Were NY TIMES foodies shocked when restaurant reviewer Frank Bruni went to judge the cuisine at the Penthouse(Yes, THAT Penthouse) Executive Club-Robert's Steak House in Manhattan's West side?

Mr. Bruni raved about the quality of the steaks and he gave Robert's Steakhouse one star in his review.

The Times notes in the ratings block that,"Ratings... reflect the reviewer's reaction to food, ambience and service, with price taken into consideration."

I would submit that , as a gay man, Mr. Bruni might know his steak, but he can't judge the meat.

UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

I thought this was important enough to pass along. from ARMY TIMES:

Walter Reed patients told to keep quiet

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Feb 28, 2007 20:26:13 EST
Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

See http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/02/TNSreedinspect070227/

READ THIS NOW....

ON POLITICS

There's an interesting article in today's NYTIMES (2-28-07). Mario Cuomo and Newt Gingrich will be debating at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. Cuomo is a most articulate gentleman. Gingrich is...Gingrich. It was in the Great Hall that Lincoln made one of his most powerful speeches and introduced himself to the eastern electorate. The point of this debate is to move political discourse away from the 30 second sound bite. If i didn't have a previously scheduled commitment, I would be there. I hope this link works, otherwise paste it into your browser.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/us/politics/28coop.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

If you have the time and inclination, take a look at the text from Lincoln's Cooper Union speech and contemplate how that would be presented today.

http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm


RADIO, RADIO

I have long thought that the consolidation of media into the hands of a very few corporations is dangerous for our democracy. Now, XM and Sirius want to take consolidation into orbit. Please read the OP-ED piece by Eric Kleinenberg in today's NYTIMES (2-28-07). If you do not have a NYT subscription, sign up for the free trial period.


STREETTTCH!

For those of you on the right who loathe the NYTIMES (or example) and for those of you on the left who loathe the WALL STREET JOURNAL (for example), here's a proposal: take one week and read materials from the other side. Folks on the right can listen to Randi Rhodes on Air-America. I know it's difficult, but guys on the left, listen to Rush or Laura Ingraham. Listen to what's going on. Check out the BBC on line. Better yet, look what Al-Jazeera is saying on its web site.

Ok, a one week task might be too much too soon. Try it for one day. Get out of your self-supporting, self-serving media rut and THINK!


ON "JOURNEY'S END" take 2

I'm still knocked out over this powerful piece of theatre. The play is a set piece that takes place in a British officers dugout on the front lines during World War 1. It's pretty much a set piece with the kid CO who drinks to forget, the older, wiser exec, the coward, the newbie who gets killed, etc. The rigid class system of the British military is all too apparent, but some of the best lines are delivered by the lower class batman to the officers.

The claustrophobic feeling of the dugout seems all too real and the stress and strain on the characters is palpable.

The utter silence of the audience was testimony enough to the power of the presentation.

Short Post

Just a short posting. Spent the evening at the theatre seeing " Journey's End." Very powerful and excellent. I must agree with all of the excellent reviews this play garnered.
___________________________________________________________________

A brief response to commenter MR:

I will say that the first thing you do in any war is ... attack your enemy. Despite what the administration said, Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the attacks on 9/11. You said the "intel' on Iraq was solid. Obviously it wasn't. Yes, as you say "sometimes you have to act with insufficient information because the consequences of not acting are too great." I agree. But you can't start a war on a hunch and you don't fight a war on the cheap.

I do not believe in turning the other cheek as all it does is present your enemy with another target. That being said, I do not believe in shooting yourself in the foot.

Fighting the "Global War on Terror" (GWOT, as the administration has labeled it) requires that you have a full panoply of weapons at your disposal: diplomatic, intelligence, economic, police, military. The terrorist organization does not consist of a uniformed, standing army representing a recognized state. Instead, it is an amorphous, highly ideological, multi-national, and decentralized entity that, as Mao Tse Tung said, "swims in the ocean of the people." Its fighters appear to be highly motivated, well financed, and well trained for their missions. Do not confuse the way they are fighting their war with the way we fight wars. I've long felt that the better model for this war was the war against organized crime as i see many similar elements in motivation and organization. Finally, I think our large scale military operations ultimately work in favor of the terrorists on so many levels.

You ask me to speculate on Bush's "motive" for going to war in Iraq. I will leave the discerning of "motive" to Bush and his therapists. All I can try to understand are his actions.

Finally, you ask, "Should you despise the President or the people who elected him?" That's a false construction. I despise the President. I disagree with the people who elected him. I believe a lot for people who voted for him would make another choice today.

Thanks for writing, MR.

TRM

THEYYYYYYY'RRRRE OFFFFFF!!!

Years ago there was an announcer at New York area horse tracks named Fred Cappasella. Fred has this wonderful, slightly nasal, slightly high pitched New York sound to his race calls I hope someone has them posted somewhere in cyberspace. Fred became so well know that the comedian Robert Klein did a take off of Fred arriving home and being greeted by his wife:

WIFE: Hello , Fred, what would you like for dinner?

Fred: (still in race announcer mode) MARTINI FIRST , SHRIMP SALAD SECOND,, VEGETABLE SOUP THIRD, COMING AROUND TO THE ENTREE , MEDIUM STEAK, THEN STRING BEANS AND POTATOS,AT THE FINISH, IT’S CHEESECAKE FOLLOWED BY COFFEE!!!

Fred would have been right at home in the current political season. With a year and a half to go before election 2008, the press has reduced the process to a horserace: who is ahead in the polls, who beats whom in a theoretical race, who has the most money. It’s been said by others that the media has reduced the election process to the equivalent of a junior high school class president’s race. I think that’s insulting to junior high schools, where adults can rein things in if they get out of hand. There is no one left to do that on the national level

We have Obama and Clinton throwing mud at each other, Giuliani waffling on every position, Mitt Romney trying to become a chameleon for the right wing of the Republican Party in trying to explain how he could have been elected governor of liberal Massachusetts, my goodness! And on, and on. The only thing we have not yet had was a candidate thumbing his (or her ) nose and going “Nyah, Nyah!” but I wouldn’t take bets against that happening in the next 18 months

For the press , it has become all process, all the time. And why not, it’s simple for us simple minded folks! We eat it up. It distills out complexity, nuance and meaning, and puts it all into a frame we can all understand-winning and losing. It would be a lot easier to put the political standings on the sports pages. Or maybe on the television schedule pages as a half hour sit-com (23 minutes less commercials). That just about fits our attention span.

NYTIMES columnist Paul Krugman talks about this issue in his Monday (2/26) column. He actually poses questions to the democratic candidates about health care and taxes. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a candidate to answer, and certainly don’t wait for some of the beat reporters to pick up on this idea of “content”. But don’t blame the reporters either. They are part of a system that has an insatiable demand for product to broadcast or to print. As a result, reporters, editors, in fact all of the cogs in the system take whatever they can get and push it through the media processor. What happens is that reporters wind out sounding less like Ed Murrow and more like Mr. Ed.

Please don’t get the idea that I’m placing all the blame on the press. I’m not. As someone who once worked in that field long ago, I learned that that you must take a very cynical approach to the media because they simply reflect who we are. They give us simplicity and platitudes because we buy it. It makes them money. Do not think for a second that “the media” are interested in informing you. They are not. The sole purpose of programming, be it news, sports, weather, Oprah, whatever, is to provide a means for you to glue your eyeballs to the commercials or print ads.

If we cannot deal with political analysis beyond 2 minutes, or three paragraphs, that kind of material gets exiled to public broadcasting or specialized publications.

Newspapers are losing money hand over fist. Television news is subsumed by the entertainment divisions. (one of my all-time favorite movies is “NETWORK”. This 1976 spoof(?) of the communications business was written by award-winner Paddy Chayefsky. Well, it was written as a spoof, but it turned out to be prophecy. RENT IT!). everything is dumbed down. Well almost everything. For some excellent reporting, try this fine piece from Seymour Hersh in the March 5^th edition of The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070305fa_fact_hersh

So the enemy is not what some in the blogosphere call “mainstream media “ or “MSM”.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

In the beginning..

Well, I decided to join the modern world and shoot off my mouth like several million other people. I hope I have something interesting to say. I intend to make this blog primarily about politics, but there are some many good ones out there that I don't intend to compete with them. Of, course, none of them accurately reflects my opinions, angst, hope, anger, humor, and frustration.

To start, what is a "Radical Moderate"? It is someone who believes that there are both rights and responsibilities inherent in your participation in society, and is not afraid to engage in vigorous debate or to take effective actions to promote that position. A Radical Moderate is someone with an open mind, willing to change a stance based on new evidence. A "Radical Moderate" is a rationalist, who understands when to act on gut feelings. Personally, my left wing friends think I'm somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun. My right-wing friends think I'm to the left of Lenin.

This mantra of "rights and responsibilities" cuts across all segments of society: classes, genders, individuals, corporations, or government entities. To my utter frustration, I find that the left focuses almost entirely on rights while the right focuses on, what? Money? I almost yearn for the time when you knew where a conservative stood: balanced budgets, status quo, beat the commies. Now, the real conservatives are the leftist environmentalists who don't want you to do anything to anything. I think they would be happier if we all ran around naked and ate berries and nuts, as long as we didn't harm the berry bushes and nut trees.

I've never met a leftist who was willing to put his or her ass on the line for the defense of this country. On the other hand I've met too may conservatives who were far to willing to put someone else’s ass on the line.

I said this would be about politic and I haven't really touched that yet. As a big ol' jump ball let me say this: I despise George W. Bush. Bush lied this country into an unnecessary war, killed almost 3,000 brave Americans in doing so, established both foreign and domestic polices that have hurt this country and its citizens. More on this theme later.

Who do I want to see as president? NOT HILLARY! She is the type of person who, if you asked her the time, would take three polls before she gave an answer. Does she have a moral compass? Can she articulate a broad vision for this country? Do you know how she will deal with the unforeseen challenges that this country faces? NO.NO. NO.

Barak Obama? Nope. Lots of sizzle. No substance.

Check out New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Impressive credentials. Lots of experience.

Don't get me wrong. I believe this country is prepared to elect a woman, or a black, or a Jew. But I don't think this country is ready to elect a president named "Mitt".

Ground rules: comments welcomed, reasoned disagreement welcomed, arguments welcomed, humor welcomed. Any of the "ism"s that are not allowed in any publication of record will not be permitted. You know what they are. As I'm just starting this blog, please put up with any technical errors I might make.