George McGovern has died…

Last week or so I wrote about former Senator  George McGovern who had been admitted to a hospice with a deadly disease. Now, at 90 years old, McGovern has died.

McGovern ran for President 3 times and was nominated once, but lost to Richard Nixon. He was a North Dakota’s Representative to the U.S. House from 1957 to 1961 and a U.S. Senator from 1963 to 1981. For 24 years he was one of the leaders of the Democratic Party.

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Quote of the Day – Say… isn’t George Will a Republican?

Certainly, this is a fascinating statement from a famous conservative columnist:

“I think there was a winner in the sense that Barack Obama not only gained ground he lost but he cauterized some wounds that he inflicted on himself by seeming too diffident and disengaged.

“It was a very good fight. I have seen every presidential debate in American history since the floor of Nixon and Kennedy in 1960. This was immeasurably the best.

“I think as a tactical measure tonight, the president did very well.” 

And we’re seeing more Republicans come out of the woodwork with a different view of the President. Very interesting.

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Ex-Senator and former Presidential Candidate George McGovern in a South Dakota Hospice.

“He’s coming to the end of his life,” McGovern’s daughter, Ann, stated. She didn’t elaborate but noted that her 90-year-old father has suffered several health problems in the last year.

George McGovern became a leader of the Democrats’ liberal wing during his three decades in Congress but lost his 1972 challenge to Richard Nixon. McGovern turned his focus in recent years to world hunger.

It was after a lecture tour a year ago that he was treated for exhaustion, then two months later, he fell and hit his head.

McGovern spent several days in a Florida hospital in April for tests to determine why he occasionally passed out and had difficulty speaking. His daughter said he has moved in the Dougherty Hospice House in Sioux Falls, SD, where he moved in August to spend more time near his family.

McGovern was a member of the U.S. House from 1957 to 1961 and a U.S. senator from 1963 to 1981.

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MSNBC Dumps Pat Buchanan

You can either celebrate or cry, but here’s the word:

Pat Buchanan has been dismissed by MSNBC, the left-leaning news network, four months after the channel suspended him.

In an angry post on his blog, conservative commentator Buchanan took his critics to task, writing, “After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.”

Buchanan says the calls for his firing began with the publication in October of his book “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” about America’s decline, which critics have called racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic.

Upon his suspension, Buchanan quotes MSNBC President Phil Griffin as telling the press regarding his new book, “I don’t think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC.”

Buchanan, a former White House aide to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a former Republican presidential candidate, had been with MSNBC as a political analyst since 2002.

On his website, Buchanan called his ouster “an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.”

Among the groups he cites as his accusers: Color of Change, Media Matters, the Anti-Defamation League and the Human Rights Campaign.

Frankly, I’m just as glad to see him go, although he didn’t really bother me. I saw him as more of a clown. He’ll turn up on the McLaughlin Group  and on Fox… don’t worry about it.

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David Frye, Nixon impersonator, dies at 77…

With a career that shriveled up after Nixon’s resignation, David Frye was an impressionist who triumphed as the Number 1 impersonation of the then President. I loved watching him. Oh, he did other impersonations… Johnson, Bobby Kennedy and later, as he tried to revive his success, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

In an Esquire interview, Frye defined his approach to Nixon:

“I do Nixon not by copying his real actions but by feeling his attitude, which is that he cannot believe that he really is president.”

Frye died on Monday in Las Vegas of a heart attack.

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American Playwright Romulus Linney has Died at 80…

Romulus Zacharias Linney IV, North Carolina born great grandson of a Congressman and father of Actress Laura Linney, may not have achieved the popularity of some of his contemporaries, but in the legitimate theater world he was considered a great intellectual and historically oriented writer. The Signature Theater Company in New York, which devotes full seasons to presenting the work of a single playwright, chose Mr. Linney to be the first writer it gave this honor to in 1991.

From the NY Times Obit:

Mr. Linney wrote plays about August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Delmore Schwartz and the poet Anna Akhmatova. He wrote about the Nuremberg trials and the Vietnam War. His sole foray onto Broadway, “The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks,” concerned a bizarre crime committed in the name of opposition to the war policy of President Richard M. Nixon; it fared poorly, closing after five performances in 1972.

And he wrote about the rural South in plays like “Heathen Valley,” about a 19th-century Episcopal bishop bringing the word of God to a remote region of North Carolina, which he adapted from one of his own three novels; “Holy Ghosts,” set among a sect of snake handlers; and “Love Drunk,” which was among his last works, about a 60-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman engaged in a creepy mutual seduction in a remote cabin.

There are few regional theaters in the country that have not done one or two of Linney’s numerous plays.

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