As an optimist when it comes to our economic recovery, when it comes to our president succeeding—not failing—in his efforts to revive the economy and to set a new economic course for our nation, I have been highlighting the positive aspects of what I perceive to be a slow and difficult, but steady recovery. Of course, the “doom and gloomers” have persistently continued to point to the negative aspects, to real or imagined signs that our economy is failing. Others—and I would...

Yesterday, President Obama visited the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany—the first U.S. president to visit this camp. At Buchenwald alone, an estimated 56,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis during World War II. If it is possible to even say so, perhaps a relatively “small number” compared to the obscene numbers of Jews murdered at other camps: Auschwitz, 1,400,000; Treblinka, 870,000; Belzec, 600,000; Jasenovac, 600.000; etc.,...

Yesterday, I posted the delightful story of how a World War II fighter pilot, who crashed his P-47 in an orchard near Parma, Italy, 64 years ago, has been contacted by the family of his Italian rescuers. Today marks the 65th anniversary of the D-Day allied landings on the beaches of Normandy. As our President honors the more than 9,000 Americans who gave their lives, many of the hero veterans of that day, will be present at Omaha Beach, or will be watching from home. Sadly, their numbers are dwindling. I...

Tomorrow marks the 65th anniversary of the D-Day Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy. President Obama will visit the tiny town of Colleville in Normandy and view the beaches below the village—the sacred landing zone dubbed Omaha Beach—and pay homage to the over 9,000 American soldiers buried here. I just finished reading the story of one of the heroes who fought during World War II. No, he wasn’t one of those brave American soldiers who stormed the Normandy beaches 65 years...

MiamiHerald.com reports that New Jersey Republican Congressman Chris Smith, who has been championing the Sean Goldman case all along, introduced a bill in Congress today that would temporarily remove Brazil from a duty-free trade program. Smith says that Brazil received $2.75 billion in benefits last year. It is reported that David Goldman, who is still in Rio de Janeiro, calls the Brazilian judicial flip-flops “an absolute tragedy.” Reports are now that the Brazil Supreme Court will...

Perhaps I am mellowing—politically that is. As a Democrat, I usually like and agree with the opinion pieces that Frank Rich writes. And so it was with his most recent column in the New York Times, “Who Is to Blame for the Next Attack?”, although something in the piece left me somewhat unsettled. In his otherwise excellent piece, Rich rightly condemns Cheney’s recent attempts to once again “using lies and fear… rewrite history and escape accountability for the failed Bush presidency…” He...

The emotional roller coaster continues for David Goldman, father of Sean, the 9-year-old boy who was abducted to Brazil almost five years ago, After writing on Tuesday that a Brazilian federal judge had ordered that Sean Goldman was to be taken yesterday by 2 p.m. to the U.S. Consulate in Rio de Janeiro to be reunited with his father, David Goldman, and returned to the United States, I sadly had to write yesterday: It would have been the happy and honorable ending to a four year heart rending struggle...

Yesterday, we reported that a Brazilian federal judge had ordered that 9-year-old Sean Goldman, who was abducted by his Brazilian mother four years ago and taken to Brazil, be released today. Sean Goldman was to be taken today by 2 p.m. to the U.S. Consulate in Rio de Janeiro to be reunited with his father, David Goldman, and returned to the United States. It would have been the happy and honorable ending to a four year heart rending struggle by David Goldman to get his son back from those who have...

During his January 2006 Senate confirmation, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito made the following remarks: Because when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position. [...] When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination...

In “Bring Sean Home,” I wrote on the desperate fight by an American father, David Goldman, to bring his son home—Sean Goldman, an 8-year old boy who is being held in Brazil in violation of all international norms and human decency, after his mother took him to Brazil in 2004. She later died in Brazil NBC’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell has been right on top of this story all along. In “Bring Sean Home, Now a Matter of State,” I wrote on the March 4, 2009, NBC...

Because I am optimistic about our economy, about Americans and about America, I have been writing about the “glimmers of economic hope” I see day after day, week after week, in our efforts to dig ourselves out of the economic mess we find our nation in. Sometimes the glimmers are quite encouraging, sometimes they are faint, transient and hardly noticeable—but glimmers of hope they are. Of course I am aware of negative economic developments; of temporary setbacks; of legitimate warnings...

We all know how massive of a securities fraud Bernard Madoff perpetrated on Americans. Some of the more recent estimates put the losses suffered by victims of Madoff’s scheme at $65 billion. Most also know that Madoff’s Ponzi scheme had many international tentacles. But until I read a recent article in a Dutch newspaper, and researched a few other foreign publications, I did not have a good grasp of how vast the international involvement, connections and losses were. In small Netherlands alone,...

Karl Rove today in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece,”‘Empathy’ Is Code for Judicial Activism”: Mr. Obama said he wanted to replace Justice David Souter with someone who had “empathy” and who’d temper the court’s decisions with a concern for the downtrodden, the powerless and the voiceless. “Empathy” is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form...

President Obama has just nominated a brilliant, experienced and well-qualified person to the Supreme Court: Judge Sonia Sotomayor. Judge Sotomayor’s qualifications, experience, character, etc., will be exhaustively examined and debated by the members of the U.S. Senate. Surprisingly, Judge Sotomayor’s gender and heritage have received almost as much attention as her qualifications. For example: The New York Times: “President Obama announced Tuesday that he would nominate Sonia Sotomayor…to...

On a day filled with the news of President Obama’s selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be his Supreme Court nominee, California’s Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, and of North Korea’s launch of two more short-range missiles even after conducting an underground nuclear test on Monday, the U.S. economy received relatively little notice. Yet it should have. For the “glimmers of economic hope” continue to get brighter. As usual, before proceeding, reader beware: For...

I applaud President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring Justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. I am thrilled because Sotomayor would be the first Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic descent to sit on our nation’s highest court. I am delighted because Sotomayor would be only the third woman to sit on the Court. I am happy because of Sotomayor’s compelling personal story, of how it may be possible for her, a person of such humble and poor background,...

Today’s remarks by President Obama in his weekly address to the nation, were particularly important, particularly poignant, because—on the occasion of Memorial Day 2009—he paid tribute to our fallen heroes and honored “the servicemen and women who cannot be with us this year because they are standing post far from home – in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world.” In his address, the President reconfirmed that “Our fighting men and women – and the military families who...

It is the beginning of the long Memorial Day weekend. Before we fire up the barbecue pits, and before we go down to the lake for the first big bash of the summer season, let’s pause for a moment and observe the real purpose and the real meaning of Memorial Day. The entire month of May is National Military Appreciation Month. The month includes Memorial Day, a most solemn day—a day to remember and honor those who have given their lives for our country, but also to appreciate all those who...

In my “The ‘Road to Heaven’ at Sobibor,” I mentioned that my great-great-grandfather, Alexander Levy, who lived in the Netherlands—Holland in those days—around the turn of the 18th century, changed his surname (or family name) from Levy to de Wind. Why did he do that? To be frank, I don’t know why he changed his last name. I don’t think that it was for religious or political reasons, as I will point out later. But it may or may not be a coincidence that in the very same...

This past Friday, I was blissfully reading an article by one of my favorite columnists, Joan Walsh at Salon.com, when I came across the name of a disease that I hadn’t heard of before. Obviously quite a serious disease as apparently many people are going to die of it. The disease is “anal poisoning.” Since English is an acquired language to me, I wrote it off to unfamiliarity with the language and asked my doctor friend, a pathologist, about it. He had never observed this phenomenon in his...

Demjanjuk and Sobibor. Two names that are emerging out of some relative obscurity. Two names that may share a common, very dark and odious past. Bloomberg.com has just reported that suspected Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk is “fit enough” to stay in jail in Germany. The 89-year-old Demjanjuk, after a long court battle, was finally deported from the U.S. to Germany yesterday to stand trial for allegedly assisting in the murder of 29,000 Jews during World War II. According to Bloomberg.com: Demjanjuk...

Last Friday, for the umpteenth time, our mailman stuffed a copy of The New Yorker in the wrong mailbox—ours. This time, instead of diligently and promptly taking it to the rightful subscriber, I actually took it home and read some of its content first. One of the articles, a short one, in “The Talk of the Town” section, really got my attention. Not because it was written in the sophisticated, refined, “haute culture” fashion that I had always assumed to be the style...

This post is dedicated to Jan Roeland van Wisse de Wind, my Dutch Uncle who spent the last few years of his life researching and documenting the de Wind genealogy. I don’t claim to be Jewish, although most of my paternal ancestors were Jewish. As a matter of fact, the earliest de Wind documented in my family tree is not even a de Wind, but rather a Levy—my great-great-grandfather, Alexander Levy, who was born...

The Dutch press is indignant at President Obama for including the Netherlands in a group of three countries which he calls the top three corporate tax havens. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad calls it a “tax haven slur,” and the popular news and information web site for internationals, Expatica.com, carries the headline, “The Dutch government has been branded by US President Barack Obama as one of the world’s top three corporate tax havens.” Radio Netherlands has...

This is the third or fourth (who is counting when you are on a roll?) in my “call-me-naïve” series on hope and optimism for our economy. WARNING: For professional and reliable economic and financial information and advice—albeit probably very depressing—please consult the real experts, here or elsewhere. For rumors and “wishful” thinking on how our economy is failing, going to hell in a hand basket, please listen to Rush Limbaugh. According to CNBC, on Friday, May 1:...