Melissa DeRosa

Cuomo Aide: How We Killed New York

I've just finished reading the hilariously terrible book What's Left Unsaid by Melissa DeRosa, secretary to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (New York) that is so unself-aware, so arrogant, so embarrassing that I have to review it. I only read it in the first place because I wanted to interview Cuomo on ...

Joachim Phoenix as Napoleon

Little Boney Goes Hollywood

The Last Duel, a 2021 film by Sir Ridley Scott with Matt Damon as a mulleted French aristocrat chud battling honorably (if stupidly) a suave Adam Driver in 1386, turned out to be better than expected: not a classic, but quite decent, especially for a director in his mid-80s. (Sir Ridley turns 86 ...

The Right’s Derek Chauvinism

Quick quiz: Who was Jerry Parr? Don’t Google it, that’s cheating! Without looking it up, do you know who he was? Odds are, you don’t. Jerry Parr was the Secret Service agent in charge of protecting Ronald Reagan on the day he was shot in 1981. When the gunfire began, Parr pushed Reagan ...

The Deadly Pattern

The question was a valid one: “How could you, a conservative and a gentleman, be for them?” The man is an acquaintance of long standing, also a gent, so I bothered to explain: “Because I’ve been there and have seen what’s going on up close.” Needless to say, it was the Middle East we ...

Adolf Hitler, His Part in Our Downfall

Sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick had an interesting theory about the Roman Empire—that it never actually ended. According to him, Rome’s Imperium merely shifted shape repeatedly down the centuries, its geopolitical center being found alternately in pre-Islamic Byzantium, Victorian London, 1930s ...

The Week That Perished

The Week’s Quirkiest, Jerkiest, and Leftover-Turkiest Headlines GOING COLD TURKEY Another Thanksgiving come and gone. And, as every year, a cavalcade of op-eds about how the holiday is “genocidal.” Although, when you think about it, while Native Americans are generally portrayed as the ...

Will New York Politicians Tax Wall Street Out of Existence?

Let's face it. Anyone who works in, or just visits, the Wall Street area of Manhattan can't deny the aura of power and money isn't what it was 20, 30 or 50 years ago. The vibrancy, the financial dominance, the gusto seems to have gone missing -- so have many of the Gordon Gekko high rollers. ...

Currency Events

The following sentence ought to be enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine, at least if it accurately reflects a reality: US attorneys plan to extract a multi-billion-dollar payment from crypto exchange Binance in exchange for discontinuing their criminal investigation of it. In other words, ...

A Pretty Good Revenge

“Vengeance is mine,” is the Lord’s saying, but also the title of a best-selling Mickey Spillane trashy novel of the ’50s. The slaughter that’s taking place in the Middle East as I write this is all about vengeance, but then most wars are about revenge. In May 1946, in Tokyo, the American ...

This Thanksgiving, Joy-Ann Reid Has Much to Be Thankful For

Why such a sourpuss, Joy-Ann? On the whole, life and MSNBC are treating you pretty well. And yet, over the last 10 years, you have complained pretty much nonstop about how badly you, and "people who look like [you]," are treated in America. I will take on faith, Joy-Ann, that your life up to age ...