by Joe Shea
MONROE, N.Y., Jan. 13, 2013 -- Two things can be said of most gun-bearing Americans: first, they are patriotic, in that they revere at least part of the U.S. Constitution; second, that they tend to be independent-minded, a quality that itself is profoundly infused with the shape of the American Dream. Thus, they are not America's enemies, even if they are often her critics.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It got buried under all the end-of-the-year hysteria over the so-called fiscal cliff, but the news that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) worked with local police departments to coordinate a violent crackdown on the activist movement known as Occupy in the fall of 2011 deserves a closer look before it slips down the national memory hole altogether.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Now that the so-called fiscal cliff - a crisis that was manufactured by the least productive, least popular Congress in history - has been temporarily averted, what actually got accomplished?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Some Americans are still expressing shock and disbelief over President Obama's winning a second term.
by Ron Kenner
BALDWIN HILLS, Calif., Dec. 23, 2012 -- Inflation, long overrated, hasn't materialized. Other painfully obvious problems, like joblessness, have spent months on the back burners. And if we can't face the real issues, we won’t make a meaningful dent.
by Ron Kenner
BALDWIN HILLS, Calif., Dec. 23, 2012 -- In the overall mechanics of transformative government, attitude is so important! Not just a simplistic "can do" confidence but the simple belief that government might - holy cow! - actually solve or take the lead in solving or confronting a major problem.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- 2012 has been the worst year for mass shootings in U.S. history.
by Ron Kenner
BALDWIN HILLS, Calif., Dec. 21, 2012 -- The Dec. 14 massacre of elementary-school children in Newtown, Conn., created headlines worldwide, yet thousands of other innocents nationwide die needlessly, routinely, with little notice. Many die prematurely because of inadequate regulation, oversight or enforcement.
by Ron Kenner
BALDWIN HILLS, Calif., Dec. 17, 2012 -- To end gun violence, to improve our schools, to rebuild our space program as soon as we can afford to, we need some other-worldly faith. But we also need a renewed faith - in this world.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 14, 2012 -- The phrase that comes to mind is, "We cannot contain our grief."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In her best-selling book, "The Shock Doctrine," author Naomi Klein outlined a process where business and political elites take a crisis, either real or created, use it to create a sense of panic and disorientation, and then push through economic policies that wouldn't merit consideration in calmer times.
by Ron Kenner
BALDWIN HILLS, Calif., Dec. 9, 2012 -- The election campaign is over and the real world presses on with its many crises. It is indeed a complex world, even if we sometimes appear to be living in an age of simple-mindedness and a new Age of Ignorance. Clearly we need to do a better job of assessing our landscape, from topless bars to topless mountains.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Dec. 6, 2012 -- An inescapable truth is staring the world's leaders in the face.
by Ron Kenner
BALDWIN HILLS, Calif., Dec. 5, 2012 -- In fairness, there has been some remarkable progress over the years, in maturing public attitudes toward minorities, women, gays, and toward the unfortunates in our society.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Walmart doesn't want you to think it was a big deal, but the events of Black Friday - the walkouts, protests and civil disobedience actions that took place all across the United States on Nov. 23 - are the start of what could become one of the biggest victories for labor in American history.
by Ron Kenner
LOS ANGELES, Calif., Nov. 30, 2012 -- Sometimes our interests and their consequences are so fixedly contrary that a kind of moral paralysis occurs, so much so that it seems to make these matters impossible to discuss except in a partisan or advocacy context. These conundrums, in my phrase, become "unmentionables."
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Nov. 27, 2012 -- A white Ford F-250 pick-up rumbled through town, a Confederate rebel flag flapping on a pole behind the cab; on the rear bumper were a pro-life and three anti-Obama stickers, the thrust of which two of which are not for a family newspaper.
by Ron Kenner
LOS ANGELES, Calif., Nov. 25, 2012 -- The majority of the electorate made it clear in the 45th presidential election that they want neither a king nor watered-down half-measures that pass for progress, nor more of the same Congressional obstructionism that marked President Barack Obama's first Administration, but instead seek a genuine transformation of America that is peaceful, constructive and consistent with our constitutional values and heritage.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Since this is a family Web site, there are certain words one cannot use to to describe the total gracelessness of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in losing the election to President Obama.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Having had a week to savor the decisive victories of President Obama and the Democratic Party, maybe it is safe to say that we are not a center-right nation anymore.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In the end, it was the math.
by Joe Shea
COCOA BEACH, Fla., Nov. 6, 2012, 12:37am ET -- Today is Obama Day. In the distant future, when the history books present their record of this time, this nation may be judged by the decision we make at the polls today (and of course, due to early voting, have been making for two weeks or more).
by Ted Manna
It's been a long, long slog through the swamp of election year politics for Americans this year. A Presidency that seemed to signal a supernova of unity, tolerance, and hope for the future imploded in the face of a crippling economic Armageddon. A stifling social polarization and an intractable governmental sclerosis spawned a black hole in the electorate's psyche. Bereft of pride and confidence, galaxies of accomplishments disappeared into the yawning maw.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It would be too facile to say that Hurricane Sandy was Mother Nature's revenge for the silence of Mitt Romney and President Obama on climate change during the presidential debates. Had one of those gentlemen taken our suggestion to address the issue, that might well have been a game-changing factor on Nov. 6.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I think it is safe to call George McGovern the last Democrat. The former Democratic senator from South Dakota who died Sunday at the age of 90 certainly was the last truly liberal candidate the Democratic Party nominated for president.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 21, 2012 -- Before we hear a single word Monday night in the final debate of this presidential election season, we know that an awful lot of it will be about trade with China. The other big thing will be the Obama Administration's relationship with Israel and its handling of Iran's apparent attempt to develop nuclear weapons.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Oct. 18, 2012 -- In Texas and Oklahoma, ranchers and farmers have joined with activists and Occupy Wall Street alums to try to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline - designed to bring toxic and dangerous tar sands oil from Canada to U.S. refineries.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 15, 2012 -- Put yourself, as best you can, in President Obama's shoes for a moment. You've just lost a critical debate and seen that loss create a declining trend in your likelihood of being re-elected to the presidency. Your Vice-President has just dramatically upstaged you with a bravura performance in a debate against your opponent's running mate. Now you face another critical debate tomorrow night, so what do you do?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I listened to the first 2012 presidential debate on Oct. 3, and was surprised at how passive President Obama was and how aggressive Mitt Romney was.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 5, 2012 -- I saw the first 2012 presidential debate at the Lakewood Ranch Town Hall here, at a watch party organized by fellow Democrats. We watched and cheered the President and frequently laughed at Mitt Romney, particularly when his statements were given the lie by his videotaped "47%" remarks. Only when I got home and picked up the ringing telephone did I learn that some people thought Obama had "lost" the event.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you're an optimist, you can be comforted by the fact that, in Mitt Romney, the Republican Party has a candidate so unpopular that even with a huge money advantage, Romney cannot be sold to the American people as a plausible alternative to President Obama.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 30, 3012 -- One reason Republicans and their presidential candidate, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, are struggling against Democrats and President Barack Obama is that as a political football, the economy has become deflated. That is to say, to paraphrase a slogan of the Clinton era, "It's not the economy, stupid - it's about people."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Sept. 27, 2012 -- As our nation marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, it seems more than a little ironic that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that settled the issue of slavery in that bloody war, has completely given itself over to the forces that the party's founders defeated a century earlier.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 27, 2012, 9:55am -- Fox News talk-show host Sean Hannity has been complaining lately about supposedly vicious remarks being made by Democrats in the course of the 2012 presidential campaign, but one by a controversial Mitt Romney supporter appears to have them all beat.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- A year ago this week, the Occupy movement was born in Zuccotti Park in New York.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It has been said often this year, and I have been part of that chorus, that the 2012 election represents that last gasp of white male privilege in America.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 13, 2012 -- As a onetime foreign correspondent who wrote from places like Northern Ireland, Iran, Pakistan, India, Vietnam and the Philippines, I see the riots in Cairo, the assassination in Benghazi and the friction in U.S-Israeli relations as part of one picture: a portrait of the Middle Eastern world preparing for war between Iran and Israel.
by Ted Manna
MELBOURNE, Fla., Sept. 9, 2012 -- President Barack Obama delivered a gritty message to a packed gymnasium of supporters Sunday afternoon at Florida Institute of Technology's Melbourne, Florida campus . The sun-kissed sky and sultry breeze off the Indian River did nothing to soften his tone. “If you give up on the idea that your voice matters, somebody will fill that void, “ he cautioned.
President Obama, beaming at supporters in a cavernous college auditorium, was sometimes upbeat and sometimes grim in his appearance on the Fla. Institute of Technology campus Sunday. Photo: Ted Manna |
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Summer vacation (for those lucky enough to still have them) is over, the kids are back to school, and now, we are finally entering the time when the political season gets serious and people start paying attention to the campaigns.
by Joe Shea
CORDELE, Ga., Sept. 5, 2012 -- In an impressive if demeaning display of Israel's power to shape America's political destiny, the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte today was forced to adopt a once-discarded platform plank that names Jerusalem as Israel's capital over the objections of thousands of delegates. The short-lived battle over the issue threatens to derail the entire Democratic presidential campaign and alienate its most generous donors.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- What is the definition of madness?
by Walter M. Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Sept. 3, 2012 -- Almost every conservative political columnist, pundit, commentator, blogger, and freelance bloviator has written about the decline and forthcoming death of the labor movement.
by Joe Shea
HARMONY CROSSING, Ga., Aug. 31, 2012 -- Mitt Romney's speech to the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa was not among the great ones that conventions of both parties have heard in recent decades, but it did accomplish two important things: It enlarged the mental portrait most of us have of this quintessentially corporate man, and it made it seem possible that he could pull this country out of its economic morass.
by Joe Shea
HARMONY CROSSING, Ga., Aug. 29, 2012 -- You could've knocked me over with a feather late last night when a Fox News hostess went to Chris Wallace, host of the network's flagship show, Fox News Sunday, and asked him what he thought of the evening's speeches by Ann Romney, wife of GOP nominee Mitt Romney, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whom many had wanted to run for president himself and who was a perennial favorite of conservatives as a potential vice-presidential pick for the Romney ticket.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- When a coven of buffoons and bigots disguised in the bodies of "birthers" figured that anyone with dark skin and a foreign name had to be born outside the U.S., Barack Obama provided a birth certificate, a state-certified copy of the "long form" that detailed he was born in Hawaii, which some birthers apparently think is a foreign territory, to a mother who was a natural-born U.S. citizen.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Aug. 24, 2012 -- Republicans can be thankful for one thing this week. With all the fuss over the comments of Missouri Congressman Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin, and his exposure of the party's retrograde position on abortion, no one is talking about Medicare.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON, England, Aug. 16, 2012 -- Can a simple man destroy the diplomatic ties between nations? The answer is yes. The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who exposed U.S. diplomatic cable and purportedly defamed the most powerful country of the world. now has instigated a diplomatic debate and dispute about his future.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Aug. 20, 2012 -- Mitt Romney had options for his running mate.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Aug. 10, 2012 -- July 2012 was the hottest month ever in the continental United States since modern record-keeping began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 12, 2012 -- Mitt Romney's choice of Rep. Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidential running mate for the GOP nomination is not likely to excite or surprise anyone. The Republicans propose to replace a man of color and a colorful Irishman with a pair of corporate statists whose ability to connect with ordinary people is in serious doubt.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Aug. 7, 2012 -- It has receded so far into the mists of history that it almost seems like it never happened.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Aug. 2, 2012 -- How do you win an election?
by Ted Manna
MERRITT ISLAND, Fla., July 22, 2012 -- The suspension of political campaigning this weekend brought a respite as refreshing and sudden as a tropical squall sucking the heat and humidity out the Florida air. It was a welcome relief from the negative, misleading messages flooding the airwaves and the Internet.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The truth hurts, especially when it is cleverly presented in 30 seconds.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's become as regular as the sun rising in the East - dismal U.S. unemployment figures come out, and the Republicans blame President Obama for the lackluster numbers.
by Hank Mills
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah -- The universe is a mysterious place, and we understand very little about how it works. Sadly, the challenges our civilization faces such as war, poverty, pollution, economic turmoil, and "black swan" events may not allow humanity to exist long enough to figure it out before our species goes extinct. If we are to learn how the universe works, breakthrough technologies like cold fusion (LENR) need to be pursued, instead of multibillion dollar projects such as the search for the Higgs Boson that will have very few real-world applications in the short-to-medium term.
by Josh Mitteldorf
Editor's Note: This article is reprinted from OpEdNews with the gracious permission of the author and OpEdNews.com, where Josh Mitteldorf is Senior Editor.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- One of America's best ideas celebrates its 150th anniversary this week. On July 2, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law what became known as the Morrill Act, after then-Rep. Justin Morrill, its principal author.
by Joe Shea
BARDENTON, Fla., July 3, 2012 -- Hundreds of thousands of Washington, Baltimore area and Virginia residents have endured stifling, 95+-degree heat without electricity for refrigerators, air conditioners and televisions as a July heat wave sweeps over the north Atlantic Seaboard - and they represent the last of at least four million people who were without power for days during the past week.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld President Obama's Affordable Care Act, Vermont is plowing ahead with its efforts to establish a system of single-payer state health care where every resident will eventually be eligible for publicly-funded coverage.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The cynical can say that President Obama's executive order on June 15 to end the deportation of college-age undocumented immigrants was election-year pandering to Latino voters.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If the victory of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in his recall election on June 6 teaches us anything, the lesson is that the Democratic Party cannot be counted upon to do what it takes to win an election.
by Walter Brasch
JERSEY SHORE, Pa. -- Garder54 calls Kevin June "a real scum." LadyDawg4 calls him a "sleazeball." Proud2bMom calls him a "liar and a thief."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The pundits called June 1 the worst day of Barack Obama's presidency.
by Mark Scheinbaum
HOUSTON, Tex., June 2, 2012 -- News that the two-year German bond has hit precisely 0% interest is the leading indicator that the Euro, the newly-created currency of 17 of the member-states of the European Union used by 332 million Europeans, will disappear from the global scene. As we know it, the Euro is likely to vanish in the middle of a weekend night, much like the Baltimore Colts snuck out of their home town to move to Indianapolis.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's not an exaggeration to say that the June 5 gubernatorial recall election in Wisconsin between incumbent Republican Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Tom Barrett is the most important election this year.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- A major blow for freedom was struck last week when a federal court judge in Washington issued a preliminary injunction blocking a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that authorizes the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world, without charge or trial.
by Mark Scheinbaum
COCOLI, Panama, May 29, 2012 -- Just the fourth and final phase remains to complete the gigantic expansion of the Panama Canal by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), and the entire nation is feeling optimistic that the rewards in commerce and revenue will outstrip the huge financial risks the cpountry has taken.
by Joe Shea
CRANBURY, N.J., May 23, 2012 -- In the lovely, quiet pastures of northern New Jersey where Edison and Einstein once reigned, Dr. Randell Mills has scored one of the greatest triumphs in scientific history, fellow scientists say: a way to use water vapor to produce any amount of cheap electricity.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 12, 2011 -- The National Aeronautics & Space Agency (NASA) revealed today that it is working on a "new form of energy" that can transmutes common materials to a "different element" and that can replace fossil fuels for use in homes, space and other transportation systems and infrastructure. A patent for the work was filed by NASA in October.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In a play on the "hope and change" theme of Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, the Republican National Committee rolled out last week a new counter-slogan, "Hype and Blame 2012."
by Randolph T. Holhut
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. --The issue of income inequality in the United States may be receiving more attention with the rise of the Occupy movement and ongoing Congressional hearins, but Harvard professor and best-selling author Robert Putnam believes that most Americans are unconcerned about it.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 6, 2012 -- Europe turned left on Sunday. Punishing both moderate parties, Greek voters turned to the far left and far right in rejecting them. In France, voters turned its presidency over to a Socialist for the first time in decades, this time to Francois Hollande. And over the past week, conservatives in Britain suffered "atrocious" losses in local city council elections.
by Mark Scheinbaum
HOUSTON, Tex., April 30, 2012 -- Just looking around the Toyota Center, home of the NBA in Houston, made it clear the graduates of Yes Prep Public Schools were having a better year than the Houston Rockets.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., May 4, 2012 -- "To all of the thousands of good and decent Americans I've met who want nothing more than a better chance, a fighting chance, to all of you, I have a simple message: Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The U.S. Postal Service is in a crisis.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- On a bright Monday morning, a day before tax returns were due, I bumped into my ersatz friend Marshbaum who was placing a change container at the Gas-High Mini-mart on Low Octane and Greed avenues.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- A few weeks ago, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives approved what Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman called "the most fraudulent budget in American history."
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Sit down with your mother, kids. It's time for Christmas card pictures."
by Randolph T. Holhut
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. -- It has not been extensively reported, but the Obama Administration has retained and expanded upon many of the national security abuses that were initiated during the Bush Administration.
by Walter Brasch
Editor's Note: Dr. Walter Brasch is a veteran AR Correspondent whose contributions to this publication have been sustaining us for many years. His articles and books are a beacon of the reporter's craft.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. APRIL 8, 2012 -- On this holiest day in Christendom, I think I'll ignore the traditional silence that journalists give to religious views in their news pages.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In watching the circus that surrounded the three days of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, one has to conclude that our country has finally jumped the shark.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- It's the beginning of April, and that means I have just finished celebrating New Year's Eve, and will soon begin shopping for Valentine's gifts. In a month or two, I may even get around to toasting St. Patrick.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Compared to the rest of the nation, Vermont's gun laws are pretty lax.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 26, 2012 -- Brains spilling out of skulls. Blood flowing down the sidewalk. Bottles arcing in the streetlights. Knives strapped to legs. Bullets smacking the wall, hitting cars and people. Suspects running, pursuers chasing them. Men falling dead in the street - I have seen it all in a decade of helping lead a Neighborhood Watch during the crack epidemic that devastated central Hollywood in the 1990s. Police said our group was a "national model," and we hold that testimonial close to our hearts.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Remember Sen. Ted Kennedy's description of the kind of America we would if Robert Bork, a conservative solicitor general for President Nixon during the Watergate years, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 19, 2012 -- The great American writer and philosopher Henry James coined the term "moral equivalence," and everywhere in the Middle East, the equation it describes is held fast to diplomats' hearts. The phrase is defined in Wikipedia thusly:
"Moral equivalence is a term used in political debate, usually to criticize any denial that a moral hierarchy can be assessed of two sides in a conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides. The term originates from a 1906 address by William James entitled The Moral Equivalent of War, subsequently published in essay form in 1910."There's another, simpler and older saying, too: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If it looks to you that the Republican Party's primary voters this year seem older and whiter than usual, you're not mistaken.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The outbreak of another round of powerful and deadly tornadoes last week in the Midwest and South was unusual in one respect - you don't normally see storms like that in the first week of March.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 10, 2012 -- Some or all of the most vile of the lying, distorting, deceiving, extreme and dangerous talk-show hosts who populate conservative talk radio - Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Tom Leykis, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Todd Schnitt, Neal Boortz and Michael Savage - may have just lost their gravy train, Newsweek reports.
HONOR ROLL*
* These advertisers have Source: Radio-Info.com |
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's a weird badge of honor in the humor writing world to be stolen from. To have someone else take your work, stick their name on it, and claim they wrote it. To tell the world they thought of that story, spun the words together, and made those jokes about the Mayor's wife's nose job.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 6, 202012 -- If you could really scrape below the surface of objective reality and peer into the unconscious minds of Republicans who will vote today in 10 states for their choice of presidential nominees, which of the key issues in the campaigns of Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Sanctorum would really be generative when they cast their votes?
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Writer's don't have feuds anymore," said Karl.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. --These are dangerous times for journalists around the world.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- It's the end of February, and one of my friends is still sporting a summer tan. I know it's phony - and she knows I know it's phony - but I have long ago stopped teasing her about it.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, FLA., Feb. 27, 2012 -- We made it!
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It shouldn't come as a surprise that that the far right is not just opposed to abortion, but contraception, too. Allowing women to have control over their bodies has never been allowed in their universe.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 22, 2012 Updated 7:30pm ET-- The stage is set tonight in Mesa, Ariz., for mistakes that make political history. Will the candidates come through?
by Mark Scheinbaum
AMARILLO, Tex., Feb 17, 2012 -- When New York Mets catcher Gary Carter in 1986 was receiving $2.07 million per year for his baseball skills, he was the highest-paid baseball player of all time. Much of it was seed money for a legacy of charity and community service that transcended the diamond.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Feb. 16, 2012 -- In an age where corporations are considered people, and the amount of power that they wield over our lives grows by the day, the state of Vermont has been fighting a seemingly impossible battle against Entergy Corp. over the future of the state's lone nuclear plant.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- In the 1950s, men's fashion was pretty straightforward. There were certain things men wore or carried without question. They carried a handkerchief or pocket square, wore a hat, and dressed up for work.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- You don't have to be a Harvard Business School graduate to know that a brand is difficult to build and easy to destroy. The experiences of Chrysler and Susan M. Komen for The Cure Foundation are a good illustration of this principle.
by Mark Scheinbaum
HOUSTON, Feb. 2, 2012 -- The 20th Century's premier boxing trainer, Angelo Dundee, died yesterday at age 90 in Tampa after a lifetime in the spotlight of sports and the shadow of Muhammad Ali, and only one flaw is attributed to him.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you are a psychologist, and you want to start a fight, it's hard to go wrong with putting out a study that concludes that the combination of low intelligence and socially conservative beliefs makes a person more likely to give in to racism and prejudice.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The players:: Five sportswriters - Sam, Chip, Tim, Len, and Max. The subject: Whether Peyton Manning will play for the Indianapolis Colts in 2012, or if he'll even play at all.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- I am sorry that today Florida voters must decide among a group of men - who are all imperfect - which should be the next President of the United States.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- In 5,000 years, we have not changed how we teach school. We still have one teacher standing in front of a classroom, lecturing.
by Walter Brasch
STATE COLLEGE, Pa., Jan. 29, 2012 -- On Jan. 27, 2012, Gov. Tom Corbett (R-Pa.) praised Joe Paterno and ordered flags on all state buildings to fly at half-staff for four days.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the demolition derby that is the Republican presidential primary careens into Florida, the battle seems to come down to a choice between a vulture capitalist of, by, and for the 1 percent and a serial adulterer who has done more to drive politics into the gutter than any man alive.
by Joe Shea
TAMPA, Jan. 23, 2011 -- The upcoming 2012 Republican National Convention will have a strong negative economic impact on the City of Tampa, Fla., where it will be held Aug. 27-30, 2012, a prominent economist told the American Reporter Monday night after the NBC Presidential Debate, but the party’s former national chairman told us shortly afterwards it will present a "great, great benefit” for the party in this year’s post-convention election campaign.
by Mark Scheinbaum
WASHINGTON, Jan, 22, 2012 -- Apple and a small cellular company in Asia might just have hit upon the greatest marketing formula since they day we never knew we needed a non-cling sheet to dry our clothes: a high-tech, spanking new iPhone with no camera.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 22, 2012 -- It is one thing when a revelation stirs the electorate against (or for) certain presidential candidates, but it is another when voters give their very impressive imprimatur - their sovereign approval - to a change in political strategy, which is what they did in South Carolina today.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Jan. 20, 2012 -- In the craziness of the campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, we've seen and heard a lot of crazy things.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It is as predictable as the sun rising in the east each morning. Someone proposes to cut U.S. military spending, and the howls of protest and outrage by conservatives immediately begin.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Jan. 15, 2012 -- Tucked between the New Hampshire primary and Groundhog Day, and directly competing against an NFL playoff game, is Saturday night's annual Miss America pageant.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 9, 2011 (7:27PM ET) -- On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney stuck his foot in his mouth so deep that the sole may have irritated his lower intestine.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FALLS, N.M., Jan. 8, 2012 -- In my one stint covering the Iowa caucuses, I pretty much scratched my head at how a few voters, doing so little, could get so much media coverage with, ultimately, so little correlation with the rest of the country or the campaign.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 8, 2012 -- Bracketed by debates Saturday night and Sunday morning, and with the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, the six Republican candidates for their party's presidential nomination had little time to prepare. Yet they were out in force all day Saturday, all over the state at crowded rallies where they seemed to command respect and popularity. On Tuesday morning, however, we will learn that was not the reality.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The people who came to the Occupy protests and encampments around the country this past fall had many different causes they supported. But nearly all were in agreement about the one big thing that they see wrong with America -- the domination of the political process by monied interests.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 3, 2012 -- Rick Santorum is to Iowa Republicans what Barack Obama was to Iowa Democrats in 2008: young, smart, well-credentialed and very much the embodiment of his party's principles. He is, indeed, the white Obama.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 2, 2012 -- News Flash: Rep. Michelle Bachmann will not be dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination after the caucus results are announced tomorrow night.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The people who came to the Occupy protests and encampments around the country this past fall had many different causes they supported. But nearly all were in agreement about the one big thing that they see wrong with America -- the domination of the political process by monied interests.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When historians look back at 2011, I believe they will see a year that matched 1968 and 1989 for revolutionary fervor that spread around the world.
by Christopher Zimny
SARASOTA, Fl. -- When one reads the brutal story of the justly paranoid Winston Smith in the George Orwell classic 1984, one is confronted soon enough with a telescreen filled with the face of the Stalin-like image of Big Brother.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- In the days of old, when knights were bold, and fist bumps weren't invented, they made their stands, and shook their hands, and battles were prevented. That is, back in the Middle Ages, when two knights met and they weren't in the mood to do battle, each knight would extend an empty right hand - preferably their own - to show the other that they were unarmed and did not intend to start swinging a sword around.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- I am a Jew.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- On the 225th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Senate voted to ratify a bill that will destroy many of our civil liberties.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I am not what you would call a brave man. Oh sure, I would protect my family from home invaders, axe murderers, and Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on our door on Saturday mornings ("sorry, no, we're Zoroastrians").
by Mark Scheinbaum
CONROE, Tex., Dec. 15, 2011 -- The President and the Pentagon say the U.S. war in Iraq is officially over - except that approximately 4,000 American men and women in our armed forces won't be home for a while, and another 4,500 or more will never come home.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The unofficial rallying cry of Occupy Wall Street - "We are the 99 percent!" - is a brilliant slogan that sums up who didn't benefit from the last three decades of government policies that catered to the wealthy at the expense of every one else.
by Walter Brasch
HARRISBURG, Pa., Dec. 13, 2011 -- If the first-year gross anatomy class at the Penn State's Hershey Medical School needs spare body parts to study, they can visit the cloakroom of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. That's where most of the legislators left their spines.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida has been decimated to the point that it is no longer a force militarily or politically.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In my three decades of journalism, I never minded working on holidays such as Thanksgiving. That's because it usually meant double overtime for working on a relatively quiet day.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, DEC. 5, 2011 -- to whom do I owe penance for the death of a possum tonight? I ran him over (twice) in the divided roadway that cuts through the community I live in, optimistically called "El Conquistador" after the Spanish explorers like Hernando DeSoto who first visited this place in the 17th Century, about 200 years after Columbus
by Walter Brasch
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. -- The Penn State Board of Trustees may have violated state law several times by its failure to publicly announce meetings and reveal how it handled the firing of Coach Joe Paterno.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The video footage of Lt. John Pike of the University of California at Davis casually hosing down a group of unarmed, non-violent protesters with pepper spray on Nov. 18 has been compared to the fire hoses and police dogs turned on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in the early 1960s.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I recently heard a story on National Public Radio about Leonardo da Vinci's "To Do" list, related by historian Toby Lester in his new book, "da Vinci's Ghost." The Renaissance Man used to organize his thoughts. Whenever something caught his eye, said Lester, da Vinci would scribble a few notes or start sketching his ideas in his notebook. That's because da Vinci believed it was useful to "constantly observe, note, and consider" the things he saw around him. And many of those notes and sketches resulted in some of his most famous paintings, drawings, ideas, and inventions - some of which we still know, use and are inspitred by today. I've done the same thing for years, although not with the same effect and accomplishment as the industrious Italian. Most of my long-lasting contributions are boob jokes, and not even good ones at that. But I do have one thing that Toby Lester doesn't have. It's an old copy of one of Leonardo da Vinci's diaries, which I have translated into English. These are a few of the highlights:
September 19, 1487 - One of my assistants told me about some guy in the next village who was born with four arms and four legs. Totally have to draw this guy. No one's going to believe this at all. Not even sure I do.
November 4, 1487 - Found the four-armed guy. His name is Wendell. He really does have four arms and legs. Was hoping he'd have two heads or something cool like that. But no, it's just the one guy with an extra pair of limbs. Dude runs like a horse though. Watched him outrun a group of villagers on horseback. Of course, he can't fight at all, although a slapfight by a four-armed man is pretty hilarious.
June 13, 1488 - Had an idea for a flying machine. Been watching all these birds, and started sketching some ideas. I'll have to get around to building one of these things. Would be very useful for flying from home to the office. I'd need to figure out a way to launch the machine though. Maybe a giant crossbow...
March 15, 1492 - Was just fired by Ludovico from the Big Horse project. Was supposed to cast a giant horse statue made out of bronze, but Michelangelo torpedoed the whole project. Put a bug in Lou's ear that he didn't think I was up to the task.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Is the Herman Cain boom, such as it was, finally over? Cain, the former CEO of the Godfather's Pizza chain and head of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), had been running neck-and-neck with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in many national polls for the Republican presidential nomination.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 19, 2011 -- I was looking through the pages tonight of our local Bradenton Herald, a McClatchy News paper purchased from Knight-Ridder a few years ago that publishes photos of people arrested and lists of all the documents filed in the past week at the Manatee County, Fla. courthouse. There in the list of foreclosures was the name of the local weekly newspaper publisher I used to work for.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa.-- For a few hours on the afternoon of Nov. 1, the people of southern California were scared by initial reports of an alert at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. An 93alert94 is the second of four warning levels.
by Mark Scheinbaum
HOUSTON, Tex., Nov. 16, 2011 -- For days, folks have asked me about the moral issues in the alleged child abuse scandal at Penn State University.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Nov. 10, 2011 -- Nothing scares the elites more than democracy.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Kid, do you keep a journal?" asked Karl the Curmudgeon. We were sitting in István's Hungarian tavern, watching the Hungarian Cup finals, as Bajai had just tied Lombard Papa, 1-1.
by Herman Cain
ATLANTA, Ga., Ga., Nov. 7, 2011 -- I am a serious person, seeking the opportunity to do a serious and very important job. Our nation has very serious problems, particularly of an economic nature, and Barack Obama does not have the skill, knowledge or will to solve them.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 30, 2011 -- If you went to Google tonight and searched for the terms "E Cat Rossi Associated Press" you'd get 1,430,000 results from blogs, Web sites and magazines like Wired.com (UK edition). That number will grow.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Now we've entered the stage of the Occupy Wall Street movement where things are starting to get dangerous for the brave American who insists upon exercising his or her First Amendment right to peaceably assemble to seek social change.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Everyone has their own way to cope with loneliness. During my last visit to Florida, I relied on baseball and my cat.
by Ted Manna
ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 29, 2011 -- Vice President Joe Biden brought his attack-dog style to the Florida Democratic Party State Convention Friday night, snapping viciously at Republican Presidential candidates and snarling at a Republican-controlled Congress more bent on defeating President Barack Obama, he said, than doing anythng about our country's problems.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Oct. 28, 2011 -- We know the names of every one of the 4,479 Americans who were killed and the 32,200 who were wounded, both civilian and military, between March 20, 2003 and Oct. 21, 2011, the day President Barack Obama, fulfilling a campaign promise, declared the last American soldier would leave Iraq before the end of the year.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It always seems that every triumph for President Barrack Obama usually comes with a caveat.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I think I hate camping.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 25, 2011 -- I remember turning to Ron Fournier, the AP's chief political writer, as we listened in Denver to Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont talking about something or other long forgotten. He's on the margin of hysteria, I told him; I could hear it coming in his voice, and it was going to get loose pretty soon, I said.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Having turned 50 a few weeks ago, I've come to the realization that the decline and fall of the American Dream roughly parallels my lifetime.
by Ted Manna
ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 20, 2011 -- If you think you have had a hard life, or even just a bad day, a few minutes around the "Champions" of the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals would abuse you forever of that notion.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 18, 2011 -- As a result of some sort of corrupt media consensus, CNN's Anderson Cooper flagrantly orchestrated an attack on Herman Cain at tonight's GOP presidential debate. Cain did well in responding, but CNN's role as a political orchestrator will be suspect from now through the next several debates.
by Walter Brasch
NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 16, 2011 -- 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."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- To many in the corporate media, the center is sacred political ground. It is where the "sensible" and "serious" people dwell.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- GASP Clothing hates normal-sized people. They hate you so much, they don't want you shopping at their stores ever. Unless you're a size six or smaller and have more money than brains, then GASP doesn't even want you setting foot in their store. (We'll forget for the moment that they're in Australia, and you're probably here in the United States. If they were an American company, they would still hate you.) GASP has made international news after Keara O'Neil, who wears a size 12, was insulted about her size by a male sales assistant, Chris, after saying she wanted to think about whether to buy her bridesmaids dresses at the retail chain. Keara was in the store last month looking at a particular dress, when Chris said "With your figure, I really think you should buy it." After that, she decided to leave, so Chris called after her, "Have fun shopping at Supre. I knew you were a joke the minute you walked in." Keara went home and emailed a complaint to GASP managers - GASPholes, I call them. Her email was a valid complaint, expressing her shock and displeasure at the way she was treated.
by Annemarie Ulbrich
LONDON, Oct. 10, 2011 -- "Al-Qaeda is losing ground in the Arabic world and the Middle East as a different narrative arises in those societies. It is operating on its periphery and faces an issue of credibility," says Sir Richard Dearlove, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service between February 1999 and May 2004.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you are wondering why protesters have occupied Wall Street for the past few weeks, and why similar protests have been springing up in cities from Boston to Seattle, all around the country, consider these facts.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa.--The most important media story this past week is that the Kardashian sisters were guest co-hosts on the fourth hour of NBC's "Today" show. One Kardashian sister per day, plus mother Kris and stepdad Bruce Jenner, the great Olympic swimming eight-gold medalist.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 9, 20911 -- CNN interrupted its regular programming Saturday morning to carry a 20-minute speech to the evangelical Values Voter conference by ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mick Romney.
by Anne Stiens
WEISBADEN, Germany, Oct. 11, 2011 -- It was one of those few perfect "sun-shiny" days when you can smell the summer, flowers, trees and grass, and feel the warm touch of sunlight on your skin with temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius as you expect in India, when His Holiness The XIV Dalai Lama met friends and Tibetans in the park of the Villa Götzfried in Wiesbaden, Germany, at the end of August 2011.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Sept. 29, 2011 -- It's been flying around the Internet over the past fortnight, and deservedly so.
by Ted Manna
VIERA, Fla. -- The flimsy breeze fluffed the impossibly tiny white sand into a billowing, gritty mist. It seeped everywhere, coated everything, and made the simple act of wiping your face feel like sandpaper scraping across your skin.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- From the "more money, poorly spent" file: the Chattanooga Airport is going to change its name to ... drumroll, please ... "Chattanooga Airport."
by Tom Watson
PASO ROBLES, Calif. -- I know what it's like not to have time to spend with your kids.
by Ginny Grimsley
NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 1, 2011 -- What makes Sarah Palin so irresistible?
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. - Parents demanded it be banned. School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries.
by Ted Manna
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 25, 2011 -- Deep cracks in what seemed to be monolithic momentum of the Republican election machine appeared here Saturday evening when Atlanta businessman Herman Cain swamped the established front-runners in a critical party straw poll that often predicts the Republican presidential nominee - and the next President of the United States.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 26, 2011 -- Surrounded by a throng of reporters and bathed in the bright lights of tv cameras from all over the world, Andrew Breitbart was in his element.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- At last week's "Tea Party" Republican presidential debate, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Texas Congresssman Ron Paul this hypothetical question: a 30-year-old man in good health elects not to purchase health insurance. He then has a major medical crisis that requires expensive care. Who should pay for his care?
by Joe Shea
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 24, 2011 -- The American Reporter was the only publication in the world that flatly predicted Herman Cain would win the Florida Republican Presidential Preference Straw Poll. We did get lucky, but it really happened because we listened well to one person.
by Joe Shea
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 22, 2011 -- On a day when the stock market teetered at the very precipice of a second Depression, and the decades-old Palestinian fight for an independent state finally neared an ultimate resolution, and U.S. unemployment barely budged from its dismal state, the Republicans - or some of them, certainly - played it all for laughs.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Julian Assange loves leaking information. He loves finding other people's secrets and sharing it with the entire world. He even likes to say "information wants to be free."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- I suddenly started feeling sorry for Gov. Rick Perry last night. It came when he said, "I don't think you have a heart."
by Ted Manna
ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 22, 2011 -- For the second time in two weeks, Republican presidential contenders will clash tonight as the Florida State Republican Party kicks off its three-day Presidential V Conference at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando with a Fox News nationally televised debate. The so-called P5 wraps up Saturday with a straw poll whose winner has historically gone on to win the Republican primary.
by Ron Kenner
LOS ANGELES, Calif., Sept. 17, 2011, 11:05pm ET -- Rep. Ron Paul may have won the presidential straw poll at the California GOP 2011 Fall Convention pulling away, but at a party dinner Friday evening, where Rep. Michele Bachmann was the principal speaker, the Minnesota congresswoman won the reception.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Sept. 18, 2011 -- SpongeBob SquarePants may be hazardous to your mental development97if you're a 4-year old. At least that's what two psychologists at the University of Virginia claim, based upon a study they conducted that may have as many holes as the average sponge who lives under the sea.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Before a Joint Session of Congress on Sept. 8, President Obama laid out a $447-billion package of tax cuts and new government spending to help stimulate the economy and create new jobs.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It may be the first time two warring entities have taken to taunting each other online, but the Taliban and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have been taking potshots at each other on Twitter. (ISAF is the NATO-led organization that has been operating in Afghanistan to help grow the Afghan National Security Forces, and to help fight the insurgent Taliban.)
by Ted Manna
TAMPA, Fla., Sept. 12, 2011 -- Trying to lift a sagging blimp of poll numbers, seven trailing candidates for the GOP presidential nomination huffed and puffed as Texas Gov. Rick Perry's fortunes rose far above theirs in the latest numbers on the race. A pre-debate poll showed him far ahead of Mitt Romney and even further ahead of the rest of the pack.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- We're 10 years removed from that tragic September morning of death and destruction in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 10, 2011 (Updated 10:03pm ET) -- As most of the nation got ready Saturday to mark the solemn anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, two gunmen with automatic weapons opened fire on 300 people just after midnight at a popular nightclub in Palmetto, Fla. When the shooting stopped, a man and woman were dead and 22 other were hit with a spray of bullets from automatic weapons and a pistol. The attackers vanished into the night.
by Ted Manna
ORLANDO, Sept. 10, 2011 -- With impassioned eloquence, an Orlando, Fla., city commissioner declared his unwavering support for Democratic President Barack Obama, calling on all Americans of all races to unite to restore the country's status in the world on the 10th anniversary of its worst tragedy.
by Walter Brasch
Editor's note:: Walter Brasch wrote columns, human interest and investigative articles about 9/11, and was one of the first to write about PATRIOT Act violations of civil liberties and the Constitution. Using investigative techniques and inside information, he questioned the Bush Administration on the truth behind its plans for invading Iraq.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Anyone who has ever bought an 8-pack of hot dogs for two bucks already knows what they're eating is not "meat" in the strictest sense of the word.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 7, 2011, 10:38pm ET -- Americans watching the MSNBC GOP presidential candidate debate tonight could not have been very encouraged about their future under any of the seven men and one woman seeking election to the White House in 2012. They left it largely to the White House to come up with a specific plan for American jobs.
by David Young
PANAMA CITY, Sept. 8, 2011 -- Despite an economic boom that could be the envy of the world, Panama's education system is listed as one of the world's worst and may slow down the expansion of its economy.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Sept. 6, 2011 -- For most Americans, the only significance of Labor Day is that it concludes a three day weekend. For Kirk Artley, it means he has about six weeks left of employment.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I write this at the end of three very long days covering Tropical Storm Irene and its aftermath here in southern Vermont.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- We were lucky.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The class of 2015 started college this week. The class of 2015 - students who will, their parents hope, graduate from college in four years - was born in 1993, the same year I got married. There's nothing that makes me feel quite so old as knowing I'm old enough to be the father of today's college freshmen. Me and Ferris Bueller.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 1, 2011 -- House Speaker John Boehner's rejection of President Obama's request to address the nation about American jobs and our economy was not only supremely rude, but broke new ground in how insulting elected officials can be towards the occupant of our nation's highest office.
by Ted Manna
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 25, 2011 -- Here on a sun-splashed, gentle curve of the Gulf of Mexico, Florida's Manatee County - a ground-breaker in implementing the state's Sunshine Act for information openness - this week joined a growing list of cities and counties in harnessing real sunshine by agreeing to install solar panels on more than a dozen major facilities, revving up the local economy with jobs and easily saving its recession-stressed budgets millions of dollars in future energy costs.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When Emmylou Harris sang Townes Van Zandt's "When I Needed You" at the Green River Festival last month, she said she was often asked to sing it at weddings.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- A piece that appeared in Rolling Stone a few weeks ago outlined the unique brand of crazy that is U.S Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 25, 2011 -- Hospital-acquired infections of a dangerous multiple drug-resistant bacteria called KPC has claimed more than 50 lives at the largest public hospital in Panama, The American Reporter has learned.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There is virtually no doubt that global warming exists. Aside from a few cranks and those heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry, the scientific consensus is that the Earth's climate is changing, and changing faster than ever before.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The Tea Party, mutant spawn of billionaires and the Republican Party, held their spineless parents and the nation hostage during the debt ceiling crisis, and now demands an even greater ransom.
by Peter Leeds
RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 22, 2011 -- You've certainly heard the endless stream of negative economic news lately. America's fiscal house is in trouble, job growth has stalled, and we may be driving right into a double-dip recession.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 17, 2011 -- I am a believer in dreams, and when I had a waking dream a few days after the S&P; downgrade of our national debt of President Obama packing his bags and leaving the White House, I was saddened for him and for my country.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- We always think of the art world as being rather genteel and well-heeled. No sensational or controversial stories, unless someone stole a painting from a museum, snuck it back in with a forgery painted over it, and the thief slept with the attractive female insurance investigator trying to track down the missing painting.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last month, I had the opportunity to hear a talk by Maria Margaronis, who covers Europe with her husband, D.D. Guttenplan, for The Nation.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 12, 2011 -- You really have to wonder why Ron Paul can't win the Republican nomination. Consider this: He's the only candidate who tells the truth. He's the only candidate who truly believes in something. (Update, 12AM ET Sunday) He's the only candidate you can trust to do what he promises to do. And he finished very close to winner Michele Baschmann in the Iowa Straw Poll Saturday.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Some people have a real problem with cursing. I won't offer any examples, but you've no doubt heard them. You might not like them, but you know what words I'm talking about. If I say "the S-word," you know what I'm talking about.
ny Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Aug. 8, 2011 -- The chickens of mismanagement, political dogma, and uncontrolled spending have now come home to roost on Wall Street.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla, Aug. 8, 2011 -- The words of Section 4, Article 14 of the Constitution of the United States, which are, "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned," are unique for two reasons.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- After watching the dispiriting spectacle over the past few weeks in Washington of grown men and women acting like petulant children, instead of acting like our elected officials, it just makes me want to ask a few questions.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Aug. 2, 2011 -- There should be little or no euphoria over the Congressional bipartisan Band-Aid used to nurse decades of festering, blistered and infected economic wounds.
by Ted Manna
This downgrading of US creditworthiness makes me mad.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I am not a ghoul. At least, I don't think I am.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As I write this on Wednesday night, I am in utter disbelief at how completely messed up things are in Washington.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I'm tired of people who try to ruin the fun for everyone. I'm tired of these smug societal Puritans who can only enjoy life when they try to spoil everyone else's good time. Like the Calvinists who burned witches at the stake. Like the preacher dad from "Footloose." Like people who call Christmas trees "Holiday foliage."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, July 24, 2011 -- I don't like getting stretched between two poles and hung out to dry, but that's what politicians do to me and my fellow Americans during these debt ceiling jams in Washington.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., July 23, 2011 -- Six weeks away from the decade anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks one would think Wall Street and the nation would take serious note of the slaughter in Norway.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's hard for many Americans to remember that when George W. Bush became President in 2001, he was inheriting from President Bill Clinton one of the strongest federal balance sheets since the end of World War II.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Businesspeople need to quit messing around with the English language. They're really screwing it up. They need to stick with selling things and making money, and leave the language to the experts.
by Richard Hardin
MOBILE, Ala. -- If graduates of some Alabama community colleges seem to lack something in the skills department, it may be that their education was organized by people who themselves have diploma-mill degrees from unaccredited colleges - and perhaps don't know how to teach.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, July 16, 2011 -- I was asked at McDonald's this morning by a few older guys how America could possibly ever recover from a $14-trillion debt load that already eats up 6 percent of our nation's budget. I was able to reply in a single word.
by Tom Clifford
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- The wrestling ring is a place where stereotypes are turned on their head and left locked in a half-nelson.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As the game of political chicken continues in Washington, it looks more and more like the rest of us will be plucked.
by Heather Buchman
STATE COLLEGE, Pa., July 15, 2011 -- Everyone is feeling the heat this summer. Human, canine, feline, or even bovine, we're all at the mercy of high temperatures. Unfortunately, AccuWeather.com meteorologists foresee no signs of relief from 100-degree heat and drought conditions in Texas and the southern Plains any time soon.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- After significant compromise with the recalcitrant Republicans who want to continue to give tax advantages to the wealthy while cutting significant social programs, President Obama has finally taken a stand on debt ceiling negotiations. However, in labor, wildlife management, and the environment he is still compromising rather than coming out forcefully for principles he and the working class believe.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- My wife and I raised a lot of eyebrows when we first announced we were getting married. It was especially puzzling to people, because we had already been married for three years.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I sent a letter to the White House late last week.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., July 8, 2011 -- There's lots of ways to kill a thing. You can starve it to death, or poison it. You can take away its functions, one by one or all at once. You can put a frog in a pot of cold water and turn on a burner under the pot, and it won't realize until it's way too late, if at all, that it's being boiled to death - that's killing it softly, or slowly. You can kill it all at once, as with a gunshot. You can stab it and let it bleed to death. You can feed it tiny bits of radium or mercury for a little while or lead for a long time and let it die. There's just a myriad of ways to kill - as Shakespeare had Cleopatra say in Antony & Cleopatra, "I have pursued conclusions infinite of easy ways to die." She chose an asp, as you would call a scorpion, and she pressed it to her breast.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Most Americans suspect that the so-called recovery after the economic collapse of 2007-09 has been uneven at best.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON -- American corporations have greater profits, more cash and pay less tax than ever before. Taking those taxes out of the American economic equation has devastated the middle class and its principal institution of progress: education.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a good thing that President Obama got his Nobel Peace Prize early in his first term. He certainly wouldn't get it now for running six wars.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Before the royal wedding, the British press was buzzing about a speckled jelly bean with Kate Middleton's face on it.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., June 27, 2011 -- The federal government has launched what may become one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in American history.
by Tom Clifford
BOGOTA -- At the cost of 25 years of their lifespan, workers toil 60 hours a week for $9 a day in the bowels of a mine that once funded an empire.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I turn 44 next week. I'm not going to raise a fuss, or be embarrassed by my advanced age. If anything, I see it as evidence that I'm doing everything right. It also gives me some insight to the proper way that birthdays should be celebrated. So here are my Ten Commandments of Birthdays. 1) Thou shalt not be an old poop and refuse to acknowledge thy birthday.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., June 25, 2011 -- Imagine a marriage in which one partner is a former heterosexual male who has declared himself a woman, augmented his breasts but kept his male genitalia, and gotten married to a formerly heterosexual man who has removed his male genitalia and had them replaced with a vaginal canal, but has not enhanced his breasts.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Over the past few months, there has been a flurry of activity in Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country to pass laws to limit voter access to the polls.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's nearly Father's Day, and I'm ruminating at a playground with my 8-year-old son - about his life compared to my own as an 8-year-old. About what it was like for the Eriks and Davids and Julies of 1975, compared to the Jeremys and Carters and Chloës of 2011.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's not news that the Tea Party radicals are now the tail that is wagging the Republican Party dog.
by Amos Grunebaum, M.D
NEW YORK -- When infertility strikes, it can be a massive source of stress for couples, and many are too quick to assume it's a female issue.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., June 12, 2011 -- Speeding along city streets, going from somewhere to somewhere else, was the Sarah Palin "One Nation I'm Not Running for Anything But Follow Me Anyhow" bus chase.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The first time a black bear visited our house in the woods, my husband grabbed the camera. We watched in fascination as the bear popped the lids off plastic garbage bins as if they were Pringle's tops. Then we called our neighbors, who put the grandkids in the car and came to watch.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- You might think that with the unemployment rate up above 9 percent once again, and with the U.S. economy showing few signs of signs of recovery, that there would be more talk about economic stimulus and less talk about the federal deficit.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- After years of having a Republican do-nothing governor, Vermont last year elected an energetic Democrat with a liberal, do-everything-and-get-it-right fervor. When Peter Shumlin was president pro tem of the Vermont Senate, for example, one of his achievements was bringing gay marriage to Vermont - without a court mandate. He ran for governor on the promise to shut down the state's aging, leaking nuclear power plant. He's only been in office since January 5, and he's already signed a bill to give Vermont single-payer health care.
by James Salt
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 7, 2011 -- On Friday, during Ralph Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition conference here, a progressive group I belong to called Catholics United attempted to deliver a Bible to Congressman Paul Ryan.
by Len Indianer
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., June 7, 2011 -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech on May 23 in Washington, D.C., in which he said, "I envision an Israel that can dedicate even more of its creative and scientific talents to help solve some of the great challenges of the day, foremost of which is finding a clean and affordable substitute for gasoline. And when we find that alternative, we will stop transferring hundreds of billions of dollars to radical regimes that support terror."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., June 2, 2011 -- For months now, two of the best-kept secrets in Manatee County government have been the secret site plans and planning staff reviews of code-named "Project Royal" and "Project Palm" in the county's new Port Manatee Encouragement Zone.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's getting harder to fly these days. The TSA is groping its passengers, airlines are trying to gouge travelers with new charges, seats are getting smaller, and people are getting angrier. I used to travel quite a bit and while it was difficult 10 years ago, it has gotten a lot harder these days.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, June 1, 2011 -- Deep in a funk last night about the future impacts of falling property tax revenues on our cities and schools, the terrible burden of mortgages on the unemployed and poorly-paid Americans who are losing their homes, and I think the grace of God, I've come up with a plan that can help Americans save their homes, banks ensure their own future, and the economy begin to steadily recover.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Is college a sucker's game? Billionaire venture capitalist, hedge fund manager and vocal libertarian Peter Thiel thinks so.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Fifteen million Americans served in the military during World War II, and about 359,000 Americans died in the war.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., May 30, 2011 -- Unless you were in a coma the past few years, you probably know who Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton are.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., May 24, 2011 -- Now they tell me I have woefully failed in the upbringing of my children.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- In spite of, or maybe because of, that intolerable "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" song by Poison, everyone pretty much knows that, well, every rose has thorns.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The latest garbage spewing hate as it circles the Internet in a viral state of panic continues a three-year smear against Barack Obama.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 22, 2011 -- I keep reminding myself that I am a nothing when I offer my opinion about Israel and its progress toward Middle East peace.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Why aren't you kids practicing your instruments?"
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., May 21, 2011 -- I am now informed that the world will end tomorrow at 6 p.m. local time.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If the International Monetary Fund is to be believed, China is poised to surpass the United States as the world's largest economy by 2016.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa -- With less than a week before the election, Marshbaum has been campaigning furiously.
by Ted Manna
MERRITT ISLAND, Fla. -- Even from miles away on the Banana River, here on Merritt Island, Fla., the shuttle takeoff spectacle impresses first-timers and old hands both, and if it hadn't been for a little help from one of those launch veterans, I still could have lost the final liftoff of the Space Shuttle Endeavour in the clouds this morning.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The former members of the Bush Administration and their conservative apologists want to give George W. Bush all the credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden and the capture of a substantial amount of his operational data on May 1.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Finally, after 43 years, I'm getting my own vegetable garden.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 4, 2011 -- It's awfully disappointing to hear a new set of facts about the death of Osama bin Laden after the first set fit the drama so well. First we heard he grabbed a gun and his wife and went down firing away, his wife taking bullets meant for him and dying at his side.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Osama bin Laden is dead.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, May 4, 2011 -- The Florida Legislature sent a proposed constitutional amendment to the Nov. 2012 ballot today that will not only apply 50 percent lower lower Save Our Homes-style caps on property tax increases on business properties, but first-time home buyers with a special 5-year, 50 percent property tax exemption. That will cut taxes for the buyers below what homestead neighbors with identical property values will pay.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., May 4, 2011 -- The killing of Osama Bin Laden by U.S. Navy Seals inside Pakistan presents a new challenge to the United States and its intelligence communities in dealing modern political and media realities.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It gladdens my heart to hear that Republican members of Congress are getting an earful from their constituents regarding the party's budget priorities.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., April 30, 2011 -- No one loves news of a "major scientific breakthrough" more than I do. I devour the stories, and they often end up in the "Briefs" section of the American Reporter's home page. But almost all of them have one thing in common: they're lies.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE N.M., May 1, 2011 -- The true nature of New York-centric and Inside the Beltway media bias was clearly revealed on CBS Sunday morning when their coverage of the fatal frailties of weather identified most of us as people with a "Ho Hum" existence.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I insult my dog on a fairly regular basis. Did you see that? I just did it again.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- In case you're in a funk because you think the reason you didn't receive an invitation to the royal wedding is because the Brits are still ticked off about that silly little skirmish back in 1776, the American media have a solution for you.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The budget game that is being played out in Washington is clear for all to see.
by Walter Brasch
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Take a pigeon.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., April 22, 2011 -- The Rev. Joey Mimbs, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Bradenton, had a day off on Good Thursday of Holy Week, the peak days of Christianity's liturgical calendar. He wasn't taking phone calls at his church or at home but enjoying a well-deserved day of rest.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- One of the dumbest things I ever heard when I was a kid was the phrase "distract the other students from their education. "I tended to hear it frequently, since I was the distraction, but I heard it in relation to other things too, especially in high school.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's been pathetic to watch the surrender of President Obama and the Democrats in the face of the Tea Party-fueled Republican goal of spending cuts and austerity for working Americans and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- A wall of suffocating heat nearly vaporized me as I walked into Marshbaum's house. In the kitchen was a portable kiln spewing fiery venom that was curling the linoleum. In the den, wildly pumping a potter's wheel flinging clay all over the room, was Marshbaum.
Mark Scheinbaum
IN THE LAND OF LIBERTY -- And dissent filled the Land.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., April 11, 2011 -- I believe in government, and I believe government ought to do all it reasonably can to make its citizens prosperous.
by Joe Shea
SARASOTA, Fla., April 10, 2011 -- Top officials from two counties blasted the Florida Department of Transportation and its consultants for barring use of fiber optic lines it will install along I-75, urging the FDOT to join the 21st Century to save money and seize opportunities to "piggy-back," or plant parallel fiber for cities, counties and towns along the way. The venue was a meeting of transportation officials with city and county government officials in Sarasota, Fla.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- No one does the persecution complex quite like right-wingers.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- I was thinking of the two Elizabeths who both fit prominently in my memories of the past seven decades. First, I looked up the origin of the name Elizabeth and was pleasantly surprised to read the meanings.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Creativity is not a tourist site. I live in a place, Brattleboro, that prides itself on being an "art town." We sell that image to newspapers and magazines in the hopes that it will drive the tourist trade our way. And it seems to be working.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As we nervously watch a nuclear catastrophe unfold at the Fukushima reactor complex in Japan, the memories of Chernobyl keep coming to mind.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., April 2, 2011 -- President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have been proved right in their outspoken effort to get a Florida pastor not to burn a pile of Korans at his church last September.
by Michael Riccards
TRENTON, N.J., March 31, 2011 -- The change of seasons, especially in the East, brings bucolic dreams of springtime, and of its sister, baseball. And once again, it is Opening Day.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- As you would expect, Michael Moore, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka were in Madison, Wisc., to support and rally the workers in their fight against the union-busting governor and Republican-dominated state legislature.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Helicopter parents are those parents who hover over their kids, guarding their precious snowflakes against all the bumped knees, skinned noses, and hurty feelings they may encounter throughout their life.
by Michael P. Riccards
TRENTON, N.J. -- All across the nation, the states are the battleground for conflicts on public pensions. While the federal government has taken aggressive steps to save, for example, UAW pensions in the automobile industry, it has rarely reformed federal pension systems (Congress belongs, of course, to those funds). In all of this, we are bearing witness to state governors' attacks on public pensions.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- There has been a lot in the news this past week.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I've been living and working next to a nuclear plant for the past two decades.
by Michael Riccards
TRENTON, N.J. -- Within hours of the 2010 Congressional elections, Republican officeholders, media wizards, and 24/7 hate television and radio began to relish the demise of the President. Now, less than six months later, we cannot find strong, legitimate Republicans to run for president. All of a sudden, we are left with a collection of no-name governors (quick: identify one accomplishment of Governor Buddy Roemer) and has-beens from previous races. Where is Bob Dole when the GOP needs him most?
by Walter Brasch
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Pennsylvania's Republican Gov. Tom Corbett may be the most adept politician in America.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Forbes magazine recently put out its "Rich List" for 2011. Several numbers stood out.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It was bound to happen someday. In the 1950s, we were given 3-D glasses to make movies "come to life." In the '80s and '90s, it was Surround Sound that put us "in the middle of the action." And in the 21st Century, odor is the Next Big Thing that will make entertainment and education more realistic.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Normally, a trip to the Post Office is pretty matter-or-fact. Not this morning.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 19, 2011 -- As Tomahawk missiles from offshore American carriers and ordnance from French Rafale jets rain down fire and death on the Libyan troops and mercenaries of its murderous, erratic leader, the last thing he's worried about is how they spell his name in the headlines of American newspapers. And there's the rub.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., March 20, 2011 -- Headlines flash by from Tokyo, Tripoli, Washington and Wall Street and the mouth begs the mind for mini-reality checks for the sake of intellectual honesty and integrity, or just plain sanity.
by Charles J. Reid
GILROY, Calif. -- After watching former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on the Christian Network explain that he committed adultery because he was "so passionate" about America, a quick image flashed across my mind in a daydream moment.
by Michael P. Riccards
HAMILTON, N.J. -- Most recently, Pope Benedict XVI sent a special team to Ireland to review the public evidence over massive clerical pedophilia in that once devout nation. The team was headed up by Sean Cardinal O'Malley of Boston, who had won plaudits over his handling of a similar mess in Boston.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., March 16, 2011 -- The banged-up flatbed bounced and bumped at 65mph, headed southbound on I-95 in moderate traffic, when a wheel came flying off.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In a op-ed piece for The New York Times written in April 1944, Vice President Henry Wallace offered this definition of fascism: "A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 11, 2011 -- Yesterday, March 10, 2011, I looked and saw the needle was below Empty and pulled into a Racetrack gas station in Bradenton to put in $10.22 of regular gas in my 2002 Saturn SC-2, which has a 1.9-liter engine and runs at 125 horsepower, and then I reset the miles counter to 0.
by Ed Tubbs
PALM SPRINGS, Calif. -- Guess who?
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Historian and satirist Thomas Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." However, Mark Twain casually remarked, "It shows that he did not know how to tell them."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There was an interesting post last week by Simon Johnson, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, on The New York Times' "Economix" blog.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As someone who works with technology every single day, I pride myself on knowing a lot about it. I manage blogs for other people, I give talks about social networking, and I'm always reading up or playing with the latest gadget.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Whenever I become downhearted over man's inhumanity to man, I recognize that man's inhumanity to women is even more frightening.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Conservatives heaped plenty of hosannas upon the memory of Ronald Reagan on the occasion of the centennial of his birth earlier this month.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON, March 1, 2011 -- The net that seeks Libyan dictator Muammar Ghaddafi is being closed tighter and tighter, day by day, as many people of his inner circle are defecting, including his interior minister, ambassadors, high-ranking government officials and his voluptuous "favorite nurse."
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON, England, Feb. 24, 2011 -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of rape and sexual assault, according to the ruling of a British court here today.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The last segment on every Friday's broadcast of ABC's "World News with Diane Sawyer" is a "Person of the Week."
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I've worked for other companies, and I've owned my own business. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, no matter which side you're on.
by Ron Kenner
HOLLYWOOD, Feb. 26, 2011 -- Another great South American literary figure is gone, but his spirit informs every dedicated writer - and especially his friends.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Feb. 17, 2011 -- Did you believe that it was going to happen this way?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 18, 2011 -- Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, a very rich Republican who ran as an outsider promising to cut government and spur the creation of 700,000 jobs, tapped into a rich vein of controversy recently when he declared that the state would reject $2.4-billion the Obama Administration offered as a down payment on a high-speed rail system linking Tampa to Orlando, and later, possibly, to Jacksonville and Miami.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Lara Logan, CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent, was beaten and sexually assaulted on Feb. 11, while on assignment in Cairo to report on the revolution on the day Hosni Mubarak resigned as president.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Spring training got underway this past week with those four magical words every baseball fan loves to hear: "pitchers and catchers report."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 15, 2011, 9:30 a.m. -- Just two days ago, the New York Times ran a very short story saying that anonymous Deutsch Börse officials in Frankfurt, Germany, had denied a story in the Wall Street Journal several days before saying that the German exchange, based in Frankfurt but a global player, was buying the New York Stock Exchange, home of the Big Board and its storied trading floor, and now officially known as NYSE Euronext.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- The thought that crossed my mind this morning was so incongruous I thought someone else must have been behind it.
by Joe Shea
FEB. 11, 2011 -- Vast, cheering throngs jammed Tahrir Square in Cairo today to celebrate the liberation of their country from the autocratic, corruption-ridden and deadly rule of President Hosni Mubarak after 18 days of peaceful demonstrations forced the Egyptian Army to remove him.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you want to know why there was a revolution in Tunisia, why a revolution is in progress in Egypt and why several other governments elsewhere around the world are now balanced on a knife edge, consider these factors.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The U.S. House of Representatives this week did something it should have done years ago - it blocked the continuation of three of the more controversial parts of the PATRIOT Act.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Brace yourself, I've got some horrible news.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Feb. 9, 2011, 9:00 p.m. -- "Do I look like I'm on a diet?" That was invariably my reply when a hostess or waiter asked me if I wanted "diet or regular" at any meal. I'm at least 115 pounds overweight, and yet that snarky response may have saved my life, I learned tonight.
by Ron Kenner
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 10, 2011 -- Until the current massive uprising in Egypt, who could have guessed? Wow! Did you watch or read the news yesterday? Thrilling! Stunning!
by Joe Shea
Now that Hosni Mubarak has stepped down and his regime is falling with him, will Israel be less secure? Even with its powerful army, navy and air force, nuclear arsenal and shrewd, capable leaders - and their steadfast American ally - they say yes.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "The business corporation is an artificial state-created entity with unlimited life; highly favorable techniques for acquiring, accumulating, and retaining vast wealth through economic transactions having nothing to do with politics; and only one purpose - making money. Human beings, on the other hand, die, do not enjoy economic advantages like limited liability and, most important, have a conscience that sometimes transcends crude economic self-interest."
by Mark Scheinbaum
TAOS, N.M. (UPDATE Feb. 8, 2011, 7:20 p.m. ET)-- Nearly half of the New Mexico Natural Gas users in the coldest areas of New Mexico entered a sixth day without heat as a new snow storm perched along the Colorado border promising more sub-zero temperatures, snow, and high winds tonight.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa.. --- A man who killed 100 sled dogs has received not a prison sentence but workers' compensation from a British Columbia agency. The man successfully proved he suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after he claimed he was ordered to kill the dogs.
by Ron Kenner
LOS ANGELES, Calif., Feb. 3, 12:50 p.m. PST -- With some 47 million people living in poverty, 50 million without health insurance, millions jobless and millions more underemployed, President Barak Obama could be less circumspect and more passionate about stimulating our economy. We need urgent measures for these urgent times.
by Justin Roberti
STATE COLLEGE, Pa., Feb. 4, 2011 -- If you don't like this winter, it may be time to move to Florida: There are a lot more ahead.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Just when you think you have everything in place, your world starts spinning again and everything goes off kilter.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Feb. 4, 2011 -- Anti-government protestors in Cairo have learned that freedom is not free.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Updated Jan. 29, 2011-- Americans don't ask their country to get involved in the internal political struggles of the nations it interacts with, and the general rule is that we don't.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., Feb. 4, 2011 -- We've spent the last two days here in Indiana trying to fend off the snow and ice storms that blanketed the entire eastern half of the country, and snowed me in for two days. Luckily, I own the company, so I can work from home if I want to.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- While many people, including our president, are calling for "civility of debate," I fear that ship sailed long ago. The real issue today is understanding the debasement of our language, and how we in America have traveled from George Carlin to George Orwell.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I wanted to be a spy when I was a kid.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The $50 million Burton Family Football Complex at the University of Connecticut may be nameless soon. Robert G. Burton, who had donated about $3 million to help fund the stadium, wants his money back and his family's name erased from UConn football. He also informed UConn he will cancel his $50,000 a season suite in the stadium.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Jan. 31, 2011 -- Looting, civil unrest, and a perceived lack of direction of the "revolutionary" movement in Egypt seem to have forced America and others to rethink their relationship to President Hosni Mubarak, and revealed the sad truths of the "Gimmetocracy."
by Joe Shea
There's a lot to do when you have to flee the country you've led for 30 years.
by Mark Scheinbaum
BOCA RATON, Fla., Jan. 29, 2011 -- The demonstrators in Cairo met by riot police, tear gas, and a gathering of soldiers and tanks should remind American and other diplomats of events 58 years ago this month, when Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein shook up Egypt, the Suez Canal and the world.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- While the national media was fixated last week on the kabuki theater of the new Republican majority in the U.S. House voting to repeal last year's health care reform bill, they missed another, more important, development in Vermont.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Jack Spratt had nothing on us. He and his wife were a perfect complement to each other. He could eat no fat, she could eat no lean - and between the two of them they kept the platter clean.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 24, 2011, 4 p.m. -- Two St. Petersburg, Fla., officers and a deputy U.S. Marshal are the latest in a series of shootings that have targeted multiple police officers and killed four in the past week. Among them were eight officers wounded in the states of Indiana, Oregon, Washington and Michigan on Sunday.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS -- So, are you on The Facebook yet? It's all the rage with the young people these days, them and their Tweeters and MySpacers, and the YouTubers. The Facebook is one of those, whatchamacallit, social Internetworks.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The problems our nation faces in January 2011 pale by comparison to the world of January 1941.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Jan. 21, 2011 -- Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to the United States this past week has been met by both praise and political posturing.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- The blizzard that drew New York City to a halt last week filled me with yearning, or, shall I say, a heart-rending longing for home. Two weeks earlier, over the same television screen, I saw one million people huddled together to watch the ball drop to the sound of voices counting down the last 10 seconds to midnight, welcoming in the year 2011.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON -- The new British coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has announced tough new measures to control immigration, including a halt to acceptance of applications for Tier 1 general immigration and making student visas harder to obtain, tuition fees vastly more expensive and jobs to pay the fees far more difficult to find.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Just about anything that could be said about the murders in Tucson have been said.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week, I was at the Statehouse in Montpelier to cover the inauguration of Peter Shumlin as Vermont's 81st governor.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 10, 2011 -- It was just about this time last Sunday night when I tuned into WFLA 970-AM here in Tampa Bay to hear George Noory and got Bill Cunningham instead. Seconds later, his guest was saying of President Obama, "He's a Marxist! He's a socialist! He's a Communist!"
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- One of the bedrock tenets of conservatism is the idea of American Exceptionalism - that the United States is the greatest nation in the world.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 10, 2011 -- Jared Lee Loughner must have known he was a nobody.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- When the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot two weeks ago published on its internet page three videos made four years ago by the executive officer of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, it unleashed a firestorm that would sink the career of a decorated officer.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Jan. 9, 2012 -- The fires of the 2010 Congressional campaign may have claimed their last victim.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Jan. 10, 2011 -- You don't get elected to Congress as a 40-year-old female Democrat in Tucson, Ariz., unless you're prepared to fight for what you believe in and ready to engage in the hard-nosed give-and-take of the highly partisan House of Representatives of 2011.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Jan. 10, 2011 -- The shootings in Tucson caught downsized newspapers, superficial cable news networks, and broadcast news networks covering sports, in an even more deficient "weekend" mode. Even the daily Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Republic couldn't update their sites - but neither could the much-respected St. Petersburg Times.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M, Jan. 9, 2011 -- One question among many that will arise from the Tucson rampage is why U.S. District Court Chief Judge John McCarthy Roll of Arizona was at the event. Appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and elevated to chief judge of the United States District Court for Arizona in 2006. He was also a former U.S. Attorney and had 40 years of law and service to his credit.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Jan. 8, 2011, 4:31 p.m. ET (UPDATED) -- Like so many Americans, the 22-year-old man, Jared Lee Loughner, identified as the shooter of Tucson, Ariz., Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others this morning at a constituent event outside a Safeway store, had a Facebook profile. But it may have been created by a right-wing hacker who wanted to pin blame for the shooting on the far left.
by Dr. Hubertus Hoffman
LONDON -- When Al Qaeda or other radicals attack and kill Christians in Muslim countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Iraq or Indonesia "in the name of Allah and the Koran," they offend the Holy Book of more than one billion Muslims, they offend the Prophet and they offend Allah in the worst way possible.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- Back in late 1979, when I was writing a story called "Notes On the End of the World" for the L.A. Weekly, then in its first year of publication, I interviewed a UCLA professor of astrophysics, who made a statement to me I have never forgotten: "Nothing in nature," he said, "ever moves in a straight line."
by Ed Tubbs
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- I was recently asked to read an email from a "conservative" that included the charge that "Obama, in just two years, has managed to double the national debt."
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- To me, one of last year's more interesting news stories was about urine in a library.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Has President Obama got his mojo back?
by Andrew Oram
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Free software in the cloud isn't just a nice-sounding ideal, or even an efficient way to push innovation forward. Opening the cloud also opens the path to a bountiful environment of computing for all.
by Randolph T. Holhut
BRATTLEBORO, Vt. -- While too many of our leaders in Washington pretend that global warming, peak oil and the growing numbers of the hungry in our nation are just figments of the liberal imagination, I recently got a glimpse of a project that, when fully operational, will take care of all three problems and provide jobs in the process.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 18, 2010 -- A remarkable new energy source from fractional hydrogen will allow a gallon of ordinary water to become the energy equivalent of 200 barrels of oil, a team of physicists working near the onetime New Jersey laboratories of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein is saying.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "OMG," said Karl. "Did you see the list of the most annoying words of the year?"
by Mitchel Cohen
BROOKLYN, N.Y., Dec. 27, 2010-- What a glorious, glorious old-time blizzard!
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It must suck to be British.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Ten years ago this week, democracy and fair play got mugged by five Supreme Court justices who overruled the will of more than 50 million Americans and made George W. Bush president.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON, Dec. 16, 2010 -- Julian Assange, who exposed thousands of stolen U.S. diplomatic notes over the past last few weeks as founder of the controversial file-sharing site WikiLeaks, won his freedom on sex -related allegations from a London-area prison this morning - at least until a Jan. 11, 2011 hearing - after Justice Duncan B.W. Ouseley of Britain's High Court noted Assange turned himself in when he learned Swedish authorities sought to question him.
Joseph Patrick Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 29. 2010 -- I created this sonnet a long time ago at a delicatessen that's now torn down at the end of Wilshire Blvd. in Santa Monica, Calif. It's meant to be read in the last minutes of the old year to welcome in the new one.
by PBS NewsHour
NEW YORK, Dec. 14, 2010 -- Below is a transcript of Tuesday evening's NewsHour segment on Richard Holbrooke's life, featuring editor Susan Glassner and U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte..
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The car died. Just choked, sputtered, and died right there on the highway.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform disbanded last week, which is good news for the nation.
by Alex Sosnowski
STATE COLLEGE, Pa., Dec. 13, 2010 -- A storm over the Northwest that started the week will spread a zone of snow and ice over the southeastern United States Wednesday into Thursday.
by Joseph Patrick Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 21, 2010 -- After 465 years, The American Reporter welcomes back the Moon at Winter Solstice.
by Mark Scheinbaum
SANTA FE, N.M.. Dec. 11, 2010 -- Mark Madoff, 46, eldest son of convicted Wall Street scam-meister Bernie Madoff was found dead this morning. It looks like he killed himself.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
READING, U.K., Dec. 11, 2010 -- Mulibir Rai had been suffering since 2004 from severe gout, a disease that causes painful swelling of the toes due to excessive uric acid in the bloodstream, and arthritis-like symptoms in his joints. He took high doses of anti-inflammatory and other drugs to suppress the acute pain, and their side-effects included unbearable headaches and nausea.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Man, I'm tired of the TSA," said Karl, my friend and part-time curmudgeon. "The groping, the full-body scans, the loss of personal freedoms."
American Reporter Staff
NEW YORK, N.Y., Dec. 9, 2010 -- A Wall Street name known and respected for more than a century until the crippling subprime bust will live on, the owner of a Florida stock brokerage house that acquired the name vowed today.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 8, 2010 -- Mr. President, you are one of the greatest people of the past 40 years, and I heartily support you - except on this deal with the Republicans over tax cuts for the wealthy. I don't think we need an extension of unemployment benefits as badly as you do, and I don't think trading that extension for billions in tax cuts is worth it, either.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 8, 2010 -- Now, Julian Assange's "insurance" file - the secret cache of documents he has vowed to release if any harm comes to him - is his greatest liability.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Sure, Buddy, you can ask me anything."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 4, 2010 -- It has been fascinating, and a little scary, to watch FoxNews unfold its attack on WikiLeaks. Today, for instance, a man from a private security company, the International Advisory Group told viewers to support designation of Julian Assange as an "enemy combatant" - presumably to set him up for the assassination some conservatives have urged.
American Reporter Staff
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 6, 2010 -- Here is the full text of the confidential U.S. State Dept. cable released by WikiLeaks, describing the cyberattacks mounted by the Chinese government against Google, the world's top search engine and a rival of the Chinese search engine Baidu.com.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Dec. 3, 2010 -- Over the past few months, Julian Assange and his team at WikiLeaks.org have done more to expose the mendacity of U.S. foreign policy than anyone since Daniel Ellsberg.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Ling Chi, also known as "the death of a thousand cuts," was a method of public execution in China that involved cutting off pieces of a person's body until he or she died. Banned in 1905, this drastic punishment first became a metaphor and then came to rest in the English language as a cliché.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 1, 2010 -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may not appreciate their release, but the State Dept. cables I've seen on WikiLeaks are nothing new - and they make America look good.
by Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 29, 2010 -- Compared to the kind of secret cables that WikiLeaks has just shared with the world, everyday public statements from government officials are exercises in make-believe.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Almost all children hear a set of conflicting statements from their parents, relatives, and friends. They're told if they study hard, if they work hard, they can achieve whatever they want. It's the "American Dream." But they're also told that life isn't always fair.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The light of late November streaming through the bare trees of the hillside I live on in Vermont summons memories of another late November afternoon, when three shots from a rifle altered the course of history.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Personal safety devices violates health and safety laws in England.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 25, 2010 -- When they turned out my lights two weeks ago, I had a neighbor who loaned me $200, and I was able to pay him back from my Social Security check two days later. I'm grateful, indeed, to him.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Thanksgiving has always been one of those weird holidays.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) is the only person sitting on President Obama's deficit reduction commission who is a progressive.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Nov. 19, 2010 -- Over the phone, his voice was raspy but it carried that certain weight federal agents' always do. He was growing sick of the constant criticism, the charges he called "false" being hurled at the Transportation Security Administration and its screeners at America's airports.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Nov. 17, 2010 -- Bemoaning Queen Elizabeth's wealth dropping to a mere $695,000,000 CNBC-TV's David Faber wondered aloud if the Monarchy had been depleting assets like "sort of Sir Robin (Hood) of Locksley."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 15, 2010 -- When I was very young, I had a nightmare: Chinese soldiers rushed into our house, found me sitting in my father's chair, and with a sword swiftly cut me in half.
by John Tyner
SAN DIEGO, Calif., Nov. 13, 2010 -- This morning, I tried to fly out of San Diego International Airport but was refused by the TSA. I had been somewhat prepared for this eventuality. I have been reading about the millimeter wave and backscatter X-ray machines and the possible harm to health as well as the vivid pictures they create of people's naked bodies. Not wanting to go through them, I had done my research on the TSA's Web site prior to traveling to see if SAN had them. From all indications, they did not. When I arrived at the security line, I found that the TSA's Web site was out of date. SAN does in fact utilize backscatter X-ray machines.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I'll be 50 next year. I've been paying into Social Security since I was 12, when I picking cucumbers in my first summer job.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 4, 2010 -- After seven hours in the Florida sun greeting voters for the Democrats, I left to get breakfast and ran out of gas as soon as I left the parking lot. Stuck in the median gap, I crossed myself and said a prayer for help; in about 30 seconds, Crystina Page stopped in her old blue van. She steered as I pushed the car across the busy street into a quiet driveway.
by Mark Scheinbaum
BOCA RATON, Fla., Nov. 8, 2010 -- On his official "Team Coco" Web site, the late-night-tv return of Conan O'Brien is summed up with this note:
If you've missed ANY of the awesome CONAN promos that have been on tv.
in the run up to our new show on Monday? WE'VE GOT EM ALL!
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- While the rest of the nation seemingly rushed headlong off a cliff on Tuesday night and allowed the party that got us into the economic mess we're in back into power, Vermont followed its own political path.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Nov. 6, 2010 -- Last night's election results have been "discounted" in the truest sense by not just Wall Street but by most foreign stock markets. It is a good refresher course in the fact that markets are usually anticipatory.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Dear politicians, political consultants, activists, and pundits: The election is over. The votes have been cast. You won or lost.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON -- Last week, the Brattleboro Reformer, my home paper, not only fired me, they fired my mother.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 3, 2010 (UPDATED Nov, 5, 2010, 12:30 A.M. ET) -- An irresistible combination of anonymous and sometimes foreign money, the rage of Republican seniors, Democratic voters' fears and apathy, and the unpredictable arrival of an infantile but influential new faction of the GOP called the Tea Party swept away the last vestiges of President Barack Obama's hope and change agenda last night, handing control of the House of Representatives to Republican conservatives and leaving the once-strong 10-seat Democratic majority in the United States Senate hanging by one uncertain vote. [Update: The final U.S. Senate results from CNN show Republicans witrh 47 seats and Democrats with 52. The final CNN results for the House of Representatives shows 186 Democratic seats and 239 Republican seats. The CNN site did not distinguish between Independents and the major parties.]
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- My little brother is finally getting married at the ripe old age of 29. And as his older brother - someone who got married when he was a 12-year-old punk - I have several pearls of wisdom that I can offer after nearly 17 years of wedded bliss.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 30, 2010 -- The biggest joke was the size of the crowd. I've seen a million people crowded into Washington for a May Day anti-war rally during Vietnam, and there weren't a million people there.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- On the eve of the 1970 midterm elections, economist and Democratic Party stalwart John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a short book entitled "Who Needs The Democrats and What It Takes to Be Needed."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 27, 2010, 6:35PM -- Ariana Huffington says she is bringing 10,000 people with her on 200 buses that leave Flushing, New York, at 6AM Saturday morning, Oct. 30, for the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., from 1 TO 3PM ET on Saturday afternoon.
by Walter and Rosemary Brasch
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- It will be cold tonight in Pennsylvania, but that means nothing to dozens of politicians who are in their final week of a ubiquitous campaign to get a government job.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Not that I have anything bad to say about airline pilots. We trust them with our lives, and God bless them, everyone.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I used to enjoy the cold weather. I don't mean "Winter is so beautiful after a snowfall" or anything namby-pamby like that.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There was a big celebration in Switzerland last week as 20 years of drilling ended on what will ultimately become the world's longest rail tunnel.
American Reporter Staff
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 24, 2010 -- There are no easy choices in America these days.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 22, 2010 -- With cuts in welfare payments and hikes in public housing rents - and 490,000 job cuts in the public sector - Britain's Conservative Party Prime Minister David Cameron hopes to slash a budget deficit that is just over half of that in the United States. But as he watches the reaction in France among workers rioting in the streets of Paris, Lyon, Nice and Marseilles, among other cities, over retirement age issues, he must wonder what is in store for London when the hammer comes down there.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa.--There's good news this week. There's only about two weeks before the midterm elections.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Just in time to influence the Vermont gubernatorial election, Forbes Magazine has released its annual report on the best business states in the Union. Vermont comes in 45th - up two spots from last year.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Back in January, I wrote about the Supreme Court's decision to grant corporations - in the name of preserving free speech - the right to spend unlimited sums of money in political campaigns.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Young violinist Tyler Clementi is on the cover of People Magazine. But he doesn't know it. He jumped off the George Washington Bridge on September 22.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 13, 2010 -- On the broad shoulders of a young Chilean miner the hopes and hearts of a battered nation and a worried world were lifted to the surface of a remote desert mine where he once labored in obscurity, only to find himself Tuesday night in a glaring spotlight cast by more than 2,000 journalists from 200 countries after he spent 68 days in captivity with 32 colleagues half a mile beneath the earth.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Oct. 8, 2010 -- Political reporters love narratives, and love to cling to them long after reality turns their story lines and conventional wisdom to ashes.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Sherlock Holmes disliked women. Sam Spade trusted only his secretary. Mike Hammer wasn't afraid to kill them. Philip Marlowe? He didn't like anybody.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- My knees are killing me. I'm either suffering from Old Guy Knee or Big Guy Knee. I like to think I'm suffering from Former Athlete Knee, which is usually a combination of both.
by Stephan Zimmermann
PRESQUE ISLE, Me. -- To judge by the blogs and local and national media, America has regressed and succumbed to an irrational fear of the Muslim religious faith.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- America's airlines - they're the ones who told passengers to take a flying leap - have wallpapered the country with ads focusing upon how inexpensive their basic airfares are.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- There is an old saying: "The more things change the more they remain the same," and, still another, "Times change and we change with them."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 2, 2010 -- As leaders and groups emerge throughout history, it is a universal precept that they are tested by trial and tragedy.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Kid, why do you insist on playing on that Facespace?" asked Karl, grabbing my mobile phone.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., Oct. 1, 2010 -- The House Republicans' long-awaited "Pledge to America" came out last week, and it's hard to believe that they could cram so many faulty assumptions, misstatements, fuzzy math and just plain lies into one 21-page document.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The old Italian crooner with the bouffant brown toupee and a career that topped out opening for Don Rickles in Atlantic City had a hard time hitting some of the notes, but there was one note he was certain of.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- A dozen or so years ago I wrote an article called "The Handwriting on the Wall," and in it I mentioned how I had laughed years earlier when a woman objected to anyone smoking in an elevator and took her case to court.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Politics is all about salesmanship and getting your message across to voters.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 28, 2010 -- The Washington Post exists in a stratosphere of journalism inhabited by only half a dozen newspapers in the world, if that. It has an exceptional reputation for fine work, and its original reporting is envied throughout the world - except when it comes to UFOs.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last Sunday, my mother's Florida condominium complex, Lauderdale West, threw a party in her honor.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's the killer question that every writer dreads:
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 18, 2010 -- I saw a curious thing today. There was a small blue insect with a hard carapace that was going up and down the screen on my lanai, which is almost 8 ft. high, apparently searching for a way to get out to the world of wind and stars and trees and fellow bugs.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Now that the commemorations and ceremonies marking the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001. attacks are passed, it's a good time to ask a few questions about the rough beast that was born that day.
by Joyce Marcel
PLANTATION, Fla. -- It's been raining so hard here in South Florida that the canal beyond our backyard overflowed and the ducks were swimming on the grass. It's just another of the many reasons this place would be a gold mine if I could write fiction.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 10, 10:00 P.M. ET -- The great irony of the Gainesville Koran-burning saga is that at the end, imams were calling the shots and other Islamic clergy were at the microphones on his lawn, calling their host an extremist on Friday.
by Joyce Marcel
PLANTATION, Fla. -- After 35 years, my mother is leaving her beloved home and moving to a one-bedroom apartment in a luxury independent living facility up the road.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, is currently the party's darling with his "Roadmap for America's Future," a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Every kid has their favorite day of the year. And because they're greedy little capitalists, their favorites are Christmas and their birthdays. They also have a few least favorite days too. Like the day after Christmas, dentist day, and the first day of school. And the second. And the third. And so on. But when I was a kid, one of my least favorite days of the year was Opposite Day.
by Joe Shea
GAINESVILLE, Fla., Sept. 8, 2010, 10:59PM ET -- I drove 385 miles for a 10-minute conversation today with the co-pastor of the church where the Rev. Terry Jones plans to build a bonfire of Holy Korans between 6 and 9 PM on Sept. 11, just after the Florida Gators finish playing the South Florida Bulls in an afternoon game at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium a few miles away.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week, the Commerce Department slashed its estimate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), reporting that the GDP rose at only a 1.5 percent annual rate in the second quarter, compared to the 2.4 percent annual rate originally predicted.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you've ever wondered why so many Americans become agitated over the idea of gay marriage, you might be interested in an explanation by author Jonathan Rauch.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 4, 2010 -- On my first night in Juarez, I stopped a policeman on foot to ask him for directions. He suggested that I let him drive my car.
by Andy Oram
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Was the future of the Internet wrenched onto a new path on Nov. 7, 2005? Bloomberg Businessweek posted an interview that day with Edward Whitacre, Jr., CEO of the telephone company SBC, posing some general questions about his plans in the wake of purchasing AT&T; Wireless. When asked what he thought about "Internet upstarts like Google," Whitacre replied with some heat:
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Aug. 31, 2010 -- It took 19 months, but as President Obama addressed the American people tonight on the end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq, it was clear to me that the young Illinois Senator had grown into the job a majority of Americans entrusted to him.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I'll eat just about anything once. There is not much I don't like or won't try.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- For most of us, people, places and things are of interest in one way or another. I'm a people person. I like to learn about a person - where they're from and what molded them, either into the person in front of me or in the pages of a book.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Given the myriad of economic, environmental and geo-political crises we are saddled with, it seems absolutely unbelievable to me that people are arguing about whether a $100 million Sufi Muslim community center should be built near the former site of the World Trade Center towers in New York.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 28, 2010 -- Like many Americans, I was startled and transfixed by the enormity of the response to Glenn Back's call to "restore honor" in America.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's understandable: if you own a company, you don't want people to confuse yours with another company that sells a similar product with a similar name.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- August is usually the silly season for news, but this year it seems somehow different; America seems to be drowning in dumb.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's hard to imagine a 100 degree day in Moscow.
by AR Staff
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 22, 2010 - The woes of Florida are well known.
by Richard Griswold
DESTIN, Fla. -- Over the past several years, Floridians have seen more than their share of disasters. Hurricanes, recession and an ecological disaster of monumental proportions have dealt severe blows - but the economic devastation of these events pale in comparison to the manmade disaster looming on our horizon.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week in this column I studied the Democratic primary candidates for governor and decided, in the end, to support Peter Shumlin. (Which, according to my e-mail, pleased his mother and ticked off Matt Dunne.)
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Okay, remember kids, this is a museum filled with very expensive items. You absolutely may not touch anything."
by Eileen Fleming
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Aug. 17, 2010 -- On Monday morning, Aug. 16, some 14 non-violent peace activists - mostly nuns, priests and other clergy - were arrested for blocking a Caterpillar truck on the site of a proposed WMD Facility in Kansas City, Mo.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Americans have little confidence in the federal government. At the same time, Americans want the federal government to be more effective.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Here is a disclaimer right up front: This article is not to defend obesity but, rather, to point out how it is and how it was.
by George Grandy, Jr.
ATLANTA, Ga. -- One of my responsibilities as regional director is to make sure that taxpayer money is used responsibly. This week, we put a number to our collective good use of federal dollars: The Census Bureau will return not less than $1.6 billion of our budgeted funds for 2010. This figure represents about 22 percent of the total amount Congress gave us to do the job nationally this year.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- A friend of mine told me today was his 22nd anniversary - five years longer than I've been married. It got me to thinking about when my wife and I got engaged. When we did it, it was a complete surprise.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Bear with me as I try to reason my way through the embarrassment of riches that is the Democratic gubernatorial primary.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The Obama Administration is a welcome change from the Bush-Cheney years. Against severe Republican opposition, President Obama has kept campaign promises to reform health care, curb Wall Street excesses, create a federally-funded stimulus program to help bring the nation out of the recession, and to remove American troops from the needless Iraq war, which has already cost Americans more than $740 billion and 4,400 lives. He has also pledged to eliminate the Bush-Cheney tax cuts for the rich, while not raising taxes on the middle- and lower-classes.
by Ron Kenner
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 9, 2010 -- Paul Krugman's 'America Grows Dark' , an opinion piece in today's New York Times, is brutally on target. It is a telling column, I think, on how America is shutting down, needlessly, and at disastrous cost.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- A few days ago American Ambassador to Japan John Roos attended the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony in Japan. On his second visit to Hiroshima, the first by an American ambassador, he expressed respect for all the victims of World War 11.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Some have argued that there's little that's new about the U.S. war on Afghanistan in last week's document dump by WikiLeaks. These people are wrong.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 5, 2010 -- Forty-seven years ago, driving a '55 Dodge with three kids working with me on a construction site, I hit a tree going 40 miles per hour and nearly killed myself.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a simple fact of life that fast and reliable Internet service is indispensable in a country that wants to continue enjoying a high standard of living.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As I get older, I'm more concerned with cleanliness and neatness. (Not the rest of the house, mind you. That's still a free-for-all.)
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The calendar may read 2010, but politically, all I see is 1994.
BY Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- This year the dog days of August began in late June and persist as I run from one air-conditioned place to another. I pre-cool my car before getting in for the morning's drive but, today, I have the leisure to read every page in Sunday's hefty edition of The New York Times. I'm just not going out of the house while the heat index is 105 F. again.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt., July 30, 2010 -- One picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes 70,000 pages of words can give you a very strong picture. I'm talking about the Afghanistan War Logs that WikiLeaks released on Sunday.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As much as I hate to admit it, a teenager's right to wear his pants below his butt is protected by the First Amendment.
by Walter Brasch
PHOENIX, Ariz., July 26, 2010 -- Two things are assured this coming week. One is that Arizona will do its best to put into practice its controversial anti-immigration bill. The other is that a federal district court will rule whether that law is constitutional.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When you hear conservative politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, talk about the need for austerity, the first question to ask is "austerity for whom?"
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., July 20, 2010 -- What a sad story the Shirley Sherrod saga has become.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Henry Ford understood that his business wouldn't survive unless his workers could buy his product, and so he paid them well.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON, England, July 18, 2010 -- With the soaring popularity of the South Asian food, "masala tikka" and "chapati" have become English words in the United Kingdom. The aroma of Indian food has given a new ambience to the cities and towns of the former colonial power, and helped more than 9,000 Indian and Pakistani restaurants flourish.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The Romans figured that if they provided bread and gladiator matches, people wouldn't notice that their leadership was inept and corrupt.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In a recent interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a newspaper owned by the far-right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, House Minority Leader John Boehner - the Ohio Republican with the day-glo orange fake tan who thinks he is going to be the Speaker of the House next year - complained about how Democrats "are snuffing out the America that I grew up in."
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I'm a ghost writer. Other people hire me to write stuff for them, but they get to put their name on it. I've ghost-written blog posts, brochures, press releases, Websites, and half a book.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Millions of Americans had pleaded with basketball superstar LeBron James to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and come to their city when he became a free agent. Bloggers, media pundits, and reporters of every kind seemed to devote much of their lives to figuring out what team James would be a part of for the 2011 season.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Earlier this week, in my day job as a business reporter, I interviewed the founders of a Vermont solar energy company. I found it interesting that it was only founded in 1998, yet from 2004 to 2007 its revenue grew 463.3 percent. That's a huge jump. Since then, it's doubled its revenue - and the number of its employees - again.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- LeBron James will play for the Miami Heat, although you probably knew that already.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., July 8, 2010 -- They laid Bruce Kelly to rest this week at the age of 70.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I've been in journalism in one form or another for my entire adult life. When I broke into the field, in the afterglow of Watergate, journalism was more than a job. It was a public service where you could make a real difference in peoples' lives. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Go after the bad guys. Stand up for truth and justice and have fun doing it.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Kid, is that what I think it is?" asked Karl the Curmudgeon.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I have spent the past few weeks glued to the television set watching World Cup Soccer. It's like eating cashews. I can't stop.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., July 2, 2010 -- "Affordable" health care? Maybe. Maybe not. The government doesn't seem to know.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- For a few days last week, the harpies of the extreme right assaulted the President of the United States for first considering, and then firing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of allied forces in Afghanistan.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The banks wrecked our economy, and they are still raking in record profits while escaping all accountability for their misdeeds.
Press Release
WASHINGTON, June 28, 2010 -- Eight individuals were arrested Sunday for allegedly carrying out long-term, "deep-cover" assignments in the United States on behalf of the Russian Federation, the Justice Department announced today. Two additional defendants were also arrested Sunday for allegedly participating in the same Russian intelligence program within the United States.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Since 2002, Vermonters have been told - endlessly - that Vermont is bad for business.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Now that the World Cup soccer championship is underway, I'm starting to realize which of my friends like soccer, and which of them are change-hating xenophobes who automatically mistrust anything invented outside the United States.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Here in Vermont, it is high school graduation season. It is difficult to look at the faces of the young people of the Class of 2010, knowing they are walking out into the worst economy in generations.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The other evening in Bellows Falls, Vt., Beausoleil sang "The Problem," a song JJ Cale wrote and recorded in 2004, long before the BP oil spill: Have you heard the news that's going 'round here/The man in charge has got to go/Cause he dances 'round the problem, boy/And the problem is the man in charge, you know....
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "Wanted: Person willing to work long hours from dawn to dark year round. Must be good with large animals and be able to handle heavy machinery. Must be able to do hard, difficult labor under constantly changing conditions in all types of weather, and be available and ready to work every day."
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The British are upset with the United States. That's not too unusual. There was this revolution thing a couple of centuries ago.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In the bad old days, old women were often labeled as witches.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., June 10, 2010 -- The Great Debate over Florida's "Hometown Democracy" Amendment 4 at the Manatee County Central Library here last night lent a frame to the broad impact of the Nov. 2 initiative to require any changes to a county master plan to be approved by voters.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Editor's note: Erik is out of the office this week, so we are firing up the way-back machine, and republishing a column from 1997. However, out of sympathy for our readers, we have edited and improved it. A lot. Like, "it would have been a whole lot easier if he had just written a new one" edited and improved.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If the old definition of a conservative is "a liberal who's been mugged," is the new definition of a liberal now "a conservative who's had his beachfront property coated in crude oil?"
by Joe Shea
REYNOLDS PLANTATION, Ga., May 29, 2010 -- Dennis Hopper died today at 74. He was a friend once, and thinking of him last night, and knowing he was sick, I said a prayer for him before I fell asleep. I'm glad I did; he's gone now, and ever after, it will be too late.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you want to see the line between sexism and misogyny skid into a puddle of sheer nuttiness, read some of the reviews of the new film "Sex and the City 2."
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., June 1, 2010 -- Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) had a good idea to slow or stop the Gulf Coast oil spill from reaching shore. Build artificial barrier islands, he told the federal government.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The late, great Molly Ivins famously called Texas "the laboratory for bad government," and what the Texas State Board of Education did last week reinforces that notion.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Have you noticed that Tea Baggers and anti-government activists seem to be worrying about all the wrong things?
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Look at your man. Now back to me. Now back at your man, now back at me. Sadly, he isn't me. But if he stopped using hair product by the pound, he could - and stopped wearing his pink shirt - he could - and didn't accessorize - you know what, forget it. Just forget it.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 25, 2010 5:30PM ET -- Have you ever wielded one of those little New Year's Eve noisemakers that roll out and straighten as you blow your heart out at midnight?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, May 21, 2010 -- Lawton "Bud" Chiles, 57, the son and namesake of former Fla. governor and U.S. Senator "Walkin' Lawton" Chiles, will announce his own candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor at an event in Lakeland, Fla., next Saturday, a top elected official close to the Manatee County restaurant owner said Friday evening.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
KATHMANDU, Nepal, May 22, 2010 -- A 13-year-old American boy, Jordan Romero, became the youngest person to scale the Mt. Everest, at 29,028 ft. the highest peak in the world.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Some time ago, middle-class suburban ladies like my mother held teas.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I can't say that I was surprised that President Barack Obama would nominate Solicitor-General Elena Kagan to succeed Justice John Paul Stevens on the Supreme Court. I can say that I was disappointed that he played so safe by picking Kagan, rather than a more experienced and more liberal nominee.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 18, 2010 -- Gov. Charlie Crist may not be so independent after all.
by Joyce Marcel
PLANTATION, Fla. -- It was 1959. Barry had a greasy pompadour and a big goofy smile. He was my college boyfriend's best friend, and when he and his girlfriend got pregnant, they thought the world was coming to an end.
by Joe Shea
TAMPA, Fla., May 13, 2010 -- The waiting was not quite agony.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Today, I had the awful realization that I'm turning 43 next month. It's awful for a couple of reasons, mostly because I will no longer be 42.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 11, 2010 -- I was a goner. I was in the middle of a very busy intersection when my car ran out of gas and I drifted into the nearest northbound lane of Cortez Rd. at 43rd St. W., trying to start it in neutral to no avail. After a few yards, I stopped. Even with my flashers on, it was only a few second before someone sat on their brakes and screeched to a stop behind, narrowly missing my back bumper.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As we watch hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil gush into the Gulf of Mexico after the the explosion and sinking of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil platform, perhaps this is another wake-up call to start moving our economy away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.
by Joyce Marcel
PLANTATION, Fla. -- Here in Florida, live-in home health care aides are like mail-order brides. The agency sends you a certified aide complete with his or her own issues. You either get along or fight like cats and dogs. If it's the latter, the agency sends you another aide. And so on.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Baseball has its own soundtrack. The crack! of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the food vendors with their cries of "COLDbeer! Getcha coldbeer HEAH!"
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, May 7, 2010 -- British Petroleum says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may ultimately cost them $16 billion. Where does that kind of money come from? Say that BP has a computer genius who is commissioned to hack the stock markets. They figure out how to do it, place buys in street name through 500 different brokers, then make their move. Wham!
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform - better known as the deficit commission - began its work this week to try and make Americans so frightened about the federal deficit that they'll support cutting Social Security and Medicare. As with every previous attempt to scare Americans into cutting Social Security and Medicare, it's nonsense.
by Tony Panaccio
CLEARWATER, Fla., April 30, 2010 -- I'm blocking out a week right after election night this November, because if Florida Governor Charlie Crist wins the Florida seat in the US Senate in that election, I am hijacking him and taking him to Vegas. He is one helluva gambler!
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It isn't often noticed because the state line serves as a great divide, but art has been creeping up the Connecticut River Valley. And it's been a very powerful force for good.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 2, 2010 -- The strange car bomb found yesterday evening in Times Square by an alert T-shirt vendor and NYPD cavalry officer is the work of an amateur, it appears; but was it also the work of a bomber?
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Are you on Twitter? Are you a power tweeter, with severe thumb cramps, because you're constantly tweeting to your friends? Or do you think it's the little yellow bird Sylvester the cat kept trying to eat?
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Art Welch, the in-school suspension supervisor at the Columbia-Montour Area Vocational Technical School - known simply as Vo-Tech - in Bloomsburg, Pa., earns $8-hr., just 75 cents above minimum wage. In the six years he has been at Vo-Tech, he has never had a raise.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- This month has been, arguably, the most eventful month ever regarding reducing the dangers of nuclear weapons.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- My copy of Vogue arrived in the mail the other day. (What? Like you don't have any secret vices?) It had a Photoshopped picture of Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover. On the very first page, a huge photo of Julia Roberts' teeth leapt out at me. I was bit.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, April 27, 2010 -- As the oil seeps from the capsized carcass of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig 52 miles off Venice, La., and the bdies of 11 workers remain undiscovered in the Gulf of Mexico, the incredible stupidity of recent White House approval for drilling off the coast of Florida is dramatized in a way nothing else can.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- He came out of the men's locker room with such a smile on his face that we all said, "What's so funny, Chris?"
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families."
by Mark Scheinbaum
TORTI, Panama, April 19, 2010 -- Smiles and cheers were the order of the day as 35 pupils at the La Tosca Elementary School in Torti received gift bags and kindergarten furniture from 18 members of the Kiwanis Club of Panama.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The Internet has changed so much in the 15 years since The American Reporter first appeared on the scene as the first exclusively online newspaper.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I just took my first vacation in a couple of years. I've been working like crazy on my new business, and an eight-hour day feels like a day off. This was one of the first times I wasn't going to work at all, and my wife was determined that I wouldn't do any work.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., April 10, 1995 -- Last year, reporter Billy Cox of the Sarasota Herald Tribune, a solid if struggling local institution and regional New York Times daily newspaper here, spent a total of 17 hours interviewing me for a story on our 15th anniversary. He wrote it and rewrote it, revised it again and again, and was finally persuaded by his editor that his account was "too depressing," and that our situation here was "pathetic."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It looks like President Barack Obama is going to follow up his biggest domestic policy achievement - health care reform - with his biggest foreign policy achievement - a new strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty and new U.S. policies regarding the use of nuclear weapons.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I've been known to wax poetic about spring.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In March of last year, the U.S. stock market was at the lowest point of the current recession. Since then, the Standard & Poor's 500 index has risen nearly 70 percent. Housing prices around the country have stabilized. Commodity prices have begun to rise again. Economic growth, as measured by the Gross Domestic Product, rose at double the rate that economists predicted.
by Mark Scheinbaum
PANAMA CITY, PANAMA, April 1, 2010 -- Editor's Note: Search engine company Google, after a long period of negotiation, last week ended censorship of Websites sought by Chinese citizens on the mainland.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt -- The so-called "Curse of the Oscars" has very strong legs. At Google you'll find 2,660,000 possible sites to read about it in just 0.26 seconds.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- There is one, and only one, answer to America's burgeoning national debt, now in the many trillions of dollars and seemingly impossible to repay. There is a way - and also a means - that can be summed up in two words. The first is prosperity.
by Chiranjibi Paudyal
LONDON, April 3, 2010 -- Islamic extremists have waged their propaganda war against the United States and its coalition partners by saying the coalition's presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is an attack on Islam. By now, thousands of people have lost their lives and billions of dollars have been spent on these conflicts, but they don't seem likely to end in the immediate future despite efforts from many quarters.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a sign of how totally insane this nation has become when the passage of a health care bill that has so many conservative elements within it is labeled as socialist.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- It seems to me I'm always defensive when the Catholic Church is implicated in another sex scandal. Our menu of links to newspaper and online headlines around the world often seem to focus quickly on wrongdoing by the Israeli government but rarely on the reprehensible conduct of my fellow Catholics in their roles as priests and religious. Why is that?
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Author Deborah Lee Luskin has chutzpah.
by Patrick Osio
LOS ANGELES, March 26, 2010 -- Are Mexican citizens' deaths any less deserving of sadness and outrage?
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "I'm getting tired of all the sloppy grammar people use these days," lamented Karl, my friend and part-time curmudgeon.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 17, 2010 -- The recent diplomatic flap over the Israeli announcement of construction of 1,600 Jewish housing units in disputed East Jerusalem has focused attention on the deteriorating relationship between that country and the United States.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I rarely go to movies anymore. My wife and I go about once a year, and take the kids a second time, but that's about it.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Every February, one of the last South Pacific islands to host a cargo cult puts on a major festival. Reading about this year's party made me think of cargo cults in general, and one in particular that I joined for a little while.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I read "The Death and Life of American Journalism" by media professor and activist Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, the Washington correspondent for The Nation, with great interest, and not just because I've been a professional journalist in one form or another for nearly 30 years.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- March is Woman's History Month - as though we don't have any history during the other eleven months - and it was somehow fitting that Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for best director and best film at last Sunday's Oscars. That's the first Oscar given to a woman for directing, even though women - including Bigelow - have been directing films for years.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's a long-standing principle in the American justice system that even the most unpopular defendants are given adequate legal representation and that the rule of law is followed without exception.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I thought we were safe here in Indiana. I thought we didn't do Zero Tolerance. Turns out the stupidity and harm of this blinded-to-logic-and-reason way of thinking has hit the Hoosier state.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Town Meeting Day has come and gone in Vermont, and I hope everyone filled out their Doyle Poll.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- After a bit more of a year of President Barack Obama's first term, we have been treated to one disappointment after another.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- That title just brought on a collective groan among readers, "Well, duh," since most of us have had "live and learn" moments in our lives: Live and learn; love and learn, lock keys in the car and learn, put your red sock with the white in the washing machine, and learn. We've experienced and we've learned.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, March 6, 2010 -- My 10-year-old Sony computer, once one of the best available, has crashed again, and with help from my brother Pat, I'm getting a new one. Unfortunately, I chose to get it from Dell to help out an American company with a so-so reputation for quality.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Up to four feet of snow hit the mid-Atlantic and New England states over the past three weeks, bringing record snowfalls, school closures, power outages and more. Around here, it was one of the most memorable winters in anyone's memory.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Hasn't feminism taken some weird twists and turns since the Second Wave splashed over the U.S. back in the 1970s?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- President Barack Obama came into office with a reputation for being a sharp and canny politician. So why does he keep alienating the people who helped get him elected president in 2008?
by Tony Panaccio
HOLLYWOOD -- If you're a reporter, don't ask Sarah Palin any questions. She ain't answering.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Mankind has always wanted to fly, and not by being X-rayed at an airport and then scrunched into a tiny seat three across with a change of planes in Atlanta. That's the kind of flying that inspired Orson Welles to say, "There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's hard to believe, but according to the Project on Defense Alternatives, the Defense Department has been given about $7.2 trillion since 1998, when the post-Cold War decline in defense spending ended. This includes President Obama's proposed total military budget for fiscal year 2011 of more than $1 trillion - which represents the biggest share of the federal budget since World War II.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Sarah Palin stood before an audience of 600 at the first Tea Party convention and in her twinkly home-spun rhetoric declared we don't need a professor of law but a commander-in-chief. As expected, she received roaring applause. And, as expected, she was wrong.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I created the Swish-Whack awards during the 2004 Athens Olympics, to shine some light on the sport of fencing, after America's Mariel Zagunis, 19, won America's first fencing gold medal in 100 years.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Recently, news stories proclaimed that the Fox News Channel was the most trusted television news source in the country. The stories were referring to a poll done by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling, which asked Americans whether they trusted each of the country's major television news operations.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Lester Young is cool. Miles Davis is cool. Jack Kerouac is cool. President Barack Obama is cool.
by Eric J. Wallace
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. -- Last night, legendary blues guitarist Mojo Collins graced the stage of the Outer Banks Brewing Station. The word "grace" cannot be overemphasized.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As I write this, we're just 24 hours away from the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics. I love the Winter Olympics. You can keep your track and field, your gymnastics, your women's softball. Give me downhill skiing, the bobsled, and curling.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "Who controls the past controls the future," George Orwell once wrote. "Who controls the present controls the past."
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When President Barack Obama said, during his State of the Union speech, "But to create more of these clean energy jobs... that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country," I literally howled. How could an ostensibly intelligent man be so wrong, wrong, wrong?
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I've been amazed at how far computers have come from the first days I used one.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's easy to make the case that there is nothing that has done more to damage the proper functioning of our democracy than the system of legalized bribery and graft that now dominates the American political process.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- No matter where it's performed, on the stage of Carnegie Hall or around a wood-burning stove, folk music is redolent of hearth and family. Maybe it's because so many folk songs are rooted in character and place. Maybe it's because a good tune can turn a local story into a legend. Maybe it's because a lot of people can play and sing together -- the very opposite of performance.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In 1972, Massachusetts was the only state that went for George McGovern over Richard Nixon for president.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There are too many traumatized people in the world right now, and there aren't enough therapists to go around.
by Eric J. Wallace
APPOMATTOX, Va. -- You drive over the long sloping hills of State Highway 460, watching the farms and thick trees slip over the horizon, how they rise and rise until you begin to think they are an endless procession speeding past in an infinite blur. In the distance, there is the dark sapphire blue pressing into the clouds, the haunting shadow violet limning the worn undulations of water-carved phosphorescent rivulets trickling down the ancient slopes.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Air America, the liberal radio network, went down in flames on Jan. 21, when it filed for bankruptcy. It wasn't because of air-to-air combat with conservative talk shows and bloggers. It wasn't because of the Recession, although reduced advertising revenue, a reality of all media, also affected Air America. It wasn't even demographics, even though older, marginalized conservatives tend to listen to radio more than do younger liberal professionals. And media history was only part of the problem.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Since it's been a year since my last annual report, in keeping with our family by-laws, I want to evaluate our progress over the last 12 months.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Only in America can the people who drove the global economy off a cliff and pushed tens of millions of people into poverty and joblessness get lavishly rewarded for doing so.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Cross-cultural experiences come when you least expect them.
By Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Today would be Carroll O'Connor's birthday. In the person of Archie Bunker, starring in "All in the Family," a sitcom in the 70s, he personified an American bigot.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There is much about the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of attempting to explode a plastic device aboard a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, that doesn't add up.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In 2002, I went to Florida for the auditions for one of my mother's musical theater productions. Here is part of what I wrote afterwards: "And then there was Red Gershon, 80, handsome, white-haired, a former mailman who lives to dance with my mother. He had such serious back problems that it was widely understood he couldn't be in the show. But only a few days after major back surgery, Red came to rehearsal 'just to watch.'"
by Walter Brasch
SUGAR NOTCH, Pa. -- A regional advocate for the rights of the homeless says actions by Sugar Notch, Pa., officials to deny shelter to homeless men may be based upon fear and a lack of knowledge.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The television weather people are turning us into sissies. They're doing everything they can to force us all into our homes, where we'll be found dead after the Spring thaw, huddled together in frozen heaps.
by Eric J. Wallace
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. -- Recently. as a requirement for a literature symposium. I was forced to read a number of "great" late 19th Century short stories, most of which were far from great, much less enjoyable. In general. they were a formulaic brand of commercial slop that academics consider literature by virtue of the conditions which bred the writing, i.e., a matter of "social commentary."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 4, 2009 -- Readers who see three YouTube videos on our front page this past week must be curious. Has The Americzan Reporter become tabloid? Is the editor out of his mind?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Has President Obama's first year in office been a failure? There are plenty of people arguing about that one. But I'd say there's one thing he has definitely failed at: articulating a vision of the future and working hard to make it happen.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The events of Sept. 11, 2001, of course, indelibly mark the decade that is ending tonight. But when you step back and look at America from a distance, you will see that the years 2000-2009 are more defined by the growth of the largest disparity in wealth since the Gilded Age, which lasted from 1870 to 1900.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's the end of the year, which means word nerds and writer-types around the country are rejoicing: the Lake Superior State University has released their 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use, and General Uselessness.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There were many reasons why the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen ended without a binding agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
by Walter Brasch and Rosemary Brasch
PHILADELPHIA, Pa., Dec. 30, 2009 -- The Philadelphia Eagles honored reserve quarterback and admitted dog-killer Michael Vick with an award for courage. Yes, you read that right. "Michael Vick" and "courage" are in the same sentence, now etched in brass.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- I wrote this poem, which is flawed as a sonnet (as were some of Shakespeare's), at a deli and coffee shop in Santa Monica, Calif., on New Year's Eve 1982. The deli is gone now, and the poem, too, has changed in several ways over the years - a word here, and years later, a word there - and I probably never read it the same way twice. Worst of all, a phrase is missing from the recorded version. I'm not sure how that happened. The version below is more or less complete.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "No, I don't want an artificial tree this year."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 24, 2009 -- Yesterday, without warning, my right leg suddenly became paralyzed five times for about two minutes each time. It's already happened twice today. So don't holiday me.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Erwin Knoll, the late publisher of The Progressive, said that in 1991, as the United States went to war against Iraq, "There is no such thing as a just war - never was, never will be."
by Walter Brasch
SHENANDOAH, Pa. -- Dick Wolf, who created "Law & Order" and its two successful spin-offs, "Law & Order: SVU" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," should probably consider establishing a branch office in Pennsylvania.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It was 6 a.m. here in south Florida and the sky was still a midnight blue when Lee pulled up in her truck. She was playing Susan Boyle's "Wild Horses" on the car stereo and it was lovely.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As a writer, I don't like trite phrases, marketing jargon, or clichés. So I was pleased to see a piece by Frances Cole Jones on CNN.com talking about her 10 worst business sayings.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec, 23, 2009 -- I like thrillers when they have a great pace and clever plotting, and that's not so common as it once seemed. Bill Napier's books, and especially his last, "The Lure," leapt out at me from the bookstands when I didn't know his name. In fact, it was only after glancing through the frontispiece the other day that I noticed I'd already read two of his books.
American Reporter Staff
BRADENTON, Fla. -- Is it the business of the media or the public to look into the private lives of celebrities? We say, short of heinous crimes, no! And while we think, based on our own religious heritage, that infidelity is wrong, we think it is God's work, not ours, to judge.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Women's happiness is once again in the news.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Dec. 13, 2009 -- Tiger Woods is in the enviable position of looking trouble in the eye, and dealing with it by quitting his job. "After much soul searching I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf," Tiger tells us.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There's a reason why Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires. Afghans are not just tenacious fighters, they are equally tenacious when it comes to corruption and playing every possible angle for fun and profit.
by Eric J. Wallace
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C., Dec. 12, 2009 -- Isaac Newton. Albert Einstein. Iconic names nearly synonymous with the word "science" itself. Petr HoYava. Who?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 7. 2009 - Support for an accord on climate change in Copenhagen has come from a surprising place: Germany's mammoth re-insurer, Munich Re, which says huge losses due to climate change demand that "fundamental framework conditions should be established" iat the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, whicxh opened today. "We cannot afford a delay at the expense of future generations," the company said in an official statement.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "I need a topic to write about," said Karl the Curmudgeon, plonking his beer on the bar, and picking up a pen. He held it over a small notebook, ready to write down whatever I said.
by John Seager
WASHINGTON, Dec. 5, 2009 -- As world leaders convene the Copenhagen climate talks, discussion has focused on the need for wealthy countries to reduce emissions. Far less attention has been paid to the inevitable reality that emissions in the poorest parts of the world need to increase. And there has been scant recognition of the role played by rapid population growth in rising emissions worldwide.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- I don't have a column this week.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Dec. 4, 2009 -- Happy Holidays to all from Angel Fire, N.M., where it is -15°F. at this writing. With a wind chill of -25°F., we're one degree off the coldest temperature ever recorded on this date in New Mexico. But the morning job figures provide a spark, if not a fire, to warm up my seldom-used strategist's seat much faster than climate change will.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Most nations view war as a last resort, a serious act used only when absolutely necessary.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- She seemed so frail.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 5, 2009 -- Remember Tim McVeigh, the former soldier who teamed up with a military buddy and bombed the Albert J. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 163 people? It happened just nine days after The American Reporter began publication, and it remains unforgettable.
by Eric J. Wallace
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C., Dec. 5, 2009 -- After forming in 2001, members of The Front Porch Country Band found themselves suddenly catapulted into the international spotlight after gleaning well over a million plays from the free-download Website MP3.com.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Believe it or not, there's a controversy brewing within the blindness community about service dogs (also called Leader Dogs, Guide Dogs, Seeing Eye Dogs, and Pilot Dogs - named after the school where they're trained). One organization, the American Council of the Blind, loves them. They believe service dogs are a valuable help to people who are blind or visually impaired.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 30, 2009 -- The President has already met with his top military and civilian defense advisors and has ordered a surge in U.S. troop deployment in Afghanistan, so what I have to say to him is too late to make much difference. After months of deliberation, another 30,000 troops are on their way to a nation that in the space of a decade has become a fractured pawn in the game that Islamic extremists play.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- One hundred and fifty years ago this week, the age of modern science began.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 4, 2009 -- The one remarkable film of 2009? "The Road,' starring Viggo Mortensen with a cameo by Robert Duvall, is based on Cormac McCarthy's National Book Award winner of the same name and is, if possible, even more unrelievedly grim than the novel.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Thanksgiving. Lists. Things to be grateful for. Whatever.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 2, 2009 -- One of the great things about the Internet is that it's encouraged thousands of new writers to self-publish their books, and hundreds of publishers to offer new books by them online and in print. One of these emerging authors is Robert Gross, whose book "The Extinction Gene," (iUniverse, 2009) is not only a first-class thriller and a natural for the screen, but short and punchy instead of long-winded, as so many new books are.
by Eric J. Wallace
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C. -- Driving down Hwy. 12 - the beach road here - sand and debris were heaped in tall piles along both shoulders. In many places deep standing water forced the traffic to a near halt. It was the unexpected aftermath of a Nov. 18 "no-name" storm with hurricane-like winds that many storm-weary locals had dismissed as just another breeze.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- For anyone hoping that definitive emissions limits and other aggressive measures to curb rising global temperatures will come out of next month's United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, think again.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The loveliest part of writing this column is the unexpected response I sometimes get from readers. A few weeks ago, for example, a woman who declined to give her name called with an odd question. Wasn't I the one who had written about having a job at the 1964 New York World's Fair? Well, yes, I was.
by Joe Shea
TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 24, 2009 -- The greatest achievement of Kona Grill, the stunning new 7,900-foot restaurant beside the upscale International Plaza on Boy Scout Blvd. here - a few blocks from the 2009 Super Bowl XLIII venue, Raymond James Stadium - is that it exists at all in an economy tighter than a snare drum and a city as badly battered by the recession as any in America.
by Eric J. Wallace
KILL DEVIL HILLS, N.C., Nov. 18, 2009 -- You saw it on the news. A region on the stormy shoulder of the Atlantic seaboard known as the Outer Banks was bracing desperately for a storm that was about to ram a nameless pile-driver into its quaint and pretty towns.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- It wasn't unusual that Rush Limbaugh went ballistic on his show, Nov. 13. He does that several times a day.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Let's talk about porn.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The good news? For the first time since Medicare was enacted in 1965, one chamber of Congress has passed health care reform.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa -- NBC news correspondent Jenna Bush Hager had a news exclusive. And, like news exclusives in the Era of Infotainment, this one was broadcast by the entertainment division. Specifically, Jenna Bush interviewed her mother, Laura Bush, on 38th episode of "The Jay Leno Show."
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M. -- I have no idea where this fits in the scheme of "new media" or online news, but in my brief life I don't think 20 or 30 years ago I could have imagined this.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I hate it when people bleep themselves.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- For political junkies, the off-year elections held around the nation on Tuesday were pretty thin gruel. There weren't many surprises.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 9. 2009 -- When you think about all the issues President Barack Obama has piled on his plate, it's enough to give you the willies.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I'm a big supporter of civil rights and personal liberties. In this country, we're all guaranteed certain inalienable rights, and are allowed certain dignities, even when facing criminal charges.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I first met Mara Williams 20 years ago, when she came from New York City to be the director of the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you were President Obama, why would you bother to give the time of day to an organization dedicated not just to the destruction of his presidency, but to liberalism in general?
by Mark Scheinbaum
NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2009 -- Full disclosure requires the author to reveal he is currently whacked out on drugs.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As Leonard Cohen says in "Anthem," Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There are many reasons why newspapers are in trouble.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you're like me, at some point in the past few years you've had the conversation about why there are so many dead bodies - fake dead bodies - on television.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- On Thanksgiving, we begged. On Hallowe'en, we bobbed - for apples, that is. That was how it all began and from that time until now, traditions and meanings have changed.
by Mark Scheinbaum
BROOKLYN, N.Y., Oct. 24, 2009 -- I wonder if a national health plan bordering on socialism would be a slam dunk if liberal Democrats like the late Ted Kennedy had "spun" the issue so that departed Senate icons such as Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond, hard-core Carolina conservatives, could make it a "populist" cause.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa.-- One of the joys of Hallowe'en is to dress in scary costumes and pretend to frighten others, who pretend to be frightened. But with less than two weeks until an evening of trick-or-treating, it's possible there won't be anything scarier than what's already happened in the country.
by David Koch
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- When ex-cons violate parole and are sent back to prison on a new felony conviction, as six out of 10 will be, their average stay in jail is from three to six years. The cost to jail them is $94,834 per "recidivist," as prison systems call them. The total incarceration cost for these recidivists alone is between $3 and $7 billion a year - just for the taxpayers of Ohio!
American Reporter Staff
HOLLYWOOD. -- The board of directors of the Los Angeles Press Club has condemned the actions of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in violating a reporter's right under state law to maintain confidential sources.
by Joe Shea
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- If God was going to bring Jack Kerouac back to life, perhaps for Hallowe'en, there couldn't be a better place than St. Petersburg, where he died at 47 in an alcoholic stupor, outlived as all his siblings were by his mother, Gabrielle, the fierce "Ma Mère."
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The wind came racing down the mountain last week and whipped the golden and ochre leaves into the air like snow. They fell for hours, swirling around my head and filling the sky. Rapt with wonder, I stood in the center of the dirt road and let them fall around me. I thought I had never seen anything more beautiful. As Robert Frost wrote in his poem "October," the wind enchanted the land with amethyst.
by Joe Shea
SARASOTA, Fla., Oct. 11, 2009 -- I found a three-day old email a few hours after Mass tonight from Rochelle Herman, a lovely publicist here on Florida's Gulf Coast, about an event that was already in progress at a huge home on Longboat Key. It's owned by Lorraine and Larry Ziff, an insurance executive and philanthropist who is helping a Sarasota-based producer named Beau Burton of Florida Films LLC on a couple of projects.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In the past couple of weeks, the pettiness - bordering on anti-Americanism - of the right-wingers has been a sight to behold.
by Mark Scheinbaum
NEW YORK, Oct. 16, 2009 -- In the conspiratorial world it goes something like this: "the largest oil and gas reserves in the world are in - pick a state, usually North Dakota, Montana, Alaska - "but the devious" - (pick one or more) Arabs, automakers, politicians, environmentalists - "are conspiring with the news media to bury the news."
by Jackie Salit
NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 13, 2009 -- When we finally get far enough down the road on health care reform, it will become clear that a driving force in the intensity of the fight was a heart attack. Not the medical kind. The political kind.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Remember The Project for a New Century?
by James J. Murtagh
LOS ANGELES -- Michael Moore has a knack for juxtaposing key moments in history. His new film starts with the fall of Rome, intercut with the collapse of American industry.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Is it wrong to be sad about the closing of Gourmet Magazine when many Americans are having a hard time putting food on the table? Why should we care about recipes featuring truffles and pheasant when people are eating fast food because its cheap and filling and they're hungry?
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's been the talk of the town around Bilgola, New South Wales, Australia. A series of romantic signs from some unnamed bloke to his girlfriend Jennifer takes a nasty turn just 40 percent of the way through the message, like some sort of emotionally-sadistic versdion of the ancient Burma Shave campaign. Five signs along the Barrenjoey Road that start out promising a lifetime of happiness end in embarrassment.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Remember when people dressed up to fly?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It seems pretty clear that the Aug. 20 presidential election in Afghanistan was not on the level.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It might have been too much to hope for, but wasn't the election of President Barack Obama supposed to mark a watershed in America? Wasn't it supposed to be another important step toward a post-racial America, where old hatreds would be consigned to the dustbin of history?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 30, 2009 -- Just follow along with me as I attempt to send a note to the author of a story on the New York Times Website. I want to contact Julie Bosman, the author of a story on their homepage about one of the winners in the race for public advocate (an elective office post I didn't even know existed).
by T.S. Kerrrigan
LOS ANGELES -- When I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley, which now seems a century ago, I had the ambitious idea of reading through all the volumes of the Loeb Library.
by Walter and Rosemary Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Within two weeks in September, Americans were cluster-bombed by hate speech and a shock wave of incivility. From politics to music and sports, with the mass media more than willing to devote thousands of column inches and hours of air time to salacious reporting, those shock waves eventually degenerated into mere ripples that have become commonly accepted.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When the phone rings at 11:30 at night, you know it's not good.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Earlier this week, my wife sent me the text message from Hell, the text message every father dreads getting. The words no father of a daughter wants to hear or read.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 24, 2009 -- I had become a Redbox customer. After several years of off-and-on patronage of Blockbuster, the world's largest video rental company, I discovered the simplicity of Redbox at Wal-Mart.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Some economists are talking like the current recession - the worst since the 1930s - is over.
by Michael D. Evans
NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2009 -- President Barack Obama's meeting today at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City with Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought little of substance, and was merely an opportunity for the world press to snap photos of the three leaders.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Nineteen-thirty-five was not that great a year for America. The country was still in the Depression. It already lagged behind other countries in health care. Women were far behind men in status, freedom, education and financial security.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 11, 2009 -- What we can never know is why the Bush Administration's top officials watched the flow of reports that warned of an impending attack on the United States and did nothing to stop it. One FBI undercover operative tells of being ordered to ignore bomber Mohammad Atta and pay more attention to innocuous "wannabes" instead. An Army unit called Able Danger saw its testimony ignored after the event about an early identification of Atta; they said his photo was on their bulletin board up until the day the attacks occurred.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Buddy, is your room clean yet?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Writing in The Washington Post last week, columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. offered perhaps the best explanation for why the right-wingers have hijacked the political agenda of the Obama Administration.
by Joyce Marcel
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.. -- Along with "If God had wanted a Panama Canal, he would have put one here," "The Titanic... could keep afloat indefinitely after being struck" and "Truth will become the hallmark of a Nixon Administration," we can now add, "Colts should run against colts, and fillies should run against fillies."
by Roger Bray
MARIETTA, Ga., Sept. 8, 2009 -- I had a strange, stilted chat today with a guy named "Rick." a customer service rep at Hackerz.com, a company that sells software for $99 that will find other peoples' passwords and sell them to you. With it, you can read everything your victims write, every character stroke they make, and even send out emails in their names.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 8, 2009 -- When I was a kid growing up in the rock-ribbed Republican stronghold of Orange County, N.Y., we had a name for people who would start a movement to get kids not to listen to a Presidential address in their schoolrooms: "Communists."
by J.M. Sylvan
AMSTERDAM -- Driving by farms with their brick barns and red tile roofs as opera played on the car radio was like being on a movie set. Was I really seeing windmills both modern and old, and a landscape dotted with cathedrals, and colorful wash on clotheslines? Yes! Pinch, pinch - I'm really here in Holland.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Sept. 8. 2009 -- Labor Day is over now, and that means about 140 million Americans are back at work after celebrating a three-day vacation. But most Americans still have no idea what Labor Day is, other than speeches, hot dogs, burgers and a pool party.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "Are Artists Special?" was the title of an amusing and insightful talk that the painter Wolf Kahn gave at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center on Saturday.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's been overshadowed by the ongoing battle over health care reform and the lingering effect of the current, but it's time for Americans to start paying attention to Afghanistan.
by Constance Daley
GLYNN COUNTY, Ga., Sept. 3, 2009 -- The wooden sign is plain and simple: New Hope Plantation.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The most remarkable thing about one significant anniversary yesterday was that it passed unremarked.
by Walter Brasch
PHILADELPHIA, Sept. 1, 2009 -- The crowd at Lincoln Field gave superstar quarterback and convicted felon Michael Vick a standing ovation when he entered the game on the second play against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Day 1 - Starting a new diet my wife wants me to try.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- At the instant they lowered Ted Kennedy's casket into the ground, lightning struck up from the earth. Yes, at precisely that instant - huge flashes illuminated the near horizon from the ground up.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The Democratic Party's most stalwart defender of civil rights, labor rights, health care, immigration, housing and education for nearly five decades in the U.S. Senate has left us.
by Mark Scheinbaum
BOCA RATON, Fla.. Aug. 26, 2009 -- Ironically, I have long thought that if anyone but Sen. Edward Kennedy had been the spearhead of the national health care reform movement it would have passed long ago.
by Zett-Alexandra Scheinbaum
WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug. 28. 2009 -- In the fall of my senior year at American University in Washington, D.C. I was an Intern in Senator Ted Kennedy's Health, Education, Labor and Policy Committee Office. My experience as an intern was probably vastly different than most as I started about two weeks before Sept. 11.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Curiouser and curiouser.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Like many Americans, I had hopes that President Barack Obama would live up to the high rhetoric of his campaign. At the same time, I had few illusions about the amount of resistance he would face as a President trying bring about real change. What I hadn't counted on was that the President and his Administration would prove to be so inept in dealing with an issue that's the proverbial no-brainer - health care reform.
by J.M. Sylvan
THE NETHERLANDS, Aug. 23, 2009 -- I am currently assigned to a small NATO base in the Tri-Border Area of Europe, where Belgium, The Netherland and Germany meet. It is tiny compared to other installations I've worked at. The airfield is home to AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems) E3 Century planes that are serviced and flown here by 3000 people from 16 countries. The American presence of 550 personnel is just a slice of the pie that makes up the larger group. Those stationed here are high-ranking enlisted men and women and officers.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Aug. 23, 2009 -- -More than 230,000 cases of the HIN! swine flu have been confirmed world wide. About 2,100 persons have died. As much as one-fourth of America's workforce an 2 billion of the world's population may be infected by the new swine flu when it peaks in Winter, according to studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, respectively.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga -- My shopping cart had what I call "go funny" wheels and with difficulty I eased it along the long line to the conveyer belt for checkout. I shifted from one foot to the other and stared at the ever-present magazines and tabloids on the racks along the way. These are so common, so similar one week to the next, they are like wallpaper - interesting patterns but not enough to hold my attention long enough to remember.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- What is it about public speaking that scares the bejeezus out of some people?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 15, 2009 -- I knew the back roads to Bethel, and I still parked 7 miles away from Max Yasgur's farm that Friday afternoon. But if I'd had my way, it wouldn't have been in Bethel, anyway.
by Margie Burns
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13, 2009 -- Documents from the Bush White House and the Republican National Committee newly released by the House Judiciary Committee show that while the Justice Department under President Bush was aggressively prosecuting local Democratic officeholders around the nation, the White House Political Affairs Office was simultaneously circulating weekly broadsides about the legal actions on a flier entitled "Democrat Ethics Breakdown."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's still way too soon to proclaim an end to the current recession, but the good news is that we have avoided sliding into a depression. And we have the Obama Administration's economic stimulus plan to thank for this.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In August of 1983, Benigno Aquino, an opponent of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, returned home from three years in exile. He didn't even make it into town - he was shot and killed at the airport.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I'm not a young man anymore. I got a harsh reminder last week when my family and I went for a walk in our local park. As we walked back to the car, we got separated; my two youngest were with me, my oldest daughter and wife were a couple hundred yards ahead.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- It isn't unusual that the Republican party is anti-union.
by Mark Scheinbaum
PANAMA CITY, Panama, Aug. 11, 2009 -- If a machete-wielding wild man who is foaming at the mouth with blood dribbling from one reddened eyeball tries to hitch a ride with me today, I'll probably give him a lift.
by J.M. Sylvan
DÜSSELDORF, Germany -- What a wonderful, rich week in Germany! After arriving in Düsseldorf on Sunday, August 2, I drove past some fantasyland buildings designed by Frank Gerhy on my way to my hotel near the Rhine River. After I took a short nap and a long walk, my friend Maki arrived at 11 p.m.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- According to a 1943 article on "self-actualization" by the late, great psychiatrist Dr. Abraham Maslow, we've learned our basic human needs are air, water, food, shelter and clothing. What Maslow formulated was a needs-based effort to motivate us using what he learned through clinical experiences with real people.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), the nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures, the people who support health care reform are getting swamped by those who don't want to see any significant change to the U.S. health care system.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I'd put my life on the line for free speech, so every time I find myself telling people to shut up and go away, I'm surprised. After all, everyone has a right to his or her own opinion, no matter how deluded he or she may be.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Oh my God!" I exclaimed to my wife, slamming the car door.
by Rebecca L. Hein
CASPER, Wyo. -- To solve an incorrigible problem is like gazing into an overcast sky as the clouds break. Light beams onto your chilly face and in this moment of brilliance you see everything. Warm and comforted, you find strength to continue.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Aug. 3, 2009 -- Tonight, in a remote and rural part of west-central China's Qinghai Province, a town of 10,000 mostly Tibetan people is entirely quarantined as officials try to contain an outbreak of pneumonic plague. Residents can go anywhere in Ziketan within the quarantined area, but the roads in and out are blocked and no one can leave, the New York Times reported today.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It still seems hard to believe that 40 years ago this week, men walked on the moon.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Has Michael Jackson been buried yet? And is his brain in the same place as his body? Inquiring minds want to know.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Kid, I need your help," said the voice on the other end of the phone. It was Karl, my friend and part-time curmudgeon. "Come over to the house. I've got a problem."
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMBURG, Pa. -- Marie Antoinette, contrary to popular opinion, never said a solution for the starving masses of revolutionary France in late 18th-Century was "Let them eat cake." But Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) apparently said something close to it.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- This has been a summer ritual in my home for many years: the Mom visit.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As I watch the world of print journalism implode, I've taken comfort in knowing that at the level of the business that I inhabit, the end would be years away.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- If I were to suggest being shocked that someone would rob a grave, I'd be misinforming you. Body snatchers and grave robbers have been around for at least a few thousand years.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I turned a wonderful age last week. An age I've been looking forward to for a few years.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's hard to resist being gleeful at seeing Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff get the maximum sentence - 150 years in prison - for bilking investors out of anywhere between $65 billion and $171 billion.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In 1892, Rudyard Kipling ended his poem "The Young British Soldier" with these immortal lines: "When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains/And the women come out to cut up what remains/Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains/An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."
by Margie Burns
WASHINGTON, July 8, 2009 -- The attorney representing Robert Blagojevich, brother of ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, in the "honest services" case charging Blagojevich and five others with fraud and corruption, says he will ask for public release of the famous wiretaps in the case.
by Margie Burns
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 6, 2009; 8:45PM EDT -- The office of U.S. Attorney Karen L. Loeffler in Alaska today backed up the FBI in denying that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is under federal investigation.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Here in Vermont, we take it as a given that the weather can be extreme. But after a June that saw Seattle-like weather, with only a handful of rain-free days and precipitation that was double the norm, I'm beginning to doubt it's an aberration.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? If an oppressive government brutally kills its young and it's not reported, has it really happened? And if young people are giving their lives for democracy, does anyone care if a weird pop star has died?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt., June 28, 2009 -- The massive public protests have ended in Iran. When unarmed protesters confront water cannons, tear gas and gunfire, they usually lose.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Some columns are easier to write than others.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's been a good week for evil. It started with a phrase in a New York Times story this past Sunday that has stuck in my head.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "So, Kid, what do you think about this whole serial comma business?" asked Karl, my friend and part-time curmudgeon. He was referring to the second comma that appears in a list, like "red, white, and blue."
by Walter Brasch
POTTSVILLE, Pa. -- The Schuylkill County, Pa., justice system managed to do something that insurance actuaries do with mixed results - it has determined not only the penalty for threats to a human life, but also the value of a human life.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The conventional political wisdom says that single-payer health care - where the government collects taxes to finance national health insurance that covers every citizen and pays the bills for medical care - is off the table.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- What if America is no longer the King of the World? What if the dollar is cast aside as the world's reserve currency? Everybody knows that the American economy is hanging by a thread. What if someone pulls that thread and unravels the whole shebang. What if?
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- It's been over 50 years since I wore the exquisitely fashioned fur scarf made of three Stone Marten skins attached to each other, flashing those beady glass brown eyes as the wearer shrugged her shoulders to adjust the draping. But, I have them. They're wrapped in tissue and placed in plastic, always ready for the style to come back.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The end of a school year is always great fodder for this column. Lawsuits by high school students unhappy with their grades, senior pranks ranging from the very minor to the outrageous, school administrators who crack down on small incidents, controversial or weird commencement speeches, and general high school shenanigans that makes normal people roll their eyes and say, "Meh, what are you gonna do?"
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- So, why is the price of crude oil now trading above $70 a barrel?
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Now that newspapers are crumbling, many people are professing a smug kind of gladness. Newspapers are "unsustainable." They're the "dead tree" model. They're old-fashioned. Hip hip hooray for the Internet! Only old folks read newspapers anyway, and who cares what they think? Information wants to be free.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Immigration is in the news again, or is it "still?" There is a big difference between what I see here on St. Simons and what I see when I visit my friend in Queens, New York.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I love Indiana. I love the people, I love the cities and towns, I love everything we stand for: corn, car racing, and the belief that any high school basketball team anywhere can win a state championship and have a movie made about them.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., June 15, 2009 -- I've seen a lot of crazy stuff, and a lot of great stuff, on YouTube, but only one video has taken my breath away.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Who do you blame when you're trying to comprehend the murder - in his church - of Kansas OB/GYN Dr. George Tiller?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Looking back over two decades, it still seem hard to believe that the events of 1989 actually happened.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- The Hermosillo, Mexico, nursery fire that killed 42 toddlers was front and center on CNN today - four days after it happened. A glance at the crawl line before 9AM showed that story after story was four or five days out of date. When I searched cable television shows after midnight Monday morning for anything about the historic Lebanese vote for a pro-Western multicultural (Druze, Christian and Islamic) governing coaltion, not even Bloomberg had anything. More and more, it seems, "news" is old, already digested and discarded by an information-hungry public.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- The 1990 Decennial Census was an eye opener for me; it was not just counting heads for an accurate picture of population growth or decline in the previous 10 years. I learned it was far more than that. We had just moved to Troy, Ohio - a small town north of Dayton, south of Toledo - and I didn't know anyone.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The speed with which Sonia Sotomayor was attacked by conservatives this week shows how high the stakes are in the upcoming confirmation hearings that will decide if she gets to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court this fall.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's early summer. Two male goldfinches in ravishing splendor are sitting at the thistle feeder, while several varieties of hummingbirds dart around the sweet water. What's missing from this picture?
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 25, 2009 -- As the rancor and noise about torture and the present furor over President Barack Obama's concept of "preventive detention" have grown, I've been forced by simple honesty to look at these two things in a larger context. What I see troubles me.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I took my family on vacation this week for the first time in a long time, and I was struck by a frightening thought: I've turned into Vacation Dad.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- We always called this day "Decoration Day," even though it had long since been officially named Memorial Day on calendars and posters.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you're a liberal arts major, you've been probably been getting an earful as we head into the college commencement season. In the midst of the bleakest economic landscape in decades, you've been continually told that you'll have few prospects and that you should've majored in something practical.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter, the nation that keeps the faith. - Isaiah 26:2."
by J.M. Sylvan
LOS ANGELES -- Stopping into the Misawa bookstore for a fun book to read as I prepared to travel for another 10 days, I spotted T.C. Boyle's newest book, The Women.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week, for the first time in my adult life, I didn't buy a copy of The Boston Globe.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It was a joke when he said, "My next 100 days will be so successful I will be able to complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest." Right? Wasn't it a joke?
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Dick Cheney has apparently been on a magical mystery media tour.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "I've got a great idea for a business. I think you're going to want a piece of this action," said my friend Karl, my literary curmudgeon and occasional drinking buddy.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga, -- Today, when I selected Mothers' Day cards, they were for my daughters who are mothers themselves. Yet, as I scanned the verses, I was thinking the words were just what I'd want to say to my own mother.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The first time I was called a "content provider," I knew things were all downhill from there.
by T. Johnson
SOMWHERE IN THE DEEP SOUTH -- A long time ago and far away, a veritable child finished his baccalaureate and decided (since that was the way the political wind was blowing at the time) to run out on his student loan - for future reference, a total of three thousand dollars.
by Andy Oram
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 4, 2009 -- Watching with an almost prurient fascination the tragic plunge of a sister institution - because the newspaper industry is cutting a path that the book industry will follow - I've noticed a subtle shift over the past few weeks from discussions of how to save newspapers to discussions of how to replace them.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There's been a lot of talk of late that there are glimmers of hope in the American economy. Since President Obama's economic stimulus package was enacted and the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department both announced plans to buy up distressed assets and backstop mortgage-backed securities, the financial markets seemed to have steadied themselves. The S&P; 500 - the broadest of the main stock indices - rose 28 percent between mid-March and mid-April.
by Mark Scheinbaum
PANAMA CITY, Panama, May 3, 2009 -- A ban on sales of alcohol and heightened securities greeted Panamanian voters Sunday as a frantic and factious three-year presidential campaign finally went to the voters. Supermarket magnate Ricardo Martinelli, 57, is the odds-on favorite to replace Pres. Martin Torrijos for a six-year term.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., May 2, 2009 -- About six months before the H1N1 'swine flu' virus broke out, an immigrant from Bangladesh began selling food on the streets of Mexico City. Shortly before his own death, the food vendor was visited by his brother, who became ill and returned to Bangladesh.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The way I heard the story, a chicken is eating lunch when an acorn falls on her head. Deciding that the sky is falling - she's a chicken, see, so she's not very bright - she runs around telling everyone, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Her friends join her to spread the word, and soon everyone is pretty much wiped out by a wily fox who sees this mass hysteria as a dining option. (Insert Dick Cheney joke here.)
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- During most of my adult life, the flu was considered an inconvenience - usually 24 hours of an upset stomach, throwing up, and perhaps a fever.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's good news for the Constitution and the rule of law that President Obama ordered the release of the Bush Administration memos that justified the use of torture and that he has not ruled out prosecuting officials who devised the policies that allowed torture to happen.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Actually, saying "pride goes before a fall" rings true to me, but we've always been aware of it and never really hit rock bottom. We've managed to be resourceful at home and too proud to crumble outside the home.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., April 22, 2010 -- A bright, clear day is rising here on Florida's beautiful Gulf Coast as I write, bringing with it the new hope inherent in every day and the bedraggled promise that all we have done to the Earth we live on can somehow be mostly undone, its ills healed and its beauty restored.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- To say that the past two weeks have been surreal does not begin to explain why I spent the entire Easter weekend waiting for a call from Pres. Barack Obama.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The fanatical Far Right, after taking a few days off to catch their collective breath, is back again - with a vengeance.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's hard not to laugh at the people who went to the various "tea bag" protests on Tax Day.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Quick! Name five things we used to depend upon that are rapidly disappearing. Okay - newspapers, magazines, landlines, network television, mail.
by Rudy Socha
LORAIN, Ohio -- Recently, as part of its GO global advertising campaign, Visa ran an ad showing a father taking his daughter to a public aquarium. The commercial was very well done and should have great appeal to young families with children, especially those who regularly visit zoos and aquariums. The tag line asks "When was the last time you took your daughter to an aquarium on a Tuesday?"
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It was a great day on Tuesday when Vermont became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage and the first state in the country to enact it without a court order.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Look, if the British want us Americans to stop making fun of them, they have to quit doing this stuff," said Karl, my drinking buddy and literary curmudgeon.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, April 10, 2009 -- Somewhere in the godforsaken waters off Somalia, a rowboat with four pirates and a brave hostage aboard is holding off an American destroyer. A rowboat is a launch that has run out of gas, which is why it no longer merits the more elegant name. But the pirates aboard are defiant and determined to succeed, and have threatened to kill their hostage if attacked.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - When it comes to newspapers, I'm locked into a love-hate relationship.
Mark Scheinbaum
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz., April 8, 2009 -- Halfway through the second act of an innovative Northern Arizona University production of "The Threepenny Opera" one demonstrator in a New York City crowd waves the sign: "AIG IS CRUEL !!!"
By Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- And yet again we are waking up to news of another disaster, this time a 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Italy, 60 miles east of Rome with 237 confirmed dead and 17,000 homeless as the rescue iof anyone living or dead in the rubble continues.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.. April 6, 2009 -- The debates are going 'round and 'round on "fixing the economy."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The British couldn't win there.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- If you get into the game early, you can make your mark on a lot of things. But Vermont boasts a remarkable list of firsts that go far beyond just being the 14th state in the Union (Vermont was the first state to join, on March 4, 1791, after the Constitution was ratified).
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Hold on a minute while I take a deep breath, before I comment about the latest phenomena to strike us. It doesn't take an earthquake or a bolt of lightning to knock me flat: "Sexting" can do it, and it's all the rage among our pubescent teens and young adults.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Several weeks ago, my family and I had the chance go with some friends and their kids to the Pokagon State Park Toboggan Run.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In the latest sign that the Republican Party has no ideas, no plan and no hope, their latest talking point against President Barack Obama is that he is trying to do too many things at once.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - They called him "Silent Cal," but Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States - the second one born in Vermont (the 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, was also born here) and the only U.S. president to be born on the Fourth of July - said one of the most beautiful things I've ever read about the state.
by J.M. Sylvan
AOMORI, Japan -- The theme of this past week naturally unfolded to become Arts and Crafts.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- This year marks the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and if he were still among the living, he would recognize the same sort of conflict that sparked the Civil War in the ongoing congressional battle over the Employee Free Choice Act.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "I can't work like this" screams the dresser, throwing a costume down. The co-producer is yelling, "OK. I'm gone! Take my name off the program. I won't have anything to do with this show!"
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Legislatures in Pennsylvania and Illinois are considering bills that would reduce or eliminate what animal welfare advocates call mutilations, and what breeders and American Kennel Club (AKC) call "breed standards." Because dogs are considered by state laws to be property, individual owners may currently cut and shape dogs' ears (cropping) or amputate part or all of their tails (docking), often without a proper sterile environment or anesthesia.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- From the outside looking in, you would probably say I had a hardscrabble life growing up, but the world of make-believe existed on the inside as I played with my paper dolls. They were something affordable and especially nice to find under the Christmas tree.
by J.M. Sylvan
AMORI, Japan -- The sublime intelligence of Japanese life is traditionally encapsulated in the highly compressed poetry called the haiku, one that doesn't allow for words that are not filled with meaning.
by Mark Scheinbaum
PANAMA CITY, Panama, Mar. 13, 2009 -- They laid Anel Omar to rest yesterday with full state honors. The murder of a complex renaissance man who was the type of guy who probably would have cried at a funeral such as his own, was also a measure of the growing, uncontrolled violence in Panama.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Greetings from Vermont, the least religious state in America.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- How timely is it that this year's Women's Film Festival in Brattleboro is showing "Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm," a 2007 film by Wendy Slick & Emiko Omorias?
by Joe Shea
INDIANAPOLIS. March 10, 2009 -- By e-mail and telephone, the White House has signaled its disapproval of a full-blown ad campaign for an Indiana gambling firm that opens a new casino Friday, the American Reporter has learned. The offending ads show a likeness of President Barack Obama calling for economic growth and "change."
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Eight years ago my curiosity was aroused when a beautiful, rich and famous actress - Winona Ryder - was arrested for shoplifting $6,000 worth of clothes and hair products from a Saks Fifth Avenue store in Beverly Hills, Calif.
by J.M. Sylvan
AOMORI, Japan -- In an attempt to learn more about the Japanese culture, I have been talking to people who are Japanese as well as foreigners that have lived here for a five or more years. Arriving in this country, I fell under the spell of the famous Japanese custom of extreme politeness to visitors. I found myself falling in love with a tidy, friendly, fascinating country that seemed at first, like a well-organized paradise. Now I am having the opportunity to see some stressful aspects of Japanese life.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- After nearly six years and the deaths of more than 4,250 deaths of U.S. military personnel, after spending more than $700 billion on a disastrous war of choice, after missteps and miscalculations that left Iraq a shambles, it looks like this nightmare is almost over.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., March 6, 2009 -- A New Jersey man whose company guarantees that its hydrogen-injection kits for cars and trucks will produce mileage gains of 50% or more has won a key stage of his battle with the Federal Trade Commission after a Federal Judge ruled the agency had not been able to disprove his claims.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Not since the horrors of Abu Ghraib have I been so disturbed by a story that combines women, sadism and murder.
Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- When you live in a coastal region almost totally dependent upon tourism to stimulate the economy, it's quite obvious that one hand washes the other - if I may use the old British expression for bartering. It's no secret we're "workin' for the Yankee dollar." Unlike the song, the working force here does not on "next day, sit in hot sun and cool off." More likely, they are cooling their heels waiting for a call and a job.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- We've all heard about the town without pity, but a town without newspapers? Please. Yet is entirely possible that in a short while, both San Francisco and Philadelphia will be without them.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- In May 2004, the New York Times, while claiming it was aggressive in pursuing stories about the Bush-Cheney Administration, slipped in an apology for acting more as the mouthpiece for politicians than as a watchdog for society.
by Richard Thieme
MILWAUKEE, Wisc. -- It is getting dark early, and although it's almost spring, it feels like late autumn, less and less light each day, cold winds biting our faces as we turn instinctively from the wind ... when we ought to be looking into the wind, looking for clues to how to trim our sails and adapt to a world that will never be quite the same again.
by J.M. Sylvan
AMORI, Japan -- Japan sits on three interacting plates of the earth's crust. They interact, grind and cause quakes. This country is part of an archipelago of 3,922 islands that were formed 15 million years ago by magma-spouting volcanoes. The people here learn to live on the edge of the hostile sea and on very unstable land.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Set aside the blather of the political pundits for a moment and let this sink in: On the 24th day of his presidency, Barack Obama recorded a legislative achievement that few of his predecessors had accomplished at any point of their terms in office.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Even if it's true that we're all separated by a few degrees, I was still surprised to learn that I was connected to criminal financier Bernie Madoff.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Feb. 22, 2009 -- What if you woke up and found out the "recession" means that the number of your unemployed friends and neighbors in your home state, New Mexico, rocketed up an astounding 6.3% in one single, solitary, sad and sorry day?
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The president of the Associated Press (AP) was spewing venom at the Bush-Cheney Administration for having turned the Dept. of Defense into a propaganda machine.
by Ted Manna
DENVER -- Hoping to jump-start the American economy and restore sagging consumer and corporate confidence, President Barack Obama today signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It is, in his words, "the most sweeping economic recovery act in our history."
AR Photo: Tony Manna |
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Every House Republican and 11 Democrats voted against President Barack Obama's $819 billion stimulus package. It still passed by a vote of 244 to 188.
by J.M. Sylvan
SONOMA COUNTY, Calif. -- My next place of work will be Japan. The past few days I have been preparing for the two-month trip. Preparations have included several trips to the chiropractor and acupuncturist.
by T.S. Kerrrigan
LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- It's true, Seamus, you and I were both born in 1939, that year Hitler was marching into Czechoslovakia and Poland, that forerunner of a decade that introduced the Atomic Age.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- On Friday, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said what a lot of us are thinking about Wall Street fat cats and how they are taking federal bailout money while handing out bonuses and pay raises to themselves.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When the Incas ruled South America, they created a series of stone highways running up and down the Andes mountains and westward to the sea. Trained runners were organized into relays. A fish caught in the Pacific Ocean in the morning could be on the plate of the Inca king in the mountains of Cuzco that night.
by J.M. Sylvan
SONOMA COUNTY, CA. -- I'm sad about the state of the world economy - yet happy that the shop 'til you drop mentality is over.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The future of rural economies, such as where I live in Vermont, is tied to increased high-speed broadband Internet access. However, it is clear that the dream of universal access in Vermont, and other rural areas of the United States, is just that - a dream.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- My wife is a smoker. Except for one year when she quit, she's been a smoker since she was about 18. But she's cut back, from as many as three packs a day to just three cigarettes. And, she now smokes outside the house.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- On National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" the other evening, I caught a story about President Barack Obama and the news media. The gist of it was that while Obama has promised to run an open and transparent Administration, and while he's already loosened the stranglehold that former President George W. Bush put on the Freedom of Information Act, the traditional press was feeling excluded.
by J.M. Sylvan
NEW YORK, NY. -- I got to talking to the Fort librarian about the conflict I was having working for the military while it was conducting an unjust war. She let me borrow a book for chaplains on ethics. I find it very helpful as I struggle with my troubled conscience. It gives me guidance by offering questions to help me focus on my behavior and those I work for.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- I was disappointed to learn that I had missed Men's History Month this January, also known as MANuary. I blame it on the fact that I thought I knew when it was, and I just didn't look at the calendar or ask for directions. So, to assuage my guilt, I'll cover some of the different holidays, celebrations, and observances for February.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's been a long time since we've seen this kind of excitement over a presidential inauguration.
by Mark Scheinbaum
EL PASO, Tex., Jan. 25, 2009 -- By early Sunday, 11 more residents of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, had been slain in a 20-hour period, including the sixth police officer killed this year in growing drug cartel violence. More than 65 police officers have been murdered in the border city of 1.4 million in the past year. Too often, U.S. and Mexican media have been AWOL from coverage.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In 1940, believing that "God Bless America" was too passive an anthem, the great folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote an answer called " Your Land." Pete Seeger, God bless him, sang it at the Inaugural Concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- We made food history last week when Indiana declared the Wick's sugar cream as its very own State Pie. I celebrated the event by having my wife tell me I couldn't eat any because of my cholesterol.
by Mark Scheinbaum
EL PASO, Tex., Jan 22, 2009 -- Do you start with the decapitated heads of police officers found in local ice cream coolers, the kindergarten kids threatened with mass kidnappings, the vigilantes who have emailed the media to prove they are serious about murdering "criminals," or do you just give up explaining it in Ciudad Juàrez, Mexico, a mile from Interstate 10 and just down the road from El Paso?.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 20, 2009 -- The words that reached out to me from the Inaugural Address of President Barack Obama were when he spoke of what Americans can achieve when "imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage." Imagination and courage are the most powerful qualities of the American character, because it is we as a people who have progressively imagined annd created this great nation, and we who have courageously defended and extended its ideals.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa., Jan. 20, 2009 -- The people are good at anointing who they believe are heroes. It gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling to know there are those among us who do extraordinary things, often at the risk of their own lives.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Why do conservatives still hate President Franklin D. Roosevelt? Why have three generations of right-wingers attacked his accomplishments? It's because FDR stood up to the most concentrated and vicious attacks by the men he called "economic royalists," and came out on top nearly every time.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Jan. 18, 2009 -- I'm uncomfortable with hate.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) flexed their muscles, shook their rattles, and told President-elect Barack Obama not to tread upon them.
by J. M. Sylvan
NEW YORK -- One great aspect of a job that requires traveling is the opportunity to visit with family and friends who live in the area. I have had the pleasure of meeting with my great-fraternal cousin, "Uncle Teddy", whose real name was Dan Brosnon, from Flushing, N.Y.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Would you eat a kitten?
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Ask me why I take such a gloomy view of human nature and the possibility of peace in our time and I'll tell you the story of the dueling theater groups.
by Joe Shea
CLEARWATER, Fla., Jan. 16, 2009. 4:04AM -- Here in this coastal resort town that is home to more Scientologists and assorted inventors and kooks than you can shake a stick at, Barry Holzsweig is breaking the mold today as he opens a long, sleek service station on a busy U.S. Highway 19 in an event that could be almost as important as the sale of the first Model A some 106 years ago. If Holzsweig and his handful of investors have their way, after today Americans may soon drive hybrid cars on hydrogen produced from water, added to ordinary gasoline - but much less of it.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- President-elect Barack Obama will soon take the reins of government, and with it, the challenge of trying to keep the U.S. economy from sliding into the abyss.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- On the way to industrial development and globalization, groups of people lived in cultures they created themselves.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Okay, boys. Put down the basketballs, I want you to do some warmups, and then you'll do some layup drills. First, let's do some jumping jacks."
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Jan. 3, 2:22PM ET -- Israeli troops in the past hour have finally launched its long-awaited invasion of the 220-square mile Gaza Strip, following seven days of intense bombardment that killed at least 430 Palestinians, destroyed thousands of offices, apartments, businesses and homes and left the ordinary people of Gaza and its tens of thousands of refugees shaking with fear.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As we begin a new year, it's hard not to look back on how much damage the Bush Administration has done to this nation's reputation over the past eight years and how much work will have to be done to mend it all around the world.
by Andrew S. Tully
WASHINGTON, March 16-18, 2001 -- Editor's Note: At the turn of the century, a batch of recently declassified analyses by the Central Intelligence Agency offered new insight into U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. The papers covered the Soviet Union's military capabilities and social, economic, political, and foreign policy issues, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Andrew F. Tully told The American Reporter.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it's January 1, 2009.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The New York Yankees just bought a first baseman for $180 million. For the next eight years, Mark Teixeira will earn about $22.5 million a season. The week before, the Yanks bought seven years of pitcher C.C. Sabathia's life for $161 million, about $23 million a season - and five years of A.J. Burnett for $82.5 million, about $16.5 million for each season, according to the Associated Press. None of the salaries include any incentive pay or outside endorsements, which add millions to each salary.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It's that time of year again. Or at least it was.
by Benjamin Perkins
WASHINGTON -- A social media site called LINK-Live, based on the Obama campaign 's Web outreach, plans to bring Inauguration Day ceremonies into the homes of millions around the world.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 29, 2008 - You can't watch events in the Middle East, South Asia or on the world's financial pages without a deep sense of foreboding. Hair-trigger tempers paired with nuclear arsenals threaten even more wars, while huge financial frauds and vast stock market debacles dash our hopes for a better world economy. Basic human needs for food, water, shelter, clothing and clean air go unmet in dozens of nations. A deep malaise of the human spirit pervades much of humanity with anger, hatred, despair, and hopelessness. Meanwhile, millions embrace Mayan predictions that the end of the world will come in 2012. It certainly feels like it could, sometimes.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In Sicily, they say that fish start rotting from the head. In the past few months, as we've gotten closer and closer to the end of President George W. Bush's failed terms in office, we've been witnessing a mind-boggling amount of corruption, greed, evil, and downright stupidity. The smell has become almost overpowering.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., Dec. 21, 2008 -- It's not productive to spend too much time analyzing the expiring Bush Administration's bridge loan/bailout of two U.S. automakers, since the new Obama Administration will either have to enhance, ignore, or unravel the deal. But even on its face it is a squandering of one last opportunity for American industry.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The chairman of the Republican National Committee has begun an irreversible descent into fear-bound paranoia and functional amnesia following his post-traumatic hysteria over the overwhelming victory of Democrats in the 2008 election and the nation's definitive repudiation of Republican policies.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Every worker in America should be cheering for the workers at the Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors. The 240 employees at Republic offered the nation an important lesson in the power of collective action.
by J.M. Sylvan
NEW YORK -- I hope your Thanksgiving was relaxing and delicious. The holidays can bring tension and grief with them in addition to joy and celebration, especially on military bases for military moms. Did you know that the Army grants six weeks of maternity leave for new mothers and gives four months before she can be sent into combat? This does not give them enough time to establish a good bond with their infants, nor the year to breast feed them suggested by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- We may talk about running out of oil in this country, but up here in Vermont, we're already practicing a lot of the survival skills we'll be needing if - or when - it happens.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 1, 2008 -- Ever since I lived and worked in India for about six months in 1972, when I had the chance to meet heads of state throughout the region and many of the diplomats posted there, I have had a strong interest in its affairs. That interest was particularly well-served by two of the distinguished American Reporter Correspondents who covered the South Asia region for us.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- John Maynard Keynes' most famous contribution to the science of economics was his principle that, in a recession, government must take the lead in stimulating demand through increased spending - even if it means running up a deficit.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Our local newspaper editor, as he does regularly, once again attacked unions as the problem in America. This is the same editor who once said "all the laziest goof-offs and goldbricks in the newsroom" where he began his career were union officials - and that the unionized New York Times editorial writers are nothing more than "limousine liberals."
by Mark Scheinbaum
SIERRA VISTA, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2008 -- Black Friday shoppers of goodwill and kind heart might hope that the neighbors near the mall in this retiree-and-military southern Arizona town never find out the home address of the Best Buy marketing genius who hired the high school drum, bugle, and glockenspiel band to pulsate the parking lot at 4AM.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- He's no poet, but AR Correspondent Erik Deckers has put his heart into the good fight for a Christmas free of lawyers and their fees.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- One of the many things I'm thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day - and thank you, America, for giving us an intelligent president once again (and to you, the 58 million or so people who voted for John "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should" McCain, whatever were you thinking?) - is that we've finally seen the end of Nancy Reagan eyes.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As we've seen over the past few months, Americans are not happy with the way things are. They want change.
by Mark Scheinbaum
BOCA RATON, Fla. -- The thoughts below were written three years and one month ago. No one cared about my ideas. On local and national radio for more than 14 years I made the same health care warning loud and clear to anyone who would listen.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The blogosphere exploded last Tuesday with the rumor that President-Elect Barack Obama might ask Sen. Hillary Clinton to be our next secretary of state.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- President Bush, as has every president since his father began the practice in 1989, annually pardons a Thanksgiving turkey.
by Rebecca L. Hein
CASPER, Wyo. -- Technology has given us practically everything, so why can't it provide a heat sensor for your phone line? Then, when you start breathing fire at the vendor you're trying to reach, someone at that company will get a clue that their automatic routing system is provoking you past all reasonable limits.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The holiday season is right around the corner, and the stores have had their Christmas decorations out since late July.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- President-elect Barack Obama clearly won the 2008 presidential election because of the market meltdown.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Well, our long national nightmare is over. America had its Frank Capra moment, Mr. Smith is going to Washington after all, and it's about time.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Those people at Oxford University sure are smart," said Karl, my friend, literary drinking buddy, and part-time curmudgeon. "Smart and irritating."
Mark Scheinbaum
PANAMA CITY, Panama -- After hosting my own election night party I awoke with a slight hangover, vaguely recalling this dream that a black guy had been elected President of the United States of America.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- One of the most famous football pictures of all time came to mind during this election season.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- In July 1944, with victory over Germany and Japan in sight, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered in the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H., to shape the economic system for the post-World War II world.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Nov. 2, 2008 -- You would have thought I was a lunatic, the way I went walking down the street shouting into the air that Jesse Jackson was running for President. You really need to be a little odd to do something like that, but ever since my friend Dennis Gurrant, an Olympic-class broad-jumper who had beaten Bob Beamon at the Randalls Island Invitational, I have been a little odd on the topic of electing a black man president.
by Mark Scheinbaum
PANAMA CITY, Panama, Oct. 31, 2008 -- I'll use Hallowe'en to relate a Panamanian horror story to anyone who is not born and bred in Panama: this is the country where one's "initial" reaction is absolutely incomprehensible. We're talking about acronyms and initials which bypass even Canada's manic imprimatur of the suffix or prefix Canada on every agency, office, and charity you can imagine.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It looks like the undecideds are going to carry Vermont's gubernatorial election, and until Saturday, I was one of them.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 28, 2008 -- Take this guy: His wife works at McDonald's, pulling down $180 a week on $7.50 an hour, and he makes a solid $15 an hour and brings home $600 a week before taxes. That $2,960 is enough to let them borrow plenty - on a home mortgage, on an F-150, a boat trailer and a snappy-looking outboard, for a family vacation with her parents, for athletic gear and special training for the older two kids. And best of all, their cinder-block 3-bedroom home that cost $132,000 in 2003 has soared in a hot market to nearly $180,000.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- With only nine days to go before the presidential election, it looks more and more like Democratic candidate Barack Obama will defeat Republican candidate John McCain by a substantial margin.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ALBERQUERQUE, N.M., Oct. 26, 2008 -- I 've visited North and South Florida and North and Central New Mexico in recent days, and the political temperature 10 days before the Presidential election is elevated by the teeter-totter of global recession.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Outrage is a columnist's best friend.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- During the final debate last week, Barack Obama called John McCain on the negative ads, saying that 100 percent of his radio and television ads were negative.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's rare that a film haunts me the way that the recent "Man on Wire" does.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Despite Sen. John McCain's belief to the contrary, the situation in Iraq has become increasingly twisted and convoluted. It is almost like Milo Minderbinder, the wheeler-dealer from Joseph Heller's World War II novel "Catch-22," is in charge.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- My family and I moved recently. We went from the heart of Indianapolis to the northern suburbs, something which did not excite me. I don't know what I hated more, leaving our little urban dwelling, or loading and unloading two truckloads of stuff in 36 hours.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla. -- The presidential debate Wednesday night never mentioned the words $2.2 trillion: that's how much the banks, brokerage and investment houses and insurance companies have so far taken from the American people's Treasury of the United States. Just for your edification, that was $7,333 for every single one of America's 300,000,000 people. Of course, the people can't be trusted with it. They just pay it.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- So, how's that bailout thing working out?
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The Sunbird Conservatives, a student group, put out some pro-McCain literature at a recruiting table at Fresno Pacific University a week ago.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Many of us grew up listening to the preamble to the radio and television show, "The Shadow." A deep voice asked a question opening the show that I'll paraphrase here: Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? Given the fact that "The Shadow," who does know what lurks therein, is a fictional character shedding no light on anything in the real world, we will have to acknowledge that no one knows what lies in the hearts of men - men being generic for mankind.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I'm thinking of taking a lot of Valium until the elections are over.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Sure, I'd be glad to help you with your homework, Honey."
by Mark Scheinbaum
TRINIDAD, Colo. (Oct. 9, 2008, 12:51PM) -- Until yesterday your choices for depositing safe money around the globe were basically Ireland, Germany or the Mafia.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 3, 2008 (3:55PM EDT) -- Like a bad joke, the Dow swung up close to 300 points today as lawmakers voted at 1 PM on the bill to bail out Wall Street banks and brokers, and then fell 450 from that point as traders began the clamor for more at the close.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Last week's presidential debate was supposed to cover foreign policy issues, but the ongoing market meltdown was too big to ignore.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 2, 2008 -- With $700 billion dollars - about $2,400 for every man woman and child in America - Congress has just about paid back all those American and foreign banks for every bad loan they've ever made. All those credit card debts that people didn't feel like paying will soon be paid for by taxpayer money, courtesy of Congress. So why not let them pay our bills, too?
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Here are some of the characteristics I want in the next President of the United States: strength, character, intelligence, confidence, the ability to learn from mistakes, empathy, emotional control, a moral compass and the ability to inspire.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Oct. 1, 2008, 7:42PM EDT -- In the last two hours, I have sent the versions of the following letter to Sens. Obama, McCain, Clinton, Dodd, Biden, Kerry, (Mel) Martinez and Nelson. I have contributed to all but Martinez, who is my U.S. Senator. I told them each the same thing:
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 30, 2008 -- Will wonders never cease? I never thought the right-wing Republicans of the House of Representatives would join arms with the progressive Democrats that populate this newspaper and put the kibosh on President George W. Bush's greedy, unrealistic and anti-American $700 billion bailout plan for Wall Street.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- It was Monday evening and the phone rang - again. It was probably the fifth time in two hours. A pleasant voice said she was from the - oh, that really doesn't make any difference. Both presidential candidates have volunteer minions on the phones and Internet day after day, month after month, for what has seemed like years.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As a typical Guy, I've complained loudly about the deadliness of another Guy's gas. Or joked about whether he would have to register an impact statement with the Environmental Protection Agency. Whether his butt should be registered as a lethal weapon. Whether the smeller is truly the feller. About whether - you get the picture.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's always time to worry when you hear that something has to be done, and done right away, or else a calamity of unimagined proportions will strike.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Being old-fashioned and terrified of needles, I approach all surgery with trepidation. So I'm not really clear why other people regard it as a necessity, or at the very least, a vacation option.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 25, 2008 2:01PM EDT (Updated 7:50 PM EDT) -- As I write, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 260 points on the greedy anticipation of Wall Street that a bailout package will restore CEO salaries and bonuses, and that all their bad decisions will be rectified by the American taxpayer for just $700,000,000,000.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- A front-page New York Times photo update of their Website at 5:10 p.m. last Sunday led off with this sad caption: "Thousands of people who refused orders to evacuate were feared stranded across a swath of Texas. Above, residents waited outside a shelter at a high school in Galveston."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Those who thought that last week's government bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would stabilize the financial markets got a wakeup call this week.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 17 (Updated Sept. 18, 2008) -- As some of the world's largest financial institutions are marched one by one to the Federal Reserve's lending window to pick up bailouts, bridge loans, cheap cash and the rest of our money, the orderly queue is getting ready to go wild. Washington Mutual is next in line, followed by Morgan Stanley and then Goldman Sachs - but who's the last before the Fed goes broke?
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- This is for all of you who are truly frightened by Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin: give it a rest.
by Joe Shea
BRADENTON, Fla., Sept. 19, 2008 -- When it comes to paying your bill, Best Buy's vaunted technology is a total bust. Anyone from your bank to Chevron or a brokerage house can post a payment on the same day, but if you are within less than two days of the payment date, Best Buy wants you to pay an additional $15 - that's how corrupt this outfit is.
by Ted Manna
DENVER, Colo., Sept. 16, 2008 -- Partisan politics paused for a breath in toss-up state Colorado Monday, as the Democratic presidential candidate and the Republican vice-presidential pick both sought to sooth Americans shocked Monday morning by news of Wall Street's steepest drop since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, wiping out $800 billion in assets in a 504-point dive.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- We've been told this time and time again by the Bush Administration since the terror attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 that the civil liberties guaranteed by our Constitution are luxuries we can no longer afford and that we must learn to live without.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Defibrillator usage increased last week after John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate and only a heartbeat from control of the nation's nuclear arsenal. But, shortly after most Republicans were shocked back to life they circled the wagons to declare she was the perfect choice. Apparently, the cure also included a dose of psychotropic drugs as well.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Vermont's unemployment rate is the highest it's been in the last 14 years (and remember - "Jim equals jobs"). It has made no progress on developing new energy resources. It's barely put a Band-Aid on health care reform. There's a gas price crisis now and one looming for heating oil this winter.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- Don't use the Good Scissors!
by Ted Manna
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Sept. 6, 2008-- This is how it starts, this elaborate electoral dance with the country's voters. Republican candidate for president Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin stepped off their brightly-lit Straight Talk Air chartered jet last night, into a cool mist visible in the blazing headlights of the happy caravan that waited to carry them straight toward their date with destiny - Election Day.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- It's been nearly a week since he announced it, and I still cannot believe that John McCain would choose someone who is arguably the most unqualified and inexperienced vice presidential nominee in recent memory.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Voters here are being entertained by an unexpectedly passionate primary race.
by Ted Manna and Joe Shea
AT THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, DENVER, Aug. 28, 2008 -- The Democratic Party celebrated its hard-fought choice of a presidential nominee with world-class music, triumphal speeches and a mile-high fireworks display that mirrored the powerful emotions on display at Invesco Field in Denver as the first African-American in American history accepted the party's nomination with "profound gratitude and great humility."
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The feeling at the Democratic National Convention in Denver this week is one of euphoria, and deservedly so. Democrats believe that 2008 will be a watershed year for the party and liberalism and an electoral repudiation of the Bush years on an epochal scale.
by Ted Manna and Joe Shea
AT THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, DENVER, Colo., Aug. 27, 2008 -- On the southernmost fringes of Democratic convention territory here, in a nondescript hotel dining room in suburban Douglas County, Colo., 17 miles from the downtown Pepsi Center where the convention's business is being conducted, 47 Arkansas delegates seemed to have a little trouble saying goodbye to their favorite sister, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Vermont is beautiful in late summer. Just a drive up to Burlington gets me drunk with the rolling greens and golds dotted with reds, pinks and blues. It lifts the heart to be here. But for how long?
by Ted Manna and Joe Shea
AT THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION, DENVER, Aug. 27, 2008 -- American Reporter Correspondent Ted Manna and Editor-in-Chief Joe Shea watched the Hillary Clinton speech at the Democratic Convention here with different perceptions Tuesday night.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- The superstar of the 2008 Beijing Olympics may not have been the multiple medalists like Michael Phelps, but the Great Wall of China. Every network covering the Olympics took the world to see it. Almost every newspaper and magazine reporter also visited the ancient wonder of the world.
by Joe Shea and Ted Manna
AT THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION, DENVER, Colo., Aug. 26, 2008 [Updated 11:30PM MT] -- As Denver police sprayed tear gas and shot pepper balls at radical protestors in a park more than a mile from the Democratic National Convention here, a prospective first lady of the United States told a compelling story of a black family's hard work, struggles and slow rise to the pinnacle of American politics.
by Ted Manna and Joe Shea
AT THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, DENVER, Colo., Aug. 25, 2008 -- Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi started off the Democratic National convention press briefings this morning with a promise of unparalleled openness and a willingness to listen, but when 4,000 protestors concerned about everything from the Iraq War to diminishing Arctic habitat for polar bears marched two miles from the State Capitol to the Pepsi Center headquarters, convention officials were nowhere to be seen.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- For the part, history is filled with missed opportunities. Perhaps the biggest one for our country came two decades ago.
by Ted Manna
DENVER, April 22, 2008 -- The lights are strung and the banners are hung. The Pepsi Center is ready for the Democratic National Convention, which starts Monday and runs through Thursday.
by Ted Manna
DENVER, Colo., Aug. 20, 2008 -- Just a few blocks from Martin Luther King Blvd. but seven miles from downtown, the Denver County Sheriff's Dept. today unveiled a collection of big steel cages - paid for by a $500,000 grant from the Democrats - for protestors arrested at their presidential nomnating convention here next week.
by Ahmar Mustikhan
WASHINGTON,D.C., Aug. 20, 2008 -- He was forced to live like a blind man in a dark dungeon for eight months, so completely denied daylight that he could not know if it was day or night, after Pakistan's Military Intelligence secretly abducted him on suspicion of promoting U.S. interests.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Shawn Johnson has the loveliest green eyes.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- As Americans, we tend to think we are the greatest country on Earth. Few ever question whether this is really so.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - You've got to love John Edwards; he's the gift that keeps on giving.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- It was the snit heard 'round the world. The snarky, scantily-clad video response that got pundits tongues wagging about something other than politics, at least until their wives saw them. Maybe its echo has faded from the news, but it still makes me wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- When Sherlock Holmes says "Elementary, my dear Watson," he bases his further explanation of the who, when, where and why of a murder after deducing through careful investigation why he has reached that conclusion. He does not jump to conclusions based upon similar situations on record. Nor does he offer his personal opinion without having gone over every element of the case at hand.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Unconditional love is rare, but I was lucky enough to find it in - of all places - my mother-in-law. With your permission, I'd like to tell you something about her and why I loved her so much.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- Are we so desperate for one last big fix of oil, that we're willing to destroy one of the world's last pristine and unspoiled regions?
by Ted Manna
AURORA, Colo., July 30, 2008 -- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain brought his trademark humor and down-home charm to Colorado for the second time in a week today, seeking to shore up support in this "battleground state."
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. - The day before the casting call, I fantasized that they would take one look at me - my frizzy red hair, my bright smile, my aura - especially my aura - and hand me a major part. Hollywood money would flow through my hands. The recognition I've always deserved would be mine at last. The worry over the coming winter's heating bills? Vanished with the wind. How could they not see that I was meant to be a star?
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- People always say that Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas is a nice man. But he has character as well as policy failings which we can no longer afford to overlook. Douglas's tenure has been disastrous.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I have written often over the past few years about the house of cards that is the American economy, but the events of the past week should frighten everybody.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When I first came to southern Vermont, in 1987, I had been on the road in South and Central America - literally on the road - for 14 years. You could say I had been a homeless person. Some called me "feral."
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- As a self-appointed fighter against corporate gobbledygook (I'm an Official BS Detector), I have railed against all jargon, corporate speak, and, well, BS that I hear from corporate America and the government. My usual method of BS detecting is to read something, point a finger pointed skyward, and shout, "This is complete and utter BS!"
by Joe Shea
SARASOTA, Fla., June 18, 2008 -- I had a strong desire to write tonight, but by the time AT&T; got through with me, I was exhausted, so I only wrote this.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- When it comes to politics, I've been feeling more like a virgin every day.
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., July 9, 2008 -- Okay, you asked for detailed recommendations in a Bear market.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- There are around 6.7 billion people sharing our planet today. And the human family is currently growing by about 1.2 percent per year.
by Walter Brasch
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Dave Comroe stepped to the firing line, raised his 12-gauge Browning over and under shotgun, aimed and fired. Before him, a pigeon fell, moments after being released from a box less than 20 yards away. About 25 times that day Comroe fired, hitting about three-fourths of the birds. He was 16 at the time.
by Mark Scheinbaum
BOCA RATON, Fla., July 2, 2008 -- Dear Sen.Obama: Thanks for repudiating Gen. Wesley Clark's stupid comments regarding John McCain's military service and preparedness to be Commander in Chief. I really don't care about your apologies.
by Walter Brasch
BLOOMSBURG, Pa. -- Wearing a pith helmet and brandishing a blunderbuss, Marshbaum burst into my office and ordered me to the floor. I looked at my faux friend and media foil, about to ask him what his latest scheme was. With Marshbaum, who was fed "Honeymooners" episodes by IV when he was a child, everything is a scheme to make money. But, in the fraction of time I had before he yelled for me to get under my desk and cover my head, I quickly determined he was serious.
by Constance Daley
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. -- Shakespeare's character, Iago, begins a dialog in Othello saying: "Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, is the immediate jewel of their souls." Well, my good name was robbed! Iago goes on to say: "Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands."
by Ahmar Mustikhan
WASHINGTON, June 30, 2008 -- The interests of the U.S. military-industrial complex appear to take precedence over U.S. national interests and human rights concerns, a recent transfer of fighter jets to Pakistan shows.
by Walter Brasch
HARRISBURG, Pa. -- There should have been absolutely no controversy in a resolution presented in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives this past week.
by Randolph T. Holhut
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- You'd think that in the 21st Century, we could do things better than we did in the 1930's. But when it comes to train travel, that's not the case.
by Elizabeth T. Andrews
CARTERSVILLE, Ga. -- They live across the street from you and something about them tugs at the corners of your mind. They have lived there for years but you hardly know them. As you pass by you wave or say hello. They wave back and some vague order is again confirmed.
by Erik Deckers
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- "Okay, Buddy, put your mitt on."
by Mark Scheinbaum
ANGEL FIRE, N.M., June 26, 2008 -- The Wall Street Bull Market Express is leaving the station and you have two months, maybe three to run down the platform, take the leap, and latch on to the caboose.
by Joyce Marcel
DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- The only good thing about George Carlin's death on Sunday at the age of 71 - and there is no good thing about George Carlin's death on Sunday at the age of 71 - is that he has already given us such a rich body of thought, analysis, observation and truth that it will take us the rest of our lives to work through it all - and even then, we probably won't be able to absorb or act on even a percentage of what he's said.
Copyright 2013 Joe Shea The American Reporter. All Rights Reserved.
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