Progressive Media Advocates
Tina Dupuy: A right-of-center nation would have never embraced the extremely liberal notion of public retirement insurance for its citizens. And government-funded health care for seniors like Medicare?! That’s not “free market” – that’s not “freedom.”
Jonathan Coopersmith: The Obama administration is discarding older NASA technologies in a quest for a new start. A historian of technology says that progress depends on finding ways to explore space at tolerable prices
Carl Matthes: It’s Springtime in America. Rebirth is rampant and organized religion is in the news. Unfortunately, it’s not the good news of renewal, faith and understanding. But rather, the church is in the spotlight over the worst possible actions and charges: child molesting and hate have engulfed church leadership. Victimimzed are the faithful and the innocent. From the Catholic Church and the Pope to Westboro Baptist Church and Minister Fred Phelps, God, to borrow the phrasing of Sinead O’Connor, needs to be rescued.
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.
Berry Craig: I’m glad to see Obama starting to show some spunk. His recent performance at the televised Q&A with the House GOP brass was a great start. It got rave reviews at our central labor council. “He looked those Republicans right in the eye and kicked their butts,” said one delegate, a retired Machinist. “But he needs to do more than that.”
Rev. Irene Monroe: It is my hope that the many conservative faith-based groups and organizations that are now part of Haiti’s earthquake relief effort will not discriminate against Haiti’s LGBTQ community as many of them did toward New Orleans’s queer communities during Katrina.
For the past two years, a small band of senior scientists and engineers at Pasadena, California’s Jet Propulsion Lab have pursued a lawsuit against their employers at Caltech and NASA to protect themselves—and by extension, all federal employees—against the unreasonable invasions of their privacy under a presidential order signed by former President George W. Bush.
Ominously, the Pentagon has spent over a trillion dollars in recent years on the refinement of deadlier killing instruments and the militarization of space from which it can control the planet with even greater authority than from its 1,000 foreign bases.
Some idea of Pentagon dominance over diplomatic approaches may be gleaned from the Pentagon’s $664 billion annual budget compared with State’s $52 billion. “Washington employs more military band members than it does foreign service officers.”
Someone asked what black people thought of Joe Wilson‘s “you lie” outburst. Of course, there isn’t a monolithic black answer to that question. I am a black person but I can’t speak for black people and I didn’t get together with other black people to form a consensus. But I did read a blog post [...]
What Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes, and their allies did in drumming Van Jones out of the government was an example of 21st century McCarthyism. They smeared Jones’ past political remarks and associations the same way Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn smeared a young Boston lawyer named Fred Fisher for being a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
Last Sunday, on a trip to Sacramento, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefly praised the nation’s history of welcoming immigrants, saying that it’s a tradition that should be preserved.
The traditional media — surprise, surprise — is now trumpeting the argument that the United States cannot “afford” to provide universal healthcare. The Congressional Budget Office estimate of a $1.6 trillion cost over 10 years is said to be a “game changer,” even though the Senators complaining about this expense are backing the wasteful F22 [...]
Los Angeles magazine slapped the word “Failure” across a photo of L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on the cover of its June issue. This was not only a cheap shot, meant to grab attention and sell magazines, but also a misleading assessment of Villaraigosa’s track record after one term. The article expressed disappointment, even bitterness, that [...]
If Sonia Sotomayer, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, joins the court she will turn its five Catholic members into a two-thirds majority. She will in fact be replacing one of the two Protestants who remained on the court. This dramatic change in the composition of the Supreme Court can be traced to the [...]
In the Oxford English Dictionary “equality” means, “Identical in amount; neither less nor greater…having the same measure, number, value, intensity.” How did three Democratic presidents, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Lyndon Johnson, speak to equality? President Barack Obama on Monday, June 1, named June as “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month” issuing a proclamation: [...]
In his second inaugural address, President George W. Bush offered a vision of an “ownership society” In America’s ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence… To give every American a stake in the promise and future of our country, we will… build an ownership society. We will widen the ownership [...]
A letter to the editor in my local newspaper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress, has persuaded me to rethink the truly remarkable accomplishments of President George W. Bush and inspired me to join the movement to erect a Bush Memorial on the National Mall. The letter, published on February 9th, was from David H. Edmunds of [...]
President Barack Obama of the Capitol of Washington, it is my most sincere honor to introduce you to Citizen Bob Alexander of the State of Washington, who by the standards you have set to ‘give our all’ has valiantly answered your call. In fact, Citizen Bob answered that call long before you were President. He [...]
If America ever is going to stop making aggressive war, Americans will first have to get into contact with reality. That’s because U.S. administrations for the past century have periodically frightened the public out of their collective wits. And a frightened nation is a malleable nation, one whose people are susceptible to being led into [...]
As quietly as it would like to be kept by the Obama team and even by many in the LGBTQ community, Obama exploits the queer community for his political gains. And like pawns on his chessboard, Obama checkmates us each time when our hopes to be included in his big tent are dashed. Our most [...]
At the request of President-elect Barack Obama, President George W. Bush convened an awkward meeting of all living former presidents at the White House to meet, and presumably give advice and encouragement to, the new guy. The body language of the participants in the summit photo, taken in the Oval Office, said it all. The [...]
President George W. Bush will be finally leaving Washington after what seemed an eternity. He will be leaving behind a country that is poorer, weaker, more polluted, more indebted, more divided and more unequal. He soiled the U.S. Constitution and breached the wall between Church and State. The whole society is less scientifically literate and [...]
by Gene Rothman – Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), in response to the issue of potential legal actions against the Bush administration’s for violations of the U.S, Constitution, wrote: “Thank you for your letter concerning impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush and his authority to grant pardons. I appreciate the time you took to write [...]
The media and the Washington foreign policy elite breathed a sigh of relief when Barack Obama thumped John McCain in the election. Had John McCain won, there was always the chance that the neoconservatives would have beaten out the Republican realists for his foreign policy soul. With a victory by the liberal Obama, however, the [...]
Guantánamo Bay, September 11, 2026. Defeated Republican presidential candidate Bjorn Looser was sentenced to death today after a secret trial, on charges that were not specified. According to the current interpretation of a law passed 20 years ago, in 2006, the government did not have to specify charges, did not have to show evidence, and [...]
In politics, truth telling can be dangerous. Remember when Jimmy Carter was voted out of office, in part, for telling the American people, in a time of high inflation and unemployment, what they didn’t want to hear — that they were self indulgent and consumed too much?
WHITE HOUSE – AUGUST, 2005- White House Kitchen – A woman wearing a tall white chef’s hat answers a ringing phone. No other person is in the expansive kitchen. She punches on a speaker phone. WOMAN CHEF: “Hello.” MAN’S VOICE: “Vice President Cheney’s office, please.” WOMAN CHEF: “He’s not here. I think he might be [...]
JP Sotille: Everyone is a potential target in the War on Terror’s lingering “With Us or Against Us” protection racket, and drones are the crooked-nosed enforcers that kill without remorse, without hesitation and without accountability.
Carole Bartolotto: The good news is that you can easily replace cow’s milk with almond, soy, rice, hemp or coconut milk instead. I love Trader Joe’s Vanilla Almond Milk.
Robert Reich: The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up.
PCL offers monthly Open House Events on the 2nd Saturday at 2pm and 3rd Thursday at 6pm. Click here to learn more.
Poizner Smears Whitman for Sharing Obama’s Immigration Position in California Governor’s Race
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.