The Charlotte News
Monday, July 20, 1959
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: The front page reports from New York that Joseph Finnegan, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, this date had resumed his efforts to get talks going again in the strike-bound steel industry. He and three key aides had gone into a private morning discussion with contract negotiators for the basic steel industry. A similar session with the United Steelworkers Union's team was scheduled for the afternoon. The rapidly spreading economic effects of the nationwide strike had provided an air of urgency to those meetings. Nearly 90 percent of the country's steel-making capacity was shut down, with steel production losses, as the sixth day of the walkout began, totaling about 214 million dollars. A half-million striking Steelworkers counted additional pay losses amounting to about 50 million dollars. Approximately 40,000 workers in related industries, chiefly coal and transportation, had also been furloughed. Under orders from the President to press for a quick settlement of the dispute, Mr. Finnegan was seeking some way to budge industry and union leaders from their entrenched positions. He sounded out both sides the prior Wednesday, the first day of the strike, and had come away saying that he could see no quick or easy solution. He said nothing could be gained by trying to get negotiators together immediately and had put off further efforts until this date. The union demanded a wage increase and improved fringe benefits and the industry contended that any increase in labor costs would be inflationary, wanting to eliminate what it called certain wasteful work practices. Steel workers presently were averaging $3.10 per hour. The President had been receiving daily reports on the strike from Secretary of Labor James Mitchell. The President had declined to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to force reopening of the mills or to appoint a Government fact-finding board to study the issues and make recommendations, a procedure available under Taft-Hartley. Two Senators and two Representatives on Sunday had criticized the President's handling of the dispute.
The Commerce Department announced this date that personal income of Americans had climbed in June to a record rate of 382.9 billion dollars per year, more than 500 million higher than the rate in May. The Department said that the increase was chiefly a reflection of higher wage and salary payments from stepped-up hiring by industry and a lengthening work week in factories generally. The report of the increase in personal income came atop a weekend report from the Department that national output in the first quarter of 1959 had reached a rate exceeding 470 billion dollars per year. The term "personal income", as used by Government economists, included all payments to individuals, including wages, salaries, rents and dividends. Wage and salary payments in June had been reported at 261.1 billion, an increase of 1.3 billion from a month earlier and a gain of nearly 12.5 billion in annual rate from the January figure. Government "transfer payments", unemployment compensation and other Federal payments which surged upward in the business recession, had dropped somewhat from the May figure. The Department said that the bigger factory payrolls the previous month had contributed half of the advance in total wages and salaries, the major payroll gains having been in the metals, machinery, stone, glass and clay industries. The prospect appeared, however, that the steel strike would cut deeply into the wage and salary payments for July, when the next personal income report would be issued a month hence. Steel industry sources estimated that the 500,000 idle steel workers were losing about 70 million dollars per week in earnings, a figure not including income lost in the transportation and steel-using industries, which would feel secondary effects of the nationwide strike.
In Henderson, N.C., in the trial for an alleged conspiracy to blow up the Harriet-Henderson Mills the previous May, the State this date sought to introduce transcripts of tape recordings of an alleged dynamite plot by union members against the struck mills. As the trial of the eight co-defendants, who were members of the Textile Workers Union of America, entered its second week, the judge excused a Vance County Superior Court jury so that they might compare the transcripts with the recordings. The assistant prosecutor prosecuting the case said that if the transcripts were found accurate, they would be offered as evidence at the afternoon session. The State said that a State Bureau of Investigation tape recorder had been hidden in a Roanoke Rapids motel room while several of the defendants had allegedly conspired to dynamite a power substation, the boiler room and the offices of the South Henderson plant of the struck mills. The meeting had taken place, according to the State, in a room used by a key State witness. It was around the testimony of a Leaksville machinist that the prosecution was building its case against the defendants, including Carolinas TWUA director, Boyd Payton. The 32-year old machinist, a former TWUA member, on Saturday had revealed himself as an undercover agent for the State Bureau of Investigation, testifying that one of the eight defendants had contacted him in May about dynamiting vital installations at the mills. He said in testimony: "I felt like with as much violence as was going on in Henderson, I felt like if I hadn't told him [referring to the president of the mills, John Cooper], somebody would have been killed."
In El Paso, Tex., it was reported that after a day of telephone talks and attendance at church services the previous day, Governor Earl Long of Louisiana planned, at last notice, to go to Denver this date. He had reservations in the Colorado city's Brown Palace Hotel. The Governor had canceled a planned second trip to Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande, the previous night. His plan to go to Denver this date had also upset a previously announced itinerary which was to take him to Phoenix, Colorado Springs and Monterrey, Mexico. The previous morning, twitching his hands nervously, the Governor had heard Dr. W. Herschel Ford thunder, "You can't live with the devil six days and live with the Lord on Sunday," as he attended services at the First Baptist Church in El Paso. After the services, Mr. Long said: "That's good preaching. It was only 35 minutes long. In the country they used to preach for an hour and a half. That's too long for an old man to sleep." A little later, he had told reporters that his plans for the ensuing few days were a mystery, indicating that he was leaving El Paso in a balloon, and that the reporters should contact him in Kansas City on July 25. "I'm going to try to lose myself between now and then."
In Las Vegas, it was reported that a prominent West Covina, Calif., doctor was held this date on suspicion of murdering his pretty, estranged wife near their fashionable $80,000 home on Saturday night. California officers were coming to Las Vegas to pick up the doctor and return him to West Covina, a suburb of Los Angeles. Sheriff's deputies had arrested the doctor the previous day at the apartment of a 22-year old cocktail waitress who was formerly a nurse in the doctor's clinic. The doctor denied knowledge of the gunshot slaying of his wife, 33, and said that he had come to Las Vegas on Friday and had been there since. But the cocktail waitress and the doctor's Swedish housekeeper told different stories. The waitress told police that she had driven the doctor back to West Covina on Saturday night so that he could ask his wife for a divorce. She said that when he confronted his wife outside their home, his wife had pulled a revolver from her purse. The waitress said that she fled and had hidden in bushes for six hours before driving back alone to Las Vegas. The housekeeper, 19, told West Covina police that the doctor and his wife had been separated since May, that when his wife had come home on Saturday night, the housekeeper said that she heard her scream for help from the garage. The housekeeper said that she then entered the garage, saw the wife lying on the floor with a cut on her forehead and saw the doctor standing over her. When she had knelt to help the wife, the doctor had grabbed her and thrown her against the wall. The housekeeper said that she was dazed and when she looked up, she saw that the doctor was holding a gun and he ordered her and his wife to get into the car. A few moments later, the wife had bolted from the car and run toward the hillside home of her husband's parents. The housekeeper said that as she had gone to telephone police, she heard a shot. She said she had been employed by the doctor since the previous September. Police said that they believed the doctor had stolen a car to return to Las Vegas. The mother had two children, 11 and 6, with the older child from a former marriage. Her former husband was presently married to the doctor's former wife. Peyton Place crosses into reality.
In Stouffville, Ontario, it was reported that an excited crowd, anxious to help save the life of a boy after he had been pulled from a nearby lake the previous day, had pushed away a man trying to breathe life into the boy and hampered the efforts of a young lifeguard. While the crowd milled and argued regarding the best method of artificial respiration, the eight-year old boy of Toronto had died on the shore of Shadow Lake, 6 miles north of the village and 14 miles north of Toronto. A man of Toronto who had sought to breathe into the boy's mouth to revive him said: "It was an awful mess. I started to use the mouth-to-mouth method and the kid seemed to come around a bit. Then 15 or 20 people started pushing me away. They were pulling the boy's arms and legs and everything." The 15-year old lifeguard at the privately-owned park said it was "like a backyard squabble with everybody pulling at the boy and arguing about the best method to use." It had been his third Sunday on the job and he had been awarded a bronze medallion the previous month by the Royal Life Saving Society.
John Kilgo of The News reports that a detailed report of the Fire Department's investigation of the July 9 explosion which had injured 13 persons, including 11 firemen, had been made to the City Council during the afternoon by Fire Chief Donald Charles. The report described events leading up to the explosion but fixed no blame, saying that the sodium-filled vat which had exploded ought not to have been in the building. But it was not made clear who should have moved it. It also said that fire prevention officials had checked the building often prior to it being vacated in 1956 and had been told by chemists that no "dangerous or hazardous or explosive materials were used in the building." It indicated that no explosives or other hazardous materials were found in the building when the Fire Department had surveyed it on August 20, 1957, and the report recommended that companies who stored hazardous chemicals ought make written reports to the Fire Prevention Bureau, failing which they would be in violation of the City ordinance.
Julian Scheer of The News
reports that social life of Charlotte had changed in just 12 days,
moving to the automatic laundry, to be more precise, the
coin-operated dryer. He indicates that the report would be read
during the afternoon, according to a survey, by a great number of
people in automatic laundries because that was where their friends
were. "There's been a steady chorus of rain drops playing a sad
and soggy tune on Mecklenburg County and a new beat has been added to
the rhythm, the beat being the whir and whine of the automatic
dryer." Since the rains had come, those places of business had
been doing a booming trade day and night. Washers had been running,
but dryers had been racing, as there was no use to try to use the
clothes-line and so the dryers had been working overtime. The
operator of one such laundry said that their dryer use had
quadrupled. Two prime examples of dryer users said that they usually
dropped coins in the washers only, but kept dryers busy during the
recent rainy days. As many men as women had been in, according to the
operator of the laundry. Mr. Scheer concludes: "Weather report:
Rainy and (automatic)
It had rained this date in Charlotte, the 11th consecutive day of rain, and the weather report forecast another day of rain the following day. The month's precipitation had totaled 4.03 inches, just .64 of an inch short of the July normal of 4.67 inches. Only a trace of rain had fallen the previous day and this date's precipitation had started with a brief early morning shower. But the rains had given the city a 5.09 inches of excess precipitation for the year. The July rains had broken a long, hot dry spell which had caused farmers thousands of dollars in ruined crops. Until the rains had started on a daily basis, rain had fallen on just one day in July. Although the rains had brought humid weather to the Carolinas, it had helped break the high summer heat. Temperatures had exceeded 90 degrees on only seven days during July and the 96 high of July 2 was the month's highest reading. A high of 89 was forecast for this date and again the following day. The low during the morning had been 70 and another 70 was forecast for the following day. It's hot down here in Shelby, and the only thing we can do is just go out and walk 'round and 'round, always counter-clockwise, while constructing some variant of Peyton Place, or something akin to it, in our head, but without violence, only various diseases overcome by miracles.
In San Diego, a missile engineer reported that it appeared to have rained early on Sunday morning and continually through most of the day, but only in a 20-foot square area on his property. He said that he knew it sounded screwy but he could not find the source any other place and that it had to be rain. The San Diego Union had sent a reporter to his home and the reporter returned, convinced it was rain, although there had not been a cloud in the sky. The Weather Bureau described it as impossible. In this day and age, anything is possible, anywhere. It was probably them Martians again.
On the editorial page, "A 'Straw Hat' Theater for Charlotte?" indicates that against the tradition of bland, unvarying summers in Charlotte, Charlotte's Little Theater during the week was being positively revolutionary. Usually shuttered for the season, the Queens Road Playhouse was pleasantly engaged in a production of "The Boy Friend", a "gay and gaudy affair, full of music, dancing and a great deal of laughter and audiences were enjoying it hugely." It was billed as an "experiment" to test the appeal and drawing power of summer theater in the city.
It is happy to endorse the project completely, finding it worthy because it met a crying need, it being ridiculous for a city the size of Charlotte to dispense completely with music and drama in the very season when they ought to be enjoyed the most. Other cities had responded to that demand with outdoor concerts in parks and stadiums and summer stock theater, and Charlotte ought follow suit.
It finds that the city had many opportunities in that area, with some being investigated. The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra Society had a committee working on the idea of a summer concert series. It would also like to see the Little Theater schedule a summer series of light drama the following summer. Undoubtedly, there would still be a potential audience large enough to spill over into summer stock productions in some appropriate barn in the vicinity. The summer theater at Tanglewood Park, west of Winston-Salem near Clemmons, had demonstrated how successful such ventures could be, even when they were far removed from a large resort area.
It finds the point to be that Charlotte's population was big enough and varied enough to want a wider range of seasonal entertainment, and residents were sophisticated enough to enjoy flesh-and-blood actors as well as shadows on a screen, live sound as well as mechanically reproduced hi-fi, and, it asserts, they actually hungered for those pleasures, which ought be satisfied.
Well, now, they had the auto races.
"Lady Chatterley's Trouble with Spies" suggests that to many elated pundits, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield's purge of Lady Chatterley's Lover almost ranked as a good thing.
The Washington Post had said: "In a sense, it is just as well that the censors flail away so often at genuine works of art instead of the shoddy cheesecake so blatantly on display at most newsstands… The renown of James Joyce owes an incalculable debt to the attempt of censors to keep that long and difficult … work, 'Ulysses', from American readers. And it is also an indubitable service to English literature to have the reading of D. H. Lawrence become a commonplace rather than a rarity…"
It finds that all great works of art deserved large audiences and thus, to that extent, agrees with the Post and others who endorsed Mr. Summerfield's censorship for making the novel popular. But it regards the quality of appreciation to be neglected for mere quantity and asks of what consequence to the world of art would it be that a billion people had looked at the Venus de Milo if all they saw in her were a slightly shocking nude woman.
Mr. Summerfield's prudish ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover had obscured the real judgment of the book-reading public, such that it was impossible to know whether the large sales of the book was good or bad for art. At present, the book was selling like popcorn in a movie house, to "best seller" appetites which had, in recent years, gobbled up Peyton Place and the like. To the literary merit of such books, the public paid little attention. The books appeared in a society where romance distorted sex, mystique beclouded its function, such that it frequently appeared as vaguely smutty or scandalous. Not only did such books raise the subject, they made a great point of parading sex with devil-may-care "frankness".
It questions whether Lady Chatterley's Lover had become a best-seller because it might be art or because of Mr. Summerfield's attempt to censor it, arousing the same peek-a-boo instinct in habitual patrons of bestsellers. Americans, Britain's angry young playwright John Osborne had observed, were as preoccupied with sex as a medieval monastery. Earthy functions and passions which Geoffrey Chaucer had written about with merriment and civilized understanding were advertised, six centuries later, as "shocking… startling… daringly frank, etc."
It finds that probably James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence would spin in their graves if they knew that Molly Bloom and Lady Chatterley, created in hours of anguish with the intent of conveying some powerful truth about human beings, were being read for shock effect. It has a suspicion that Lady Chatterley's trysts were being spied on by many who saw less "art" in them than delicious scandal.
"Welcome—To a 100-Horsepower Mind" indicates that when Dr. William Poteat had quit Caldwell Hall in Chapel Hill two years earlier and gone to Austin, Tex., to teach candidates for the Episcopal ministry, he had left the state without a teaching Poteat for the first time in generations. The remarkable Baptist family, with the exception of Dr. W. H. Poteat, who was an Episcopalian, had given the state William Louis Poteat, president of Wake Forest during the 1920's, and a stout adversary of the type of Monkey Law which had disgraced Tennessee. In addition, the family had contributed Dr. Hubert Poteat, a great Latin teacher at Wake Forest, Ida Poteat, the longtime head of the Meredith College art department, and Dr. E. McNeil Poteat, perhaps the outstanding Baptist theologian in the world until his death a few years earlier.
With all of his distinguished forebears gone, it had been doubly painful to see the lone remaining Poteat depart the state. It was thus glad to note, from editor Henry Belk of Goldsboro, the news that Dr. Poteat was returning to be a professor at the Duke Divinity School. To his former philosophy students in Chapel Hill, the return might be vaguely disconcerting, but welcome nonetheless.
It indicates that the phrase someone had once applied to Winston Churchill, "hundred horsepower mind", precisely fit the return for Dr. Poteat. "His philosophy students in Caldwell Hall will remember him as a teacher who could demolish a shoddy proposition with the observation: 'Perhaps so, but there are at least eight things wrong with your way of putting it.'"
With unceasing wit and merriment, and with a "jaw-breaking vocabulary" which delighted in such terms as "egocentric predicament" and "bifurcation of nature", Dr. Poteat had led his students down the trails of the off-beats, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Rilke, as well as the on-beats, from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. Regardless of his subject matter, a teaching Poteat was welcome back to the state, it concludes, any time.
"How To Tell Donkeys from Elephants" indicates that outside of the weather, the hottest issue in Washington was economy in government. Both Democrats and Republicans had gone to absurd lengths to hang the "spender" tag on their opponents.
It does not know why they bothered as the economic philosophies of the two parties had been put to a revealing test each evening in perhaps 100 hotel rooms in Washington. It finds the tip-off to have been, according to a particularly perceptive pundit: "When serving a drink, the Republican usually measures it with a jigger. The Democrat just pours."
A piece from the Green Bay
Press-Gazette, titled, "Less Noise, Please", indicates
that one of the remarkable feats of the present age of technocracy
was the creation of HISS, (high intensity sound simulation), to test
equipment used for trips through outer space. The project was
probably worthwhile but the sound was so dreadful that it could shake
buildings off their foundations and would never be heard by a human
ear because it would kill
"And yet it would seem that some creative mind might instead find a way to drown out everyday sounds that may not kill directly but certainly can drive adults crazy. A cap pistol shot off suddenly in a small room and accompanied by a shrill 'Gotcha!', golf balls in the washing machine, the off-beat of rock 'n' roll, a plate, particularly a valued one, dropped on the kitchen floor, the all-night shrieks, giggles and only slightly muffled screams of a slumber party, all seem to be unimpaired in velocity by the most up-to-date soundproofing constructions.
"If there are unearthly and piercing sounds in outer space, perhaps this is one reason why men in their thirties and the fathers of small children were picked as Astronauts for the first trip."
Drew Pearson indicates that actor James Stewart, who had won many a woman's heart with his acting in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "The Glenn Miller Story", "The Spirit of St. Louis" and many other movies, had been forced to surrender to the lone female of the Senate, Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. He had finally put in all of his reserve flying time to qualify for promotion as a reserve Air Force general, but surrendered after Senator Smith remained adamant that it was not fair to drop some 60,000 less glamorous Air Force officers because they failed to fill the reserve requirements and then turn around and let a star-stuffed actor get promoted without flying time.
He indicates that to gauge what was going to happen in the steel strike, one had to understand some of the difficult cross-currents inside the union, the steel industry and the Eisenhower Administration. One was inside the United Steelworkers, where its president, David McDonald, had not been too popular with his men. In April, 1957, Donald Rarick, had run against Mr. McDonald for the presidency and had amassed 223,516 votes while Mr. McDonald received 404,172. Mr. Rarick had no build-up or chance to campaign and his vote was largely one of protest against Mr. McDonald. During the current steel negotiations, most union members had not wanted to go on strike as too many had been out of work during the 1957-58 recession. Now that the strike had been called, however, it would likely solidify Mr. McDonald's union behind him, even though he had not wanted the strike.
Second, among the steel executives, who in the past had played ball with Mr. McDonald and he with them, there had been fostered a cooperative union-industry relationship with wage increases having been granted and the increase passed to the public, plus additional profits. But recently, a new set of executives had been taking over big steel. The days of Benjamin Fairless, who had worked his way up from a coal miner to become chairman of U.S. Steel, were over. Younger, tougher Roger Blough was presently running U.S. Steel. Eugene Grace, the 82-year old onetime czar of Bethlehem Steel, and Tom Girdler, the iron-fisted boss of Republic Steel, had resisted union organization like tyrants. But once the union had been recognized, they cooperated.
The new executives had now replaced them. Charles White was the new head of Republic and more profane than any steel puddler ever thought of being, more difficult to get along with than Mr. Girdler. Months earlier, the steel executives had decided that there was going to be a showdown with the union and the decision had gone higher up than even the steel industry. The bankers, the automobile manufacturers as the chief users of steel, and those who sat around the Duquesne Club in Pittsburgh, had all decided that the present was the time and that Mr. McDonald's union was the place to make a stand against the continued round of wage increases.
Joseph Alsop examines the announcement of Senator Hubert Humphrey as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, the first such formal announcement, made the previous week by Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman and fellow Senator Eugene McCarthy. There were reasons for the early announcement because the more demure tactics of his rivals for the nomination had not been working well for the Senator, with polls and other indices having suggested that something big and bold was required to get the show on the road. Logically, the Humphrey candidacy should have attracted much support in its unannounced phase, as the Senator was a "brilliantly clever and fearsomely energetic politician. Few men today are more effective on the platform. He has warmth and humor that his enemies admire. His record may be disliked by many southern Democrats and by all conservative Republicans. Yet it is a record that ought to command great northern Democratic enthusiasm. What, then, is his handicap?"
James Rowe, Jr., Senator Humphrey's campaign advisor, had said to Adlai Stevenson, "There's nothing wrong with the Humphrey campaign that wouldn't be cured by your assassination." The statement pointed out that the natural supporters of the Senator were also the natural supporters of former Governor Stevenson. They were not supporting Senator Humphrey because they still hoped that Mr. Stevenson would make a third try at the presidency. Senator Humphrey, himself, had not pressed Mr. Stevenson to stop blocking the road, only intimating that a time might arrive when he would ask for Mr. Stevenson's support.
Mr. Rowe had worked hard for Mr. Stevenson as the Democratic nominee in 1952 and 1956, and had now gone further for Senator Humphrey, pointing out that Mr. Stevenson would have to speak his mind eventually unless he wished to be entangled again in the experience he most loathed, the presidential primary. That was because all generally potential candidates, whether announced or not, would be automatically entered in the Oregon primary. Mr. Stevenson had asked Mr. Rowe to find out how he could stay out of the primary there and Mr. Rowe obtained a letter from the national committeeman from Oregon saying that unless Mr. Stevenson was entered by petition, he could escape the primary by filing an affidavit that he was "not now and does not intend to become a candidate". The letter had not yet elicited such a signed affidavit.
One or two of Mr. Stevenson's entourage favored support of Senator Humphrey. At least two others favored support of Senator John F. Kennedy, but the remainder, allegedly including Mr. Stevenson's closest advisor, William Blair, favored a wait-and-see stance. It thus seemed doubtful that Senator Humphrey would obtain Mr. Stevenson's early and active backing, which he needed.
The Senator's present hope was therefore the strategy of trying to defeat the front-runner, Senator Kennedy, in the primaries not taken over by favorite son candidates. Mr. Rowe had even suggested, half-seriously, an unprecedented gentleman's understanding with Senator Kennedy that whoever would win two of three primaries would win and the beaten candidate would back the winner. It was probably too commonsensical, suggests Mr. Alsop, to be quite feasible. "For who would say which primary Humphrey and Kennedy were to enter? And what guarantees would be given that the bargain would be kept? But at least the proposed bargain is something new in the frenzied history of our presidential politics, and its simple common sense makes it worth recording."
Robert C. Ruark, in Palamos, Spain, indicates that his family had formed a habit of automatically buying the New Yorker for better than 20 years because some people such as Sid Perelman and Charles Addams did outrageous things in the magazine, and E. B. White was special in the front of it. At the time, the magazine was edited by the late Harold Ross, a "hick". He had put out a glossy magazine for other hicks as he was aiming, he said, at the old lady from Dubuque. He was helped by people such as James Thurber, from Ohio, as the latter indicated in his book on Mr. Ross.
He says that he found the magazine a little rough going at present because all of the stories seemed to start out: "When I was a little girl in Upper East Pakistan, my amah always used to… And so on for 90 years with the wrong amah."
"But man, I am here to tell you that this broad on page 127 has got me made. The headline says: 'Look at her and you know (with no period) She uses a Hasselblad 500 C, and she is attracted to the man who always looks for this shield (inserted picture of shield). She is often seen at Van Cleef and Arpels, and she is attracted to the kind of man who always looks for this shield (inserted picture of shield). She keeps time with the Lucien Piccard… He does with a Patek Philippe, and he is the kind of man who always looks for this shield (inserted picture of shield)."
He says that if that "dame" wanted to use a Hasselblad 500 C, it was her business, but it sounded suspicious to him, and that she might as well "get tattooed and switch to that other hasselblad which does not avoid the manufacture of stereo and monaural records under the same roof, like it says, just as plain."
And he goes on about the ad…
"I've been reading this advertisement over and over, and still can't quite figure out what this girl is hustling, Blue Cross or Warner Bros. stereo records. But that shield is in there, loud and strong, and if you see a girl keeping time with Lucien Piccard, you just call up Van Cleef and Arpels and ask them, straight out, has anybody seen Hasselblad 500 C lately? If they hang up, call the cops."
A letter writer responds to two letter writers of Saturday, July 11, who had commented on the editorial recommending that the Democrats fire DNC chairman Paul Butler. This writer indicates that notwithstanding that he disagreed with certain statements which Mr. Butler made, he usually found that he used great wisdom in his expressions and deeds. Some members of Congress, particularly Democratic leaders, had nothing about which to brag, having proved themselves by their inactivities and indifferences during many campaigns, particularly during the presidential races, not to be part of the national Democratic Party. He had often wondered whether it was the result of their feeling of the security they believed they possessed because of the length of time they had served in Congress. For many years he had proposed a change for members of Congress to serve no more than two consecutive terms and not to be eligible to run for any house of Congress before an absence of two terms.
That may sound all well and good to some, especially given some of the crackers populating the Republican Party in the current Congress, including most especially Loonybird Johnson, the leader of the cackling loonies. But the problem then becomes lack of continuity, lack of familiarity with some of the complex rules of both bodies, ultimately producing an even worse cracker-barrel of crackers, amateurs with one issue behind them on which to harp endlessly, acting essentially as glorified lobbyists for their particular district, pork-barreling whenever they can.
Term limits are fine for the presidency, but not for Congress. After all, we have, under Article III of the Constitution, life terms for all Federal judges appointed pursuant to that Article, as long as they are on "good behavior", subject to impeachment when they are not. Because of the discontinuity within the executive branch, it only stands to reason therefore that some elected body have continuity spanning generations to afford the proper understanding of our Constitution, hopefully, within the legislative body, before having to leave it to the Federal judiciary to straighten things out—the practically weekly exercise needed with this corrupt and ignorant present Administration, full of the most amateurish and politically biased individuals who ever populated an executive branch in the country's history, far more so than during the Nixon era. A "Saturday night massacre" today would not even arise as there would be no special counsel appointed by the Trump Department of Justice run by his personal attorney, to fire, let alone anyone who would refuse to do so because of illegality. The dyed-in-the-wool Robert Borks are probably among the remaining few more moderate forces in the current Department.
An example of that continually occurring illegality, redundantly challenged successfully in the courts, occurred again today, when a 7-2 majority of the Supreme Court had to reject a stay of the Federal District Court's order blocking the Postal Service from tampering with mail-in ballots, after Trump's obviously corrupt attempt to manipulate the votes in the midterm elections by having his loyal Postal Service personnel determine who could cast a mail-in ballot, (only good, white Amuricans who sign the pledge for the $5,000 bribe never to be paid), mandating states to provide to the Federal Government, in unprecedented fashion, a list of eligible voters in each state, against which the Post Office would then match mail-in ballots by a special bar-code to determine whether there were variances from the submitted lists, in which case, that particular ballot, along with any others in that particular random batch of mail-in ballots, would be automatically rejected for mailing, at the sole discretion of the executive branch, the Postal Service thus left to go "postal" on all of us who are among the "Communist-Socialist Democrats" who oppose fascism and neo-Nazism.
No one in the history of the country has ever devised such a blatantly plain effort to rig an election. It is, of course, within the very province of these idiots who still go on denying the outcome of the 2020 election and believe, against all facts to the contrary, that it was somehow rigged against their boy, the failed Leader of the first term. If there was any rigging going on, it was only by Trump's minions, who failed to rig it well enough that time. If you differ, take it up with your psychiatrist. We are very tired of hearing about it from idiots who do not follow politics, usually never voted prior to 2016, never took a basic civics course, do not understand how our Constitution works, do not understand how the laws work in relation to it, and prefer a dictator such as Trump seeks to be.
Follow your game shows and your celebrity apprentice shows and other reality television all you want, but leave it on the side of the road outside the arena when it comes to politics. Get lost, shut up, and go away. The American people at large are tired of it. We're tired of hearing from you morons. Shut up and go away. Read a book. Learn something. You are dumb, little clowns who view politics as a carnival show, nothing more, nothing less. While there always has been a certain carnival atmosphere to it, that is not its essential element, and it is certainly not a reality television show which can be governed by a reality television star. Most of those who were too dumb to see that the first time around, and decided to give the proven failure another try, expecting a different result, have been educated for the most part this time.
Let us hope there will never be another such self-absorbed, self-promoting idiot in the White House. The only people left who continue to support him are either multi-billionaires, who have benefited enormously at his feet, morons who refuse to be educated in the least about the dangers of creating in this country a totalitarian oligarchy, traitors to the country who literally want to destroy all forms of government so that they can, in their grandiose imaginations, rule the roost, and con artists like the man in the White House, with whom they find great commonality, right down to his felony convictions. That is the kind of trash who continue to support him, the remaining 33 percent, with defections therefrom monthly.
Framed Edition
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