Free Republic

Maryland lawmakers agreed this week to require public school teachers to pay union fees – a move that bolsters the state’s connection to organized labor as others move toward a right-to-work status. The bill passed Thursday in the General Assembly and is headed to the desk of Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley for signing after Monday, the final day of Maryland’s 2013 legislative session. The bill is also part of a larger progressive agenda put fourth this year by leaders of the Democrat-controlled Assembly that includes the approval of tax increases and one of the toughest gun-control proposals in the country.

FREDERICK, MD - Some people in Maryland will get a surprise when they look at their tax bill. In a special session the Maryland General Assembly approved increasing taxes for people who make more than $100,000 a year and couples who make more than $150,000 a year. Those changes take effect this week. "They will go up for most people anywhere from five to 15-percent, and what they'll also see is that they'll be retroactive. I think Maryland families are suffering under the current economy and really don't need to be sending more and more to the government," said Sen....

While changing channels I caught a commercial with Lou Dobbs announcing Brinkley is going to be on his show tonight talking about his controversial book Tour of Duty. He did this last nite on O"Blowhard and now it looks like he's going to get another chance. Yet again, POW'S and vets get trashed by Kerry and his ilk. Time to majorly freepmail these two. Lou Dobbs http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form4.html?7 Douglas G Brinkley dbrinkle@uno.edu

Douglas Brinkley is the William Ginsburg of the Kennedy death circus. Before the crash, the boyish, gap-toothed Brinkley was known primarily as a Michael Beschloss-in-waiting, a telegenic historian fielding calls from the cable news networks. Now the University of New Orleans professor has parlayed a contributing editorship at George and a friendship with Kennedy into a job as a necropublicist. Between Saturday and Tuesday, Brinkley appeared on MSNBC, Late Edition, Meet the Press, Good Morning America, Dateline, Today (twice), and NPR (twice). He also penned columns about his relationship with Kennedy for Newsweek and the New York Times, and was...

You always think of David Brinkley in black-and-white, and not just because he's identified with the first days of television news. His whole manner, like his delivery, was black-and-white, coat-and-tie, crisp-and-clear. He was the antithesis of Casual Fridays, Fox News and the talk shows that are really shout shows. Oh, David Brinkley editorialized the news, all right, but he did it in the most effective, minimalist style. A wry detachment was his trademark. He could say more with one uplifted eyebrow than all the high-decibel, full-color opinionators that crowd the air today. He had a way of making the viewer...

The Times obituarary on David Brinkley includes the following: As part of the Huntley-Brinkley team, Mr. Brinkley held forth from Washington, while Huntley, a saturninely handsome correspondent who was given to punditry, reported from New York. The chemistry between the two, thanks largely to the controlled astringency of Mr. Brinkley's commentary, gave the broadcast a dominant place in the ratings, overtaking Mr. Cronkite's evening news program on CBS in two years.

<p>I remember not too long ago when a friend of mine lost his father to cancer, he talked of his only consolation being that at least his dad and mom would be together.</p> <p>But it's what he said next that stuck with me. "Neil, it's just me and my sisters. There's no one in front of us now."</p>

WASHINGTON--To have worked alongside David Brinkley on television is to have experienced what might be called the Tommy Henrich Temptation. Henrich, who played right field for the Yankees when Joe DiMaggio was playing center field, must have been constantly tempted to ignore the game and just stand there watching DiMaggio, who defined for his generation the elegance of understatement and the gracefulness that is undervalued because it makes the difficult seem effortless. Brinkley, who died Wednesday, a month shy of his 83rd birthday, was a Washington monument as stately, and as spare in expression, as is the original. Long before...

David Brinkley, who died Wednesday night (June 11) at age 82, was the greatest broadcast journalist who ever lived. There are many reasons for that. One is that he had a gift for stating complicated things simply. If there was ever a cliche in his writing (and he wrote all of his own stuff, unlike many in what passes for broadcast journalism today), I never saw it. And I would have seen it, because I was a copyboy at NBC News in Washington in the early '60s and in charge of filing the correspondents' scripts. I read his scripts as...

NTXT

Retired television news veteran David Brinkley was rescued from his burning home by a persistent police officer who broke into the home through a window, authorities said... [snip]