BY TOM TOMORROW
Matt Stoller points out five giant issues that are ignored by Clinton and Obama (and for the most part by Edwards), when any genuinely progressive presidential candidate would be trying to drag them onto the national agenda.
Almost forgotten now is how Howard Dean vowed in December, 2003 “to break up giant media enterprises.” Of course, that vanished when he became party chair.
I highly recommend The Scanner, a new political blog by someone who (1) is anonymous and (2) genuinely knows what they’re talking about. (However, you might want to subscribe to the feed rather than bookmarking it, because it seems to keep to a relaxed schedule of one post per month.)
You can start here: “Why the “new progressive movement†is fucked”
I’m so tired of the commercialization of decrying the commercialization of Christmas!
When I was growing up, we didn’t need special issues of Real Simple Magazine or episodes of Oprah to decry the commercialization of Christmas. I bet my entire family could have decried the commercialization of Christmas for less money than they spend on one disapproving segment on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about competing neighbors in Boca Raton who each spend $1 million each year on Christmas decorations in their subdivision. In fact, one year when times were slow at dad’s law firm, we decried the commercialization of Christmas without spending any money at all!
That’s because we understood the true meaning of decrying the commercialization of Christmas. It’s about giving, and sharing, and spending time with your loved ones being angry about the CGI baby Jesus in the Wii commercial.
The worst part is that it starts earlier every year. First it was December, then Thanksgiving, then Labor Day. I wouldn’t be surprised if we wake up one year soon and we’re decrying the commercialization of Christmas on December 26th, before we’ve even returned the copy of It’s a Wonderful Life we bought to decry the commercialization of the previous Christmas!
So take my advice: this year, step back from your over-scheduled, stressful life, and decry the commercialization of Christmas the old fashioned way. You don’t need big corporations to do it for you. Just get together with the people you care about the most, and bitch about it like your parents did…and their parents before them. I bet a year from now you’ll look back on this as the best decrying the commercialization of Christmas of all.
Wexler Wants Hearings, where Judiciary Committee members Robert Wexler (D-FL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) call for impeachment hearings for Vice President Cheney, has almost 90,000 signatures as of Monday afternoon. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to sign it—the more people who do, the more likely it is big online groups will jump in and make it a cause of their own. Then we could be talking about 500,000 signatories…which in turn would make room for all kinds of good things.
The Secret Library of Hope
12 Books to Stiffen Your Resolve
By Rebecca SolnitHope is an orientation, a way of scanning the wall for cracks — or building ladders — rather than staring at its obdurate expanse. It’s a worldview, but one informed by experience and the knowledge that people have power; that the power people possess matters; that change has been made by populist movements and dedicated individuals in the past; and that it will be again.
Dissent in this country has become largely a culture of diagnosis rather than prescription, of describing what is wrong with them, rather than what is possible for us. But even in English, a robust minority tradition can be found. There are a handful of books that I think of as “the secret library of hope.” None of them deny the awful things going on, but they approach them as if the future is still open to intervention rather than an inevitability. In describing how the world actually gets changed, they give us the tools to change it again.
Here, then, are some of the regulars in my secret political library of hope, along with some new candidates: