Just a few random thoughts on Barack Obama’s speech last night: -- Well and good to go on the attack and not wait around like a dope for the right-wing hate machine to rip him apart as John Kerry did four years ago. -- But how about a little something ...

It did pique my interest that the candidacy of Barack Obama is not universally welcomed by African-Americans, since in the primaries he won the great majority of African-American votes. What’s the problem? According to several black sociologists it’s that Obama’s success might undermine black claims of incorrigible racism in our ...

In case you saw the news the other day that Schenectady High School is among just 19 “persistently dangerous” schools in New York, and you have kids in the school, and you’re panicking, I’m here to tell you to relax. The report is bogus. Schenectady is no more one of ...

Those cuts to the state budget that you’ve been worrying about – stop worrying. Nothing’s going to change. Oh, it’s possible that the $10,000 gift you and your lodge brothers were hoping for from your local assemblymen to put a new roof on the lodge hall might be reduced to ...

If you’re a labor union and you lose 40 percent of the elections in which workers vote whether or not to have you represent them, and further, if you find it relatively easy to get unorganized workers to sign cards saying they want you to represent them, especially when you ...

If you follow the letters to the editor in the Gazette you know all has not been well at the emergency room of the new, expanded Ellis Hospital in Schenectady. Patients have reported waits of up to 10 or 12 hours, which is not exactly what we expected the “streamlining” ...

It was a wonderful performance Friday night at SPAC – Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Martha Argerich on piano and the Capucon brothers on violin and cello, together with the Philadelphia Orchestra – but the crowd was very light. The place was barely half full. The Gazette reviewer speculated it was ...

The other day I pointed out that the liberal Unitarians who recently got shot at in Tennessee responded in a more “Christian” way than the fundamentalist Christians who got shot at last December in Colorado. An usher in the Unitarian church put himself physically in the path of a man ...

Oh, what a colorful little detail to add to the already colorful saga of the drug ring in Schenectady that allegedly included Lisa Kaczmarek, wife of retired Police Chief Greg Kaczmarek. It popped up in some motion papers filed the other day by the state attorney general’s office, which is ...

Desperate times, Gov. Paterson tells us. Tax revenue to the state is falling, and we’re all going to have to tighten our belts. He’s calling the Legislature back into session to deal with the crisis. Except that revenue is not falling. It’s going up. It’s simply going up less than ...