My secretly held view (I suppose I was hedging my blogger bets) that the Occupy Wall Street protests wouldn’t last a month was a product of the pessimism that has chased my life-long optimism about all things American. I am now happy to admit that I was wrong, perhaps very wrong, and you better believe that I’m paying attention when a friend who is a wise old head of some 70 years and is cynicism squared calls me and ebulliently declares that a bunch of smelly latter-day hippies and...

THE HAYMARKET MASSACRE There is an historic precedent for the Occupy Wall Street movement — the labor strikes of 1877 and 1886. While thuggish police and troops made those late 19th century strikes as violent as Occupy Wall Street protests have been peaceful, the two sets of events are inextricably bound by the same dynamic: In 1877 and 1886, the hundreds of thousands of striking workers were revolting against the robber barons and capitalists who tightly controlled their lives while today’s...

Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom. ~ HO CHI MINH Over the four decades since the death of Ho Chi Minh, debate continues to rage over whether he was a nationalist or a Communist, as well as whether he was as simple and gentle as his public persona made him appear to be or the instigator of brutal excesses carried out in his name. The questions are important because as the principal architect of victory in Vietnam, as well as the man who shares responsibility for the deaths of...

While not exactly a wardrobe malfunction, Ron Paul’s right eyebrow appeared to droop during the Republican presidential debate on Tuesday night. What caption would you write for this photograph?

EIGHT BELLES GOES DOWN AT THE 2008 KENTUCKY DERBY One of my fondest childhood memories is being taken to Delaware Park, at that time one of the premier thoroughbred tracks in America, by my mother to watch morning workouts. She instilled in me an appreciation for the beauty, athleticism and intelligence of thoroughbreds and the sights, sounds and smells of those misty mornings have never left me. Then much later in life I fell for a woman who is an excellent equestrienne and have loved watching...

Occupy Wall Street protests have been growing exponentially since the first demonstrators began filling Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan on September 17. The reasons are pretty obvious: * The overreaction of the NYPD to demonstrations marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1 got the attention of the mainstream news media, which had largely ignored the protests. There’s nothing like some indiscriminately used pepper spray to get the attention of reporters and photographers. * News coverage...

Herewith a sampling of posts from some of my favorite blogs and bloggers: Although much of his material is Philadelphia-centric, Will Bunch is among the top political bloggers anywhere. (And a good friend.) He writes at Attytood (which is how many native Philadelphians say “attitude”) that: The Occupy Wall Street movement might have died on the vine were it not for the short-sightedness (and I’m being kind) of certain members of the New York Police Department. The protests in...

Among other things, Republicans today are the party of the delusional. It’s courtship with Christianists and then the Tea Party in the quest for short-term gains took it ever further to the right — and sometimes completely out of right field — while ignoring the larger reality that mainstream voters wouldn’t by these brands of extremism. But a funny thing is happening on the way to 2012. Jobs growth has been slow or non-existent in the year since the Bush Recession “officially”...

These are boom times if you are a collector of ironies, and none may larger than despite the fact that President Obama has been repeatedly accused of being weak on fighting terrorism by the Republican national security choir, he has been more successful in three short years than the bombastic and serially reckless Bush administration was in eight. The aggressive Obama administration push back has included stepped up drone attacks and commando raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan and in the mountainous...

Anti-Semitic Pope Pius XII leaves a meeting with Adolph Hitler There have been 265 Roman Catholic popes, 266 if you count Pope Joan, who existed only in the popular imagination in the Middle Ages, and these don’t count various usurpers, interlopers and antipopes. To paraphrase Longfellow, some of the real popes were good, some were bad and some were horrid. Regular readers of this blog are aware that my view of the modern Roman Catholic church and is somewhere south of horrid. The Holy See...

There is something comical, even farcical, to the reaction of the oligarchs and their congressional and news media helpmates to the growing Occupy Wall Street protests, which have laid bare the reality that our so-called democratic system is rigged to benefit the wealthiest 1 percent at the sacrifice of the other 99 percent. The protests will be a failure as a means of ironing out the perversities in the system, which is much too powerful to be pushed back by a bunch of smelly protesters, but they...

Millions of people claim they were at Woodstock despite the fact there were only 400,000 or so. And with the passing of Steve Jobs, millions will claim that they bought the 128K, the first Apple computer, 25 years ago before the brand became the standard by which all other computers are compared. No matter. I myself finally escaped the clutches of Bill Gates and his evil PC Empire a mere three years ago and had to drag the Dear Friend & Conscience into this brave new world where functions...

Until I caught the journalism bug big time, I wanted to be an architect. As with many wannabe architects, Frank Lloyd Wright was my hero and I suspect had I actually followed him into the profession my buildings would have been influenced by his. That noted, I find much of modern architectural design to be boring, ugly or fetishistic, which is to say designed for the architect’s gratification alone. Not so with I.M. Pei’s legendary Terminal 6 at JFK Airport. Built in 1970 as the National...

JOBS AND WOZNIAK AT WORK The company that revolutionized the way we work, live and recreate was started in that most American of places — a garage. It was in the garage of a ranch house on a quiet suburban street in Los Altos, California where the late great innovator Steve Jobs and business partner Stephen Wozniak launched the Apple dynasty in 1976. It was in a suburban Seattle garage the previous year that Bill Gates and Paul Allen designed a minicomputer that would be the start of Microsoft,...

Despite a penchant for bombast, Sarah Palin has revealed little about her inner feelings over her three years in the national limelight. But her rationale in announcing that she was not seeking the Republican presidential spoke volumes, albeit unintentionally. “Not being a candidate, you are unshackled and able to be even more active,” she explained. “I look forward to using all the tools at my disposal to get the right people in there who have a servant’s heart.” Translation:...

The knots that the Republican Party has tied itself in grow ever tighter as the shakeout continues in the race for the 2012 presidential nomination, but none is tighter than the jobs knot. Some 14 million Americans are unemployed as the aftereffects of the Bush Recession plague the country like a bad migraine. Opinion polls consistently show that Republican voters say jobs creation is the first priority by a significant majority. In the newest Washington Post poll, for example, 51 percent name...

There was a collision of conventional political wisdoms yesterday as Chris Christie announced that he would not seek the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and neither bode well for the political future of the New Jersey governor. One wisdom is that political celebrity is a fickle and fleeting thing in America today and he probably blew his only opportunity try the Oval Office on for size. The other is that given New Jersey’s deep problems and turbulent statehouse politics, this moderate...

With time running out for Sarah Palin to decide whether to enter the fray for the Republican presidential nomination, much has been made of her hold over a fanatical if diminishing fan base while very little has been made of her hold over a supplicant and unquestioning press. That, of course, is because the press isn’t about to put on a hair shirt and flail itself with birch bessoms over any of its manifold failings. The former vice presidential candidate and half-term governor is, of course,...

As Joe Gandelman writes here, Chris Christie has decided not to seek the Republican president nomination, unfreezing a race that has seemed to be moving in slow motion as the party faithful and campaign contributors with deep pockets waited to see what the New Jersey governor would do. Not stated in Christie’s boilerplate announcement this afternoon are the less apparent reasons why he won’t run. They include the fact that: * He is, in many respects, a RINO. He favors gun control, believes...

If you’re of a certain age you might remember a time when the U.S. was preeminent among wealthy nation s in a number of respects,including providing educational opportunities for all of its citizens regardless of their ability to pay. The U.S. has already fallen from the top in other respects. It now incarcerates more people on a per capita basis than any country other than China. It has the highest infant mortality rate among industrialized nations. It has ceded leadership in alternative...

The new millennium has spawned a sibling to the old adage that “You Can’t Fight City Hall” — “You Can’t Fight Wall Street” — a reflection of the hopelessness most of us feel about reforming let alone fighting back against the financial institutions that are a de facto shadow government that is responsible for the ongoing economic downturn. And so I have looked at the Occupy Wall Street protests with skepticism. That feeling is fueled by the fact that...

I can recall only three presidents in the last 75 years whose force of personality — charisma and all that — was so powerful that it was their most effective governing tool. They would be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and, of course, Barack Obama. This tool, however, can be a double-edged sword. While all three presidents were able to accomplish a great deal, in the cases of FDR (the Great Depression) and Obama (the Great Recession and an obdurate opposition party) under trying...

I have been fond of saying over the years that “discovery is a bitch,” that is that the pre-trial phase of a lawsuit in which each party can obtain evidence from the other, can be more important — and damaging — than the trial itself. Which is precisely why, to my knowledge, Sarah Palin has never made good on her threats to sue adversaries real and imagined. Palin has most recently threatened to sue Joe McGinniss for defamation because of The Rogue: Searching For...

The check from Metropolitan Edison arrived, as it always does, at mid-month. You see, we don’t pay our local utility for electricity. It pays us for the surplus electricity we generate from the 20 photovoltaic cells on our south-facing roof, which is more than enough to light our house, run our appliances and heat our water. The installation of the system was not cheap, but because of generous federal and state tax rebates engineered by President Obama and his ally Ed Rendell, whose stepped...

I am still having a difficult time getting my head around this, but it appears that today’s Republican Party is adamantly against abortions for the unborn, adamantly against health care for the newborn if their mother chooses not to have an abortion and lacks insurance, adamantly for letting an adult with serious health issues die if they lack insurance, and adamantly for executing people even under the flimsiest of evidence. Have I got that right? Yes I do, but the question arises as...