Taking aim at those who stoke the fires of racism

Jeb Lund catalogues in great detail all the people who have contributed to the racist paranoia in the country that poison the minds of people like the murderer in Charleston, and have constantly emitted “the long low dog whistle that entered the mainstream of American conservatism with Nixon and the Southern Strategy in 1968 — a toxic mixture of anti-government resentment, absolute refusal to recognize the left as legitimate, and racial loathing.”
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The pope’s encyclical on climate change and inequality

I have not read pope Francis’s 40,000 word encyclical Laudato Si’ dealing with climate change and its relationship with inequality. But Joshua J. McElwee, the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, has read it and summarizes some of the key points. There is no doubt that this document is going to infuriate conservatives in the US even though the basic message would be considered uncontroversial in most parts of the world.
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Our strange and conflicted attitudes towards marijuana

The state of Colorado has legalized the recreational use of marijuana and also allowed it to be used for medicinal purposes. But that does not mean that people whose use fits into those categories are exempt from being punished. Take the case of Brandon Coats, an employee of the Dish Network company, who in 2010 was fired for using marijuana legally outside of work hours to deal with the muscular spasms he suffered after he became paralyzed as the result of a car crash. They fired him two weeks after he informed his company of his use and gave them a copy of his medical marijuana card.
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Changing racial identities

The Rachel Dolezal story (the 37-year old woman president of the Spokane, Washington NAACP with white parents who for some time since leaving college has presented herself as black) has certainly got people’s attention. Given that at bottom it seems to be a story of one person’s attempt to start a new life with a new identity in a new community, something that is not at all unusual given the mobile nature of modern society, the media buzz is extraordinary. The reason is of course because questions of race are always hot-button ones and also because of this story’s man-bites-dog nature. Stories of black people passing as white are not uncommon and, given the history of slavery and anti-black racism in the US, quite understandable. But white people adopting a black identity, while not unprecedented, is certainly unusual.
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The unbearable cluelessness of the rich

I think I could write something every day about the sense of entitlement of the well-to-do in the US and their obliviousness about how bad things really are and how obnoxious their behavior is. The latest example comes from California where the wealthy are balking at cutting back on water use in the face of the extreme drought. For them, money is the primary determinant of what can and cannot be done.
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Keeping track of the number of Republican presidential candidates

Yesterday Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. This may have surprised some since he seems to have been running for president for some time, creating Super PACs, raising money, hiring campaign staff, giving speeches, visiting early primary and caucus states, and all the other things associated with running. But this is American politics, where candidates start by first dropping hints, then forming what is known as an ‘exploratory committee’, and defer making an ‘official’ declaration for as long as they can to avoid being bound by campaign finance rules and to create suspense. So here is a summary of who is at what stage of the process.
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