Acts of violence against individuals are deplorable. But there seems to be something especially despicable about attacking someone purely because of that person’s ethnicity or gender or sexuality. This type of violence seems to be driven by hate for what people are as opposed to violence committed for gain (say as part of a robbery) or that is random and can be blamed on the pathological mental state of the perpetrator. [Read more…]
Rand Paul clearly has ambitions of running for the presidency, if not in 2016 then later. He got a lot of press for going to Howard University to talk about GOP outreach to the African-American community. It was not a big success, unless he was trying to get a negative reaction from the students there in order to improve his standing with the GOP base, which sees all minorities as moochers. [Read more…]
Whenever I give a talk, as I did recently, on the fight over the teaching of evolution in schools, I am almost always asked why these take place mostly in the US. That is not exactly true but in many other countries, there is no equivalent of the Establishment Clause that people can appeal to to keep religion out of the affairs of the state and so there is little recourse to the courts. In other countries, religion is either so deeply entrenched that the dominance of religious views are taken for granted or religion is so weak (in most of the developed world) that it is not a serious issue or gets resolved in the political arena. [Read more…]
As some of you know, the US Congress actually passed a law that was signed by president Obama named the Magnitsky Act requiring the administration to impose sanctions on those people deemed to be responsible for the death of Russian whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Not surprisingly, the Russian government deemed this to be interference in its internal affairs and responded by banning adoption of Russian babies by Americans. [Read more…]
It is no secret that there is considerable friction between the extreme fiscal wing of the GOP and its extreme social/religious one. The former occupy the top levels of the national party leadership and care mainly about helping the wealthy get wealthier at the expense of the rest of us, and have for long used conservative social issues mainly as a way to fire up their base and get them to vote for them. They managed to keep the nutters out of leadership positions in the party and tossed the crazies a few rhetorical crumbs now and then to keep them happy. [Read more…]
As I have said before, when religions are in the minority, they tend to emphasize tolerance and acceptance of diverse views. It is only when they get political power or influence that they reveal their true intolerant natures. Even if they do not become a state religion, as long as political leaders feel they are important enough to pander to, they start to suppress anyone or anything that opposes them. [Read more…]
The trials taking place at Guantanamo are pretty much a sham, a mockery, designed to produce guilty verdicts at all costs. Scott Horton describes them as a theater of the absurd and thinks that they may on the verge of collapse.
He describes what has happened, including that conversations that defense lawyers were having with their clients were being monitored. He also says that the Obama administration and its military spokespeople have been consistently lying about what was going on, retreating only when their lies were exposed. [Read more…]
Glenda Jackson was a wonderful actor, nominated four times within the space of six years for Best Actress Academy Awards and winning twice, in 1971 and 1974. She retired from acting and went into politics, and was elected as a Labour Party member of the British parliament in 1992 and has served continuously since then. She has been a strong voice for progressive causes and was a thorn in the side of the odious and unctuous Tony Blair, who was her party leader. She announced that she would retire from politics at the end of her current term, which would be 2015 unless elections are called earlier. [Read more…]
So as expected, president Obama released his budget proposals with his offer to make cuts in Social Security (via the chained CPI) in return for some tax hikes. And as equally expected, some leading Republicans are now saying that it is the Democrats who are trying to balance the budget on the backs of seniors by cutting benefits in social services and that they are going to defend it (see here and here). [Read more…]
Robert Ingersoll was a decade-long customer of Arlene’s Flowers & Gifts, a store in the town of Richland, WA who had often asked the proprietor Baronelle Stutzman to send flowers and other gifts to his partner Curt Freed. After the state passed a referendum last November legalizing same-sex marriage, Ingersoll and Freed decided to get married and Ingersoll naturally turned to Stutzman to provide flowers for his wedding. To his surprise, she refused saying that “I am sorry. I can’t do your wedding because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.” even though she had long known about his relationship. [Read more…]