Kris Kobach
When Dr. John Lott Jr. came before the Kobach-Pence “election integrity” commission last week and called for background checks for voters – the same kind that gun owners must undergo before purchasing a weapon – even the clowns had to realize that the circus had run off the road.
After all, there are more than 30,000 gun deaths annually in America. Between 2000 and 2014, however, every comprehensive study – whether by courts, academics or journalists — have found only a handful of cases of voter impersonation. Lott, however, told the commission that his proposal would allow Democrats to “go and prove, essentially, to Republicans, that there’s no fraud.”
There can no longer be any reasonable doubt that it is the fraudulence of this commission, rather than unverified claims of voter fraud, that is the greater threat to our democracy.
Last Tuesday’s second meeting of Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, headed by Kansas Secretary of State and newly […]
Pope Francis
Credit: Franco Origlia
ROME—Popes have had many enemies over the centuries. They have been poisoned, strangled, clubbed to death, and one supposedly was smothered with a pillow.
Even in our supposedly more civilized era the last two popes of recent memory had detractors. It was just that the whispers of dissent were often just that, low voices from fringe groups that no one took very seriously.
Now, in the era of fake news and alternative facts that has brought organizations like Breitbart to the mainstream (and has former Trump adviser Steve Bannon critiquing church doctrine), even fringe groups in Catholic circles are increasingly making their voices heard.
That’s exactly what happened over the weekend when a group of theologians and academics, bolstered by a handful of previously unknown but apparently very conservative clergy, issued what amounts to an online petition that accused Francis of propagating heresy.
Let’s repeat that: “Heresy.”
The accusations come in the form of a 25-page letter called a “Correctio filialis de haeresibus propagatis” which, for those whose Latin […]
To witness the death of the multi-billion dollar National Football League, you really don’t need to see sportswriters wringing their hands over the moral dilemma of covering America’s Roman circus of brain trauma.
And you don’t need to watch multi-millionaire football stars, pampered for most of their lives, ostentatiously disrespecting the American national anthem, kneeling, their raised fists in the air.
You don’t need to see the desperation in the NFL’s television commercials: actresses in team gear, holding snack trays to feed their (virtual) extended team-gear-wearing families, as the NFL begs middle-class women to mother their game before it dies.
You don’t have to do any of that to see how football is dying.
All you have to do is go out to a youth football field, as I did on Sunday morning, and talk to parents and coaches.
“Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level,” says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.
“And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just […]
A water pipe in Cairo: Eighty-nine percent of the global population currently has access to clean drinking water.
Credit: Reuters
Beautifully lush islands jutting picturesquely out of the turquoise sea with sun glinting off the calm surrounding water: Such are the pictures of the Salomon Islands we have become familiar with from travel brochures. And they are not the kind of images that lead one to suspect that there might be a shortage of fresh water on this island chain located northeast of Australia.
But there is. According to the most recent statisticscompiled by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), four out of every 10 Salomon Islanders don’t have secure access to clean drinking water. This makes the Salomon Islands a member of the small group of countries in which the drinking water situation has not improved, but rather worsened, in the past few years. At the turn of the millennium, only two […]
After President Donald Trump rescinded an Obama-era executive order that offers work permits to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, many religious communities responded with resounding disapproval. In addition to faith-based groups that physically protested the move, a staggering number of faith groups from across the theological spectrum issued statements condemning the decision, arguing it did not reflect a religious call to compassion and describing it as “immoral,” “reprehensible,” or “cruel.”
Members of Trump’s own evangelical advisory board — a loose band of more than 20 conservative Christian pastors and advocates who have advised the president since his campaign days — took a decidedly different stance.
Rev. Tony Suarez, a vice president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) and a member of the board, said Trump’s announcement was actually a victory for faith-based advocacy. He pointed to the president’s inclusion of a six-month window allowing recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to apply for an extension as evidence the White House had been convinced to moderate its stance on immigration policy.
“[The […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
