The Charlotte News
Thursday, February 20, 1958
THREE EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that a House investigating subcommittee had returned to the disputed Miami television channel case this date, with one member expressing concern over what he called the "backstage" manner which apparently applied to the FCC. Representative Charles Wolverton of New Jersey, the senior Republican on the subcommittee, said that a person would not have thought of appearing in a Federal court in the "backstage, surreptitious manner" which apparently applied to the FCC. He said that he thought something had to be done such that a quasi-judicial Commission would be free from the implication that it could be approached along political lines. The subcommittee was hearing from Frank Katzentine, the loser in the Miami case, appearing for the second day. The previous day of his testimony had brought up the names of Vice-President Nixon and Senator Estes Kefauver in connection with maneuvers to win the Miami television channel. Mr. Wolverton had asked why there could not be the same attitude toward the regulatory commissions as there was toward the courts. He commented that the ICC had adopted a code of ethics and read into the record a July 15, 1951 letter he said had been written by Jerry Carter, national Democratic committeeman from Florida, to the FCC, quoting the latter as having said that it was the writer's pleasure to recommend Mr. Katzentine, who had been a loyal Democrat all of his life and was "entitled to all the consideration a good citizen and good Democrat is entitled to", recommending that he be given every consideration for the channel.
The Senate Finance Committee approved this date the full 5 billion dollar boost in the debt ceiling sought by the President, effective until June 30, 1959.
The House Appropriations Committee this date approved 2.8 billion dollars in additional money to run the Government for the remainder of the fiscal year ending June 30, but said that the main effect was to make the following year's budget look better.
At Cape Canaveral, Fla., an Atlas ICBM had been launched this date, but apparently had blown up about two minutes after the launch.
The Weather Bureau was indicating that "a shift in the jet stream", not that unusual, was the cause of the extreme cold weather over the Eastern two-thirds of the nation, while the Far West enjoyed a relatively warm spell. There was no real hope forecast for warm weather for the Eastern half of the nation for the ensuing 30 days. The jet stream was the normally west-to-east wind currents of the upper air at about 10,000 to 40,000 feet, but they were now blowing north to south over the central part of the country. No one knew why the jet stream made such changes, with a Weather Bureau spokesman indicating, "You'd have to go way back to the sun—we don't know what causes it."
Temperatures continued to moderate in most areas from the Rockies to the Atlantic Coast this date but more snow in parts of the storm-stricken Northeast had slowed cleanup operations. Light snow had fallen on areas of the northern and central Appalachians, the upper Ohio Valley and western New York. There was a little relief from the severe cold which had hit most of the Eastern half of the country for nearly a week, as the core of the arctic air mass moved eastward into the Atlantic. Temperatures had reportedly dropped in the upper Great Lakes region and skies cleared.
In Calcutta, at least 214 miners were believed dead this date after an explosion in India's most modern coal mine, which flooded two other mines.
In Nashville, it was reported that a skeleton found under a concrete floor at the State prison had ended a 19-year search for a missing convict and opened a nationwide hunt for a fellow prisoner on a murder charge. The prisoner being sought, who had finished a six-year highway robbery sentence in 1940, was charged the previous day with killing the discovered missing prisoner, following a dice game in the prison metal shop in 1939, with officials indicating that a second prisoner implicated in the slaying, convicted of murder, had been stabbed to death in the prison in 1951, with his killer having been exonerated by self-defense. Three other prisoners still serving time for murders in the early 1930's had been removed from the prison the previous day for questioning in the case and for their own protection. Two of them had told reporters that they had witnessed the death of the man whose body was found. Members of the deceased's family had contended for years that he had been slain inside the prison, but prison officials had listed him as an escapee, putting out the usual bulletin for his arrest. Officials received several tips on his whereabouts, including two letters which they said had been in handwriting similar to that of the prisoner who was now being sought for his murder. The former warden at the time of the killing had said the previous day that the prison had been searched from top to bottom and even the big water tank had been drained to check reports that the man had been slain. The tip which had broken the case had come on the prior Friday, when a suburban policeman received information by telephone which had initiated a new probe, leading officers to the concrete grave. The victim had been one of four teenaged reformatory escapees, dubbed the "baby bandits" in Chattanooga, who had been sent to prison in 1937 after their capture by a posse near Rossville, Ga. After he had gone to prison, he had received a $6,000 devise from his grandmother. He was declared legally dead seven years later and his estate was settled. The State Attorney General, Harry Nichol, said that there were reports that the deceased had learned too much about the prison dope racket and may have been killed for that reason. The slaying had been reported, however, as having followed a dice game in which the deceased had won about $400. The Attorney General said that his information was that one prisoner, now dead, had held a knife against the deceased's stomach while the other prisoner, now being sought for the slaying, slipped a towel around the deceased's neck and strangled him to death. Well, you cannot blame that one on "Maverick". But there were the moompicters...
In Springfield, Ill., the State
Parole and Pardon Board had considered thrill-slayer Nathan Leopold's
plea for parole this date after he had served more than 33 years in
Stateville Prison for the 1924 kidnap and murder of Bobby Franks, 14,
occurring in Chicago. He had been 19 at the time of the crime. He
begged the Board to show him the mercy which he had not shown to his
victim, asking to be given a chance to try to be useful and justify
his existence. It was his fifth attempt at seeking parole. He and
Richard Loeb, then 18, had entered the prison on September 11, 1924,
after pleading guilty to the crime, having been spared the death penalty
through the defense of Clarence Darrow. They had been sentenced to
life for the murder and 99 years for the kidnaping. Mr. Loeb had been
slain by another inmate in 1936. Mr. Leopold's parole would be
approved and he would be released on March 13. Stateville was no place to be
In Orland, Calif., it was reported that the 1,200 residents of nearby Hamilton City had been evacuated this date as more than 400 men battled to save a levee which was holding back the rain-swollen Sacramento River.
In Smithfield, N.C., a man entered pleas of nolo contendere this date on eight charges. That elucidating report is of special note.
In Wilmington, N.C., it was reported
that for the fourth straight day, an earth tremor had occurred,
though not as bad as its predecessors. Residents along a 25-mile
stretch of ocean from Southport to Wrightsville Beach, and as far
inland as 15 miles, had reported a mild earth shock. It had trembled
the ground, rattled windows and dishes and caused at least one glass
jar to bounce off a shelf. Dr. G. R. McCarthy, UNC geologist who had
been keeping a sharp eye on the seismograph at Chapel Hill, said that
if the tremors were caused by nature, the odds against them coming
four days in a row within 30 minutes of each other was 110,000 to 1.
He said that there was a slight tremor in the Wilmington area during
the morning, but posited that something other than earthquakes were
causing them. Each of the shocks, which had begun on Monday, had
lasted about ten seconds and had done little or no damage, each
having occurred at about the same time, around 9:30. Dr. McCarthy
said that they had him worried, that sometimes quakes came one after
the other, but that it was the wildest sort of coincidence that four
would occur as those had in Wilmington. He said that a "moderate
quake" had been recorded on January 18, 1884 in the Wilmington
area and that another tremor had been recorded at Southport in 1927.
The previous day's tremor had rattled dishes and windows from
Southport to Wilmington, but no damage or injuries had been reported.
The commanding officer of the Army's Sunny Point Ammunition Depot had
said that there were no explosions or blasting operations around the
military base, indicating that his wife had reported dishes rattling
at their home in Southport for the third day in a row. He said that
occasionally they had jet planes break the sound barrier, but that
they were alert when that happened and could not pin the tremors to
any such incident and so were accepting the local theory that it was
an earthquake. A man from the Raleigh-Durham Weather Bureau said that
the tremors appeared "suspicious" to him. It's yet another
episode in the continuing, mounting body of evidence that the
Martians are obviously upset over the three satellites and are
warning us to stop it. Either that or it is the birds of the Feather
Dick Young of The News reports that though it appeared dubious as to some aspects of the proposal for consolidating the City and County schools, the City School Board had voted this date to go along to the extent of naming a committee to study the feasibility of merger. The Board's chief concern was the cost, having heard the business manager estimate that a county-wide school tax rate of 60 cents would be necessary to support the merged system.
John Kilgo of The News reports that a 15-year old boy had said that he had taken the "coldest swim" of his life and was "shaking like a leaf in a windstorm" after a hockey game which had started on a small lake in the Hoskins section the previous day, during which he had fallen through the ice at a thin spot and was rescued by the five other boys playing in the game. He said he had walked down the ice away from the other boys and hit the thin spot and down he had gone. The first boy who had come to his aid had also fallen through the ice, and a second boy who sought to rescue the first two had also fallen through. Three other boys decided not to risk going after the others one at a time, but made a chain by holding each other's hands and came out into the lake where the first boy was floating around, grabbed his hand and pulled him out. He said that the lake was about six or seven feet deep, but deep enough to cause trouble when the top of it was covered with ice. He said that they been playing ice hockey out there almost all morning and it seemed to be about two inches thick, until he fell through. He admitted that he was scared. The boys had gone to a cleaning shop owned by the mother of one of them and there had their clothes dried while they sat in a back room wrapped in blankets. The boy who had first broken through said that they did not have anything else to do in Hoskins as there was no place at all to go and play, that they had gone to a drugstore, but now they would not let them come around there. He said that it would be nice to have a recreation center so that they could meet there and play ball. All six of the boys who had fallen through had been present at school this date. The first boy who had broken through, however, was all shook up, yea, yea, yea.
In Parkton, S.D., local firemen had pegged their campaign to sell tickets for their annual ball on the motto: "You come to our dance and we'll come to your fire."
On the editorial page, "Open the Hedgerows and There It Is" finds it an esthetic tragedy in Charlotte that a magnificent public library was concealed behind one of midtown's rudest architectural hedgerows. It finds the library to be a masterpiece of grace and symmetry, contemporary design at its best, both decorative and functional, able to see in it through modern eyes that which John Ruskin, Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler had seen in the Gothic spire, an aspiration towards stature.
But it did not grow out of its site in the manner of organic architecture, rather was more or less swallowed by its site. While it was too late for regrets about the site, the dream of sweeping aside the buildings which obscured it was too nascent to be discarded and it recommends completely exploring the possibility of raising enough funding to clear the area for a park. There was no public money available for such a project, but there were many individuals and civic-minded business firms and service organizations interested enough in the idea to volunteer gifts in advance of any real campaign. The Charlotte Optimist Club was among the first organizations to become seriously interested in the project, which had begun in January with an offer of $1,000 toward purchase of the property which would be needed for the park. Now, the Jaycees had joined the Optimists in sponsoring a public fund-raising drive and the previous day, Jaycees officials had suggested that a "combined effort of civic clubs of Charlotte would make the library park a reality."
It finds that the demonstration of public spirit was worthy of the highest ideals of both civic organizations and the spirit which had always bode progress for Charlotte. It suggests that the job would not be easy as the property was reportedly valued at between $200,000 and $300,000, but that the commendable end was worth whatever effort it required.
"A Bigger Incubator for Bright Students" indicates that the ability of UNC to incubate young eggheads had been considerably strengthened recently by a $100,000 Carnegie Corporation grant to enlarge its program of advanced training for gifted students.
The grant would enable UNC to extend through the sophomore, junior and senior years the special instruction it had been providing for top-ranking freshmen, and would also enable calling attention to the fact that the University had been paying special attention to gifted students long before the launch the previous fall of the Russian Sputniks had called into question the worth of the U.S. educational system.
The program had begun in 1954, with its aim being to make certain that students who were of superior preparation and capacity would be able to advance as rapidly and as far as their abilities permitted. Participating students were selected on the basis of tests and high school records. They were kept together as freshmen in special courses in mathematics, history of Western civilization and English, with each student also taking two other courses, usually a foreign language and a natural science. The Carnegie grant would make it possible for other special courses to be offered to the group as they advanced toward graduation.
Such programs for the gifted were often criticized as undemocratic, although they were open to everyone who could qualify. Competition, which was said to justify the glorification of campus athletes, was the essence of the idea. Yet in Charlotte and other communities, public resentment regarding special instruction for especially talented children had tended to eliminate or severely limit such instruction in the public schools.
It finds it not to make much sense, as no one criticized the coach for giving his most agile quarterback a little extra drilling. But the real point was that recognition and awareness of gifted children represented only fairness and not preferment.
UNC's Kenan professor of classics, Berthold Ullman, touched on the point in a recent article, indicating: "… The great advantage of our way of life, including our school system, is freedom, which we cherish above everything else. Russia's asset is discipline. If we could borrow a little of their discipline and they a bit of our freedom, it would be a blessing for us all… No class in school is stronger than its weakest student; that is, the progress of a class is too often determined, not by the best student but by the worst. The poor student gets the attention; the good student gets neglected and has not enough to do. The motto of our schools should be: 'Everybody to the top of his ability.'"
It suggests that it was the motto which had motivated UNC to single out its brightest students to challenge and encourage them to make the most of their abilities, being a commendable motto for a university, and for the public schools.
"Is It Time To Talk of 'Beesy' Days?" finds that nothing was written about more on editorial pages than the weather, but that there were a few curmudgeons who saw no logic, no realism, no consistency and no sense in such flitting fancies as the coming days of spring and summer.
One of them had asked the Chapel Hill News Leader recently: "Why do you keep talking about spring when it is still mid-winter?" The newspaper had replied: "Because spring, which is a state of mind, is pleasant just in anticipation. Spring, when it actually arrives, is sometimes disappointing, being cold, windy and wet. But spring as anticipated is always warm, flowery, beesy, budsy and birdsy. Its cold rains are only April showers and its sharp winds are only zephyrs from the orange blossom belt in Florida."
It commends the newspaper and asks it to "blow a little zephyr our way."
It must have recently attended a showing of "April Love" while unwittingly anticipating "North by Northwest" the following year.
A piece from the Indiana Publisher, titled "Oh, Thou Blissful Ignorance", indicates that Joseph Lyford, a former United Press reporter presently working for the Fund for the Republic, had interviewed 100 people on the streets of Denver two months earlier, offering a dollar bill to anyone who could name any part of the first ten amendments to the Constitution known as the Bill of Rights, finding that only four of the people were able to mention any part of it.
The Denver Post had reported that most of the answers had been quick and brief, that they did not have the slightest idea of what he was talking about, could not remember, or had not read about it since they were knee-high to a grasshopper. Three women waiting for a bus laughed when they heard the question and one of them explained, "We've been out of school too long." High school students had done a little better, with some of them saying that they had not studied the Constitution since the seventh grade, and the four who did identify parts of the Bill had been men. None of the women interviewed had displayed the slightest knowledge of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
It concludes: "And still we claim the United States is the best-informed nation in the world."
Drew Pearson indicates that before Harold Stassen had submitted his resignation as the disarmament negotiator, he had written a confidential farewell report which would probably be suppressed by Secretary of State Dulles. In it, he had informed the President that he was certain that the Russians were ready to negotiate a ten-year truce in the cold war and that it could be the beginning of a permanent peace. He was blunt in his recommendation that the U.S. begin immediate negotiations, notwithstanding the nearly violent opposition of Secretary Dulles. He advised that unless the U.S. acted, it would be passing up the greatest opportunity of peace in a decade.
Other U.S. diplomats, having no axe to grind for or against Mr. Stassen, had generally agreed, basing their conclusions on the fact that Russia had industrial and farm problems, needed respite in competition with the West, that from that respite could come better understanding and peace.
But in direct contrast to Mr. Stassen's recommendation, the President had issued his blunt note to Russian Premier Nikolai Bulganin during the week, a note which had been dictated by Secretary Dulles. Thus, despite the effort by the President to write a cordial, friendly letter to Mr. Stassen upon his resignation, it had been the Dulles policies which were being followed with regard to Russia.
Jock Whitney, the Ambassador to Great Britain, would end up publishing the staid, staunch Republican New York Herald Tribune about the time he would bow out of diplomacy. He had invested 2.8 million dollars in the Herald Tribune and had an option on its control, and on the q. t., had been looking around for a new possible publisher.
Vice-President Nixon was sending his speeches to publisher Mike Cowles of the Des Moines Register-Tribune and Look Magazine, with little personal notes asking Mr. Cowles to "take a look at this and let me know what you think." The only trouble was that the speeches were already mimeographed and Mr. Cowles suspected that they were sent to about 200 others. He said that if Mr. Nixon had sent the speeches to him in advance, he might have been more flattered.
Julian Scheer reports on Harry
Golden
But the house was now gone and its loss was being mourned around the South and the nation, including those who had never agreed with a word Mr. Golden had spoken or written. Gone also were its shelves of Southern literature, philosophy, magazines and clippings, letters from governors and grocery clerks, as well as its framed photographs of Senator and former Governor Kerr Scott, the late James Street and the late Josephus Daniels. There had been those who had come to think of North Carolina as the state of Charles Aycock, Thomas Wolfe, Howard Odum, Frank Graham, and Harry Golden.
Mr. Golden was "a cigar-smoking, bourbon-drinking, East Side New York immigrant's son who writes, sells subscriptions to and solicits advertising for the South's most widely reprinted publication." He commanded several hundred dollars when he spoke on tour, but charged nothing to talk to ten students at Central High School or Queens College in Charlotte. He had been the subject of stories appearing in Time, The Nation, Coronet, Look and other such publications. He wrote for 14,500 subscribers who included former New York Governor Thomas Dewey, Adlai Stevenson, and Harry Truman. The 16-page, five-column tabloid monthly of 25,000 words was entirely written by him. When the next issue would be late, he could count on receiving telegrams from around the country asking where it was.
He was preparing a book, set to come out in the spring, titled Only in America, a compilation of reprinted pieces from the Israelite. He explained that the publication was informal chat, with "editorials" tossed haphazardly around a hundred advertisements, without any discernible pattern to its makeup or content. He might spend the columns on a yarn about his boyhood days on the East Side or a piece titled, "How Well Samuel Johnson Prepared Oysters", or one called, "Monday Is the Best Day To Die", the latter setting forth his theory that people had made a fetish of the weekend and so a Monday death was convenient for not upsetting the weekend routine.
"Advice to the TV Networks", in a recent issue, had suggested that Mr. Golden might give Ed Sullivan competition with a program on an opposite channel with him reading from Henry George or Plato. Mr. Scheer suggests that "William Shakespeare on Alcohol" or "I Miss Jacobson The Schnorrer", the latter word referring to a professional beggar, might be thrown in for good measure around favorite quotations.
The Israelite always carried pieces on the South, about which Mr. Golden had said that he dearly loved for it had educated him, Zionism and the Democratic Party, subjects on which he discussed with authority.
He had been an itinerant newspaperman 16 years earlier, coming to Charlotte from Hendersonville in 1942 to start a newspaper, having become managing editor of a small daily in the latter town after teaching school and working on scores of newspapers, including David Stern's New York Post and the New York Mirror. He had picked up a couple of backers who had quickly dropped him when they learned that he was not a money-maker for a liberal Southern newspaper. He said that he had wanted to publish a liberal newspaper in North Carolina, but being a Jew, a liberal and a Northerner, figured that the odds were too much and so insulated himself and called the paper the Carolina Israelite. He supposed that critics could say that it was another "Jew paper" and thought that perhaps, sooner or later, the non-Jews would get acquainted with it. Recently, he had said: "So now I sit in my office and I look out of the window and I watch the American middle class running around in circles. I use Jews as examples and rely on the Gentiles to get the point."
One editor had pointed out that he was writing a Yiddish newspaper and translating it into English. Mr. Scheer observes that the Gentiles had obviously gotten the point, for his subscribers numbered nearly as many non-Jews as Jews and the newspaper wound up in the hands of North Carolina farmers, mill workers, teachers, editors and housewives. The audience seemed to love the off-beat spelling of Rivington Street yarns, his knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, comments on Shakespeare, on which he had taught an evening college class in Charlotte two years earlier, Euripides and the Talmud.
His office had become a gathering place for politicians, reporters and visiting journalists who wanted to find out what made the South tick. No one quite knew where his fund of knowledge derived, but he was an expert on the Klan, White Citizens Councils, anti-Semitism in the South and other current regional problems. The newspaper contained no big headlines, no pictures, no mats, no third-party contributions except letters and an occasional book review by one of his sons, no social notes and no obituaries. He said that the last obituary they carried had been of Caesar's death in 44 B.C.
He had become one of the South's most outspoken anti-segregationists and when the North Carolina General Assembly had met in a special session in Raleigh two summers earlier to enact a conservative anti-integration plan, he had regarded it as his duty to go to Raleigh to have his say. The same week, his "Vertical Negro Plan" had appeared in the Israelite, suggesting that as long as white people did not have to sit with blacks, everything would be just fine, and so they should just take the seats out of the classrooms. His sense of humor was legend. He loved the South but did not mind a terse, often harsh, dissection of the region and particularly the social drive of the Southern middle-class.
He said that he had left the Elm Street church with the mill workers and the fellows who pumped gas, and organized a new fellowship which had the name "Fair Haven" or "Park" in it, while his opposite number in the Jewish middle-class was constantly on the alert for the tall, blonde, blue-eyed rabbi. As they both glanced over their shoulders, "they see the Negro a-coming along, fast."
He did not seem to mind the reference that he was a "character", indicating that his critics needed a chuckle also. The previous year, for instance, he had insisted on marching in Charlotte's first St. Patrick's Day parade, saying that he was marching in the absence of his sons, descended from a long line of Irish kings on their mother's side. "Anyway, from my research, I am convinced that the Irish are one of the lost ten tribes of Israel." Grady Cole, who had put on the parade, vowed that Mr. Golden was the only man present who knew the words to Irish marching songs which the group tried to sing.
Some of his readers questioned his philosophical background, for they knew that he had attended college only briefly, had no degrees and only a limited educational background. He threw them off base when he read a paper before the exclusive philosophical society in Charlotte, of which he was a member. He was a sturdy 18th Century Rationalist but hearkened back more in his writing to the "modern boys", feeding from Lord Shaftsbury, Robert Burns, Shakespeare, Jefferson and Churchill. He read everything which came his way, setting a pace with his irregular hours too fast for many close friends. For entertainment he stuck to Spinoza and the Latin poets. Some friends needled him when he dredged up obscure philosophical references to support an argument, but it did not worry him, indicating, "One thing they can't say is that Harry Golden isn't an interesting so-and-so."
He had hidden from friends an old pleasure of babysitting his grandson when his son and his family had lived in Charlotte. He had many friends but socialized only slightly, often staying strangely aloof and to himself, sitting for hours before a typewriter, a record player playing Bizet or Mozart, pounding out another issue of the Israelite or a book review or a story for a liberal publication. He would stop and say aloud, "Ah, they're gonna love this one."
"The paper and the man are a state of mind—Harry Golden's mind.
"It is far from burnt out."
A letter from J. R. Cherry, Jr., indicates that the recent editorial, "How Russia Enlisted Almost Everybody", was "about as rotten a piece" as he had known "to drip from the so-called 'enlightened and objective' liberal pen" of the editors, finding the attempted smear of Democratic Congressman Francis Walter of Pennsylvania, co-author of the Immigration & Nationality Act, to be in keeping with the "ever odd liberal reasoning." He believes Mr. Walter to be one of the "stalwart anti-Communists in the House" who had always been the target of "accelerated abuse among you liberals and the Reds." He regards the "inexcusable error and weakness" of the editorial to have been the same as virtually all non-Communist liberals. He believes that if the Act were put to a national referendum, the American people would overwhelmingly approve of it as it was and would reject the crippling amendments which both the Communists and non-Communist liberals would attach to it, finding it significant that in 1952, the Congress had passed it over "minority stooge Truman's veto." He thinks it was the "finest piece of legislation of its kind" which the country had in many years and that it ought not be scrapped "to feed Communist insanity, nor to feed the not altogether unrelated sloppy idealism of thick-headed liberals. The Kremlin has chalked up enough political victories over us. Let us not hand them another."
As usual, Mr. Cherry provides a calm, sedate, objective view of his subject matter, free from the slightest evidence of slanted opinion, based entirely on irrefutable fact. As we have suggested before, he was well before his time, and would fit squarely within the current Trump Administration, would probably be head of Homeland Security these days, after having enjoyed a long-running and successful program on Fox.
A letter writer from Clinton, S.C., quotes from Marie Antoinette that if the workers did not have bread, let them eat cake, questioning what had happened to France of that age, also indicating that Czar Nicholas had sported himself while the people had starved, asking what had happened to Russia at that time. "We go off to Georgia to play golf and leave the unemployed to do the best they can. Well, I hate to think what will happen."
He might comment today that the current occupant of the White House has spent a third of his 30 days in office thus far on the golf course, while inflation continues to climb and his stupid tariff policies continue to push it upward, after he ran primarily on the issue of bringing prices down, especially on the necessity for everyone, food, having done absolutely nothing except to exacerbate the situation, the same being true of the war in Ukraine, while offering up the wonderful solution for Gaza of converting it to a Middle Eastern Riviera. Meanwhile his stooge passes daily pronouncements claiming them to be against "waste, fraud and abuse" in the Government, while only actually destroying the very means by which such waste is reported regularly to Congress, eliminating those means which might cause Trump or his stooge and their fellow billionaire oligarchists trouble, the while so obviously divorced from reality as to find common ground with the oligarchy of Russia and suggesting that Ukraine was led by a dictator, as NATO sinks slowly in the West as a viable entity under U.S. leadership, the average Trumpie thinking it some liberal thinktank organization formed a couple of years ago by Biden or Obama.
Sooner or later, the people who are dedicated supporters to this fool are going to wake up and realize that he could care less about them and their welfare, as was made coldly evident at the time of the pandemic during his first term in office, could care less if they live or die, could care less if the American people live or die, as long as His Highness remains in power, his coldly self-evident goal to establish some type of singular place in the history books of the world as the first American king since King George, every bit as whacky as this old codger.
Follow him if you will, right off the cliff into the abyss, but do not ever say that you were not duly warned by those who have a reasonable understanding of history and thus can foresee without any crystal ball the outcome of this foreordained disaster. He is not, as some people apparently believe, just a brash, arrogant talker who, in fact, "gets things done". In fact, he gets nothing done except the propagandistic wish list necessary to keep Fox Propaganda on top of the ratings and fuel his vanity mill, bent on making it easier for billionaires to bilk and milk the American people, while offering the latter a few peanuts to keep the lesser lights happy, so that they can sleep at night without being concerned about the "murder of little babies", that the Gov'ment will be coming to take your cache of guns so's to prevent you from being plenty prepared to correct the little children at the schoolhouse should they become so uppity as to fail to accord you the royal prerogatives to which you are entitled by birth, participation of birth-gendered males in female athletics, that anti-MAGA syndrome might lead to blocking the assurance that the Constitution will be amended or overthrown to disallow birthright citizenship and that the Constitution will be amended to permit him, though not others, to be elected to a third term in office, and other such straw-man issues and pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
We remind that it takes not only two-thirds of each house of Congress or two-thirds of the state legislatures to send a Constitutional amendment to the states, but also ratification by three-fourths of the states. We also remind that the Congress is responsible for funding of the Government, not some fictional department created by His Majesty within the executive branch, and to pass muster with the Congress requires 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster. It is good to know how and why things work before you set about trying to change them. It is also good to realize that a victory margin of 1.5 percent of the popular vote does not a mandate make, but rather suggests the need for a coalition government seeking input from the other party. But, of course, the Trumpies were never blessed with very much common sense or any book learning of which to speak, only some very rudimentary training in accounting, keeping track of the books, as long as the books substantiate what they want them to say, that Trump, Inc., is the only brand to buy for its uniformly high quality and prestige, even if a bit smelly along the edges.
Framed Edition
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