This one is mostly indoors boys and girls, so don’t worry about the sunscreen lotion and come right in!

I’m giving up officially. On politics. Specifically, American politics. I was raised in what my mother regularly called “a Democratic kitchen” in the South, by parents who had been Roosevelt Democrats. My father cast his first vote as a 21 year-old for FDR’s second term. Four years after that, my [...]

In this interview, Loewen links the Civil War era to the later era known as the Nadir of Race Relations (1890-1940), and further, to the modern day Neo-Confederate movement, which tends to look amazingly like it’s twin brother…the Tea Party.

Join me vicariously for another desktop vacation. In this installment I share my photos from around the Chesapeake Bay.

When the only thing that’s enough is too much…

So I’m out on my driveway washing my car last weekend, when my neighbor walks by. He is an old Chinese guy in his late 90s. I see him often, making his way to the corner and back, a distance of about 40 yards. The round trip takes him about [...]

The man on the motorcycle is dead.  He was twenty-two, a motorcycle enthusiast, murdered and from Puerto Rico.  His wish was to be embalmed and posed this way and his wish, like the wish of another murdered twenty-four year old in this country (posed standing upright in his mother’s living [...]

I. History of Nowruz Imagine it’s the fifth century before the Common Era, on a plain bejeweled with a magnificent palace complex and flowing gardens, with the coffee brown Zagros mountains in the distance, and a sky the color of lapis lazuli. Colorful tents and scents all around, wafting in [...]

I thought God might be pleased with the Texas education board putting him into their textbooks (he likes to try to stay ahead of Paris Hilton in popularity) but he instead asked me to publish this blog for Him: Okay, I may be Old Testament School but though I’m flattered [...]

Texas has just officially doomed generations of their children to ignorance and being oddities in their grasp of history and reality…because neither of those items supported the political views of conservatives and Republicans. I normally keep my quotes to a minimum but there is so much outrageousness here, I couldn’t [...]

Holi (pronounced ho-lee), also known as Phagwa, is marked at the transition from the Hindu months Phalguna to Chaitra. The Hindu calendar being lunisolar, this date changes every year. In 2010 it fell on March 1st. Besides India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, it is observed by the South Asian diaspora [...]

WHAT IS HATE SPEECH? Hate speech is the kind of speech used to denigrate an individual or a group of people because of something about them, such as their race, ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ideology, social class, or physical appearance. Speech is considered written or oral [...]

    I am bothered by movies, such as “Saw” and “Hostel”, that, to me, serve no purpose other than to depict the extremes of human pain and cruelty. I confess to having never watched a film from either of those series, nor have I watched a Hannibal Lector movie, [...]

While the subject of hate is complex, hate itself can be divided into two general categories: rational and irrational. Unjust acts inspire rational hate. Who but the most spiritual or the most philosophic of us could argue that hatred of someone who had maliciously harmed us or our loved ones [...]

Taking Action Against The SCOTUS Decision! A couple of weeks ago I posted in the Time Out..O/T post an alert from CREDO Action Alert and asked everyone to sign the petition.  The petition was on for a FCC hearing. The hearing was on internet freedom.  According to CREDO and another [...]

Preface I recently wrote an article about the upcoming trial of Scott Roeder. There have been numerous responses to the article, and many have been both thoughtful and passionate. I began to write this as a responses to some of those posts in the hopes of offering both explanation and [...]

Ashura 1388 – December 27, 2009, begins over 1,300 years ago. During the three year reign of Yazid I (680-683 CE) of the Ummayad Caliphate, one man refused to swear allegiance to the caliph, he was Hossein, son of Ali, the father whom Shi’as believe the Prophet Mohammad designated to [...]

Lately there has been alot of talk in the air of progressives that are not satisfied with the way things are going in this country.  At the beginning of this year, there was such a euphoria that we had a change agent in Washington, but I think alot of people thought [...]

Cartoon by Jeff Parker – Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com – http://www.cagle.com/news/Thanksgiving09/main.asp I saw this cartoon and I had to share it with everyone.  It says so much of the worldview of our conservative brethran, and yet if it was the shoe on the other foot…

Everyone wants to know why more hasn’t been done in the last 10 months than actually has occurred.  There are a lot of reasons. 1)      The President is a CEO, and few CEOs can come in and change the direction of their company immediately.  There is just too much resistant [...]

With war raging in Europe and knowing it was only a matter of time before America became involved, Jacqueline Cochran, the most famous female pilot next to Amelia Earhart, met with Eleanor Roosevelt and General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, to discuss a program which would employ women pilots, to free the [...]

13 Aban 1388 / November 4th, 2009 began with an early morning 4.9 earthquake near the southeastern port city of Bandar-e Abbas. But, 850 miles away to the north in Tehran, there were other tremors brewing beginning around 9:00 AM.

Our words are what define us as a society, in many ways.  Words may be turned into images, such as plays, or movies, or even defined further through actions associated with the words, but it is the words that hold the definition. Many speak of those who have fought for [...]

Bush used what he called patriotism as a wedge to defend his disastrous policies.  But he was not being patriotic he was being nationalistic.  The difference between the two are often conflated by those like Bush and Cheney that want to use the word patriotism for political ends. NATIONALISTS, follow [...]

I previously had thought only conservatives revised history to fit the memes of the modern day but it seems like progressives are playing that game as well. We have all heard the right wing revisions of history like FDR was not successful at ending the Great Depression when the truth [...]