Begun in January 2004 by a founder who began blogging in 2002, American Street provides a broad cross section of progressive political news, opinion and humor from members all over the country. Plus naked photos of celebrity platypi.
Regarding Members Of Our Team Effort
Current members are listed above. But many contributed before, some now blogging giants and some who blog no more.
Asterisks* throughout the sidebars denote the full roster of our talented team, past and present.
In the category below are those whose blogs are defunct, or blog extremely rarely, or who never had their own blog at all.
But it is a partial list, as all other past members are categorized by region, topic or both, elsewhere in these sidebars.
The last politician to quote Pat Buchanan was Richard Nixon when Pat was penning speeches in a back room of the West Wing, but he didn’t give him credit — at least not in public. Sarah Palin has no hesitation giving credit where credit is due, however:
WALLACE: I know that three years is an eternity in politics. But how hard do you think President Obama will be to defeat in 2012?
PALIN: It depends on a few things. Say he played — and I got this from Buchanan, reading one of his columns the other day. Say he played the war card. Say he decided to declare war on Iran or decided really come out and do whatever he could to support Israel, which I would like him to do.
Really Sarah? Buchanan? War in Iran? Seriously? There are three distinct hooks we can hang our critical hat on in this one simple (for her) answer.
Note the cynical, almost casually callous way she invokes the notion of a war with a nation that has committed zero acts of aggression towards us, never in (modern) history started a war despite its bluster against the West and Israel, a sovereign nation of 74 million people, twice as many as California, and almost as large as Alaska. She thinks this is a political winner? Now? In the middle of two wars on either side of Iran? You and whose army Sarah? Never forget, war is just a game to neocons.
And that brings me to the second point. She has no original ideas, no thoughts of her own. Small wonder she is the darling of people like Bill Kristol. She’s an empty vessel, much like George W. Bush, so adverse to learning, to understanding how tings really work with no appreciation for history whatsoever that the warmongering cultists at the America Enterprise Institution can easily propagate her brain with tough sounding sloganeering containing little or no substance or foundation in reality. Turning our foreign policy over to the whims of Israel’s militant wing is the thematic backbone of neocon dogma. It’s like she’s the long lost third daughter of Dick Cheney.
Last … Pat Buchanan? Really? You’re admitting you crib notes from one of the most notorious xenophobes in American politics? A guy who ran for president more times than Jesse Jackson and lost in such spectacular fashion three cycles in a row? That Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative Nixonite, culture warrior who, by the way, was one of the lonely few on the right who opposed the invasion of Iraq you incessantly cheer-lead for? Good strategy that.
This all assumes that Palin herself would advocate a war on Iraq if she were running for office. Or is she being almost too clever by half? She ain’t, and never will be a serious candidate. She’s a flirt, and will milk that to sell her brand, but that’s all. I’ll take her at her word that she is offering advice to President Obama, advice from someone dedicated to his failure, hoping he’s as stupid as she is and do something guaranteed to cut his term in office short — just like she did to her own stint as a chief executive.
That Monterey concert was 42 years ago. By that time, Emmett Till had been dead a dozen years, three college students had been ambushed and murdered, Malcolm X and Medger Evers had been assassinated, men and women had died as Civil Rights martyrs and children had been blown up in church. Within a year, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy would be assassinated.
The passage of the major Civil Rights bills in the mid 60s opened the door for other reforms. The rights of farmworkers to organize unions, the rights of women, the mobilization to end the Vietnam War, the environmental movement, the anti-nuke movement, the rights of the disabled, gay rights and more would be advanced in the ensuing years.
Of the young adults who fought through the Depression and WWII, former news anchor Tom Brokaw dubbed them as the ‘Greatest Generation.’ The record of baby boomers, however, was also marked by a litany of great achievements. And the economy reflected their spending habits. And just as the front edge of that spending wave hit retirement age, the economy collapsed.
More than 15 million unemployed. That’s more than 2 million more than were unemployed in the worst Great Depression Year.
The failure of a major insurance firm snowballed through major banks that had assumed financial risks well beyond sustainability. Financial institutions from major brokerages, banks and insurance companies set up the fall that took down all those jobs. And their lobbyists have now hijacked our government efforts to regulate them back to lower risk levels, while their terrible decisionmakers rake in excessive bonuses.
Unlike the Great Depression, it’s not Dillinger and Bonnie Clyde robbing the banks that overspeculated. It’s the crooked banks robbing our federal treasury and the jobs of millions. 1 in 5 men aged 25 to 54 are unemployed today. Our government plans to counter that demonstrate a failure in Congress and more concern about budget deficits than the human and community toll of so many people out of work.
The one major program initiative that had the capacity to reduce future spending while alleviating a major need (whose escalating costs keeps threatening more in the middle class) was the healthcare insurance reform plan. Once again, after getting that amended so often to favor their businesses, insurance industry lobbyists have virtually killed the plan. Even if it passes, the mandates it contains will drive insurance company profits to new record levels.
The cost to taxpayers? Who cares?! The unemployed? Who cares?! Every Congressional Republican plus half a dozen Democratic senators remain the biggest roadblocks to healthcare insurance reform. But there’s plenty of blame to spread further around for the anemic response to the high unemployment. The White House, the Federal Reserve, major media outlets, major financial institutions deserve an enormous public rebuke for that.
But there’s another group pretty well insulated from the worst impacts, that didn’t exist in the 1930s. Retired seniors. Some from the Greatest Generation and some baby boomers look to survive this crisis with most of their assets and income intact. Though freedom and justice remain highly touted all around as the bedrock of our nation, expanded police and intelligence powers, secret prisons, torture and other unthinkable traits of repressive tyrannies are growing. And the other bedrock to our nation’s success, economic opportunity, is shrinking rapidly.
Lesser opportunities for Generation X and even lesser ones for Generation Y seem destined to lead to a Generation Z… for Zero. Is that really the culmination of the American Dream?
It certainly looks that way. The power brokers of extreme greed grow wealthier fastest if they keep our society fighting over partisan differences rooted in myths and insults. Within both major parties, there’s been further splintering exploited by those same greedy extremists.
The greatest void goes beyond the immediate financial distress, however. There’s an even greater moral void developing. Too many in our government will make no concession to the greatest need of all: the sustained well-being of the next generation and all the ones that follow.
Which leads to the only foreseeble solution remaining. The generations that got us through the Great Depression and everyy challenge since, through this current Great Recession, have to grab the reins again. Only this time, we won’t solve things by gathering a hundred thousand at the Capitol Mall.
It’s going to take millions of us, assembled wherever the greatest powers lie. If necessary we’ll have to march and shut down wall Street, march and shut down K Street, march and shut down those who don’t give a damn about our children at all. Maybe it’ll take a massive general nationwide strike - a massive work stoppage, to let them know they’ve gone too far.
March, strike and boycott. The proven tools that produce ethical social reforms. Steel yourself for it. It’s time to organize now to mobilize this year.
Unless, of course, Generation Zero is okay by you.
“If the price of certainty is essentially for us to adopt the exact same proposals that were in place for eight years leading up to the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression — we don’t tinker with health care, let the insurance companies do what they want, we don’t put in place any insurance reforms, we don’t mess with the banks, let them keep on doing what they’re doing now because we don’t want to stir up Wall Street — the result is going to be the same,” he said. “I don’t know why we would expect a different outcome pursuing the exact same policy that got us into this fix in the first place.”
Middle class Americans, Obama said, “are more and more vulnerable, and they have been for the last decade, treading water. And if our response ends up being, you know, because we don’t want to — we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.”
After their performance in 2009, we can risk the next generations no more. Email and Paypal activism just isn’t enough. Weary or not, here we come.
If you need more moral incentive, consider these words and these.
George W. Bush FAILED MISERABLY on his two attempts at transformative change in this country. He took his “man-date” after the ‘04 election and squandered what little good will he had on a pathetic attempt to privatize Social Security, planning to put Wall Street in charge of the nation’s social safety net — before we were reminded that what can irrationally go up is just as likely to exuberantly go way, way down. The Democrats held firm against his ill-advised plan, thank Buddha, a rare site indeed.
Bush still had a congressional majority when he tried, and failed, to fix immigration, which tore his party in two. I’ll give him education reform, something he put through with decent bi-partisan support (most importantly, with help from the late Ted Kennedy who was also expecting No Child Left Behind to be funded). However, President Obama plans a sweeping overhaul of education policy to fix the gaping holes and unmanageable metrics Bush’s plan left behind.
Bush also pushed through two huge tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans (which are about to expire) on top of the unfunded Medicare Drug Plan (addressed in both the House and Senate bills), plus starting a couple of pathetically run wars (now hopefully being handled more responsibly with less cowboy “strategery”), the illegal one about to be wound down.
Bush’s stunning nose-dive in approval, from 90% to 22%, helped usher in Democratic majorities in Congress and all but assured that whoever won the Democratic Primary would become our next President. But it was his foreign policy fiascoes that were primarily responsible for bring him down and contributed to thwarting his late term legislative initiatives.
There never was any sense that the Democrats ever wanted to take George W. Bush down they way they want to with Obama, and tried with Clinton. Within hours of the 2006 “Thumpin’” that turned Congress over to the Democrats, Speaker Pelosi announced that impeachment was “off the table.” These two parties simply operate with different rules. One wants to actually govern, while the other doesn’t care if they accomplish anything as long as they can say they “won.”
When all is said and done, it doesn’t look like there will be any lasting effects from the Bush Administration’s agenda, save for the hundreds of thousands killed, millions forces from their homes and the dreams of a comfortable retirement for so many Americans shattered.
The list of Obama’s legislative accomplishments is pretty impressive when you put it in perspective, a first year’s laundry list that trumps anything since the New Deal or the Great Society according to Norm Ornstein (via):
[T]his Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president — and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment.
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Most of this has been accomplished without any support from Republicans in either the House or the Senate — an especially striking fact, since many of the initiatives of the New Deal and the Great Society, including Social Security and Medicare, attracted significant backing from the minority Republicans.
It’s a pretty striking wish (fulfillment) list, even if the gaping hole known as Health Care Reform languishes in perdition:
Of course, neither the Pundiocracy, the public nor Greater Blogistan should let facts get in their way, especially when this Congress, which has accomplished so much in so little time, has a dismal approval rating. Pile on, kick the dogs when they’re down.
The nearly complete absence of cronies and lobbyists from administration positions, federal boards and commissions has only made it easier to count and point out the few that got exemptions. Where was the snark when Bush let lobbyists write his budget or Cheney and his oil executive buddy’s took crayolas to the map of Iraq? Watching the Health Care sausage get made has us sick to death of the debate, but that hasn’t stopped the carping because every discussion with everyone, everywhere wasn’t on CSPAN once actual legislation passed both houses of Congress.
Yep, unemployment sucks beyond belief, and that overshadows all things great and small. But could it also be that our liberal media, the real liberals like Olbermann and Schuster, may have forsaken policy analysis for gotcha games with rival conservative pundits and the tweets of rat-F’er wannabees?
The rally cry for every incumbent Democrat this fall should be: “Have you SEEN the list of what we got done?”
