think or thwim

Via the very cool site Letters of Note:

Santiago de Cuba

Nov 6 1940

Mr Franklin Roosvelt, President of the United States.

My good friend Roosvelt I don’t know very English, but I know as much as write to you. I like to hear the radio, and I am very happy, because I heard in it, that you will be President for a new (periodo). I am twelve years old. I am a boy but I think very much but I do not think that I am writing to the President of the United States. If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american, in the letter, because never, I have not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.

My address is:

Sr Fidel Castro
Colegio de Dolores
Santiago de Cuba
Oriente Cuba

I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.

(Thank you very much)

Good by. Your friend,

(Signed)

Fidel Castro

If you want iron to make your sheaps ships I will show to you the bigest (minas) of iron of the land. They are in Mayari Oriente Cuba.

The original: Link

castro, letters, letters of note, roosevelt

floods

The Root:

It’s self-evident that a movement that calls the president a lying, socialist, Nazi eugenicist with a fake birth certificate is about something more than deficit spending. People don’t brandish automatic weapons and pray for the president’s death because they want to keep their employer-sponsored health plans. But to name the stalking beast is more than we can bear.

Not, thankfully, for Carter. He knows the tea-baggers aren’t new, that their fear of “big government” is but the latest version of states’ rights, which was itself a pseudonym for white supremacy.

2008 Election Map (a screen shot I took on election night when I was comparing these maps):

1861 Free vs Slave State Map:

Mason Dixon line: intact, but fading. Again from The Root:

The sad, and tiresome, part is that we have to have that same damn conversation over and over again. We can take some comfort in the fact that part of the intensity we see from the vein-popping angry populism of the birthers and the tea-baggers, the Joe Wilsons and the Glenn Becks flows from a desperate recognition that they are on the losing end of a historic argument. Obama’s presidency is the checkmate against an ugly America that they want to preserve, but that they see fading not-so-slowly in the rearview mirror.

:: 3 Quarks

barack obama, jimmy carter

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