Progressive Media Advocates
Robert Illes: Grover Norquist, toady of America’s wealthy business class who few but political wonks have heard of, heads the so called “Club for Growth” which requires every Republican who wants to keep his or her government job to promise not to raise taxes.
Jerry Drucker: All GOP robot models are programmed with specific daily attack/talking points and are preset to be repeated endlessly, often using the very same Frank Luntz power point words of the talking points.
Brent Budowsky: Hochul’s victory suggests Democrats have a fair chance to reelect President Obama, restore Democratic control of the House and maintain Democratic control of the Senate.
Nyabingi Kuti: The Crenshaw office is one of the main reasons that Kamala is now ahead by a razor-thin margin. Over 500 volunteers of all races and ages came to Crenshaw and banged out over 25,000 calls in two weeks in support of Kamala.
Eric Garcetti: Kamala ended the night/early morning with a 40,382 vote lead statewide, with 96.2% of the precincts statewide reporting. This is only a 0.6% margin, but she is ahead. The outstanding precincts are located in four counties: San Bernadino, Riverside, Kings, and Yolo. These counties are still counting.
Joseph Palermo: Wouldn’t it be something if the Bin Ladens of the world funneled untraceable cash into Republican candidates’ coffers because they know they can count on the GOP to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of their greatest recruiting vehicles?
We are one week away from making history in California by electing San Francisco District Attorney Kamala D. Harris as California’s Attorney General.
Robert Reich: The perfect storm: An unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top; a record amount of secret money flooding our democracy; and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that’s raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.
Regardless of the outcome of the midterm elections, the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United is one that cannot be ignored. Joe Palermo called the impact of the Citizens United decision a “game changer”.
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.
Robert Illes: Christine O’Donnell; Her idiocy, past and present, has made her a national figure, with millions of dollars flowing into her campaign.
Jerry Drucker: One score and ten years ago the Republican Party brought forth to this nation, a concept conceived in the privatization of government for profit, dedicated to the proposition that large corporations (now persons), special interest groups and lobbyists, can expand the United States wealth for those several entities and the vast eternal warring military-industrial complex.
Robert Illes: So in the spirit of not letting any national calamity go to waste, the Republicans and their media mouthpieces have doggedly tried to hang the spill baby spill around the current President’s neck: Obama’s Katrina? read the graphics beneath the Fox “news” propagandists.
Joseph Palermo: He still wants to blame a “few bad apples,” instead of looking at his own role fanning the flames and pouring gasoline on the fire while the $8 trillion housing bubble was being pumped up. Greenspan said AIG’s problems were with insurance, but Born countered that if CDSs had been insurance they would have been regulated. Greenspan is bullshitting us again.
Andrea Christina Nill: A businessman like Poizner should also be sensitive to the fact that California could risk losing $164.2 billion in expenditures, $72.9 billion in economic output, and approximately 717,000 jobs if it removed all of its undocumented immigrants.
Tom Degan: It’s going to be an absolute scream in the next few years watching the Bush Mob try to rewrite history with the flood of books that are sure to come out. The latest screed by Rove is merely the tip of the iceberg. They have quite a chore ahead of them no doubt. Putting a positive spin on the worst administration in American history? I imagine something that tricky would be the equivalent of trying to put a smiley face on a decomposing pig:
Please join the LA Media Reform Group, California Common Cause, and the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute on March 27, 2010, at Occidental College for our third annual summit. Given the recent Supreme Court decision, the changing media landscape, and the importance of the upcoming election cycle, we’ve decided to make this year’s theme, “Preserving Democracy.”
Randy Shaw: While conservatives love bashing “Hollywood liberals,” Sunday night’s Oscar telecast showed how little this description applies. From Kathryn Bigelow’s promoting George W. Bush’s argument that the U.S. invaded Iraq to protect Americans, to the disproportionate acclaim given to films exalting the military, to the exclusion of Michael Moore’sCapitalism, A Love Story from the documentary nominees, Hollywood now largely avoids any hint of progressive social analysis.
Jules Siegel: Rahm Emanuel must make an accommodation with Dean. Otherwise, 2010 is going to be a repeat of Massachusetts, and Barack Hussein Obama will probably be a one-term president. The most troubling aspect of Massachusetts is that the GOP now has a viable presidential candidate and his name is Scott Brown. This is not Sarah Palin. This is a very astute politician who looks like a Ken Doll and can talk like a sane person when he wants to.
President Obama’s Nobel lecture might have showed us that the United States has reached a turning point: either the national security monster we’ve created is going to eat us alive by bankrupting the country or we’re going to have to shift course. We must begin to spin off the 700 or so military bases and installations around the world and focus on building a better life for our own people here at home.
It occurred to me that calling somebody you dislike a “Nazi,” especially when they (or their programs) clearly are not, is a pretty Nazi thing to do.
Conservatives are entitled to their political heroes, and if they have core principles should celebrate their leaders’ deaths the way he or she would have wanted them to do. Just don’t attack us for remembering our heroes – depriving us of our chance to grieve.
The latest failure to communicate on the part of Democrats is in using the term “health care reform.” What does that term mean to the public? Why it means that the government will diddle with our great medical care!
President Barack Obama has done a symbolically extraordinary thing by nominating for the first time in U.S. history a person of Latino descent to the Supreme Court. The president has stayed true to the theme of his long campaign when he adopted “Si Se Puede” from the legendary Latina leader, Dolores Huerta. Right-wing talk show [...]
According to the loonie chorus on the right, we’re all sons of bitches now. When they’re not bashing Sonia Sotomayor for asking sharp questions from the bench – which would seem to be a pretty basic part of the job description for a judge – or wondering whether her taste in spicy food clouds her [...]
Angola 3 News: Hidden behind the walls, huge numbers of human beings have their spirits broken daily. Secretly, many suffer false disciplinary reports, illegitimate confiscation or destruction of personal property, physical beatings, rape, and sometimes fraudulent criminal penalties.
Tina Dupuy: Because these giant corporations are getting a free pass by the very premise they create jobs, they’re in essence piling their tax burden onto their workers.
Ivan Eland: Unfortunately, even if the law is not changed, civil liberties groups already have a perpetual war on their hands–despite the decimation of the main al Qaeda group.
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Why Liberals Don’t Stand a Chance in the Corporate Media
Joseph Palermo: Our political spectrum, as refracted through the lens of corporate media, runs from center-right to far-right. No wonder the conventional wisdom in Washington holds, without evidence, that the United States is a “center-right” country. Those making that argument might not be real, informed commentators — but they play them on TV.