Florida Gov. Rick Scott Fellow Floridians, have you read the newspapers today? Tax cuts that you would have received aren’t going to happen. Why? Because that money has to pay hospital expenses which would have been paid by the federal government if our dearly beloved governor, Rick Scott, and the like-minded state House Republicans hadn’t exercised their […]
Poring over a book Be wary of the words you choose. They may mean something entirely different from what you thought they meant. Someone posted on Facebook the photo of an attractive young female teacher who led the school cheerleading squad and seduced a high school athlete into having sex with her. A fellow commented: […]
Mary Clare Jalonick My old stomping grounds (for only two years), The Associated Press, is at it again. Whenever some government pronouncement about cholesterol or fats is sounded, AP quotes the positions of official medical sources, completely ignoring the discordant voices in American medicine. The news organization follows this practice even though the medical establishment […]
I’m part-way through an email promotion for what the fitness trainer alleges to be the most amazing discovery about how to flatten your abs ever revealed. I come to this headline: “Big Mistake No. 1: You’re Core Isn’t Working Properly.” And that short, profoundly ignorant sentence undermines the guy’s credibility. I want to shout at […]
When I was in my upper 30s, working with the Palm Beach Post, I came across a piece written by the copy chief that had the conjunction however in the middle of a sentence, with a comma on either side. I still remember how startled I was. I’d never encountered this punctuation error before, and couldn’t […]
Pope Francis Republican Catholics are in a quandary. Do they adhere to their political ideology on climate change, or do they follow their spiritual leader, Pope Francis? As is well-known, the pope recently issued an encyclical (letter to the church’s bishops) denouncing the world’s political leaders for putting national interests ahead of efforts to combat […]
New York Stock Exchange United Airlines plane A single day last week told the story of what’s become of life on planet Earth. On Thursday, July 9, computers brought down the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal. And none of the interruptions in service by these institutions, […]
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders This week, two persons on either end of the political spectrum called for a radical change in the nation’s health-care system. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a New Hampshire Independent and self-described democratic socialist running for president, long has advocated this position, so his message on Facebook was no surprise. For Merrill […]
Donald Trump At an appearance by Donald Trump this week, all of the veterans present supported him, MSNBC reported, showing one man saying, “He tells it like it is.” The veterans forgave Trump for remarking that Sen. John McCain wasn’t a war hero, saying that was just politicians sniping at each other, the TV […]
Ric Bradshaw A few days ago, the sheriff of Palm Beach County in southeast Florida expressed defiance over criticism arising from a joint media investigation that found sheriff’s officers had shot at 123 persons since 2000, and one in four were unarmed. Despite those alarming figures, not a single officer has been criminally charged since […]