In 2024, a presidential election year, facts still matter in America. Despite how much Joe Biden consistently lies about his own life and voting record, serially misrepresenting it in a sad, pathetic attempt to place himself in the center of everything that matters or has has value in the USA, and its history since WWII, to appeal to people whom his own staff and supporters mock. Biden's false face and lies aren't fooling anyone! Compare Biden's lies about saving lives as a lifeguard with Ronald Reagan's actual reality as a teenager in the 1920's.Yes, I've got some thoughts!

In 2024, a presidential election year, facts still matter in America. Despite how much Joe Biden consistently lies about his own life and voting record, serially misrepresenting it in a sad, pathetic attempt to place himself in the center of everything that matters or has has value in the USA, and its history since WWII, to appeal to people whom his own staff and supporters mock. Biden's false face and lies aren't fooling anyone! 

Compare Biden's lies about saving lives as a lifeguard with Ronald Reagan's actual reality as a teenager in the 1920's. Yes, I've got some thoughts!

I bring this up today because there has been YET another attempt to reinvent Joe Biden and make him something he has never been or ever was, and I use as my jumping off point this tweet of Greg Price, below, https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1783900381346410512

It immediately set off alarms in my head, especially when Biden makes false claims about saving people's lives as a lifeguard.

Having had several friends in the past who were , in fact, real life guards who saved REAL LIVES, including along often-crazy Lake Michigan when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette, Illinois, in the latter case, but two blocks away from Lake Michigan...

It also made me recall what I'd seen in a great episode of the one series on PBS American Experience, that tends to be both the most honest factually and the one most down-the-middle politically, without the usual liberal cant and chic propaganda embedded into it that gets into almsot every other PBS program of the past 20 years. Unfortunately!

By the way, in case you want to read in its entirety the AP's 2005 article about then-New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and his willful deception about his amateur baseball career, it's here

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gov-admits-baseball-tale-untrue/#

He was someone I spoke to quite a few times in Washington DC when I lived and worked there from 1988-2003, when Richardson was first a New mexico congressman and later the U.N. Ambassador, before becoming governor.

I greatly admired him and his background, epsecially his serious foreign policy whehn he was just out of college and worked at the State Dept, then parlayed that into a very impressive career.

Then came news of his involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal, which seemed to paint a worse picture of him at first. Every subsequent bit of news was EVEN WORSE, which is where things stoodf when he died last September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Richardson

Gov. Admits Baseball Tale Untrue 

November 25, 2005 / 8:58 AM EST / AP

You can see the following tweet thread in its entirety at https://x.com/hbbtruth/status/1783928222914150685

Video is at: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7gbhw0

----

Dave

David Bruce Smith

Hallandale Beach/Hollywood Blog: http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @hbbtruth, https://twitter.com/hbbtruth/with_replies
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bruce-smith-b945b376/

Instagram: @hbbtruth https://www.instagram.com/hbbtruth/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DavidSmith0215

Personal thoughts on the proposed idea of a gondola going across the Potomac River, next to Key Bridge, from Washington DC's Georgetown area to Arlington County's Rosslyn Metro station. Naturally, it causes me to recall crossing it on 9/11. Don't ruin the views of that iconic bridge -and the iconic views FROM it. NO to the #gondola

Per #DC #gazebo, having lived in #Arlington fm '88-'03, mile N. of #Ballston #Metro, I've walked across #KeyBridge 1,000-plus x's. NO Gazebo

— HallandaleBeachBlog (@hbbtruth) May 29, 2015

A gondola is a lot less far-fetched than you might think. Here's why it's worth looking into: http://t.co/XQAYOqDqa5

— Grtr Grtr Washington (@ggwash) May 29, 2015

DC is contributing $35K for a feasibility study of a Georgetown-Rosslyn gondola: http://t.co/3j0hzzUDq7 on http://t.co/UHp43KPMLC

— Grtr Grtr Washington (@ggwash) May 29, 2015

GreaterGreaterWashington blog

Yes, it's worth looking into a gondola in DC 

by Topher Mathews 

May 29, 2015

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/26925/yes-its-worth-looking-into-a-gondola-in-dc/

Having lived in Arlington County for about 15 years from 1988-2003, a mile north of Ballston Metro, conservatively, I've walked across Key Bridge about a thousand-plus times to get to and from Georgetown and Downtown DC from Arlington. 
It actually could be even more times, since I also worked part-time for a few years at stores in Georgetown, both at the Abercrobie & Fitch in the Georgetown Mall in the early '90's, and years later at the Barnes & Noble Superstore .and often walked home at night after closing.

USA Today's Susan Page was a very frequent visitor at Barnes & Noble, especially baseball-related books, and A&F was where I'd first told then-U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson -whom I was a big admirer of- just what I'd heard and read about the newly-elected to the House Bernie Sanders of Vermont, after he admitted that he'd never heard of him before.

Many if not most walks across the bridge came on weekends when the Metro runs less frequently and I could walk to Georgetown and its great Washington Harbour area, one that I so often used as a second home for writing purposes, in about 75 minutes.
Roughly the same amount of time as walking to Ballston Metro and waiting and waiting and waiting... and then walking to Georgetown from the Foggy Bottom metro next to GWU, George Washington University.
If the weather was even halfway nice I'd usually walk, especially on sunny Sundays when I could listen to sports radio on my walk into Georgetown and not really think so much about the distance.
If you hadn't already caught on from previous posts over the past eight years, I'm a longtime walker from way back...

As I've written about previously here on the blog, including back on September 11th, 2011, 

9/11 -George F. Will on the American landscape ten years after 9/11: Commemoration can’t heal what is self-inflicted

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html

that includes my experiences on 9/11, walking from my office on Pennsylvania Avenue opposite the DOJ and the FBI, and walking' the seven-plus miles or so home because, 

a.) the Metro was packed like sardines times ten, and, frankly,

b.) I didn't want to be underground for so long and not know what was going on.

Everyone in my office had been kept informed via my awesome portable Sony radio the size of a sub sandwich, which had TV station audio reception back then, before FCC's Digital TV changes changed that.

We all listened to the audio of NBC's Today Show, but I didn't personally see footage of collapsing WTC Towers until hours later, at the Baltimore Orioles team store in downtown DC around the corner from NY Times Washington bureau, where I headed after my building was ordered to evacuate because of the fears that a plane -what we later came to all know was United #93- would be used to attack the Capitol Building or the White House.

Bud Verge was a friend I'd met and the very savvy and friendly manger of the O's Team store then, and it was there while he waited for his wife to come pick him that watching a TV that usually was running Orioles team highlights, that I first saw the two Towers fall.

Then I walked over to the NY Times Washington bureau to hear what some of  my friends and their colleagues had heard or was being reported, before I decided to finsih my walk home, a little bit better infromed than I had been when the fighter jets were flying directly overhead.

Lots of other north Arlington residents I know walked home by choice across Key Bridge from downtown DC or even Capitol Hill because they shared the same concerns I had, that given everything that had already happened that morning, to say nothing of all the rumors we heard reported at the time, like the State Dept. being partially-bombed, something would or could happen on the Metro -or to it.

With my work clothes in my gym bag over my shoulder and that radio under my left arm like a football, every few minutes I'd stop and let a group of passersby catch their breath, too. and together, we'd get caught up on what we "knew" at the time via uncertain voices reporting "facts" from DC or NYC.

And all you could do was shake your head at what you were hearing.

That was never more the case then when standing halfway across Key Bridge over the Potomac looking at the nearby Washington Monument, looming larger than ever.

I still remember exactly how that felt.

So yeah, while I understand the arguments for studying the gondola idea cited by GreaterGreaterWashington, I'm firmly against a gondola that would ruin the view of that iconic bridge and the views that you can see FROM it.

Let 'em walk across the bridge.
Or call Uber or lyft.

Sweet & smooth Christmas a cappella from the sextet called "Vocation" - Ett barn är fött (A child is born) & Sleigh Ride -LIVE on Abbey Road, TV4's Nyhetsmorgon

TV4's Nyhetsmorgon: Vocation – Ett barn är fött (A child is born) LIVE on Abbey Road, December 22, 2011.
http://www.tv4play.se/nyheter_och_debatt/nyhetsmorgon?title=vocation_ett_barn_ar_fott&videoid=2126555&utm_medium=sharing&utm_source=permalink&utm_campaign=tv4play.se







TV4's Nyhetsmorgon: Vocation – Sleigh Ride -LIVE on Abbey Road, December 22, 2011.
http://www.tv4play.se/nyheter_och_debatt/nyhetsmorgon?title=vocation_sleigh_ride&videoid=2126551&utm_medium=sharing&utm_source=permalink&utm_campaign=tv4play.se


This music makes me think of the music I heard one odd pre-Christmas night 21 years ago at the Abercrombie & Fitch at Georgetown Mall, where, within 15 minutes, I ran into and spoke with both then-Rep. and future UN Ambassador and New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and then-ABC News correspondent and Gator alum Forrest Sawyer, wearing a trench coat that made him seem like Joel McCrea in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, one of my all-time favorite films.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Sawyer


I was the first person to tell Richardson about his future House colleague -and present U.S. Senator- Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and because he had never heard of him, at first, I think he thought I was joking about Sanders' VERY liberal politics.
"Even for Vermont" I think I told Richardson a few times.


The store had too many contrasting colognes being sprayed into the air for my tastes -by the adorable sale clerk from Kentucky who worked there- but when you were there, it felt like you were in the most Christmas-y place in all of Washington, D.C., besides near the National Christmas Tree on The Ellipse, where I'd been earlier that night.


(Far away from the decidedly un-Christmas feel of SE Broward County this week.)


Yes, back when the late and much-missed Au Pied du Cochon was just a few blocks away up on Wisconsin Avenue, the default hangout for my friends and I after we saw a film in Georgetown, esp. a foreign film.
Back in the early '90's, there were sometimes even two new au courant foreign films playing within four blocks that had the New York Times film critics abuzz, like Indochine or the Chinese film, LIFE.


When I was there with my friends and my then-significant other, the restaurant seemed almost magical, straight out of a film with interesting, attractive people, delicious-smelling aromas, and some "wicked" people-watching wherever we turned our heads.
We felt so "civilized" when we were there, which as pretentious as it sounds -and no doubt was- was no less true.
At certain points in time in the 15 years I lived up there, Au Pied du Cochon was one of the best places in all of Washington, D.C. to be.  


That's where we ate and drank after seeing all three films of the Three Colors trilogy of Krzysztof Kieślowski, starring, respectively, longtime HBB favorites Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Iréne Jacob. (I actually bought the film posters of "Blue" and "Red" and had them in frames in my home.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Colors_Trilogy


Boy, thinking back to THOSE days, it REALLY makes this area seem underwhelming, fun-wise.


Downtown Hollywood could do worse than to have one-tenth of the sort of magnetic persona that area of Wisconsin Avenue had at night. 
But in order to have even that, you need something for people to do at night besides eating, drinking or shopping, and right now, what is there?
No movie theaters, no bookstores with either charm or programming, no old-style news stands...


It's completely lacking in energy.


Maybe once the FEC commuter train is running in a few years and most of the shop owners in Downtown Hollywood who are now so rude and unfriendly have fled, someone with some common sense will invest some money and take advantage of its natural advantages.


I must tell you, though, among my friends, many who used to regularly patronize Downtown Hollywood at night, the collective corrosive effect of so much rudeness, second-rate service and products, and perennial worrying about both parking and safety/crime, has burned too many people, too many times.
"They're just not that into you."


Not that this avoidance has helped The Village at Gulfstream Park at night very much, though, because they are NOT going there either.


Some new faces with common sense and personality at Hollywood and Hallandale Beach City Hall, on the City Commissions, wouldn't hurt, either.


Notice all the 4's for Channel 4 above the ginger bread house doors!





Helena Insulander of Vocation is interviewed by Nyhetsmorgon hosts Kristin Kaspersen and and Steffo Törnquist. December 22, 2011.


http://www.tv4play.se/nyheter_och_debatt/nyhetsmorgon?title=samtal_med_morgonens_musikgaster_vocation&videoid=2126473&utm_medium=sharing&utm_source=permalink&utm_campaign=tv4play.se


Nyhetsmorgon homepage full of video clips and info: 
http://www.tv4.se/nyhetsmorgon

Where's the Disney story in the Miami Herald?

Below, an email I sent earlier this afternoon to Miami-area resident and longtime South Beach Hoosier favorite Matt Drudge, with the hopes that he'd turn his immensely powerful combination telescope and microscope of The Drudge Report in the general direction of Orlando and Miami.

This illuminating Orlando Sentinel story by Scott Powers and Jason Garcia is perhaps as
good an example as any I'm familiar with that properly illuminates both the 'fixer' mentality and backroom-dealing culture of Tallahasseee, and the Miami Herald's own clueless-ness in the year 2008, a large organization that is neither deft enough nor quick enough on the draw to properly use the myriad resources it possesses, to the detriment of its remaining number of readers.

As to my own original thoughts below about the future of the Herald Building itself,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IMG_1642.jpg consider yourself warned.

And yes, I'll admit, I completely forgot about the Terra Group's purchase of the building, but the general point still holds true.
Winner of the 2005 'Best Architectural Eyesore': The Miami Herald Building, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132-1609
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/bestof/2005/award/best-architectural-eyesore-42698

See also:
http://www.miamisunpost.com/archives/2006/07-27-06/eightstoryfrontpage.htm

Sometime soon, I'll share some thoughts on what it was like to be in that huge building in the late 1970's, and look out towards the bay from the desks of the Sports Dept. of the late and much-missed Miami News.
___________________________
Thursday July 3rd, 2008
12:30 p.m.

Dear Matt:

I'm somewhat dumbfounded that you haven't yet linked to the infuriating story about Disney once again playing its Bigfoot card behind the scenes to carve out some special treatment for itself. The story in today's Orlando Sentinel by Scott Powers and Jason Garcia is as clear and to the point as you could ask for.

Now, personally, me being me, I'd like for the article to have asked State Rep. Stan Mayfield,
who helped craft the legislation, to publicly identify these "lawyers" (i.e. lobbyists), who were able to $weet talk him and his committee into inserting such a patently deceitful exemption 'exception' on behalf of Disney & Co.
Yeah, I'd really like to know who they are.

The fact that the reputed largest newspaper in the state, the Miami Herald doesn't mention this story anywhere in the paper today, a front page story to be sure, and on its antiquated and third-rate website, rather than have their own bureau reporters ferret out the true facts, runs two AP dispatches, the most recent of which contradicts/clarifies the first, is another larger
question worthy of discussion.

Clarification: Parking Lot Guns-Disney story
http://www.miamiherald.com/775/story/591998.html
Disney says it's exempt from new gun law
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking_news/story/592379.html

That's a question that might more reasonably be brought up in the not-too-distant future, when, aping the recent moves of The Tribune Company, McClatchy will likely raise the idea of selling the property where the Herald HQ is located, right on Biscayne Bay, where it's long been the largest eyesore on the Bay.

You can place this example of the Herald once again ignoring the troubles of a large state employer on the agenda/autopsy page, right after that delicious item I told you about the day it happened last September.

That was where the Herald ran a story in their third-rate Sunday opinion section, Issues & Ideas, shortly before a Dem presidential debate at the U-M, where one of their Latin America experts wrote that Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico was actually born in Mexico, which would surely come as shocking news to his mother, who was in Santa Monica, CA when Bill was born.

You'll recall that I stated to you at the time how this merely confirmed my own doubts about
the tenuous grasp of the U.S. Constitution by most reporters, other than the Second Amendment, and in this case, not only the individual reporter at the Herald who wrote this, but his editors as well. A two-fer.

That this simple "fact" could've been discovered and refuted by a nine-year old in all of about 30 seconds via Richardson's own presidential or gubernatorial website, or that the newspaper never ran a correction, is just one of the many reasons why the Miami Herald has been in economic and editorial free fall for years.

Matt, I can hardly wait 'till the geniuses at The McClatchy Company try to re-assure their stockholders that they won't have any trouble getting the City of Miami or Miami-Dade County to change their zoning laws to accommodate McClatchy's desire to sell the property, and turn it into bayside luxury condos. (What else!)

That's when I think you'll see South Florida residents (inc. bloggers) decide that "what's good for the goose is good for the gander," and decide it's time for that area to become the beautiful bayside park it should've always been.
(The one the city and county completely botched with Bicentennial Park years and years ago, and are now trying to fix with their current equally flawed project.)

Then we'll see how dedicated to the concept of transparency and accountability the Miami Herald's Editorial Board is, when South Florida civic activists make it their business to give the proposed deal the highest possible degree of scrutiny.
You know, just for ol' times sake.
'Chinese wall' and all that.

Hmm... as of Noon, there were only 346 Orlando Sentinel reader comments on their website.
That's like, what, the total of all comments to the Herald in a good week?
Exactly, hence my email to you now.

Please consider adding it before the 4th of July.

Adios!

Dave
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
http://www.southbeachhoosier.blogspot.com/

______________________________ __________
Orlando Sentinel
Walt Disney World fires back on guns at work
Scott Powers and Jason Garcia, Sentinel Staff Writers
July 3, 2008

Walt Disney World employees won't be packing any heat in the company parking lots anytime soon.
The giant resort has declared that much of its sprawling property is exempt from a new state law that allows Floridians with concealed-weapons permits to keep firearms locked in their cars at work.
Disney, which has 60,000 employees and a long-standing policy against allowing guns on its land, cites an arcane -- and late-added -- loophole in the new law, which took effect Tuesday.

To see the rest of the story:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/custom/tourism/orl-disneyguns0308jul03,0,4282076.story
________________________________________
Reader comments at: http://www.topix.net/forum/source/orlando-sentinel/T7AB2CU04R1EK4NK0