Walking down Main Street, pushing a grocery cart loaded with clothes, toys, and appliances was Marshbaum. Fastened to the right front corner of the cart was an American flag tied onto a three-foot ruler. “Patriot!” he was calling out. “Step aside for an American patriot!” “You posing as a homeless veteran to get spare change?” I asked after almost being body-checked by the cart. “I’m doing exactly what the government told me to do,” he replied. “The government told...
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Spouting Change to Stay the Same
All of the presidential candidates are spouting “CHANGE” as their “catch-word of the day.” Change the health care system. Change the economy. Change the corporate hold on middle-class Americans. The only thing they’re not relying upon to get votes is spare change. A multi-million dollar campaign needs corporate investment—the kind the candidates say they oppose, but most are taking, nevertheless. From Iowa in January to the last primary in June, candidates are dishing out heaping platters of rhetoric that...
The Disconnected Media
Add pundits, pollsters, and the press to the list of losers in the New Hampshire primary. They weren’t on the ballot. They didn’t vote. And they didn’t get it right. For the Democrats, Sen. Barack Obama, fresh from victory in Iowa, was supposed to cruise into a double digit win in the Granite State. Sen. Hillary Clinton, at least if anyone believed the media, was going to be flattened by the Obama steamroller that was chugging to dominate all...
Benazir Bhutto Not What the Media and Bush Administration Claimed
By Saleeem Khan, Ph.D. The violent death of Benazir Bhutto on December 27, is the latest event in a culture of violence that has been steadily spreading in the body politics in Pakistan. Ms. Bhutto’s assassination took place in Liaqat Park 28 years after the execution in April 1979 of her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a democratically elected prime minister of Pakistan, at the hands of a military dictator. The prison where his execution was carried out...
Oops! The Media Did It Again
Ever vigilant, the mass media dug into a critical social issue and rooted out the information in their never-ending quest to guarantee the people’s right to know. What they determined was the people’s right to know was that 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, star of Nickelodeon’s “Zoey 101,” is pregnant. Jamie Lynn is the younger sister of Britney Spears, the former Mouseketeer who has combined a chart-topping career as a singer/dancer with being America’s Celebrity Super-Skank. The National Enquirer first...
George W. Bush’s Convenient Truth
The man whom the people elected in 2000 to be president was in the temporary residence of the man whom the Supreme Court anointed. President George W. Bush hosted former Vice-President Al Gore, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and five other Nobel laureates, Nov. 26. This annual handshake photo-op has been an American tradition. The Nobel committee had cited Gore, Oct. 12 , as “probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of...
A Halloween Scare
There are a lot of scary things in the world. There’s the “fun-scary”—kids who dress up as clowns, monsters, or fairy princesses once a year to get a month’s supply of candy, which they’ll finish off by morning. There’s scary movies, from “Jaws” to “Friday the 13th“ to—well—“Scary Movie.” The murder mystery genre—in books, TV, and film—can scare even the least gullible. What’s even scarier is that there were about 1.4 million violent crimes last year; about 17,000 of...
Why Bush Should Have Signed the Children’s Health Care Bill
WANDERINGS, with Walter Brasch For release: Oct. 3, 2007 brasch@ptd.net by Walter M. Brasch President George W. (“I-Demand-an-Up-or-Down-Vote”) Bush today vetoed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which expired this past week. The highly successful program to aid children was begun in 1997 under the Clinton presidency. The bipartisan legislation bill to increase funding and continue SCHIP was passed overwhelmingly by the House (265–159) and Senate (67–29). It would have increased health insurance for about two...
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