Commentary By John A. Ostenburg On any given day, 7,000 high school students will stop going to school — permanently. That number mounts to 1.2 million students who each year constitute a new graduating class of "dropouts." In his book, Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our[Read More…]

Commentary By: Jamison Foser If there is anybody out there who still doesn’t believe that the conservative media will attack President Obama no matter what he does, consider this: Right-wingers are telling children to skip school as a protest against Obama’s encouragement of students to stay in school. I know,[Read More…]

Commentary By: Jamison Foser If you get caught defending Adolph Hitler one time, you could, I suppose, claim it was an accident; a momentary lapse of reason. If you get caught defending Hitler two times … Well, I guess you could say it was just be an unfortunate coincidence. But[Read More…]

Commentary By Karl Frisch By now, CNN’s Lou Dobbs, with his single-minded obsession over all things anti-immigrant and his bizarre embrace of the loony birther movement, is well known for trafficking in disturbing, misleading, and often inaccurate garbage. Escaping under the radar of many, however, are his close associations with[Read More…]

Commentary by Eric Boehlert Have so many blue-chip advertisers ever fled a program as quickly as the who’s who of corporate America that’s sprinted away from Glenn Beck in recent weeks? I certainly cannot recall ever seeing a mass exodus of this scale. The A-list collection of disgruntled Beck advertisers[Read More…]

Commentary From the Chicago Tribune: After myriad television appearances, radio shows and news conferences since his arrest on corruption charges, the seemingly omnipresent former Gov. Rod Blagojevich has made the case for his innocence again, this time in a 259-page memoir that offers small glimpses of both his rocky tenure[Read More…]

Commentary By John A. Ostenburg Organized labor in America has two major goals during the coming year: (1) to see health care reform enacted by the Congress of the United States, and (2) to see the same body pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).  Anyone in the nation who is[Read More…]

Commentary By John A. Ostenburg Even lots of informed citizens, when they hear about TIF districts, have a negative reaction. TIFs have a bad reputation and it’s not totally undeserved. First of all, let’s define what constitutes a TIF district. The acronym stands for tax increment financing. A TIF district[Read More…]

Drew from InvisiblePeople.tv on Vimeo. Commentary Can anything prepare us for Drew’s story? Drew lost his job, then he lost his wife and daughter to a drunk driver. He is an educated man, but today he lives on leftover food he finds in dumpsters. There’s nothing I can add to[Read More…]

Commentary By Karl Frisch Following Wednesday’s early-morning news that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy had lost his battle with brain cancer, Media Matters posted the following statement from president Eric Burns at 3:51 a.m. ET on the County Fair blog: “Ted Kennedy was a true American statesman. The values that he[Read More…]