By Fred Topel

Since being elected president in 2000 (look it up if you don’t remember), Al Gore has forged a career as a public speaker. The movie of his speech about the climate crisis, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar for best documentary. The former vice president also serves as the chairman of Current TV, a next generation news service he cofounded. The cable network features political programming with hosts like Cenk Uygur and Jennifer Granholm. It offers an alternative to the ultra right wing Fox News, and serves as a breath of fresh air when compared to the staid but supposedly balanced CNN.

Gore presented the network’s latest programming, anticipating the 2012 election cycle, to the Television Critics Association on Jan. 13. The critics must have reminded Gore of his days facing the White House press corps. We get the scoop on Snooki, so we’re not letting any fancy guys in suits get off easy.

Perhaps Gore is still a politician at heart. He took questions from critics but you might say he was filibustering to keep the conversation revolving around his talking points. Yes, he brought up the climate crisis on his own. Check your cable listings for Current TV and below for Gore’s thoughts on news coverage, Occupy Wall Street and the upcoming election.

Read SuicideGirls’ interview with Al Gore on SuicideGirls.com.

by David Seaman

I thought it was a hoax when I read this morning that US Senator Rand Paul was detained in Nashville by the TSA. It is, however, real. If ever there were a time to stand together and speak out against the out-of-control police state, it is today.

Specifically, I feel that:

• The TSA, which detained US Senator Rand Paul this morning for refusing a full-body gropedown, is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and must be de-funded and scrapped. It intimidates citizens and searches us without warrants or cause, in CLEAR VIOLATION of our rights.
• The NDAA’s indefinite detention without trial provision is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and completely disgusting. It must be amended immediately; those who drafted and supported these provisions should be removed from office. It’s a criminal act and a near declaration of war against the American people.
• The proposed Enemy Expatriation Act, or EEA, is even worse.
• Bills like SOPA, and global treaties like ACTA, enable government and corporate censorship. Such a push toward totalitarian censorship is DISGUSTING AND UNACCEPTABLE.
• The dishonestly titled “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011” is OUTRAGEOUS. It damages the Internet’s freedom and provides a wide open door to Big Brother censorship and archiving of PRIVATE personal communication online. This affects YOU. Incidentally, this legislation does very little to protect minors from exploitation. It has been given a ridiculous name so that any politician voting against it faces political suicide: “How could you vote against protecting the kids?!”
• Hollywood, once a progressive force for good that questioned the political status quo, has now become just another cynical lobbying power that has no problem permanently weakening the freedom of speech, as long as they protect their lame franchise major motion picture profits. Time to boycott Hollywood. The MPAA’s strong-arming of politicians to support SOPA/PIPA, as well as their television networks’ pathetic coverage of these issues, is unacceptable.

Disobedience is civil. Disobedience is patriotic. Speak up, speak out.

David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and on his humble YouTube channel, DavidSeamanOnline. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.

Related Posts:
SG Political Contributor David Seaman Discusses SOPA and NDAA
NDAA And Occupy Congress: What If You Now Live In A Dictatorship, And No One Told You?
NDAA 101: Fact Vs. Fiction

by David Seaman

SG Political Contributor David Seaman gives us a simple primer on the NDAA – a bill Obama signed into law on New Year’s Eve, when he thought the world wouldn’t be watching. Why you should be scared of it, and why it’s unconscionable and unconstitutional.

David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and on his humble YouTube channel, DavidSeamanOnline. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.

Related Posts:
SG Political Contributor David Seaman Discusses SOPA and NDAA
NDAA And Occupy Congress: What If You Now Live In A Dictatorship, And No One Told You?

by Yashar Ali

Note to men: if your sense of masculinity depends on avoiding ever having to buy a plastic tube filled with cotton, you’ve got way bigger problems than you realize.

Earlier this year, I was watching a repeat episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The guest on particular this episode was Dr. Oz, who was tasked with answering a series of health questions, many of which were related to women’s reproductive health.

After Dr. Oz answered a question about douching, Oprah turned to a gentleman who was sitting in the audience and (with some humor) apologized to him for being stuck listening to all the conversation about “womens’” stuff and being seen in on TV for participating in an episode that dealt with, among other topics, menstruation and menopause issues.

The gentleman turned out to be Major League Baseball player, Jim Thome, who plays for the Chicago Whitesox. He had brought his wife to the Oprah show as a gift (tickets to the Oprah Show were nearly impossible to come by). 

Oprah’s interaction with Jim Thorne left me fuming. Why should we feel bad for him? Why would Oprah feel bad for him? I am an Oprah fan, but her apology was uncharacteristic for someone who spends her life advocating for and helping women.

[..]

by David Seaman

News Corporation chief executive and chairman Rupert Murdoch lashed out on Twitter against the changing tide of public opinion with regards to SOPA and PIPA. In this video post, SG Political Contributor David Seaman talks about why big media corporations such as Fox and Disney support these ugly sister acts, and gives us an overview of yesterday’s day of internet action against them.

He also gives us an update on NDAA – one of the most treasonous bills ever signed into law by Congress according to some – and points us in the direction of the grass roots groups who are seeking to recall every congressman that supported it. Also, David talks about last night’s NDAA segment on Coast to Coast, in which he participated.

David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and on his humble YouTube channel, DavidSeamanOnline. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.

Related Posts:
NDAA And Occupy Congress: What If You Now Live In A Dictatorship, And No One Told You?

While, as a subscriber funded site, we cannot blackout on #J18, we would like to express our profound gratitude and support to those that do. Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, CraigsList, BoingBoing, RawStory, and YourAnonNews are among the 7,000+ sites that are going dark or marking their opposition to SOPA in some form.

Many internet users know SuicideGirls as a pinup site, but, as a social network that predates both MySpace and Facebook, much of our content is user generated. Under the restrictive and open-ended terms of SOPA it would be virtually impossible for us to operate. It would be an utterly impractical and economically unviable task to police the providence of all the content our users upload and the links they post prior to publishing, and being forced to do so would seriously stifle the free speech our members currently enjoy.

Despite reports to the contrary, SOPA is far from dead, and there are powerful lobbying groups with deep pockets working to ensure it passes in some shape or form. Please join us and voice your opposition to SOPA and its sister act PIPA.

SuicideGirls
XOX

by SuicideGirls

On the surface, The Last Mountain is a documentary about the dirty business of coal, the highly destructive and toxic practice of mountaintop removal mining, and one community’s fight to preserve their homes, their livelihoods, their health, and the last great mountain in the region. However, the story of Coal River Mountain in West Virginia is allegorical of much that is wrong with America, which is why during our roundtable conversation with the film’s champion, renowned environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he barely mentions the four-letter word that is coal. Instead, Kennedy focuses on the underlying history and climate that has allowed corporations to rape and pillage our environment, and poison and kill our citizenry with impunity.

In The Last Mountain, Don Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy (he retired at the end of December 2010), is typecast in the role of modern day robber baron. As the largest coal producer in Central Appalachia, his company is only able to function on the scale it does by subjugating democracy. Mountaintop removal mining is cheaper and less labor intensive than traditional underground coal extraction methods, but it causes such an affront to the landscape, water and air, that it can only be done when the authorities charged with protecting the public interest are willing and able to look the other way.

Between 2000 and 2006 Massey chalked up a staggering 60,000 EPA infractions, but has suffered little in consequences beyond much belated and pitifully low fines that serve the government’s need to be seen to be doing something while maintaining the status quo. Of course, Massey is not the only corporation and coal is far from the only industry that is using and abusing our severely compromised shell of a democracy. In light of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate campaign donations (and a subsequent one that makes direct-to-candidate payments permissible), our government couldn’t be for more up for sale if it were posted on eBay.

Though there will inevitably be dark days ahead for our democracy, it’s not all doom and gloom thanks to a groundswell of grassroots activism as witnessed in Coal River Valley and documented in The Last Mountain. As for the environment, Kennedy points out towards the end of this interview that there’s an (LED) light at the end of the tunnel, and ironically it’s capitalism in its cleanest and purest form that may end up saving the day.

Read our interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on SuicideGirls.com.