Showing posts with label assassination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assassination. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The contents of Abraham Lincoln's pockets the night he was assassinated

By Jack Brummet, Presidents Editor



Courtesy of the Library of Congress digital archives. . .a photo of the items that were in Abraham Lincoln's pockets the night he was assassinated.  Interestingly, the contents include a pocket knife and a confederate five dollar bill.
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Friday, November 16, 2012

Painting: Benazir Bhutto

By Jack Brummet

I created this digital art the day after Bhutto's assassination in 2007.

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Friday, December 09, 2011

John Lennon's involuntary departure

By Jack Brummet, Rock Ed. and NYC/Metro Ed.



"Imagine no John Lennon."  December 8th is such a sad day.  I just read a piece about Lennon on The Norton Report. 

We lived a few blocks away from the Dakota and often caught glimpses of John and Yoko around the UWS. I remember Keelin was in a store on Columbus once, and they cleared the store because the Lennons were coming in to shop.

That night, December 8th. 1980,  we could hear the sirens from our place on W. 84th. I was listening to Vin Scelsa on WNEW-FM 102.7, when he got word that his friend had been assassinated. It was utterly devastating listening to Vin's reaction. There was such a pall over New York those next few days; it was heartbreaking. New York had bounced back a little bit from the lows of the mid-to late 70's.  And then, this.  In our town.  One of our flawed, but great heroes, eliminated. . .
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Monday, March 14, 2011

Being President: More Dangerous Than Coal Mining

By Jack Brummet, Social Mores Editor
and Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor

The odds of surviving the Presidency aren't really all that good.  Of forty-four Presidents, eight died in office (Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, and JFK).  Nearly one in five Presidents will succumb to natural causes or be knocked off by a kook while they are in office.



Do you remember the "20 year curse" (sometimes called the curse of Tecumseh)?   Since 1840--with two exceptions--U.S. Presidents elected in years ending in zero have been killed or have died of natural causes while in office. One of those exceptions--Ronald Reagan, just barely escaped death--John Hinckley's bullet missed his heart by only an inch.  Gerald Ford had a gun aimed at him twice in one month!   FDR had five bullets shot at him by Giuseppe Zangara--even before he was sworn in for his first term.  Theodore Roosevelt was shot after he'd left office, but was running for a new term.  In fact, he carried the bullet in his body until he died.  Two Puerto Rican assassins attempted to shoot Harry Truman.   One guy was going to kill Dick Nixon by flying a commercial airline into the White House, 9/11 style.  He killed the pilot and co-pilot, but was shot before he could take off.  Reagan broke the "every 20 years" curse, but some people think the curse is just taking a little break.  George W. Bush extended that little break.  Interestingly enough, only one President--Zachary Taylor--who died in office didn't follow the 20 year pattern.

Some people believe the 20 year curse was an ancient Indian curse,  spoken by the great Indian chief Tecumseh after he and his braves were routed by the notorious Indian-fighting President William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe. 

Obviously a sample of 44 Presidents is such a small statistical sample that it may not be really relevant.  But, at the moment, we've had nearly fifty years without a Presidential mortality.  We're on a roll.
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Monday, October 27, 2008

Good news/bad news: Feds break up Obama assassination plot

From Chris Matthew's Daily Hardball Briefing (which arrived a minute ago):

Breaking News - In the last hour we learned that federal agents have broken up a plot they say to assassinate Barack Obama and then go on a murder spree and kill about 100 African-Americans. We'll talk to NBC News Justice Department correspondent Pete Williams, who is covering that story tonight.

I haven't seen any other articles or posts on this yet, but The Hardball Briefing can be trusted.

Sad news, but good news that the plot is broken...
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Saturday, March 15, 2008

The ides of March: It was 2,052 years ago today that Caesar was assassinated

click to enlarge the scene on the Ides of March

2,052 years ago today, on March 15th, 44 B.C., a plot of 60 conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, succeeded in killing the Emperor Julius Caesar.

The sixty conspirators came to a meeting in the Forum Romanum with daggers hidden in their togas. They stabbed Caesar at least 23 times as he stood at the base of Pompey's statue.

E tu Brute? - Legend has it that Caesar said in Greek to Brutus, “You, too, my child?” The Senators all fled after the deed, and three slaves carried his body home to Calpurnia hours later.


A bust believed to be of Julius Caesar, uncovered at Thera

The unwitting conspirators had no long-range plan beyond killing Caesar, and, in a major F***-up, they did not also assassinate Mark Antony. Brutus apparently went soft. The assassins had only a small band of gladiators to back them up. Marc Antony (whom we usually call Mark Anthony in English), however, had a whole legion, the keys to the privy purse, and Caesar's will.

Eventually a peace was brokered, and the 60 assassins were let off the hook.
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Friday, February 22, 2008

The JFK conspiracy buffs, and cover-up fanatics are about to have a field day...


A sketch, detailing how the single bullet
theory works. Click to enlarge.

A batch of old documents linked to the slaying of President John F. Kennedy has reportedly been unearthed in Texas. The documents include a highly suspect transcript of a conversation between assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and Oswald's killer Jack Ruby that numerous people have thought is actually a work of fiction--a bogus conversation that was destined to be included in a novel about the JFK assassination conspiracy. This is according to a Dallas Morning News published on Sunday.



The newspaper said the Dallas County district attorney's office, which found the documents, would display them at a news conference on Monday morning.

The Morning News said the items from an old safe in a Dallas courthouse included personal letters from former District Attorney Henry Wade, the prosecutor in the Ruby trial. Jack Ruby shot Oswald two days after the president's death. There were also papers and records from Ruby's trial, a gun holster and clothing that likely belonged to Ruby and Oswald, D.A. Craig Watkins told the newspaper.


One item is sure to inflame the Kennedys, the surviving Warren Commission members, and the ranks of the dwindling but still vocal and cantankerous of the JFK conspiracy theorists. This is a conversation in which Oswald and Ruby allegedly discuss killing Kennedy to halt the mafia-busting agenda of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy (ed's note: Jack Ruby, although Jewish, was allegedly an associate of La Cosa Nostra).

The Morning News said one theory about the transcript was that it was part of a movie script Wade was working on with producers, for a film that was never made.

As you know, the official U.S. government version of the murder is that Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy on November 22, 1963, as the president's motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas.

A few days later, Ruby shot Oswald dead at point-blank range as police were escorting their prime suspect. Live on national TV, which I remember, they played and replayed that whole long, weird weekend. Jack Ruby died some years later in prison.
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Saturday, December 29, 2007

The angels are weeping. . .

The angels are weeping today, for Benazir Bhutto, her family, and Pakistan itself, and for the six members of the Anderson family of Carnation, Washington (near Seattle), who were gunned down on Christmas Eve by their daughter/sister/aunt and her boyfriend


click the weeping angels to enlarge


"They were my family, too, you know?" Joe McEnroe told a Seattle Times reporter in a jailhouse interview. He may face death for the Carnation slayings.



And the angels weep for Benazir Bhutto, who was not perfect, but who had become a sort of JFK-figure of hope/beacon of light to the mess that is Pakistan.
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Saturday, December 08, 2007

27 years ago today, John Lennon was assassinated



John Lennon was assassinated by a deranged fan outside his home 27 years ago today. We lived in the neighborhood at the time, and could hear the sirens. I was listening to Vin Skelsa that night on WNEW when he broke in in tears, to tell us the news about his friend. Lennon had just released Double Fantasy (his best record in years) two weeks earlier. It was an incredibly depressing time, especially in New York City. Hostages were being held in Tehran, Jimmy Carter had just been trounced in the election, and Ronald Regan would be sworn in as President in a few weeks. For months fans gathered across the street from The Dakota, in what would become Strawberry Fields in Central Park.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007

McCain would like to blow Osama bin Laden away



The Boston Globe reported yesterday that G.O.P. presidential candidate John McCain told the workers in a weapons factory that, if elected, he wants to catch Osama Bin Laden.

"I will follow Osama Bin Laden to the gates of hell and I will shoot him with your products," McCain said.

McCain later told reporters he was joking when he made the comment at Thompson Center Arms in Rochester.

Perhaps. But the bottom line is, he succumbed to the moment, when those workers stared raptly at him, and it was the political equivalent of saying "talk dirty to me."


The Senator gives The President a man-hug
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