Donald Trump's first appearance in the New York Times. We should have known.

So as we have all observed the New York Times has been unrelenting in its unflattering Trump reportage. Which seems fair because let's face it New York has to take the blame for Trump to some degree, just like Alaskans had to take responsibility for Sarah Palin back in 2008.

However to be fair the New York Times was telling us what we needed to know about Trump from the very beginning.

This is from Trump's VERY FIRST write up in the Times:

Major Landlord Accused Of Antiblack Bias in City 

The Department of Justice, charging discrimination against blacks in apartment rentals, brought suit in Federal Court in Brooklyn yesterday against the Trump Management Corporation, a major owner and manager of real estate here. 

The corporation, which owns and rents more than 14,000 apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, was accused of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in its operation of 39 buildings. Most are in Coney Island, Brooklyn, and in Jamaica Estates and Forest Hills, Queens. 

Seeking an injunction to halt alleged discriminatory practises, the Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals “because of race and color.” It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available. 

At the corporation's main office, 600 Avenue Z in Brooklyn, Donald Trump, president, denied the charges. 

“They are absolutely ridiculous,” he said. “We never have discriminated, and we never would. There have been a number of local actions against us, and we've won them all. We were charged with discrimination, and we proved in court that we did not discriminate.”

 So to be clear Trump's very first appearance in the Times was due to a lawsuit that the federal government filed over racism.

And the first time that he was quoted in the paper was to deny that he had done anything wrong.

Once you realize that, it kind of puts this into a whole new perspective.

Donald Trump to African-Americans: "What do you have to lose?" https://t.co/3tKdAJzqei https://t.co/a31oCRJjhz

— The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) August 19, 2016

The answer?

Everything.

P.S. That this was indeed Trump's first appearance in the paper was confirmed by no less a source than the New York Times itself.

Sister Mary Moosenuggets gives a shout out to Billy Graham on his 96th birthday.

I actually was not going to address this video as it does not have much of anything to do with politics. However it does deal with Palin and her phony religious convictions, so that is certainly in my wheelhouse.

Do not expect a transcript as this thing is so convoluted and impossible to follow that it would take me an hour and I would end up with a splitting headache.

The first thing I noticed is that Palin was dressed as if she had suddenly been accepted into the nunnery. Gone are the sparkly shirts and fake cleavage, and instead she is wearing what looks like a minister's robe or a table cloth from a Black Mass.

Hard to tell really.

Palin essentially gushes over Billy Graham for a little over six minutes, telling us how honored she was to have attended his 95th birthday..

..seen above, and how her mother came to become a follower of his.  (Though in this newer version she explains that her mother saw his message on television, and in the original version I do believe she suggested that Sally had seen him in person.)

Palin explains that her mother became enamored with Graham during the time that she refers to as the "Jesus Era" of the seventies, which is a sanitized memory of what we all called the era of the "Jesus Freaks."

What makes this video interesting, in an "Oh my God there is a four car pileup on the highway" kind of way, is that Palin is clearly working without a script, and her meanderings are essentially a stream of consciousness look into how her brain misfires and jumps from topic to topic like a frog in a frying pan.

All in all it is incredibly bizarre and in some ways a little disturbing. But then again what about Sarah Palin is not both of those things?

P.S. Oh I almost forgot that in the early part of the video the person behind the camera kept adjusting it up and down in an attempt to frame her in the shot without cutting off the top of her head. Which makes me think that either it was a drunken Todd or Bristol behind the camera.

Lighter from the Vietnam War.

Just as true now as it was then.

I was a kid back in the 70's and naively believed that after that debacle we would have learned our lesson as a nation.

God kids are stupid.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970's yesterday may be remembered as yet ANOTHER day that the music died.

Courtesy of BBC News:

 Bee Gees singer Robin Gibb has died aged 62 after a lengthy battle with cancer.

I have been expecting this for quite some time after recently seeing him in a an interview.  He was always a very thin guy, but his recent weight loss was clearly the result of a serious illness. 

As I mentioned in the title I grew up in the 1970's, specifically attending high school in the late seventies when the Bee Gees became the most popular singing group in the world. It is NO exaggeration to say that there music was EVERYWHERE.

It was featured in the most popular films (Grease Saturday Night Fever, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), and was so omnipresent on the pop radio stations that if you did not immediately hear one of their songs after turning on the radio, one would surely play within the next fifteen minutes.

I was the generation that found ourselves identified by the Disco era so, being cool and all, I rejected the dance music out of hand right after it completely saturated our pop culture. For me it was just overkill, and the Bee Gees were the worst offenders by far in my opinion.

However I started to hang out with a group of kids at school that had bonded together over gymnastics.

They practiced after school across from the weight room where I spent an hour a day after school three times a week, and one day I wandered over out of curiosity after spotting one of the kids from my typing class.

After years of martial arts training I was very flexible, while the weightlifting had made me quite strong, so the very first thing I did was jump up on the rings and press into a handstand, which unbeknownst to me at the time was a rather advanced gymnastics maneuver. After they saw that, I was in the group whether I wanted to be or not.

Besides gymnastics the other love they all shared was a love of the Bee Gees music. Of course I immediately had to give them shit for listening to that "fucking disco crap." But they explained that THEY were fans of the Bee Gees earlier music and lent me an album called "Best of the Bee Gees."

I was hooked, and started buying up their older stuff everywhere I could find it.

Essentially it became the soundtrack for those last few years of high school. (Of course over the years my prejudice against disco softened and today I enjoy hearing "Jive Talking" almost as much as I enjoy hearing "I Started A Joke.")

It was sad enough when Maurice died back in 2003, but now with Robin gone it really does feel like the end of an era.

Well anyhow for all of you who may not know just how talented this trio was, or perhaps over the years have simply forgotten, let me share with you one of my favorite songs. (And yes of course it WAS written before they turned their considerable talents to disco.)

Anchorage, Alaska in the 1970's.

This is the Anchorage I remember.  Before the oil money started to pour through the city streets, and we learned that cash was the key to happiness, while trading away our soul in exchange for strip malls and cookie cutter housing developments.

4th Avenue, at that time the heart of the city.

Seedy bars, adult book stores, and houses of worship were often seen only blocks apart on the same street.

Pre-fab housing Alaska style.

Did you know Anchorage had a Drive-in theater?

Two actually, and in the summer it was too light out to see a damn thing on the screen, and in the winter we froze our asses off while trying to make out the actor's faces through the haze of drifting exhaust emanating from our idling automobiles.

Spenard Road, where massage parlors lined the street all in a row, and the prostitutes too nasty to get jobs in them waved at you as you drove home from school.

I delivered the Anchorage Daily News, every morning at 6:00 a.m. to this one.

This is essentially what every neighborhood I lived in looked like back then.

I have to say that the city is a whole hell of a lot tidier these days, but there certainly was something raw and untamed about the Anchorage of the 1970's. Come to think of it, most of US were raw and untamed back then as well. 

To see many more great photos, just click here.