BRAVO Continues Cellular Phone Drive

The Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO) is continuing to collect used cellular phones as part of a resource program designed to enhance services to survivors of violent crimes. This effort involves collecting cell phones that are viable and preferably manufactured within the past 3 years. BRAVO has been collecting cellular phones for remanufacturing for the past 5 years. This effort is a great way to support BRAVO with very little time commitment! Any individual or organization that has cell phones they wish to donate should contact BRAVO and we will arrange to retrieve the cellular phones from your location. For more information, please contact BRAVO at 614-294-STOP (7867), or 1-866-86-BRAVO.

BRAVO works to eliminate violence perpetrated on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identification, domestic violence and sexual assault through prevention, education, advocacy, violence documentation and survivor services, both within and on behalf of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities.

Darfur Escalation NOW!

As security continues to dissolve and the humanitarian crisis deepens in Darfur, Africa Action invites you to participate in our escalation campaign to stop the genocide. Three years after the atrocities began, and two years since the U.S. described the violence as genocide, the international community still has not implemented a plan to achieve peace in Darfur. Today Darfur still has over 2.5 million internally displaced people who are under attack by the Sudanese government and their proxy militia, and living in the worst humanitarian conditions in history. For over two years, Africa Action has been at the forefront of advocating for a United Nations peacekeeping force (UNPKO). After our January escalation campaign earlier this year, President Bush began voicing support for a UN mission and we believed we were poised for the realization of this call, but seven months later, the people of Darfur are still without the protection they need.

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Save the Ballots!

On September 3, 2006, all the ballots from Ohio's 2004 presidential election will be destroyed. There are several voting rights organizations working to investigate and analyze these ballots in regards to irregularities in that election. There have been many barriers to access to these ballots since the election and we must depend on the cooperation of local county Boards of Elections. If we don't save the ballots, the public record will be gone forever. Act now!

Funds are needed to pay for copying and personnel to gather, preserve and analyze the ballots.

Go to Save the Ballots

If you can volunteer, contact Ohio Honest Elections at 614-224-8771.

News media’s love-hate for nuclear weapons

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.

Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive -- fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.

In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.

By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years -- and probably more like a full decade -- away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms.

Tom Friedman's Walter Cronkite moment

The reality that the Vietnam War was a hopeless catastrophe definitively penetrated the mass American psyche when CBS Nightly News Anchor Walter Cronkite---the "most trusted man in America"---faced the facts.

That was in 1968, shortly after the Tet Offensive shredded any pretence that an American victory (whatever that would mean) was possible in Southeast Asia. When Lyndon Johnson heard Cronkite had turned on the war, he knew it was over, and soon thereafter declined to run again.

Now Tom Friedman has done the same thing about Iraq and Southwest Asia. Has anybody noticed?

Friedman has long been the lead neo-liberal cheerleader for the American attack on Iraq. From his perch on the New York Times op ed page, Friedman has pontificated long and in earnest about the need for the US military to establish "democracy" in the land once run by Saddam Hussein, that horrific dictator installed by the US military, then fired in the wake of 9/11 attacks conducted by his bitter rival, Osama bin Laden.

The best thing in the world for big oil

"This war in Iraq has been the best thing in the world for Big Oil and OPEC. They've made the largest profits in the history of the world. The interesting thing about your book is you show how it was all planned from the beginning. The story is like a spy thriller." -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Listen to RFK and Greg Palast on Iraq, a 20-minute conversation about blood and oil, the podcast of 'Ring of Fire' from Air America.

The following is part of the story referenced in their discussion:

THE JERK: WHY SADDAM HAD TO GO
by Greg Palast
Excerpt from 'Armed Madhouse'

The 323-page multi-volume "Options for Iraqi Oil" begins with the expected dungeons-and-dragons warning:

The report is submitted on the understanding that [the State Department] will maintain the contents confidential.

For two years, the State Department (and Defense and the White House) denied there were secret plans for Iraq's oil. They told us so in writing. That was the first indication the plan existed. Proving that, and getting a copy, became the near-to-pathologic obsession of our team.

War at home: The Seattle shooting

Through the actions of a lone man with an unstable mental history, the Middle East wars have hit my community. Naveed Haq, from a middle class Pakistani-American family in eastern Washington State, shot six women at the Seattle Jewish Federation, in the city where I live. He killed one and left three critically wounded, saying "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel." I've never been to the Federation offices, but I've worshipped at affiliated Seattle synagogues, attended Federation-sponsored events, and met one of the women who was critically wounded. So Haq's reprehensible attack felt personal. Aside from the shooting of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane and an ambiguous 1994 incident involving a New York taxi driver and a van of Hasidic students, this may be the first politically motivated killing of an American Jew by an American Muslim in the past sixty years. As such, it risks sharply increasing the level of fear in America's Jewish communities, and with it the reflex support of even the most questionable Israeli actions.

We could dismiss the deaths as isolated from politics, the actions of a

No guts, no grace

SAN FRANCISCO -- Do you think the Bush administration is going after the press? The San Francisco Chronicle says on the front page this morning, "Cameraman Jailed for Not Yielding Tape," whereas The New York Times is reporting, "U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records." I'm feeling like a bunny trying to outrun a pack of wolfhounds.

Hezbollah's top ally in Israel

"Israel is doomed," said a friend of mine some months ago, returning to the United States after a trip to Israel. I asked him why, and my friend, who spent 20 years working in a high level position in the Pentagon, answered, "They've put in an Air Force man as chief of the General Staff."

He was talking about Dan Halutz, appointed chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces in February of this year.

My friend began his stint in the Pentagon in the middle Sixties, as one of Robert McNamara's "whiz kids." He'd spent long years listening to Air Force generals expounding the virtues of air power, and how their bombers would wipe out the Viet Cong without the need for any ground forces.

Those bombers never did wipe out the Viet Cong, though they destroyed vast forests while other USAF planes drenched the ground cover with poisons that plague Vietnamese and Americans to this day.

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