AUSTIN, Texas -- "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -- Dwight David Eisenhower, April 16, 1953.

The news is not good. Osama bin Laden wants us to invade Iraq. We're at orange on the alert code. The economy is tanking. We're spending $1.08 billion a day on the military.

The president wants a $674 billion tax cut. In the first year, 50 percent of that tax cut would go the richest 1 percent of Americans and three-quarters of it would go to the richest 5 percent. In the years beyond that, the concentration at the top actually gets worse, according to citizens for Tax Justice. To pay for that, he wants to raise the rent on subsidized housing for the poorest people in the country and break up Head Start, sending it down to the states, where governments are frantically cutting everything they can. Money to pay for everything from cleaning up Superfund sites to leaving no child behind is being slashed to pay for this obscene tax cut.

AUSTIN, Texas -- And another thing CEOs should probably avoid ... Sprint Corp. has just fired its two top executives for (I love this part) a conflict of interest. It seems these worthy gentlemen felt perfectly entitled to pay zero taxes on more than $100 million in stock-option gains. Isn't that special? But that's not why they were fired.

They were fired because Sprint's accounting firm Ernst & Young set up these lucrative tax shelters. After the IRS disallowed the shelters, the execs were at war with their own company's auditors. Not nice.

It gets better. In return for giving the two execs what turned out to be very bad advice, Ernst & Young got $6 million -- paid by Sprint. Now the execs owe the taxes and penalties, but they no longer have the money, since Sprint's stock price hit the skids in the general implosion of telecommunications. Plus, they are no longer employed

Pretty big mess, and it's happening all over.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Normally, I don't bother to follow the doings of the far right. Having lived in Texas all these years, I figure I don't have much to learn on that score. But I was much struck by a report in Salon, the online magazine, on the recent conference of the Conservative Political Action Committee.

It sounded no more than usually loony to me -- equating Islam with fascism and terrorism, attacks on feminazis, the dread environmentalists, family planning, Harry Potter and other menaces to civilization. No crazier than the John Birch Society or the militia movement I've known all these years. But reporter Michelle Goldberg noted one striking difference: The conference was attended by people in power. Vice President Dick Cheney gave the keynote speech, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao spoke, as did House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Senate Whip Mitch McConnell, Republican National Committee Chair Marc Racicot, etc.

In 1968, the Kerner Commission, a civil rights advisory board created by President Lyndon Johnson, warned that America was rapidly becoming "two nations," "black vs. white," "separate and unequal." The Kerner Commission Report was published only a few years after legal racial segregation had been outlawed. The "white" and "colored" signs indicating segregation in hotels, restaurants, and water fountains had disappeared. Yet despite these meaningful reforms, the deep patterns of structural racism were so profound and the economic chasm between African Americans and whites was so pervasive, that the Kerner Commission feared it might become insurmountable.

This January 2003, there was new evidence that the Kerner Commission's dire warnings have become reality. A study just released by the Federal Reserve System illustrates beyond any doubt that black Americans and many other racialized minorities are rapidly losing ground economically. The median income for all families within the U.S. was $39,900 in 2001; African-American household median income is only about 60 percent of the typical white family's annual income.

Two of my friends, Byron and Steve, are applying for a marriage license this Friday, Feb.14, at the Franklin County Courthouse at 11:00 am, 373 South High Street. Gay and lesbian people around the world are doing the same thing this Valentine's Day. This is a courageous action they are taking,; it comes out of their deep conviction for justice and fairness for  ALL people and out of the love they have for each other. Won't you join us to support them? Or perhaps you and your partner would like to also apply. Below are both their statement and Rev. Troy Perry's, founder of Metropolitan Community Churches. Thank you, Rev. Marj Creech, Pastor of God's Promise MCC of Granville