Volume 267 | No. 18

Mon, May 22

2022—Southern Baptists reveal their leaders have been conspiring for years to protect hundreds of sex abusers. 2004—Portsmouth’s Leftist Marching Band debuts in Market Square. 1980—Jimmy Carter gives South Korean dictator Chun Doo Hwan the OK: use military force against civilians to “restore order” in Gwangju. 1977—Gun rights fanatic Harlon Carter takes over the NRA—46 years after murdering Ramón Casiano, 15. 1968—Scorpion, its nuclear torpedos, and 99 crewmen are lost at sea. 1962—Thomas G. Doty buys dynamite and flight insurance, then boards Flight 11, which explodes. Instead of $300K, his wife gets a $3.00 refund. 1949—Ex-Defense Secretary James Forrestal ambiguously defenestrates from a 16th floor hospital …

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The Rule of the Gun

Dear Editor: One of the more common responses of gun rights supporters, besides offering “thoughts and prayers” after another mass shooting, is that “this is the price of freedom.” According to a 2019 report by the Pew Research Center there were 96 democracies in the world including the United States. The only nation among this group where an epidemic of gun violence is the “Price of Freedom” is the United States. There have been over 200 mass shootings in the United States this year, with over 250 deaths and counting. (ABC News, May 2, 2023) This begs the question, why are other countries able to …

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Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

By W.D. Ehrhart So now we find out that Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow paid the private school tuition of a boy Clarence Thomas and his wife were raising “as a son.” We can add this to Thomas selling his mother’s home to Crow, who promptly sank thousands of dollars into the house to refurbish it, and then let Thomas’s mother live there rent-free. Oh, and there are the decades of luxury vacations, luxury cruises, and luxury private jet travel, courtesy of Harlan Crow. None of this was, as required by law, reported by Thomas. And then there’s his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a stridently vocal …

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Sun, May 21

2016—In Houston, hundreds rally to support Islam. Hundreds more rally, armed, to oppose it. All have been duped by a Russian troll farm. 2001—GAO refutes the GOP: Dems didn’t vandalize the White House. 1981—The Senate OKs $20 billion to resume full-scale production of nerve gas and other chemical weapons. 1980—In Gwangju, Korea, students using weapons looted from armories drive troops from downtown. 1975—Responding to a FOIA request, the CIA debuts its “neither confirm nor deny” non-response. 1968—Students protest the Vietnam War in West Berlin, Paris, Peking, Berkeley, and New York. 1952—Blacklisted actor John Garfield dies of a heart attack at 39. 1946—A screwdriver slips; the …

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The Rebel Girl Still Frightens Reactionaries—
Even From the Grave

On May 5th we published something quite surprising. A news release from the New Hampshire Historical Marker Program said, “Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a well-known labor, women’s rights and civil liberties activist,” had finally been honored by an historic marker “in downtown Concord, near the site of her birthplace.” Less surprisingly, now it’s gone. It was removed on Monday, in a dubious and irregular procedure, after a panic attack among Republicans in high places. Why? Because: “One gets a sense of the energy and fire of some of those turn-of-the-century radicals,” Howard Zinn wrote in A People’s History of the United States, “by looking at the …

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