Screen shot from the trailer of Inception     10. Black Swan   Using the ballet “Swan Lake” as a backdrop, this film intensely brings to life the reality that performers can often lose their selves when performing. Directed by Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), Nina Sayers

On December 6th, Chicagoans came out for an Emergency Response Rally organized by the Committee to Stop FBI Repression to support activists who have been targeted by the FBI in the past months. Those present stood in the cold and condemned U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been directing the FBI to expand its repression of activists in Chicago.

Weeks after the FBI raided their home, two Chicago
activists, Stephanie Weiner and Joe Iosbaker, stood before a crowd of about 150
Chicagoans gathered outside the Dirksen Federal Building and declared during a
press conference they, and twelve others who were subpoenaed, have no intention to go before any grand juries and participate in a “fishing expedition.”

On the day before Thanksgiving, members of single payer advocacy organizations gathered for a press conference to voice strong concerns with a Democratic health bill that they feel fails to address the biggest problems with health care in America.

The jury’s still out on much of the Affordable Care Act, but here are 1.3 billion reasons why it may have improved on the status quo in some fashion: Consumers and businesses are expected to receive an estimated $1.3 billion by this August in rebates from health insurers who spent

Lost in yesterday’s House vote to replace the defense trigger cuts is that the public actually wants to cut the defense budget by even more than what’s contemplated in those cuts. Ask your average American whether the defense budget should go up or down in 2013, and by how much,

The fallout from JPMorgan Chase’s “Fail Whale” trade (I’m trying to coin this phrase, so help me out, will you?) continues. But there’s been a thread in one section of the liberal blogosphere that has confounded me. For some reason, writers are trying to position this as a problem for

The deal to extend the payroll tax cut through the end of the year included a deal to “extend” unemployment benefits. I put “extend” in sarcasm quotes because the bill actually reduced that extension gradually. Instead of 99 weeks of unemployment to jobless workers in hard-hit states, the bill gradually

The President today is in Reno, Nevada, and he’s going to take a victory lap on HARP 2.0. President Obama will announce new figures Friday showing a dramatic spike in the number of Americans taking advantage of federal programs designed to help struggling homeowners and stabilize the lagging housing industry,

We now have yet another state diverting a large portion of the hard dollar funds they received from the foreclosure fraud settlement, and instead of using them to help homeowners, moving them to cover a budget hole. The latest example concerns Arizona, one of the major states suffering from the