‘Featured Media’ Articles

As it stands, my projections for tomorrow are mixed. I will go on the record and predict the Democrats will loose 43 seats and the House majority. As for the Senate, I will go with a 5 seat loss, leaving that chamber with 52 Democrats, 46 Republicans, and 2 Independents (Socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut). These predictions project my belief that the overwhelming majority polls are showing Republicans 3-5 ahead of where reality lies. This discrepancy is driven entirely by a reliance on polling that does not capture cell-phone only households. Close to 25% of American households fit that description, and the majority of those (according to other anecdotal data) trend liberal. [Read the rest of this article...]

It seemed a no-brainer that Congress would substantially re-regulate the insurance and investment banking marketplace, but Congressional Republicans had vowed to block all legislative initiatives pushed by the President, and they held firm. Financial reform, like every other piece of legislation in the last two years, had to clear the unprecedented legislative hurdle of finding 60 senators to approve cloture. Just like health care reform, cap and trade, and the stimulus, financial reform would not be allowed to come to an up or down, democratic vote. The most amazing legislative accomplishment of the last two years, built on the backs of working voters assaulted by Wall Street, was the Republicans' success at turning the United States into [Read the rest of this article...]

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and it's a disease people need to be aware of. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaskan Native women, resulting in 40,820 deaths in 2006, the last year for which the CDC has statistics. In that same year there were 191,410 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed. [Read the rest of this article...]

The most frightening trend, in my opinion, is the pattern of parents allowing their kids a pass on things they disliked when children themselves. Multiplication tables, vegetables, and the use of soap in the nightly bath might have been impositions when you were a child, but we use to grow up and accept the reasons behind the torments. Now, parents berate teachers that assign homework, question the need for mathematics in a calculator age (it is, by the way, the foundation for logical problem-solving), and embrace the "inner beauty" of their Type Two Diabetic children who came about their obesity and disease via their own parents who spared the vegetable and pushed the soda. I work with at-risk children on a regular basis, and the most [Read the rest of this article...]

Times are tough. We all know it. No matter what the mainstream papers say about improvements in the economy we all know someone who is either out of work or who is working a much lower paying job just to keep food on the table and a roof over his or her head. It’s hard to be optimistic and to believe there is anything you can to that will make a difference in your life during these hard times, but here is some common sense ideas that may make things easier, especially if you’re not already practicing them. [Read the rest of this article...]

As a writer, it is almost impossible to resist the urge to compare the NFL with the Roman Empire. All of the talk of coliseums and gladiators, legions and conquest tend to leave normally humble scribes in the throws of hyperbole. And so it is that I, a certified football junky, am left to proclaim the coming fall of professional football as we know it. The NFL has fallen victim to that most American of vices, hubris. The owners and marketers that drive the league are convinced of its immortality in the same way that U.S. automakers were in the 70's and 80's, and Major League Baseball owners were in the 50's and 60's. [Read the rest of this article...]

Small farm wineries take a raw product, grapes, and turn it into a fully value-added product, wine, all in one location, and sell much of it to tourists locally, generating new monetary input to the local economy. They do not exploit cheap foreign labor, but provide local jobs, both to the local workforce and to immigrant vineyard labor. Immigrant labor is usually provided more of the social safety net and job stability in small vineyards and wineries than they get from large corporate commodity farms or from chain restaurants and chain hotels and large construction companies. [Read the rest of this article...]

Which brings us to a man in desperate need of great marketing, a man who’s very name causes foaming at the mouth and gnashing of the teeth. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the shadowy extremist scheming to erect two gigantic marble sculptures of Osama Bin Laden to replace the twin towers, is in desperate need of a great adman! Balls International Industries, in return for drilling rights in choice Middle East locations, will be happy to cure the Imam’s ills with a bit of Balls marketing magic. [Read the rest of this article...]

We Americans internalize the information we receive from sources we have come to trust. Once inside us, they form a perception that resits logical argument and appeals to rational thought. Once we are told enough that Islam is a threat, we begin to act in ways that alienates practitioners of the religion. Alienation leads to misunderstanding. Misunderstanding leads to conflict. Conflict leads to hatred. Islam as a threat becomes the self-fulfilling prophesy. It is the same vicious cycle that we have endured within racial debates; the same cycle we endured with the million of illegal immigrants from Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Italy after the turn of the 20th Century; the same cycle we endure with today's immigration debate. [Read the rest of this article...]