Ohio vote count

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your publication and for the persistent, committed work of Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman.  If we ever have an election system in which we can believe, we will owe much to these two gentlemen.  Also, the National Voting Rights Institute, and Black Box Voting.  You are harbingers of hope.  Keep up your good work!

Carol Harkins
Tulalip, WA 

Hungering for justice at my first congressional testimony

Washington, March 14 -- Last Wednesday evening, the House Appropriations Committee voted to throw another $67,000,000,000 at the murderous work in Iraq and Afghanistan. That night members of the committee, righteously indignant and nearly unanimous, gave President "Bring ‘Em On" Bush a loud slap in the face.

Whoa! You mean the most powerful committee in Congress voted 62-2 to stop funding our national war crimes orgy? Of course they did…and then we all lived happily ever after.

No, the killing will proceed as planned, with no congressional intervention, although chances are you heard absolutely zip about the 67 Billion Dollar Question, thanks to the Guardians of Reality who insured the news from that hearing was the Dubai Port deal, not the unimaginable sum of our money Congress voted for war, nor the voices raised against it.

That news must come from places like the internet site you’re now reading, not the corporate press. And I’m here to tell you the story.

Experts question credibility of US human rights report

Foreign policy, legal and human rights authorities are raising serious questions about the credibility of the U.S. State Department’s annual report on human rights, released last week.

The response of Noah S. Leavitt, an attorney who has worked with the International Law Commission of the United Nations in Geneva and the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is typical. Leavitt said, "The sad reality is that because of the Bush Administration’s haughty unilateralism and its mockery of international prohibitions on torture, most of the rest of the world no longer takes the U.S. seriously on human rights matters.”

While most of the experts contacted find little fault with the accuracy of the report, they question whether U.S. human rights abuses committed in the “Global War on Terror” have diminished America’s authority to speak out on this issue.

Did Bush make mistakes in good faith?

When we watch a video of Bush being informed of the danger of Hurricane Katrina and recall that he claimed that there was no way he could have known of that danger, our faith in his good intentions may be shaken.

And when we learn that Bush has long since authorized wiretapping without court approval, what are we to make of his public statements (such as last June 9, or July 14, 2004, or April 20, 2004) when he reassured us that all wiretapping requires court approval?

Our President says the United States does not torture, but he's been informed that it does because even if he doesn't read newspapers, reporters have asked him and his press secretary about specific cases.  When Bush signed a bill banning torture he added a signing statement claiming the right to keep torturing.  Yet he says he doesn't torture.  How should we characterize that statement?  It's clearly not the truth.

THE FULL SENATE MUST DO WHAT THE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE WOULD NOT, CENSURE BUSH FOR HIS ILLEGAL WIRETAPS

The president has admitted he broke the law. And yet the Senate Intelligence Committed abdicated its oversight responsibility by refusing to even conduct an investigation. On March 12, Senator Feingold called for the Senate to censure Bush for systematically authorizing illegal wiretaps of Americans in defiance of the authority of the FISA court. Even retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor sees the looming threat of dictatorship.

When will members of Congress who hate Americans and their rights stop conflating the checks and balances in our Constitution with treason? The REAL treason is by those who would defend any criminal behavior by the commander in chief in the name of patriotism. Crimes against our own citizens do NOT make us safer and cannot be tolerated in a free democratic society, and especially not when justified by fear-mongering about the threat from outside.

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Vision statement by former Columbus resident, now candidate for 15th Congressional District, Florida

Dear Editor:

As an orthodox Catholic, I find much that is disagreeable in the standard Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative political ideologies. There is a greater vision for America, and we have only to look to our past to find some keys to our better future.

I am inspired by such policy initiatives as the New Deal, the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, and the Apollo project. The New Deal brought the government into the hands of those more interested in the common good, than the special interests of amoral financial speculators, and greed-driven elites. Government, churches and charities all have a role to play in addressing the rights of all people to live a life worth living.

The Manhattan Project had an immoral end of developing a nuclear weapon, but it represents the idea that the government has a key role to play in bringing together the greatest minds in the world. In today’s money, a like Project would cost us $20 billion. Imagine if we gathered the world’s best researchers to work on perfecting energy technologies such as nuclear fission/fusion, or any number of brilliant

Chicago pro-immigrant, anti-HR4437 rally

CHICAGO -- On March 10, 2006, approximately 100,000 people converged in downtown Chicago under the slogan "We are America." The overwhelmingly immigrant crowd demonstrated for immigrants' rights and protested U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner's (R-WI) bill HR 4437, which would "...amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to strengthen enforcement of the immigration laws, to enhance border security, and for other purposes" via means such as increased legal penalties for illegal immigrants and employment eligibility verification programs. A number of politicians and community activists spoke in support of the rally, including prominant Democrats Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, pictured in this set.

View the photographs

The most dangerous Black professor in America

Back in 1919, in the chaotic aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration sought to suppress radical and progressive intellectuals here at home. Government agents harassed W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis. Copies of African-American socialist A. Philip Randolph’s militant journal, The Messenger, were seized and destroyed. When President Wilson was given a copy of The Messenger, he declared that Randolph must surely be “the most dangerous Negro in America.”

Randolph later went on to found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925, the first successful African-American labor union. In the 1930’s. Randolph conceived of the National Negro Congress, a black united front that challenged the racism of Jim Crow segregation and the inadequate programs of the Roosevelt administration in dealing with black unemployment. In 1941 Randolph pressured Roosevelt with the call for a “Negro March on Washington, D.C.,” resulting in the desegregation of defense industry jobs generated by federal contracts. Randolph was indeed “dangerous” to the enemies of black freedom.

Why did J. Kenneth Blackwell seek, then hide, his association with super-rich extremists and e-voting magnates?

The man who stole the 2004 election for George W. Bush -- Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell -- has posted a picture of himself addressing the white supremacist ultra-right Council for National Policy (CNP). He then pulled the picture and tried to hide his participation in the meeting by removing mention of it from his website, kenblackwell.com.

First discovered by a netroots investigator (uaprogressiveaction.com), Blackwell's photo at the CNP meeting was found on Blackwell's website on Monday, March 6. Then it mysteriously disappeared.

Blackwell has ample reason to hide his ties to the CNP. When the Free Press investigated the CNP and its ties to the Republican Party, Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates told the paper that the CNP included "a former Ku Klux Klan leader and other segregationist policies." Berlet emphasizes that these "shocking" charges are easy to verify.

Berlet describes CNP members as not only traditional conservatives, but also nativists, xenophobes, white racial supremacists, homophobes, sexists, militarists, authoritarians, reactionaries and "in some cases outright neo-fascists."

The ultimate movie monster may be the Military-Industrial Complex

Reviews of:

WHY WE FIGHT
A film by Eugene Jarecki

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
Directed by Jonathan Demme

As our nation lurches sickeningly toward outright fascism, it's both liberating and disturbing to see a complete, coherent take on the core of the problem.

WHY WE FIGHT is a deeply clarifying and profoundly saddening summing up of the domination of the United States by what Dwight Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex."

Eisenhower himself was hardly without blame for its rise. He was a great general who defeated the Nazis in Europe. He also raised serious questions about the use of the atomic bombs on Japan. And at the end of his eight-year presidency (1953-1961) he famously warned of the power of the armed services in combination with the pull of the huge corporations that profit from them.

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