The recent death of Coretta Scott King, and the massive public memorial held in her honor, which President George W. Bush attended, marked an end in a phase of Civil Rights History. Coretta Scott King had been the principal force behind the establishment of the federal holiday honoring the life and legacy of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1986. Yet Coretta King’s death forces today’s proponents of racial justice to ponder serious questions about how Dr. King’s holiday has been subverted from its real political meaning.

Only days before Coretta King’s death, newspapers and the electronic media had widely documented the deep disarray within both the King family and Atlanta’s King Center. In December, 2005, the King Center board, controlled by younger son Dexter King, announced it was considering selling the center for $11 million to the National Park Service. Dexter’s decision immediately provoked public protests from the elder son, Martin Luther King, III, and Bernice King.

Attorneys representing Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff in the CIA leak case believe they have a rock solid defense to present in their client's perjury and obstruction of justice trial expected to begin next year.

In numerous court filings over the past few months, lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby have maintained that their client did not intentionally lie to federal investigators and a grand jury regarding the role he played in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson during the summer of 2003.

Instead, Libby's attorneys have said that their client was dealing with other, more crucial matters, such as the Iraq war, terrorism, and national security and simply forgot about how he first learned that Plame was employed by the CIA when he told the grand jury - untruthfully - that a reporter told him that she worked for the spy agency.

Do you favor or oppose the United States Senate passing a resolution censuring President George W. Bush for authorizing wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders?

3/15/06 Favor Oppose Undecided

All Adults 46% 44% 10%
Voters 48% 43% 9%

Republicans (33%) 29% 57% 14%
Democrats (37%) 70% 26% 4%
Independents (30%) 42% 47% 11%

Based on 1,100 completed telephone interviews among a random sample of adults nationwide March 13-15, 2006. The theoretical margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, 95% of the time.

http://americanresearchgroup.com/

THE AMERICAN PRISON CAMP at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeast corner! of Cuba, a sliver of land the United States has occupied since 1903. Long ago, it was irrigated from lakes on the other side of the island, but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off the water supply years ago. So today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a 30-year-old desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently, prisoners drank the yellow water.

The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so that prisoners could not identify them.

Something fundamental about who we are as a nation is dribbling away, it seems, without alarm or even debate. We torture prisoners - it's out in the open, a done deal. We're fighting an unnecessary war that, well, yes, was launched on a lie, but too late now; we're in, we can't get out. And our neighbor's phone is being tapped.

But the worry that trumps all others is the state of this proud, imperfect democracy. We may be surrendering our power to change the national direction or demand that government be responsive to us. My fellow Americans, our voting machines don't work, at least not all the time. The mechanism of our democracy is in chaos, and almost everyone is going along with it.

Thanks to the allegedly well-intentioned, but disastrous, Help America Vote Act, the country is shifting, county by county, to electronic voting machines, which are not only glitch-prone on a spectacular scale (e.g., 100,000 phantom votes were recorded in Tarrant County, Texas, during the state's primary last week), but work, like God, in mysterious ways, which we're not supposed to question. The results they give us are all too often unverifiable.