Democracy Now! and Free Speech TV team up with Aspen Public Access Channel, Grassroots TV, for historic national broadcast.

I was on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado this week when Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter asked me, “Is Obama a sellout?” The question isn’t whether he is a sellout or not—it’s about what demands are made by grass-roots social movements of those who would represent them. The question is, who are these candidates responding to, answering to?

The world lost one of its great comedians this week with the death at age 71 of George Carlin. Carlin had a career as a stand-up comic that spanned a half-century, in which he continually broke new ground, targeting those in power with his wit and genius.

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While the TV meteorologists document “extreme weather” with their increasingly sophisticated toolbox, from Doppler radar to 3-D animated maps, the two words rarely uttered are its cause: global warming.

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Amy Goodman on MSNBC’s Hardball, discussing the women’s vote in the 2008 election.

“This way to better media,” read the floor sign directing people through a skyway to the Minneapolis Convention Center. Thousands of people gathered there for the fourth National Conference for Media Reform, hosted by freepress.net. They came from all walks of life and all ages to address a central crisis in our society: our broken media system. I was one of the invited speakers.

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David Iglesias is an evangelical, Hispanic Republican—yes, that one, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico—and he has positive things to say about Barack Obama.

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“Utah” Phillips died this week at the age of 73. He was a musician, labor organizer, peace activist and co-founder of his local homeless shelter. He also was an archivist, a historian and a traveler, playing guitar and singing almost forgotten songs of the dispossessed and the downtrodden, and keeping alive the memory of labor heroes like Emma Goldman, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, “the Wobblies,” in a society that too soon forgets.

I think the diversity of ideas, religions, and opinions in this country is our glory, is the strength of the U.S. And I think that’s why independent bookstores, which are the sanctuaries of that diversity of opinion, are just so important. They are our intellectual watering holes.

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As the U.S. presidential race continues, so does the arms race worldwide. People—civilians, children—are being killed and maimed, on a daily basis, by unexploded cluster bombs and land mines. Thousands of nuclear missiles remain at hair-trigger alert. The U.S. government rattles its saber at Iran, alleging a nuclear-weapons program, while at the same time offering enriched uranium to Saudi Arabia.

A veteran of Army intelligence has shed new light on the military’s 2003 shelling of the Palestine Hotel, a Baghdad home to many journalists, including two who were killed by that attack.

Sami al-Haj is a free man today, after having been imprisoned by the U.S. military for more than six years. His crime: journalism. Targeting journalists, the Bush administration has engaged in direct assault, intimidation, imprisonment and information blackouts to limit the ability of journalists to do their jobs. The principal target these past seven years has been Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television network based in Doha, Qatar.

Democracy Now! has been selected as an Official Honoree at the 12th Annual Webby Awards in three categories: News, Political and Podcast.

Food riots are erupting around the world. Behind the hunger, behind the riots, are so-called free-trade agreements, and the brutal emergency-loan agreements imposed on poor countries by financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

Amy Goodman appeared on The Tavis Smiley Show Thursday on PBS discussing her new book. Watch excerpts of the interview.

As the media coverage of the Democratic presidential race continues to focus on lapel pins and pastors, America is ailing.

Sen. Barack Obama is clearly a bad bowler. But it was not too long ago that African-Americans were not allowed in some bowling alleys. In Orangeburg, S.C., three young African-American men were killed for protesting against that town’s segregated bowling alley.

The American Psychological Association is in the midst of its own heated presidential campaign. The central issue is whether APA members should be banned from participating in “harsh interrogations.”

It has been 40 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. King was there to support striking sanitation workers, African-American men who endured horrible working conditions for poverty wages. While King’s staff was opposed to him going, as they were scrambling to organize King’s new initiative, the Poor People’s Campaign, King himself knew that the sanitation workers were at the front lines of fighting poverty.

We just passed the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. military members killed in Iraq since the invasion five years ago. Still, the death toll climbs. Tomas Young was one of those injured, on April 4, 2004, in Sadr City. Young is the subject of a new feature documentary by legendary TV talk-show host Phil Donahue and filmmaker Ellen Spiro, called “Body of War.”