Portside

Campaigners take legal route after success against big tobacco and other industries led to change

It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that this monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s part of a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s global empire.

Minnesota just banned captive audience meetings, presumably understanding that it is unreasonable to force working people to attend mandatory meetings at which their boss delivers to them the equivalent of an Ayn Rand book reading.

Going back more than 20 years, FISA court rulings have complained of FBI agents lying to the court and abusing the law. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment.

Homelessness and poverty are the tragic results of unfettered capitalism and raging inequality, whether it’s in rural West Virginia or in San Francisco’s Tenderloin.

“I was told that if I tried to discharge myself, or seek care elsewhere, that I could be arrested for trying to kill my child”

Sanders is the only member of Congress who calls himself a socialist. And if you're wondering how a Democratic socialist differs from a Democrat, he'll point to the time he took to the Senate floor for 8 1/2 hours in 2010, railing against President Obama for supporting Bush-era tax cuts. That's drawn him few fans in corporate America. But in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, a rural dairy farming region, Bernie does really well.

Historians cannot understand the behavior of the American people past and present without paying serious attention to nationalism and religion--or, more precisely, religions, since religion is a weak category. The relationship between religions and foreign relations is more problematic. Thus my text for this sermon is an old American adage, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: For someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail.

The act of illegally crossing the border into the United States used to be treated as a civil offence resulting in deportation. But the decision of the federal government several years ago to treat illegal crossings as a criminal offence has led a mass incarceration of immigrants in segregated facilities.

Jazz is by nature a contradiction. No other music is so dependent upon individuality, but it hinges on an interplay with others in a giving, attentive way that emphasizes communication and communion. The single voice is key, but it takes on a rare power within the ensemble. Charlie Haden embodied that duality with a vital and beautiful grace.