Lady Bird Johnson passed away - why doesn't DU have something on the front page

[LynneSin]

Yes, I know that her husband was responsible for getting us into that Vietnam mess but he was also responsible for some of the great civil rights acts that were passed during his tenure.

Lady Bird Johnson was a class act and she had a tough act to follow with taking over the first lady duties from Jacqueline Kennedy but I always thought she was a great lady.

We should our respect for this great democratic lady!

[karlrschneider]

1. There was yesterday, apparently it sank.

...

[kestrel91316]

2. She DIED???? Yesterday???? I never heard a word about it.

[msongs]

3. its been all over the usual media (LBJ did not "get us into" that Vietnam mess) nt

[ben_meyers]

5. But the family sure profited from Nam

After Johnson took over the Oval Office, Brown & Root won contracts for huge construction projects for the federal government. By the mid-1960s, newspaper columnists and the Republican minority in Congress began to suggest that the company's good luck was tied to its sizable contributions to Johnson's political campaign.

More questions were raised when a consortium of which Brown & Root was a part won a $380 million contract to build airports, bases, hospitals and other facilities for the U.S. Navy in South Vietnam. By 1967, the General Accounting Office had faulted the "Vietnam builders" -- as they were known -- for massive accounting lapses and allowing thefts of materials.

Brown & Root also became a target for anti-war protesters: they called the firm the embodiment of the "military-industrial complex" and denounced it for building detention cells to hold Viet Cong prisoners in South Vietnam.

Today, Brown & Root is called Kellogg, Brown & Root -- a Halliburton subsidiary better known as KBR.


And all the while Lady Bird was planting flowers. She was the major shareholder in KBR-Halliburton when they hired Cheney.

Some of us old guys may have a faulty memory for some stuff, but I still hold a grudge.


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1569483

[niyad]

4. requiescat in pacem, dear lady.