by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, showbiz
Gerry Goffin, a hit songwriter and former husband of Carole King, died early Thursday. He was 75.
Together with King, he wrote such classics as “The Loco-Motion,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and “Up on the Roof.”
King described Goffin as her first love.
“He had a profound impact on my life and the rest of the world. Gerry was a good man and a dynamic force, whose words and creative influence will resonate for generations to come,” she said in a statement.
“His words expressed what so many people were feeling but didn’t know how to say. If you want to join his loved ones in honoring him, look at the names of the songwriters under the titles of songs,” King added.
The lyricist died at home of natural causes, according to a statement from his publicity agency.
Goffin’s repertoire of hits ran across decades, from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, and includes some of the most familiar songs of modern times.
Born in Brooklyn, Goffin met King when they were students at Queens College, according to a biography on the Songwriters Hall of Fame website. They married in 1959.
Their big break came soon after with “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” which was recorded by The Shirelles. Luminaries like The Beatles and Whitney Houston also performed his songs.
Among Goffin’s other hits are: “Saving All My Love For You” with Michael Masser, “Who Put The Bomp” with Barry Mann and “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination” with Barry Goldberg.
He is survived by his wife, Michele Goffin, five children and six grandchildren.
People we have lost in 2014
by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, politics
Former President George W. Bush left the White House more than five years ago and has since stayed out of most Washington debates. But it would be hard to tell that if you have been listening to Hillary Clinton over the past month.
From defending her record at the State Department to defining her economic vision, Clinton has used Bush as her primary rhetorical device to both explain her vision for the future and defend her past.
“The biggest accomplishment in the four years as secretary of state was helping to restore American leadership and we did that in a number of ways,” Clinton said earlier this month before faulting Bush for the U.S. standing on the world stage when he left the White House in 2009.
Democrats have always been fond of faulting Bush and it was part of President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
But the fact that Clinton, who is admittedly thinking about running for president in 2016, is attacking him says as much about how she views her future as it does about the state of the Republican Party.
The former first lady has started pointing to the Bush administration when talking about the turmoil in Iraq, too.
When pressed about Obama removing troops from the country, Clinton regularly points out – and did so at a CNN town hall on Tuesday – that the withdrawal decision was made by Bush, not Obama.
When asked earlier this month in New York about troops in Iraq and the failure to get a status of forces agreement, Clinton said, “The deadline on Iraq was set by the prior administration, that if there were not a status of forces agreement… there would not be American troops.”
Strategy not without problems
Democrats close to Clinton love the Bush lines.
“Seems to me Hillary thinks George W. Bush was a terrible President,” Paul Begala, a CNN contributor and a longtime Clinton confidant, said before enumerating a number of ways he feels Bush failed, including two “botched” wars, turning “a massive surplus into a crippling debt” and presiding “over an economic collapse.”
“I hope she keeps it up,” Begala said.
But the strategy does not come without problems.
While Bush was unpopular in office – and still is with Democrats – his standing has improved since leaving Washington.
His overall approval rating hit a seven-year high in 2013 with 47% of Americans approving how he handled his tenure. While 50% said they disapproved, the trend has been been up in recent years. Most presidents experience this when they leave the job.
By bashing Bush, Clinton is also looking backward. Her book tour/campaign has carefully tried to keep her looking forward.
She told an audience in Canada on Wednesday that she doesn’t think much about her legacy because she is “very present-oriented and future-oriented.”
Republicans see any strategy that has Clinton looking backward as a winner for them.
“She is the personification of a political system that voters believe needs new blood and new energy,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican strategist and former Mitt Romney spokesman.
“So looking back, Clinton may feel that she has an advantage because she gets to point fingers at George W. Bush, but it is problematic for a candidate who is essentially part of the status quo for the last 25 years,” Madden said.
People close to Clinton reject that idea.
“Part of charting a new course for the future is a clear-eyed assessment of where we are and how we got here,” Begala said. “Hillary is simply speaking her mind. Radical candor – I love it.”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
For Clinton, bashing Bush might be more than just a standard red and blue tactic, though.
In front of a liberal audience at the New America Foundation in Washington last month, Clinton brought out her most fiery Bush rhetoric.
The speech was, in part, an attempt to make inroads with progressive Democrats, some of whom have been apprehensive about Clinton’s more moderate positions.
Bush, she said, “allowed the evolution of an entire shadow banking system that operated without accountability” and failed “to invest adequately in infrastructure, education, basic research and then the housing crash, the financial crisis hit like a flash flood.”
Clinton then went on to say that the Bush years showed that “we can turn surpluses into debt, we can return to rising defects, that is what happens when your only policy prescription is to cut taxes for the wealthy.”
CNN contributor and progressive activist Sally Kohn said if she were in Clinton’s camp, bashing Bush “is exactly what I would be doing.”
Kohn is an outspoken Clinton critic. In a recent CNN opinion piece she asked, “Does Hillary Clinton have to be so boring?”
Other than changing her positions on a number of fundamental issues, Kohn said, siding with the left by showing her distaste for a shared bogeyman could be effective.
“He is a universally known quantity,” Kohn said. “It is a way for her to run against something that is concrete because she can’t run against President Obama.”
To Kohn, Bush is Clinton’s foil against the left. She shows that she shares their opinion on him, but subtly says to progressives that she doesn’t “want too much noise or else” you will get another Bush.
Don’t elevate anyone current
Few president run for elected office again and Bush seems more content these days with painting than politicking.
And Clinton knows that. By focusing on Bush, Clinton isn’t elevating any other potential rivals who don’t have the name recognition she does.
When Clinton is asked about gridlock in Washington or the lack of legislation getting passed on Capitol Hill, she regularly mentions House or congressional Republicans in general terms and never mentions some of her possible 2016 contenders – like Sen. Ted Cruz or Sen. Rand Paul – by name.
“There is no distinctive Republican head of the party for her to post up against,” Madden said. “So she is again going to this habitual reflex: Just blame Bush.”
On the contrary to Clinton, Republicans like Cruz and Paul are ready and willing to be mentioned with Clinton.
Paul regularly jumps at the opportunity to fault Clinton and frequently says the Benghazi terrorist attack should disqualify Clinton from holding higher office in the future.
Asked about Paul’s attacks last week, Clinton told ABC that “He can talk about whatever he wants to talk about. And if he decides to run, he’ll be fair game too.”
Clinton did not, however, refer to Paul by name in her answer.
Cruz, too, is eager to confront Clinton.
“Secretary Clinton from the beginning has stonewalled on this rather than acting as a partner getting to the bottom of what happened,” the Texas Republican said on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” after the town hall.
This strategy, Madden says, helps elevate their profile on a level with hers and may be the most potent way to build “a strong national profile as a potential Republican candidate.”
by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Injustice has no borders, as we at Oxfam know well from years of experience working in more than 90 countries. We also know that poverty has no political party in our own country, the United States.
Last week Oxfam released a new study that dispels many of the political myths surrounding the nation’s minimum wage debate. It shows not only that increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour would give some 25 million workers across America a much-needed raise, but also that, on average, one in five workers in every single congressional district in America – red or blue – would benefit from such a raise.
In fact, according to our data, a hike in the minimum wage would benefit more than 55,000 workers in the average congressional district.
We found that the workers who would gain most are concentrated in districts that are remarkably diverse, from highly condensed urban areas to poor rural areas. At the top of the list is East Los Angeles (31.8% of workers), followed by the largely rural south coastal district in Texas’ 34th District (29.9% of workers). A district in the San Joaquin Valley of California is next, followed by more districts in Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley. Next on the list are districts in Dallas-Fort Worth (28.8% of workers), the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas (28.5% of workers), El Paso (27.9% of workers), the Bronx (27.6% of workers), and the boot heel of Missouri (27.3% of workers).
Raising the minimum wage would equally help Americans who live in Republican and Democratic districts, rural and metropolitan. It would also pump money into the economy and save billions in taxpayer dollars by reducing the number of low-wage workers receiving federal assistance. It seems an obvious thing to do.
From 1938, when a federal minimum wage was established, to its most recent increase in 2007 – passed by overwhelming majorities in Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush – most members of Congress recognized that as the cost of living goes up, so should the minimum wage. So why has the issue become bogged down in partisan politics that do little to serve our people or our future?
We are lucky enough to live in a wealthy democracy, but Oxfam is seeing the same growing problem of inequality in America that we see in developing countries: Relatively few people hold more and more power. In principle, the United States is the land where all people are created equal. But in reality, political power is stacked in favor of the wealthy.
Because of this imbalance, millions of hard-working Americans can’t stop falling behind, working at jobs that pay under $10 per hour and rarely offer benefits – some not even a day of paid sick leave.
Our study found that at least one-fourth of Americans work at jobs that pay so little that they cannot sustain themselves and their families without turning to government programs or going into debt. The average age of a worker who would benefit from a minimum wage increase is 35. Most (55%) are women. Over a third are parents of dependent children.
These are people like Tenesha Hueston, a single mother of four in Zebulon, North Carolina, who, according to a New York Times article in November, was making $7.75 an hour as a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant. Or Nick Mason, a father of two in Hixson, Tennessee, who made $9 an hour as an assistant manager at a pizza chain. They work these jobs year after year, while trying to care for their own children and parents, struggling to pay their bills. For them and people like them, the American Dream is a distant mirage.
According to our analysis, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would lift more than 5 million Americans out of poverty and help 14 million children see a boost in their family income. Fourteen million women, including 6 million working mothers, would get a raise. Three million single parents would be better able to sustain their families.
The sad irony of the standoff in Congress over raising the minimum wage is that petty partisanship gets in the way of a deal that would benefit large numbers of constituents in every congressional district, seemingly a boon to elected representatives of both parties. At least, that has been the logic that led to bipartisan support for increasing the minimum wage 22 times before now.
Members of Congress from each party need to be willing to overcome the divide: to be open to the debate, to consider the needs of hard-working constituents and taxpayers, to consider the wide range of benefits – and ultimately, to give a raise to the people who need it the most.
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
It breaks my heart to read about the death of James Boyd, a homeless man shot and killed by Albuquerque police in March. Boyd was apparently mentally ill.
His death recalls the January shooting of Keith Vidal, the North Carolina teenager who, his family says, suffered from schizophrenia and who was shot and killed after police arrived to help with a crisis.
Many details of that case are still unclear, and it’s hard to know who or what is responsible.
Tragically, incidents such as this appear over and over again in the news. The scenario goes something like this: Police are called to assist with a person who is experiencing a mental health crisis. There is an escalation in tensions, perhaps the introduction of a real or imagined threat, and this leads to someone getting hurt or, worse, killed. And it’s not always the person in crisis; sometimes, it is the police officer.
Another all-too-common outcome is that the person in crisis ends up not at the hospital but at the jail. Police officers, families and certainly people with mental health conditions don’t want this to happen. And it doesn’t have to.
There is a time-tested, well-researched way to lessen the likelihood that calling the police for assistance will end badly. In 1988, an approach was developed in Memphis that has been slowly – too slowly – making its way throughout the country. It’s called Crisis Intervention Team Training, usually just referred to as CIT.
Here’s how CIT works: A team of police officers (or other first responders) from one department or jurisdiction, or from a coalition of neighboring departments, undergoes a comprehensive week-long (40-hour) training program that does several things. It teaches some basics about mental illnesses, substance abuse disorders and developmental disabilities, and it explains how to recognize and interact with someone with these conditions who is in crisis.
News reports indicate that the detective who was put on administrative leave after the Keith Vidal shooting had not completed the CIT program, though others in the Southport Police Department, where he served, had. If true, we can’t know whether this would have changed the outcome, but it most certainly could have helped.
A cadre of community experts provides the training. They include fellow police officers, mental health professionals, family members and people who live with mental health conditions. In addition to clinical information and learning about community resources (and how to link to them), trainees hear personal stories, acquire de-escalation skills and put knowledge into practice through role play.
Officers and people who have had their own crises act out a number of no-holds-barred, real-life scenarios. They also get a sense of what it’s like to experience extreme mental health symptoms, such as hearing voices. It’s not always pretty to watch or listen to, but the outcomes of the CIT training show great promise.
Research shows that when CIT trained officers respond to a call, there are myriad benefits. The use of physical restraints goes way down, as do injuries to people in crisis and to officers. People are less likely to be arrested and taken to jail. And because officers know how to connect people to community services, the need to use the most expensive emergency services can sometimes be avoided. Equally valuable is the goodwill that CIT engenders. Officers report greater satisfaction in knowing how to help people, and citizens report greater trust in their police.
If cities as large as Philadelphia and Houston and rural communities such as New River Valley in Virginia and Cambria County, Pennsylvania, can institute CIT, why aren’t there teams in every community? Of course, it costs money to pull officers off the street, to train police dispatchers, to pay for materials and for costs associated with using community buildings. Grants from government entities and foundations can at times help to offset these costs. And much of the training is done by volunteers.
While the basics of the training program remain the same, it must be tailored to each locality. Therefore, more than anything else instituting a CIT program takes commitment and coordination. This usually begins with a person, or small group of people, building a coalition of community stakeholders. How many fewer tragedies might there be if more people stepped forward to become CIT champions?
‘My brother just needed help, and now he is dead’
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Checking the weather display for our departure from JFK Airport in New York to London’s Heathrow Airport, an awkward blob of green, yellow, and red is sprawled diagonally across most of the New England coastline. Studying the computer in Operations, the routing filed with ATC (air traffic control) appears to navigate through the least intense area of a very wide storm system. I pick up the company phone, taking a rare opportunity to consult with our dispatcher located in a central location at our main hub almost 1,400 miles away.
The term “Republican leadership” has become the biggest oxymoron in politics. If we learned one thing from Republicans’ elections, it’s that their leadership simply follows their tea party base in an unceasing march to the right.
Following their losses at the ballot box in 2012, Republicans rolled out a post-mortem calling for a move to the middle, recognizing that their days as a competitive national party were numbered if they continued on their current rightward path.
Since then, we have seen Republicans across the country do the exact opposite. They have grown more paranoid, more insular and more fearful. It’s that fear of the tea party that shut down the government to disastrous consequences last year, and it’s that fear that just caused them to replace one leader of the Republican shutdown with another.
In 2011, when John Boehner took over as speaker, he was billed as a moderate. And Eric Cantor was called mainstream. But both alternated between being hamstrung by and kowtowing to their right wing and drove their majority off a cliff.
And the numbers speak for themselves: after three and a half years, they have turned Congress into the least-trusted institution in America. Gallup now pegs confidence in Congress at just 7% — the lowest confidence rating for any institution ever recorded by Gallup in the past 40 years.
With ratings that abysmal, one might think that House Republicans might use a turnover in leadership as an opportunity to steer their sinking ship in a new direction. Think again.
Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise are members of the same tea party club and were elected on pledges of fealty to the tea party agenda. And that agenda will keep turning off the American public, dragging their ratings down and dragging Republicans further and further outside the mainstream.
The tragedy is that the middle class pays the price.
How did we get to this place, where the House majority continues to move so far from the center of American politics that they can no longer see it? NBC News provides some clues, finding in its polling that “the Tea Party is in a VERY different place on key issues” than even other, mainstream Republicans.
Take immigration as an example. Just 19% of tea party Republicans believe immigration helps the United States, compared to 47% of the country at large. With House Republicans beholden to this tiny minority of the country at large, they will continue to drag their party to the right — and their so-called leadership will have no choice but to follow, if they want to keep their jobs.
You can change the names on the door, but the out-of-touch agenda remains the same. If the country is to have any hope of combating the serious challenges facing us and creating an economy that works to lift up middle-class families, we need more than just a change of figureheads in the House.
We need to change the House majority.
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by tyler | Feb 21, 2024 | CNN, opinion
Amazon’s new Fire Phone isn’t a phone. It’s a shopping mall. Not that boring shopping mall slowly dying on the edges of suburban America, but a gorgeous mall with infinite selection and endless opportunities for entertainment, from books to movies and everything in between.
The price starts at $199 with a two-year contract, or $649 without a contract. The Fire Phone may well give its competitors a run for the money.
Malls are social spaces, and so is Fire Phone. Its five cameras and assorted sensors are exactly what is needed to create immersive interactive experience. And what better thing to socialize around than using it to identify new products, deals and scoops? The only piece missing from Amazon’s new mall is food, but you can be sure that soon, there will be an Amazon Fresh truck waiting around the corner or an Amazon aerial drone hovering just over the horizon ready to deliver your order.
Amazon is pretty late to the mobile space, and if Fire Phone was just another well-designed mobile device, it wouldn’t have a prayer of catching up to Apple or Google. But Amazon isn’t playing catch-up, it’s changing the game by shifting the focus of mobile devices to what it does best: Satisfying our seemingly endless desire to buy stuff.
Google is still struggling with creating a shopping strategy for physical products, and Apple is little more than an elegant specialty store in cyberspace. In contrast, Amazon pioneered online shopping and has reinvented the shopping experience time and again. Fire Phone is just the latest chapter in that long history.
A crucial feature in the Fire Phone is Amazon’s Firefly technology, which turns the phone into a one-touch information source for anything that can be viewed with the phone’s many cameras. You see a cool jacket on an actor in a movie – capture the image and Amazon will find it for sale. If you hear a song you like, grab a sample and Amazon will tell you the artist and offer to sell you a copy.
Or, next time you are at your favorite suburban mall, snap a picture of a product in a physical store and Amazon will offer it to you for less. This may be the most diabolically disruptive aspect of the Fire Phone.
While Apple and other companies are building out physical stores at great cost as part of their shopping strategy, Firefly allows Amazon to invade every store in every mall on the planet and turn it into a de facto showroom for Amazon.
This will drive retailers crazy. Expect to hear much about how Fire Phone is going to kill physical shopping in the days to come. I wouldn’t be surprised if some stores attempt to ban Fire Phone entirely.
Once upon a time shopping was mainly “bricks-and-mortar:” an exclusively physical retail experience. After Amazon appeared on the Web, shopping evolved to “bricks-and-clicks:” an expanded shopping reality that provided shoppers the option of visiting either a physical space or a virtual space. Doomsayers proclaimed the end of physical stores, but while online shopping has been profoundly disruptive, the physical shopping experience evolved to coexist with shopping in cyberspace.
We are now moving from “bricks-and-clicks” to “bricks-in-clicks:” a world where the line between physical and virtual not only blurs, but becomes a two-way conversation.
Getting competitive pricing with your phone camera is just the start. The next phase will be “augmented reality” shopping. Want to see if that elegant lounge chair really fits in your living room? Select your chair, hit a button and it appears on your screen as if it were actually in your room. You can even walk around the chair, viewing it from multiple perspectives. Sounds futuristic, but iPhone and Android users can experience this today with apps like Sayduck. With five cameras and multiple sensors, Fire Phone will be able to do this with even greater fidelity.
Amazon’s Fire Phone is being released at a moment when we are seeing the rapid growth of the so-called “Internet of Things,” where billions of physical objects from toothbrushes to satellite sensors are being connected to the Internet.
Before long, shoppers wandering into a physical store won’t use their phones to merely take a picture of an object; they will have a phone-mediated conversation with that object. And when that happens, Jeff Bezos will probably reinvent things again.
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