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Across the country last week thousands of Americans gathered at more than 850 house-parties organized by the Sierra Club to watch a new documentary, 'Coal Country'. I meant to write about the doc last week but better late than never especially as the movie's screenings have been met with intimidation and outright threats of violence in several places, with the unseen hand of big coal working with local officials to prevent the movie from being shown.

A stunning film that exposes the devastation of mountaintop removal coal mining to the forests, streams, and communities of Appalachia, 'Coal Country' puts the personal stories of residents of the hardscrabble coal towns at the heart of the story -- both working miners whose livelihoods depend on the mines and longtime locals organizing against the devastation of their native preserves. Far from a one-sided polemic, the film is an intimate portrait of the complex issues facing these areas with a keen understanding of the need for jobs, and the relative prosperity that coal brings to areas that desperately need cheap energy.

The trailer gives a sense of the power, beauty, tragedy and inspiration of the film.

Is there something inherently wrong with entrusting a private company to run a prison? Might this even be unconstitutional? As far as I'm aware, no court in Europe or the United States has entertained this question. When and if one does, there will now be a precedent to cite: a potentially historic 8-1 ruling just handed down by the Supreme Court in Israel that overturned a 2004 Knesset amendment permitting the establishment of such prisons.

In an opinion rightly hailed as a "bombshell" in 'Haaretz', Israeli Supreme Court President Dorit Benisch did not deny that privatizing prisons might potentially save money. She simply determined that incarceration infringes on such fundamental liberties that only the state should carry out this function, not least since the alternative is to turn prisoners into a means of extracting profit. "Economic efficiency is not a supreme value, when we are dealing with basic and important rights for which the state has responsibility," ruled Benisch.

The ruling is not without its ironies, among them the fact that Israel doesn't actually have a written constitution, only a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to serve as a guideline for legal rulings. There is also the fact that, as Yonatan Preminger noted in this fine article in the magazine 'Challenge' a year ago, the conditions in Israel's state-run prisons have often been abysmal, with prisoners and security detainees (mainly Palestinians) crowded into cramped, squalid cells bereft of adequate beds and toilet facilities.

BEIJING--During President Obama's recent visit to China, he got some advice on Afghanistan from Chinese government officials – and an offer of Chinese assistance toward a negotiated settlement of the war.

Yang Wenchang, a retired senior Chinese diplomat who is currently the president of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA), told a small group of US journalists that China is willing to cooperate with the United States in finding a way out of the Afghan morass. "The two presidents discussed the issue at length," said Yang, who maintains extensive contacts with US and other Western officials as head of CPIFA. "China will cooperate."

However, during a wide-ranging discussion over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Beijing, the former ambassador said that China does not believe that the US and NATO can succeed militarily. "I think Obama should realize from the outset that no outside power can rule Afghanistan. The Russians tried to change the system in Afghanistan for ten years," he said. "Many Americans, especially among the Republicans, want to send more troops. I don't think NATO can succeed."

In his contribution to 'Going Rouge: An American Nightmare', 'The Nation''s Washington, D.C. Editor, Chris Hayes, quotes a joke from a friend in publishing: In the future the Internet will consist entirely of Sarah Palin slide shows. It was disheartening this week to watch the exhaustive coverage of Sarah Palin's book 'Going Rogue' and see so few serious responses to the substance of her book. (And yes, there is substance.) The AP fact-checked Palin, but gone almost completely unanswered are many of the policy prescriptions she is injecting into the political debate: Tax cuts to stimulate job growth (been there, didn't work) and drill, baby, drill as an energy policy.

Fortunately, 'Going Rouge' managed to inject some sanity into the debate. Here's video of Naomi Klein on Wednesday's Joy Behar Show, commenting about Palin's economic policies and her role in the healthcare debate. And here's a great video from GRIT TV, where 'The Nation''s Richard Kim, Max Blumenthal, Salon's Rebecca Traister and Alaskan blogger Shannyn Moore discuss Palin's record in Alaska, and how her policy prescriptions would impact women in America. And here's a thoughtful review of both books from 'Inside Higher Education'.

Lastly, here's a podcast of NPR's On Point from Friday. I was on for the full hourlong week in review--topics were Palin, mammograms and healthcare.

Sarah Palin may have the headlines.

But Harry Reid has a health-care reform bill, and it is advancing. Indeed, with Saturday night's 60-39 Senate vote to open a historic debate on the measure, the movement humanize America's healthcare system -- which began almost 70 years ago -- is closer to a congressional breakthrough than at any time in its history.

"Ted would be happy," Reid said Saturday night, invoking the name of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, who spent a political lifetime championing health care reform.

Bill Moyers, who was at the side of President Lyndon Johnson at the time when disastrous decisions were being made to escalate the U.S. presence in the quagmire that was Vietnam, used his experience to speak Friday night to President Barack Obama about what could be an equally disastrous decision to escalate the U.S. presence in the quagmire that is Afghanistan.

"Our country wonders this weekend what is on President Obama's mind," Moyers began, at the opening of a remarkable hour of television. "He is apparently, about to bring months of deliberation to a close and answer General Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops in Afghanistan. When he finally announces how many, why, and at what cost, he will most likely have defined his presidency, for the consequences will be far-reaching and unpredictable. As I read and listen and wait with all of you for answers, I have been thinking about the mind of another president, Lyndon B. Johnson."

The presidential adviser turned journalist, who will retire his "Bill Moyers Journal" television program in April, then turned to decades old tapes that were recorded as Johnson was making the decision to surge hundreds of thousands of additional soldiers into a war that would kill almost 60,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese.

You gotta give Sarah Palin's book tour credit for one thing: It's really putting the passive-aggressive instincts of the religious right on public display.

And not just because she spends much of her 432-page book blaming campaign media flacks and hairdressers, bless their cinder-black hearts, for the McCain/Palin ticket's loss in 2008. Here's Sarahcuda talking up 'Going Rogue' for the Christian Broadcasting Network this week, reproving her critics by saying, "These are probably some lonely people, some shallow people who want to take a shot like that, and we need to pray for these people."

The former (for half a term) governor of Alaska sounds a bit like the 'Saturday Night Live' Church Lady, who pretended to be generous and devout but was always on the verge of boiling over with resentment, even barely contained violence, for anyone whose demeanor she considered insufficiently pious. (What would Dana Carvey's character have said about Palin's too-tight skirts and stiletto-heeled red pumps, I wonder?)

Hurricane Katrina is often called a natural disaster, as if it was all nature's fault, not man's. The reality, of course, is that federal, state and local governments ignored warnings from scientists for years, both that climate change would lead to increased storm activity, and that destruction of wetlands outside of New Orleans had hurt the city's natural defenses against a storm surge. Calls for fixing levees and infrastructure investments went unheeded while the doctrine of markets and profits held sway.

This week, a federal district judge finally ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers was indeed responsible for part of the devastation in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward and parts of St. Bernard Parish.

The failure of the Corps to recognize the hazards wetland destruction had created was "clearly negligent on the part of the Corps," said U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr. "Furthermore, the Corps not only knew, but admitted by 1988 [the threats to human life] and yet it did not act in time to prevent the catastrophic disaster that ensued."

My new Think Again column, called "History Isn't a Dirty Word," about the incredible amnesia shown by the MSM regarding the Bush presidency is here.

My new 'Nation' column, on Marty Peretz's 'New Republic' being "Bad for the Jews" is here.

This week on Moyers:

This week in 1) craziness and 2) corruption:

1) SC offering shoppers tax-free weekend on guns

President Obama is expected to make a decision regarding his Afghanistan strategy after Thanksgiving. Before doing so, he would be wise to consider an alternative which has, until now, been excluded from the systematic review of the gravest decision a president must make. That alternative is laid out clearly in a just-released letter to President Obama from the Congressional Progressive Caucus' Afghanistan Taskforce.

Through careful consultation with a wide array of experts, including those who testified at a series of forums on Afghanistan earlier this year, the Taskforce has developed a smart, alternative approach that would be more effective in providing for both US and Afghanistan security, and far less costly in treasure and lives.

The secretive Federal Reserve, former lair of "masters of the universe" like Alan Greenspan and Tim Geithner and current engine of a Wall-Street-first, Main-Street-last "recovery," is being set up by the Obama administration and Congressional leaders to get more powers.

That's a bad idea.

But it will be made a little less bad if Congress establishes some oversight over the largely-unaccountable institution.

My new Think Again column is called : "History" Isn't a Dirty Word about the incredible amnesia shown by the MSM regarding the Bush presidency is here .

My new 'Nation' column, on Marty Peretz's 'New Republic' as being "Bad for the Jews" is here (I took a relatively high road here, and did not get personal about Peretz but whenever I write about "aging ideologue" I like to point out the following. The man's entire life is filled with nothing but negative accomplishments. He has never published a book; never published a memorable piece of scholarship. He has written no journalism of note, save in a negative fashion. He does not actually edit the magazine upon which his name appears. All he has really done since becoming an adult is to spend down the inherited fortune of his ex-wife, lose TNR readership, destroy its reputation, end its tenure as both a liberal and a weekly magazine, and spew insults to people who, almost without exception have accomplished more in life than he has. Were it not for his former wife's inherited fortune, we would take his racist rants no more seriously than we would any other bitter, crazy old man screaming at Arabs and Latins on the streets of Cambridge.)

That's all this week

It's hard out here for a blogger.

And hard for online journalists, unemployed new media producers, and just about anyone else dabbling in journalism without professional backing.

Beyond the basic financial challenges, there is scant legal help for members of the new media, even though they face the same complex, pricey legal threats as traditional media. Plus extra threats -- like government attempts to out anonymous bloggers, which can cost a lot to fight in court.

The Senate healthcare bill unveiled Wednesday night by Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, is not exactly the cure for all of what ails America.

But the 2,074-page document significantly expands access to medical care for Americans who currently lack coverage, contains a modest public option, bars discrimination by insurers against Americans with pre-existing medical conditions and gets remarkably good marks from the Congressional Budget Office.

In many respects, Reid's "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" is a better bill than the House measure.

I'm writing today from Chongqing, a vast city in central China that is China's gateway to its western regions. By some accounts, Chongqing is the largest city in the world, a muncipality of 32 million people, but that, I've learned, is misleading, since that number includes the population of a handful of satellite cities and a rural population of 20 million. A few years ago, however, China carved Chongqing and its 32 million people out of Szechuan province and made it a municipality of its own, and today the Chongqing is a pilot project for the most important thing happening in China, and perhaps the world: the urbanization of as many as half a billion people from rural farms and villages into newly constructed cities. "Chongqinq," says Wen Tianping, the city's spokesman, "is a microcosm of China itself."

The scale of the enterprise is staggering. In Chongqing, each year for the indefinite future, the plan is to move 500,000 people from rural to urban life. That means that Chongqinq must plan, ready, and construct the equivalent of a city the size of Atlanta, Georgia, every year, providing jobs, roads, housing, infrastructure, schools, hospitals and more. It's a project that has been going on in China for the past 20 years, during which 200 million people have already been urbanized, and over the next generation another 200 to 300 million people will follow in their footsteps.

"We have plans, timetables, goals," says Qian Lee, the director of Chongqing's comprehensive business promotion project. "You can't have a plan for everything. But we don't make plans to be abandoned. We make plans to be accomplished. You do it scientifically, as we always say in China."