This weekend's fast-moving, long-overdue HBO docu-drama on the theft of the 2000 election stopped four years short. It did a riveting job of portraying how Team Bush, headed by James Baker, strong-armed its way into the presidency. But it's now time for the major media to finally face up to Act 2 of the GOP's rape of the American electoral system, and produce a piece of equal heft and clout about Ohio 2004. And let's hope it won't be necessary to follow with a third piece on how the GOP could steal 2008.

The most telling moment in this generally credible HBO offering comes at the very end. Al Gore's Florida point man, Ron Klain (as played by Kevin Spacey), spots the victorious James Baker getting on his private plane. Ever the gentleman, Klain approaches Baker to congratulate him, and ask "if the best man won." Baker responds he thinks so.

As the end game for the Democratic nomination takes shape, the historic union of the feminist and civil rights movements has never been more in evidence. Nor has the next upcoming appointment to the US Supreme Court ever been more pivotal.

It's no accident that for the first time in history, we have both an African-American and a female contender. No matter what one may think of the two individuals -- their stands on the issues, their personalities, their "baggage" -- the margins between them are very small. They are each a product of historic movements that have come to this moment precisely at the same time, and in partnership. It will be difficult for the Democrats to win without the full, enthusiastic support of both of them.

Part of this confluence can be told through parallel voting rights histories. The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, allegedly guaranteed the right to vote "regardless of race." The 19th Amendment, guaranteeing the ballot for women, came a full fifty years later.

Does that say this country is more sexist than racist?

"What this means is that corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have… .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

–Derrick Jensen

(Perhaps my profane words will offend, but in light of the fact that we are in a race to eradicate capitalism before it renders the Earth uninhabitable, I don’t give a fuck).

Yes. It’s another anti-capitalist rant by Jason Miller. Big surprise! I’m the associate editor for Cyrano’s Journal Online, the anti-capitalist tool. We’re not big fans of free market ideology and its tacit socioeconomic license to rape, pillage and plunder.

Well, why shouldn’t the Pentagon put its four-stars on the tube to ladle out patriotic talking points to the American public like mess hall stew?

There’s a straightforward quasi-honesty to government-managed news, which only has a weird feel because the Penta-pundits had to pose as impartial analysts and play along with the image the networks wanted to project: seriousness, independence, etc. How demeaning that their meetings with the Secretary of Defense had to be secret — an embarrassment awaiting ultimate exposure by the New York Times.

Let us consider the awkwardly evolving nature of war. Even as its psychological support diminishes among a public grown skeptical of any enterprise that requires ultimate sacrifice and absolute faith — and influenced, at least at the margins of its consciousness, by a permanent and growing pro-peace movement — it is more necessary than ever, as the engine that drives such a large part of the economy and makes so many people rich. The war machine can’t simply be dismantled. War must remain “inevitable.”