Plain-Spoken Politics with a Long Island accent
This is another column about the burgeoning crisis between the US and Iran. Since I have yet to gain any traction with this issue I have decided to sprinkle gratuitous pop-culture references throughout the piece to generate interest.
Rosy neo-con visions of sugar plum oil fields and Jeffersonian democracy fairies transforming the Middle East have blurred beyond recognition over the past decade. So, it’s a good time to change the subject and refocus
In a world of shrinking newsrooms, Long Island has so far managed to remain a haven for journalism and educated opinion spanning a breadth of perspective.
Simultaneously clutching his Nobel Peace Prize in one hand and George W. Bush’s preemptive strike doctrine in the other, Obama has straddled this no-man’s land about as well as any president possibly could.
You absolutely must be the primary sentinel of your own health. To be effective in that capacity, you have to be in touch with your body and deduce what is good or bad for it. Today’s given wisdom is often tomorrow’s discredited procedure and may even be hazardous to your health.
When you examine the litany of geniuses who wrought havoc in the markets in their profligate quest for unmitigated deregulation, you’re hard-pressed to find the fairer sex among them.
Um, sorry, black folk. Apparently in Ron Paul’s America, the right of a state still trumps your right to be considered more than three-fifths human.
By touting natural gas as the clean-burning fossil fuel that is cheaper to use and helps reduce our dependence on foreign oil, the industry has nailed the PR trifecta: cheaper, cleaner and patriotic.
If you guaranteed most folks an income next year of one million bucks, but it came with a 70% tax rate, what percentage would sign on the bottom line? Do you suppose there would be a huge groundswell of tea baggers with five-figure incomes turning up their noses on principle over this outlandish top marginal tax rate (which still prevailed in Reagan’s first term)? I, for one, would sign up in a heartbeat then register Republican and rejoin the NRA, lest anyone try to get their mitts on my remaining $300,000.
As furious debate over fracking continues in the United States… Canada struggles to balance the economic benefits drilling has brought with the reports of water contamination and air pollution that have accompanied them.
Jed Morey is the publisher of the Long Island Press, an alternative weekly newspaper with a circulation of 85,000, and www.longislandpress.com, which welcomes more than 750,000 unique visitors every month.
