Hold Fast

In his series building up to the announcement of his Wanker of the Decade, Atrios has declared Joe Klein the third runner-up. That post includes a link to a Greg Sargent piece wherein Sargent eviscerates Klein’s casual accusation of Atrios as an “ideological extremist,” with no explanation of what ideas make Atrios extreme. To highlight [...]

[Read more →]

Matt Stoller has a long and thought-provoking post on two recent Democratic primary elections where ostensibly progressive candidates with strong support from online progressive organizations were handed crushing defeats. The whole post is worth reading, as it’s a chilling look in the mirror that reveals a lack of effective progressive infrastructure. Noting that the IL-10 [...]

[Read more →]

Tucker Carlson’s online rag, The Daily Caller, is doing a series of hit pieces on Media Matters for America. Based on anonymous sources and conspiracy-minded dreck, the whole series is a hot mess. Today’s feature piece is an attempt to discredit Media Matter’s non-profit tax status, with the dramatic sounding headline of Media Matters tax-exempt [...]

[Read more →]

Over at ThinkProgress, Brad Johnson has a good post about the deficit reduction debate that’s been tied to the debt ceiling. He puts the political positions of progressives, President Obama, and the Tea Party side by side to draw out a continuum of recommended actions (or non-action). Johnson writes, “As of this moment, the president’s [...]

[Read more →]

Cenk Uygur of MSNBC does his best Howard Beale impersonation, explaining to his audience why he turned down an offer from MSNBC that would have paid him more money to have a smaller role that prevented him from being as hard on the Obama administration and other Democrats as he currently is. As Cenk puts [...]

[Read more →]

Digby responds to a long, interesting piece on the differences between how Republicans and Democrats maintain their political coalitions across time and legislative battles by Robert Cruickshank. Digby writes: Cruikshank is making an appeal to progressives to apply the GOP coalition rules to themselves and stick together, even if the centrists continue to play their [...]

[Read more →]

This piece in the American Prospect by Vivien Labaton and Gara Lamarche, titled “Why Movements Matter,” is definitely worth reading. On the one hand, I strongly agree with the identification of pro-worker, pro-fair taxation, and pro-immigrant rights movements as pointing in the direction of a meaningful broader progressive movement (though if you were to look [...]

[Read more →]

My friend Ilyse Hogue, formerly of MoveOn, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace and now of Media Matters for America, has a very important article in The Nation, titled “Why the Right Attacked Unions, ACORN and Planned Parenthood.” Hogue makes the convincing case that the American right has attacked institutions which not only fight for progressive [...]

[Read more →]

The New York Times has a profile on Gene Sharp, arguably one of the most important advocates for freedom of the last hundred years. Sharp’s writing on non-violent strategic campaigning, specifically on the overthrow of dictatorships, has been instrumental to the thinking of activists in places like Serbia and Egypt, and remains instructive for countless [...]

[Read more →]

UK Uncut is doing what is probably the most inspiring and savvy economic organizing in the English-speaking world. The video above is just brilliant, not only for how powerful it is but for how simple they make the act of standing up for economic just in the face of austerity measures. The accompanying blog post [...]

[Read more →]