We All Need A Higher Minimum Wage
Election’s over, the good guy won, so what now for working people? Labor’s wish list for our re-elected president and the new Congress is long, but certainly the most basic item is raising the pay of...
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Musical Weapons Of Mass Destruction
Romney pals, Big & Rich. Photo courtesy Larry Darling via Flickr. The Romney “Believe in America” bus may have been on the road right until the end, but in the last weeks of the campaign it was...
View ArticleLegalization (With A DUI Chaser)
Paul Stanford, 52, is the author and prime mover behind Oregon’s marijuana legalization initiative, Measure 80, which had gotten 46.5 percent of the vote as of Sunday morning when I called to offer...
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Behind The Twinkie Defense
Harvey Milk, George Moscone & Dan White The apparent demise of the Twinkie brings back memories for me. A dozen police cars had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring...
View ArticleA Flash In The Pan
The mood on Election Night was as tense as a cold vintage Condrieu inside the dank, red velvet-lined interiors of Bern’s steakhouse in Tampa, Florida. Home of the largest private wine collection in the...
View ArticlePaula Broadwell, Whistleblower
Q: What name did Monica Lewinsky call Maureen Dowd? Answer below. In Men in Black Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith make use of a device that erases memory as they save the USA and the whole collateral...
View ArticleOld Apache Trail
To the east of the Phoenix megalopolis runs the Old Apache Trail, which starts out harmlessly enough as Highway 87. As you wind your way through ravines and red cliffs, the road gets narrower a until a...
View ArticleTaking More Control Of Your Final Days
One of the sick ironies of “pro-life” activism opposing abortion and euthanasia is that, if such self-identified advocates are successful in obtaining their goals, not only do more people suffer and...
View ArticleMy Beautiful America
Itinerary: America, more of my America: Sacramento to Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Scottsdale, Arizona for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen West, Bentonville, Arkansas for Pea Ridge battlefield (Civil War)...
View ArticleScenes From A Marriage
Constance Gee’s just published memoir, Higher Education: Marijuana at the Mansion, is a terrific book. (Her last name is pronounced with a hard G, as in clarified-butter ghee.) The title refers to the...
View ArticleHome Care Workers Need Presidential Help
The country’s 2-million-plus home care workers have been waiting a whole year now for President Obama to make good on his promise to grant them the federal minimum wage and overtime pay protections...
View Article‘Paranoia Strikes Deep’
Headline: A lone gunman opened fire today in (San Francisco, Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, Oak Creek…) and shot _____ innocent people, killing _____ people and wounding ____ more....
View ArticleRiver Views
It’s Boxing Day, the day for servants and the working class to receive presents from their employers. That centuries-old tradition sounds a lot like the 1% vs. 99% divide we face in the present. Boxing...
View ArticleMore Miserables
On Christmas Day, several new movies hit the big screen. The most notable this year was the latest version of Les Miserables, which opened to critical acclaim. I sat in seat K2 at the 10am showing in...
View ArticleNote To Alex
The NY Times arrived this morning with the Sunday magazine devoted to “The Lives They Lived,” an extra round of obits for people who exited in 2012. Guess who wasn’t mentioned? I suppose if they’d...
View ArticleThe Hoisting Of Russell Crowe
Every time Russell Crowe appeared on screen in Tom Hooper’s new film of Les Misérables all I could think was: Thank God The Gladiator wasn’t a musical. Imagine if Crowe’s lean, mean, fighting machine...
View ArticleSports Notes
Last weekend the Atlanta Falcons defeated the Seattle Seahawks 30-28. The San Francisco 49ers defeated the Green Bay Packers 45-31. The 49ers will play the Falcons in Atlanta next Sunday at noon. The...
View ArticleKing: I Have A Dream. Obama: I Have A Drone.
A simple twist of fate has set President Obama’s second Inaugural Address for January 21, the same day as the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Obama made no mention of King during the...
View ArticlePainful Paeans To America
Panic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert Speer’s Hall of the People after a full-on peroxide...
View ArticleSuperbowl
The Super Bowl rendered the usually crowded freeways of Phoenix, Arizona, as quiet as I-29 during a blizzard. Even Christmas can’t command such a complete shutdown of the American automobile as the...
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