coakley
GRITtv: Lessons from Massachusetts
Scott Brown, a Republican with tea party support, won the special election for the last two years of Ted Kennedy's Senate term last night over Democrat Martha Coakley. Predictably, the blame game has already started, with critiques leveled at everyone from Coakley herself to the President. But what does this mean, both for Massachusetts and for the rest of the country? We ask Air America's Mark Green, Malia Lazu of The Gathering Project, and Ann Eldridge Malone of the Alliance to Defend Health Care if this election was a referendum on health care, on Obama, or on lousy Democratic campaigning.
Email this pageGRITtv: Can We Scan Ourselves to Safety?
"There's money to be made and there are people out there who are going to say it can be done. And, yeah, it's techie and sexy and sounds good." That's Bruce Schneier quoted in a piece by Liliana Segura at AlterNet, talking about new airport security technology. In the wake of the failed underpants bombing attempt, new rules have been added, and discussion has ramped up of the use of full-body scanners and other invasive technologies. We ask Segura and Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent if we can scan ourselves to safety, or if this is just more security theater designed to get us to give up our civil liberties.
GRITtv: The F Word: Lessons Not Learned
A year ago I was freezing on the Mall with a few million others, watching the inauguration of a new President. Today I'm sweltering in my unnaturally hot office, fearing the inauguration of a new movement. A year ago, the mall was packed with grassroots democratic voters; young people, people of color, and activated independents whose massive discouragement with the political status quo had driven them to dig down, dismiss the conventional nay-sayers and work hard for change and for Obama. On inauguration day, this program, live in Washington, raised the question to voters. "If we are the ones we can believe in, and change is not simply about someone else, namely a president, what will progressives inaugurate?" A year on it looks as if it's not progressives who've spent the year inaugurating. If the Democrat's loss in Massachusetts is anything to go by, it's the anti-Obama Right who've spent the year creating a movement: some of it racist, some corporate, and some plain desperate … From war, to health care, to the Employee Free Choice Act, Democrats in the Obama administration have walked away from every proposition that stood a chance of igniting their grassroots base. Those now calling Coakley smug, know whereof they speak. Smugness is epidemic. -- Laura Flanders
GRITtv: Jan. 20, 2010
Scott Brown, a Republican with tea party support, won the special election for the last two years of Ted Kennedy's Senate term last night over Democrat Martha Coakley. Predictably, the blame game has already started, with critiques leveled at everyone from Coakley herself to the President. But what does this mean, both for Massachusetts and for the rest of the country?; Katrina vanden Heuvel looks back at the last year of the Obama administration and offers some prescriptions for fixing the Democrats' populism problem; Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who has a long history with Haiti, says that the country just cannot sustain another big earthquake. She joined us via phone, after another aftershock hit Haiti this morning; Mark Danner tells his stories of reporting from Haiti; we ask Liliana Segura of AlterNet and Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent if we can scan ourselves to safety, or if this is just more security theater designed to get us to give up our civil liberties.
