Great moments in Escapee history: Khrushchev blinks

On this day in 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, convinced that the resolve shown by American president John F. Kennedy was far more than bluster, agreed to remove Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, thereby ending the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before agreeing to do so, Khrushchev extracted two promises from Kennedy - for the US to never invade Cuba and to remove American missiles from Turkey. Both promises were kept, though the existence of the latter part of the agreement was kept secret for decades.

The 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis eventually cost both leaders dearly. Little more than a year later, Kennedy was assassinated by an avowed Marxist who sought and was refused asylum in the alleged workers' paradise of his hero, Fidel Castro, two months earlier. Within a year of Kennedy's death, Khrushchev was deposed in a bloodless coup.

Haven't the Jews suffered enough?

As reported Friday by the Associated Press -

NEW YORK -- Halle Berry is the latest celebrity to join the Foot-in-Mouth Club. The 41-year-old actress has apologized for making an inappropriate joke at last Friday's taping of NBC's "The Tonight Show."
Berry, who showed host Jay Leno photos of herself that she had distorted by using computer software, remarked that one snapshot - in which her nose appeared cartoonishly large - made her "look like my Jewish cousin."

Chicken Little morphs into Give 'em Heck Harry

"We can't just walk away and no one suggests we can" - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid telling radio host Ed Schultz today why Democrats won't end funding for the war.

Quite a change of tone for the good Senator since his assertion last spring that "this war is lost."

Hair peace, man

A lock of lefty icon and posthumous screen fave Che Guevera sells for $100,00 at auction, according to today's New York Times ...

... which ended when the aliens realized Kucinich could never be our leader

In her new book, Shirley MacLaine claims that Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich had an "extremely moving" encounter with a UFO at her home in Washington state ...

Rudolph the Red Knows Rain, Dear

Russian czar wannabe Vlad "The Impaler" Putin commenting on new US sanctions against Iran, as reported in today's Wall Street Journal - "I think running around like a lunatic - with a razor and waving a red banner - isn't the best way to solve this kind of problem," said Putin, perhaps alluding to his own experience with this sort of thing while running the KGB.

Tax policy 101

"It's a product that you're taxing, it's not the people that you're taxing" - prairie populist Ed Schultz on his show today while talking with a listener about tobacco taxes.

Ditto

Director Francis Ford Coppolla in an interview in the November issue of GQ magazine, asked what he thought of The Sopranos -

"I never saw The Sopranos. I was so sick of gangsters."

Great moments in Escapee history

Radio Berlin International's final broadcast on this date in 1990; last song "The End" by the Doors.