We are currently being inundated with polls and it is easy to become overwhelmed, with the risk of whiplash as one poll jerks you one way to be followed immediately by another in a different direction. The media will highlight any new poll, especially if it is a surprising outlier, and even more so if it supports their desired narrative of a close race, thus whipping up interest in following the news. [Read more…]
Conservative circles are buzzing at the release of a new home video that was taken by Barack Obama’s father during his actual birth. Although old and grainy, the video clearly shows a white woman giving birth to a baby, with Obama’s mother’s name (Ann Dunham) on her chart, her photo, a calendar open to the month of August 1961, and a flag of Kenya. This proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Obama was born in Kenya. [Read more…]
The Maryland Marriage Alliance, the group leading the effort against the referendum that grants equal rights to same-sex marriages in that state, has been careful to try and not appear to be religious hatemongers, arguing that they do not oppose gays or gay rights in general, but that their goal is limited to only objecting to extending marriage to cover their unions. [Read more…]
I am not generally a fan of insult humor of the kind made famous by Don Rickles, which consists of rude put downs of the other person. I tend to prefer the more subtle forms. [Read more…]
The statistics on rape in the US are truly horrible. On average, a woman is raped every two minutes and every year about 32,000 women get pregnant because of rape. One needs to keep those numbers in mind to understand why Republican Senate candidates like Richard Mourdock (who thinks that rape is god’s will) and Todd Akin keep saying these crazy things that either minimize rape or suggest that women were asking for it or simply have to deal with the consequences. They cannot stomach allowing that many abortions. And they are by no means the only such people in the Republican party. [Read more…]
In my book The Achievement Gap in US Education, I emphasized the distortions in thinking that can occur when people unquestioningly take the performance or behavior of one group (usually the majority group) as the norm and/or desirable, and evaluate all other groups by how they compare with that standard. [Read more…]
For reasons that are not at all clear to me, Fox News seems to think that the story of the attack on the US consulate in Banghazi that resulted in the deaths of four diplomats is a huge story in this election and is pushing it relentlessly, though there is no evidence that people care that much about it. [Read more…]
I have been railing at the use of drone attacks that have killed so many innocent people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and possibly other countries that we have not heard about. But since there is bipartisan consensus on this issue in the US, there has been hardly any serious discussion here, as can be seen from the fact that it has not been a factor at all in the election. [Read more…]
Documentarian Laura Poitras is one of this year’s MacArthur Fellows, the so-called ‘Genius’ awards. Poitras is working on the last of a trilogy about the post-9/11 war on terror. The first one My Country, My Country is about the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the elections in that country is 2005. It was nominated for an Academy Award. Here is the trailer. [Read more…]
You have to hand it to Barack Obama, despite all the reports of him being aloof and professorial, he does come across as a person who is comfortable and relaxed in public, quite unlike Mitt Romney who seems to be always on the edge of saying something that will be awkward. [Read more…]