Progressive Media Advocates
On May 21, Los Angeles voters will have the chance to weigh in on the question of overturning Citizens United through a constitutional amendment. And if Prop C passes, Los Angeles will be the largest jurisdiction to approve a resolution to overturnCitizens United.
Peter Dreier: Progressives are rarely satisfied. It is part of our political DNA. There’s so much injustice in the world, it’s sometimes hard to feel that we’re making progress. But as Chinese philosopher Laozi reminded us, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
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.
Sheila Kuehl: The measure is crafted to look as though it is limiting the ability of both unions and corporations to make campaign contributions to candidates or measures, but, in truth, it would place a far greater burden on unions
Shamus Cooke: In California, the unions agreed to a rotten compromise, which taxes the rich at a lower rate while including an increase in the state sales tax that disproportionally affects working and poor people.
Joseph Palermo: The Republicans think they believe that with enough SuperPAC money and stoking up the base, along with relatively high unemployment and gas prices and millions of underwater mortgage holders, they can win a close election.
Bill Leumer and Ann Robertson: The Occupy Wall Street movement drew the obvious conclusion: meaningful change will happen, not by endless waiting for the politicians to act, but by working people relying on themselves and acting collectively.
Carl Matthes: A schoolyard bully is someone who intimidates, is overbearing and tyrannical. Who better fits that description than someone who uses a Christian pulpit to turn the all-encompassing Love of God upside down and then uses it to bully God’s children?
Paul Hogarth: Proposition 25 was put on by labor unions and the Democratic Party, and political consultant Roger Salazar has been retained. Liberal bloggers and other progressives are skeptical, with some going so far as to claim it doesn’t make sense to get a majority for the budget – if raising taxes we need would still require a two-thirds vote.
Randy Shaw: Two weeks into her general election campaign, Meg Whitman has already proved that she has not followed politics in recent years. How else to explain her already picking a fight with CNA and Rose Ann DeMoro that the candidate cannot win, and that makes her look worse with each passing day?
New York City provides a case study of a large, ethnically diverse, California-like entity where citizen ballot measures are not an option. The result? A profoundly undemocratic city where large real estate developers call the shots.
I was going to try to write something in a humorous voice about how Darth Limbaugh was directing Emperor Cheney’s imperial storm troopers, dressed as Senators Graham and Boehner, out to savage and malign Sonia Sotomayor. I figured that there must be some workable pun in the idea that they can take the white sheet [...]
Governor Schwarzenegger’s May “budget revise” last week – which proposed more mass layoffs, more painful cuts and more reckless borrowing – had all the makings of the end of a Shakespearean tragedy, where the protagonist has run out of options due to troubles of his own making. One could also view it as the definition [...]
We get to vote, again, on May 19. This time we have a bunch of ballot initiatives that the Republican Party demanded as a condition of reaching a budget “compromise” last winter. The commercial media tell us that most of these measures are failing in polling, but still have a chance at passage. Still have [...]
Before the California Democratic Convention ended yesterday, delegates bucked the Party leadership on the May 19th ballot measures – by securing a “no endorsement” on Propositions 1A, 1D and 1E. State legislators and Party operatives pushed “yes” on all six measures, but enough of the grassroots who stayed for the tail end of the session [...]
California is not doing very well. It has the largest budget deficit of any state, and its funding of schools, health care, transportation and other basic services is held hostage by far right-wing Republicans. Yet California is staunchly Democratic in presidential and U.S. Senate races, and produced the greatest number of Obama volunteers of any [...]
As you know, the budget package adopted recently calls for a May 19 special election and puts six ballot measures before voters. One of these initiatives, Proposition 1E, asks voters to approve the diversion of $460 million over two years from Mental Health Services Act (MHSA) revenues to the Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and [...]
Barack Obama has spoken out against Proposition 8, the proposed California constitutional amendment which takes away the right of same-sex couples to marry. In a letter to the Alice B. Toklas Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Democratic Club in San Francisco, Barack said: “I am proud to join with and support the LGBT community in [...]
Sikivu Hutchinson: Black Skeptics Los Angeles spearheaded its First in the Family Humanist Scholarship initiative, which focuses on providing resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless and LGBTQ youth who will be the first in their families to go to college.
Carl Matthes: Despite the much-heralded 2008 success of Prop 8 in California to stop same-sex marriage, that vote, and it’s subsequent ramifications, provided not only 18,000 lesbian and gay couples with legal marriages, but the accelerant for the Prop 8 case currently being decided by SCOTUS.
Randy Shaw: Obama could regain young people’s support by lowering student loan rates, enacting immigration reform and rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, but time—and his political capital—is running out.
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