BUSTED.

Undercover video shot in May by a conservative activist shows two corporate distributors of free cell phones handing out the mobile devices to people who have promised to sell them for drug money, to buy shoes and handbags, to pay off their bills, or just for extra spending cash.

The ‘Obama phone,’ which made its ignominious YouTube debut outside a Cleveland, Ohio presidential campaign event last September, is a project of the Federal Communications Commission’s ‘Lifeline’ program, which makes land line and mobile phones available to Americans who meet low-income requirements.

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

For years, Obama has maintained an overall approval rating above 50% as many Americans have refused to dislike him, despite majorities being against his policies and giving him lots of disapproval on key issues.

That seems to be changing. Via HotAir, a CNN poll puts Obama’s approval rating at just 45%, a drop of eight points from a month ago. His disapproval is up nine points, to 54%.

RTWT. “The drop in Obama’s support is fueled by a dramatic 17-point decline over the past month among people under 30…” “The number of Americans who think he is honest has dropped nine points over the past month, to 49%.”

UPDATE: We know he’s in trouble…because he’s lost Germany:

several hundred leftists staged a colorful demonstration on Monday afternoon in Berlin…with a poster showing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. uttering his famous line, “I have a dream.” Underneath was Obama saying, “I have a drone.”

What now, are we supposed to believe that even German leftists must be motivated by racism? Oh wait…sorry.

Via Zero Hedge, Republican former VP Dick Cheney comes out against Edward Snowden:

I’m interested by several aspects of his remarks.

First, there is what Cheney didn’t say: Cheney apparently did not call Snowden a liar. I’m not sure if that puts Cheney at odds with Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who said last week:

“[Snowden] was lying…He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he’s even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

Rogers’ language is a bit slippery: He plants the word “lying” but doesn’t indicate that Snowden was lying about the most crucial revelations, namely, the extent of NSA surveillance of people’s phone records and Internet activities. Between that and Cheney’s apparent silence on the same, I will take the NSA surveillance revelations as ‘confirmed’.

Rogers and Cheney do both call Snowden a “traitor” and suggest that he is a front for someone else; perhaps China. They are not the first to wonder if he’s a front. I figured that Snowden could be acting for an NSA higher-up (who opposes the surveillance programs); but I never totally ruled out (and still don’t) that Snowden could be acting for China. It struck me as a bit odd, from the beginning, that Snowden is holed up with a foreign power which delights in the embarrassment to the U.S. here, and as well, benefits from it.

Anyway, Cheney goes on to strongly defend the NSA surveillance; he suggests it would have prevented the 9-11 attacks, and takes a ‘trust us’ type of stance.

I disagree with Mr. Cheney. I do so respectfully; he’s a great American, and there are two sides to every story. I come down on the Rand Paul / civil liberties side of this one. The current extent of surveillance goes well beyond anything I ever defended the Bush-Cheney administration doing.

And the Obama administration’s other scandals – for example, their IRS / Tea Party scandal, or their multiple spy-on-the-media scandals, or multiple occasions when they happily manipulated classified info for political gain, and/or lied to the American people – have, by now, proven that they (the Obama administration) are profoundly unworthy of trust.

UPDATE – Some tidbits from the last several days:

• Snowden was a prolific online commentor. (Heh)
• Thousands of firms trade confidential data with the U.S. government. Did you know that Internet companies answers tens of thousands of government requests per year?
• More video of the Obama administration contradicting itself on surveillance and civil liberties; this time, Joe Biden of 2006 attacking the Bush programs which were, again, less than what Obama has now.

UPDATE: NSA surveillance has provoked disagreement among the scholars at Cato. Here is a lengthy piece from Julian Sanchez, discussing many legal details from a viewpoint I agree with.

In my new post at Ricochet, I take aim at the latest stupid thing to come out of Lindsey Graham’s mouth.

Here’s a preview.

Honestly, I feel sorry for the people that would have to read Graham’s mail.  There’d be a lot of rambling love letters with a return address from Sedona, Arizona.

Graham needs to remember that he is hired and fired by the people of South Carolina. The facts show that Graham has more in common with John McCain, Barack Obama and the Washington DC crowd than he does with anyone who will see his name on a ballot next year.

Please read the whole thing!

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

. . . it would not only be news, but proof of her unfitness to hold elective office or make public comment on issues of consequence.

But, Ms. Landrieu is a Democrat, so it’s just a slip of the tongue.

Senator Mary Landrieu: South Dakota Borders on Canada, You Know

Heh.

In a Gallup tracking poll released Tuesday, former-President George W. Bush currently stands with a favorability rating of 49%, compared to 46% who see the 43rd president unfavorably. Meanwhile, another Gallup poll shows President Obama with only a 47% approval rating, with 44% disapproving.

John Nolte from Breitbart explains why:

After all, Obama fooled everyone when he ran as the anti-Bush in 2008.
Everyone thought Obama meant he would be less hawkish than his predecessor. But as we have seen, Obama apparently has no problem killing American citizens via remote control with drones or greatly expanding on Bush’s surveillance state. This, even though Obama told us he had pretty much won the War on Terror.

Read the whole thing!

-Bruce (@GayPatriot)

As many have observed, the humanities (and allied disciplines) at U.S. universities have gotten rather silly, these last few decades. Now they’re also falling from favor among job-conscious students:

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The humanities division at Harvard University…is attracting fewer undergraduates…

Universities’ humanities divisions and liberal-arts colleges across the nation are facing similar challenges in the wake of stepped-up global economic competition, a job market that is disproportionately rewarding graduates in the hard sciences, rising tuition and sky-high student-debt levels.

Among recent college graduates who majored in English, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; for philosophy and religious-studies majors, it was 9.5%; and for history majors, it was also 9.5%…By comparison, recent chemistry graduates were unemployed at a rate of just 5.8%; and elementary-education graduates were at 5%.

Coincidence?

But, not to worry: Harvard’s Humanities department is prepared to sneer at anyone who doesn’t see how tremendously valuable they are:

This “is an anti-intellectual moment, and what matters to me is that we, the people in arts and humanities, find creative and affirmative ways of engaging the moment,” said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of Arts and Humanities…

Homi Bhabha, director of the Humanities Center at Harvard….said he didn’t give much weight to criticism from some elected officials who carp that young people need to go into fields that are supposedly more useful. “I think that’s because they have a very primitive and reductive view of what is essential in society,” he said.

Get it? If the Humanities are in decline – despite this being an age of left-wing triumph, and with university revenues/budgets near all-time highs – it’s not the fault of Humanities professors for too often failing to teach kids how to reason, usefully, about life’s problems. No, no, no. It’s everyone else’s fault for being primitive, reductionist and anti-intellectual.

All I can say is: I have an idea of what’s genuinely intellectual, and Sorensen/Bhabha are not it.

Via Zero Hedge.

UPDATE (from Dan): Jeff addresses a topic near and dear to my heart. There are many reasons the humanities are in decline and a good number of them trace back to the humanities professors themselves who focus on esoterica and offer, in the words of Homi Bhabha (whom Jeff quoted above) a “reductive view of what is essential in society”.

Perhaps were more humanities professors to show a genuine passion for the ideals which had defined their professor until scholars (thinking they were really quite clever) started “deconstructing” it in the 1970s, they would find greater interest among students.  But, professors would then have to make the case why the study of philosophy and great works of literature mattered to those who pursued careers in law, medicine, banking and commerce.

I highly recommend Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind which explores one aspect of the humanities’ decline in contemporary academia.

A couple of opinion pieces. First, from Legal Insurrection:

…I’m also concerned with what could be done with the information gathered about American citizens not suspected of a crime if put into the hands of politicians and political groups, and bureaucrats who work for or are sympathetic to such politicians and political groups.

The threat, oddly enough, is proven by the [present] leaks…If some government employee who has sworn to keep information secret is willing to leak [it]…for (allegedly) good purposes, what’s to stop that person from violating his or her oath by leaking data-mined information…for other than good reasons…?

…The issue goes beyond the NSA programs. Obamacare is a form of data mining. Obamacare will put into the hands of the IRS medical and health information of an unprecedented level.

And from Reason:

…everything and everyone are relevant to everything, because anything could yield some clue that could conceivably solve some crime. But that view is the same one that justified those general warrants from King George III.

The problem with indiscriminate [surveillance] of homes and effects is not that it’s ineffective in finding wrongdoing. It’s that the innocent people should not be punished in the pursuit of the guilty….

The danger isn’t (just) in what’s being done with the surveillance databases now; it’s in the fact that they exist, i.e., what could be done with them – and will be, sooner or later. Especially under an administration as power-hungry, deceptive and corrupt as Obama’s.

In the Bush 43 days, I believed that the government was only after real terrorists. But because of Obama’s IRS/Tea Party scandal specifically, I now know otherwise. That scandal has proven that the government’s motives are not pure.

And thus the NSA revelations, while they may be a non-scandal by themselves, they do carry the whiff of all of Obama’s other scandals. Because all of them fit together in a disturbing pattern. I am not against responsible counter-terrorism; I am against Obama’s pattern.

Lots of news this weekend on the NSA (phone surveillance) & PRISM (Internet surveillance) revelations. (Some info on how PRISM works from the Silicon Valley side of things, here.)

As these revelations dominate the headlines, perhaps they do obscure other important Obama scandals like Benghazi, IRS / Tea Party, DOJ spying on AP, Pigford, the many EPA scandals, and more. But I say, look at the bright side. There are plenty of revelations to come in those other scandals, so it’s probably temporary.

And, although it’s bad that the Obama administration is so scandalous: given that it is, it’s good that so many of them are coming to light. If some voter doesn’t care about scandal X, they may well care about scandal Y. Even a good chunk of Obama’s left-wing base who may approve of his IRS abusing the Tea Party, is disturbed that he has gone from criticizing to defending the NSA’s activities in spying on ordinary Americans.

So, meet Edward Snowden, now receiving media attention as the NSA whistleblower. I found the whole article interesting. One minor detail which caught my eye is that Snowden sounds like a disillusioned Obama supporter:

…the election of Barack Obama in 2008 gave him hope that there would be real reforms [of CIA and NSA activities], rendering disclosures unnecessary. [Snowden] left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility…It was then, he said, that he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in”, and as a result, “I got hardened.”…”you can’t wait around for someone else to act…”

By the way, it looks like Obama means to prosecute the recent leaks. If he does, let’s remember that he will be carrying out the law.

Having said that: The difference between Candidate Obama and President Obama on these issues is astounding, even to a seasoned cynic. Here’s Obama from 2007:

[The Bush] administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest…

Now click here for some video of Obama hemming and hawing about how we should all trust the Congressional and judicial oversight of these massive surveillance programs. (more…)

Sound familiar?

Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to two cities where unrest has occurred and again condemned his detractors as “a handful of looters” and vandals.

In the southern city of Adana, where pro- and anti-government protesters clashed Saturday night, Erdogan greeted supporters from the top of a bus before lashing out at his opponents in the highly polarized country

If he wanted to defuse the situation, he might do well to acknowledge the protestor’s grievances rather than insult them.

Another nation’s leader said that Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, “is one of the few foreign leaders with whom he has developed “’friendships and the bonds of trust.’”

Wow, just wow, is about all I can say in response to this piece of leftist rationalization which I saw today on Facebook.  It goes without saying that we’d be hearing something VERY DIFFERENT from this fellow if there was a Republican president.

The message here boils down to: freedom doesn’t matter, liberty doesn’t matter, rights don’t matter, and the most important role for government is to stand for “social justice.”  Here’s the link, but I’ve quoted the whole thing in its appalling entirety below:

Things I’m more worried about than my phone being tapped:
Global warming. The richest 1% controlling more wealth than the bottom 50%. Homelessness. Gutting the food stamp program. The rich hiding several Trillion untaxed dollars. Secretaries paying more in taxes than billionaires. Politicians being bought and sold. Malaria and starvation. More people per capita in prison than any other country. The “war” on drugs. More black men in prison than in college. Rising cost of education and health care. The rise of extremism. The continued oppression of women. The general lack of compassion in the world. The degree to which we all blame our problems on others and close our eyes to our own irrationality.
That more people are outraged by a small loss of privacy than any of these other issues.

Should I add “People who write in sentence fragments” to his list of outrages more “worrisome” than a government which spends all its time monitoring its people, or is that just my pet peeve?

Not surprisingly, the best responses to this kind of thing date to the founding of the Republic.  We’ve always got the classic from Benjamin Franklin: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

But in this context, where the message is to sacrifice liberty for “social justice,” I think Sam Adams might be better, though trying to choose just one passage that is appropriate is rather like an embarrassment of riches.  I have long admired this one:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Perhaps this one is better: “If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.”

And just in case the Obamalaise is getting to you, here’s one worth repeating regularly: “Nil desperandum, — Never Despair. That is a motto for you and me. All are not dead; and where there is a spark of patriotic fire, we will rekindle it.”

Over at Ace, CDR M asks the important questions about the Obama administration’s surveillance program:

If the War on Terror is over and the administration views terrorism through a pre 9/11 prism, why is the administration assembling and wielding the most powerful and intrusive systems of surveillance ever conceived?

President Obama just gave a speech, wherein he addressed the NSA surveillance revelations. From CNN:

Sweeping up Americans’ telephone records and monitoring Internet activity from overseas are “modest encroachments on privacy” that can help U.S. intelligence analysts disrupt terror activity, President Barack Obama said Friday.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he reassured Americans…

And from Yahoo!:

“I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs,” Obama said…”My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards.”

Isn’t that reassuring? Obama says he means well!

Dan has posed the question, Is revelation of phone data gathering “scandal” a (kind of) distraction?

With respect, my answer is: Perhaps. Maybe the Obama crew staged the NSA revelations, to divert attention from their main scandals.

But, if true, wouldn’t it mean they’re getting desperate? (Telling the media “Don’t cover that scandal, cover *this* one.”) As a fan of truth coming to light, I’m pleased. And don’t worry, the other scandals are still under investigation and have plenty of revelations to come. There will be plenty of oxygen for them.

So, getting back to the NSA revelations…I’m worried by some of the commentary I’ve seen.

Dan quotes law professor John Yoo as saying that this “data collecting isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.” And Yoo may well be right, as regards the state of the law today.

But that doesn’t necessarily make it right. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The right to be secure in your “papers”. Now, the Framers (of the Constitution) said “papers” in part because they couldn’t conceive of phone calls. In their day, people communicated over distances by paper letters. Can you imagine one of the Framers saying the following?

Having the Post Office collect data for the President on every letter that every person sends isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of letters and not information on the sender and recipient, the weight of the letters (or number of pages), etc.

I can’t. In other words, I don’t find it terribly reassuring to be told that they don’t actually open the letters phone calls and read listen to them.

Finally, I would remind people that the NSA is traditionally much closer to the White House than the other security agencies, which is why I put “for the President” in the above mock-up. I do support counter-terrorism, but… Color me skeptical. I have concerns on this.

UPDATE (early Monday morning 06/10/13):  Looks like my random thoughts were really quite random.  It appears the White House didn’t leak the information.

Please note the inclusion of this post in the Random Thoughts category.

Yesterday afternoon, taking a break from editing the now-completed first half of my novel, I learned about the reports of the federal government gathering data from various phone services, notably Verizon, and thought it yet another of the administration’s many scandals, but later caught Andrew C. McCarthy’s piece on National Review’s  Corner saying this was being blown out of proportion.

Later, caught a few minutes of “On the Record with Greta van Susteren” where Karl Rove was giving the president the “benefit of the doubt” on this issue. Just before bed, via Instapundit, learned that University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo who “served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department of President George W. Bush” offered a view similar to McCarthy’s claiming that this “data collecting isn’t unconstitutional because the Fourth Amendment only protects the content of phone calls and not information on the dialed numbers, length of the calls, etc.”

Do wonder if someone in the White House deliberately leaked the information to the Washington Post (which broke the story) knowing it would be blown out of proportion and so creating a large audience for administration flacks when they set the record straight.  And when people learn that this story, sucking (at present) the air out of other administration scandals, has been blown out of proportion (if indeed it has), they might be more likely to discount those other scandals.

Just a thought.  And now concluding where I began, you know why I include this in the “Random Thoughts” category.

UPDATE:  Glenn reports that Ann Althouse offers similar thoughts to those expressed above:

ANN ALTHOUSE ON WHY THE DATA-MINING SCANDAL LEAKED: “I suspect it was someone who wanted to distract us from the IRS scandal (and other scandals) so that the scandal of the moment would be one that’s about Bush.” (more…)

Michelle Malkin has a must-read post on NSA phone surveillance of Americans (a subject that I touched upon in an earlier footnote).

She starts by reminding about the NSA phone surveillance of the Bush administration:

The Bush NSA’s special collections program grew in early 2002 after the CIA started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah. The CIA seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and personal phone directories. NSA surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible. As a result of Bush NSA work,the terrorist plot involving convicted al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris was uncovered — possibly saving untold lives…

Normally, the government obtains court orders to monitor such information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But the window of opportunity to exploit the names, numbers, and addresses of those associated with the top terrorist leaders was obviously small…

So the Bush administration had the NSA track Americans’ overseas phone calls, insofar as captured terrorist phone numbers might show up. But the Obama administration? Not so much…err, so little:

The new Obama order covers not only phone calls overseas with the specific goal of counterterrorism surveillance, but all domestic calls by Verizon customers over at least a three-month period.

[Malkin now links/quotes an article at Politico:] Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order “shockingly broad.” …The “top secret” order issued in April by a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at the request of the FBI instructs the telecommunications giant Verizon to provide the NSA with daily reports of “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

I’m willing to preserve our counter-terrorism efforts. And I don’t know much about the legal ins/outs of all this. But, all domestic calls by Verizon customers? Sheesh! This surely goes beyond the Bush NSA surveillance that the public debated in 2005-6.

So, it’s worth discussing the rightness (or wrongness) of the broadened surveillance. The more so if (note IF) the War on Terror is over, as some international observers thought Obama to be implying in his speech last week.

By way of counterpoint, Senator Feinstein implies that the broadened phone surveillance did start under Bush, in 2007. But that still wouldn’t make it right. Or make it anything that the public has approved, because we haven’t learned about the broadened efforts (or been able to debate them) until now.

As always, please feel free to post whatever more you know about this issue, in the comments.

In today’s Morning Jolt today (available by subscription), Jim Geraghty reflects on “the latest offering from the Family Channel”, a drama called “The Fosters” featuring an interracial lesbian couple raising a “brood of adopted, biological and foster children.”

“After watching the pilot, where the parents come across so saintly,” Geraghty suspects . . .

. . . that the writers will be terrified about portraying them with any flaws, either because they’ll be afraid they’re portraying gay parents negatively, or because they fear their audience will be even momentarily repelled by characters that the entire show’s purpose is to get you to love and accept.

In other words, if Hollywood is afraid to portray a gay character as human, with strengths and failings, moments of character and moments of weakness, and so on . . . are they really being all that groundbreaking or brave or honest in their creation?

Reading that concluding question, I recalled an essay that both Bruce and some eaders shared with me, Bret Easton Ellis’s overlong, but insightful rant, “In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves,” where the novelist also wondered about Hollywood’s depiction of gays:

The reign of The Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude, is—lamentably—still in media play.

. . . .

Where’s the gay dude who makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It?  . . . . But being “real” and “human” (i.e. flawed) is not necessarily what The Gay Gatekeepers want straight culture to see.

Interesting how the views of a conservative pundit and a non-conservative gay iconoclast parallel each other. (more…)

As expected, Obama has promoted Susan Rice to be his national security advisor.

She will head an agency that does large-scale spying on Americans’ phone records.[1] The question is, does she deserve to?

Obama wanted to make her Secretary of State but couldn’t, because that position requires confirmation hearings, at which Rice would have faced uncomfortable questions on Benghazi. Just a reminder, here’s what happened with that:

1. Four Americans, including one of then-Ambassador Susan Rice’s fellow ambassadors, died in a terrorist attack while Obama did nothing. Obama attended campaign fund-raisers the next day in Vegas.
2. Ambassador Rice then told the American People falsehoods about how those Americans died. The falsehoods protected an Obama campaign narrative (about their great job against terrorism) at a critical moment in the 2012 election.

The second one is the sticking point. How much chance is there that Rice didn’t know the real story of Benghazi, in the very moments when she was giving us all the fake one to benefit her boss’ campaign? In other words: is Susan Rice a liar, or a fool?[2]

———————–
[1] Whether the NSA spying on so many Americans’ phone records is right or wrong, I will leave open for now. It could be a worthy topic, not least because it ties in with the Obama DOJ’s spying on, and highly selective prosecution of, reporters and officials for national security leaks. You see, NBC reports that the DOJ will investigate this new leak about how the NSA spies on the American customers of Verizon. But the DOJ apparently didn’t care when Leon Panetta, former CIA Director, leaked Top Secret info about Seal Team Six. Wonder why?

[2] Also recall that one of the criticisms of George W. Bush was that he (supposedly) valued personal loyalty too much, in his underlings. Given that Susan Rice must be either a liar or a fool on Benghazi, could Obama have promoted her for any other reason than her loyalty to him? Is this yet another moment of “Obama is actually worse than the Left said Bush was”?

Glenn Reynolds reports:

Just watch this:

H/t Ace & Powerline.

On matters political, I often lock horns with my sisters. In our family, the men lean Republican, the women Democratic. But, today the elder of my two sisters had a letter published in the New York Times with which I agree wholeheartedly:

I disagree with David Brooks when he says you should travel to Africa if you truly wish to save a dying child (“The Way to Produce a Person,” column, June 4).

You cannot save a dying child simply by being present. To save that child, you need a doctor as well as money to pay for that doctor and the many other components needed to save and maintain a life such as medication, food, clothing and shelter.

I laud Jason Trigg’s decision to earn large sums on Wall Street and donate that money so others can continue their direct services on the ground.

Some of us are firmly committed to helping those in need and willing to battle on the front line, but we need the money that Mr. Trigg earns and donates to continue our work.

She’s right.  Compassionate individuals can better help those in need with the resources of those who have been successful in profitable fields of endeavor.

If you want to help my sister assist the less fortunate of Westchester County, join me in making a donation to the Sharing Shelf, a program she started that provides new and gently used clothing to need children.  (Just type “Sharing Shelf” into the “Designation” Window.”)