Dirty Harry
Dirty Harry is a 1971 American action crime thriller film produced and directed by Don Siegel, the first in the Dirty Harry series. Clint Eastwood plays the title role, in his first outing as San Francisco Police Department Inspector "Dirty" Harry Callahan; the film drew upon the real life case of the Zodiac Killer as the Callahan character seeks out a similar vicious psychopath. Dirty Harry was a critical and commercial success and set the style for a whole genre of police films, it was followed by four sequels: Magnum Force in 1973, The Enforcer in 1976, Sudden Impact in 1983 and The Dead Pool in 1988. In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally and aesthetically significant". A killer shoots a girl in a hotel rooftop swimming pool. Police arrive at the crime scene, where SFPD Inspector Harry Callahan finds a blackmail note signed "Scorpio" ordering the city to pay $100,000 or he will continue to kill; the mayor asks police officers.
During lunch, Inspector Callahan foils a bank robbery. He kills two of the wounds a third. Confronting the wounded robber, Callahan delivers the film's iconic line: I know what you're thinking:'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being this is a.44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question:'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, punk? The robber surrenders to Callahan, but replies that he needs to know if the gun is still loaded. Callahan pulls the trigger with the weapon pointed directly at the robber, laughs as it is revealed to be empty. Callahan is assigned Chico Gonzalez, whom he believes to be an inexperienced rookie. Scorpio is staking out potential victims near a public park, but is spotted by a police helicopter and runs away. Callahan and his new partner believe they see him that night on the streets, but in the course of tracing him to his home, Callahan looks into a window and watches a sexual encounter before being caught by neighbors who try to beat him up as a peeping Tom, until Chico intervenes.
Based on Scorpio's communications, the city decides. They set up a stake-out. Scorpio arrives and there is a shootout in which a policeman disguised as a priest is killed. Scorpio delivers a second ransom demand to the police, stating he has now kidnapped a teenage girl who he says will die if his demands are not met. Callahan is assigned to deliver a case full of money, he waits near a pier as directed by Scorpio who calls Callahan on a nearby pay phone, giving him instructions to go to another location in the city with another payphone, where he will call again. Callahan encounters Scorpio at the Mount Davidson cross. Scorpio beats Callahan into submission before telling him that he intends to let the girl die, his partner has been following them and there is a shootout in which Chico is wounded. After being stabbed in the leg with a hidden knife by Callahan, Scorpio escapes without the money and reports to a hospital; the police learn of Scorpio's hospital visit, a doctor recalls having met Scorpio and that he lives in a room at Kezar Stadium.
Callahan finds Scorpio there and after a chase he shoots and tortures Scorpio by standing on his wounded leg, demanding to know where the girl is being held. Scorpio confesses, but by it is too late and the girl is found dead; the district attorney tells Callahan that Scorpio's rights have been violated, they cannot hold him. Callahan continues to shadow Scorpio on his own time. Scorpio pays a man $200 to beat him then reports to a hospital claiming he is a victim of police brutality. Scorpio acquires a handgun, hijacks a school bus and contacts the police with yet another ransom demand for money and a flight out of the Santa Rosa airport. Callahan jumps onto the roof of the bus from an overpass. After Callahan forces Scorpio off the bus, the latter flees to a nearby quarry and holds a boy at gunpoint. Having shot Scorpio through the shoulder, Callahan reprises his line about losing count of his shots. Unlike the earlier encounter, Callahan does have one remaining bullet, with which he kills Scorpio when the latter goes for his gun.
Callahan throws it into the water before walking away. Clint Eastwood as SFPD Homicide Inspector Harry Callahan Andy Robinson as Charles "Scorpio" Davis Harry Guardino as SFPD Homicide Lt. Al Bressler Reni Santoni as SFPD Homicide Inspector Chico Gonzalez John Vernon as The Mayor of San Francisco John Larch as Chief of Police John Mitchum as SFPD Homicide Inspector Frank "Fatso" DiGiorgio Woodrow Parfrey as Jaffe Josef Sommer as District Attorney William T. Rothko Mae Mercer as Mrs. Russell Albert Popwell as Bank robber Lyn Edgington as Norma Gonzalez Ruth Kobart as Marcella Platt Lois Foraker as Hot Mary William Paterson as Judge Bannerman Debralee Scott as Ann Mary Deacon The script, titled Dead Right, by the husband-and-wife team of Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink, was about a hard-edged New York City police inspector, Harry Callahan, determined to stop Travis, a serial killer if he has to skirt the law and accepted standards of policing, blurring the distinction between criminal and cop, to address the question as to how far a free, democratic society can go to protect itself.
The original draft ended with a police sniper, instead of Callahan. Another earlier version
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party; the Democrats' dominant worldview was once social conservatism and economic liberalism, while populism was its leading characteristic in the rural South. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran as a third-party candidate in the Progressive Party, beginning a switch of political platforms between the Democratic and Republican Party over the coming decades, leading to Woodrow Wilson being elected as the first fiscally progressive Democrat. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition in the 1930s, the Democratic Party has promoted a social liberal platform, supporting social justice. Well into the 20th century, the party had conservative pro-business and Southern conservative-populist anti-business wings.
The New Deal Coalition of 1932–1964 attracted strong support from voters of recent European extraction—many of whom were Catholics based in the cities. After Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s, the pro-business wing withered outside the South. After the racial turmoil of the 1960s, most Southern whites and many Northern Catholics moved into the Republican Party at the presidential level; the once-powerful labor union element became less supportive after the 1970s. White Evangelicals and Southerners became Republican at the state and local level since the 1990s. People living in metropolitan areas, women and gender minorities, college graduates, racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, such as Jewish Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and African Americans, tend to support the Democratic Party much more than they support the rival Republican Party; the Democratic Party's philosophy of modern liberalism advocates social and economic equality, along with the welfare state.
It seeks to provide government regulation in the economy. These interventions, such as the introduction of social programs, support for labor unions, affordable college tuitions, moves toward universal health care and equal opportunity, consumer protection and environmental protection form the core of the party's economic policy. Fifteen Democrats have served as President of the United States; the first was President Andrew Jackson, the seventh president and served from 1829 to 1837. The most recent was President Barack Obama, the 44th president and held office from 2009 to 2017. Following the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats held a majority in the House of Representatives, "trifectas" in 14 states, the mayoralty of numerous major American cities, such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Portland and Washington, D. C. Twenty-three state governors were Democrats, the Party was the minority party in the Senate and in most state legislatures; as of March 2019, four of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court had been appointed by Democratic presidents.
Democratic Party officials trace its origins to the inspiration of the Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other influential opponents of the Federalists in 1792. That party inspired the Whigs and modern Republicans. Organizationally, the modern Democratic Party arose in the 1830s with the election of Andrew Jackson. Since the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the party has positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues, they have been more liberal on civil rights issues since 1948. On foreign policy, both parties have changed position several times; the Democratic Party evolved from the Jeffersonian Republican or Democratic-Republican Party organized by Jefferson and Madison in opposition to the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. The party favored republicanism; the Democratic-Republican Party came to power in the election of 1800. After the War of 1812, the Federalists disappeared and the only national political party left was the Democratic-Republicans.
The era of one-party rule in the United States, known as the Era of Good Feelings, lasted from 1816 until the early 1830s, when the Whig Party became a national political group to rival the Democratic-Republicans. However, the Democratic-Republican Party still had its own internal factions, they split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe and the party faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the modern Democratic Party. As Norton explains the transformation in 1828: Jacksonians believed the people's will had prevailed. Through a lavishly financed coalition of state parties, political leaders, newspaper editors, a popular movement had elected the president; the Democrats became the nation's first well-organized national party and tight party organization became the hallmark of nineteenth-century American politics. Opposing factions led by Henry Clay helped form the Whig Party; the Democratic Party had a small yet decisive advantage over the Whigs until the 1850s, when the Whigs fell apart over the issue of slavery.
In 1854, angry with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, anti-slavery Dem
Flag of the United States
The flag of the United States of America referred to as the American flag, is the national flag of the United States. It consists of thirteen equal horizontal stripes of red alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton bearing fifty small, five-pointed stars arranged in nine offset horizontal rows, where rows of six stars alternate with rows of five stars; the 50 stars on the flag represent the 50 states of the United States of America, the 13 stripes represent the thirteen British colonies that declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, became the first states in the U. S. Nicknames for the flag include the Stars and Stripes, Old Glory, the Star-Spangled Banner; the current design of the U. S. flag is its 27th. The 48-star flag was in effect for 47 years until the 49-star version became official on July 4, 1959; the 50-star flag was ordered by the president Eisenhower on August 21, 1959, was adopted in July 1960. It is the longest-used version of the U. S. has been in use for over 58 years.
At the time of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, the Continental Congress would not adopt flags with "stars, white in a blue field" for another year. The flag contemporaneously known as "the Continental Colors" has been referred to as the first national flag; the Continental Navy raised the Colors as the ensign of the fledgling nation in the American War for Independence—likely with the expedient of transforming their previous British red ensigns by adding white stripes—and would use this flag until 1777, when it would form the basis for the subsequent de jure designs. The name "Grand Union" was first applied to the Continental Colors by George Preble in his 1872 history of the U. S. flag. The flag resembles the British East India Company flag of the era, Sir Charles Fawcett argued in 1937 that the company flag inspired the design. Both flags could have been constructed by adding white stripes to a British Red Ensign, one of the three maritime flags used throughout the British Empire at the time.
However, an East India Company flag could have from nine to 13 stripes, was not allowed to be flown outside the Indian Ocean. Benjamin Franklin once gave a speech endorsing the adoption of the Company's flag by the United States as their national flag, he said to George Washington, "While the field of your flag must be new in the details of its design, it need not be new in its elements. There is in use a flag, I refer to the flag of the East India Company." This was a way of symbolising American loyalty to the Crown as well as the United States' aspirations to be self-governing, as was the East India Company. Some colonists felt that the Company could be a powerful ally in the American War of Independence, as they shared similar aims and grievances against the British government tax policies. Colonists therefore flew the Company's flag. However, the theory that the Grand Union Flag was a direct descendant of the flag of the East India Company has been criticised as lacking written evidence. On the other hand, the resemblance is obvious, a number of the Founding Fathers of the United States were aware of the East India Company's activities and of their free administration of India under Company rule.
In any case, both the stripes and the stars have precedents in classical heraldry. Mullets were comparatively rare in early modern heraldry, but an example of mullets representing territorial divisions predating the U. S. flag are those in the coat of arms of Valais of 1618, where seven mullets stood for seven districts. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress passed the Flag Resolution which stated: "Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white. Flag Day is now observed on June 14 of each year. While scholars still argue about this, tradition holds that the new flag was first hoisted in June 1777 by the Continental Army at the Middlebrook encampment; the first official U. S. flag flown during battle was on August 3, 1777, at Fort Schuyler during the Siege of Fort Stanwix. Massachusetts reinforcements brought news of the adoption by Congress of the official flag to Fort Schuyler. Soldiers cut up their shirts to make the white stripes.
Abraham Swartwout's blue cloth coat. A voucher is extant that Capt. Swartwout of Dutchess County was paid by Congress for his coat for the flag; the 1777 resolution was most meant to define a naval ensign. In the late 18th century, the notion of a national flag was only nascent; the flag resolution appears between other resolutions from the Marine Committee. On May 10, 1779, Secretary of the Board of War Richard Peters expressed concern "it is not yet settled what is the Standard of the United States." However, the term, "Standard," referred to a national standard for the Army of the United States. Each regiment was to carry the national standard in addition to its regimental standard; the national standard was not a reference to the naval flag. The Flag Resolution did not specify any particular arrangement, number of points, nor orientation for the stars and the arrangement or whether the flag had to have seven red stripes and six white ones or vice versa; the appearance was up to the maker of the flag.
Some flag makers arranged the stars into one big star, in a circle or in rows and some re
Jimmy Carter
James Earl Carter Jr. is an American politician and philanthropist who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A Democrat, he served as a Georgia State senator from 1963 to 1967 and as the 76th governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975. Carter has remained active in public life during his post-presidency, in 2002 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in co-founding the Carter Center. Raised in Plains, Carter graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1946 with a Bachelor of Science degree and joined the United States Navy, where he served on submarines. After the death of his father in 1953, Carter left his naval career and returned home to Georgia to take up the reins of his family's peanut-growing business. Carter inherited comparatively little due to his father's forgiveness of debts and the division of the estate among the children, his ambition to expand and grow the Carters' peanut business was fulfilled. During this period, Carter was motivated to oppose the political climate of racial segregation and support the growing civil rights movement.
He became an activist within the Democratic Party. From 1963 to 1967, Carter served in the Georgia State Senate, in 1970, he was elected as Governor of Georgia, defeating former Governor Carl Sanders in the Democratic primary on an anti-segregation platform advocating affirmative action for ethnic minorities. Carter remained as governor until 1975. Despite being a dark-horse candidate, little known outside of Georgia at the start of the campaign, Carter won the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. In the general election, Carter ran as an outsider and narrowly defeated incumbent Republican President Gerald Ford. On his second day in office, Carter pardoned all the Vietnam War draft evaders. During Carter's term as president, two new cabinet-level departments, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education, were established, he established a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, new technology. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties, the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the return of the Panama Canal Zone to Panama.
On the economic front he confronted persistent stagflation, a combination of high inflation, high unemployment and slow growth. The end of his presidential tenure was marked by the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response to the invasion, Carter escalated the Cold War by ending détente, imposing a grain embargo against the Soviets, enunciating the Carter doctrine, leading an international boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In 1980, Carter faced a primary challenge from Senator Ted Kennedy, but he won re-nomination at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. Carter lost the general election in an electoral landslide to Republican nominee Ronald Reagan. Polls of historians and political scientists rank Carter as an average president. In 2012, Carter surpassed Herbert Hoover as the longest-retired president in U. S. history, in 2017 became the first president to live to the 40th anniversary of his inauguration.
He is the oldest and earliest-serving of all living U. S. presidents. In 2019, Carter surpassed George H. W. Bush as the longest-lived American president in U. S. history. In 1982, he established the Carter Center to expand human rights, he has traveled extensively to conduct peace negotiations, monitor elections, advance disease prevention and eradication in developing nations. Carter is considered a key figure in the Habitat for Humanity charity, he has written over 30 books ranging from politics to poetry and inspiration. He has criticized some of Israel's actions and policies in regards to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and has advocated for a two-state solution. James Earl Carter Jr. was born on October 1, 1924, at the Wise Sanitarium in Plains, Georgia, a hospital where his mother was employed as a registered nurse. Carter was the first U. S. president to be born in a hospital. He was the eldest son of Bessie Lillian and James Earl Carter Sr. Carter is a descendant of English immigrant Thomas Carter, who settled in Virginia in 1635.
Numerous generations of Carters lived as cotton farmers in Georgia. Carter is a descendant of Thomas Cornell, an ancestor of Cornell University's founder, is distantly related to Richard Nixon and Bill Gates. Plains was a boomtown of 600 people at the time of Carter's birth. Carter's father was a successful local businessman, who ran a general store, was an investor in farmland, he served as a reserve second lieutenant in the U. S. Army's Quartermaster Corps during World War I; the family moved several times during Carter Jr.'s infancy. The Carters settled on a dirt road in nearby Archery, entirely populated by impoverished African American families, they had three more children: Gloria and Billy. Carter got along well with his parents, although his mother worked long hours and was absent in his childhood. Although Earl was staunchly pro-segregation, he allowed his son to befriend the black farmhands' children. Carter was an enterprising teenager, given his own acre of Earl's farmland where he grew and sold peanuts.
He rented out a section of tenant housing that he had purchased. Carter attended the Plains High School from 1937 to 1941. By that time, the Great Depression had impoverished Archery and Plains, but the family benefited from New Deal farming subsidies, Earl
Jim Wright
James Claude Wright Jr. was an American politician who served as the 48th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1987 to 1989. He represented Texas's 12th congressional district as a Democrat from 1955 to 1989. Born in Fort Worth, Wright won election to the Texas House of Representatives after serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II, he won election to Congress in 1954, representing a district that included his home town of Fort Worth. Wright distinguished himself from many of his fellow Southern Congressmen in his refusal to sign the Southern Manifesto and he voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, though he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he became a senior member of the House Public Works Committee. In 1976, Wright narrowly won election to the position of House Majority Leader, he became Speaker of the House after Tip O'Neill retired in 1987. Wright resigned from Congress in June 1989 amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into compensation that he and his wife had received.
After leaving Congress, Wright became a professor at Texas Christian University. He died in Fort Worth in 2015. Wright was born in the son of Marie and James Claude Wright; because his father was a traveling salesman and his two sisters were reared in numerous communities in Texas and Oklahoma. He attended Fort Worth and Dallas public schools graduating from Adamson High School studied at Weatherford College in his mother's hometown of Weatherford, the county seat of Parker County west of Fort Worth, at the University of Texas at Austin, but he never received a bachelor's degree. In December 1941, Wright enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces, after training, he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Air Corps in 1942, he trained as a bombardier and earned a Distinguished Flying Cross flying during combat in B-24 Liberators with the 530th Bomb Squadron, 380th Bomb Group in the South Pacific during World War II. His retelling of his wartime exploits is contained in his 2005 book The Flying Circus: Pacific War—1943—As Seen through A Bombsight.
After the war, he made his home in Weatherford, where he joined partners in forming a Trade Show exhibition and marketing firm. As a Democrat, he won his first election without opposition in 1946 to the Texas House of Representatives, where he served from 1947 to 1949, he was defeated in his bid for reelection in 1948, after a rival claimed that Wright was weak in opposing both communism and interracial marriage. He was the mayor of Weatherford from 1950 to 1954. In 1953, he served as president of the League of Texas Municipalities. In 1954, he was elected to Congress from Texas's 12th congressional district, which included Fort Worth and Weatherford, he won despite the fervid opposition of Amon G. Carter, publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper and the benefactor of the Amon Carter Museum. Carter supported the incumbent Democrat Wingate Lucas. Wright would be re-elected fourteen times rising in prominence in the party and in Congress, he developed a close relationship thereafter with Amon G. Carter Jr. Wright said that the easiest way to "defeat an enemy is to make him your friend."
In 1956, Wright refused to join most of his regional colleagues in signing the segregationist Southern Manifesto. In 1957, he voted for the Civil Rights Act, which created the Division of Civil Rights within the U. S. Justice Department and the investigatory Civil Rights Commission. Signed by U. S. President Dwight Eisenhower, the law was pushed through Congress by U. S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and Speaker Sam Rayburn. However, Wright refused to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required desegregation of public accommodations and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, his reason for not supporting that legislation had to do with the voting rights provision of the law, which Wright enthusiastically supported, felt the Civil Rights Act was weak without the right to vote granted to all citizens. It was signed into law by President Johnson. In 1961, Wright finished in third place in the special election called to fill the U. S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
Two finalists for the Senate emerged from a field of seventy-one candidates. College professor John G. Tower of Wichita Falls, narrowly defeated the interim appointee William Blakley, a Dallas industrialist, in a runoff election. Tower hence became the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. Wright was riding in the motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Wright became a senior member of the Public Works Committee. Though in line to become committee chairman, he entered the race for House Majority Leader and was elected by one vote in December 1976, defeating Richard Bolling of Missouri and Phillip Burton of California. Wright won the majority leadership position with the support of all but two Democrats from the large Texas delegation, all Democrats on the Public Works Committee, all other Southern representatives. In the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, Jim Wright is infamous for the Wright Amendment, a contentious law he sponsored that restricted air travel from Dallas's secondary airport, Love Field.
Passed in 1979, the Wright Amendment was designed to protect the then-fledgling Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. The Amendment allows non-stop flights originating from or bound to any commercial airport within 50 nautical miles of the DFW Airport Control Tower to serve only states bordering Texas, it was the compromise agreed to with Southwest Airlines to expand their
