The Academy Awards continues to get its lumps for the fact that its membership is skewed heavily white and male and old and this year’s nominees were conspicuous by the lack of actors of color, and that even in films that dealt explicitly with black themes and featured black actors in major roles, it was the white people involved who got nominated.
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Billionaire and former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg has said that he is considering entering the presidential race as an independent candidate and said that he is willing to spend up to a billion dollars of his own money in the endeavor. He says he will make his final decision sometime in March.
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People on the eastern seaboard of the US are digging themselves out after last week’s major snowstorm. One of the things that I have long been curious about is how people actually measure the amount of snow that falls. Unlike rainfall that is relatively easy to measure, snow is very variable in its water content and winds can cause it to swirl and create drifts and uneven amounts even within a small region.
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It is clear that Donald Trump is having a blast right now. For someone with a massive ego who loves to be in the limelight, has a gut instinct for what a sizable fraction of the country finds appealing, and does not mind whom he offends, running for president without having to beg people for money is an ideal occupation, especially since he can say whatever he wants and the media will cover him.
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Sarah Palin is Baphomet’s gift to comedians who can mine an endless source of material from her rambling utterances.
As I wrote a few days ago, as part of a nationwide effort called Breaking Our Silence, I will be reading a story by a woman who had an abortion and neither regrets it nor feel ashamed about it. More details of the event to be held tomorrow at Beachland Ballroom, 15711 Waterloo Road, Cleveland, OH 44110 from 6:00-8:00 pm. and is free and open to the public can be found at the above link.
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As one should have expected knowing her history, faced with the rising popularity of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has adopted rhetoric that could easily have emerged out of the mouths of the Republicans and Fox News, even to the extent of accusing him of being a communist sympathizer.
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Those who try and change racist symbols and names like that of the Washington football team immediately come right up against that brick wall of the ‘It’s our tradition and as long as we think its not racist, it can’t be racist’ argument. I cannot afford to laugh at such ridiculous arguments because the people of Cleveland use that same argument to defend the racist Chief Wahoo baseball logo.
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Kalle Lasn is the editor of the magazine Adbusters that is credited with being one of the brains that inspired the Occupy movement that in 2011 resulted in huge numbers of people occupying public spaces in New York and other cities to protest inequality and financial corruption. While many people have argued that the dispersal of the movement signaled its failure, when Jake Whitney interviewed him for the December 2015/January 2016 issue of The Progressive magazine, Lasn disagreed with that conclusion and said that the spirit of Occupy is very much alive.
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The eastern seaboard of the US has been hit by a major snowstorm starting last night that is shutting down major cities along the coast, like Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. In Cleveland we are used to a couple of such blizzards every winter but the path of this particular storm was such that it completely missed this area and we have not had any snow at all in the last few days. In fact, the entire winter has seen only about 8 inches of snow so far, when the average by now should be close to 30 inches.
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