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February 10, 2010
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Democracy, Democrat, Opinion, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology, The Pundit's Corner
 Leave a comment Once upon a time in a land far far away. • “Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat,” declared Republican Rep. Robert Rich of Pennsylvania during a debate on the House floor on July 23, 1935. That remark came after Republicans hinted they were considering a move to impeach Roosevelt, according to the New York Times [...] February 10, 2010
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Commentary, Current Events, Democracy, Opinion, Politics, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology, The Pundit's Corner
Leave a comment President Obama can stop running now. Someone should really tell him that. He is still in campaign mode and wants to give those feel good speeches. The problem is the speeches don’t feel so good anymore and we really don’t need somebody running for an office he already won. Being President is not about approval [...] February 10, 2010
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Commentary, Comments & Discussion, Current Events, Democracy, Democrat, Opinion, Politics, Social Classes, Social Issues, The Pundit's Corner, The Writer's Corner
Leave a comment Sarah reads from her palm. She mixes up names and trashes the English language and makes up little idioms like shout outs and six pack joes and hockey moms. She really isn’t into all that minutia of policy and stumbles around when pressed and mixes metaphors and trips over sound bytes and puts her pedagogy’s [...] February 10, 2010
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Opinion, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology, The Media, The Pundit's Corner, The Writer's Corner, Uncategorized
Leave a comment You wake thinking something exploded. Someone hit the house with a hammer and everything shakes. You jump out of bed because something has just happened and yet the house is quiet. A meteorite just hit the house. A UFO landed on the roof. A jetliner crashed in your yard. Your wife runs in and says [...] January 28, 2010
We live in a age when fame is the ultimate bar of success. John Kennedy Toole. How many people have heard of him? Maybe some. Maybe.He wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. The novel went on to win a Pulitzer. Highly reviewed. A classic. The author. He committed suicide ten years before the book ever saw [...] January 28, 2010
People are either Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. But this says nothing about why we vote. It is not issues. Issues are the window dressing we paint over our biases. The reason we vote the way we do goes back to childhood. Did we hear dad use the N word? Did we grow up [...] January 28, 2010
In the early days of Obama’s run for President a lot of people said he had no experience. Remember all those people who said this guy had just been a Senator for a couple years and did he really have the experience to walk into the ring and govern and be the leader of the [...] January 28, 2010
Guess what. We cant afford ideologies anymore. Like our credit we have used them all up and at the end of the day they mean nothing anyway. The Democrats are socialists and the Republicans are right wing fascists who want us all to be teabaggers now and the independents want to overthrow the government. Please. Those [...] January 28, 2010
F Scott Fitzgerald said in the opening of The Great Gatsby, “I was going to become that most limited of all specialist the well rounded man. This isn’t an epigram, life is more successfully looked at from a single window after all.” Certainly President Obama is that most limited of specialists…the visionary. He is at [...] January 28, 2010
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Governance, Opinion, Politics, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology
Leave a comment When I wrote my last novel Rocket Man about a man struggling to keep his home, I emphasized the chaos of the American Dream and threw everything but the kitchen sink at my poor main character. Now this fictional character seems to have moved down the pike into the mainstream of suburban America. A bank [...] January 28, 2010
Grace under Pressure was Hemingway’s definition of courage. It certainly rings true as President Barack Obama faces his second year in office. Being a President is not a popularity contest and the will of the people is a relative term. Leaders are not defined by approval ratings or pundits or bloggers–they are defined by their ability to see [...] January 28, 2010
He could have given a feel good speech. There is no one who can give a better speech than Barack Obama. He can soar to the heavens and take us with his vision, his eloquence, his verbal acuity. But he did none of that. He told it like it is and it was a hard [...] December 17, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Democracy, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Sociology, The Pundit's Corner
One comment Joe Lieberman needs to be bitch slapped. We need Hillary or someone to get in and fight for us now. The President is too remote, too Ivy League, too government by deal. As Keith Obermann said in a piercing comment, “there is a big difference between compromise and compromised. “With the loss of the Public Option, no [...] December 8, 2009
Tis the season. They come in drips and drabs. One, two, three, then a flood as the yuletide approaches. The cards are store bought hand made or sometimes they are an ecard that we flick open and forget. And sandwiched in this holiday flood are three by five envelopes that stand out in the short [...] December 8, 2009
All things go around eventually. The darling becomes the bum. The favored becomes the forgotten. The chosen one is relegated to the also ran. And honeymoons end. Unfortunately. Now Fox and MSNBC are both turning their guns toward President Obama. This more than anything else should demonstrate the President goes his own way. He makes [...] December 8, 2009
If you watch the former cheerleader and horsey vineyard owner you start to feel what crept up when Richard Heene played his theme song for his science reality show and you realized that people will go to extreme lengths to become famous. The couple on Good Morning America talked in subdued tones of the egregiously injured–”our [...] December 8, 2009
Whoops. Another icon falls. Sports figures just keep going down like the proverbial dominoes. Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Tiger Woods. But he is such a good golfer! The best. The sports pundits line up in their suits and nod and speak in low tones. Yes yes he has made some bad choices but I believe [...] December 8, 2009
About six months ago we gave up plastic. Shock. Paralysis. Fear. No bottomless well of credit to cushion the stupid decision, the rash moment, the dinner that started out as a snack and ended up costing over a hundred dollars. We literally never had any cash in our pocket. We were debit card people who saw money [...] November 25, 2009
Now Every Democrat down in the Senate liked healthcare reform a lot, but among the Democrats there was one who did not. The Liebergrinch hated healthcare reform – the whole Senate season. Now, please don’t ask why; no one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. Or it could be [...] November 17, 2009
http://www.speakwithoutinterruption.com/site/podcasts/hazelgrove-w/ November 16, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Entertainment, Opinion, Politics, Social Issues, Television, The Media, The Pundit's Corner
Leave a comment Even if we agree that our journalism is less than objective these days and television now resembles the carnival more than the domain of the Cronkite’s and the Murrow’s with hawkers yelling at us as we walk down the dusty aisles…that still doesn’t mean we can’t try for a representative news channel. You could never [...] November 16, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Commentary, Opinion, Politics, The Media, The Pundit's Corner
Leave a comment There is an old saying: never let anyone see how smart you are, they will cut you off at the knees. Certainly President Obama never heeded this little aphorism. He has shown us how smart he was time and again and he is paying a price. Smart people have to be careful. You do not [...] November 16, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Comments & Discussion, Democracy, Democrat, Opinion, Politics
Leave a comment Who can forget seeing Oprah with Barack at the big rally in Chicago? There she was the number one woman in America with sway over millions of American women and men and she was standing with the man who would change the world. Oprah loves Barack Obama. Let there be no mistake. She supported him, [...] November 12, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Books, Entertainment, Opinion, Publishing, Social Issues, Sociology, Television, The Media
One comment “Inappropriate. You are being inappropriate Larry.” Now this sounds like Larry whipped out something from his pants or cracked an obscene joke or flipped Carie Prejean the bird or swore. Larry did something far worse…he hit the wall. The wall is where the Bush Doctrine meets Sarah Palin…what do you think of the Bush Doctrine? It is [...] November 11, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Commentary, Communications, Healthcare, Marketing, Social Aspects, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology, Television
2 comments You’ve seen it. You’re sitting there with your kids watching Elf or some kid movie and here they come. A middleaged couple yucking it up over some wine and before you know it they are in the bathtubs in the yard holding hands, celebrating the fact that flaccidity has been banished with CIALIS. So you [...] November 10, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Healthcare, Opinion, Politics, Recovery, The Pundit's Corner
2 comments In the depths of the Great Depression the United States government undertook the largest project in the United States to date–The Hoover Dam. Billed to provide electricity and water for the West from the Colorado river and to finally tame the Colorado so it would quit washing out farms–the dam was audacious. No one knew first [...] November 9, 2009
“I have a constitutional duty to make the right decision for my district whether or not the decision was popular.” When was the last time we heard that? It gets better. “I had to make a decision based on the needs of the people in my district…a lot of my constituents are uninsured, a lot [...] November 8, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Economic Crisis, Economics, Healthcare, Opinion, Politics
Leave a comment I know a man whose job it is to call up doctors and hospitals and knock down their fees. He has a large home and shiny sports cars and acreage and stocks and bonds and his kids will go to Big Ten schools and he is very affable and is known as a man who [...] November 8, 2009
THE RECESSION IS OVER! So says President Barack Obama and government officials. Prosperity is right around the corner. REALLY? Now what corner is that prosperity lurking on? Herbert Hoover’s corner? The bankers corner? The auto manufacturers corner? AIG’s corner? The bail out execs with bonuses corner? Barack Obama’s corner? Geitner’s corner? I mean I must be [...] November 8, 2009
You really should watch Glenn Beck to understand what is going on. The third party is here and it is a radical amalgam of disgruntled teabaggers and 9/12 ers who have coalesced around Republican contests and are now going to unleash their own far right candidates to purge the republicans of moderates and anyone else [...] November 8, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Opinion, Politics, Social Classes, Social Issues, Sociology, The Writer's Corner
Leave a comment I would think he gets it now. There is a subsonic rumbling in America. It breaks out like a volcano on the cable shows. Gas emits from the Palin Beck coalition in the name of taking back America. They took back the election in upstate New York and gave it to a Democrat. They took [...] November 8, 2009
At a white people rally in front of the capitol yesterday Michele Bachmannn from Minnesota called for revolution. She threw a large stack of paper to the ground and whipped up Teabaggers, 9/12ers, closet Klansmen, guntoters, and the assortment of middleaged white people who hold signs of Obama as Hitler, Healthcare as a concentration camp, [...] November 8, 2009
Twenty three billion trees. That’s how many the Civilian Conservation Corps planted. Eight hundred new state parks. Millions of men taught to read and write and trained for future professions. Franklin Roosevelt’s baby brought charges of socialism and worse. Some thought he was trying to create a personal army the way Mussolini and Hitler were doing. [...] October 27, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Commentary, Comments & Discussion, Democracy, Governance, Healthcare, Politics, Social Issues, Sociology
4 comments We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. So if we are to take these words at their core and apply them to the year 2009 then we [...] October 26, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Politics, Social Aspects, The Pundit's Corner
One comment Seven Million. That’s what insurance companies are spending a week to defeat this healthcare reform. Now why would that be? Is it because they are just so sure they are providing us the best healthcare out there and no other system could better serve the American public than the one where insurance companies decided who [...] October 21, 2009
Whatever it takes. That’s what it is now. You don’t want to leave this planet without your fifteen nanoseconods. The woman who had a zillion babies proved that one. Her own show and book deal just for having more babies than anyone else. Now we have the parents who decided to throw the dice on [...] October 21, 2009
Well now why isn’t the economy turning around? Why is the combined unemployment and underemployment in this country topping twenty percent! Why is Wall Street booming? Why is Goldmans posting record profit and giving out record bonuses? Why does the average American have no credit? Why does no money trickle down at all? Why is [...] October 21, 2009
Richard Heene and the great balloon hoax does have historical precedence. Orson Wells on October 1938 pulled a balloon hoax of his own with a War of the Worlds episode broadcast in New York City. Millions of people thought the Martians had landed and panic ensued. Wells said he was sorry and that was pretty [...] October 14, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Entertainment, Governance, Minorities, Opinion, Politics, Republican, Social Issues, Sociology, Sports, Television, The Media, The Pundit's Corner, The Writer's Corner
Leave a comment So Rush Limbaugh is down for the count. No NFL team for him to hang his hat on. Seems the NFL wants nothing to do with him or his views. They repudiated the Limbaugh world hook line and sinker. Which of course for Rush is something he will make much of and increase ratings, but, [...] October 13, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: African-American, Commentary, Comments & Discussion, Current Events, Politics, Sports
2 comments The St. Louis Rams. Ok. Rush wants them. Why not? He’s got the bucks. He wants to do what rich men do when they become very rich–they buy professional sport teams. So he has the right. Absolutely. As Bill O’Reilly said on his show last night, he has right to buy any team he wants [...] October 6, 2009
Maybe Dave Letterman should retire. If you watched last nights show then you will have to agree it had the look and feel of a an old boys club, rich men yucking it up on national television with Dave’s peccadilloes moving in the background. Forget that Steve Martin looked like an ass with his socks [...] October 1, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Democracy, Environment, Environmental Issues, Geopolitical Events, Global Warming, History, Sociology, Television, The Pundit's Corner
One comment Ken Burns newest film is amazing. The parks are amazing. We watch and watch and I have been at it eight hours now after four episodes. At times it is like a marathon with the people and parks running by you in a mind stream of sequences of people and events that you struggle to [...] September 25, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Freelance Author, Politics, The Writer's Corner
One comment Sarah and Rod–strange bedfellows of fame and fortune by Bill Hazelgrove Used to be you had to run for something or be in office. Not anymore. You can be considered viable and newsworthy and even political merely by keeping a media presence on the national radar screen. Rob and Sarah are strange bedfellows but they are queerly [...] September 24, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Opinion, Social Issues, Sociology, Television, The Pundit's Corner, The Writer's Corner
Leave a comment You know Jay Leno moved to an earlier time slot because demographics being what they are show all the boomers getting older and going to bed earlier and so they don’t want to stay up and watch the edgy late night shows. So Jay is now Jay Lite. No desk. Sitting on a couple of [...] September 22, 2009
Leopards don’t change their spots. We see this with the banks. The bankers will continue giving each other bonuses and doing business as usual. Why? Because the market has not dictated they change. They received their TARP money are doing just fine thank you very much. Too late really. But this debate over health care [...] September 18, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Economic Crisis, General Topics, Healthcare, Opinion, Social Issues
3 comments It is not about healthcare by Bill Hazelgrove It is not about healthcare. It is the fear of the other. Rural whites and glenn beck runnaways have coalesced with a broad populace that has lost their credit their jobs and their homes. Swindled at the pump they believe ala cable heads there must be a villan and [...] September 16, 2009
Guns around the President–gasoline on the fire by Bill Hazelgrove Um, is it just me or does anyone else find it strange that fully armed people are popping up outside of venues where the President is speaking? I mean the second amendment is the second amendment but shouldn’t we have a bubble of security around the President…any [...] September 15, 2009
MTV ups the ante…Kanye is the new Sacha Cohen by Bill Hazelgrove Can you top Sacha Cohen coming down from the rafters inverted with his ass showing and landing in Eminem’s lap and giving him such a crotch shot as he runs out in disgust from the awards? Too bad they staged it. So the next year [...] September 14, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Advice, Current Events, Politics, Television, The Media
Leave a comment The American President–Obama should take heed by Bill Hazelgrove In the Michael Douglas movie, The American President, he plays a President who takes a girlfriend played by Annette Bening. Richard Dreyfuss is a conservative senator who wants to run for President and he starts a smear campaign against Bening and by proxy the President. Advisers around Douglas [...] September 10, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Accountability, Congress, Current Events, Democracy, Opinion, Politics, Republican
6 comments Someone let a craker in the house by Bill Hazelgrove C’mon Mr. South Carolina lets cut to the chase here. You can do better than YOU LIE. You wouldn’t do that to a white man now would you boy? I’m from Virginia Wilson…I know the score. My people fought in the Civil War on the side of [...] September 9, 2009
Will the Beatles ever go away? by Bill Hazelgrove Um, I know it is blasphemous to say, but, will the Beatles just ever, you know, sort of fade away? I mean not like their music fades away of course…it is fantastic, but this media event stuff over…well nothing is kind of stupid. So they are now on Guitar [...] September 8, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Accountability, Children, Current Events, Democracy, Education, Entertainment, Opinion, Politics, Television, The Media
3 comments President Obamas speech–victimized again by television by Bill Hazelgrove Television may appeal to what is banal and base and it may be low art but it should not be used to hurt our democracy. We have been victimized again. Talking heads on the left and the right have hacked it out over the Presidents speech to school [...] September 4, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Democracy, Democrat, Opinion, Politics, Republican
2 comments The conversation we can’t have–politics by Bill Hazelgrove A lady the other day started spouting off about how Obama was ruining the country. I was working in the corner of this coffee shop and didn’t say anything. Then she started going on about how she hates the media because of the way they treat Sarah Palin and [...] September 2, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Business, Current Events, Economic Crisis, Opinion, Recovery
Leave a comment Necessity is the mother of invention–the unemployment generation by Bill Hazelgrove Here is the dirty secret of unemployment compensation–it kills your incentive to get a job. Sure there are people that bust it out and keep looking and never slow down. But for the rest of us we know that check is coming every two weeks and [...] August 27, 2009
The last Kennedy by Bill Hazelgrove I grew up in Baltimore and Virginia and my parents were Kennedy liberals. They loved JFK much the same way people love Obama today. It was the hope and passion and idealism that John Kennedy inspired and even as a very small child I can remember seeing the funeral on the [...] August 25, 2009
Death of a Movie Star? by Bill Hazelgrove Read an article in the New York Times about the cratering of big movies with big stars. Seems people don’t care about movie stars anymore. Scratch that…they care they just don’t care enough to lay down almost ten bucks for a ticket. Tom Hanks, Sandra, Julia, Cruise–where have all [...] August 19, 2009
Our cultural heritage–cable television by Bill Hazelgrove Vapidity aside…is it just me or has cable become the dumping ground of all that is cheap, shallow, worthless, produced in a nanosecond on a shoestring with a gnats intelligence? Certainly the pay channels are the only refuge now. I was just reading David Foster Wallaces’s essay on [...] August 17, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Book Review, Books, Creative Writing, Freelance Author, Literature, The Writer's Corner
Leave a comment Bright Shiny Morning–a meditation on fame by Bill Hazelgrove James Frey. Isn’t that the guy who duped Oprah. Yep. That’s him. Just read his latest book Bright Shiny Morning. It is about LA. Very interesting writer. Sort of man who skates very fast on thin ice. Not dishing the novel but I see why A Million Tiny [...] August 16, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Healthcare, Opinion, Politics, Social Issues
One comment Let’s do it for the Forty Six Million by Bill Hazelgrove Do it for the forty six million. You may have health care, you may have very good health care and you don’t want anyone fooling with it. I get it. So why be in favor of health care reform? Do it for the forty [...] August 15, 2009
And then you are at the end and it is over. Your vacation flew by like everything else and you can’t help but feel you missed something. So you stand for a last minute to try and take it all in. You stand and inhale the peace and quiet and realize you have missed something. [...] August 14, 2009
We don’t know how to be bored anymore. We know how to work how to stress how to charge ourselves up to work but we don’t know how to be bored. On vacation we become bored. It is part of being on vacation. We don’t want to structure all of our time and suddenly we [...] August 13, 2009
By the fourth day of your vacation you are ready to let go. It happens this way you have tried to maintain some control of your old world but you realize there is nothing you can do. Emails will go unanswered and phone calls not returned. You simply quit caring and that is the first [...] August 11, 2009
Your first moment of disorientation comes a day into your vacation. I am in the boundary waters away from television and blogs and any kind of talking head. All I have is this blackberry that I write on and then journey to a lodge in this remote wilderness of a million acres to pick up [...] August 11, 2009
I am in the boundary waters away from the drudgery of American life. Americans are the most overworked people in the world. Our work ethic has gone bad and enslaved the middleclass in a death march to the grave. We no longer have a middleclass but a working class with no hope of getting ahead. [...] August 8, 2009
The American vacation – a dying institution by Bill Hazelgrove A German friend of mine said the other day that Americans are the most overworked people in the world. “Ja, what is wrong with these people they never relax…you people work too hard..” Another friend of mine never uses his vacation days and in the winter he [...] August 6, 2009
Slick Willie rides again August 5, 2009
Fear of Flying July 31, 2009
The Ha Ha Culture by Bill Hazelgrove We live in the ha ha culture now. Maybe you’ve noticed all the magazines and newspapers saying ha ha you don’t have what these people have. It’s literally everywhere. Our culture is based on presenting people with what they don’t have. A trip to the grocery store is [...] July 28, 2009
A Beer with the President Alright. First of all I want to thank everyone for coming…Professor Gates, Sergent Crowley. I think having a beer in the Rose Garden is very appropriate and I thank both of you for joining me. Professor I think wearing your Academic gown is very appropriate with your honorary degrees around your [...] July 24, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Accountability, African-American, Current Events, Minorities, Opinion, Social Issues
Leave a comment President Obama and the “stupid” police by William Hazelgrove Police are in an uproar. The President called them stupid. Was it stupid for the cop to arrest the black professor from Harvard in his home.? Probably not stupid just more of the same old same old. The police say this officer is stellar. He is fair. Maybe [...] July 24, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: African-American, Current Events, Minorities, Opinion, Social Issues
Leave a comment Guilty Until Proven Innocent–Our Police State July 22, 2009
The Fake Landing on the Moon There was a show on about how the moon landing never occurred. According to this show the astronauts merely orbited in their can of spam and then after eight days came back down with beards and waved to everyone from the helicopter picking them up like returning crusaders. According to [...] July 17, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Current Events, Economic Crisis, Economics, Governance, Social Classes, Sociology, The Economy, The Pundit's Corner
Leave a comment Ya gotta love the banks. Chase just make a killing. Brilliant! They took TARP money and bought treasuries and rode them up and made billions off of billions. Imagine if someone gave you a millions dollars and then told you what games to play at the casino because they knew the effect of millions of [...] July 14, 2009
Posted by Bill Hazelgrove in: Democracy, Economic Crisis, Economics, Governance, Recovery, Sociology, The Economy, The Pundit's Corner
Leave a comment We need amnesty for the middle class. We are going through the closest thing we have to the Great Depression and it has torched middle class credit. Forget the millions who have lost their homes or the people who have declared bankruptcy. They will be effectively shut out of the credit market for years. But [...] |
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What if an African American were elected President?
First of all it would be very difficult to elect an African American President in America today. There would have to be some sort of cataclysmic event like a massive meltdown of or economic system that would cause people to lurch violently left. But let’s just say that happened and an African American were elected. [...]