Category: Politics and Current Events
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It is no secret that the evangelical wing of the Republican Party has some strong reservations about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. The “agents of intolerance” charge that McCain leveled at Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell during the 2000 primary, for instance, has not been forgotten. Nor were evangelicals pleased when McCain…
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Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, will be participating in Slow Food Nation, "the first-ever American collaborative gathering to unite the growing sustainable food movement and introduce thousands of people to food that is good, clean and fair," and he’s also contributing to their blog.…
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The McCain campaign and its supporters cry foul when anyone even whispers that, if elected, he will be 72 years old when he puts his hand on the bible to take the oath of office. But if it’s ageist to ask whether a 72-year-old has the mental, emotional, and physical stamina to take on what…
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Oregon—where I live—held its primary election on May 20. For the first time since I moved here for college in 1972, the primary actually meant something to the presidential contest. Always in the past our primary is so late in the game that the presidential candidates for both parties have already been crowned. This exceedingly…
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Almost 35 million Americans – 11.3 percent of the population – were classified as food insecure or very food insecure (a term that used to mean “hunger”) by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2006. Not coincidentally, this is almost the same number of Americans who live at or below the nation’s official poverty level…
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The Religious Right has successfully spent the last thirty years putting the fear of God into Republican presidential candidates. Those who deviate from the evangelical political liturgy are threatened with the special purgatory of corporate golf games and Viagra ads reserved for unsuccessful Republican nominees. And of all the hymns aspirants are required to memorize,…
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In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. In 2007, Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for unionists with thirty-nine labor leaders killed; a number significantly lower than the 197 assassinated in 2001—the year before President Uribe assumed office. Consequently, the Bush administration is clearly correct when…
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We recently posted about Beacon Press author Bill Ayers and his connection to Barack Obama. Stanley Fish posted about the controversy on his blog at the New York Times, and "confesses" his own association with Bill Ayers: Did I conspire with Bill Ayers? Did I help him build bombs? Did I aid and abet his…
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Frederick Lane discusses the aging of the liberal members of the Supreme Court, and what this year’s election might mean for the future of the court. “Change is an inevitable feature of the Supreme Court, but few presidential elections have taken place in the shadow of such potentially momentous change as this one.”
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Since Wednesday night’s Pennsylvania Democratic Presidential Debates, Beacon author Bill Ayers has been in the news for his connection to Barack Obama, after George Stephanopoulos pressed Sen. Obama to discuss his association with Ayers. Ayers is a widely respected and admired writer, activist, and professor of education, whose opposition to the war in Vietnam led…
