The four little girls,
remembered:
Almost 50 years after their deaths, the House voted Wednesday to award the Congressional Gold Medal to four young girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., a seminal moment in the civil rights movement.
Addie Mae Collins, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14, were killed on the morning of Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, in a bombing that also injured 22 other churchgoers. The attack caused international outrage and drew the attention of civil rights leaders, who came to Birmingham to expose the city’s discriminatory practices and compel Congress to pass civil rights legislation.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Fake GOP letters:
Batswala Dala, France Amoore and Tom Shane all have published letters to the editor in Bay Area newspapers. Trouble is, none of the men exist.
Under dozens of pseudonyms, Kyle Vallone has orchestrated the publication of scores of letters to the Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the Tri-Valley Herald during the last decade. A Times investigation found that the San Ramon man submitted more than 100 letters under fictitious identities to the three newspapers. Vallone estimated that he has had a hand in 200 bogus letters published in Northern California newspapers.
Vallone said the idea occurred to him while he was working on a Republican campaign in 1994. He and other workers would write letters on behalf of a candidate and send them to a "tree" of supporters who would sign their names and send them to newspapers. It occurred to him that he could skip a step, make up fictitious identities and send the letters via e-mail. He used free e-mail accounts and various voice-mail systems, his cell phone and home phone numbers to pull off his hoax.
"That probably wasn't the correct thing to do, but we were just having fun. It wasn't like something that we really took seriously," Vallone said.
The funniest part of the story, however, are the newspaper editors acting shocked, shocked!that anything like this was happening.
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Tweet of the Day:
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show, we had to start off with the TX gun "instructor" who basically decided he could hold a gun class anyplace he didn't see anybody around. Then, into the weeds on budget procedure, as Republican bleating for a Senate budget is met by... filibustering the conference motion on that budget. More on Republican backlash against sequestration cuts that make them uncomfortable. An explainer of why Harry Reid often switches his votes "for strategic reason," but then nothing "strategic" ever seems to happen. Finally, a return to that crazy story line about the collapse of the global austerity movement.
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