Charles Hayes: If we elect a Republican as president in 2012, we deserve the calamity that will follow. After all, “stupid is as stupid does.”
Occupy Wall Street Not Same Old Political Crap
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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.
Privatize Me
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Tom Degan: The problem with the elitist mentality of the plutocracy which is seeking to destroy anything concerned with “public works” is that they just can’t stomach the fact that we all own a piece the American infrastructure.
Apocalypse September!
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Walter Brasch: It’s probably just a coincidence, but 1988 was also the same year that George Bush, whom Sadaam Hussein called The Great Satan, was elected president.
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
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Charles Hayes: It’s crystal clear that real warriors—men and women who have been in the thick of prolonged battle—seldom afterwards view war as a viable way to settle differences, any kind of differences.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Municipal Workers
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Joseph Palermo: I cannot believe that in the 21st Century we are having this kind of a debate on the role of labor unions in this country. But I suppose it isn’t surprising since we have a new Gilded Age going on.
Koch Brothers Protest Rally
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Thousands of protesters gathered this weekend in Palm Springs to express opposition to the secret meeting held by David and Charles Koch. The Koch brothers, owners of the 2nd largest privately held corporation in the United States, were conducting their bi-annual retreat where they and a cadre of well heeled power brokers hold strategy sessions.
The Politics of Hate—and Hate Speech
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Walter Brasch: While most Tea Partiers are White, middle-aged or senior citizens who are angry but not violent, whenever there is violence, whenever there is racism, discrimination, or homophobia, there are Tea Party sympathizers present.
Bring on the Clowns
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Tom Degan: You thought the One-hundred and Eleventh Congress was beyond awful? OH, BROTHER! This one will be remembered as the worst in history. Anyone care to make a little wager on this point?
Our Nation Has Been Manchurian Candidaterized
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Jerry Drucker: Five major corporations own most all of the media, including TV. Very soon, when the GOP rules the House, there will be no more PBS or NPR. Sesame Street will be replaced by K Street and daily news will come straight from the RNC.
Sarah Palin: America’s Full-Time Professional Duelist
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Tina Dupuy: Palin is now our nation’s only full-time professional duelist. She fights with everyone. Her entire post-quitting career is centered on flame wars, most of which she starts.
In Search of the Real Tea Party
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Denis Campbell: Almost all feared what looks to become the continual flip-flopping of the government every two years that will prevent a single problem from being fixed and create an even more polarized and angry electorate. Said Marilyn from Delaware, “This will be like Israel, where no one can agree and they just fight all of the time.”
What Obama and the Democrats Have Not Done
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Stanley I. Kutler: For the past year, the media, reflecting disenchantment with Barack Obama, their very own rock star, have “predicted” huge Democratic losses for 2010. Like blackbirds who fly off the line (as Eugene McCarthy once said), the media follows in lockstep.
The Moderates’ Lament
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Tina Dupuy: The current Republican Party is counting on the Tea Party’s morphing into the attack wing of the GOP – isolating moderates and anyone with genuine new ideas. And that means there will be Representatives who are not actually representative.
Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt
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Charles Hayes: Today I feel very differently about the Vietnam War than I did in my youth, but my own feelings of guilt during that time give me a unique kind of insight into the psychology of courage and commitment. America has never had a shortage of courageous citizens willing to take up arms and fight to the death for reasons and causes beyond their own understanding. Arlington Cemetery in Virginia serves as proof. But my sense of the decades since the end of World War II is that America has and is experiencing a courage crisis of shameful origin and of tragic consequence.
Stop Calling Republicans ‘Hypocrites’
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Tina Dupuy: Espousing virtues you don’t personally have to live up to is basically the point of being a Republican.
How the Internet Can Make It Harder to Act
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Paul Loeb: For all the strengths of online engagement, people still need to gather together, eat, joke, flirt, tell their stories, attach names to faces, and ultimately build deeper levels of trust.
Political Wrangling Aside, We’re In This Together
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Steve Hochstadt: I believe that as a society we are moving away from a desire to solve problems cooperatively toward a single-minded motivation to defeat opponents. Political conflict has spread into “culture wars,” in which other people’s choice of newspaper or dinner beverage, or their attitude toward recycling or marriage makes them our enemy.
Chris Matthews Nails It
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Tom Degan: Let’s face some serious facts here, boys and girls: The right wing in this country has always been (since the days of the Confederacy and before) a tad crazy — not to mention dumber than doggy doo doo. What is happening to them now is beyond anything in their long and entertainingly weird history. In effect they’ve totally lost it.
Oily Birds and Other Atrocities
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Tom Degan: How ever will they justify continued off-shore drilling in light of what is now happening in the Gulf of Mexico? In just a few short days we’ve gone from a tragedy to a disaster to a full blown catastrophe. It will be more than interesting to see the depths to which the right wing will now stoop in order to trivialize this hideous event. Rush Limbaugh is already floating the idea out to his half-witted “Dittoheads” that this was sabotage on the part of the “eco-nazis”; that some unnamed environmental organization plotted this disaster in order to further their evil socialist agenda.
Honorees Revolutionize Progressive Communications
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Wendy Block: Valley Democrats United’s (VDU’s) 2010 Badge of Courage honorees knew corporate media would respect progressive voices about the same time Rush Limbaugh invited Amy Goodman to guest host his radio show. So documentarian extraordinaire Robert Greenwald, and citizen journalists for the world Sharon Kyle and Dick Price, crashed the international debate.
Trust in the GOP’s Dearth of Experience
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Tina Dupuy: When Republicans warn that a policy is a job-killer – Americans should listen. If any group of lawmakers and thinkers know about killing jobs it’s the Grand Old Party. In 2008, the final year of the Bush Administration, after two terms of careless deregulation implemented with bastardized pseudo-free market battle cries, the economy lost 2.6 million jobs. An annual job loss not equaled since 1945. When it comes to job extermination the GOP’s display case has a full assortment of trophies. So, of course Republicans are now the best authority on how not to kill jobs. Basically, don’t do what they did.
Outrage Is All the Rage
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Michael Sigman: It’s often momentarily satisfying to react to outrage with more outrage. For years, I’ve rooted like a sports fan for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann when he righteously matched and even outstripped the bile of the ignorant Right. But during his recent absence from the airwaves, it’s been a tonic to follow Laurence O’Donnell’s more reasoned approach and Rachel Maddow’s measured, humorous way of skewering the opposition.
What Does Rupert Murdoch Want?
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Jim Fuller: This is your duty as a citizen: Take a deep breath and try to watch and listen to Fox for a half hour or so at a time, at various times of day. More if you can stand it. You’ll rarely catch even a single story that is not twisted to fit an extreme right view of the world.
A “Center-Right” Country?
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Joseph Palermo: With the hoopla at the CPAC convention and the hyperventilating on FOX News you’d think the Republicans are worried about something. With Citizens United and the Supreme Court in their pocket, and with the billionaires’ club and corporate America backing them, they’ll be back in power faster than you can say the words “President Marco Rubio.” That’s why the Democrats can’t afford to fail now.
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