Reflections of An Uncommon Common Man

Jamilah Lemieux   Jamilah Lemieux,  senior digital editor at Ebony magazine, was a guest on an MSNBC program called Now with Alex Wagner and was responding to remarks made by Ted Cruz about how he turned to country music after September 11, 2001. He thought that it was the only genre of music that addressed the anger that he was feeling as a result of the attack. She said  “Nothing says ‘Let’s go kill some Muslims’ like country music.”  I have listened to country music for years and I have never heard a song that encouraged people to kill Muslims. I wonder how much country music that Ms. Lemieux listens to. For that matter I wonder how much rap she listens to. The following is a cop killer rap song by Ice-t. I got my black shirt on I got my black gloves on I got my ski mask on This s_ _t's been too long I got my twelve gauge sawed off I got my headlights turned off I'm 'bout to bust some shots off I'm 'bout to dust some cops off Cop killer, better ...

    Anyone that knows anything about me has figured out by now that I am not very fond of the modern day Democratic Party. In my opinion the last fairly decent Democratic president was John F. Kennedy. However one of my favorite presidents, who happened to be a Democrat, was Harry S. Truman. I would put Truman on my ten greatest presidents list. Truman was a man straight from the ranks of the common people. He was a Southerner who only a high school education. Unlike so many presidents and presidential candidates today he experienced true struggle in his life. He had been a farmer, bank teller, railroad worker, who slept in hobo camps along the tracks. Was a artillery captain who experienced combat in World War I and later opened a haberdashery with a close personal Jewish friend, and fellow veteran, that eventually went bankrupt. Although he didn't have to, he spent years paying back his creditors. Truman was honest as the day was long. He maintained that honesty even as...

General George S. Patton     General George S. Patton is the only American or British general that wasn't surprised by the massive German armored and infantry attack through the Belgian Ardennes forest on December 16, 1944, which came to be called the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans consider Patton to be the best General in the Allied Army and for that reason the spearhead of their their attack avoided the sector that Patton's forces protected. Patton's Third Army has been ordered to save the American's trapped in Bastogne, which are comprised primarily of the elite 101st Airborne Division. The 101st Airborne numbers about 11,000 troops and they are surrounded by 60,000 German troops. They entered Bastogne on December 20th. Patton promised General Anthony McAuliffe, the commander of the 101st, that he would reach Bastogne by Christmas day but due to the terrible winter weather it doesn't look like he is going to make it by then. So, he stops at a Catholic cath...

  A few days ago a friend of mine made the statement that in his opinion Abraham Lincoln was not a Christian. There was a time that I would have agreed with him. A few years ago it was my opinion that he was a Deist, Universalist or an agnostic. Over the years I have studied Lincoln extensively and I believe that he went through several phases in his life. As a child Lincoln's parents were hard shell Baptists. His parents met at a revival that was going on in Kentucky in the early 1800's. Tom Lincoln  and Nancy Hanks set eyes on each other while dancing in the spirit. They were married and Lincoln came along in 1809. Nancy read the Bible to little Abe daily and taught him the Ten Commandments. Lincoln said later that when he was tempted to do something wrong he always thought of his mother and the Ten Commandments. He once walked for miles to return a few cents to a customer that he had overcharged when he was a store clerk. As president he visited his commanding general at...

 I heard the sad news a few days ago that a very good friend of mine had passed away. We served together in the Tennessee Air National Guard 118th Security Police. The two of us trained together in a medical evacuation exercise at Savanna Georgia in 1979. There a nurse dropped me on my head, while carrying me on a stretcher. She and another nurse were trying to carry me on to a C-130. We guarded a C-130 crash site in McMinnville in 1980. Pulled summer camp together at Gulfport Mississippi in 1981. Two weeks at Rhein Main Germany in 1983, where we did air base ground defense training, and riot control. We worked an air show and witnessed a demonstration by German protesters and an F-104 crash on the autobahn that killed five people in a car. The crash also severely burned several people in a parking lot. In 1984 we endured two weeks of Air Base Ground Defense School at Little Rock A.F.B.. Probably my two roughest weeks in the Guard. From the time I met Jerry we were pretty much in...

Laurie Pritchett on the right speaking with Martin Luther King Jr. As a student of history my favorite area of study is military history, especially the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. Running a very close second is the study of race and the Civil Rights movement in America. The history of race is closely intertwined with military history. The American Revolution was a compromise between those who saw the need to establish a free Republican form of democracy for a limited group of white people and those who wanted to preserve those freedoms by the continued enslavement and subjugation of black people, Indians and certain classes of poorer white people. There were a few egalitarians like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams who were willing to go much further but they were too few in number. However the brilliance of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution was that it gave an unfulfilled promise to people of all races and classes. The Founding Fathers s...

OUR ILLUSTRIOUS POTENTATE     A writer by the name of Sara Paretsky has made the charge that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell disrespected Obama twice in one week by inviting Netanyahu to speak without State Department approval and not attending the observance of the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma. Technically it was a violation of protocol for Congress to bypass the State Department. In my opinion it was the right call because the stakes are too high on this one. The treaty that Obama is negotiating with Iran has the potential of leading to World War III and no one is more qualified to sound the alarm than Netanyahu. It was a violation of protocol but no law was violated that I am aware of. Secondly, in my opinion it was a public relations mistake for the Republicans to ignore the ceremony in Selma. However we must never forget that the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which resulted from what had occurred in Selma could not have been possible without the support of the ...

ALONZO CUSHING   Alonzo Cushing was born on January 19, 1841 in Delafield Wisconsin and was raised in Fredonia New York. Cushing was one of four brothers who would eventually serve in Union forces. Alonzo would graduate from West Point in June of 1861. Just two months after the beginning of the Civil War. His younger brother Lt. William Cushing would serve in the Union Navy. Howard Cushing would be killed in 1871 fighting the Apache's. Alonzo must have been pretty sharp because he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant and First Lieutenant on the same day. He was brevetted a Major after the battle of Chancellorsville. A brevet rank was a rank that was usually given for bravery in battle or meritorious service but once the war was over you reverted back to your actual rank. For example Cushing was only paid as a major if he actually performed the duties of a major. Once the war was over he would revert back to his actual rank of First Lieutenant.    At Gettysburg Cus...

Eddie and Butch Ohare   Edward Joseph O'hare aka "Easy Eddie" was the lawyer for Al Capone. He was very skilled at keeping his only client out of jail during his career as one of America's most notorious organized crime bosses during the 1920's and 30's. Eddie was paid a very lucrative salary by Capone that enabled him to live a lavish lifestyle. He had a home that filled an entire city block in Chicago. Easy Eddie had two children, a son and a daughter. Then one day he decided to rat out Al Capone. He had been a part of Capone's illegal activities and could see that the Feds were going to get Capone one way or another and by turning states evidence he might be able to keep from going to prison himself. It was his testimony that helped nail Capone for income tax evasion. Capone was arrested and sent to the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary and later to Alcatraz. Eddie was able to avoid prison but not a mob hit. One thing that you don't do is rat out th...

Neville Chamberlain and Barack Hussein Obama  On September 30, 1938 English prime minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia away in the infamous Munich agreement. It was an agreement between England, France, Germany, and Italy. Hitler issued an ultimatum demanding the German speaking and very strategic Sudetenland in order to avoid war. Chamberlain sincerely believed that appeasing Hitler would avoid war. Just twenty years earlier the world had experienced the worst war in world history to that time. Sixteen million people died, which was mostly soldiers, and twenty million were wounded. Although it is generally agreed that Germany lost the war, the armistice of 1918 left many unresolved problems and Germany physically intact. Germany itself for the most part had not been invaded. Because of the harshness of the Versailles treaty, especially in the area of reparations, this caused hyper-inflation and severe economic problems for Germany and the G...