Progressive Media Advocates
This week’s top 10 most read was led by Jasmyne Cannick’s White Feminists Don’t Care about Black Women, which points out how major liberal feminist organizations were slow in chastizing local radio hosts when they called Whitney Houston a “crack ho.”
Brent Budowsky: Where I take offense is when Lanny smears, demeans, misrepresents and ridicules liberals as McCarthyites when they (perish the thought) call for a boycott of Limbaugh sponsors.
Denis Campbell: Liberals in Egypt are up against a party that spent 83 years in hiding as an illegal entity, yet remained, quietly, very well organized.
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.
Mark Naison: It’s time that liberals stop trying to scare disillusioned activists with the prospect of a Republican presidency and start trying to scare the White House and the Democratic leadership into doing something to show they are worthy of activists votes.
Berry Craig: A lot of liberals think the nuttier these tea party-tilting Republicans talk, the more likely they are to turn off John and Jane Q. Public. I hope my fellow lefties are right.
Julie Driscoll: What the left views as weakness and the right views as radicalism, I view as brilliance. Anyone who thinks he’s weak hasn’t been paying attention.
Julie Driscoll: I promised my son that I would never protest or condemn or belittle this war, that I would never dishonor his service by reducing it to foolishness.
Stanley Kutler: Bachmann is so obviously an off-the-wall politician, one deservedly dismissed as a fringe candidate. But ironically, the liberal media have propelled her rise from well-deserved mediocrity to suddenly a “serious” candidate
Tina Dupuy: If liberals were doing to their country what extremist tea party Republicans are doing to theirs – it would be called unpatriotic. A whole tsunami of sound bites would sweep the country calling for the sabotage to stop.
John Peeler: Disillusioned liberals ought to know that if this effort takes off, it is very likely to siphon votes away from Obama and facilitate a complete Republican takeover of the federal government.
Bernard A. Weisberger: The current situation is evidence of the crashing failure of liberal America to stand up for its forgotten principles of some sixty years ago, and its decision to chain itself to a Democratic Party now under the leadership of “centrists” or “moderates” who in fact occupy the terrain once held by the vanished race of liberal Republicans.
Joseph Palermo: The credibility of Anthony Weiner’s loud liberal voice in the House of Representatives, who recently showed the temerity to take on Justice Clarence Thomas for his conflict of interest in Citizens United, is now toast
Tom Hayden: It is time for our most prominent liberal economists to broaden their analysis of the domestic crisis to include spending for these unfunded wars. Only Joseph Stiglitz has done so.
Jim Fuller: Rather than being genuine political liberals and/or progressives, those self-deluding, unquestioning Obama supporters are far more closely related to the members of the various Tea Party organizations than they are to anyone on the political left.
Lydia Howell: Nine months after taking office, Obama began slamming the Democratic Party’s liberal/progressive base for daring to notice, much less criticize, his corporate-friendly policies and center-right positions. In the wake of his Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission, Obama will likely make a sober call for national sacrifice.
Tom Hayden: While it is significant that Canada will end its combat role in Afghanistan next year [unlike the U.S. commitment until 2014], it is disheartening that both the Conservative and Liberal parties have agreed to stay in a “training” role indefinitely
John Peeler: The fact is, neither liberals nor conservatives, neither Republicans nor Democrats, have the stomach for the major sacrifices that Simpson and Bowles are calling for, and it’s not at all clear that the public in general is ready either.
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.
Steve Hochstadt: So when I see myself labeled as part of the “liberal elite”, and more often hear people talk about the “liberal elite”, I know they are trying hard not to think about all the people they know who are liberal but not elite, or elite but not liberal.
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.
Tom Degan: Those in the extreme right who like to pretend that they’ve cornered the market on patriotism need to be exposed for what they are – ideological snake oil salesmen. All we have to do is open our eyes to see the damage that their thirty-year domination of our political conversation has done to this country.
Sherwood Ross: Where President Eisenhower once got a landslide voter response for his campaign slogan of “Peace and Prosperity,” it should surprise no one that President Obama’s failure to deliver either one of those ideals has turned off a nation.
Paul Hogarth: Despite all the ranting right-wingers make about “terrorists” and how much they accuse liberals of being “un-American,” their worldview has far more in common with Islamic fundamentalism – from a violent jingoism, to the treatment of gays and women, to a rejection of science. American Taliban is a much-needed dose of reality for the upcoming election, as Republicans magnify the non-issue of a proposed Islamic community center in Manhattan.
Berry Craig: Bottom line: It’s plain loco for liberals to punish Democrats for being insufficiently liberal by staying home on election day and letting the Obama’s-a-Kenyan-Islamo-Socialist crowd win.
Steve Hochstadt: Conservapedia is mainly silly, reflecting Schafly’s cranky ideas, such as that vaccines are a conspiracy to poison us. But the wider idea that science, and other kinds of knowledge, can be “liberal” or “conservative” is dangerous. This is exactly the argument that German Nazis and Soviet Communists used to reject “Jewish” or “capitalist” ideas.
Sherwood Ross: Get it straight: the best remedy for what ails America is to pay working people fairly. It is the toil and dollars of the American people that made America great.
Dana Lone Hill: It seems as if the ongoing battle within the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe over alcohol will still continue, but the biggest obstacle will be the battle will be with each other. The days of working together as a tribe seems to be a thing of the past…when there was no alcohol.
Ann Robertson and Bill Leumer: As inequalities in wealth continue to create an ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest of us, the concept of “shared sacrifice” is becoming increasingly ludicrous.
Lauren Steiner: So while America is supposedly coming out of the recession, many Americans are not experiencing any relief. 50 million Americans live in food insecure homes, including 17 million children.
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It’s Only Unethical When It’s Called ‘News’
Tina Dupuy: Why doesn’t the Left have a Fox News? Why isn’t there a liberal version of political organizing on television? There are currently nine 24-hour news stations, so why isn’t there one that’s outright for progressives?