Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Pentagon Papers Charges Are Dismissed; Judge Byrne Frees Ellsberg and Russo, Assails ‘Improper Government Conduct’
By Martin Arnold, The New York Times, 5/11/1973
New Trial Barred But Decision Does Not Solve Constitutional Issues in Case
Los Angeles, May 11 — Citing what he called “improper Government conduct shielded so long from public view,” the judge in the Pentagon papers trial dismissed today all charges against Dr. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo Jr.
And he made it clear in his ruling that the two men would not be tried again on charges of stealing and copying the Pentagon papers.
“The conduct of the Government has placed the case in such a posture that it precludes the fair, dispassionate resolution of these issues by a jury,” he said.
David R. Nissen, the chief prosecutor, said, “It appears that the posture is such that no appeal will be possible.”
Mother’s Day Turns 100: Its Surprisingly Dark History
By Brian Handwerk, National Geographic
As Mother’s Day turns 100 this year, it’s known mostly as a time for brunches, gifts, cards, and general outpourings of love and appreciation.
But the holiday has more somber roots: It was founded for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace. And when the holiday went commercial, its greatest champion, Anna Jarvis, gave everything to fight it, dying penniless and broken in a sanitarium.
It all started in the 1850s, when West Virginia women’s organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis-Anna’s mother-held Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College. The groups also tended wounded soldiers from both sides during the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865.
In the postwar years Jarvis and other women organized Mother’s Friendship Day picnics and other events as pacifist strategies to unite former foes. Julia Ward Howe, for one-best known as the composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”-issued a widely read “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace.
Around the same time, Jarvis had initiated a Mother’s Friendship Day for Union and Confederate loyalists across her state. But it was her daughter Anna who was most responsible for what we call Mother’s Day-and who would spend most of her later life fighting what it had become.
One thing that you learn as an artist is that it’s good to have a patron. The popular illusion is of the independent entrepreneur who through the strength and novelty of their original vision captures the hearts and minds of the masses and markets their output commercially.
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