Here’s a 96-minute account of the historic Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.
Enjoy!
Each year, roughly 800,000 people are arrested for marijuana offenses. That amounts to one arrest every 42 seconds, which represents a great strain on the criminal justice system.
The irony in all of this is that Americans overwhelmingly oppose stiff penalties for marijuana offenses.
A new poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates shows that only 6 percent of Americans think pot-smokers should be jailed.
Moreover, a majority of respondents say they would support legislation that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting people who grow, possess or sell marijuana in states that have legalized it.
The Republican Party doesn’t often field black candidates for public office, but when it does, they’re usually wingnuts of the first order.
My favorite example is Alan Keyes, who was recruited from outside Illinois to carry the GOP banner against Barack Obama in a U.S. Senate race in 2004 (see HERE). But there have been others — Herman Cain and Allen West, to name just two.
And now there’s E.W. Jackson (above), a right-wing clergyman selected by the Republican Party of Virginia as its nominee for lieutenant governor.
Jackson is the homophobe’s homophobe, as he makes clear when he ...
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Writing in Scientific American, Patrick Mustain imagines THIS LETTER from the food industry to consumers:
Dear Consumers: A disturbing trend has come to our attention. You, the people, are thinking more about health, and you’re starting to do something about it. This cannot continue.
Sure, there’s always been talk of health in America. We often encourage it. The thing is, we only want you to think about and talk about health in a certain way—equating health with how you look, instead of outcomes like quality of life and reduced disease risk….
Whatever the current health trend, we respond by developing ...
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Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s detachment from reality is getting worse, as we see HERE:
While the Internal Revenue Service maintains it was not focusing on conservative groups out of political bias, Sen. Rand Paul claimed Sunday there was a “written policy” floating around the agency that said IRS officials were “targeting people who were opposed to the president.”
“And when that comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy,” the Republican senator from Kentucky said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Pressed for more precise details about the memo he was referring ...
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James Rosen (above), who worked at WREX-TV in Rockford for a while in the 1990s, is SAID to have been the subject of a federal investigation of leaks of classified information:
When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.
They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department ...
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Most of us rabid political partisans, whether lefties or righties, take special pleasure in citing what we see as the excessive rhetoric of certain people on the other side of the spectrum.
And so it is with me when right-wingers like Republican State Rep. Glenn Gruenhagen (above) of Minnesota spout their particular brand of nonsense.
Gruenhagen has been in office for little more than two years, but already he’s made quite a reputation for himself.
For example, he held a news conference a couple of months ago to denounce legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage. Homosexuality, he said, is a ...
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The RESULTS of a new CNN/ORC poll are mostly good news for President Obama.
The principal take-aways from this survey are these:
Fifty-three percent of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.
“That two-point difference is well within the poll’s sampling error, so it is a mistake to characterize it as a gain for the president,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Nonetheless, an approval rating that has not dropped and remains over 50% ...
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Stephanie Koontz, one of my favorite social historians, WARNS HERE about the potential pitfalls of nostalgia:
In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth.
In society at large, however, nostalgia can distort our understanding of the world in dangerous ways, making us needlessly negative about our current situation.
(Snip)
There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, ...
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Despite suggestions from such conservatives as Charles Krauthammer and Newt Gingrich to temper their rhetoric, more than a few Republicans these days are claiming that the so-called scandals that currently beset the Obama administration are the worst in American history.
Let’s knock down that nonsense with just two examples of past scandals, shall we?
For starters, the notion that Obama’s problems are worse than Watergate hardly merits discussion. Richard Nixon, after all, needed a presidential pardon from his successor, Gerald Ford, to keep him safe from criminal prosecution.
There is no evidence that Obama has committed any crimes, much less ...
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When U.S. Marines were shown providing umbrella coverage for President Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a Rose Garden news conference the other day (see top photo above), the right-wing noise machine went into high gear.
The prevailing opinion among the Obamaphobes was that it was disrespectful of the president to have uniformed members of the U.S. military hold his umbrella.
But, of course, Obama’s not the first president to so utilize our military men, as the photo above of George H.W. Bush will attest.
Sarah Palin’s snarky comment on Umbrella-gate (“Mr. President, when it rains it ...
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Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, whose skillful way with words usually exceeds her grasp of the facts, waxed indignant the other day over four cases in which conservative activists were targeted for tax audits.
It’s a scandal, Noonan averred.
Well, piffle!
Nate Silver, one of the best numbers-crunchers extant, rebuts Noonan’s column HERE:
Ms. Noonan is surely correct that many conservative taxpayers were audited. In fact, based on some simple math that I’ll present in a moment, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Mitt Romney voters were selected for an audit in 2012.
However, it’s also likely ...
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A Facebook friend of mine has dug up THIS WONDERFUL STORY from four years ago:
Bill Nye [above], the harmless children’s edu-tainer known as “The Science Guy,” managed to offend a select group of adults in Waco, Texas at a presentation, when he suggested that the moon does not emit light, but instead reflects the light of the sun.
As even most elementary-school graduates know, the moon reflects the light of the sun but produces no light of its own.
But don’t tell that to the good people of Waco, who were “visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence,” ...
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One morning back in 1977, I was having coffee with a certain prominent public official (an appointee, not a politician) whose judgment in most matters I usually respected.
Our conversation eventually turned to an upcoming local election, and this guy said he was pretty sure that Candidate A would easily defeat Candidate B. He based this prediction, he said, on the opinions he had heard from virtually all of his friends.
My own sense of the situation was that the election likely would be closer than this other guy thought, but I didn’t say so. This was an older gentleman, ...
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Most Americans are not following the controversies regarding the Internal Revenue Service and the Benghazi tragedy with especially intense interest, as we see HERE:
A majority of Americans are following both the controversy over the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi and the brewing IRS scandal – but at levels below historic averages, according to a new poll.
Fifty-four percent said they are closely following the story of how the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups, according to the Gallup survey on Thursday, and 53 percent are closely following Benghazi. For both stories, 22 percent were following “not too ...
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Ordinarily, I like to know what’s going on in the world. But I’m glad I didn’t know about THIS:
During 10 days in November 1983, the United States and the Soviet Union nearly started a nuclear war. Newly declassified documents from the CIA, NSA, KGB, and senior officials in both countries reveal just how close we came to mutually assured destruction — over a military exercise.
That exercise, Able Archer 83, simulated the transition by NATO from a conventional war to a nuclear war, culminating in the simulated release of warheads against the Soviet Union. NATO changed its readiness ...
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The right-wing noise machine has strongly implied, and falsely so, that the Obama administration doctored government emails concerning the Benghazi tragedy.
In truth, however, it was the Republicans themselves who doctored the emails. And a gullible reporter at ABC News peddled the falsifications to the public, as we see HERE:
Last week, ABC News’ Jon Karl [above] reported on emails that he said he’d obtained, that purported to show the process involved in developing the talking points on the September 11 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Once CNN’s Jake Tapper actually did obtain a real email, and the White House ...
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It’s probably safe to say that many Americans think the current “scandal” at the Internal Revenue Service is about who has to pay how much in taxes.
But that’s not the case, as Steven Rattner MAKES CLEAR:
One of the bigger ironies about the I.R.S. imbroglio is that it had nothing to do with taxes. These newly formed entities didn’t seek 501(c)(4) status to avoid taxes — these groups don’t earn profits and therefore don’t pay any taxes, regardless of their status. The important benefit that came from achieving 501(c)(4) status was freedom from having to disclose the names ...
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The image above, which I ran across on Facebook this morning, is based on an INTERVIEW of three months ago with actor Bruce Willis.
And, of course, it’s pure bunk.
Willis clearly doesn’t understand what the Second Amendment really means. It means what the Supreme Court says it means, not what the firearms industry and its mouthpieces at the National Rifle Association say it means.
As I’ve pointed out here on numerous occasions, Justice Antonin Scalia, the most conservative member of the Supreme Court, put it well when he wrote the majority opinion in a case of four years ago ...
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The Washington Post editorial board, which is not always as liberal as some conservatives seem to think it is, makes good sense in THIS CASE:
Republicans and conservative media obsessed with what they regard as the Obama administration’s scandalous coverup of the nature of the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last Sept. 11 have offered a shifting series of allegations. First they charged that U.N. Ambassador Susan E. Rice “willfully or incompetently misled the American public” when she appeared on news programs Sept. 16 and described the attack as having emerged from a spontaneous demonstration against ...
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