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brasch wrote a new diary post: Eliminating the ‘99%’ Can Lead to a Better Message for Social Justice
by WALTER BRASCH It’s time to retire the 99 percent. Not the people, but the slogan that identifies the Occupy Movement. “We’re the 99 percent” slogan focused upon two completely different groups of people. The 99 percent are the masses, the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the middle class; the 1 percent refers to the concentration of wealth [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: The Trayvon Martin Case: A Lesson Still to be Learned
by WALTER BRASCH For years, my father, a federal employee with a top secret clearance, carried a copy of his birth certificate when he went into Baja California from our home in San Diego. Many times, when he tried to reenter the U.S., he was stopped by the Border Patrol. My father had thick black hair [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Reality, News Perception, and Accuracy
She quietly walked into the classroom from the front and stood there, just inside the door, against a wall. I continued my lecture, unaware of her presence until my students’ eyes began focusing upon her rather than me. “Yes?” I asked. Just “yes.” Nothing more. “You shouldn’t have done it,” she said [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: The Late Great Commonwealth: Catching Up to the Republican Primary
by WALTER BRASCH It’s the beginning of April, and that means I have just finished celebrating New Year’s Eve, and will soon begin shopping for Valentine’s gifts. In a month or two, I may even get around to toasting St. Patrick. It’s not procrastination, it’s just that I’m a Pennsylvanian, and the state encourages [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: FRACKING: Pennsylvania Gags Physicians
by WALTER BRASCH (Part 1 of 3) A new Pennsylvania law endangers public health by forbidding health care professionals from sharing information they learn about certain chemicals and procedures used in high volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. The procedure is commonly known as fracking. Fracking is the controversial method of forcing water, gases, and chemicals at tremendous pressure of [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Star Gazing: Comets, Actors, and Angelina’s Right Leg
by WALTER BRASCH In 1973, some friends and I went to the rooftop of our apartment building to watch Comet Kahoutek, touted by astronomers and the media as the comet of all comets. We were sure we’d see it since we had the requisite equipment—binoculars and beer. But we didn’t see the comet. Not [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Tanness, Anyone? Oscars and the Bronze Beauties
by WALTER BRASCH It’s the end of February, and one of my friends is still sporting a summer tan. I know it’s phony—and she knows I know it’s phony—but I have long ago stopped teasing her about it. In her never-ending quest to appear to be beautiful and healthy, she has slathered skin tanning lotion into [...] -
brasch wrote a new diary post: Fewer Words; Less Filling
by WALTER BRASCH The Reduced Shakespeare Co. cleverly and humorously abridges all of Shakespeare’s 37 plays to 97 minutes. Short of having a set of Cliff’s Notes or a collection of Classic Comics, sources of innumerable student essays for more than a half-century, it may be the least painful way to “learn” Shakespeare. The critically-acclaimed show, [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Labor Pains: A Fable for Our Times
by Walter Brasch Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam. Now, Sam was a bright young man who wanted to work and save money so he could go to school [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: The Lowly Groundhog: Long May They Live
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, Thursday. That means there will be an additional six weeks of winter. Or, it means there will be an early Spring. It doesn’t make much difference. Phil has an accuracy rate of about 39 percent, according to the StormFax Weather Almanac. That’s probably about the same as TV weather forecasters. StormFax [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Sanctimonious Hypocrites Can’t Diminish the Warmth for Joe Paterno
by WALTER BRASCH Gov. Tom Corbett (R-Pa.) praised Joe Paterno and ordered flags on all state buildings to fly at half-staff for four days. That would be the same Tom Corbett who had said he was “personally disappointed” in Joe Paterno for not doing more to alert authorities in the Jerry Sandusky case, while acknowledging that [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Outsourcing America’s Health Care
“Ola, Amigo! Pack your bags, we’re going to Mexico!” bubbled Dr. Franklin Peterson Comstock III, faux physician and money-maker. “Yeah, I could use a decent vacation,” I replied, figuring he’d pay for both of us since he had just set the world record for the most nose jobs in a 24-hour period. “What vacation?” [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Miss America: Auditioning for Center Stage
by Walter Brasch Tucked between the New Hampshire primary and Ground Hog Day, and directly competing against an NFL playoff game, is Saturday night’s annual Miss America pageant. Although the headquarters is still near Atlantic City, where it originated in 1921, the pageant—don’t call it a beauty contest—has been a part of the Las Vegas [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Making Sport of Our Future
by WALTER BRASCH One of the fun things sports writers do is try to predict the winners and scores of upcoming games, from high school through the pros. For special “look-at-us-we’re important” bonus points, they create lists of “Top” teams and rank them, both pre-season and weekly. Sports writers have some kind of genetic mutation [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Stories We Will Still Have to Write in 2012
by WALTER and ROSEMARY BRASCH In January 2009, with a new president about to be inaugurated, we wrote a column about the stories we preferred not having to write, but knew we would. Three years later, we are still writing about those problems; three years from now, we’ll still be writing about them. We had [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: One Jew’s Christmas
byWALTER BRASCH I am a Jew. I don’t mind receiving Christmas cards or being wished a “Merry Christmas” from friends, clerks, or even in junk mail trying to sell me something no sane person should ever buy. My wife and I even send Christmas cards, with messages of peace and joy, to our friends who [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Pennsylvania Legislators Shoot Down Pigeons—Again
by WALTER BRASCH If the first year gross anatomy class at the Penn State Hershey medical school needs spare body parts to study, they can visit the cloak room of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. That’s where most of the legislators left their spines. The House voted 124–69, Dec. 13, to send an animal welfare bill [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Labor Not Represented in Management of the ‘People’s Universities’
by WALTER BRASCH Although more than one million Pennsylvanians are members of labor unions, and the state has a long history of worker exploitation and union activism, neither of the two largest university systems has a labor representative on its governing board. The only labor representative on the Board of Governors of the State System of Higher [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Death by Healthy Doses
by WALTER BRASCH They buried Bouldergrass today. The cause of death was listed as “media-induced health.” Bouldergrass had begun his health crusade more than a decade ago when he began reading more than the sports pages of his local newspaper, subscribed to his first magazine, and decided TV news could be informative if it didn’t mention [...]
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brasch wrote a new diary post: Penn State Trustees May Also Have Violated State Law
by WALTER BRASCH The Penn State Board of Trustees may have several times violated state law for its failure to publicly announce meetings and how it handled the firing of Coach Joe Paterno . However, these violations may be the least of the Board’s worries, as it scrambles to reduce fall-out from the scandal that began with revelations [...]
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