Brent Budowsky: Don’t laugh. Ted Cruz is apparently thinking of bringing his ability to outrage a majority of voters and alienate a majority of his Senate Republican colleagues to a campaign to be commander in chief.
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.
Conservative Revisionist History
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Charles Hayes: It’s an old cliché to say that victors write the history of their times, but the opportunists who take full advantage of these biased histories are the ones to keep an eye on.
Romneyism Laid Bare
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Robert Reich: Un these last days before the election, we have learned enough about the beliefs of the Republican presidential candidate to see them as a worldview all its own – a kind of creed that explains Mitt Romney.
A Capitalism for the People
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John Peeler: We need a capitalism in which no firm is too big to fail, in which corporations serve the public interest, and in which every person has a solid foundation for living a productive life..
Will Romney Pick Gingrich for VP?
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Victoria Defrancesco Soto: Gingrich is in that sweet spot to the right of Romney and to the left of Santorum. It is in this spot that Romney needs to concern himself.
Obama and Leftists Survey — Question 5
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After the November election, how will America look in the coming four years?
Conservatism’s Growing Affection for Ignorance
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Charles Hayes: If we elect a Republican as president in 2012, we deserve the calamity that will follow. After all, “stupid is as stupid does.”
Return of the ‘Right Hand of God’
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Sikivu Hutchinson: Reed has sought to wed the Tea Party’s political momentum with the considerable grassroots apparatus of the Christian right.
Winner-Take-All
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John Peeler: “Winner-Take-All Politics” provides a well-documented analysis of how the United States government, since the 1970s, has systematically enriched the top one percent of the country at the expense of everyone else. Written by distinguished political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the book shows how big business interests ratcheted up their national organizations to defend their interests in national policy debates. In addition to employing far stronger lobbying, these interests created think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, designed to challenge the liberal conventional wisdom of the New Deal and Great Society and replace it with an explicitly conservative, free-market-oriented way of thinking.
Repubs Winning, Dems Whining
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Michael Sigman: The Right’s genius for manipulating people’s sense of grievance — combined with liberals’ weak brew of tepid policy proposals and corporate coziness — leads ordinary voters to cast their ballots against their own economic interests time and time again.
Smile, You’re a Liberal After All!
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Steven Conn: As midterm elections approach, conservatives seek to return America to the way things used to be. Not so fast, argues historian Steven Conn, unless you really want racial segregation, child labor, voting discrimination, and all the other things that old-time conservatives once supported.
Why Johnny Can’t Think Critically
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Rev. Irene Monroe: A mind is a terribly thing to waste. But for conservatives and Tea Party activists who want to indoctrinate our kids rather than to educate them, a mind is a terrible thing to have. Now with far-right activists like Glen Beck pushing for more Jesus and less Darwin — working to reshape the academic landscape in schools, colleges and universities across the country — we will soon know without having to wonder “Why Johnny Can’t Think Critically.”
Clapping for Conservatism
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Steve Hochstadt: These days it seems like only political allegiance determines judgments about whether people are good or bad. I want to be judged by how I act, not how I vote, by whether I tell the truth, how I treat my neighbors, how I live in my community, how well I take care of my mother. (Hi, Ma.)
It’s the Country, Not the System, That’s Stacked Against Liberals and Progressives
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Berry Craig: The poll numbers hint at the biggest GOP edge: the U.S. is the most conservative country in the Western democratic world. “Liberal” — which means centrist or center-left in other industrial democracies — is as far left as mainstream American politics flows. The U.S. is the only industrial democracy that doesn’t have a significant democratic socialist or social democratic party.
Blue Dog Democrats and Republican Triangulation
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Senator John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, has served up a devastating critique of the direction the Republican Party has taken recently. “If figureheads like Ann Coulter are turning me off,” Ms. McCain writes, “then they are definitely turning off other members of my generation as well.” She understands that when the GOP’s dominant personalities are [...]
Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream
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Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. – Lord Acton The greatness of our nation can more easily be undone than you might expect. What I witnessed . . . only reinforced my view of how fragile our freedom is. – Samuel J. Wurzelbacher Not since the publication of [...]
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Obama’s Peace Prize Continues Tradition of Dubious Choices
Only a few commentators, including the president, seemed to sheepishly realize the irony of his receiving the prize shortly after escalating one war and while continuing to fight another. You would have thought that the escalation alone would have been enough to satisfy all of the warheads at home; but to stanch the domestic fallout from being associated with too much peace, Obama, when accepting the peace award, gave a speech defending war.