Piece Of Art

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...

Carl Oglesby, 1989. Carl Oglesby died of lung cancer at his home in Montclair, New Jersey on Tuesday, September 13, 2011, at the age of 76.  I knew of Carl for decades, and briefly overlapped with his life in the JFK assassination research circles in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1970s-1980s. Yesterday, I posted of being a panelist at the A.S.K. conferences in Dallas. Carl's books Who Killed JFK?  (1991) and The JFK Assassination: The Facts and the Theories (1992), reflected those years, as well as his lifelong passion for investigating the underpinnings of the JFK assassination. (Another friend from those days, Tom Miller , author of  The Assassination Please Almanac , 1977, went on to be a well-known travel writer.) One of  Carl Oglesby' s often-forgotten books, which I think reveals a twilight language view of the world and should be read by students of political history, is The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate and Beyond (1976). ...

Former New York Yankees right-handed pitcher Hideki Irabu was found dead of an apparent suicide in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes, authorities said. The body of Irabu, 42, was found at 4:25 p.m. PDT Wednesday, July 27, 2011, county sheriff's Sgt. Michael Arriaga said. "He was found dead by an apparent suicide," Arriaga said. TMZ reported that he died by suicide by hanging himself. Irabu lived in LA with his wife and two children, where he had investments in various Japanese restaurants. Baseball player suicides are not as rare as one assumes, and my study of them in the mid-1980s predicted a wave of self-deaths in 1989 . Half of the suicide victims were pitchers, and all of those during the 20th century were right-handed. Hideki Irabu (Japanese: 伊良部 秀輝) (May 15, 1969 – July 27, 2011) was a professional baseball player of Okinawan and American mixed ancestry. He played professionally in both Japan and the United States. Irabu's biological father...