BANGKOK, Thailand -- He boasts of killing 20 Thai communists and fondly recalls working with the CIA, but denies suspicions that he leads a death squad, involved in bombings and shootings to help the Red Shirts cripple Bangkok.

Major General Khattiya "Seh Daeng" Sawatdiphol is one of the biggest reasons the government and military are afraid to attack the Red Shirts' barricades and clear them from Bangkok's streets.

"Every morning at 4 a.m., I inspect all these barricades," Maj. Gen. Khattiya said in Thai during an interview next to barriers built with bamboo spikes, rubber tires, rags, flammable oil, concrete blocks and razor wire.

"Every day I go out and do a reconnaissance. I do a tactical show of force."

He is wanted for questioning about a mysterious alleged death squad known as "Ronin Warriors."

The government and military blame them for several recent killings resulting from dozens of unsolved M-79 grenade attacks on banks, electric pylons, army positions, an airport fuel depot, government offices, and an evening crowd of people on Silom Road near the Red Shirts' barricades.

If President Obama has his way, Elena Kagan will replace John Paul Stevens -- and the Supreme Court will move rightward. The nomination is very disturbing, especially because it’s part of a pattern.

The White House is in the grip of conventional centrist wisdom. Grim results stretch from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico to communities across the USA.

“It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” President Obama said in support of offshore oil drilling, less than three weeks before the April 20 blowout in the Gulf. “They are technologically very advanced.”

On numerous policy fronts, such conformity to a centrist baseline has smothered hopes for moving this country in a progressive direction. Now, the president has taken a step that jeopardizes civil liberties and other basic constitutional principles.

From reining in Wall Street to preventing the next oil spill and tackling global climate change, we often hold back from taking important public stands because we’re caught in a trap I call “the perfect standard.” Before let ourselves take action on an issue, we wait to be certain that it’s the world’s most important issue, that we understand it perfectly, and that we’ll be able to express our perspectives with perfect eloquence. We also decide that engagement requires being of perfect moral character without the slightest inconsistencies or flaws.

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In his report on Gaza issued late last year, prominent South African jurist Richard Goldstone accused Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes. His language also showed awareness of the fact that the former is an occupying power with most sophisticated weapon arsenal (as reflecting in the number of Palestinian victims), and the latter is a besieged, occupied faction in a state of self-defense. Although Goldstone must have been aware of the kind of hysteria such a report would generate, he still did not allow ideological or ethnic affiliation to stand between him and his moral convictions.

Despite some initial apprehension – owing to the fact that Goldstone is a self-declared Zionist with links to Israel - many justice and peace advocates were comforted by the man’s past record. He was a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

(Stony Ridge, OH) For decades a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Toledo, Ohio has been home to working class Americans and the place where their children were raised. There is even a local park and playground right around the corner complete with Little League field. Its idyllic serenity has not been spared from the pains of the current economic and housing crisis. On the morning of May 3rd, one working-class anarchist and laid-off auto-worker facing eviction resulting from just one more of the nearly 1.5 million foreclosures in the U.S., decided that now was the time to stand his ground.