Dellums died on Monday at the age of 82. Jon Schwarz writes an appreciation of the life of this avowed socialist congressman who had to fight opposition from even within his own Democratic party. In a memoir, Dellums described the approach he took in 1970 to unseat a Democratic incumbent who was a Cold War liberal who had supported Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war policies.
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The neoconservatives have had a terrible influence on US politics. They gained a firm foothold in the Bush-Cheney administration and succeeded in pushing for disastrous wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and threatening war against Iran. Their goal was the destabilization of the Arab governments in the region, and the dynamic they created resulted in the Obama administration continuing the policies and leading to chaos in yet more nations like Libya and Syria. The resulting blowback with the rise of groups like ISIS resulted in the neoconservatives being discredited and lying low for awhile but they are making a comeback.
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Samantha Bee tries to correct an imbalance in the way that sexual abuse of men and women are treated in the media and in our culture generally. She is joined in this message by Terry Crews who has said that he was sexually assaulted too.
I must admit, I did not know what the phrase ‘drop the soap’ alluded to.
We now know much about the horrors inflicted by the US on Vietnam during that war. It is sometimes suggested that the atrocities committed by the US during that war were an aberration of some kind, a deviation from its usually honorable behavior in wars such as in ‘good’ wars like World War II. But this investigation from Reveal discusses how in that war, US soldiers committed a war crime when they rounded up German prisoners of war in a field and machine-gunned them. General George S. Patton called it a murder but none of the people involved were punished.
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It has rightly been pointed out that while atheists span the entire spectrum of the population, the atheist movement itself, in the sense of the leadership of organizations and the most visible atheists in the media, has been dominated by white men. This is fortunately changing and Christopher Cameron in an article titled Black atheists matter: how women freethinkers take on religion reports on those developments. In doing so, he addresses the often-raised question of why the horrors of slavery did not result in the wholesale discrediting of religion in the black community since religion was often used not only to justify slavery but to encourage black people to passively accept their situation in return for their reward in heaven. He says that support for religion in the black community ebbed and flowed depending on the contemporary situation.
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In my series of posts about Howard Bryant’s book The Heritage, I discussed the book’s thesis of how the responsibility of successful black athletes to speak out on issues of injustice that was started by Paul Robeson, and carried on by Jackie Robinson, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Muhammad Ali, went into decline with the arrival of extremely successful athletes like OJ Simpson, Michael Jordan, and Tiger Woods who wanted to do nothing that would endanger their lucrative corporate endorsements.
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Actor and strong science advocate Alan Alda recently revealed that he has had Parkinson’s disease for the last three years.
The 82-year-old told the CBS This Morning show he was diagnosed three-and-a-half years ago but had only decided to speak about it now.
“The reason I want to talk about it in public is… I’ve had a full life since then,” he said.
“You still have things you can do,” he went on, revealing he was “taking boxing lessons three times a week.”
Parkinson’s is a progressive condition in which the brain becomes damaged. It can lead to tremors, difficulty moving, speech changes and eventually memory problems.
News organizations tend to be reticent about reporting on wrongdoings within their own walls. But yesterday Colbert discussed the explosive allegations against Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, the network that produces and broadcasts his show. In addition, he brings up the Kimberly Guilfoyle-Donald Trump Jr. genital photo issue.
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Ryan Grim and Zaid Jilani report on a new study that finds that adopting the Medicare For All plan advocated by Bernie Sanders that is increasingly supported by politicians and the public would not only improve the availability and quality of health care and cut costs but also result in increased wages for people. But what is noticeable is that this study was not done at some leftists but by a former Bush administration economist and issued by a conservative think tank.
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