The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

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I Am Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

By Ripper on Wed, 08/25/2010 - 6:29am |
I am ashamed of those fellow Americans of mine who are twisting the words and life's work of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf into a fanatical caricature for the purpose of stopping the Cordoba House project. Fellow Americans like Rick Lazio,...

Why Park51 must rise and stand

By Ripper on Sun, 08/22/2010 - 6:36pm |
The construction of the Muslim community center originally called Cordoba House and now known as Park51--but always as the "Ground Zero mosque" by its vocal opponents--was never subject in the first place to a debate about its propriety. For the...

Historians Discover First Draft of Bill of Rights

By Ripper on Sat, 08/21/2010 - 2:20am |
Fast on the heels of this summer's revelation that Thomas Jefferson erased the word "subjects" while writing the Declaration of Independence and replaced it with the word "citizens," another team of researchers announced this week they have discovered the first...

Blinded by the Right: How Democrats Can Win

By Ripper on Mon, 08/16/2010 - 2:24pm |
My high school classmates and I loved Manfred Mann's cover of the song "Blinded by the Light," and not just for its energy. We listened to it over and over partly because we were certain that no lyrics played on...

Politics for Dummies

By Ripper on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 4:08pm |
Each time I see the video of Linda McMahon, the WWE owner and Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Connecticut, delivering a swift kick to an employee's testicles as she fires him, I can't help thinking of the movie "Idiocracy." In...

This land is my land. Period.

By Ripper on Tue, 08/10/2010 - 3:18am |
Confusion of Tongues by Gustav DoréIN THOSE YEARSby Adrienne Rich In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic,...

Waiting for <strike>Perot</strike> Palin

By Ripper on Sun, 08/08/2010 - 8:05pm |
Surely porcupines mate, but exactly how they do it is a prickly matter.Can the GOP, struggling for a message beyond "Don't Blame Us, We Gave Obama Our Mess," absorb energy from the Tea Party without losing the support of moderate...

Who Caught You When You Fell: An Ode to the Right

By Ripper on Thu, 08/05/2010 - 5:22pm |
Who Caught You When You FellThank God you can't recall your mother forcing you bloodiedfrom her womb, slipping through the doctor's gloved fingersand landing headfirst on the delivery room's tile. Otherwiseyou'd know that women don't drop babies, doctors do.You don't...

The Magnetic President

By Ripper on Tue, 07/27/2010 - 4:47pm |
With a smile as warm and broad as any of his predecessors, a charisma that brought seas of humanity shoulder-to-shoulder to light their candles of hope from his torch, and a way of engaging the issues that was so calm,...

Race and the Right Wing Agenda

By Ripper on Wed, 07/21/2010 - 7:10pm |
The manufactured controversy of Shirley Sherrod's speech to a local NAACP group in Georgia, like the manufactured controversy of the Obama Justice Department's treatment of the New Black Panther Party, are the kind of tempests in a teapot that Fox's...

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