For the last three nights, Crystal and I have been woken up at odd hours in the morning, including once at four o’clock, by a 125 decibel montage of horns honking, sirens wailing and whistles blowing.
When President Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised a sweeping recovery, the city of New Orleans cheered. It was a touching moment where politics were pushed aside, hope was restored in a city without a future and, if but for a fleeting second, New Orleans breathed again.
The Theory of Evolution has flaws. It is not perfect and no real scientist will claim that it is. Despite this, it has been a very useful scientific tool for analyzing and observing what is going on in our world. Also, thousands of scientists all over the world are working feverishly to either find the missing links of evidence or to find new evidence that modifies the theory. It is a staple of the secular scientific world and, like all good science, is subject to change, updating and clarification.
As a New Orleans resident, I’ve followed the political fallout from Katrina very closely. I’ve talked with other evacuees, read dozens of blogs and watched countless hours of news.
In the United States, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and similar leagues have an uphill battle. State athletic commissions refuse to sanction them, congressmen try to ban them, sponsors refuse to back them and cable/satellite companies refuse to carry their events.
When Jennifer Wilbanks took off on a nearly fifteen hundred mile odyssey across country to escape her impending wedding, I sincerely doubt that she understood the panic and madness that it would cause. I sincerely don’t believe she ever expected to be on CNN, to have a nation-wide search party looking for her or to be the center of a major news story. Unfortunately for her, that’s exactly what happened.
Every week in the United States, innocent men are sentenced to death, either directly by lethal injection or indirectly by being given prison terms far longer than any human’s natural life. Every week in the United States, rapists, murderers and child molesters are set free on technicalities, hung juries and smooth lawyering.
With the recent bankruptcy reform about to be signed into law, without so much as a harsh second glance from Congress, Americans need to take a moment and ask themselves who’s really running this country.
The RavenSpeak column has become one of the most popular sections of Raven’s Rants. Despite initial fears of not “fitting in” with the rest of the site, the column has gained a great deal of popularity and sparked some powerful and interesting debates.
There’s no doubt after the election that the world, especially the United States, is changing and in frightening ways. Though I’m no “tree-hugging liberal hippie” by any stretch, I am a concerned libertarian, a freedom fighter in the truest sense of the word.
Every campaign season, I watch as politicians carry on about whatever issues are hot at the moment, trying to scrape together the last of the key undecided votes and build momentum toward election day. Every time, without fail, what starts as big ideas and dreams deteriorates into meaningless pandering and mudslinging.
There seems to be a quiet understanding in American that our political system is broken. Less than half of the nation votes, many offices, especially on the local level, aren’t even contended and our rate of Senator re-election is higher than it ever was in Communist Russia.
I’m not a sports fan. I feel I should make the clear up front. I’m not the type to obsess over what season it is or isn’t, I don’t play fantasy sports and I don’t follow any teams, college or pro, with any zeal.
I was watching the news the other night, trying to follow the upcoming election and, to be honest, I found it more than a little dizzying because, instead of hearing about issues and debates, I watched in horror as words like “battleground states” and “home field advantage” filled their place in my head.
If anyone was surprised when Kerry picked Edwards to be his running mate, I feel sorry for them. Edwards had been the top choice ever since the primaries and never got knocked down from the top of the list, even as other, bigger names were kicked around.
Every time I decry the war in Iraq, I get met with the same shortsighted response. That there are people out there, fighting and dying for our country and that we should support them and their sacrifices.
When the photographs of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners came out, I wasn’t shocked. I was heartbroken, sad and even a bit bitter, but not shocked. Simply put, I understood going into this war that these types of things happen in war and that, no matter how many conventions you hold, no matter how much you try to civilize war or how much you try to humanize the enemy, war, fundamentally, is a brutal struggle that invariably brings out the worst in mankind.
Every so often, someone re-raises the issue about whether or not state sales tax should apply over the Internet. Threats have been levied, government debates have been raised and, a few times, some large online retailers have been pushed into testing out ways in order to make it practical. However, it’s all come for naught.
When Janet Jackson stood there on the stage of the Super Bowl Halftime Show, for that split-second where her right breast was exposed to the world, she probably wasn’t thinking about the controversy it would cause and, if she was, she certainly didn’t realize how long it would carry on.
I don’t watch a lot of television and I’m the first to admit that I’m not very up to date with the trends on it. However, lately that seems to be a good thing as television, traditionally the media of pop culture, has steadily grown worse and worse.
I’ve been called a lot of nasty names in my life, but misogynist isn’t on the list, at least it’s not one of the names I hear regularly from relatively well-informed people.
When Rush Limbaugh admitted that for the past four years he’s been addicted to illegal pain killers and purchasing them off of the black market, he created something of a quandry for himself and his party.
In the advertising world, “targeting” is a buzz word. Everyone is talking about how they can better target their advertising and streamline their message. Of course, in advertising, targeting makes sense, if you can focus your message only on those most interested in hearing it, not only do you save money by not blasting your message to deaf ears, but you can repeat your message more often to those who might actually buy the product. So, targeting not only makes good business sense, but good advertising sense.
George W. Bush has had a lot of great lines as a President. Between his famous foul-ups of the English language (AKA: Bush-isms), his homely, often religious, quotes that seem to make little sense and his various fibs/half-truths, the Bush presidency has produced more one-liners than your average Rodney Dangerfield performance.
Here’s a statistic that you probably didn’t know and almost certainly won’t believe: The average dress size for a woman in the United States (and most of the world for that matter) is a fourteen.
June 4th was a very bad day for Martha Stewart. In a period of less than 12 hours, she was indicted on nine counts of securities fraud by a federal grand jury and, as a result, stepped down as CEO of the company she helped found and even bears her name. It honestly wouldn’t shock me if the words “Black Wednesday” have already entered her vocabulary to describe that dark day.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a series of smug articles from war hawks asking the question “Where have all of the war protesters have gone since the American troops were welcomed in Baghdad?” After all, with France seeming to soften its anti-war line and many of the doves in Congress oddly silent, it seems that the anti-war crowd lost their fight.
“Terrorism: An Act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”
I was once told that you could tell a lot about a political agenda by the people that supported it, that the types of people who support an agenda say almost as much about it as the issues themselves. Well, if that’s the case, then what I’ve learned this past week is that the saber-rattlers and the people pushing forward the agenda for war are a bunch of immature children who can’t let people disagree with them, especially other countries.
When hundreds of poets gathered this past weekend to protest the impending war with Iraq, all of them were risking their reputation but only one of them was risking his job. His name is Bill Collins and he’s the current U.S. Poet Laureate.
The entire nation is buzzing about President Bush’s upcoming plan to revitalize the economy. The media, in particular CNN, has been ranking it as his number one challenge of 2003, the democrats have already begun slamming it as being targeted at the most wealthy Americans and the only thing that’s clear is that everyone wants relief and everyone is looking for Washington to bring it.
The Evangelical Environmental Network, a group of 23 religious organizations lead by Rev. Jim Ball of Philadelphia, has taken up what can only be called an unusual cause, the stamping out of the SUV movement. The group, in conjunction with the SUV Ad Campaign, has begun a television and print ad blitz in eight metro markets asking the question “What Would Jesus Drive?”
Imagine for a second that you had fallen asleep on Nov. 4th and just woke up today. You would have missed the Nov. 5th elections, the Republican Party’s victories, the media blitz, the subsequent change of leadership in the Democratic Party and the windfall of predictions and speculations about what it all means. Basically, you would have woken up in the exact same country your lazy ass fell asleep in a week ago.
In the movie “The People vs. Larry Flint”, Larry Flint, played by Woody Harrelson, gave a lecture to the free speech society he helped fund. In it, he asked one fundamental question of the world, “What is more obscene, sex or war?”
I don’t smoke pot. It’s something that’s never had a place in my life and I’ve always seen drugs, even alcohol, as a potential hindrance to my goals in life. That’s why I’ve always been very careful about where I tread, what I take and when I take it. But despite this goodie-two-shoes approach to all things potentially addictive, I’m probably one of the few human beings that’s genuinely outraged that marijuana is illegal.
During the Super Bowl in January, The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy ran a series of ads linking illegal drug use to supporting terrorism. The critics jumped on this immediately accusing the White House of tapping Sept. 11th fears to push an entirely unrelated issue and worse, accusing harmless drug users of supporting terrorism across the globe.
Yes, Florida has done it again. After the election controversy in 2000, spending millions on election reforms and promising endlessly to improve the quality of the voting process in the state, Florida has managed to create yet another controversy, this one perhaps worse than the first.
I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a baseball fan. In addition to not being a huge sports fan, I’ve always thought of baseball as, well, the sport of wusses. Think about it, there’s little contact between players, the action itself is extremely slow, it gets called on rain and the most exciting moments involve a small white ball being propelled by a wooden bat over a distant wall. Baseball’s the only sport where players get to sit down every few minutes (I wonder how they’d feel if they tried playing soccer) and baseball is also the only sport currently preparing to go on strike.
When it comes to foreign policy, I don’t have many rules, but one of the critical ones I do have is “If you can avoid it, don’t start a fight.” While I think every country, the same as every individual, has the right to defend themselves against aggression, if it is at all avoidable, it’s unwise to be the aggressor.
Greed may be considered a sin, but it’s also a universally understood emotion. Pretty much everyone knows what it’s like to see what someone else has and want it for yourself. It’s only human to want more than what one has and most of the time that isn’t a problem.
Every once in a while, I get one right.
I really hate to waste precious time on something that’s as trivial as the Pledge of Allegiance. In the end, what happens or doesn’t happen to it will have no bearing on myself or any lasting impact on others.
When the Marines in Afghanistan took custody of John Walker, they knew they had a lot more than just another POW; they had a media event. As an American fighting for the Taliban, he has become the source of not only a lot of media attention, but also controversy.
