John Peeler: Our present plight is rooted in the loss of consensus about social justice, management of the economy, and most fundamentally, about who we are as a people.
Move Over Real Housewives, It’s Time for Fun With Secret Donors
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Tanya Acker: Featured in the cast might be a group of “liberty-loving” freedom fighters who think that spreading the risk of health care costs is communism.
You’re Not Supposed to Be Happy
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Tina Dupuy: The whole idea of a democracy is accepting you’ll never fully get your own way in government.
The Urgency of a Senate Rule Change
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Joyce Appleby: More than 300 historians, political scientists, and law profs from colleges and universities throughout the country have signed a petition calling upon their Senators “to restore majority rule to the United States Senate by revising the rules that now require the concurrence of 60 members before legislation can be brought to the floor.”
Every Man His Own Historian
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Stanley Kutler: The right’s twist of history to please its backers and fuel its agenda is a vigorous enterprise. Serious history, serious scholarship and serious discussion of facts and ideas are dismissed with tunnel vision.
What Obama and the Democrats Have Not Done
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Stanley I. Kutler: For the past year, the media, reflecting disenchantment with Barack Obama, their very own rock star, have “predicted” huge Democratic losses for 2010. Like blackbirds who fly off the line (as Eugene McCarthy once said), the media follows in lockstep.
Checks and Balances
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Ron Wolff: Government is simply the institutionalization over time of the collective will of the people at any given moment, established with at least one essential objective in mind: the prevention of the inevitable chaos that would result in its absence.
Chock Full of Nuts
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Berry Craig: The video shows Tea Baggers answering questions about why they are protesting. Almost all of their replies are the usual right-wing rants against President Obama’s “tyranny,” “socialist agenda” and “onerous taxes.”
Black Gays Invited to White House
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Rev. Irene Monroe: Just as my enslaved ancestors could have never imagined an African American family residing in the White House, nor could my African American LGBTQ brothers and sisters who fought in the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in New York’s Greenwich Village imagine that one day a special invitation from the White House would openly welcome us in.
Right-Wing Sedition
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In 1798, during the Quasi-war with France, Congress, with President John Adams’ support, passed the Sedition Act. Outraged by attacks on her husband, Abigail Adams supported the act, which was opposed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among others. “Let us not establish a tyranny,” wrote an alarmed Alexander Hamilton to an ally in Congress. [...]
The Consent of the Governed
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“… to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men [and women], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” — Declaration of Independence “Your people, Mr. Jefferson, are a great beast.” So said Alexander Hamilton, the leader of America’s first conservative party, to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the [...]
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We Don’t Need a Law to Stop Cyber-Cowards
Berry Craig: But if this old reporter were a blogsite boss he’d exercise his First Amendment right to make bloggers tack their names on what they write or they wouldn’t get posted.