Ted Vaill: Mitt Romney, the Republicans’ default choice for President no one really likes, deserves to be asked the hard questions such as those directed by Jeff Daniels to the panel of GOP candidates in Adam Sorkin’s “Newsroom”,
I-Ronnie of I-Ronnies
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Tom Degan: The Republican party has sunk so deep into the ideological cesspool since January 20, 1981, Ronald Reagan is starting to look like Theodore Roosevelt!
Confessions of a Child Janitor
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Tina Dupuy: Gingrich has a dark vision for a Shining City Upon a Hill: where poor children work in place of union labor. It’s basically the 20th century played in reverse.
Remembering the Benefits of IRCA, 25 Years Later
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Michele Waslin: The benefits of IRCA—as well as the bipartisan support needed to pass it—should give our current congressional leaders something to think about.
The Perils for Obama of Not Talking About Poverty in America
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Joseph Palermo: By not speaking about the poor and poverty in America President Obama allows the Reagan era “welfare queen” construct to go unchallenged and, even worse, creates a vacuum that’s already being filled by right-wing pseudo-scholars.
Arab Spring, Mideast Peace
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Brent Budowsky: The Arab Spring involves aspirations that move people around the world, across the continents and throughout the ages. Ultimately, it will prevail.
Dems Need a Liberal Reagan
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Brent Bukowsky: Democrats desperately need a progressive version of Ronald Reagan, who stood for his own high principles and battled from the wilderness of 1976 to the presidency in 1980.
Ronnie at 100
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Tom Degan: The sad, pathetic truth of the matter is that on the evening of Tuesday, November 4, 1980 I got so falling-down intoxicated, I voted for the man just as a joke. A failed, “B” movie actor in the White House? That ought to be good for a nice, long chuckle , I thought.
The Reagan Centennial: Celebrating Reaganomics
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Joseph Palmero: If you like the way things are in the United States today — with Gilded Age levels of inequality, weak labor unions, low-wage service jobs for most of the workforce, and a public sector that’s dying on the vine — then you can thank Ronald Reagan.
Reagan v. F.D.R.
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Adam Eran: Acting together solved problems in FDR’s philosophy. Such action was the problem, in Reagan’s. Now we have experienced roughly 40 years of each. Which one produces better results?
Dysfunctional Politics Begets Suicidal Policies
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David Love: The Republican party faithful care little about the lives of everyday people. But they do care about their corporate benefactors. They claim to care so much about deficit reduction that they do not want to extend unemployment benefits, yet they want to extend the very tax cuts that wrecked the U.S. economy.
Republican Relativism as Radical Rhetoric
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Anthony Asadullah Samad: It seems the Republicans need to pump themselves up every couple of months or so these days. It’s not so much that they are meeting that troubles me. It’s sorta like an AA meeting except here it’s where “ideologue-holics” come together and try to sober up on their 2008 Presidential defeat with new rhetoric that gets more and more extreme with each outing. This time, it was at the 2010 Southern Republican Convention in New Orleans that the more “radical” elements of the party come together to try to micromanage the Presidency and give a demented spin on the course of current affairs.
Exit Gen. Grant – Enter St. Ronald?
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Steven Conn: A Republican member of Congress wants to remove the visage of Ulysses S. Grant from the $50 bill and substitute Ronald Reagan. But why? Historian Steven Conn speculates that the party wants to make its past match its present orthodoxy.
Archbishop Oscar Romero: Thirty Years and Little Learned
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Joseph Palermo: And what did those who formulate United States foreign policy learn from the carnage in El Salvador? The same thing they should have learned from Vietnam: Whenever the United States sticks its nose into another country’s civil war it only raises the level of death and destruction making the politics all the more intractable. And in the end it achieves very little other than what could have been worked out peacefully in the first place.
Supremes Murder the First Amendment: Whaddaya Gonna Do?
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Gary Coseri: I hacked the computer of Barack Obama. “Mr. President,” I wrote, “this can’t be happening. This can’t be right. Didn’t you say something about ‘hope’ and ‘change’; no more politics as usual? Wasn’t that you?” He wrote back that he was always glad to hear from “the People.” And that the FBI would soon be knocking on my door. Which is what happened. And it was true: They wear bad shoes!
Be Born Again: Reject the Politics of Denial
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Reaganomics didn’t work, and we all know it. Nothing ever trickled down — the rich became richer, the poor became poorer, and the middle class got squeezed.
Friday Feedback: Oligarchs Will Not Play Fair
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Every Friday the LA Progressive features a comment that was particularly noteworthy. This week we are featuring a comment submitted by Carole Lutness, writing in response to Anthony Asadullah Samad’s Economic Recovery Will Be More than Trusting President Obama’s Stimulus Plan.” Carole writes: The oligarchs will not play fair. They are not built that way. [...]
Obama’s Opportunity to be a Transformational Leader
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The election of Barack Obama has generated speculation that he can—and will—emulate the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the manner in which he manages the problems that overwhelmed George W. Bush in his second term. In The Politics Presidents Make, Stephen Skoronek argues that presidents who come into office opposed to an existing vulnerable [...]
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
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“Men…think in herds; …go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses…one by one.” — Charles MackayRepublican Assemblyman Roger Niello‘s recent editorial “Performance Based Budgeting Deserves a Look,” is his bid to appear as a man who has recovered his senses. In it, he reminds us that California’s state budget process is imperfect. The [...]
California’s Failure to Invest in Higher Education Gives the State Little Hope for Economic Prosperity in the 21st Century Global Economy
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As California’s leaders continue to wrestle with how to tackle the ever growing budget deficit, cuts to education and in particular public higher education, continue to be mentioned as a solution to economic tumult. Such cuts would be a blow to a State that already has fallen from “trend-setter” in terms of education and economic [...]
Ronald Reagan and the Day the Earth Stood Still
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by Robert Brent Toplin – Hollywood’s current sci-fi thriller, The Day the Earth Stood Still, features Keneau Reeves as a visitor from outer space who warns earthlings about impending ecological disaster and senses he must destroy mankind to save the earth. The movie is drawing a lot of young patrons to the theaters to enjoy [...]
Who Lost the Election?
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by Eric Ekstrand – The results of the election of Tuesday, November 4th, were more than the elevation of a singularly talented, skilled, and visionary statesman, Barack Obama, to our highest office; more than the ultimate display of the progress this country has made towards civil rights and justice; more than a victory for the [...]
Voters Are Rejecting Republican Ideology, Not Just Bush and McCain
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With pundits finally predicting an Obama victory, some are already spinning the election as a referendum on President Bush and on John McCain’s weak campaign. This frame—which claims Bush was an “anchor” around John McCain’s neck from the outset—spins this election as a rejection of specific politicians, not the Republican Party. But John McCain publicly [...]
Testaments: George H. W. Bush
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This week, John Peeler presents “Testaments,” a series of poems that take the form of valedictory statements by each of the postwar presidents, in the poetic manner of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. George H. W. Bush Called Reagan on his voodoo economics, didn’t matter; people wanted to believe. So swallowed it and served [...]
How We Can Win
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You’d have to be on a media fast to have missed journalist/blogger/commentator David Sirota on TV (Stephen Colbert, CNN, Fox News[!]), radio (NPR, Pacifica) and in the pages of Newsweek and The New Republic earlier this summer. He was discussing his New York Times bestseller The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring [...]
Who Creates Jobs? Democratic Presidents Do!
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A recent poll asked whether private companies, Congress, or the president has the most to do with creating new jobs. I find it amusing when pollsters ask for opinions on something that is purely factual. Only 5% got the right answer and said it is the president. Look at the private sector job growth results [...]
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Friday Feedback: Occupy Wall Street’s Gullible & Unsophisticated Protesters
Friday Feedback: This week, Hollis Steward comments on Joe Palermo’s article, “Occupy Wall Street’s “Gullible” and “Unsophisticated” Protesters,” followed by rejoinders by hwood007 and Cindy-Roy.