Author Archives: jsl915@aol.com

my family invented it! Over the weekend, my mother pulled out some scrapbooks her mother had put together and there was a little family tree written by grandmother Anna Leroi Waterman–going back to our first forbears in the U.S.: John … Continue reading →

toward exposing the sewer discharge of Trump’s rhetoric. The New York Times’ editorial board cross checks Trump with McCarthy and Wallace. And now what we need is  a contrast and compare to Hitler and Stalin. As the Times writes, “History … Continue reading →

I will allow myself five minutes to feel glosserific! Turn to page 108 of the December Vanity Fair.

Always remember: it’s the people in this country who most stridently espouse hyper-patriotism who are the least democratic. Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept itemizes the number of neo-con boot-lickers whose total lack of detachment and objectivity haven’t earned them a … Continue reading →

I don’t mean bombs-bursting-in-air stuff. I mean, like when you’ve gotten to the bottom of all those small plastic grocery bags–the 125th Street Fairway has really solid ones–that you use as little garbage bags.

Is that what Democrats say when they meet someone really hot at a party? This speculation prompted by my starting Mark Hertsgaard’s important late-1980s book, “On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency,” which details twin disasters of the … Continue reading →

Frat boy, cartoon-brain provocation from a representative of a major network. Will CNN even discipline him?

It’s great that the President is finally calling out the mad-dog warmongers and opportunistic immigration-phobes, but why can’t he bring himself to confront them by name?  Does he understand that by not naming names he is enabling these individuals–and yes, … Continue reading →

That’s what military escalation will accomplish. Look what happened with us post-9/11. Endless, savage, unproductive war. Make that counter-productive, as we see with the rise of ISIS as a direct result of our Iraq invasion, something that at least Bernie … Continue reading →

Frank Bruni in the Times decries the immediate exploitation of the Paris massacre by war-mongering right-wing human noise machines. It’s all too reminiscent of George W. Bush, insisting that the “evildoer” could be vanquished by more tax cuts for the … Continue reading →