A recent ESPN/Seton Hall poll regarding attitudes towards steroids in baseball is instructive. The numbers can be spun any number of ways, of course, and will be, but what I find most interesting is that even among the (only) 25 percent of respondents who say they'll attend fewer games than last yea...

The Nation's Dave Zirin has been virtually a one-man media campaign in exposing the criminal assault on baseball slugger Barry Bonds by the United States Justice Department. After seven years of investigation, the Justice Dept. arrived in court this week with virtually no case against Bonds. A judge...

I "worked with" Paul Harvey for nine years at WHO Radio in Des Moines. His morning news broadcast from Chicago (and much more recently, from a recording studio in Arizona) aired during the Van & Bonnie show in the 7am hour. His mid-day report stretched 15 minutes, beginning at noon, six days a w...

Thank heavens that bankrupt Americans spent billions of dollars last year deciding between John McCain and Barack Obama. They faced an historic choice between "Change" and "Change you can believe in", but the victory has proved decisive. In the battle of war vs. peace, the undisputed victor was war,...

Why do we love the Oscars? Perhaps because our favorite films each year reflect our individual tastes, and so often our identities. Esquire magazine has just said it best-- "There's no emotional investment in it. You didn't help make the movie. You didn't uncover some overlooked gem. All you did was...

Sometimes moments of inspiration come in the smallest of packages. I used to work with a guy named Dick. What the hell, I'll tell you his last name. It was Lem Mon. That's with a space. French, maybe. Des Moines must have a few. Dick was a technical director like me at WHO Radio, and he was my senio...

We're now less than a week away from the 81st Annual Academy Awards telecast on that network that shows "Lost", and I'm as giddy as a baby in a swing, to quote the Oscar-winning song of 1945. (That's accurate. Look it up.) The drama of next Sunday's ceremony may pale by comparison to the sight of Sh...

The uncovering of the A-Rod steroid story blows me away. Where is the media and public outrage on the players' behalf? Yes, that's right. In 2003, their union voluntarily agreed to re-open the collective bargaining agreement to address the issue of performance-enhancers and then to begin testing, in...

A $500,000 pay cap on bailed-out executives is nice, but if you can't balance your company's books without a handout from hard-working taxpayers, how about even less than that? Half a million dollars can keep 10 families of four knee-deep in beer and Skittles for a year. That's still plenty to take ...

"Slumdog Millionaire" may indeed be the best picture of the year, as much for its energy and its polished editing as for its suspenseful and heartwarming story. (My insides have been very cold of late.) I found the plot amusing-- 19-year-old product of the Mumbai slums appears on Indian television v...