"Words that make actions speak louder."
I live in a nice place. I mean that literally. It took some getting used to. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, where people put a premium on being direct and to the point, have no time to waste on small talk or personal sharing, and will call a stupid idea stupid to your face, […]
Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week — and the media doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they’re stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him? Lost in the tortured pondering over this […]
One of the trickiest parts of dealing with the extremist right is figuring out whether a given group is just harmless garden-variety crazy — or harboring the special kind of insanity that will lead to acts of local violence or outright domestic terror. it’s a question worth asking in the wake of the state of […]
John McCain, who from the early 1980s worked hard to establish himself the one of the Senate’s shining champions of Vietnam veterans’ issues, completed his betrayal of the Iraq-era troops today. Brandon Friedman of vetvoice.com has the details: Yesterday VoteVets.org delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures to the office of Senator John McCain. Through that […]
In last week’s essay, I noted that our ability to function effectively as a nation has been deeply compromised by the conservative movement’s reflexive reliance on Us-versus-Them politics. Allowing a winners-and-losers worldview to dominate our country is a dangerous self-indulgence, I argued. History is littered with the corpses of great empires and economies that were […]
The old joke goes that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who think there are two kinds of people in the world, and those who don’t. Funny thing is: it’s not a joke. In fact, it turns out that this one oddly recursive fact can tell us a whole lot about […]
Can we progressives — who won’t be caught dead these days calling ourselves liberals — can we stop serving as a punching bag for the right? And speak with depth and conviction about the things that really matter to us? Once and for all, can we break through the false and humiliating charade that they […]
A while back, while I was deep in the midst of my maundering three-week wander<
Part I Part II The conservative worldview has succeeded so wildly — and is still holding such tenacious sway over the ways Americans approach their current stack of problems — because the conservatives started out 30 years ago with a focused plan that put promoting their model of reality at the center of every other […]
This is Part II of a series on the strategies used by the conservatives to promote their worldview, and the lessons progressives can learn from them to promote our own. Part I is here. As we saw in the previous post, the entire conservative movement was organized around the single goal of changing the country’s […]