Rights and Democracy
Proving Innocence
Imagine being locked up on death row for 20 long years with no physical evidence linking you to the crime. You’ve been convicted thanks to “eyewitnesses,” most of whom have changed their stories. How would you feel as you face the executioner?
Anti-Gay Bullying Requires Strong Action by Schools
September was a bleak month that demonstrated the deadly toll anti-gay bullying can take on young lives. Four young men in four different states committed suicide after being harassed by classmates because they were gay or were perceived to be gay.
Responsible for his own Words
You’ve probably heard by now about the latest outrage against free speech committed by the supposedly Radical Left-Wing Mainstream Media. Juan Williams, Fox News’s house black liberal, was fired from his day job at National Public Radio because he told Bill O’Reilly, Fox’s Prince of Fairness and Balance, that he got nervous when a Muslim-looking person got on a plane with him.
Public TV? It Would Be a Good Idea
Asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi supposedly replied, “I think it would be a good idea.” The same could be said about U.S. public television.
The Year of the Screwball
This is going to go down as the Year of the Screwball Election. Never before have so many nutcases, whackos, and practicing lunatics come out of their caves to run for public office.
Private Broadcasting
Sheriff Joe Arpaio: A Modern-Day Bull Connor
In April 1963, while confined to jail in Birmingham, Alabama for leading peaceful civil rights demonstrations in what was then considered to be the most segregated city in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote an open letter challenging a group of local ministers and the nation to speak out against the brutal, segregationist tactics of the infamous Birmingham police commissioner, Bull Connor. Forty-seven years later, in Maricopa County, Arizona, there’s another police official who seems bent on defying the Constitutional rights of non-white, law-abiding citizens.
Tied to the Tracks
If life were an old-fashioned movie serial we’d be at the scene where Barack Obama is tied to railroad tracks while an oncoming train sounds in the distance.
Whitman’s House
Four Hundred Thousand Reasons to Vote
Alan Simpson, the co-chair of President Obama’s task force on deficit reduction, insulted those who depend on Social Security–many of them older women, children, and people with disabilities–by referring to the program as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” Earlier, Simpson described the millions who depend on Social Security benefits as “lesser people.”
