Progressive Media Advocates
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: In late spring of this year, Americans Elect will hold a primary consisting of three rounds of online balloting where the six candidates with the most votes will emerge. Anyone can vote as long as they are a registered voter.
Berry Craig: This old reporter turned history teacher finds anonymous bloggers of any political persuasion eminently ignorable. In my book, no name equals no credibility.
Walter Moss: The primary question is not whether President Obama has always acted wisely (or unwisely) during his first three years in office, but the extent to which he possesses the values necessary for political wisdom and has displayed it.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: The 2010 mid-term election demonstrated that immigration issues could be a potent political force within the GOP. Candidates across the country, and in particular in the South came into office by espousing harsh anti-immigration policies.
Walter Moss: We want our leaders to exercise political wisdom. At least, we do if we think about it. Does anybody really desire unwise leaders? But what do we mean by political wisdom? What virtues and values does a wise leader possess?
David Love: Republicans are once again turning President Obama’s faith into a political issue. But will their strategy work? History and hypocrisy suggest that the political gamesmanship won’t succeed.
Victoria Defrancesco Soto: In the 2012 election cycle we will see ads targeted to left-handed political science majors at Big 12 Schools — OK, maybe not quite that specific, but close.
Nick Capo: Progressive reformers have led this country to a better state in previous decades, and they will do so again. But it has to start at the local level.
Charles Hayes: Commercial media thrive on dissension, so their pursuit of perpetual conflict is easy to understand, even if it is not always forgivable.
Anthony Samad: The Republicans need a vehicle with a big enough horn to get the public’s attention. They need to raise the ideological rhetoric just to have a chance. Regardless of what it does to the nation. The rhetoric bomb is coming under hood and sheets. The question is, will the nation stand for it.
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.
Stephen Box: As I traded “new father” anecdotes with one of the most powerful men in Los Angeles, I realized that our experiences contained within them the lessons that could move LA forward.
Why are today’s politicians drawn to Theodore Roosevelt? Is it his political beliefs and achievements? No, says historian Rosemarie Ostler. It is more likely his pugnacious personality and his pungent way with words.
Robert Reich: Wall Street is its own worst enemy. It should have welcomed new financial regulation as a means of restoring public trust. Instead, it’s busily shredding new regulations and making the public more distrustful than ever.
Robert Reich: Political elites are worried about thunder on the right and the left, but they show scant understanding of what these growing anti-establishment forces signify. Meanwhile, the nation drifts.
Wendy McElroy: A supremely political animal, Hoover occupied high office for nearly 50 years, during which he was instrumental in laying the foundation for a national security state.
Steve Hochstadt: Republicans avoid talking about their leadership and power in Washington for the past 30 years, because they are fighting to undo the changes in our political system that came earlier, during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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.
Michael Sigman: Expert political prognostications may be devoid of useful information, but they can help us resist our own tendencies to act like big shots, prediction-wise.
James Livingston: When David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh suggest that the Occupy Wall Street crowd might be speaking “an anti-Semitic code,” you know the times, they are hysterical.
Tomiko Brown-Nagin: History shows that American political activism has never been limited to the form that it conventionally takes today—electoral politics. Citizens have historically employed an array of tools to influence public policy
Walter Moss: I have come to fear that Obama may possess two of the flaws that led to Gorbachev’s downfall — an inability to forge a political consensus and a failure to articulate a political vision that can inspire average people.
Anthony Samad: I’ll be curious to find out how many people were hired from the CBC job fairs around the country. Or was it another “smoke and mirrors” engagement to make politicians look good?
Rodolfo F. Acuña: One of the first political lessons that I remember was Benito Juárez’s famous saying, “entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz,” “among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace.”
Colleen Rowley: Numerous polls confirm we’re approaching a unique moment where a variety of rationales for ending the wars are coming together that transcend prior political differences.
Tom Degan: Not only would the candidacy of Sarah Palin guarantee the reelection of Barack Obama, it would be a months-long holiday for political satirists everywhere.
Sikivu Hutchinson: Reed has sought to wed the Tea Party’s political momentum with the considerable grassroots apparatus of the Christian right.
Randy Shaw: In hindsight, activists should have taken it upon themselves to become the vessels of hope rather than trusting Barack Obama. But at this political moment, it is Obama who is best positioned to restore the hopes of his core supporters.
Rosemarie Ostler: Obama’s critics have found a variety of ways to portray him as exotic and un-American. But this is nothing new. For two centuries politicians have been labeling their opponents as not quite American enough.
Walter Brasch: “The gas companies pay a one-time fee for your land, but you lose the right to utilize it as anything more than grassland forever. . . . You can never build on those easements. They took my retirement away by eminent domain.”
Tom Hayden: Newcomers like Senator King worry that the Obama administration has “essentially rewritten the Constitution,” giving rise to a new Imperial Presidency, buffered by an expanded security state.
Lauren Windsor: Prop C is a fitting rollout for Get Money Out. Voters of Los Angeles, join your city council and put your money where your mouth is. On Tuesday, May 21, vote yes on Proposition C!
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Friday Feedback: “The Role of the Middle-Class Revisited”
Friday Feedback: This week, Rosalio Munoz comments on Dr. Rodolfo Acuña’s article that states, “Chicanas/os and Latinos remain political pochos because once they are out of college most do not remain politically active.”