George’s slightly off-center view of the world
From the misty corners of my memory
It’s January, time to reflect on the year just passed. Dave Barry, as he does every year, gives us a trip down the memory hole of 2018, helping us to remember much that we tried to forget.
“What made this year so awful? We could list many factors, including natural disasters, man-made atrocities, the utter depravity of our national political discourse and the loss of Aretha Franklin.”
Re-live the year just finished. Read Dave’s month-by-month report.
“Your people come first, and if you treat them right, they’ll treat the customers right.”
Wild Turkey whiskey and Kool cigarettes finally caught up with Herb Kelleher. The co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines has died at age eighty-seven. Southwest began flying in 1971, serving three Texas Cities: Dallas (Love Field, not DFW), San Antonio and Houston. Today, Southwest, with 58,000 employees, carries more domestic passengers than any other airline, serving ninety-nine U.S. cities and ten foreign countries. It is the most, actually the only consistently profitable airline, even without charging fees for checked baggage or itinerary changes and with a highly-unionized workforce.
Continue reading ““The business of business is people.””
Everybody loves full-flavored craft beer. (Well, almost everybody; there are still a lot of Coors Light drinkers.) In the last couple decades, so-called craft beers have taken an increasing share of the beer market. Their percentage is still small, but it’s enough so the big guys have taken notice. MolsonCoors/MillerCoors, Anheuser-Busch InBev and others are marketing their brands as craft, e.g. Blue Moon, Shock Top. They also are busy buying up small breweries. Boulevard, Widmer, Lagunitas, Firestone-Walker are among the many dozens who have outside ownership.
The craft-beer industry is maturing and entrepreneurial founders of breweries are looking to retirement or a payday – or may have investors who are – or have grand visions of expansion. The giant beverage companies are eager to add an admired brew to their roster of brands. A few, such as New Belgium Brewing (Fat Tire) have taken a different path: employee ownership. Others, like Full Sail, have private equity funds as owners. But as Boston Beer founder Jim Koch recently told a gathering of brewers, PEFs are not content with collecting a share of profits. They expect a “liquidity event” event within a few years, i.e. a sale for cash.
Try to find on the label or in advertising, though, who owns a brand. They want their consumers to envision hands-on entrepreneurs working with a tight group of enthusiast-employees. The giant beer companies believe that disclosing a brand’s corporate ownership spoils the craft-brewery cachet. So you won’t find any mention of it.
The Brewers Association has come up with a seal to identify independent brews. To be authorized to display the Independent logo a brewer must meet three requirements:
The Brewers Association has on its CraftBeer.com web site a tool for finding craft brewers nearby. I tried the CraftBeer.com search tool for breweries near me. Included in the list that came up were Widmer Brothers in Portland and 10Barrel Brewing in Bend. Both had the notation “Greater than 25% ownership by Anheuser-Busch InBev.” (32% of Widmer and 100% of 10 Barrel)
“In guitar music, especially electric guitar, a power chord (also fifth chord) is a colloquial name for a chord that consists of the root note and the fifth. Power chords are commonly played on amplified guitars, especially on electric guitar with distortion.”
Dick Dale and the Del-Tones gained fame in southern California in the late fifties, working from their home base, the Rendezvous Ballroom near Newport Beach. The story goes that in 1962, on a bet that he couldn’t play a song using only a single guitar string, Dick Dale (née Monsour) reached back into his Lebanese roots and remembered his uncle playing a song on one string of a lute. Dale upped the tempo – and the volume – several magnitudes. The song was “Misirlou,” (or “Miserlou”) meaning “Arab Land.” The song had been recorded many times since the 1920s, but never like Dick Dale. “Misirlou” entered the rock canon and established Dale as “King of the Surf Guitar.”
Continue reading “The Power Chord – Parts I & II”For an illustration of how to steal an election, let’s go back seventy years, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s successful 1948 Texas primary campaign for the U.S. Senate.
The 2018 mid-term elections are already history-making, and not just for illustrating the gaping political divide between urban and rural voters. Republicans have been bleating for years about rampant voter fraud, while working diligently to prevent citizens from voting and when unsuccessful in that to stop votes from being counted. Turns out that the few documented cases of actual fraud involve Republicans.
Remember North Carolina? That’s the state whose GOP-controlled legislature, in a lame-duck session after the 2016 election, passed a bill limiting the governor’s powers. The lame-duck Republican chief executive signed the bill before vacating his office for the newly-elected Democratic governor who had beaten him in the election. (Fast-forward to 2018: Wisconsin and Michigan have just done the same thing.)
Republican fraud in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district 2018 election was so blatant and so egregious that the state’s Board of Elections—made up of four Democrats, four Republicans, and one Independent, responsible for tabulating and verifying every ballot – voted unanimously not to certify Republican Mark Harris’s purported win. Republican lackeys had gone door-to-door in the district collecting mail-in ballots, claiming authority to gather and deliver them as a service to voters.
For an updated, blow-by-blow sequence of NC’s yet-to-be-decided congressional election go to ballotpedia.com.
For an illustration of how to steal an election, let’s go back seventy years, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s successful 1948 Texas primary campaign for the U.S. Senate.
In his third term representing Texas’s 10th congressional district, LBJ suffered an ignominious defeat in a 1941 special election for the Senate. He retained his House seat, running unopposed in the next three elections. The House though, was a dead end in Johnson’s mind; his ambition reached far beyond being a congressman. In 1948 he ran again for the Senate.
The important election was the primary. Southern states were solidly Democratic and had been since Reconstruction. The general election would be a formality. Former governor and living Texas legend Coke R. Stevenson was LBJ’s main opponent in the three-way race. Steven won the election –Johnson was second – but did not receive the required majority of votes. A runoff election was scheduled.
Johnson campaigned in frenzy, crisscrossing the state in the“Flying Windmill,” a rented helicopter with his name emblazoned on its sides.He drew crowds by simply landing an aircraft that most residents of rural towns had never before seen.
The initial tally gave Stevenson a narrow victory. A few days later an amended count from Jim Wells County in southern Texas gave Johnson 202 additional votes, providing him with an 87-vote margin of victory. George B. Parr – banker, rancher, oilman – considered the “Emperor of South Texas” and a Johnson supporter, controlled elections in more than a dozen south counties, but not Jim Wells County. Had he controlled Jim Wells, LBJ may have won without the controversy.
The amended count from Precinct 13 – Jim Wells County – showed, oddly, that voters had cast their ballots in alphabetical order, had signed in with identical handwriting and used the same pen. Some were not eligible to vote or were out of the county on Election Day or were dead. Jim Wells’s officials produced neither the actual ballots nor the ballot box. (The votes and “Box 13” have never been found.) Democratic officials – in those days, political parties ran the primary elections – declared Lyndon Johnson the winner. LBJ easily beat his Republican opponent in the general election. Johnson entered the Senate carrying his new nickname: “Landslide Lyndon.”
Johnson soon became the unchallenged “Master of the Senate.” John F. Kennedy chose him as his vice-presidential running mate in the 1960 election. He moved into the White House after JFK was assassinated in 1963. A year later he won the presidential election by a genuine landslide.
LBJ famously said, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that he had steered through the Senate, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” Republicans have since controlled the southern states for two generations and counting.
Robert A. Caro provides a riveting account of the 1948 election and the general political climate in southern Texas in Means of Ascent, the second volume of his The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
