Posts under ‘Current Events’

I’m peripherally familiar with Frank Schaeffer – the man who, with his father, Francis Schaeffer, played an important role in the establishment of the Religious Right in the 1970s and 1980s. It wasn’t until I read Mark Morford’s article and clicked on the link that led to a YouTube video of Rachel Maddow interviewing Frank [...]

Apparently, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stepped on some toes with his speech at the United Nations. France led the exodus, as twelve countries walked out while Ahmadinejad delivered what some sources called a “fiery” speech that addressed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other topics. Mark Kornblau, the spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, [...]

I’ve held off on posting the final part of Sara Robinson’s series of essays on fascism in America for fear of turning off my readers. The popular picture of fascism, with references to Hitler and Mussolini, just clashes too harshly with our national mythology, doesn’t it? Fascism is sneaky – it doesn’t always look like [...]

A sentence from President George W. Bush’s address to Ms. Mostoller’s class at Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington, D.C. on October 1, 1991: “Write me a letter — and I’m serious about this one — write me a letter about ways you can help us achieve our goals.” Here is the entire speech, [...]

Strong words for a title, no doubt. But justified, I think. In the short 4 months that I took off from blogging (I didn’t visit my political links at all), I am just shocked at how sharply the environment has changed. Every link I go to, which is, of course, a progressive link (I have [...]

The following is a continuation of a three-part series by Sara Robinson, published on August 11, 2009 on the Campaign for America blog. At the end of the article; I have added two links, one to an explanation of how hate radio played an important part in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and another to [...]

On September 11, 1970, Spiro Agnew, in an address to the California Republican state convention in San Diego, uttered these famous words (crafted by William Safire): “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club — the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs [...]

I’ve watched a few videos of the Tea Party rallies around the country and what strikes me about almost all of them is that there is an inchoate rage against the government. People are furious about the approach that the Federal government has taken to resolve the financial crisis but they lack the education and [...]

For further evidence that low-RWA liberals, moderates, and conservatives should not let their guard down against the high-RWA religious right, here is a portion of an essay posted by Robert Altemeyer, the author of The Authoritarians, on his website. You can read The Authoritarians and the complete essay there, free of charge. I’m not sure [...]

A friend sent me a link to the following essay by Leonard Pitts, whom I greatly admire as a writer. It isn’t news to any of us that the culture wars are still raging, even though part of the reason so many of us voted for President Obama is because we were thoroughly tired of [...]