Mark Knows It All

                    At my office Christmas gathering today we talked about our Christmas traditions.  Family is very important in the Mahoning Valley resulting in many traditions traversing the years through our very large, extended ethnic families.  Third generation Americans have turned up the volume on those traditions as we see our children marry outside of our ethnic group, have our grandchildren, and move out of the area in search of greener pastures!!  They have become Americanized as the Feast of the Seven Fishes morphs into beer and wings at Quaker Steak and Lube. For people like me, the transition has been somewhat difficult.  Those of us from very large families also attend lots of funerals.  My parents, aunts and uncles and many of my cousins are now gone. What began in my life as two huge Christmas gatherings on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day has become what restaurants are ...

University of Virginia students protest in front of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity  Yellow journalism is a term coined in the late 19 th century to describe the battle between the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers in New York City.   They used yellow ink to exaggerate their headlines.   Using trumped up stories loaded with factual inaccuracies has been around since the invention of the printing press.   After all, if the goal is to sell newspapers, you have to give the public a story they want to read. With the advent of radio, and television, and now the electronic media, the American public has come to expect, and even believe, that the press is doing a good job by reporting the news that needs to be reported in an accurate and objective manner.  That is misplaced trust.  Today’s press is anything but. Today’s rule of reporting is to define the political narrative you want the public to hear, then bend the facts of the story to fit the narrative....

Here is a rule of thumb for all politicians.  Don’t spit in the eye of the people who put you in office.  Unfortunately, that is a rule the Obama administration and his progressive supporters have yet to learn.  This past Tuesday, the Democrats took a thumping.  As of now, the Republicans have attained a degree of control in the country they have not seen since the Great Depression in terms of controlling g overnorship's , statehouses, and even here in Mahoning County, the Probate Court, the Auditor’s Office, and a portion of the Court of Appeals.  In my lifetime I have never seen the complete collapse of a political party on this scale.  That includes the aftermath of Watergate and Richard Nixon. What is the response?  Obama said he is listening to the voters who didn’t vote.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz says it was “get out the vote issue” as opposed to a policy issue.  Two things happen in this type of election: 1) the people ...

                          The chickens have come home to roost.  In my lifetime I have never seen the implosion of political party as happened yesterday.  From the top on down to local races, the Democratic Party is reaping the rewards of its assault on America these past six years.  This wasn’t a Republican wave.  It was a Republican hurricane. Everywhere you look, red has covered all level of governments.  In addition to taking control of the Senate, the Republicans have gained additional seats in the House of Representatives.  Thirty two states now have Republican governors, including the bluest of the blue Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts.  In Ohio, John Kasich won most if not all counties, including Mahoning and Cuyahoga. The Republican Party controls more state houses than any time since the mid 1920’s.  Chris Redfern, the Ohio Democratic Chair, lost his own Ohio...

                    There is an organization called the College Board whose purpose is to provide guidelines and exams to those schools with Advanced Placement classes.  The organization is a non-profit focusing on helping students transition from high school and college.  It provides guidelines, outlines and apparently exams to school boards using their program. Several years ago the College Board put together a blue ribbon panel of historians to develop an Advanced Placement history curriculum.  It is a guideline with outlines and exams.  This particular program is now being implemented in the schools, and the reaction has been…let’s say….not good. Conservatives have let their feelings be known loudly!! I know Progressives and uber-liberals deny it, but after the tumult of the 1960’s those marching on the streets migrated to liberal arts programs, education and journalism.  For all intents and pu...

                                                Only those of us who stayed in the Mahoning Valley after the close of the steel mills understand what it was like to see the fabric of our local society torn apart.  Back in those days we did not have the degree of government safety net that has been built up over the past twenty years.  This community not only lost the mill jobs, but the community leaders who left with them.  Locally owned corporate headquarters either disappeared through bankruptcy or just packed up their bags and left.  No community can lose upwards of 60,000 jobs and survive. Youngstown was the capital of the Rust Belt, a center for disdain, the punch line of jokes as we watched all that we grew up with disappear in front of our eyes.  As long as I can remember, this area was a center of corruption and mob violenc...

Ferguson, Missouri, is ground zero for everything that is wrong in 21 st Century America.  This is progressive America.  It is a harvest of despair, hate, division, jealousy, racism, class warfare, a collapse of values, the destruction of rule of law, the militarization of our police forces, the death of an independent and neutral press….all mixed into one ugly soup.   It is sad.  It is dangerous.  It is a preview of things to come in a country that is slowly but deliberately destroying the fabric that has held it together for over two hundred years. At the heart of the matter is the tragic shooting of an unarmed black 18 year old young man by a white police officer.  At first blush, it was disturbing.  All he was doing was walking down the street when the cops told him and his friend to move to the sidewalk.  He was shot in the back.  Pictures of a cherubic young man flashed all over the news programs.  He was a gentle gi...

One only has to look at a map to understand American interests in the Mideast.  The United States had Iran surrounded with military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan thereby assuring that in those three countries terrorist mischief would be kept to tolerable levels.  Then, Barack Obama gave it away.  Mired in the muck of political ideology, he unilaterally withdrew our forces from Iraq, and is in the process of doing the same thing in Afghanistan.  Meanwhile, Iran pretends to be cooperating with the United States as it continues to run its centrifuges stockpiling weapons grade uranium.  The result is the beginning of the third Iraq war.  Terrorism from Syria has spread into central Iraq as bad guys even the Taliban find to be despicable establish an Islamist terrorist caliphate in the center of the Mideast threatening Israel, moderate Arab states like Jordan, and the United States itself.  These alleged human beings have brutalized any who oppose...

I have always found it interesting how the government calculates inflation.  They simply remove the items that are going up in price from the formula.  It is more than a political ploy.  Government entitlement increases are based on the rate of inflation giving Uncle Sam a vested interest in officially declaring there is no inflation.  So much for my Social Security increase!!!  It also doesn’t take into account the inflation you can’t see….shrinkage.  Have you Golden Oreo lovers noticed there is something askew about those nifty new sticky top packages?  The number of Oreos per pack has shrunk.  Shrinkage!!  How about the full size Reese’s Cups in those big orange packages.   Today’s full size Reese’s Cup is now the size of a Junior Mint.  If they shrink anymore, you will be buying the wrapper. Shrinkage.   The same goes with a Hershey Bar.  The jumbo size now is equal to the regular size years ago.  ...

America is finally coming to its senses.  The collapse of Iraq and the children immigrant fiasco along the southern border are proving to be a bridge too far for the American public. Barack Obama's poll numbers are now officially worse than George Bush's post-Katrina. Even Chuck Todd of NBC News declared the Obama presidency over.  A progression of not-so-phony "phony" scandals has knocked the new Messiah off his pedestal notwithstanding the efforts of a supplicant press to shore him up.  Now the press is left scrambling trying to salvage liberalism itself and Hillary Clinton's presidential bid.  Even more onerous for Obama is the ever so slight but growing possibility of impeachment.  Ultimately it will be a political decision within the Democratic Party and the liberal press.  When the powers that be reach the conclusion that continuation of his presidency would destroy the chances of a Clinton presidential election victory in 2016, Obama will b...

According to the New York Post, Staten Island’s Gwendolyn Williams (pictured above), age 9, got a “Fitness-gram” from New York City School PS 29 telling her she is fat as part of a city school system mandated BMI test.  The test results were given to the students in a barely sealed envelope to be brought home to their parents.  When confronted by the upset girl’s mother as to how this skinny girl could possibly be fat, the school principle responded they didn’t think the children would open the envelope. Schools are now providing three meals/day to many students during the school year and oftentimes during the summer months.  The government is now mandating calorie and portion sizes, as well as Draconian measures such as only skim milk.  The result is school lunch sales are down 12%.  Food waste measured by analyzing garbage contents is skyrocketing.  To combat this, some systems are now analyzing the home packed lunches brought to school by ...