On Sunday, February 13, 2011, a few hundred union members gathered at the state capitol building in Madison, WI to confront Gov. Scott Walker over a bill designed to strip public employees of their right to organize. The next day, they were joined by over a thousand teaching assistants from the state’s two public universities. [...]
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How do we talk about the American Dream? And is this a story Americans are ready to hear? According to communications experts Drew Westen and Celinda Lake, they’re beyond ready to hear it; in fact, they’ve been waiting for years for progressives to speak to them with the muscular populism that marked earlier progressives like [...]
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Progressives have suspected for years that working- and middle-class Americans vote for the GOP because they have a deeply unrealistic idea about their real chances of becoming wealthy. We’ve joked that working stiffs vote for tax cuts and other goodies for the rich because they seriously believe that they’re going to be rich themselves someday, [...]
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If last Tuesday showed us anything, it’s this: We are not going to get America back on the right road — the one that leads to a progressive, just, carbon-free, equal-opportunity future — by political means alone. That was an illusion, and it’s time to give it up. We are up against powers so massive [...]
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One of the biggest problems facing the Democrats going into this election is that they’re getting absolutely zero respect for everything they’ve done for the average American over the past two years. Tax cuts, health care reform, financial reform, expanded veterans’ benefits, direct funding of student loans — the list is long, and one that, [...]
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In August 2009, I wrote a piece titled Fascist America: Are We There Yet? that sparked much discussion on both the left and right ends of the blogosphere. In it, I argued that — according to the best scholarship on how fascist regimes emerge — America was on a path that was running much too [...]
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I haven’t been blogging for the past few weeks because I was busy moving house. After nearly seven years in Canada, my husband and son and I packed up our things, and came home to the US. The decision was almost an accidental one — it’s a long and not very interesting story; suffice to [...]
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Now that the so-called Ground Zero Mosque controversy is slipping off the front pages for the first time in weeks, it’s time to ask: Just what the hell was all that about, anyway? Why was it so important that we had to spend all that time discussing it? And why are the conservatives taking out [...]
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Dave Johnson’s post on the broken contract that’s allowed private interests to siphon off our public wealth for the past 30 years is incredibly important. His basic argument is this: We, the People built our democracy and the empowerment and protections it bestows. We built the infrastructure, schools and all of the public structures, laws, [...]
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The beat goes on. In the nearly two weeks since I wrote Part I of this series, an armed gunman was arrested en route to assaulting an obscure progressive foundation in San Francisco — one that’s often been at the center of Glenn Beck’s blackboard (which has become Conspiracy Theory Ground Zero for 2010). Also, [...]
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