CALLAHANTICS

OK American ladies; I think we need to finally begin to strategically look at what we can do as a group to save ourselves, our children, our men and our government. Before we get distracted by the shiny marbles and trinkets that are spinning around us constantly from Al Franken and John Conyers and Bill Clinton; to Blake Farenthold (and even though Roy Moore was kept from stampeding his way into congress on that poor horse “Sassy”). We are already forgetting that harassment and borderline pedophilia has been around for centuries and certainly is not a new issue in Congress. Former Florida congressman Mark Foley and Former New York congressman Anthony Wiener, former Republican U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert and all of the ones we haven't heard about yet, who led to congress to pay out $17 million in settlements. While power does come with responsibility; integrity is far more important than either of them—and we as both a gender and a nation have fallen down on the job of requ...

Now that I am on the ground working an operation, let’s take a few minutes to do an overview of the role Red Cross fills during a response. The medical field has a good term for this role: Triage. In the beginning of any incident (from a terrorist incident to natural disaster), triage roles include search and rescue for the first responders (Firemen, Law Enforcement, National Guard, and Red Cross). This is to address immediate medical need to keep people alive; nothing more; nothing less.  Triage wards of a hospital are similar: Get the person in, keep them alive, get them to the next stage of recovery, get the next person in and start the process again until there are no more people in a life-threatening situation. This is a laborious and constant process. In a disaster response, this is where the Red Cross role is situated. Money comes from a donor and goes to finance to report, record and log the donation. Then the money goes in a fund that acquisition uses for the variou...

I have been shaking my head every morning for the past several months trying to conceive of a strategy or desire that would encourage Trump to behave in the various erratic and unpredictable ways that he has over the past 205 days he has been in office. It has crossed over from the standard laymen to writing for Rolling Stone and USA Today that provide second-hand diagnoses of “malignant narcissism”   from accredited psychologists at Johns Hopkins University to more speculative hypothetical diagnoses like “ CARB Syndrome ” and Dementia . The anomalies that keep occurring indicate that Trump could even be in stages of sundown delirium stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The problem is that his behavior appears too consistent to be completely random, and yet too erratic to be entirely deliberate. One factor that may be helpful is to consider what a person who worked in entertainment for a long period of time would learn hosting an unreal reality show, Celebrity Apprentice .   ...

Americans of all stars and stripes are working night and day trying to figure out what happened to our country our government and even ourselves over the past eighteen months. It’s as if we are looking cross eyed at a world where Dick Wolf, Lorne Michaels, Aaron Sorkin, Trevor Noah, Jake Tapper, Fareed Zakaria, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann and Stephen Colbert are all beginning to sound equally logical in their intellectual approaches to what and where our nation is currently. Any situation where parody and reality become intertwined to a degree where nearly all of us are second guessing everything we see, hear, read, etc.; information begins to appear ludicrous. So why does it seem so familiar? Well, for starters, while America is still a relatively young country; our political parties have switched platforms multiple times.    Republicans worked toward greater federal power to fund massive projects during the 1860s including the transcontinental railroad and a state univers...

I have been an American Red Cross volunteer since the early 2000s. Why? Well, to be honest, I was looking for a mission to care about. Between contracts as a graphic designer and content writer; I was going slightly stir crazy, and it was a slow period in New York at the time. So I briefly thought through areas that I wanted to support, and randomly chose American Red Cross.    I walked in the door of the Greater New York Chapter which was at 150 Amsterdam Avenue . I went directly to HR/Volunteer Resources where I met Curt. He looked at my resume, asked me to sit down and called the disaster health and mental health director who invited me to come on board to assist them in re-configuring and updating their roster and have better track of their people. About two months after I took on that role, the lead, Lauren came by my cubicle and stated, “You know media; Right”?”   I was deep in writing, so I answered flippantly, “Yes, like you know medicine and there are so ...