Opinion

It’s time to say goodbye to changing clocks twice a year

We are fast approaching the time when we move our clocks back an hour, commonly described as “falling back,” and say goodbye to daylight saving time. Perhaps members of Congress could get their acts together and make it unnecessary to change the clocks twice a year. On Nov. 5 at 2 a.m. local time, clocks are to be moved back. This will give each of us some extra sunlight in the morning and less sunlight in the late afternoon. As we approach the winter solstice on Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year, the amount of daylight will shrink steadily. For cities in the South like Houston, their shor...

The majority of Americans want their country back

While I was familiarizing myself with Mike Johnson of Louisiana, our new speaker of the House, news arrived of a uniquely American event, another mass shooting, this time in a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston, Maine. The details are characteristic: Kids were having a good time at youth night in the bowling alley when a white male opened fire with an assault-style, semiautomatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine. Despite Maine’s permissive gun laws—concealed carry is allowed without a permit—no good guy with a gun stepped up. At least 18 are reported killed and many more wounded. Which made ...

My struggles with canine love on the rebound

It started as a typical rebound relationship. I was drowning in grief, and to say my judgment was impaired is an understatement. Tovi had died two weeks prior, breeding an impulsivity in me that no intervention could interrupt. I was sure adopting another dog would sedate my debilitating pain. The day after he died, I frantically dragged my husband to three shelters and cried when no one came home with us. Tovi was the closest thing to a soulmate I’ve ever had. He was there for me during my tumultuous 20s, and having him as a stable presence forced me to grow up. We lived in nine places, took ...

Europe figured out how to control social media abuses while protecting benefits

Most Republicans and Democrats can agree that Big Tech needs reining in. But given the gridlock in Congress, even popular legislative initiatives are going nowhere these days, including measures that would update the law to address fast-moving social media companies such as Meta. Unlike Europe, which is adopting holistic, modern laws, the U.S. is stuck with dysfunctional legislation-by-lawsuit. In the latest example, dozens of state attorneys general, including Illinois’ Kwame Raoul, have targeted Meta for supposedly violating consumer protection laws by pushing “addictive” products on youngst...

Hating on Halloween: Why a New Jersey school ban is a treat and not a trick

By Leonard Greene

The power went out on my block the other day, and even though it meant being without electricity, the internet and heat on a chilly morning, it was worth it because it also meant my neighbors couldn’t operate their annoying inflatable Halloween display.

I hate Halloween. I know I’m not the only one. I hate Halloween, and all that goes with it, from the creepy costumes to the pagan pageantry and the little beggars with buckets banging on my door for candy.

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With a speaker of the House finally in place, it’s time for the GOP to get real

In the end, after three weeks of embarrassing paralysis simply trying to find someone from their ranks to lead the House of Representatives, GOP members settled on someone unfamiliar to most of the country. Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson is our new speaker of the House.

A member since only 2016, Johnson ascended anyway, probably due as much to simple exhaustion as anything else. On the surface, his selection isn’t encouraging, given the need for compromise to get the people’s business done.

Maine Rep. Jared Golden’s penance offers a sign of hope after yet another mass shooting

Another mass shooting with an AR-15-style rifle, this time in Maine. As a nation, we’ve become troublingly inured to this kind of event. Multiple communities have been traumatized only to see politicians throw up their hands.

The twisted American resistance to sensible gun control is too ingrained. In our region, of course, residents of Highland Park cope after the July 4, 2022, horror, and many still recovering psychologically (and some physically) must feel some bitterness at being consigned to some sort of hall of fame of tragedy. Parkland, Newtown, Paradise, Uvalde … Highland Park.

The GOP is eating its own

— MAGA Mike Johnson says there’s no need for gun laws cuz we still use cars ... Yesterday I wrote about how virtually every Republican policy position, from climate change to education to healthcare and guns, is driven by either the hope for campaign funds from billionaires and industries or the fear that those funds will be used against them in a primary.

Thursday night, MAGA Mike Johnson, our new Speaker of the House, proved my point. After a slaughter of people in Lewiston, Maine that was so grizzly that it caused Maine Democratic Congressman Jared Golden to apologize to his constituents for having been in the pocket of the firearms industry all these years, MAGA Mike, however, was holding true to the NRA talking points. All we need is prayer: there’s no need to do anything about guns, because cars still kill people. Seriously.

“At the end of the day,” he told Sean Hannity, “the problem is the human heart. It’s not guns. It’s not the weapons.” Problems of the “heart,” of course, is just another way of saying that it’s not the guns, it’s the terribly sick, mentally ill shooters. As if other countries that have a fraction of our mass shootings (or none at all) don’t have mentally ill people, too. But just ignore all those dead children: after all, cars kill, too.

“You know,” MAGA Mike added, “in Europe and in other places, they use vehicles to mow down crowds at parades.

They’ve done that here in the United States. It’s not the weapon that’s the underlying problem. I believe we have to address the root problems of these things and mental health obviously, as in this case, is a big issue…” Does that mean that Republicans now want to re-open the mental health facilities that Reagan shut down, triggering America’s first modern homelessness crisis? Silly rabbit: of course not. It’s just the usual GOP BS, pre-written by the weapons industry as they pour more cash into Republican coffers.

— Did you know that last quarter we had “blockbuster” GDP growth running at 4.9%? Now that Bidenomics has shifted our economy — or at least a fair part of it — away from neoliberal Reaganomics and back to FDR’s old fashioned real economic policies, the economy just won’t quit. Republican Fed Chair Powell is doing everything he can to produce a recession, but we still had 4.9% annualized growth last quarter.

In the first three decades after WWII America was consistently running a bit over 3% annual GDP growth; when Reagan shifted us to Reaganomics, that slid down into the 2% annual range through the next four decades. Today we’re back to a rip-roaring economy. Now, if somebody would just let the news media know…

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How to deal with visual misinformation circulating in the Israel-Hamas war and other conflicts

By Paul Morrow, University of Dayton

In the three weeks since war began between Israel and Hamas, social media has been taken over with images and stories of attacks, many of which proved false.

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Any friend of Trump is no longer a friend of mine

In the gruesome wake of one of the most heinous terrorist attacks in world history two weeks ago, the twice-impeached, America-attacking Republican frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination, Donald Trump, called the murdering Hezbollah terrorist network in the Middle East “very smart,” and I am once again thinking I’ve had my approach to this ugly menace all wrong.

Trump unloaded his latest bilge in a steady, all-day stream, first on a Fox rightwing propaganda radio show, and later in front of a crowd of fawning goons in Florida, while doing one of his slurry, standup routines where he hulks over a lectern, waves his fat, little hands, and spits out every unhinged thought that crosses his tiny, polluted mind.

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California fire victims have suffered enough. But now their suffering may be taxed

Warren Thompson was having his first cup of coffee on a November morning nearly five years ago in his home in Paradise, California, when his sister-in-law called to warn him of an approaching fire. He looked out the front window. “It was completely dark like it was in the middle of the night,” Thompson said. He immediately left to drive toward Chico in his 2004 Honda Accord, leaving all of his belongings — save for his Tabby cat, Cinder. What was normally a 20-minute drive took a harrowing four hours. But he was among the survivors of the second deadliest fire in modern American history, claim...

This Supreme Court decision is destroying America — and no one is talking about it

According to Talkers Magazine, the “Bible of the Talk Radio Industry,” I talk with around 6 million people every week on my nationally syndicated call-in radio/TV show. What I’m hearing, increasingly (I’ve been doing this program for 20 years now), is frustration bordering on despair about the inability of America to get basic, necessary things done.

Why is it, people ask, that we can’t do anything about guns amidst all these mass shootings? Or homelessness? Or affordable healthcare and education? Why are we moving so slowly on climate change? How did social media get excused from responsibility for its own content and then become overrun by Putin bots and Nazis?

And why do we let the billionaires who own social media (along with all the other billionaires) get away with only paying an average 3.2% income tax when the rest of us are making up for it by paying through the nose? Why can’t Congress pass a simple budget or raise taxes enough to stop running deficits?

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