July 21st ought to be a national holiday

On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority — which, until then, it held absolutely — to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.

Excerpt from Fred Kaplan, “The Day Obscenity Became Art” – NYTimes.com.

A holiday not because of Lawrence’s book, but to celebrate the expansion of freedom this decision represented.

While it lasts.

The White House’s wrong and gutless reaction

. . . to the whole Shirley Sherrod business just makes me sick.

(A few months ago Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, gave a speech at an NAACP dinner. She told a story about not helping a white farmer as much as she should have 24 years ago — and went on to tell how she realized quickly that was wrong. She did help, so much so that Sherrod and the farmer even became friends, confirmed by the farmer’s wife who told CNN, “She helped us save our farm by getting in there and doing everything she could do.” The point of Sherrod’s story at the dinner had been that people needed to look beyond race. That was what she had learned 24 years ago.

But a right-wing zealot edited the video of Sherrod’s speech, eliminating the whole point of her story. There was an outcry that she was a racist. The White House reacted to the outcry by forcing her out of her job.)

UPDATE: Apparently USDA Secretary Vilsack is taking credit for firing Sherrod. The White House should tell him to correct the decision. They aren’t reacting to the event, which was positive. They are reacting to the shameful, lying, agenda-driven, right wing, out-of context depiction of the event.

Best line of the day

This is why I have always loved Toy Story II more than Toy Story I. The first Toy Story was brilliant and revolutionary and a landmark — no one had ever done a computer animated movie like it before. But the second Toy Story was true greatness … it was a little bit funnier, a little bit more touching (Jessie’s song is one of the great moments in recent movie history), and — more than anything — it was second. The first is inspiration. The second belongs to the power of resolve. Great second albums, great second seasons, great second books just impress me more than debuts.

Joe Posnanski

From a fine tribute to Dean Smith.

Maybe I should just have a best Posnanski, best Taibbi, best Pierce, etc., line of the day.

Anne Marbury Hutchinson

Anne Marbury was baptized on this date in 1591. She married Wiiliam Hutchinson when she was 21, and they had 15 children. The family emigrated to Massachusetts in 1634.

Serving as a skilled herbalist and midwife in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Hutchinson began meeting with other women for prayer and religious discussion. Her charisma and intelligence soon also drew men, including ministers and magistrates, to her gatherings, where she developed an emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God, stressing personal revelation over institutionalized observances and absolute reliance on God’s grace rather than on good works as the means to salvation. Hutchinson’s views challenged religious orthodoxy, while her growing power as a female spiritual leader threatened established gender roles.

Called for a civil trial before the General Court of Massachusetts in November 1637, Hutchinson ably defended herself against charges that she had defamed the colony’s ministers and as a woman had dared to teach men. Her extensive knowledge of Scripture, her eloquence, and her intelligence allowed Hutchinson to debate with more skill than her accusers. Yet because Hutchinson claimed direct revelation from God and argued that “laws, commands, rules, and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway,” she was convicted and banished from the colony, a sentence confirmed along with formal excommunication in the ecclesiastical trial that followed.

Library of Congress

Anne Marbury Hutchinson and five of her six children living with her were killed by Siwanoy Indians in New Netherlands (in what is now Pelham Bay Park, The Bronx, New York City) in 1643.

Among her descendants are Franklin Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Stephen A. Douglas and Mitt Romney.

Redux post of the day

From one year ago today.

Stupid is as stupid does

I had my ID checked at the ball game the other night to buy a watered-down beer. OK, I’m used to this stupidity by now, checking the ID of obvious AARP members.

But this a-hole vendor insisted I take my license out of the plastic. He gave it a once over, made sure the hologram was there, and so on. Like I was getting on a f***ing airplane bound for Syria. (I will remind you that it became legal for me to buy alcoholic beverages 43 years ago.)

So I took the beer and gave it to a teenager in the crowd.

Sheep in the wolf’s lair — but brave sheep

Sixty-six years ago today, German military officers failed in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase. Four were killed but Hitler, though wounded, was saved by the heavy wooden table on which he was reviewing maps. This from the BBC —

Adolf Hitler has escaped death after a bomb exploded at 1242 local time at his headquarters in Rastenberg, East Prussia.

The German News Agency broke the news from Hitler’s headquarters, known as the “wolf’s lair”, his command post for the Eastern Front.

A senior officer, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, has been blamed for planting the bomb at a meeting at which Hitler and other senior members of the General Staff were present.

Hitler has sustained minor burns and concussion but, according to the news agency, managed to keep his appointment with Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

*****

Von Stauffenberg was arrested the same day and shot. The rest of the conspirators were tried and hanged or offered the chance to commit suicide.

Eight of those executed were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks and their executions filmed and shown to senior members of the Nazi Party and the armed forces.

Sitting Bull surrenders

The Lakota Tatanka-Iyotanka (Sitting Bull) surrendered to the U.S. Army on this date 129 years ago (1881).

This from a fine, brief biographical essay at AmericanHeritage.com:

On the morning of July 20, in front of American and Canadian soldiers and a Minnesota newspaperman, Sitting Bull had his eight-year-old son, Crow Foot, hand [Major] Brotherton his Winchester rifle. “I surrender this rifle to you through my young son,” said the chief, “whom I [thereby] desire to teach . . . that he has become a friend of the Americans. . . . I wish it to be remembered that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle. This boy has given it to you, and he now wants to know how he is going to make a living.”

Fly Me to the Moon

And let me play among the stars.

It was 41 years ago this evening (U.S. time) that man first walked on the moon, an event that I believe centuries from now will rank as the most historic happening in our lifetimes.

I can remember watching the TV that evening thinking how cool it would be if some creature came crawling over the horizon into the field of view of the live camera. That was crazy, but at the time who really knew?

The New York Times has its next day coverage on-line, including the historic front page.

As Walter Cronkite said that afternoon when the lunar modular set down, “Oh, boy.” It was exciting in a way that you can’t explain now.

 Man on Moon

Conversationalist

Another fascinating blog post from Scott Adams. It includes this:

You might think that everyone on earth understands what a conversation is and how to engage in one. My observation is that no more than a quarter of the population has that understanding. . . .

Prior to the Dale Carnegie course I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were. To me, listening was the same thing as being bored.

Best line of the day

Well, I think the first thing is, you don’t feel like you’re thirty-five years old. You just don’t, and as that number gets higher each year you get more confused as to why you still feel like you’re in your late twenties. This is called senility, and it means that eventually you’re going to end up in a bed where a nurse has to carry out your pee in a plastic bowl while you scream, “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SOUL ASYLUM?”

dooce®

July 19th

George McGovern, a very good man if a very poor presidential candidate, is 88 today.

Florencia Bisenta de Casillas Martinez Cardona was born in El Paso 69 years ago today. We know her as Vikki Carr. She had three top 40 hits, including “It Must Be Him,” which topped at number 3 in 1966.

Howard Schultz, the developer of Starbucks, is 57 today.

Anthony Edwards, “Goose,” is 48 today.

The artist Edgar Degas was born in Paris on this date in 1834. He is especially identified with dance as a subject. Degas is considered an Impressionist, even a founder of the school, but he rejected the term. That’s Degas’s L’Absinthe.

Sam Colt was born on this date in 1814.

Sam Colt’s success story began with the issuance of a U.S. patent in 1836 for the Colt firearm equipped with a revolving cylinder containing five or six bullets. Colt’s revolver provided its user with greatly increased firepower. Prior to his invention, only one- and two-barrel flintlock pistols were available. In the 163 years that have followed, more than 30 million revolvers, pistols, and rifles bearing the Colt name have been produced, almost all of them in plants located in the Hartford, Connecticut, area. The Colt revolving-cylinder concept is said to have occurred to Sam Colt while serving as a seaman aboard the sailing ship Corvo. There he observed a similar principle in the workings of the ship’s capstan. During his leisure hours, Sam carved a wooden representation of his idea. The principle was remarkable in its simplicity and its applicability to both longarms and sidearms.

Colt History

Best line of the day

If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media — as I am — what’s most striking aren’t the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain.  One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all.

Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Best question of the day

That’s really the only relevant question:  how much longer will Americans sit by passively and watch as a tiny elite become more bloated, more powerful, greedier, more corrupt and more unaccountable — as the little economic security, privacy and freedom most citizens possess vanish further still?  How long can this be sustained, where more and more money is poured into Endless War, a military that almost spends more than the rest of the world combined, where close to 50% of all U.S. tax revenue goes to military and intelligence spending, where the rich-poor gap grows seemingly without end, and the very people who virtually destroyed the world economy wallow in greater rewards than ever, all while the public infrastructure (both figuratively and literally) crumbles and the ruling class is openly collaborating on a bipartisan, public-private basis even to cut Social Security benefits?

Glenn Greenwald

Answer: Too long.

High Ground Maneuver

Scott Adams of Dilbert takes a fascinating look at Apple’s reaction to the iPhone 4 problem. An excerpt:

I’m a student of how language influences people. Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words: “We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.”

Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.