Five Facts You Didn’t Know about the Inspiring Ida B. Wells

Happy 153rd birthday of teacher, journalist, civil-rights activist, Republican, and gun advocate Ida B. Wells!

Google has a “Doodle” today (see below) in honor of this remarkable and courageous woman.  You may know she was born a slave before the Civil War and helped found the NAACP in 1909, but here are five interesting things you may not have heard:

1.  Ida Wells was the original Rosa Parks.

She refused to move to the back of the train, “71 years before the activist Rosa Parks showed similar resistance on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.”

Notes on the Parties’ Platforms UPDATE BELOW

Every four years, at their presidential nominating conventions, the Republican and Democratic Parties write their official platforms.  (Apparently one Web site has the text of past platforms going back to 1840.)

You can read them yourself, but they are not simple lists of concise statements of the parties’ positions; they’re full of background, findings of fact, and other long-winded attempts to frame the issues in their favor, present their positions in a way that makes them sound reasonable, and persuade the reader to agree with them.  Fair enough, and perhaps that’s inevitable, but the result is that the 2012 Republican Party platform (in PDF form) is some 60 pages long, the Democrats’ 40.  As Speaker John Boehner has remarked, “If it were up to me, I’d have the platform on one sheet of paper.  Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform?  I’ve never met anybody.”