Recently Mitt Romney said: “I need to get 50.1 percent or more” to win.
No, he doesn’t. What he means of course is that he needs just one vote more than 50%, which is not at all the same thing since 50.1% can translate to a winning margin of 200,000 votes in a presidential election. [Read more…]
I recently had a seven-part series titled ‘On Insults’ and the first one dealt with the question of what constitutes an insult and who gets to decide whether something is a slur or not. It is not an easy question to answer. Are insults and slurs inherent in the words themselves? Does it depend on the intent of the person using those words? Or does it depend on the perception of the person at the receiving end? [Read more…]
The Boy Scouts of America is similar to the Catholic Church in its homophobia and its attempts to cover up sexual abuse within the organization. But the Oregon Supreme court recently ruled that 20,000 pages of secret ‘perversion files’ kept by them on suspected child abusers must be released to the public. [Read more…]
We are now less than five months away from the elections and well into the political rah-rah season when people are expected to choose sides and where the goal becomes to help your candidate win. As a result, there will be an intense focus on increasingly marginal issues in order to create the illusion that the candidates differ widely and that it is therefore essential that the opposing candidate not be successful because dire consequences will ensue. [Read more…]
The public library in the Detroit suburb of Troy had a ballot levy in order to raise funds to continue its operation. Of course the Tea Party, with its mindless opposition to any and all taxes, whipped up a campaign against it because they are willing to close down even public libraries to keep a few extra bucks in their pockets. [Read more…]
Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show have one of their always worth watching discussions on race issues, funny on the surface but also making serious points.
(This clip appeared on June 11, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Terrorist acts that indiscriminately kill civilians are vile but an even more despicable strategy is the one known as the ‘double tap’. This is where in the immediate aftermath of the first attack, a second attack is launched on those who rush to aid the injured, wreaking even greater death and destruction. [Read more…]
I wasn’t so long ago that ‘death squads’, shadowy groups that murdered enemies of a government, used to be the prerogative of despised authoritarian governments, usually in developing countries. But that has changed. [Read more…]
Sharon Broussard is a black columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who on June 6 wrote on why blacks should support same sex marriage, pointing out that influential voices in the black community (which along with Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons are the most opposed to it) had come around to the idea that this was an important civil rights issue. [Read more…]
The US media loves to commemorate anniversaries. But I have not heard of any plans to address the fact that this year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of modern times: when John F. Kennedy began the bombing of Vietnam. [Read more…]