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Mike Ashford, of Annapolis, Md., is a true gentleman and noted raconteur who owns one of the world's finest bars, McGarvey's Saloon, near the Annapolis (Md.) City Dock. Mike was also one of Walter Cronkite's best friends, if not his very best friend, in the world. In this video from Cronkite's funeral, Ashford tells the story of the day he met the famed CBS newsman, how they became close friends and the many sailing adventures they enjoyed. In its 8 minutes, you get a glimpse of a Cronkite that many people never saw.

A retired airline pilot, Ashford opened McGarvey's in the mid-1970s. It's been a favorite Annapolis watering hole for visiting and local sailors ever since, and many nonsailors as well. What really sets McGarvey's apart from the rest is the service. It's the finest I've ever experienced. I've been going there ever since it opened, and I feel fortunate to have worked there the summer of 1979, manning the door five evenings a week, after I got off my day job that summer.

Dave Barry / Wikimedia Commons

"Of course the truth is that the congresspersons are too busy raising campaign money to read the laws they pass. The laws are written by staff tax nerds who can put pretty much any wording they want in there. I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene ('Yes, yes, YES!' moaned Vanessa as Lance, his taut body moist with moisture, again and again depreciated her adjusted gross rate of annualized fiscal debenture)."

Armonk, N.Y native Dave Barry (born 1947) is a humorist, author and, until 2005, a Pultizer Prize-winning syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald. His dad was a Presbyterian minister. He got his start in journalism as a reporter for a small daily in West Chester, Pa. One day he wrote a guest humor column for the Philadelphia Inquirer that attracted the attention of Gene Weingarten, who later hired him to the Miami Herald. From his Web site: "For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened.

"Dave has also written a total of 30 books, although virtually none of them contain useful information. Two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave.

"Dave plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson and Mitch Albom. They are not musically skilled, but they are extremely loud. Dave has also made many TV appearances, including one on the David Letterman show where he proved that it is possible to set fire to a pair of men's underpants with a Barbie doll.

"In his spare time, Dave is a candidate for president of the United States. If elected, his highest priority will be to seek the death penalty for whoever is responsible for making Americans install low-flow toilets.

"Dave lives in Miami, Florida, with his wife, Michelle, a sportswriter. He has a son, Rob, and a daughter, Sophie, neither of whom thinks he's funny."

Robert Anton Wilson in 1977 / Wikimedia Commons

"The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct."

Brooklyn, N.Y. born Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) was a writer, editor, philosopher, an ex-anarchist and libertarian. Wikipedia describes him as "at various times, an American novelist, essayist, philosopher, polymath, psychonaut, futurist, libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic.....'My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.'

"...Wilson wrote 35 books, and many other works. His best-known work, the cult classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea and advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. Wilson and Shea derived much of the odder material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of the Playboy Forum. The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "guerilla ontology" which he apparently referred to as "Operation Mindf***" in Illuminatus! The trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws (named after Illuminatus! character Hagbard Celine), concepts Wilson revisited several times in other writings.

"...Wilson also supported many of the utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and the theories of Charles Fort. He and Loren Coleman became friends, as he did with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and wrote extensive commentaries on the author and two of his novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, in his book Coincidance.

"...Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism. In a 1988 interview, when asked about his recent book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. Wilson commented: "I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic... I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity... I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical... The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational! ...They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them.' "

"Somebody's gotta go back and get a s***load of dimes."

Virginia's transportation funding mess is no laughing matter, but neither were many of the other themes (such as racism) explored in the landmark 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles. Nominated for three Academy Awards, and considered by the American Film Institute as one of the greatest American comedies of all time, the Hollywood western spoof was written by Brooks, Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman (who wrote the original story and draft), Norman Steinberg and Al Uger.

Unfortunately, and given the Virginia General Assembly's die-hard opposition to raising the gas tax (which Virginia has not increased in 22 years), this passage suggests what may be the only future option for available to solve what is quickly becoming a crisis in Virginia. The Virginia Department of Transportation has closed many of the state's interstate highway rest stops, cut back on its mowing budget, curtailed a program that aids motorists whose cars have broken down, and announced layoffs of 700 VDOT workers, with more to come.

Virginia's gas tax, incidentally, is 17.5 cents per gallon which is lower than 39 other states in the nation and lower than all its neighboring states, except Kentucky. The state's transportation fund is billions of dollars in the red, and that deficit is growing as we speak. There is no money for new road construction, and not enough for existing maintenance that's required. Meanwhile, many candidates in Novembers election, such as Republican gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell, are vowing not to increase the gas tax.

Hat tip to Baker Ellett, who suggested this one!

Anne Wexler / Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates web site

"There are more compulsive gamblers today in America than ever before in the history of this country. We've exploded gambling and brought it into every neighborhood in America."

Anne Wexler (1930 - 2009) was a veteran of many Democratic campaigns, a former associate publisher of Rolling Stone, and an official in the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Since the election of President Ronald Reagan, she was the most prominent female lobbyist in Washington D.C., and was "one of the more powerful women in Washington," writes Joe Klein in a tender appreciation on Swampland. Her nickname was "The Rolodex Queen."  Wexler was a graduate of Skidmore College, and it was there that she got her first taste of politics, as a door-knocker for Harry S. Truman, according to her obituary in The New York Times. After graduation, she married an ophthalmologist and became a homemaker in Westport, Conn. She got back into politics in 1966 as an organizer for an antiwar candidate in a Democratic congressional primary; though he lost, her interest in politics only deepened. In 1968 she led Sen. Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign in Connecticut, and she later led the losing 1970 Senate campaign for the Rev. Joseph Duffey, who also lost. Wexler and Duffey fell in love during that campaign and divorced their spouses and later married. She died Sunday, at age 79, after a long battle with cancer.

Smedley D. Butler

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Smedley Darlington Butler (1881 - 1940) knew a few things about war. He was a two-time Medal of Honor recipient and at the time of his death from what was most likely a gastrointestinal cancer, he was the most decorated Marine in the history of the corps. The Quaker son of a Pennsylvania congressman, Butler dropped out of school at age 16 to enlist in the Marines at a time when the United States had declared war against Spain. They sent him to Guantanamo, Cuba but the fighting was over by the time he arrived. He later fought in the the Boxer Rebellion in China, in Haiti, Honduras and other locations in Central America. Though he was still in the Marines in World War I, he did not see action. After 34 years in the Marine Corps, he retired as a major general in 1931, then promptly hit the lecture circuit on which he gave a popular speech, War is a Racket. He later turned it into a bestselling booklet with five chapters, the last of which was titled To Hell with War! In 1935, he told the magazine Common Sense:

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

In 1934, Butler revealed to Congress that a cabal of big businessmen, including Prescott Bush (President George W. Bush's grandfather) had asked Butler to lead a coup against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (of whom Butler was no fan). Butler blew the whistle on them instead. A congressional committee confirmed some details of the alleged plot, but historians are sharply divided on its significance.

Sir George Porter

"I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago."

Sir George Porter (1920 - 2002) was a British chemist and one of three winners of the 1967 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on flash photolysis. Among other things, this let to the first scientific proof of the existence of free radicals. From Wikipedia: "His later research utilized the technique to study the minutiae of the light reactions of photosynthesis, with particular regard to possible applications to a hydrogen economy, of which he was a strong advocate. Porter became a Fullerian Professor of Chemistry and director Royal Institution in 1966. During his directorship of the Royal Institution, Porter was instrumental in the setting up of Applied Photophysics, a company created to supply instrumentation based on his group's work. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967 along with Manfred Eigen and Ronald George Wreyford Norrish. Porter was president of the Royal Society 1985-1990, having been elected a Fellow in 1960 and also winning the Davy Medal in 1971, the Rumford Medal in 1978 and the Copley Medal in 1992. He was knighted in 1972 and was made a life peer as Baron Porter of Luddenham, of Luddenham in the County of Kent, in 1990." From World Scientific Books: "Porter had a marvelous gift for communicating his infectious enthusiasm for science, and as President of the Royal Society, he worked hard to improve the status of science, and employed his communication skills ably in the defense of British science under attack from inadequate government funding, of which he was fiercely critical."

H. L. Mencken

"Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates."

Henry Louis Mencken (1880 - 1956) aka the "Sage of Baltimore" was one of the meanest journalists who ever stomped the American soil. He took no prisoners when it came to attacking people people he considered beneath him, including con artists, fundamentalist Christians, those who were intolerant, osteopaths, chiropractors and, in one startling case, the entire state of Arkansas, which he called "the apex of Moronia." His criticism of the American South was scathing, and the best example, perhaps, was his coverage of the Scopes Trial in 1925. Those stories were published in the 2007 collection, A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Mencken never attended college but learned the craft of journalism by taking a night class in news and business writing. By age 19, he was a reporter for the Baltimore Morning Herald. He moved to the Baltimore Sun in 1906, at the age of 27. He was Ayn Rand's favorite columnist; was friends with literary icons F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theordore Dreiser and pujblishing icon Alfred A. Knopf. Mencken believed that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest American novel ever published. He was the founding editor of The American Mercury, from which he stepped down in 1933, and continued to write for the Sun until 1948 when he suffered a stroke that left him unable to read, write or speak. He died in Baltimore on January 29, 1956.

For more on crabs, see below!

Benito Mussolini

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

Benito Mussolini (1883 - 1945) was a founding figure in the rise of 20th Century fascism. He was the son of an anarchist blacksmith, worked as a journalist and early in his career was one of Italy's most notable socialists. Mussolini moved toward "The Third Way," which was fascism, after concluding in World War I's wake that socialism was a failure. Mussolini rose to power in 1922, and was much admired by Adolf Hitler. Unlike German fascism, however, the Italian version was not at its roots anti-Semitic, although Mussolini later followed Hitler's and the Nazi's lead against Jews. You can read more about him here, here, and here.

From Wikipedia: Mussolini and the fascists managed to be simultaneously revolutionary and traditionalist; because this was vastly different to anything else in the political climate of the time, it is sometimes described as "The Third Way".The Fascisti, led by one of Mussolini's close confidants, Dino Grandi, formed armed squads of war veterans called Blackshirts (or squadristi) with the goal of restoring order to the streets of Italy with a strong hand. The blackshirts clashed with communists, socialists and anarchists at parades and demonstrations; all of these factions were also involved in clashes against each other. The government rarely interfered with the blackshirts' actions, owing in part to a looming threat and widespread fear of a communist revolution. The Fascisti grew so rapidly that within two years, it transformed itself into the National Fascist Party at a congress in Rome. ... Between 1925 and 1927, Mussolini progressively dismantled virtually all constitutional and conventional restraints on his power, thereby building a police state. A law passed on Christmas Eve 1925 changed Mussolini's formal title from "president of the Council of Ministers" to "head of the government." He was no longer responsible to Parliament and could only be removed by the king. While the Italian constitution stated that ministers were only responsible to the sovereign, in practice it had become all but impossible to govern against the express will of Parliament. The Christmas Eve law ended this practice, and also made Mussolini the only person competent to determine the body's agenda. Local autonomy was abolished, and podestas appointed by the Italian Senate replaced elected mayors and councils.

"The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down."

From Wikipedia: Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982) was an American science fiction author whose work explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works, Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences and addressed the nature of drug use, paranoia and schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The quote above came from Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959) ... Dick's stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is "real" and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become surreal fantasies as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion constructed by powerful external entities (such as in Ubik, vast political conspiracies, or simply from the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. "All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality," writes science fiction author Charles Platt. "Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person's dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely."