Yesterday Donald Trump introduced with much pleasure Sarah Palin who endorsed his run for the Republican nomination. Her 20-minute speech was the usual blend of run-on-sentences, digressions, folksy language, jingoism, and appeals to people’s sense of grievance that ‘their’ country is being taken away from them. I find it truly painful to listen to her for more than a few minutes but soldiered on to the end.
[Read more…]
Seth Myers points out yet another example of what is well known. There is absolutely nothing that president Obama can do, short of eliminating all government regulations and all taxes for those earning over $250,000, that will not be childishly criticized by the Republicans.
[Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald paints a portrait of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the awful head of the Democratic National Committee, that explains why, as long as people like her dominate the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, it can never embrace a truly progressive agenda.
[Read more…]
Bernie Sanders keeps hammering away relentlessly on the issue of wealth and income inequality. He has focused on the situation within the US but the same critique applies to the entire world. Now comes along a new report from the charity group Oxfam that shows that the situation keeps getting more and more outrageous.
[Read more…]
We know that abortion rights are under fire from many sides. Strategies involve harassing people entering clinics that provide these services, threatening not only those who work in the clinics but also their families, and even going to their homes and the schools their children attend. Planned Parenthood for example, has been under relentless attack. And of course some of these zealots have gone on to actually commit murder in pursuit of their goal.
[Read more…]
The Eagles founder member died today. The group had a huge number of hits in the decade that they lasted before they broke up. Here is a live BBC performance from 1973 of my favorite song by the group, Peaceful Easy Feeling.
[Read more…]
This year’s nominations for the Academy Awards have been criticized for their lack of diversity despite the existence of worthy contenders. Even the president of the Academy expressed disappointment. Roy Wood Jr. reveals to Trevor Noah why it is so hard for black people to get even nominated and what they should do to get greater recognition.
[Read more…]
If we have a question about anything, however bizarre, the impulse for those of us with access to a computer would be to insert the query into a search engine and see what the internet throws up. But before that came into existence, people went to their neighborhood librarian and the January 2016 issue of Harper’s magazine has a list of some of the questions posed to the New York Public Library’s Reference and Research Services between 1940 and 1989.
[Read more…]
I sometimes embed graphics such as charts, graphs, cartoons, and other images in my posts. They are meant to appear in the body of the post and I check that they do before posting. But one reader Steve informs me that for him the graphic sometimes appears only as a link and he has to click on the link to see it which is, of course, a nuisance.
[Read more…]
The fourth Democratic party debate was spirited. While the positions of the candidates were already known to me, it would have been informative to the more casual voter. It was refreshing to hear people who are science and reality-based. There was no immigrant-bashing, refugee-bashing, or Muslim-bashing, and little chest-beating and jingoism about how America is the greatest country so suck on that, world! Yeah! (You can read the transcript here.)
[Read more…]