Dispatches from Vilnius

Al Gore went into hibernation after conceding the 2000 election.  He reappeared several months later sporting a beard, as though he had been on a walkabout,  but it turned out he had hid away in Europe.  The beard became the subject of intense scrutiny in the media, seemingly more so than the first 6 months of George W. Bush's time in office. The Democrats had prevailed in a fight over the leadership of the Senate, thanks to Jim Jeffords splitting from the Republican ranks to join the Democratic Senate caucus as an Independent.  The general election had left the Senate equally divided 50-50.  This nullified Vice-President Dick Cheney's tie-breaking vote, which would have given the leadership to the Republicans.  It was a tough day for Trent Lott, who had long groomed himself for the position.  Jeffords was recently  eulogized  for this bold move, passing away in August of this year. It was hard to gauge which way the Democrats would t...

By 1994, the party was over.  Facing an unprecedented defeat in Congress, Clinton also found himself mired in a real estate investment scandal known as Whitewater.  Republicans had scored a monumental turnover in Congress, gaining control of both chambers for the first time in 40 years.  George W. Bush had also scored a surprise victory over the popular Ann Richards in Texas.  Republicans had big wins in other traditionally Democratic states as well.  At the time it seemed like a repudiation of the Clinton administration, but in retrospect it was more likely the final stage of the Reagan Revolution, which saw many Dixiecrats turn Republican and take over the South and many of the Midwest states. The election of Reagan in 1980 had accelerated the shift of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party that had started in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Bill.   Lyndon Johnson had foresaw this shift, but for him it was more important to pas...

Back in '92 I felt something was seriously amiss when Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination for President.  I didn't worry so much then as I didn't think he stood a chance in the general election against George H.W. Bush, who was still basking in the favorable light of the end of the Cold War.  But, enter Ross Perot and it became anyone's election, as the man who made himself a billionaire by distributing welfare checks, split conservatives in two, and Bill only needed 43 per cent of the popular vote to win. Clinton's candidacy seemed like a long shot but the media picked up on him early .  He lost the first four Democratic primaries to Paul Tsongas, but cash started rolling in just in time for Florida, where Clinton scored a big victory on Super Tuesday, finally gaining the momentum he needed to carry him through the remainder of the primaries.  To that point, Clinton hadn't won a single state, but the media still considered him the front runner a...

Poor Alison Grimes couldn't bring herself to say she voted for Barack Obama when pressed by the Louisville Courier-Journal, afraid she might lose a valuable endorsement in the Bluegrass state.  She made it known she is a Clinton Democrat, saying she voted for Hillary in the 2008 primaries.  She was too young to have voted for Bill back in 1992 and 1996, not turning 18 until after the November 1996 election. It seems our dear president has become nonexistent in the eyes of his fellow Democrats.  Even his former cabinet members seem to view him in the past tense.  It must be pretty lonely for Barack Obama in the White House these days. Meanwhile, Republican candidates want to remind voters that Obama is not only very real, but that he is still the greatest threat to their personal freedom.  They scramble to link the Ebola virus to his immigration reform, as if offering a pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrants (or amnesty as conservative pundits ca...

Grimes showing the door to Obama The most worrisome thing in these midterm elections is the way Democratic candidates have run away from traditionally Democratic issues.  I'm most disconcerted with Alison Lundergan Grimes, who seems to be running more as a Tea Party candidate in Kentucky, looking to unseat a Republican who grew too fat on Congressional largesse, as she seems to campaign to the right of Mitch on most issues. Grimes is apparently against climate change policies, as she has championed the coal industry every step of the way in this election, even though coal is no longer the biggest industry in Kentucky, and employs less than one percent of the work force in the state.  That's right -- less than one percent!  Yet, to hear Alison tell it, the fate of Kentucky, and the nation for that matter, hinges on coal. This isn't the only issue Grimes appears out of step on.  She touts her NRA membership and has spoken out against Obama on any form of g...

Make way for a new Bible Museum in DC.  The Green family is shelling out big bucks and relying on the added support of good Christians to realize an $800 million museum devoted exclusively to the Bible in the nation's capital.  As Alan Rappeport noted in this article for the New York Times, there appears to be an agenda by the selection of DC to house the Green family's huge collection of ancient Biblical texts and other artifacts.  Steven Green an ardent evangelist firmly believes in the Bible as a historically accurate document and judging by his traveling exhibit will offer "re-enactments" to support this belief. For the last five years, Mr. Green has searched the world for rare Biblical documents and artifacts, spending a purported $30 million on everything from rare papyrus texts of Psalms in Aramaic to first editions of the King James Bible.  He was advised by Scott Carroll, an archaeologist and historian, who has since pulled out of the project as h...

Given all the attention Wonder Woman has been getting lately, she just might steal the show from the upcoming Superman v. Batman .  Initially, she appeared to be little more than an afterthought, a way to attract women to the second installment in the rebooted Superman series.  However, the selection of Gal Gadot as the Amazonian warrior princess seems more a fulfillment of teenage boys' wet dreams than it does the feminist ideal originally envisioned by William Moulton Marston in 1941, although Marston seemed to enjoy his puerile fantasies as well. To read this article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker, Wonder Woman has undergone quite a transformation since she debuted in Sensation Comics in January, 1941.  She followed pretty closely on the heels of Superman and Batman, which premiered in 1938 and 1939 respectively.  Wonder Woman evolved considerably during the war to accentuate the American woman's role in WWII, combining feminism with patriotic duty. ...

Marshall Pass, William Henry Jackson, 1899 On my first visit to Colorado in 1987, I spent the night at a hostel in Boulder, where I chatted with a young guy on a Peace March for nuclear disarmament.  There had been a lot of hope coming out of the Reykjavik Summit between Reagan and Gorbacev the year before that a lasting peace might emerge in the wake of the Cold War.  I had just come from a Harmonic Convergence at Chaco Canyon and was similarly pie-eyed with expectation that something good was going to happen in this new world order. Boulder was a liberal den -- a veritable Berkeley of the Rockies -- with a great university radio station that I listened to as I drove into the mountains on my way to the Northwest.  I remember listening to Cat Stevens before the reception faded out, although I suppose John Denver's Rocky Mountain High would have been more appropriate.  I wanted to cut through the mountains and took US 34 out of Boulder toward Roosevelt Nati...

Breakfast at Tiffany's was about as far away from the book as you can get, but combine Audrey Hepburn, a cat and the recurring theme of Moon River and you have a wonderfully engaging film that still lingers today like a soft refrain.  Hard to believe it was 53 years ago that this film premiered.  A nasty literature teacher might assign this novel to her students and see what she gets back in the way of book reports. As the story goes, Truman Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the lead roll in the adaptation of his novella, but rather than a big blowsy blonde that would have been more in keeping with Capote's Holly Golightly, Blake Edwards went for a soft charming brunette in Hepburn.  But, the biggest character makeover was the creation of Paul Varjak, played by George Peppard.  In the novella, "Fred" was gay and had no love interest beyond that of "older brother" in the novel.  Hollywood wasn't ready for such a character, so Edwards rebuilt this ...

Seems Leon Panetta has an axe to grind with his old boss, saying that Obama caved into the counsel of his top aides rather than listen to him when it came to retaining a "small US force" in Iraq.  I hope Leon mentions in his book that this was Robert Gates plan, engineered in the waning months of the Bush administration, and carried out by the Obama administration, which he served. A wave of criticism has emerged with the rise of ISIS, or IS as it is now being referred to.  For all this blather that we should have retained a force in Iraq, there is little mention that military intelligence advisers warned way back in 2002 that a war with Iraq would increase Islamist militancy throughout the region.  But, it seemed the Bush administration had a score to settle with Saddam Hussein and wasn't heeding any of this advice.  It was only in 2007 that Bush seemed to see for the first time the Pandora's Box he had opened and made what Fox news now regards as a " w...

While on vacation I found myself playing chess in what seemed like a king's age.  We fell into a conversation about past chess greats.  I of course brought up Bobby Fischer.  My Danish friend mentioned a grandmaster from his country but couldn't remember his name.  As it turns out, he meant Bent Larsen, one of Fischer's toughest opponents, and whom Fischer beat on his way to claiming the world championship in 1972. Fischer and Larsen were considered the two greatest threats outside the Soviet Union at the time.  Both were young prodigies.  Both were known for their daring and cunning, throwing more experienced chess players off guard.  The two met in Denver, Colorado, in the summer of 1971.  Larsen wasn't used to the high altitude and heat, and felt this gave Fischer an unfair home country advantage, which the young American seized upon to set up his fateful match with Boris Spassky the following year in Reykjavik.   If Larsen had mor...

Even in Cagliari, Sardinia, there are those sympathetic to the plight of Leonard Peltier, who has been sitting in a federal prison since 1977 for crimes he didn't commit.  With all attempts to have his sentence overturned exhausted, there has been an ongoing effort to have him pardoned.  His best chance was in 2000, when Bill Clinton was leaving office, but Clinton deferred.  So now there is pressure on Obama to finally give the 70-year-old Native American activist the pardon he has so long deserved. Probably the best account of the events that led to the arrest and conviction of Peltier is Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse .  Many others have championed Peltier over the years, including Michael Apted, who did a documentary entitled Incident at Oglala that brought the issue even more sharply into focus.  But, as is so often the case, time has a tendency of dulling our awareness of these issues, and we tend to forget them. The FBI...

I guess it could be best described as a love-hate relationship between the US and France, but it is a friendship that dates back to the founding of the United States as depicted in this French stamp from 1937.  I want to say thank you to all the French readers.  Please feel free to comment.  It is an open forum.

History is a funny thing.  As I noted earlier, the new Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum for American history has come under fire from the right wing for purportedly not focusing on the basics, i.e. the "Founding Fathers," or more specifically the religious conservative interpretation of these seminal political figures. Ben Carson is the latest conservative presidential wannabe to rail against the new curriculum, claiming it will cause high school students "to go sign up for ISIS."   Sadly, I've come to expect such hyperbole from the religious right wing, which seems to think the country is on the eve of a zombie apocalypse and the only way to right the country is to ground ourselves in the basics of the Bible, which they seem to think the Founding Fathers based the Constitution upon. Now one can understand such hacks as Sean Hannity attacking the curriculum on such grounds, but Ben Carson is a well respected neurosurgeon, so you would think he has ...

I have to give a high five to the many Ukrainian readers out there.  Have no idea how you found out about this forum or your interest in it, but your support is greatly appreciated!  I also greatly sympathize with your situation at the moment, as I follow events the best I can in the press.  Please share your thoughts and impressions.

Wouldn't it be great if the government actually took suggestions?  I suppose they do in the form of polls and at the election booth but in the end it seems the government does what it wants to do anyway, regardless of what anyone else thinks.  The idea of the "suggestion box" apparently came from Heinz Company around 1910.  I would like to hear your thoughts on the many topics covered in this blog, good or bad.  I greatly appreciate that so many persons from so many different countries are looking in, and look forward to reading your thoughts when I return October 1  --  Jim.

I would be most remiss not to remember that day in September when the skies were filled with pillars of smoke where the New York City Twin Towers once stood before.  It is still too early to make light of the event, but to be honest the day would have completely slipped by me hadn't I seen several mentions on facebook.  Apparently, these casual onlookers weren't so distant as Frank Rich thought.  Walter Sipser, one of the men in the photo,  said they were all in "a profound state of shock and disbelief," as many were that day to see such a famous architectural icon go up in smoke.  The photo by Thomas Hoepker just made them look distant.  Even Hoepker seemed to question his own photo, not releasing it until five years later, when it became a "whipping postcard" for pundits and columnists alike looking to seize on anything to justify their moral outrage.  It seems the moral of this photograph is be careful how you are pictured in front of a trag...