Archive for March, 2010

Thirty years ago, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador was assassinated in the early evening at the tiny church, Divina Providencia. The day before, at the Cathedral of San Salvador, he had ended a sermon with words he directed at Salvadoran soldiers and police:
“I would like to make an appeal in a special way to… »

The corporate media (and NPR) have pumped up the Tea Bagger opponents of the health care reform bill with about the same intensity they used to diminish those who marched against George W. Bush’s $3 trillion war in Iraq. From the corporate media’s take on this whole health care debate you’d think Republicans never get… »

In his piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “Identity Politics Leans Right,” Sam Tanenhaus raises some thought provoking questions for historians. He uses the current debate raging inside the Texas State Board of Education about what should be included or axed in the American history curriculum. He uses the Texas case as a… »

Having spent ten years on the Cornell University campus as a graduate student, lecturer, and visiting assistant professor, I can tell you that it is one of the most beautiful and picturesque college campuses in the country. Its waterfalls and gorges surrounding the oldest part of the college fulfill Ezra Cornell’s vision for a… »

Peter Baker’s profile of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the New York Times Magazine raises some interesting questions about President Barack Obama’s top aide. For Emanuel, it seems that all politics are electoral politics. He wouldn’t know a social movement if he saw one. Widely considered a wizard inside the Beltway, Emanuel… »

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a generation of people who lived in North America who had experienced a lot of terrible things. There was an economic collapse and people didn’t have enough to eat and jobs were scarce. Then came a huge bloodbath that touched every family. Loved ones were killed,… »

There’s been a lot of commentary about President Barack Obama’s failure to construct a winning “narrative” for the elections of 2010. In 2008, there were millions of people “fired up and ready to go.” But after a year plus of the Beltway-Rahm Emanuel strategy of never exposing oneself to political risk the grassroots energy of… »

Sometimes I think there are two Californias out there. One of them is the California of small things and small thinking. It’s the California that is obsessed with petty anti-tax politics. The one that wants to gut social programs and dismantle our public higher education system. It thrives on driving wedges… »