April 4, 1960: "Ben Hur" with Charlton Heston won 11 awards.

It was a great night for "Ben Hur" at the 1960 awards.    In total, the film swept 11 of the 12 categories, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Charlton Heston). 

It's still a great movie all of these years later.   I catch it anytime I get a chance.    Finally, I did not know that the movie was based on a book written in the 19th century!

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April 4, 1968: We remember MLK

Maybe it's me but certain events are frozen in my memory and I recall them like it was yesterday.

As I remember, I was reading my brand new The Sporting News, the weekly sports newspaper that we used to read before ESPN or the internet.  My parents gave me a birthday subscription and I loved rushing to the mailbox to consume every bit of information.

At the time, I asked myself the classic pre-season questions:  Would Yaz and the 1967 Miracle Red Sox repeat?  Are the Cardinals now a dynasty?  

After all, they had won the World Series in 1964, 1967 and had Bob Gibson on top of their rotation.   

And then the phone rang.  It was my school buddy Harvey with the news that Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis.

Then President Johnson spoke to the nation!  By a crazy coincidence, he had just announced days before that he would not be running for reelection in 1968.   

Then all hell broke loose.  Cities were burning from coast to coast.   I shared the frustration about Dr. King's assassination but did not understand what looting businesses had to do with the shooting.  My guess is that all of the chaos boosted Governor Wallace's campaign, or the "law and order" man that election.

Over the last years, we've created a national holiday to remember Dr. King and his words are heard over and over again.

Nevertheless, I've asked myself a simple question:   What would Dr. King say of the state of black America today?  the collapse of the black family?  the black on black crime?  the terrible black Democrat leadership that runs cities like Baltimore and Detroit?    the dependence on government programs?

We will never know but I'll submit that Dr. King would not be happy.

For sure he'd be reminding the "identity politics" Democrats to judge people on their character not the color of their skin.

Let me recommend this one Jason Riley.

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1949: Another anniversary for NATO

                                     

NATO has been in the news lately.  

You may have heard about Article 5 of the NATO agreement, or the mutual defense clause.

Or maybe you’ve heard that some member countries are not paying their way.  

Unfortunately, NATO is not much of an alliance anymore.  

To say the least, this is not what the US and President Truman had in mind when NATO was created in 1949.    

NATO was designed as a Western Alliance against the USSR.  The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and NATO defended the Europeans.

It worked well because there was a goal of containing communism.   

Today, the USSR is gone and Europe has a lot of self-inflicted wounds, from terrible birth rates to an unsustainable welfare state.

Going forward, NATO won’t survive as an alliance if the US continues to do all of the heavy lifting.   

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