The very same conservatives who borrowed-and-spent us into the deepest financial catastrophe in nearly a century are now righteously lecturing the rest of us on the topic of "fiscal responsibility." As usual, their arguments are encrusted with a thick layer of diversions, misconceptions, factual errors and out-and-out lies. Here are some of the most pungent ones, along with the facts you need to fire back.
It is that time again: Thanksgiving, the official kickoff of the 2008 holiday season. As you prepare to head once again into the family fray to spend quality time with your conservative relatives, it helps to note that most of the right wing's favorite anti-liberal slanders are rooted in some deeply-held—and deeply wrong—assumptions about who liberals are, and what we believe. Your best defense is to listen closely for these underlying myths and fables at work—and be prepared to challenge them head-on. Here's how.
In the seven years since the U.S. was hit by a terrorist attack, a few of the myths promulgated in those first few years have hardened firmly into a new conventional wisdom—some so stubbornly that you often won't even find progressives questioning them any more. The time has come to call out a few of these persistent myths that are still being taken as fact and start firing back on them.
In the universal health care debate, Canada is once again getting dragged into the fracas, shoved around by both sides as either an exemplar or a warning — and, along the way, getting coated with the obfuscating dust of so many willful misconceptions that the actual facts about How Canada Does It are completely obscured in the melee. As a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border, I'm in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand.
Progressives have been picking at the whys and wherefores of liberal presidential candidates being brought down by withering attacks from the right ever since Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. But there's one fairly simple and glaring factor that I'm increasingly convinced plays at least some role in this—the different cultural roots of conservatism and liberalism. Seen this way, some solutions become obvious.
Call it holocaust, lynching, or apartheid -- whatever the atrocity, it always begins with language that privileges us, dehumanizes them, and somehow justifies their removal from our midst. The right has scored some very specific and tangible (and otherwise politically untenable) benefits by the simple act of grinding our discourse down the point where it's now mostly conduced in the coarsest of us-versus-them terms. Somehow, we need to find our way back to each other.
The premise is preposterously obvious and simple -- but all the more powerful for being so. Where people -- from families to nations -- see themselves as one unified group, where everyone's in the same boat together rowing toward a more-or-less agreed-upon future shore, and where there's enough mutual trust and respect to allow people to cooperate in achieving their common goals, the group tends to survive and thrive.
It turns out that the energy of this moment is about who we are, and where we are, and what happens to people's minds when they're left hanging just a little too far past the moment when they're ready for transformative change. Here are the seven criteria for revolution, the reasons why we're fulfilling each of them now—and how conservative policies conspired to put us on the road to possible revolution.
From the very beginning, we've been some of the biggest dreamers and most effective planners the world has ever seen. Seven years of conservative rule have devastated their legacy.
Now is the perfect time for a march on Washington, D.C.
For the past thirty years the American working class has seen its wages stagnate and its standard of living kept afloat only through the accumulation of ever higher levels of debt. Consider that from 1980 to 2004, GDP per person rose by almost two-thirds, yet the wages of the average worker actually fell when adjusted for inflation. more »
This was the Campaign for America's Future's Big Afternoon at the Big Tent. CAF took over the Digg Stage (the entire upstairs floor of The Big Tent) for a series of four panels addressing some of the Big Questions we wrestle with here. more »
Beyond today's political squabbles over such topics as offshore drilling or oil speculation is this hard fact: the Age of Oil — and an American empire built on oil — is coming to an end, and there is no turning back. Americans can either get out in front of this change and come out of it at the century's end with much of their greatness intact — or continue to fight it and end up as another of history's has-beens.
Jeremiah Wright is everywhere this week -- and the media doesn't quite know what to make of it. Mostly, they're stuck so hard in the election horse-race narrative that they only question they can think to ask is: Does having Wright out there hurt Obama, or help him? more »
A few months ago, I appeared on Fox News and was told by "anchor" (hereby "cartoon character") Greg Jarrett that "historians agree" that the New Deal exacerbated the Great Depression. more »
Progressives around the country can breathe a little easier today: James Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger, the Unitarian Universalist martyrs who died during his assault on their church in Knoxville, Tenn., last July. Progressives should take three lessons away from Knoxville.
Peering fearlessly into the increasingly likely terror of a Democratic President with larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Wall Street Journal editorial page sums up the stark horrors that could ensure.
Because Bush and his allies have failed, our fellow citizens are ready to consider the progressive message. But what is it? In simple terms that all Americans understand, what do we stand for? Try using this 12-word answer. Then join our continuing debate on how to take advantage of "the progressive moment."
Mental illness will probably figure largely in the story of 58-year-old Jim Adkisson, who opened fire during a kids' performance Sunday at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist church. But for those of us who've watched and worried about right-wing crazies for years now, there's the sickening feeling that our worst nightmare may have also come true.
The very same conservatives who borrowed-and-spent us into the deepest financial catastrophe in nearly a century are now righteously lecturing the rest of us on the topic of "fiscal responsibility." As usual, their arguments are encrusted with a thick layer of diversions, misconceptions, factual errors and out-and-out lies. Here are some of the most pungent ones, along with the facts you need to fire back.
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