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What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

John Pilger's documentary explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Pilger claims that the film "...tells a universal story... analyzing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called "war on terror". According to Pilger, the films message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the "seed beneath the snow". Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who purportedly took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries and who he claims are profiting from the war in Iraq. He investigates the School of the Americas in the U.S. state of Georgia, where General Pinochets torture squads were reportedly trained along with tyrants and death-squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

Two of the largest cable news providers, Fox and CNN, have laid claim to the title of "most trustworthy" this year. Both reference recent polls to back up these claims (Fox / CNN) but how does the media or news agencies like them establish or develop trust and how do they define it? More importantly, how do we (the audience) define it?

For the third time in the last 20 years, establishment voices with high-profile slots in traditional media are trying to convince the public to accept cuts to Social Security by endlessly claiming such cuts are necessary, without giving coherent evidence to justify the claim. Twice, under former presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, these voices were defeated - but they didn't give up. And now they are in striking distance of their goal: the fact that Republicans have taken over the House, combined with the fact that the president appointed a deficit reduction commission which nearly recommended a cut in Social Security benefits - and might well have done so if Representative Schakowsky hadn't worked to undermine the co-chairs' plan - means that one can't be complacent; some reports have suggested that the president may indicate support for cuts to Social Security in his State of the Union speech. Of the two principal Washington political actors who will shape the outcome - the Republican leadership and the president's team - one is a determined adversary of the public interest, the other a very uncertain ally. The most successful anti-poverty program in US history is again in grave danger.

The 30-minute speech I gave last month at the Symphony Space in New York is now available on video, and is posted below in three YouTube segments (the first segment also contains the 4-minute introduction of my speech). The speech pertains to the evolution of my views on media criticism, the nature of media propaganda and what drives it, and what can be done to combat it. A DVD of the entire event -- featuring the three other speeches: from Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore -- is available at FAIR's website. I want to note one example, from today, that vividly illustrates many of the themes I discussed in that speech.  It is found in the following passage from this Reuters article on Obama's escalation of the covert war in Yemen and his targeting of U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki for assassination: A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that a U.S. strike last Friday killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel al Qaeda operative, which followed last month's attempted strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Whether Awlaki has any operational role in Al Qaeda at all is a matter of intense controversy.  The U.S. Government has repeatedly asserted that he does, but has presented no verifiable evidence to support that accusation.  But what is not in dispute is the notion that Awlaki is "the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."  He unquestionably is not, and never has been, as multiple Yemen experts have repeatedly noted.  The Reuters claim is factually and entirely false. Whatever one's views are on Obama's assassination program, targeting U.S. citizens without due process obviously raises extraordinary and vitally important questions.  As The New York Times' Scott Shane put it when confirming Awlaki's inclusion on Obama's hit list: "The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an America

Numerous media outlets -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and NPR, among others - last night published classified files on more than 700 past and present Guantanamo detainees. The leak was originally provided to WikiLeaks, which then gave them to the Post, NPR and others; the NYT and The Guardian claim to have received them from "another source" (WikiLeaks suggested the "other source" was Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former WikiLeaks associate who WikiLeaks claims took, without authorization, many WikiLeaks files when he left). The documents reveal vast new information about these detainees and, in particular, the shoddy and unreliable nature of the "evidence" used (both before and now) to justify their due-process-free detentions. There are several points worth noting about all this:

I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that people assume that there is no difference between the way they experience the world and the world as it exists. I'm surprised people are willing to assume that metaphysical claims (i.e. claims outside of the purview of human testability/experience) are absolutely true. It seems that the only honest position one can have on "God" (in quotes to emphasize the lack of consensus on its definition) is to hold that "God" or "The Kingdom of Heaven" or "enlightenment" seem to be possible states of human consciousness; as such they may have individual normative value and seem to me to be generally socially desirable.

Job sharing and increased leisure are the answer to rising unemployment, claims thinktank

Economic meltdown, pro-democracy revolts, protest camps - it's kicking off everywhere. But was all this catalysed by new social media and technologies as many claimed? Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent who witnessed much of the unrest at first-hand, tells Liz Else that it's a lot subtler than that

President Obama, he says, "seems to be playing a sly double game-protecting banks from sharing the pain while proclaiming sympathy for embattled homeowners." Greider adds, "The government, in effect, has been sheltering banks from facing the hard truth about their condition." Banks may be valuing mortgages or mortgage bonds at 85 cents on the dollar when their true market value is closer to 30 cents. "That strengthens the case for a general and orderly write-down now: if many of these loans aren't ever going to be rapid, then the assets now claimed by the banks are imaginary."

The Great Recession could have spawned another era of fundamental reform, just as the Great Depression did. But the financial rescue reduced immediate demands for broader reform. Obama might still have succeeded had he framed the challenge accurately. Yet in reassuring the public that the economy would return to normal, he missed a key opportunity to expose the longer-term scourge of widening inequality and its dangers. Containing the immediate financial crisis and then claiming the economy was on the mend left the public with a diffuse set of economic problems that seemed unrelated and inexplicable, as if a town's fire chief dealt with a conflagration by protecting the biggest office buildings but leaving smaller fires simmering all over town: housing foreclosures, job losses, lower earnings, less economic security, soaring pay on Wall Street and in executive suites.

Since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig April 20 killed 11 oil rig workers, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico continues to claim the lives of wildlife, like birds and sea turtles, compromise the fishing and tourism industries, and threaten the culture of the Gulf coast. That, and it's spawned an awful lot of misconceptions.

In a flurry of blind panic and irrational exuberance, organizations from the European Central Bank to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suddenly abandoned everything we had learned, at a bitter cost, about economics during recessions and decided that fiscal austerity was the way to go while the world was in the depths of a slump - indeed, many claimed that spending cuts would actually be expansionary.

A secondary school in north London claims to have almost eradicated homophobic bullying after it started teaching lessons on gay history.

WASHINGTON -- Billionaire Warren Buffett rebutted claims that the Obama administration is unjustly hurting business orders with high taxes by saying that in fact, the wealthy have never had it so good.

From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. "The future has no future" is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks. 

Forget about whether you're liberal or conservative, pro-union or anti. A simple question: in either the public or the private sector, would you not expect a college grad who has worked his or her job for 4 years to be paid significantly more than someone with a high school diploma who's had his or her gig for 2 years? 

Why doesn't money (usually) buy happiness? Alain de Botton breaks new ground for most of us, offering reasons for something our grandparents may well have told us, as children. It is rare, and pleasing, to see a substantial philosophical argument sustained as well as it is in this documentary. De Botton claims that we are more anxious about our own importance and achievements than our grandparents were. This is status anxiety.

Barack Obamas indefinite detention claim, coupled with the enemy combatant right he inherited, enables him to lock up any US citizen forever without a trial, author and political consultant Naomi Wolf told RT.