I’m pretty sure every girl goes through a “horse phase” at one point or another. Maybe it’s because we’re peddled Marguerite Henry, C.W. Anderson, and Walter Farley books early on in our youth. Maybe it’s just because horses are pretty. Whatever the reason, I and all my friends played with Breyer horses, drew pictures of horses, and ran around the school playground pretending were were jockeys.
Watching the Triple Crown races with my mom was a large part of my “horse phase.” She told me stories about picking her favorite horse with her sisters during the post parade during her childhood, and she and I did the same together. Admittedly, after 20 years of watching a Triple Crown drought I got a little jaded toward this tradition. I still enjoyed watching, I still picked a favorite, but my inexperienced heart had been broken too many times by spoiler horses to expect anything of greatness. By the time American Pharoah rolled around, I was barely paying attention. Read More on Medium
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Roseanne Barr said something racist and her show got cancelled. There’s no need to spend a lot of time re-hashing what was said or why; Barr has a long history of racist vitriol, and it was only a matter of time before ABC decided she wasn’t worth keeping on their payroll.
The aftermath of Roseanne’s cancellation resulted in more than simple backlash from her fans. Her show was regarded as the sitcom for Trump supporters, so a comment from the Trump administration was certain. The result was a nearly two-minute speech from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which she began the “but what about MY apology” circuit. Read More on Medium For several years I have volunteered for an organization that partners with internationals attending our local university. By picking them up from the airport, helping them buy winter coats, hosting a weekly community dinner, and connecting them to neighborhood resources, the goal is to ensure that international students and their families are made to feel welcomed and loved.
Welcoming and loving foreigners is a distant concept to much of America today. Americans voted in 2016 based on “cultural anxiety.” Attacks against people of color in the form of white supremacist rallies and police shootings have been exposed. A country that prides itself in aligning with “Christian” morality has come to a point where Christians are the least likely to accept responsibility for refugees. Most recently, immigrants have been indefinitely separated from their children, and thousands of undocumented children have been subsequently lost. Read More on Medium February 14, 2008, I was at after-school rehearsal for my high school’s spring play when a classmate looked at her phone and exclaimed to us all that there had been a shooting at Northern Illinois University, the college just up the road.
This was before widespread cell phone access among teens, and there certainly were no smart phones. The rest of us without phones had no way of getting in touch with our parents and no way to look up exactly where and when the shooting took place. This was particularly alarming for me because my dad worked for NIU. For all I knew, my dad had been shot. Read More on Medium I have been casually making videos on YouTube since 2010. Back then, YouTube was not a career goal, and analytics and algorithms were practically unheard of. People made videos because they enjoyed it. They made videos because it was a creative outlet. They made videos to find a sense of community.
I am still in that place. I don’t make videos consistently enough to earn money or to garner a plethora of views, but that doesn’t matter to me. The friendships I have made through the YouTube community and the things I’ve learned from those friendships are more valuable to me than trends or clickbait or AdSense earnings. It’s difficult for some people to understand, but I make videos because I like to make them, and that’s that. I recently was confronted about this. Read More on Medium I recently started a new job as a retail display coordinator. Having been with my company for five years I assumed people would have a vague understanding of the display branch and, therefore, what I would be doing in my new position. Not so. A few dozen tragic conversations later, I’ve discovered it’s incredibly difficult to grasp.
Read More on Medium My church’s caring ministry is affiliated with GriefShare, an international grief support program. The first holiday season after my dad passed away, I went to a GriefShare Surviving the Holiday seminar. Going in, I didn’t think I had a lot to gain from it; I had already gone through several “firsts” with my dad’s birthday and father’s day, so the first round of holidays without Dad didn’t seem like a big deal.
However, as I went through the seminar, I realized I probably wasn’t as prepared as I thought, and I ended up gaining a few pearls of wisdom that I’ve taken with me over the years: Read more at Too Damn Young: Donald Trump got elected as a Washington “outsider.” Americans voted to “drain the swamp” and to “shake up” Washington elites. But the past few months have proven that changing the culture of Washington isn’t easy to do if you don’t know how Washington works, and learning on the job may not be advisable for the Leader of the Free World. Assuming Trump makes it through the next four years and chooses to run again in 2020, the growing question for Democrats remains who their next presidential candidate will be, and moreover, who their winning candidate will be.
The clear answer can be found in Dick Durbin, U.S. Senator from Illinois. On the surface, Durbin is the opposite of what modern liberals need to champion. He doesn’t fit the “outsider” trope, having served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and currently serving in his fourth term as a senator. Durbin is as far-left as one could get, being the Democratic Whip for more than ten years and consistently aligning himself with party policies. He is also the dictionary definition of the “old white man” candidate that causes many young democrats to fight for congressional term limits. How, then, is Durbin the perfect presidential candidate? By being a clear anti-Trump. Part of Hillary Clinton’s failure as a candidate was not being distinctive enough from Trump in terms of character. Her email scandal, her history with her husband’s infidelity, and her willingness to take money from dubious sources tarnished her credibility in ways that were too similar to Trump’s questionable integrity. Durbin has somehow managed to stay away from corruption throughout his 35-year Washington career. His entire resume of scandals can be reduced to two instances, both of which were unsubstantial and short-lived. In 2005 Durbin compared Guantanamo Bay interrogation techniques to those utilized by the Nazis and the Soviet Union. He was widely criticized in the immediate aftermath and apologized before Congress, but his remarks were later praised for raising legitimate issues of morality. In 2014 it was reported that Durbin’s female staffers were being paid $11,000 less than his male staff members, but it was researched and reported by a notoriously conservative PAC. Their sources have never been corroborated, and subsequent reports have only been on activist conservative websites, not legitimate news outlets. A Washington career with only two minor blips is as close to spotless as it gets. Trump, by comparison, has created a controversy for himself nearly every week of his four months as President. Those instances would undoubtedly be re-surfaced during presidential debates, but they pale in comparison to Trump’s laundry list of failings, and Durbin is universally acknowledged as one of the best debaters in the senate. Where Trump is polarizing and divisive, Durbin is the calm in the storm, and it’s all in his manner of speech. You can tell when he’s angry, but he doesn’t scream across the senate floor. Even if you disagree with him, he’s hard to argue with. The message that got Elizabeth Warren kicked off the senate floor was repeated by Durbin, but when he talked, the senate listened. The elephant-in-the-room investigation on Trump’s ties to Russia usually leads to chaotic argument, but Durbin shifts the conversation to bipartisan unity. The most convincing argument against Durbin is his age – he will be 76-years-old by 2020, and should he win, the oldest President in history. But Trump will be 74 by then, so it’s apples and oranges, and with a qualified running mate at his side, Durbin’s age would be just a number. If anything, Durbin is living proof that with age comes experience, and experience in leadership is exactly what our country needs. Today’s America is not one that walks a line of moderation. It’s not surprising that we’ve followed Obama’s liberal, inclusive, groundbreaking administration with an alt-right, deregulating, constitutional-originalist one. We’ve tried the “outsider.” It’s time for the pendulum to swing back inside. Have you ever re-tweeted your own tweets so you could whine about the same thing twice? Sean Hannity has.
Last month, Ted Koppel ran a story on CBS Sunday Morning about the political divide and polarization in America. Most of the story included clips from various points throughout history, and a small portion featured an interview with Sean Hannity. The story was not a profile of Sean Hannity. Hannity’s comments were not the basis for the story. Yet between March 26th and 28th, Hannity tweeted and re-tweeted 23 times to complain that his interview was 45 minutes long and the portion CBS used was edited “unfairly.” He even went so far as to run a special feature on his own show about “The Anatomy of EDITED Fake News." The ALL CAPS in the title was OMINOUS and THREATENING, and I was waiting for an intense breakdown of Koppel's piece explaining how and why it was FAKE. Instead, Hannity spent his time connecting random, factually-dubious dots to create a CBS-fake-news-conspiracy-theory tracing back through generations of newscasters. Of course, Koppel being a contributor for CBS for one year makes him culpable as the leader of the CBS-fake-news army, right? It was painfully clear that there was no validity against anything Koppel did and Hannity was merely throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it would stick. But the act of dedicating an entire TV segment to attack Ted Koppel brings Hannity’s usual banter to a new low. Ted Koppel is a legend who paid his dues and demands respect, yet Hannity declared him "not a journalist." The irony of Hannity thinking he understands journalistic integrity (or journalism in general) is rich. If Hannity understood journalism, he would know that interviewers give interviewees the basic idea of the piece, so Hannity knew it was not a profile and anything he said would be used merely as context. If Hannity understood journalism, he would know the interviewee has no rights to the final published story, so CBS can edit however they wish. Unless Hannity sues CBS for defamation and a court mandates the release of the full interview (which is not a winnable case) CBS does not owe Hannity anything. If Hannity understood journalism, he would know that editing is a necessary and standard practice. If it wasn’t, we would expect novelists to publish their first drafts and 20-minute segments on 60 Minutes would be 6 months long. Hannity’s definition of edited news being “fake” is incorrect and ridiculous. Hannity’s final tweets on the subject were perhaps the most telling to his attitude: “Hey John,” he responded to John Heilemann, “who called the election of 2016 correct? You told me @POTUS had ‘no shot’. And I am ‘bad for America’? This arrogance is laughable” Translation: I was right, you were wrong. Let me spit on the ground you walk on. Followed with, “I'm so thankful to expose ‘Edited Fake News’. I don't give a sh/;()$& what any media people think of me.” Translation: I don’t know how many characters to use to make up the s-word, so I’m just going to smack my keyboard for emphasis against those darn “media people.” And of course, only a true journalist would put his punctuation outside his quotation marks. Let’s all just be honest: no one noticed or cared that news pieces are edited until Hannity got his feelings hurt and cried to twitter about it. All he proved was despite his flippancy in assigning the term “angry snowflake” to others, he is the most appropriate definition of one. SYCAMORE – Whimsical Perspective, a new store in downtown Sycamore, will open its doors Thursday. The shop is located in the Opera House building at 366 W. State St. on the corner of California and State streets. ... Laura Bright, owner of Whimsical Perspective along with her husband, Ron, hope to add a new, unique vibe to the downtown area. Bright has been posting on a blog under the same name for the past six years, featuring painted furniture pieces, DIY home décor and design, which will serve as inspiration for the store. |
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