The site for the Teach-in was at the Frank Lloyd Wright Unity Temple in Oak Park IL. The architectural masterpiece is now used by a Unitarian Universalist Congregation that gives its entire collection away each week to those who need it more. They believe in Margaret Mead’s counsel when she wrote, “Never doubt that a [...]
UPDATE BELOW: Back in 1996 fellow Portlander Molly Bordonaro, fresh from her first “job,” working at ALEC, a Washington-based righty hothouse wherein nasty legislation is nurtured into glorious bloom so it can then be transplanted in vulnerable states, came back home to run for US Congress, for the seat currently occupied by David Wu. As [...]
One thing we’ve all noticed by now about the right is their incomparable message discipline; as soon as one of the smarter ones comes up with a deliberately misleading three-second, fact-bereft emotional appeal, it is immediately disseminated to the minions and they all say it, verbatim, until they’re told to say something else. When I [...]
Joe Wilson’s political opponent Rob Miller in the 2008 election and facing him again in 2010 has so far raised $700,000 to defeat Wilson thanks to the “You lie!” outburst. Wilson has raised $200,000 as of Friday morning from those who support what he claims was an emotional outburst. The outburst may have been strictly [...]
UPDATE BELOW: UPDATE II: After reading abundant analysis about the health care speech last night, some of which said better what I might have said, I’ve decided that the most enlightening, and to a degree hopeful, thing about the speech was the boorish outburst by Neo-confederate Joe Wilson of South Carolina. ”You lie!” Hmmm. Care to [...]
I just finished watching President Obama’s health care speech, and have taken copious notes to post something in the morning, but am too lazy and drunk to get into it right now, having had a more than usually lengthy and arduous day at work today. In short, he sounded the right notes, and called out [...]
Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear a case, Citizens (sic) United vs. Federal Election Commission, in which Chief Justice (!) John “Moonface” Roberts has set his sights on eliminating all restrictions against corporate money in politics, and is clearly wasting no time while he temporarily has enough black-robed wingnuts by his side, to win with [...]
As those of us who work for a living know, many days lead one to wish that we might have been heiresses and could simply bag the whole thing, but then, what, exactly, would we do? Work doesn’t just give us the means to live, but it also provides structure to our lives, a sense [...]
When George Bush was catapulted into office in 2000 by a convoluted decision of a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court, after having lost the popular vote, he and his cronies rolled into town like a conquering army, determined to ram through a radical political agenda they’d been careful not to emphasize on the campaign trail, where [...]
A good case can be made that U.S. legislators no longer represent their voters and that our two-party system is only one-party because not only do banks own Congress as my senator Dick Durbin so honestly said, but pay to play politics owns Congress on all legislative matters. Voters like me, learned in the 2008 [...]