While down with the flu in January, I read a lot of Richard Stark. Aka Donald Westlake. A pile of volumes from Stark/Westlake’s Parker series towered on my nightstand. The adventures and misadventures of Parker, an ultra cold hearted professional thief, were the perfect antidote to fever.
The late Donald Westlake grew up in Albany, New […]

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“Traumatic grief, with its unanswered questions, its numbing shock, its horror, its ability to sear disturbing images into our souls that cannot be erased by sleep or by time–this process follows the same general path both for persons and groups.”
When 12:30 struck, none of us fourth graders knew that our young president was being […]

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This just in from Hollywood– Jon Corzine, who until about a week ago was Top Dog in the tanking Wall Street unreality series My Own Private MF Global has been cast as supervillain Two-Face in the next Batman opus. Buzz sez Bat producer Michael Uslan saw the Reuters piece The Two Faces of Jon Corzine […]

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Happy Halloween! Last weekend, New York Governor Andy Cuomo ordered his dog, Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, to have state and city cops chase Occupy Albany campers out of a downtown park in the Capital City. But oops, both sets of cops (and Albany County District Attorney David Soares) balked. Lots of reasons. Some jake, some […]

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In my previous post, I wondered if the protesters on Wall Street had proposals of how to fix things, or if they were theoreticians from Nephelokokkygia.
So exactly what do those Wall Street protesters want?
A proposed list of demands can be found at their website. They don’t want much.
Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This […]

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Some of the progressive blogs are lauding the protests against Wall Street as if these protests were an uprising of the “PEOPLE” against the rich, and a copy of the heroism of the Arab Spring.
Now, I am aghast at the Wall Street shenanigans as much as the next person, but when the president and his […]

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 The man was well until his wife baked him a “healthy recipe” from the NYTimes “Healthy recipe section: Fava bean and artichoke stew.
He soon became pale and jaundiced, and it took awhile for the ER doc to figure out why the man was sick. He had an acute hemolytic crisis, where his red blood cells […]

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While the economy collapses, the Middle East is on fire, and our beloved President seems to be as unable to communicate with the American people as the previous president, the news stories are full of a tweeting congressman.
Jokes are easy to make about the problem, especially since the congressman’s name is easily mispronounced to resemble […]

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When the first message on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s Internet) was sent by UCLA programmer Charley Kline, on October 29, 1969, the message text was the word “login”; the letters “l” and the “o” were transmitted, then the system crashed.
Forty two years later, the Internet is everywhere and rapidly becoming embedded in every […]

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Albany, New York isn’t just the seat of a clown car state government– it’s also a college town. And college students, when boozed to the gills, can out-bozo politicians. (Well, almost.) On March 12th crowds of drunken students rioted in the Albany neighborhood known as the student ghetto. The lads and lassies, most of whom […]

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Remember the late great Tea Party? The grass roots movement that made the political establishment quake? For one glorious moment it seemed as if a truly independent, average Joe/Joan movement might be gathering steam. A memory from that halcyon time: assorted TV pundits telling Republican leaders that Tea Party people “don’t like you guys either”. […]

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The NYTimes has a headline that questions if “Shaken Baby Syndrome” exists. Actually, the article is better than the headlines, but I worry that by trying to absolve the guilt of the perpetrator by showing the problems in diagnosing when and how the child was injured, they are missing a  teaching moment.
What you need to […]

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And so it begins. Not with a bang but a brrrrrr. On January 5th, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo laid down his first State of the State address in a freezing cold auditorium at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center in Albany. The space wasn’t frigid by accident. Some like it hot, but Andy does […]

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If only I were Edith Piaf. But alas, I can’t say je ne regrette rien. Once upon a wasted time (circa late 1970’s and early 80’s) I hung on New York City’s downtown art/music scene. The scene never fit me, I tried to fit it. Which was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. […]

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The headline Last week in New York Newsday regarding The Nassau County Crime Lab Failures is not surprising, given the Department response. Those following the Story noted that the Police Commissioner first responded to the Critical reports by “Transferring the Commanding Officer” This on the surface, appears to be a good first step, however Those […]

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Sometimes a story is so local it jumps up and bites you. Such is the case with the stash of potentially explosive materials found in an apartment building in the town where I live. Say hey for Delmar, New York. It’s a mighty nice place. Delmar is a suburb of Albany. The kind of […]

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Ho humdrum. It’s back to political bidness in the Empire State. The gubernatorial race ended just as predicted. Andrew Cuomo finally got elected to something. (Becoming attorney general on Eliot Spitzer’s coat tails doesn’t count.) Not that beating Carl Paladino is proof of public appeal. A friend of mine in Hudson County, New Jersey suggested […]

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On October 22, an enormous (11 stories, 500,000 square feet) abandoned warehouse on the Albany, New York waterfront caught fire. Smoke blanketed a large section of the city’s downtown and an adjacent highway. After five days, the fire at Central Warehouse continues to flare, with firemen hosing it down from the outside due to fear […]

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Previous: Robin Palmer: Weatherman Yippie Right Wing Rebel Forever, Part One

Pigs’ Heads & Bomb Plots
Richard Robin Palmer grew up in Ithaca in Tompkins County, New York. His parents were college professors prominent in natural science fields. Both were politically conservative. Robin fought particularly fiercely with his father, a fan of Joe McCarthy. Robin […]

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In early February 2009, I was skimming the Drudge Report and came across a headline that went something like this: Protester Throws Shoes at Mayor of Ithaca, New York. I immediately knew the shoe-thrower was my friend Robin Palmer. Robin died this August at age 80. He was a born rebel and lived in that […]

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I love how Tom Friedman in the NYTimes lectures his US readers on “how the Chinese see us” by relating a skit on China’s government owned TV station where children were taught to ridicule the US:
China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children… getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the […]

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I abhor the anti Muslim bigotry that lies behind the entire kerfuffle about some bigoted “pastor” getting his ten minutes of worldwide fame threatening to burn a Koran.
We Catholics put up with this type of ignorance for the last 250 years in the US. In the past, they picketed May processions/fiestas, telling us we are […]

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The naive guys at the NYTimes Freakonomics blog have a short article on the cost of health care, especially medicines, in third world countries:
A new study analyzed the effects of buying four basic prescription drugs in “low- and middle-income countries,” and the results aren’t pretty. “Buying brand name amoxicillin, for example, […]

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Written by: John Sullinvan
Visit John’s Blog Here
It is sad to hear stories of hate throughout history, but it is a part of human nature, it has been happening for thousands of years. In the case of NYC, the city has seen a good chunk of hate, the Irish, Italians, Blacks, Catholics, Indians, […]

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With all the hyperbolic political rhetoric in the blogosphere, one wonders if the American people are indeed “having a temper tantrum”.
Or maybe the patience of the American people with political correctness is now finished.
Example one: After years of the American public watching news reports of suicide bombings,  or lashing raped women, destroying Hindu temples and […]

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The so called “Ground Zero Mosque” (the real name of the project is Park 51) is proposed as a 15-story Islamic Community Center containing a mosque, a swimming pool, and a 500-seat auditorium. Detractors first called the project the “WTC Mosque” but then someone came up with the name “Ground Zero Mosque” because that name […]

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Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, a former president of Chicago Theological Seminary and current senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, writes in the Washington Post today that fighting against the mosque in “Lower Manhattan” translates into an attempt to deny American Moslems the basic religious freedoms guaranteed in our Constitution.
“It is crucial that Americans […]

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New Yorkers are rolling in the aisles. The summer of our discontent (economic, political, you name it) has been made glorious circus by the race for the governor’s seat. A clown car of candidates is lurching round the ring. This year’s Volkswagen– or is it a Volt?– is almost totally filled by state Attorney General […]

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The Taliban did it again. Killed a medical team whose only crime was to travel into isolated areas to treat eye disease.
Their “crime”? They were supposedly being “spies”, even though only a few of the medical team were Americans. Oh yes: And they were (gasp) Christians. Can’t have that, can we. Kill the infidel. Never […]

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The Cordoba Project plans to construct a 13-story mosque and community center about 2 blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood.
I’m not in favor of this idea. I don’t like to let emotions rule my political judgment but the events of 9/11 still sting. I was close to the World […]

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