In today’s New York Times, Adam Liptak details another case in which judges and prosecutors obstinately defend a wrong decision and thereby put a man’s life at stake. The headline of the article, “Lawyers Stumble, and Clients Take Fall” says it all: A man on Alabama’s death row may fry because his attorney—addicted to meth […]
Read More… from Why do prosecutors and judges obstruct justice?
Whenever there is a contentious issue between the two dominant political parties, the Democrats and many Republicans immediately depict their positions as better for the middle class. Below you’ll find a few of the thousands of quotes which put the middle class front and center in the recent “fiscal cliff” confrontation. I place “fiscal cliff” […]
Read More… from With all this talk of helping the middle class, both parties ignore the poor
On the Sunday before Christmas (or the Sunday after, when the celebration of the birth of Christ comes on Saturday) the color comic section is always full of the holiday. For example, today the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette offers 24 comics in a 4-page color comic insert of which 16 focus on Christmas. If we remove the […]
Read More… from Sunday comics reflect mass media’s desire to commercialize Christmas
In his press conference on the Sandy Hook elementary school slaughter of the innocents today, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) executive vice president, gave new meaning to the term American exceptionalism, the theory that there is something inherently different about the United States from other nations. LaPierre blamed violent video games, movies and […]
Through the years, I have read and heard four basic arguments by those who oppose gun control. Those who favor making it easier for people to buy and carry guns repeat these arguments with an almost religious fever, as if the incontrovertible logic of their statements trumps all other facts and reasoning. But careful examination […]
Read More… from None of the four arguments against gun control make any sense when you analyze them
Now is the time to put the pressure on elected officials, gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association (NRA) to strengthen gun control laws. What I’m talking about is a rapid fire assault of letters, emails and tweets. Let’s prove that sometimes the pen can be mightier than the sword and the gun. I’m asking […]
Read More… from Now’s the time for a rapid fire assault on gun manufacturers and elected officials
To think that the killing of 32 college students at Virginia Tech in 2007 once marked for many the epitome of the unspeakably horrific. Now we see even worse—the mass murder of 20 children aged 5-10 and seven of their teachers, followed by the killer’s suicide. What could be worse than the killing of these […]
Read More… from Instead of trying to stop voters from voting, states should stop semi-automatics
George Will told “The Big Lie” in his column this week, which I read in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review as “Off the cliff of credibility.” Long-time followers of the pseudo intellectual Will know he is capable of telling a whopper. His Wikipedia biography details a fib he told in a 2009 article about global warming, which […]
Read More… from George Will plays the intellectual but tells the “big lie”
It’s amazing that the right-wing ideologues in the news media continue to use failed slogans and continue to take repudiated positions. It’s as if there has been a message retrenchment to the basics of Romneyism among media stalwarts. I didn’t realize that the right-wing media was channeling Romney’s worst until earlier this week when channel […]
Read More… from The right wing persists in using failed slogans and attitudes
One of the minor threads in the vast patchwork quilt called anti-intellectualism in the mass media is the assault on merit scholarships for college students. For example, the New York Times used today’s report on the effort of the University of Oklahoma to attract National Merit Scholarship winners to treat the practice of giving these […]