By Ed Griffin-Nolan

John McCain suggested the other day that he might appoint New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to clean up the mess in the nation’s financial markets. While this would be one of his better appointments to date (he’s only made one real personnel choice, and we know where that went), it still missed the mark.

The guy you really want is Eliot Spitzer. Not Eliot the governor, but Eliot the attorney general, the guy everyone feared and revered as the Sheriff of Wall Street. Spitzer made his career by policing the securities industry. He knew better than to worship brokers and traders; he told us to watch them like hawks. We now know why he was able to be so coldblooded and clear-eyed in his approach to Wall Street: He’d obviously dealt with pimps long enough to know the game.

It was hard to relate to the recent hurricane’s Southern

discomfort—until its remnants visited Central New York

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

Did you ever find yourself rooting for the hurricane? It’s OK; you don’t have to tell me. Sometimes when you watch those big circles swirling across the television screen, the announcers are getting all excited, and the correspondents are standing in the whipping winds getting soaked and their hats are blowing off (what did they expect?), you may just find some part of yourself feeling badly for Ike as he gets downgraded to a Category 3. As you make your way to bed you may (or you may not) secretly hold out hope that he will find that warm air mass out there over the gulf and somehow regroup as he heads toward shore.

Sarah Palin is a history-making choice. And here is the history I hope she will make: Years from now her selection by a failed presidential candidate named John McCain will be known as the moment that sounded the death knell of the Republican Party’s pandering to the religious right. Decades down the road people will attribute McCain’s defeat to his deference to the theocrats who have stolen the party of Lincoln and pushed the country in a ruinous direction for nearly a generation. 

If the maverick title were ever applicable to McCain, it can now be retired. McCain, by all reports, wanted to run with his ideological soulmate Joe Lieberman, but the party would not accept someone whose version of family did not match that prescribed by their religion. He turned, at the 11th hour, to the fresh-faced Alaska governor.

Come next January, we will have a president who was born outside the continental United States. A man who knows the tropics will command the Army of the North. Either the Hawaiian-born Barack Obama or the Panama Canal Zone’s John McCain will hold the nuclear football and the authority to lead our millions of soldiers and sailors, Marines and airmen into battle. 

He will inherit command of more than 130,000 ground troops in Iraq and a contingent of nearly 30,000 spread throughout Afghanistan. Conventional wisdom says that McCain is the more experienced candidate in international and military affairs, due to his military background and years in the Senate. That is true. It is also true that George W. Bush has more experience with Category 5 hurricanes than any other president of the United States, but such experience is of little comfort to the people of New Orleans.

Playing a politician in Batman movies could become Mayor Matt Driscoll’s next secret identity

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

You may recall reading that the Syracuse New Times, standing on long-held principles, is not sending any correspondents to the Olympic Games in Beijing. The principles in question have nothing to do with the dispute over China’s human rights record. They are twofold: one, we forgot to budget money for a trip to China; and two, we don’t have a regular sports section.

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

Is Barack Obama just a political candidate or is he the leader of a genuine mass movement? It is the rare public figure who can be both. Nelson Mandela is one of the few names to come readily to mind, and it is no insult to Sen. Obama to state the obvious: He is no Mandela. 

As Obama shifts to the center in order to compete with John McCain, progressives grow concerned that his compromises may undercut the message of change that gave his candidacy legs. He is making the shift from inspirer to compromiser, from party leader to one who would lead a nation, and it makes his progressive friends understandably nervous.

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

You can’t leave it to Carmelo. Jim Boeheim isn’t going to make a stink. And Lopez Lomong is going to be far too busy trying to be the fastest runner he can be. Central New York’s famous Olympians are working on bringing the gold back from Beijing. 

That is as it should be. No one should expect the Olympic athletes to take the lead in promoting human rights. That should be the job of the political leaders, most especially the man who likes to call himself the Leader of the Free World. Instead we are now soon to be treated to the spectacle of the president of the United States happily participating in China’s coming-out party without so much as a mention of its occupation of Tibet, treatment of workers at home or suppression of political dissidents. It didn’t have to be this way.

Improve the Food Stamp program by eliminating unhealthy foods from the eligible list

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

The Food Stamp program is one of the most successful social service programs ever devised. It is also a testament to the value of political compromise in a democracy. It is not just a social welfare program to help hungry Americans; it’s also a program to aid farmers by boosting demand for their products.

politics, poop and pistols

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

Nobody stops to thank the road crews. You can’t, really, because you’re busy trying to squeeze by and not run one of them over, and you’re really mostly thinking about how the road work is keeping you from getting where you have to be or want to be, or which way you’re going to go next time to avoid it.

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

The year was 1980. The setting: a bar in New York City. An inebriated crowd begins to chant “Nuke Iran! Nuke Iran! Nuke Iran!” We knew the drill. It was time once again to hustle my Iranian-born future brother-in-law out the side exit. 

At the time, 54 Americans were being held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, and being Iranian in this country was something like wearing a Yankees cap at Fenway Park.