Piece Of Art

Beware of the Ides of March Thinking About Being Tapped in Tampa? In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date on which Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate by a group of conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus. The group included 60 other co-conspirators according to Plutarch. According to Plutarch, a seer had foreseen that Caesar would be harmed not later than the Ides of March and on his way to the Theatre of Pompey (where he would be assassinated), Caesar met that seer and joked, "The ides of March have come," meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied "Ay, Caesar; but not gone." This meeting is famously dramatized in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March." Let me ponder, as a futurist, on this special date, one remote but possible ...

Today, few remember that the shoo-in candidate to be the Republican nominee in 1968 was a man named George Romney, Mitt Romney's father. A rarer minority recall that George was thrown under the bus, on the road to the convention, by a Rockefeller. The background of what happened to George Romney and why he was derailed on his way to becoming the Republican candidate in 1968 is worthy of revisiting. A Gallup Poll after the November 1966 elections showed Romney as favored among Republicans over former Vice President Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination, 39 percent to 31 percent; a Harris Poll showed Romney beating President Johnson among all voters by 54 percent to 46 percent. California's Nixon considered Michigan's George Romney his chief opponent. Romney was pressed for his opinion on the Vietnam War, which hawk Richard Nixon supported. Finally, on August 31, 1967, in a taped interview with talk show host Lou Gordon of WKBD-TV in Detroit, Romney stated: "When I...