King Fossil Fuel has ruled: there will be no Senate debate on global warming this year. And Joe Lieberman's greenwashed campaign gift for John McCain is a no-go.

On June 6 the Senate failed to override a Republican-led filibuster against the bi-partisan Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. It was a stunning victory for a coal-oil-gas industry that will resonate through the presidential campaign and deep into next year's new presidency and Congress.

The legislation was complex and controversial, involving a wide range of potential strategies to fight the climate crisis. At its core were "cap-and-trade" schemes establishing a federal bureaucracy meant to control emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Proposals introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) promoted renewables and efficiency, among other things. Waiting in the wings was a series of amendments which may have set aside roughly a half-trillion dollars for funding new commercial reactor construction.

Keene, NH -- More than nine hundred Antioch College alumni and former students, faculty and staff called for the resignation of Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock and Board of Trustees Chair Art Zucker.

The 900-plus signed onto a petition circulated by an alumni group, Antioch College Action Network, that is being presented to Antioch University trustees at their June 5-8 meeting in Keene, New Hampshire.

In June, 2007, under the direction of Murdock and Zucker, the Antioch University Board of Trustees voted to suspend operations at Antioch College effective June 30, 2008, triggering a remarkable outpouring of alumni organizing and fundraising to keep the College alive. Last month, after nearly six months of negotiations, the board narrowly rejected a deal with alumni major donors which would have allowed the College to continue operating.

Alumni involved in the negotiations have said the University negotiating team, led by Murdock and Zucker, repeatedly obstructed a resolution.

Over the years, once in a great while, I’ve been surprised to cross paths with a journalist at a major TV outlet who actually seems willing and able to go outside the conventional boundaries of media discourse.

That’s what happened one day in the fall of 2005 at the Boston headquarters of the CN8 television network, owned and operated by the corporate media giant Comcast. I showed up for an interview about my book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." My expectations weren’t very high.

After all, I was setting foot in the studios of a large commercial TV channel with wide distribution of its programming in New England and beyond. And Comcast, shall we say, has earned a reputation as a voracious media conglomerate with scant interest in the public interest.

I was scheduled to appear on a prime-time nightly show hosted by Barry Nolan, a longtime TV newsman. When the cameras started rolling, it quickly became clear that he’d actually read the book -- and was willing to explore its documentation and damning implications about the use of media to drag the United States into one war after another.

To the credit of producers Guy Jacobson and Adi Ezroni, “Holly” is not “Pretty Baby.” Although it’s a movie about child prostitution, there’s no nudity, sex, or violence or Hollywood glitz. The gritty and realistic feel of the movie and the sordid world of child sexual trafficking results from the fact that it was shot on location in Camodia, with many scenes filmed in actual brothels.

The story itself concerns Patrick (Ron Livingston), a ne’er-do-well low-grade card shark who works on the side in stolen artifacts, until he meets the 12-year-old Holly (Thuy Nguyen). Holly’s been sold by her impoverished Vietnamese peasant family and smuggled into Cambodia. Her initial market value is tied directly to negotiating the price of her virginity a la “Pretty Baby,” but that’s where the similarities end.

The Worthington Arts Council has chosen a proposal for Project Green, a public visual arts installation to celebrate the spring groundbreaking of the Peggy R. McConnell Arts Center. William Cravis, a visiting professor of sculpture and foundations at Ohio University, will execute his proposal this summer.

In keeping with Project Green’s theme of sustainability, Cravis’ proposal incorporates the use of thousands of plastic bottles and containers. To collect these materials, the Worthington Arts Council and Sustainable Worthington are partnering on a city-wide Bottle Drive from May 2 – June 18. They are in need of plastic containers of all shapes, sizes and colors. Bottles or containers should be rinsed out, the labels removed and the caps left on. The plastic materials can be dropped off at several sites across Worthington:

WAC Office/Griswold Senior Center, 777 High St. 2nd Floor
Northwest Library, 2280 Hard Rd.
Old Worthington Library, 820 High St.
Worthington Community Center, 345 E. Wilson Bridge Rd.
Worthington Municipal Building, 6550 N. High St.


Funny how we can’t seem to hear the truth until it’s uttered by a professional liar.

Thus Scott McClellan, who was George Bush’s press secretary for three years, beginning shortly after we invaded Iraq — the very Scott McClellan who personified lock-step obedience to the cause — has acquired sudden street cred as Someone To Listen To, as he tells us what we already know. Our society may not convene truth commissions, but it does publish tell-all books by ex-aides of the powerful, which feed us pieces of truth in the form of scandal.

McClellan has given the country a bit more (unwanted, embarrassing) self-awareness than it had a week ago, prior to the release and subsequent media splash of “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” His book raises a lot of questions, but only one that matters: Now what?

The United States maintains secret prisons on ships in the ocean in order to detain people outside the reach or even the knowledge of any system of law, the better to torture the ever-living cheney out of them. Over at the Black Commentator, Glen Ford (now at the Black Agenda Report) has been calling the Bush Cheney gang pirates for years. And the point is not just that they're criminals, but that they are outlaws, killers, and thieves who operate outside any national allegiance or system of laws or morality.

The torture ships are in the news of late, at least in England, thanks to the work of an attorney and author named Clive Stafford Smith and his organization: Reprieve ( http://reprieve.org.uk ). A report just released by Reprieve has resulted in news reports in The Guardian, Associated Press, and Reuters.

“In 1992, Bill Clinton put the call for universal health care at the center of his program. But, once president, his closeness to Wall Street and his intellectual dependence on Robert Rubin of Wall Street made him leery of antagonizing the insurance industry. It was President Clinton's unwillingness to confront the insurance companies that led to his failure to honor his commitment to work toward a universal health care program. . . His administration's top priorities were reduction of the federal deficit. . . and approval of NAFTA. These actions antagonized and demoralized the grassroots of the Democratic Party. Clinton lost any power to mobilize people for the establishment of a universal health care program. This frustration of the grassroots, and especially the working class, also led to the huge abstention by the Democratic Party base in the 1994 congressional elections and the consequent loss of the Democratic majority in the House, the Senate, and many state legislatures. At the root of this disenchantment with the Clinton administration was its unwillingness to confront the insurance companies and Wall Street.”

In politics, as in so many other aspects of life, anger is a combustible fuel. Affirmed and titrated, it helps us move forward. Suppressed or self-indulged, it’s likely to blow up in our faces.

With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination coming to a close, there’s plenty of anger in the air. And the elements are distinctly flammable. As Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times on June 3, "the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion."

Herbert doesn’t spread the blame evenly. And, as an elected Obama delegate to the national convention, I don’t either. But at this stage in the nomination process, the returns of blame aren’t merely diminishing -- they’re about to go over a cliff.

The anger that’s churning among many Hillary Clinton supporters is deserving of respect. For a long time, she’s been hit by an inexhaustible arsenal of virulent sexism, whether from Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews.

If Barack Obama were facing defeat now, his supporters might be more inclined to dwell on the thinly veiled, and sometimes unveiled, racial

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