As you may have heard, we purple ticket holders wuz robbed. Thousands of us spent Inauguration Day inside Washington, D.C.’s Third Street tunnel and didn’t make it through the security gates in time to hear Obama take the oath of office. Some listened to his address clustered around portable radios. Others wandered into the frozen capital, seeking televisions.... Read more

It ain’t all pretty, but 2009 looks a lot better than anything this millennium has witnessed so far. As in all things psychological and political, the signs point every which way. So here are my predictions — some grim, some gleeful, some substantiated and some woven of the holey cloth of dreams. Here’s to a really new New Year.

Class struggle, welcome back ... Read more

"None of us in this building live under the illusion that anything we do will put an end to sexual violence against children in Vermont,” announced Senate President Pro Tem Peter Shumlin a couple of weeks ago, when the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled 34 recommendations for stiffening the state’s already stiff sex offender laws. The report comes after a summer of hearings held in response to the public lust for revenge following the murder of 12-year-old Brooke Bennett, allegedly by her uncle, Michael Jacques, a repeat sex offender.... Read more

As he stepped onstage in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night, Barack Obama was already transformed from candidate to president. On display was his genius, the genius of leadership: He eloquently named the terrible situation — “two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century” — then instilled the courage to overcome it. The president-elect had nixed the planned fireworks. But he could not squelch his optimism.... Read more

For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils under the foundations of Wall Street, opening fissures in the walls of marble. Lenin told his comrades the profit-insatiable capitalist would eventually sell the people the rope to hang him with. Now he’s sold us the rope — and we’ve hanged ourselves. But the salesman, too, is gazing nervously at the gallows.... Read more

After three days sequestered in a media-free room, Sarah Palin emerged to deliver what the AP called “a star-turning performance.” Katie Couric pronounced her “feisty, folksy, fiery and emotional.” A delegate from Wisconsin gave the bumper-sticker makers the slogan they should be copyrighting now: “She is one kick-ass lady.”... Read more

Hysteria, said Elia Kazan, “is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard and exact facts will cool it.” Kazan was wrong about a lot of things — for instance, his decision to inflame anti-communist hysteria by naming names of alleged pinkos during McCarthy’s Hollywood inquisitions. But he was really wrong about this.

I come to this insight painfully, having spent almost three decades carrying buckets of facts to try to quell America’s blazing sex panic. But as I witness the latest flare-up of panic in Vermont, I conclude: Facts have nothing to do with it.... Read more

“Here, brother, for you a flag,” sing the proud sons and daughters of Armenia, formerly the proud sons and daughters of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “Look at it, three colors / It’s our gifted symbol / Let it shine against the enemy / Let Armenia always be glorious!”... Read more

For a while there — especially during the tense days between Obama’s victory and Clinton’s belated exit — it looked as if American feminism might not recover from the Democratic primary contest.... Read more

Marx believed that the edifice of capitalism was built upon misery, and misery would bring the edifice down. To increase productivity and profit, he reasoned, bosses assembled workers in factories. Once there, though, the workers would soon notice that they were all similarly miserable — and that they outnumbered the bosses. The workers would organize and overthrow the bosses. Capital created its own revolutionary proletariat, Marx concluded: The system contained “the seeds of its own destruction.”... Read more