Phairness Doctrine

*For purposes of this article, “white superiority”, or “white supremacist”, is also meant to include mysogyny, homophobia, sexism, bigotry, and white nationalism.   I’m thinking about the men whose task it was to write the new laws for this country. From scratch. We were finally splitting from the British. Yay! We had the opportunity to create whatever we wanted. To make the rules. Have it our way. It is also true that most of the founding fathers were slave owners. It’s hard to fathom, with today’s brain, how human beings could look at another human being as their “property”, and consider that normal. Slaves were thought of as less than human. Or, at the least, humans who were “less than” enough to justify treating this most inhumane way. This was the societal baseline at the time of the founding. For some, it still is.  But, it wasn’t like today, where some white people may walk around with a vague sense of their standing in the world’s pecking order ...

As the Democrats wrestle with the idea of impeachment, we continue to hear from Nancy Pelosi that impeachment is too divisive, that we need to continue gathering evidence, or that the number of Representatives who back impeachment is still a minority in the House and she worries about public sentiment and poll numbers. There’s one sure way to ensure that the backing she so desperately wants is created , as opposed to passively waiting for the support to grow. Starting an impeachment inquiry will put a huge spotlight on the amount of obstruction that has been perpetrated by Trump. There will be hearings, there will be wall to wall news coverage. Examples of obstruction will be discussed, examined, defended, shown for all to see.  And that, the seeing , is the most important part of the equation. Allow me to illustrate the power behind seeing a crime, as opposed to being told about a crime. In February of 2014, NFL running back Ray Rice was arrested fo...

“Look out for the railroad tracks!” That was the standard refrain from our parents as we left the house growing up as teenagers driving cars. Not the usual bit of parental advice one expects to hear, but we heard it. All the time. It wasn’t for no reason, though, Actually, it was for a very good reason. See, the little rural town of 6,000 in which I grew up in Alexandria, Indiana, had two sets of active train tracks that criss crossed our sleepy little burg. Getting anywhere required the crossing of at least one, sometimes two set of tracks along the way. There was absolutely no way to avoid them. Every couple of years, there would come the inevitable news that some unlucky Alexandrian had lost their focus for a split second, long enough to enter the train crossing without realizing a train was bearing down on them. I know, it seems impossible that a train could sneak up on you like that, but they can. Especially when crossing those tracks was no longer a special occurren...

The Democrats should be moving full speed ahead on impeaching the president. This is the moment where, historically, Democrats have chosen to take the sensible, well-thought out, reactionary way forward, when what was needed was for them to grab ahold of the narrative and shape it to THEIR will. We don’t need to wait and contemplate while hoping the unredacted version of the Mueller Report gets released soon (we’ve seen enough already). What Trump does so well is to set the framing of the narrative. For instance, when he repeatedly made his racist birther claims about President Obama, Trump introduced a frame, a worldview, that included the possibility of Obama not being an American citizen. The narrative within that frame, whether for or against, necessarily included discussion of Obama’s citizenship, a topic we’d never addressed before in reference to a sitting president. It didn’t matter that his birtherism claims weren’t true, they became a part of the narrative, the disc...