This post has been in the works for quite a long time and I will be using it as a basis for further investigation during the months to come. The previous post, which addressed some causes of the Boston Tea Party not commonly known, is related to the topic of this post in that in [...]
Posts under ‘Ideas’
Nattering Nabobs of Negativism
On September 11, 1970, Spiro Agnew, in an address to the California Republican state convention in San Diego, uttered these famous words (crafted by William Safire): “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club — the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs [...]
Van Jones and America
Yesterday morning, I learned that Van Jones had resigned from his position in the Obama administration. On March 21, 2009, I wrote a post in which I explored the role of faith in advancing the goals of progressives. I learned then of Van Jones, so I am surely in the minority of those who knew [...]
Is the Religious Right Christian?
After I discovered Ernest Partridge’s Crisis Papers website, I did a little exploring and discovered his book, Conscience of a Progressive, which is a book in progress. Dr. Partridge has decided to not post to the Crisis Papers website as frequently as he has in the past so that he has more time to devote [...]
The Republican Noise Machine
I really like what Chet Bowers has to say about what a political philosophy of conservatism should entail. This is going to be a long post, so bear with me, please. I am trying to show how the talking heads on right-wing radio and TV have highjacked true conservatism. Nothing new there, since I have [...]
Are Progressives Anti-Progress?
The fact that conservatives have been attacking liberals for years because liberals are always fighting against progress, as defined by the conservatives, got me to thinking. Are progressives anti-progress? For a number of years, I have been more than a little confused about the meaning of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’. I tackled this topic [...]
A Cartoon For Our Times
I found this cartoon on Brad Shorr’s blog and thought it summed up our present sad state of affairs quite well: The gentleman on the left, putting money into the hat, is G. K. Chesterton, who, with Hilaire Belloc, promoted a socioeconomic philosophy called distributism. We live in interesting times. Senator Obama’s campaign for the [...]
Bill Moyers on Obama, Revisited
On December 1, 2008, I posted a link to a video on YouTube that I thought was a very thoughtful commentary by Bill Moyers on President-Elect Obama. Several days after I posted the link, the video was removed from YouTube because the person who uploaded the video to YouTube violated the terms of use agreement [...]
Re-Framing the Liberal Agenda
Not long ago, I read an essay that claimed that many prominent neo-conservatives were disenchanted liberals who broke off from the liberal movement in the mid to late 1960s. When I consulted the website Conservapedia, I found their definition of neo-conservative to agree with what I had read. To say that the idea that neo-conservatives [...]
A Thoughtful Article in Tikkun Magazine
Tikkun Magazine offers thought-provoking articles every issue. I found this one to be particularly interesting, because I know many liberals who have an inordinate fear of religion. Can you blame us after what we witnessed in the last election campaign? However, I do think that we need to over-come this fear and realize that many [...]