For Shelby Steele, all of the problems that President Obama now has or will ever have are caused by the self-importance Obama derives from being black.

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Wes… Read full post »

For Shelby Steele, all of the problems that President Obama now has or will ever have are caused by the self-importance Obama derives from being black.

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Wes… Read full post »

Yesterday, Eldrick "Tiger" Woods announced that he's going to play in this year's Masters Golf Tournament.  As a media event, "Tiger Woods at the Masters" will be bigger than big.  It will be bigger than Obama, bigger than Bush v Gore, bigger than Ali/Frazier, even bigger than Madonna.… Read full post »

Massachusetts and Kentucky usually aren't mentioned in the same sentence. 

And there are good reasons for that.

KY is a poor and poorly educated border state.  "Tradition" means backwards, ignorant, superstitious, and violent.  MA is a wealthy and highly educated place where… Read full post »

I'm a simple guy who had one New Year's Resolution for 2009--drink more.  And  I couldn't believe how easy it was to double my alcohol consumption from one beer a month to two.  Readers might think this was a cheap resolution, but I'm allergic to booze and my head can turn in… Read full post »

Greg Sargent of The Plum Line reports that the Tea Party faction is calling on Republican candidates to campaign on a platform of repealing health reform in 2010. 

Sargent and other lefty commentators are chortling that the Tea Partiers are creating "instability" in the Republican Party and&nbs… Read full post »

Christmas in our house is more of a process than an event.  Because I work in the education biz, my wife and I generally don't think much about Christmas until the end of fall semester.   Then, Christmas begins to happen--first the tree, then the singing Santas, and finally the outdoor… Read full post »

The article below was published as an op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader in 2006.  Seeing some of the Santa posts in Open Salon, I thought a slightly revised version would be fun here.

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Every year, we hear jeremiads about how the United States is forgetting the true me… Read full post »

Yesterday was a very bad day, but it would have been much worse if I didn't have superb bladder control.  When I most needed my bladder to manage the gateway between my drippy waste and the external world, it came through with a dominating, Hall of Fame performance.  My bladder wasn't… Read full post »

There's so many stories coming out about health reform that the relentless spinning is making everybody's head spin. My own sense continues to be that the Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass health reform legislation with a public option this year. I don't know whet… Read full post »

I was glad to see Kind of Blue's call to discuss something positive some weeks ago.  I've been thinking of posting about the impact of love and this gives me a great reason to gather my thoughts together and do some writing.  It's a difficult story to tell because I doubt it'll… Read full post »

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On TPM, there's a post on Jesus leaving Christianity that was written by William K. Wolfrum during the 2008 election campaign.

. . . [I]n an announcement that has left his followers shaken, the Christ himself has come forward to announce that he is leaving Christianity, effective immediately. The rea… Read full post »

I've been thinking about all the poor conservatives who think that Barack Obama is a Stalinist, that Obama's going to set up "re-education" camps, or that he's taking "away" American freedoms by talking about "doing the right-thing" on health care.

According to Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner… Read full post »

Max Baucus finally unveiled the "Baucus Bill" on health care today and I was prepared to give Baucus credit for all of the work he and his staff did on the legislation. I'm for the public option, but I thought Baucus get credit for a sincere effort to craft a bi-partisan… Read full post »

What's someone to do who's been emotionally terrorized by evangelical Christianity? That's one of the questions posed by Max Blumenthal in a Nation article on Matthew Murray, a young man who was raised according to the strictest tenets of "movement Christianity," profoundly rejected the faith of his… Read full post »

I've been blogging for three years and one of the themes of my first year of blogging was the weenie boy masculinity of the right. Things have gotten so bad with the right that it's more accurate to characterize them as a freak show and I've done so on several occasions.  But… Read full post »

It looks like WWE CEO Linda McMahon is gearing up to run as a Republican for Christopher Dodd's Senate seat in Connecticut. That makes a lot of sense. The Republicans have been sounding more and more like professional wrestlers over the last ten years. All the Bush administration chest-beating about… Read full post »

Just saw something where Barack Obama called Kanye West a "jackass" over the Taylor Swift incident.  I bet President Obama's criticism of West is going to go over a lot better than his criticism of the Cambridge police for being stupid in the Henry Louis Gates case.  It's hard not… Read full post »

The comedian plot to take over the world continues to gain steam. First the evil comics made Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert into America's two most trusted newsmen. After taking over the news business, the comedians gained more momentum when the leaders of Comedian Central (not to be confused with "… Read full post »

I was going to title this post "Fuck the Progressive Media," but I'm still uncomfortable using the word "fuck" even though I've known what it's meant for more than forty years.  The reason "Fuck the Progressive media" is a better title is that progressives increasingly have their heads up their… Read full post »

8:07, My daughter Miss Teen and I are set up in a classroom at Morehead State University in Morehead, Ky to watch Obama's health care speech.

Thanks for the room guys.  Morehead State also wants me to remind you  that the university does not necessarily endorse anything… Read full post »

In a way, conservatives are right about President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren being indoctrination. It's indoctrination into the dominant ideology of individualism. But why do conservatives object? They believe in individualism just as much as Obama.

What I found charming about Obama… Read full post »