Tom Degan: Show me a guy whose antics are too weird for the GOP and I’ll show you a guy who really should be be watched – if only for our own amusement.
Conservative Revisionist History
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Charles Hayes: It’s an old cliché to say that victors write the history of their times, but the opportunists who take full advantage of these biased histories are the ones to keep an eye on.
Political Ads Work If Citizens Don’t
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Charles Hayes: If most Americans lived up to Thomas Jefferson’s expectations about attaining the knowledge required of citizenship, thirty-second political ads would be a waste of money.
Right-Wing Propaganda: False Equivalents
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Steve Hochstadt: These two conservative propagandists know that the average reader, especially those who want to believe conservative ideas, won’t or can’t follow the trail backwards from their misleading writings to the real facts. They don’t seek truth, they obscure it.
Occupy Should Stay Unattached to Political Parties
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Mark Nathan: We need grassroots social movements of such force that it will reinvent what is possible in mainstream American politics. The Occupy movements have started such a process.
Empty the Tea Pot
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Charles Hayes: The progressive political agenda for 2012 has never been clearer: Empty the Tea Pot. Remove the Tea Party ideologues from office and those who cater to their whims.
Disaster Capitalism in the Budget Debate
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Adam Eran: Historic tax reductions on the wealthy, and the Wall-Street-Fraud recession, have reduced public revenues, and this reduction now makes otherwise too-popular-to-cut programs vulnerable. But are such cuts really necessary?
The Fight to Save Social Security Begins Now
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Shamus Cooke: Obama’s Deficit Reduction Commission attacks Social Security and Medicare. The retirement age would be raised from 67 to 68 (for those born after 1959) and from 68 to 69 (for those born after 2006). But current retirees will be affected too. The social security cost of living adjustment will be unhinged from the inflation index, meaning, payments will decrease via inflation.
Party Like It’s 1892!
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Steven Conn: The great historian Richard Hofstadter, writing about the Populists, described third party political movements in this country as bees: They sting one of the two major parties. Then they die.
LA’s Sheriff Baca Stirs Fear Against Marijuana Days Before The Election
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Linda Milazzo: If Baca doesn’t want to smoke pot, he doesn’t have to. If Baca doesn’t want to eat edibles, he doesn’t have to. But that’s no reason to use underhanded tactics to prevent wise legislation from passing – legislation that will generate income California desperately needs.
Gas on the Fire
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om Degan: When there are no issues to distract the people from what really matters, just conjure up a boogie man that the half-witted masses can rally against. Seventy-five years ago the German people had the Jews. Today we have the Muslims. Isn’t life wonderful?
Progressive Media Bolstering Republican & FOX News Agenda
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Randy Shaw: Here’s a thought. What if the progressive media stopped reporting on every silly idea promoted by Sarah Palin and used that time to report on positive actions by the federal government to help people. I get emailed press releases announcing such accomplishments each day, so the stories are out there but are not covered.
Spinning the Truth
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Steve Hochstadt: We have learned to expect our political leaders to adopt partisan positions on every possible issue, subordinating facts to ideology, truth to political advantage. We can no longer believe even the basic biographical “facts” that they claim qualify them for office.
Cuéntame: Facebooking Teabagger Bigots
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Berry Craig: Caballero also said that “From calling Mexicans ‘filthy, stinking animals,’ to listening the likes of Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin deliver hateful speech after hateful speech, to the increased use of violence in their words and actions, Teabaggers have come out in full force against our community.”
Joe Arpaio’s Chief Deputy Cites Conspiracy Theory Involving President Obama To ‘Muzzle’ His Boss
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Adnrea Nill: During his own deposition testimony, Arpaio admitted to not reading his own book and blamed the references to the wingnut reconquista conspiracy theories contained in it on his co-author.
Holding Obama Accountable
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Randy Shaw: pecifically, activists must employ what I describe in The Activist’s Handbook as the “fear and loathing” approach that has long proved necessary to get most politicians to do the right thing. Activists must make Obama fear the political repercussions of not backing progressive positions, even to the extent that the President comes to “loathe” those creating such pressures.
Darfur: Time to Let the People Speak
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Although Darfur has been a priority issue for both the Bush and Obama administrations and their European counterparts, Western efforts have not yielded a payoff in peace and well-being for the people of Darfur.
No Nonsense Census
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There’s been another informed and intelligent decision by the Obama administration. In August 2008, in an LA Progressive article entitled “Census Nonsense,” which decried the Bush administration’s move to exclude legally married same-sex couples from being counted as married couples during upcoming the 2010 census, I wrote, “…to capsulize the situation, as it stands now, [...]
The Consent of the Governed
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“… to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men [and women], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” — Declaration of Independence “Your people, Mr. Jefferson, are a great beast.” So said Alexander Hamilton, the leader of America’s first conservative party, to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the [...]
Media Cries “Deficit” to Defeat Progressive Agenda
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Despite all of the economic history of the past 30 years, the traditional media is brushing off its favorite bogeyman – the budget deficit – to defeat and/or scale back President Obama’s progressive budget, education, and health care agenda. The New York Times warned in a front page story on March 21 that a new [...]
Goodbye, “Uncle Larry,” Hello (Again) “Uncle Clarence:” Are Black Conservatives Still Relevant?
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The announcement that syndicated talk radio host, Larry Elder, was leaving his daily radio “squawk show” shouldn’t go without notice. Elder is a major remnant of the “colorblind” conservative movement that allowed race and race-based disparities to be subjugated through senseless rationales of relative truths, which made no sense when Elder’s show was launched in [...]
Gods, Guns, and Gays – Part Two
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As the uncommitted Mexican American Super Latino, I get to comment on what stupid people forget. Not so long ago, a white guy (now the Chair of the Democratic National Committee) said that his election was not going to be about “God, Guns, and Gays.” As a result, the right wingnuts went crazy with shock [...]
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