There has been a lot of discussion lately about how to fund the kind of rigorous investigative journalism that exposes corruption and keeps public officials accountable. Rigorous reporting is a public good and an essential part of a healthy democracy.  The last few years have shown that the free ma...

Careful what you wish for... Sen. Tom Harkin, the proud father of the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, told a Senate hearing on Thursday that NCCAM had disappointed him by disproving too many alternative therapies. "One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and...

One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Dateline DEA newsletter, the Drug Enforcement Agency's a "bi-weekly email informant." The DD is drug war news you can use. This week's edition is especially juicy. We learn that the DEA helped arrest 750 alleged members of the Sinaloa drug cartel after 21-m...

My friend Kathryn Joyce has a new book out about the Quiverfull movement.The book grew out of a Nation article on the Quiverfulls, a conservative Christian movement dedicated to "building God's army" by having as many children as possible. My review copy in the mail and I can't wait to read it. Nady...

When Dustin Lance accepted his Academy Award for best screenplay for Milk, he addressed the bulk of his remarks to the gay and lesbian youth of America, promising them that the dream of Harvey Milk would one day would soon be fulfilled with full federal rights for all, including the right to marry: ...

Gabriel Sherman's first-rate story, The Scoop Factory, takes us inside the online news magazine, Politico : If the 2004 campaign belonged to the blogs, this year's presidential contest was defined by the rise of the Web-print venture founded by banking scion and emerging media mogul Robert Allbritto...

-The UN's International Labor Organization predicts that worldwide job losses from the current recession could hit 50 million by the end of 2009 and pose a threat to global stability. Last week, the new U.S. Director of National Intelligence told Congress that economic instability is now a greater t...

On Monday, I was a guest on the Laura Flanders Show on GRITtv along with comedian and activist Janeane Garafalo, and journalist Danny Schecter. Our discussion was about what separates out-and-out frauds like Bernie Madoff from the architects of the subprime crisis and other Wall Street miscreants wh...

My latest feature story is about the increasing political power of national feminist lobby/advocacy groups and their role in shaping the economic stimulus package, which passed the House yesterday. Obama yanked the rug out from under Planned Parenthood and other groups that advocated strongly for th...

Sec Def Gates admits that it's hard to find non-lobbyists to fill top spots at the Pentagon these days. [Washington Independent] I'm going to be closing the Majikthise comments on these update posts in order to encourage people to interact more on the other site. Better to have one big conversation ...