Photo Credit: Brian Turner Senate confirmation of judicial appointees always slows down in the final year of a president’s term when the Senate is not controlled by the president’s party. Under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, the confirmation process began to shut down almost two years before Barack Obama’s last […]

Read more

  “Not a dime’s worth of difference,” was how Alabama Governor George Wallace described the Democratic and Republican Parties of the late 1960s, when he led the short-lived American Party. The same can be said of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump as they compete for the voters Richard Nixon saw as key to a Southern Strategy […]

Read more

Photo Credit: Mike Rastiello Singer-songwriter Gary P. Nunn sometimes closes his shows with a ripping rendition of “You Ask Me What I Like About Texas.” Ah, Texas! The Lone Star Beer, the barbecue, the boots, the bullshit, the batshit-crazy candidates routinely elected to public office. Among the elected officials is a Republican attorney general so religiously homophobic […]

Read more

  Photo Credit: Justin Hoch March 3 will mark the 25th anniversary of the videotaped beating of Rodney King in South Central Los Angeles—an event that history may regard as the unofficial commencement of what we now call the Black Lives Matter movement. The video surprised many white Americans, but very few African-Americans. (Seventeen years […]

Read more

Photo Credit: Tobin  Is it possible for an epidemic to be invisible? Since 1991 the annual number of newly documented cases of thyroid cancer in the United States has skyrocketed from 12,400 to 62,450. It’s now the seventh most common type of cancer. Relatively little attention is paid to the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland that wraps around […]

Read more