Prose Before Hos

Why Progressives Should Care About The Courts And Vote Obama

Posted on November 5, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Three Reasons Progressives Should Care About the Courts (and Vote for Obama) by Bill Blum in Truth Dig.

The Text: Like Hamlet on the battlements, the progressive left is haunted by a question: to vote for Barack Obama with all his faults or, by boycotting the elections or casting ballots for a third party, risk the inauguration of Mitt Romney? To some on the left, disaffected by Obama’s statist posture on national security, his kowtowing to Wall Street and timidity on climate change, there is no appreciable difference between the two major candidates. So why not stay true to genuine progressive values and turn away from Obama, even in the swing states?

Of all the reasons for rejecting such thinking and the risks posed by a Romney victory, perhaps the clearest is that Romney’s election will enable the Republican Party to reshape the Supreme Court—and the entire federal judiciary along with it—for a generation. And, as the courts shift ever more decisively to the right, the fight for social justice and basic human decency also will be set back a generation.

Those doubting the risks involved in a wholesale GOP makeover of the courts should, at a minimum, reflect on three basic principles.

Ben Stein Defies FOX On Economy

Posted on November 5, 2012 in Videos

Now, if only these dolts could win some of Ben Stein’s reason.

The Case For Voter Rebellion

Posted on November 5, 2012 in Articles

The Article: We Vote, They Rule: The Case for Voter Rebellion by Scott Tucker in Truth Dig.

The Text: Democratic and Republican politicians keep each other in business. That matters much more than the usual dead end debates about whether there is a dime’s or even a dollar’s worth of difference between the two ruling parties of this corporate regime. Of course there are differences, and the divergent points in public policy are very much what we would expect from a party that hopes for a better regulated form of capitalism on the “left,” and a party that hopes for a more dictatorial rule of the rich on the right. Only in the bizarrely reduced worldview of “our two-party system” would the borders of one country define the borders of political thought and practice.

Beyond our borders, millions of people freely and regularly vote for socialists and communists of various kinds and parties, and those citizens are not trembling under jackboots or facing summary execution in the soundproof basements of police states. If we insist on principle that the regime in Sweden is a political twin separated at birth from the regime in North Korea, then we will not be above calling President Obama a socialist and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont a Bolshevik. Those rhetorical steamrolling tricks can be left to the far right, however, if we identify in any way with the democratic left. Let us generously define this democratic left to include left-leaning members of the Democratic Party, as well as the growing number of people who are opposed to this bipartisan corporate regime. We need a public conversation about the present conditions and future prospects of the democratic left in the United States. This is why the question of a change in our whole economic and political system cannot be ruled out of order. That kind of censorship is not a promising premise for any political conversation.