Culture/Society

Does Donald Trump’s popularity among Republicans indicate that a big part of the GOP base is more authoritarian than it is conservative? Yes, suggested Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas in a Friday post. “The crazies don't really care about any conservative platform, they just want someone to reflect their own bigotries and xenophobia, all the while telling the weenies to fuck off…

Gordon Gekko of Wall Street would be a popular choice of liberals for the 1980s movie character who best illuminated the supposedly ugly truth about the Reagan era, but he’s not Andrew O’Hehir’s choice. In a Monday analysis of the films of the late Wes Craven, O'Hehir stated that Freddy Krueger, from Craven’s 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, was “the most potent pop-culture signifier of the…

In an interview with author Salman Rushdie on Friday’s CBS This Morning, co-host Gayle King teed him up to bash Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, imprisoned for refusing to issue gay marriage licenses: “What do you think about what's going on in Kentucky with Kim Davis, who’s standing up for her religious beliefs, when you were really the victim of religious beliefs, where they were trying to get…

At the top of Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed that the jailing of Rowan County, Kentucky Democratic Clerk Kim Davis “could be the last front in a losing battle against same-sex marriage” as she had been refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage on June 26.

Academy-Award winning British actress Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks, Sense and Sensibility) doesn’t get why younger women are rejecting the label of feminist. During a Sept. 2 interview with Variety about her new film A Walk in the Woods, the self-described “radical feminist” complained that she found the reluctance for young actressesto embrace the title of “feminist” simply, “bizarre.”…

Montel Williams targeted 'Black Lives Matter' activists on Wednesday's CNN Tonight, especially in the wake of the anti-police "pigs in a blanket; fry like bacon!" chant that its protesters recently used in Minnesota: "The rhetoric is being ratcheted up way too high in 'Black Lives Matter.' And we ought to ratchet it back down, and come up with solutions." Williams later criticized the left-…

Ahead of Pope Francis’s upcoming visit to the U.S., Wednesday’s NBC Today touted a new Pew Research Center poll finding that a minority of Catholics do not believe abortion to be a sin. Willie Geist used the Pope adjusting the process of forgiving abortion as a segue: “...the Vatican announced priests may now forgive women who’ve had abortions....The Pope isn't alone when it comes to a bit of a…

Well this certainly falls into the weird news section. Longtime Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner is suing Hasbro toy company for making and selling a toy hamster with her exact name -- after Hasbro was warned earlier this year to discontinue selling it. Six-time Emmy Award winning journalist Harris Faulkner (Outnumbered, Fox Report Weekend)  wasn’t too happy to find out her unique name was used…

In a Tuesday post, David Roberts opined that “nativist conservatives” won’t accept that America shares responsibility for climate change, or for any other “ills in the world,” because they believe that the very idea is “unpatriotic.” “Conservative psychology is averse to ambiguity and nuance,” asserted Roberts, “so for ideological conservatives America is either God's chosen country, a force for…

The Hollywood Reporter’s calling it “yet another unconventional media move for the president.” You might call it a frivolous distraction for a POTUS faced with an anemic economy, an angry electorate and a foreign policy more or less embodied by the feckless efforts to “degrade and ultimately defeat” ISIS. While he’s in Alaska flipping the late-second term bird to John Boehner and the Ohio…

In an interview with left-wing Salon columnist D. Watkins for Sunday’s Meet the Press web-based feature Press Pass, moderator Chuck Todd lobbed one softball after another to the controversial commentator. Todd began: “...there is an education that's happening, I think, in white America. Black America knew what was going on between law enforcement and African-Americans. I think white America is…

Jeffrey Tayler of The Atlantic offered more of his anti-theist – and especially, anti-Catholic – vitriol in a Sunday item for the left-wing Salon. Tayler likened God to Don Corleone of The Godfather, and then spent most of his column ranting about how Pope Francis is akin to the fictional Mafia boss.  The atheist claimed that "Don Corleone could only have dreamed of committing crimes on the scale…

This past Friday, a deputy in Houston, TX was gunned down “execution style” after an unprovoked altercation with 30-year-old Shannon Miles, who is black. ABC, NBC and CBS dutifully reported the tragedy during their Saturday and Sunday broadcast news shows while noting the increase of police officer deaths in 2015. But they left out that death threats against officers are a frequent occurrence at…

On Friday, Washington Monthly's Ed Kilgore and Kevin Drum of Mother Jones contended that the conservative war on political correctness is a tempest in a teapot, and that being politically correct is pretty much synonymous with not being a bigoted jerk.