With all the fanfare around the new movie version of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann with a screenplay by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, it’s a great time to go back to the book and be reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegant, graceful writing; so fragile and yes, unique, that it may never really be brought successfully to the screen. Continue reading
At moments, “The Lessons of Watergate” conference, held a couple of weeks ago in Washington, D.C. by the citizen’s lobby Common Cause, was a little like that two-man road show retired baseball players Bill Buckner and Mookie Wilson have been touring. In it, they retell the story of the catastrophic moment during the bottom of the last inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series, when the Mets’ Wilson hit an easy ground ball toward Buckner of the Red Sox, who haplessly let it roll between his legs. That notorious error ultimately cost Boston the championship. Continue reading
Along with its sandy beaches and quality snorkeling, the Cayman Islands’ reputation as an offshore tax haven for corporations, banks and hedge funds has become so well-known its financial institutions now are featured in travel brochures as yet another tourist attraction. Continue reading
If you’re one of those who equate the worlds of Washington and Hollywood—the standard joke: “Politics is show business for ugly people”—then a presidential inauguration is the Oscars, Golden Globes and Emmy Awards combined, right down to the parties, balls, extravagant wardrobes and goody bags stuffed with swag. Continue reading
As Saturday Night Live’s Stefon would say, this Washington tale has everything: accusations hurled and counter-hurled, handguns, multimillion dollar payoffs—just what we need to briefly distract us as the parties play chicken up on Capitol Hill’s fiscal cliff. Continue reading
We’re spending a holiday season weekend at the home of friends in a small Connecticut town just a few miles up the road from Newtown. Continue reading
Forty years ago, as a young, aspiring political operative, I was a staff member on Senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign. We thought we could beat Richard Nixon but famously lost every state in the union, except Massachusetts (with the District of Columbia thrown in as a forlorn consolation prize). Continue reading
A week has passed since Hurricane Sandy struck, and the short subway ride uptown this morning almost seemed normal, except for the bigger crowds getting on at Penn Station and Times Square—commuters from outside Manhattan where wind and storm surge water damage were so much worse and all too often deadly. Overheard conversations were filled with stories of how people had coped. Continue reading
On a Monday morning in January 1979, my boss Jerry Toobin, the news and public affairs director at WNET, New York City’s public TV station (and father of journalist Jeff Toobin), walked into our work area and said to me and my fellow cubicle mates, “Bill Moyers would like to talk with Prince Sihanouk. Anybody got an idea how to find him?” Continue reading
That ringing in your ears isn’t church bells or a touch of tinnitus. It’s the sound of campaign cash registers all over the country, chiming together like the world’s biggest carillon, as money pours in as never before. The total being spent for all the races in 2012 is projected at $6 billion this year; possibly rising to as much as $8 billion—which perhaps not coincidentally is the same amount the National Retail Federation estimates Americans will spend on Halloween. Continue reading
With just a couple of weeks left in September, members of the House and Senate hurried back to Washington after their August recess and the party conventions, ready to get some legislating done and impress their constituents before they head back home for the final stretch of their reelection campaigns. Continue reading
I briefly interviewed Gore Vidal once. It was a little more than thirty years ago, at the end of a long day of filming in Los Angeles. I was working as writer and segment producer on an arts magazine pilot for public television. Continue reading
So what do you get when you combine Mitt Romney, expensive horseflesh, fancy dinners and a financial scandal in the City of London? An interesting confluence of people and events that once again raises question about the wealthy Republican candidate’s ability to relate to ordinary Americans and highlights the overwhelming, caustic influence of big money in this year’s presidential race. Continue reading
My neighborhood has become a cash machine for the Obama re-election campaign. Continue reading
With the Federal Communications Commission scheduled to vote today on TV stations posting political advertising data on-line, we know pretty much for certain the final tally will be 2–1. What we don’t know is on which side of the issue Democratic FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn will fall. Continue reading
Growing up Protestant in a small town in upstate New York, the commemoration of Lent was not as major an event as it would be in, say, a Catholic household. We didn’t give up chocolate or gum or anything else for those forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, nor did most of the grown-ups we knew forsake any of their particular pleasures or bad habits. Continue reading
Watching some of the news coming from Capitol Hill last week, two old music videos started buzzing around in our heads. One was the classic “I’m Just a Bill,” from Schoolhouse Rock, in which a beleaguered piece of legislation sits outside on the marble steps hoping to someday become a law. The other was that Paula Abdul “Opposites Attract” number from 1989 with the sleazy cartoon cat and the chorus that starts, “I take two steps forward, I take two steps back.” Continue reading
On Tuesday, Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford was convicted in a Houston federal court on 13 out of 14 criminal counts of fraud. As The New York Times reported, “The jury decision followed a six-week trial and came three years after Mr. Stanford was accused of defrauding nearly 30,000 investors in 113 countries in a Ponzi scheme involving $7 billion in fraudulent high-interest certificates of deposit at the Stanford International Bank, which was based on the Caribbean island of Antigua.” Continue reading
Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself. Continue reading
Just a few months after public outrage forced Bank of America to drop a planned $5 fee for using debit cards to make purchases, the financial institution is at it again. Continue reading
If you would seek proof of that famous Margaret Mead adage, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” look at what’s happening as more and more people protest Apple Inc.’s labor practices in China. Continue reading
I knew all those years of sitting in darkened theaters on sunny afternoons, awash in movies new and old, stale popcorn and gallons of diet soda, would pay off some day. For one, there was the woman I met in 1975 at the late, lamented Carnegie Hall Cinema during a Mel Brooks double feature. She came and sat next to me when a guy kept bothering her during Blazing Saddles and we wound up dating—until she lit out for a career in the hinterlands, acting in summer stock. Continue reading
In the spirit of the season, I’d like to file a complaint—about complaints. Corporate America just doesn’t handle them the way they used to. As in, at all. Continue reading
Have you heard about the great brown cloud? No, it’s not a new nickname for Donald Trump (his cloud is more an intergalactic nimbus of Aqua Velva and Tang), or the ominous menace in a new Stephen King novel. It’s almost as nasty, though. Continue reading
The other day, a couple of kids up in Kingston, NY, called 911 looking for Santa Claus. Law enforcement arrived to tell them that what they had done was naughty, not nice, but in deference to the holiday, no pepper spray was involved. Continue reading
You maybe should think twice when even Jack Abramoff thinks you’re beneath contempt. Not that Newt Gingrich cares. Continue reading
Early last Friday morning, as the Occupy Wall Street protesters were just uncurling from their sleeping bags, I went downtown for a walkthrough of their campsite at Zuccotti Park, now also known as Liberty Plaza. I met up there with AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and New York City Central Labor Council President Vincent Alvarez. (I’m president of an AFL-CIO affiliated union.) Continue reading
Miriam “Ma” Ferguson was the first woman governor of Texas. Like my own dear ma, she both hailed from Bell County, deep in the heart of the state, and graduated from Mary Hardin-Baylor College (now the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in the fine town of Belton, Texas, long may they wave). Continue reading
About a year after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, I visited Oklahoma City and went to the bombsite with a friend who had covered the attack as a television news cameraman. No memorial or museum had yet been built; fencing covered with teddy bears, flags and scrawled messages surrounded an empty, grass-covered lot. Continue reading
For Manhattan at least, last week was the weather week that wasn’t. But the minor earthquake and weakened Hurricane Irene served as reminders of the caprice of nature and—only a couple of weeks before the tenth anniversary of 9/11—the knowledge that at any given moment calamity literally is just around the corner. Continue reading
Although born and raised in a small town in the Finger Lakes region of New York, I’m the hybrid child of an upstate NY father and a mother from Texas—they met at Fort Hood (then Camp Hood) during World War II. And you thought different species couldn’t mate. Continue reading
RSS
Good consumers, bad citizens
Posted on May 31, 2013 by Michael Winship
A few days ago, I was listening to a radio talk show discussion of the bill passed on May 7 by the New York City Council, requiring some businesses to provide paid sick leave to employees. Continue reading →