From closing Guantanamo to lifting the gag rule Bush era policies are coming to an end. But is it a new era of progressive government?
Katrina vanden Heuvel editor and publisher of The Nation, Mark Green President of Air America Radio and the author of Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President, Andrea Batista Schlesinger Executive Director of the Drum Major Institute, and Ali Abunimah Co-Founder of The Electronic Intifada and the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse discuss Obama’s first week in office and whether a new era of government has been inaugurated.
President Obama, in his first major environmental act since taking office, will order the Environmental Protection Agency today to move swiftly on a request by California and other states to set the nation’s toughest vehicle emissions standards.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/…..#038;tsp=1
By GRITtv on January 26th, 2009 at 10:59 am
From NY Magazine:
“…it’s not hard to see where Obama and the left could be on a collision course. It didn’t go unnoticed in labor circles that when Obama’s transition website, Change.gov, morphed into whitehouse.gov, a number of progressive economic planks suddenly disappeared. Gone were mentions of fair trade. Gone was any reference to EFCA, the so-called card-check bill that would make it much easier to organize unions and is the highest of all priorities for organized labor. Though the promises enumerated there to gays and lesbians are many and explicit—civil unions and full federal rights, workplace non-discrimination, the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell—you can bet that, especially after the Warren imbroglio, the LGBT community will be on lookout for foot-dragging. And there’s foreign policy, where Obama could incite liberal outrage if he doesn’t pull troops out of Iraq as quickly as promised or fails to intervene in Darfur.”
By GRITtv on January 26th, 2009 at 11:07 am