• Home
• Popular Articles
• Authors
• Archives
• About We! a Progressive Voice
• Contact Us

The Meaning of the Spector Switch

by Mary Lyon

Arlen Spector?!?!?! The first time I blurted that out was during an industry screening of Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, in which his name came up in connection with the rogue “magic bullet” issue. I just had another Arlen Spector blurt a few minutes ago (as of this writing, anyway).

He’s switching? Defecting? “Coming home,” as some people on the other side of the aisle (oops, I mean, his side of the aisle now, don’t I?) have noted with the added word “welcome”? The newest Senate Democrat, the Man of the Hour, has even moved the Swine Flu and his former GOP sister Susan “we don’t need no stinking epidemic funding!” Collins off the top of the breaking news watch.

Well, okay, I’m celebrating. I guess. Read more

Reason Returns to the White House

by Mary Lyon

Like it or not, knuckle-draggers: Science is back IN.

As a life-long Catholic, I couldn’t be more delighted. I’m sure the airwaves and the cable channels will soon be wall-to-wall with conservatives and Republicans and other assorted 133h-century thinkers whining and moaning and ringing their hands – probably gnashing their teeth and rending their garments, too, according to the Old Testament model. The gas giants certainly will weigh in (there! How ‘bout that for blurring the lines between science and “morals”?). For the sake of decency and morality I will not name them here especially since one in particular got WAY too much undeserved attention last week and doesn’t need any more help from little me. Instead, I will step up, myself.

I am utterly thrilled that the White House has now moved out of the Dark Ages. For the last eight years I have watched the national debate with growing sadness as the volume and temperature turned up, and fact-based reality gave way to the faith-based mindset. The sins were legion. Government-issued “scientific” reports were cherry-picked clean of evidence supporting global warming. Anti-choice red tape strangled federal funding to women’s health programs throughout the country and across the globe. Realistic sex education was deemphasized or even banned from schools (hey, Governor Palin, how did abstinence-only education work out for that still-unmarried, high-school-aged new-mom daughter of yours?). And then there was the narrow-minded religious extremist nominee Dr. David Hager who was tapped to head the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. This darling man was best known for recommending that women struggling with PMS look for a cure by reading the Bible. Why did he even bother with medical school, I wonder? I dreaded the “brain drain” prompted by the Bush tourniquet choking off federal funding for scientific research. No wonder some of our finest scientific minds were leaving the country. Way to lead the world, America! Read more

Neo-Dubya-Conservatism Kept the Lid On, and NOW Look!

by George Thomas

In these trying economic times….

The main difficulty I have with our loyal (harrumph) opposition’s harping on the feast of jackals they expect after Obama’s agenda fails, is that not one of them has yet articulated any alternative plan that would prevent the country (and the entire industrialized world) from dribbling down the figurative toilet.

Even the standard social evolutionary models that our oddball neoconservative friends cite, do NOT promise a painless recovery.  The conservative do-nothing Hooveresque strategy involves very deep and very long descents into economic depression.  True, any recovery of some form of Western Industrialism would possibly be quite adaptive, and many improvements could come with this fine package.  Trouble is, it will require a wait of about, oh, say, years numbered in three figures.  Until recently, the only scenario of this kind of civilization-collapse I could envision involved nuclear war followed by centuries and perhaps millennia of starting over, with imaginative Classical Florescences and Dark Ages parallels in some far future.  I don’t think any of us alive wish to wait that long to fulfill plans we made in 2007 to buy that yacht, or that third mansion. Read more

All about the love - Glendale’s ‘Love Your Self’ program has something for every woman

by Ellen Snortland

The week before Valentine’s Day there’s an event in Glendale to help women be their own sweethearts … or at least their own best friends.

On Feb. 7, 50/50 Leadership, a locally based nonprofit, is sponsoring a “Love Your Self” program that includes speakers, products and services in numerous styles and flavors. I don’t know about you, but there are many things I am curious about. But, like a lot of people, I’m often too nervous — or too cheap — to just take the plunge and improve my professional and personal life.

Since I’m a volunteer speaker at this event, I’ll use myself as an example. I’ll be speaking about self-defense because I firmly believe it’s a basic human right for all people to know how to set a boundary, and then protect that border physically, if push comes to shove. My particular mission in life is to educate women and girls in physical self-defense, mainly because they are often convinced they can’t protect themselves. I know a lot of females from all backgrounds who agree that they should have self-protection training, but many don’t really know why. Some don’t know what questions to ask or where to start. Read more

So What Do I Do Now?

by Mary Lyon

This is a heckuva hangover. More than just the sun dawned on me on the morning
after Obama Day. I realized as I woke up following the Inauguration of Barack
Obama as the 44th President of the United States that I’m not sure how to behave
anymore.

For eight years I’ve felt like a hostage. This might as well have been a lesser
version of Gitmo from where I stood. It’s been sheer torture watching America
taking its cue from the George W. Bush way of operating and literally devolving.  I’ve spent eight years gritting my teeth when a view of the White House flashed across my TV. I could never look at that view without thinking how that house had been stolen out from Al Gore and all the rest of us. I’d think about the
occupant within and find it impossible even to refer to him as President. I just couldn’t. Still can’t, if you really wanna know. He just was never The President, to me. Didn’t win fair and square the first time. The results the second time are sufficiently questionable in my mind that I couldn’t warm up to him then, either. And considering the ham-handed behavior of the bullies and goons surrounding him at all times, there was literally nothing to convince me otherwise. Read more

The Future of Civilization

by Robert C. Koehler

Tribune Media Services

The tight, absurd parameters of “peace,” as they are drawn by the military model we continue to believe in, make real peace —neither bitter nor temporary — impossible even to imagine. God save us, for instance, from New York Times editorials, which inflict as much damage on civilians as F-16s.

“Israel must defend itself,” the paper intoned a few days into the bombing attack on Gaza that quickly left 350 people dead, expressing regret only that the action was “unlikely to weaken” Hamas. The editorial affected a neutral assessment of the situation that failed to mention either the Israeli occupation of Palestine or the month-and-half-long blockade of Gaza that preceded the bombardment and, among much other deprivation, left the region’s few hospitals drastically undersupplied with medicine, gauze or even space to treat the flood of newly wounded. Read more

On Earth Peace to a Middle East of Good Will?

by George Thomas

This will prove to be a rare view:  I’m tired of the violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Oh, wait!  This just in!  Lots of others share this view!  What a surprise.

Since the Yom Kippur War in 1967, the cyclical news coming from Israel and/or Palestine and/or neighboring spectator and/or participant-observer states, non-states and “rogue” entities, might lead one to think we like this sort of thing.  The arguments?  We all know the arguments.  We’re growing concerned over the arguments, many experiencing the urge to jump up and run to the Victrola to reset the needle on the broken record. Read more

Chill - The latest from the front on global warming

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

One of the bright spots in print journalism is Tom Knudson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the Sacramento Bee, who has had a brilliant ongoing series about how humanity has affected California’s splendid Sierra Nevada range. Since much of what he writes about the Sierra pertains to where I live in the Mount Shasta region, I’ve read his work with considerable interest. His latest deals with the effects of global warming on the Sierra. It’s a must-read.

Knudson concludes what we had already noticed here. The snowpack is diminishing, decade by decade. Quite often we get rain instead of snow here at the 3,500 foot level, and as a result we often have winters with less than five feet of snow. When I moved here nearly 20 years ago, the annual average was 14 feet a year. We’ve matched that only twice in twenty years. Read more

Dark Prayer

by Robert C. Koehler

The water churned and pushed against the ice with a dark seriousness that reminded me of prayer.

Subzero Chicago night at the edge of the year, the edge of change, the edge of what’s bearable. I stood on an old breakwater, a long, crumbling construction of concrete and steel that jutted into Lake Michigan — just stood, feeling the wind scrape my face. Whatever thoughts came to me were honest ones. Or maybe I just needed to grieve.

“Courage grows strong at the wound.”

Someone said this to me earlier this year and I felt a rush of reverence as I contemplated wounds and war, a wrecked economy, a wasted planet, hope, illusion, the holidays, the human condition. My niece just got married; the same day, a friend was mugged in the alley behind her house. The dark water undulated beyond the ice, gurgling, whispering. Dear God . . . Read more

Solstice 2008 - Leaving the cookies out

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

In Iceland, they believe in elves.

Well, that’s harmless enough. Most societies have legends and folklore regarding “the little people,” Jungian myths writ small. When you think of Jungian legends in the überconsciousness, you think of Thor and Jehovah, Prometheus and Lucifer, angels and dragons, vampires and giants. Variants on those figures exist nearly everywhere.

What makes Iceland stand out is that the belief is pretty literal, enough so that their twenty-first century technology bends to the belief. When they consider building a new road, or a subdivision or a canal, they don’t just consider the impact on the environment and local economies and quality-of-life issues, and propose mitigations, but they consider the impact such things might have on the elves. The government has a guy whose job is it to pore over the plans, go out to the site, have a walkabout, and come back and tell the government if, in his opinion, the elves would like it or not. There’s one case where a two-lane highway abruptly narrows to one lane, an inconvenience and potential hazard even in a place where traffic is light, as it is in Iceland. It’s done that way because the government determined the elves wouldn’t like a two lane highway along that particular stretch. It didn’t pass the EIS: the Elvin Impact Study. Read more

Next Page »

• Letter to the Editor: Good Cars need Good Teams - by R. A. Letcher, PhD

  Good cars need good teams -- designers, engineers, line workers… and learning-oriented managers by Robert A. Letcher, PhD [Author’s note: I submitted the following as a letter to the editor of The New York Times, after that paper carried an article under the headline, "To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’", 02/15/2009.] It is widely accepted that you can't win a horse race without a good horse. Of course, it helps to have a lot of money and a good plan for spending it. But, you still need a good horse. The authors reminded me of this when they wrote: “The companies’ plans are required to show progress in cutting long-term costs as a condition for keeping their loans.” I doubt GM and Chrysler can win this most important "automobile race" merely by having better accountants and more muscular negotiators: they still need a good "horse". That means the companies will have to show that their teams can still design and build cars that people are drawn to buy and willing to pay for: winners. I doubt they can. The problem isn't that they didn't know how to; it's that they don't know how to break out of the group-think that ensnarled them, their managers, their whole organizations, decades ago. I would be more optimistic, had the government also required the companies to include plans for transforming themselves into learning organizations. Aye, there’s the rub: learning entails risk-taking, not “yes people”.

• Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm

  

• Fiscal Therapy - Getting the economy back on its feet, giving taxpayers a break, saving your retirement fund and your kid's college tuition? Done. And it won't cost you a penny.

  For years now, whenever I've been invited to lecture students on how our tax system works, I have asked a simple question: What is the purpose of the United States of America? The most common answer, be it at prestigious universities, elite prep schools, rural community colleges, or crowded urban high schools, is this: To make people rich. This should come as no great surprise. For anyone born after, say, 1970, the world has been shaped by Ronald Reagan's remaking of government's relationship with private interests—a vision of lower taxes, less regulation, and maximum economic leeway for those at the top. In this view, the pursuit of wealth is the warp and weft of America; everything else will follow. By contrast, the preamble to the Constitution tells us the nation's reason for being in 52 words that can be reduced to six principles: society, justice, peace, security, commonwealth, and freedom. Individual riches don't make the list. They are a product of American society, not its guiding purpose. Progress, then, must begin with a return to the best of the values that created this Second American Republic—one born, it's worth remembering, from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, whose principles (weak government, unfettered capitalism) found their resurrection in the economic policies of the past three decades.

  ---

  read more at Mother Jones

  ---

  ---

• How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely

  

• Advertisement

• Recent Posts

  • So long and thanks for all the fish.
  • Challenges that confront and confound efforts to bring about institutional change
  • Obama’s A Genius! He Shows Why Unending Madness is Inevitable!
  • General Dave’s Map Shows Human Terrain Really Continues East into Afghanistan and Pakistan!
  • Good Torture - Some torturers are born; the best are made
  • Beyond unemployment insurance in the face of structural job loss: Who ever said it would be easy?
  • Republican Opposition to the Stimulus: Wrong, But Not Treason
  • Neo-Absurdists - They love America and hate the United States
  • The Meaning of the Spector Switch
  • Notes from the Class War - The right moves further and further out of touch
  • Holy Minerva! Scientists at War over Human Dignity
  • Reason Returns to the White House

• Recent Comments

  • bob letcher on So long and thanks for all the fish.
  • Jerry Lobdill on So long and thanks for all the fish.
  • George Thomas on Holy Minerva! Scientists at War over Human Dignity
  • PB on Holy Minerva! Scientists at War over Human Dignity
  • Craig Hawley on Christmas at the Edge of Depression

Copyright © 2008 We! Magazine ·Log in