WASHINGTON – (From a White House briefing) We now face a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it. After decades of eroding middle-class security as those at the very top saw their incomes rise as never before and after a historic recession that plunged our economy into a crisis from…
Last week, the Oscar nominations were announced, and nine movies are vying for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Why there are nine and not ten like last year and not five like there were every year for sixty years is a long and complicated story; it mostly involves a combination of preferential voting system…
Psychiatrist Gerald May begins his book Addiction and Grace with a bold statement, “I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God”. Although many of us live with such hope, many people don’t have that experience – at least they’re not aware of it until they are in crisis or at…
Politician of the Year: When Time magazine isn’t distracted by groups (“The Protester”) or gimmicks (“You”), it gives its Person of the Year award to the individual, left or right or wrong, who most moves the needle and dominates the narrative. In that spirit, I give the Politician of the Year Award to Councilman Carl…
dvd of the week On my favorite movies list of 2011, Moneyball manages to make baseball statistics dramatic and funny. Bennett Miller’s crafty use of slow motion, muted colors and slyly gorgeous cinematography creates an epic grandeur for what is really a story of office politics. He and the screenwriters use American audiences’ sentimentality about…
End results in Iowa: Both former Pennsylvania senator, Rick Santorum and former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney captured just fewer than 25 percent of the votes – with Romney standing on a wafer-thin victory podium and Santorum standing at his side on a second place platform, awkwardly set only one-tenth of one percent shorter than the…
Iowans gather Tuesday for the nation’s first primary season caucus BY JOEL TRAMBLEY Tuesday evening, 100,000 or so Iowa voters will bundle up, brave the cold and head out to one of 800 political gathering places. At 7 p.m. (CST), they will begin the process of picking our next president. Below is a primer on…
You wouldn’t have known it in California, but Tuesday, Nov. 8, was Election Day. The third year of a president’s term typically has few marque races, but there were a number of states with elections impacting the progressive movement and the LGBT community. Arizona. In one of the night’s biggest surprises, state Senate President Russell…
Democratic senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry recently penned an op-ed for the Boston Globe in which he takes on pundits who have criticized President Obama’s “evolving” views on gay marriage and accuses them of stirring up a “phony debate about a real issue.” Today, Senator Kerry is an avowed supporter of marriage…
