Every single one of the candidates currently running for the Republican nomination is a walking disaster. But one of them, Texas congressman Ron Paul, seems to be getting a disturbing amount of support from liberals. Mostly that’s because his nut-job libertarian views happen to not sound so nutty on a handful of issues. He wants to end the War on Drugs. He is against the death penalty. He would not support a constitutional ban on gay marriage. He was opposed to the War in Iraq and wants to end all American military intervention abroad. All of that sounds pretty good to us left-wing types — downright refreshing coming from a Republican. Some progressives have claimed they’d rather vote for him than for Obama. Even Occupiers have sung his praises.

But if you’re a liberal who supports Ron Paul, you either haven’t been paying enough attention or you’re out of your fucking mind.

Here are 20 reasons why:

1. He wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act. That’s the 1964 law that made segregation illegal and outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. Paul claims it infringes on people’s freedom. If a restaurant or hotel wants to ban African-Americans, he believes they should be allowed to. As he put it in a speech to Congress: “the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.”

2. He’s also against the Americans With Disabilities Act. That’s the 1990 bill passed by the first President Bush, which followed up the Civil Rights Act by making it illegal to discriminate against someone because of a disability. Paul wants it gone, too.

3. He is against public health care. You know how you think Americans are crazy because they can’t do any better on universal health care than the watered down bill Obama got through? Well, President Ron Paul would do much, much worse. He thinks that in an entirely private system, poor people would have all of their needs taken care of by charitable doctors who would be willing to work for free. Ron Paul, by the way, is a medical doctor.

4. He wants to dissolve the public education system. He promises to eliminate the Department of Education entirely and leave the question of whether to offer any public education at all up to local governments. He calls public education “socialist” (which we actually agree with, but he, unlike us, doesn’t think that’s a good thing) and says, “I preach home schooling and private schooling.”…

[continues at the little red umbrella]

UPDATE: NBC has removed this ad off the internet because Disinformation is talking about it …

Many in the Occupy Wall Street Movement are patting their efforts on the back, and even claiming credit for what looks like a shift by President Obama towards a more engaged campaign discussing economic fairness.

The President’s speech in Kansas was modeled on remarks made by the Republican Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt in 1910. There’s nothing like quoting a Republican for credible centrist positioning. (Note: he quotes TR, not FDR.)

Will he embrace GOP Pres Eisenhower’s warning about the Military Industrial Complex next?

Unlikely.

Richard Eskow was quick to salute the new Obama:

“Barack Obama channeled one of American history’s truly transformative figures by visiting the tiny Kansas town where Teddy Roosevelt gave his ‘New Nationalism’ speech over a century ago. It was refreshing to see the President invoke his predecessor, who was a powerful and fearless agent of change both inside and outside the White House.

“For the first time the President directly confronted the injustice of our growing economic divide, which were caused by the ongoing rapacity of the already-wealthy. He promised to take real action against the bankers who accepted our help after ruining the economy, then went on hoarding the nation’s wealth for themselves at everyone else’s expense. Teddy would have been proud.” (He was also proud of his role in the bloody Spanish-American War that turned into the Vietnam before Vietnam.)

Clearly it’s more heartening to hear the president’s new-found embrace of the needs of the millions being hurt by Wall Street’s crime spree — rather than watch his more devious collusion with it.

His speech seemed more radical because of the way the right attacked it. A columnist for the Wall Street Journal compared him to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, but also saw the speech for what it was — a campaign posture, a technique for rallying a disenchanted base, not a promise of tough action by the White House.

Writes Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, “Some will say hearing crude Chavista populism in the Obama speech is an overreaction. That once it’s understood the Kansas speech was the work of the party leader, not the president of the United States, it becomes easier to think about it without overreacting to its intense and vivid rhetoric…”

President Roosevelt was sincerely battling the monopolists of his time, not opportunistically playing politics. “One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours,” Roosevelt said, “is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests.

“No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks, but service rendered.”

Amen.

Just recycling TR isn’t the same as applying his policies. Even Eskow admits that, admitting, “the Obama Justice Department sits idly by as the SEC continues to let major corporations pay slap-on-the-wrist fines for executive criminality- fines that are often paid by the same shareholders they deceived — while “neither admitting nor denying wrongdoing.”

Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog goes further: “Wow, I have to hand it to Obama’s spinmeisters. They’ve managed to find a way to resurrect his old hopium branding by calling it something completely different that still has many of the old associations.

“And we have a twofer in Obama’s launch of his new branding as True Son of Teddy Roosevelt. …The second element of this finesse is that Obama is using the Rooseveltian imagery to claim he will pass legislation to get tough on Big Finance miscreants. That posture, is of course meant to underscore the idea that you just can’t get the perps with the present, weak set of laws.”

The Financial Times reported him saying” “financial institutions whose business model is built on breaking the law, cheating consumers or making risky bets that could damage the entire economy. I’ll be calling for legislation that makes [anti-fraud] penalties count — so that firms don’t see punishment for breaking the law as just the price of doing business.”

Sounds good, except there are laws and rules on the books right now that could be deployed!

Trying to get new “anti-business” legislation through the Republican Congress is sure to be a non-starter and only intended to give him a new club to attack his adversaries with, rather crack down on Wall Street fraud.

Writes Smith, “No, it has plenty of tools, starting with Sarbanes Oxley. As we’ve discussed at length in earlier posts, Sarbox was designed to eliminate the CEO and top brass ‘know nothing’ excuse. And the language for civil and criminal charges is parallel, so a prosecutor could file criminal charges, and if successful, could then open up a related criminal case. Sarbox required that top executives (which means at least the CEO and CFO) certify the adequacy of internal controls, and for a big financial firm, that has to include risk controls and position valuation. The fact that the Administration didn’t attempt to go after, for instance, AIG on Sarbox is inexcusable …”

We can go on and on detailing the many ways the President, reborn as Teddy Roosevelt, was anything but a rough rider charging up Wall Street hill.

Writing on Huff Post, Jim Sleeper, a former journalist turned Yale professor, compared Obama’s speech to suggestions in an earlier article in the NY Times by Drew Westen, a critic telling him what he should be saying: “Here are some of the lines that Westen suggested in his essay last summer. Following them are the ones Obama delivered this week….”

Westen last summer on what Obama should say: “Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness…”

Obama last week: “Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt’s time, there’s been a certain crowd in Washington for the last few decades who respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. ‘The market will take care of everything,’ they tell us. If only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes – especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger … It’s a simple theory — one that speaks to our rugged individualism and healthy skepticism of too much government. … Here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It’s never worked…”

Well, at least Obama is open to suggestions but is it for a turn around in the way he’s governing, or is it to find new applause lines?

Writes financial analyst Ellen Brown, “The continued dominance of the Wall Street money machine depends on … collective amnesia. The fact that this memory is surfacing again may be the machine’s greatest threat — and our greatest hope as a nation. order his Attorney General to enforce the laws right now.”

Network other outlets and his News Dissector blog. He made the film Plunder the Crime Of Our Time. Please email comments to dissector@mediachannel.org.

Park Won Soon, the newly elected mayor of Seoul, is “perhaps the first politician to win with an Occupy Wall Street platform”.

Park Won Soon ran on a platform of social justice. The previous mayor of Seoul had resigned over the issue of school lunches, Park pushed for the universal provision of lunches to all Seoul school children. He also promised to direct social services to helping the poor and disadvantaged. Korea has become increasingly divided in terms of rich and poor, and Seoul has some of the richest and some of the poorest people in the country. Park pledged to be the mayor of all of Seoul and not just the wealthy. His opponent Na Kyung-won was a wealthy businesswoman. The Park campaign characterized her as part of the 1 percent, whereas Park himself would represent the 99 percent.

The OWS movement in Korea hasn’t been particularly large. About 250 protesters gathered in front of the Financial Services Commission for a weekend of demonstrations in the middle of October. But since then, the focus of the movement for economic justice has been defeating the KORUS Free Trade Agreement.

Park Won Soon is a long-time civic activist who was expelled from school in the mid-1970s for his student activism. Later, as a human rights lawyer, he was active in the democratization movement of the 1980s. In 1994, he helped found one of the pivotal civil society organizations in South Korea: People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD). This organization focused on expanding the notion of democracy beyond the narrow definition of voting. In those early days of Korean democracy, and to a certain extent even today, Korean politics is rather opaque, still subject to the influence of powerful families and wealthy chaebols (conglomerates). PSPD has done much to bring transparency to government and to dispel what Koreans call jeongkyung yuchak (political-economic collusion). After PSPD, he went on to create the Beautiful Foundation and a thinktank called Hope, both devoted to principles of economic justice and sustainability.

Park’s supporters, during his mayoralty race, extended far beyond his civil society followers. Many Koreans are disgusted with political as usual. They dislike the ruling Grand National Party. But many are not particularly happy about the opposition either. They supported Park because he is not a politician. Much of his support came from younger voters.

Photo: Roy Kerwood (CC)

Via the Toronto Sun:

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death — according to the tragic Beatles star’s last personal assistant.

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon’s death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

In new documentary Beatles Stories, Seaman tells filmmaker Seth Swirsky Lennon wasn’t the peace-loving militant fans thought he was while he was his assistant.

He says, “John, basically, made it very clear that if he were an American he would vote for Reagan because he was really sour on (Democrat) Jimmy Carter.

“He’d met Reagan back, I think, in the 70s at some sporting event… Reagan was the guy who had ordered the National Guard, I believe, to go after the young (peace) demonstrators in Berkeley, so I think that John maybe forgot about that … He did express support for Reagan, which shocked me.

For more information, see original article.

M.C. Escher, "Drawing Hands", 1948.

ScienceDaily reports:

Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.”But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes? They probably “enshrine the preferences of the right-handed majority.”

Casasanto, of The New School for Social Research, and Evangelia G. Chrysikou, of the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to find the causes of these correlations. Does motor experience “give rise to these preferences, or are they hardwired in the brain?” If the former, “how flexible are these preferences? How much motor experience does it take” to instill them?

Their surprising findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Read More: ScienceDaily

Saturn Devouring His Son (de Goya).

Around 11:00 p.m. CNN called the U.S. senate race in Wisconsin for Tea Party favorite Ron Johnson, finally ending a nail-biter that saw incumbent Democrat Russ Feingold projected at within one half of one percentage point of Johnson shortly before polls closed at 8:00 p.m. local time.

During that three-hour window of opportunity we held a breathless deathgrip around that slender hope over at one of Russ’s suburban canvassing centers.

The crew had literally worked their asses off for Russ — at 17 calories per minute, our 12-hour shifts of non-stop door-to-door troop rallying, we’d shed about a pound each day.

I figure that I alone must have knocked on over a thousand doors during this election cycle, reminding folks not only of what Russ has done for Wisconsin, but what Johnson’s Tea Party threatened to do to it, and why it all added up to an unequivocal imperative to support Russ.

And with many votes yet to be counted,* and rumours that those were concentrated within the most traditionally Democratic districts in the state, we seemed to have good reason to hope.

Russ rejected the TARP bailout. He voted ‘No’ to the Iraq war. He opposed the Bush-era glad-handing of the U.S. Treasury to the wealthiest 2%. He supported legislation against predatory recission against premium payers by Big Insurance. Russ is a True Progressive Hero.

And what has Johnson done? What’s HIS track record of public service? Well, he doesn’t really have one. He essentially inherited his business, directly deriving more than a quarter of all its revenues** from his in-laws megacorps. That and licensure as a certified public accountant provided him with the thin plastic veneer of economic authority to curry the patronage of Big Finance, the Koch brothers, Club for Growth, and the state AICPA. Essentially Ron Johnson is a millionaire dilettante.

More at The Great Amateur Hour

It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.

Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:

Left / Liberal / Progressive

Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:

Right / Conservative / Reactionary

The shades of difference among the meanings of the words within the triads, however, are not minor. One can very well be extremely right-wing without being a reactionary in any meaningful sense — think of Ayn Rand. One can be extremely left-wing without being a liberal in any meaningful sense — think of Lenin.

I propose, therefore, to accentuate the differences between the words commonly lumped together, to clear up all ambiguities by assigning technical meanings to commonly-used terms, and thereby define a three-dimensional space within which political writers and thinkers could more clearly be pegged.

Read more at The American Scene

Hope you like what you read, for more about me, please check out my blog at www.mickeyz.net.

__________________________________________________________

If you were to open your mouth and belt out the words “this land is your land,” you could rest assured that someone nearby would add: “this land is my land.” The chorus to Woody Guthrie’s 1940 classic is common knowledge … as are the first couple of verses.

But it isn’t until you get to the later verses — the verses often omitted from official versions — that you start comprehendin’ what good ol’ Woody (1912–1967) had in mind:

As I was walkin’ I saw a sign there
And that sign said “No tresspassin’”
But on the other side, it didn’t say nothin’
Now that side was made for you and me

In the squares of the city / In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me

Let’s not forget that Guthrie penned the song in response to Irving Berlin’s saccharine “God Bless
America.” Let’s also not forget the words he scrawled on his guitar:

“This machine kills fascists.”

Woody said: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, ’cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

Guthrie laid the foundation for generations of American singer-songwriters to use their lyrics to challenge the saccharine platitudes of pop music. From Bob Dylan in the 1960s to Ani DiFranco today, American folk singers have provided a Greek chorus of protest and outrage to keep us all more honest and aware.

__________________________________________________________

Above: Photo by Al Aumuller, courtesy of the United States Library of Congress

The above is a chapter from  50 American Revolutions You’re Not Supposed To Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism. For more about the author, please check out www.mickeyz.net.

Photo: Stevertigo (CC)

From the Onion. Yeah, that Onion, so progressives please try to remember where you left your sense of humor:

LEXINGTON, MA — Describing himself as “terribly exhausted,” famed linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky said Monday that he was taking a break from combating the hegemony of the American imperialist machine to try and take it easy for once.

“I just want to lie in a hammock and have a nice relaxing morning,” said the outspoken anarcho-syndicalist academic, who first came to public attention with his breakthrough 1957 book Syntactic Structures. “The systems of control designed to manufacture consent among a largely ignorant public will still be there for me to worry about tomorrow. Today, I’m just going to kick back and enjoy some much-needed Noam Time.”

“No fighting against institutional racism, no exposing the legacies of colonialist ideologies still persistent today, no standing up to the widespread dissemination of misinformation and state-sanctioned propaganda,” Chomsky added. “Just a nice, cool breeze through an open window on a warm spring day.”

Sources reported that the 81-year-old Chomsky, a vociferous, longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy and the political economy of the mass media, was planning to use Monday to tidy up around the house a bit, take a leisurely walk in the park, and possibly attend an afternoon showing of Date Night at the local megaplex.

Sitting down to a nice oatmeal breakfast, Chomsky picked up a copy of Time, a deceitful, pro-corporate publication that he said would normally infuriate him.

[continues at the Onion]

Very few Americans realize there exists a large network of far left philanthropists and foundations in America dedicated to destroying the American way of life, our Christian-based culture and our free enterprise system.  They seek to remove America from its constitutional foundations and move it toward a European-style socialism.  Much of this effort is coordinated by a little known group called the Tides Foundation and its related group, the Tides Center.

The Strategic Principles of the Tides Foundation

Over the course of its 33 year history, the Tides network has given hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-free enterprise groups, gun control groups, anti-private property groups, abortion rights groups, homosexual groups, groups engaged in voter fraud, anti-military groups, and organizations that seek to destroy America’s constitutional basis. All told, over 100 leftist organizations have received funding from one of the two Tides groups.

Not surprisingly, this network of anti-American groups played a key role in electing Barack Obama by using classic propaganda techniques in making false allegations about Bush (he lied regarding WMDs, he stole the election in Florida, he knew in advance about 9/11, etc, etc.) and created the impression that Bush and by extension, the GOP, was corrupt.  Obama, of course, was portrayed as the reformer who would save America from this corruption.

Millions of Americans fell for this mythology and so without being openly partisan, this vast network of far left groups, along with its media allies, was able to manipulate American public opinion during the last election cycle.  Meanwhile, anyone who tried to reveal Obama’s real agenda, his role in the corrupt Chicago political machine, his socialist political associations, or his soft spot for Middle Eastern terrorists was labeled a kook by this same network.

The amount of funding the Tides Foundation and Tides Center provides the hard left is unprecedented. Indeed, its financial disclosures show that the Tides Center has raised between $48 and $71 million each year since 1998 and the bulk of this revenue is contributed back to far left groups. The closely-aligned Tides Foundation has reported revenues of between $59 and $77 million every year since 2002.  The two tax exempt groups are supposed to be non-partisan, but they are certainly extremely political and they push the envelope regarding what non-profit groups are allowed to do politically.   All together, both Tides groups have contributed over $500 million to the organized left.

The list of hard-left causes is long and there is not enough space to review them all.  But here’s a brief review of a few of them…

[continues at the Western Center for Journalism]

Evan Bayh is not a centrist, he’s a corporatist, according to Bill Maher.

Maher appeared on “Anderson Cooper 360″ Tuesday night to comment on the state of affairs in Washington, D.C. He argued that Evan Bayh, the retiring Senator from Indiana, is what’s wrong with Congress. The Senate is “where legislation goes to die,” Maher says, because “corporatist Democrats” like Bayh act like Republicans.

Maher told Cooper that politics are not polarized enough and that the U.S. lacks a real progressive party.

A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency that is being prepared by the History channel does not yet have a cast or a premiere date. Not a frame of footage has been shot. It does, however, have prominent critics who want it brought to a halt.

The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of fact and emphasis. But like a similar controversy over a 2003 television film about Ronald Reagan, the dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself.

The mini-series, called “The Kennedys,” is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show “24” and an outspoken political conservative. That raised alarms among Kennedy partisans when the History channel said in December that it would pick up the project.

Now a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is releasing an Internet video in which Kennedy scholars say the scripts offer a portrait of the president and his family that is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, a hatchet job.

“It was political character assassination,” the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, said of the screenplays in a telephone interview. “It was sexist titillation and pandering, and it was turning everything into a cheap soap opera of the worst kind.” Mr. Greenwald said he is hoping that his 13-minute video and an accompanying petition, at stopkennedysmears.com, will take on lives of their own on the Web. A title card at the film’s conclusion reads: “Tell the History Channel I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history.’ ”…

[continues in the New York Times]

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose book A People’s History of the United States became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Auburndale, Mass. The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said.

Published in 1980 with little promotion and a first printing of 5,000, A People’s History was, fittingly, a people’s best-seller, attracting a wide audience through word of mouth and reaching 1 million sales in 2003. Although Professor Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book was taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country, and numerous companion editions were published, including Voices of a People’s History, a volume for young people and a graphic novel.

A People’s History told an openly left-wing story. Professor Zinn accused Christopher Columbus and other explorers of committing genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

Read More: AP via the NY Times

But when you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait
Don’t you know it’s gonna be alright…

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow
Don’t you know know it’s gonna be alright…

Coming only two days after the Republicans’ upset U.S. Senate victory in Massachusetts, the sudden demise of the Air America radio network — after a protracted illness — left liberals reeling and conservatives gloating over the failure of their competing ideology’s highest profile outlet.

But the end of Air America is not the end of liberal talk radio, nor should it be, according to observers.

“The only thing they did that was outstanding — boy, did they get a lot of PR,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade journal of the talk-radio industry.

“The thing that was so maddening about Air America’s original programming — and they squandered their initial capital and their initial publicity — [was that] all you heard was about how bad Rush Limbaugh was and how bad Sean Hannity was,” Harrison said in an interview Friday. “If that’s the ‘liberal message,’ there is no message.”

Charlie Kireker, the chairman of Air America, announced Thursday that the board was pulling the plug on the 5-year-old venture, which supplied programming to about 100 stations nationwide, including KTLK-AM (1150) in Los Angeles. The network had had financial problems from the outset, and they were exacerbated by the worsening U.S. economy, which has resulted in advertising cutbacks across all media…

[continues in the Los Angeles Times]

From the Air America site:

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.

Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success.

With radio industry ad revenues down for 10 consecutive quarters, and reportedly off 21% in 2009, signs of improvement have consisted of hoping things will be less bad. And though Internet/new media revenues are projected to grow, our expanding online efforts face the same monetization and profitability challenges in the short term confronting the Web operations of most media companies

When Air America Radio launched in April, 2004 with already-known personalities like Al Franken and then-unknown future stars like Rachel Maddow, it was the only full-time progressive voice in the mainstream broadcast media world. At a critical time in our nation’s history — when dissent on issues such as the Iraq war were often denounced as “un-American” — Air America and its talented team helped millions of Americans remember the importance of compelling discussion about the most pivotal events and decisions of our generation.

Through some 100 radio outlets nationwide, Air America helped build a new sense of purpose and determination among American progressives. With this revival, the progressive movement made major gains in the 2006 mid-term elections and, more recently, in the election of President Barack Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress.

Laws have changed for the better thanks to this revival…..but all the same our company cannot escape the laws of economics. So we intend a rapid, orderly closure over the next few days. All current employees will be paid through today, January 21. A severance package will be offered tomorrow to full-time current employees with more than six months of tenure.

We will strive to assist affiliates and partners in achieving a smooth transition. Starting at 6 pm EST today, we will provide our affiliates, listeners and users a selection of encore programming until 9 pm EST on Monday, January 25, at which time Air America programming will end.

We are proud that Air America’s mission lives on through the words and actions of so many former radio hosts who are active today in progressive causes and media nationwide. In the years ahead, as we look back, we should all be proud of our passionate determination to assure that our nation’s progressive voice would be heard loud and clear. Through the hard work and dedication of current staff, and those who preceded you, a lasting legacy was forged which will now continue through other voices and venues.

Thank you.

Don Hazen writes on Alternet:

The three M’s — Bill Moyers, Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow — scored highest in a recent AlterNet survey* asking more than 5,000 readers to rate the most influential progressive media figures. Moyers, who scored 67.5, and Moore, with a 66.2 score, were very close. Maddow was a tad behind at 63.5.

It’s no surprise that Moyers, the moral sage, and Moore, the rabble-rouser, are ranked at the top. They have been popular with AlterNet readers for years. Moyers’ current show, “Bill Moyers’ Journal,” gets at the heart of our many social ills with long-form exploration and probing interviews. Recently, Moyers spent an episode on the Lyndon Johnson Vietnam tapes, drawing a connection to Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan. The show was a television masterpiece.

Moore built his popularity with the astoundingly successful 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which remains the highest-grossing documentary of all time, taking in over $200 million worldwide, including U.S. box office revenue of almost $120 million. Bowling for Columbine, released in 2002, took in more than $58 million while Sicko (2007) brought in $36 million. The $14 mill pulled in by Moore’s most recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story, is a large drop-off, and must be seen as a disappointment.

Moore also had the highest recognition score in the survey at 98.4 percent — quite a feat for the former editor of the Flint, Michigan alternative weekly The Flint Voice. Moyers was next at 96.4, followed by Arianna Huffington at 95.6.

But the big story in the survey is Rachel Maddow. For her to leapfrog legends like Noam Chomsky, Arianna Huffington and Amy Goodman — longtime media mainstays — is a huge accomplishment. Maddow’s success demonstrates that brains and savvy have a place on cable TV, amidst the name-calling that sometimes passes for dialogue. And it indicates that progressives will follow the right talent to corporate media, which may encourage mainstream media outlets to hire more progressives.

Read More: Alternet

When I read that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins separated after 23 years together, my thoughts immediately turned to their two decades of liberal political activism. The Democratic power couple was particularly active during the 2008 Presidential Campaign.

Here’s Susan Sarandon talking about Sarah Palin at Boston University in September 2008, when she says that Palin’s views are “worrying” and would set the woman’s movement back. She also quoted actor Ed Harris, who said Palin “would be a really large footnote in the annals of moose hunting”. Saradon also expresses her thoughts on the media’s coverage of politics.

Tim Robbins was no less involved in political commentary and activism. In this video originally provided by CrooksandLiars.com, Robbins appears on Real Time with Bill Maher and really gets after Steve Hayes, who tried to claim a connection between al-Queda and Saddam Hussein. Tim Robbins got the best of him:

Robbins: “You’re partly responsible, you could start with an apology. You wrote a book saying there was a connection Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.”

Hayes: “You want to know why I wrote that book? Because there was a connection Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.”

Maher: “No there wasn’t.”

Robbins: “You can lie a thousand times-it doesn’t make it true.”

[continues at Zennie's SF Gate blog]

Ethan Nadelmann is one of a handful of marvelously charismatic and motivating speakers within the liberal and progressive universe. He talks creatively and emphatically about race, class, gender, corruption, power, human rights, immigration and the devastating impact of prison-industrial complex on all aspects of society, all progressive touchstones. Yet relatively few people know who he is, or follow his efforts. Why? Because he has devoted his life to transforming America’s attitudes and laws about drugs, which is no easy task, and often a thankless one.

There exists a complex, almost paradoxical attitude toward drug use and the ramifications of “drug war” repression among many progressives. Even Baby Boomers, many who successfully navigated a journey through their own drug experimentation as they came of age, often overreact to the possibilities of their own childrens’ experimentations with drugs. And in the case of our last three presidents, all who used drugs, the consistent stance is to go out of their way to avoid any acknowledgement of any positive role that drugs play in our society, or even seriously consider a less destructive approach, which would be the legalization and regulation of drugs. President Obama, who has been quite honest about his personal drug use, nevertheless has been somewhat dismissive about even modest reforms concerning pot — a drug far less dangerous than the alcohol and cigarettes, which pervade our society and generate billions of advertising dollars to maintain dependencies and widespread social use.

The way our country deals with illegal drug use — a behavior that has been with humans since the beginning of time — has truly become a civil rights and human rights issue in our midst, as millions are arrested each year in an overwhelmingly racist, and uniquely American crusade against personal choice and liberty. Hundreds of thousands are in jail on drug charges, even for simply smoking pot or possessing it in the wrong part of the country, or being tricked by cops, as young people frequently are in New York City. Meanwhile we can attribute much of the development of the surveillance state, the huge allocation of funds to combat issues of fear, the massive numbers of security personnel we have in our midst, mainly on two things — 9/11 and the “war on drugs.”

[continues at AlterNet]

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