Four years ago, I was an idealistic college student who believed in change. Frustrated with the years of Bush-style imperialism and capitalism, I was ready for some big government and the return of civil liberties, singing the doxology Praise God From Whom all Blessings Flow as balloons reigned down and Obama waxed eloquent on a stage overlooking thousands of people. Needless to say, I have learned my lesson over the last four years. Although a less harmful sovereign, Obama turned out to be—surprise, surprise—a neo-liberal. The problem, however, was not with Obama, it was with me….
When presented with the choice of curling up on the couch with my beloved and our two still-at-home kids to watch Robin Hood or going off alone to watch the presidential debate on-line, it was a no-brainer. Truth be told, I would have taken a far lesser offer. Maybe even a trip to the dentist….
The number of people in the U.S. living below the poverty line in 2011 was 46.2 million, the highest in the more than 50 years that records have been kept.[i] (1961 is a few years before Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and about seven years before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the “Poor People’s Campaign” that would take Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis.) Why then is so little attention being paid to poverty and poverty-related issues in the current presidential campaign?…
“The individual today is often suffocated between two poles represented by the State and the marketplace” (Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus #49). The 2012 U.S. presidential campaign has, to a degree unseen for several years, brought to the fore the fundamental issues of political life: the relationship of the individual to society, the role of the state and of the economy in society, etc. The selection of Paul Ryan as Republican Mitt Romney’s running mate, an intellectually capable and ideologically driven conservative, ensures that will continue to be the case….
Every week on the lecture trail I meet progressives who are demoralized and/or infuriated by Barack Obama’s performance as president. They insist that they will not work for him again or even vote for him. Many have signed petitions saying as much. They are finished with Obama.
Often they assume that I agree, since I have criticized many of Obama’s policies throughout his presidency, and I have been deeply involved in the Occupy movement. But my progressive friends and allies are overlooking that many of them made this very mistake in 2000, that their charge of betrayal is exaggerated, and that Barack Obama, for all his temporizing and capitulation, is in important ways America’s most progressive president since FDR. Moreover, electing a more compelling human being to the White House is probably impossible in this country. It is too soon to give up on our first African American president. So I wrote The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective [….]
We are in an economic crisis, but we are also in an identity crisis. Who are we? What do we, as a nation, stand for?
Perhaps I am mistaken, but it sure seems that President Obama began his much anticipated jobs speech with a little political theology. In classic civic fashion he could have referred to an economic crisis that has left “millions of Americans jobless,” or “millions of our fellow citizens jobless.” Instead, he referred to an economic crisis that has left “millions of our neighbors jobless.”
By Andrew Marin
Historians note that on 28 June, 1969 the modern era of the battle over gay rights unofficially began. It was in the early hours of that morning in Greenwich Village in New York City at an underground gay club called Stonewall Inn that a group of LGBT patrons began fighting back against the NYPD, who regularly showed up to receive bribes and shake-down those in the club under the threats of a very public, and irrevocably damaging, “outing.”
Far from rising to the occasion of what has been labeled as the Arab Spring which is surely ushering in a new era of international relations, for all Obama’s rhetoric America has simply confirmed the viewpoint that led Bin Laden to launch his campaign back in the 1990’s –American interests trump values and the rule of law.
President Obama must soon decide how many American soldiers to bring home now. Of course, whatever he decides, he’ll be strongly criticized.