Daily Kos

Reposted from Native American Netroots by Ojibwa

The Polson Museum in Hoquiam, Washington, has a room dedicated to “Common Land, Uncommon Cultures: Traditional Peoples of Grays Harbor.” Shown below are some photographs from these displays.

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Reposted from Daily Kos by Land of Enchantment When I was a kid in southwest Georgia, on those rare occasions my grandfather drove us into Valdosta, one of the things I most wanted to do besides eat way too much ice cream was visit a department store there. Not to pine for what was on the shelves that we couldn't afford, but to watch the clerks send cash and notes in little capsules through pneumatic tubes up to third floor where the bookkeepers and vault were. Whooooooosh! I often thought how cool it would be to ride in one of those if it were big enough.

Not quite the same idea that Elon Musk, of SpaceX and Tesla electric car fame, has in mind with his Hyperloops, but in the same genre of really cool transportation.

While Musk may actually make it happen, at The Atlantic, Megan Garber writes in Pneumatic Tubes: A Brief History that he isn't the first inventor to ponder the use of vacuums to speed people to their destinations and for other uses:

Otto von Guericke's Magdeburg Hemispheres, 1660s Working in the 17th century, the German scientist Otto von Guerickeconstructed the world's first artificial vacuum. He demonstrated his invention using a contraption known as the "Magdeburg hemispheres": two large, copper hemispheres with rims that fit tightly together. When the rims were sealed, air was pumped out of the interiors. In an innovation that would lead to the pneumatic tube, Guericke was able to demonstrate that the air-less hemispheres could be held together by the air pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The Atmospheric Railway, 1830s The atmospheric railway took advantage of Guericke's demonstration, relying on air pressure to provide its power for propulsion. In 1799, the inventor George Medhurst proposed the idea that goods could be moved pneumatically through cast-iron pipes; in 1812, he expanded the idea to include passenger carriages. […] Robert Goddard's New York-to-San Francisco Vacuum Train, 1910s The American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard didn't confine his ideas to the air: He also had a plan for making a train that would go from Boston to New York in 12 minutes flat. His idea? Float the train on magnets inside a specially-built tunnel with all the air pumped out; that would eliminate the friction that normally slows a train down. Goddard's vacuum railway was, of course, never built. [...]

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—The Many Democratic Parties:

It is no secret that I am a proponent of a politics of contrast for Dems, a Lincoln 1860strategy. I am also a proponent of a Big Tent Dem Party. Are these two ideas mutually exclusive? I think not. For example, while I am skeptical of a short term strategy that can deliver significant wins for Dems in the South, the medium and long term offer opportunities. But I think they come from the devolution strategy that Howard Dean is trying to execute, creating strong state Democratic parties that control their own local message. National branding still requires a national message and, more importantly, negative branding of the Republicans. Today Mark Schmitt writes a compelling piece, "One Democratic Party, Or Many?" that I think nicely illustrates this point. [...]

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Tweet of the Day:

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On today's Kagro in the Morning show, the live stream's data center is moving, so it's podcast-only once again. And too bad, because we got a glowing tribute from Bill in Portland Maine in Cheers & Jeers, marking the two-year anniversary of Daily Kos Radio! Without Greg on hand, we read through Georgia's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup. Excessive levels of Teh Crazee necessitated an extended GunFAIL report. Stop feeding Gop trolls on birtherism? NYT's Q&A with Snowden. Investing Daily questions the privatization of national security, leading to a surprise (to me) conclusion about private equity in the already too-convoluted picture.

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High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.

Reposted from A Frayed Knot by Mokurai Editor's Note: There is even more of this sort of thing for anybody who would be interested. -- Mokurai

"How is it that we here the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?" -- Samuel Johnson (in answer to Thomas Jefferson and the American Colonists).

Americans in general, and uneducated ones in particular, have a nasty habit of looking at their founding documents in isolation, as if these marbled monuments, with their words engraved, were simply "discovered" or "written." They "were not written": they had writers, and they had thinkers. In addition, they had an audience, too. When Americans think of their own founding moments without any grounding in seventeenth and eighteenth century English political thought, they mistake everything. They come away amazed at the genius of Thomas Jefferson, silently blot out parts of his document, and put a piece of polemic through an apotheosis.

What I'd like to do, with my background, is try to look at the "Declaration of Independence" as a letter, which is the form it partially emulates, and a polemic, which it emphatically is. The document is an argument that is attempting to be persuasive.

For Thomas Jefferson, the ultimate goal of his Declaration is that Parliament would vote to let the colonies go without a fight. Follow me below for some detail.

Reposted from Native American Netroots by Ojibwa

The Tulalip tribes--Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skykomish, and others—have lived along the Salish Sea (Puget Sound) for thousands of years. Dramatic changes in their cultures began 1792 with the arrival of the British ship Discovery. Several of the displays at the Hibulb Cultural Center tell the story of these changes from the Tulalip perspective.

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Reposted from Native American Netroots by Ojibwa

In 1832 Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, with young Swiss draftsman Karl Bodmer and hunter-taxidermist David Dreidoppel, embarked on a scientific expedition to study the flora, fauna, and native peoples of western North America. In 1833, they left St. Louis on the steamboat Yellow Stone owned by the American Fur Company and began their journey up the Missouri River. At Fort Pierre in what is now South Dakota, they changed to the steamboat Assiniboine which took them to Fort Union on the Montana-North Dakota border. From here they went by keelboat (a human-powered craft) to Fort McKenzie.

Reposted from JekyllnHyde by Dave in Northridge

On August 8, 1974, Richard Milhous Nixon addressed the nation and resigned his office as President of the United States.  To this day, he remains the only White House occupant to have done so.

At the heart of this unprecedented decision was the political train wreck and a "third rate burglary" which is forever etched in the nation's conscience.  The Watergate Scandal involved the actions of elected and unelected men who went to extreme lengths in seeking to demonize and destroy their political opponents.  Secretly taped conversations - whose release was ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States- divulged heretofore unknown details of the extent of Nixon's complicity in enabling this disaster.  It involved maintaining enemies lists of journalists and politicians; sanctioning illegal break-ins; authorizing wiretapping; conjuring up conspiratorial schemes; tainted campaign funds through the appropriately-named CREEP; and a host of other unlawful, unethical, and unsavory activities, including the "Saturday Night Massacre." Many of these finding came as a result of riveting investigative hearings on Capitol Hill and through the reporting of the Washington Post.

Few people - other than perhaps diehard staffers and GOP loyalists - shed tears for one of the most paranoid men ever to become President.  For one whose political career was built on strident anti-Communism, dirty political tricks, race baiting, and blatantly lying about prolonging an immoral war, it was finally over.  This time, the country really didn't have "Nixon to kick around anymore."

This sorry chapter in American political life provided many lessons for both admirers and detractors of the Nixon Administration.  Most important of all, its conclusion reiterated in clear, unambiguous terms a simple legal principle: not even the President of the United States was above the law.

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Cartoon Source: Herblock, Washington Post, June 23, 1973.  Even before the Watergate burglary, Nixon's troubles with editorial cartoonists and the press had started earlier, notably with the release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.

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Fort Benton, Montana, began in 1846 as a fur and hide trading post located north of the Missouri River on a site favorable for trade with the Blackfoot Indians. As the oldest continually occupied non-Indian settlement in Montana, many call this small town (population about 1,600) the “Birthplace of Montana.”

Reposted from Native American Netroots by Ojibwa

The Northwest Coast is a region in which an entrenched and highly valued artistic tradition flourished and continues to flourish. The Suquamish are the people of the clear salt water. For more than 10,000 years they have occupied that area known today as the Kitsap Peninsula, Bainbridge Island, Blake Island, and parts of Whidbey Island in what is now the state of Washington.