Friday, October 28, 2016

Be president of the United States! Earn big bucks!

Old Post Office, now the Trump International Hotel, summer 2016

     Jimmy Carter is perhaps the most disdained president of recent history. Thinking about the late 1970s, the American public generally remembers the energy crisis, the hostages in Iran whom Carter couldn’t free, his “national malaise” and that’s about it.
 
National Portrait Gallery
   Which is unfair. At first he was very popular, for common man moves like walking with his family during the inaugural parade. Carter offered welcome relief from the Greek tragedy of Richard Nixon and the Roman farce of Gerald Ford.
     His being a peanut farmer was celebrated, and companies offered products trying to capitalize on Carter’s grinning likeness. The government quickly moved to make it stop.
     On May 3, 1977, Assistant Attorney General John M. Harmon prepared a memo suggesting the Federal Trade Commission might prevent the president’s likeness from being used commercially.
     “The commission could probably prohibit the use of advertisements, labels, or trade names which implied that the president endorsed, profited from, or was connected with the sale of a particular product,” he wrote. “The prestige of the presidency and President Carter’s well-known background would probably allow the commission to eliminate most of the attempts to attach the president’s name to peanuts and peanut products.”


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10 comments:

  1. Boy just having a different opinion about a brutal occupation will get you slandered by Clark St. and most main stream news outlets. Carter builds homes has a real functioning charity and has a passion for the plight of the Palestinian people locked in an open air prison. But the hateful press has only one narrative and maligns him every chance they get. Gee that Green Energy initiative would've been nice had he been elected a second term we're used to $2.20 a gallon, something Carter wanted us off, oil!

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    1. "A hateful press"? C'mon Paul, consider whose house you're visiting. I didn't consider tucking in a half line about Carter's wandering awful close to the old border of anti-Semitism, but had trouble jamming this column into its allotted space. You can't fight every battle every time everywhere. Clark St. touches upon the tragedy of our times. We can't balance anything, can't put away our private causes, can't talk about Jimmy Carter as president without lurching forward a few decades to parse his stance on Israel. If Donald Trump is elected, that will be a big reason why -- it will be by people like Clark Street, focused on one point, missing the big picture.

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    2. Or as Neil Steinberg said in his MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2016 post "And Jimmy Carter had gone insane during his first term in office. I truly believed that, then and now." Who you crappin' Neil?

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    3. Four years is a long time. When he was elected, I thought he was great -- I worked for his campaign. By the time he left office, I thought he was nuts. I know it's a wild shift that might be hard to imagine for you iron bar of consistency sorts.

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    4. Neil, not being snarky here but I would love for you to elaborate on how you went from campaign worker to thinking the man was nuts. I am not an iron bar type but do not understand this transition in perception.

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    5. That's a good question. Maybe it has to do with aging from 16 to 20. I'll have to check the record, but I just recall him flailing about, feckless.

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  2. As far as I'm concerned, the only bad thing Carter did was losing to that worthless B-movie actor who put a sunny, avuncular face on greed and bigotry. And of course that wasn't Carter's fault.

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  3. There is something unseemly about a presidential candidate hawking his business interests. Hillary and Bill were making money giving speeches and writing books after their time in office. Hillary's remark about being dead broke was silly. While she might not have foreseen making 250,000 dollars a speech there was no way that they were not going to be able to enrich themselves by making speeches. If Trump loses (hopefully) I am sure he is going to be out there making money on giving speeches.

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  4. Jimmy Carter said some harsh things about Israeli policy during his unsuccessul efforts to broker peace, but he's no anti-Semite. Concerning his charitable activities, he gets good press building houses for Habitat, but far more important is the work his foundation has done to help eradicate a variety of terrible parasitic diseases in Africa. It gets little detailed attention in the press, but puts him in the very forefront of efforts to abate human suffering. And the Carter Center gets high marks for efficiencly and accountability from charity rating services.

    Tom Evans

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