Categotry Archives: Politics

When You’re Trapped Between Work and Family: A Writer’s Doubts

This morning, I really, really wanted to chew a head off, or at a minimum, a hand. This is the absolute bane of all small business owners, particularly artists and writers: setting up a new business. Yeah, yeah, it’s exciting and I’m grateful and, well, yada, yada. But when three children are yowling, busting heads and basically working through their Ophelia, Hamlet and Polonius routine and the man is conducting scientific experiments in the kitchen, the whole process of arranging [...]

Bob Costas on Gun Control

Bob Costas stared at the camera with a steely-eyed glare, and then used the entire ninety second halftime segment of last night’s Cowboys vs. Eagles game to argue in favor of stricter gun control laws in the wake of Kansas Chief Linebacker Jovan Belcher’s murder suicide.  Costas paraphrased and quoted from a piece by Fox Sports Columnist Jason Whitlock:  How many young people have to die senselessly? How many lives have to be ruined before we realize the right to [...]

A Real-Life Banned Author: Stephanie Saye

Stephanie Saye is one of my friends. She’s also the author of Little 15, which tells the story of a high school girl who has an affair with her basketball coach. Little 15 raises a number of provocative issues, like: whose fault is it anyway? What sort of moral culpability, if any, does the teenager bear? What kind of girl gets involved with a married man? What kind of married man violates all moral and legal precepts by sleeping with [...]

Dark Knight Lawsuits, Surveillance and Freedom

Survivors of the Aurora, Colorado “The Dark Knight Rises” theater shooting have filed suit in the U.S. District Court of Colorado against the theater owner.  In two lawsuits filed in federal court on September 21, 2012, the plaintiffs allege that the theater, Cinemark USA negligently failed to provide adequate security.  According to the plaintiffs, the theater should have taken more measures to prevent James Holmes from killing twelve people, and wounding fifty-eight others. Here are some of the measures the [...]

Friendship and Politics

As my Facebook newsfeed fills with snarky barbs, I sigh and fantasize that the 2012 Presidential Election on the sixth of November has already passed.  I could write about the decline of manners; after all, it’s a time-honored pastime to lament how nasty elections have become.  The problem with this focus on the decline of manners is that it ignores just how rude, if not downright defamatory our American forebears were when engaged in political debate. Take the Presidential Election [...]

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