Am. History & Culture
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We’re All Pottervilleans; We Always Were
I'm up early this Christmas morning waiting for my sleep-deprived family to wake up and came across this article by Rich Cohen in Salon. He has a somewhat different but I think intriguing angle on Capra's famous Christmas film. The idea that It's a Wonderful Life is sentimental swill is nonsense according to Cohen–the real
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What Do Dems Stand For?
Fineman says something interesting in his Huffpost piece entitled "'Democrat' Is No Longer A Brand". Some excerpts: As the lame duck tax debate slogs towards its inevitable conclusion — nearly $1 trillion worth of extended and new tax cuts over two years — I'm wondering: what does the brand "Democrat" mean? If anything. The Republicans
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How Change Will Happen
It's becoming increasingly clear to me that nothing changes on the economic justice front until there's significant pressure that comes from the bottom up, and that's not going to happen until the culture-war issues that divide us are put to the side. I'd go farther and say that the upward pressure has to come from
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The Battle for the Commonplace Center
When democratic political leaders go to college they tend to study things like political science, economics, law, and public policy. These fields tend to use a scientifically false theory of human reason — Enlightenment reason. It posits that reason is conscious, that it can fit the world directly, that it is logical (in the sense
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Quote of the Day: James K. Galbraith
. . . in the long run we need to recognize that the fate of the entire country is at stake. Its governance can't be entrusted indefinitely to incompetents, hacks, and lobbyists. Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in
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Thanksgiving Encounters
One of the commonplaces or cliches about conservatives is their devotion to given-ness, their sense of the "rightness" of the old-fashioned and their resistance to the "new fangled". But there's a truth there, especially when it concerns Sarah Palin conservatives. This "rightness" correlates in their mind as "common sense" because it's time tested and has
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Tribal America (work in progress)
Just talking about party affiliation doesn't work anymore, because anybody with any sense realizes the party system doesn't serve the American people anymore. The party system as it exists now is egregiously top heavy and dysfunctional. The current system is neither responsive nor effective; it's a joke. It's made our country ungovernable, and something else
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Why the Game is Up
And why I don't write about politics anymore. Chris Hedges: The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts
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Tea Party Profile: Jennifier Stefano
Stefano has big goals for making the Republican Party more assertive. “The lower end of Bucks County [PA] is heavily Democratic,” she said. “We have to go out and start bringing the message to the people, recruiting people to run for vacant seats there. Democratic areas, working- and middle-class places, the conservative message has to