As I wrote a few days ago, as part of a nationwide effort called Breaking Our Silence, I will be reading a story by a woman who had an abortion and neither regrets it nor feel ashamed about it. More details of the event to be held tomorrow at Beachland Ballroom, 15711 Waterloo Road, Cleveland, OH 44110 from 6:00-8:00 pm. and is free and open to the public can be found at the above link.
[Read more…]

As one should have expected knowing her history, faced with the rising popularity of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has adopted rhetoric that could easily have emerged out of the mouths of the Republicans and Fox News, even to the extent of accusing him of being a communist sympathizer.
[Read more…]

Kalle Lasn is the editor of the magazine Adbusters that is credited with being one of the brains that inspired the Occupy movement that in 2011 resulted in huge numbers of people occupying public spaces in New York and other cities to protest inequality and financial corruption. While many people have argued that the dispersal of the movement signaled its failure, when Jake Whitney interviewed him for the December 2015/January 2016 issue of The Progressive magazine, Lasn disagreed with that conclusion and said that the spirit of Occupy is very much alive.
[Read more…]

This is the time when organizations and individuals start endorsing candidates for the presidency. It is not clear that endorsements matter these days as much as they were reputed to do in the past. Nowadays people have greater access to information and are less likely to vote the way that some organization tells them to, even if they belong to that organization. What endorsements do is indicate a vague general alignment of views between the candidate and the endorser.
[Read more…]

Glenn Greenwald writes that when seriously challenged, the political party establishments react in ways that are similar to the stages of grief, with the relevant stage being proportional to the degree of fear about the strength of the challenge. He lists seven such stages and provides links to elaborate on each.
[Read more…]

The ghastly story of what happened in Flint, MI should strike fear into the entire nation because it is not just a local story affecting one impoverished town. For those unfamiliar with the case, the people of that city have been found to have dangerously high levels of lead in their blood due to the contamination of their drinking water. This has been going on for two years. As a result, the residents of that city have been forced to purchase bottled water until the mess is cleared up and president Obama has issued an emergency declaration, enabling federal government resources to be used to address the emergency.
[Read more…]

A new poll shows Sanders with a whopping 60%-33% lead over Clinton in New Hampshire.

Former secretary of labor Robert Reich offers comebacks to six of the most common criticisms expressed by skeptics of Bernie Sanders such as:

1. He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.
2. He couldn’t get any of his ideas implemented because Congress would reject them.
3. America would never elect a socialist.
4. His single-payer healthcare proposal would cost so much it would require raising taxes on the middle class.
5. His plan for paying for college with a tax on Wall Street trades would mean colleges would run by government rules.
6. He’s too old.

[Read more…]