"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -- Thomas Jefferson.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The district attorney of San Francisco, Terence Hallinan, got it right. Tuesday saw a scene outside U.S. District Court in that city that was probably without parallel in American history. Five jurors plus one alternate (there were three more jurors unable to attend but in agreement) publicly apologized to the man they had found guilty four days earlier and proclaimed to the press their shame that they had been, as one of them put it, "manipulated, intimidated, controlled" by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer into finding Ed Rosenthal guilty.

It was certainly one of the most moving scenes outside a courthouse I have ever witnessed: six angry people asking Rosenthal for forgiveness and declaring that they would be ashamed of what they did for the rest of their lives.

In the summer of 2000, the Universal Health Care Action Network (UHCAN) Ohio’s free care committee conducted a survey of the ten non-profit acute-care hospitals in Columbus. The results will appear in a report to be issued in December (check the uhcanohio website for a copy of the report). UHCAN Ohio has already met with administrators of several hospitals, all of whom indicated a willingness to collaborate with the community group on instituting improvements recommended in the report.

The group wanted to find out how easy it is for individuals to get information about free care. The concern was not that the hospitals aren’t providing free care, but rather that hospitals do not take steps necessary to inform patients and the public that free care is available to those in need. Thus, people are not seeking needed care because they don’t know – and can’t easily find out — about free care.

Free care is care provided by a hospital to low-income, uninsured people for which the hospital does not expect to be paid. For people who have no health insurance and little money, free care is often the only way they can get necessary medical treatment.

In my mind the basic tenet of determining what is or is not ethical behavior is, whether if placed in a similar circumstance one would feel that they were treated fairly and in a dignified manner. If I apply this micro-definition to the state of urban education in America it doesn't take the proverbial rocket scientist to figure out that ethics and equity has long been missing in action. The state of urban education is abysmal. The efforts to reform urban education across the country is meant (for the most part) with contempt and extreme resistance to change. The de-valuing of the urban child, in favor of the suburban and sometimes rural (if not Appalachian) is a malady that strikes at the heart of one of this nation's most valuable assets, its children.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The state of the union is that money talks and public policy is sold to the highest bidder. Those who give money in political contributions -- less than one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all campaign contributions in the 2002 elections -- get back billions in tax breaks, subsidies and the right to exploit public land at ridiculously low prices.

This system in turn costs ordinary Americans billions of dollars, not to mention the costs to health, safety and the environment, and the cost of not having enough money for good schools.

Public Campaign, the group working for public financing of political campaigns, has put together some of the salient information in the form of a poster, available at www.publiccampaign.org -- and perhaps the most depressing thing about it is the size of the payoffs for relatively small investments in political campaigns.

For example, the top corporations that paid zero taxes from 1996 to 1998 --including AT&T, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chase Manhattan, Enron,

I was in South Carolina to haul a 1968 22-foot Airstream back to California behind my Ford 350 one-ton truck. Interstate 40 would have been a logical route west, but out of respect for the late Patton, the bulldog martyr to cop violence, I headed north from Knoxville, Tenn., into Kentucky. Rolling out of Lexington, Ky., toward St. Louis at dusk, I could see graceful horses nibbling at the snow-covered pastures as the sunset turned the western sky red.

All the way across the Great Plains I listened to radio reports of the cold about to roll down out of Canada. There's nothing between you and the North Pole out there on the prairie. "Not even a tree to hide behind," as one 19th-century pioneer homemaker plaintively wrote home to her European mother as she and her family cowered in their sod cabin amidst the terrible blizzards of 1886 and 1887 that finished off the cattle boom and sent Teddy Roosevelt scuttling east from his ranch on the Little Missouri.

The snow and ice finally caught up with me 100 miles east of Denver, where I sat in the lobby of a Comfort Inn listening to a Cherokee