Archive for September 23rd, 2008
September 23rd, 2008
Joe Biden, the foot-in-mouth vice presidential nominee for the Democrats, has been a one-man faux-pas machine throuhgout much of his career, so it’s odd that Barry O picked him for the veep spot. The latest, according to Ben Smith in Politico,
Here’s the post directly from Politico:
Joe Biden’s denunciation of his own campaign’s ad to Katie Couric got so much attention last night that another odd note in the interview slipped by.
He was speaking about the role of the White House in a financial crisis.
“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed,” Biden told Couric. “He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
As Reason’s Jesse Walker footnotes it: “And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, ‘Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?’”
OK, Chuck here again. For all of you history challenged blog readers, I’ll explain. Republican Herbert Hoover was president when the stock market crashed in October 1929. Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and took over in April 1933.
At that time, the only television sets that existed were in laboratories. Read a short history of TV here  .
The first U.S. license for a television station was issued in 1928 by the FCC to (W3XK) to Charles Jenkins. But only fellow scientists and inventors would have been able to watch. Television didn’t become commonplace until the late 1940s in big cities, and the mid-1950s in smaller cities like Rockford.
What Biden was talking about was Roosevelt’s practice during the 1930s and 1940s of talking directly to Americans in their homes, on the RADIO. They were called “fireside chats.”
September 23rd, 2008
My Tuesday column talks about the Rockford Park District’s grand opening of Southwest Park, and asks the park board to buy more land for parks and open space. Because it’s difficult to find my column on our website, rrstar.com, (you have to cliick on News, then News Columnists, to find me) I’m also putting it on the blog. Read it by clicking here
September 23rd, 2008
Poor old Ron Wait. The long-time state represenative who lives in Belvidere seems to attract awfully nasty advertising from his occasional opponents.
When Republican Wait first ran for the office against the now-deceased fellow Republican Jim Kelley, an appointed incumbent, Kelley ran a radio commercial against Wait in the GOP primary that was so ridiculous in its negativism it was a stereotype of the whole genre. I can still remember it: “He’s a teacher who doesn’t teach, a farmer who doesn’t farm, a lawyer who doesn’t practice law, and he lives in a big house with his mommy.” The ad worked, but not the way Kelley intended — Wait won.
When Democrat Barb Giolitto challenged Wait many years later, the Dems ran an add that morphed Wait into a “fat cat.” Giliotto beat Wait that year, but two years later he came back to defeat her.
This year, Democrats think they have a chance to beat Wait once again, with Rockford lawyer Greg Tuite.
And so state Dems are pouring money from party coffers into the race, mailing oversize postcards that portray Wait as a friend of sex offenders, because in 2005 Wait posted $500 bail for a friend’s son who had been jailed on a sex-crime charge against a minor. The person was later convicted and is serving a five year sentence.
Republicans have hit back with a TV ad, which has people saying they’re tired of Tuite’s negative campaigning.
But Capitol Fax reports that the Wait TV ad takes an “unusual” turn:
“With his campaign failing, Greg Tuite has resorted to negative attacks that have been called misleading, full of half truths and false,” the ad asserts. The source cited in the ad is the Illinois Review, a partisan Republican blog.
That’s not the problem, however. The problem is that the Illinois Review post cited is simply a verbatim reprint of a Ron Wait campaign press release.”
Thanks to Cap Fax for pinning the tail on the elephant.
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