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Day One of Mitt Romney's foreign trip did not go particularly well. He learned first-hand that no country likes an arrogant American coming in to tell them how bad a job they're doing, regardless of how special the "special relationship" is.
Another madman, another massacre, this time in Aurora, Colorado. When will it end? The Supreme Court has guaranteed an individual's right to bear arms -- how does that end? Do we wind up with private armies, owned by rich individuals and corporations? Is that where it ends?
President Romney today announced that Sri Lanka has won the bid to represent the American people in Congress, having narrowly edged out both India and China with a spate of well placed bribes in the final hours of the race.
At times it feels to rank-and-file teachers like the wealth and power of the entire nation is aligned against them. For me personally, May 7, 2012 was one of those times.
[Program Note: I am taking the day off today. But I did want to post this link to a transcript of Martin Luther King Junior's "Drum Major Instinct" speech. This is the speech that was misquoted on his new memorial in Washington D.C., and you really have to read the speech itself to [...]
President Barack Obama gave a speech today in a small town in Kansas. The reason he chose this venue for this speech was to draw historical comparisons with a speech given there by Teddy Roosevelt, over one hundred years ago. While you may see some clips of Obama's speech in the news, few will bother to look up the original speech. Which is a shame, and which is why we present it today. We leave comparisons with Obama's speech to others, for now, mostly because the speech itself is a long one. But it is worth reading to the end, to see where the real (capital-P) Progressives stand in American history.
Every so often, I am so impressed by a comment to one of my columns that I offer to just turn my column over to the author, and let them have my soapbox. This doesn't happen often, usually around once per year.
I've written a few columns so far about the Occupy Wall Street protest, [...]
We'd like to begin today with an issue that we regularly get incensed about here, mostly because it flies under the radar of just about everyone -- including the entire media universe. Because for once, Democrats are making the attempt to use the issue to make some political hay (even though, in this regard, they're admittedly almost as bad as the Republicans).
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the young black men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
Roughly once a year or so, I turn this column space over to a guest author. This usually happens when a point of view is presented to me either in public comments or private emails which has impressed me. I haven't always completely agreed with these points of view, but have thought that they deserved a wider audience because the writing was so thoughtful and the reasoning so impressive. Other times, I do heartily agree with the guest author. But sometimes the author writes on subjects which I don't feel qualified myself to tackle. Today, I am once again turning my column over to a group of three authors who have a point to make -- a point that lies mostly outside my experience, which is why I don't comment on it very often: the state of education in America, and how politics relates to it.