With the first anniversary of the nightmarish devastation of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans by Hurricance Katerina (with the assistance of the Bush administration) looming, and the major news media already gearing up for their fifth anniversary of 9/11 extravaganzas, the UK newspaper The Independent directs our attention to another black mark on the calendar.
A miserable milestone was passed the other day. America's (and Britain's) disastrous war in Iraq has now lasted longer than th
When her Aunt Virginia died in 1982, Lorna Catling had no idea that forty years earlier the Gestapo had declared her aunt "the most dangerous of all Allied spies" in France, and issued orders to "find and destroy her." Virginia Hall seldom spoke about what she had done during World War II, and didn't even bother to collect all the honors she was entitled to for her heroic service. Tomorrow one of those long overdue honors will be presented to Catling as her late aunt's representative
In case you missed it, you can find video of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Surfin') speculating about the effects of dinosaur flatulence here. And no, booze was not involved in the congressman's ramblings. Probing the effects of dinosaur farting is just something Rohrabacher sees as part of his official duties, one of the ways in which he serves the interests of his constituents.
The question about the noxious gas emitted by thunder-lizards was part of the noxious gas Rohrabacher emitted during la
Matt Cunningham's Red County/OC Blog has an interesting post today on legislation backed by Representative Loretta Sanchez (D-Anaheim) that would require present-day U.S. taxpayers to pay reparations to World War II residents of Guam.
It's not that our citizens or soldiers have ever done anything wrong to Guam. In fact, American soldiers—funded by U.S. taxpayers in the 1940s—gave their lives or limbs to remove the brutal Japanese military from their island. We could also note the U
Question: Which Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright recently mailed me a book with the note, "All the Best"? The only hint: The book sent by the laureate was Raul Morín's Among the Valiant: Mexican-Americans in World War II and Korea, which is in the same vein of macho swagger for which the Pulitzer Prize present-giver is famous. The first person to post the correct name of the playwright here, PLUS the name of the WWII hero mentioned in Morin's book whose life story was given the Charlton
I devote a couple of pages of my Orange County: A Personal History (book signing Sept. 18 at the Yost!) to the Huntington Beach-based California Coalition for Immigration Reform, the single group most responsible for fanning the anti-Mexican flames in the United States over the past 15 years. One crucial moment I discuss is CCIR head Barbara Coe's self-professed epiphany regarding the illegal-alien menace, as quoted in Daniel Sheehy's 2006 book Fighting Immigration Anarchy: American Patriots Bat
A filmmaker is exposing the world to the little-told story of Jewish
Americans who banded together to fight Nazis during World War II.No, the filmmaker is not Quentin Tarantino and the story is not the fictional one told in his film Inglourious Basterds, which not only won at the weekend box office but scored the largest debut in the illustrious director's career.Documentary filmmaker Steven Karras' book The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II,
which is scheduled
