Apollo 8 50th Anniversary

Fifty years ago today the Apollo 8 mission was launched just four days before Christmas.

1968 had been a rough, tumultuous year.  We'd lost the Rev Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy to assassins bullets.  Riots had broken out in several US cities.  Czechoslovakia got invaded by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact to put an end to the Prague Spring.
The Vietnam War was raging, and the protests against it were ramping up.  Nixon was now the president-elect after LBJ declined to run for another term.

Despite all the national and international drama, NASA was still working to make President Kennedy's challenge to the country to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade happen.

And this mission was critical to making the other goal happen with the clock inexorably ticking toward the end of the 1960's.

After launching on December 20 with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders onboard   was one packed with historical firsts.   The first to leave Earth and set out for another celestial body.  Most importantly in that Cold War space race period, the first manned mission to orbit the moon. 

It arrived at the moon to start its ten orbits of the moon on Christmas Eve.   And then the got the sight and the photo of a lifetime, the famous shot of Earth rising above the moon.

They also sent a message from lunar orbit to the people back on Earth breathlessly watching the mission.



Seven months later, the mission that President Kennedy had set the nation on course to complete would be accomplished with Apollo 11 landing on the moon that July.

Happy Birthday Governor Ann!

'We're not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth - not most days, but every day.'-Ann Richards
September 1 happens to be the birthday of the best Texas governor in my lifetime so far in Ann Richards who was born on this date in 1933.

She would have been 82 today, and no one will ever forget her classic line at the 1988 Democratic National Convention when during her nationally televised speech,  she said about then President George Herbert Walker Bush in that consummate Texas drawl, “Poor George, he can’t help it, He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” 

I was proud to vote for her three times, once as our state treasurer, and twice as our governor.  When she took office as our governor in 1991, under her leadership our state went from having a $6 billion deficit to a $2.5 billion surplus.  Her cabinet looked like Texas in terms of the talented people she chose for it and the diversity of the people on it.    

And we were proud to have her representing our state as our 45th governor, the second woman to hold that position and the first to be elected into the position on her own merits.

She sadly has been the last Texas Democrat to hold the position

We lost her on September 13, 2006 to esophageal cancer, but she has inspired a legion of young women in Texas and beyond to consider careers in public service. 
And she is sorely missed.

Happy 99th Birthday Bayard Rustin!

Today is not only St Patrick's Day, but the 99th birthday of civil rights icon Bayard Rustin, who was born in West Chester, PA on this date in 1912.

Rustin was one of our trailblazing leaders who was an advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr on the principles of non violence, helped Dr. King organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, a behind the scenes leader in the Civil Rights Movement, a trustee on University of Notre Dame's Board of Regents in the early 70's, a founder of the A. Philip Randolph Institute and a human rights and election monitor for Freedom House.

He not only was a civil rights movement hero, Rustin was also a trailblazing leader in the gay rights movement.   He testified on behalf of New York's Gay Rights Bill and said this in his 1986 speech the 'New Niggers Are Gays':

 Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new "niggers" are gays. . . . It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. . . . The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people

He died on August 24, 1987 due to a perforated appendix.

According to the New York Times, Rustin once wrote that 'The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.

Feel you on all of that Brother Rustin.    Hope we are throwing a serious party for your Centennial birthday next year or the planning for it is in the works.. 

And for you haters, especially in the African-American community who ignorantly assert that gay peeps have 'done nothing for our people', the life of Bayard Rustin is a powerful rebuke to that bull feces.

Happy birthday, Bayard Rustin.

Barbara Jordan's 75th Birthday

It would stand to reason that a trailblazing political figure like Barbara Charline Jordan would be born on George Washington's birthday.    One of the things I have lamented about Texas' slide into conservafool madness is that we haven't produced national political leaders with her stature ever since.


As you longtime readers know, I have much love for Barbara Jordan and a lot of my attitudes toward government were formed by watching her actions and listening to her eloquent words as she represented me as a Texas state Senator and later in Congress .

If you ever hear me mention the letters WWBD, she's who I'm referring to when I say it. 

Every time I hear somebody say there's no such thing as an honest politician, Barbara Jordan's memory comes to my mind when I tell that person that's bull feces.  Barbara Jordan was so ethically rock solid that when Ann Richards became the governor in 1990, she appointed her as the head of her Ethics office that she established in the wake of the scandal ridden Clements administration 

Yesterday would have been her 75th birthday, and I'm pausing for a moment to think about her remarkable life.   She was the first African American woman and first elected to the Texas State Senate since Reconstruction.   The first Southern Black woman ever elected to Congress.   She served on the Judiciary Committee during the Watergate Hearings.   The memorable 1992 DNC keynote speech.  She was considered by Jimmy Carter as a vice presidential running mate in 1975 and by President Clinton for a seat on the US Supreme Court.





Even in death she was a trailblazer when in 1996 she became the first African American to be interred in the Texas State Cemetery.

There are some of us who still refer to the 18th Congressional District, the one currently held by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and once held by Mickey Leland, the man who succeeded her as 'Barbara's Seat'.

Texas, and the nation could stand to have more leaders like her. 

Colonel Sanders 120th Birthday

It escaped most people's attention and I'm surprised the nekulturny media pimps at PETA didn't release another one of their anti-KFC screeds, but today was the 120th anniversary of the birth of one of my fellow Kentucky Colonels, Harlan David Sanders.

'The Colonel' at age 65 took a $105 Social Security check, a sixth grade education and a chicken recipe and parlayed it into a global food empire. Until his 1980 death at age 90, he traveled 250,000 miles a year visiting KFC restaurants worldwide.

For years, he carried the secret Original Recipe in his head and the spice mixture in his car as he drove coast to coast visiting franchisees.

By 1976, he was ranked as the world’s second most recognizable celebrity behind only heavyweight champion (and fellow Kentuckian) Muhammad Ali. I lived down the street from the Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville where he is buried.

I'll have to make a pilgrimage to my local KFC in his honor.

Happy Birthday Sylvia!

Today is the birthday of the mother of the trans rights movement as we call her, Sylvia Rae Rivera.

She was born in New York City on this date in 1951 to parents of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan extraction, and was a founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance.

She also founded with her friend Marsha P. Johnson STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a group focused on helping homeless young street transwomen.

She was a Stonewall Veteran in addition to being a loud and persistent voice railing against the attempts by the gay community to erase and exclude transpeople, people of color and low income people from the nascent TBLG movement and civil rights legislation.

I had the pleasure of meeting her in May 2000 and having a long conversation with her about some of those events.

We also agreed to disagree about Lyndon B. Johnson.

Sylvia lost her battle with cancer in February 2002, but her memory will live on through the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and the MCC's Sylvia Rivera Food Pantry named in her honor.

In 2005, the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood where she organized much of her activism was renamed "Rivera Way" in her honor.

MAGNET also had some commentary about the Mother of the Trans Rights Movement as well.