"Words that make actions speak louder."
I spent several days over last weekend as a volunteer webworker covering the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Salt Lake City. These annual confabs are always a highlight of the summer for me as a UU. They’re also one of the best shows going if you want to remember, all the way down, what it […]
Sometimes, when you’re up to your chin in alligators, it’s hard to focus on the fact that there’s a big, broad, alligator-free world waiting somewhere out there, beyond the edge of the swamp.
It’s been a wild couple of weeks for those of us in the wingnutology business. Our services have been in tremendous demand as the mainstream media tries to sort out the meaning of what Scott Roeder and James von Brunn did. I’ve done an average of one radio show every day for the past two […]
Dear Conservatives: Your fellow Americans demand an answer — and we want it now. Just one simple question: Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war? Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don’t insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are — and […]
The storm I’ve been warning about is coming in faster now. It is time for the right to stand up against the escalating tide of violence fueled by its own rhetoric. To get a sense of just how fast, you only need to take stock of what’s been happening on the right wing since President […]
Republicans have been running on immigration as a signature issue for the past several elections, so it’s ironic that progressives are the ones with the most to gain from solving the immigration problem. But before we can do that, we need to understand—and agree—on what the problems are, and what can and should be done. […]
One of the things I’m really liking about the new regime is the way the stark, terrified silence of the Bush years is giving way to noisy, energetic public discussion of subjects that would have been considered hardcore political pornography just a year or two ago. Mr. Obama himself may not want to talk about […]
Somewhere back in February, about three weeks into the Obama Administration, everybody on the left suddenly noticed that there was something different going on with the conservatives. The outrageous screeds and paranoid delusions sounded pretty much as they always had — but there was a new fury behind them, a strident urgency that hadn’t been […]
Whew. Run your bank into the ground? Hey, it was our fault for not keeping a better eye on you. Here’s some cash. Since you’re rich guys, we trust you to do the right thing going forward, so we’re not going to bother you with a bunch of rules and oversight—but you promise to be […]
Last week, in Part I of this short series, I talked about the three main scenarios that dominate progressive conversations about America’s future: 1) Permanent Decline — Due to Americans’ native hyperindividualism, political apathy, and overweening willingness to accept personal blame for their country’s failures, the corporatists finally succeed in turning the US into Indonesia. […]