Rights and Democracy
Newspaper Nostalgia
It’s been a little more than 50 years since I first walked into the Des Moines Register newsroom to begin a career in journalism. It was a beat-up scruffy place filled with beat-up scruffy people, almost all men. They worked in a big room lined with gray steel desks piled high with newspapers, stacks of books, notebooks, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette stubs. They wrote on manual, black typewriters. The phones, also black, had rotary dials.
How to Achieve Transparency for the Supercommittee
Come December, the priorities and role of our government could be drastically and fundamentally altered. Are your views and concerns being heard?
Mitt Romney Believes in Corporate America
At an Iowa campaign stop in August, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a startling assertion. Asked about his refusal to raise taxes on corporations while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet, he replied, “Corporations are people, my friend.”
Gridlock and Bedlam
My friend Richard is a little crazy and very smart. He spends his days filling the Internet with screeds and rants on his favorite subject — the continuing collapse of our society. I’d tell you his last name, but if you wrote him, you’d get his scary emails too.
What Have They Done with Ron Paul?
You may have heard of Ron Paul. He’s a popular Republican candidate for president who finished one point behind winner Michele Bachmann in Iowa’s Ames straw poll. He’s done well in other polling too, generally holding onto third place as the frontrunners come and go. And he raised an impressive $8 million in the third quarter of this year.
Columbus Day Questions
Many of us will never forget that famous elementary school rhyme: “In fourteen hundred ninety-two / Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” At the time, it’s not likely that we would have sensed any looming controversy behind those grade school lessons. With Columbus Day just around the corner, however, it’s worth asking whether affection for the holiday is really a serious case of misguided nostalgia.
A Long Shadow of Doubt: The Execution of Troy Davis
September 21, 2011 was a sad day for American justice. On that date at 11:08 pm, the state of Georgia administered a lethal injection into the body of 42-year-old Troy Davis and put him to death.
Doubt’s Shadow
MIA: Obama’s New Common-Sense Immigration Policy
Now that the electronic shackle is off, it’s really nice not having to listen to the eerie computer-voice commands regularly broadcast from its plastic speaker.
With Poverty on the Rise, this is no Time to Slash the Safety Net
The increasingly extreme conservative ideology pervading Congress and the tea party is infused with a dogmatic creed of rugged individualism, used to justify policies that benefit only the super-rich and large corporations, while hurting — even killing — the rest of us.
