It's that familiar season, full of quaint old false beliefs. Like that crazy Santa Claus notion there's such a thing as just desserts. Who's been naughty and who's been nice? It's pretty clear in the world of global politics, but there's no relation between behavior and the consequences. In fact,...

The Senate held a historic vote on health care reform Sunday night at 1 AM. Splitting exactly along party lines--that is, if you call Joe Lieberman a Democrat--the health care bill made it through a cloture vote and is one step away from final passage and the conference committee.

To...

You can learn a lot from obituaries -- and recently there have been some great ones.

In February, it was Conchita Cintrón, a celebrated female bullfighter.

Cintrón, who retired from bullfighting after having killed as many as 750 bulls in the ring, died in...

President Barack Obama ended his first prime time press conference on the "I" word.

"When I hear people just saying we don't need to do anything...then what I get a sense of is that there is some ideological blockage there that needs to be cleared...

GRITtv, The Nation, Alternet, FireDogLake, Afro-Netizen, Air America, Brave New Films and the Media Consortium are collaborating on a live program, streaming online, today from 12 (noon) to 2 pm eastern.

Join LAURA FLANDERS, PHIL DONAHUE, JANE HAMSHER, RICHARD KIM, VICTOR NAVASKY, CENK UYGAR, MARK GREEN,...

Voter registration deadlines are just over a week away in many states. Polls open in just over a month. In an election that could well be decided by new voters, voter registration efforts are in overdrive. But signing people up might be the easy part: after that, there's voting. As...

A threatened elite seeks to consolidate control and tighten its grip on a nation's resources ...

You could be forgiven for thinking I'm describing Bolivia, where conflict between landowners and backers of the democratically elected president Evo Morales claimed 30 lives so far this month, but I'm not. Reading...

It's 6 am in Denver and the sky's beginning to light up. An anti-war march starts in a few hours. The hip-hoppers from yesterday's Rock the Bells show are probably just getting to sleep. In the most expensive hotels, I imagine, some are sharpening their knives and getting ready to...

The New York Times ran a feature August 12, on Georgian civilians who've joined the fight against the Russian invasion of that former Soviet republic. The story, by Nicholas Kulish and Michael Schwirtz is full of empathy and heart.

Nika Kharadze and Giorgi Monasalidze went to war last week,...

It's the anniversary of the US bombing of Hiroshima - which makes it a day to consider power and vulnerability. Johnathan Schell writing in Yes Magazine reflects that, "During the Cold War, the principal objection in the United States to a nuclear-weapon-free world was that you could not...

Vanity Fair has released a cartoon cover online in response to the New Yorker's swipe at the media coverage of the Obamas. The fake Vanity Fair cover shows John McCain, in a walker with a bandaged head and Cindy with a bundle of pills giving her hubby a fist-jab....

Information or Inflammation? Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker and Danny Schechter of Media Channel.org went at it on GRITtv with Laura Flanders, Monday. Watch the clip:

Watch the full interview on GRITtv.org

As the Bush administration unveiled a publicly-financed plan to "save" mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, local residents at a town hall forum in Miami were calling for criminal prosecutions of the loan-shark mortgage brokers and investment firms that profited from poor people's housing despair.

It...

Democrats and Republicans played out a partisan fight Wednesday over who is to blame for housing hurricane victims in toxic trailers.

Over one million people were displaced after hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Thousands were sent to live in emergency travel trailers that had poisonous levels of formaldehyde. Prolonged exposure...

It reads like a Hollywood script -- Colombian commandos descend into the jungle and exit with 15 hostages, including a former Colombian presidential candidate and three American Pentagon contractors who'd been held by anti-government guerrillas. The hostages had been held for six long years. What a long time and what...

The rush is on to woo women voters and the politicians and the pundits think they know the trick. Everybody from DNC chair Howard Dean to conservative pundit William Kristol is talking about sexism and why it matters. But women voters aren't stupid. If there was more than...

So much for the Government's much touted commitment to alternative energy. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration has placed a nearly two-year moratorium on the construction of new solar energy projects on public land. While the amount of oil drilling and gas drilling on public land...

Free trade... Free oil contracts... There it is again, that cute word "free."

Of 46 international oil companies, including firms from China, India and Russia that had their eye on the first major oil deals in post-Saddam Iraq, guess who got the gig? Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total and BP!

The western...

So much criss-crossing the country; so many carbon fuels consumed, so little learned. After a year of nomination contests, the press corps has wracked up millions of miles, but are we -- or they -- any wiser about this country of ours? Looking ahead, will the coverage be any more...

I spent some of Wednesday with a worried mom from Idaho Falls, Idaho, whose only son is in the National Guard. Once a month he drives 200 miles to train, then he drives 200 miles back home again. (All for $200, most of which is spent on gas.) He served...