In past years the Starbucks holiday cups have had winter and holiday images like snowflakes, reindeer or pine trees.  This year, Starbucks decided on a plain red design with no wintry images. Right-wing Christians decided that the lack of wintry images is an example of political correctness and a slam against Christians.  I'm not sure when winter designs like snowflakes have been cons ...

There's a war on our police ... actually, there are two wars on police:  one is a declared war --- the one that ISIS called for in January of this year; and the other is a war of retaliation against police brutality and the killing of unarmed Americans by the police. Both wars kill innocent people, innocent police officers in this case.  But, then again ... war does kill innocent people.  The a ...

I just did something really fun:  I downloaded the Republican Party Platform onto my laptop!  If you can ignore all the "freedom" talk, and the "opportunity" and "Constitution" and "Founding Fathers" spin, you'll see quite readily just what their agenda is. Right off the bat they tell you that government spending is harming the economy, which is batshit.  Government spending increases employmen ...

We've had inklings of this news, but in the April 5, 2015 edition of The Washington Post this article lays out the facts --- the hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants is Saddam Hussein's. The power of ISIS is the former Baathist Party of Saddam Hussein's.  Most of the Iraqis involved in the success of ISIS are former Iraqi officers who served under Saddam Hussein, including some who we ...

Just noticed that it's been two months since I posted on CLN.  It surely isn't because I have nothing to say;  I think that maybe it's that my Facebook page has drained some of my passion from my blog site! The inspiration for commenting hits me in the moment and I dash off a quick and shortened opinion to my "Friends" on Facebook.  It's like a release valve and some of the steam floats off, an ...

Suddenly and surprisingly, the GOP has now decided that it cares deeply about economic inequality in America. I'm sure we all remember that the previous position of the right on this subject was that even mentioning economic inequality was waging "class warfare" and was "the politics of envy."  We're glad that they have finally ended their See No Evil period, and now seem interested in addressing ...

Here's my understanding of how we got ourselves in this current fix with extremist Jihadis. It all started with the Russian invasion/occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The CIA opposed this move by the USSR and decided to raise an opposition army in the middle-east --- by approaching our ally, Saudi Arabia, and asking them to inspire their citizens to go wage war in Afghanistan.  The logic ...

The extremists on the American right, still suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome, are now blaming our president for the terrorist attack in Paris.  Why, you might ask yourself, would they do that?  What motivation could there be for such an outrageous accusation?  On what basis would the wing-nuts reach such a laughable conclusion? It seems that the major contributing factor in Obama's "gu ...

According to many war hawks, like John McCain and Lindsay Graham, Putin has been aggressive in Ukraine because Obama showed weakness a year ago by not bombing Syria.  Well, that could be an attractive position if not for the fact that a few years earlier Putin also was acting out aggressively in the neighboring country of  Georgia. He invaded Georgia at the same time that the Bush/Cheney administr ...

Many of us remember clearly the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement.  Most of us remember that there were a lot of white faces joined with black ones in the demonstrations and voter registration drives.  And, we know that white Americans died alongside black Americans in the Civil Rights era.  That difficult period made our nation stronger:  we showed that America stands for big ideas and fairness ...