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A Murder in Oklahoma
A young man was senselessly shot and killed Tuesday in small town Oklahoma, and yet another racial controversy has followed. The usual admonitions about the questionable reliability of early press...
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Two Towns, Two Police Shootings
Our favorite news-and-talk radio station informed us of another fatal police shooting Tuesday afternoon. Not the one in St. Louis that you’ve probably heard about, which happened just a few miles from...
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A Bittersweet Departure
Attorney General Eric Holder has announced his resignation, yet we feel no glee. Holder was by far the worst Attorney General of our lifetime, which stretches back to the days of John Mitchell, but his...
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Bitterly Clinging to the Last Remaining Certainties
During the past week our usually quiet and placid block of this prairie city was rocked by an earthquake and a home invasion. Both are almost unheard of around here, and therefore unlikely to reoccur,...
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Walking Down the Street Toward Civilizational Decline
Call us old-fashioned fuddy-duddies, or say that we’re newfangled feminists, but we have long held to the opinion that a woman should be able to walk down a public street without being subjected to the...
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Thug Life
The eyewitness testimony and physical evidence presented to a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, indicate that 18-year-old Michael Brown led a thug’s life and died a thug’s death. This unhappy...
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Another Grand Jury, Another Controversy
Yet another grand jury has declined to indict a white a police officer involved in the death of a black man, this time in the Staten Island borough of New York City, and the latest round of racial...
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Race, Class, Gender, and the New Rules
Race, gender, and class are the trinity of modern liberalism, and all three are becoming increasingly complicated. While growing up in the heroic era of the civil rights movement we were taught that...
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Black Coffee, White Guilt
At the risk of sounding like the unfashionable cheapskate old fogies that we are, we confess we have never once patronized a Starbucks coffee shop. Instead we brew our two essential cups of morning...
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This Time in Baltimore
Monday’s baseball contest between the Chicago White Sox and Baltimore Orioles was postponed due to rioting, a rare occurrence in the history of the national pastime but what you might expect in...
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That White Woman in Seattle and All the New Rules
By now you’ve probably heard about the white woman who was “passing” for black in Seattle, well enough to have to become the president of the local chapter of the National Association for the...
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Race and the Race
Democrats are constantly calling for a frank national conservation about race, as if it hasn’t ranked right up there with sports and weather and the sex lives of celebrities as one of the three or four...
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Meanwhile, at the Democratic Race War
As we avert our grimace from the Republican Party’s reality show of a presidential nomination contest to the Democratic race, we find that things there are no more comforting. The front-runner is still...
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Over at the Other League
Every now and then we avert our eyes from the desultory Republican primaries and check in on what the Democrats are up to, just as we’ll occasionally glance at the National League standings now that...
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On Race, Gender, Class, the Olympics, and Of Course Presidential Politics
The 2016 Olympics won’t wrap up until some sort of bizarre post-modern samba-dancing and gender-bending closing ceremony on Sunday evening, but already the American team is assured of heading home with...
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The Latest Skirmishes in the Race Wars
Two more black men were fatally shot by police this week, this time in Charlotte, North Carolina and Tulsa, Oklahoma, and both communities suffered from the rioting and looting that now routinely...
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A New Deal For Black America from an Old White Guy
Republican nominee Donald Trump outlined a “New Deal for Black America” on Wednesday, and we have to admit that to such middle-aged white folks as ourselves it made a lot of sense. Even the skeptical...
View ArticleSimpson vs. Trump in the Ratings War
On an otherwise nice early spring Monday, two remarkably unsurprising headlines grabbed our attention. One was about former football hero O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” confession to double murder in an...
View ArticleBill Cosby, Greek Tragedy, and Yet Another Tabloid Scandal
Even on a day full of news of grave international import, the most compelling story here in the United States was probably comedian Bill Cosby being convicted on three counts of sexual assault. The...
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