Hey Folks,

Just a thought bubbling around in the Uke Man’s head.

A few days ago Bryan Flannery, a little-known candidate for the Democratic nomination for governor, came out with unsubstantiated charges about the front-runner, Ted Strickland, supposedly having once hired a pedophile to work in his office. Flannery also wanted to know why Strickland had “gone to Rome with that man.”

The charges were quickly rebutted by Strickland who claimed that similar charges had been made long ago by an opponent in a very heated campaign, that the aide had denied any such orientation, and that no one had brought any evidence forward.

After Flannery’s big, one day splash, those charges are not being heard – I can’t even find them on the net.

OK, but what happens next?

Hot on the heels of this mud, Bill O’Reilly, Joe Scarborough, and other national, right-wing, talking-point flunkies “discover” the evil Judge Conner and call for his impeachment because he is soft on . . .

Yep!! PEDOPHILES!!!!!!!

OK, but what happens next?

Washington D.C. — By a vote of 348-71, the U.S. House of Representatives voted March 16 to spend 67,000,000,000 dollars more for open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that a growing majority of the people they represent believe the war is wrong.

In an eleventh hour effort on March 15 to appeal to the conscience of the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, six peace activists took their case to his office on Capitol Hill where they read the names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the war, and negotiated with Hastert’s staff for a meeting with the Illinois congressman.

The six were part of a 34 day campaign named “The Winter of Our Discontent” organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence (Voices). The campaign includes 34 days of fasting, civil disobedience, Capitol Hill vigils and lobbying, to demand the U.S. end the occpuation and its economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people.

Welcome, Please Come In

"We have a responsibility to promote human freedom. Yet freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen."

The more I ponder these words, the deeper my confusion grows - at the consciousness that confabulated them, at the futility of any possible response. And so the war enters its fourth year, impervious to its own unpopularity, disabling critics with the irony it generates.

In the context of what can only be called worldwide despair, the Bush administration has issued a National Security Strategy white paper oblivious to the extent that it fits the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results each time.

The report's assemblers proudly announce to the nation that they have learned nothing, hoisting one more time the flag of pre-emption, as though no one will notice how tattered and blood-stained it is: ". . . we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."

Dear Editor: The New York Times saw fit to assign two reporters to the aftermath of the Belarus election. Their article cites American objections to the official outcome, a landslide victory for incumbent Aleksandr Lukashenko. The Times article cited international observers who disparaged the election as "rigged" and "...held under widespread repression."

But when similar objections were raised in the United States immediately following our own presidential election in 2004, The Times ignored them, except to publish a single front-page article a week later that disparaged "conspiracy theorists." Since 2004, mountains of evidence have surfaced about hackable election machinery and impossible discrepancies between exit poll results and the tabulated vote that favored incumbent George W. Bush. The Times has similarly ignored this unpleasantness. 

Evidently, rigged elections are only possible outside the borders of the United States.