I read this on the Internet yesterday:
"Matt Lauer fired from Today for sexual harassment"
I couldn't believe it.
I'm still, to this very day, thinking about his role in helping to create the garbage going on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (Do you remember the MSNBC special he hosted last year, where Lauer threw hardball questions at Hillary Rodham Clinton, then turned around and gave softball inquiries to Donald Trump...a man who spent eleven years on Matt's main network, NBC?)
Late this past Tuesday, NBC News Chief Andrew Lack told the 59-year-old New York City native to clean out his desk. And as soon as Today came on yesterday morning, coanchors Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb gave viewers the news about Lauer's firing.
Lauer threw two decades as show cohost down the drain.
One of Lauer's colleagues turned in a detailed complaint against his inappropriate sexual behavior, and it triggered a serious review by Lack and his colleagues.
It all stemmed from an incident the colleague reported took place in 2014, when NBC and most of the other Comcast networks were showing the 2014 Winter Olympics (held in Sochi, Russia).
Lauer's victim reported this to NBC's human resources department this past Monday; the next day, he got the pink slip.
Two years before the Sochi incident, Katie Couric (who cohosted Today from 1991 to 2006) was interviewed on Bravo's Watch What Happens.
Host Andy Cohen asked Couric to describe Lauer's "most annoying trait."
Couric's reply: "He pinches me on the [posterior] a lot."
'Nuff said.
From what I've read, it's not so surprising that Lauer would help deliver a proven sexual predator to the very top of American politics.
Compared to what just happened with Lauer, it's going to be very hard to remove Trump from the most talked-about political office there is...but we really need to be up to it.
Some of this information came from Jen Hayden's 11-29-2017 Daily Kos article about Matt's removal from the job he's best known for. (Jen, many, many, many thanks!)
Just got a few thoughts rolling in my mind right now...so, here goes:
*Quite a few people who've been sending letters to the Omaha World-Herald to protest the NFL players who are taking a knee during the playing/singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" have been asking those athletes to protest "on their own time." (Maybe such letters have also shown up in your city's newspaper or newspapers, too.)
Say those NFLers went on to confine their grievances over America's longstanding history of injustice to "their own time."
Once the word got out, how do you think the people attacking the NFL players following in Colin Kaepernick's footsteps would react?
I'll bet you the same way they are right now.
*One of the biggest myths out there in sports is that today's NFL players don't get involved in their communities.
You'd be surprised to find that many (if not most) of the players on the league's 32 teams are involved, in some way or another, in community work...be it through foundations or through some other kind of charitable work.
*I read yesterday that NBC's and MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell blew out 71 candles.
And I still can't help but think about Mitchell's role (as well as that of so many other Big Media journalists) in handing the Big Prize to a man who, from 2004 to 2015, hosted NBC's most famous stunt show (okay, reality show).
Last year, as Donald Trump sought the Big Prize, viewers of the news programs Mitchell appeared on (as host or as a guest) got the impression that the New Rochelle, NY native didn't "want to cover the Clintons anymore."
Well now, special prosecutor (and former FBI director) Robert Mueller is spearheading an investigation of the Trump-Putin connection that- let's face it- helped take 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue out of the Democratic Party's grip.
Heads are rolling right now...especially that of Trump's first campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
With that in mind, does the birthday dinner Mitchell enjoyed yesterday leave a bad taste in her mouth now?
Speaking of taste...hope you're enjoying today's Halloween candy! See you later!
It changed America's spirit.
It changed politics.
It changed history.
It helped turn television into America's leading source for news and information.
And, yes...it made for a somber Thanksgiving and a somber Christmas.
On what turned out to be a sunny day in Dallas, TX, one of three bullets fired from the Texas Book Depository ended a history-making presidency one thousand days after that tenure began.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest ever elected to the most talked-about political job there is (he was 43 years and almost six months old when elected on 11-2-1960), the first Roman Catholic person to get the job, and, as things turned out...the last standing US senator to win a presidential election in this country during the 20th Century.
And the fourth (and most recent chief executive) gunned down by an assassin.
I'd turned eight years of age eleven days earlier. And I was one of the millions of Americans who cried when it happened.
Yep, I was born during the Dwight Eisenhower years...but I barely remember living through Ike's second term. Compared to memories of Eisenhower's last four years as commander in chief, I've got more memories of JFK's abbreviated term of office.
And those memories include his inaugural speech, his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, a nuclear test-ban treaty signed during the JFK years, America finally getting its space program rolling (okay, flying), the creation of the Peace Corps, and Kennedy's stand on civil rights.
It took Joseph's and Rose's second son a good while to get hip to the message that advancing freedom all over the world (a message the 35th President brought out in his inaugural address) also means advancing freedom right here in these fifty states.
But after 250,000 assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial on 8-28-1963, that did it.
And those Southern Democrats Kennedy spent most of 1960 trying to woo in order to take the White House back from the Republicans were just going to have to get hip, too.
Almost a week ago, someone from the Associated Press turned in an article talking about the speech JFK gave in response to the 1963 March on Washington. (The AP article made it to this past Monday's Omaha World-Herald, and that's where I saw the report.)
One thing the article's author put in really struck me. It was the observation that, in lots of American homes during the bulk of the 1960s, you'd find pictures of three prominent people: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and...John F. Kennedy.
Three symbols of hope.
Three symbols who ended up brutally murdered.
And these three symbols were killed before any of them could reach the age of fifty.
When Kennedy took a bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald, it began the demise of America's famous "can-do" spirit.
Don't think so?
Think about all the talk about health-care reform...and about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Think about all the talk surrounding whether immigration reform should take place here in the United States. Think about what's being said as to whether effective gun-control laws can ever get passed here. And now we talk about whether we should see to it that all of our country's children get a decent education...rather than how.
One thing's for sure: Oswald's act (no, I'm not into conspiracy theories...especially about just how Bobby's and Ted's and Joseph the Younger's brother died) led to the 1965 proposal of the Constitution's 25th Amendment...an amendment that finally got ratified on 2-10-1967.
When Lyndon Johnson moved up to the presidency this afternoon in 1963, the nation went without a vice president...until LBJ's 1964 runningmate, Hubert Humphrey, became America's second-in-command on 1-20-1965.
Never again would America's government run sans a vice president.
I've been going on YouTube to check out how ABC, CBS, and NBC (as well as WFAA-TV, the ABC station in the Metroplex) covered the events of 11-22-1963.
Words such as "disbelief," "anger," "sadness," and "indignation" were reported to have come out of so many people's mouths that day.
Some of the mouths belonged to key government officials.
Speaking of key government officials...some of today's government officials would absolutely love to see the next US senator to have won the White House (that's right, the man in there now, Barack Obama) removed from the White House.
And at least one big-name hate-radio (oops...talk radio) host would love to see Obama (a US senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008) gunned down.
Really now...do we HAVE to go through this again, with another history-making chief executive?
Haven't we learned anything from the events that took place fifty years ago today?
