I remember my cousin Patrick Kelly Connor, a Navy flier shot down in Operation Desert Storm. Who do you remember? We’ve set up a open thread at TPMCafe for readers to share their remembrances this Memorial Day.
You may remember Roy Ashburn, the staunchly anti-gay rights California legislator arrested in early March for drunk driving after leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento. Ashburn, now openly gay, is speaking out in favor of gay rights.
David opened the question: who are you remembering this Memorial Day Weekend? I’m remembering Larry Rosenberg, or to cite his full birth name, Lawrence Isidore Rosenberg. He was a Navy electrician aboard the destroyer escort USS Fechteler when it was torpedoed by German submarine U-967 northeast of Oran, Algeria on May 5th, 1944.
Of course, I never met him. And even my father, his nephew, only had a small child’s memories of his Uncle Larry. But I remember him and feel I know him because of the echoes of grief that his death shook down through the decades until I was born and well into my adulthood.
Of the 215 on board the Fechteler 186 were rescued by the USS Laning, another destroyer escort in the same convoy. He was one of the 29 who died, probably doomed by the fact that at the time of the attack he was in the engine room where the torpedo struck the ship. Read More
I’ve written several times before about the uncannily functional Kindle, which, aesthetic discomfort notwithstanding, has pretty much totally weened me from physical books. But today I’m writing with a more tragic tale. More or less out of the blue, my Kindle’s screen has decided to commit suicide. No triggering event, no trauma and certainly no note. The result is one side totally gone, the other side totally bollixed. You can see the crime scene photo here.
Has anyone else had this happen? And is this thing has finished as it looks? At first I thought a little reseting or repowering or something might do the trick. But it seems not. Has anyone had to deal with Amazon trying to get one of these fixed? Good experience or bad?
As I noted not long ago, a simple look at the public opinion data suggests that Charlie Crist is threatening to push Democrat Kendrick Meek out of the running altogether as the de facto Democrat in the Florida Senate race. See this graph to see what I mean. Eric Kleefeld looks at how Crist’s positioning is moving more and more conventionally Democratic as his independent run goes on.
When last we spoke, I was telling you about my Kindle’s sudden demise. Or rather the apparently sudden demise of its screen. One of the reasons I like sharing things with you is that I immediately find out more than I could possibly have learned on my own about the subject. So this is what I’ve found out so far.
First, my Kindle is pretty clearly toast. The screen is broken, which I guess is probably pretty obvious from the picture (but denial goes a long way). And this actually seems to happen a lot. It turns out that the eInk which the whole system is based on has a layer of glass in it. And it’s actually quite fragile. It seems like quite a few of you have had the same thing happen to yours. Read More
With the recent Blumenthal and now Kirk stories (and with Memorial Day upon us), it’s worth remembering that pols across the board have a long history of either wildly embellishing or just outright falsifying their own military records. Help us pull together a list. What are some of the best? Send tips to our comment email address at the upper right.
The latest developments on the overnight raid by Israeli commandos on the flotilla of pro-Palestinian activists trying to break the blockade of Gaza to bring in relief supplies:
I think the best take I’ve seen on the boarding of the ‘Freedom Flotilla’ off Gaza comes today from Bradley Burston in Haaretz. Bernard-Henri Levy, speaking this morning at a conference in Tel Aviv, seems to have a similar take. Read More