Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is an award-winning journalist who lives in Baltimore.
Earlier this month, in Murfreesboro, Tenn., Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was on the stump, supporting members of that community opposed to the building of an Islamic center.“Our Constitution guarantees separation of church and state,” Cain trumpeted. “Islam combines church and state. [The protesters are] objecting to the fact that Islam is both a religion and a set of laws.”
Read More
Circumstantial evidence is apparently dead in U.S. courts, if the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial is any indication. An Orlando, Fla., jury found Anthony not guilty of either first-degree murder, manslaughter or child abuse in the death of her daughter, Caylee Anthony, three years ago.
Read More
Is Oklahoma City pharmacist Jerome Ersland a murderer? A jury in that town thought so. Too bad there’s no jury to find Antwun Parker’s mom guilty of being an awful parent. I’m sorry, but there’s just no other conclusion to reach. You may agree or disagree after you hear the details of the story. It was May 19, 2009, when Ersland was working at the Reliable Discount Pharmacy in Oklahoma City. A video surveillance camera showed two males wearing ski masks walk into the store brandishing guns and attempting to rob the joint.
Read More
As might be expected, liberals are whipping out the Bull Connor card about HB 56 — the recent Alabama law to curb its illegal immigration problems.
“This draconian initiative signed into law … by Gov. Robert Bentley is so oppressive that even Bull Connor himself would be impressed,” said Wade Henderson, the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, in the Los Angeles Times. He blasted the law as “designed to do nothing more than terrorize the state’s Latino community.”
Read More
‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" is a just-published biography by college professor and author Manning Marable that attempts to objectively fill in gaping holes in the famed "Autobiography of Malcolm X." Like me, Marable, who died recently from complications of pneumonia, had some reservations about the full accuracy of the autobiography, parts of which he kindly described as "fictive."
I found Marable’s material about the al-Qaida interpretation of Malcolm X’s legacy particularly revealing.
Read More
As a curmudgeonly conservative Republican who’s pushing 60, I have to fess up: I like rap music.Hey, rap music helped kill disco. I feel I owe rap and rappers a debt I can never repay. One of the rappers I like is that guy named Common.His moniker might ring a bell because Common’s the rapper who was invited to “An Evening of Poetry” at the White House a couple of weeks ago. Common’s invitation caused quite a few conservative noses to get twisted out of joint. Here was Karl Rove’s huffy reaction:
Read More
A group of American heroes got their proper salute and recognition — 50 years later — on a Public Broadcasting System two-hour documentary called “Freedom Riders.”
In May of 1961, a group of black and white Americans departed Washington, D.C., and headed south.
One group was on a Trailways bus; the other took a Greyhound bus. Their goal was to see if Southern bus terminals were desegregated, as they should have been if the Supreme Court’s 1946 Morgan v.
Read More
Monday marked the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. During the latter years of his life, King was subject to extensive FBI scrutiny. OK, that’s much too kind.What King was subjected to was surveillance and harassment that bordered on criminal, which is why I’m using this anniversary to call for a bipartisan congressional committee that will pressure the FBI into releasing — unredacted — all its files about the bureau’s informants and the surveillance of all civil rights and anti-war groups.
Read More
“The system is broken.” That’s the new mantra making its way around the country.
You’ve heard it a couple of dozen times if you’ve heard it once, haven’t you? Our immigration system - the one that has allowed America to achieve unprecedented ethnic, racial and religious diversity by those who legally immigrate here - is supposedly broken.
Read More
No one really likes people who crow, "We told you so." But the truth is: we did tell you so.
Here’s the headline from the story that appeared on the Maryland Reporter Web site: "Costs of in-state tuition for illegal immigrants could be higher than projected."
And now, a few details from the body of the story.
Read More
What?Did I read the White House Office of the Press Secretary release dated March 10 right? Did President Barack Obama really hold a White House conference on bullying prevention?Indeed, he did. And in the process, he made this rather revealing assertion:“If there’s one goal of this conference, it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up. It’s not. Bullying can have destructive consequences for our young people.
Read More
‘The Star-Spangled Banner” — don’t they teach it in schools anymore?
Apparently not. Sunday, at my beloved Super Bowl again, there was singer Christina Aguilera, butchering our country’s national anthem. The line that was supposed to be “O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming” became, in Aguilera’s alternate universe, “What so proudly we watched at the twilight’s last gleaming.”
I blame the nation’s school system for this. Back when I was a little feller, growing up in Baltimore, we actually had to sing our national anthem.
Read More
President Ronald Reagan — Republican, conservative and white — is not exactly popular among black Americans. But during the recognition of his 100th birthday, there was one group of black people celebrating. They live on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada.
Read More
Her name is Kelley Williams-Bolar. She’s 40, a college student, a teachers aide and a single mom. And, on Jan. 15, she became a convicted felon.
Here’s how this sorry state of affairs came about. Williams-Bolar lives in an Akron, Ohio, public housing project. In addition to attending college, she worked at an Akron high school as a teaching assistant. Sounds like a solid, law-abiding citizen, right?
Read More
It was not long after the Tucson, Ariz., shootings that Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik went into full-blowhard mode about who was responsible for the massacre.
Hint: It was not suspect Jared Lee Loughner.
According to a story on CNN.com, Dupnik “used a nationally televised press conference to condemn the tone of political discourse in his state.”
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/people/gregory-kane?quicktabs_1=0
