Dick Price: To get a handle on the damage California’s current approach to incarceration is having on its citizens, consider this: In a recent 23-year period, California erected 23 prisons—one a year, each costing roughly $100 million dollars annually to operate, with both Democratic and Republican governors occupying the statehouse—at the same time that it added just one campus to its vaunted university system, UC Merced.

Dick Price: Next week, Georgianne Nienaber departs on a 12-day investigative research trip to Haiti where she will look to fill in gaps in the mainstream media’s news coverage while also providing emergency medical assistance to rural Haitians. As she works with Haitian human rights organizations to develop story ideas, she also invites LA Progressive readers to contribute their thoughts on where else she might look.

Dick Price: To get elected, we understood that Obama had to take a pragmatic approach. But underneath the pragmatism, we were attracted to the compassionate world view, the deep ability to grasp complex issues, and the eloquence to voice our best hopes and dreams for the future that we saw, and see, in the man—traits that had been so woefully absent in George W. Bush fear-mongering, hate-mongering, war-mongering reign.

Different strokes for different folks, right? If Tiger and dozens of other celebrities can do what they’re doing and hurt no one, why should we care?

So, right, it’s a wonderful movie, and as much as the LA Progressive does such things, we give it four stars, a kiss and a hug and a pat on the behind, and recommend that you see it. But I think we were touched with something more that night.

There was nothing in the order about invading anyone’s privacy. According to Nelson, “Bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the Department of Commerce cooked up the requirement for a background investigation.”

“Just Old Men Talking,” Written by Grady L. Mackey III, Directed by Sharon L. Graine/. September 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 13. Playhouse Theatre Players, 600 Moulton Avenue, Los Angeles. Reservations at 323.227.5410

Sitting in that auditorium thick with nostalgia for another age, you’ve got to wonder where’s the passion beyond this room? Where’s today’s outrage? Where are the young people inflamed with the outrages of their elders?

As Governor Arnold Swartzenegger and the Democratic-controlled state legislature strip education funding wholesale to meet California’s budget collapse, Pasadena’s public school district offers a microcosm of the woes besetting school districts that are already in …

Because we publish the LA Progressive, folks send us announcements of all kinds of events, ones supporting every imaginable progressive cause taking place throughout Greater Los Angeles. It’s more than any three couples could attend …

Can you imagine the pickle we’d be in if George Bush still occupied the White House? Or if we had a McCain-Palin administration making the problems facing America today that much worse?
That thought kept crossing …

If you’ve glanced at the LA Progressive recently, you know that our weekend last week was consumed with the media workshop at Occidental College, which this magazine sponsored and which Sharon and I helped organize. …

by Dick Price –
In choosing a prominent anti-gay evangelical preacher from Orange County to deliver the invocation at his inauguration, President-Elect Barack Obama has gone out of his way to insult the gay-lesbian community, which …

I didn’t really mean to do it. I usually have more self-control. Something just came over me. I couldn’t restrain myself. Please forgive me.
I voted Friday.

by Dick Price –
If you’ve spent two minutes on our LA Progressive, you know where we stand on Proposition 8, the wrongheaded and wronghearted initiative that would take away the recently won right to marry …

The remorseless Santa Anas that whistle across the Antelope Valley teach residents of Palmdale, Riverside, Victorville, and surrounding communities all there is to know about high desert winds.
But this November, those same folks might …

by Dick Price –
When classes end at Reseda’s Grover Cleveland High School, American History teacher Ferial Masry drives across town to a restaurant, changes her clothes in the ladies room, and begins walking the streets …

In our ongoing immersion into all things political, we held the first fundraiser in our home last Saturday. We’re not exactly social butterflies, so the idea of having dozens of folks over for Stella, Brie, …

I am, or at least I was for much of my life, an inveterate newspaper reader. Once I left my childhood home in Minneapolis and moved to New York City at 17, later to …

“If I asked for a show of hands on impeachment, I know what I’d get,” Congressman Xavier Becerra told the jubilant crowd of 100 or more packed into the new local Democratic Party headquarters in …

At a recent strategy meeting among fellow progressive activists, Sharon and I were surprised to learn that our politically savvy friends felt that California as a whole and even our bluer-than-blue Los Angeles neighborhood was …

Now that Barack Obama has emerged as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, our attention turns quickly to which running mate would most help secure victory in November and who would stand that proverbial heartbeat away …

Now slogging through its sixth bloody year, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq is much on my mind this Saturday afternoon. On the television in the next room, the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee …

In recent generations, the test was the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, and maybe the Cold War.
With polar bears drowning in open Arctic waters and evermore fearsome storms spinning out of warming oceans in …

The 150 Democratic Party activists who gathered for the 56th Annual California Democratic Council convention this past weekend in Fresno certainly had sky-high hopes about their party’s chances in the November elections—but they had their …

Thwarting the Bush Administration’s latest assault on individual liberty, a small band of Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees have fought and won—at least for now—a battle against government efforts to trample their rights to privacy and …

Texas best-selling author and radio commentator Jim Hightower swung through Southern California this past week to ruffle a few feathers—“kick a little ass,” is what he actually said—and spread a little sunlight as the long …

In 1971, a group of veterans—current Massachusetts Senator John Kerry prominent among them—staged a protest called “Winter Soldier” that helped end the Vietnam War but that also unfairly saddled the Democrats with a “soft on …

(Part 1 of a 2 Part Story)
For those of us of a certain age, the image is forever seared in our minds of Governor Orville Faubus blocking the doorway to Little Rock’s Central High School, …

As the Democratic Party’s presidential primary season moves into the homestretch with Senators Clinton and Obama vying to match each other stride for stride, two voter groups — Latinos and the young — are playing …

With the Iraq Occupation grinding through its fifth year, the Bush Administration and its supporters continue to trot out the “Support the Troops” bumper stickers and yellow ribbon decals at every opportunity, shaming us into …

Despite decades of governmental and grassroots efforts, a drumbeat of gang-related killings over the past several years, some apparently racially motivated, has driven gang violence to epidemic proportions here in Los Angeles. With gang crime …

The Iraq-Afghan War has taken on a sad new face as stories of shoddy health care given returning veterans began surfacing lately. Newsweek brought us up short with its coverage last month of the Minnesota …

In early February 2008 , the world’s leading scientific body on global warming issued its latest report confirming what many of us have suspected: either we do something profound about greenhouse emissions or we will …

Sure, John Kerry took it in the neck for telling voters he was “reporting for duty.” His brand of high-minded earnestness will forever be an easy mark for the kind of rightwing nastiness that has …