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The Face-Off For Obama’s Senate Seat
President Obama’s term was tainted when former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich tried to sell the vacant Senate seat and mad ethe controversial decision to appoint Sen. Roland Burris, D-Il.
Now the contest for that Senate seat could be a bad omen for Obama and the rest of the Democrats if Independent voters side with Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who won a primary nomination for the Senate race Monday along with Democratic state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Guantanamo Turns 8
President Obama’s postponing of his promises to close Guantanamo Bay has upset human rights groups while his conservative critics lobby to keep it open.
On his second day in office, Obama made said there is no time to lose in closing Guantanamo Camp X-Ray prison.
“The United States can fight terr
orism without sacrificing our values and our ideals,” he said in January 2009. “I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture. Second, we will close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp and determine how to deal with those who have been held there.”
While the prison is smaller than any time since 2002, delays in Obama’s plan to replace the site with a maximum-security prison in Illinois mean the original Jan. 22 deadline to close the site will not be met. Funds to refurbish the prison …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Addiction
If your roommates complain how you play too many video games or why you’re on Facebook at 4 a.m., you can now test if you’re another wired American, or if you’ve developed an addiction.
While our generation the first to be raised on the Internet, the concept of addiction to electronics has been growing more accepted among doctors since the early 1990s, and is being added to the American Medical Association’s records.
One of the first advocates of the condition, Dr. Kimberly Young, who founded the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in 1995, was inspired to research it when her friends started to get hooked in early America Online chat rooms.
“If anything middle-aged people get hooked online since they have time on their hands,” said Young. “The big distraction really becomes something different every few years. When the …
Popularity: 2% [?]
Cold War Memories Thaw
The younger generation of Russians and Americans are mixing better, but Russian polling shows that they still fear the other nation’s politicians.
President Obama has initiated numerous efforts to reset cooperation with Russia, but at the time of his Moscow summit in July, Russian polls conducted by the Levada Company gave Obama one of his lowest opinion rankings worldwide.
Only 23 percent of Russians had confidence in Obama to do the right thing in international affairs, while 55 percent say they were not confident. Only 12 percent said the U.S. treats Russia fairly, while 75 percent said that the US abuses its power.
At the July summit in Moscow, Obama asserted that the old hardliners like Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin be more open with social reform and civil rights, but conveyed trust in the handpicked successor of the former President and one time KGB officer.
“I think it’s important, even …
Popularity: 1% [?]
No M*A*S*H for Millennials
Despite our generation’s professed concern for world affairs, movies about current events like war make little profit, which discourages their production.
This was not always so. The single most watched television show of all time is still M*A*S*H, and its satire about Army surgeons during the Korean War – a thinly veiled parody of Vietnam while the war was still going on.
The show’s writer Larry Gelbart passed away recently. One of its stars, Mike Farrell, who played Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt, does not expect television to tackle more substantive topics since few writers with Gelbart’s skill have the support of networks or movie studios.
“Larry had this frantic capacity to turn words in a way that allowed emotions to be there,” Farrell told Scoop Daily. “When I was doing M*A*S*H, people were keenly aware that while we were talking …
Popularity: 2% [?]
