Blog

Gone with the wind: Tariff wars

The weather finally turned crisper in the Northeast thanks to cooler air moving into the region from Canada.

I hope it didn’t have to pay a tax at the border or maybe surrender its son, Cool Air Jr.

You have to worry about everything and everyone crossing the American borders these days. On Friday, President Donald J. Trumpet imposed tariffs of 25 percent on 800 Chinese goods coming into the U.S. while China imposed tariffs on soybeans, corn and pork, which hurts American farmers, who largely went for Trump in the last election. …

Read more

Read More

Why are women so hard on one another?

In my guise as editor in chief of WAG magazine, I had a pleasure of sharing a moment with Ashley Judd on the red carpet of the Greenwich International Film Festival (GIFF) in Connecticut Friday night. She is an exquisite-looking woman who is, more important, exquisite in her manners and manner. I began by thanking her for her work as one of the leaders of #MeToo and asked her if she thought that this time, the response to the sexual harassment women have suffered would really be different.

It already is, she said, and the result will be an improvement not only in the lives of women but of men as well. …

Read more

Read More

When Donnie meets Kimmie, a preview

As spring approaches, everyone is abuzz at the prospect of a thaw in relations between the “my button is bigger than your button” guys – President Donald J. Trumpet and L’il Kim Jong-un.

It was South Korea that actually announced the rapprochement on the White House lawn Thursday and, if you think that was unusual (having an intermediary make an announcement of a major foreign policy step involving the American people that has thus far included no actual address to the American people), well, you have to remember that nothing is usual with the act unilaterally (he wishes) Trump. ...

Read more

 

Read More

Stormy weather with The Donald

Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky
Stormy (Daniels) Weather
Since Donald Trump and I’ve been together
Keeps raining all the time.

The howling winds, ice-laced downed branches and big, fat raindrops and snowflakes of back-to-back nor’easters are nothing compared to the bomb cyclone that is Trump-et. The man who says he loves chaos – thinking it is somehow the same as a constructive exchange of differing ideas – has plenty of it these days. He’s got porn star Stormy Daniels suing him over the nondisclosure agreement she says he never signed, thus freeing her to show and tell about her relationship with The Donald. ...

Read more

 

Read More

Against bad manners

On Oct. 25, 1995 – one day after the United Nations turned 50 – then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threw Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat out of a concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall that ironically featured Ludwig van Beethoven’s great ode to humanity, his Symphony No. 9. The Clinton Administration then criticized Giuliani for an egregious breach of international diplomacy, but Giuliani said he could never forgive Arafat’s terrorist past, even though at that point he had been praised by both the Americans and the Israelis for his role in the Middle East peace talks.

It’s an age-old problem. We have our values. Do we cast them aside in social situations? We do not. But neither do we make a mockery of our values by punctuating them with rudeness.

Impolite behavior seeks to ridicule and humiliate others. But it is really only a reflection of those who advocate it.

I thought of this while watching the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang as Vice President Mike Pence avoided contact with Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, even though he was sitting right in front of her and the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, had shaken her hand. ...

Read more

 

Read More

Making America (Alexander the) Great again

Thursday, July 20 marks the anniversary of the birth of Alexander the Great in 356 B.C. in Pella, the capital of ancient Macedon, now Macedonia, a region in northern Greece.

Alexander has been an obsession of mine since childhood, when I read the legends associated with his conquests of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. From Alexander, I learned how to navigate difficult parents and how to lead from the front – skills that would later serve me well in grappling with equally challenging bosses. Thanks to Alexander, I learned to work through pain, illness, grief. I figured if he could fight a battle with a punctured lung, I could gut life out. ...

Read more

 

Read More