The Trail of the Catonsville Nine has been out of print for 15 years, and the new edition includes Robin Andersen's preface and essay that brings the play's ideas and themes up to date including an analysis of the media coverage of the war in Iraq.

Poetry and documentarian Lynn Sachs with footage from Investigation of a Flame

The new edition includes Berrigan's original introduction, and additional materials by Robin Andersen and James Marsh that bring its ideas and themes up to date in the context of the war in Iraq.

On May 17, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, nine men and women entered a Selective Service office outside Baltimore. They removed military draft records, took them outside, and set them afire with napalm.

The Catholic activist involved in the protest against the war included Daniel and Philip Berrigan; all were found guilty of destroying government property and sentenced to three years in jail.

Finally a reason to get excited, as we now have before us an electable candidate worthy of taking on George W. Bush and his coterie of neoconservatives next November. Well, at least that's what the scared liberals out there would have us believe. But John Kerry is neither electable nor exciting. He is a Zionist sympathizer who supports Bush's "road map for peace" in Israel and Palestine, as well as a corporate Neoliberal, who voted in support of NAFTA, normalized free-trade with China, and the US's $17.9 billion dollar "aid" package to the IMF.

Not to mention Kerry is also a proclaimed War Criminal, where he participated in bloody swift boat patrol missions on the Mekong Delta near Cambodia in Vietnam. And as he put it in to Crosby Noyes of the Washington Evening Star upon his return in 1971, "[During those missions] I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 caliber machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in

For 30 months, 9/11 was a huge political blessing for George W. Bush. This week, the media halo fell off.

     Within the space of a few days, culminating with his testimony to the Sept. 11 commission Wednesday afternoon, former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke did serious damage to a public-relations scam that the White House has been running for two and a half years.

     We may forget just how badly President Bush was doing until Sept. 11, 2001. That morning, a front-page Philadelphia Inquirer story told of dire political straits; his negative rating among the nation’s crucial independent swing voters stood at 53 percent, according to the latest survey by nonpartisan pollster John Zogby.

     On Sept. 12, Bush’s media stature and poll numbers were soaring. Suddenly, news outlets all over the country boosted the president as a great leader, sometimes likening him to FDR. For many months, the overall media coverage of President Bush was reverential.

     With intimidation in the air, all but a few mainstream journalists tamped down criticisms and lacquered on adulation. A kind of war-mentality

The global coffee industry has endured colossal changes over the past fifty years. Production of beans has shifted from country to country. Profiteering from the product has increased almost exponentially through huge sales at retail outlets such as Starbucks and Seattle's Best. But not all involved in the coffee market have benefited equally. Small coffee farmers have suffered tremendous loss. Environmental degradation has also increased as ancient forests have been cleared in hopes that the bare land can be transformed into fertile ground, worthy of growing cash crops. Countries have lost entire export industries as multinational corporations race to purchase the cheapest beans they can find. And no country has felt the pain of these transformations greater than Colombia.

In the mid-1970s coffee in Colombia accounted for 50% of their legal exports. During the global craze of the 1990s, as retail shops opened up on street corners throughout the industrialized world, Colombia's coffee industry bottomed out. By 1995, the country's coffee industry had suffered tremendously. Coffee dropped from 50 to 7% of Colombia's legal exports.

The king is dead--long live the king! Okay, so the old lefty saw about it-doesn't-matter-who-gets-elected-they're-all-the-same-anyway might have less punch this time around. The Bush-led extremist puppet show that has hacked and brutalized its way into power is so evil, so corrupt, so completely dangerous down to the cellular and atomic level that it would be unthinkable not to wish them gone whatever the cost. Still, preventing evil is not the same as promoting good. A grim duty, perhaps. But hardly one that stirs the soul.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. The rigged two-party shell game has, exactly twice, by my count, been forced to slay The Beast, or at least to lull it to sleep for another few decades. Once was the historic liberal-left alliance that produced the New Deal. It was the communist left, in large measure, that organized the CIO and made Roosevelt's mass strategy feasible despite enormous opposition from within the ruling class. The other was the valiant (or tainted, or cynical, depending on your perspective--though certainly belated) attempt to end American Apartheid via the Voting Rights Act.