Parents deliver the message
The scenery had been painted and the lines rehearsed, and all was set for a production of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" at a Johnson County elementary school in Paintsville, Ky., Thursday. All except one aspect, the segment in which Linus van Pelt answers Charlie Brown's question about whether there was anybody who knew what Christmas was all about. That - the entire minute on which the play is based (and which was included in cartoonist Charles Schulz's original 1965 television special) - was gone.
The segment, of course, was the recitation by Linus of Luke 2:8-14, which tells of the birth of Jesus Christ and is where the day and the season get their names.
Radio talk show host Glenn Beck, hearing of the planned excision of the biblical text, suggested parents stand up and recite the text themselves.
"I would get together with parents and I would - if I knew this was coming," he said, "take the script of what Linus actually says, and I would stand up as a block of parents and just stop the show and just all of us at that point, 'Doesn't anybody know what Christmas is all about?' And all of the parents stand up and just start saying it, even as the play is going on."
That's exactly what they did.
"It was just an amazing moment - it really was," said Joey Collins, the father of one student. "Everybody was pretty much in tears and clapping. It was just a great time."
De-Trumping a park
Two New York state Democratic legislators want Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's name off a state park for which he donated the land.
Trump donated the land to the state when a golf development deal fell through there in 2006, and even though the park closed in 2010 its signs remain.
However, Assemblyman Charles Levine and state Sen. Daniel Squadron want to rename the closed park for Peter Salaam, a Muslim and free slave who helped the colonies fight the British in the Revolutionary War. The legislators, who wrote Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo with their request, said Salaam played "meaningful roles" in the battles of Bunker Hill and Concord and also participated in the skirmishes at Saratoga and Stony Point in New York, which is about 21 miles from the park.
The legislators made their suggestion after Trump opined that Muslims should be temporarily banned from immigrating to the U.S. due to terrorist concerns They said they will introduce legislation to that end in 2016.
A spokesman for Trump said the state cannot remove the businessman's name.
Pinocchio time
Hillary Clinton's nose, a la Pinocchio, may have grown a little more last week when she fudged her comments about whether she would agree to accept money from Big Oil firms.
"Well, I don't know that I ever have," she said at a campaign stop in Iowa City, Iowa. "I'm not exactly one of their favorites."
Research by the super-PAC "America Rising" says differently. And the liberal Huffington Post joined in the chorus.
"Nearly all" of Clinton's fund-raising bundlers, the newspaper said, have worked for Big Oil. Further, she personally benefits from a multimillion-dollar mutual fund that invests in Big Oil, and the serpentine Clinton Foundation has taken in huge amounts of money from the same folks.
She continued her say-one-thing-and-do-another tour when she appeared with billionaire Warren Buffett to tout some of Buffett's favored tax hikes. When the wealthy aren't in her corner, they're greedy; when they're in her corner, they simply think alike.
Michael Short, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, wasn't buying it.
"Hillary Clinton's economic agenda is more about redistribution than growth," he said, "and we've seen the results of that approach over the last seven years with the slowest recovery since the Great Depression and an ever-shrinking middle class. Campaigning with the third richest person on the planet is an odd way to communicate that she understands and cares about the needs of millions of Americans still struggling in the weak Obama economy."
You're yesterday's news
Vermont-based Democracy for America, a group founded out of Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign, told the former Green Mountain State governor what it thought of him last week when it chose to support Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.
Dean is supporting Hillary Clinton and had emailed the group on her behalf.
However, the first time the organization made an endorsement in a Democratic primary, it opted for the state's own Democratic Socialist candidate after pitches from Sanders, Clinton and former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley. In fact, the vote wasn't even close. Sanders got 87.9 percent of the votes by of some 270,000 members. Clinton got a paltry 10.3 percent of the vote.