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Archive for March, 2008

Einsteinian Insanity

Late last week, Newt Gingrich delivered a curious, under-reported speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He called it, “Answering the Obama Challenge”, and it was framed as a response to Barack Obama’s historic speech about race. (Video and transcript available here. My emphasis.)
Segregation was a horrible institution imposed by force by the […]

Family lore: One Little Indian

(Continuing from “The French Scout”)
We’d gone into a loop: the family was in the U.S. for hundreds of years…. the name was DeRock…. they were in New York, always…. prior to 1900, they weren’t there. I had both too much information and too little. We were Delaware? Seneca? […]

624787

Via memeorandum comes the first general election ad of the season. America, meet John McCain — war hero, former POW, and patriot extraordinaire:

No doubt we will all know his Navy serial # (624787) by heart before this is all done… and why not? He was a hero indeed; I, for one, admire […]

Family lore: The French Scout

When I began working on my father’s maternal ancestry, I fully expected to hit a brick wall at some point. Even with my admittedly superficial grasp of early American history, I knew that there weren’t going to be many records of the French scout who’d married an Indian girl.
Our knowledge of this line […]

Comments and spam

Just a quick administrative note.
My spam software seems to be twitching and gibbering suddenly. It’s sucking some comments into the spam box and not others.
Thus far, the only commenters affected are (some of) those who have been part of the discussions here for years.    Since I’ve been fishing them out non-stop for the last […]

Obama - Bloomberg, and a potential domestic crisis for Polimom

The buzz this morning is that NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg introduced Barack Obama before a speech on the economy. Is Bloomberg perhaps going to endorse? Or even… is it possible that there’s a joint-ticket possibility? Marc Ambinder writes:
The First Read gang is all a-buzz at the Obama-Needs-A-Jew-On-The-Ticket Angle, but I think […]

Six apologies… and counting

The State of Florida has become the sixth to apologize for slavery — an issue about which I’m long-since on record:
Five other U.S. states have apologized for slavery since last year, including Alabama, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia.
Interesting that only one of the six states that have managed to step forward on this […]

Obama’s only half as scary now

Hunh. Evidently the NEHGS hasn’t nearly enough paid work to keep its researchers occupied.
Researchers at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found some remarkable family connections for the three presidential candidates — Democratic rivals Obama and Clinton, and Republican John McCain.
Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother’s side, is also a distant […]