Progressive Media Advocates
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: At the national level there is much discussion of Bush fatigue. With talk of P./47’s father, Jeb Bush, jumping in the race, the question is whether enough time has passed for Americans to forget about the foreign and domestic failures of George W. Bush.
Karen Finney: Last week’s Senate vote on a U.N. treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, shamefully made America seem small-minded and exclusive.
Joseph Palermo: The hate brigades have taken aim at Ms. Crowley not because she showed “bias” or was “wrong” about the facts or exceeded the role of moderator, but because she performed a genuine act of journalism in front of 65 million viewers.
Matthew Fleischer: Prop. 32’s cynical appropriation of Occupy Wall Street-style anti-corporate rhetoric, and the language of campaign finance reform, fits what has become Dolphin’s signature in recent years – the “Trojan Horse” political campaign.
Joseph Palermo: The trick thus far for the Romney-Ryan ticket has been to pretend to want to “save” Medicare even while putting forth Ryan’s “voucher” plan that would end Medicare, not only “as we know it,” but end Medicare PERIOD.
Unai Montes-Irueste: Romney is at a serious disadvantage when it comes to “devil in the details” discussions about education policy, especially in areas of overlap with President Obama’s policies on immigration,
Berry Craig: The folks at Fox aren’t real newshounds. They’re rabble-rousing hacks in the tradition of the country’s old-time partisan press.
Jerry Lembcke: Just as perennial announcements that “Freud is dead” or “God is dead” signal that they’re anything but, the recurring claims that America is over and done with the war in Vietnam are just as certainly premature.
John Peeler: It is distressing that a president who came to office as a bitter critic of abuses of presidential authority by his predecessor now takes essentially the same position as George W. Bush. Power that is unchecked and operates in secret is always dangerous to democracy.
Joseph Palermo: Despite the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq, during this dismal period of “austerity” the public isn’t likely to see any discernible difference in the government’s misplaced priorities.
David A. Walsh: Sure, Ravitch may “cherry-pick” her facts and sound like the tobacco companies, and Brill may be a defamatory admirer of Joel Klein, bosom buddy to Rupert Murdoch, but at least those are creative attacks.
Michael Sigman: With Bachmann having no chance to win the nomination, it’s shaping up as a race to the bottom between Romney and Perry, fantasies of a deus ex machina notwithstanding.
Robert Reich: Had the President and the Democrats stuck to their guns during the health-care debate and insisted on Medicare for all, or at least a public option, they wouldn’t now be facing the possible unraveling of the new health care law.
Randy Shaw: The rise of community service (abetted by high school students desiring to boost their college applications) over the past two decades has not stopped dramatically increasing social and economic inequality and an increasing disbelief in once universally accepted scientific theories such as evolution.
Brent Budowsky: The one national leader who understood was a prophet without honor in a nation addicted to oil: President Jimmy Carter.
Rev. Irene Monroe: In 1991 Gomes came out of the closet as a pre-emptive strike against a rabidly conservative Christian student group on campus whose magazine hurled homophobic diatribes against us LGBTQ students.
Andrea Nill: The Bush brothers don’t appear ready to fully acknowledge the role their party has played in stoking nativism and killing the chances for sensible immigration reform in the near future.
Joseph Palermo: Whatever President Obama accomplished during his first two years in office, with most of the heavy lifting thrown on Nancy Pelosi’s shoulders, his decision to normalize the sweeping changes in American governance of the George W. Bush period will likely neutralize any lasting positive effects for Democrats.
Tom Hall: A conservative Republican judge, appointed by George H.W. Bush has done what the Tea Party activists have been demanding – he restored the Constitution. Judge Vaughn Walker held that the U.S. Constitution, and its provisions requiring equal protection of the laws, required that Proposition Hate be stricken down.
Robert Reich: Average Americans are hurting. But their pain isn’t coming from government. It’s coming from an economy whose benefits are concentrating ever more at the top, whose giant corporations are controlling ever more of our democratic process, and whose costs and risks are becoming ever more burdensome for the middle class and the poor
Ivan Eland: The sad truth is that if Iran wants a nuclear weapon, it will likely eventually get one. So the United States should quit wasting valuable political capital beseeching, threatening, and horse-trading with China, Russia, and other UN Security Council members to incrementally ratchet up likely futile multilateral economic sanctions against I
Ivan Eland: Even though George H.W. Bush’s and Clinton’s original intentions of protecting international food aid using U.S. forces might have been high-minded, they then engaged in mission creep—with Clinton eventually taking sides in the Somali civil war, chasing around a warlord who was in U.S. disfavor, and ignominiously withdrawing U.S. forces when the warlord killed a small number of U.S. Rangers in the “Black Hawk Down” incident.
Randy Shaw: President Obama aspires to change the way politics is played, saying he is tired of questions masquerading as talking points, and of “tactics” substituting for the best policies. Like Dukakis, he wants the two parties to engage in national policy debates, where the best ideas prevail. Unfortunately, that’s not how politics works in the United States, and Obama’s misguided idealism is costing his base dearly.
Olbermann differs from O’Reilly in that he cares about truth and falsehood, and he understands the distinction between journalism and propaganda. Bill O’Reilly is a liar and a demagogue and a right-wing propagandist.
Barack Obama’s reaction to the mass protests and violence in Iran shows he is following through on his pledge to be more like George H.W. Bush rather than his son, George W. Bush. Obama has admired the father’s realism and has criticized the idealistic neo-conservatism of the son. But is realism a better foreign policy [...]
The Codex Alimentarius Commission, based in Rome, is an international organization jointly created in 1962 by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations, “allegedly” to protect the health of consumers with guidelines for food standards. Codex Alimentarius may present the greatest disaster for our food supply—and [...]
At the request of President-elect Barack Obama, President George W. Bush convened an awkward meeting of all living former presidents at the White House to meet, and presumably give advice and encouragement to, the new guy. The body language of the participants in the summit photo, taken in the Oval Office, said it all. The [...]
On July 2, 2007 George W. Bush commuted the sentence of convicted felon and former top White House staffer Scooter Libby for his convictions on five felony counts of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice. He didn’t pardon Libby but, instead, issued a Grant of Executive Clemency before Scooter Libby even served a single [...]
by David Swanson Russ Baker’s new book presents an account of the U.S. government that is both remarkably new and extensively documented. According to this account, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current president, devoted his career to secret intelligence work with the CIA many years before he became the CIA director, and [...]
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.
Steve Hochstadt: The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s finally made an issue of fathering. If women were going to get out of the house and into the workplace, men had to change their roles, too.
The Frying Pan: A successful mayor and council cannot be satisfied with merely coping as issues arise, but must be able to anticipate and define the city´s needs for the next four years. As our newly elected leaders prepare for their roles, we´ve asked writers to share their thoughts about what lies ahead for Los Angeles.
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