As you would expect, Chip Cronkite spoke at the memorial service for his late father, Walter.
But would you expect Chip to direct a documentary about comic book creators?
The Legends Behind the Comic Books Trailer from Stonebridge Productions on Vimeo.
According to Fox News, liberal Holland is out of control and drug addicts have run amok, particularly in Amsterdam. One resident of the capital city of the Netherlands begs to differ.
But despite appearances, is Amsterdam in fact a cesspool of decadence and despair? Maybe Karen Damen knows…
The 911 call to the Cambridge, MA Police makes it clear that the caller was acting at the request of someone else, and she said nothing at all about race until she was asked by the police dispatcher. It sounds as though the dispatcher said, “Are they White, Black or Hispanic?” Listen starting at 2:00 into the audio clip.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/911call.mp3]This gives her a lot of credibility when she says that she did not speak with Sergeant Crowley at the scene, contrary to his filed report.
And the recording of Crowley’s radio calls does nothing to substantiate his claim that Professor Gates was loud and abusive.
The big loser in all of this is Obama. He’s lost the backing of cops nationwide, and he’s handed the Right the ammo they needed to question who Sonia Sotomayor will empathize with once she’s seated on the Supreme Court.
I would suppose that the first thought for some Americans when hearing “Gates” and “Harvard” in the same breath would be to think, “Didn’t Bill Gates drop out of Harvard?” But the talk of the town today is the imbroglio surrounding the arrest last week of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The disorderly conduct charge was quickly dropped. The arrest report is available at The Smoking Gun.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0723092gates1.html
This story is such a big deal here in greater Boston that I’ll weigh in with a few points.
The talk show “On Point” on Boston’s NPR station WBUR has a must-hear hour on Goldman Sachs & Co.. The springboard is investigative reporter Matt Taibbi’s exposé, “The Great American Bubble Machine.”
[audio:http://www.bu.edu/wbur/storage/2009/07/onpoint_0721_1.mp3]
(Note: I’m hot-linking this audio from ‘BUR, and it isn’t on my server, so it may disappear.)
Taibbi rips apart the understandably defensive, but ludicrous, arguments put forth by Goldman Sachs consultant Charles Ellis, who claims to be outraged by the excesses of the market — yet he insists the blame lies with government regulators and complicit consumers, but not the banks. I feel that Ellis and his ilk deserve to be treated with ridicule, condescension and derision.
Taibbi also tears into President Obama, for paying lip-service to an end of lobbyist influence and bonus-driven business as usual on Wall Street. I’m becoming increasingly disappointed with Obama for what he isn’t doing, in contrast to Bush, who I hated for what he was doing.
The Old Guard has now truly come to an end. As Bismo said tonight, it’s perhaps fitting that Walter Cronkite passed away during the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s flight to the Moon. This video clip is from a 2007 CBS special celebrating Cronkite’s 90th birthday. The program was produced by Nancy Kramer, who Carol and I helped last year with some background material for an installment of 48 Hours|Mystery.
I also agreed with Bismo when he said that he never warmed up to Huntley and Brinkley as TV news anchormen. Many adults apparently preferred the team, but they were much too severe to appeal to kids. Cronkite was The Man. He narrated the audio book of his autobiography, “A Reporter’s Life”, and I listened to it twice, all the way through. It was abridged from his book, but I trusted Walter to leave in all the good stuff.
Cronkite is indelibly associated with not only NASA in the 60’s, but his live coverage of the assasination of JFK, and his landmark editorial asserting that the Vietnam War, in his opinion, could not be won. Cronkite’s credibility and judgment were held in such high esteem that LBJ realized his Presidency was doomed and he declined to seek re-election.
Another noteworthy accomplishment of Cronkite’s was that he helped introduce The Beatles to America. Here is a video clip from Nancy Kramer’s TV special that I first posted over a year ago.
© 2007 CBS Worldwide Inc.
[flv:/Video/2008/FEB/CronkiteBeatles.flv 440 330]
Lastly, I would like to point out that Walter Cronkite was a big fan of the comic strip Peanuts, and he wrote the introduction to volume 2 of The Complete Peanuts. Walter cried on air when John Kennedy died, he cried on camera again when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, he denounced the Vietnam War, he has a Beatles connection, and he loved Charlie Brown and Snoopy. I loved the man and everything he stood for.
