P I C T O G R A P H . C O M
"If you want sky-high gas prices, put an oil man in the White House." -- JMB
[ John Bancroft is a writer. At his website, at least, you can go home again. ]
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Must Read
The book is
The Dark Side:
The Inside Story of How
the War on Terror Turned Into a
War on American Ideals,
by Jane Mayer. Here's
Alan Brinkley's review
from The New York Times.
Several of the
more important sites on the web:
ACLU: American Civil
Liberties Union
Now, more than ever.
Amnesty International
Working to protect
human rights worldwide.
Harvard Anti-Torture Coalition
Demand the truth.
Stop torture now.
Free Press
Promoting diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media and Internet neutrality.
NPR: National Public Radio
Intelligent, lively
news, analysis and features.
American Freedom Campaign
The U.S. Constitution is under attack. Fight back. Take the pledge.
The Nature Conservancy
Protecting nature.
Preserving life.
NRDC
Natural Resources
Defense Council
Defenders of Wildlife
Dedicated to habitat and wildlife conservation worldwide.
NARAL
Pro-Choice America
Local Harvest
Real food. Real farmers.
Real community.
Oregon Tilth
Dedicated to biologically sound, socially equitable agriculture.
P I C T O G R A P H . C O M
Site Index
Are we hallucinating yet?
New book club, new mission, new model.
Just in time for Labor Day reading comes
the Progressive Book Club. Like other book clubs, it seeks to sign up members who will buy a minimum number of books over a couple of years' time. Unlike other book clubs, it will donate $2 from every sale of more than $10 to a progressive cause chosen by the member. It also offers online community features that set it apart and mails out no paper catalogs. All very cool.
But here's what most impresses me: the club's Editorial Board, which includes such leading lights from publishing, politics, nonprofits, academia and elsewhere as novelist and locavore Barbara Kingsolver, editors and publishers Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation) and Lewis Lapham (Lapham's Quarterly), environmentalist, journalist and author Bill McKibben, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, proprietor of DailyKos.com.
Also recommended: LibriVox: acoustical liberation
of books in the public domain..
HuffPost: Read all about it.
Why do I like The Huffington Post? First, like me it leans left. But just as important is that it features writers who know their craft. Two of my favorite recent posts were by Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which John Le Carre called "impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial and scary as hell," and Jane Smiley, whose most recent novel is the deliciously juicy Ten Days In The Hills.
Also recommended: TPM: Talking Points Memo
Quick Read: Get the facts fast.
See how the candidates rate on the Truth-O-Meter at PolitiFact.com, a service of Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg Times. Even with propagandist-in-chief Karl Rove ranting from the sidelines now, we still need this spin corrective badly. Fox "News," after all, blathers on.
Also recommended: FactCheck.org
