Rejecting Nobel’s Audacity of Hope

This article appears in North of Center.  I hope everyone in the downtown Lexington area picks up a copy.
Rejecting Nobel’s Audacity of Hope:  Why We Should Not Appreciate Barack Obama’s Peace Prize
When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that it would give President Barack Obama the 2009 Peace Prize, I, like many people, reacted bitterly.  Having [...]

Read Full Post »

When Washington Lobbies Pony Up for Budding Photojournalists

The past few days I’ve been in Washington DC at a Campus Progress training summit.  We’ve been talking about effective journalism, writing good ledes, weighing the ethics of journalism against the challenges of being a college student, and other important facets of the profession.
One of my assignments is to take some digital photographs and construct [...]

Read Full Post »

Vote Nader 2008

In “Civil Disobedience,” an essay I like to assign in the classes that I teach, Henry David Thoreau voices the frustration of living in a country whose government is the primary agent of injustice.  Then, as today, the United States was burdened by an expensive war of imperial aggression.  The institution of slavery was frowned [...]

Read Full Post »

More Trouble at My Old Kentucky Home

The University of Kentucky community is reeling once more after another shameful incident on campus, which calls attention (yet again) to our institution’s horrid record of racial equality.  Early this morning UK police discovered an effigy of Barack Obama hanging on a tree near Rose Street and the William T. Young Library.  Within hours, the national media [...]

Read Full Post »

A Media Oversight?

It’s been about a week since the final Presidential Debate of 2008, which was not so much a debate as a structured exchange of personal attacks between John McCain and Barack Obama.  Media pundits immediately speculated as to whether McCain’s aggressive wit–”If you wanted to oppose George W. Bush, you should have run in 2004″–would [...]

Read Full Post »

We Are Exerting our Military Might in Iraq and Elsewhere, Remember?

Another Presidential debate has come and gone, and neither candidate engaged the problem of our nation’s military aggression against “forces of evil” to any level of consequence.  Worse, issues like health care and our economic crisis functioned as talking points, seemingly unrelated to the way our country chooses to spend its money.  According to Barack [...]

Read Full Post »

Sarah Palin and Reasons Why Churches Should Not Have Tax Exempt Status

In the days since Sarah Palin emerged as the Republican VP candidate, droves of artifacts from her past have surfaced.  Apparently she’s a former beauty pageant contestant, sportscaster, PTA supporter, small town mayor, avowed hockey mom, and (unfortunately) a member of an Assemblies of God church.
A video from Wasilla Assembly of God in Alaska that [...]

Read Full Post »

Wind Energy in Lowville, NY

The Associated Press circulated a story about Lewis County, NY this past weekend. The piece, entitled “Windmills Split Town and Families,” casts John Yancey in the role of a prototype Lowville citizen who opposes the Maple Ridge wind project. As the article explains, energy developers have built 195 wind towers in Lewis [...]

Read Full Post »