http://youtu.be/hobGkobU68k
Now here’s something you don’t see every day. Conservative rock band Madison Rising plays here before left-wing “Occupy Congress” demonstrators, who heartily cheer the band at the end of the tune. One bearded demonstrator even dances into the camera shot. The tune is called “Before the Hyphens Came” and it’s about Americans dropping their differences and becoming one again. Kind of heart-warming stuff. For real. Worth watching from start to finish.
The New York Times’s Gail Collins was once after someone I worked for. It was terrifying and hilarious.
Ms. Collins was at Newsday then and every day she would call and ask to speak with my boss, who will mercifully remain unnamed. He knew she was after him, and tried to do the long duck. But he knew that she knew that we knew she would never give up, so it got futily ridiculous.
I was the politician’s press secretary, and every morning and afternoon I would have to tell Ms. Collins on the telephone that, “gosh, I know it’s hard to believe,” but I still had not seen or spoken with my employer. It was pretty much true. He was avoiding me, the bearer of pink while-you-out notes, like the plague. It was a mini-vacation for me.
Ms. Collins, who was just reaching the top of her game as a liberal columnist, and who was much-feared for her wickedly smart pen, took mercy on me. Unlike some other leading scribes at the time, she understood the plight of this twenty-something political flack and laughed through most of our calls.
The situation became so preposterous at some point that my boss relented and called her — after leaving messages for her at the oddest hours of the day — and, as expected, she skewered him to the wall in her next column. But somehow, through the whole process, there was cordiality. We got feathered, but didn’t feel tarred, if that makes any sense.
I thought about that week-long exchange this morning when reading Gail Collin’s latest piece, which is on Newt Gingrich. It is, as always, cutting to the bone — and wickedly funny. Her pen is so light, yet it can be ruinous to her targets. I don’t share Ms. Collin’s political philosophy, but I am jealous as heck of her writing ability and wit, and forever grateful that she didn’t gut me like a fish in my twenties. I’m not sure I could have recovered from it.
via 40tech.com
Google opened a huge headquarters in lower Manhattan last year to great fanfare. Its reward? A 17% property tax hike in its first year of operation. Has anyone mentioned lately that New York is ranked as having the worst business climate in America? Google it. It’s out there.
from seopher.com
There are more than three million not-for-profit corporations in America, and a heck of a lot of them receive government funding. Free money — as it has been for years — is awfully hard to resist, and non-profit programs have twisted themselves into pretzels to fit the guidelines of federal, state, and local funding streams. More than 140,000 not-for-profits, for example, receive New York State government dollars every year. Thousands more receive money from New York City and other municipalities.
Now, Governor Cuomo has issued an executive order declaring that not-for-profits with executive directors earning more than $199,000 per year cannot use state funds to pay those salaries, except in certain circumstances. The order is effectively useless. Money is fungible. A not-for-profit can easily move funding streams around to pay an executive director whatever it wishes. It can simply designate non-state funding channels to salaries.
But Governor Cuomo has started a conversation that not-for-profits have dreaded for years. That is, government can no longer afford to pay for every organization with a catchy mission statement. Only not-for-profits serving essential needs — and there are many of them — should be getting government support. (Not-for-profits can often provide services more efficiently than government can.) Governor Cuomo, who has extraordinary political acumen, wisely chose to fire this shot at highly-paid nonprofit executives. It was a safe and popular way to initiate this public dialogue. But make no mistake about it, this conversation is only beginning.
These pages came under passionate fire a year ago for raising this issue. But this, unmistakably, is where things are headed, and rightly so.
ABC has the exclusive goods on Newt Gingrich’s marital infidelities as told by his second wife Marianne Gingrich. They will air in full tonight. If Mr. Gingrich is anything like President Bill Clinton, expect the character assassination of Marianne to soon begin.
The former Mrs. Gingrich tells ABC News that Mr. Gingrich wanted her to “share” her husband with other women, including his current wife. (Why is this not one bit surprising?)
Marianne Gingrich is about to come under unimaginable personal fire, just as Kathleen Willey and others were by Bill Clinton’s hatchet team. They will seek to destroy her credibility in any way possible. All one can say, is “hang in there.”
Chalk one up for the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). The group is reportedly working to stop the City of New York from employing high-tech body scanners on city streets in an effort to identify anyone carrying a firearm. The City, whose intentions are good, is seeking to implement this technology because its physical body pat-downs are being challenged as a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches. The scanners would make the pat-downs virtual rather than physical, which the NYCLU rightly argues remains an arbitrary, and therefore unreasonable, search of citizens.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is only trying to protect the public. But in doing so this way, his department would be putting individuals at greater risk, ultimately, than they are from being shot. Technology designed to protect the public can be used to enslave it in the future. Tyranny is more dangerous than a handgun.
The Constitution was not written to protect us from one another. It was written to protect us from government’s encroachment on our liberties, which is what this is. Fight on, NYCLU.
It’s impressive to see how quickly the Internet community coalesced in opposition to SOPA and PIPA, overreaching house and senate bills, respectively, that would give Washington bureaucrats the power to censor the Internet.
The hipster-chic-geek techies blacked out sites by the thousands today in protest of the legislation, effectively saying “damned if we’re going to let big government interfere with our industry.”
It’s impossible not to see irony in some of the names involved in the protest. Arianna Huffington, the Wikipedia founders, and other decidedly-left leaning ‘net leaders were in the forefront of the blackout movement. Yet these very people routinely support government interference in other industries, like healthcare and energy.
This week, it seems, everyone in liberal lower Manhattan is an Internet libertarian, a free-market conservative for all things online. Think they might extend that thinking now in defense of other industries?
I don’t either.
A few years ago, after reading an article about coffee consumption in America, I did some rudimentary math to figure out how much of the stuff I had ingested in the course of my life. I came up with around 30,000 cups using a most conservative estimate. (Using the same three-a-day math — my wife is laughing somewhere — I’m at 35,000 now…35,001.)
Two thoughts spring to mind when considering those numbers. 1.) The liver and or kidney are remarkable organs, better than anything Gevalia might create, and 2.) If coffee was going to kill me, it likely would have already.
Today we read in the Washington Times a superbly written story by Patrick Hruby on caffeine “addiction” in the country. Mr. Hruby lasers in on the pace of today’s world and some of the latest caffeinating technologies — aerosol caffeine, caffeine gum, caffeine lip balm, caffeine water, super caffeinated soft drinks — to meet its daily demands.
A former naval-officer-turned-
Many people are surprised to learn that colonial Americans — at least its men — drank volumes more alcohol per capita that we do today. But then, they really couldn’t get a great cup ‘o joe in those days. And anyone over the age of 40 will remember all those skinny, teetering smokers in the 1960’s and 70’s. We are they 40 years later, alternatively fortified.
If one is going to be addicted to something, I highly recommend caffeine. It makes obsolete that old Paul Simon lyric, “no thank you please it only makes me sneeze; I’m tired of waking up on the floor.” One can’t wake up on the floor if one never sleeps, right?
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