Politics / Commentary
There’s No Good News for Democrats Because There’s No Good News
“All politics are local,” Tip O’Neill famously said, and the political smoke signals being sent up locally going into the 2010 midterms all point to systematic failure on the part of the governing party. Democratic constituencies have been forced to sit back while the politicians they elected are helpless in the face of an unprecedented… »
An Unsanitized Look at the Origins of the Iraq War
Neo-conservatives within the Bush Administration – Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, and others, repeatedly told us on TV that individuals who opposed President George W. Bush’s attack, invasion, and occupation of Iraq… »
Remaking California: Reclaiming the Public Good
R. Jeffrey Lustig has compiled (and contributed) to an amazing set of useful essays that examine the many maladies plaguing California’s politics and public institutions and provide food for thought that points to possible remedies. Remaking California: Reclaiming the Public Good, is the most important book on contemporary California politics to be published in many… »
University of Phoenix: Something Right Out of David Mamet
“Always Be Closing” is the slogan of “Premiere Properties,” the fictional Chicago real estate office in David Mamet’s play, Glengarry Glen Ross. “Always Be Closing” is not only the theme of Mamet’s examination of the tyranny of the “bottom line” over human relationships, but also appears to be the driving principle behind the “University”… »
Robert Gibbs Blew It
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs showed poor press management skills in handling the whole Shirley Sherrod saga. He allowed the media frame to shift quickly to the missteps of the administration rather than emphasizing the underhanded, contrived, and racist actions of Andrew Breitbart and his fellow travelers at Fox News.
Instead of explaining to the… »
Elisabeth Bumiller: Wrong on the Tonkin Gulf Incident
In an article in today’s New York Times, “Senate Records Show Doubts on ‘64 Vietnam War Crisis,” senior national security correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller writes: “Even at the time, there was widespread skepticism about the Gulf of Tonkin incident . . . ”
Wait a minute! Is that so?
“Widespread skepticism?”
The New York Times and… »
Class Warfare Heats Up in California
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently submitted a “budget” to the legislature that eliminates CalWORKS, the state’s highly successful welfare-to-work program that is needed now more than ever. This move would make California the only state in the nation to dismantle its safety net. He’s even willing to throw away the federal matching funds CalWORKS receives… »
Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan — What’s the Difference?
In her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch, who was a devotee of No Child Left Behind-type policies when she served as Assistant Secretary of Education under Poppy Bush, shows that the data are in and the corporate educational “reforms”… »
Afghanistan Again
After nine years of war the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan lacks support at home and is widely recognized as a drain on the domestic economy in a time of severe economic contraction. The billions of dollars in U.S. economic assistance to the Hamid Karzai government has created an unsustainable class of Afghans who are dependent… »
Michael Tomasky’s Despairing Take on American History
In a recent piece in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, titled “Against Despair: How Our Misreading of History Harms Progressivism Today,” Michael Tomasky notes how The Huffington Post sometimes evokes Franklin D. Roosevelt in its assessment of President Barack Obama, which tells him something about “the way liberals interpret and talk about history.” (3) Tomasky… »