Andre's Executive Order

On 9/11, Americans remember the tragedy that redefined our understanding of modern conflict. We remember the people who died in the twin towers. We remember the passengers on the planes and the brave men and women who brought down one of them before it hit the Pentagon. We remember the firefighters and first responders and brave citizens of New York City who stepped into all that chaos and death to try to find anyone who had survived and help someone. Anyone. Those who were not close to ground zero wrestled with our shock, our grief, our disbelief and the rising swell of empathy and compassion that drove us to want to contribute, to donate, to even travel if necessary and be a part of the national effort to handle this unprecedented event. As someone who spends much of his time saturated in politics and current events, 9/11 marks another turning point that would have almost as dark implications as the attack, itself. The attacks on the World Trade Center cast the first stone in w...

If you're white, you're racist. If you're like me and you read that or hear it, what's the first thing that goes through your mind? Anger? 'Oh fuck you...'  Is it surprise? "Whoa... what the hell man?" How about defensiveness. "Not if I can help it. Not that I know of." Or maybe dismissively vague. "Well everyone is a little, right?" There's an article in the Atlantic concerning the role of race and the current Administration. It's a long article to listen to or read (you have both options), but it's engaging and beautifully written. It's the first article in a long time that I've really felt left me understanding the deeper framework under which we're struggling in our politics and social battles today. Let me digress... One of the hardest things in my life has been coming to terms with how much of who I am and how I am that has nothing to do with my conscious choices. Sure, I made conscious choices...

No matter how much lipstick you see on a collar, or strange perfume you catch on a shirt, there is part of us that always holds out hope that the evidence we see hinting towards something awful is wrong; A hope that despite the signs, the underlying message is different. But when you walk in on the cheating couple, that hope is removed and even though you might have strongly suspected infidelity the whole time, something about getting absolute knowledge still hits like a hammer. Yesterday, we got that absolute confirmation: Our president is an unapologetic and soul-deep racist who believes his inner circle is above the law. Joe Arpaio - The Tyrant of Arizona Sheriff Arpaio has a long and sordid history in Arizona, the kind of history you would think would horrify any reasonable person including unconstitutional jail living conditions, failure to investigate sexual assault cases, misuse of funds, abuse of power, election law violations, and even a staged...

The tricky part about critiquing late stage capitalist consumerism isn't thinking about it, it's talking about it. We live in a world that can no longer afford it's costs, consequences, and horrific toll on most participants but people have been living with this particular cancer for so long that they can't see any suggestion to the contrary as anything but communism. So we recoil from the conversation. Yet here we stand, sinking up to our throats in a thick slime of uncontrolled income disparity, poverty, diminishing opportunity capped with climate change placing an impending need on us to pull together if we're going to survive as a species. But like a pretty flame, we paw at the false promise of unrestricted wealth heedless of the burns it inflicts on almost everyone who touches it. It lures millions into impoverished complacency; men and woman spending meager incomes month to month in hopes that eventually their 'temporary' fina...

David Harsayni is a senior editor at The Federalist, a conservative blog that gets a great deal of attention nationally. I regularly keep tabs on Real Clear Politics for articles about the election and current events. This shoddy piece of pseudo politics caught my attention and immediately hit a land mine with me. At the risk of making him more popular, a few things need to be said. The article itself: The Fedralist: 10 Abortion Questions Hillary Clinton Won't Answer A good political thinker starts by getting fired up about something. They let their emotions flow about an issue and let those emotions fuel investigation and debate. They explore the ideas with the choir of voices like them then pit those ideas against their opponents and fight it out. But the good political thinker is debating and battling to test the limits and contours of the issue. Like a old grave rubbing, you run the crayon back and forth over the whole area and the outline of the message on the stone gets ...

"And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." -Genesis, 1:28 This single verse has had a powerful impact on western culture. While fairly simple and straight forward, it forms the religious foundation upon which consumerism, and manifest destiny are justified and things like climate change are denied. The state of humanity is understood to be an ongoing project to subdue and control the natural world, and the conquest of nature and the planet is seen as God's will and therefore just in all actions and most methods. This, itself, has had some terrible consequences for our country. But for some, like Ted and Raphael Cruz it doesn't stop at conquest of the natural world. ' Dominionism ' is a theological approach that reads more into Genesis 1:28 than most ...

What's the structural difference between religion and science? Religion is a matter of belief. It's stories and ideas that encapsulate an emotional state, values, traditions, and cultural outlook of believers. When a group of people share the same beliefs about how to live life and what is sacred, their celebration of those things is what we call 'religion'. So with religion, the expression may change and the methods of understanding will almost certainly change, but the underlying conclusions and fundamental ideas never do. Your religion can't be wrong, you can just deviate from it's rightness. With religion, your method may be wrong, but your desired outcome never is. Science is about the process, itself. With science there is no conclusion that is above challenge or question. Science requires consistency above all else - the ability to repeat discovered results. It requires consistent application of discovered rule sets and methods between various trial...

Bernie Sanders takes Wisconsin! This makes seven wins out of the last eight contests and reinforces the populist message and its resonance with Americans across the country.  The delegate count, 1279 for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders' 1027 makes the race appear to be a dead heat. I've spoken with numerous young voters, but Bernie supporters are particularly  excited, enthusiastic, and motivated by the prospect of real populism and the focus of morality and social justice in politics again as a front running concern of a candidate with a proven record of consistency in his approach and priorities. But there's a problem. Bernie Sanders supporters are falling in love with the moment more than the message . Bolstered by the fatigue with political complexity and manipulation by corporation and dark money, Bernie voters are doing what has sabotaged American voters again and again throughout our history. They are loading all their hopes and fears and dreams and fr...

In the late 1970's, the Republican party got some bad news. That news was that they were outgunned. The sheer number of people who identified as “Democrat” significantly outnumbered the voters who identified as “Republican”. With the ethnic diversification and urbanization of the United States ever increasing, the strongholds of what might be Democratic power seemed to growing as the primarily rural and white mainstays of the Republican party were shrinking. Now put down your value judgments on any of this and step slowly away. Just understand the environment. Just before the 1980's, the Republican core America was, in fact, shrinking. The Democratic core America was, in fact, growing. It was a reality of the time that has shifted with many Latinos later joining the Republican party which at the time was unexpected by Democrats and with certain Urban areas remaining conservative despite conditions normally friendly to Democrats, something unexpected by Republicans. But we...

If you've been paying any attention to political news, which if you're reading this you do, you're probably pretty saturated with the continuous commentary on Rush Limbaugh and his attack on Georgetown University Law student Sandra Fluke. But before we let the topic completely go, there's one more piece worth examining. Despite reading countless articles about this, I found most analysis of HOW the scandal came about to be lacking. They focused on trying to make the arguments about the underlying issue, birth control, and did a poor job of examining the actual nature of the interchange between Rush, the public, his sponsors, and our collective psyche as the American people. But few if anyone examined the confluence of events that led to the scandal, even though that analysis answers a lot of questions about everything from Bill Maher to the question of partisanship and how this issue really transcends it. So what happened to Rush? We know what he said, but what did ...

So President Obama announced the end of the Iraq war, bringing the troops back by the end of the year. “Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a presidential hopeful, said in a campaign press release that Obama had shown "weakness" in making "a political decision and not a military one." The withdrawal, Bachmann argued, "represents the complete failure of President Obama...” Now to understand today's topic, you need to remember that at the last Republican debate just a few days ago Bachmann was besides herself with rage that Obama had pulled the United States into four wars, putting our troops in danger and overextending our international presence. President Obama also recently announced that a predator drone strike had knocked out Gaddafi's caravan allowing rebels to locate and kill them man. Now prior to this, Republicans had criticized Obama for not forming a no-fly zone over Libya and then criticized him for forming one a few days later. In this c...

Americans want something new. Whether they call themselves tea party, progressive, conservative or liberal, there is an underlying consensus that something fundamentally wrong has taken hold of our country and perhaps our world. This wrongness is causing uprisings and conflict within nations on an unprecedented level and shows no sign of fixing itself. Political parties seem unable to identify the issues involved and as the Occupy movement spreads, they struggle to grasp what they even can do. Make no mistake, regardless of the ideological framework from which the protesters come, there is a common theme present in both the baby boomers chasing Sarah Palin with tea bags hanging from their hats and the young people packing US cities today. That constant is the underlying feeling that something very deep in the tissue of our country's body is sick. Our knee jerk reaction is to blame it on Obama or wealth or liberals or government but the truth, as is usually the case, is more nuanc...