"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
When it comes to Muslim-Americans, that is … The stupid, it burns! Updated (9/20/15): And then there’s this, the revelation that Ahmed’s clock is not what he claims it to be, which has changed my thinking. Not about how stupid we look when we overreact to Muslims in our midst, but about the specific case […]
I know, let’s start Monday off with a mixed bag of bloggage and unconnected thoughts. In a previous post I mentioned driving through Phoenix on Interstate 10. We knew about the I-10 shooter, of course, and had actually considered changing our route through town, but then there was a shooting on the other freeway, I-17, so we said […]
Any minute now. For reals. We’re back from a two-week road trip, during which I neglected the hell out of this little blog. But never fear, I gathered material for a couple of Air-Minded posts, not to mention a future post recounting our adventures. I’ll get cracking as soon as I catch up with all the other […]
Aren’t BLM protests about the lives of innocent black Americans killed by cops? The little girl this woman mentioned, the boy in Cleveland with the air gun, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, that poor guy who reached into his car for the drivers license the cop told him to show, the other poor schmoe who had his hands in the air when the cop shot him dead, and so many more, seemingly a new life taken every day by a cop somewhere in this country?
I was hoping the mean-spirited and loaded phrase “anchor baby” had gone the way of the dodo but then Trump (who else?) had to say it and of course the media too, and now it’s stinking up the whole place again. Second- and third-tier Republican candidates are tripping over microphone cables to announce their own plans […]
My problem is I still think of the primetime MSNBC news shows … All In with Chris Hayes, the Rachel Maddow Show, the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell … as news shows. Chris Hayes, I’ll give him this, covers a lot of news (his recent series on water use in the American Southwest was exceptionally good), but […]
The debate, from what I did absorb, consisted of buzzwords, predictable talking points, and appeals to the lowest common denominator.
A friend passed along a link to a New York Times opinion column on the discrepancy between our feelings about the killing of people and the killing of animals. One line jumped out at me: “Animals are not stained by original sin.”