Bill Lichtenstein

It didn't take long. On the heels of the Jimmy Fallon appearance by President Obama, an attack ad from American Crossroads, the Super PAC being "advised" by Karl Rove, hit the Internet and the airwaves, depicting President Obama as a celebrity president whose policies had failed young people.

Mental health activists supported by young people are engaged in a direct action to prevent the closing of public mental health clinics in Chicago. You can watch it live here.

For the past year, mental health advocates in Chicago have been opposing the closing of public mental...

Rush Limbaugh's bullying of the young law student Sandra Fluke recalls the incident that finally knocked Sen. Joe McCarthy off of his pedestal on June 9 1954, after he attacked the integrity of a young Harvard Law grad, Fred Fisher, an associate at Hale and Dorr in Boston....

If you're looking for some interesting reading, you might try these 167 emails filched by the underground hack-tivists of Anonymous from Stratfor, an intelligence firm based in Texas that has been dubbed a "shadow CIA." Among other spooky tidbits, Stratfor allegedly monitored the political prankster group,...

The Washington Post has proclaimed "Occupy Wall Street is Over." Like they know.

The only thing I see is over is the Washington Post's coverage of the BP Oil Spill, Rupert Murdoch's wiretapping the government, the mud hole where the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans used...

Looking at this nice-looking group of kids, who would have thought, as we faced a global financial disaster, that they could have been involved in messing things up so badly?

Which one would you have said would have been most likely to crash the world's economy?

I just got this notice about a new web application called Zaarly. It seems that right in your area, there are people selling things you want, and Zaarly can find them and their contacts for you (wait, didn't that used to be what the Yellow Pages was?) And...

As Rupert Murdoch sat before the U.K. Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on Tuesday, claiming that he was nothing if not contrite about the recent allegations of his company's phone hacking, London comedian Jonnie Marbles rushed forward to smear a paper plate covered with shaving cream in the...

After getting off to a rocky start at the beginning of President Obama's term, the stock market has grown steadily. Consider the Dow Jones, which went up 128 points on Wednesday alone.

Even if you don't have a stock portfolio overflowing with GOOG and AAPL, and especially...

I could care less about an FCC commissioner going to lobby for Comcast. I care about what Comcast did to Barry Nolan in 2008, for standing up to Bill O'Reilly at a time when it wasn't so au courant to criticize Fox News. O'Reilly had a hissy fit after Nolan...

It's rare to work in an established art form where you can work with and be influenced by those who invented the genre.

Not so for documentary filmmaking.

Bob Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles, Ricky Leacock and Charlotte Zwerin, so often forgotten, whose last film project was our...

Proof there's hope. Nick Kristof walked the streets of Cairo for days, and writes of the needed paradigm shift in the attitudes of Americans regarding the Middle East.

He says Al Jazeera trumped the U.S. news media in sparking democracy there:

Too often, Americans scorn...

Yet another US journalist is on CNN, talking about having had to "run for their lives" and having their equipment destroyed or confiscated. Those with stories like this include Anderson Cooper, Nick Kristof, and an ABC producer who was nearly beheaded.

No one...

Athletes for years have thanked "the man upstairs" after a great catch, a home run or winning a big game. As a result, an oft-asked question by those watching sports has been, if God is responsible when you win, why doesn't anyone ever blame God when they lose?

Meet Stevie...

NPR has hired the multi-national law firm of Weil, Gotshal and Manges to conduct an internal investigation of the firing of NPR news analyst Juan Williams on October 20, after Williams told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly on the air that "I'm not a bigot" but that if Williams sees people...

News came this morning that the U.S. unemployment rate increased in August, to 9.6 from 9.5 percent in July. The job loss was less than Wall Street had predicted.

With the announcement came the good news that 67,000 new jobs were added to the private sector, including...

Just in case there is any lingering confusion in differentiating between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fox News' Glenn Beck following Beck's impersonation of Dr. King at the Tea Party Jamboree last Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial, here's a hint: only one of them was asked to apologize after...

If you're feeling run over by the need to use single syllable words in order to express yourself in 130 characters on Twitter and tired of Sarah Palin "inventiating" new words, here's a chance to luxuriate with (yes, that's a word) and help save obscure and endangered words from extinction...

The US District Court decision on August 4, overturning California's Proposition 8 and its ban on same sex marriages was a watershed moment for proponents of equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans.

Within hours of the landmark decision, pundits ranging from MSNBC's liberal Rachel Maddow to...

File this under "What a different world we live in":

In the wake of the June 28 arrest of ten alleged Russian spies living in the U.S., an opinion piece in today's The Moscow Times, boldly criticized Russia's intelligence services, saying:

Russian intelligence and the spies they hire...