Sometimes I participate in a sort of email round robin discussion group with my brother and friends, and recently we were discussing what happened to the Sambo’s restaurant chain and that led to a discussion of the story “Little Black Sambo.”
Dennis Myers
As part of my job, I am on a lot of political party mailing lists, Republican, Democratic, American Independent, Libertarian.
It was 50 years ago this month that Barry Goldwater was nominated for president by the Republican Party. During this month, many competing conservative voices have been claiming him. But it’s hard to imagine him claiming some of them.
Earlier this month a book by former Republican U.S. Senate nominee Todd Akin of Missouri was released. Akin is the candidate who lost his 2012 Senate race after making the claim that the bodies of women have a chemical function that prevents rape victims from becoming pregnant.
For as long as I can remember, we’ve been doing stories in journalism about gas prices. They are nearly always the same, based on figures from a local or regional arm of the American Automobile Association, either viewing-with-alarm about high prices or viewing-with-pleasure about low prices.
Recently, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article about journalism in the Washington Times, a small newspaper published in D.C. by the Unification Church. The piece was written by a columnist named Ben Carson.
In June 1939, Miss Boulder Dam Bettina Norberg, who was a resident of Burlingame, Calif., and had never actually seen the structure whose name she bore, arrived in Nevada during her royal term to tour the dam. She made the trip so that she could describe it during her duties as Miss Boulder Dam.
Fifty years ago this month Congress enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Fifty years ago next year, Congress enacted Medicare. Both measures faced furious opposition and even violence over the bitter course of enactment.
In August 1990, I was covering a court case at the Douglas County Courthouse. Walking past the law library, I noticed the defendant and his lawyer through a glass wall. I swung my camera up and shot some footage of them and then continued on my way.
In 1918, U.S. Rep. Edwin Roberts of Nevada, who was the wartime Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, stayed in D.C. until just before the election. While he was working in the House, back in Nevada his opponents did their best to poison the atmosphere against him, portraying him as a traitor for voting against the declaration of war against Germany and against the draft. By the time Roberts arrived back in Nevada, the political climate was so toxic that in Reno’s Riverside Hotel, someone called him a coward and the result was a fistfight.
Last week in this space, I told a tale of a 2011 measure at the Nevada Legislature that would have switched the state to digital records storage to solve a problem that didn’t exist.
Eleven years ago at the Nevada Legislature, Assemblyman Bob Beers introduced legislation to start converting public records in Nevada to digital formats. His Assembly Bill 260 provided for “a medium for the storage of records electronically that requires a machine to access the information contained within the medium (including) without limitation, magnetic and optical media.” This kind of came out of nowhere.
Recently, I received a mailing from the Democratic National Committee. Tailored to each recipient, mine read “Obamacare is winning, Dennis” in the subject line.
The latest phase of the Republican National Committee’s search for a site for the party’s 2016 presidential nominating convention has come to an end in the past few days.
In October 1973, the Nixon administration was deep in scandals from its various forms of corruption. Vice President Spiro Agnew was under investigation for the bribes he had taken as Maryland governor and vice president. News of the probe had become public and Agnew did a slow burn about the publicity.