LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.2010 Webby Award Winner for Best Political Blog  
October 24, 2010
Log in / Register

 Choose a size
Text Size

Featured Arts and Culture

Stephen Elliott: The Art of the Overshare

The self-reflective "Adderall Diaries" author opens up about his literary projects, his hyperlocal politics and the role of narcissism in his work.
Featured Reports
AP / Richard Drew

Too Much Fox-Flavored Kool-Aid for Juan Williams

Juan Williams is living evidence that watching too much Fox News will rot your brain.
Featured Cartoons
Mr. Fish

Good Grief, Barack Obama

 
A/V Booth

NPR canned Juan Williams and created a firestorm of negative publicity and political calls to defund public broadcasting. Is there such a thing as separation between so-called objective and opinion media? And how much is the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage mess costing Americans?

It’s hard to believe that the tea party movement is less than 2 years old. Just think of the cast of colorful characters we’ve gotten to know in such a short time—from old favorites repurposed for the job like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann to newcomers like Christine O’Donnell. Stephen Colbert relives the magic in this special “Colbert Report” mash-up.

Right about where NPR’s Juan Williams says, in this clip from Monday’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” that he thinks Bill O’Reilly is “right,” offering the Fox News host his support after last week’s O’Reilly kerfuffle on “The View,” things take a fateful turn for Williams’ career. Coincidence?

 
Arts and Culture

“The Adderall Diaries” author isn’t one to hold back, as readers of his memoir—not to mention his tweets, blogs, “overly personal emails,” essays and online magazine, The Rumpus—know well. Here, he opens up about his literary projects, his hyperlocal politics and the role of narcissism in his work.


We here at Truthdig know that our own Robert Scheer really wishes that he didn’t have to write his latest book “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street,” but ... (continued)


“Carlos” is a fictionalized but persuasively believable biography of celebrity terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a man known for his indolence as well as support for a whole gamut of revolutionary causes.

 
Digs

The Questions Education Reformers Aren’t Asking

Mike Rose notes that no one in power is asking fundamental questions about the purpose of education and whether much-hyped reforms might do more harm than good.

 
 
Reports

The crisis over faulty or fraudulent paperwork in mortgage foreclosures—which is either a big deal or a humongous deal, depending on which experts you believe—is the fault of arrogant, greedy lenders who played fast and loose with the basic property rights of homeowners.

The only way to objectively define the tea party is to find a test case. And thanks to Wisconsin’s Senate race, we have exactly that.

Sometimes tea party ideologues are described as libertarians, but the behavior of their leading candidates betrays an authoritarian streak just beneath all the sonorous rhetoric.


Juan Williams is living evidence that watching too much Fox News will rot your brain.

While Republicans hammer away at a key set of themes, from jobs to the deficit, Democrats have left loyalists who deserve better without the support of a driving national message.

It is not pension claims that are driving the current political uproar. It is popular fury at the people who created the present economic crisis and have been rewarded, with everyone else left to face the consequences.


I do not regard gay and lesbian soldiers seeking elementary legal equality as political heroes. It takes much greater courage for soldiers and veterans of all sexual persuasions to renounce war and imperial adventures. [Pictured above is Stephen Funk, a former Marine who refused to serve in Iraq.]

As a wife, I understand where Ginni Thomas is coming from. As a reporter who covered every sordid minute of the Thomas-Hill hearings, I don’t.


Behind the wonderfully engaging smile of this president there is the increasingly disturbing suggestion of a cynical power-grabbing politician whose swift rise in power reflects less the earnestness of his message and far more the skills of a traditional political hack.

In this, the year of the Mama Grizzly, let’s stop stirring the moose chili for a moment to ponder three words—man up and whore—and what they have to tell us about the muddled state of gender politics.

 
Ear to the Ground

The U.N. has begun flying tents into the West African country of Benin to shelter some of the hundreds of thousands of people chased from their homes by heavy flooding after months of heavy rains. Adding to the misery is an outbreak of cholera. two-thirds


As French President Nicolas Sarkozy tries to push through a reform plan to increase the retirement age, protests and strikes have wreaked havoc on the country and sent Sarkozy’s approval rating into a tailspin.


Raul Grijalva is a four-term congressman from southern Arizona. Yet in the wake of the state’s SB1070 anti-immigrant legislation, the historically shoo-in Democrat is locked in a tight race with his Republican challenger after Grijalva had the gall to back a national boycott campaign against the Grand Canyon State.


In a horrific witch hunt, violent assaults against gays have followed publication in an Ugandan newspaper of an article headlined “100 Pictures of Uganda’s Top Homos Leak.” The paper, called “Rolling Stone,” said it plans to continue to publish the names of gay individuals.


A cholera outbreak that has killed about 200 people in rural Haiti is threatening to spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince, potentially endangering the hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors crowded into squalid camps around the city.


The release of some 400,000 classified military documents on the Iraq War has led the U.N. to call on the Obama administration to investigate American troops’ human rights abuses. Leaked documents tying British forces to possible war crimes sparked a demand for a public inquiry in the U.K. as well.


The midterm elections are nearly upon us, and things are looking a little dicey for longtime California Sen. Barbara Boxer in her race for re-election against newcomer Carly Fiorina. That’s why President Obama happened to be at… (continued)

 
 
 

 
Join the Liberal Blog Advertising Network
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Blogroll

Sites

     

Blogroll

 

AlterNet
Arts and Letters Daily
BuzzFlash
Center for Investigative
  Reporting

Citizens for Ethics
Democracy Now!
Human Rights Watch
KCRW: Left, Right & Center
Laura Flanders

Media Matters
Mosaic
Ms. Magazine
Progressive Book Club
TheHill.com

The Nation
The Peter B. Collins Show
Where’s Our Money?
Working for Change

Altercation
Boing Boing
Salon | Broadsheet
BuzzMachine

Cursor
Daily Kos
Feministing

Blogroll Continued

     

Advertise Liberally
Blogroll

 

The Huffington Post
Instapundit
LA Observed
Political Animal

Romenesko
Taegan Goddard's
  Political Wire

TalkLeft

Talking Points Memo
Tapped
The Largest Minority
The Notion

Think Progress
Wonkette

BRAD Blog
Crooks and Liars
Informed Comment
SirotaBlog

           

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.