Dear Bob

Thanks for the great article on the DC protests and Tularemia.

I will tell you that it's much more important to those of us who were also in Crawford at Camp Casey in Aug, especially the last weekend Saturday rally.

So many of us from Dallas were there that day and so many of us were sick with pneumonia like symptoms after the weekend that in the next few weeks we called it " the Camp Casey cold ".

I never gave it another thought until the DC march and Tularemia alerts. When we all read about the bio sensors going off and learned of the symptoms, lights went off for many of us as we thought back to that last week in august and the worst cold we’ve ever had !

I posted an email to a few of the "peace " lists and asked if anyone was sick  - I am also a member of the Camp Casey Alumni yahoo group and i will say that I have about 20 emails from folks that were sick and i get a few more every day ! If you would ever be interested in talking to any of the folks that were sick let me know – I’ve asked John Conyers and my own Congressman to look into it- to no avail.

With Issues 2 through 5 on the November ballot, an unprecedented opportunity is being presented to Ohio voters. With these amendments, Ohioans can choose to dispens with politices as usual, and begin to return power to the hands of Ohio voters rather than the lobbyists who have had free reign in the state capital for the last 15 years.

These issues simplify absentee voting, reduce special interest money, more fairly apportion electoral and Congressional districts, and create a bi-partisan State Board of elections. All common sense issues, and all bitterly opposed by Ohio's Republican leadership.

Their stance is that passage of these issues would lead to vote fraud and DIsenfrancise countless Ohioans. Can anyone forget the long lines, lack of voting machines, and problems with what voting machines were available, in 2004? All occured under the current system which favors the majority party. And for the last fifteen years that has been the Republican party. With electoral districts gerrymandered beyond any reasonable bounds to favor the majority party, with the corruption which has reached even into Governor Taft's office, the

AUSTIN, Texas -- The entire political world is agog: Tom DeLay indicted, Scooter Libby in danger, Karl Rove rumors abound, Miers' nomination in doo-doo. So I'm writing about ... pensions. They're just so sexy, I couldn't resist.

Of course, the word pension is a terminal turnoff for anyone under 60 -- so redolent of the blue-rinse perm set. As one whose idea of financial planning consists of playing bingo at the Safeway, I'd prefer to be out listening to reggaeton, myself. Still, when you're getting screwed, you really should know about it.

This column is part of a continuing effort to see if we can keep our eyes on the shell with the pea under it, even while some other shells, mighty flashy and colorful, are whizzing around. Our particular shell bears the fatal rubric, "You are getting screwed again."

AUSTIN, Texas -- On one of those television gong shows that passes for journalism, the panelists used to have to pick an Outrage of the Week. Then, each performer would wax indignant about his or choice for 60 seconds or so. If someone asked me to name the Outrage of the Week about now, I'd have a coronary. How could anyone possibly choose?

I suppose the frontrunner is the anti-torture amendment. Sen. John McCain proposed an amendment to the military appropriations bill that would prohibit "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners in the custody of the U.S. military.

This may strike you as a "goes without saying" proposition -- the amendment passed the Senate 90 to nine. The United States has been signing anti-torture treaties under Democrats and Republicans for at least 50 years. But the Bush administration actually managed to find some weasel words to create a loophole in this longstanding commitment to civilized behavior.