Why evangelicals and Catholic leaders are against contraception

Why do the leaders of some religious groups like the Catholics and now even evangelicals oppose contraception, to the extent of even objecting to health insurance policies covering it? After all, access to safe, reliable, and easy contraception has to be one of the most beneficial advances that society has made. And the fact that 99% of all sexually active women use some form of birth control suggests that women are quietly ignoring the words of their religious leaders. [Read more…]

The Tea Party up close and personal

After writing about Max Blumenthal, I recalled earlier work that he did on US domestic politics and a short documentary in 2010 that took a look at the Tea Party and its wealthy backers and the racist messages that drove much of the rhetoric. It was the standard Blumenthal method of going to their meetings and talking with them and you can see the angry reaction from people like the late Andrew Breitbart, while Blumenthal remains calm with a smile on his face. (For some reason, the 28-minute documentary is followed by 12 minutes of a blank screen.) [Read more…]

Revisiting the issue of scientism

In my earlier posts on scientism (see here and here), I said that I never used the word myself since I was not quite sure what it meant and tended to agree with Sean Carroll that the word was being tossed around with too many different meanings that made it not helpful in discourse. One commenter said that the word had a long and illustrious history and that the Oxford English Dictionary had a clear definition. So I went and looked it up. [Read more…]

The Republican civil war takes shape

While America has shifted into the mode of near-constant electioneering, even numbered years are particularly bad since they feature elections to House and Senate seats. Matt Taibbi writes that one thing that will be interesting to watch is the Republican party leadership trying to wrest back control from the very people they promoted in years gone by as the ‘real Americans’. He says that the US Chamber of Commerce is bankrolling this effort to the tune of $50 million to prevent ‘loser’ candidates from being the party’s nominees. [Read more…]

Max Blumenthal on the Israeli apartheid state

Joshua Frank interviews Max Blumenthal about his new book Goliath and how it has exposed the many PEPs (progressive except for Palestine) in the US who will talk freely against injustice except when it comes to the apartheid policies of Israel and the support it gets from the US government and Congress as a result of the powerful Israel lobby. On this issue, the PEPs become strangely silent or attack those who try to bring greater awareness to what life in Israel is really like. [Read more…]

NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston vs. Glenn Greenwald

I have written harshly in the past about NPR’s national security correspondents Tom Gjelten and Dina Temple-Raston, describing them as serving pretty much as mouthpieces for the national security state. I came across this clip from a conference at New York University in 2010 in which from the audience she posed a question regarding Anwar al-Awlaki to Glenn Greenwald who was on the panel that showed how much she is locked into the mindset of believing what the government tells her. The exchange between her and Greenwald is very revealing. [Read more…]

The sad plight of poor people in Republican-controlled states

It turns out that about 6 million people have signed up for lower-cost health insurance under either the health care exchanges or are eligible for the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, the latter being designed to take care of those who earned too little to be eligible for the former. That is undoubtedly good news. [Read more…]