Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of a Violent Faith Jon Krakauer, 2003 Having torn through Krakauer’s earlier books, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, I had every expectation that this book would be an up-all-night page-turner, and I wasn’t disappointed. What I didn’t expect, though, was that it would end up being [...]
The GOP strategy for achieving its already media-trumpeted 2010 landslide is shaping up, and it has to be admired for its sheer audacity, as well as its desperate but hardly unwarranted reliance on the media continuing to be as stupid as it was throughout the Bush years. Richard Cohen, David Broder, and David Gregory are [...]
I guess it’s a matter of priorities. It seems that the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, DC has officially announced, well, threatened, that if the DC City Council approves gay marriage, they would “no longer to be able” to do any charitable work under city contract. So there. My first thought is that this same question [...]
A case is currently wending its way through the courts that ironically may be decided on precedents set back during the civil rights movement, originally intended to protect civil rights activists from retaliation by racist state and local governments. Political activism by African Americans was, shall we say, less than encouraged in the Jim Crow [...]
The right has fallen into something of a rut of late; so deliriously successful have they been with their strategy of dramatically doing and saying the most outrageous and vile things they can think of and then even more dramatically wailing, fainting, and demanding sympathy (and of course revenge) over the entirely predictable reaction, that [...]
Since the shocking but grimly unsurprising murder this morning of “abortion doctor” George Tiller by an O’Reilly-sodden and Operation Rescue-enamored righty nutcase, I got a curious sense of deja vu, and reading more, have developed a bleak acceptance that this is the new normal. The anti-sex movement, which includes “pro-lifers” as well as gay bashers [...]
Well, what a surprise. In filing belated expense disclosures with the State of California after a failed bid to keep donors secret, which is against California law, the Mormons report that in addition to the $20 million its members donated to the Yes on 8 campaign, it seems that the church itself coughed up about [...]