FERGUSON AUDIO BOMB: ‘If the FBI were to come out of its investigation with the conclusion that this recording is legitimate, it would likely change the case considerably’
Posted: August 26, 2014 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, U.S. News | Tags: Brown, CNN, Don Lemon, Forensic pathology, Johnson, Michael Brown, Police officer, Wilson 1 CommentIf the Michael Brown Audio Is Real, It May Corroborate Piaget Cranshaw’s Account
Charles C. W. Cooke, The Corner:
…Given how close the first and second shots on the recording are (less than a second), it seems unlikely that Brown would have had enough time to have escaped the clutches of a police officer and run past three cars before the second shot was fired. Moreover, if the “several more shots” of Johnson’s recollection represent the second fusillade, what happened to the remaining four shots from the first barrage? Again, I suppose it is possible that the recording missed the initial couple of shots. But had a police officer fired so many rounds from such short range and paused half way through, I’d expect that Johnson would have said so…(read more)
HotAir‘s Allapundit:
…If it’s authentic, it tells us how many shots were fired. The man’s attorney tells Don Lemon she hears 11 shots. I hear 10. A forensic examiner who listened to the tape told CNN he heard“at least 10,” six shots followed by a pause followed by four more. The autopsy report from the family’s forensic pathologist claims Brown was hit at least six times, all from the front. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] The Great Society’s Triumph and Tragedy
Posted: May 16, 2014 Filed under: Economics, Health and Social Issues, Politics, White House | Tags: Great Society, Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Ronald Reagan, United States, University of Michigan 3 CommentsThe Great Society was launched on May 22, 1964, during Lyndon Baines Johnson‘s address at the University of Michigan. The speech was a milestone in American history, heralding fundamental changes that advanced racial equality while also decisively expanding the scale and scope of government. It is no exaggeration to say that the Great Society created the foundation for America’s modern welfare state. Half a century later, has America achieved Johnson’s vision?
The Great Society at Fifty
Posted: May 9, 2014 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, History, Politics | Tags: Great Society, Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Nicholas Eberstadt, Ronald Reagan, United States, University of Michigan, Weekly Standard Leave a comment
What LBJ wrought
For The Weekly Standard, Nicholas Eberstadt writes: May 22, 2014, marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” address, delivered at the spring commencement for the University of Michigan.
[Below: On Jan. 4, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson outlined his goals for a Great Society in his State of the Union. You can watch and read his entire speech at millercenter.org]
That speech remains the most ambitious call to date by any president (our current commander in chief included) to use the awesome powers of the American state to effect a far-reaching transformation of the society that state was established to serve. It also stands as the high-water mark for Washington’s confidence in the broad meliorative properties of government social policy, scientifically applied.
No less important, the Great Society pledge, and the fruit this would ultimately bear, profoundly recast the common understanding of the ends of governance in our country. The address heralded fundamental changes—some then already underway, others still only being envisioned—that would decisively expand the scale and scope of government in American life and greatly alter the relationship between that same government and the governed in our country today.
In his oration, LBJ offered a grand vision of what an American welfare state—big, generous, and interventionist—might accomplish. Difficult as this may be for most citizens now alive to recall, the United States in the early 1960s was not yet a modern welfare state: Our only nationwide social program in those days was the Social Security system, which provided benefits for workers’ retirement and disability and for orphaned or abandoned children of workers. Johnson had gradually been unveiling this vision, starting with his declaration of a “War on Poverty” in his first State of the Union months earlier in 1964, just weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In LBJ’s words, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that,” he said, “is just the beginning.”
The Great Society proposed to reach even further: to bring about wholesale renewal of our cities, beautification of our natural surroundings, vitalization of our educational system. All this, and much more—and the solutions to the many obstacles encountered in this great endeavor, we were told, would assuredly be found, since this undertaking would “assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.”
Memorably, Johnson insisted that the constraints on achieving the goals he outlined were not availability of the national wealth necessary for the task or the uncertainties inherent in such complex human enterprises, but instead simply our country’s resolve—whether we as a polity possessed sufficient “wisdom” to embark on the venture.
Read the rest of this entry »
LBJ a Liberal Hero? In Your Dreams, Pal
Posted: April 13, 2014 Filed under: History, Politics | Tags: 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Michael Kazin, United States, Voting Rights Act 1 Comment
Michael Kazin writes: From 1964 to 1968, close to 34,000 Americans died in South Vietnam. We will never know how many Vietnamese women, men, and children perished during those years, but the total, according to most estimates, was at least one million. Among the dead were tens of thousands of civilians—blown apart by explosives dropped from planes, burned to death by napalm, or gunned down by U.S. troops whose commanders told them that, in a village considered loyal to the Vietcong, they should “kill anything that we see and anything that moved.” Their commander-in-chief was Lyndon Baines Johnson.
This past week, on the golden anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, four of LBJ’s successors went to his library in Texas to praise his character and his deeds. George W. Bush lauded him for turning “a nation’s grief to a great national purpose.” Jimmy Carter chided his fellow 
Democrats for not emulating Johnson’s determination to fight for racial equality. Barack Obama remarked that LBJ’s “hunger” for power “was harnessed and redeemed by a deeper understanding of the human condition, by a sympathy for the underdog, for the downtrodden, for the outcast.” Bill Clinton reflected that Johnson “saw limitless possibilities in the lives of other poor people like him who just happened to have a different color skin.”
Some liberal journalists echoed the chief executives, past and present. LBJ, wrote my friend E.J. Dionne, presided over “a consensual period when a large and confident majority believed that national action could expand opportunities and alleviate needless suffering. The earthily practical Johnson showed that finding realistic ways of creating a better world is what Americans are supposed to do.” Not a word about those countless people in Southeast Asia whose lives reached their unnatural limits when they encountered an American infantryman with an M-16 or a bomb dropped from a B-52.
Of course, to remember what the United States, during LBJ’s tenure, did to Vietnam and to the young Americans who served there does not cancel out his domestic achievements. But to portray him solely as a paragon of empathy, a liberal hero with a minor flaw or two, is not merely a feat of willful amnesia. It is deeply immoral. Read the rest of this entry »
Obama and the LBJ Delusion
Posted: February 3, 2014 Filed under: History, Politics, White House | Tags: Great Society, John F. Kennedy, John McCormack, Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, Tip O'Neill 1 Comment
John Aloysius Farrell writes: Lyndon Johnson recognized opportunity when he saw it. The body of John F. Kennedy had been tucked into an Arlington hillside for but a few days when Johnson summoned the leaders of Congress to the White House in late 1963. They were going to seize this moment of national unity, he told the assembled lawmakers, and move the vital legislation—on civil rights, taxes and other pressing issues—stalled in congressional cul de sacs.
To get the tax cut through the Senate, Johnson told the leaders, hewould have to pare federal spending. That meant chopping wasteful programs, like funding for antiquated Navy yards, from the Pentagon budget. They were relics from the world wars, LBJ said, barnacles in an era of ICBMs and nuclear warheads. At his side was Kenneth O’Donnell, Kennedy’s chief of staff.
“Where are you going to close them?” asked House Speaker John McCormack, a flinty Democrat from South Boston, knowing well that the yards were huge employers. Philadelphia, the Speaker was told. Brooklyn. And Boston. At which point McCormack drew on his cigar, turned in his chair, and blew a mighty cloud of smoke in Ken O’Donnell’s face.
“How did it go?’ Johnson wanted to know, after the meeting was done. Well, said O’Donnell, the Boston yard in Charlestown sat in the district of McCormack’s protégé—Rep. Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. —who happened to be the deciding vote on the Rules Committee. “You’ll never get a piece of legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives as long as he’s there,” O’Donnell said. Read the rest of this entry »
The Fifty-Year War
Posted: January 8, 2014 Filed under: Health and Social Issues, Think Tank, White House | Tags: Johnson, Lyndon B. Johnson, National Treasury Employees Union, New Deal, Service Employees International Union, United States, War on Poverty, World War II 1 CommentNRO has a feature on the ‘War on Poverty‘, reviewing a taxpayer-funded big-budget blockbuster that took 50 years to make, only cost 15 trillion dollars, and is still in production…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proclamation of a “war on poverty,” and the progress in this theater has not been encouraging. Trillions of dollars have been spent, and the number of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in 1964, while the poverty rate has held steady at just under one in five. That contrasts unpleasantly with the trend before President Johnson declared his war: The poverty rate had been dropping since the end of World War II. That progress came to a halt as President Johnson’s expensive and expansive vision began to be implemented in earnest, which coincided with the tapering of the postwar boom. By the 1970s, the poverty rate was headed upward. It declined a bit during the Reagan years, crested and receded again in the 1990s, and resumed its melancholy ascent around the turn of the century.
To understand the failure of the war on poverty requires understanding its structure, which itself is bound up in the idiosyncrasies of Lyndon Johnson’s politics. President Johnson played many parts in his political career: Southern ballast to John Kennedy’s buoyant Yankee idealism; an enemy of civil-rights reform and anti-lynching laws who reversed himself in 1964; a sometimes reluctant but in the end unshakeable Cold Warrior. But at heart President Johnson was a New Deal man, and his Great Society, of which the war on poverty was a critical component, was his attempt to resuscitate the spirit and the political success of Franklin Roosevelt’s program.
It was the New Deal that made Johnson’s Texas a fiercely Democratic state, as the older residents of New Deal, Texas, no doubt remember. Johnson’s House district was energetically anti-Communist, not especially segregationist, but above all wild about the New Deal. Johnson ran for the House as a New Dealer, and it was his association with FDR’s domestic agenda (and, according to biographer Robert Caro, a few thousand fraudulent ballots) that made him a senator and a force.
The Kennedy Curse
Posted: November 6, 2013 Filed under: Education, History, Politics, White House | Tags: Bill Clinton, Democrats, Great Society, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, Johnson, Kennedy, Larry Sabato, Ronald Reagan, Sabato 2 Comments
For a half-century, John F. Kennedy has mesmerized Democrats.
Robert Costa writes: It’s a black-and-white picture we’ve all seen before: an earnest, 16-year-old Bill Clinton shaking hands with President John F. Kennedy. It was snapped in July 1963 in the Rose Garden, soon after Kennedy addressed a group of Boys Nation delegates. Ever since, and most notably during his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton has recalled the moment. For him, it was more than a brief encounter; it was an experience, and one so powerful that Clinton once said it caused him to have “arthritis of the face.”
Clinton’s deeply felt connection to Kennedy is hardly unique. Memories of Kennedy’s presidency, from his inaugural address to the horror of Dallas, live on in the American imagination. But they linger particularly with Democrats, and for the past 50 years, generations of them have venerated JFK as their party’s tragic hero. Democrats may have long ago abandoned the Kennedy program, but JFK’s flame flickers elusively in their hearts.
The President of University of the Texas-Pan American Young Democrats Is a Sex Offender
Posted: September 23, 2013 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Education, Politics | Tags: Battleground Texas, Democratic, Jenn Brown, Johnson, Texas, Twitter, University of Texas–Pan American, Young Democrats 1 CommentSterling Beard reports: The president of the Young Democrats at one University of Texas campus, who’s involved in Democratic voter-registration efforts in the state, happens to be a registered sex offender.
Billy Wayne Johnson, who identifies himself on his Twitter account as president of the Young Democrats at University of Texas–Pan American, was registered as a sex offender in 2006. According to Campus Reform, Johnson was convicted for indecency with an 8-year-old-child.
Johnson can be seen posing with voter-registration cards in a picture on the Young Democrats Facebook page, with the caption saying the group “teamed up with Battleground Texas to register people to vote.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Media’s Double Standard
Posted: August 9, 2013 Filed under: Mediasphere, Reading Room | Tags: Chick, Chick-fil-A, Corkins, Family Research Council, Johnson, Leo Johnson, Sarah Palin, Weekly Standard Leave a commentSome hate crimes are less hateful than others.
Mark Hemingway
On August 15, 2012, at 10:46 a.m.—one year ago this week—Floyd Lee Corkins entered the lobby of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. He was carrying a backpack that contained 15 Chick-fil-A -sandwiches, a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol, and 100 rounds of ammunition. Corkins has since pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing for the crimes he proceeded to commit. He’s set to spend decades in a prison cell and fade into obscurity.
But Leo Johnson deserves to be remembered for his heroism that day. The building manager for the Family Research Council was manning the front desk that morning and let Corkins enter the building under the pretense he was a new intern. The video of what happened after that is remarkable.
After Corkins takes a suspiciously long time rummaging through his bag to produce identification, Johnson cannily stands up and walks around the desk to get a closer look at what Corkins is doing. Corkins bolts upright, gun in hand. Without the slightest hesitation, Johnson rushes Corkins, who fires twice. A bullet shatters Johnson’s left forearm. “And I just couldn’t hear anything, my arm just kind of blew back. So at that point I was thinking: ‘I have to get this gun,’ ” Johnson told The Weekly Standard. “That was my sole focus—I have to get this gun—this guy’s gonna kill me and kill everybody here.”
From there, Johnson somehow manages to push Corkins across the lobby and pin him against the wall with his bad arm. “I just started punching him as hard as I could, until I could feel his grip loosen,” recalled Johnson. Eventually he takes the gun from Corkins with his wounded arm. Before long, Corkins is subdued on the ground. Corkins now admits that it was his intention to shoot everyone in the building. There’s no question Johnson saved a lot of lives.
BET Founder: ‘This Country Would Never Tolerate White Unemployment at 14 or 15 Percent’
Posted: March 30, 2013 Filed under: Economics | Tags: African American, Black Entertainment Television, Black people, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Johnson, National Press Club, Robert L. Johnson, White American Leave a commentBlack Entertainment Television (BET) founder Bob Johnson said Tuesday that the nation would “never tolerate white unemployment at 14 or 15 percent” and yet unemployment for the black community has been double that of white Americans for over 50 years.
“This country would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent. No one would ever stay in office at 14 or 15 percent unemployment in this nation, but we’ve had that double unemployment for over 50 years,” Johnson said while speaking at the National Press Club about the gap between whites and blacks in America.
“The national average is 7.7 percent, and African-American unemployment is 13.8 percent. To be honest, it’s probably greater than that when you count the number of African-Americans who have simply given up on finding employment,” said Johnson, who is also founder and chairman of The RLJ Companies.
In 1972, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 11.2 percent in January of that year and as low as 9.4 percent in December of that same year. It dipped as low as seven percent in April 2000. The unemployment rate for blacks in February 2013 was 13.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Johnson said the challenge was to figure out why the unemployment rate for blacks has been so high, “and if that doesn’t change, somebody’s going to have to pay— 34 million African-Americans are not going to leave this country, millions of African-Americans who don’t have jobs.”
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