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Pfc Bradley Manning will likely face court martial – and if we don’t act now, he could be convicted on charges that he ‘aided the enemy.’ Last week, Lt. Col. Paul Almanza, the investigating officer in Pfc. Bradley Manning’s Article 32 hearing, recommended that Manning face a court-martial for all 23 charges of which he is accused. The charges Almanza has recommended are absurdly disproportionate to the acts Manning is accused of committing — the most egregious being “aiding the enemy... Read Full Story

This week on the FDL Book Salon at 5:00pm eastern. Details about the books are below. Saturday, July 16th, Civil Rights Attorney, Abby Dees will be here to discuss her new book, Queer Questions Straight Talk, Hosted by Teddy Partridge. Abby’s website and blog . Sunday, July 17th, Editor of The Washingtonian magazine, Garrett Graff will discuss his new book, The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror, Hosted by Cynthia Kouril. Garrett’s website . To contact the FDL... Read Full Story

Worth revisiting today, an essay on the life of MLK, Jr.: Prophet with Honor, by Marshall Frady for New York Review of Books, October 27, 1983 . Have we made any real progress toward the dream? Read Full Story

Sign the letter to the Commanding Officer of Bradley Manning’s brig urging for Bradley’s unnecessary POI order to be lifted Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army private accused of leaking classified information to Wikileaks, has been held in the brig at Quantico Marine Corp Base for five months in inhumane conditions, with severe restrictions on his ability to exercise, communicate, or even sleep. Manning has not been convicted of any crime. Nor is there a date certain for any court... Read Full Story

Compañeros, I have a dream today. No it’s not the dream where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers . . . I have that dream too, but today’s is different. In this dream, Obama’s deficit commission, the Pew-Peterson Commission, Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson, Peter Orszag, Alice Rivlin, Peter Peterson, and David Walker are cast into the middle of Redskins Park, surrounded by a thousand eager flesh-eating... Read Full Story

This report should come as no surprise to anybody: BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned. An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change . These... Read Full Story

photo: disparkys via Flickr Welcome to a new day; welcome to MyFDL! Things will look familiar and yet very different; give yourself plenty of time to acquaint yourself with the new bells and whistles, and more time reacquaint yourself with the slightly different location and feel of older tools and resources. Leave a comment here with any questions or concerns and we’ll try to get to them as quickly as possible. One of the first exercises I’d like to suggest after logging in and... Read Full Story

I believe that this will be the last post ever under The Seminal name – and I am extremely honored to be able to do it. The new look and features that are coming to "MyFDL" are exciting – and represent a step forward in the evolution of the political blog – but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for The Seminal. Two-and-a-half years ago, I was a wannabe blogger dinking around with my own little site on Blogspot. On a good day, I’d get 20 hits, but I still wrote passionately about... Read Full Story

Barnsdall Art Park is vital part of Los Angeles — and municipal art gallery and park that the LA City Council now wants to privatize, citing budget issues. To do so would limit citizens’ access to enjoy and create art and go against the goals of the land’s donor. Sadly, the privatization seems to be steamrolling ahead with minimal community outrage input as a way to keep Barnsdall open. Barnsdall Art Park, atop a hill in the center of East Hollywood,  was the gift of Aline Barnsdall to the... Read Full Story

Recently, while in an antique store in northern Wisconsin, I broke down and sprung for a used copy of the big-ass hardcover Time-Life version of Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator .   And I don’t feel a bit guilty. Yeah, old Norm made his living on hackwork and treacle — but if we were to rid the world’s art galleries of hackwork and treacle, a lot of famous art by a lot of famous artists would suddenly disappear.   As Robert Hughes pointed out in his 1982 commentary on an ironic... Read Full Story