It was a sunny and bright, but a cool day for twelve days into April as I drove up the Taconic from Tarrytown. On this day, in Warm Springs, Georgia, 64 years ago, the civilized world was shocked and saddened by the news.   more »

Our subject on April 15th, known to all Americans as Tax Day, is the viability of the American financial system and can we afford to continue on America’s current path of “tax and spend” and survive economically.   more »

Our guest is Dr. Kenneth Cohn, the author Collaborate for Success, and Better Communication for Better Care, and we will be talking about his ideas on the critical issue of healthcare reform.   more »

Our guests are Rick Kelsey and Gary Johnson, and our topic today is, “Creating Game-Changers for Education, Through Urban Game Design,” the using of “The Mentoring & Collaboration Model” to solve important technology problems and opportunities at the community level   more »

Our special guest is Mr. Michael Shapiro, a long-time Scarsdale resident and noted criminal defense lawyer. Mr. Shapiro, who was raised in the Bronx, was educated at the City College of New York, where he received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude, and later earned his JD from New York University.   more »

Recently there was a letter to the editor written by Peter Polstein. He basically accused the Obama administration of treasonous activity with his ludicrous claim that we were moving towards becoming a Marxist nation.   more »

Our topic today is a dual one, the importance of higher educational, especially PhD programs for improving our school leadership and a discussion on the sustainability of our public school system in recessionary America.   more »

Our guest is Cal Ramsey and Alan Rosenberg will join me as a guest panelist. Our topic is “Basketball and its impact on inner city youth.” Mr. Cal Ramsey has been part of the NYC athletic landscape for over fifty years. Since his graduation from NYU in 1959, where he starred in basketball as an All-American, he still holds many team records and was a member of NYU’s Scholastic Honor Society.   more »

Our guest is Special Agent Maryann Goldman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and we will talk about InfraGard and its critical importance to national security. Joining me on our panel will be Mr. Tony Russo, the President of the InfraGard Hudson Valley Membership Alliance Inc, who is the also the President of Aries Wine and Spirits, which is located at 128 West Post Road in White Plains, NY, and White Plains City Councilman Glen Hockley.   more »

Our subject will be his group’s sponsoring of the “Energy Independence Rally in Washington, DC, on March 3, 2008,” and how we can wean ourselves off the dependency of imported oil!   more »

The Roosevelt Library is the nation’s first presidential library and the only one used by a sitting president. It includes 17 million pages of archival material and museum collections serving annually more than 125,000 researchers, museum visitors and students.   more »

In fact, there is no official way to even spell Presidents Day or Presidents’ Day. The only one clear fact is that under federal law it is still Washington’s Birthday and that only a handful of states have changed it to Presidents’ Day. Therefore, Washington’s Birthday, which was enacted as a federal holiday in 1880, in the District of Columbia, and was expanded to the nation in 1895, still remains.   more »

Our guest will be Dr. Nora Eisenberg, PhD, the author of the novel, When You Come Home, which documents the sadness and the waste caused by the “Gulf War Illness.” We will explore why Ms. Eisenberg wrote this book, what the affects of this syndrome have wrought on thousands of veterans, and are there precious lessons that we must learn from our involvement in overseas campaigns regarding the preparation needed in the future.   more »

Our guest on Wednesday will be Christopher N. Breiseth and our subject will be “Franklin Roosevelt and How his Enduring Legacy is Relevant to Today’s America.” Mr. Breiseth, who graduated from UCLA, Oxford University and received his doctorate from Cornell University, happens to be related to President Franklin Roosevelt. He has just retired as President of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York, and remains President Emeritus of Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.   more »

Once again we are in a the first month of 2009, and we have just segued out of the western New Year to the ancient Chinese New Year, 4707, the Year of the Ox. People born in the Year of the Ox are patient, speak little, and inspire confidence in others. They tend to be a bit eccentric and bigoted, and they anger easily. They have fierce tempers, and though they speak very little, they speak with authority and are often quite eloquent. They can be aggressively stubborn, and hate to be opposed. They are usually compatible with people born under the sign of the Snake, Rooster, and Rat.   more »

try to get to Hyde Park at least twice a year on January 30th, the date of the late president's birth (and my daughter Dana's also) and also on April 12th, when he passed away in Warm Springs, Georgia.   more »

Alida Brill is a writer and a social critic whose interests span diverse topics. She has published books, essays and monographs on such issues as the debate between freedom and control in democratic society, privacy rights, the ethics surrounding decisions about dying and death, the policy and politics of reproductive technologies, intolerance and prejudice, community transition and economic dislocation, the changing meaning of patriotism, censorship, pornography and popular culture, women’s equality, girls at risk and the coded journals of Beatrix Potter.   more »

Our guest on Wednesday will be Ms. Jill Alcott Baskin, CEO of Alcott & Partners, Inc., who has more than 23 years of development and event management experience that combines both institutional and independent work in the not-for-profit and corporate arenas. Our subject this week is "Charity for the 21st century, how you can enrich your own life and improve society by participating in philanthropic activity. “   more »

The New Deal statistics 1933-9 -what the real numbers mean!   more »

Most critics of the New Deal and its sea change affects regarding the future of State's Rights, interstate commerce, war powers, civil rights, the "Establishment Clause," collective bargaining, public power (TVA and Niagara Falls), woman's rights, "choice," and a plethora of other important issues, see this as a usurpation of the Founders intent. Truthfully that may be correct, but so what! The Founders never envisioned any of the following that the country and the world has seen.   more »

Since this is Inauguration Day, it now seems a new era has dawned on Washington, and hopefully, the nation, I wanted to drop you a line and express my sentiments. Much has been discussed on the air, over the past week, regarding the upcoming, and hopefully, potential great legacy of our next president.   more »

Michael A. Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation where he co-helms the Privatization of Foreign Policy Initiative. Previously, Mr. Cohen has taught speechwriting and political rhetoric at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.   more »

This article is typical of the claptrap that is promulgated by the apologists for the New Deal critics. In fact, unemployment went down every year in the FDR’s first two administrations. The unemployment by March of 1933 had reached almost 25% and another 25% were only working part time. We were in economic slippery slope that saw the closing of thousands of banks, breadlines,   more »

Just read your piece and even though you regard yourself as a student of history, your understanding of the New Deal, (FDR) and what it accomplished seems quite skimpy and uninformed. Constantly I hear references from people like you that FDR was surrounded by "socialists."   more »

They lived among different peoples for thousands of years until the Babylonian Captivity and the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE destroyed their country. If any one group, nation state, or people have an historical legacy to a land, it is the Jews in Israel.   more »

Again, as I stated earlier in many, many words. Jews have been in that area of the world long before Mohammed existed. In fact, thousands of years before. Israel as a country goes back to the time of Kings Saul, David and Solomon (1000 BCE) .Modern Israel is not much younger then any of the other states in the region.   more »

Defensible borders depend on one's neighbors. As long as one's neighbors want to kill you, borders have to be fortified and well-kept. Both the French and Germans built their own versions of the Maginot Line in the late 1930's. The question of Alsace and Lorraine were always debatable as Kashmir, the Falklands, Gibraltar, and scores of other places.   more »

The harsh reality is that oil, at the moment, and for the discernible future dictates policy. The Israeli bashers, who say they are not anti-Semites, fool no one. Israel has a right, as any other state to exist and have defensible borders. World history and law has always sided with the right of self-defense. But for the Jew-haters, self-defense is always disproportionate.   more »

Israel seems to always get criticism constantly for efforts to defend its own people by the Jew-haters of this world. In 1914 Pancho Villa crossed the Mexico-Texas border, robbed banks in Brownsville and killed American citizens. General Pershing was sent with an American force in search of Villa and stayed there for a considerable period of time. Again no society can tolerate it s borders being violated and its citizens being killed and maimed.   more »

The partition of 1947 was not accepted by the Palestinians, it was never their land, and no Arab government existed in that Mandate region for hundreds of years. The last two governments were the British from 1918 through1948, and the Ottomans from 1516 to 1918.   more »

Israel has as much right to the land they occupy as any one. In fact, they have a greater right. The Arabs, as a whole, are an impoverished, backward, and venal group. Only a few of their vast numbers have the guts to stand up and say what is right. Brigands, and their tribal blood feuds lead them, and their religious insanity makes them the bane of the current world.   more »

I was just up at Hyde Park as an invited guest to a reception for the gifting of a long-displaced painting of FDR piloting the sloop Amberjack II to Campobello Island in June of 1933 with the ill-fated cruiser Indianapolis as his escort. This was FDR’s first visit to Campobello since he was stricken with polio in 1921.   more »

My guest on this year’s first edition of The Advocates is Ms. Judy Cheng-Hopkins. Our subject today is the ongoing problem of refugees in the world today, and what is being done about it by the United Nations. Ms. Judy Cheng-Hopkins is the United Nations Assistant High Commissioner for refugees. This position, supervises all UNHCR operations in the world. It also oversees the Division of Operational Support which includes the Emergency and Security Service.   more »

In the other day’s Journal News we were witness again to the entertainment of another mindless diatribe by one of the most notorious haters that Greenburgh has produced. Mr. Ed Krauss has been railing against Supervisor Paul Feiner for years now. At every opportunity he comes to the Town Board, with his faux expertise to lecture the town on the law, ethics, the park system, insurance liabilities and the like.   more »

Our guest is Mr. Neil Goldstein and our subject will be “energy, energy independence, and the politics to get there!”   more »

Our special guest is Mr. Nick Taylor, the author of “American –Made, The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, When FDR put the Nation to Work.”   more »

In 1651, writer George Herbert (not a relative of George Herbert Walker Bush) wrote “For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.” Of course in our more modern era, Ben Franklin and others added on the extra line that for, “want of a rider the battle and thence the war was lost.”   more »

Our guest today is Mr. Anthony Rudel. Our subject is radio and how it evolved from a play toy of amateur enthusiasts to being the voice of FDR.   more »

Today I will be talking to Ms. Allegra Dengler about our “national voting system and is your vote being counted?”   more »

Maybe this Blog should be called The Weekly "De-Standard." I just read Fred Barnes' recent silliness where he actually wrote in print that FDR prolonged the Depression to allow WWII to bail us out. That's some stretch of the imagination. I am sure Mr. Barnes will now go down in history as either the most original thinker since Socrates, or the biggest moron allowed writing something under his/her own name.   more »

Our guest is John Cavanaugh who is currently serving as executive director of Building Bright Futures, a private sector/public sector partnership designed to create a national model for urban educational excellence and equity in the Omaha metropolitan area. Our topic today is, “How can we start American children off on the right path to learning?”   more »

In this era of the ultimate “lame duck,” a term attributed to Horace Walpole in 1761, in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, who George W, Bush embodies, we have seen some interesting phenomena emerging. One is that there seems to be a gigantic undercount in various districts and states, especially in Alaska. With all of the evidence on the ground, polling, and statistical estimates, turnout seems to be flat.   more »

Our guest today is Thomas Nesi, author of Poison Pills : The Untold Story of the Vioxx Drug Scandal. Our subject today is the six reasons why consumers need to be cautious about new and heavily marketed pharmaceutical drugs! Thomas Nesi is a communications professional with more than thirty-five years experience in medical communications and strategic planning. He is a published author and professional lecturer as well as a medical film-maker.   more »