A recent New York Times article pointed to a rising trend of attacks on homeless people in America, and indicated that several states were considering legislation to classify these attacks as hate crimes.
Any way you slice it, attacking a homeless person is a barbaric thing to do. The homeless are indeed an easily identifiable minority group, and a particularly helpless one at that. Should assaulting a homeless person be classified as a hate crime?
Sonia Sotomayor was sworn in as the U.S. Supreme Court's 111th justice on Saturday. It's the first time that the ceremony has been televised. Share your thoughts on the court's first Latina and third woman justice.
This is a story that got my attention recently. The first time I heard about the incident was last week it when it aired on MSNBC.
Now when I first heard about this, I didn'tread anything into it or jump to any conclusions. The story involved people wanting to assert their constitutional right to bear arms at presidential town hall meetings.
It definitely raised a red flag and presented some concerns when one man in Arizona and close to a dozen people pop up doing the same thing at another presidential event just a week later.
Is there a coincidence between these two reports, or is it something more? That's what many people would like to know. We all understand the fact that having constitutional rights, as well as the freedom to assert those rights, are the hallmarks of our democracy. There's no question about it.
My question is whether or not these most recent incidents have taken place in greater numbers during President Obama's administration. If so, there's a greater concern here that I hope people take seriously.
So what do you think? Are individuals demanding the right to bring guns to presidential assemblies happening more frequently now than in previous years with previous presidents?
About 8,000 people with little or no health insurance waited in long lines in Los Angeles to receive free healthcare. The event was created by Remote Area Medical (RAM), a nonprofit that began in 1985 to bring free health services to the world's inaccessible areas. Today, more than 60% of RAM's work serves rural America.
Check out video from our Web team's visit to RAM's recent event. Also make sure to catch Tavis' interview with Stan Brock this Friday, August 21.
Also leave a comment on what kind of healthcare reform you'd like to see.
Hate it or love it, the Philadelphia Eagles just made a major roster addition.
As a result, the sports world turned upside down when the Eagles announced that Michael Vick would make his return to the football field.
The announcement led to a full-day discussion on talk radio and continued coverage on ESPN. What led Vick to the Eagles? Let's just say Michael Vick definitely found an angel in the form of Tony Dungy.
Pole-dancing, however, must have somehow been okay.
Websites are still buzzing about the performanc, and yet, the question still remains: Is it Miley Cyrus' prerogative to do as she pleases or should she be more concerned about being a positive role model?
There is a small community of L.A. residents who have redesigned their lives to adhere to standards of low-impact living in food production, waste reduction, water and energy use, as well as education, transit and housing. Our Web team visited the Los Angeles Eco-Village to find out how they make it happen. Check out the video from our visit.
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck Florida and the Gulf Coast, breached New Orleans' levees in multiple locations and flooded 80% of the city. More than 1,800 people lost their lives in the hurricane and floods, and damage estimates hover around $80 billion, making it one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history.
2) On Thursday, FEMA urged New Orleans residents, particularly those still living in temporary trailers, to prepare a family disaster plan for the current hurricane season.
During the hearings, Waters said: “It is high time to get serious and get beyond just talking about doing something to help these people: four years after Hurricane Katrina we still have individuals living in trailers, seeking additional benefits, dispersed throughout the country in unfamiliar cities, and disconnected from their families, friends, and their hometown.”
Waters' remarks and the government's recent actions raise an important question: Have we done enough to help the Gulf Coast region and New Orleans rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina?
Share your thoughts with us below. Check out Tavis' conversations with journalist Dan Baum, who chronicled New Orleans' response to Hurricane Katrina for The New Yorker, and with Alden McDonald, the president of a New Orleans bank damaged by the storm. And visit our post-Katrina special feature page, “Right to Return.”
With the movie's popularity will no doubt come an increase of attention into the lives of Julia Child, Julie Powell, and The Art of French Cooking. Sales of the book itself have spiked (number one on all of Amazon, as of writing this…not too shabby), but does that mean people are actually going to attempt the book's notoriously labor-intensive recipes? According to Michael Pollan, they probably won't. Not only that, people are less likely to cook anything complicated these days than ever before, French or otherwise.
In Pollan's latest article, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, he describes the correlation between the rise of interest in cooking shows on TV, and the decline in people actually cooking. According to one expert he talks to, cooking will be to our grandchildren what butchering a chicken is to us, a scary thought considering the myriad dangers of corporate-prepared foods.
I think it's worth taking a moment to consider the fact that if there had been no Naomi Sims, there would be no Iman, no Alek Wek, no Naomi Campbell, no Tyra!
The fashion and women's magazine industries might have continued to skip over African American women, particularly dark-skinned African American women (yes; I said it) to model their clothes and grace their covers.
So when Sims lost her battle with breast cancer Saturday, at the age of 61, the fashion industry lost a pioneer, and the world lost one of the most exquisite icons of the "Black is beautiful" movement.
Even though Americans have plenty of concerns to keep them up late at night, they may have to add yet another one to their list. In a recent story from CBS News, a group of presidential advisers concluded that the virus known as swine flu could have a serious impact on American lives.
How serious, you ask? Well, according to an article in The Washington Post, roughly 90,000 lives could be lost this fall to H1N1 illness.
The Center for Disease Control reports on their site that about 36,000 Americans die on average a year from flu complications. The number, however, is still staggering.
What we wouldn't want to see is another public official given the task of allaying concerns, only to stir up more trouble, especially in the midst of a crisis.
Are we prepared for a killer flu season? Check out the video to learn more.
Two and a Half Men stars Cryer alongside Charlie Sheen (also, a wise-cracking housekeeper and an equally sassy chubby kid), and is a return to the sitcom in its most iconic form. Unlike other shows of recent years that attempt to change the sitcom into something new, vibrant, and in some cases, unrecognizable, Two and a Half Men has more in common with I Love Lucy than Arrested Development.
For one thing, Men is filmed in front of a live audience (like Lucy). For another, its jokes are rarely ironic or meta, rather they're pretty much straightforward gags. Unlike Lucy, they spend a lot of time riffing on bodily functions and sex, but the comic timing and simplicity of the humour is for the ages. Two and a Half Men may not be the most intelligent show on TV, but that doesn't make it any less funny.
The weeks and months following the death of the King of Pop have brought a lot of new information to the fore, some of it nice, much of it not.
Probably the most puzzling thing to come out in recent days, however, has been the news that the FBI had almost 600 pages of files on Michael Jackson. San Francisco blogger Michael Petrelis broke the story after a Freedom of Information Act request yielded 591 pages, available to anyone curious enough for the bargain-basement price of $49.10.
While it may be some time before the files are released, there is a great deal of curiousity as to what they contain. While LA Weekly's Patrick Range McDonald notes that it's not uncommon for musicians to rack up lengthy dossiers (Elvis' was 650 pages, John Lennon's a mere 300), one wonders what Jackson's contained.
Some commenters on the blog suggest much of it is related to the singer's infamous child molestation trials, while others quip that there's probably more than one Michael Jackson in the FBI's system. Either way, it looks like this story isn't going away anytime soon.
On his blog, Dancing With Delay (yes, really), the man formerly known as "The Hammer," for his mercilessness in the political arena, offers clips to his TV spots, media contact information and e-mail updates via a service called, "Two-step with Tom." Really.
In his bio on the site (which, incidentally, contains no mention of dancing), Delay introduces himself as "one of the most-sought after conservatives on the national scene," and asserts that he "spends a great deal of his time educating conservatives on how to fight in the new political paradigm." One can only hope this includes dancing, because that's obviously the only thing holding them back at this point.
Inglorious Basterds is set in WWII Europe, wherein a group of Jewish soldiers (the Basterds), led by Brad Pitt, make it their mission to dispatch as many Nazis as they can in the nastiest ways possible. Heads are broken in with bats, throats are cut, scalps are taken. No Saving Private Ryan, this, but we are talking about Tarantino, after all.
Listening to co-star Eli Roth tell it on CBC radio's Q, this film incorporates the best elements of all the director's previous work, and rolls it into one majestic, artful, cinematic triumph. Roth's enthusiasm is understandable, given which side his bread is buttered on, but listening to him describe it, it's hard not to want to drink the Kool-Aid.
Much has been said of the film's final line, “I think this just might be my masterpiece,” but as Tarantino put it to one interviewer, “It's not for the chicken to speak of his own soup. Maybe three years from now I'll have more of an opinion. But, really, it was just meant to be a line for people to have fun with.”
Well ladies and gents, it's official. Paula Abdul is leaving American Idol. The pop star and songwriter appeared as a judge on the hit show for eight seasons.
Speculation around Abdul's departure has been on entertainment sites for as long as I can remember.
While best known for The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, Coppola has a new film out called Tetro, which is a return to his personal roots as an artist and filmmaker. As Coppola put it in the first of his interview segments, “When I was younger I wanted to write and direct films that were in the spirit and inspiration of the great filmmakers who inspired, really, all of my generation.”
Tetro is a grand and operatic film, part of what Coppola calls his “second career.” While, like his wines, Coppola's filmmaking seems to become more refined with age, he'll never be able to recapture the reckless youthful ambition that made his early films so great and made him an international celebrity.
The 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse offers a glimpse into Coppola's creative process on the chaotic set of Apocalypse Now. Shot mostly by his wife, Eleanor, during the more than 200 days Coppola and his crew spent in a Philippine jungle trying to make the film, it documents the director's self-doubt, perseverance and descent into near-madness.
In footage from a press conference that opens the film, Coppola sums it up this way, “We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack, Dennis Hopper refused to learn his lines, Marlon Brando was famously difficult, Coppola contemplated suicide and, from it all, a brilliant, timeless film emerged.
Tetro is worth watching, but there's no way it can capture the same urgency and passion that imbued Coppola's earlier work. How could it?
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