Reflections of An Uncommon Common Man

Florence Harding  For a short time Florence Harding was a student at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music--until her rich father pulled her out because he didn't like the company that she kept. At 19, she was pregnant after eloping with a man that her father did not approve of. Two years later she would be abandoned by the man she said was her husband. At 31, she was married to future president Warren G. Harding, newspaper magnate and unrepentant philanderer. She was 5 years older than Harding and her father believed that he only married her in order to gain social prominence. Harding would later be threatened with blackmail by one of his girlfriends, Carrie Phillips, who had been a close friend of Florence. She considered divorce but never pursued it. Back then this would have been a death sentence for Harding's chances at election and Carrie never revealed the affair to the public. Like future presidents Kennedy and Clinton he supposedly had sex in the White House with

  A Birmingham police detective was pistol whipped by a black man, with his own weapon while bystanders stood around taking pictures and mocking him. The following is what the officer told CNN. “A lot of officers are being too cautious because of what’s going on in the media,” said the officer, who asked to remain anonymous for the safety of his family. “I hesitated because I didn’t want to be in the media like I am right now.” When I saw that the officer was a Birmingham police officer I thought about how much that we have changed as a country in the last 52 years. I was a 13 year old boy when I saw the pictures of the Birmingham police dogs ripping into black protesters and innocent bystanders and the pictures of fireman using high pressure hoses that were powerful enough to rip bricks off of buildings. I am a native born Southerner but I have always hated injustice. No matter who is on the receiving end of it. Being a 13 year old I was not as up on current events and American hi

 Before the Civil War William Tecumseh Sherman was the president of a small military academy in Louisiana. That school would eventually become Louisiana State University or LSU. His goal was to model it after West Point and the Virginia Military Institute or VMI. The name Sherman would become hated in the South and in some circles today it is still met with loathing. Ironically Sherman loved the South and the Southern people, before, during and after the Civil War. He would donate two captured Confederate cannon to the school after the war that are still at LSU today. Understandably there are no buildings or landmarks named after him on campus. His philosophy of war reflected the realism of a great military leader. Once the war began he intended to prosecute it in a manner that would bring about the quickest resolution. He once said "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over". It was said that Grant broke the backbo

  William Tecumseh Sherman's famous March to the Sea didn't develop overnight. The idea for it began with Ulysses S. Grant's failed first attempt at capturing Vicksburg. On December 26, 1862 Grant launched a two pronged attack. Sherman via the Yazoo River would attack from the northeast. Grant would follow the railroad line of the Mississippi Central. Sherman would be defeated with heavy losses at Chickasaw Bayou on December 29th. In the meantime Confederate General Earl Van Dorn destroyed Grant's supply base at Holly Springs and General Nathan Bedford Forrest destroyed rail lines in West Tennessee stopping the transfer of supplies to Grants army. Without a line of supply Grant abandoned his part of the attack. He discovered however that his army could live off of the land. Grant simply confiscated and foraged for enough food to get his army safely back to base.   By February 1864 Vicksburg was in Union hands. Sherman decided to destroy the city of Meridian Miss

Hiroshima on the left and Nagasaki on the right   On August 9th 1945 the United States dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki Japan. The death toll estimates have ranged from as low as 20,000 to as high as 87,000. The death toll was not as bad as Hiroshima because hills shielded part of the city from the maximum effects of the blast. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was code named (Little Boy) and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was code named (Fat Man).  Little Boy was a uranium bomb built at Oak Ridge Tennessee and Fat Man was a plutonium bomb built at Hanford Washington. Fat Man  The bombing of Hiroshima has always overshadowed the bombing of Nagasaki. It is kind of like the first moon landing. Everyone was glued to their television sets for Apollo 11 but interest for the subsequent moon landings waned. With the exception of Apollo 13, and that was because of the drama of the astronauts near death experience. In many ways the story behind the Nagasaki bombing was much more

  I posted this picture of Obama as a college student smoking weed in his dorm room. My wife's cousin asked me who the guy in the picture hanging on the wall was. Until she asked that question I hadn't really thought about it. One look and I realized that it was Idi Amin. He was a brutal dictator of Uganda from 1971 until 1979 and it is estimated that he was responsible for the deaths of at least 300,000 people. Amin was also in power during the famous Entebbe raid. The following is from Wikipedia. Someone has suggested to me that this photo has been photo shopped. Even if it is Obama has admitted to the fact that he was a heavy smoker of marijuana. Based on his support of modern day radical Islam I have no doubt that he was probably a supporter of Idi Amin.  In June 1976, Amin allowed an Air France airliner from Tel Aviv to Paris hijacked by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO) and two members of the German Revo