Ten months after Mubarak’s fall, Egyptians are risking imprisonment and death in Tahrir Square once again to demand an end to military rule and the election of a civilian government. Some members of the military, disgusted by the murder of their fellow citizens, are standing with them. (more)
Does America need a third political party? The backlash against Obama on the left and the tepid support for Romney would seem to make this a fine time for an independent party to emerge. But it’s also the year of $1 billion campaigns and Citizens United-style funding schemes.
Comic artist Frank Miller’s recent tirade against the Occupy movement gives us a glimpse into the mind of a man made important by an entertainment culture that pushes death, selfishness, uncritical obedience to authority and simplistic notions of good and evil. Guardian columnist Rick Moody has a word for such fare: cryptofascist. (more)
Basically, I love movies about moviemaking. And basically, Hollywood loves making these movies. They have been a well-established genre since Chaplin was a pup. And a pretty good genre it is—there’s nothing like self-regard to bring out the feverish in people.
David M. Kennedy’s “Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America” is part memoir, part police thriller, taking us through the genesis and evolution of one of the most promising responses to urban violence and drug markets in the last two decades.
Some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends keep ascribing our difficulties to structural problems in our politics. But the problem we face isn’t about structures or the party system. It’s about ideology.
Maybe Jon Huntsman will be the next candidate to see a meteoric rise and fall in his poll numbers. Pretty soon, though, we’re going to run out of meteors.
On the evening of November 8th, Occupy Wall Street, the populist uprising built on economic justice and corruption-free politics that’s spread like a lit match hitting a trail of gasoline, notched its first major political victory in the unlikeliest of places: Ohio.
Every social movement needs to guard against the inevitable attempts of mainstream media sources to warp its message, defend its targets and recast its members as lazy, crazy or fringy malcontents. Luckily for the Occupy movement, British journalist Laurie Penny is more than capable of taking on, and taking down ... (more)
Morality in the land of the free is a curious mix of Tinkertoys and torture racks. We have just witnessed a full week of brutal coordinated police assaults upon peaceful protesters. The Occupy movement must therefore rise to a new level of coordinated and class-conscious actions against the corporate state.
Tasteless and questionable as it was for CNN to “co-sponsor” a Republican presidential debate with a pair of right-wing Washington think-tanks, at least the branding was accurate.
Emma Sullivan, 18, says she will not write an apology to Sam Brownback after telling her roughly 65 followers on Twitter that the Kansas governor sucks. Sullivan has gained thousands of additional followers since her high school principal ordered her to apologize to Brownback.
The violent police assaults in response to the Occupy movement are proof that Occupy has hit a political nerve; Britain is preparing for the demise of the euro; meanwhile, the student wing of Occupy tries to encourage higher education. These discoveries and more after the jump.
A progressive, sensitive and highly rational Romney? Yes, but you have to skip Mitt and go all the way back to the words of his father George to make the connection.
The next round of international climate negotiations begins in South Africa on Monday, and a report by the World Development Movement forecasts that rich countries are set to continue using the same coercive tactics that marred previous talks: tying aid money for developing countries to watered-down deals.
Mexican human rights activists have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate President Felipe Calderon (above), senior Mexican officials and the country’s most-wanted drug kingpin for allegedly overseeing the capture, torture and killing of civilians in violence surrounding drug trafficking and the government’s effort to suppress that illegal trade. (more)
Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov is notorious for heading one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, and millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being given to a for-profit military contractor turned propaganda machine to make sure he remains a faithful and able ally in the global war on terror.
From his seat in Congress, House Speaker John Boehner announced in mid-September that American business owners would continue to hold the nation’s wealth (and thus the public welfare) hostage until government granted them the “low-tax, deregulated world they wanted,” writes journalist and author Thomas Frank in Harper’s online. (more)