The political consequences from Ohio’s stolen 2005 presidential election have been made manifest. The two loudest and most unprincipled men in the state, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and the World Harvest Church’s Pastor Rod Parsley, have formed a disingenuous ebony and ivory right-wing political alliance.

Their goals are clear: to be the new Mack Daddys of the Ohio Republican Party and to pimp and play the economically desperate Ohioans.

Since the presidential election, the stats are now familiar: during the first four years of the Bush administration, Ohio lost more jobs than any state except Michigan; in the year prior to the 2004 election 330,000 manufacturing jobs disappeared from the Buckeye landscape, the most in the nation; and Ohio leads the U.S. in outsourcing well-educated young adults between the ages of 18-44.

Contact Senator Voinovich and urge him to OPPOSE the Bolton nomination.

Please also copy your letter to his Senate webform: voinovich.senate.gov/

  Put something in subject line like "Please OPPOSE Bolton" (use your own words) to insure that your message is clear to staffers.

To contact your elected representatives:  http://www.congress.org/congressorg/home/

League of Women Voters Media email database:  http://www.capwiz.com/lwv/dbq/media/

TV news addresses:  http://digbig.com/4bqmq

Addresses for major U.S. daily publications/wire services/weekly publications: http://digbig.com/4cqge

Major publication addresses by state:  http://digbig.com/4bwxw

The unholy alliance between the corporatists and religious fundamentalists, the "Talibankers," is beginning its final naked play for complete control of the mechanisms of government by pursuing the GOP strategy of imposing the "nuclear option" against minority voices in the Senate. This change would end the use of the filibuster in Senate debates on judicial nominees. Of course, a blitzkrieg of disinformation is being spread about what this means, but anyone devoted to intellectual honesty knows that this radical and unwarranted act is hypocrisy. It is pandering to power over principle (After all, the Senate has approved over 95% of the judgeship nominees made by Bush, a far greater percentage than Clinton nominees approved by the GOP in the 90's. And these handful being rejected are not on religious grounds, but due to their extreme inclination to side with corporations against the interests of America's working class).

Leading this propaganda assault is our homegrown Taliban with their "Justice Sunday" (Just Us Sunday?) event on April 24th, being used to declare their jihad against the Constitution. This event features Senate

Conservatives run around singing the praises of Wal-Mart, proclaiming it an American success story. None other than Dick Cheney calls the Beast of Bentonville his favorite company. But what I love about Wal-Mart is the way the company highlights the phoniness of two centerpieces of the conservative movement’s sloganeering propaganda: the so- called “free market” and “local control.”

In the mythical world of the free market—for which Wal-Mart supposedly serves as a shining example—prices for goods and labor should rise and fall based on the magic of the “invisible hand” of market supply and demand. In the nirvana of the so-called free market, workers can sell themselves for whatever the market can bear.

So let me introduce you to a place called China. Wal-Mart—in its never-ending quest to promote its heartland, Arkansan family values—is a willing customer of the Chinese labor system, where people work 12- to 18-hour days, earn meager wages and have no days of rest—all for the honor of laboring inside factories full of chemical toxins and hazardous machines, leading to sickness and death at the highest rates

Telephone interview by Bernie Dwyer for www.cubadebate.cu with Professor Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 28th August 2003.

[Bernie Dwyer] A couple of new popular books have recently been published such as Weapons of Mass Deception and Stupid White Men. Do you see them as a viable alternative to the corporate media?

[Noam Chomsky] No, they are not trying to be an alternative to the corporate media. They are just books among the many books written about the way the corporate media function and there is by now, in the United States, more than any other western country that I know, a rather significant popular movement concerned with the corporate media, which is virtually all the media within the United States, and the way they function as a kind of propaganda system.

There is also a lot of popular protest against efforts to increase the concentration of the media in fewer and fewer hands so as to prevent even the limited diversity that exists. The books that you mention are just two of the many. The books themselves, the critical literature