Tuesday, November 20, 2007

"My first foray into free speech"

Noted without comment

"In throwing her support behind presidential candidate Hillary Clinton with an unprompted, heartfelt speech at a New Hampshire rally last month, Carole Simpson, the longtime ABC news anchor-turned-Emerson College journalism instructor, flung herself into the partisan fires . . .

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"Simpson, 65, said she immediately regretted her actions and offered her resignation the next day, which university officials refused to accept. Now Simpson is considering an offer from the Clinton campaign to stump for the candidate, namely before black audiences in the South. She and other university officials have agreed she will not teach political journalism courses if she campaigns for Clinton.

" 'I know I made a mistake. It was definitely the wrong venue for my first foray into free speech,' Simpson said. 'But I'd really like to see her win.' "



(I'm a liar, I will comment: First, sorry for the ad, I'm too inept to figure out how to remove it. And I don't have anything against this ex-anchor, in fact I'm grateful for the inadvertent admission about the realities of corporate news-making.)

Thursday, November 01, 2007




Hot stuff, eh?

The bottom pic is the only surviving portrait of my main man, Louis-Michel Aury. He was an insurgent pirate fighting the Spanish and Americans in the early 19th c. Caribbean. Although he helped found the first republic to offer the franchise to all men, regardless of skin color, his memory lives mostly in second-rate ghost stories circulating around NE Florida. Amelia Island, the site of the Republica de las Floridas, is now a white-supremacist golf holiday resort.

L. O. L.


The top painting is a self-portrait done by William Augustus Bowles, who married two Creek chicks and started a revolutionary United Nation of Creeks and Cherokees; the portrait hangs in the National Gallery. He was imprisoned in the Phillipines, escaped to West Africa, made his way to London and then back to Florida, and was finally killed while in jail in Havana. My man...