Posted on 03.23.18 by Danny Glover @ 5:58 pm
President Donald Trump reached his fiscal breaking point today when Congress sent him a $1.3 trillion spending bill only hours after passing it — and without lawmakers having had time to read the 2,200-page bill before they voted on it. Earlier in the day, Trump suggested by tweet that he might veto the bill. Then after reluctantly agreeing to sign it, he warned Congress, “I will never sign another bill like this again.” As a nation, we’ve been here before. Thirty years, ago, President Ronald Reagan threw down the budgetary gauntlet in his last State of the Union address to Congress. Trump’s confrontation came after two government shutdowns since January and the potential for a third. Reagan’s came during another era of broken budgets. Here’s an excerpt of his speech:
All that was the buildup to a climactic, theatrical moment, where the Great Communicator masterfully used props to drive home his point:
Watch the clip for the full effect: Filed under: Government and History and News & Politics and People and Video Comments: None |
Posted on 02.17.18 by Danny Glover @ 9:30 pm
“The Jug,” which is just a short drive from my hometown, is one of the many fascinating geographic landmarks that God carved into the great Mountain State. It has seen better days.
The Jug is also the name of a bar and grill located in a bend in the road at the point where the stream meanders. I don’t drink. But I love The Jug. It’s an iconic piece of Tyler County history. I took some aerial photos of it last fall. The owner, Gladys Fletcher, was there visiting with friends when I stopped. It turns out her daughter, Janie Spencer, was good friends with my Mom in high school. Mrs. Fletcher jumped at the chance to get some aerial photos of The Jug and asked all kinds of questions about my drone. She is in this photo. You can learn more about The Jug from the Tyler Star News. Filed under: Aerial Photography and History and West Virginia Comments: None |
Posted on 10.07.17 by Danny Glover @ 6:34 pm
Every now and then, journalists in the big city get the urge to head for the hills of West Virginia and hunt stereotypes. They always find their prey. Then they tell stories that misrepresent the reality of life for most West Virginians. You can call it Hatfields-and-McCoys journalism because the tradition is at least that old. The latest installment comes courtesy of The Washington Post, which sent a reporter hunting for hillbillies as part of the paper’s series on Social Security Disability Insurance.
What galls me are the predictably cliched portrayals of country folk, and they start with the opening anecdote about digging roots from the hills for money: “For the people of the hollow, opportunity begins where the road ends.” The implication is that the anecdote represents the norm — not just in that hollow but in all of Logan County and the entire state. Poverty reporter Terence McCoy made that point clear a few paragraphs later when he added, “In West Virginia, getting by means digging roots in the mountains.” No, it doesn’t! Maybe it’s OK to spout that kind of nonsense when writing the script for a reality television show like “Appalachian Outlaws,” but it’s bad journalism. I spent most of my first 24 years in the Mountain State and still visit regularly, and the only person I ever knew who dug roots was my paternal grandfather. And he did it as much for the thrill of hunting ginseng, a rare find in his part of the state, as for the money. Most West Virginians who fall on hard times don’t dig roots to “get by”; they turn to family for support. That’s a bit harder to do when multiple family members are on the government dole and/or are estranged from each other. The Post found a family like that not because it’s the norm but because it fit the false image that urban elites have of the state. That’s also why the Post repeatedly called attention to the fact that Donna Jean Dempsey, the main character in its tale, lives in a rundown shack without running water. It’s mentioned twice in the story and in two separate photo captions. The photos further reinforce the ridiculous perceptions that prim-and-proper journalists tend to have of West Virginians. The portraits include: a woman who wears the same filthy flannel and blue jeans for a week; a shirtless, bushy-bearded Bubba sitting on a porch; and a gaunt mountain man who relies on oxygen after five heart attacks and two strokes. Then there is the closing anecdote. Having survived to another SSI payday, Dempsey treated herself to three six-packs of beer at the local dollar stores. McCoy milked that development for all it was worth, characterizing it as “the best moment of the month” for Dempsey. “She lit a cigarette, stretched out her legs and opened a beer,” he wrote. And then a few sentences later: “She looked down at her beer and thumbed its lid. She took a sip. The moment could last a while longer, she decided.” Save for a trip to the still and Dempsey sipping from a moonshine jug, he couldn’t have asked for a better redneck ending to this chapter of yellow journalism about West Virginia. Filed under: Government and History and Human Interest and Media and People and Photography and Rednecks and West Virginia Comments: None |
Posted on 08.27.17 by Danny Glover @ 2:57 pm
West Virginia doesn’t have a “Confederate statue” inside the U.S. Capitol, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the reports of historically ignorant journalists in Washington. In their rush to pile onto the growing pile of maligned Confederate statues, the media recently set their sights on the National Statuary Hall Collection. What better place to prop up more straw men for knocking down than in a building with 100 famous statues? This particular angle to the debate over the Confederacy piqued my interest when I first saw it in The Washington Post because the disparity appeared egregiously unjust at face value. “The U.S. Capitol has at least three times as many statues of Confederate figures as it does of black people,” blared the ridiculously long but seemingly fact-based headline. The problem is that readers can’t take anything the media report these days at face value, especially when it involves an explosive topic like race. Many journalists are hard-wired to assume that racism exists whenever outrage about it grows loud enough. And they have no interest in digging deep into a story line if their research might undermine their assumptions. So it is with the attack on “Confederate statues.” The contempt implied in the loaded phrase may make sense when the focus is on prominent rebels like Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Vice President Alexander Stephens and Gen. Robert E. Lee. But as a native of West Virginia, I grew suspicious of the coverage when I saw in the Post a map of states with supposedly Confederate statues. A state riven by war I didn’t immediately reject the idea that elected leaders in West Virginia could have chosen to memorialize a Confederate with one of its two monuments at the Capitol. After all, 18,000 West Virginians fought for the Confederacy. West Virginia’s Capitol also is home to a statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. At the statue’s dedication in 1910, the United Daughters of the Confederacy called Jackson “the greatest and most illustrious man ever born on the soil of West Virginia, a typical soldier, patriot and Christian.” Union troops, on the other hand, weren’t recognized with the Mountaineer Soldier statue for two more years, and a prominent memorial to Lincoln didn’t appear until 1974. But it still seemed odd that a state formed in the Civil War would have recognized a Confederate leader in the U.S. Capitol. With that history in mind, I turned to a remarkable storehouse of information called the Internet for answers. Filed under: Government and History and Media and News & Politics and People and West Virginia Comments: 1 Comment |
Posted on 03.31.17 by Danny Glover @ 9:10 pm
Sometimes in my research for work, I stumble across some of the coolest bits of trivia in aviation history — like the fact that America once launched bears into space to test the short-lived B-58 Hustler, a nuclear bomber of the Cold War era. Even better is the related cover illustration I discovered in a 1962 issue of an Italian weekly newspaper. Filed under: Aviation and History and Media and Wildlife Comments: 1 Comment |
Posted on 01.17.17 by Danny Glover @ 8:13 pm
My wife and I watched the movie “Hidden Figures” over the weekend, and the best part was discovering that one of the three main characters, Katherine Johnson, is a West Virginia native. Here’s what WVU Magazine had to say in a story about Johnson and other “Barrier Breakers“:
I love learning the stories of famous West Virginians, especially those whose successes shatter the stereotypes of the great Mountain State as the land of hillbillies, rednecks and rubes. You can learn more about Johnson via NASA, which ended its story about her by saying, “Not bad, for a little girl from West Virginia.” Here’s what President Obama had to say about Johnson when awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, followed by the text of the award citation:
Filed under: Government and History and Movies and People and Technology and Video and West Virginia Comments: None |
Posted on 01.13.17 by Danny Glover @ 8:01 pm
Some Americans are so irrational that they fear fellow humans just because they work in blue-collar jobs or like the National Rifle Association. People who don’t think the way they do, embrace the causes they hold dear or even eat at the fancy restaurants they like are “white trash” worthy of scorn. USA Today columnist Glenn Reynolds shared a few recent anecdotes and quotes to illustrate this phobia, all of them in response to the election of Donald Trump as president:
As Reynolds notes, this kind of class bigotry isn’t new in America. It’s actually older than the country, as documented in great detail last year by historian Nancy Isenberg in the book “White Trash.” It is a dry read at times, but the stories in it are remarkable, in part because they stretch over hundreds of years. The current angst among America’s elite shows that nothing has changed. Ironically, this new wave of narrow-mindedness started with the political ascension of a billionaire celebrity named Trump. Filed under: Books and Culture and Hatin' On Rednecks and History and News & Politics and People and Rednecks Comments: None |
Posted on 12.09.16 by Danny Glover @ 6:27 pm
I spent many summer weeks of my youth at my grandfather’s property along Indian Creek in West Virginia, and as a teenager I hunted deer there occasionally. My wife and I have dreamed of owning it for two decades. As of today, and thanks to generous parents, in life and in death, we do — all 35 acres, a house that probably should be condemned and an old shed assessed at $190 belong to us now. I now jointly own outright a piece of “Almost Heaven,” a dream fulfilled for any West Virginian. It is a bittersweet moment, the transfer of the property coming as the result of my father’s death at age 78 in July. We’d rather have had him with us a while longer. But I smiled through the tears as we bought back into the family the half of the property that had gone to my uncle’s stepchildren after his death in 2010 and as my mother deeded her half to us. The place we always called “the farm” henceforth shall be known as Rougeneck. It’s the perfect melding of my wife’s and my Louisiana and West Virginia family histories. (For those who didn’t know, rouge is French for “red” — think of Louisiana’s capital city, Baton Rouge, which means “Red Stick” — so the name of the property is the enlightened way of saying “redneck.”) Here are a few pictures of the property and my family through the years: Filed under: Family and History and Hunting & Guns and Photography and Rednecks and West Virginia Comments: None |
Posted on 10.23.16 by Danny Glover @ 8:09 pm
Today’s find at an antique store in Frederick, Md. — a postcard of the West Virginia Capitol with a 1942 postmark from Parkersburg, W.Va. Based on the note, a Mrs. R.L. Kreyling was trading postcards with a Mr. John Howe of Irvington, N.J. She asked him to send her one of New Jersey’s Capitol because that was her favorite to collect. A side story: I searched the name R.L. Kreyling for Parkersburg and discovered that one Robert L. Kreyling received a patent for an invention that “relates to manufacture of combined paper board and silicate-clay adhesives.” He assigned the patent to Philadelphia Quartz Co. in 1946. Filed under: Advertising and History and Hobbies and West Virginia Comments: None |
Posted on 10.07.16 by Danny Glover @ 9:01 pm
Originally published on the FAA’s internal website and at Medium. A few eventful minutes at work on Jan. 15, 2009, left an indelible mark in New York air traffic controller Patrick Harten’s mind. He constantly replayed those terrifying moments in his head in the weeks that followed, and although they ultimately ended with the inspiring tale known as “The Miracle on the Hudson,” Harten kept imagining the tragedy that might have been. Now he is reliving those remarkable moments all over again — on the big screen via actor Patch Darragh, who plays Harten in the movie “Sully.” “I thought they did a great job capturing what it felt like to be there that day,” Harten said. “I’ve heard from some of the passengers, and they thought so, too. … Parts of it were tough to watch.” The movie is based on the actual events surrounding the forced emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River. It happened on a cold winter afternoon a few minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport in New York. A flock of Canada geese flew into the Airbus A320, taking out both engines at a low altitude. Capt. Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger chose to land on the water after concluding that he didn’t have enough time to return to LaGuardia or to land at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. Harten is the air traffic controller who talked to Sullenberger that day from the terminal radar approach control facility for several airports in the New York area. The Federal Aviation Administration’s TRACONs manage the airspace near airports, and New York TRACON is one of the busiest. Harten, who first publicly shared his account of the incident in dramatic testimony to Congress, started his shift in the LaGuardia sector of the TRACON minutes before Flight 1549 took off. But soon after he issued a routine heading for the flight, Sullenberger reported the bird strike and double-engine loss. He headed back toward LaGuardia for an emergency landing. Harten quickly arranged runway access there and communicated the details to Sullenberger. But 35 seconds after first reporting the emergency, the pilot uttered these ominous words: “We’re unable. We may end up in the Hudson.“ Sullenberger predicted that fate more definitively about a minute later, after Harten suggested a runway at Teterboro instead. “We can’t do it. … We’re gonna be in the Hudson.” “I’m sorry, say again,” Harten responded. He then lost radar contact with Flight 1549. “I thought I was part of one of the worst aviation incidents in modern history at the time,” Harten recounted. He imagined the plane clipping a wing on the water, cartwheeling and breaking into pieces. Even if it landed smoothly, he figured most people on board would drown or succumb to hypothermia. “I was expecting there to maybe be a handful of survivors.” Read the rest of the story at Medium. Filed under: Aviation and Government and History and Movies and News & Politics and People and Video Comments: None |
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