news blog

There are some things I just don't get.

One of them is America's chronic inability to address our energy dependence on countries hostile to our core values.

Though grave damage is being done to our national security and economy, as a nation, we just can't summon the will to solve a problem which does have a solution.

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com.

Send up a flare! The 2011 federal budget has sprung some leaks in the midst of a storm. Not sure there's enough money for life rafts!  Forget women and children first!

Lee Marvin, tough character actor turned unlikely (and equally tough) movie star, would have turned eighty-six a couple of weeks back, but of course that event will go largely unnoticed. We lost him over twenty years ago to a heart attack, abetted by some very intense experiences and a stated fondness for tequila in quantity.

The Google v. China controversy has missed the point. It should be about The Cloud, and how China's attack on The Cloud brought us closer to the future presaged in George Orwell's 1984.

As an active board member of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, I always look forward to attending the annual conference. There are few non-client gatherings I make it a habit to attend annually and the fact that Huffington Post is graciously providing this very forum speaks volumes to the influence our industry has. Thanks to Arianna and her people for their participation.

We don't rest enough. We don't move enough.

Those are the paradoxical conclusions from a series of studies that got a lot of media attention last week.

The "Move Your Money" campaign was featured on CBS Sunday Morning this week. Arianna appeared on the show to talk about why moving money out of big banks and into smaller banks is important:

I felt my first earthquake when I was in the shower--one of those plastic modular showers that my plasterboard-walled studio apartment offered in its tiny bathroom. I'd finally made it to LA--city of my dreams, and was working in TV. I could wait for the mansion in Beverly Hills (still waiting, BTW...)--just being in Hollywood meant a lifelong ambition had been achieved.

Goldman Sachs appears to be testing the limits of its special talent for avoiding all accountability following revelations of its role in exacerbating the Greek debt crisis.

As the dust settles on the aftermath of the health reform summit held yesterday by President Barack Obama and attended by leaders of both parties in Congress, not much has changed. Not that anyone really expected anything to change, much, to be honest.

Last night's 8.8 earthquake in Chile was the fifth strongest ever recorded in modern times. While relief agencies and governments gear up to help those affected by the quake and resulting tsunami, Americans get yet another warning about our own vulnerability to a sudden quake and/or tidal wave.

At literally the eleventh hour, a.m. Hawaii time, a 12-foot tsunami generated by the massive 8.8 magnitude Chilean earthquake is predicted to strike our seven inhabited isles. First landfall: the Big Island, where 61 people died in 1960 when a tsunami took out Hilo after a magnitude 9.6 Chilean tremblor.

Today, Feb. 27, is the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's speech at Cooper Union in New York City, which the eminent Lincoln historian Harold Holzer has called the speech that made him president. Why was his address that night so successful, and what does it mean for us today, including for President Obama? The answer is, a lot.

Tonight marks the start of the Jewish holiday of Purim. Jews around the world will read the Book of Esther, chronicling the traditional story of the Jewish people's salvation from destruction over two millennia ago.

The Purim story has a special resonance this year: The Book of Esther marks civilization's first recorded repudiation of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT).

February 24, 2009

Imagine all of the Federal buildings in Washington collapsing in less than a minute killing 30-40% of our government workforce, crippling the tax collection system leaving the government no money to pay salaries or overhead. Our government, which seems to barely work at full capacity with gleaming buildings and a gargantuan budget, would come to a halt.