Congressional districts are required to be redrawn after every census that occurs every decade. They have to be contiguous and to represent a limited range of numbers of people but beyond that the process is pretty much up for grabs. Whoever has the power to draw the lines can do so to achieve their own goals, such as to create safe seats for one party or to unite (or disperse) a particular ethnic or racial group, and so on. [Read more…]
On Tuesday morning, the news headlines on the radio that I listen to while having breakfast mentioned that president Obama had shaken hands with Cuban president Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. I immediately said to myself that this would be treated as a huge story in our shallow media and I was not disappointed. [Read more…]
The Daily Show gives a summary of all the assurances we were given about what the NSA was doing that turn out to have been false. [Read more…]
Role reversal can be a useful gauge of when something is unfair, but not always, and it has to be used judiciously. Take the case of racism. One occasionally hears complaints that minorities or people of color can say things that would be condemned as racist if others did it, and this is labeled as a form of ‘reverse racism’. [Read more…]
I came across these cartoons that seemed relevant to the recent post on the class warfare currently being waged by the one-percenters against everyone else. [Read more…]
Sesame Street parodies are fun to watch and I liked this James Bond one. Note how the music is evocative of the originals without infringing on the copyright, though I doubt anyone would be so crass as to sue Sesame Street
Interestingly, this parody featured a woman as the villain and it got me to wondering if any of the villains in the Bond films had been women. I have seen many but not all of the films, and all the evildoers have been men. [Read more…]
If there is one thing that really makes my blood boil, it is smug, rich people coming up with arguments as to why people who are barely surviving on what they earn should not be paid more. These people are disgusting human beings. I honestly cannot understand how you can be so lacking in basic human decency that you think that it is actually a good thing for people to live in constant anxiety about how to make ends meet. The fact that children are also among those affected does not seem to bother them in the least. [Read more…]
It seems like every year, I keep forgetting to start the war on Christmas and before I realize it, there are only a few days left for me to destroy the holiday. But then I realized that there are some Christians who specialize in finding some event somewhere that enables them to conjure up how the godless are oppressing them and express righteous indignation over it. [Read more…]
Jesus and Mo have figured it out.
I wrote earlier about the puzzling insistence of the Republican party pursuing policies on birth control that are guaranteed to alienate women. Jonathan Capehart describes how they seem to be deliberately pursuing policies that alienate African Americans and Latinos as well. [Read more…]