Today, filmmaker Robert Altman died at the age of 81. Altman is one of cinema’s most important directors. Outspoken, passionate, and visionary, Altman’s fims-including “M*A*S*H,” “Nashville.” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “The Long Goodbye,” and “The Player”-are just some of the hallmark films Altman directed. Never willing to dance with the Hollywood system […]

Rep.  John Conyers has been one of a handful of consistent very public, vocal critics of the Bush administration.  He has recently published an article, “George W. Bush v. the U.S. Constitution,” in the periodical In These Times.  In the piece, Rep. Conyers explains:
Many of us remember a time when the powers of our
government were […]

Today is the final day to weigh on this issue. It is imperative. Please check out the Common Cause site and their Protect Net Neutrality campaign.
And to learn more about the historical context that set all this in motion, including Bill Clinton’s onerous Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was a $72 billion boondoggle […]

Bill Moyers, a journalist’s journalist, once noted:
A producer is a saboteur who tries to infiltrate the passivity of viewers and to create impressions that are lasting.
The Oklahoma born Texas raised Moyers, currently the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, has spent more than five decades honing his craft. Moyers worked in both […]

When in 2003 the Pentagon screened Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s brilliant film “The Battle of Algiers,” the Washington Post reported that a Pentagon flier promoting the screening read as follows:
How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. … Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. […]

Country singer Tim McGraw says rebuild the safety net, take care of the poor
‘It’s innate in me to be a Democrat–a true
Southern populist kind of Democrat. There’s not
a lot of those anymore. I’m not saying I’m
right or wrong. That’s just the way I feel. The
issues that matter to me are the social safety
nets for people, […]

In the recently released “The Last King of Scotland” Forest Whitaker-one of cinema’s best and underrated actors-does indeed give a great performance as the brutal 1970s Uganda dictator Idi Amin. If you didn’t know that already you can pick-up any paper promoting this movie and you will see review after review declaring Whitaker as a […]

…If you want it. Coming on the heels of the news that more than 665,000 Iraqis have lost their lives due to the invasion and occupation of their homeland, the responsibility weighs even heavier on all our shoulders to end the war now. In my most recent post I discussed the fine documentary The […]

In the provactive new documentry The U.S. vs John Lennon, Gore Vidal ends the film with these words:
Lennon sang about love and peace and “represented life, and that is admirable,” he says. “And Mr. Nixon, and Mr. Bush, represent death. And that is a bad thing.”

It is, indeed, a bad thing. Lennon, who became […]

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns today’s murder of Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist renowned for her critical coverage of the Chechen conflict. Politkovskaya was found shot to death in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow..[read more].
JOURNALISTS KILLED ON DUTY: 80*
Here is a statistical analysis of journalists killed in Iraq since hostilities began […]