Long before the fiscal crisis leading to Chapter 11 bankruptcy, however, ultimate control of the company and its profit left Jackson County. Transition to outside ownership began under John H.R. Holmes, son of the company's namesake Harry Holmes.
Ashland resident John Fox III, vice president of strategic planning when he left the company in 1987, said there was some angst when John Holmes relinquished controlling interest to R.J. Reynolds Development Corp. in a $74.1 million leveraged buyout in1986. Holmes became the company's president in 1968 and took the company public in 1976. Two years later, he and other veteran leaders were gone and RJR Nabisco had sold the company to Shaklee Corp. for $123 million.
"Everyone knows what generally happens after a merger," Fox said. "The new owner puts its own people in and those who were there are winnowed out. I don't think anybody resented Holmes selling, but there was some trepidation about what the new guys were going to do."
People began to arrive in Great Falls searching for work. He recalled transplants from North Dakota telling tales of desperate families pulling weeds from the ground and cooking them up for food.
Breuning's seniority paid off again — he held onto his job. But he and his wife never built their house. They sold the lot for $25, making a tidy $10 profit. It turned out to be the only time Breuning ever owned property — he was renter for the rest of his life.
Despite the hard times of the decade, he said what he considered the nation's greatest achievement came in 1935, when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law as part of his New Deal.
"I think when Roosevelt created Social Security, he probably did the best thing for people," Breuning said. "You hear so much about throwing Social Security out. Don't look for it. Hang on to your hat. It'll never go away."
Von Anhalt is reportedly working with Dr. Mark Surry of the Southern California Reproductive Center in Beverly Hills. He made a sperm donation yesterday and told TMZ that he's spending close to $100,000 to go through the surrogate process.
"It was always my wife's dream for us to have a child ... and even though we won't be using any of her eggs, she would be thrilled to know I'm going through with this," Von Anhalt told TMZ. "I am so excited!! I hope Zsa Zsa is going to hang around for awhile. I want her to see and hold the baby's hand. She will be a mother again at 95!! It was her wish to have a boy
Taken together, Arthur Marx’s two books about his father offered a bittersweet picture of life in the Marx home. He described himself as desperate both to escape from his father’s shadow and to please him, an impossible task. The comic genius who kept millions in stitches was, in his private life, miserly and emotionally distant.
“No matter how much he loves you, he’ll rarely stick up for you,” Mr. Marx wrote in “Son of Groucho.” “He’ll make some sort of wisecrack instead to keep from getting involved. It’s a form of cowardice that can be more frustrating than his monetary habits.”
When “Life With Groucho,” which was much sunnier than the sequel, was being serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, Groucho denounced it as “scurrilous” and threatened legal action unless substantial changes were made.
Arthur sent him a phony set of galley proofs with the requested changes but had the book published as written. Groucho never brought the matter up again.
During a 40-minute speech, she talked of her love for the outdoors and the “delicate balance” between hunting and fishing and the outdoors.
“... I personally understand the importance of protecting the environment,” she said.
Hunting and fishing, Palin said, are part of America’s “heritage” and the country’s “exceptionalism.”
“Don’t retreat, stand tall,” Palin told the crowd as she emphasized the importance of “responsible conservation.”
Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions. And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
Conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds first used the term this week in the context of the Giffords shooting.
"So as the usual talking heads begin their 'have you no decency?' routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?" he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "The Arizona tragedy and the politics of blood libel."
The Saints are Super Bowl champions and will bring the title back to New Orleans, which is surely ready for a raucous celebration. Tracy Porter’s 74-yard interception return for a touchdown sealed the victory for the Saints, but Drew Brees was the star throughout. He finished 32 of 39 passing for 288 yards, 2 touchdowns and no interceptions. The 32 completions ties a Super Bowl record held by Tom Brady.
The New Orleans Saints have won Super Bowl XLIV.
They beat the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 here at Sun Life Stadium in South Florida.
Saints quarterback Drew Brees was 32-o-39 for 288 yards and two touchdowns.
But it was the big 75-yard interception return for a touchdown by cornerback Tracy Porter that sealed the deal.
"I studied and knew their tendencies," Porter said. "I just jumped around and the ball went right into my hands."
Porter's teammate Darren Sharper, who was on the Green Bay Packers as a rookie when they lost to Denver, said this was a game that nobody had faith in the team except for the team.
"Man this is unbelievable," Sharper said. "I don't know of anyone who gave us a chance, but when you get here, anyone can win."
Michelle Grant surprised her husband, Daniel, with a trip to Reno from Folsom, Calif., late Tuesday night to get the book signed for his birthday.
“I told him to get the day off, but he didn’t know where we were going until last night,” said Michelle Grant, who likes Palin because “she is who she is.”
Daniel Grant said the former Alaska governor is “a true conservative.”
“I hope she’ll do like Reagan and lead the Republican Party back to its roots,” he said.
The tone for all this behavior is always set somewhere way up the corporate totem pole, and it always reflects some dreary combination of simple business considerations (i.e. what’s the best story and sells the most ads) and internalized political calculus (i.e. who is a “legitimate” candidate and who is an “insurgent” or a “second-tier” hopeful). It’s not that the reporters are making this judgment themselves, it’s that they have to listen to what the apparatus Up There is saying all day long — not just their bosses but the think-tank talking heads they interview for comments, the party insiders who buy them beers at night, the pollsters and so on.
And when all these people start getting in their ears about this or that guy doesn’t have “winnability,” or doesn’t have enough money to run, or has negatives that are insurmountable, all that thinking inevitably bleeds into the coverage. It’s not that the reporters are “biased.” They just don’t have the stones, for the most part, to ignore all the verbal and non-verbal cues they get from authority figures about who is “legitimate” and who isn’t.
Once the signal comes down that this or that politician doesn’t have the backing of anyone who matters, that’s when the knives really come out. When a politician has powerful allies and powerful friends, you won’t see reporters brazenly kicking him in the crotch the way they did to Dean and they’re doing now to Sarah Palin. The only time they do this is when they know there won’t be consequences, meaning when the politician’s only supporters are non-entities (read: voters), as in the case of Ron Paul or Kucinich. Like America in general, the press corps never attacks any enemy that can fight back...
Moderate Republicans—yes, they are not yet extinct, though most are in hiding—scoff at Sarah Palin and wish she would go away. But she's not going away. This week she's going on-air with Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey to flog her new book, Going Rogue: An American Life, and to promote her brand of in-your-face, power-to-the-people conservatism. President Obama is no doubt happy to have her out there on full display. He cannot help but relish the prospect, no longer farfetched, that the Republicans will nominate Palin to oppose his reelection in 2012. A student of history, Obama could be thinking of his predecessor in presidential coolness, John F. Kennedy. In 1963 Kennedy's advisers counseled against giving Sen. Barry Goldwater national stature by posing with the GOP's conservative insurgent at a White House photo op. "What are you giving that SOB all that publicity for?" demanded White House aide Kenny O'Donnell. "Leave him alone," JFK replied. "He's mine."
Obama knows the long odds against a right-wing populist winning the presidency, no matter how good she looks in a skirt (or running clothes), brandishing a gun. He shouldn't be too cocky, however, because the death of the center is ultimately a problem for him and the whole country. If the Palinistas seize the GOP, they probably cannot take the White House. But their brand of no-prisoners partisanship sure can tie up Congress.
In modern memory, Capitol Hill has never been so polarized. With conservatives refusing to reach across the aisle, it will be hard to get even the most modest health-insurance reform through the U.S. Senate, where a 41-vote minority can block legislation. Without bipartisanship, forget about reducing the deficit or doing anything meaningful on the environment, immigration, or tax reform.
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s. Francis Bellamy was a progressive Baptist minister and a Christian socialist who composed the pledge for the 400-year Columbus anniversary in 1892 and published it in a youth magazine. His cousin Edward Bellamy, a socialist from Massachusetts (Glenn Beck, are you taking notes?), was the author of the 1888 bestselling utopian novel "Looking Backward: 2007-1887," which described a collectivist America in 2007 in which everyone is drafted in an "industrial army" and dines in public kitchens. (Instead of an industrial army, the United States in 2007 had a reserve army of the unemployed and working poor, and instead of public kitchens we had Starbucks.)
The Bellamys, like many at the time, were inspired by the integral nationalist and statist ideals that were percolating in Europe. From the 1890s until the 1940s, American schoolchildren often accompanied recitation of the pledge with "the Bellamy salute," a stiff-armed salute of the ancient Roman kind that was indistinguishable from the later fascist and Nazi salutes. Heil Amerika! It was Franklin Roosevelt who suggested replacing the salute with a hand over the heart.
Think the worst is over? Wrong. Conditions in the U.S. labor markets are awful and worsening. While the official unemployment rate is already 10.2% and another 200,000 jobs were lost in October, when you include discouraged workers and partially employed workers the figure is a whopping 17.5%.
While losing 200,000 jobs per month is better than the 700,000 jobs lost in January, current job losses still average more than the per month rate of 150,000 during the last recession.
Also, remember: The last recession ended in November 2001, but job losses continued for more than a year and half until June of 2003; ditto for the 1990-91 recession.
So we can expect that job losses will continue until the end of 2010 at the earliest. In other words, if you are unemployed and looking for work and just waiting for the economy to turn the corner, you had better hunker down. All the economic numbers suggest this will take a while. The jobs just are not coming back.
An independent investigator has found evidence that Gov. Sarah Palin may have violated ethics laws by accepting private donations to pay her legal debts, in the latest legal distraction for the former vice presidential candidate as she prepares to leave office this week.
The cultural left is sometimes as prone to dimwit populism as the right. Witness Al Sharpton's moving an audience to tears by assuring Michael Jackson's children that he wasn't "strange," but his critics were. Sleep-overs with other people's children? Compulsive plastic surgery? Gobbling pills? Mainlining IV drugs? Sorry, reverend, strange doesn't begin to describe the poor soul. But then, nobody ever proposed running Jackson for national office.
Here are a few pictures I took at Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon today, including a couple of them from the historic lodge:
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