Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog wishes you a happy Juneteenth, marking the day Democrats lost their slaves. (Democrats owned slaves, not Republicans.) African-Americans continue fighting for their freedom from the Democrats, who today treat people of color like they still own them and that they MUST vote for Democrats and ONLY Democrats.
That political party, which I’m ashamed to say I used to belong to years ago, even distorts the Juneteenth holiday. They try fundamentally transforming it into a day when Democrats – the only extant political party which supported slavery and even fought a Civil War over it – can act like they are above reproach while THE REST OF THE COUNTRY shares a guilt The Party pretends to be free from.
Joe Biden, embodying the grotesque hypocrisy of that detestable political party, EULOGIZED A KLANSMAN – DEMOCRAT SENATOR ROBERT BYRD – yet Biden thought he was fit to give finger-wagging lectures to the rest of us. (If this post upsets you, tell the Democrats to stop politicizing Juneteenth by pretending they had nothing to do with slavery, or the Ku Klux Klan, or Jim Crow, etc.) Continue reading








FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH (1907) – Written by Thomas William Lawson, a writer and stock manipulator who made a fortune from shady stock deals … in between advocating for cleaning up Wall Street to shut down those fleece jobs. The reforms Lawson campaigned for were taken up decades later when Franklin Roosevelt appointed future Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to head the Securities Exchange Commission.
Jim Randolph, one of the novel’s main characters, is in the T.R. mold: he may be a bloated rich pig but at least he’s a bloated rich pig with a sense of noblesse oblige. Jim shares Teddy Roosevelt’s disdain for the Trusts and for con men who use the stock market to rip off their clients. 








THE DOLLY MADISON MURDERS (2023) – In September of 2002 24-year-old Mandi Alexander and 79-year-old Mary Drake were found murdered in the Dolly Madison Bakery in Great Bend, KS. Compared to many other unsolved crimes around the world this case has gotten comparatively little attention. 

“See how he apes his father” was a saying long associated with contemporary enemies of John Quincy Adams as a complaint about how the younger Adams was as stubborn and single-minded as his father John Adams. He pursued his own ends regardless of political consequences.
THE CORSICAN BROTHERS (1941) – Another of the many adaptations of the Alexandre Dumas novel that have very little to do with the original storyline. In this case the tale was transformed into an action-packed sword-fighting, gun blazing, hell-for-leather chase vehicle for Doug Jr.
Each grows into a man of action, Lucien as a bandit chief and Mario as a dueling, gambling ladies’ man. When they are reunited they set out to bring down the man who massacred their family – Baron Colonna (Akim Tamiroff), now the tyrannical ruler of Corsica.