GOP readies another round of legislative terrorism in search of spending cuts. Biden needs to fight back hard PUBLISHED DECEMBER 13, 2022 in Salon.com Sometime during the next session of Congress, Republicans will check the box on one of their perennial agenda items whenever a Democrat is president: Threatening to crash the entire U.S. economy…
Category: Articles
The Media Frenzy Over High Gas Prices Obscures an Inconvenient Truth
Many Americans seek a villain, but they forgot to look in the mirror. Published in Commondreams Nov 4, 2022 Journalist and media critic James Fallows did us a service by recently pointing out in a couple of his of his posts that among the media’s most unexamined and hoary clichés is that fabled phrase, used whenever the media…
The Rise of the Right-Wing University
Despite its liberal reputation, academia is being flooded with right-wing money and ideologies. Published in Commondreams Oct 3, 2022 The notion that American institutions of higher learning are pervasively left-wing and endeavor to instill liberalism or socialism in their students is a conventional wisdom that has gone virtually unexamined since the student movement in the 1960s….
A Zombie Herd of Independent Minds
How conservatism extols rugged individualism while fashioning a mob of abject conformists. Published in Commondreams Setpember 03, 2022 Since time immemorial, the con artist’s sucker pitch to his targets has been the same. “You are special: you are savvier, more clear-sighted, more clued-in than the average clod, and because I like you so much, I’m gonna…
America Still Doesn’t Designate Violent Domestic Extremists as Terrorists
Republicans have made it politically impossible either to update statutes or shape social expectations to deal effectively with domestic terrorist threats. Published in Commondreams August 30, 2022 It garnered little notice, but New Zealand, half a world away from the events of January 6th, has designated the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization, making it “illegal…
Performative Cruelty Is Republicans’ Only Remaining Policy
Being mean and nasty to perceived enemies is all the GOP has to offer. Published in Commondreams July 26, 2022 Do you remember the incident during the 2016 campaign when Donald Trump mocked a reporter with a physical disability? The crowd of his supporters thought it was screamingly funny. Or the following year when he told an audience…
The GOP’s Army of Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists Poses a Danger Greater Than You Know
Nothing threatens American democracy more than the religious extremist factions teaming up with far-right fascist groups with guns. Published July 14 in CommonDreams (link to article) The Supreme Court’s disastrous rulings on prayer on public school property and abortion rights have finally focused proper attention on the role of religious extremism in undermining democratic self-rule. For…