History for June 17

History for June 17 - On-This-Day.com
John Hersey (John Richard Hersey) 1914 - Writer, journalist, Newt Gingrich (Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich) 1943 - Politician, historian, author, Barry Manilow 1946 - Musician 


Joe Piscopo (Joseph Charles John "Joe" Piscopo) 1951 - Comedian, actor, Greg Kinnear 1963 - Actor, television personality, Venus Williams 1980 - Tennis player 


1775 - The British took Bunker Hill outside of Boston. 


1854 - The Red Turban revolt broke out in Guangdong, China. 


1856 - The Republican Party opened its first national convention in Philadelphia. 


1876 - General George Crook’s command was attacked and defeated on the Rosebud River by 1,500 Sioux and Cheyenne under the leadership of Crazy Horse. 



1924 - The Fascist militia marched into Rome. 


1930 - The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Bill became law. It placed the highest tariff on imports to the U.S. 


1940 - The Soviet Union occupied Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. 



1944 - The republic of Iceland was established. 


1950 - Dr. Richard H. Lawler performed the first kidney transplant in a 45-minute operation in Chicago, IL. 


1969 - Boris Spasky became chess champion of the world after checkmating former champion Tigran Petrosian in Moscow. 

Controversial Baltimore Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby Attempts to Prevent Release of Freddie Gray Autopsy, Evidence | Video | TheBlaze.com

Controversial Baltimore Prosecutor Marilyn Mosby Attempts to Prevent Release of Freddie Gray Autopsy, Evidence | Video | TheBlaze.com:

 "BALTIMORE (TheBlaze/AP) — On the heels of a denial for a broad gag order in the case, Baltimore’s top prosecutor on Monday asked a judge instead to bar attorneys representing the six police officers charged in Freddie Gray’s death from sharing evidence before their trial.

State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s filed a protective-order motion asking for all discovery materials in the case to be deemed confidential. Just over a week ago, a judge refused to grant Mosby’s request for a complete gag order."

Best-Selling Author Brad Meltzer Reveals President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Biggest Secret’ | TheBlaze.com

Best-Selling Author Brad Meltzer Reveals President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Biggest Secret’ | TheBlaze.com:

"And yet.

“Whatever you think of Reagan, you have to admit, he had a black belt in badassery,” Meltzer continued."

Could This Be What Happened to Vladimir Putin When He Vanished for 10 Days? | Video | TheBlaze.com

Could This Be What Happened to Vladimir Putin When He Vanished for 10 Days? | Video | TheBlaze.com:

"Beck said a man like Putin doesn’t just “vanish” for 10 days, especially amid the wild speculation that there had been a coup.

“The more likely scenario now is that Putin was being held somewhere against his will,” Beck concluded. “It was a show of force by the FSB, Alexander Dugin or perhaps another influential fascist radical. They wanted to make sure that Putin got back into the business of taking more land and restoring Russia to her previous glory.”

Francis & Political Illusion

Francis & Political Illusion | Maureen Mullarkey | First Things:
"It comes as no surprise.
Handwriting has been on the wall along the Viale Vaticano from the get-go.
At the beginning of his pontificate, Francis revealed himself to be fastidiously attuned to image.
He refused to give communion in public ceremonies lest he be photographed giving the sacrament to the wrong kind of sinner.
So, when he agreed to pose between two well-known environmental activists and brandish an anti-fracking T-shirt, we believed what we saw.
It was a portentous image.
Press toads hopped to their keyboards to correct the evidence of our lying eyes. 
Francis was neither for nor against fracking, you see. 
Nothing of the sort. 
He was simply using a photo-op to assert blameless solidarity with the victims of ecological injustice. 
(Both a decisive definition of such injustice and its particular victims went unspecified.)
If that restyling were true, then the more fool Francis.
But Francis is not a fool. 
He is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist..."

The Federal Reserve's worst nightmare: The 'ghost of 1937'

The Federal Reserve's worst nightmare: The 'ghost of 1937':
"In trying to steer the economy of 2015, the Federal Reserve is fighting the foreboding spirit of 1937.
Wall Street strategists, in fact, are worried that the U.S. central bank is so cautious over not making the mistakes of a long-ago ancestor that it may miss a solid opportunity to normalize monetary policy after seven years of decidedly abnormal times.
"Many policymakers and market observers assert that the risk of the Fed raising rates too early exceeds that of moving too late.
This is the specter of 1937, when the Fed raised rates prematurely and exacerbated the Great Depression..." 
What's causing much of the consternation is fear that, like 1937, a desire to avoid bubbles and normalize rates will come too soon and plunge the economy back into a slump. 
The Fed took its short-term rates target down to zero amid the financial crisis and the Great Recession, and has been there since late 2008.
However, that recession officially ended in 2009, yet the central bank has not moved on policy.
In addition to zero rates, it has boosted up its balance sheet to $4.5 trillion in a liquidity program whose effect has been to pump up the stock market by 220 percent.
...The best investors likely can hope for is that it's not as bad as other times in the past..."

Legendary Gunmaker Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy | TheBlaze.com

Legendary Gunmaker Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy | TheBlaze.com:

"Colt Defense LLC announced Sunday night that the 179-year-old company is filing for bankruptcy.

The firearms company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., and Colt officials say they plan to restructure financially during this time. This process, according to a press release on Colt’s website, will allow for the “accelerated sale” of  the company’s business operations in the U.S. and Canada."

The New Liberal Know Nothings

The New Liberal Know Nothings - WSJ
...Try naming three prominent liberals or Democratic heavyweights who support the president on trade.
Such is the state of a party in which Barack Obama is the extreme-right flank.
...It’s not that Democrats don’t have thoughts or position papers on Iraq, ISIS, the Mideast.
It’s just that they don’t particularly care about any of it.
Mentally, they’ve checked out of the great-power game.
...Oh, but there’s Iran. 
As details of the pending agreement become clearer—no snap inspections of Iran’s military sites; no snapback sanctions; no credible U.S. military options on the table; no restrictions on Iran’s missiles; no answers about its past nuclear weapons work; no promises to release Americans held by Iran; no moderating of Iran’s regional behavior; an upfront $150 billion bribe in the form of sanctions relief—so too does the scale of the administration’s capitulation.
Negotiations with Iran now amount to a diplomatic strip tease, the only difference being that Washington both takes it off and doles out the dollars.
...It’s worth noting that the original name for the Know Nothings was the Native American Party, though somebody must have thought better of that one.
Later it was renamed the American Party.
“Americanism” has usually been the cause of people who imagine that they can keep the world at bay, either by shutting our doors or closing our eyes. 
It never works. 
Boorishness is a bad basis for policy, and so is blindness.

Russia warns of 'new military confrontation' in Europe

Russia warns of 'new military confrontation' in Europe:
"Relations between Russia and the West took another downturn this week when Russia warned that any stationing of military equipment along the border with eastern Europe could have "dangerous consequences."
The warning came as Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Tuesday that Russia would add more than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles to its nuclear arsenal this year, Reuters reported.
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued the warning on Monday after the New York Times and other media organizations reported that the U.S. had offered to store military equipment for up to 5,000 troops – including battle tanks and heavy weapons -- in allied eastern European countries.
"The emergence of such information confirms that the U.S., in cooperation with its allies, apparently has serious sights on ultimately undermining key provisions in the 'NATO Russia Founding Act' of 1997, in which the alliance pledged not to deploy substantial combat forces on the territory of the countries mentioned in the permanent basis," the ministry said in a statement on its website.

The city has an entire "area" where there is an abundance of buttocks?-----Female shot in 'buttock area' at Muskegon house party: police chief

Female shot in 'buttock area' at Muskegon house party: police chief | MLive.com:
"MUSKEGON, MI -- A female suffered a gunshot wound to her buttock area on Saturday, June 13, during what police say was a house party at a Muskegon home.
The shooting allegedly occurred around 1 a.m. in the backyard of a home in the 1000 block of Oakgrove in the city of Muskegon, said Director of Public Safety Jeffrey Lewis.
Lewis said a female was "shot in the buttock area" while outside at a home at that address.
A house party was taking place at the address and some participants of the party were in the backyard prior to the reported shooting, Lewis said.
At some point, someone "got mad" and the victim was shot, Lewis said. 
The injury is not considered serious, he said."

Maine Legislators Announce – the 2nd Amendment is Your Gun Permit! - Eagle Rising

Maine Legislators Announce – the 2nd Amendment is Your Gun Permit! - Eagle Rising:

"In an amazing and perhaps a bit surprising win for freedom, the legislators in the deeply purple state of Maine have just passed a bill that would abolish the need for concealed carry permits and allow residents (over the age of 21) to carry firearms freely."

The Intellectual Weakness of The Fourth Estate

The Intellectual Weakness of The Fourth Estate [CBD]:
The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is a recurrent theme around these parts, and we all have examples we can trot out to expose the stupidity of the media.

This one might be my favorite though
 .....Imagine a large industrial corporation that produces hundreds of thousands of relatively expensive products with just 14,000 workers. 
The market for their products is quite literally the entire United States, and the math --really just arithmetic -- says that those 14,000 workers are a tiny part of the market. 
Yet the brilliant media accepts unquestioningly the weak-minded analysis that Henry Ford raised his workers' wages so that they could become consumers of his products.

"Henry Ford understood this when he paid his workers high enough wages to buy his cars. Today's titans of the economy appear to have forgotten the lesson."

Math doesn't lie. 
This is a moronic supposition that should have been rejected after 10 seconds of doodling on a scratch pad.

After thousands of examples of the intellectual flaccidity and inferiority of the journalists in our midst, we have to accept the fact that they are not the best and the brightest. 
They are, overwhelmingly, college students who couldn't handle college math, couldn't manage to do the work to pass Biology 101 and Chemistry 101, and were daunted by the prospect of reading a bunch of long books with lots of facts in them, so history was not an option either.

So what was left? (fill in the blank)_____ Studies or Journalism."

They are lying!!-----90 Days: Treasury Says Debt Has Been Frozen at $18,112,975,000,000

90 Days: Treasury Says Debt Has Been Frozen at $18,112,975,000,000 | CNS News:
"The portion of the federal debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress closed Thursday, June 11, at $18,112,975,000,000, according to the latest Daily Treasury Statement, which was published at 4:00 p.m. on Friday.
That, according to the Treasury's statements, makes 90 straight days the debt subject to the limit has been frozen at $18,112,975,000,000.
$18,112,975,000,000 is about $25 million below the current legal debt limit of $18,113,000,080,959.35.

The average American woman now weighs as much as the average 1960s man

The average American woman now weighs as much as the average 1960s man - The Washington Post:
"The average American woman weighs 166.2 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As reddit recently pointed out, that's almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed in the early 1960s.
Men, you're not looking too hot in this scenario either.
Over the same time period you gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the 60s to 195.5 today. 
Doing the same comparison as above, today's American man weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from the 1960s. "

BREAKING: The State of Alabama Just Officially Sent This Document to Barack Obama in Historic Move

BREAKING: The State of Alabama Just Officially Sent This Document to Barack Obama in Historic Move:

"Members of the Alabama House and Senate who supported the Convention of the States believed the federal government has not only created an enormous national debt that continues to hobble the American economy but has also “invaded the legitimate roles of the states through the manipulative power of federal mandates.”

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill wanted to make sure President Obama got the message. Not only did he send the application to the speaker of the U.S. Senate and the speaker and secretary of the U.S. House of Representatives but also directly to President Obama"

McDonald's hires 7,000 touch-screen cashiers

McDonald's hires 7,000 touch-screen cashiers - CNET:
""Welcome to McDonald's .
My name is HAL 9000. May I take your order?"
McDonalds recently went on a hiring binge in the U.S., adding 62,000 employees to its roster.
The hiring picture doesn't look quite so rosy for Europe, where the fast food chain is drafting 7,000 touch-screen kiosks to handle cashiering duties...."

History for June 16

History for June 16 - On-This-Day.com
Stan Laurel 1890, Erich Segal 1937, Billy 'Crash' Craddock 1939 - Country singer 


Roberto Duran 1951 - Boxer, Phil Mickelson 1970 - Golf player, Tupac Shakur 1971 - Rapper 


0455 - Rome was sacked by the Vandal army. 


1858 - In a speech in Springfield, IL, U.S. Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln said the slavery issue had to be resolved. He declared, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." 


1884 - At Coney Island, in Brooklyn, NY, the first roller coaster in America opened. 


1903 - Ford Motor Company was incorporated. 


1952 - "My Little Margie" debuted on CBS-TV. 


1961 - Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union while in Paris, traveling with the Leningrad Kirov Ballet. 


1963 - 26-year-old Valentina Tereshkova went into orbit aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft for three days. She was the first female space traveler. 


1980 - The movie "The Blues Brothers" opened in Chicago, IL. 


1996 - Russian voters had their first independent presidential election. Boris Yeltsin was the winner after a run-off. 


2000 - U.S. federal regulators approved the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE Corp. The merger created the nation's largest local phone company.