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The Fallen Heroes Who Went to Vietnam in John Bolton's Place |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=28850"><span class="small">Michael Daly, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Sunday, 15 April 2018 08:40 |
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Daly writes: "They all had the same birthday and same draft number. But while the now-hawkish national security adviser rode out the war in safety, these brave young soldiers never came home."
'Our new national security adviser, John Bolton, was born on the same day in 1948 as Weyman Cook, Jerry Miller, and Richard Lassiter, whose own chances for future achievements ended when they were killed in Vietnam.' (image: Daily Beast)
The Fallen Heroes Who Went to Vietnam in John Bolton's Place
By Michael Daly, The Daily Beast
15 April 18
They all had the same birthday and same draft number. But while the now-hawkish national security adviser rode out the war in safety, these brave young soldiers never came home.
 ur new national security adviser, John Bolton, was born on the same day in 1948 as Weyman Cook, Jerry Miller, and Richard Lassiter, whose own chances for future achievements ended when they were killed in Vietnam.
Their common birthday was Nov. 20, number 185 in the 1969 draft lottery, which was based on date of birth and ended student deferments—such as the one Bolton had until then enjoyed at Yale. He might well have been called up, as the draft went up to 195, but he managed to get a spot in the Maryland National Guard and then a local Army reserve unit. The Guard and the Reserves had long waiting lists, as they offered a way to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
“I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy,” Bolton wrote in his Yale 25th reunion class book. “I considered the war in Vietnam already lost.”
Instead, Bolton went to Yale Law School, interning in the summer for the stridently pro-war Vice President Spiro Agnew, who told everybody that the fight in Vietnam was progressing far better than the effete media suggested. Bolton later served at no peril in the Justice Department and the State Department, all the while being quick to recommend the use of military force. He was an ardent supporter of the Iraq War and has gained a reputation for being ever ready, almost eager to send others into combat.
We will never know what Cook, Miller, and Lassiter might have accomplished. Cook had seemed like he might be one of the lucky ones after a helicopter he was in went down in Vinh Long on March 6, 1969. The married 20-year-old from Corinth, Mississippi, miraculously survived and stepped away unhurt. He could have just stood there with his whole young life before him.
But a number of comrades were trapped in the burning wreckage and in his last minutes he demonstrated that he possessed the stuff of greatness. The citation of the Soldier’s Medal he was subsequently awarded “for exceptionally valorous actions while serving as crew chief of a UH-1D helicopter” reads:
“The aircraft developed flight difficulties and crashed to the ground, bursting into flames upon impact. He managed to remove himself from the helicopter unharmed. As soon as he realized that the others were still trapped inside the burning aircraft, he rushed into the flames and pulled one of the survivors from the wreckage. As a result of his heroic action, Specialist Fourth Class Cook was severely burned and later succumbed to these fatal wounds.”
Cook was buried in Oak Hill Church of Christ Cemetery in Alcorn County, Mississippi. He was preceded in death by 19-year-old Cpl. Jerry Miller, who died on Sept. 9, 1968, in Binh Thuan province.
Miller had previously been wounded and knocked unconscious by an enemy rocket. He awoke to see that a number of his comrades were more seriously injured and he radioed for assistance. He insisted that the responding medics help the others first and pitched in to assist despite his own wound. He was subsequently awarded a Bronze Star, but he declined to accept it.
“He believed you only get out of life what you put into it,” his mother, Jean Cornett, was later quoted saying. “He just didn’t think he had done more than anyone else would have.”
A month later, Miller was on patrol when somebody in his squad failed to see a trip wire. The explosion killed Miller instantly. He is buried in Resthaven Memory Gardens Cemetery in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Another soldier born on Nov. 20, 1948, was a hero of another kind even before he was drafted. PFC Richard Lassiter, of Norfolk, Virginia, was the oldest of nine children raised by a single mother after their father deserted the family and moved to New York. Lassiter had stepped in to become the man of the house when not much more than a youngster.
“He was our protector,” his sister, Pauline Antomattei, told The Daily Beast on Saturday. “He was the father I didn’t have.”
She added, “He was strong, not just physically strong, but strong within the family and community. We depended on him.”
He was nicknamed “Joe Nose” because of his prominent nose. The more notable bigness about him was the magnitude of his presence, which turned sparkling with what his sister calls “a 100-watt smile.” He seemed larger than life, not only a man, but also a man to emulate although only a teen.
“To see him in person, he was formidable,” his sister recalled. “He was beloved by men and women. Women loved him, the guys wanted to be him and wanted to be his friend.”
Then came an induction notice from the Norfolk draft board. He headed off to Vietnam predicting he would not survive to see his mother and eight siblings again.
“He actually said, ‘I’m not going to come back home,’” the sister remembered. “Of course, everybody said, ‘No, no, you will.’”
On May 5, 1969, Lassiter’s unit embarked on a patrol in Quang Ngai province. He advised a comrade named Don DePina not to “walk point,” as taking the lead was called.
“He was the one who told me to take the ‘pig’ [walk further back], where I was less likely to be shot instead of walking point,” DePina would say in a remembrance posted online as part of a Virginia veterans project.
Lassiter himself then took the lead.
“He was walking the point when we were ambushed,” DePina would recall.
Lassiter’s sister, Pauline, was 11 at the time. She remembers being taken out of school and coming home to see soldiers were there, talking to her mother.
“I remember my mother breaking down and everybody was crying,” she told The Daily Beast.
Lassiter was buried at Hampton National Cemetery in Hampton, Virginia. His mother sought to keep going however she could.
“Right after Richard died, she took up word puzzles,” Pauline recalled. “Some people go to therapy. She would do these word puzzles and would zone out.”
The oldest sister, Virginia, was 15 at the time. She subsequently joined the Air Force. She became pregnant at 19 after her first sexual experience and chose to have the baby. She went into labor at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center, which bungled a spinal tap and failed to have a crash cart on hand to revive her. She was left in a perpetual coma, paralyzed, unable to speak.
The mother had lost her oldest son and now had all but lost her oldest daughter.
“They were just like the soul,” Pauline recalled. “They were it… It’s like the family died.”
Virginia’s baby girl did survive and is now a CPA with a master’s degree, raising two kids of her own in Chicago.
And Richard Lassiter’s friend from Vietnam returned home to serve as the director of veteran’s services in New Bedford, Massachusetts, from 1999 to 2002. He recorded the remembrance of Lassiter that was posted online.
“Richie was my friend,” DePina said. “I will always remember Richie as my bother. I love you and your name is spoken by me every day.”
DePina continued to help combat vets however he could while going to work as a cab driver. He was murdered in a robbery by two teens, aged 18 and 16, in November of 2015. He had hoped aloud in his remembrance of Lassiter that he would be reunited with his friend when his own time came.
“God bless, and I will see you. Don.”
Others who were born on Nov. 20, 1948, who died in Vietnam include Heinrich Ruhlmann, Leonard Deinlein, Jorge Luis Mendez-Matos, and Rene Buller.
And John Bolton lives on to become our new super-hawk national security adviser. Neither he nor his office responded on Monday to a request for comment about a time when he faced actually being in a war.
Maybe he was too busy in the first official day of his latest achievement in a future such as was violently denied those other young men born on Nov. 20, 1948.
“They never got a chance,” Richard Lassiter’s sister, Pauline, told The Daily Beast.
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Amazon Apologizes for Shipping Ten Thousand Copies of Comey's Book to White House |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 14 April 2018 13:44 |
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Borowitz writes: "Calling it a 'regrettable accident,' Amazon apologized on Thursday for shipping ten thousand advance copies of James Comey's book, 'A Higher Loyalty,' to the White House."
James Comey. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty)
Amazon Apologizes for Shipping Ten Thousand Copies of Comey's Book to White House
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
14 April 18
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 alling it a “regrettable accident,” Amazon apologized on Thursday for shipping ten thousand advance copies of James Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” to the White House.
Cartons of the book arrived early Thursday morning and kept coming throughout the day, until stacks of the book clogged virtually every hallway and office in the building.
Reportedly, Donald J. Trump was so incensed by the book situation that he screamed at Mike Pence while the Vice-President was in the middle of praising him, one source said.
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, called any speculation that Trump had ordered Comey’s book “absurd,” adding, “The President does not order reading material.”
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said that he had “absolutely no idea” how the ten thousand Comey books made their way to the White House, but advised Trump to follow the procedures on the Amazon Web site for returning unwanted merchandise.
“You can print up the return labels at home,” he said. “The books should be picked up and out of there in two weeks, three weeks, max.”
Bezos said that shipping the ten thousand books back to the company’s warehouse would not be overly costly for Amazon. “We get an amazing deal on postage,” he said.
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Median CEO Pay at Largest Companies Reaches a Record $15.7 Million |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20588"><span class="small">The Washington Post</span></a>
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Saturday, 14 April 2018 13:31 |
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Excerpt: "CEO pay is up yet again. A booming stock market and bulging equity awards propelled the median 2017 compensation for CEOs of the 100 largest companies to the highest figure in 11 years, according to a new analysis."
Businessmen on Wall Street. (photo: AP)
Median CEO Pay at Largest Companies Reaches a Record $15.7 Million
By The Washington Post
14 April 18
EO pay is up yet again. A booming stock market and bulging equity awards propelled the median 2017 compensation for CEOs of the 100 largest companies to the highest figure in 11 years, according to a new analysis.
The report, released Wednesday by executive compensation and governance research firm Equilar, examines pay of the 100 largest public companies by revenue, and comes in advance of broader CEO pay rankings that typically arrive later in the spring and analyze the companies of the entire Standard & Poor's 500-stock index.
New to Equilar's analysis is the inclusion of a CEO-to-worker pay ratio for each company, thanks to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that went into effect this year. The rule requires publicly traded companies to release a ratio of what their CEOs make in comparison to their median paid worker.
For the 100 largest companies, the ratios tend to be far higher than the broader market, with a median of 235 to 1, compared with 72 to 1 for companies in the Russell 3000 index that have reported their 2017 numbers so far. In other words, CEOs of the largest companies tend to get paid a lot more than others.
Each year, the list produces some eye-popping numbers in part because CEO pay packages are valued on the date new stock awards are granted. As a result, multi-year grants that CEOs only get access to over time can bulk up the size of a CEO's pay package one year, only to see the number plummet — albeit still to relatively high numbers — the following year.
The highest-paid CEO in this year's study is Broadcom's Hock Tan, who has been in the news after President Trump blocked the company's $117-billion bid for Qualcomm and, weeks later, for changing its legal domicile from Singapore to the United States. Tan's 2017 package was valued at $103.2 million. That massive number includes a new stock grant valued at $98.3 million that will pay out over a period of several years only if Broadcom meets certain total shareholder return performance thresholds.
Other names at the top of the new list include American International Group CEO Brian Duperreault ($42.8 million); Oracle co-CEOs Mark Hurd and Safra Catz (north of $40 million each); and Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger, whose pay was valued at $36.3 million.
Many of the companies on this list with the highest CEO pay ratios, meanwhile, employ large groups of retail, temporary or foreign workers whose lower annual wages can make the ratio look particularly high.
At ManpowerGroup, the staffing provider, the ratio of CEO to worker pay is 2,483 to 1; at retailer Kohl's, the ratio is 1,264 to 1. (Manpower notes in its proxy that 95% of the employees used in that calculation are "associates" employed at client firms in 80 countries, a majority of which are in temporary roles; if it calculated the ratio using just the 5% that are permanent staff, the ratio would be 273 to 1.)
And who was the lowest-paid CEO in this ranking of the 100 largest companies? That would be the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, whose stock holdings may number in the billions but whose annual compensation from Berkshire Hathaway, where he is CEO, is limited.
According to Berkshire's proxy, Buffett received a $100,000 salary, the same he has received for more than 25 years — but no bonus or new stock awards; Berkshire also provided security services for Buffett that cost $375,000 in 2017. The CEO pay ratio at Berkshire is 1.87-to-1.
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FOCUS: Under Russian Terror, All Exiles Are Fearful and All Deaths Are Suspicious |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29699"><span class="small">Masha Gessen, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Saturday, 14 April 2018 11:41 |
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Gessen writes: "The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an intergovernmental authority, has confirmed that the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were hospitalized in England last month, were poisoned with Novichok, a Russian-made nerve agent."
Investigators gather evidence in the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, England. (photo: i-Images/eyevine/Redux)
Under Russian Terror, All Exiles Are Fearful and All Deaths Are Suspicious
By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
14 April 18
 he Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an intergovernmental authority, has confirmed that the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who were hospitalized in England last month, were poisoned with Novichok, a Russian-made nerve agent. What’s more, the form of the gas was pure enough to suggest that it was deployed by a state actor. “They practically wrote that it was Russia,” an anchor on a Russian state-television news show concluded. “Though, of course, it’s not so.”
The official Russian line on the poisonings is that they were set up—presumably by the British government—in order to frame Russia. The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued a series of denials and counter-accusations, and, on Monday, the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, addressing Russian diplomats who have been expelled by different Western countries, called the entire affair an “unprecedented provocation.” The Russian media, for their part, have aired endless, daily reports on the Skripals, methodically casting doubt on every aspect of the story. Why are the Skripals recovering? journalists ask, implying that if the father and daughter had really been poisoned by Russian-made nerve gas, they would be good and dead. Why do their voices sound so strong? Why did they turn off location services on their cell phones on the day of the poisoning? Why hasn’t Yulia returned to Russia?
The practice of committing—or in this case, attempting—blatant murder and following it with a series of equally blatant denials is nearly as old as Soviet state terror. During the Great Terror of 1937–38, the secret police killed thousands of people every day, but hid this fact from the victims’ families. Soviet terror abroad worked similarly, if more selectively. The Soviets killed defectors, such as Georgy Agabekov, a rogue secret-police officer who was assassinated in Paris, in 1938, eight years after he defected to the West. This was legal under a 1927 Soviet law that made defection punishable by execution. But they also killed suspected traitors, such as the American Communist Juliet Stuart Poyntz, who disappeared in New York City, in 1937. And, most famously, they killed Leon Trotsky, the out-of-favor revolutionary who was banished from the Soviet Union, in 1929, and killed in Mexico City, in 1940.
Ramón Mercader, who killed Trotsky with an ice axe, denied any connection to the U.S.S.R.—he claimed that he killed Trotsky over a woman. But, once he completed his twenty-year sentence in Mexico, he moved to the Soviet Union, where he was promptly awarded Hero of the U.S.S.R., the highest military honor. Mercader lived out his days in Cuba but is buried in Moscow, with a pseudonym on his gravestone.
Soviet media denounced the dead Trotsky, just as it had denounced him when he was alive, as an enemy not only of the Soviet state but of all the world’s working classes. Three decades later, an entirely new generation of exiles—dissidents who were expelled from the U.S.S.R. or who escaped its satellites—were denounced in only slightly milder terms. Some of them were also killed. In 1978, the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was murdered with a poisoned umbrella, in London. (Earlier, more conventional attempts to poison Markov had failed.) In 1981, a terrorist cell operating out of East Germany detonated a bomb at the Munich headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; no one was killed. These high-profile attacks, combined with the continued vitriol of Soviet media, made murder a credible threat for Soviet exiles. Every accident, and every heart attack, began to look suspicious. When the exiled writer Andrei Amalrik died, in a car accident, in Spain, on his way to a human-rights conference, many observers in the U.S.S.R. and abroad were convinced that he had been murdered, although people who shared the ride with him said that he had been tired and lost control of the car. When the exiled singer-songwriter Alexander Galich died, from electrocution, while setting up a new stereo system in his Paris apartment, in 1977, the dissident community split among similar lines.
A generation later, when the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky was found dead in his house in London, in 2013, his large circle of friends and acquaintances split into two irreconcilable camps: those who believed that Berezovsky committed suicide, and those who were convinced that he was killed by Russians. In Berezovsky’s case, one might argue, it was a distinction without a difference: the former Kremlin kingmaker had been hounded by Russian agents for years, and Scotland Yard had foiled assassination attempts against him. One of his closest allies, the former Russian secret-police agent Alexander Litvinenko, had been killed by polonium poisoning, in London, in 2006. It took nearly ten years for an official inquest to place the blame on the Kremlin. Now probable culpability for the attempted murder of the Skripals has been assigned much faster.
To Russians living—and dying—abroad, especially in the United Kingdom, any number of other deaths appear suspicious. A BuzzFeed report last year identified fourteen deaths that might have been hits. After the Skripal poisoning, another high-profile Russian from Berezovsky’s circle was found dead, in London, and his death was quickly ruled a homicide.
In addition to the many recent deaths that remain mysterious, some of the deaths from the seventies and eighties continue to ignite debate. When, one day, late-Soviet and Russian secret-police records can be examined, it will likely emerge that some presumed murders were, in fact, accidents, and some apparent accidents might have been murders. But, in the uninterrupted logic of terror, the facts matter less than the fear. Hundreds of the Kremlin’s active opponents have left Russia in the last six years, moving the intellectual center of the opposition abroad, much as it happened in the seventies. In London, New York, and the Baltic republics, they continue to meet, organize, and plan a post-Putin future; in fact, the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, who moved to New York five years ago, chaired this week the Forum for a Free Russia, the fifth such gathering he has organized, in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Every person at the gathering, and scores of other Russian activists who are not there, have watched the unfolding Skripal investigation and wondered, at least occasionally, if they might not be next.
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t the end of another eventful Infrastructure Week, we have Scooter Libby pardoned by the president*, possibly for Obstruction-Signaling purposes. We have Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein 
