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The film Selma and the fight for the right to vote – in 1965, and now: ARI BERMAN of The Nation comments. He’s an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is working on a book about voting rights since 1965.
Plus: Much of the film Selma is based on the work of historian TAYLOR BRANCH. We’ll speak with him about Selma in his book At Canaan’s Edge: Martin Luther King 1965-1968.
Also: Obama’s liberal apologists: TOM FRANK says they helped torpedo change and make the Democrats safe for Wall Street–and it didn’t have to be that way. Tom writes a column for Salon.com.
And we’ll also revisit a conversation with GARRISON KEILLOR—he says it’s time for all of us to become Republicans.
Plus: 
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Also: the best documentary film of 2014 is 
Rabbi Leonard Beerman of Los Angeles, who died December 24 at age 93, was a great fighter for social justice and peace over the last sixty-five years. His lifelong commitment to nonviolence, Beerman explained, came out of his experience in 1947 in Jerusalem, when he joined the Haganah fighting for Israeli independence. “Luckily, I was spared” killing anyone, he told the Los Angeles Times. “And when I came back, I became a pacifist because of what I had seen: People transformed to just hating, hating, hating. It is no way for humankind to live.”
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Also: it’s the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of World War I, when, after five months of unparalleled industrial-scale slaughter, British and German soldiers stopped fighting and exchanged gifts of food. 
Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate. There were also some outside the CIA, in the military and the FBI, who risked careers and reputations by resisting—and who sometimes paid a heavy price. They should be thanked and honored.
Torture is a crime, a violation of the Federal Torture Act. Those who engaged in the torture documented in such exhaustive detail in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report should be prosecuted, and those who conspired in that torture should also be prosecuted. They include UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo, says Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of the Law School at the University of California Irvine.
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Plus: 
Q. In your new book our man Frank Bascombe says he wants to “decommission” certain words and phrases. What’s the idea here? What is on Frank’s list of decommissioned words?