Obama’s Budget Finally, A Progressive Budget. This Mini Depression is partly the result of a widening gap between what Americans can afford to buy and what Americans when fully employed can produce. –Robert Reich Obama’s Goal: Halving the Budget Deficit by 2012. Really? Halving the budget deficit by 2012 is a nice goal but it [...]
Ensure Stimulus Funds Reach the CSU System
February 28, 2009 By
The faculty in the California State University are deeply concerned about the rapid decline in the ability of our nation’s largest four-year university system to deliver higher education to all eligible students. Our public university system is staggering from deep cuts to state funding already made this year, last year, and earlier this decade. Now [...]
Ending the Annual Budget Impasse Ritual
February 28, 2009 By
The California budget process is broken due to the requirement for a two-thirds vote to pass the budget. I would like to suggest a different procedure that preserves the minority protections of the two-thirds requirement while encouraging negotiation and ensuring that there definitely will be a budget passed. Proposal: If no budget passes by the [...]
Friday Feedback: Land Use and Transit
February 27, 2009 By
Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment submitted by Yoshidad, writing in response to “Economic Recovery Must Include Transit“ by Erin Steva and Kevin J. Powers. Yoshidad writes: Let’s not forget revisions to the land use that accompanies transit. Currently the vast majority [...]
Corruption Touched CIA’s Covert Operations
February 27, 2009 By
Paramilitary agents for the CIA’s super-secret Special Activities Division, or SAD, perform raids, ambushes, abductions and other difficult chores overseas, including infiltrating countries to “light up” targets from the ground for air-to-ground missile strikes. This week the government acknowledged for the first time that some of SAD’s sensitive air operations were swept up in a [...]
Color-Blind, Power-Oblivious: Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism
February 27, 2009 By
It was all too predictable that Attorney General Eric Holder would be attacked for his recent remarks about race in America. To suggest that the nation is still haunted by the specter of racism is unacceptable it seems, especially since, with the election of President Obama, we have ostensibly entered the “post-racial” era. But, in [...]
Finally, A Progressive Budget
February 26, 2009 By
President Obama’s new budget is, well, audacious — not just because it includes several big, audacious initiatives (universally affordable health care, and a cap-and-trade system for coping with global warming, for starters) but also because it represents the biggest redistribution of income from the wealthy to the middle class and poor this nation has seen [...]
Obama Reaches the Bleechers. Jindal? Off the Fists
February 26, 2009 By
Feels like it’s still the best of times and the worst of times. If the night of President Obama’s first major speech to a joint session of Congress proved anything, it confirmed that America chose the better of two directions last November. Nothing could underscore that more glaringly than the comparison of Obama’s remarks to [...]
Obama Finds Pony: Sets Forth Plans on Healthcare, Alternative Energy, Education
February 26, 2009 By
Only President Barack Obama could keep digging in a barn filled to the roof line with manure and find a brand new pony. Yet that is what the country and indeed the world needed in his non-State of the Union budget speech Tuesday night to a joint session of the US Congress. Talk is cheap, [...]
Obama’s Goal: Halving the Budget Deficit by 2012. Really?
February 25, 2009 By
The President’s message on fiscal responsibility — that he’ll cut the current one by half by the end of his first term — is smart politics right now, but it may be dumb politics by November of 2012, and doesn’t make much economic sense regardless. We’re in a deepening recession, in case you hadn’t noticed. [...]
The Lowdown on Black Ministers Living on the Down Low: Son’s Arrest Raises Questions about Bishop T.D. Jakes’s Sexuality
February 25, 2009 By
When preachers pontificate about the sins of homosexual sex, they need to be careful of what they say; their words invariably will be back to bite them, as we have seen with fallen evangelical star Pastor Ted Haggard. For Bishop T.D. Jakes, the internationally known African American evangelical star dubbed as the black Billy Graham, [...]
Obama’s Policy on Civil Liberties: Bush Lite?
February 25, 2009 By
Barack Obama entered the presidency as one of the most rhetorically pro-civil liberties politicians in recent memory. And shortly after taking office, he drew applause from friends of liberty for promulgating executive orders closing Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, ending CIA torture, suspending kangaroo proceedings at military tribunals, and pledging more openness than the secretive [...]
A Dozen Books That Tell Americans Like It Is
February 24, 2009 By
If newspaper readership is plummeting, maybe it’s because readers are turning elsewhere to catch a glimpse of the causes behind the official story. Recognizing this, some book publishers courageously are using their printing presses to bring interpretive reporting to the reading public. Here are a dozen books Americans need to read as they paint a [...]
Neo-Confederacy Erupts with Governors’ Rejection of Stimulus Money
February 24, 2009 By
Southern Republican Governors Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Rick Perry of Texas, and Mark Sanford of South Carolina are making noises about “refusing” federal dollars from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package. They are posturing in a way reminiscent of an earlier generation of Southern governors who stood for “states’ rights,” which [...]
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Between the Lines: New York Post “Chimp” Cartoon — Incendiary Satire Has a Dangerous Past
The New York Post issued a “sideways” explanation (I really wouldn’t call it an apology) on a provocative and highly incendiary political cartoon it ran on February 18th. Combining two news events of the day, one in which a Connecticut woman named Charla Nash was attacked by her “pet” chimpanzee — which nearly ripped off [...]