I would have posted about this earlier but was having connectivity issues. President Obama today formally dedicated the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington DC. The original ceremony was delayed by Hurricane Irene and the aftermath. There is something truly fitting that King’s memorial would be dedicated by the first black President. During his lifetime King was denied entry to businesses and persecuted...

With twelve months to go before The Election, Occupy Wall Street has to morph soon into more than a messy mirror image of the Tea Party without its political focus. Half a century ago the emotional energy of street theater protest was not enough to save America. We started the 1960s with a Cuban Missile Crisis victory of JFK followed by the Civil Right Act and Great Society dreams of LBJ, but the rage over Vietnam...

Pampered Protesters by Michael Reagan The hordes of so-called “protesters” now polluting the streets of several U.S. cities, including New York, are sending confused messages about their grievances. The unemployed among them complain that the jobs available to them are beneath them. I guess that cancels out the old concept of starting in the mailroom and advancing step-by-step to the boardroom....

Are we about to see protests like those in New York sweep the Western world? Columnist Alexander Hageluken of Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung urges his German readers to get up and take resort to the only method of effecting change left to the average person: mass protest. For the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Alexander Hageluken writes in part: To begin with, at first there were very few people occupying a park...

Is Steve Jobs and the success he engendered the perfect demonstration of how far off track the global financial system has gotten? According to columnist León Bendesky of Mexico’s La Jornada, innovation and creating new products that consitute progress requires the availablity of credit, an element of buisiness that banks have rejected in favor of sophisticated financial instruments that generate little...

By WALTER BRASCH Newspaper columnist Ann Coulter, spreading the lies of the extreme right wing, called the Occupy Wall Street protestors, “tattooed, body-pierced, sunken-chested 19-year-olds getting in fights with the police for fun.” She claimed the protestors, now in the thousands in New York, are “directionless losers [who] pose for cameras while uttering random liberal clichés lacking any reason or...

I did little research before this eighth (yes, eighth! and that doesn’t even include the Twitter debate) Republican presidential primary candidates’ debate. Check out this list for videos of each of them. Luckily, I keep myself pretty immersed in news on a daily basis between online, radio, newspapers, a senior in high school who wishes he could vote and a sixth grader who made it onto student council...

That Huffington Post headline was the lead for one of its many celebrity stories that I noticed this morning. I admit to perusing HuffPo a few times a week to give balance to my daily readings of various Internet news blogs. One savvy woman creatively used the free content from many talented writers to make herself a multi-millionaire – beyond what she had achieved through her earlier divorce proceedings....

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...

I’m disgusted: On the Bowery, on the second floor of an ancient flophouse, nine men pay less than $10 a night to sleep in cramped cubicles topped with chicken wire. Half the stalls in their shared bathroom are missing doors, and their halls are lined with spooky rows of empty cubicles whose last occupants either took off or died off. Directly above them, on the third and fourth floors, stylish young men...

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...

Harvard Med Surgical Oncologist Ramzi Amri thinks so: I have done 1.5 years of research on the type of tumor that affected Steve Jobs and have some strong opinions on his case, not only as an admirer of his work, but also as a cancer researcher who has the impression that his disease course has been far from optimal. Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment...

What is it about mainland China that prevents the emergence of innovators like Steve Jobs? While in the West it seems obvious that a lack of free speech, free expression and free association puts China at a disadvantage, this editorial from Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po shows that Beijing still has a way to go before it accepts that in order to unleash the creative power of its people, it will have to loosen...

Mushrooming from lower Manhattan, the inchoate backlash brings expectable reactions in Washington from Democratic cheerleading to GOP hypocrisy. As Eric Cantor calls protesters “a mob…pitting Americans against Americans,” Nancy Pelosi reminds the Tea Party toad, “I didn’t hear him say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol,...

Of natural causes, yesterday, at his home in Washington, DC. I was lucky enough to have interviewed Kameny nearly thirty years ago, and to have visited him in his home, while working on the film Before Stonewall. Together we dug through his collection of memorabilia. He showed me the State Department letter confirming that it “does not hire homosexuals and does not permit their employment” and his photos...

There’s a difference between Flo Ziegfeld’s shameless 1896 scandal publicity and the corporate machine that was MGM’s 1949 publicity, which brings us to the present day. You see, Ziegfeld was selling sex to a society that didn’t allow women’s ankles to be exposed in public, while MGM was pouring an endless glop of corny wholesomeness on the pancakes of sentimental hogwash to more...

Happy Coming Out Day. Come Out. It’s good for you… “The more you’re in the closet, the worse for you,” says Robert Trivers, a Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. “There is an immunological dimension to self-deception.” In his new book (out in the UK, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others, and coming soon...

As has been apparent from previous posts (here and here), I support the Obama administration’s decision to take out American-born, terrorist-turned, traitor Anwar al-Awlaki before he could do any more harm to America and Americans. My opinion was reinforced when I read that al-Qaeda—the same gang of terrorists that massacred more than 3,000 innocent American men, women and children; the same organization...

We return to the story of Anna Held, Florenz Ziegfeld’s meal ticket from 1895 … The 1896 Broadway revival of A Parlor Match had two musical highlights – the hit song “Daisy Bell” (also known as “A Bicycle Built for Two”), and Anna Held’s performance of the playful “Won’t You Come and Play With Me?” To guarantee ongoing publicity, Ziegfeld let out...

Reason Magazine, the Koch Brothers funded libertarian publication had a surprisingly fair and balanced look at the Occupy Wall Street movement. Occupy Wall Street: Beyond the Caricatures Outsiders are criticizing a heterodox movement that they choose not to understand. It’s very easy to decree from afar that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators flooding Lower Manhattan right now are there for no other...

The killing of American-born, al-Qaeda-affiliated, terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki has sparked anger among civil liberties groups and has set-off a lively and legitimate debate in our country. In response to an article decrying the killing of American born al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist Al-Awlaki, I disputed the contention that the killing of the terrorist was Unconstitutional, illegal or amoral, or that it represented...

It’s hard to find a company that seems in as muchlf-inflicted chaos as Netflix — one of my own personal favorite companies. In recent months it seemingly has not just shot itself in the foot but bit itself in the lower proximities. Is that an exaggeration? No. Just look at this story about a massive corporate about face: Netflix Inc. is abandoning its widely panned decision to separate its DVD-by-mail...

WASHINGTON — It’s not often that a sound bite from a Democratic candidate gets so under the skin of my distinguished colleague George F. Will that he feels moved to quote it in full and then devote an entire column to refuting it. This is instructive. The declaration heard ’round the Internet world came from Elizabeth Warren, the consumer champion running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts....

“A pretty girl is like a malady,” quoth the poet. Celebrity and its handmaiden, Publicity, have been with us ever since P.T. Barnum perfected the art and artifice, and Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. learned how to create ticket sales for a “celebrity” who nobody’d ever heard of, Anna Held, whom he stole from the Folies Bergere in Paris: The 1896 Broadway revival of A Parlor Match had two...

This weekend, GOP presidential candidates are groveling at the “Values Voters Summit” in Washington, a noisy minority with frontrunner Mitt Romney defending his faith from attacks as “a cult.” All this is reported with a straight face by media large and small, who a generation ago would have dismissed such fringe doings as a crackpot sideshow. Today, the Tea Party and the Religious Right hold America...