By David Swanson

What it would have cost us to publicly fund independent media that would have prevented the invasion of Iraq wouldn't amount, in a year, to what we spend on a month of occupying that country.

By David Swanson

President Obama said on Tuesday night:

"Now, the truth is that, unless you have a -- what's called a single-payer system, in which everybody is automatically covered, then you're probably not going to reach every single individual because there's always going to be somebody out there who thinks they're indestructible and doesn't want to get health care, doesn't bother getting health care, and then, unfortunately, when they get hit by a bus, end up in the emergency room and the rest of us have to pay for it."

By David Swanson

By David Swanson

Project Censored has released a valuable new book called "Censored 2009: The Top 25 Stories of 2007-08".

By David Swanson

George Lakoff has one of the louder voices in the chorus arguing that elections must be won on personality and fluff rather than policy positions. One problem with this advice is that if, at the end of it, you win an election, you won't know what you've won. You won't know whether the people you elected will do anything you want done unless they've told you their policy positions as well as making all the right moves in the area of visual dramatic superficial BS.

By David Swanson

Last Friday one of two things indisputably happened. Either a dozen senior Congress members and several well-known expert witnesses went certifiably and collectively insane, or charges of the most extreme executive abuses of power ever heard in the history of this nation were backed up by overwhelming evidence during a six-hour hearing of the House Judiciary Committee focused on the possible need to impeach the President and the Vice President. Either way, a nation with a public communications system worthy of a democracy would have learned the news.

There's been a lot of public discussion of late of the Associated Press's Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier's changes in style rules. Out with "just the facts," in with opinion and perspective. Or so the story goes. The changes that are afoot at the AP appear to be part of a broader trend, influenced - in part - by the internet, the medium itself and the competition from bloggers. Of the two biggest problems I see in American journalism, this trend could fix one of them while not necessarily having any immediate impact, pro or con, on the other.