By Doctor Cleveland on Mon, 11/18/2013 - 7:57pm | Sports, Social Justice
A few weeks ago, an NFL player named Jonathan Martin, offensive left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, walked off the team and sought counseling for emotional health issues. This has led to the suspension of his teammate, the incongruously-named Richie Incognito, on charges of outlandish workplace harassment; an official NFL investigation into the team, now reaching to behavior by the coaches; and the kind of publicity you just can't buy.
By Ramona on Mon, 11/18/2013 - 3:55pm | Business, Humor & Satire
Everybody knows the Walton family, the people who put the "Wal" in "Walmart", is the richest family in America. They're so rich you would have to pile up more than 40% of the wealth in the entire United States to even be on the same level. If each member of the family lived to be a thousand years old, they couldn't even begin to spend all of their fortune. So asking them to pay their employees a living wage and a few measly benefits is like asking them to give up, say, 1/10,000th of their fortune. (Don't quote me on that; I don't know that for absolute
Timothy Geithner is getting what some on Wall Street will jokingly refer to as his first "real job" as a President and Managing Director at private equity house Warburg Pincus. At Business Insider, Joe Weisenthal's take is that it could have been worse from a conflict of interest standpoint -- at least he's not as a Too Big To Fail bank, lobbying against regulations.
Yesterday I wrote about Opening Day for Michigan’s deer hunting season. But yesterday was also opening day for a hunting season not seen in Michigan for almost 50 years. Despite pushback from many different organizations, and petitions set up on a whole lot of petition sites, our grand Poobahs in Pure Michigan caved once again to special interests and instituted a hunting season for wo
By Ramona on Fri, 11/15/2013 - 5:01pm | Sports, Personal
Today marks the opening of hunting season here in Michigan’s north woods. The schools are closed in most upper state communities, including ours.
Opening Day is an annual holiday for the kids, even though only a small percentage of them will be out in the woods with guns. For many of them, today will be their initiation in deer camp, and it’s a day they’ve been waiting for all year. I don’t quite know when it started but I do know that up here it’s one of those holidays that is so sacrosanct nobody questions it.
In The New York Times today, Lori Gottlieb, a bestselling author, practicisng psychotherapist and contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthlyworries, "Has Obamacare made it un-P.C. to be concerned by a serious burden on a middle-class family’s well-being?"
By Ramona on Sun, 11/10/2013 - 6:32pm | Politics, Social Justice
They’ve elected a new mayor in Detroit, which, in other circumstances, might be a big deal, but since Detroit is under the thumb of a state-appointed emergency manager (who promptly–and probably unconstitutionally–took away all authority from every elected city official), the new mayor, Mike Duggan, will likely be mayor in name only. He’ll be invite
ocean-kat’s recent blog about secessionists, struck a chord with me and reminded me that I needed to finish writing this piece. It is a topic which has been tumbling around in my mind for a long time.
I was on Facebook a while back, having a discussion with a friend. She is a single mother living in the UK, and doesn't like being told she must get her child vaccinated.
We're an odd bunch, we Americans. We've had a hate-hate relationship with the very rich for as long as we've existed as a country, but, damn their black hides, we can't stop taking care of them.
After all these years we've become used to sparring with the super-rich over how much they get to keep and how much they should share. They want to keep it all, and we know that. We want them to behave like responsible citizens, and they don't think they should have to.
Due to apathy, off-off year elections (i.e., elections on odd-numbered years) tend to have lower voter turn-out than even off year elections. The bad news is that, for whatever reason, Republican-leaning voters tend to be less affected by apathy than Democratic-leaning voters. The good news is that this low turn-out means your vote counts more than it would for even-numbered years. So, go vote!
From Edward Snowden's Manifesto for the Truth from his residence under the protection of Vladmir Putin and the decidedly not free and open Russia:
....Sometimes the agencies even deliberately try to hide their surveillance of high officials or the public. While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – this is what the currently available documents suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem in need of global solutions.....
Bummer. I know the premiums are steep. I've been there. I remember when I moved from Philadelphia to New York City, and my rate jumped from $200 to $800--without even changing my plan. I received a letter saying that my premium might rise. The next thing I knew, boom, $800 charged to my credit card.
At least you get better coverage out of the deal. I still had to pay for my ER visit because it fell under my $3000 deductible. But what could I do? This America. Private companies are supposed to wring people out like dirty washcloths. It's called a free market.
But this is different, isn't it? It's not the free market that's squeezing you dry. It's the government. Government isn't supposed to squeeze people. It's supposed to get out of the way and let the free market squeeze people.
Coming back from the gym this morning, I encountered an 18 wheeler with a flatbed trailer, stuck on a narrow West Village street, trying to navigate between the fancy cars parked on both sides. I asked the driver if eyes outside the truck would help. He was happy to tell me where to look while he steered the truck back and forth in an effort to straighten out the trailer without smooshing anybody's fine examples of German luxry auto manufacturing.
When I first heard that Rev. Marvin Winans (of the gospel-singing Winans klan) refused to receive and Bless a child before his congregation because the child was born out of wedlock, I thought it was just another one of those ridiculous urban legends, because no Black minister could be that pompously out of touch with reality (I specified "Black minister" because Pat Robertson is White, and I’m not surprised at anything he does), and certainly no one with as high a public profile as Marvin Winans could possibly be that big a fool.
By Ramona on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 11:04am | Politics, Media
Ted Cruz, that notorious commie-hunting senator from Texas channeling a certain notorious mid-20th century commie-hunting senator from Wisconsin, is just one in a long line of rock star politicians who think they've latched onto the best way to get their cockamamie ideas across: Get out there and make shocking accusations
The NSA's answer to charges that it spies on the phone calls of citizens in the European Union is that it isn't spying, it is analyzing information provided to it by the intelligence agencies of allied governments. See, the NSA doesn't spy on Spanish people's phone calls. Spain does. Then they tell the NSA all about it. Glad we cleared that up.
A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday, I was in the check out line at a local store. Just ahead of me was a lady checking out only she was over her budget and was having items taken off the bill. It took a while but I was not in a hurry. Shopping is just about the only thing I do to get out of the house these days, so I don't rush through it. After she got her over spending adjusted, she discovered she had left her EBT card at home. I could see her embarrassment in her face as she apologized. She said she would come back in a few minutes. There was tears in her eyes as she left the store. So all of us were switched to another register and I asked the young man checking me out if he thought she would come back. He said yes because she was a regular customer. Her tears of shame bothered me all day. In my head I had visions of her being a single mom that is over worked and tired. I think it is time that our politicians stop shaming people for being in need of SNAP and do something to remove that need.
I've been away at an academic conference for nearly a week, leaving blog posts unfinished, e-mail unanswered, and campus office untenanted. I had a wonderful time with a bunch of scholars and actors at the American Shakespeare Center's reproduction of Shakespeare's Blackfriars playhouse. (If you'd like to see some excellent theater, a trip to see the ASC's company in Staunton, Virginia, is a great idea.) But I also bumped up against a small problem that's began to follow me wherever I go professionally: the problem of my (real) name.
(1) Merkel's now famous or infamous cell phone has apparently been 'monitored' since 2002, initiated by, I assume, white guys in the Bush administration. No one has asked who authorized that action. It was before she was Chancellor. She apparently was put on the NSA 'list' when she became an important politician in Germany. This would lead one to believe that this could have been a very long list, perhaps 'a routine intelligence' procedure, NSA business as usual, and furthermore, the program involved may date back to well before 2002.
A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday, I was in the check out line at a local store. Just ahead of me was a lady checking out only she was over her budget and was having items taken off the bill. It took a while but I was not in a hurry. Shopping is just about the only thing I do to get out of the house these days, so I don't rush through it. After she got her over spending adjusted, she discovered she had left her EBT card at home. I could see her embarrassment in her face as she apologized. She said she would come back in a few minutes. There was tears in her eyes as she left the store. So all of us were switched to another register and I asked the young man checking me out if he thought she would come back. He said yes because she was a regular customer. Her tears of shame bothered me all day. In my head I had visions of her being a single mom that is over worked and tired. I think it is time that our politicians stop shaming people for being in need of SNAP and do something to remove that need.
