Progressive Media Advocates
Joseph Palermo: It’s as if the baby boomers, having gotten their own quality schooling for a fraction of the price students pay today, are kicking the ladder out from under their children and grandchildren and substituting it with a shoddy, privatized product to which they, in their youth, never would have succumbed.
Charles D. Hayes: A plethora of new books suggest America has entered a state of rapid decline. Here are three worth considering.
Joseph Palermo: The rubbish that House Speaker John Boehner and other congressional Republicans keep dishing out about the federal budget shows the multimedia “bubble” that envelops the GOP and its mouthpieces is pretty durable.
Walter Moss: Given the continuing Republican control of the House of Representatives and the leading role of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan, how does the president move the country forward? By principled compromise and exercising abundant political craftsmanship!
John Peeler: Obama, if he could free himself of the Wall Street crowd, is the likelier buyer of Will’s prescription of breaking up financial institutions that are “too big to fail”.
Carl Bloice: The words of a party’s platform and the declarations of its candidate don’t mean much in the real world of political wheeling and dealing.
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.
Joseph Palermo: After telling his readers he isn’t going to blame the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior, David Brooks plows right ahead and blames the poor for being poor because of their bad behavior.
Carl Bloice: Greed is rampant, poverty and economic inequality are growing relentlessly in our country and our political system is ever increasingly corrupted by money. The system is in trouble.
James Livingston: When David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh suggest that the Occupy Wall Street crowd might be speaking “an anti-Semitic code,” you know the times, they are hysterical.
Tina Dupuy: We cannot hold our lawmakers accountable without transparency. And if we can’t hold them accountable – they’re not working for us. Actually we’ll never know who they work for.
Carl Bloice: If the whole, hardly-nail-biting business accomplished nothing else it momentarily diverted attention away from the big budget fight coming up, the one that will probably shape the country’s economic and social reality for decades to come.
Ron Wolff: Robust cognitive ability, a healthy emotional outlook, and high ethical standards will combine to produce decisions fitting our complex society.
Carl Bloice: I’m just intrigued these days by how much the people who have a lot have become the most insistent that those below them on the social ladder bear the brunt of paying for capitalism’s current crisis.
Joseph Palermo: I cannot believe that in the 21st Century we are having this kind of a debate on the role of labor unions in this country. But I suppose it isn’t surprising since we have a new Gilded Age going on.
Joseph Palermo: The 2010 midterm campaigns have shown us that Alito and his four fellow Justices were not only wrong about the potential effects of Citizens United they greased the wheels for a corporate takeover of the governing institutions of the country.
Carl Bloice: I guess the message is obvious. The cadre of the “real tea party,” the Tea Kettle party, the truly conservatives and the austerity brigades have one thing in common: if they come to power life will become a lot harder to pubic workers, students, the elderly and a whole lot of others. Class bias speaks loud.
John Peeler: It is always a bit of a shock when a well-know conservative says something sensible, so imagine how stunned I was in this past week when TWO (count ‘em!) prominent rightist talking heads talked sense.
Carl Bloice: The “moderate Republican” has gone the way of the typewriter. As the tea party people and their ilk become more racist and reactionary – and their rhetoric more incendiary, each day – the GOP encourages them and endeavors to pull them into its embrace. Meanwhile the “bluedog Democrats” become increasingly irrelevant with each passing day, their bark more in evidence than their bite.
There are not two groups involved, the young and the old. It’s a continuum starting from entrance into the workforce until retirement. While he says he speaks in the interest of the young, if there is a severe curtailment of Medicare and Social Security those hurt most will be the youngsters when they reach the age where they need them both.
If the media would only cover Obama’s peace prize win with half as much enthusiasm as they did Bush’s landing on the aircraft carrier we might have made some measurable progress.
Rightwing populism is dangerous but the greatest potential peril lies not in the presence of some loony or deluded, irrational people parading through the streets. It arises from the certainty that there will always be someone lurking about in a trench coat to fan the flames for their own cynical purposes.
The 30-year class war the rich launched against the working people in this country (and reached its apogee during the George W. Bush years), has left the middle class reeling and wounded. Only bold federal action that puts something concrete in the palms of middle-class Americans can begin to turn these dire social conditions around.
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 [...]
by Charley James – Last Saturday, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus came up with an unusually convoluted bit of punditspeak about forgiving Dick Cheney his self-admitted war crimes and crimes against humanity including lying the country into war, illegal wiretapping, outing Valerie Plame-Wilson, torturing prisoners of war and – oh, right – telling Fox News’ [...]
Not surprisingly, red meat conservatives are wallowing in denial today, now that the shock of Tuesday night has worn off. Basically, the arguments run along one of two or three lines: Obama tricked people, Obama stole the election or that despite the size and scope of the win across counties and states, he must abandon [...]
Alright, so it’s been an unpredictable election year. When the primaries began, Hillary Clinton was the heavy favorite and John McCain was all but dead in the water with Fred Thompson’s entry in the race being eagerly awaited by conservative and moderate Republicans alike. And something may yet happen – the oft-cited, much worried about, [...]
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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Will the Social Animal Achieve Adulthood?
Charles Hayes: How disturbing a notion that many of our daily behaviors are reliably predictable. How disappointed would you be to discover that some scientist could study the details of your life and then accurately predict the things you will do or say in the near future?
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