Progressive Media Advocates
Dick Price: Thursday, a hundred or so veteran agitators gathered in Will Rogers Park on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills to protest the conjectured sale of the Los Angeles Times to Charles and David Koch, plutocrat owners of the $115-billion-annual-revenue Koch Industries, who have expressed interest in using the paper to spread their drown-government-in-the-bathtub invective.
Lauren Steiner: Please help us spread the word across Los Angeles! Come with signs that say “Bruce Karsh, please don’t sell the LA Times to the Kochs” and “Bruce Karsh, our democracy is not for sale” We are gathering Thursday, May 23 for a rally and march.
Steve Smith: A sale by Oaktree (which has controlling interest in the Tribune Co.) to the Kochs would be an affront to the values of Angelenos and working people everywhere.
Joe Mathews: Most American newspapers today are owned by little-known rich people or faceless corporations, and it’s rare that papers do things that people love or hate. The LA Times suffers from this same malady: It’s unthreatening and predictable.
Lauren Steiner: The president of Oaktree Capital Management, is poised to sell the LA Times to the Koch Brothers but Angelenos don’t have to sit by and let that happen.
Good Grief: Who’s Going to Cover LA Now? The LA Media Reform Group’s 6th Annual media conference at Occidental College takes place Saturday, April 27th
Steven Mijulan: Sheldon Adelson, the gnomish, ginger-haired casino magnate who threw more than $150 million after Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and other candidates in 2012, let it be known to the house organ of the One Percent that he plans to double the amount he spent in 2012 in upcoming elections.
John MacMurray: But whatever the NRA wishes to be; however it regards itself and its place in the cosmos; some changes will have to be made in the way it does business.
Steven Mikulan: Take away organized labor and the political playing field suddenly becomes a whole lot more even for a party with a vast treasury but a shrinking demographic base.
Richard “RJ” Eskow: DeMint’s performed one public service by abandoning his post: He’s given us a glimpse of a half-hidden Washington where leaders don’t lead, think-tankers don’t think, and the house always wins.
Robert Reich: The Koch brothers, Karl Rove, the rabid Republican right, CEOs and Wall Street titans who want to entrench their privileges and tax advantages — all of them would like nothing better than for every progressive in America to throw in the towel.
Matthew Fleischer: Nothing has been more surprising than the decision of Romero, a former California State Senate Democratic majority leader, to serve as the measure’s frontwoman.
Matt Fleischer: Despite their reputations as libertarian true believers, the Koch brothers are nothing if not practical businessmen, who have no trouble taking advantage of government subsidies when it bolsters their bottom line.
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.
Tom Hall: While the “liberal media” focuses on the regular, intentional lies that Romney and Ryan spew, there is an insidious, flagrantly racist, anti-semitic campaign being waged in emails to every potential hate voter in the U.S.
Lawrence Rosenthal: Paul Ryan confirms the Tea Party’s role as both a power within the Republican Party and as the guarantor of Republican conservative orthodoxy.
This week, Linda Milazzo’s “John McCain, A Veteran Was Demeaned In Your Name. Will You Defend Her? Linda Milazzo,” which looks at Illinois Rep. Joe Walsh’s scurrilous attacks on an Iraq War veteran.
Robert Illes: But in many ways worse are the watery “liberals” on, say, MSNBC, especially Chris Matthews, whose main interest seems self-serving, to maintain the election as seeming like a tight horse race.
Dick Price: Obama showed conviction with his stances on marriage equality and justice for DREAMers — and that has paid off. We can only pray for more of the same
Brent Budowsky: The armies of the dictatorship of dollars have mobilized for the grand battle of the gathering storm. Kennedy was only elected in 1960 because he ran with Johnson. Democrats have no margin for error in 2012.
David Love: Faced with hard times, people have clear choices. Either they join forces across racial and ethnic lines and fight their common adversary, or they double down on the dumbness, thrive on misinformation and assign scapegoats.
Tanya Acker: Featured in the cast might be a group of “liberty-loving” freedom fighters who think that spreading the risk of health care costs is communism.
Jerry Drucker: ALEC in Wonderland and the GOP Crazy Makers – Thank God for the wise and courageous voters of Wisconsin for showing the rest of us how to save our nation. Also great thanks to the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the 99%. Let’s continue revolting peacefully.
Mark Naison: Over time, people of courage and integrity will turn the tide and begin to restore sanity to educational discourse and develop a powerful alliance of teachers, parents and students, supported first by the Occupy movement, and later by unions, religious organizations and progressive politicians.
Joseph Palermo: If someone like Todd who represents a “liberal” network can’t see Colbert’s parody for what it is then it truly illustrates how disconnected the corporate media have become.
Joseph Palermo: These powerful right-wing political obstacles that must be sidelined if progressive change can have any chance of success, whether Obama is at the helm or any number of the string of future presidents he now tells us we’ll probably need.
Wendy Block: But Stephen, my basic motivation for telling you about DISCLOSE is because when you oppose things, you lavish them with criticism on your show for the benefit of the entire Colbert Nation, which pretty much means the entire universe. I bet your opposition could – no, will — clinch our victory.
Bruce Reilly: The classic method of the powerful to distract the masses is to get them to fight amongst themselves. The easiest one is via racism, and the other is class warfare pitting the Middle Class vs. Lower Class.
Robert Reich: If Occupiers are expelled from specific geographic locations the Occupier movement can shift to broad-based organizing around the simple idea at the core of the movement: It’s time to occupy our democracy.
Ted Vaill: Is he a legitimate contender for the White House, or just running a book tour? Is he a stalking horse for the Koch Brothers? Has he sexually harassed female subordinates?
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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