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Defending Clint Eastwood in Live Performance

I have been ruminating on the Clint Eastwood Empty Chair performance at Romney’s GOP convention, and I just can’t help loving what he was trying to do.  I’m not kidding or being facetious.  What Eastwood did was actually pretty brave and interesting and, while it didn’t really work out in the end — due to poor dramatic structure and lack of a button ending — it was still dangerous and exciting and absolutely real.

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What's in a Deaf Sign Name? Hunter and his Gun!

The last week of August caught a firestorm in the Grand Island, Nebraska Public Schools system as administrators scrambled to recover from banning a three-year-old Deaf child named Hunter Spanjer from using his sign name because his fingers “looked too much like a gun” — and any sort of suggestion of a gun, even as a sign name, is verboten.

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Thanks for Giving Us "Amercia," Mitt Romney

In the history of literature, there are many examples of writers changing the spelling of America to have an artistic effect. The spelling can be changed for reasons ranging from strong sarcasm to political commentary. Ice Cube, after all, released an album called AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted — an astute criticism of racism in the United States. It is like how sometimes the United States is spelled with a dollar sign (United $tates) to reflect the power that money has in the United States political process.

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Obama Chooses Love

Yesterday, Barack Obama made a wise and moral choice in publicly coming out in favor of same sex marriages:

… in an interview with ABC News, President Obama said, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

With that one statement, he made it clear that he believes that it’s wrong to prevent couples who are in loving, committed relationships from getting married. …

In the interview, he said that he had discussed the issue around the dinner table with his wife and daughters. He said he’d heard from service members who, even after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, felt constrained because they aren’t allowed to get married.

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Obama to Reward Restraint in Tuition Increases

My mother always told me that when it came to higher education, it was more important where you got degrees at the Masters level and above than where you got your bachelor’s degree. A person could, for example, get a bachelor’s degree at my alma mater Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and then a Masters degree from Harvard and be equally impressive (according to my mother) as a person who got both degrees from Harvard. At the time that I attended Rutgers, the tuition was under four thousand dollars for New Jersey residents.

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Obama Dedicates the Man in Granite

Yesterday, President Obama dedicated the dramatic 30-foot high Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial emerging out of granite, and that moment of unveiling was a grand indicator of how far we’ve come in a short time and oh how so much much farther we have to travel together.

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The Perfect New Republican

I’ve always felt Obama was an old time, circa 1973, Republican.  He certainly isn’t a liberal Democrat as the recent budget bloodying proved in principle.  On May 1, 2009, I wrote an article — How to Save the GOP — that still rings today with un-acted upon truths:

The GOP is in trouble and today, I will offer my conservative adversaries ten things they must do to regain relevance in the localized world of politics. As a wild liberal, I feel it is my duty as an American citizen to restore the political balance in the USA — Obama is whupping fundamentalist Republican arse — and we need to restore some sort of intelligent, loyal, opposition in order to maintain a society where ideas matter more than ideals.

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