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There are two kinds of people in this world: those with tattoos, and those without.I fall into the former category.  We who get inked cannot fully explain why we do so. The things we choose to mark on our bodies having meaning to us (well, most of us: drunken buffoonery aside, we take our ink seriously), so much so that we want to make it part of our skin. But even that doesn't fully explain why people willingly endure hours of pain to indelibly mark themselves with colored ink.More...

I Got Tattooed Today (OH BOY)!

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Fresh on the heels of the Biennial of the Americas, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Metro Denver hosted their annual food & beverage tasting event, Sabor. And there could not have been a more beautiful setting for an evening of networking and cross-cultural celebration than the Botanic Gardens in all their blooming glory.  Entering guests were presented with a plate and a wine glass,  then set free to roam the garden to fete and feast on delectable samplings from more than 40 of Denver's top restaurants, caterers and vendors. Before I'd even filled my glass I was intoxicated by the fecund landscape and the elegant Henry Moore sculptures nestled in the verdant scene. Los VIP's floated through the pre-tasting event and into exclusive dining areas as the setting sun cast its long, August rays, creating moments that felt like a dreamy Impressionist painting come to modern-day life. But with a Latin soundtrack.Now in it's third year, the collaborative  evening began as a way for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to bring its membership together with the larger Denver business community, raise its own profile and create networking opportunities for all. I'm sure the more than 2500 attendees would agree, it was a brilliant idea.More...

Latin Lover: Sabor at the Botanic Gardens

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Brian Williams has already marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina with an NBC "Dateline" special, but now he'll add an interview with the President to his anniversary coverage.Williams will interview President Obama in New Orleans in an interview to air beginning Sunday, August 29 on "NBC Nightly News."  Williams will anchor the broadcast from there beginning on Thursday.More...

Brian Williams To Interview Obama From New Orleans On Katrina Anniversary

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MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A leading pest control company has released a list of the 15 most bedbug-infested cities, and New York, Philadelphia and Detroit have scratched their way to the top.Terminix released its report Tuesday, basing it on an analysis of call volume to the Memphis, Tenn.-based company's 350 service centers.More...

New York The Most Bedbug Infested City In America

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The other day we received a wacky cover letter.  It's the type of bizarre letter we receive a few times every year.    We cringe when we get it and have taken measures to stop them, with no success.   We are certain that some company out there is charging a fee to job seekers for this "professional" cover letter, because they are all written in the same vein.More...

Approaching a Recruiter - Don't Do What He Did

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Virginia Woolf wrote standing at a favorite desk; J.K. Rowling supposedly wrote "Harry Potter" at a local coffee shop; and rumor has it that Lord Byron wrote on the toilet.Last week we asked you -- devoted book lovers and writers -- to let us in on a little secret: Where do you compose your masterpieces?More...

Writer Wednesday: HuffPost Readers Respond To #WhereIWrite (PHOTOS)

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Democratic Providence mayoral candidate Chris Farley Young raised some eyebrows and smiles on TV this week when he traded conventional talk of politics for a soulful ditty about a "rich man who stands in his house." A few days later, he raised the bar of spontaneous affectionate display -- already set quite high by himself -- by proposing to his girlfriend during the closing remarks of a live televised debate.During a Monday appearance on Fox Providence's "Coffee With The Candidates," host Elizabeth Hopkins seemed rather taken aback by the "perennial gadfly candidate's" choice to fill up his entire interview segment with a heart-felt song, but Young was undeniably well prepared (pitch failures aside), with a recording of a softly crooning guitar riff and some interesting lyrics:More...

Providence Mayoral Candidate Chris Young Serenades TV Anchor, Proposes To Girlfriend During Debate (VIDEO)

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Coloradans generally place high value on independence, chafing against any attempt to tell us where and how to live, what to believe, what to do with our free time. I'm no exception. I know what's best for me -- or at least what I like best -- and, as long as I'm not hurting anyone else, I want the right to follow my own desires.But it's equally true that all Coloradans live in varying degrees of interdependence with each other. The western story of frontier settlers fending for themselves, growing or killing their own food and cooking it with fuel they gathered themselves, is as outdated as the Pony Express. Nowadays, we each depend on many people -- teachers to educate our kids, road crews to keep our highways drivable, business owners to provide goods and services, doctors and nurses to tend to our ills, journalists to dig up the information we need. And that doesn't even count the vast network extending throughout and beyond Colorado -- factory workers, farmers, miners -- all of whom help to meet the complex needs of the modern Coloradan.More...

Independence and Interdependence: Equally Important Values

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Los Angeles -- The City of the Angels may be about to give birth to a new version of the "American System" -- the national-state-local transportation partnership that, for over a hundred years, helped propel America into global economic leadership.

In 1824, Henry Clay and the Whig party proposed the first American System. The federal government, using revenues on tariffs and from the sale of public resources, would fund transportation infrastructure -- roads, canals, harbors, railroads -- to link different regions of the country. Clay's vision of major federal investment as the key to improved transportation was finally realized only during Abraham's Lincoln's administration. But from 1860 until 1973, this partnership-based American System was the foundation of America global leadership. It's culmination was the Interstate Highway System.

By 1973, it was clear that a transportation system dependent on oil could no longer be "made in America." OPEC laid down the core challenge -- move beyond oil with a new version of the American System, or keep importing oil at the cost of exporting jobs and technological leadership. America blinked. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the oil industry kept blinders on our leadership. Today we send a billion dollars a day out of our economy and into those of Venezuela, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Nigeria. That's about three and a half million jobs a year. Not only is our oil imported but so are most of the vehicles we use to burn it. New transportation technologies, like advanced batteries, are emerging not from American laboratories but from places like China and Europe.

The federal deficit would seem to make a second version of the American System (one designed to create a made-in-America transportation system that's no longer dependent on oil) a fiscal impossibility. But Los Angeles has come up with a new formula --one that seems to offer the hope that perhaps, after all, America can rise to the challenge of moving Beyond Oil.

L.A. voters have approved a sales tax to pay for twelve new major transit projects, which are planned to be built over 30 years. But now the city, led by Major Antonio Villaraigosa, has proposed to build all twelve projects in ten years instead. Called "30-10," this proposal will dramatically lower costs, because construction costs currently are very low. It will accelerate the creation of 167,000 new jobs in this region alone. Building more transit all at once will also increase the total number of jobs created, because if the volume of projects is big enough then the supply chain -- equipment manufacturers -- will build local factories. That's why China has been jumping ahead.

The L.A. sales tax won't generate enough revenue to pay for this accelerated schedule. So Villaraigosa is asking the federal government to loan the city the shortfall -- loans secured by the sales tax -- further leveraging the fact that the federal government can borrow money cheaply right now. So this is the perfect response to our seeming economic dilemma -- it generates jobs now, but helps pay down the federal deficit later.

But why do this only in Los Angeles? Cities all over the country in the past five years have agreed to tax themselves to build new transit projects. But in many cases they lack the cash flow to pay for the projects quickly. Denver, for example, just decided against another sales tax increase and is slowing down its transit expansion.  But federal loans could bridge the gap without increasing either the sales tax or the federal deficit. And cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Seattle all have opportunities to build a new kind of partnership with the federal government -- one in which the feds become the banker, but local communities pay for projects that will benefit them. This, after all, was how Franklin Roosevelt solved one of the major failures of the first American system -- electrifying rural America. Rural Americans paid for their new REA electrical systems -- but the federal government made sure they had the credit they needed to finance the upfront costs.

It will be ironic if the city that gave us the freeway is the same one that shows us the path toward a much-needed new American Plan -- one that gets us Beyond Oil.More...

A New "American System"?

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