Posted on 07/17/2008 4:50:17 AM PDT by saveliberty
Thursday, 17 July 2008
10:00 am - Funeral Mass - Great Upper Church
Open to the Public
Doors open at 8:00 a.m.
(Will Need to Pass through Security Checkpoint Magnetometers)
The Most Reverend Donald W. Wuerl
Archbishop of Washington
Presider
Reverend David O’Connell, CM
President of The Catholic University of America
Celebrant & Homilist
Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
400 Michigan Avenue, NE
Washington, DC 20017
Metro: Red Line – Brookland/CUA
In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to:
Dana Farber Cancer Institute
I remember how Sunday morning Fox News used to be so good with Tony in charge and Brit’s comments...those were the good ‘ol days indeed! But I have to agree with Rush when he said that Tony would have viewed this as a promotion - getting to be with God. I hope that people would really concentrate on that fact and prepare for their own futures. We don’t know what lies ahead, but you can know peace when you KNOW God intimitely through the love He has bestowed on us through Jesus Christ. Tony Snow knew this and LIVED this relationship out in a very public way! What he would want is people coming to Christ as a RESULT of his death! No great love is there than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
Darnit I thought I could be strong all day but reading these posts makes me so sad. I miss Tony.
Rest In Peace, friend.
RC
-Dent
Just a heads up. BOR is going to do a segment at the end of his show on the playful side of Tony.
Thanks, mware. I am watching now
Brit Hume and Greta both said on Fox this afternoon that the hardest but most touching thing was watching Tony's beloved children, and seeing how strong and full of grace they were.
I have to cry at every picture of them. No child should have to bury their parent.
My experience has largely been with Catholic funerals. You’re more likely to see a lot of color than black. This time of year, women in sun dresses and men in suits but not black.
BOR is still wearing the suit he wore to the funeral.
BTW Skunk Baxter was also one of the guys that the Defense Dept asked to attend a War College, because he thinks outside the box.
I was diagnosed with 3rd stage melanoma on October 4, 2006. I had surgery and a pet scan and on November 9th, I went to see the oncologist to find out the verdict. I was scheduled to take my daughter and granddaughter to Disneyland the next day. (I live in Kansas and had wanted for 50 years to go). I was told that they got it all and it had not metasticized. I’m still cancer free today. Every day is a blessing just like the day we flew to Disneyland.
Is this where I ask how he got the name Skunk, or are some things better left unsaid?
eek
He filmed from DC, deffie. I wonder if he didn’t broadcast this before his radio program.
Jeff Baxter played psychedelic music with Ultimate Spinach, jazz-rock with Steely Dan and funky pop with the Doobie Brothers. But in the last few years he has made an even bigger transition: Mr. Baxter, who goes by the nickname “Skunk,” has become one of the national-security world’s well-known counterterrorism experts. A wiry man who wears a beret to many of his meetings, Mr. Baxter, who is now 56 years old, has gone from a rock career that brought him eight platinum records to a spot in the small constellation of consultants paid to help both policy makers and defense contractors better understand the way terrorists think and plan attacks. The guitarist-turned-defense-consultant does regular work for the Department of Defense and the nation’s intelligence community, chairs a congressional advisory board on missile defense, and has lucrative consulting contracts with companies like Science Applications International Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. He says he is in increasing demand for his unconventional views of counterterrorism.
“We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles,” says Mr. Baxter, who sports a ponytail and handlebar mustache. “My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at.”
One of Mr. Baxter’s clients — General Atomics’ vice president Mike Campbell — likens him to a “gluon,” a term drawn from quantum physics that refers to the particles binding together the basic building blocks of all matter. Contractors and policymakers say Mr. Baxter can see past bureaucratic boundaries and integrate information drawn from a variety of sources, though some who have worked with him say he can also be a self-promoter.
Mr. Baxter can speak the acronym-heavy vernacular of the professional defense consultant, but he would never be mistaken for one of the hardened ex-military men who fill the ranks of the industry. He rarely wears ties, is fond of self-deprecating jokes, makes frequent popular-culture references, and peppers his speech with casual profanity. He also often appears on VH1 music retrospectives. Still, he’s careful not to discuss current or past projects that might be classified and keeps to a punishing schedule. One morning recently, a black government-issued sport-utility vehicle picked him up outside a Washington café as soon as he had finished breakfast and whisked him to a Pentagon agency for nearly 12 hours of meetings. That evening, he traveled to Ohio’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for several days of briefings and meetings. He flew 230,000 miles last year, and makes a point of dissolving brightly colored packets of vitamin supplements into his drinks to stave off illness.
Mr. Baxter, who joined his first band when he was 11, began studying journalism at Boston University, but dropped out after a year in 1969 to begin working with Ultimate Spinach, a short-lived Boston psychedelic rock band. He moved to California a short time later and became one of the six original members of the avant-garde rock group Steely Dan. He quit the band in 1974 and joined the Doobie Brothers, helping to remake its sound into a commercially appealing mix of funk and jazzy pop. Mr. Baxter left the group in 1979 after a long tour in support of its most popular album, “Minute by Minute.”
His defense work began in the 1980s, when it occurred to him that much of the hardware and software being developed for military use, like data-compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices, could also be used for recording music. Mr. Baxter’s next-door neighbor, a retired engineer who worked on the Pentagon’s Sidewinder missile program, bought him a subscription to an aviation magazine, and he was soon reading a range of military-related publications.
Mr. Baxter began wondering whether existing military systems could be adapted to meet future threats they weren’t designed to address, a heretical concept for most defense thinkers. In his spare time, he wrote a five-page paper on a primitive Tandy computer that proposed converting the military’s Aegis program, a ship-based antiplane system, into a rudimentary missile-defense system. On a whim, he gave the paper to a friend from California, Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. To Mr. Baxter’s surprise, the congressman took it seriously, and the idea proved to be prescient: Aegis missile-defense systems have done well in tests, and the Navy says it will equip at least one ship with the antimissile system by the end of the year. “Skunk really blew my mind with that report,” Mr. Rohrabacher says. “He was talking over my head half the time, and the fact that he was a rock star who had basically learned it all on his own was mind-boggling.”
Quite so. One presumes that no one ever has to enjoin him to “think outside the box.”
Hard to say. An old man I used to know well, a legend in his own town died yesterday. What a week. Hope these things do not happen in three’s, personally.
“Open to the Public”
How gracious of the family.
More prayers for Tony!
I am sorry that you’ve lost two friends so quickly.
I can’t bear to hear anything about Tony, yet. It’s too painful. God blessed us with him for a short time, but it was time well spent. What a rich life! What a gem of a man. God bless his family.
TY!
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