I welcome responses to what I’m writing in this column, and over the past couple of days have received what I feel are three letters powerful enough to share with my readers. What strikes me is that they are all basically saying the same thing. Thoughts for the day: RICHIE: I see a new ice […]
You are probably familiar with the children’s book series Where’s Waldo? It actually dates back to the late 1980s in England, where the original title was Where’s Wally? Anyway, the key to the books – and later the movies and games – is that despite his relatively easy-to-recognize red-and-white striped shirt and hat and glasses, […]
Okay Donald, the cat’s out of the bag. It wasn’t so bad when, toward the end of last month, the Guardian printed quite a lengthy take on the billionaire behind Breitbart and Bannon, not to mention Brexit and (just to keep the alliteration going) Big Boy Bouffant as well. Now, however, Jane Mayer – author of […]
So there he was this week in Detroit, addressing about 1,000 people inside the American Center for Mobility. A banner behind him read, “Buy American – Hire American.” Trump announced that “the assault on the American auto industry is over!” He was going to set up “a task force in every federal agency to identify […]
The following article, “Urban Romulus: How the Myths Have Shaped My Life,” appears in a new online mythological journal called Immanence. It’s written by a young African-American from south-central LA, Romeo Keyes, who I’ve been mentoring for the past year-and-a-half. He is a remarkable writer and knows more about myth than anyone I’ve ever met. […]
During the 1980s, I became an environmental activist in fighting to protect the Atlantic striped bass. A combination of fishing pressure and pollution in their primary spawning grounds of the Chesapeake Bay had seen the fish’s population plummet to near-oblivion. Finally, after Congress intervened while Maryland declared a five-year fishing moratorium and other states along […]
While running for president, Donald Trump vowed to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency “in almost every form.” Tragically for all of us, especially our children and grandchildren, the dismantling has begun. A leaked version of Trump’s proposed budget reveals that, while military spending would increase by $54 billion, massive cuts are planned […]
My friend Mark sent this along to me, something he wrote this evening after coming home from work: “Tyranny is back with a vengeance torn from the history we tried to forget. The sins of our fathers that have haunted us for centuries have stepped out of the shadows and wreak chaos and mayhem that […]
On Monday, ExxonMobil – the oil-and-gas behemoth that flatulated Rex Tillerson from CEO to running the State Department – released their latest big news. They were going to invest a cool $20 billion to “expand manufacturing in the U.S. Gulf region,” alleging this would create more than 45,000 “high-paying jobs.” Lest we forget, scientific studies […]
A friend of mine raised the questions in an email: “How much does it cost to fly that huge jet to Florida every weekend? This guy spends too much of your money and my money and for what? How does a citizen demand an accounting for this bullshit travel cost?” So I decided to look […]