News reports said Bernie Sanders met with the pope during his whirlwind trip to Vatican City. But I’m wondering if a more apt description would have been “Bernie intercepts Pope Francis.”
“This morning when I was leaving, Senator Sanders was there,” Francis told reporters onboard his papal airliner. “He knew I was leaving at that time and he had the courtesy to greet me. I greeted him, his wife and another couple.” The other couple were Jeffrey Sachs, an economics adviser to Sanders, and Mrs. Sachs. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-pope-francis-vatican.html?ref=politics&_r=0
Staying on the same floor at the Vatican City residence where the pontiff lives, Sanders and his wife Jane were said to meet the pope in the foyer of the Domus of Santa Marta as Francis was about to embark to Greece to meet with Syrian refugees. No pictures of their encounter were taken but I could envision a Saturday Night Live-like skit wherein Sanders is pacing the hallway agonizing over the pope’s delay in exiting his room while Jane nudges him they have to get to the airport so they won’t miss their flight back to New York. Sanders is acting like a teenager waiting for a rock star to emerge after a concert. His wife is like a parent who only wants to get away from the long haired, tattooed scrum of young fans.
But let’s be serious for a moment. The trip to Rome was an intelligent move. It linked Sanders to a popular pope and could help him secure votes in the Catholic and Latino communities of New York and California.
Now for some Hillary time: Did anyone else notice during Thursday night’s debate that almost every answer Hillary Clinton gave was preceded by a smile or a giggle and a “Well, …” She really has to work on being less robotic.
The longer Hillary delays in releasing transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions the more credibility she is giving to allegations she played it soft with Wall Street and would continue to do so as president.
Here’s what Seth Abramson, an assistant professor of English at University of New Hampshire, had to say on Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/release-of-clintons-wall-street-speeches_b_9698632.html?utm_hp_ref=politics. It makes you wonder …
Who’s Number 1? If you’re like me and spend Sundays filling in boxes for The New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle, you might have been puzzled by the answer to 16 Down in the April 3, 2016, issue. The clue: six letters identifying the “company that passed Walmart in 2015 as the world’s largest retailer.”
Now, I spent more than three decades following Walmart as the editor and publisher of Chain Store Age, a retail industry magazine, Internet site and producer of trade conferences. So I was more than a little surprised to read in a crossword puzzle some pretty earth-shattering news, at least as far as the retail industry was concerned. I was further caught off guard after I filled in the blanks and found the answer to be Internet retail pioneer Amazon.
You see, Amazon had worldwide sales in 2015 of $107 billion. That’s quite a tidy sum, but it was less than one-quarter of Walmart’s $482.1 billion!
Ah, but Walmart’s perch at the top of the retailing pyramid, a spot it has enjoyed since 1990, has been supplanted by another Internet upstart—Alibaba Group, China’s gargantuan company that accounts for 10% of the country’s retail sales. Alibaba announced this week its 2015 sales will total $490 billion.
