It Is Time

It is time to reestablish that culture that our Forefathers lived and died to create, not in merely the words, but the deeds. It is time.

On the Statue of Liberty are inscriptions about giving Americans the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It is time to actually fulfill that promise and give our Latino brothers and Latina sisters that promised freedom. It would appear we, like some Madison Avenue advertising agency have shown the slogans, yet denied the reality to much of Latin America. We seem to say you cannot attempt to cross the border illegally, and have children in the United States, and you cannot become a citizen. Many have lived here for over twenty years and have as many as three generations in America, but are still considered illegal and must constantly be on constant vigil against reprisal.

Every one knows that conditions south of our borders have long been devoid of the opportunity to allow families to grow and prosper with a life style that rewards ability and enlarges the middle class. They have struggled to get here and died in closed freight trailers on some lonely desert or fallen prey to rings exploiting them into prostitution and economic slavery. They must keep watching with a constant eye for immigration and threats to be deported should they try to get better wages or living conditions. Mexicans in particular have migrated in large numbers to America to provide for their families in land that once was in fact theirs. Additionally Latinos from Latin and Central America have come here to escape political and economic hardships. Their children have grown up here and seen the hypocrisy between what we do and what we say we do.

America should be the literal shining beacon of hope and justice for immigrants, but most with the exception of the first Europeans who crossed the ocean shores, have had to suffer until they were assimilated and accepted into a kinder, gentler society. There were Irish, Italian, Jewish, Black, and Oriental slums and repressions. And so, there are now Latinos marching, shouting, and asking for justice in the American mosaic that is our culture.

People that have been here ten years should be on a fast track toward citizenship. Those that have lived in America and have two or more generations that are native born and lived here have earned that right. People that have lived here and been gainfully employed for five years should have that right as well. We should reform the hiring laws to penalize those that hire illegal workers and have degrees of legal work status for those that desperately seek jobs and enrich, not detract from our culture. Parents of children born here need to be able to remain and provide for their families. An Amnesty Day must be set and adhered to that is fair and real. We must retain the heritage to the claim of the Land of Opportunity and Freedom.

From Liberty Enlightening the World is its inscription by Emma Lazarus:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
' With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

It is time to reestablish that culture that our Forefathers lived and died to create, not in merely the words, but the deeds. It is time.

by Thomas P Love

http://tomlovetexas.blogspot.com/2007/10/it-is-time.html

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution by Wikipedia

The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.
Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) that had held that black people could not be citizens of the United States.^[1]
Its Due Process Clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without certain steps being taken to ensure fairness. This clause has been used to make most of the Bill of Rights applicable to the states, as well as to recognize substantive and procedural rights.
Its Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. This clause was the basis for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision which precipitated the dismantling of racial segregation in United States education. In Reed v. Reed (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that laws arbitrarily requiring sex discrimination violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Text

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
 

Validity of public debtSection 4 confirmed the legitimacy of all United States public debt appropriated by the Congress. It also confirmed that neither the United States nor any state would pay for the loss of slaves or debts that had been incurred by the Confederacy. For example, during the Civil War several British and French banks had lent large sums of money to the Confederacy to support its war against the Union.^[47] In Perry v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court ruled that under Section 4 voiding a United States government bond "went beyond the congressional power."^[48]

The United States debt-ceiling crisis in 2011 raised the question of what powers Section 4 gives to the President. Under the current law, the executive branch of the government (which includes the Treasury and the President) is obligated to carry out all appropriations authorized by the Congress. It has been argued that, in the presence of conflicting statutes (a federal budget statute, which instructs the Treasury to spend a certain amount of money, and a debt ceiling statute, which limits the amount of money that the Treasury is allowed to borrow in process), the statute that was passed more recently "wins"; therefore, in this situation, the President may simply instruct the Treasury to continue issuing bonds beyond the ceiling. Furthermore, such an instruction may be difficult to challenge in court, because it would take a joint resolution of both chambers of Congress to get standing to challenge it.^[49] In addition, it has been observed by many, such as legal scholar Garrett Epps, fiscal expert Bruce Bartlett and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, that the debt ceiling itself may be unconstitutional and therefore void as long as it interferes with the duty of the government to pay interest on outstanding bonds and to make payments owed to pensioners (that is, Social Security recipients).^[50][51]
The issue of what effect Section 4 has regarding the debt ceiling remains unsettled.^[52] Legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen has argued that Section 4 gives the President unilateral authority to raise or ignore the national debt ceiling, and that if challenged the Supreme Court would likely rule in favor of expanded executive power or dismiss the case altogether for lack of standing.^[53] Erwin Chemerinsky, professor and dean at University of California, Irvine School of Law, has argued that not even in a "dire financial emergency" could the President raise the debt ceiling as "there is no reasonable way to interpret the Constitution that [allows him to do so]".^[54]

Power of enforcement

Main article: Congressional power of enforcement

Section 5, the last section, was construed broadly by the Supreme Court in Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966).^[55] However, the Court, in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), said:

Any suggestion that Congress has a substantive, non-remedial power under the Fourteenth Amendment is not supported by our case law.^[56]

Proposal and ratification

The 39th United States Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment on June 13, 1866.
Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment was bitterly contested: all the Southern state legislatures, with the exception of Tennessee, refused to ratify the amendment. This refusal led to the passage of the Reconstruction Acts. Ignoring the existing state governments, military government was imposed until new civil governments were established and the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.^[57]
By July 9, 1868, three-fourths of the states (28 of 37) ratified the amendment:^[58

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Validity_of_public_debt

A Day in the Life: Delusion verses Reality

I never saw anyone hunt for game with semiautomatic weapons, but far too often, they have been used to kill lots of people quickly.When I wrote this in April 2007, we had just had one of a series of events that highlighted a reason to ask why and how can we prevent the mass killings. Now we have suffered many more of the same type of events with almost no action but  political theater. How many deaths will it take to achieve true awareness. Some say guns protect from gun violence, but at Fort Hood Army Base not even soldiers were immune and they indeed carry guns.

As I watched the news of the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia unfold, I thought of my own experiences with the mental health system in America. I have two step sons that have paranoid schizophrenia, and when they are taking their medication, they are not psychotic. The struggle to help them to lead meaningful and productive lives has encompassed the last twenty years of our existence. Once you have encountered the right of a mentally unbalanced person to not take their medicine, even though there is no possible way they can rationally make that essential decision; and then the criteria that they must actually be an immediate threat to themselves or others to get help to not be a threat, can you fully ask the question: which is more insane, the illness or the system?

I hear people debate whether to have more gun control or not despite the statistic that in gun deaths unrelated to wars, America has more gun deaths than all the rest of the world combined. In fact, we have 83% of the world’s gun non-military related deaths since 1980. But the question how an unmedicated mentally unbalanced person could seemingly legally buy two guns and then kill thirty-two people is answered that Virginia does not report mentally impaired individuals to the very data Federal base that determines if someone can legally buy a weapon. Why? Simply put, it is not illegal to be psychotic, but to not treat that psychosis is also not illegal.

I hear people say that mentally unbalanced people, that really want to kill people, can use other weapons. That is undeniably true. There is the case of a young woman being shoved into an oncoming train from a passenger platform by an unmedicated delusional individual that perceived her as an imaginary threat. If one wishes, one could possibly connect airline hijacking to unbalanced minds. However; that perceived threat met an immediate cry to safeguard boarding and passenger loading all across America. We have sky marshals and airline check-in procedures at all airports in every terminal, but we have averaged as many as thirty thousand gun deaths in America yearly since 1980. Why?

How many of these have been at the hands unbalanced individuals, one only can guess, but guns are not the main problem of society verses the individual on mental health. The root cause is proper treatment when that treatment is needed and the monitoring of that sick mind so that they can resume being a contributing member of society, not a potential time bomb that must explode to get the very help needed to prevent tragedy. I recently asked the question why mental health workers and social workers cannot help make sure ill and chemically imbalanced individuals take their medicine, and was met with the response that it’s not in the budget. Why? The next time a sick individual lets loose their unmedicated delusions and your loved one dies, will you be satisfied with that response?

_Thomas P Love 04/17/07

 Wall Street Journalreported, only 12 states account for the majority of mental health records in the FBI database. Mayors Against Illegal Guns, co-chaired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, reported that 19 states have each submitted less than 100 mental health records to the FBI database.

http://www.alternet.org/34ths-states-ignore-mental-illness-background-checks-gun-buyers?akid=9851.38024._JrUQE&rd=1&src=newsletter766339&t=2
 

The Fiscal Cliff Explained By Thomas Kenny

“Fiscal cliff” is the popular shorthand term used to describe the conundrum that the U.S. government will face at the end of 2012, when the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011 are scheduled to go into effect.
Among the laws set to change at midnight on December 31, 2012, are the end of last year’s temporary payroll tax cuts (resulting in a 2% tax increase for workers), the end of certain tax breaks for businesses, shifts in the alternative minimum tax that would take a larger bite, the end of the tax cuts from 2001-2003, and the beginning of taxes related to President Obama’s health care law. At the same time, the spending cuts agreed upon as part of the debt ceiling deal of 2011 will begin to go into effect. According to Barron's, over 1,000 government programs - including the defense budget and Medicare are in line for "deep, automatic cuts."
In dealing with the fiscal cliff, U.S. lawmakers have a choice among three options, none of which are particularly attractive:

• They can let the current policy scheduled for the beginning of 2013 – which features a number of tax increases and spending cuts that are expected to weigh heavily on growth and possibly drive the economy back into a recession – go into effect. The plus side: the deficit, as a percentage of GDP, would be cut in half.
• They can cancel some or all of the scheduled tax increases and spending cuts, which would add to the deficit and increase the odds that the United States could face a crisis similar to that which is occurring in Europe. The flip side of this, of course, is that the United States' debt will continue to grow.
• They could take a middle course, opting for an approach that would address the budget issues to a limited extent, but that would have a more modest impact on growth.

Can a Compromise be Reached?
The oncoming fiscal cliff is a concern for investors since the highly partisan nature of the current political environment could make a compromise difficult to reach. This problem isn’t new, after all: lawmakers have had three years to address this issue, but Congress – mired in political gridlock – has largely put off the search for a solution rather than seeking to solve the problem directly. Republicans want to cut spending and avoid raising taxes, while Democrats are looking for a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Although both parties want to avoid the fiscal cliff, compromise is seen as being difficult to achieve – particularly in an election year. There's a strong possibility that Congress won't act until the eleventh hour. Another potential obstacle is that the next Congress won't be sworn in until January 3, after the deadline.
The most likely outcome is another set of stop-gap measures that would delay a more permanent policy change until 2013 or later. Still, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that if Congress takes the middle ground – extending the Bush-era tax cuts but cancelling the automatic spending cuts – the result, in the short term, would be modest growth but no major economic hit.
Possible Effects of the Fiscal Cliff
If the current laws slated for 2013 go into effect, the impact on the economy could be dramatic. While the combination of higher taxes and spending cuts would reduce the deficit by an estimated $560 billion, the CBO estimates that the policies set to go into effect would cut gross domestic product (GDP) by four percentage points in 2013, sending the economy into a recession (i.e., negative growth). At the same time, it predicts unemployment would rise by almost a full percentage point, with a loss of about two million jobs. A Wall St. Journal article from May 16, 2012 estimates the following impact in dollar terms: “In all, according to an analysis by J.P. Morgan economist Michael Feroli, $280 billion would be pulled out of the economy by the sunsetting of the Bush tax cuts; $125 billion from the expiration of the Obama payroll-tax holiday; $40 billion from the expiration of emergency unemployment benefits; and $98 billion from Budget Control Act spending cuts. In all, the tax increases and spending cuts make up about 3.5% of GDP, with the Bush tax cuts making up about half of that, according to the J.P. Morgan report.” Amid an already-fragile recovery and elevated unemployment, the economy is not in a position to avoid this type of shock.
The cost of indecision is likely to have an effect on the economy before 2013 even begins. The CBO anticipates that a lack of resolution will cause households and businesses to begin changing their spending in anticipation of the changes, possible reducing GDP before 2012 is even over.
Having said this, it's important to keep in mind that while the term “cliff” indicates an immediate disaster at the beginning of 2013, the impact of the changes - while destructive over a full year - will be gradual at first. What's more, Congress can act to change laws retroactively after the deadline. As a result, the fiscal cliff won't necessarily be an impediment to growth even if Congress doesn't address the issue until after 2013 has already begun.
The Next Crisis
Unfortunately, the fiscal cliff isn't the only problem facing the United States right now. At some point in the first quarter, the country will again hit the "debt ceiling" - the same issue that roiled the markets in the summer of 2011 and prompted the automatic spending cuts that make up a portion of the fiscal cliff.

http://bonds.about.com/od/Issues-in-the-News/a/What-Is-The-Fiscal-Cliff.htm

To learn more about this issue, see my article What is the Debt Ceiling? A Simple Explanation of the Debate and Crisis

Henry A. Wallace from Wikipedia

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd Vice President of the United States (1941–1945), the Secretary of Agriculture (1933–1940), and the Secretary of Commerce (1945–1946). In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.

Henry A. Wallace, son of Henry Cantwell Wallace, a farmer, journalist, and political activist, was born on October 7, 1888, at a farm near the village of Orient, Iowa, in Adair County.^[1] Wallace attended Iowa State College at Ames, Iowa. At Iowa State he became a friend of George Washington Carver, and they spent time together collecting botanical specimens. Wallace graduated in 1910 with a bachelor's degree in animal husbandry. He worked on the editorial staff of the family-owned paper Wallaces' Farmer in Des Moines from 1910 to 1924, and he edited this publication from 1924 to 1929. Wallace experimented with breeding high-yielding hybrid corn, and he wrote a good number of publications on agriculture. In 1915, he devised the first corn-hog ratio charts indicating the probable course of markets. Wallace was also a self-taught "practicing statistician",^[2] co-authoring an influential article with George W. Snedecor on computational methods for correlations and regressions^[3] and publishing sophisticated statistical studies in the pages of Wallaces’ Farmer. Snedecor eventually invited Wallace to teach a graduate course on least squares.^[4]
With an inheritance of a few thousand dollars that had been left to his wife, the former Ilo Browne, whom he married in 1914, Wallace founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company in 1926, which later became Pioneer Hi-Bred, a major agriculture corporation, acquired in 1999 by the Dupont Corporation for approximately $10 billion.
Wallace was raised as a Presbyterian, but left that denomination early in life. He spent most of his early life exploring other religious faiths and traditions. For many years, he had been closely associated with famous Russian artist and writer Nicholas Roerich. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "Wallace's search for inner light took him to strange prophets.... It was in this search that he encountered Nicholas Roerich, a Russian emigre, painter, theosophist. Wallace did Roerich a number of favors, including sending him on an expedition to Central Asia presumably to collect drought-resistant grasses. In due course, H.A. [Wallace] became disillusioned with Roerich and turned almost viciously against him."^[5] Wallace eventually settled on Episcopalianism.
Henry Wallace was also a Freemason and attained the 32nd Degree in the Scottish Rite.
Secretary of Agriculture
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Wallace United States Secretary of Agriculture in his Cabinet, a post his father, Henry Cantwell Wallace, had occupied from 1921 to 1924. Henry A. Wallace had been a liberal Republican, but he supported Roosevelt's New Deal and soon switched to the Democratic Party. Wallace served as Secretary of Agriculture until September 1940, when he resigned, having been nominated for Vice President as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1940 presidential election. During his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Agriculture he ordered a very unpopular strategy of slaughtering pigs and plowing up cotton fields in rural America to drive the price of these commodities back up in order to improve American farmers' financial situation. He also advocated the ever-normal granary concept.

 Vice President

Wallace was elected in November 1940 as Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His inauguration took place on January 20, 1941, for the term ending January 20, 1945.
Roosevelt named Wallace chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) and of the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board (SPAB) in 1941. Both positions became important with the U.S. entry into World War II. As he began to flex his newfound political muscle in his position with SPAB, Wallace came up against the conservative wing of the Democratic party in the form of Jesse H. Jones, Secretary of Commerce, as the two differed on how to handle wartime supplies.
On May 8, 1942, Wallace delivered his most famous speech, which became known by the phrase "Century of the Common Man" to the Free World Association in New York City. This speech, grounded in Christian references, laid out a positive vision for the war beyond the simple defeat of the Nazis. The speech, and the book of the same name which appeared the following year, proved quite popular, but it earned him enemies among the Democratic leadership, among important allied leaders like Winston Churchill, and among business leaders and conservatives.
Wallace spoke out during race riots in Detroit in 1943, declaring that the nation could not "fight to crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home."

 

In 1943, Wallace made a goodwill tour of Latin America, shoring up support among important allies. His trip proved a success, and helped persuade twelve countries to declare war on Germany. Regarding trade relationships with Latin America, he convinced the BEW to add "labor clauses" to contracts with Latin American producers. These clauses required producers to pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions for their employees and committed the United States to paying for up to half of the required improvements. This met opposition from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Wallace believed that both the American and the Russian revolution were part of "the march to freedom of the past 150 years." After having met Molotov, he arranged a trip to the "Wild East" of Russia. On May 23, 1944, he started a 25-day journey accompanied by Owen Lattimore. Coming from Alaska, they landed at Magadan where they were received by Sergei Goglidze and Dalstroi director Ivan Nikishov, both NKVD generals. The NKVD presented a fully sanitized version of the slave labor camps in Magadan and Kolyma to their American guests, convinced them that all the work was done by volunteers, charmed them with entertainment, and left their guests impressed with the "development" of Siberia and the spirit of the "volunteers." Lattimore's film of the visit tells that "a village... in Siberia is a forum for open discussion like a town meeting in New England."^[6] The trip continued to Mongolia and then to China.
After Wallace feuded publicly with Jesse Jones and other high officials, Roosevelt stripped him of his war agency responsibilities and entertained the idea of replacing him on the presidential ticket. The Democratic Party, with concern being expressed privately about Roosevelt being able to make it through another term, chose Harry S. Truman as Roosevelt's running mate at the 1944 Democratic convention, after New Deal partisans failed to promote William O. Douglas. Wallace was succeeded as Vice President on January 20, 1945, by Truman. On April 12, 1945, Vice President Truman succeeded to the Presidency when President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Henry A. Wallace had missed being the 33rd President of the United States by just 82 days.

Roerich controversy

From the middle 1920s, Wallace was a devoted supporter of Nicholas Roerich, a philosopher and Russian emigre.^[7] With agreement from Roosevelt, Wallace had lobbied Congress to support Roerich's Banner and Pact of Peace which was signed in Washington, D.C. in 1935 by delegates from 22 Latin American countries. Roerich and his son George were sent to Central Asia by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to search for drought-resistant grasses to prevent another Dust Bowl.
During the 1940 presidential election, a series of letters that Wallace had written in the 1930s to Roerich was in the possession of the Republicans. In the letters, Wallace addressed Roerich as "Dear Guru", and signed the letters as "G" for Galahad, the name Roerich had assigned him. Wallace assured Roerich that he awaited "the breaking of the New Day" when the people of "Northern Shambhalla" — a Buddhist term roughly equivalent to the kingdom of heaven – would create an era of peace and plenty.
With the Republicans planning to reveal the "eccentric" religious beliefs of Wallace to the public prior to the November 1940 elections, the Democrats countered by threatening to release information about Republican candidate Wendell Willkie's rumored extramarital affair with the writer Irita Van Doren.^[5][8] The Republicans did not publicize the "Guru" letters, and Roosevelt and Wallace won the election, overwhelmingly.
In the winter of 1947, independent columnist Westbrook Pegler published extracts from the letters. Pegler characterized Wallace as a "messianic fumbler," and "off-center mentally." There was a personal confrontation between the two men on the subject at a public meeting in Philadelphia in July 1948. Several reporters, including H.L. Mencken, joined in the increasingly aggressive questioning. Wallace declined to comment on the letters, while labeling some of the reporters "stooges" for Pegler.^[9]

 Secretary of Commerce

 

Roosevelt placated Wallace by appointing him Secretary of Commerce. Wallace served in this post from March 1945 to September 1946, when he was fired by President Harry S. Truman because of disagreements about the policy towards the Soviet Union. He is the last former Vice President to serve in the President's cabinet.

 The New Republic

Following his term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace became the editor of The New Republic magazine, using his position to criticize vociferously Truman's foreign policy. On the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, he predicted it would mark the beginning of "a century of fear".

 The 1948 Presidential election

Wallace left his editorship position in 1948 to make an unsuccessful run as a Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. With Idaho Democratic U.S. Senator Glen H. Taylor as his running mate, his platform advocated friendly relations with the Soviet Union, an end to the nascent Cold War, an end to segregation, full voting rights for blacks, and universal government health insurance. His campaign was unusual for his time in that it included African American candidates campaigning alongside white candidates in the American South, and that during the campaign he refused to appear before segregated audiences or eat or stay in segregated establishments.
As a further sign of the times, he was noted by Time as ostentatiously riding through various cities and towns in the South "with his Negro secretary beside him".^[10] Many eggs and tomatoes were hurled at and struck him and his campaign members during the tour, while at the same time President Truman referred to such behavior towards Wallace as very un-American. Wallace commented that "there is a long chain that links unknown young hoodlums in North Carolina or Alabama with men in finely tailored business suits in the great financial centers of New York or Boston, men who make a dollars-&-cents profit by setting race against race in the far away South."^[10] State authorities in Virginia sidestepped enforcing its own segregation laws by declaring Wallace's campaign gatherings as private parties.^[11]
Wallace's campaign to advance progressive causes inspired several activists and organizations. One short-lived effort was an attempt by Harry Hay, an active Communist teacher in Southern California, to create an organization of homosexuals, to be called Bachelors for Wallace, which would lobby for the inclusion in Wallace's platform of a call for the reform of sodomy and other laws that were the basis of widespread anti-gay discrimination and persecution. Hay was unsuccessful in his efforts to find other homosexual men willing to join such a risky venture, and the idea was never realized. Two years later, however, Hay and other leftists successfully founded the Mattachine Society, now recognized as the first significant grassroots organization for LGBT rights in the United States.^[12] Wallace had not made any official statements in support of gay rights and it is unclear how much support this group gave to the campaign. Yet, in the tenor of the times, such an organization would have been highly controversial. The fact that group generated almost no notice by the press or even the campaign itself, may be because of other controversies facing the campaign.
The "Dear Guru" letters reappeared now and were published, seriously hampering his campaign.^[5] Even more damage was done to Wallace's campaign when several prominent journalists, including H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Thompson, publicly charged that Wallace and the Progressives were under the covert control of Communists. Wallace was endorsed by the Communist Party (USA), and his subsequent refusal to publicly disavow any Communist support cost him the backing of many anti-Communist liberals and socialists, such as Norman Thomas. Christopher Andrew, a University of Cambridge historian working with evidence in the famed Mitrokhin Archive, has stated publicly^[13] that he believed Wallace was a confirmed KGB agent, though evidence for this was never produced.
Wallace suffered a decisive defeat in the election to the Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman. He finished in fourth place with 2.4% of the popular vote. Dixiecrat presidential candidate Strom Thurmond outstripped Wallace in the popular vote. Thurmond managed to carry several states in the Deep South, gaining 39 electoral votes to Wallace's electoral total of zero.

Later career

Wallace resumed his farming interests, and resided in South Salem, New York. During his later years he made a number of advances in the field of agricultural science. His many accomplishments included a breed of chicken that at one point accounted for the overwhelming majority of all egg-laying chickens sold across the globe. The Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the largest agricultural research complex in the world, is named for him.
In 1950, when North Korea invaded South Korea, Wallace broke with the Progressives and backed the U.S.-led war effort in the Korean War.^[5] In 1952, Wallace published Where I Was Wrong, in which he explained that his seemingly-trusting stance toward the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin stemmed from inadequate information about Stalin's crimes and that he, too, now considered himself an anti-Communist. He wrote various letters to "people who he thought had traduced (maligned) him" and advocated the re-election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.^[5]
In 1961, President-elect John F. Kennedy invited him to his inauguration ceremony, though he had supported Kennedy's opponent Richard Nixon. A touched Wallace wrote to Kennedy: "At no time in our history have so many tens of millions of people been so completely enthusiastic about an Inaugural Address as about yours."^[5]
Wallace first experienced the onsets of Lou Gehrig's disease on one of his frequent trips to South America in 1964.^[14] He died in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1965.^[5][15] His remains were cremated at Grace Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the ashes interred in Glendale Cemetery, Des Moines, Iowa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace

Know Nothing, Do Nothing Congress by Harry Truman

You are here because you are interested in the issues of this campaign. You know, as all the citizens of this great country know, that the election is not all over nothing but shouting. That is what they would like to have you believe, but it isn't so--it isn't so at all.

The Republicans are trying to hide the truth from you in a great many ways. They don't want you to know the truth about the issues in this campaign. The big fundamental issue in this campaign is the people against the special interests.

The Democratic party stands for the people.

The Republican party stands, and always has stood, for special interests. They have proved that conclusively in the record that they made in this "do-nothing" Congress.

The Republican party candidates are going around talking to you in high-sounding platitudes, trying to make you believe that they themselves are the best people to run the government. Well now, you have had experience with them running the government. In 1920 to 1932, they had complete control of the government. Look what they did to it!

This country is enjoying the greatest prosperity it has ever known because we have been following, for sixteen years, the policies inaugurated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Everybody benefited from these policies--labor, the farmer, businessmen, and white-collar workers.

We want to keep that prosperity. We cannot keep that if we don't lick the biggest problem facing us today, and that is high prices.

I have been trying to get the Republicans to do something about high prices and housing ever since they came to Washington. They are responsible for that situation, because they killed price control, and they killed the housing bill. That Republican, 80th "do-nothing" Congress absolutely refused to give any relief whatever in either one of those categories.

What do you suppose the Republicans think you ought to do about high prices?

Senator Taft, one of the leaders in the Republican Congress, said, "If consumers think the price is too high today, they will wait until the price is lower. I feel that in time, the law of supply and demand will bring prices into line. "

There is the Republican answer to the high cost of living.

If it costs too much, just wait.

If you think fifteen cents is too much for a loaf of bread, just do without it and wait until you can afford to pay fifteen cents for it.

If you don't want to pay sixty cents a-pound for hamburger, just wait. That is what the Republican Congress thought you ought to do, and that is the same Congress that the Republican candidate for president said did a good job.

Some people say I ought not to talk so much about the Republican 80th "do-nothing" Congress in this campaign. I will tell you why I will talk about it. If two-thirds of the people stay at home again on election day as they did in 1946, and if we get another Republican Congress like the 80th Congress, it will be controlled by the same men who controlled that 80th Congress--the Tabers and the Tafts, the Martins and the Hallecks--would be the bosses. The same men would be the bosses, the same as those who passed the Taft-Hartley Act, and passed the rich man's tax bill, and took Social Security away from a million workers.

Do you want that kind of administration? I don't believe you do--I don't believe you do.

I don't believe you would be out here, interested in listening to my outline of what the Republicans are trying to do to you, if you intended to put them back in there.

When a bunch of Republican reactionaries are in control of the Congress, then the people get reactionary laws. The only way you can get the kind of government you need is by going to the polls and voting the straight Democratic ticket on November 2. Then you will get a Democratic Congress, and I will get a Congress that will work with me. Then we will get good housing at prices we can afford to pay; and repeal of that vicious Taft-Hartley Act; and more Social Security coverage; and prices that will be fair to everybody; and we can go on and keep sixty-one million people at work; we can have an income of more than $217 billion, and that income will be distributed so that the farmer, the workingman, the white collar worker, and the businessman get their fair share of that income.

That is what I stand for.

That is what the Democratic party stands for.

Vote for that, and you will be safe.

 

Elizabeth, New Jersey, October 7, 1948 by President Harry S Truman

http://www.speeches-usa.com/Transcripts/053_truman.html
 

Former GOP Fla. Gov. Crist Says Romney, Ryan 'Aren't Up to the Task'

By Marc Caputo, The Miami Herald

 

he biggest Florida speaker at the Democratic National Convention wasn't a Democrat.

Yet.

After former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist's speech Thursday night, it's only a matter of time before he officially joins the party's ranks in a slow march to running for governor in two years.

Crist's high-profile role disturbed many Florida delegates, but it furthered President Obama's campaign message - that the Republican Party is too extreme.

"As a former lifelong Republican, it pains me to tell you that today's Republicans - and their standard-bearers, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan - just aren't up to the task," Crist said. "They're beholden to ‘my way or the highway' bullies, indebted to billionaires who bankroll ads and allergic to the very idea of compromise."

Crist's speech was as much a condemnation of today's Republican Party as it was an explanation of why he's officially moving toward the Democratic Party and away from the conservative positions he once espoused.

Republicans and many Democrats alike won't let Crist forget he campaigned for years as a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, gun-touting "Reagan Republican" and "Jeb Bush Republican." In 2010, in his unsuccessful Senate bid, he bashed Obama's agenda and ran as a "true conservative."

"Is he here, and in this for his principles?" asked Democratic delegate Bob Hartnett of Orlando. "I've got a long time to think about that. But there are many others in this party qualified to lead and be onstage representing our people."

Crist said Thursday that he was addressing the convention "not as a Republican, not as a Democrat, but as an optimist." Crist referred to Bush in his speech as "my friend" - a comment sure to irk conservatives as well as Bush, who has described Crist as an opportunist.

Crist ran as a conservative in his first statewide race in 1998, when he unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate. With Bush's help, Crist was elected education commissioner, attorney general and, in 2006, governor where he governed as a centrist.

"Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him," Crist said. "I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me."

But the timing of Crist's departure from the Republican Party suggests a colder political calculation. He officially left the party just before a candidate-qualifying deadline in the 2010 Senate race.

Crist was running against fellow Republican Marco Rubio, and Crist would have handily lost the GOP primary. So he left the GOP and ran as an independent, though he ultimately lost the general election.

Crist's undoing in the GOP: The infamous "hug," his decision to appear onstage with Obama in 2009 in Fort Myers, where he literally embraced the president and the $787 billion stimulus program.

"That hug caused me more grief from my former party than you can ever imagine," Crist said. "But even as the Republican Party fought tooth and nail to stop him, this president showed his courage, invested in America - and saved Florida."

Crist was the only Republican governor to break ranks with his party to talk up the stimulus, which every GOP governor and Legislature wound up using to patch holes in their budget.

As the primary race intensified, Crist then flip-flopped on the stimulus, alternately bashing it and talking it up depending on the day or the media outlet he was addressing. Crist released a radio ad that bashed Obama for spending. The Florida Democratic Party later released a TV spot that questioned Crist's authenticity.

Crist brushed aside those differences Thursday night.

"I'll be honest with you, I don't agree with President Obama about everything.," Crist said. "But I've gotten to know him, I've worked with him, and the choice is crystal clear."

Crist credited Obama with not only saving the economy in Florida, but for fighting to ensure that BP cleaned up the Gulf Coast after the oil spill. Crist said nothing Thursday about the president's Affordable Care Act, which Crist once described as scary.

Crist's role at the Democratic National Convention underscores the weakness of the party in Florida, where only Sen. Bill Nelson holds a statewide seat. The Legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the state.

Democrats want a winner. They note that, as an independent, he garnered 1.6 million votes in 2010 to Rubio's 2.6 million. Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek came in third, with just over 1 million votes, the overwhelming majority of which would likely have gone to Crist had there not been a three-way race.

Meek won't rule out running for governor against Crist. Florida Senate Democratic leader Nan Rich, of Weston, is running. And former state Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink might want a rematch against Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who narrowly beat her in 2010.

"If by some miracle Charlie Crist makes it out of the gauntlet of a Democratic primary even though he called himself a staunch conservative, he then has to run on his dismal record," said Scott's political advisor and pollster Tony Fabrizio, who ticked off the dismal economic indicators that unfolded on Crist's watch.

Former Miami Beach Democratic state Sen. Dan Gelber recently penned a column welcoming Crist to the party, and he chuckled at Republicans painting the former governor out as a flip flopper.

"Just a week ago," Gelber said, "Republicans nominated Mitt Romney, a former pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, anti-Reagan economic, self-described progressive who used to be concerned about global warming."

Crist steered clear of mentioning Romney's reversals, but he did echo the Democratic talking point that the Republicans "would break the fundamental promise of Medicare and Social Security" - a line of attack that could prove devastating in must-win Florida, a state with a disproportionate share of elderly residents.

Crist's speech was brief. Accustomed to having a fan at his side to keep cool, Crist didn't have the luxury on Thursday night and was on the cusp of breaking into a sweat on stage.

But he ended quickly and smoothly as he started to win the home crowd, noting "I used to play quarterback just down the road from here at Wake Forest University. My dad always told me, ‘Charlie, it takes a cool head to win a hot game.'"

Crist said Obama had the "cool head" the nation needs.

"That's the leader Florida needs. That's the leader America needs," he said, as the crowd rose to its feet. "And that's the reason I'm here tonight."

 

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/07/167436/former-fla-gov-crist-says-romney.html