification, equal opportunity for all as the best answer to Fascism or Communism, elimination of the poll tax, passage of a Federal anti-lynching law and the FEPC bill, along with several other points.

He believes that Senator Graham's program was supported by a majority of North Carolinians.

A pome appears from the Atlanta Journal, "Revealing An Item That More Often Than Not Affects One's Appetite:

"People who brood
Don't relish their food."

But if in it is bubblegum,
The brood is as explicable
As the handle gone
With water ineluctable.

Sixth Day of Christmas: Six grinches grousing grimly in Trumplanderkind.

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