Green Bay’s Superbowl Victory: A Win for “Socialism”

10 different teams have represented the NFC in the Superbowl over the last ten years. It has been 7 years since a team repeated as Superbowl champion. This competitive parity is loved by fans and the NFL has been prospering as a result, becoming America’s undisputed number 1 sport. This most recent Superbowl became the [...]

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Political violence and democracy in America

I was away camping in the Big Basin Redwood State Park over the weekend and was shocked when I returned to civilization to find out about the attempted assassination of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Shocked, but not surprised. I have been afraid something like this would happen basically since I got to the US in [...]

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The Europe of the conservative imagination

This article by Jeffrey Kuhner in the Washington Times is a great example of conservative commentary in response to Health Care Reform. It’s the Washington Times, so not completely mainstream (being owned by a Korean cult leader and all) but it’s only a small jump beyond what you can read in the Washington Post. Certainly it [...]

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Earth Hour: Good idea, bad framing

So this Saturday is Earth Hour. For the uninitiated Earth Hour is call to action that asks people to turn of their electricity for one hour in recognition of climate change. Earth Hour was started in Sydney, Australia, in 2007 and has since been taken global by WWF. Their website says: In 2009 hundreds of [...]

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DC joins the future

Two weeks ago, relatively quietly, the world changed in DC. On Wednesday March 3 the government of the District of Columbia began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The video below is of the first same-sex wedding in DC, a week later. DC has joined five states in allowing same-sex couples to wed: New Hampshire, [...]

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The dangers of media fragmentation

I ran a social media for social change workshop on the weekend for people involved in the AshokaU Changemaker Campus program. During it I was asked a question which often concerns me but for which I have no good answer: how do we reach diverse audiences with our message when so many people’s media consumption [...]

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America the Ungovernable

My Dad always used to say to me, “Tom”, he’d say, “America is ungovernable.” Dad’s talking nonsense again I would think to myself, of course America is governable. I mean, it’s being governed isn’t it? Now that I’m living here I can say: only barely. Dad was right, America is an incredibly difficult country to [...]

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The Obama Adminstration one year in

This is an exerpt from an interview I did with Alex Steed for the Millennials Changing America blog. He has been collecting perspectives from  youth organizers about the successes failures and dynamics of year one of the Obama administration and was interested in my “outsiders perspective”. I’m now officially a token Aussie.

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Updates from the Civil Rights battle of our times

Gay marriage is the civil rights issue of our times, the clearest and most blatant example we still have of institutionalised discrimination against a group of peope in our society. In America the battle is primarily being fought state-by-state as progressive chafe at the lack of progress at a Federal level, where the noxious ‘Defence [...]

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The Republican Mindset

See if you can follow this logic, from an interview Republican Senator Orrin Hatch gave to a conservative outlet on Monday. Speaking about the proposed health care reforms he said: If they get there, of course, you’re going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody’s going [...]

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