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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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 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...
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,...
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...
That is the real question the radical right is asking. For they have vested in Shirley Sherrod all their pent-up racial hatred and, in willful ignorance of the facts, have accused and convicted her of being the Wicked Witch of...
"He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave." -- Andrew CarnegieFor a political organization whose smear tactics make cholera smell like Clorox, the tea party seems awfully upset...
I have questions, lots of questions, and not just about politics.• Why do hot dogs come in 10-packs, but hot dog buns come in 8-packs? Is there no communication at all between meat packers and bakers?• If "Whatever doesn't kill...
During his first 18 months in office, President Obama has often reiterated the essence of Rodney King's plaintive appeal for civil fellowship, "Can't we all just get along?" Time and again, Republicans have rebuffed Obama's pleas for bipartisanship with thundering...
Call your Senator now. Heavy duty, evil, bad voodoo shit is going on in the U.S. Senate as you read this. Call your senators now before it's too late. The worst polluters on the planet are trying to shove regulators...
With the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico washing up on the White House lawn and no reason to believe BP's latest scheme to plug the leak with mud will alleviate the mounting economic and environmental toll, it's past time...
I have $100 available in $25 increments to TPM Cafe Readers who are in desperate need. I won't name names. You know who you are.Email ripperm (AT) att (DOT) net with your PayPal account and a one-paragraph explanation of your...
January 13 - The coastal city of Léogâne is the epicenter of a catastrophic 7.0 earthquake in Haiti that kills more than 200,000 people and leaves more than a million others homeless.February 27 - A magnitude 8.8 earthquake centered off...
...and a time to everything under heaven.-Ecclesiastes 3:1 or The Byrds, take your pickIt's time to stop stamping our feet over the Public Option and other noble health care reforms we wish were in the legislation that Congress will soon...
Just like the headline on this post, rumors of the Public Option's death are greatly exaggerated.Here is the message I received today from Aaron Swartz of Progressive Change Campaign Committee:hey, chris -- what's up?did you see? mccaskill's office let me...
