Some things I learned recently:
Jazz legend Louis Armstrong came late to the political arena, but he didn’t mince words when he arrived.
As David Margolick reports for the New York Times, Armstrong responded to the desegregation standoff in Little Rock, Arkansas by stating, “President Eisenhower…was ‘two faced,’ and had ‘no guts.’ For Governor Faubus, [Armstrong] used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print….He then sang the opening bar of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.”
Armstrong’s response to the controversy that followed? “‘I said what somebody should have said a long time ago,’ he said the following day in Montevideo, Minn., where he gave his next concert. He closed that show with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ — this time, minus the obscenities.”
Supreme Court Justice David Souter nearly resigned following the Bush Vs. Gore decision
Government Employees Blowing the Whistle on Illegal Arm Sales in Iraq Are Treated Like Terrorists
As MSNBC reports, “For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.” Retaliation was also reserved for people pointing out fraud by Halliburton and other government contractors.