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Sarah Palin and Rod Blagojevich: A Match Made in Reality TV Heaven
Tweet Share on Facebook July 29, 2010 Comment (5)It would be America's ultimate political reality show: Rod and Sarah, two ex-governors, bound to make out like bandits and discover their true soulmates--each other. In the finale, Sarah would promise to visit Rod in federal prison every chance she gets to be in the neighborhood. Ratings would be sky high for their teary goodbye.
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Shirley Sherrod Is a Modern Day Rosa Parks
Tweet Share on Facebook July 27, 2010 Comment (48)Rosa Parks was no accidental heroine in the American civil rights movement; and nor is her kindred spirit, Shirley Sherrod--a dignified government agriculture official who lost her job in a public humiliation--sadly, one for the Obama administration. Sherrod is a gift to us, a wise older woman who took shabby treatment on the national stage without a trace of victimhood. She did not say a word against Tom Vilsack, the cabinet secretary who demanded she resign via Blackberry without too much information. When he realized how wrong he was for believing something he saw on Fox News, he said he was sorry. Like Parks, Sherrod has shown she is made of quiet class and conscience that will not accept second-class citizenship. Telling a true, transformative story about her own journey in racial justice in the Deep South, she refused to be branded as a racist--and did not crack when even the NAACP briefly turned on her, one of its own. (The organization also quickly apologized.)
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Time to Take Back 'Conservative' From the Right
Tweet Share on Facebook July 23, 2010 Comment (24)For those who like Bob Dylan's song lyric, "Good-bye is too good a word, babe," let's infuse it with fresh political relevance: "Conservative is too good a word, babe." To wit, "conservative" is too good a word for Fox News, for the Tea Party movement, and for upstart Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich, the Republican party elder statesman whose idea of governance was to shut the federal government down. Each in its own way is trying to undermine our democratically elected government. It's not just that they don't fight fair; it's also that they say and do some sordid stuff.
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Census 2010: An American Pursuit, With Flaws
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2010 Comment (6)Have I told you how much I love the Census? Jump in, let's go for a ride around the block of American democracy to count every single person living on it--babies, the young and the old, students and workers, single and married, rich, poor, and anxious members of the middle class, artists and bus drivers, wired and not, employed and unemployed, the uninsured sick and the covered healthy, military and civilian, homeless, incarcerated and free, citizens and immigrants, people of any religion, color, language or kind. And now it's over this time around, so let me say a few good words on what it's all about.
