Manhattan Diary
by Cahir O'DohertyRSS 
Recent Posts
- Will New York Senator Chuck Schumer ditch gay couples for an immigration deal?
- If nobody's happy, it's working – the abortion debate and Irish politics of stalemate
- Conservative news entertainment complex claim Barack Obama leader of Al Qaeda
- Why Irish grudges are passed on - a long tradition of never forgetting
- Boston man confronts Infowars conspiracy nuts over 'false flag' claim
Archives
After a week of political upheavals the baby boomer generation that comprises most of our current government seem to think the worst is - or soon will be - over.
They predict that Civil War voting reflexes will kick in, as they always seem to before general elections, and calmer heads are probably anticipating a return to some kind of normalcy soon.
On Wednesday the Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato, 42, was viciously murdered with a hammer in his own home.
It was an attack he feared was coming. Friends said he was a brave but frightened man. On Wednesday the day he dreaded finally arrived.
The hardening of attitudes in our political culture has reached our Catholic hospitals.
Relationships between the hospitals and the increasingly hardline US bishops have become so explosive in recent months they're making national news.
Now this is Hardball. It seems that our political pundits have finally had enough of political parties reinventing American history to suit their ideology. Watch below:
Ireland's political culture values who you know, not what you know. It's a political system built on nineteenth century model in the twenty first: "I knew your father, you play on the right sports team, sure didn't we go to school together, and wasn't your grandfather on Collin's side."
It's a great way to forge connections - and the Irish love connections - but it turns out, irrefutably, that nepotism is no basis for a system of government.
Despite President Obama's grandly unifying speech this week, Arizona is still one of the most divided states in the nation - an epicenter of the kind of overheated partisan bickering that is tearing the fabric of the nation.
That some of this is actually their own fault doesn't help matters. Just a week after the horrific shooting of Gabby Giffords and 18 other innocent citizens in Tucson, in their wisdom a group called Crossroads of the West went ahead with a scheduled gun show and a crowd of 4,000 showed up.
You know all those birds that have been falling out of the sky around the world? Do you know what's causing it to happen?
If you replied that it was freak weather conditions, or fireworks, or over eating, or any number of the recent explanations put forth by scientists you'd be wrong - dead wrong.
It was actually the Senate's repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell that caused it.
When Americans decry socialism what they often mean is sharing.
It took me ages to understand that. For many Europeans living here the intensity of many American's objection to public programs of any kind is a terrific surprise, particularly when you notice how generous they can be one on one.
There's no connection between a culture of 24/7 paranoiac anti-government rhetoric and the decision of deranged individuals to attack its figureheads.
There's no connection between putting crosshairs on Congressional leaders heads and the decision of deranged individuals to shoot them.
Just how shockingly unreconstructed and far right are Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's views? In an interview with the California Lawyer this week Scalia was asked the following:
In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?
