Would-be Nevada Senator Sharron Angle has recently taken to depicting America's unemployed as a group of people so spoiled by the extension of unemployment benefits that they have basically stopped looking for work, preferring to live on the dole than accept one of the many magical jobs she claims are available. Angle's position is one that's been gaining steam recently among 2010 candidates -- Rand Paul, for example, recently characterized the unemployed as a group that needs to accept "a wage that's less than we had at our previous job in order to get back to work," adding, "Nobody likes that, but it may be one of the tough love things that has to happen."
It's not just candidates, however. Representative John Linder (R-Ga.) -- the ranking Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee -- citing a "Detroit News story about landscaping businesses complaining that potential employees rejected job offers in favor of collecting unemployment benefits," decreed that "nearly two years of unemployment benefits are too much of an allure for some."
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WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website that made headlines in April when it released a classified video of a US army helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq, is preparing to release a new video, this time showing a deadly US airstrike in Afghanistan in 2009, the Guardian reports.
According to the Daily Beast's Philip Shenon, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disclosed his plan to release the video in an email sent to the site's supporters this week. Word of the existence of the video also surfaced earlier this month after a U.S. army intelligence analyst who was arrested in connection with the Iraq WikiLeaks video claimed he had also leaked the Afghanistan video to the website. WikiLeaks' intention to release the video was mentioned as early as April in an article in the London Times.
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The fear of the sellout is rampant among many ethnic and racial groups in the United States and Canada. When members of these communities enter positions of privilege, they indeed become objects of pride and admiration, but these feelings are often accompanied by a nervous uncertainty as to whether they will eventually "forget where they came from." The sellout has been branded with several epithets in the majority-white North American context. Most of the derogatory terms have referred to being or "acting white," which has been one of the constant characteristics of the sellout. Black sellouts have been called "Uncle Toms" or "Oreos," while South Asians have been called "coconuts" and Asians have been labeled "twinkies" or "bananas."
These epithets point to a deep-seated animosity towards 'race betrayers' who the host community regards as a traitor and an ungrateful free rider. In studying the fear of the sellout among black Americans, Randall Kennedy notes in his book Sellout that a sellout is "a person who betrays something to which she is said to owe allegiance" and can refer to individuals whose actions "retard African-American advancement."
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I was in the studio audience when Chaz Bono stopped by The Wendy Williams Show. Chaz, Sonny and Cher's kid, has been chatting up all the talk show hosts lately to promote his new memoir Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man and corresponding film Becoming Chaz, which documents his transformation from female to male. The vision of Wendy -- the "drag queen" of the disenfranchised, herself -- and Chaz together on stage got me thinking about the many obstacles that individuals face in the pursuit of their own happiness.
Wendy kicked off the conversation by commenting on Chaz's weight loss, mom, and love relationship before getting down to the business of him being a man. "What's it like to shave your face," she asked. To the studio audience -- who may have never known him as Chastity -- Chaz looked like a man. He sounded like a man. He crossed his legs like a man. Man, oh man, some might've even called him the man: the rich, white one responsible for all of the world's oppression, inequality, and sadness. Yet, he faced down more discrimination in a day than I probably have in my entire life.
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The DC Environmental Film Festival has, yet again, managed to pull together an impressive collection of films (documentaries, animated, archival, children's, etc.) looking at our energy, climate and environmental challenges and opportunities. From astoundingly beautiful vistas (how about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (America's Wildest Refuge) to the devastatingly destressing (such as a 40-square mile Superfund site in Oklahoma (Tar Creek)), the "19th Annual Environmental Film Festival in the nation's capital" provides a rich montage across the beauty and pain of 21st century environmentalism.
There are a myriad of rich themes within the Festival. The Energy Film Series, for example, has over 20 events -- in other words, it is impossible to make it to every film worth seeing. On the other hand, to transition to one of the films, don't "bag it" ("to quit, forgo, or give up on") and -- if you're in the DC area -- get yourself to at least some of these great films.
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By now you've probably already heard that texting REDCROSS to 90999 donates $10 to the Red Cross relief effort. HuffPost Impact has the scoop on the best international aid organizations accepting contributions for the rescue and recovery effort in Japan, and here's HuffPost blogger Saundra Schimmelpfennig on how to make a smart, strategic donation.
In Los Angeles, home to one of the largest Japanese-American communities in the country, many of its members are stepping up to offer their time, crafts, and services in support of the relief effort. Japanese-American comedians Paul Ogata and KT Tatara join Kevin Nealon at a Laugh Factory event where 100% of the ticket sales go to the Red Cross. At restaurant Takami Sushi & Robata, where many of the staff are personally affected by the tsunami, 100% of all meal proceeds are being donated to the Red Cross. And the JapanLA store on Melrose is hosting an art exhibit in which 100% of all the sale proceeds benefit the relief effort as well. If you know of any other events going on around the city, please let us know in the comment section below.
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Say this for Glenn Beck, he works fast. Less than 48 hours after we launched our campaign to let businesses say that the US Chamber of Commerce didn't represent them, Beck hit back. A true friend of Chamber (here's a picture of him, broadcasting from their roof; certainly worth the $10,000 he donated from his $32 million earnings), he put little old 350.org up on his board Friday night next to a hammer and sickle. We were part of a communistic conspiracy that also included the Apollo Alliance, not to mention the Service Employees International Union.
In some sense, I guess, this pleased us. Right back to J. Edgar Hoover and his attacks on Martin Luther King, 'communist' has always been the epithet of choice for any organizers who've shown signs of being effective. (The Tea Party is obviously chagrined that actual working people in Wisconsin are upstaging them). In some other way, it's just sad: confronted with the hard choices posed by physics and chemistry, Beck (like too many others) tries to figure out some spectral ghost to blame.
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Our world is in the midst of an emotional meltdown. People are restless, volatile, our tempers about to blow. Recently, a riveting Newsweek cover story, "Rage Goes Viral" described how from Tunisia to Egypt a wave of rage is rocking the Arab world to create revolutions. Then there are the talk radio ranters, congressional incivility, and domestic terrorists such as the Arizona shooter. Rage is also prevalent in our daily lives: There's road rage, office rage, supermarket rage, and even surfer's rage. Why is rage so rampant? What is the solution?
In my book, "Emotional Freedom" I explore the differences between "good" and "bad" anger. Anger can be a healthy reaction to injustice such as cultures fighting to free themselves from repressive regimes. Anger rallies people. It creates energy and motivation to rebel against dysfunctional political or social systems. It also motivates groups to go on strike say, for higher, well-deserved wages or to defend human rights. On a personal level, anger can be good if it's expressed in a focused, healthy way rather than using it as a weapon to punish or hurt others.
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Southern California Bulldog Rescue first started as a group committed to caring for dogs associated with local English Bulldog show groups. But when the board of the English Bulldog breed club began rejecting elderly and sick dogs from the rescue program, 12 volunteers decided to form a group that would rescue all bulldogs regardless of age, health, or breed standard limits. The group of volunteers, headed by Skip Van Der Marliere, George Britton, and Elaine Feinstein officially established their own rescue program on January 1, 2007. Southern California Bulldog Association allowed them to rescue more dogs, but also meant they would no longer receive any financial support by the breed club. This made them reliant on donations and volunteer work entirely.
Since opening its doors, SCBR has rescued, sheltered, and found homes for over 200 bulldogs a year. The foundation's goals include not only rescuing bulldogs from kill shelters, but accepting them from owners who can no longer care for them. The foundation also spends time rehabilitating dogs, providing medical treatment, neutering the animals, and giving hospice care for older and terminally ill dogs. In the last five years, a group of about thirty volunteers has cared for over 600 rescued or neglected dogs.
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Most of us think of prices in the context of shopping expeditions. In the marketplace, prices ration what we consume, guiding how we allocate resources among our many wants. They prompt us to set priorities within the limits of our budgets. Just as prices steer our purchasing patterns, they steer the decisions of the companies that make what we buy, enabling them to meet our demand with their supply. That's how markets organize a capitalist economy.
But prices are all over the place, not only attached to things we buy in a store. At every crossroads, prices nudge us to take one course of action or another. In a way, this is obvious: every decision amounts to a choice among options to which we assign different values. But identifying these prices allows us to understand more fully our decisions. They can be measured in money. But our most important currency is, in fact, opportunity. The cost of taking any action consists of the alternatives that were available to us at the time. The price of a five-dollar slice of pizza is all the other things we could have done with the five dollars. Economists call this the "opportunity cost." By evaluating opportunity costs, we organize our lives.
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When you're writing a long story, you often labor for a long time in the dark. You're not exactly sure where your story is going (even if you've plotted the whole thing out) and you're not exactly sure how you're going to get there, and there are many days when you're not sure the effort is going to be worth it. You can cheer yourself on, and you can listen to the cheering of friends, but for me, the best motivation comes when I stumble upon a sign from the universe that I'm on the right track.
I received one such sign yesterday. I'm writing a story that I have recently decided will be set in 1952. I have been doing a lot of research on the era, and one of the industries I have been studying is the makeup industry. There were revolutions going on in the '50s, the famous lipstick wars, and I have decided to make some of this part of my plot. I've created a lipstick called Perfect Red, which is blood red, and the blood part will be important. These decisions -- 1952, lipstick, blood -- are completely arbitrary, and I sometimes wonder if they're "right." The sign confirmed that they must be.
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In the last decade, science has made enormous strides in decoding the human genome and finding associations between genetic variants and certain conditions, or diseases and disorders. We owe a lot of our individual characteristics, after all, to minor variations in our DNA. So it seems reasonable that small discrepancies in our genomes can mean the difference between being a routinely sound sleeper and a chronic insomniac.
And now we have proof: new research just published in the journal Neurology concludes that people who have a gene variant called DQB1*0602 have a higher chance of developing narcolepsy, a sleep disorder that causes excessive daytime sleepiness. It's not that having this variant dooms a person to narcolepsy. The association is probabilistic, not deterministic, meaning that you might develop narcolepsy if you have the gene, or you might not. Depending on the population, 12 to 38 percent of those with the variant do not have the sleep disorder and are considered healthy sleepers. Also, people without the gene variant can develop narcolepsy, though this is less common.
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Yesterday, the two Fiscal Commission co-chairs, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, put forward their long-awaited draft proposal. I was looking forward to seeing bold, creative ideas for getting America's fiscal house in order. I wasn't disappointed. They leave no sacred public cow untouched. However, one thing nearly made me fall out of the chair. These seemingly well-informed insiders want to shut down the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (or OPIC). They argue that OPIC - which provides market-based financing and insurance for U.S. businesses investing in poorer countries - actually provides no net public benefit to the United States.
How does one begin with that? I'll give the co-chairs the benefit of the doubt. In typical Washington fashion, let's just blame this gross misjudgment on poor staffing. In contrast to the co-chairs stated rationale, OPIC provides huge benefits to the United States. According to OPIC, it has supported over 270,000 U.S. jobs and $72 billion worth of American exports over time. And due to U.S. legislation, it won't support transactions that would cause the loss of a single U.S. job at home.
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It seems that every time I'm flipping through the television stations and I pass HBO, they are perpetually showing the movie The Blind Side Sandra Bullock is sporting blond hair as she portrays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the feisty woman who took the homeless Michael Oher under her wing and into her home. It is jarring every time I see Sandra Bullock as a overly highlighted blonde. She is great looking and though she can carry this blond hair color that helps to define the character she portrays in the film with the help of makeup and great cinema lighting, there is no doubt that she looks most beautiful in her signature brunette hair. By the way, I am sure her natural brown hair color is enhanced with a few highlights and chocolate rinses.
Enhancing your own hair color is the best hair tip I can give to all women. Clients are always bringing me pictures of their favorite celebrities' hair color. Usually it's the same five or ten pictures from various advertisements or magazine layouts. Sometimes they are a great color choice for the client. Other times they are dead wrong. Here are some tips and hair-color options we can learn from celebrity hair colors.
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Glenn Beck can do better. Fox News can do better. When it comes to upholding truth and having civil dialogues, let's be honest, we all can do better. Last Thursday, I asked you to take up the challenge and say, "I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler." When the next day Glenn Beck told his audience that I was "dangerous," mischaracterized what I believe, and then took that mischaracterization and said that it "always leads to mass death," my first desire was not to be civil. When his next step was to leap to the Nazi corruption of churches in Germany, and to suggest that I and "progressive Christians" were like the Nazis, I got angry.
The Bible says, in your anger, do not sin. So, I took a deep breath and decided with my staff that it was time we give FOX News some encouragement. How do we respond with truth in a civil manner? We decided that we should tell FOX News that they can do better than this. If you think FOX can do better, click here and send their CEO an email.
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Robert Rodriguez--like his good buddy and frequent collaborator Quentin Tarentino--sure loves his pulp fiction fiction and his B-movies. In a both an homage to, and hilarious send-up of, '70's B movies, there are more limbs severed and blood splattered in "Machete" than in the best of Sam Peckinpah. If you're not generally a fan of movie violence, don't let that scare you away. This is brilliant satire, my friend, and the violence is cartoon-like, no scarier than your average Saturday morning kids show. In fact lots of it's hilariously funny. It makes for a wild ride, one of the most purely entertaining movies to come along in quite a while. Go see "Machete" both for its love of filmmaking and for its timely take on immigration along the border.
Rodriguez also loves his Hispanic brothers and sisters, whether legal or illegal (particularly the sisters played by the strong and sexy Michelle Rodriguez (no relation) and Jessica Alba). I can't remember a recent movie that shows so much respect for the men and women who work hard to build our houses, tend our gardens, wash our dishes, and take care of our children. It's appropriate that this film opened on Labor Day weekend.
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As Labor Day arrives and with it the unofficial end of summer, it's almost time to put the white linen pants back in the closet and stick the grill in the garage for another eight months or so. And what better way to mark the end of summer than with a pitcher of margaritas? The margarita is a light, refreshing and potent cocktail that can cool down the most sweltering days and tame the most savage thirst. Of course, margaritas are delicious year-round, but something about them says "summer" to me, even when I'm drinking one in February. One thing I particularly love about margaritas is how easy they are to make -- all you need is fresh-squeezed lime juice, the tequila of your choice, and triple sec.
When I mention that third ingredient to friends, I get a lot of "Huh?"s and "What's that?"s. Well, triple sec also goes by the name of curaçao. What's the difference between curaçao and triple sec? After intensive research, I can tell you definitively that... I'm not sure. What I do know is that both curaçao and triple sec are orange liqueur, a vital and under-appreciated ingredient in one of the world's most popular cocktails.
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Oh, American pop culture... how you never cease to amaze and mortify me on a daily basis.
I can try to duck you by not watching any reality shows or reading tabloids, but then you rear your ugly head on The Soup anyway. I know the names Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt, Justin Bieber, and Kim Kardashian without actually having seen or heard anything any of these people have produced (and I am not linking them from my blog. They don't need any more help in their attention whoring). I immediately understand a reference to someone being The Bachelorette, but I've never watched one minute of the show. In these over-wired times, we can't help but absorb some of this slurry by visual osmosis. People continue to find new ways to make themselves famous with no discernible talents, and the audience has pretty much given up on demanding better from their media. In the past few years, it seems the standards for what is acceptable entertainment have hit such a low, I feel we should all be watching television from the bottom of a tremendous barrel.
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Yes, the concept of writing a query letter can be an intimidating process. The fact that it should only be one page in length makes the need for potency even more relevant. It is the proposal for your proposal and it's just as important. You have to be able to convince agents why you and why your book.
Before you write your query letter, you should do your homework. Learn as much about the agent as possible before you go pitching them. There are a lot of websites and books about how to research and find literary agents in your specialty. A great way to find the right match is to read the acknowledgment section of best selling books that are similar to yours. It is also very important that your book proposal is outstanding, you already have a platform and you have a well thought-out marketing plan before you approach any agent. It is critical that you know enough about the business to have an intelligent conversation. This preliminary work is so crucial that is was the catalyst for me producing the Everything You Should Know product for authors.
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I was somewhat moved (sentimental as I am) by a piece in the Guardian today about The Rake's Progress which opens at Glyndebourne next Sunday. This will be the umpteenth revival of the celebrated John Cox/David Hockney production which was one of the two new productions at Glyndebourne 35 years ago in 1975. I saw John Cox at lunch in the canteen at Glyndebourne two weeks ago looking as fresh as ever - and it is clear that the production will return similarly new and shiny. He was speaking enthusiastically about the cast he has this year. But I am sure he is remembering also the wonderful team we put together all those years ago including US opera legends Donald Gramm and Rosalind Elias. It is still available on DVD but with another legend, Samuel Ramey, as Nick Shadow.
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Guilt is that nagging sensation that we have not done all that we can do -- that somehow we have short-changed ourselves and people we love because of something that we could have avoided. Despite our best efforts, we sometimes find ourselves in deep states of regret or guilt about things we could have done. What are some of the factors that contribute to this guilt, and what can you do to overcome this?
(1) Recognizing what you could have done is not necessarily what was possible: When we think about what was possible (spending more time with your children, not having moved so much, not going through with that divorce) we often forget that at that time there were other things going on that made that impossible. When we remember, our brains selectively hone in on memories. The whole situation is not accurately remembered by the memory centers in your brain and sometimes your recall is just false without your knowing this [1]. When recalling what was possible, remember that your recall is probably faulty. You have probably forgotten how intolerable it was to live with your partner prior to the divorce or how difficult it was to find a job that did not require traveling.
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My husband and I have split up, and although it was my decision to leave and it remains the right one, it sucks. We were married almost 10 years and have two daughters, so it was a hideous outcome to arrive at after trying so hard not to. Divorce was the less sucky of the two sucky options I saw before me, but that fact doesn't mitigate the suckitude one iota.
That divorce is hard is not news. It's like when people say marriage is hard. It's obvious, a tremendous understatement, and yet when it comes out of someone's mouth, everyone clucks and nods in empathy and truly seems to know exactly what the speaker means, even though they were told nothing. It's so outrageously, undeniably true and universal that it requires no explanation, no elaboration, for people to instantly relate and silently run their minds over their current apparently intractable struggle. When you're going through a life changing personal matter that you'd rather not discuss, lazy, somewhat cliched distillations like that can come in mighty handy. "Divorce is hard" is my go-to summary when well-meaning people ask me how things are going and I sense that they don't want more than a fleeting peek into my emotional life.
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CIMMFest unleashes itself on the city for the third time on Thursday with a mash of movies, music and movies with music in them. But with about 70 films from all over the world shown over four days at CIMMFest, as the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival is known, choosing what to see won't be simple. To help out, we've picked out these six can't-miss CIMMFest screenings.
Fix: The Ministry Movie: CIMMFest opens with a film that's incredibly musical and incredibly Chicago. "Fix: The Ministry Movie" follows the iconic Chi-town industrial band, Ministry, through its liquor-drenching audience concerts and backstage chemical hazes, exploring the raw emotions of artistry of rock and roll. Also opining in the film are members of Tool, Korn and Jane's Addiction, as well as newly minted Oscar winner Trent Reznor. Ministry bassist Paul Barker, film producer Ed Bates and "Fix" director Douglas Freel are scheduled to appear at the screening at Music Box, which will be the film's world premiere.
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I first moved to New York City in 1996, and I have no need or desire to live anywhere else in the world. After living in New York City for over half of my adult life, I still find myself in many New York moments that remind me why I'm living in the greatest city in the world. Strolling in Central Park in the summer with my kids, we might come across a line of people who waited overnight to see Shakespeare in the Park with some of the world's best actors, take in the sights and sounds at the Boathouse restaurant and arrive at the amazingly entertaining Rose Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History. On the tiny island of Manhattan, endless opportunities arise for entertainment, stimulation and awe. My book, New York, New York: So Good They Named it Twice, An Irreverent Guide to Experiencing and Living in the Greatest City in the World is for those who choose to live here, as well as for those who have always wondered what it would be like.
Here are some classic fiction and nonfiction books that will help the armchair traveler, the visitor, and the newly arrived to understand the heart and soul of New York.
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Fail first policy. To the unknowing, it sounds like another one of those ill-conceived foreign policy doctrines, or possibly a method for dealing with the runaway deficit. It certainly doesn't sound like something that might end up affecting each and every one of us where it counts most, but that's exactly what may happen.
Fail First policy, also called "step therapy," is the practice of forcing doctors to prescribe the least costly drug in any class to patients first, even if the physician wants to begin treatment with a different medication. Medical insurance companies have devised this approach in order to keep costs down because if a patient responds to any of the cheaper medicines, the insurer has saved money. It can be a substantial amount of savings in the short run, depending on the drug in question. With health care in the news almost every day now, the policies and guidelines used by insurance companies have come under much closer scrutiny. At first glance, Fail First policy may seem innocuous. After all, who can be against keeping medical insurance premiums down, and possibly making health care cost less for all of us? Well, there is another side to this story, as there is in every great debate.
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Via Curbed LA: On Tuesday when this property went on the market, almost 250 people came to the twilight open house--quite a coup for a property priced at almost $4 million. The home, built in 1929, is located in super-exclusive Beverly Crest. According to the official listing, the home is 6,400 square feet, has four bedrooms and five bathrooms, and the master suite has walk-in closets and dressing rooms "Designed To Fit A Pop-Star's Entire Wardrobe!" Outside, once you're bored of the stunning panoramic views, you can turn around and watch movies on the outdoor theater.
Just last summer, this home was sold for $1.5 million, and Curbed LA reports on the flip:
"The flippers have done the usual with the house--took the white paint off the wood, installed track lighting, put in a combination reflecting pool-outdoor theater setup, and staged it up with lots and lots of pop art."
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The two most astonishing features of the altogether astonishing Tahrir Square uprising, as well as of the protests it has catalyzed around the region, are the role of the Internet and the prevalence of non-violence. I want to suggest these two characteristics of the new Middle Eastern street politics that once would have been considered wholly atypical and utterly improbable are closely related. In combination they smash the stereotypes about Islam and the Arab street as being preternaturally inclined both to anti-modernism and to violence.
Keep in mind this was not a secular uprising. Muslims protected Christians and Christians Muslims as they prayed. The suicide bombers notwithstanding, Islam is no more inherently violent than Christianity. Just as Christianity -- the Crusades and the Inquisition aside -- afforded reasons to Martin Luther King to resist segregation peacefully, Islam affords reasons to Muslims to struggle for freedom non-violently. The very term jihad, though it has been hijacked by warriors, has non-violent inflections focused on a struggle for purity and spiritual clarity. Anxiety about the Muslim Brotherhood led some American politicians to malign the initial protest, forgetting not just that the uprising was about much more than the Brotherhood, but that the Brotherhood had itself eschewed violence for decades.
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Like many of my friends, I cannot remember a bleaker time in the political history of this great nation. But the other night at the Union Square Theatre, I had a true epiphany. The production was a one-man show by an artist of such dazzling gifts that I felt a burst of such spirit, such hope, that there were still things -- and people -- that would make it all alright.
The play was Daniel Beaty's Through the Night, and to call it a play is an understatement. It is an experience. The experience itself is orchestrated by the characters, a ten-year old boy trying to save his father's business, a health food store in a Harlem neighborhood, a pastor of a congregation of ten thousand who is himself addicted to Ho-Hos, (and in a booming voice) a closeted gay in the music business (you don't have to be in the service not to ask, not to tell), a sexy woman, a fearful father to be whose baby might have HIV, all of them portrayed, sung, danced and sent with great power into the theatrical ethers by Daniel Beaty, author, poet, spokesman for a multitude of those in a project, and, in my opinion, all-around genius.
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President Obama's biggest worry should not be that his approval ratings hit a new low in July (says Gallup). Or that nearly forty percent rate him as worse than average as a president. That's just a paper figure and it can change at any time. The big worry should be that more people disapprove of his performance on the following issues than approve: the federal budget deficit, unemployment, health care, taxes and immigration. The blame for this is not Obama's, it's the Democrats. They have blown the mandate that they had to make the changes that voters hungered for in November 2008.
It wasn't just the Democrats abysmal cave in on Afghanistan, or their even more abysmal failure to plow taxpayer dollars Congress ladled out to Wall Street and the big banks into a direct jobs and home foreclosure relief program. These two failures stoked public frustration, impatience, and fury at the Democrats. The day after Obama won his electoral college landslide victory, the GOP was reeling. President Bush was both discredited and loathed. The public blamed him and the GOP for two failed, flawed, costly wars, for making a shambles of an economy, the endless chain of sex and corruption scandals, and an unprecedented giveaway to Wall Street.
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Kate Gosselin, her eight kids, bodyguards and a TLC crew took the ferry to Bald Head Island, N.C., on Sunday for a week of camera-ready beach fun. The next day I arrived with little more than a swimsuit and a stack of books, hoping to unplug for a whole week for the first time in years.
It was with a mix of vexation and glee that I learned the Gosselins were renting the house (at $8,025 for the week) directly across from me. I had been warned during my trip over. "Kate Plus 8!" was the subject line of several emails my devoted but celebrity-ignorant dad sent me, along with wildly distant photos of the sextuplets on the beach. My mom, who recognized the Gosselins only from reading my work, filled my voicemail with tales of Kate jogging at 7 a.m., Kate standing with her hands on her hips while her kids played with the camera crew, the piles of new pink and green beach toys and towels stacked in their packaging on their porch. It was a lot of excitement for an island where the biggest disruptions are intimate beach weddings, allowed only in off-season.
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