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Fraudbuster Bob Fitrakis announces bid for governorship

On Tuesday, November 29, 2005, well-known Columbus attorney, author, and radio host Dr. Bob Fitrakis will announce his bid to be the next Governor of the State of Ohio.  The announcement will be made on the west side of the State Capitol building along High Street in Columbus starting at 12:30 pm.  Dr. Fitrakis has written several books and numerous newspaper columns on the irregularities and outright fraud that were rife during the last few elections in Ohio.  Winner of many community and journalism awards, he has been endorsed by the Green Party of Ohio and will be seeking the party's nomination as candidate for Governor next spring, along with two other fraudbusting veterans: Anita Rios (Lt. Governor) and Tim Kettler (Secretary of State).  Together they will spearhead the Green Party campaign to clean up the sleaze that has become so entrenched with the two major parties and their big money patrons.

Ongoing quest for the many manifestations of bigfoot

Review and Commentary on Mike Palecek's Latest Novel

"George Bush is a liar AND a loose gun for hire." I found it so refreshing to read these affirmations of truth on the cover of Mike Palecek's latest novel, Looking for Bigfoot.  Palecek's "irreverent" novel is a potent attack on almost everything which is perverse, depraved, immoral, and malevolent about the US government and the society which it creates and perpetuates (through the public education system and its subservient corporate media). The search for Bigfoot which Jack Robert King, the novel's protagonist, undertakes is a metaphorical quest for the truth behind the deteriorating facade of the United States as a benevolent super power which spreads freedom and liberty around the globe.

Condi gets an "F" in world diplomacy

Where Dick Cheney clearly just infuriates because he is the sort of vicious spit-worthy heart defective (in all ways) citizen who should no more be in public office than Jeffrey Dahlmer, they trot out Condolessa to sound academic in her defense of why Saddam Hussein was all along a "threat" and how we are rewriting history to insist on them not fabricating evidence to hype the menace. She Gets an "F."

No - Saddam was not shown to have had WMDs, he had no mobile long range ballistic missiles that could hit us in the US hidden on trucks, he had no navy really to write home about, he had no nuclear fissile material or yellow cake or anything that looked like a nuclear program-not even for civilian use above the usual- and no, he had nothing directly to do with 9-11. But they tried to make us believe otherwise.

Ohio's Diebold Debacle: New machines call election results into question

Massive Election Day irregularities are emerging in reports from all over Ohio after the introduction of Diebold's electronic voting in nearly half of the Buckeye State’s counties. A recently released report by the non-partisan General Accountability Office warned of such problems with electronic voting machines.

E-voting machine disasters

Prior to the 2005 election, electronic voting machines from Diebold and other Republican voting machine manufacturers were newly installed in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The Dayton Daily News reported that in Montgomery County, for example, “Some machines began registering votes for the wrong item when voters touched the screen correctly. Those machines had lost their calibration during shipping or installation and had to be recalibrated. . . .”

Steve Harsman, the Director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections (BOE), told the Daily News that the recalibration could be done on site, but poll workers had never performed the task before.

The city of Carlisle, Ohio announced on November 22 that it is contesting the results of the November 8 general election as a result

Poll shock

One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process - and democracy itself.

But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."

Drowning the hard questions: A Nova special

Since Bill Moyers retired, I watch PBS pretty rarely. I remembered why when I saw the NOVA special on New Orleans, "The Storm that Drowned a City." It gave some useful chronology, but in an hour-long program on the genesis and history of the storm, they avoided raising even the possibility that the Bush administration may have contributed to the disaster.

I waited and waited for discussion of global warming's potential role in fueling Katrina's ferocity. Finally, near the end, this science-focused show spent maybe a minute quoting a scientist suggesting a possible link, and then quickly undermined his words by having the prime expert they kept coming back to dismiss the connection. They didn't even try to link Katrina to the broader pattern of global climate change-related disasters, like increases in tornadoes, floods, droughts, and forest fires. (A year before Katrina, Swiss the world's second largest reinsurance company, warned of a potential $150 billion annual toll from these kinds of disasters). The NOVA show just kept repeating the same loop of scientists saying, we dodged the bullet before, but it's headed for us now.

The Mazruiana collection revisited

Ali A Mazrui debating the African condition
An annotated and select thematic bibliography, 1962-2003
Compiled by Abdul Samed Bemath
Published by Africa Institute of South Africa & New Dawn Press, Inc.
ISBN 1 932705 37 6 

A year ago, in a citation on Ali A Mazrui’s nomination as 100  Greatest Africans of all times by New African Magazine he is profiled as representing a positive image of Africa and its people.

A month ago Mazrui was yet again nominated as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world. The honour this time was bestowed by an American journal Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment.

Who is this man about whom the late Palestinian academic Edward Said observed in his classic Culture and Imperialism: “Here at last was an African on prime-time television, in the West, daring to accuse the West of what it had done, thus reopening a file considered closed.”?

He is undoubtedly a Global African and as this continent’s most respected contemporary scholar of repute is widely acclaimed as its foremost thinker and writer.

How pre-war Iraq intel was cooked

Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.

When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) - both of whom are aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut administration's claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security - said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of "public reprimand" brought against lower-level administration officials who work or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for "cherry-picking" questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the war.

Let's make lemonade this Thanksgiving

AUSTIN, Texas -- Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving. But a mere soupcon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. We are abundantly blessed with lemons. Let us make lemonade.

I am grateful for the extraordinary number of readers who sent along their ideas on How to Fix All This. The ideas ranged from the sublime to the practical, from the universal and global to the price of milk. The country is teeming with good ideas, all of which we need.

I was particularly intrigued by this thought from peace activist Gen Van Cleve: It's 2009 and the Bush people are gone, leaving in their wake fury, suspicion, distrust -- basically, our name is mud, whether we've left Iraq by then or not. Most of the rest of the world considers us: A) insane, B) imperialist and C) morons. What to do?

Thanksgiving and more taking

When Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our blessings -- or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money.

In its unadorned state, the idea of being thankful is on a collision

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