Paul H. Rosenberg posted an excellent article to the L.A. Independent Media Center which both puncture’s David Horowitz’s hollow martyr pose and makes a strong case against his claims about reparations in the "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too" ad. Among other choice tidbits, Rosenberg points out:

Of course, Horowitz himself is an old hand at silencing people he disagrees with. In the late 1980s he spearheaded the campaign to shut down the news program "South Africa Now," carried on many PBS stations. His rationale? It was "communist propaganda," because its producers worked with members of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, which included communists in its ranks. (Southern segregationists in the 50s and 60s used the same tactics against Martin Luther King.)

The New York Times has an interesting-looking review of On Hostile Ground, a documentary which gives credit where credit is due, by showing the heroic actions of three abortion providers who put their lives on the line every day to make women’s reproductive rights a reality.

Slate‘s The Best Political Weblogs looks like a very interesting feature, although their declaration that by featuring selected blogs they are somehow democratizing journalism, would be more convincing if they actually featured weblogs from people other than their well established, published journalist buddies.

While trying to find a webbed version of FAIR‘s excellent expose of the Boston Globe’s hypocrisy on the David Horowitz saga (they blasted student editors for censoring Horowitz–a feat that is, in fact, impossible, as I have remarked before … and then they themselves refused an ad from an environmental group which criticized Staples), I accidentally stumbled across a great essay of FAIR‘s Women’s Desk back from 1993, Erasing Rape: Media Hype an Attack on Sexual-Assault Research. It’s a skillful refutation of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet job on Mary Koss’s research on acquaintence rape… nothing much new for those of us who have kept track of the research on sexual violence for a while, but definitely a good summary of the criticisms Roiphe (and nearly everyone else who objects to the Koss research) uses, and the reasons why these criticisms are full of it.

A great interview with Alison Bechdel, cartoonist of Dykes to Watch Out For