Carl Matthes: Apparenlty, Republicans want politicians to control all the wombs in the nation. And, they don’t care if women are raped or hurt to make their point.
Tradition and Change at Thanksgiving
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Steve Hochstadt: Maybe because it happens slowly, we don’t notice how often we must re-create our habits, our daily routines. Jobs change, neighbors move, and the great events of family life add and subtract loved ones from our lives.
Independence Day, For Some
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In 1852, former slave and legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass was invited to give a speech at a 4th of July event to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Mexican Spring: Occupy Moves South
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Unai Montes-Irueste: Mexico’s youth, the leaders of the “Mexican Spring,” are not copycats, they are building on a foundation that activists laid over one year before the “Arab Spring.”
Occupy the Winter of Our Discontent
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David Swanson: Above all: stay! Continue to hold public space! Grow, and rotate people. No single person need stay forever. But the 99% of the 99% that cheers from the sidelines needs to get into the squares and parks.
MLK Would Oppose Today’s Wars
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William Loren Katz: Would Dr. King have called for withdrawal from Vietnam and, had he lived, not called for a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan? Would he have failed to see parallels that are as obvious as they are frightening?
‘10 Commandments Judge’ Running for President
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Walter Brasch: The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was removed from office for defying the Constitution and a federal court order is one of 14 major candidates running for the Republican nomination for the presidency.
Michele Bachmann’s Lack of Historical Awareness
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Sharon Kyle: What happens when a serious presidential candidate endorses a document that glosses over the holocaust conditions African-Americans endured for 100s of years
North Country Twit
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Tom Degan: Michele Bachmann maintains that the Founding Fathers ended slavery, huh? She is off by years. Four score and seven years, to be exact. She also pegged John Quincy Adams as one of “the very founders that wrote those documents.” He must have been quite the prodigy. When the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, 8 year old John Quincy Adams was one week shy of his ninth birthday!
The American Dream
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Tom Degan: This, I believe, is one of the most important and educational films ever made. It explains in terms easy to understand (and with brilliant satirical insight) what has happened to this once-great nation, and why we all need to stand up and take it back.
Checks and Balances
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Ron Wolff: Government is simply the institutionalization over time of the collective will of the people at any given moment, established with at least one essential objective in mind: the prevention of the inevitable chaos that would result in its absence.
‘Well, That Freedom Ain’t for Me’
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Berry Craig: The show featured a slave mother’s explanation of the Declaration of Independence to her young son. “…Freedom isn’t something that these men plan on giving us,” she said. “…All of this talk is about them getting their freedom, or more freedom because they’re already free….I told him, ‘Son, these are the same men that will beat Negroes nearly half to death…They call us, who God has created, their property…No, son, these men will not free you. And my son looked at me and said ‘Well, that freedom ain’t for me.’
Tea Baggers: The Great American Debate Recommences
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Louise W. Knight: The Tea Party campaign raises again the issues first fought out when the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation in the 1780s.
Friday Feedback: Martin Luther King Jr. Belongs to All of Us
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Friday Feedback: Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream doesn’t just belong to any one particular group. It belongs to all of us. The civil rights struggle is a human rights struggle, and the LGBT community should be a part of it.
Rediscovering Principles — But Which Ones?
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Ron Wolff: Appointed judges, intellectual and political elites, mainstream journalists, bureaucrats, and Europeans — the customary targets of conservatives — fall victim to his keyboard. He almost equates property rights to the means of pursuing happiness, totally ignoring reams of evidence to the contrary. (As we know from last week’s article, nobody expects a correlation any more between belief systems and evidence.)
In War, Winners Can Be Losers
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Of course, a case can be made that it is better for a nation to win a war than to lose it. But perhaps it is time to learn from the world’s tragic, blood-stained history that there is a third alternative: using our intelligence and creativity to resolve conflicts without war.
Sotomayor IS a Wise Latina, and Our Court Needs Her
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Exposure to a wide range of life experiences and education are the keys to progress. Judge Sotomayor has had both the benefits of that exposure and the formal as well as practical education necessary to make her a wise Latina justice of the Supreme Court.
Tips for Celebrating the Fourth
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First off, get a jump on your neighbors. Don’t wait till Saturday, when “independence” will be so day-before-yesterday. Today, rush down to your neighborhood fireworks stand, grab a small family pack, and wait till dusk. Then go out to your driveway and light up a few to celebrate the 233rd anniversary the Congressional resolution of [...]
Independence Day Edition!
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Evolutionary psychology teaches us that it may take as many as 1,000 generations for even an exceptionally beneficial genetic mutation to permeate an entire species. It is not surprising, then, that a mere ten generations after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, American human nature has (apparently) changed negligibly, if at all. This point [...]
The Consent of the Governed
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“… to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men [and women], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” — Declaration of Independence “Your people, Mr. Jefferson, are a great beast.” So said Alexander Hamilton, the leader of America’s first conservative party, to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the [...]
End “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
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Shortly after Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he attempted to push the U.S. military to openly accept the reality that it had gays and lesbians in its ranks. Colin Powell, then Clinton’s top general, and Sam Nunn, the powerful Democratic Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, nixed the effort by arguing that coming [...]
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