Death and Taxes
HEY, BOSSES! Let Us Work from Home!
Hey, Bosses…no matter what your justification for demanding workers return to the office in the fall, we don’t want to go back. There are obvious exceptions to this rule, but otherwise, your argument for making us is invalid. For convenience and clarity, I’ve created a collective brief to help you reconfigure your priorities and assertions, which can also serve as a cheat sheet for your employees to forward to HR. Here are some current top reasons. Employees should feel free to make this personal: Safety This is supposed to be the most important thing, right? Right??? Well, unless you are clairvoyant with proof of 100% accuracy, you can’t assure anyone’s safety right now. You likely never could. Even science, defined by discovery, doesn’t know everything. So, if you love the thought of end...
Pride Month Held Some Valuable Lessons for Country Music’s LGBTQ+ Community
In June 2020, country music had zero openly LGBTQ+ artists signed to Nashville’s major record labels. By June 2021, country music had three openly LGBTQ+ dotting the big record label rosters. Brooke Eden went public on social media with her longtime partner Hilary Hoover in late 2020, and Lily Rose signed with Big Loud Records in a joint deal with Back Blocks Music and Republic in January 2021 partly on the strength of her uptempo love song “Green Light,” sung directly to another woman. Then, CMA Award-winner T.J. Osborne of the country duo Brothers Osborne came out as gay in a February 2021 feature in Time. As a result of that modest yet groundbreaking queer uptick, this year’s Pride month was hands down the queerest in country music history. As the host of Proud Radio, an LGBTQ+-fo...
National Gun Violence Day Honors Victims and Survivors, But It’s Not Enough
I started writing this op-ed at the end of March, just days after the Boulder, Colorado shooting took place at a supermarket killing 10 people. As I continued to formulate my thoughts in preparation for Gun Violence Awareness Day, today, June 4, when I knew this op-ed would publish with our friends at SPIN, there have been many more mass shootings, many of which never made the news. The ones that did make the news include the March 31 shooting in Orange, California at an office building, an April 7 shooting by former NFL player Phillip Adams, another on April 15 at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis, the May 9 Colorado Springs birthday party shooting, and just last week, a shooting just miles from my home in the Bay Area – the San Jose, California railyard shooting. Over 100 people die of g...
Trump’s Impeachment Defense: What About Madonna?
Former President Trump’s attorneys in his second impeachment trial lit up social media with a provocative argument defending his right to use fighting words: Madonna did it, too. Trump is accused of inciting the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol in Jan. 6 by a group of supporters who claimed with no basis in reality that he won the November election. Trump lawyer Michael Van der Veen played a montage Friday that included Madonna speaking at the Women’s March in January 2017, saying she’d “thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.” In another clip, Johnny Depp asked a festival crowd in June 2017: “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” Van der Veen said he “did not show you their robust speech to excuse or balance out the speech of my client, for I need not.” H...
Up in Smoke
He looks like a guy who’s done some time and knows a thing or two. One month out of jail, he wears aviators, sounds like De Niro and often mentions God. Who else could have pulled him through almost 32 years behind bars, shafted in the injust Florida prison system? His sentence was life imprisonment. His offense, smuggling marijuana. Incarcerated in 1989 at the age of 40, he’s now 71. His son was 11 when he was locked up, he’s now 43. They just spent their first Christmas together in 31 years. Richard DeLisi is out due to the Last Prisoner Project, who discovered his case from his family’s petition page, freedelisi.com, started by his son and nephew. He sits here today to talk with me, with his attorney Elizabeth Buchanan, who had to drive to him with her computer, so that we could speak v...
Make It Sing
Before I lay into the Democrats for missed opportunities at the House impeachment hearing, let’s review a few facts from the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection: President Trump told his crowd of his supporters that he would walk with them to the Capitol to disrupt the election certification. He said, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” So, they walked to the Capitol and they fought. They brought pipe bombs, metal pipes, bear spray, sledgehammers, baseball bats, knives, flex cuffs, tasers, riot gear, Confederate battle flags, Nazi paraphernalia, Trump merch, and a noose. Trump bailed on walking to the Capitol with his supporters. Instead, he went home, watched TV, and trolled Vice President Mike Pence. Trump’s supporters, per his urging to fight, overwhelmed...
National Treasure
If you care at all about democracy and the way our world works, you should be watching Real Time with Bill Maher. As January 2021 marks the show’s 19th season, it’s one of the most in-demand shows on air. With good reason. What the world needs now—right now—is someone brave enough to fight for the truth. Someone who will put himself out there, be willing to be despised as much as he’s revered, and say the things that make us ponder and squirm. From religion to healthcare, mass media to political correctness, Maher enlists experts to help start the all-essential conversations. He leaves it up to you, the thinker, to do the rest. Nineteen seasons, FYI, doesn’t happen to any TV show by accident. Before Real Time there was his round-table, idea mosh pit Politically Incorrect (1993 – 2001...
The Silly Parties
The 1970 famed Monty Python Flying Circus sketch “Election Night Special” featured political parties ranging in silliness that ran against each other for local elections. The bit had two main parties: the sensible and the silly, but there were also other independents such as the slightly-silly and the very-silly. Full of ridiculously long candidate names and ludicrous costumes, the various parties may have parodied the UK elections, but are just as insightful when looking at the U.S. Over the last 35 years there have been many silly parties and candidates who have run for president of the United States and SPIN is taking you back through some of the absolute silliest! Election of 1988 – Mrs. Foggybottom, Cocktail Party CREDIT: Mrs Foggybottom campaign flyer In 1988, the elegant...
What Is My Culture?
Third Eye Blind founder, singer and songwriter Stephan Jenkins has interests that go beyond music. He will be sharing his viewpoints on a variety of issues on SPIN. Today, he takes a look at what is culture and how that defines who we are: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, unpitied…” E.burke The first pop song I ever heard was I want you back by the Jackson 5. I was all in for music for life right then and there. I was 6-years-old. I played for hours every day on my neighbor’s drums along with James Brown and Bob Marley for years until, by the age of 16, Clyde Stubblefield’s and Carly Barrett’s rhythms were ingrained in me. I believe I have an authentic lyrical style, but it would not exist without the daisy age of hip hop, and I would not sing...
Don’t Tread on Me! Navigating Among the Politically Unmasked
Third Eye Blind founder, singer and songwriter Stephan Jenkins has interests that goes beyond music. He will be sharing his viewpoints on a variety of issues on SPIN. Today, as a new wave of COVID-19 sweeps America, he takes on those who refuse masks in public: Are you crying out to be liberated from the tyranny of wearing a mask in public and politely staying the fuck away from me at the market? Of course not. Like the rest of us, you’re tucked into your bandana trying to dodge those bastards. Recently, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered wearing masks in public as NYC opens this month. More cities will follow suit. This, along with the swill, promulgated from the top that public mask-wearing is PC weakness, suggests encounters with the aggressively unmasked increase as we all venture back into pub...
Spike Lee Shares 3 Brothers Short Film With George Floyd, Eric Garner Footage
Spike Lee took to Twitter last night to share a powerful video amid nationwide protests, as he blended footage of Eric Garner and George Floyd being killed by police officers with a scene from his 1989 film Do The Right Thing. The video shows a scene from the film, where a police officer continues to choke character Radio Raheem (played by Bill Nunn) and surrounds it with cellphone footage of Garner’s murder in 2014 and Floyd’s on May 25. The short’s caption reads “3 Brothers-Radio Raheem, Eric Garner And George Floyd” and the clip starts with the question “Will history stop repeating itself?” Lee has been vocal about the recent murders of Floyd, Breonna Taylor in Louisville and Ahmaud Arbery, tweeting on May 29 “May Our Queen And Kings Rest In Paradise While Agent Orange Tweets ‘When...
