Democrats

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Hear Tom Hayden as he spoke at a popular bookstore in Sacramento, CA on June 25, 2008.



From June 25, 2008, to a stand room only crowd at one Sacramento's finest bookstores, Hayden
discussed his books
href="http://www.amazon.com/Writings-Democratic-Society-Hayden-Reader/dp/0872864618/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1
?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217699638&sr=1-1">Writings for a Democratic Society
and
href="http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Chicago-Eight-Generation-Lights/dp/0872864952/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8
&s=books&qid=1217699690&sr=1-1">Voices of the Chicago 8: A Generation on Trial. Hayden was the
60's radial icon, having been head of the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society_%281960_organization%29">
Students for a Democratic Society, and one of the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Seven">Chicago 8 who were put on trial for allegedly
plotting to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention.


Duration 58:21

href="http://www.archive.org" target="_blank">
Hear George Lakoff as he spoke at a popular bookstore in Sacramento, CA on June 29, 2008.

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The author of
target="_blank">Don’t Think of an Elephant and Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at UC Berkeley spoke about his new book
href="http://www.amazon.com/Political-Mind-Understand-21st-Century-18th-Century/dp/0670019275/ref=s
r_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217030205&sr=1-1" target="_blank">The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand
21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain..



George Lakoff is known for his ideas about the centrality of metaphor to human thinking, political behavior and society. In recent years he has applied his work to the realm of politics, exploring this in his books. He is the founder of the progressive think tank the Rockridge Institute.

Duration 1:43:55

Tom Hayden adds wisdom of experience to social activism

By Bruce Dancis - bdancis@sacbee.com

Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Editor's note: Bee staff writer Bruce Dancis was a prominent anti-war activist and member of Students for a Democratic Society. He spent 20 months in federal prison as a Vietnam War draft resister. Dancis also has a master's degree in American history from Stanford University. Dancis and Tom Hayden have met a handful of times since being introduced in 1966, most recently at an SDS reunion in the early 1980s.

At 68, Tom Hayden says he's "retired from competitive politics."

Yet the well-known activist, defendant in the Chicago 8 conspiracy trial and member of the California Legislature for nearly 18 years is hardly idle, despite having heart bypass surgery in 2001.

While Hayden has no plans to run for office, that doesn't mean he's given up on shaping the nation's politics.

Hayden currently sits on the editorial board of the Nation and writes for the online Huffington Post. He's founded two Web sites – Progressives for Obama and Stop Funding Torture – and teaches, most recently at Occidental and Pitzer colleges in Southern California. He's also involved in efforts to end the war in Iraq and in other issues, such as sweatshops, globalization "and the effects of it in my own backyard, in Los Angeles, where we have 97,000 out-of-work, out-of-school kids on the street."

Primarily, though, says Hayden in a recent hourlong phone interview from his office in Culver City, "I think my proper role is to reflect and research and write."

He has written six books since 2000, including two released this year, "Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader" (City Lights, $21.95, 592 pages), a collection of nearly 50 years of journalism and autobiography; and (with Ron Sossi and Frank Condon) "Voices of the Chicago 8: A Generation on Trial" (City Lights, $15.95, 285 pages).

Obama and Dean Team Up to Recast the Political Map
Thursday 05 June 2008 - by: Sam Stein, Huffington Post

DNC Chairman Howard Dean will team up with Democratic Party presidential nominee Barak Obama to test his 50-state strategy. (Photo: AP)

Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign's most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing an unconventional path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: unlike those before him, he has pledged to redraw the electoral map by putting new, traditionally Republican states in play.

Obama, Clinton and Anger to Burn
by Norman Solomon - Published on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

In politics, as in so many other aspects of life, anger is a combustible fuel. Affirmed and titrated, it helps us move forward. Suppressed or self-indulged, it’s likely to blow up in our faces.

With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination coming to a close, there’s plenty of anger in the air. And the elements are distinctly flammable. As Bob Herbert just wrote in the New York Times, “the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion.”

Herbert doesn’t spread the blame evenly. And, as an elected Obama delegate to the national convention, I don’t either. But at this stage in the nomination process, the returns of blame aren’t merely diminishing — they’re about to go over a cliff.