Culture/Society

Donald Trump has been likened to (among others) Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, George Wallace, Morton Downey Jr., and Nickelback, the band. “Nickelback” is also a football term, which brings us to yet another Trump comparison: Dave Zirin believes that the Washington Redskins franchise “is becoming the sports equivalent of the Donald Trump presidential run, a dead-ender operation with nothing to…

There’s nothing worse than when a fun site takes itself too seriously. That’s what happens when Buzzfeed, the site aimed at millennials for it’s nostalgia-inducing gifs and listicles, ‘weighs in’ on divisive social issues.The results are as groan-worthy as you’d expect by a site ran by 20-something hipsters. 

Comedy Central's Larry Wilmore vomited up the oft-used leftist insults of social conservatives on Tuesday's Nightly Show in a rant about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. Wilmore hinted that her supporters were akin to the Ku Klux Klan, and mocked her Christian prayer gesture as a Nazi salute. The "comedian" later likened Davis to notorious segregationist George Wallace, and hyped that "going to jail for…

Anthony Faiola hyped how Pope Francis is "grappling with a conservative backlash to the liberal momentum building inside the [Catholic] [C]hurch" in a front-page, above-the-fold item in Monday's Washington Post. Faiola played up the "growing sense of alarm among strict conservatives, exposing what is fast emerging as a culture war over Francis's papacy," and underlined that the "conservative…

Example #547,282 why a modern liberal arts BA has all the inherent honor and usefulness of a fake phone number scrawled on a cocktail napkin: Michael Todd Landis writing on George Mason University’s History News Network proscribing language we are allowed to use when talking about the Civil War. Landis, Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University, doesn’t really have much to say…

Does Donald Trump’s popularity among Republicans indicate that a big part of the GOP base is more authoritarian than it is conservative? Yes, suggested Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas in a Friday post. “The crazies don't really care about any conservative platform, they just want someone to reflect their own bigotries and xenophobia, all the while telling the weenies to fuck off…

Gordon Gekko of Wall Street would be a popular choice of liberals for the 1980s movie character who best illuminated the supposedly ugly truth about the Reagan era, but he’s not Andrew O’Hehir’s choice. In a Monday analysis of the films of the late Wes Craven, O'Hehir stated that Freddy Krueger, from Craven’s 1984 movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, was “the most potent pop-culture signifier of the…

In an interview with author Salman Rushdie on Friday’s CBS This Morning, co-host Gayle King teed him up to bash Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, imprisoned for refusing to issue gay marriage licenses: “What do you think about what's going on in Kentucky with Kim Davis, who’s standing up for her religious beliefs, when you were really the victim of religious beliefs, where they were trying to get…

At the top of Thursday’s CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley proclaimed that the jailing of Rowan County, Kentucky Democratic Clerk Kim Davis “could be the last front in a losing battle against same-sex marriage” as she had been refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing gay marriage on June 26.

Academy-Award winning British actress Emma Thompson (Saving Mr. Banks, Sense and Sensibility) doesn’t get why younger women are rejecting the label of feminist. During a Sept. 2 interview with Variety about her new film A Walk in the Woods, the self-described “radical feminist” complained that she found the reluctance for young actressesto embrace the title of “feminist” simply, “bizarre.”…

Montel Williams targeted 'Black Lives Matter' activists on Wednesday's CNN Tonight, especially in the wake of the anti-police "pigs in a blanket; fry like bacon!" chant that its protesters recently used in Minnesota: "The rhetoric is being ratcheted up way too high in 'Black Lives Matter.' And we ought to ratchet it back down, and come up with solutions." Williams later criticized the left-…

Ahead of Pope Francis’s upcoming visit to the U.S., Wednesday’s NBC Today touted a new Pew Research Center poll finding that a minority of Catholics do not believe abortion to be a sin. Willie Geist used the Pope adjusting the process of forgiving abortion as a segue: “...the Vatican announced priests may now forgive women who’ve had abortions....The Pope isn't alone when it comes to a bit of a…

Well this certainly falls into the weird news section. Longtime Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner is suing Hasbro toy company for making and selling a toy hamster with her exact name -- after Hasbro was warned earlier this year to discontinue selling it. Six-time Emmy Award winning journalist Harris Faulkner (Outnumbered, Fox Report Weekend)  wasn’t too happy to find out her unique name was used…

In a Tuesday post, David Roberts opined that “nativist conservatives” won’t accept that America shares responsibility for climate change, or for any other “ills in the world,” because they believe that the very idea is “unpatriotic.” “Conservative psychology is averse to ambiguity and nuance,” asserted Roberts, “so for ideological conservatives America is either God's chosen country, a force for…