Presidents’ Day is an American holiday celebrated on the third Monday in February. Originally established in 1879 in recognition of President George Washington, it is still officially called “Washington’s Birthday” by the federal government. Continue reading
This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation’s founding, including the never-ending battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to “take back America.” Continue reading
I’m not trying to steal Joe Biden’s thunder when he landed at LaGuardia and saw frozen planes, unplowed runways and shortage of underpaid personnel. Of course, Governor Cuomo and newly elected Mayor Bill deBlasio jumped to get the money to redo the 75-year-old LaGuardia, including some minimum wages. But I’m not talking about architecture or wages. I’m talking about people decaying before my eyes as I walk down Broadway on a 20-degree, gray, Saturday morning; decaying along with the unpicked-up mounds of frozen snow and lingering garbage. Continue reading
It took the New York Times to take a look at a serious symptom befalling men all over the United States in the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping, it noted, by at least 1 percent a year, according to a 2006 study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. Continue reading
The 2013 NFL season has come to a close, and, after all the hype ending in a way that no one was expecting. Super Bowl XLVIII was expected to be an incredibly close game between the league’s best defense in the Seattle Seahawks and the NFl’s best offense in the Denver Broncos. Instead, the Seahawks completely dominated the game in almost every positional battle, winning 43–8. Continue reading
A friend of mine from advertising, Richard Tucker, now working as a freelance producer, sent me a funny email the other morning with a huge bee on it. The headline reads “If I Die You Die,” which in advertising generally means, “Duck, a blood bath is coming;” or perhaps it’s a metaphor for the world of people. Richard is a very clever fellow. Continue reading
The banjo-playing troubadour was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for his political views. But Seeger continued being an activist and folk singer all of his life. He died at a New York hospital Monday night at age 94. His grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson said the American musical legend passed after six days in the hospital. Continue reading
I’ve just come back from a walk in the 7-degree temperature of New York City. I walked uptown ten blocks and then back downtown and I feel frozen, literally. Continue reading
A long time ago, 1958, ’57, when I was a young accordionist, 16 or 17, I got a road job with a quintet of dance musicians. I was recommended by my teacher, an excellent musician himself. It seems a friend of his and his band leader, Ted Huston, just had his accordionist quit cold on him. They didn’t get along. I spoke to Huston on the phone, he seemed okay. He said he’d send me the band’s book of arrangements to study. He played piano and wrote the arrangements and would be willing to take a chance on me based on my teacher’s recommendation. Huston said he’f send me a plane ticket to Birmingham, Alabama, where the band was headed. Continue reading
Wikipedia notes, “The use of banned performance-enhancing drugs in sports is commonly referred to as doping, particularly by the organizations that regulate sporting competitions. The use of drugs to enhance performance is considered unethical by most international sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, although ethicists have argued that it is not different from the use of new materials in the construction of suits and sporting equipment, which can also aid performance and give competitors an unfair advantage. The reasons for the ban are mainly the health risks of performance-enhancing drugs, the equality of opportunity for athletes, and the exemplary effect of drug-free sport for the public. Anti-doping authorities state that using performance-enhancing drugs goes against the “spirit of sport”. Continue reading
Monday night, I went to Carnegie Hall for one of the most amazing concerts I’ve ever heard in my entire life. The concert was titled “Shostakovich for the Children of Syria” and all the proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Fronteres (MSF) to aid the ongoing debacle of violence going on there, which is encapsulated by Ramsy Baroud’s article, Assessing the conflict in Syria and Egypt, particularly in the first two pages, which will give you a feel for the chaos going on there. Continue reading
In hearing and seeing about sequester cuts from Native American elders on Abby Martin’s “Breaking the Set” (RT-com, Parts 1 &2), I was shocked to find these cuts seem to be an existential threat to the Sioux. They are living now on an underfunded Indian Health Service (IHS) that all Americans, particularly South Dakotans, should know is in serious danger. Thus, education is the alternative to Indian elders to the intense damage done in their communities by alcohol, drugs, overcrowding, high suicide rates and unemployment, and leaving aged grandparents to raise and educate children. Read on . . . Continue reading
Picture this. You’re a young guy in his 20s, an elderly woman in her 70s, a vet in his 40s down on his luck and some guy walks up to you and POW! He “roundhouses” you with a right or left and you’re down for the count or maybe for good. Knockout! That’s the new urban blight game gangs and solo thugs are playing with innocent people of all ages and genders, representing a new low in civility and a disregard for law and the safety of others. Continue reading
William Bratton was sworn in last Thursday as commissioner of the New York City Police Department, the largest in the nation, heralding a second term at the helm of the NYPD and his first under progressive new mayor Bill de Blasio. Continue reading
December 22, pre-dawn, 6 A.M. the black town car appears at our door to whisk my wife, son, and me to Newark Liberty International Airport. We were flying to Sioux Falls for Christmas with our family. Continue reading
While news and condolences were streaming into my local NY-1 channel over the loss of the political giant Nelson Mandela last Thursday evening, they reviewed his life as a boxer, young lawyer, and activist, the man who ‘singlehandedly’ roused his people to take down the South African Apartheid state after he had been imprisoned for nearly 28 years. Yet, despite his glorious life, I felt a shock of grief at his death. Continue reading
Motor-mouth Rush Limbaugh, America’s most popular radio fascist, calls the pontiff’s 50,000-word statement, “pure Marxism,” calling for church reforms, and says he thinks it’s “sad how wrong Pope Francis is,” reports CNN. Well, I think of how wrong and wrecked the prescription-drugged and addled-brain of Limbaugh’s is. I don’t value his intellect or his spiritual leanings. Continue reading
Once more, on Nov. 24, 2013, Israeli PM Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu made the terrible mistake of mouthing Israel’s deep-rooted hypocrisy on nuclear weapons. I’m surprised the seasoned investigative journalist Pepe Escobar didn’t mention it. So I thought I’d slip into this dialogue and fill in a few facts in Escobar’s otherwise excellent interview. Continue reading
One of the main problems with the Affordable Care Act web site began with the Reagan administration, which has adversely affected government performance since then. At that time, the management habit of concentrating on your core capabilities and contracting out other processes was applied to government. Government, it was decided, should contract out such non-core capabilities as logistics, food services and information technology (IT). Continue reading
The upbeat song identified with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” wafted across the city’s waters at the recent dedication of the stunning F.D.R. memorial honoring his vision of a world founded on four essential freedoms, articulated during World War II. A bell tolled as the four were cited—freedom of speech and worship and freedom from want and fear—at the new four-acre park gleaming at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. Continue reading
NEW YORK—Given all the brouhaha over reforming stop-and-frisk, a first-of-its kind analysis, a report from the New York Attorney General’s office found that just 1.5 percent of stop-and-frisk arrests resulted in a jail or prison sentence longer than 30 days. Continue reading
It’s hardly just corn growers who should be irate. Indeed, everyone with a conscience should be mad as hell at those in Congress who have signed up to a heartless farm bill proposal to begin cutting an additional $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps). Their plan has begun to throw millions of people out of the program and cut benefits for millions more. Continue reading
Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor last Tuesday. The city seemed to be saying in its vote, “Enough is enough” after 12 years of the autocratic Michael Bloomberg and honcho Ray Kelly’s “stop and frisk” police force. Continue reading
For several months now long trains of rail cars full of crude oil can be seen inching along, or stopped altogether, beside I-787 in downtown Albany NY. Other tankers fill the rail yards off I-90 not far from the SUNY campus. Continue reading
The industry keeps putting profits before serving the public as President Obama has become the health insurance industry’s top salesperson. In Massachusetts, he urged Americans to take a long view on implementing the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. While it may provide coverage to millions who now lack it, the evidence is mounting that Obama never should have trusted the private health insurance industry to begin with. Let’s look at why. Continue reading
Uruguay will soon be the first nation in the world to completely legalize the use, sale, and cultivation of (strikingly affordable) cannabis. Can the first country to fully legalize the sale and use of pot end the illegal drug trade? We’ll see. Continue reading
In the past months, there has been between 90 and 900 Tbq (terabecquerels) of strontium-90 pouring into the Pacific, raising levels by up to two orders of magnitude. Since June 2011, there have been further large discharges of strontium-90 from Fukushima that have not been measured with precision. Continue reading
At JPMorgan Chase, you want record earnings and deals, not record settlement payments. But the nation’s biggest bank with $2.4 trillion in assets could be days away from the biggest and most painful settlement ever. As big as the $13 billion number is, it may not preclude criminal prosecution. What’s more, it could involve an express admission of wrongdoing, something that could curtail tax deductions and fuel shareholder suits. Continue reading
The first time I heard this story was on Russia Today (RT.com), on Abby Martin’s Breaking the Set. I thought my ears were playing tricks on me. They weren’t. It turned out that behind the contamination of the Amazon Rainforest communities with poisonous, heavy oil sludge was a new kind of criminal, Chevron CEO John Watson, whose notion it was to sue the indigenous people after they won a nineteen-billion dollar lawsuit against Chevron. Continue reading
After shutting down the U.S. government for 16 days and driving the nation toward the brink of default, a chastened Congress voted late Wednesday to reopen federal agencies, call hundreds of thousands of civil servants back to work and raise the $16.7 trillion debt limit. Continue reading
Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve “is a yearly celebration observed in a number of countries on October 31, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows (or All Saints) and the day initiating the triduum of Hallowmas, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed believers according to Wikipedia. Continue reading
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Netanyahu warns world (again) about Iran ‘aggression’
Posted on February 20, 2014 by Jerry Mazza
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu opened his weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday with more words of warning to the West about Iran. Continue reading →