AmericanDreamer

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• Location northern Virginia
• Party Democrat
• Politics Pro-equitable educational opportunity, pro-labor and pro-union (not because labor and unions are always in the right but as part of a necessary counterweight to overweening and destructive corporate power in our day), build-a-21st-century-safety-net, pro civil rights modern-day populist/egalitarian liberal on economic issues; moderate to left of moderate on most social/cultural issues; anti-militarist cross between a liberal internationalist and a realist on foreign policy issues (as I interpret these two traditions they lead to very similar conclusions). Civic republican (lower-case "r"). Good-government progressive. There. Aren't labels unhelpful? Moderate by temperament, which basically means I try to be civil and find it constitutionally hard not to hear out other points of view, although I am opinionated and occasionally startle others who come to assume I can't do anything except nuance. I try to think independently and if a conclusion I reach seems inconsistent with any of the above labels, I'm not bothered by that. I used to be, but that was many years ago.

Favorites

• Favorite Books Four that are especially pertinent as I write in August 2010 are: A Presidency in Peril, Robert Kuttner; The Fireside Conversations: America Responds to FDR During the Great Depression, Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine; The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and Washington Rules, by Andrew Bacevich. A few that come to mind are Walking with the Wind, John Lewis (perhaps the living "famous person" I most admire); Hitler's Thirty Days to Power, Henry Ashby Turner; Cincinnatus, Garry Wills (on George Washington and restraint in the exercise of power); Everything for Sale, Robert Kuttner (clearest and most sensible presentation on pluses and minuses of markets I've read); Animal Farm and other works by George Orwell; A Hope in the Unseen, Ron Suskind; The Arrogance of Power, William Fulbright; The Irony of American History, and Moral Man and Immoral Society, both by Reinhold Niebuhr; The Divine Right of Capital, Marjorie Kelly; RFK: A Memoir, Jack Newfield (on the possibility of growth in senior public officials while serving in office); The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell.
• Favorite Quotes (lately; it changes): "I used to make these speeches and denounce public officials with such fervor and such a lack of facts."--former fiery, self-critical, and effective labor and civil rights leader Jerry Wurf, speaking of his younger, less effective days. "Two pins shared a balloon. Watch out, said one of them, I'm going to prick a hole in *your* half."--Tor Age Bringsvaerd, courtesy website of Thomas Hylland Eriksen. "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."--Martin Luther King, Jr. "The question is not 'If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?''If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?' That's the question."--Martin Luther King, Jr.; "I wouldn't urinate on you if you were burning at the stake."--a New Jersey resident, in correspondence to President Franklin Roosevelt