I like Noam Chomsky a lot, his recent books about the quagmire in Iraq are very good, and nobody minus Bob Avakian, Raymond Lotta, or Dr. Cornel West has really matched his "Deterring Democracy" and "What Uncle Sam Really Wants".
The only problem I have with Chomsky is he's an Anarchist, and I don't think Anarchism has the answers that will actually liberate humanity and get us to a better society, and he has professed kind of reformist ideas in the past... but overall, he is a very progressive and excellent writer and an amazing groundbreaking linguist, and I hope to see him more and more in the mainstream.