News & Features

After the recent election, many Americans are unsure how the health care reform bill initiated by President Obama will affect them.  This bill includes several provisions that deal with individuals seeking drug addiction prevention and treatment.  Many believe (and hope) that this plan really will make addiction care more affordable and accessible. However, although Obamacare may provide needed assistance to drug addicts, proponents and officials of the bill are hesitant to publicize these benefits in fear of the bill attaining the negative stigma often associated with drug addicts themselves.  

Last week, the FCC released new figures that showed that ownership of TV and radio stations by women and people of color remains abysmally low. People of color own just 3.6 percent of all full-power TV stations, and women own less than 7 percent. If the changes Genachowski is seeking are approved, one company will be allowed to own the daily newspaper, two TV stations and up to eight radio stations in the same market. These changes would disproportionately impact communities of color. In fact, nearly 40 percent of TV stations owned by people of color could be impacted by the FCC’s decision since they are located in the top-20 markets, which are the ones affected by this rule change. 

General David Petraeus, erstwhile CIA chief and U.S. commander of the Iraq theatre, not to mention one of the most admired military generals in modern times, resigned when stories of an affair with his biographer broke. General John Allen, current commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, too, is now facing possible relief of command if the 20,000 plus pages of email exchanges with a civilian named Jill Kelley are to be found to have breached military codes of conduct. The details of the scandal are the stuff of reality TV. Call it “Housewives of Tampa Bay” if you will, or better yet, an HBO movie, say, “From Tampa With Love?” 

Unfortunately, the criminals behind these fake driver’s licenses tend to learn as they go, gaining more information about the system and finding new techniques to beat it. This makes spotting fakes  difficult and compels law enforcement to scramble to keep up. Many fabricated driver’s licenses can pass the quick glance of a bouncer, and even the bar codes on many fake cards have become detailed enough to fool a typical scanning device. The websites that offer these cards, though clearly illegal, have reached out to buyers by advertising on social networking sites, and may show up in major search engines

One of the most disturbing trends in American public health is that women's life expectancy is shrinking in many parts of the U.S. Women's longevity took an unprecedented nosedive during the past decade, researchers recently discovered, with their life expectancy tumbling or stagnating in one of every five counties in the country. The last time life expectancy fell for a large number of American women was 1918, due to Spanish influenza.

If no one else is rejoicing about the systemic inconveniences imposed on Florida voters on Election Day, where waits as long as eight hours to cast a ballot were endured and witnessed by thousands of voters, the state’s former senators Mike Bennett and Ellyn Bogdanoff should be elated.  "I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert,” Bennett said in 2011 when sponsoring legislation to impose stricter voting requirements. 

Republicans, meanwhile, went about lying with their customary abandon. They slandered the president as, variously and sometimes all at once, Kenyan-born (Donald Trump’s meme); an apologist for Islamic terrorism (Mr. Romney himself, in accusing the president of sympathizing with Benghazi murderers); a secret homosexual (Jerome Corsi, a popular conspiracy theorist and member of the Romney campaign press corps); and a heretic of possibly Christian persuasion who, in supporting same-sex marriage, has “shaken his fist at God” (the Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy).

On Election Day, Arizona remained a red state -- electing Sheriff Joe Arpaio to a sixth term in office, Republican Jeff Flake to the U.S. Senate, and voting for Mitt Romney for president -- while its neighbors, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, went blue for President Obama. According to political pundits, the reason those states voted Democrat this year was because of their fast-growing Latino populations. If having a large Latino population was all a state needed to turn blue, then Arizona, which is almost one-third Latino, should have been blue, too. But it wasn’t.