As a followup to my recent Storify post about the 2015 Sidney Hillman Foundation Prizes, here’s video of the moving speech by Death Row attorney Bryan Stevenson.
Jeb Bush’s statement about GW Bush and Israel was basically a pander to his audience that he thought would land well with the fat cats in the room, where the host was Paul Singer, a sort of Sheldon Adelson wannabe. For much of the rest of the country, I believe it will come off as a weird sort of toxic brag, conjuring up nightmarish memories of the last Bush presidency. Here’s the Washington Post story on Jeb’s supposedly private meeting with those donors.
Fascinated to learn that Laird’s Applejack, a tasty liquor still available nowadays was made in the Americas beginning in 1698! In the fine print is also the info that around 1760 George Washington obtained the recipe and arranged to distill it for the imbibing citizens of Virginia. Producers of one of my fave TV shows, “Turn: Washington’s Spies,” could practically do product placement of Laird’s on their show! Please click on the headline above for a full post with pictures and a classic W.C. Fields comedy movie video clip.
Post-speech update: Great #SOTU speech by Pres Obama, who hit all the right notes. Six years later he’s still my guy. Optimistic, progressive. Midway thru I realized his inaugural was 6 years ago on this date, 6 days after I’d lost my job (an event I wrote about here on the third anniversary of that occasion). On the widely discussed zinger of the night, when the president noted he’d run his last campaign, the Republicans responded by mocking him, and Barack riposted that he’d won both those races—sheesh, the REPUBs are such histrionic crybabies, acting all hurt by his truthful statement. 
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This past Sunday morning NPR did a reprise of Pres Obama’s past State of the Union addresses, w/special emphasis on where the economy was at each juncture, in ’09’, ’10, and ’12, a reminder to me of the nadir we’d reached at the end of the Bush presidency (800K jobs lost in the last quarter of ’08), and of the obstacles thrown in the path of the recovery ever since, including the foolish and misguided austerity imposed on the country by the REPUBS, even at a time of low interest rates, when spending on infrastructure, promoting job creation, was so clearly indicated. Amazingly, despite their unremitting obstruction, which has limited the breadth and strength of the recovery, Pres Obama has nonetheless been able to help direct the economy out of the recession to the point where business and hiring are improving markedly. It’s a remarkable record, yet so little remarked upon in the media. All this has tracked parallel to my own path from longtime corporate employment in book publishing to six years’ self-employment building my own publishing services business, an enterprise that’s gone from little activity, mired in the dismal days of ’09 and ’10, to the point where I can barely handle all the work I have.
As I wait for President Obama to give tonight’s address, I’m so thankful for his efforts and accomplishments. I only wish they were more widely appreciated. It’s a historic injustice they are not.
As Facebook friend Michael Bell, a longtime author of mine, pointed out when I shared the above observation, “At least the Derby entries have to have SOME qualifications, apart from being a horse.”
The Ford bros are all about manipulation and playing the media to their advantage.
