Tag Archives: Politics

Getting Germany Back on Track

By Markus Ziener

The Mar­shall Plan has become syn­ony­mous for mas­sive help, for bring­ing about a her­cu­la­neum task and hav­ing a coun­try rise again from the ash­es. Orig­i­nal­ly designed to help Europe get back on track after the dev­as­ta­tions of World War II, it has a much broad­er mean­ing today. In dis­cus­sions about how to rebuild Ukraine at some point in the future, there’s again talk of the need for a Mar­shall Plan. How­ev­er, it’s worth­while to take a step back and look at what the orig­i­nal Mar­shall Plan was all about.

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Numbers That Make You Think: Public Opinion of the United States is on the Rise

By Hannah Quinque

Pho­to Cred­it: Air Force 1 CC0 1.0, NASA https://search.creativecommons.org/photos/3e19b785-53a0-4e75-9466-d304d43c894d

Dear Read­er,

What has most sig­nif­i­cant­ly affect­ed your view of the U.S. with­in the last year? Black Lives Mat­ter protests, maybe? Well, they might have changed, but the same fights are fought still. Dis­as­trous ways to deal with Covid-19? Vac­ci­na­tion might have saved many lives, but 50,000 Amer­i­cans have died from Covid-19 since Octo­ber, and the rate of new infec­tions is still at 70,000 new cas­es each day. But hey, one major change can’t be dis­put­ed even by the most cyn­i­cal blog­ger: There’s a dif­fer­ent POTUS (Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States)! And although he faces obsta­cles at home, a recent study sug­gests that Joe Biden’s pres­i­den­cy made America’s image abroad take off again after a Trump-induced dive. Read more »

We Were Trumped!

By Bobbie Kirkhart

Amer­i­cans do not vote direct­ly for their pres­i­dents. We vote for the peo­ple who will vote for our pres­i­dents. Each state is assigned elec­tors, based part­ly on pop­u­la­tion, but each state is assigned an addi­tion­al two elec­toral votes, regard­less of its size. Con­se­quent­ly, a vote from a per­son in a rur­al state has more influ­ence than a vote from an urban­ized area. This sys­tem has giv­en us five pres­i­dents who came in sec­ond in the people’s vote with mixed results. Three have made us ques­tion this sys­tem. With Ruther­ford Hayes, we got Jim Crow law that denied African Amer­i­cans their civ­il rights for more than 100 years. With George W. Bush, we got the Iraq war. With Don­ald Trump, well, we got – Trump!

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Politics and Religion in a Secular State

By Bobbie Kirkhart

It is iron­ic that, as the world’s first sec­u­lar democ­ra­cy hav­ing scorned all state reli­gion, we soon became and have remained, social­ly and polit­i­cal­ly, pre­oc­cu­pied with god. Cam­paign speech­es end with “God bless you.” The song, “God Bless Amer­i­ca,” which Irv­ing Berlin wrote as a par­o­dy sung by a com­i­cal­ly chau­vin­is­tic char­ac­ter, is now per­formed as a patri­ot­ic hymn.

“God Bless Amer­i­ca” by Joelk75 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

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