After wrestling with a small mountain of data over the holiday weekend, I realized that my background in socio-cultural studies is too slim to write the kind of article I’d like to write about the recent influence of the right wing’s plunge into Judeo-Christianity on American culture. I can look at the tortures of [...]

If you haven’t yet heard of the “Downing Street Minutes” (aka “Downing Street Memo), that’s understandable. This remarkable document hasn’t made much of a splash in the mainstream media, and certainly isn’t as flashy as the Michael Jackson trial.
If you’re okay with the explanations to how we got into the mess in Iraq, don’t bother [...]

I am neck-deep into writing and researching the inflence of the ultraright wing in modern culture. It’s very much like seeing a palimpsest emerge, with the first and strongest lines emerging around religious intolerance, torture, and dominionism. To do it justice I’m going to have to serialize it. My goal is to release the first [...]

To celebrate the return of some form of maturity in the United States Senate, today’s New York Times Editorial complains that “it’s not terribly encouraging to see how low the bar is for joining the moderate camp,” and goes on to point out that “several staunch [...]

I’ve spent most of the last two days assembling facts and quotes about right-wing influence on modern American culture, and have come to the conclusion that this article deserves more time than I’ve been able to give the usual fare here. So, in lieu of making a sub-standard post on something inane, I’m going to [...]

On stem cells, roses, and the fallacies inherent in the “culture of life” philosophy.
All life has intrinsic value.
I was inspecting our new roses this weekend, removing pests, fertilizing the soil after this month’s nearly incessant rains, removing any weeds lest the beautiful, fragrant flowering hedge in my dreams become choked with noxious sow thistle [...]

I had another one of those gawd-awful deja-vu moments just now, reading this article at DailyKos. The offending quote is this one, uttered by none other than our president, George “W Stands for Witless” Bush:
“But I have made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers’ money, to promote science [...]

No Toto, we’re not in Nazi Germany anymore. Or Korea or Vietnam during the wars. But we might as well be:
Mr. Dilawar asked for a drink of water, and one of the two interrogators, specialist Joshua R. Claus, 21, picked up a large plastic bottle. But first he punched a hole in the bottom, the [...]

According to CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll, I am one of the 25% of Americans who knows what a “blog” is. Of that fraction, I am one of 32% that can claim to be “very familiar” with them. And, to my astonishment and dismay, I am one of a very slim 2% who reads blogs with political content [...]

It was a sad moment for me when I read that Newsweek had officially retracted their Periscope article on prisoner abuses at Guantanamo Bay. It was a sadder moment for the so-called “free and independent press” and for American democracy. For those of you who haven’t been following the story, it’s really pointless for me [...]