One of his main tasks that famous evening was to warn John Hancock and Sam Adams of their impending arrest. Hancock and Adams were British. In fact, everyone who heeded Revere's warning was British. The Declaration of Independence did not occur until the following year.
In Lexington, Revere met up with Dr. Samuel Precott, who had been, er, visiting a ladyfriend until 1 a.m. No doubt he was victimizing her, as described in the post below.
John Edwards: The legal case against him appears weak. What bugs me is the amount of money involved.
The former presidential candidate was today indicted by a grand jury on six counts over $925,000 allegedly spent keeping mistress Rielle Hunter and daughter Quinn in hiding during his 2008 run for the White House.The better part of a million bucks, and for what? To support a woman and child for a year, or so we are told. But doesn't Rielle have a job? How well does one woman have to eat? And doesn't Edwards have some ready cash of his own?
This site says that "Bunny" Mellon's financial aid fetched Rielle a $28,000 BMW plus a home that cost $2,900 a month to rent. Fancy shmancy, by my standards. But the total comes to some $68 thou for the year for shelter and transpo. I still don't see the need for $925,000. Does anyone out there know what they spent the money on?
Rielle fancies herself a film-maker. I'm wondering if she used the funds on a project.
The inevitable Weiner splurt. Yesterday, CNN demonstrated a stunning ability to take 45 seconds worth of data and stretch it to fill 20 minutes. How long can this crap keep up?
Something like the "Rodney King effect" may be occurring. When the infamous Rodney King beating video first hit the news, everyone was shocked. Many presumed that a jury would need about three minutes to vote for conviction. But when L.A. teevee stations kept playing and playing the video, the shock impact wore off -- at least outside the black community.
Some weeks (maybe days) after the initial impact of the Monica revelation, something like the Rodney King effect took hold. Familiarity bred indifference. Support for Clinton solidified and "Ken Starr" became a dirty word. After more than six years of vilifying Clinton, the Republican attackers had uncovered nothing more than a few illicit hummers which bore no discernible relationship to Whitewater or any of the other bullshit charges they had proferred. Most people decided that they didn't give a damn.
Vitter regrets. Bob Somerby has an interesting piece up which compares l'affair Weiner to the David Vitter scandal:
That said, Vitter did business with the so-called “D.C. Madam”—and this involved illegal conduct! People who like to fling poo all about certainly could have done so. But on Hardball, the egregious chimp Chris Matthews barely mentioned Vitter’s fall. When he did, he sympathized with “poor David Vitter,” who had been on his show before.Yeah. Matthews was not his usual moralizing self on that occasion. Why?
In recent days, more than a few pundits have brought up the DC Madam case. As longtime readers may recall, Deborah Jeane Palfrey and I had two or three long-ish conversations. She could not understand why the authorities came down on her like the proverbial ton of bricks while turning their usual blind eye to all the other escort agencies in D.C. That mystery remains unsolved and, for the most part, unaddressed.
I liked her. My heart sank when she described her legal strategy; basically, she planned to offer a piano-player-in-the-brothel defense: Don't ask me what they're doing upstairs...! That trick never works. Unsurprisingly, she was found guilty on April 15, 2008.
On May 1, she committed suicide. She had been working with Dan Moldea on a book. Had I known, I would have advised her to find another partner.
Throughout the two weeks before her death, I kept planning to call her up and offer words of comfort. But what to say...?
Then she was gone. During those two weeks, she probably felt that she didn't have a friend in the world, aside from her mother. I used the woman as blog post fodder but neglected to offer basic human sympathy at a time when that balm might have soothed.
Unforgivable.
9 comments:
Do you really think she killed herself?
I am so sorry to learn of the suicide of Ms. Palfrey. My condolences to her friends and family. Suicide is always hard on the survivors (not to mention the victim), but sometimes the victim is so tormented, he or she sees it as the only escape.
Joseph, did you notice that David Vitter is Roman Catholic:
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/11/01/what-is-david-vitters-religion/
Mr. Matthews is always soft on his friends, but especially when they share his religious beliefs, no matter how he would come down on them if they were Baptist, Jewish or (gasp!) atheist.
djmm
Paul: There's a lot of evidence that she planned out her suicide. That said, te statement by Moldea did raise a red flag with me, because I don't entirely trust him.
Still -- why would anyone kill her? If she "had" something on someone, she would have said something.
I grilled her on the rumors that Dick Cheney had been one of the clients of one of the girls; she honestly did not know. Most of the men hid themselves. She thought that the selective persecution of her operation was mysterious, but she did not have an answer to the mystery.
Bob Somerby brought up the Catholic connection in one of his blog posts. Chris Matthews, the late Tim Russert and Maureen Dowd, all Irish Catholic and all hard on Clinton then Gore. Bob was of the opinion that same sex marriage and abortion went against their beliefs hence the bias against Democrats. In Matthews' case his desire to take part in the election of the first Black president overcame his social conservatism.
There are still a lot of Cat-licks who are fuddy duddies on the subject of sex, but liberal-ish in other areas. Not sure if Matthews really qualifies as being one of those.
Then there are Cat-licks who are stone reactionaries through and through. They usually announce their presence when they start muttering weird things about Our Lady of Fatima.
One thing I hadn't realized about Vitter was that his use of the DC Madam's harem was prior to his taking office, and was likely estopped prosecution because of the statute of limitations.
So it was not a crime that could be then prosecuted, partially explaining how he's skated on accountability somewhat.
XI
I've often wondered if there was a connection between the uber-Catholics and pedophile priests.
A psychosis brought about by being victimized as a child. A misplaced anger as it were, taken out on non-Catholics.
I do know from my attending Catholic high school that the most disturbed priests were the Irish ones. One of them would lose it and go into rants about "Suzie Swine" and "Mary Pig" in the class room. I thank god that my mom, a devout Italian Catholic passed away before the scandal of priests molesting innocents broke. I would have killed her.
That was supposed to be "It would have killed her"
She was dissapointed that none of her children took the vows. Come to think of it back then when I was in school not that many considered it. I suspect that the shortage of priests was one of the reasons the pedophiles were transfered to a new parish instead of being sent to an out of the way monastery. Fewer priests means fewer churches and fewer churches means less in the collection box and a less lavish life style for the Bishops and Cardinals.
Good points re: Mathews and Catholics-get-a-free-pass reflex. Jimmy Breslin is the same -- RFK, Bob Drinan et al could do no wrong -- Abzug, Holtzman always suspect {maybe some gender distortion there as well, a la Mathews' grim excoriation of Hillary).
On the madam -- had heard from two quite separate Washington types that the buzz was that Wolfowitz was a client and then the plot got tangled tragically.
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