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Edie Adams died today at the age of 81. Younger readers of this blog will not remember her, but I do. She was a singer (a Julliard alum, no less), a Tony-winning and Emmy-nominated actress, and the wife of TV comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs. She was also one of the most beautiful and sexy stars to ever grace screen and stage, and (from all accounts; we never met) a truly good person. Those Americans who were raised by television as I was will probably recall Edie Adams most easily as the long-time TV pitchwoman for Muriel Cigars. (Yes, I am...

The "Musicians Who Turn 50", "Musicians Who Turn 60", "Favorite Drummer" and "Favorite Guitarist" were such hit threads on FR, I've decided to do this one. Who is your favorite SONGWRITING DUO? We all know that Lennon-McCartney were amazing together and possibly the best songwriting duo ever. They might be mentioned several times on this thread. If you choose John & Paul, be specific about which song and lyric(s).

Recently, I reviewed a new American history anthology. I was amused to find included in the book a generous selection of 1960s protest songs. Apparently, lyrics by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Country Joe MacDonald are making their way into the academic canon, and at least some professors seem to think these are “must-read” documents for our students. Well, maybe so. But if one really wants song lyrics that reflect the 1960s, I'd point my students instead to some of the songs from math professor and musical satirist Tom Lehrer. In terms of insight into America, Lehrer's “National...

I've been watching Lost In Space reruns over at hulu.com recently, and it's been quite an enjoyable time. In fact, in many ways I enjoy the show now more than I did as a child, which was a lot. A a child, I loved watching the original Star Trek, of course — and I still do — but I have to admit that in my early childhood I found a great deal of it to be baffling and or slightly scary. Lost In Space, however, was my favorite — the show I'd fight my little brother to see. It was...

Even though I’m embarrassed to have been a Democrat for so many years, I’m proud that even in my 20’s, I thought the 60’s was the worst decade in America’s history. Because I was born in 1940, I was at UCLA for some of those years and had a bird’s eye view of my fellow college students. It was not a pretty sight. What makes that time the source of so much nostalgia for so many people of my age -- the incessant folk songs, the tie-dyed shirts and blouses, the granny glasses, the bongs, the infantile anti-establishment content that...

60s Needle in Academic Haystack by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 25, 2008 Finding a front-page 60s radical four decades after the fact is a bit like finding a needle in an academic haystack: You just have to stumble upon the institution of higher learning that the professional protestor sought shelter in. Case in point: Mark Rudd of Students for a Democratic Society. We unearthed this pop culture relic thanks to Jonah Goldberg’s invaluable book, Liberal Fascism. “Today his is a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Goldberg relates. “Rudd has expressed remorse for his violent youthful...

Kobler’s Key to the CouncilBOOK REVIEW: Kobler, John F., C.P.  Vatican II, Theophany and the Phenomenon of Man: The Council's Pastoral Servant Leader Theology for the Third Millennium.  (American University Studies, Series 7, vol. 100)  New York: Peter Lang, 1991.  0820414921, 9780820414928  $51.95 by Paul Zarowny, Ph.D. Whatever its multiple shortcomings, my book on the Council is the only published attempt to provide a synthesis, at least in a seminal way, of the religious ontology shaping the sense of the Council.[1]     Passionist priest Fr. John F. Kobler’s Vatican II, Theophany and the Phenomenon of Man (1991) is a follow-up to...

Can we revive '60s-era ideals? December 7, 2007 BY DICK SIMPSON Politically, 1968 began in Chicago in 1967. The country at the time faced three great crises: racial discrimination, the Vietnam War, and the imperial presidency in which all executive, legislative and judicial power was being gathered into the hands of the president. Behind these loomed the cultural clash of the '60s generation. The hippies, Yippies, Beatle-loving, pot-smoking free lovers doing their own thing came up against Richard J. Daley, the Chicago cops and the National Guard upholding the status quo against their own ''barbarian'' children. Society was sliding into...

Can America rise above the divisions of the 1960s? Not yet. . . . What fell out of 1968 was a profound division over what I would call civic vision. One side, which took to the streets in Chicago or occupied Columbia University, concluded from Vietnam and the race riots that America, in its relations with the world and its own citizens, was flawed and required big changes. Their defining document was the March 1968 Kerner Commission report, announcing "two societies," separate and unequal. The press, incidentally, emerged from Vietnam and the riots joined to this new, permanent template. That,...

Ted Nugent Blames Hippies for Divorce, Abortion, Drugs and Crime 7/3/07, 2:22 pm EST It was only a matter of time before Ted Nugent decided to rain on the Summer of Love’s anniversary parade. In an article from today’s Wall Street Journal titled “The * Summer of Drugs,” the notoriously opinionated guitar god took some time off his busy hunting schedule to blame “stoned, dirty, stinky hippies” for “rising rates of divorce, high school drop-outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes.” * Highlights (including some choice words for Jimi...

Summer of love: 40 years later Hippie Hippie Shakedown: But where was love? BY DAWN EDEN, Guest Columnist LA Daily News WHEN it comes to inappropriate names, "Summer of Love" has to be right up there with "Joy Division," the name the Nazis reportedly gave to the sections of concentration camps that housed the guards' sex slaves. For one thing, it was not just a summer event. The countercultural happening that swept through San Francisco and beyond began with an April1967 planning announcement by concert promoter Chet Helms, aka Family Dog, creating the "Council for the Summer of Love." It...

Liberals love to boast that they are not "religious," which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. – Ann CoulterThis day, America and the world are in a dire cultural, political and spiritual crisis. The very existence of civilization as we know it seems to hang in the balance. Will America be what intellectual Bill Bennett calls "the [world's] last best hope," or will America (and the West) go the way of Holland, which in January of this year erected a monument in Amsterdam? The monument was not to Rembrandt, not to Grotius, not to...

Apparently, Senator Barack Hussein Obama, D-Illinois, is the Messiah. The New York Times reported on Sunday that in Obama's time at Harvard Law School, he "developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once." Also on Sunday, the Boston Globe reported, "These days, Obama is the hot new candidate for the White House, trying to end the warring in Washington...

Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean is giddy about the prospects of America revisiting the 1960s through the election of a Democratic Congress and president. Addressing a recent religious conference in Washington, D.C., he spoke glowingly about how the radical counterculture changed America, and how he looks forward to the nation returning to the "same moral principles" that made the '60s great. "Drugs, free-love, clothing optional, public urination--those were the days," said a wistful Dean. "I remember this one girl, or guy, I'm not sure. We got stoned and had great sex. I wonder whatever became of her or him?" Dean...

Get prepared. This film of the Passion isn't your typical Hollywood production, and it's producers say playing the race card is needed. It's not Mel Gibson's The Passion, but folks involved in this big-screen's production are no less passionate in bringing this adaption of Christ's last 48 hours to your local cinema house in a film that openly plays the race card - with the Messiah cast as a black man. This racial perspective to the conventional biblical story, the producers say, "is sure to challenge Conservative Christian beliefs."

John McWhorter is right to say that we ought to pause and remember the Watts riots of 40 years ago and ponder their implication for America's present and future ["Burned, Baby, Burned..." FR post here]. I take strong issue, however, with the conclusions he draws from his review of the events in Watts and South Central Los Angeles in 1965. I think the difference between McWhorter and me arises in large measure from our profoundly different perspectives on the event. He writes that he was born two months after the riots occurred and that his conclusions are based on his...

IRAQ I Wrote Bush's War Words -- in 1965 By Daniel Ellsberg, Daniel Ellsberg worked in the State and Defense departments under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. He released the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971. President Bush's explanation Tuesday night for staying the course in Iraq evoked in me a sense of familiarity, but not nostalgia. I had heard virtually all of his themes before, almost word for word, in speeches delivered by three presidents I worked for: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Not with pride, I recognized that I had proposed some...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: (Story) "A Republican congressman has called for a deadline to pull US troops from Iraq, while other members of President George Bush's party urged his administration to revamp Iraq policy. Republican Walter Jones, a North Carolina conservative, said on ABC's This Week that he would offer legislation this week setting a timetable for the US withdrawal from Iraq. 'I voted for the resolution to commit the troops, and I feel that we've done about as much as we can do,' said Jones, who coined the phrase 'freedom fries' to lash out at the French for opposing...

The emotions this movement inspired coincided with the one deeply moral political phenomenon that postwar America has experienced--Martin Luther King's civil-rights movement. The Rev. King's multiracial civil-rights marches and their role in overturning de jure and de facto segregation in the U.S. were a political and moral achievement. In retrospect, it's clear that the moral clarity of the early civil-rights movement was a political epiphany for many white liberals. Some have since returned to traditional, private lives; others have become neoconservatives. But many active liberals carried along their newly found moral certitude and quasi-religious fervor into nearly every major public-policy...

Last Sunday's edition of The New York Times contained a startling admission. Among 5,400 homosexual couples who have "married" in Massachusetts since last May, nearly two-thirds were pairs of women. A lesbian is about four times as likely to opt for same-sex "marriage" as a homosexual man. [It's] the same psychological divide familiar to any young man on the make in the heterosexual world: Darn it, the women are all looking for that ring. This wasn't supposed to be.

Revenge of the '60's Written by Jack Engelhard Monday, April 25, 2005 The 1960s just won't quit. Today, from the New York Times and elsewhere, we learn that Pope Benedict XVI was turned into a traditionalist when, back in the 1960s and serving as a professor at the University of Tubingen, he saw the face of Marxism and radical leftism and said, “no thank you.” The 60s changed all of us, some for better, some for worse. Jane Fonda is back and getting fairly good press. Ward Churchill keeps drawing big crowds, and of the three A-list authors we've lost...

TÜBINGEN, Germany, April 23 - For all Pope Benedict XVI's decades as a Vatican insider, it may have been the crucible of a university town swept by student radicalism in the late 1960's that definitively shaped the man who now leads the Roman Catholic Church. During his Bavarian childhood under the Nazis, Joseph Ratzinger became convinced that the moral authority based in Catholic teachings was the sole reliable bulwark against human barbarism, according to friends, associates, and his biographer, John L. Allen Jr. But while his deep reading and thinking in theology, philosophy, and history were fundamental to development as...

For those who look closely, signs of desperation on the part of liberal Democrats are everywhere. I am not sure when they finally came to the realization people are figuring out what they are really about, but they know it's happening. And they are afraid of the truth more than anything. They are so afraid they will say and do anything to blur reality so the average person won't know their positions are baseless. For instance, Rep. John T. Salazar, D-Colo., said last week: "Creating private accounts will only hasten the demise of Social Security, by draining trillions of dollars...

This is marvelous! Turn up volume. Sit back. Listen! Oh, nostalgia, thy name is "fireflies forever!" If this isn't a trip back down Memory Lane, I don't know what is! http://www.thestatenislandboys.com/U_thrill_me/index.htm

No longer will Shiites be assassinated by Saddam's Sunnis if they dare to tell their followers to worship G-d in their own unique way. No longer will Kurds worry about whether their political acts will lead to their children and wives dying unimaginably gruesome deaths. A Stalinist leader who allowed Sunnis to rule by tyranny is in prison, the oppressed are on the verge of being liberated by our country, and the New York Times is bitching about it. What's wrong with this picture?

The reelection of President Bush has sent the Democratic Party reeling. How could a President with so many perceived negatives win with such relative ease? The economy is not fantastic, the War in Iraq is not universally popular, health care costs and fuel prices are rising, President Bush smirks and stutters, and the Redskins lost! Why is John Kerry not President today? Additionally, why, in a supposedly ideologically divided electorate, have Republicans defied political convention and steadily increased their majorities at both the Federal and State levels? The truth in undeniable. Americans are beginning to no longer vote in line...

Oh, that Pinch Sulzberger! Such a kidder! The New York Times publisher’s latest little excellent adventure was in running an op-ed arguing that George W. Bush took conservative college juniors, and in one year flat, turned them into socialists. Instead of having frat boys go in drag, Sulzberger would dress up liberals as Republicans, who then, miraculously, morph into … liberals! The op-ed, by Joshua Foer, a senior at Yale, was entitled, “Enter Right, Exit Left.” Based on the title, one would expect the piece to be about how the writer and his ilk entered school as young Republicans, only...

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni keeps '60s spirit intact for a new generationBy Tyrone BeasonSeattle Times staff reporter Nikki Giovanni may be a 60-year-old cancer survivor with a respectable teaching job at Virginia Tech University, but her opinions; and hair; are as edgy as ever. A cornerstone of the Black Arts literary movement in the 1960s and early '70s who sported an Afro when Afros were social statements, Giovanni still looks hip with her new, don't-mess-with-me platinum locks. And Monday, when the poet and activist pulled up the left sleeve of her sweater in an auditorium filled with 500...

In the new issue of Doublethink, a Washington-based right-wing quarterly, Hitchens reveals that if the election were today he'd support President Bush -- never mind his recent Vanity Fair puff piece about Democratic hopeful John Edwards. "I don't believe in [Edwards]," Hitchens tells Doublethink interviewer Tom Ivancie. "I mean, I told him I wouldn't vote for him. . . . Because I'd vote for Bush. The important thing is this: Meanwhile, Hitchens suggests that old nemesis Bill Clinton was a CIA plant at Oxford, where both were students in the late 1960s. "I think he was a double," Hitchens says....

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 November 23 Credit: NASA, Lunar Orbiter 4 Explanation: Like a target ring bull's-eye, the Mare Orientale is one of the most striking large scale lunar features. Located on the Moon's extreme western edge, this impact basin is unfortunately difficult to see from an earthbound perspective. It is over 3 billion years old, about 600 miles across and was formed by the impact of an asteroid sized object....