Columns

When the Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges against FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried this week, it ended a nearly 2-month-long drama.

Let me begin by saying that I am not against electric cars. They probably are the future of personal transportation, but the key word there is “future.” The Biden administration and the nut-job government of California are trying very hard to do way too much, way too soon.

It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness, the saying goes. And a group of Black and Jewish leaders is taking that spirit to the fight against racism and antisemitism — times 15.

As the college football season came to an end this year, two stories grabbed lots of headlines.

There’s no Chewing Gum Hall of Fame. However, you can visit the next best thing: Joanne’s Gum Museum, in a little building in Quartzsite, Ariz., featuring a collection of 4,000 pieces amassed since the 1940s.

It’s still in the box, hidden from the triggered gaze. The only ones who know what lies inside the wooden slabs painted in the Italian flag colors are indigenous to Philadelphia, pun intended. It is the statue of an Italian icon, Christopher Columbus, a piece of public art that sat undisturbed for more than 40 years in its current location at the southern end of Broad Street on Marconi Plaza.

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema declared herself a Marxist on Friday. Not Karl; Groucho. As in, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” She felt compelled to leave the Democrats, she explained, because of the “broken partisan system” and said that she had “joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics.”

Since I am in the holiday spirit (and, having just consumed a mug of hot toddy, a glass of eggnog and a nip of cheer, the holiday spirits are in me), I have decided to follow in that great tradition of boring everyone silly by writing a Christmas letter.

Today’s topic: “How to be a Black man.”

Any business can put up a sign on the building. If you’re the Ohio Theatre in Lima, though, a sign isn’t enough. The renovated entertainment venue needed a marquee.