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
 
November 30, 2011
Log in / Register

 Choose a size
Text Size

Featured Reports
AP / Schalk van Zuydam

Cry, the Beloved Climate

The United Nations' annual climate summit descended on Durban, South Africa, this week, but not in time to prevent the tragic death of Qodeni Ximba.
Featured Reports
AP / David Goldman

Below the Safety Net

The courageous people who work day and night in overcrowded urban emergency wards are forced to confront society's failures.
Featured A/V Booth
USA Today

Scott Olsen Speaks, Twice

Things are looking up for two-tour Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, who has regained his voice after being wounded at Occupy Oakland on Oct. 25.
 
Digs

Occupy Wall Street

Find all of our Occupy movement coverage from Truthdig editors, contributors and commenters, as well as the latest from Twitter and around the Web.
 
A/V Booth

The Truthdig columnist speaks at Occupy Harvard about the school’s role in the economic collapse. Long before he was a steadfast critic of the 1 percent, Hedges attended Harvard Divinity School.

Tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act, a Pentagon spending bill set to go before the Senate for a vote this week, is a truly scary provision that would give the military the ability to lock up terrorism suspects, or those so considered by the military, without trying or charging them. Americans included.

Things are looking up for two-tour Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, who was injured Oct. 25 during a police raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment, where he was taking part in demonstrations against the corporatization of the American political system. (more)

 
Arts and Culture

In the spirit of fostering a more “socialist culture,” the Chinese government is banning commercials that interrupt television dramas. Judging by this BBC report, China’s TV executives seem much more concerned with lost revenue than with government interference.


It’s bound to happen, when a movement like Occupy Wall Street takes hold on a national scale, that some famous people in the entertainment business will attach themselves to the cause, and that their bids for legitimacy as self-styled political activists will be met with skepticism, if not worse.


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)

 
 
 
Reports

Even the briefest acquaintance with this smoggy, sprawling capital is basis enough to conclude that much of the campaign rhetoric we’re hearing about China is unrealistic, dishonest or just dumb.


The United Nations’ annual climate summit descended on Durban, South Africa, this week, but not in time to prevent the tragic death of Qodeni Ximba.


Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen. The government just did not like what he wrote.

Chris Hedges is working on a new book and is expected to resume his column in a few weeks. Meanwhile, click here to look back at the classics.


The courageous people who work day and night in overcrowded urban emergency wards are forced to confront society’s failures.


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)

 
Ear to the Ground

Occupy has opened up the conversation about economic inequality in the U.S.; UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi has had her hand in more than just the UC system; and a woman says she had an affair with Herman Cain for more than a decade. These discoveries and more after the jump.


In a recent speech, Dan Rather, once one of the few voices trusted to moderate our in-home information supply, called the current state of the news business “upside down and backwards.” Inspired by Occupy Wall Street, Rather issued a call to get back to proper journalism, and he suggested that the job would fall to independent journalists.


This may not come as particularly surprising news, but psychiatry experts tasked with examining Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who killed 77 people and injured 151 in a mass shooting in his home country last summer, have concluded that he is insane.


Here we have some news that Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown believes “can unite the tea party and Occupy Wall Street.” Sound implausible? Well, Bloomberg News’ parent company went to court to access 29,000 pages of documents from the Federal Reserve, from which the outlet gleaned ... (more)


As you may recall, a couple of years ago Facebook was caught making users’ personal information public without advance warning, suggesting a cavalier attitude toward the issue of privacy, putting it generously. Well, the Federal Trade Commission also treated the social networking giant generously, it turns out ... (more)


So much can change in a few short weeks during campaign season. Just last month, Herman Cain was pulling to the front of the pack of Republican presidential candidates, but now his future prospects have dimmed considerably after yet another salacious headline hit the wires.  (more)

Paulson Congress

Back in July of 2008, when most of us were still blissfully ignorant about the approaching economic apocalypse, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was very aware of some important market distress signals, and he chose to share some of those with an elite group of financial executives, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

 
 
Change.org|Start Petition
 
 
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 © 2011 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.