[ Posted Tuesday, January 30th, 2018 – 23:55 UTC ]
As usual, I hereby offer up my initial snap reactions after watching both President Trump's first official State Of The Union speech (last year's was just "an address to the Congress"), and the Democratic response. I like to do this before I dive in to what others may have opined about the speech, so as not to be influenced by any Washington media groupthink. Tomorrow morning, I'll be able to see who agreed with me and who didn't, of course.
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[ Posted Friday, January 26th, 2018 – 18:58 UTC ]
American women were in the news this week in a big way, on both sides of the political aisle. Last weekend, millions of women took to the streets to protest, once again, Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office. By the end of the week, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri was making headlines for his rather Neanderthal views on, as he put it, "modern womanhood."
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[ Posted Thursday, January 25th, 2018 – 16:27 UTC ]
We're all on the brink of entering a brave new world of self-driving cars, but what few have bothered to point out is that we're going to have to come up with an equally brave new world of legal liability in order to do so. Because nobody's really got an answer to a very basic legal question: if a self-driving car causes an accident, who gets sued? Who pays for damages and injuries? These are basic questions, but the answers are going to get complicated pretty fast.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 24th, 2018 – 18:38 UTC ]
The state of Vermont has just made some history. It has become the first state in the Union to legalize the recreational adult use of marijuana through its legislature. There was no citizens' referendum where the people voted the new law in; instead, representative democracy worked as designed -- a clear majority of Vermonters were in favor of legalization and their elected representatives actually represented this viewpoint by changing the law. This is important because there are many states like Vermont (24 in total) where the direct democracy of ballot initiatives never took hold. When the people can't directly vote on the issue, it is up to the state government to act, to put it another way. Vermont will become the ninth state with legal recreational marijuana this July, when the new law takes effect. Over one-fifth of the American population now lives where weed is legal. Marijuana legalization can now be said to have reached -- and passed -- the tipping point. There is no going back, at this point, to the failed War On Weed, which has been waged for approximately the last century of American history. All that is really left to happen is for the federal government to wake up to this new reality. That may still take a few years, but at this point it has to be seen as all but inevitable.
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[ Posted Friday, January 19th, 2018 – 18:46 UTC ]
Where we find ourselves as a nation: this week, the not-at-all-liberal Wall Street Journal broke the story that Donald Trump paid off a porn star mere days before the 2016 election, to the tune of $130,000, to keep her silence about an affair they had right after he had married his third wife. It was later revealed by In Touch Weekly magazine that Trump had compared the porn star (stage name: Stormy Daniels) favorably with his daughter. And yet this news didn't even really break onto the front pages. After one year of President Trump, such a revelation is considered minor news, in other words. That's where we find ourselves as a nation, folks.
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[ Posted Monday, January 15th, 2018 – 18:26 UTC ]
I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award in behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice.
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[ Posted Friday, January 12th, 2018 – 18:17 UTC ]
The mainstream media crossed two cultural lines this week, in reaction to one of the most offensive things any American president has ever been caught saying. The first line crossed was to overrule the censors. Standards and practices can't complain when a word used on the news is a direct quote from the president, after all. That would be censorship of a different (and darker) type. Still, last night we were rather surprised to here a reporter on the evening NBC news broadcast actually use the word "shithole." No bleeping, no asterisks, just: here is what the president called some African countries. On broadcast (i.e., non-cable) television, at 5:30 P.M. (not some late-night broadcast, in other words). That is a first in America, to be sure. The Washington Post used Trump's unexpurgated, unbowdlerized quote in so many headlines today it was tough to keep an accurate count.
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[ Posted Friday, January 5th, 2018 – 18:46 UTC ]
What's that you say? Trump's golfing wasn't the big story this week? There was, in fact a Wolff at the door, and nobody's certain yet whether Trump lives in a house built of straw(men) or brick (as in: "thick as a...")?
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[ Posted Thursday, January 4th, 2018 – 18:59 UTC ]
While I do realize there are all kinds of things happening in the political world right now -- not least among them the juicy slugfest between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump -- all of that is going to have to wait for another day (which is to say, tomorrow's column). Instead, I feel compelled to again write about the same subject I wrote about yesterday. Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to have cast himself into the role of King Canute, desperately ordering the incoming tide to halt and turn back. This didn't work out so well for Canute, and it is not going to work for Sessions, either.
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[ Posted Wednesday, January 3rd, 2018 – 19:21 UTC ]
For the third day in a row, marijuana is legally available for both purchase and consumption in California, for purely recreational purposes, to any adult age 21 or older. Also, for the third day in a row: the sky did not fall, the sun still rose in the east, and people are not rioting in the streets. Astonishingly, it turned out to be only an acorn that beaned Chicken Little, and none of the dire hellscapes predicted -- for almost a century -- by the government, the Puritans, and the likes of Nancy Reagan has yet come to pass. It's just another day, in fact, little different from all the tens of thousands of days when marijuana was prohibited.
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