Check out the United Nations page on Human Rights Day and celebrate that on this day in 1948 the UN General Assembly adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The focus this year is on poverty. “Poverty is a cause and a product of human rights violations.” The video is from the intro of the 1998 […]

Earlier this month, before the election, Democrats accused the Bush administration of playing politics with the Agriculture Department’s report on the status of hunger in the United States by delaying its release until after the election. The recent history is that the report is released in October about two-thirds of the time and in November […]

This article, featuring the views of Charles Rangel, D-NY is getting a lot of action on Newsvine. The premise is pretty simple. We should reinstate the draft so that all of us, including the sons and daughters of lawmakers, would bear the risk of wars we choose to engage. The theory is that would make […]

A week has passed since my last post urging us to vote. This has been intentional. I wanted to let some time pass to allow a clearer picture of the new political landscape to emerge. There are winners and losers for sure, but I believe the real winner is the politics of compromise. Many claim […]

The old Simon & Garfunkel song describes two lovers as one is about to leave in the coming morning. He dreads the coming dawn. He dreads what awaits him as light breaks the darkness of night and the thrill of being with his love. This will be our condition too, come Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. […]

From Newsvine and the A.P: Since 1999, the number of people struggling with hunger has risen from 31 million to 38 million in 2004. The Agriculture Department report has generally been released in October, a month after annual poverty figures are released by the Census Department. Democrats said the delay appears political. Competitive elections across […]

From Reporters Without Borders: The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who […]

Time to listen to Adam Brodsky’s Uncivil Rights again. Transcript of Olbermann’s commentary at truthout.org. [youtube]ZXofTYFTH7A[/youtube]

That’s the name of John Reed’s book about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Warren Beatty’s Reds tells his story. This week the movie was released for the first time ever on DVD in a 25th Anniversary Special Edition. This is one of my all time favorite movies. In many ways it is more relevant today […]

This is the way Jack Abramoff described Ralph Reed in an email to his partner in crime Michael Scanlon. Both Abramoff and Scanlon have plead guilty to corruption charges in the lobbying scandal that is still being played out in Washington, DC. The clip below is from Bill Moyers’ recent “Capitol Crimes” on PBS. The […]