I’m Not The Only One

Anthony Weiner, a Congressmember from my old hometown of Queens, is just the latest (and won’t be the last!) of many politicians embroiled in an embarrassing scandal.  At the same time, we recently learned that former Senator and failed Vice Presidential and later Presidential candidate John Edwards has been indicted by a North Carolina grand jury on six felony charges which if convicted he will face 30 years in prison and $1.5 million fine.

I’m not going to rehash the entire story regarding the New York Senator and his fondness for underage and college-age females but in the event you still don’t know about it just Google Anthony Weiner or check out the compressed version here.

While Congress is trying to determine whether Weiner used Congressional resources to send his semi-nude pics to young girls of all ages, the Weinermeister has decided to temporarily abandon his job to seek professional help for his sex addiction.  According to the Daily Mail of the UK, however, Weiner will continue to stay on the Congressional payroll and will still collect (not earn) $476.71 a day (calculated from his annual salary of $174,000).  Thankfully, Weiner got enough bad press and harassment from the public that he finally gave up his Congressional seat. (more…)

I was pleased to learn yesterday that the Supreme Court turned down the class action lawsuit alleging that Wal-Mart (cue scary music) discriminated against its female employees by giving them less pay than the male workers for the same jobs.  The four-year old gender discrimination suit which included over one million plaintiffs, Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. was denied to proceed as a class-action lawsuit, but suggested the lawsuit could be pursued by individual plaintiffs.

I think the court was right to turn the lawsuit down. 1.6 million plaintiffs? Yeah right.  I doubt many of those women were paid less simply because they were women, but for more legitimate reasons.  If Wal-Mart paid women less than men for performing the same tasks, why hire men at all?   Sounds like a waste of money.   I’ve seen lots of men at Wal-Mart, often working the same jobs alongside their female counterparts, working at the checkout and restocking shelves. (more…)

With March Madness upon us, a touchy issue comes up, the proverbial elephant in the room everyone can see but nobody wants to discuss: player compensation.

Let’s focus on college basketball, which with football, is one of the most popular collegiate spectator sports today.  Games between Division I teams are almost always televised with big-name sponsors paying a fortune for ad space, then there’s the ticket sales and the merchandising of everything from apparel to video games.  Everybody wins; coaches and support staff of winning teams enjoy high salaries, the universities rake in the revenue from ticket sales (when games are played on campus) and merchandising and the TV and cable networks rake in the advertising revenue.  Well, everybody wins except the players. (more…)

The following is in response to “A Letter From A Republican to Hispanics” by Dennis Prager.  Reading will more easily put the following into its proper context.

Prager begins by addressing all the illegal aliens within America’s Latino community, despite the fact that most Latinos are not only here legally, but were born here.  And of those of us born here, the majority of us are not “anchor babies” but the descendants of immigrants and of people already residing in the lands the U.S. has conquered (i.e., Puerto Rico, two-thirds of Mexico known today as the U.S. southwest, Texas, etc.) whose ancestors became U.S. residents (not citizens, at least not right away, and certainly not first-class citizens) not by choice but by as a result of Manifest Destiny, the sick ideology that demands the United States dominate the entire Western Hemisphere. (more…)

It’s nice to see President Obama pretend to do something right for a change.  He recently petitioned Congress to end tax breaks for U.S. companies that hire workers overseas, in an effort to encourage businesses to hire workers domestically. As to whether this will result in more jobs for Americans is iffy at best.  After all, Obama is asking Congress not to create incentives for businesses to hire workers domestically, he’s simply asking Congress to take away the rewards Washington gives to U.S. companies who hire abroad. He certainly is not creating incentives for foreign corporations to set up shop in the U.S. and hire Americans. (more…)

You’re sure to get a different answer depending on who you ask.  People don’t argue very much about who pays taxes as much as about who doesn’t pay taxes.  Illegal immigrants, criminals, people on welfare and the unemployed are the usual scapegoats blamed for getting an easy ride on the backs of the taxpayers.

Bullshit.

The truth is, between both levels of government (three if you live in an urban area), there are so many different taxes, everyone pays them.  In fact, it’s almost impossible to pay no taxes in America.  What are a few of these taxes that everybody pays? (more…)

Well, every Latino blogger seems to have something to say about the whole mess in Arizona, so I might as well say my piece too.

The new law is ridiculous, for several reasons.  Let’s cut the bullshit and not pretend Arizona is looking to keep out illegal Canadians, Englishmen or Germans with this law.  It’s the illegal Mexican immigrants that have white Arizonans going nuts, and it’s that specific group for whom the law is intended.

Law enforcement are required to ask the legal status of anyone who “appears” as if they may be in this country illegally.  Aside from raiding the parking lot at Home Depot, how do they actually accomplish this?  How does one “look” illegal?  Furthermore, if such a thing existed as an illegal “appearance”, wouldn’t illegal aliens in Arizona deliberately change their appearance so as not to “look illegal”? (more…)

If you live in a blue state like I do, you are undoubtedly beaten down with rules and taxes; rules which make living more difficult and expensive and taxes and fees which only increase the financial burden.

As a native New Yorker, I’ve seen things go from bad to worse.  Both my home city and state are good examples of a kleptocracy, where the state is run by people who are socially conservative and economically liberal and the city is run by people who are socially liberal and economically liberal, but not socially liberal in the sense that would allow for any kind of observance of civil rights.  Government is as expansive and as expansive as you can imagine, except no liberal goals are actually being met.  Modern-day liberal milestones like gay marriage and legalized medical marijuana do not exist here.  (more…)

In this day and age where news commentary often dwarfs actual news reporting, it’s hard to not see union spokespeople on television grinning ear to ear as Toyota launches a massive worldwide recall of over four million Camrys and Corollas.  United Auto Workers reps have been more than happy to appear on all major networks and news channels to suggest that Toyota’s failure to catch their defective parts before the cars left the factories because the company’s nonunion workers were “not committed to the product” because the company was “not committed to them”.

These union flunkies are capitalizing on the collective short-term memory of the American public.  Say what you want about Toyota, but they never received a bailout from Congress because for the last 30 years they have been manufacturing automobiles that Americans actually want to drive.  While car makers around the world have seen a loss in sales in the last few years, it was the Big Three that have been hemorrhaging red ink since the 70s. (more…)

I recently learned that the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) is in serious financial trouble, to the point that the 25-year old trade association isn’t sure whether or not they will exist next year.  No, this is not a plea to whip out your credit card and make a donation; this is simply my slightly apathetic reaction to the organization’s $300,000 budget deficit.  A desperate plea from NAHJ’s President to raise $300,000 by December 15, 2009.

A little background: Upon graduating from college in winter 2007, I joined NAHJ in hopes the membership would help me find a journalism job.  Needless to say, I was more than disappointed.  Now NAHJ is asking for increased donations, even going as far as sending unwanted emails to former members such as myself to join their “Count Me In” initiative, asking me to either donate myself and/or raise funds from my friends, family, colleagues and employer.

This is what happens when you don’t change with the times. Just as the newspaper industry has been dying a slow fiscal death for the last few decades, shouldn’t the same thing happen to a trade association for journalists? This is why I did not renew my NAHJ membership. I graduated college with a large amount of debt, couldn’t afford to become a member in the first place but did so in the hopes it would give me an edge in getting into the newspaper business. To my dismay I never really got any work due to my NAHJ membership. (more…)

I recently interviewed Adam Shepard, author of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25 and the search for the American Dream.  I had several questions for Shepard, who was gracious enough to pull himself away from his busy book tour to answer them.

INTOO: Would your experiment have been as successful had you tried it in a state with a higher tax burden like New York, Illinois or California?

Shepard: There’s no way to say for sure because I didn’t go to those states, but I think although finding a job may have been harder I would’ve had the same attitude towards reaching my goal that I did in South Carolina.  Besides, in a state like Illinois or California I would’ve been paid more.

I think the better question is, would my experiment have been as successful if I had tried it in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe or South America?  This is the USA, and we’ve got it good here.  I doubt I could’ve reached my goal had I tried this in Central America or anywhere else. (more…)

If there’s one thing bloggers love, it’s a good rebuttal.  We’re constantly offering rebuttals of arguments, comments or news stories we don’t agree with.  For anyone familiar with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (which has become required reading in many universities), Adam Shepard’s Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream offers a well-deserved objection to her thesis that in America the poor stay that way no matter what they do.

While Nickel and Dimed is inherently flawed, I highly recommend checking it out (borrow it, don’t buy it) before reading Scratch Beginnings, if for nothing else than to gain a good chuckle at the former and a greater appreciation of the latter.  For those unfamiliar with Nickel and Dimed, the book is the result of a social experiment conducted by Ehrenreich between 1999 and 2000 in which she attempted to examine the lives of America’s working poor by taking whatever low-wage job she could find and living off her earnings. While some may deem Ehrenreich to be a better writer than Shepard, there’s little doubt as to which author has the better story to tell. (more…)

I didn’t know who Ellis Henican was before he wrote a scathing column about bloggers earlier this month.  The piece titled, “The Perils of Bathrobe Reporting” begins with a focus on the “pesky” nature of facts.

“They have this maddening habit of refusing to present themselves.

Often — and I know this from many years of wrestling facts as newspaper reporter and columnist — you have to go outside and grab the jumpy suckers one by one. Then, you have to shine a light in their eyes and slap ’em upside the head, stunning them long enough for the rest of the world to get a good, clear view and start to figure out exactly what these particular facts might mean.”

First of all, fact-finding is not as difficult as Henican describes above.  This couldn’t be more of an exaggeration.  It’s natural to regard one’s own profession as the best or better than others, but the passage above is really going too far.

Unlike most bloggers, I have a significant background as a journalist.  From 2000 to 2007 I worked as an intern, editor, photographer, staff reporter, columnist and later as a freelance reporter,  Henican speaks about journalism with all the naive enthusiasm of a journalism major-in other words, someone who has never stepped into a real newsroom in his life.  I can think of a few members of this “noble profession” who didn’t find facts to be that pesky, especially when these facts can be complete works of fiction or worse, copied word for word from the works of other journalists and passed off as their own: (more…)

After 11 years of attending college (I dropped out three times and spent a few semesters part-time) I finally earned my Baccalaureate degree last December. All I really have to show for it is a shelf full of books I was unable to sell back to the college bookstore that I’ll never read, a dozen or so notebooks whose few remaining unused pages serve as a memo pad and a shitload of debt.

I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly practical person, but choosing to attend college forced me to make some fairly impractical decisions. For example, attending classes full-time made it absolutely impossible to work full-time; my grades suffered the few times I did attempt to do so. As a result, I could only search for part-time employment and passed up several promising full-time positions. (more…)

Since no one has really responded to my scam rundown, I figured I’d get the ball rolling by discussing Affirmative Action, one of the most destructive scams ever enforced by the government and the most racist policy ever supported by liberals.

The first problem with Affirmative Action is that it is based on the assumption that all white people are wealthy and that all minorities are poor. This theory is highly flawed; even when Affirmative Action was first drafted in federal law in the 1960s, this was not true. There were many successful African-Americans who were, although segregated from whites, highly educated and among the middle-class, well before the Civil Rights Movement. (more…)