archiveSpeaking Out

I hate to sound cynical, but sometimes, perhaps, I can be. I felt a bit cynical when I wrote about Angus T. Jones’s rant over the sitcom that made him a millionaire, Two and a Half Men, when he labeled it as “filth” despite the fact that his character has...

Protesters attacked with a song, a quite appropriate song, given the circumstances. At the Rhode Island Statehouse tree lighting, carolers showed up singing “O Christmas Tree” after they heard their governor, Lincoln Chafee refer to the 17-foot spruce tree as a “holiday tree.” He says the term was “inclusive” and...

Oxford Dictionaries teams named squeezed middle the Word of the Year for 2011. In a year in which the Occupy movement has gained such notoriety, perhaps that’s not a surprise. Unless, like me, you honestly hadn’t heard the term. The “squeezed middle” isn’t particularly had to figure out. It refers...

Apparently, standing up for what you believe in isn’t enough for today’s protestors: they wish to have a “face” attached to their movement. They got their wish this past week, when photographs of a bloody Occupy Wall Street protestor made their way to the front page of newspapers. Police tackled the...

Am I the only one who was a little disturbed by the reaction of the crowds outside the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray? Granted, I suspect most of us want to see justice — particularly whatever we consider justice in a given scenario is — carried out. And the more...

I’ve been accused of missing the point of this whole “Occupy Wall Street” thing. And maybe I am. I posted on my Facebook page that something told me that if the people who were spending all their time at the tent city in protest of Corporate America would spend as...

A motorcyclist participating in a riding protest against a mandatory helmet law died in an accident police say he would likely have survived if he had been wearing a helmet. The man flipped over his Harley Davidson’s handlebars and hit his head on the pavement. The death, beyond any doubt,...

Is this “Call Out Your Neighbor Week” on Facebook? At least twice this past week, a Facebook “friend” has done a post about someone else — in both cases I have in mind, it involves a person I don’t know and have never even heard of — accusing them of bad behavior....

Over at Living In the World, Not On It, one of my readers, Aislínge, talks about a strange story out of New Mexico, in which a guy is lashing out at his former girlfriend in an anti-abortion message. The billboard depicts the man cradling a baby. But the baby isn’t...

Apparently unsatisfied with getting production of his sitcom halted for the remainder of the season, Charlie Sheen is now giving his bosses an ultimatum about the next season of his hit series.

The only thing more shocking than the continual rants coming from Charlie Sheen, even after CBS and Warner Brothers pulled the plug on the remainder of Two and a Half Men’s season, is what some of his fans are saying about the decision.

When a gunman opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Gibbons two weeks ago, some immediately began questioning the language and imagery of today’s political debate. Those of us who made mention of a now-infamous map that Sarah Palin’s website had featured, which depicted 20 districts that the GOP needed to “target,”...

I would have hoped that no one thought after reading Sunday’s post pointing out a graphic used by Sarah Palin and another used by the Democratic Party that I was trying to imply that only one side of the political coin uses imagery that seems to advocate violence. In fact,...

Last March, Palin released a map depicting districts Republicans needed to target with icons resembling the crosshairs of a gun. Palin has taken a lot of heat for that from liberals. But don’t think the left hasn’t used a similar tactic.