Gary Corseri: Jeffers gaze was not so much bitter as it was unflinching, steady, resolute and sui generis. “The cold passion for truth,” he wrote, “hunts in no pack.”
Who Will Save Social Security and Medicare?
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Shamus Cooke: Obama and the Democrats are aligning with Republicans to strike the first major blows against Social Security and Medicare. The decades-long political agreement to save these programs is dead, and the foundation of American politics is shifting beneath everyone’s feet.
Tipping Points
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Steve Hochstadt: TThe shifts away from conservative positions on gay and interracial marriage and immigration signal the decline in the attractiveness of major elements in traditional Republican ideology.
Occupy the Ballot Forum and Independent Politics
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Dan Bluemel: Because of its electoral structure, the U.S. political system has never been welcoming to third parties. Some critics have argued this leaves the political landscape entrenched in a system comprised of moderates and hardliners who, in essence, espouse the same ideology.
Review: E.J. Dionne’s Our Divided Political Heart
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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.
Obama Won. Now It’s Time to Change the System
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Peter Dreier: As he did during his 2008 campaign, Obama should encourage the organizers and activists who are challenging corporate power, recognizing that their ability to agitate and mobilize ordinary Americans can help him be a more effective president.
Sorry, Occupy
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Mark Naison: The transformative role that Occupy activists have played in coordinating relief to the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Sandy has shown me that the Occupy networks that survived the evictions were much stronger than I realized.
Deepak Chopra on Sister Giant November 10 – 11, 2012
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World-renowned spiritual leader Deepak Chopra released a video endorsement of Sister Giant, a nonpartisan conference on women and politics organized by bestselling author Marianne Williamson
Bubba and the Boss Go Buckeye
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Brent Budowsky: On Thursday the staggeringly popular former president, who is known as the Comeback Kid, will appear in Ohio to talk about the great American economic comeback, alongside Bruce Springsteen.
Jack Welch Capitalizes on Collateral Damage
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JP Sottile: We can talk cavalierly about the “paranoid style in American politics,” but just beyond the Birthers and latter-day Red Scarecrows who populate the Tea Party and Rep. Allen West’s townhall meetings, there is a deeper, darker secret that we all basically know and lament.
The “Sam Bacile” Election
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Joseph Palermo: The destruction that “Sam Becile’s” little Youtube movie caused could in comparison to the potential damage that outside groups could do to American politics.
Understanding the (Untapped) Power of Women
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Power of Women hen you walk into a room and fewer than 50% of the people there are women, “it should look peculiar,” said Madeline Di Nonno, executive director of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, “and it doesn’t.” Marianne Williamson, in her lead-up to the upcoming November conference: SISTER GIANT: Women, Non-Violence [...]
Did Monica Lewinsky Really Save Social Security?
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Eric Laumen: Amidst the controversy of the Starr commission’s Monica Lewinsky investigation, President Clinton, a centrist through and through, was forced to fall back on the support of his party’s left-progressive wing and abandon bipartisanship.
Gridlock and Earthquake: Prospects for a New American Politics
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John Peeler: What if popular support for both major parties really did dry up? Then there really would be a chance for a sweeping reshuffle of American politics.
The American Dream: Deferred for Now but Not Forever
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ecently, on CNN’s Sunday morning financial show, “Your Money”, CNN contributor Will Cain commented that contemporary American politics is partisan perhaps beyond anything that we’ve ever seen in the history of the country, because the country itself is more divided along partisan and ideological lines than ever before. I agree with Mr. Cain. In my [...]
The Romney Campaign’s Situational Demagoguery
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Joseph Palermo: Worse than Swift Boating, worse than Willie Horton, Mitt Romney is running the most craven, dishonest, and hypocritical campaign we’ve seen in contemporary American politics.
Opposition to Gay Marriage: The Republican Love Affair with the Past
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Tina Dupuy: The current crop of Republicans are less into Jesus (who didn’t like rich people or capital punishment) than they are into 1st Century values like stoning misfits in the public square.
Political Dog Tales: Fala, Checkers, Freckles, and Seamus
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Joseph Palermo: Nixon’s Checkers speech has since entered the American political lexicon as denoting any corny political oration designed to tug on Americans’ heartstrings while serving to shore up a faltering campaign.
It’s All Over Now, Rickie Blue
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Tom Degan: If Mr. Rick had been born with dark skin he’d today be organizing birthday parties for preschoolers at a Chuck E. Cheese somewhere in central Pennsylvania.
The Last Campaign of Richard Nixon
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Devin Griggs: The parties might be reversed and the cultural issues of the 1970s flipped, but American politics since the Nixon-McGovern race has remained fairly fixed and share all of the rhetoric and even less of the substance that once defined American politics.
The Sad Spectacle of Obama’s Super PAC
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Robert Reich: The sad truth is Obama has never really occupied the high ground on campaign finance. He refused public financing in 2008. Once president, he didn’t go to bat for a system of public financing.
Who Is Sheldon Adelson and What Has Newt Promised Him?
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Robert Reich: Never before in the history of American politics has a single couple given more money to a single candidate and had a bigger impact than Sheldon Adelson and his wife – all courtesy of the Supreme Court and its grotesque decisions that speech is money.
Sharon Stands Up for “Blah” People on Cenk Uygur’s “The Point”
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Thursday evening, LA Progressive Publisher Sharon Kyle appear on “The Point,” hosted by The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur to discuss Rick Santorum’s “Blah” People and Ellen Barkin’s tweet about being manhandled by New York’s finest.
Obama’s Hillary Card
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Brent Budowsky: Hillary Clinton as vice presidential nominee would electrify the Democratic vote from women and turn the gender gap into a gender canyon. Equally important, Hillary Clinton has great appeal to working-class voters of all races.
Big-Drama Obama
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Brent Budowsky: The Truman metaphor is right for Obama, but it must presage a sustained battle for jobs, and not another brief theatrical scene in an incoherent drama with an inconclusive ending.
Did 9/11 Really Change Everything?
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Mary L. Dudziak: Even if 9/11 changed the way Americans thought about the world, it could not determine the actions we would take in its aftermath. It did not deprive American leaders of choices.
Why S&P Has No Business Downgrading the U.S.
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Robert Reich: S&P’s intrusion into American politics is also ironic because, as I pointed out recently, much of our current debt is directly or indirectly due to S&P’s failures (along with the failures of the two other major credit-rating agencies — Fitch and Moody’s) to do their jobs before the financial meltdown.
Reigning in Government Contractors
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Robert Reich: The President should ban all political activity by companies receiving more than half their revenues from the U.S. government.
Pelosi’s Path to Victory
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Brent Budowsky: The president’s budget and congressional responses will have a revolutionary impact on American politics that will either cement the total domination of the right and humiliation of progressives in the battle of ideas, or pave the way for House Dems to restore Democratic control in 2012.
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Not American Enough? This Political Slur Has a Long History
Rosemarie Ostler: Obama’s critics have found a variety of ways to portray him as exotic and un-American. But this is nothing new. For two centuries politicians have been labeling their opponents as not quite American enough.