A 14-year old high school freshman in Irving, Texas who likes to invent things made a clock and took it to his high school to show it to his new teachers, hoping that they would be impressed by his abilities. Oh, they were impressed all right. The Dallas Morning News describes what happened.
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I will not be watching the second Republican debate tonight. It is on cable TV like the last one and to watch it would require me to go to a friend’s place and I simply can’t be bothered. I made the effort for the first one just to see what this mass audition would look like and now the novelty is gone.
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With all the focus on Kim Davis and her crusade to stop same-sex marriage in her county, we should not overlook the fact that similar strategies are being used by other regions in the US.
In North Carolina, 32 of the state’s 672 magistrates have excused themselves from marrying couples altogether, once a duty of the office, to avoid marrying same-sex couples. Magistrates opted out as early as June, when a new religious objection law was passed. The law allows magistrates to refuse to perform a marriage, but once they do so they are then barred for performing any other marriage for six months.
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A lesbian couple applied for a marriage license today at the Rowan County clerk’s office in Morehead, Kentucky, the first same-sex couple to do so since clerk Kim Davis returned to work. CNN covered what happened before and when they went into the office.
I have been going on and on about how the term ‘politically correct’ has been abused both pre-emptively (by people who then go on to say mean things about members of marginalized groups) and defensively (to deflect attention from the fact that they have said something offensive). I was wracking my brain trying to think of a succinct way to capture what people really mean when they haul out political correctness but succinctness is not the strong suit for a wordy person like me.
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One has to be wary of seeing trends based on a few data points but there does seem to be a glimmering of hope that people around the world are fed up with the severe austerity policies that have been strongly pushed by a coalition of the transnational oligarchy, conservative politicians, and neoliberal organizations like the IMF and World Bank in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008. These austerity policies that have cut benefits and services while reducing taxes on the rich have created austerity for only the middle classes and the poor, while hugely enriching the already wealthy and the elites of the financial sector.
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Rowan County clerk Kim Davis has returned to work today and said that while she personally will not authorize the licenses, she will not block her deputies from issuing them, something that US district court judge David Bunning had sternly warned her from doing.
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I wrote about how when Republicans are accused of saying derogatory things about any group of people or proposing discriminatory ideas that adversely affect women or any minorities, they are quick to haul out the defense that they are being criticized because of ‘political correctness’.
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The glaring weakness in the early stages of the campaign of Bernie Sanders had been his inability to connect with and gain the support of a significant chunk of the black community. The early stages of his campaign was focused almost exclusively on economic issues, seemingly with the belief that people would understand that economic injustices were at the root of many of the difficulties faced by the African American community and that his long-standing record of strong support for civil rights would speak for itself.
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