Peter Daou, highly influential blogger, netroots expert, and political consultant, recently published an insightful article with the Huffington Post on the political theory behind the health care debate. Daou discusses the theory of the Overton Window as a method of influence and control in the public debate on health care reform, one that is rather effectively swinging the debate from progressive to radical right. Daou extensively quotes the Commonweal Institute's very own Dave Johnson, and rightly so, as Johnson is highly versed on the mechanics of the Overton Window and its effects on debate and policy.

The article is now housed in the Commonweal Institute's Archives.

In our April Newsletter, the Commonweal Institute put out a call to action asking you to send us your ideas and commentary on some of the issues the country is facing today. In May, Barry Kendall met Dave Finnigan while at the Campaign for America's Future conference in Washington DC. Finnigan, a consultant with a background in anthropology and health education, is the founder of two influential websites: Climate Change is Elementary and Two Years to Change. In June, Finnigan submitted an important article to the Commonweal Institute. The article summarizes the theory and methods behind creating successful and widespread behavioral changes that will lower carbon footprints, as well as push larger numbers within society to towards more sustainable, and less environmentally damaging lifestyles and daily choices.

"...California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

The Center for American Progress (CAP) recently released two encouraging reports on the current state of progressive values and politics in the US, with a bright forecast for the progressive agenda. The first report, New Progressive America: The Millennial Generation, highlights important generational shifts among the American electorate, singling out the Millennial generation (those born between 1978 and 2000) as the key demographic responsible for the country's departure from conservativism. The second report, The Political Ideology of the Millennial Generation, examines the Millennial Generation's subsequent restructuring of core American values.