Commentary & Opinion

The interview won’t air until tomorrow, but the story that Lance will admit to Oprah of using performance enhancing drugs makes us all ask the same question.  Does Oprah still have a network?

That’s really the only revelation likely to come from the dialogue, since only the most ardent disbelievers still imagined Lance rode clean all these years.  He’ll tell the public limited facts about the process, although allegedly he won’t admit to being the so called “ring leader” of the sophisticated drug program.  He’ll simply admit to being just another guy in the peloton who doped to stay relevant, just like everyone else on the road.  He’s part of the gang, just no Al Capone.  Given Armstrong’s actions over the years, it’s hard to image this to be true.  But truth seekers will have to settle for this for the time being.

  For the first time in decades Hall of Fame voters decided not to confer baseball’s highest honor to anyone. What makes this announcement unusual is that the most celebrated names from an era marked by performance-enhancing drugs did not gain entry into baseball’s promised land. To make matters even more peculiar, this was a period in baseball history when testing for drugs didn’t exist.

Despite the proud prose that presaged it and all the periodic pronouncements that sought to endow it with continuity, ours has, from the outset, been an aggressively promoted ‘Marketocracy.’  Though an apt description, “The land of the free” and “Home of the brave,” does not apply to everyone, equally.  It is and has always been subject to selective affirmation.

  New York State – and much of the nation – has made tremendous strides in reducing smoking rates.  In the mid-1960s, nearly half of Americans smoked; today it’s roughly half that nationwide and lower still in New York.

The successes have come as the result of scientific findings that have linked smoking to lung cancer and other health problems.  Those scientific breakthroughs also identified the health risks faced by nonsmokers who were exposed to second hand smoke from tobacco products.