By Bonnie Fishman / San Francisco Bay Area Walnuts were my go-to nut ingredient during my 30 years of owning a bakery. I knew how to incorporate them into delicious desserts such as brownies, cookies, and coffee cakes. But I knew nothing about the growing or harvesting of these versatile and healthy morsels. Fortunately for me, 99% of walnuts grown in the United States are from the California Central Valley, where the climate for them is ideal. Here in California, walnut trees begin to bud around April through May. The trees are beautiful majestic specimens with a wide branch spread. I had the privilege of visiting a walnut grove a couple of weekends ago in the south San Francisco Bay Area. it was a remarkable experience. My husband Bob and I took a Sunday drive to Mike and his wife Jan’s beautiful slice-of-heaven 13-acre homestead in the rolling green hills of the Bay Area. Their home is nestled against a tree-covered foothill, along with their walnut grove, flower gardens, beehives, and their collection of antique farm equipment, such as an old grape press and an even older olive press. Inside a very large metal garage, filled with every kind of tool imaginable. the walnut processing happens each October. The farm was inherited from Jan’s parents, who purchased it back in 1969. Some of the 30 walnut trees are older than 60 years! These are English walnuts, which come in five varieties. The duo have an additional 15 young trees that were planted recently. It’s hard to believe but Jan’s parents used to build NASCAR race cars in this very garage. They even produced several winners! No, this is not Mike and Jan’s business. Mike is a retired fire department captain and Jan a retired grade-school teacher. The walnuts are a hobby. If they didn’t pick them and take the meat out year after year, the trees would still produce and create a huge mess on the ground in the grove. It’s bad enough they have to combat crows, turkeys, deer, and squirrels when they do harvest. I can’t imagine what a field day these critters would have if all of the nuts remained. Mike and Jan do harvest each year, by hand. They shake the trees and rake the nuts into piles before collecting in big drums. When all is said and done, they yield about 300 quart-size Ziploc bags each season. Jan only requires a dozen bags for her personal yearly stash. The rest go to friends and family. Lucky us. Walnuts have a round, hard husk. Inside the husk is the shell that we know and recognize. After cracking the shell carefully but firmly, the meat is removed in two pieces. Walnuts are known for supporting good health for your cardiovascular system. They contain antioxidants that can reduce inflammation, are high in fiber, and are an excellent source of vitamins and minerals such as copper, folic acid, phosphorus, vitamin B6, manganese, and vitamin E. Walnuts have a higher fat content than other nuts. When you grind them in a food processor, they get greasy, so careful not to overdo it. Most nuts get stale over time if left on your shelf for too long. You will be able to taste or smell the rancidity. I recommend freezing nuts in Ziploc bags. I usually don’t have this problem because I bake a lot and use them up. One last tip: if you want to enhance the great flavor of walnuts or any nuts for that matter, toast them lightly in the oven before using. Today’s recipe is a delightful snack for cocktails, watching a movie, or even to give away in an attractive jar for a hostess gift. It’s best to store the finished product in a tin or jar so it doesn’t get soggy. Pecans would also work nicely with this recipe. Besides for snacking, these walnuts are a nice addition to a salad. Add them to the top of the salad after it is dressed otherwise they will lose their crunch from the moisture. Are you nuts about walnuts, too? Please let us know at The Insider how you use them! Candied Curry Walnuts Yield: 1 lb. 12 oz. raw walnuts halves or pieces 2 oz. butter or margarine, melted 6 Tbs. sugar 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 tsp. curry powder 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon 1/2 tsp. ground ginger 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper (more if you want spicier) Preheat oven to 350°. Line a cookie sheet with foil. Spray with pan release. Reserve. In a medium bowl, toss together the walnuts and melted butter. In a smaller bowl, mix together the sugar and spices. Combine the sugar mixture with the nuts. Spread the walnuts on the prepared cookie sheet in a single layer. Bake for 12 minutes. Cool to room temperature. Separate nuts with a fork. Store in a covered tin or glass jar at room temperature. They will last a few weeks if stored properly. Bonnie Fishman attended the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London. Later, she owned and operated Bonnie’s Patisserie in Southfield, Mich. and Bonnie’s Kitchen and Catering in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. She has taught cooking for over 35 years and created hundreds of recipes. She is now living in Northern California.

By Andy Borowitz March 7, 2022 MOSCOW (The Borowitz Report)—Vladimir Putin is “very upset” that the Ukrainian people are far less obedient than Donald J. Trump, Kremlin sources have confirmed. According to the sources, Trump’s four years of ardent toadying left the Russian President emotionally unprepared for the Ukrainians’ defiance. “If I wanted Trump to do something, I’d just snap my fingers and consider it done,” Putin reportedly said. “It was wonderful.” Putin’s entire plan for invading Ukraine, in fact, was predicated on the false assumption that the Ukrainians “would act like Trump,” one source indicated. “After he invaded, he kept waiting for the Ukrainians to tell him how strong and smart he was,” the source said. “When there were no displays of Trumpian sycophancy, his mood darkened.” At a Kremlin meeting over the weekend, Putin’s frustration at the Ukrainians for being less obsequious than Trump boiled over, sources said. “If the President of the United States can abandon democracy and the rule of law, why can’t these people?” Putin asked, pounding his desk.

By Alan Resnick / Detroit Back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, there was a television show called Who Do You Trust? The emcee asked married pairs of contestants to answer questions, and the husband would decide for the couple whether he or his spouse would respond. Let’s update that game show with the following question: “Who do you trust to handle the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Joe Biden or Donald Trump?” On February 28, CNN reported the results from a survey taken from Feb. 25-26. A random sample of 1,100 Americans were asked their opinions regarding the Ukrainian situation and Biden’s response to it thus far. Of the respondents, 83 percent favored increased sanctions of Russia and 58 percent opposed the United States taking military action. These results were consistent across party affiliation. At the same time, though, 58 percent of those surveyed answered “not much” or “not at all” when asked how much they trusted Biden to make the right decision about Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, political affiliation was a huge differentiator regarding trust in the President: 84 percent of Democrats trusted Biden to make the right choices, while only 9 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of independents were of a similar mindset. The lack of trust in Biden with regard to his handling of the Ukraine conflict is generally consistent with his overall approval ratings, so I suppose that they are not all that surprising. But I sure do wish that the survey had also asked, “How much would you trust Donald Trump to make the right decision about Ukraine?” To my way of thinking, there seem to be three options for dealing with the Russian invasion. First, take military action, either by sending troops into Ukraine to fight and/or by attacking Russia directly. On a purely visceral level, this would be my first choice. Watching the evening news and seeing the terror and despair on the faces of women trying to flee to safety with their young children, and the heroic bravery of the Ukrainian men and women picking up arms to fight for their homeland, brings tears to my eyes and the desire to make this more of a fair fight. But there seems to be one teeny, tiny problem with the United States or other countries sending boots on the ground into this battle: It likely would mean the beginning of World War III and the probable end of the world, particularly since so many countries now have nuclear arsenals. So logic needs to prevail over raw emotion. President Biden has repeatedly stated that our troops will not be sent into Ukraine, although some have been sent to NATO allies bordering Ukraine for their protection. The second option, imposing the strictest economic sanctions possible, is the one that Biden has chosen and is playing out now. Most would agree that the President and his team have done a spectacular job of getting NATO and the broader Western world to act in unison against Russia. For goodness sake, even Switzerland has gotten off the fence and announced that it will freeze Russian assets. The ruble has dropped 90% since the beginning of 2022. Most of the drop came after the move to block Russian banks from the SWIFT payments system. Many of the economic sanctions have been geared toward hitting Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs where it hurts them the most: in their wallets, by freezing their assets. Unfortunately, these actions have also made the Russian citizenry collateral damage. There has been news footage of lines at ATMs that snaked down sidewalks and around buildings in Moscow, and at Russian banks in Europe as customers rushed to withdraw cash. Vox describes the current situation as, “The worst economic crisis that many of them have seen. . . The person on the street has already been suffering and doesn’t have much in savings, if anything. But at the moment, they risk not even receiving their pension payments.” While tragic for the average Russian citizen, this may very well have been by design, a strategy to have the general population rise up, take to the streets, and voice their displeasure and disgust at what Putin has wrought. He’s now feeling the heat from both his oligarchs and the Russian people. At the same time, the United States and other countries are supporting Ukraine by providing weapons and supplies. It’s too early to know if this option will bring Putin to the negotiating table or antagonize him into expanding the conflict. His pronouncements and threats sound increasingly incoherent and unhinged, quite similar to those of our former President when he talked about North Korea. Hopefully, Putin’s announcement that he has put his nuclear forces into “special combat readiness” is nothing more than sabre rattling, but one never knows. The third option in this situation would simply be to do nothing and stay out of the fray. In effect, say to the Ukrainians: “We have our own problems. Best of luck to you.” Isolationism appears to be increasingly popular among some segments of the population, and it has been a recurrent theme throughout our nation’s history. It was at its zenith after World War I and the Great Depression, when foreign affairs took a back seat to America’s economic survival. But this position ended after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It’s difficult to envision President Biden even considering this position, given that Ukraine has been an ally of the United States for years. It just seems distinctly un-American to tell approximately 44 million people to “pound sand” when we have recognized their independence since 1991. Now for that second question about trusting Trump to handle the situation in Ukraine. Here’s my answer: “Hell no.” It’s difficult to see Trump choosing anything other than option number three. On Feb. 23, Trump described Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy.” This is of course consistent with Trump’s suck-uppery to Putin during Trump’s term in office. He even went so far as to take Putin’s word over his own intelligence agency with regard to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Given his affinity for tyrants and dictators, he certainly would not choose to send troops into Ukraine to fight the Russians or threaten any sort of military action against Putin. It’s equally problematic to envision Trump choosing to apply catastrophic economic sanctions to Russia, even though he was a very big proponent of tariffs. Remember, Trump was impeached over his attempt to shake down Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for disinformation against Joe Biden and his son Hunter in return for weaponry to be used to defend against Russia. And once again, there’s Trump’s affinity with authoritarian figures, even though many feel that Putin considers Trump to be nothing more than a “useful idiot.” It’s literally impossible to imagine Trump taking the leadership role in getting NATO together in opposition to Putin. In 2019, some of Trump’s senior administration officials told the New York Times that, “several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization … Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.” Whether the former president thought it a poor return on investment or a desire to please Vladimir Putin is debatable, but clearly Trump was not a NATO guy. Then there’s the Feb. 28 Newsmax interview with John Bolton, Trump’s national security advisor. Bolton sat back and listened as the host, Rob Schmitt, rattled off Trump accomplishments Schmitt felt hindered Russia from attacking Ukraine. The highlights of Bolton’s response: “He barely knew where Ukraine was … He once asked John Kelly if Finland was a part of Russia. It’s just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians.” Interestingly enough, Bolton did admit that there were some sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs while he worked for Trump. But he also said, “In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard.” So the only option for Trump would be to tell Zelenskyy and his people to fend for themselves, even though Ukraine is an ally. It’s certainly the choice that Putin prefers. And in some ways, it is the safest choice for America, at least in the short term. It does keep our country out of a potential nuclear conflict, albeit leaving us with a tremendous amount of blood and carnage on our hands. But it’s truly frightening to think about the longer-term consequences of the “do-nothing” alternative. Russia shares borders with other NATO members such as Poland and the Baltics. And God help us all if Trump gets re-elected and Putin decides it’s time for another power grab. Alan Resnick is an industrial psychologist with over 40 years of professional experience. He and his wife are sheltering at home in Farmington Hills, Michigan. He is passing the time by cooking, exercising, catching up on friends’ recommendations of must-see TV and writing.

By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. A confession: When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to pinch items from stores in the Roosevelt Field mall near our homes on Long Island. We only did it a couple of times, taking some candy, batting gloves, a baseball bat, a mitt. It was mostly on a dare, to see if we could do it. Any feelings of guilt were assuaged by the thought that we were heisting goods from big stores that wouldn’t notice the loss, and we got a good laugh from a line in the Commander Cody song “Stealin’ at the 7-Eleven”: “Steal from them or let them steal from you!” Those were the days before security cameras and alarms that were triggered if you took unscanned merchandise out the door. Oh, you could still get caught, but we feared the long faces of our parents more than we feared the long arm of the law. Fast forward 50 years or so and shoplifting has reached levels of brazen absurdity across the country. You’ve likely seen the news footage of people simply marching in, cramming bags with stuff, and marching out while employees watch helplessly. In a truly American “15 minutes of fame” moment, one shoplifter at a Rite Aid drug store at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in mid-town Manhattan stopped to be interviewed by a reporter from the New York Post. “Sometimes I feel bad for these guys in charge, you feel bad for the security guys,” said the thief who claimed to have been stealing from establishments like Rite Aid for months without being arrested. The common explanation for this crime wave is that there are no significant penalties attached to this kind of theft. At least 38 states have raised their felony threshold to $1,000 worth of stolen goods, and the value of each incident is counted separately. In California, you need to pinch at least $950 worth. Bail reform in places like New York is being blamed for putting dedicated thieves back on the street immediately. This has made shoplifting a lucrative business for organized gangs that fence stolen goods online. Naturally, there is no shortage of bargain-hunting customers or Artful Dodgers (who often need to support their addictions) willing to go out and pick a Rite Aid or two on behalf of the gangs. Low-wage jobs that make it hard to make ends meet are also helping to fuel the pool of purloiners. New York City has reported levels of thievery not seen in 30 years: 26,000 complaints last year. It has gotten so bad that some stores have had to lock stuff up behind glass or simply shut down, as the Rite Aid mentioned above is doing after having $200,000 worth of merch swiped in the past two months. “They come in every day, sometimes twice a day, with laundry bags and just load up on stuff,” a store employee told the Post. “They take whatever they want and we can’t do anything about it. It’s why the store is closing. They can’t afford to keep it open.” And little is being done to stop it. Some stores forbid their employees to engage with shoplifters. Last year, a clerk at a Rite Aid in Los Angeles was shot and killed after he confronted two men. Employees worry about being fired or even sued if they touch the accused. “All you can say is, ‘Please, please don’t do that,’” a security guard at a CVS at 49th and Broadway told the Post. At times, the pandemic has had the silver-lining of tamping down street crime, but mankind’s dark urges must play out somewhere. Pandemic anxiety and economic stress, the breakdown in trust between cops and the communities they serve, substance abuse, political rage, a pervasive urge to settle beefs, all of it makes it hard to feel safe these days, which feel a long way from the time when I as a privileged, protected, clueless middle-class kid who thought shoplifting was a harmless joke. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.

One film journalist’s stream-of-consciousness cinematic journey through the pandemic, Part 73 By Laurence Lerman / New York City There’s been an explosion in visibility for the great state of Montana in movie theaters and on TV screens in recent years. The wide-open spaces, sweeping mountain ranges, sprawling forests, glistening rivers, ranches, reservations, Native Americans, cowboys, horses, rattlesnakes…all those things help make Montana Montana (on-screen, that is). Those aren’t what a born-and-bred New Yorker like me typically dives into. But that’s changed over the past couple of years with the opportunities afforded via streaming platforms, a growing sense of metropolitan ennui, a handful of high-profile movies and, in particular, one very entertaining television show. It’s Yellowstone, of course. Created by Taylor Sheridan and John Linson, the Western drama Yellowstone premiered in the spring of 2018 and just wrapped up its fourth season in January. A large-scale saga that follows the days and nights of a powerful Montana family and their large cattle ranch, as family members regularly clash with a bordering Indian reservation and encroaching land developers, the show stars a very fine Kevin Costner as the family patriarch, John Dutton. Ably supporting him in this frequently violent, crime-filled dynastic drama are Wes Bentley, Luke Grimes, Kelly Reilly and Cole Hauser as his sons, daughter and dedicated ranch foreman. To describe Yellowstone as a smash hit is an understatement. While the series initially slid under the radar, it began building a substantial audience during the Covid lockdown, and has since grown into a unstoppable powerhouse. Paramount reported that 14 million viewers have watched Yellowstone’s Season 4 premiere since it dropped in November, 2021, making it the #1 show on all of television last year (including the networks, cable or premium networks). Clearly, the show has resonated across the nation and not just in the markets where well-produced Western-themed fare traditionally performs strongly. A great cast, superlative production values and juicy “Godfather Goes West” storylines notwithstanding, I think the show’s fresh and invigorating setting of the 41st state of the union also plays a significant role. It’s as good as explanation as any for Yellowstone’s surprising popularity in New York, L.A. and other equally cosmopolitan markets. The state of Montana has provided the narratives and backdrops on the big screen plenty of times over the years, going back to Allan Dwan's 1954 Technicolor Western Cattle Queen of Montana starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. For me, “Montana in the Movies” means the big country filling the screen in a clutch of seminal Seventies films, beginning with a pair of revisionist Westerns by Arthur Penn: Little Big Man (1970) starring Dustin Hoffman as a Little Big Horn survivor and the oddball horse thief tale The Missouri Breaks (1976) with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. There’s also the offbeat caper flick Thunderbolt and Lightfoot with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges, written and directed by Michael Cimino. That one served as a warm-up of sorts for Cimino’s infamous Heaven’s Gate (1980), an epic Western from United Artists about the Johnson Country War whose scope and size was rivaled only by its disastrous critical and commercial reception, prompting the parent company of UA to sell the studio off to financier Kirk Kerkorian a year later. Four decades on, Montana remains a player. The last couple of years have seen the release of Anne Kerrigan’s well-received wilderness drama Cowboys (2020), the rough-and-tumble neo-Western Let Him Go (2020) with Kevin Costner, Diane Lane and Lesley Manville and the fiery action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021), directed by Taylor Sheridan and starring Angelina Jolie as an addled smokejumper. I’ll cheat a little and also include Jane Campion’s 2021 Oscar favorite The Power of the Dog, which was actually filmed on New Zealand’s striking Maniototo Plain and handsomely stands in for the film’s early 20th century Montana setting. A couple of upcoming titles on the radar include The Ploughmen, directed by and starring Ed Harris, concerning the strange friendship between a young Montana sheriff and a notorious older murderer; and the aptly named Montana Story by longtime independent filmmaking duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel about two estranged siblings returning home to their family ranch. But it’s Yellowstone writer/director/producer/actor Taylor Sheridan who’s the primary force behind Montana’s renaissance (albeit a small-screen one, though Sheridan himself describes his episodic series as “sort of like long-form films that are doled out in hour-long installments). Sheridan’s reign is continuing in a big way with the arrival of a popular Yellowstone prequel and another pair of spin-offs on the way. Starring Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Sheridan’s 1883 chronicles John Dutton’s 19th century ancestors as they make their way across the treacherous American West in the hope of a better life. It premiered on the Paramount Network in December and, according to industry trade magazine Variety, had the biggest new series premiere on cable TV since 2015. The show quickly migrated onto sister platform Paramount+ and was the streamer’s most watched series premiere ever. Still another Paramount Yellowstone prequel will follow the next generation of Duttons, this series set in 1932 during the Prohibition and Great Depression eras. Its name? 1932. The show was announced a couple of weeks ago, a day or so after 1883 was renewed for a second season. Also in the development stage is 6666, a show that will reportedly focus on a popular Yellowstone supporting player as he travels south to begin a new life on the numerically monikered titular Texas ranch. Both Yellowstone and 1883 are shot in and around the mountain-lined vistas of Southern Montana, which is where the future series are likely to be filmed. Sheridan seems to be doing for the state’s Beartooth and Big Horn Mountain ranges what John Ford did for the towering sandstone buttes of Monument Valley with his classic westerns Stagecoach (1939) My Darling Clementine (1946), The Searchers (1956) and at least a half-dozen others: creating a strong and immediate association between his entertainment properties and their panoramic backdrops. Yellowstone’s universe is expanding. So is Taylor Sheridan’s. And so is Montana’s. Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.

By Jessie Seigel / Washington, D.C. It’s time to bring Alexander Vindman back into the U.S. government. In this day of appalling Republican cheerleading for Vladimir Putin, a cold-blooded killer, the superbly-credentialed Vindman has shown himself to be a man of impeccable character and vision about the current crisis in Ukraine. To recap, Vindman’s honorable history: As the old, cynical expression would have it, no good deed goes unpunished. Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Vindman was penalized by former President Donald Trump and his cronies for doing his duty. Because Vindman obeyed a legal subpoena to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, and provided evidence leading to Trump’s first impeachment, Vindman was fired from the National Security Council (NSC), deprived of promotion to colonel, as well as to attendance at the prestigious United States Army War College for which Vindman had already been chosen, and essentially forced into retirement. As NSC director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Russia, Vindman had an extremely valuable expertise to contribute to U.S. policy on Ukraine and Russia. And given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vindman’s loss of his position is a great loss to our nation. Within the last few months, as a private citizen, Vindman has written numerous articles—published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs and others--warning about Russia’s coming aggression against Ukraine and discussing how it should have been handled. In the past days, just before and after the Russian invasion, his appearances on news shows, analyzing Putin’s strategic actions, have been ubiquitous. But this is not the same as having access to the latest classified information and being in a position to advise the government directly. Vindman--A Profile in Integrity In his role on the NSC, Vindman was present on the phone call in which Trump tried to extort a public announcement from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky that Ukraine would investigate then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Zelensky was asking for greatly needed security aid and a diplomatically significant White House visit. Trump famously tried to twist Zelensky’s arm, saying he would do it, but with the condition that first, “I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot, and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” Concerned about the call’s legality and its possible national security implications, Vindman appropriately reported it up his chain of command. And when subpoenaed to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, he obeyed the law, honoring the subpoena and testifying in both closed and public sessions. At the public hearing, Vindman said he recognized that his testimony before the committee “would not be tolerated in many places around the world.” He said, “In Russia, my act of expressing concern to the chain of command…would have severe personal and professional repercussions, and offering public testimony involving the president would surely cost me my life. I’m grateful…for the privilege of being an American citizen and public servant, where I can live free of fear for mine and my family’s safety.” Vindman then directly addressed his immigrant father, who had brought his family to the United States when Alexander and his twin brother Yevgeny were only three years old. Vindman’s father had been a civil engineer and member of the Communist Party in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union, but left because he became disillusioned with the communist system and institutionalized anti-Semitism. The Vindman family is Jewish. Lt. Colonel Vindman ended his statement by addressing concerns his father may have had about his challenging power: “Dad, I'm sitting here today in the U.S. Capitol. Talking to our elected professionals is proof that you made the right decision 40 years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry. I will be fine for telling the truth.” But Vindman was not fine. President Trump and his son, Donald, Jr. denounced Vindman on Twitter, leading Vindman, in concern for his family’s safety, to request protection from the Army. Furthermore, before his testimony, Vindman was in line for a promotion to full colonel and had been accepted to the prestigious War College. Afterwards, he was fired from Trump’s NSC, and although the army left his name on the promotion list, the Trump administration held up promotion of everyone on the list—hundreds of other officers also due for promotion—in order to prevent Vindman from getting his. The War College opportunity disappeared as well. Trump’s minions also pressured the Army to dig up dirt on Vindman in order to stop the promotion, and the Army caved in, doing an investigation which ultimately found nothing—but was conducted behind Vindman’s back. It became clear to Lt. Colonel Vindman that if he stayed in the military—especially if Trump were reelected—he would no longer be permitted to work in the area of his expertise or be given other important or rewarding work. So, on July 8, 2020, after 21 years in the military, which he saw as part of his family, Vindman announced he would retire. Vindman’s twin brother, Yevgeny, also worked at the NSC and was also due for a promotion to colonel. The Trump administration vengefully removed him from the NSC as well. But his brother stayed in the military, and President Biden gave him his promotion to colonel. Since leaving the military Vindman has become a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Policy Institute, and author of the memoir, Here, Right Matters: An American Story. He is also a Pritzker Military fellow at the Lawfare Institute, a board member of the Renew Democracy Initiative nonprofit, and a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylavania’s Perry World House. In August 2021, Vindman told NPR’s “Fresh Air” that his new book is meant to present an affirmative view of doing the right thing, but “not because there are inherent rewards.” He said, “There are never inherent rewards for just simply doing the right thing. Actually, there are inherent rewards from doing the wrong thing because usually that’s what the payoff is, and that’s why people do it. But for the right thing, it's being able to live with it.” In February, Vindman filed a suit against several Trump allies, including Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and former White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, alleging that they intimidated and retaliated against him while he testified in Congress, and thereby violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. The complaint, aiming at something larger than just the damage done to Vindman himself, alleges that the witness intimidation and obstruction of justice aimed at Vindman: “sent a message to other potential witnesses as well: cooperate and tell the truth at your own peril.” If Vindman wins the suit, the nation will have obtained at least some accountability for at least one of the many scurrilous actions of the Trump administration. Vindman Takes on the Putin Cheerleaders Departure from the military has freed Alexander Vindman to speak out publicly in a way that that is considered inappropriate for those in active service, and Vindman has not been reticent to do so. When Trump, Pompeo, and Tucker Carlson complimented Putin on his invasion of Ukraine, Vindman responded. As widely reported, Trump waxed enthusiastic on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’ Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, it’s independent, a large section of Ukraine.’ I said, ‘How smart is that?’” Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State in the Trump Administration, had the nerve, in a Fox News column, to claim President Biden has been weak towards Putin and “doesn’t know that it takes strength to defend America and keep us out of war” while Pompeo simultaneously kept himself busy licking Putin’s boots, calling the thuggish dictator “very savvy” and “very shrewd” and adding, “I consider him an elegantly sophisticated counterpart and one who is not reckless but has always done the math.” Pompeo had also previously called Putin a “very talented statesman” who “knows how to use power,” and said we should “respect that.” Finally, on February 22, Tucker Carlson a nakedly open propagandist, questioned why it is disloyal to side with Russia, saying both on his show and on Russia’s RT network: “Why do Democrats want you to hate Putin? Has Putin shipped every middle-class job in your town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked your business? Is he teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Does he eat dogs?” The next day, because Vindman had accused Republicans of encouraging Putin to attack Ukraine, Carlson brought Vindman’s Ukrainian heritage into it, saying that "your job is to take up arms in defense of Alexander Vindman's home country, or else you're evil." Vindman shot back in a tweet: “Hey TuckyoRose, Yes, I 100 percent support defending my homeland. That’s why I did more than talk, I served 21 years in the U.S. Army. What did you do besides sow discord amongst Americans, cheerlead for our enemies, and weaken us, inviting attacks on the U.S?” “TuckyoRose, of course, was a play on Tokyo Rose, the nickname for the Japanese propagandist who, through radio broadcasts, tried to destroy the morale of American soldiers during WWII. To MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace, Vindman said of Trump, Pompeo and Carlson, “When blood starts to flow as a result of them cheerleading for Vladimir Putin, they will own this.” I second that thought and will go Vindman one further—where’s Joe McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee when we legitimately need them? Vindman’s Nuanced View of Russia’s Aggression In his memoir, Here, Right Matters, Vindman writes that the U.S. has always had a hard time understanding how Russian leadership thinks, and that when there is a lack of understanding, there is a tendency to fill that gap by expecting the adversary to think like us. He writes, “When things then don’t go the way we expect, we get into a muddle of anxiety which leads to self-deterrence. Unable to game out the risks realistically, we fear taking any action at all. We can imagine a million things going wrong, and instead of figuring things out well enough to take some well-calculated risks, we become paralyzed.” Vindman does not accuse the U.S. government of being paralyzed. But he does suggest that it has a tendency to “self-deter.” In The Atlantic, the New York Times, USA Today, and Foreign Affairs, between December 2021 and last week’s invasion, Vindman sets out his view of Putin’s strategy and what he feels the U.S. should have done if it had not fallen prey to self-deterrence. In December, Vindman warned, in the New York Times, “Mr. Putin — no doubt picking up on the decreased American appetite for foreign entanglements over the last few years — has seized his chances with encroachments on Ukrainian sovereignty…. Even interference in Western elections is just another tactic to weaken the West and create a privileged sphere of Russian influence.” In January, Vindman wrote in USA Today, “Vladimir Putin is an aggressive thinker, but he is not irrational. He will take all that he can as long as the cost is bearable. While diplomatic efforts to dissuade him were necessary and important, they came without the movement of troops and equipment that would have significantly raised the costs of invasion.” Vindman gives the Biden Administration credit for bringing together NATO allies and getting them to agree to impose sanctions. He also gives due credit to the Administration for reacting to the warning signs with consistently powerful statements of its commitment to defend NATO’s eastern borders, and Ukraine’s right to sovereignty, territorial integrity, and self-determination. And in Foreign Affairs, he wrote that the U.S. commitment to peace and diplomatic resolutions “has been commendable.” In addition, Vindman has given credit for the use of sanctions. But Vindman also argues that in focusing on diplomacy without an equal emphasis on “hard-power tools,” the Biden Administration “missed an opportunity to head off the crisis….” While Vindman is not advocating the United States go to war for Ukraine, he suggests that that a show of force along with an “ambiguity of intention,” would have served the West and Ukraine better than diplomacy alone. Specifically, he has suggested that Biden’s open acknowledgment in December that he would not send American troops to fight in Ukraine removed the possibility of strategic ambiguity. Vindman argues that the implicit threat of U.S. and NATO intervention would have forced Putin to consider the risks of further escalation. In Vindman’s view, telling Putin that U.S. interests end at NATO’s borders “emboldened Mr. Putin to ignore international norms.” Vindman also questions the U.S. refusal to provide Ukraine advanced weapons systems (Patriot missiles, anti-air, and anti-ship missiles) on the grounds that the weapons were too sophisticated for its armed forces to handle. He argues that their possession might still have affected Russia’s decision concerning invasion. Again, Vindman has only suggested a “more active level of U.S. engagement that avoids crossing into military adventurism.” Apparently, the West is now sending weaponry, but it is coming more than late. Vindman has become a prize "get" for TV bookers Vindman has noted that the situation would be far worse if Biden’s predecessor were in office. Still, he expresses the view that Biden’s administration has been reactive when it should be proactive, and that Biden’s senior advisers seem to have recommended narrow, low-risk policy options, which were bound to fail in accomplishing the desired effect. Overall, Vindman’s analysis makes sense. It seems to me, based on Putin’s past performance, that he will continue to take territory—even beyond Ukraine—until he thinks someone will stop him. That’s what would-be conquerors do. I also think that Putin has counted on the West’s fear of the crisis turning into World War III to deter them from acting against him. The one element to which I do not think Vindman gives sufficient weight is the damage Trump did: the accumulated effects of Trump’s persistent obsequiousness to Putin; the divisions that Trump, under Putin’s tutelage, created here at home; and Trump’s somewhat successful effort to divide and weaken NATO—which forced Biden to expend energy restrengthening that alliance, energy that could have been directed more forcefully and immediately at Russia’s behavior earlier on. All this may also have contributed to Putin thinking he could invade Ukraine with total impunity. Although former Lt. Colonel Vindman is continuing to contribute his expertise to our national foreign policy conversations, it is really too bad that the government lost the kind of access to his analyses it would have if he were still working for the NSC. Whether or not Biden ultimately agrees and applies Vindman’s insights, it would be more than useful for the country to have them as this crisis evolves. Political columnist Jessie Seigel had a long career as a government attorney in which she honed her analytic skills. She has also twice received an Artist’s Fellowship from the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities for her fiction, and has been a finalist for a number of literary awards. In addition, Seigel is an associate editor at the Potomac Review, a reviewer for The Washington Independent Review of Books, and a dabbler in political cartoons at Daily Kos. Of this balance in her work between the analytic and the imaginative, Seigel jokes, “I guess my right and left brains are well-balanced.” More on and from Seigel can be found at The Adventurous Writer, https://www.jessieseigel.com.

By Andy Borowitz March 2, 2022 PALM BEACH (The Borowitz Report)—As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to encounter difficulties, Donald J. Trump has advised Vladimir Putin “just to claim that he won.” “He needs to get on TV and say that he’s the winner,” Trump said. “He should say that he had a victory in Ukraine like you wouldn’t believe.” Trump said that the Russian President should hold rallies across the country to tell his supporters that he won but that his victory had been stolen from him. “I thought Putin was smart, but maybe he’s not so smart after all,” Trump said. “If he doesn’t say he won, he’s some kind of stupid dummy.” Trump said that, since his calls to the Russian leader kept going straight to voice mail, he left Putin a suggestion of what he should tell the Russian people. “All he needs to say is, ‘Frankly, we did win this invasion,’ ” Trump said.

By Naomi Serviss / New York City Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning American playwright Eugene O’Neill did not do whimsy. His complicated genius and poetically tragic life, reflected in familiar masterworks, Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh, are emotionally thrilling time bombs of mythic proportions, merging human failures with unanswered existential questions. The Irish Repertory Theatre scheduled its opening of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, for March 2020. The company had rehearsed four weeks. Sets had been constructed, Costumes fit, and sound checked. Muscle memory juiced, scripts memorized. When live theater was Covid-cancelled, the team was stung but determined not to crumple. After inhabiting O’Neill’s brilliantly scarred world for so long, why deprive appreciative audiences of storied New York actors? The company’s collective resolve, helmed by Artistic Director Charlotte Moore and Producing Director Ciarán O’Reilly, morphed into an online sensation the last week of October, 2020. The production, starring the singularly gifted Robert Cuccioli and bottled-lightning cast was an endorphin rush to view, even on a laptop. It virtually electrified my bleak quarantined days, floored critics and slayed the viewing public. More than 6,000 viewers tuned in. It was a New York Times Critic’s Pick: “Powerful…a hearty serving of digital theater that nearly matches the real thing… a production with such chemistry and pep that it stands as a reminder of those pre-pandemic theater days of yore.” Lightning is about to strike twice. In the flesh this time. You have from now until April 17 to witness what the fuss was all about. Some people may not be ready to mingle with the theater public. Understandable. We all have our tolerance thresholds. Although I’m vaccinated and boosted, I still mask-up in stores, museums, theaters and restaurants. Some theaters, including the Irish Rep and The Public, require proof of being boosted, in addition to having the first two jabs. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, O’Neill labored over a cycle of nine plays about a New England family. He disdained theater’s commercialization and worried that his sweeping drama would be corrupted posthumously. Tragically, he destroyed the manuscripts. One was accidentally left behind: A Touch of the Poet. The work, completed in 1942, is the first of O’Neill’s nine-play cycle. It’s a tragic story laced with humor about the Irish immigrant experience in the New World. It tracks the family of the tempestuously haughty Cornelius “Con” Melody, proprietor of a seedy inn and tavern in 1828 Boston. Debt-laden fabulist Con (Cuccioli) identifies himself as a landed gentleman and war hero. He’s neither. The play has had four Broadway productions, having premiered in October 1958, five years after the playwright’s death. O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936. Confession: It’s not really about the legendary scribe. It’s about the production. And the actors. In my humble opinion, Cuccioli is one of the finest actors in the theater community. He personified bad cop Javert in Les Mis, and crushed the leading role in Broadway’s 1997 Jekyll & Hyde. He departed the production after nearly 900 shows. It opened in 1997, but Cuccioli had owned the role off and on since 1994 when he created the part in Houston. The show had long legs, closing in 2001. His pedigree reveals scores of film and television bona fides along with vast theater experience. The Long Island native attended St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset and St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, where he earned a finance degree. Before landing on the stage, he was improbably an E.F. Hutton financial consultant! But it’s not just his acting acumen that impresses. He’s a genuinely mensch-y guy. When his high school honored him in Spring 2000 with a “Robert Cuccioli Day,” I tagged along and wrote a Newsday feature about that experience. He was graciously down-to-earth with the smitten students, reminiscing about his time spent in those hallowed halls. Which brings me back to A Touch of The Poet. If you heed my advice and consider attending a performance, you will be amused, engaged and highly entertained. Cuccioli et al will not disappoint. The reverb of the denouement delivers a knock-out punch that will resonate long after New York’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade winds its way along Fifth Avenue. Naomi Serviss is a New York-based award-winning journalist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Highroads (AAA magazine), in-flight publications, spa and travel magazines and websites, including BroadwayWorld.com

A Poem by Dr. Barry Lubetkin / New York City When I was a year old, the Russians were saviors. They unlocked the gates at Buchenwald and fed and freed the starving prisoners. They perished  in the snow by the tens of thousands protecting their precious Leningrad. They joined our GIs with smiles and handshakes as together the evil enemy was vanquished. ...and then the angels died. Brick by brick they walled off the world from the warmth of freedom. So many millions cried out from enslavement. So many millions searched for truth in vain. So many millions were tortured, killed by the masters and their puppets. When I was 30 years old my eyes saw it. In Kiev, the beleaguered and terrified rabbis fed us matzo with anti-Israeli filth taped to each piece. In Leningrad, we gave jeans and T-shirts to teenagers on buses and were scorned and followed by plain-clothes police agents. In Moscow, we lectured to colleagues about advances in our understanding of human sexuality, and were not so quietly told to leave the classroom with our pornographic ideas. Only the beaches in Sochi with their hard black pebbles for sand allowed us to escape the sadness that surrounded us. After the revulsion I felt upon this discovery, my Russian grandparents’ words flooded my brain. “Remember the Cossacks and their vicious anti-Semitic programs. Remember the Free Soviet Jews movement in the ‘70s that helped our people move to new lands where they could freely practice their rituals. Remember Stalin, Lenin…Remember, boychik, these people have always hated us.” And then the empire of menace dissolved under the flag of freedom and for the briefest moment in time the world had a chance to recover. I am now in my 70s and the beating heart of evil has found new breath and fresh blood in its rage to recover all of its broken pieces. And its missing artery is a free and democratic Ukraine. And just as it shared the world’s joy at the end of World War II, Russia reaches for the hammer and the sickle again and takes the world along as it lurches toward the next world war. Barry Lubetkin, Ph.D. is the co-director and co-founder of the Institute for Behavior Therapy in New York City. The Institute for Behavior Therapy is the oldest private cognitive behavior center in the United States.

By John Rolfe / Red Hook, N.Y. Much has been written about the demise of local newspapers in America. Thousands vanished as people flocked to the Internet for their information (or disinformation as is often the case). Print editions once served to keep us informed about important matters in our own communities. Now, ensnared in the World Wide Web, we become fixated on events in far-off places, many of little or no consequence but served up in ways that rile us. Be that as dismay, I come to you with a gripe about another result of this sad development: the end of one of life’s small and comforting pleasures. My wife and I are among a class of fossilized citizens who still enjoys reading an actual paper with our morning coffee. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not dour Luddites. We like websites and spend plenty of time on them. But leisurely reading on a screen just isn’t as pleasurable as sitting on a comfortable sofa or easy chair and holding a newspaper, magazine or book. I don’t know why. It just isn’t. Anyway, having a newspaper delivered to one’s home has become a quaint relic of a bygone time. I fondly recall pedaling my ass, er, riding my bike around my hometown delivering Newsday (“the Long Island Newspaper”) during my formative years. Now “paperboys” drive cars and if the ones we’ve had lately are any indication, they are far less reliable, even in good weather. Spotty delivery service exacerbated our dissatisfaction with a once-great local product. For 21 years, we subscribed to the Poughkeepsie Journal, New York’s oldest newspaper (founded in 1785), but only on Sunday. I wrote columns — family humor, commuting, social-political screeds — so that gave us at least one reason to subscribe. But the paper itself was steadily shrinking, its once-robust multiple sections that were full of lengthy features and news about the Mid-Hudson Valley were down to about two-to-four pages apiece after undergoing an ownership change that delocalized its management while gutting its editorial staff here. (The brain trust now resides about 60 miles south, in Westchester.) In a sign of great irony, the main section became padded by pages of obituaries in extra-large, space-filling print. My wife enjoyed reading them for the often detailed stories about the deceased while I contented myself with knowing that if I wasn’t in there, I was good for another week. (It’s good to stay informed.) But the price of the subscription kept rising while delivery on any given Sunday became a crapshoot. Where once I could report a delivery issue to the circulation department in the paper’s Poughkeepsie headquarters and be given prompt, attentive service, I now had to call God-knows-where and deal with a customer disservice representative who inevitably expressed regret at our not receiving the paper but did little else. “Please know you can get the paper for free online,” the rep inevitably said. “If we wanted to get the paper online, why would we pay to have it delivered?” I inevitably asked. I also inevitably had to ask to be credited for the missed delivery. “OK, we have credited your account 75 cents,” I would be told. “Seventy-five cents! The subscription is $21 for the month! Divided by four weeks I should be getting at least $5 back!” After a moment or two of uneasy silence and perhaps a hem or haw, I’d be told, “Please know we will get the paper to you tomorrow.” “So we still have to pay for a day-old paper?” After more back-and-forth, I was usually able to secure a “We will credit your account accordingly.” But the promised paper only occasionally arrived. It was this kind of dedicated insult-to-injury service that primed us to cancel the subscription when the paper canceled my own column several weeks ago. Left longing for our Sunday coffee companion, preferably a local one, we signed on with the Daily Freeman out of Kingston, a 151-year old publication that, while emaciated, still retains old some school features like a Letters to the Editor page (something older readers of my column often told me they missed). Of course, our delivery issues began immediately, even with a new service provider. Three weeks in, we still hadn’t received our first issue. “I’m sorry to hear that,” the somewhat befuddled customer disservice rep said each time I called. “I will be sure to work on your account.” “How about you work on the delivery service?” I asked. “You can work on the account all you want. Will that get the paper here?” “We will be sure to have it to you next Sunday,” I was promised … twice. “Let us pray,” I replied each time, adding a spiritual note of hope to the proceedings. Hallelujah, the dam finally broke and in the middle of last week we received a stack of day-old (or more) papers. What’s more, deliveries have been arriving every day since. (I do expect a bill for them any day now as our subscription is Sunday-only.) All I can say is if the intent of modern newspaper management is to drive people away from print and onto their websites, the folks where I live are doing a grand job with the first half of the equation. It’s a shame. The passing of the paper is like losing a cozy old friend who will be truly missed when they are gone for good. John Rolfe is a former senior editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids, a longtime columnist for the Poughkeepsie Journal/USA Today Network, and author of The Goose in the Bathroom: Stirring Tales of Family Life. His school bus drivin’ blog “Hellions, Mayhem and Brake Failure” is parked on his website Celestialchuckle.com (https://celestialchuckle.com) with the meter running.

Fred Plotkin, a pleasure activist and passionate Italy and culinary expert, speaks each Friday with leading people in the arts FRED PLOTKIN is one of America’s foremost experts on opera and has distinguished himself in many fields as a writer, speaker, consultant and as a compelling teacher. He is an expert on everything Italian, the person other so-called Italy experts turn to for definitive information.  Fred discovered the concept of "The Renaissance Man" as a small child and has devoted himself to pursuing that ideal as the central role of his life. In a “Public Lives” profile in The New York Times on August 30, 2002, Plotkin was described as "one of those New York word-of-mouth legends, known by the cognoscenti for his renaissance mastery of two seemingly separate disciplines: music and the food of Italy." In the same publication, on May 11, 2006, it was written that "Fred is a New Yorker, but has the soul of an Italian."

By Carly Mitchell / New York City (The author, a public-school teacher, is using a pseudonym for professional reasons) New York City public schools are currently reveling in the one week of winter vacation affectionately known as “February Break”. This sort of interlude is one of the many perks of teaching, a difficult job, but at the end of the day, a career I’m thankful for. In the midst of all of the turmoil currently taking place around the world, I feel especially fortunate to be able to take a step back. For the first few days of my vacation, I ventured to Martha's Vineyard, the quintessential New England island off of the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., with some friends. The island is known to be a summer spot, thus the only people whom I interacted with were the year-round “locals.” I have a few local friends, and through these people, I connected with some fellow teachers who are employed by the Martha’s Vineyard public school system. The conversations I had this week with the three teachers whom I met were familiar, much the same as conversations I have had with teachers in Brooklyn, where I live and teach at a low-income public middle school. One young woman told me that the island was experiencing a teacher shortage. I explained to her that this was also happening in New York City. In fact, the New York State United Teachers Union reported in October, 2019, that state officials predict New York State “will need more than 180,000 new teachers in the next decade.” This fellow teacher also explained there is a substitute teacher shortage. Things are so desperate, she said, that the island upped substitute teacher pay from $90 to $120 a day. New York City substitutes, in comparison, make $199.27 a day, in consideration of the high cost of living. The Martha’s Vineyard School District is comprised of a half dozen small schools, one of which includes the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. There are some 700 students currently enrolled in the school system. Of these students, 43 percent are economically disadvantaged, which may come as a surprise to many who associate the island with wealthy white summer folks. Demographically, the statistics are also a bit unexpected: while more than 60 percent of students are white, nearly 25 percent are Hispanic (there is a large population of Brazilians on the island), and 5 percent are African American. Less than 2 percent of students are Native American or Asian, although there is a Wampanoag reservation on the island. It’s odd to think that there are such troublesome similarities between the small-town Martha’s Vineyard schools and the public schools in New York City. But I am not really surprised. The state of education is dire, and until the teaching profession is more valued, the future of education is questionable. On the bright side, during my trip, I have received numerous emails from my students who have completed the break homework I assigned,which included some test prep. (Perhaps I am becoming known as the “mean” teacher,) When we return to school, I am hoping we all feel refreshed and ready to tackle the challenges March will surely present. Now begins the official countdown until spring break! Carly Mitchell (a pseudonym) is a public-school teacher in Brooklyn N.Y. who loves to learn, to educate, and to expose the hypocrisy of New York City politicians.