My state can do something about torture: Disbar John Yoo
Cross-posted at Attytood:Believe it or not, there's actually a significant contribution that people in my home state of Pennsylvania can make towards wiping some of the stain of torture off of our...
View ArticleDon't forget the No. 1 Reagan revision book, "Tear Down This Myth"
When you write a progressive book and it's ignored by the New York Times -- as happens all the time -- there's not really much you can do about it. That's the great thing about Daily Kos -- in a true...
View ArticleIndefensible! Phila. Inquirer gives column to John Yoo
Cross-posted at Attytood.By late last year, the world already knew a great deal about John Yoo, the Philadelphia native and conservative legal scholar whose tenure in the Bush administration as a top...
View ArticleWrist-slap for rich Philly pol shows real "empathy" in America
Cross-posted at Attytood:Vince Fumo knew all the right people -- and they were there for him when he needed them.Born 66 years ago into a successful South Philly family that owned a savings-and-loan...
View Article"Let them come to New York"
Cross-posted at Attytood.There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to...
View ArticleHealthcare reform is too late for Joaquin Rivera
Cross-posted at Attytood:I don't know what kind of medical insurance that Joaquin Rivera -- who was the bedrock of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican community -- had, but that's not really the issue here....
View ArticleHow progressives can turn the Reagan myth on its head!
Cross-posted at Attytood:This Friday marks the 99th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. You're going to be hearing a lot about the Gipper this week, and you're going to be hearing a lot about him for...
View Article"A black guy did it"
Cross-posted at Attytood:How many times must we read this kind of baloney:
View ArticleThe killing of Sherrod's dad by a white farmer in 1965
Cross-posted at Attytood:For all the over-warped speed in initially getting that bogus version of the Shirley Sherrod story out there and pushing her our the door at the U.S. Department of Agriculture,...
View ArticleIt's not about the mosque! It's America's war on "the Other"
Cross-posted at Attytood:A few months ago, I spent a Sunday morning in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart on Thomas Road in East Phoenix, just on the cusp of the immigration flare-up over racial profiling...
View ArticleJobless America: Reagan's chickens coming home to roost
Cross-posted at AttytoodWhether espousing an America so strong that no nation would dare insult it or promising to ''get the Federal Government out of the classroom,'' Mr. Reagan's message connected...
View ArticleHow Beck rewrites U.S. history -- and how to fight back
Cross-posted at Attytood.As I prepare to cover this weekend's Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin rally in D.C.and for the official launch of my book The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters and...
View ArticleI Went Behind Tea Party Lines: What I Learned
Last March, the week that the health care reform was signed into law, I plopped down on a sofa and watched Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck for an hour with two of his biggest fans. I was nearing the end...
View ArticleHatred in black and white at the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot
As individuals, you could not paint the members of the so-called Tea Party Movement with a broad brush, nor would you want to. As a journalist. I traveled from Arizona to Massachusetts, talking to the...
View ArticlePalin. Beck, the Tea Party and the Big Lie about saving "children and...
Cross-posted at Attytood:We are going to protect our young, we are going to protect the next generation of Americans, so the Mama Grizzlies are growling, we are rising up on our hind legs and saying...
View ArticleRight-wing Oath Keepers fighting to return baby to abusive dad
Cross-posted at Attytood:Paranoid politics, which has flourished in the Obama era, can lead people in some strange directions. I can find no better example than this: Tomorrow, a large crowd of...
View ArticleI Saw Palin Reveal What 2012 Is About: American Exceptionalism
Cross-posted at Attytood, after attending Sarah Palin fundraiser at Plumstead Christian School (so you didn't have to :-)I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of...
View ArticleThis week, help me tear down the Reagan myth
Arguably, there's been one good side effect of the chaos in Cairo and the horrible blizzard. Had it been the kind of slow news week you'd normally get in the early February dead of winter, your TV set...
View ArticleBig media's shameful news brownout on the Wall Street protest
Cross-posted at Attytood.What do you think was running in the pro-government, pro-Mubarek newspapers in Egypt back in February, when crowds of unhappy and often un- or under-employed citizens began...
View ArticleWhat I Saw at the Revolution
I attended my first revolution this week. I have to confess I was a little nervous as I walked closer to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the epicenter for this once unimaginable American Autumn. For...
View Article#OWS and the day the future crossed a bridge
It started with a bridge. It always starts with a bridge. Take a look around to Selma, Alabama. In 1965, John Lewis and his young revolutionary cohorts didn’t march with the lawyer-drafted language for...
View ArticleUnfortunately Limbaugh is still on air in Philly
I'm usually more of a lurker than a poster these days but still a big fan and daily visitor -- and I think it's important for the credibility of Daily Kos that people get things right. Sometimes, that...
View ArticleAfter Aurora: When "thoughts and prayers" simply aren't enough
I know it may sound trivial, but as I watched some of the early coverage of the Aurora shooting yesterday, I thought about an episode I'd just seen of HBO's cable-news drama "The Newsroom." It centered...
View ArticleThe real victims of Romney's America
Cross-posted at Attytood.com.The worst thing about Mitt Romney's condescending Ayn Randian rants down in Boca Raton wasn't the part where he makes the novel argument that it's easier to become...
View ArticleShocked by the NFL ref fiasco? Where've you been the last 30 years?
(Cross-posted at Attytood)To every football fan out there who watched in shock and the opposite of awe Monday night as replacement refs stole a game from the Green Bay Packers even after the Seattle...
View ArticleBob Costas learns the right time to talk about guns in America: Never
Cross-posted here.Bob Costas is very, very silly man. The pro football world is still reeling from the tragedy in Kansas City, where 25-year-old Chiefs' linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend...
View ArticleDown in the boondocks
Cross-posted here:This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.....Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health,...
View ArticleIt's time to marginalize a fringe group called the NRA
Cross-posted here:“The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire," [said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center.] The more polarized the...
View ArticleHow can you ask a woman to be the last woman to die for a mistake?
Cross-posted here.On Monday, President Obama hailed the pioneers who in 1848 first fought for women's rights at Seneca Falls.On Wednesday, Obama's Pentagon sent America's female troops charging up...
View ArticleThe long hot summer of 2013
I spent a couple of nights last week on the lookout for a cloud of rising smoke. From the chimney at the Vatican? No thank you -- there were already thousands of journalists around the globe fixated on...
View ArticleYes, the 43rd anniversary of Kent State does matter...now more than ever
Cross-posted at Attytood:The other day one of my blog trolls wrote something that actually made me laugh out loud. He was complaining about something I wrote and added, "at least it wasn't my 285th...
View ArticleAtlanta's Turner Field Is Dying -- And American Sanity Is Dying With It
Cross-posted at Attytood:I'm know I'm going to sound like an old man again, but I can remember 1997 like it was yesterday. I can almost taste it, smell it -- the time when a couple of Yankee kids named...
View ArticleI'm done with '60 Minutes' and its sponsors -- and you should be, too
Cross-posted at Attytood:For the majority of us who care about stuff -- whether it's politics, or the direction of the country...or the media that write about those things -- there is nothing more...
View ArticlePeggy Noonan writes the most ironic, un-self-aware column in the history of...
Cross-posted at Attytood:There's a reason that Gordon Gekko's famous speech scene in "Wall Street" -- "The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is...
View ArticleChris Christie: Male chauvinist pig
Cross-posted at Attytood:Memo to self: Don't take a three-day weekend if you're trying to stay on top of the Gov. Chris Christie beat. Since I last sat at my newsroom desk Wednesday night, New Jersey's...
View Article4 Dead Americans
Cross-posted at Attytood:Their killing shocked the nation, as it should have. Four innocent, God-fearing Americans from the Heartland, gunned down in cold blood by an armed militia. It's been a while...
View ArticleWhy not a national story? Philly cops accused of robberies, sex assaults, and...
Cross-posted at Attytood:It's now been more than six years since the night that Dagma Rodriguez, a 33-year mother of three from the rugged neighborhood of West Kensington, said that she was sexually...
View ArticleAmerica...What the Hell Is Wrong With Us?
Cross-posted at Attytood:A politician who's in a tough re-election fight deleted a Twitter posting yesterday because he thought would offend voters in his home state. I know, I know, these days...
View Article50 years ago, Philly erupted -- and the fuses are back again
Tomorrow (Thursday) marks the 50th anniversary of the worst outbreak of civil unrest in the modern history of Philadelphia. The three-day Columbia Avenue riot in the predominantly black neighborhood of...
View ArticleFast food, Ferguson and "heightening the contradictions" in 2014 America
Cross posted at Attytood:Supposedly, the term "heighten the contradictions" has its origin in the writings of Marx (Karl, not Groucho) and some of his later 20th Century acolytes who believed that the...
View ArticleHow To Get Away With Murder...in Ferguson
Cross-posted at Attytood:The shorter version of this week's news out of Ferguson is basically this: Tin soldiers and Nixon coming. The grand jury investigation of the shooting of teenager Mike Brown,...
View ArticleHow Robert McCulloch indicted himself
Cross-posted at Attytood:Each and every minute felt like an hour. The first bulletin on Monday that the Ferguson grand jury had reached its decision -- and that it would be announced that night -- came...
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"Bodies upon the gears": The 50th anniversary of 417 words to inspire today's...
Cross-posted at Attytood:When you think about the sheer volume of speeches that are delivered on any given day -- from state legislatures to Rotary Clubs to dingy school auditoriums -- the thing that...
View ArticleTorture and Police Killings Cut From the Same Cloth of Injustice
Cross-posted at Attytood:America's snooze alarm went off again this week. Slowly, fitfully, people are starting to wake up from a long national slumber. Our psychic clock radio switched on this time to...
View ArticleBen Carson's foreign policy guru wants U.S. troops to convert world to...
Cross-posted at Attytood:In 2003, a two-star Army major general, Robert Dees, retired after a decorated 41-year career as a soldier in which he became a top officer in the legendary 101st Airborne...
View ArticleSo that's 'democratic socialism'? Count me in!
Cross-posted at Attytood:First, quickly, some exciting news. My major project -- the one that caused me to be absent for much of October -- is quickly coming to fruition. It's an Amazon Kindle Single...
View Article5 things I learned writing an e-book about Bernie Sanders
Cross-posted at Attytood:Just six months ago, I was dreading the 2016 presidential race. After all, the Beltway pundits were all telling us the same thing, that it was a done deal -- the dual of the...
View ArticleMore Americans support Bernie than The Donald -- but he gets 1/23 the TV...
I've been working a day schedule this week, which I am very much not used to. Among the discombobulating things is that I've been exposed (sometimes with the sound off, which is how I prefer a lot of...
View ArticleWhy the Bernie Sanders Revolution Is Not Televised
As a writer, I never expected to fall in love with the 2016 election. As recently as 6 or 7 months ago, I fully expected that America was on a collision course with dueling oligarchic dynasties -- Bush...
View ArticleMeet the fossil-fuel-loving, hedge-fund billionaire behind Hillary
Cross-posted at Attytood.Hillary Clinton hasn't exactly been a lion in winter during her slow march toward the Democratic nomination. To be sure, her narrow win Saturday in Nevada seems to shore up her...
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