352 QuickLinks

Saturday, February 25, 2006
Blogs are vital alternative media sources, by Carolyn Kay
(3 comments) There is a huge advantage in having many eyeballs patrolling the sources of information, many minds with many varieties of experience free to express their thoughts in an open forum - discussion that is not chosen and/or edited by people whose living may depend on not offending the powerful ... (Published in the Financial Times, of London)

Sunday, February 19, 2006
Barbara Boxer, Mark Crispin Miller, and others on Barry Gordon From Left Field!
(3 comments) Sen. Barbara Boxer, Mark Crispin Miller, and other great guests will be interviewed on Barry Gordon From Left Field, Sunday, Feb. 19, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on www.kcaaradio.com on the World Wide Web, and on KCAA 1050 AM in the Inland Empire of California. Listen in and phone in, and tell your family and friends to do likewise. Knowledge is power!

Saturday, February 11, 2006
Jason Leopold & Others Webcast on "Barry Gordon From Left Field"!
(3 comments) Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific Time, guests on "Barry Gordon From Left Field" will include Jason Leopold, one of the top investigative reporters today, who will discuss his news-breaking article just published by Truthout.org, with hard-hitting revelations from Leopold's sources inside the CIA, NSC, and State Department on Cheney, Libby, and others in the CIA leak investigation; The Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr, minister of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin, Texas, and author of "America, Fascism, and God," who will provide refreshingly liberal views from a "heretical" religious perspective; and two couples who met through the Internet and who for Valentine's Day will discuss the risks and rewards of the hot cultural phenomenon of online dating. So catch the webcast, on www.kcaaradio.com, and call in, to 1-800-809-0802. Don't let the Right monopolize the airways!

Sunday, February 5, 2006
Today on "Barry Gordon From Left Field" Progressive Talk Radio
(3 comments) Update! Barry's guests today include Bob Barr, conservative activist and former Republican congressman from Georgia, who will discuss being "political bedfellows" with former Vice President Al Gore, in speaking out against the NSA wiretapping and other abuses of civil liberties by this administration; Corey Robin, author of "Fear: History of a Political Idea," who will talk about the use of fear to manipulate public opinion; and Demtric Collins, music producer, who will talk about his company's new hit CD "Doggie Dog World & Kitty Cat Kingdom," which teaches children to appreciate animal life. So catch the webcast, on www.kcaaradio.com, or the broadcast, in the Inland Empire of California, and call in, to 1-800-809-0802, each Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. PST to let the world know the Left is right!

Saturday, February 4, 2006
(Scathing, Vital) Lessons Learned from the Alito Fight
(3 comments) Final result is that the Democrats have been sorely outplayed. They have switched positions in the middle and criticized their own stance and their own voters. So, when the elections roll around, the Republicans say the Democrats are "flip-floppers" and "wafflers" and "weak." They convince the electorate to vote for them instead because they are strong and mean what they say.

Thursday, February 2, 2006
Bush SOTU Brings to Mind Recent Re-Issue of Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here," About Rise of Folksy Fascist
(3 comments) Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here" envisioned an America in thrall to a homespun facist dictator. Newly reissued, it's as unsettling a read as ever. Read the excellent, chilling review in The Boston Globe by Joe Keohane, the editor of Boston's Weekly Dig.

Sunday, January 29, 2006
Waxman et al. Today on "Barry Gordon From Left Field": Progressive Talk Radio
Former president of SAG and candidate for Congress Barry Gordon hosts "Barry Gordon From Left Field" on progressive radio station KCAA 1050 AM, broadcast from the Inland Empire (the fast-growing area east of L.A.) and webcast on http://www.kcaaradio.com/, every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm PST. Today's noted guests are: Rep. Henry Waxman, leading congressional Democrat, who will discuss healthcare and other issues; Quentin D. Young, MD, former physician to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, Past President of the American Public Health Association, and Chairman of the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group, who will also discuss healthcare issues; and Terrence Blanchard, jazz trumpeter, film composer, and current Grammy nominee, who will discuss the upcoming awards from The Recording Academy. Listeners are encouraged to phone in. "It's a whole new ballgame!"

Sunday, January 22, 2006
Today on "Barry Gordon From Left Field": Progressive Talk Radio / Webcast
Former president of SAG and candidate for Congress Barry Gordon hosts "Barry Gordon From Left Field" on progressive radio station KCAA 1050 AM, broadcast from the Inland Empire (east of L.A.) and webcast on http://www.kcaaradio.com, every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm PST. Today's noted guests are Author David Heenan, who will discuss his newest book, "Flight Capital," about the "reverse brain drain" that is sending U.S.-educated foreigners and even U.S. citizens back to their ancestral homelands to build up their economies at the expense of our own economic well-being; Steven Gardner, lawyer for the Center for Science and the Public Interest, who will talk about their lawsuit against Viacom, owner of Nickelodeon, and Kellogg Corp., to stop the marketing of junk food to children; and Dianne Bates, entertainment journalist, who will report on the Sundance Film Festival and especially on the new political documentaries that have surfaced there. Listeners are encouraged to phone in ... and let the public know the Left is right!

Sunday, January 15, 2006
Today on "Barry Gordon From Left Field": Progressive Radio Talk Show
Former president of SAG and candidate for Congress Barry Gordon hosts "Barry Gordon From Left Field" on progressive radio station KCAA 1050 AM, broadcast from the Inland Empire (east of L.A.) and webcast on http://www.kcaaradio.com/, every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm PST. Today's noted guests are Douglas Massey, professor from Princeton and author of what Barry believes is one of the most interesting and important books of 2005 -- "Return of the 'L' Word" (as in Liberal) -- and Stephen Farber, online critic for Movieline.com, who will talk about the awards shows and the films in contention for 2005. Listeners are encouraged to phone in ... and let the public know the Left is right!

Sunday, January 8, 2006
New Progressive Radio Talk Show / Webcast: "Barry Gordon From Left Field"
Former president of SAG and candidate for Congress Barry Gordon brings his talk radio show "Barry Gordon From Left Field" to progressive radio station KCAA 1050 AM, broadcast from the Inland Empire (east of L.A.) and webcast on www.kcaaradio.com, every Sunday from 2 to 5 pm PST. Today's noted guests will discuss Ariel Sharon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush's overreaching and constitutional history, and commitments vs. resolutions for the new year and the rest of your life. Listeners are encouraged to phone in ... and let the public know the Left is right!

Friday, December 30, 2005
"Is Wal-Mart Good For America": "Frontline" Documentary Rebroadcast
Low wages, poor benefits, and worker abuse are the hallmarks of Wal-Mart's business practices, and the retail giant is setting the example for companies all across America. You can learn more about how Wal-Mart's policies send American jobs overseas by watching the rebroadcast of PBS's "Frontline" documentary, "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" on Tuesday, January 3. Click here to check local listings to see when the one-hour special -- one of the highest-rated programs in "Frontline" history -- will air in your community. In "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?", correspondent Hedrick Smith examines Wal-Mart as a global force changing the balance of power in the business world and leaving workers behind. You'll hear from an IBEW member who worked at television manufacturer Thomson Industries and see Rubbermaid's equipment auctioned off to Chinese buyers, illustrating how Wal-Mart's strong-arm tactics on suppliers to lower prices have driven jobs from once-solid American companies to low-wage operations overseas. You can learn more about the program on Frontline's website. Don't miss it! -- From UnionVoice.org

Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Fascism then. Fascism now?
(3 comments) When people think of fascism, they imagine Rows of goose-stepping storm troopers and puffy-chested dictators. What they don't see is the economic and political process that leads to the nightmare.

Monday, November 28, 2005
"War Based on a Lie": A Letter to the Editor in "Stars & Stripes"
(3 comments) Weapons of mass destruction? I’m still looking for them, and if you find any give me a call so we can justify our presence in Iraq. We started the war based on a lie, and we’ll finish it based on a lie. I say this because I am currently serving with a logistics headquarters in the Anbar province, between the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. I am not fooled by the constant fabrication of “democracy” and “freedom” touted by our leadership at home and overseas.

Saturday, November 26, 2005
Europe in Uproar Over CIA Operations
(3 comments) From Scandinavia to the tropical Canary Islands, the CIA's clandestine use of European soil and airspace for counter-terrorism missions is triggering outrage, parliamentary inquiries and a handful of criminal prosecutions.

Friday, November 25, 2005
Brownie, You're Doin' a Heck of a Job ... At Cashing In
(3 comments) Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job. [WHO WANTS HIS ADVICE? WHO WOULD INVEST IN THIS COMPANY? WHO DOES HE STILL HAVE INSIDE ACCESS TO? WILL KATRINA SURVIVORS SHARE IN HIS PROFITS? THIS IS A PRIME EXAMPLE OF WHAT IS SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH OUR COUNTRY]

Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Thanksgiving, from the ground up
(3 comments) Every morsel on the table is a reminder of the value of the land and those who work it.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005
GM Closures to Hit 12 Plants, 30,000 Jobs
(3 comments) UAW leaders blasted the latest cutbacks as "disappointing, unfair and unfortunate" and said the company's "continuing decline in market share is not the fault of workers or our communities." "We have said consistently that General Motors cannot shrink itself to prosperity," UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and Vice President Richard Shoemaker said in a statement. The automaker needs to offer vehicles "that consumers find attractive, exciting and want to buy."

Tuesday, November 22, 2005
Silver spoons and rusted wrenches
(3 comments) THE AMERICAN auto industry is dead. With General Motors announcing, days before Thanksgiving, 30,000 more layoffs and nine plant closings, the Rust Belt just got the final strike of the sledgehammer. When GM finally goes down for good, all the rusted remains of that region will crumble. ... Those born with silver spoons rarely come to the aid of those born with rusted wrenches. We're either going to continue the ridiculous trend of tax cuts that essentially pad the trust funds of the wealthy or we're going to reinvest in the region that helped the United States win its many wars and made us the world's sole economic superpower. Otherwise, this region will soon rust to dust and ash.

Thursday, November 17, 2005
Hawkish Dem Rep. John Murtha (PA) Calls for Immediate Pullout from Iraq, Blasts Cheney & Bush
(3 comments) "It is time for a change in direction," said Rep. John Murtha ... one of Congress' most hawkish Democrats. "Our military is suffering, the future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf region." ... Murtha, a Marine intelligence officer in Vietnam, angrily shot back at Cheney: "I like guys who've never been there that criticize us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done." Referring to Bush, Murtha added: "I resent the fact, on Veterans Day, he criticized Democrats for criticizing them."

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Class Matters
(3 comments) Two months ago, in his prime-time address from New Orleans, President Bush called upon the nation to "rise above the legacy of inequality." He was joking, obviously. The president's congressional allies now propose to cut Medicaid, food stamps, free school lunches and child-care subsides. They do not propose to save money by undoing the tax cuts that have handed an average of $103,000 a year to people making over $1 million.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Faith and Conscience
(3 comments) President Bush's promises to double foreign aid to Africa and send more money to poor countries with effective governments aren't on track. Let's hope the president hasn't forgotten he made them.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Spoils Go to Party Most Apt to Adapt
(3 comments) Bush's top political goal has always been to mobilize a massive turnout of Republicans by pursuing an unapologetically polarizing agenda, even at the price of straining his relations with moderate voters. ... Bush has seen his approval rating among independent voters fall to an almost unimaginable 29%. ... One fissure [in the Democratic Party] is between those who want to aim at swing voters and those who want to emulate Bush with an agenda intended to excite their base. The more important disagreement is between those who want the party to promote its own ideas and those who want to stay low while Bush is struggling.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Venture of Warner Bros., AOL to Provide Old Television Shows a New Life Online
(3 comments) Time Warner Inc. plans to announce today that it will make more than 100 old television series — including "Falcon Crest," "Kung Fu" and the '70s sitcom that made John Travolta a star, "Welcome Back, Kotter" — available for free in the first major archive of TV shows on the Web.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
This isn't the real America, by Jimmy Carter
(3 comments) IN RECENT YEARS, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican. These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights. Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Bush, The Albatross Around GOP Candidates' Necks; i.e., GOP Rats Desert the Sinking Bush Ship of State
(3 comments) Douglas R. Forrester now says the chief reason for his loss by a wide margin in the race for New Jersey governor is President Bush's unpopularity.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Doing Unto Others as They Did Unto Us
(3 comments) How did American interrogation tactics after 9/11 come to include abuse rising to the level of torture? Much has been said about the illegality of these tactics, but the strategic error that led to their adoption has been overlooked. The Pentagon effectively signed off on a strategy that mimics Red Army methods. But those tactics were not only inhumane, they were ineffective. For Communist interrogators, truth was beside the point: their aim was to force compliance to the point of false confession.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Burn in hell, Mr. President
(3 comments) Polls show most Americans share my distrust of Bush. We all see him for what he is – a dishonest, opportunistic political beast who lets nothing stand in the way of his unbridled lust for power. He speaks of God at one moment and calls those who dare disagree with him “motherfuckers” the next. He has, without blinking an eye, sent more than 2,000 American military men and women, along with countless thousands of Iraqi civilians, to their deaths in a senseless invasion based on manufactured “evidence” and outright lies. Then he has the gall to stand up on the day we set aside to honor those who served and continue to promote his lies and call those who see the truth traitors who aid the enemy.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Playing With Fire
(3 comments) Fewer than 200 of the approximately 500 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have filed petitions for habeas corpus hearings. They are not seeking trials, merely asking why they are being held. And according to government and military officials, an overwhelming majority should not have been taken prisoner in the first place. These men have been in isolation for nearly four years, subject to months of interrogation. Do they really have anything left to say?

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Bush Tries to Gag Critics in Veterans Day Speech
(3 comments) In his Veterans Day speech, Bush took the low road. Responding to critics who charge him with manipulating intelligence and hoodwinking the American people into war, Bush said: “It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began.” And then he set about rewriting it.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Right on the run
(3 comments) Unethical – in the polite, understated sense that Carlo Gambino was “unethical” – and incompetent. Those glaring Bush-administration qualities pretty much explain why Democrats walked away with all the goodies in Tuesday’s elections. Those are the qualities against which the electorate protested at the ballot box.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Frist Sells Soul To The Devil
(3 comments) On the way to work at his job on Capitol Hill, Sen. Bill Frist’s limo stopped at a traffic light, and the Devil opened the door and joined him on the back seat. ... Without batting an eyelid, Frist got into the Senate chamber and announced that the leaking to the Washington Post of the fact that the CIA had set up secret world-wide torture camps was a far more serious "crime" than the establishment of those very same camps. "There you go, Devil. You owe me ten grand."

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Democrats and the War
(3 comments) Everything that needs to be known is now known: The reasons the Bush Administration gave for the American war in Iraq were all falsehoods or deceptions, and every day the US occupation continues deepens the very problems it was supposed to solve. Therefore there can no longer be any doubt: The war--an unprovoked, unnecessary and unlawful invasion that has turned into a colonial-style occupation--is a moral and political catastrophe. As such it is a growing stain on the honor of every American who acquiesces, actively or passively, in its conduct and continuation.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Radioactive Bush
(3 comments) Bush’s unparalleled unpopularity gives ... [Democrats] the opportunity to really stand for something, like getting the troops out of Iraq, like boosting the minimum wage to a livable level, like providing universal health care and free college education, like alleviating poverty. Now’s the time for boldness.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Bush's Conservative Judge Harbors Libertarian Streak
(3 comments) Judge Alito's broad reading of the freedom of speech and press clauses of the First Amendment stands in contrast with his narrower interpretation of other constitutional rights, including the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and the Sixth Amendment's guarantees of fair trial rights for criminal defendants.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Democrats Losing Race For Funds
(3 comments) The Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean is losing the fundraising race against Republicans by nearly 2 to 1, a slow start that is stirring concern among strategists who worry that a cash shortage could hinder the party's competitiveness in next year's midterm elections. ... The explanation most offered by Dean allies for the sluggish start is that donors are tired of giving after watching Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) fail to deliver the White House.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument
(3 comments) President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence. Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Woes of Auto Parts Maker Threaten Wages
(3 comments) To the 3,800 plant workers of Lockport, a class war is underway in the auto industry. Many of them believe Delphi's bankruptcy was orchestrated by auto executives to permanently smash the pay scale of working people. There is a sense here that nobody is holding the people in top management accountable. ... if Delphi and its workers don't craft a deal on pay, pensions and benefits, a costly strike looms over the auto industry.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Group Trains Air Force Cadets to Proselytize
(3 comments) A private missionary group has assigned a pair of full-time Christian ministers to the U.S. Air Force Academy, where they are training cadets to evangelize among their peers. ... The organized evangelization effort has continued this year despite an outcry over alleged proselytizing at the academy that has prompted a Pentagon investigation, congressional hearings, a civil lawsuit and new Air Force guidelines on religion.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
U.S. Orders College to Drop Fellowships For Minorities
(3 comments) Federal prosecutors are threatening to sue Southern Illinois University over three scholarship programs aimed at women and minorities, calling them discriminatory. ... University spokeswoman Sue Davis said Friday that the programs have helped improve the school's diversity and are similar to those at other schools nationwide.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Strategists: Bush Comeback Will Be Tough
(3 comments) "Unless Bush and his advisers do something dramatic to reposition the administration and stop the slide in public approval, they're going to find they have very few friends who want to come to the White House, let alone friends who want them to come to their districts," Light said. "And that's about the worst possible position for a president to be in."

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Keep the Internet Free
(3 comments) Delegates from around the world will gather next week in Tunisia for what is known as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Few people are aware of WSIS's existence, its mission or the purpose of this conference. That is unfortunate, since the principal agenda item calls for a wholesale change in governance of the Internet that could lead to a significant setback for global freedom of information.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
In First for Africa, Woman Wins Election as President of Liberia
(3 comments) Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated economist and former World Bank official who waged a fierce presidential campaign against the soccer star George Weah, emerged victorious on Friday in her quest to lead war-torn Liberia and become the first woman elected head of state in modern African history. [WHY ARE NO WOMEN PROMINENTLY MENTIONED AS SERIOUS CONTENDERS FOR PRESIDENT IN THE U.S.? SHAME ON US!]

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Centrist Democrats Provided Edge on Detainee Vote
(3 comments) "A foreign national who is captured and determined to be an enemy combatant in the world war on terrorism has no more right to a habeas corpus appeal to our courts than did a captured soldier of the Axis powers during World War II," Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a statement.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Conservative Episcopalians Warn Church That It Must Change Course or Face Split
(3 comments) Conservative leaders of the Episcopal Church U.S.A. and their Anglican counterparts from overseas intensified their warnings Friday about the possibility of a schism in the Anglican Communion if the Episcopal Church did not renounce the consecration of gay bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Democrats Seek Documents on Abramoff and Bush Meeting
(3 comments) House Democratic leaders called on the White House on Friday to release documents showing whether a powerful Republican lobbyist [Jack Abramoff] had a role in arranging an Oval Office meeting last year between President Bush and the president of the West African nation of Gabon, whose government had been asked by the lobbyist to pay $9 million to help arrange such a meeting.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
'Faith talk' and Tammany Hall [Talk Values but Deliver the Goods]
(3 comments) People are inclined to trust the political judgments made by those who help them in times of need, and in this era of slashed government social programs — replaced in part by grants to "faith-based" providers — it's conservative evangelical ["mega"] churches that now play that role for many struggling Americans.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
Wal-Mart & Its Foes Turn to Religion
(3 comments) Wal-Mart has quietly reached out to church officials with invitations to visit its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to serve on leadership committees and to open a dialogue with the company. Across the aisle, one of the company's chief foes, Wal-Mart Watch, this weekend is launching seven days of anti-Wal-Mart consciousness-raising at more than 200 churches, synagogues and mosques in 100 cities, where leaders have agreed to sermonize about what they see as moral problems with the company.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
U.S., N. Korea Stick to Their Positions in Nuclear Talks
(3 comments) Negotiators didn't expect to resolve the complex issues involved in only three days. Pyongyang and Washington remained far apart on major issues involving North Korea's nuclear weapons program following three days of six-party talks that concluded here Friday. North Korea continued to insist that progress be made by the parties agreeing on "step-by-step measures" in which Pyongyang would be compensated at each juncture. ... The United States, on the other hand, has argued that the focus should be on a complete, verifiable dismantling of North Korea's weapons program.

Saturday, November 12, 2005
On Bush, the Dems, Jon Stewart, Hunter Thompson, Bill Moyers, and King (not Don); by John Cusack
(3 comments) Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future. ... This is indeed a league of bastards -- these men are human scum.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Legacy of 42nd President Framed With Barbs at 43rd
(3 comments) Clinton talked at length about his legacy, making the case for his policies on balanced budgets, global peacemaking and even health care -- saying recent history has shown he was right to push for reform even if he made mistakes in the effort.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Oil's Bigwigs Enjoy a Rigged Market
(3 comments) Fundamentally, the energy market isn't really a market -- it is rigged by nationally run oil monopolies that dictate the supply and prices of crude oil, individually within their own borders and globally through the OPEC cartel. In that system, private firms such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron are mere price-takers. But they are also willing free-riders who benefit handsomely from the price-fixing of others.

Friday, November 11, 2005
His Image Tarnished, Bush Seeks to Restore Credibility
(3 comments) Faced with a bleak public mood about Iraq and stung by Democratic accusations that he led the nation into war on false pretenses, President Bush is beginning a new effort to shore up his credibility and cast his critics as hypocrites.

Friday, November 11, 2005
'Wake up, Democrats — it's a new day'
(3 comments) All across the nation, on a host of local issues, Americans demonstrated the polls are true: the Right is wrong for them. This is wonderful news for progressives of all stripes, but there is danger, too, and it's the same danger that has sunk the Left for the last decade: voters didn't vote for Democrats, they voted against Republicans. If the Left wants to duplicate these results in 2006 and take back the Hill, it must respond to this victory not with conciliatory gee-whiz shuffling of feet, but with a full-out charge against the neoconservative agenda.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Is This the End of Bushism?
(3 comments) If we define Bushism as the political project of building a majority coalition, despite a commitment to unpopular policies, based on a superior cultural, national security, and leadership image among voters, that project is now failing.

Friday, November 11, 2005
The President Should Be Held Accountable, by Sen. Ted Kennedy
(3 comments) Earlier this week, several of our Republican colleagues came to the Senate floor and attempted to blame individual Democratic Senators for their errors in judgment about the war in Iraq. It was little more than a devious attempt to obscure the facts and take the focus off the real reason we went to war in Iraq. 150,000 American troops are bogged down in a quagmire in Iraq because ... in his march to war, President Bush exaggerated the threat to the American people. It was not subtle. It was not nuanced. It was pure, unadulterated fear-mongering, based on a devious strategy to convince the American people that Saddam's ability to provide nuclear weapons to al Qaeda justified immediate war.

Friday, November 11, 2005
For book, Carter takes off gloves
(3 comments) Outlining what he called a "profound and unprecedented change in basic American policies" under the Bush administration, Carter said the invasion of Iraq was a moral and political disaster, and has left the United States in more danger from terrorists than before. Tax cuts for the wealthy and proposed spending cuts to social programs have demonstrated an "open and overt commitment to the rich at the expense of the poor," while the Bush administration has sacrificed the environment for business.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Lest We Forget on Veterans Day: The Cuts Proposed for Vets by George "AWOL" Bush
(3 comments) The Bush budget plan slashes benefits for veterans by eliminating funding for state programs that provide veterans with long-term care, more than doubling prescription drug co-payments for some veterans, and requiring them to pay an annual enrollment fee of $250. The Bush plan would also trim nursing home care by $351 million, which would eliminate approximately 5,000 beds in nursing homes run by the Veterans Administration.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Cost of Bush War of Lies: 15,477 Wounded Vets; 2060 Who Will Never Live to be Vets
(3 comments) 10-Nov: Two more U-S soldiers and a Marine have been killed in Iraq. The soldiers died Thursday after being hit by small arms fire about 75 miles west of Baghdad. They were members of a U-S army unit detailed to the Second Marine Division in western Iraq. The Marine was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb. He was taking part in the latest U-S-led push in western Iraq known as Operation Steel Curtain. The goal is to wipe out insurgent strongholds and infiltration routes along the border with Syria.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Administration Uses Lax Dirty Bomb Clean-Up Standards to Justify Lax EPA Standards
(3 comments) "It's outrageous," said Daniel Hirsch, head of Committee to Bridge the Gap, a group that studies nuclear risk. "They are permitting much higher doses than are protective of the public, and appear to be doing so as part of an overall effort to relax public radiation protections." Hirsch referred to a companion proposal, also controversial, that would relax or eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency's guidelines on allowable radiation exposure from a wide variety of other sources, including nuclear power plants, dumpsites and even airport security devices.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Senate Approves Plan to Limit Detainee Access to Courts
(3 comments) The Senate endorsed a plan yesterday that would sharply limit suspected foreign terrorists' access to U.S. courts, an effort to overturn a landmark 2004 Supreme Court ruling that has allowed hundreds of detainees held by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge their detentions.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Bush Aide Fires Back at Critics On Justification for War in Iraq
(3 comments) The White House went on the offensive in the debate over the Iraq war yesterday, insisting that U.S. intelligence had compiled a "very strong case" that Saddam Hussein harbored banned weapons and accusing congressional critics of hypocrisy because many of them voted for force three years ago.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Who Loves Freedom More? by Michael Kinsley
(3 comments) The Constitution is not supposed to be just an obstacle course for officials who are trying to get around it. It ought to inspire policy even when it doesn't impose policy. Ditto the Geneva Conventions. Why would you even want to be clever about reasons it might not apply here or there?

Friday, November 11, 2005
Bush Vigorously Attacks Iraq War Critics
(3 comments) President Bush forcefully attacked critics of the war in Iraq today, accusing them of trying to rewrite history and saying they are undercutting American forces on the front lines.

Friday, November 11, 2005
80% of Seniors Doubt Medicare Drug Benefit
(3 comments) Open enrollment starts in days, but only two in 10 plan to sign up, a survey says. Many appear confused about all the options. ... If doubts harden into disdain, that could force major changes to one of President Bush's most promoted domestic-policy accomplishments.

Friday, November 11, 2005
AP-Ipsos Poll: Most Americans Doubt Bush's Honesty
(3 comments) Almost six in 10 -- 57 percent -- said they do not think the Bush administration has high ethical standards and the same portion says President Bush is not honest. ... More than eight in 10, 82 percent, described Bush as "stubborn," with almost that many Republicans agreeing to that description.

Friday, November 11, 2005
FDA Issues Warning for Contraceptive Patch
(3 comments) Users of the Ortho Evra contraceptive patch are exposed to more estrogen than from birth control pills so are at higher risk of blood clots and other side effects, the Food and Drug Administration has warned.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Under Pressure from Right, FDA Suggests Warnings for Condoms
(3 comments) Against a background of pressure from social conservatives, the Food and Drug Administration is recommending a new series of labels for condoms, warning that they "greatly reduce, but do not eliminate" the risk of some sexually transmitted diseases. Though little noticed by the general public, the issue of condom labeling has become another battleground in the nation's culture wars.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Some Abortion Foes Unsure About Alito
(3 comments) Some antiabortion groups are starting to wonder whether Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. is as strong an ally of their cause as opponents have depicted him. Although he has been wholeheartedly embraced by most major conservative groups, those whose sole mission is to restrict and prohibit abortion have reservations about the latest Supreme Court nominee as they learn more about his record on the divisive issue.

Friday, November 11, 2005
Rove Says the Tide Is Running in Conservatives' Favor
(3 comments) Karl Rove ... denounced liberal judges Thursday for engaging in "judicial imperialism" and told conservative activists that reform of the federal judiciary was on the way, led by the Supreme Court's new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr. "The wind and tide are running in our favor," Rove said in a speech ... that also predicted Senate confirmation of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Friday, November 11, 2005
U.S. Trade Deficit Soars to Record Levels in September
(3 comments) The U.S. trade deficit ballooned to record high levels in September after exports — notably of aircraft — fell and imports surged, the Commerce Department reported today. In other economic news, a widely watched gauge of consumer confidence strengthened this month and the government reported a slightly larger than expected rise in new unemployment claims.

Friday, November 11, 2005
House GOP leaders scuttle budget-cut vote
(3 comments) House Republican leaders scuttled a vote Thursday on a $51 billion budget-cut package in the face of a revolt by moderate lawmakers over cuts to Medicaid, food stamp and student loan programs.

Friday, November 11, 2005
ACLU, NAACP ask Congress to redo voter law
(3 comments) Civil rights activists argued Wednesday that a 2-year-old Supreme Court decision largely wiped out 40 years of progress minorities have made under the Voting Rights Act.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Oil and Grilling Don't Mix
(3 comments) Senators struck a note of populist outrage when they ordered oil executives to appear before the Energy and Commerce committees to explain high fuel prices and record company profits. ... But instead of calling oil executives on the carpet yesterday, senators gave them the red-carpet treatment. ... From the start, the ferocity of the questioning seemed to come in inverse proportion to the amount of industry funds a questioner had received.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Anti-Terror Measure Rejected in Britain
(3 comments) The House of Commons on Wednesday soundly defeated an anti-terrorism measure championed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, dealing him one of the most significant political setbacks of his eight years in office. The lower house of Parliament voted 322 to 291 against a proposal to allow suspects in terrorism cases to be held for as many as 90 days without charge, up from the current 14. It was Blair's first loss in a major vote in that house since he took office in 1997.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
For GOP, 2006 Now Looms Much Larger
(3 comments) In a season of discontent for the White House, Tuesday's election results intensified Republican anxiety that next year's midterm contests could bring serious losses unless George W. Bush finds a way to turn around his presidency and shore up support among disaffected, moderate swing voters.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Congress May Limit Bush's Powers with Patriot Act
(3 comments) Congress edged closer yesterday to limiting some of the sweeping surveillance and search powers it granted to the federal government under the USA Patriot Act in 2001, including a provision that would allow judicial oversight of a central tool of the FBI's counterterrorism efforts. ... it would mark another significant setback for the weakened Bush administration as it battles the GOP-controlled Congress over the limits of its powers related to terrorism and the Iraq war.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Democrats Query Nominee On Ethics
(3 comments) Senate Democrats are pressing Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. about his rulings on cases that involved financial companies in which he had investments, a sign that ethics questions may play a role in his confirmation hearing.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
A Party Finds the Right Words
(3 comments) Tuesday's elections will be seen as a rebuke to Bush. But they may be more important as the moment Democrats finally figured out how to talk without embarrassment about God and the practical uses of government.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Kaine Puts Roads at Top of Agenda, Says Virginia GOP's Ads 'Backfired'
(3 comments) Gov.-elect Timothy M. Kaine (D) said yesterday that he will immediately begin a series of town hall meetings across Virginia to rally public support for a legislative battle next year over fixing the state's transportation problems. A day after his victory over Republican Jerry W. Kilgore, Kaine savored the latest Democratic win in a state known for its fidelity to the GOP in recent years. At a morning news conference in Richmond, he declared that voters had rejected the Kilgore campaign's attacks on his record.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
An Important Indictment
(3 comments) The flailing Bush presidency continues to spin off new compelling story lines almost daily; yesterday it was torture, today it's Bush as electoral albatross. It's almost inevitable that the media will let some fall by the wayside. But according to a new Pew Research Center poll, the recent indictment of senior White House aide Scooter Libby is a really big deal: Even more important to the country, for instance, than the 1998 charges that President Bill Clinton lied under oath about Monica Lewinsky. Those, of course, led to Clinton's impeachment.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
War, Spin, & A Little Bit of Everything
(3 comments) The spinmeisters, meanwhile, put out their predictable talking points after Tuesday's elections: Democrats saying their day is coming, Republicans saying the local races meant nothing. Had the outcome been reversed, the party messages would have flipped as well.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Ballot Measures Mostly Draw Scowls From Voters
(3 comments) In this off-year election, voters across the country defeated a range of ballot initiatives — lashing out at ideologically driven arguments and rejecting tax cuts in favor of putting money into infrastructure and education. ... "The issue agenda has shifted from the '90s and early 2000s, when the focus was on lower taxes and limiting government," he said. "Now we are spending most of our time figuring out how to meet essential services." Because of this, "voters are being less ideologically driven —there is less real hostility to government," he said. "At the moment, I think voters are in a pragmatic middle ground."

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Abramoff Allegedly Scammed African President for Meeting with Bush
(3 comments) Jack Abramoff asked for $9 million in 2003 from the president of a West African nation to arrange a meeting with President Bush and directed his fees to a Maryland company now under federal scrutiny, according to newly disclosed documents. The African leader, President Omar Bongo of Gabon, met with President Bush in the Oval Office on May 26, 2004, 10 months after Mr. Abramoff made the offer. There has been no evidence in the public record that Mr. Abramoff had any role in organizing the meeting or that he received any money or had a signed contract with Gabon [notorious for human rights abuses].

Thursday, November 10, 2005
House Shelves Alaska Drilling in Budget Fight
(3 comments) House Republican leaders were forced to jettison a plan for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska on Wednesday night to save a sweeping spending bill, a concession that came one day after the party suffered significant election loses.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Amtrak Fires Its President in Dispute Over Future
(3 comments) Amtrak's board fired the company's president on Wednesday morning, widening a divide between the Bush administration and Congress over the future of the railroad.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Blaming the Messenger
(3 comments) The truth is that the damage is caused by the administration's underlying acts and policies, not by the news media's disclosures, which serve only to hold officials accountable for their actions. It is the secret camps themselves and the abuse and torture of prisoners that smear America's image and jeopardize Americans serving their country, not newspaper articles.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
The Return of Ahmad Chalabi
(3 comments) Mr. Chalabi's record as a double-dealer and unreliable source stretches back for decades. He has long been distrusted by those in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency who know Iraq best. But during the crucial months that the Bush administration was planning the invasion and occupation, Mr. Chalabi became a favorite of pro-war Pentagon and White House officials, largely by telling them what they wanted to hear. It is alarming that the administration is still willing to reward him with such a high-ranking official audience.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Feel the Burn, Girlyman
(3 comments) In the aftermath of the California special election the headlines read, “SCHWARZENEGGER ROUTED”, a most welcome bulletin that for inspirational value ranks a close second to “COULTER DROWNS IN SEWAGE TREATMENT MISHAP”. Yet the most relevant factor is not that He Who Gropes has just been groped. It is the way in which he has been groped that serves as a template for liberal success.

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Pat Robertson: Intelligent design rejection was a vote against God
(3 comments) On today's broadcast of "The 700 Club," Robertson told Dover [PA] residents, "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God." The founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network explained, "You just voted God out of your city."

Thursday, November 10, 2005
Oil Company Execs Defend Profits to Senate, With an Assist by the Bush FTC
(3 comments) The head of the Federal Trade Commission said a federal price-gouging law "likely will do more harm than good." "While no consumers like price increases, in fact, price increases lower demand and help make the shortage shorter-lived than it otherwise would have been," FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras told the hearing. "That's an astounding theory of consumer protection," replied Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Deadly Explosions Rock Jordan Hotels
(3 comments) Explosions hit three hotels in the Jordanian capital Wednesday night, and at least 18 people were killed and 120 wounded. A police official said the explosions indicated the involvement of al-Qaida, which has launched coordinated attacks on high-profile, Western targets in the past.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
CIA v. Cheney
(3 comments) Cheney's current situation has the makings of a Greek tragedy in the way he is about to self-destruct. The tragic flaw of overweening arrogance - the Greeks called it hubris - did not begin with Euripides. Nor will it end with the inexorably approaching demise of the vice president and other leaders of the current US administration.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
What America Exports: Paper, Waste and Jobs
(3 comments) In the 21st century the US economy has ceased to generate net new jobs in middle and upper middle class professions. This is a serious economic, social and political problem that receives no attention.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Willie Horton's Swift Boat Crashes In Virginia
(3 comments) Republican Jerry Kilgore's defeat in Virginia is not only a reflection of voter disillusionment with George W. Bush, who swooped in at the eleventh hour for a rally with the gubernatorial hopeful, it marks a stunning repudiation of the GOP's vaunted attack machine. Throughout the campaign, Kilgore avoided the issues Virginians cared about most -- transportation and education -- homing in instead on the character of his opponent, Tim Kaine. This time-tested Republican strategy proved to be a grave miscalculation.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
A Culture Of Lies
(3 comments) If the public had known what White House was planning: handing over public assets to its private benefactors, concentrating wealth and power to secure long-term partisan advantage, and mortgaging the country’s fiscal future and civil liberties to pull it off—we would have long ago seen angry torch-wielding mobs storming the castle.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Bush Suffers a Trifecta of Defeat in Off-Year Election
(3 comments) You can bet the already nervous Republicans who are Busheviks out of fear that Tom DeLay or Karl Rove will blow their knee caps off if they stray from the Politburo (White House) party line are now going to start breaking away out of fear that they will lose their 2006 elections.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Democratic Turncoat Turned Out
(3 comments) St. Paul [MN] A year after Mayor Randy Kelly publicly backed President Bush for re-election, voters here showed they hadn't forgotten -- and weren't in a forgiving mood. Residents of this heavily Democratic city ousted Kelly, electing fellow Democrat and former Council member Chris Coleman by a 70 percent to 30 percent margin.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
PA Evolved, But the World is Still Flat in Kansas
(3 comments) TOPEKA, Kan. — The state Board of Education approved curriculum standards Tuesday that question evolution and redefine science to include concepts other than natural explanations. The board, in a 6-4 vote, recommended that schools teach the "considerable scientific and public controversy" surrounding the origin of life — a dispute most scientists contend exists only among creationists.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Centrist Senators Feel Assured on Abortion After Alito Visit
(3 comments) Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Alito told her he would respect precedent even if he disagreed with the original ruling ... Alito also met privately with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who emerged from their discussion saying the veteran federal appeals judge had assured him that he considered Roe a precedent that "deserved great respect."

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
The Roots of the Riots in France
(3 comments) The young Muslims living ... outside Paris, Lyon and Marseilles are no less alienated than those living near Amsterdam, Barcelona and London. ... It is ... discrimination, not Islamic fervor, that is seen as sparking the riots. But will some of the fury be focused into jihad? ... these radicalized young people, like any European citizen, would be eligible for visa-free travel to the U.S.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
The Won't-Be-Bullied Pulpit
(3 comments) The rightful role of communities of faith is not to speak and act as though God is in the pocket of the Democratic or Republican parties. Our role is to boldly proclaim the biblical themes of justice for all, peace on Earth, the sacredness of all life and the preciousness and fragility of the environment.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Bush Gambles, Loses Campaigning
(3 comments) Iraq, Katrina, CIA leak, Harriet Miers. Things couldn't possibly get any worse for President Bush. Wait, they just did. Bush put his wispy political prestige on the line in the Virginia governor's race and lost Tuesday when the candidate he embraced in a last-minute campaign stop was soundly defeated ... "Republicans are not so angry at the president that they want to vote for the other guy. They just stayed home," said GOP consultant Rich Galen.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Wag the Damascus?
(3 comments) Military planning for Syria was thus initiated long before the United Nations report implicating the Syrian regime in the February assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a vocal critic of Damascus. And it should be pointed out that much of the new military planning is also related to Syria's overt and clandestine support for the Iraqi insurgency, as well as its continued harboring of former Iraqi Ba'athists and their families.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Central Torture Agency?
(3 comments) Why should we adhere to the Geneva Conventions when our terrorist enemies do not? The answers are simple. First, we have long championed the Geneva Conventions because we want our citizens treated humanely when they are captured. Second, morally it is the right thing to do. If this amendment passes, what weight will our complaints have when other governments use their intelligence services to torture Americans?

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Mr. Kaine's Victory
(3 comments) Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's triumph in Virginia's gubernatorial race is a watershed -- the victory of a Southern Democrat who prevailed despite his principled opposition to the death penalty and his refusal to rule out new taxes.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Report Warned C.I.A. on Tactics In Interrogation
(3 comments) A classified report issued last year by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general warned that interrogation procedures approved by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks might violate some provisions of the international Convention Against Torture.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Big Builder Sees Slower Home Sales
(3 comments) The nation's largest maker of luxury homes ... said yesterday that soaring home prices appeared to have ended. It was the latest sign that many real estate markets are slowing.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Forget "President Schwarzenegger": Voters Terminate Arnold's Pet Initiatives
(3 comments) There was talk of amending the U.S. Constitution so that a foreign-born citizen could run for president. ... some around the governor ... counseled a rightward shift to put the governor more in the mainstream of the national GOP. ... Polls showed the governor's once-solid bipartisan support steadily eroding throughout the year as his opponents spent tens of millions of dollars in TV ads to tarnish his image ... If Tuesday's early results hold [and they did], it would suggest that Schwarzenegger's celebrity appeal has faded.

Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Gubernatorial Wins in NJ & VA Show How Dems Can Beat GOP (Stuck with Bush)
(3 comments) Democrats swept gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday, sending new tremors through Republicans worried that President Bush's sagging popularity may drag down the party in next year's midterm elections. ... Especially ominous for Republicans were the results among swing voters in suburban and exurban communities across northern Virginia ... in affluent but socially moderate suburbs ... a backlash against the conservative positions ... on such social issues as gun control, the death penalty and gay adoption ... in the fast-growing exurban communities that have become an increasingly important stronghold for the GOP ... Democrats ... overcome Republican cultural appeals ... with more focused attention to bread-and-butter concerns [such as overdevelopment].

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
More Concerned About the Leak than the Torture, GOP Wants to Investigate CIA Prison Story
(3 comments) Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert called Tuesday for a congressional investigation into the disclosure of alleged secret U.S. interrogation centers abroad. The Washington Post reported Nov. 2 on the existence of secret U.S. prisons in Eastern Europe for terror suspects.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Poll: Libby Indictment Hits Major Nerve
(3 comments) Four in five, 79 percent, said the indictment of former Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on perjury and other charges is important to the nation ... [and] 43 percent, now say U.S. and British leaders were mostly lying when they claimed before the Iraq war that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ... That's up from 31 percent who felt in February 2004 that the leaders were lying.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
While Paris Burns
(3 comments) President Jacques Chirac and his ministers ... appear to have no idea what to do and to whom to talk. Their floundering illustrates the deeper problems that underlie the current unrest: a failed approach to absorbing immigrants into society, an out-of-touch political elite and ministers more interested in a presidential election that's still nearly two years away than in coming up with answers for today's literally burning problems.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Bush’s Approval Ratings Will Not Recover – There Will Be No Comeback
(3 comments) Bush isn’t going to make a comeback. He’s fallen and he can’t get up. A comeback presupposes substance and ability. A worthy character who has suffered some setbacks, bad luck or simple human mistakes can make a comeback because he has it in him ... George Bush ... doesn’t have the personality suited for making necessary changes ... Even if he had the inclination to make a change, he doesn’t have the ability. He simply doesn’t know what the hell he is doing. ... there is no polite way to put this – the man is an imbecile.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
So Iraq Was About the Oil
(3 comments) When Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson publicly decried the Bush administration’s bungling of U.S. foreign policy, the focus of the press coverage was on Wilkerson’s depiction of a "cabal" headed by Vice President Dick Cheney that had hijacked the decision-making process. Largely overlooked were Wilkerson's frank admissions about the importance of oil in justifying a long-term U.S. military intervention in Iraq.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Syllabus: The Bush-Cheney Ethics Refresher Course
(3 comments) Apparently the new "ethics refresher course" at the White House is going to focus on reminding White House staff that classified information is not supposed to be told to reporters ... Seriously, who in the hell are they kidding? Themselves?

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Compassion's Toll on Society of "Owners" Too Poor to be Sick
(3 comments) That crapshoot called health should never be the dividing line between comfort and poverty. In the United States, a health-industrial complex designed to punish the sick as it cures them is poverty's cruelest recruiter, and the middle class' gathering economic threat.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Wal-Mart's Tax on Us
(3 comments) Wal-Mart, the Alpha Dog of discount stores, has also become the Alpha Hog at the public trough. The phenomenal growth of the world's largest corporation has been supported by taxpayers in many states through economic development subsidies ... The economic impact of these subsidies on small businesses is given a human face in one powerful segment of Robert Greenwald's new documentary, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price."

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Yes, They Lied, by William Rivers Pitt
(3 comments) "The President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true, and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it." -- Ari Fleischer, 12/4/2002

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Grokster Calls It Quits on Sharing Music Files
(3 comments) Grokster, a developer of file-swapping software used to trade copyrighted music and movie files, said Monday that it would halt distribution of the software and cut off support for its associated network as part of a landmark settlement with the recording industry and Hollywood studios.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
France Beefs Up Response to Riots
(3 comments) Confronted by the most dramatic social uprising since 1968, the government of France remains largely helpless against gangs of angry youths. The response is being crafted by a lame-duck president and an interior minister and a prime minister who are slugging it out to replace him. While many French leaders depict the rioters as simple criminals, political and social analysts and many French citizens see the fires that are burning across the country as reflecting a growing identity crisis in a nation where social policies have not kept up with rapidly changing profiles in religion, race and ethnicity.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Wider Scope in Prewar Probe Sought
(3 comments) "Comparing public statements with what the intelligence community published does not alone tell the story," [Sen. John D.] Rockefeller [IV (D-W.Va.), the panel's vice chairman,] said in a statement yesterday. "If necessary, we may need to conduct interviews and request supporting documents." Rockefeller warned that "if the committee is denied testimony or documentation, we must be prepared to issue subpoenas."

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
GOP Budget Cuts Face Varied Opposition
(3 comments) House Democrats have compiled lists of committee votes for cuts to agriculture, student aid, child support and health care programs, as well as for oil drilling in the Alaska refuge, that Democratic leaders vow to use in next year's midterm congressional elections. "This is going to test whether moderate Republicans are really moderate," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "There are a ton of people who will have a day of reckoning coming."

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Blair Failed In Dealing With Bush, Book Says
(3 comments) Prime Minister Tony Blair was so "seduced" by the "proximity and glamour of American power" that he failed to use his leverage with President Bush to slow the rush to war with Iraq, Britain's former ambassador to the United States has written in a new book ... "DC Confidential."

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
No More Blank-Check Wars
(3 comments) Requiring Congress to declare war, rather than just approve or authorize the president's decision to take troops into combat, would make it much harder for Congress to duck its responsibilities. The president would be required to give Congress an analysis of the threat, specific war aims with their rationale and feasibility, general strategy and potential costs. Congress would hold hearings, examine the information and conclude with a full floor debate and solemn vote.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Conservatives Also Irked by IRS Probe of Churches
(3 comments) The IRS threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena because of an antiwar sermon there during the 2004 presidential election is part of a larger, controversial federal investigation of political activity at churches and nonprofit groups.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Lying with Intelligence
(3 comments) Bush exploited the worldwide horror felt over the 9/11 attacks to justify the Iraq invasion. His outrageous claim, repeated over and over before and after he dragged the nation into an unnecessary war, was never supported by a single piece of credible evidence. The Bush defense of what is arguably the biggest lie ever put over on the American people is that everyone had gotten the intelligence wrong. Not so at the highest level of U.S. intelligence, as DITSUM No. 044-02 so clearly shows. How could the president not have known?

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Deadliest Suicide Bombing Against G.I.'s in Months Kills 4 in Iraq
(3 comments) In Washington, the Pentagon announced planned troop rotations that would leave a force of at least 92,000 in Iraq through 2008, though officials emphasized that the numbers could change ... Suicide car bombings against American soldiers are rare, and the attack underscored the increasing skills of insurgents here.

Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Energy Companies Feel the Heat on the Hill
(3 comments) With voters fuming about high fuel prices, two Senate committees want answers from oil company executives about why they are ringing up record profits. Senior officials from ExxonMobil Corp., Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, BP America and Shell Oil Co. are to appear tomorrow before a joint hearing of the Energy and Commerce committees, to try to deflect a push by Republicans as well as Democrats for anti-price-gouging legislation, including a windfall profits tax.

Monday, November 7, 2005
'Bush doing corporate bidding while on the clock
(3 comments) Among Latin Americans, polls show George W Bush to be the most unpopular American president in history. On November 3, 2005, the Argentine daily reported the results of a poll that showed 6 out of ten Argentines opposed Bush's presence in their country.

Monday, November 7, 2005
Bush's Wall of Shame
(3 comments) Somewhere in this world of ours there should be at least one Wall of Shame (and perhaps an adjoining Wall of Cronyism) for an administration which has heaped favor, position, and honors on those who have blundered, lied, manipulated, and broken the law (not to say, cracked open the Constitution and the republic). Here is just a sampling of the band of culprits who might appear on such a wall and but a few of the things for which they might be held accountable:

Monday, November 7, 2005
10 Officers Shot as Riots Worsen in French Cities
(3 comments) Rioters fired shotguns at the police in a working-class suburb of Paris on Sunday, wounding 10 officers as the country's fast-spreading urban unrest escalated dangerously. Just hours earlier, President Jacques Chirac called an emergency meeting of top security officials and promised increased police pressure to confront the violence.

Monday, November 7, 2005
Delays Hurting U.S. Rebuilding in Afghanistan
(3 comments) ...the United States hopes to withdraw 4,000 soldiers from the country's south next spring; a drop in overall foreign aid is expected; and Taliban attacks are rising ... Government ministers here say that the foreign consultants and contractors the Americans pay for are producing shoddy work and achieving little - though charging dearly.

Monday, November 7, 2005
Bush declares: 'We do not torture'
(3 comments) Bush supported an effort spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture ... "We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding ... Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture," Bush said. [So why oppose a law vs. torture?]

Monday, November 7, 2005
Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Military Tribunals
(3 comments) The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider a challenge to the Bush administration's military tribunals for foreign terror suspects, a major test of the government's wartime powers.

Monday, November 7, 2005
Military backs down, will carry Ed Schultz Show overseas
(3 comments) Armed Forces Radio has decided to include the Ed Schultz Show in overseas programming ... The Department had intended to begin carrying Schultz's show earlier, but that deal was put on hold after Schultz's remarks. Several Democratic senators [encouraged by public email campaigns] then wrote to officials in the Defense Department ... Schultz will share the airwaves with conservative radio maven Rush Limbaugh.

Monday, November 7, 2005
Antiwar Sermon Brings IRS Warning
(3 comments) The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California's largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

Monday, November 7, 2005
We Americans are like recovering addicts after a four-year bender
(3 comments) Bush made his white constituency feel good about themselves, but no longer. Citizens are rediscovering democracy

Monday, November 7, 2005
Evaluations, Cronyism and Pay
(3 comments) [A discussion of] the Bush administration's goal of replacing the General Schedule pay system with one that more strongly links pay raises to annual performance evaluations at all federal agencies ... a common employee fear about the proposed system ... [is] that managers will slant annual evaluations to reward favored workers ...

Monday, November 7, 2005
Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy ... And Becomes Isolated
(3 comments) Increasingly, however, Cheney's positions are being opposed by other administration officials, including Cabinet members, political appointees and Republican lawmakers who once stood firmly behind the administration on all matters concerning terrorism.

Monday, November 7, 2005
What Are We Holding Together?
(3 comments) As Yugoslavia broke up in 1991, the first Bush administration put all its diplomatic muscle into a doomed effort to hold the country together, and it did nothing to stop the coming war. We should not repeat that mistake in Iraq.

Monday, November 7, 2005
Don't Count on a Filibuster: Alito Charms Senate Dem's, "Defies" Labels
(3 comments) Although liberal activists are portraying Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. as a right-wing extremist, his 15 years' worth of legal opinions do not promise fealty to any ideology. Though many of his rulings favor business or prosecutors, they are often narrow — and a sizable number cut the other way. Accordingly, Democrats in the Senate are cautious, and there is little or no talk of a filibuster. "My instinct is that we should commit" to an up-or-down vote, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said Sunday ... "He isn't Robert Bork," said a top aide to a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee ...

Monday, November 7, 2005
Bust Strategy to Get Out of Hole: Historical Precedents etc.
(3 comments) Calling for more cuts "was the biggest political adjustment he's made in months and will pay the biggest dividends if he follows through," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Ousted from PBS, Rove Crony Investigated for Corruption at Voice of America
(3 comments) Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the head of the federal agency that oversees most government broadcasts to foreign countries, including the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, is the subject of an inquiry into accusations of misuse of federal money and the use of phantom or unqualified employees ...

Saturday, November 5, 2005
High Prices for Energy Hold Down Job Growth
(3 comments) Job growth was surprisingly meager last month, the Labor Department reported yesterday, in a sign that business executives have become worried that the economic damage from high energy prices might be growing.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Alito: Permissive on Copyright & Wiretaps
(3 comments) "... he takes a limited view of copyright, which could bode well for tech companies, as well as a permissive approach toward electronic surveillance by police."

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Some in GOP Regretting Pork-Stuffed Highway Bill
(3 comments) ... with spiraling war and hurricane recovery costs, the pork-laden bill has become a political albatross for Republicans, who have been promising since President Bush took office to get rid of wasteful spending.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Evidence Mounts, Tying Top GOP Lobbyist to Interior Dept. Official
(3 comments) The Justice Department is investigating [Jack] Abramoff's practices, focusing on tribal clients that paid him and a public relations associate $82 million between 2001 and 2003. Investigators are examining whether executive branch officials or members of Congress and their staffs did favors for the lobbyist for campaign contributions, jobs or trips.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Credentials Are Fine, but Values Matter, Too
(3 comments) Lawyers and jurists such as ... John Davis and Robert Bork (and possibly Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge Samuel Alito?) ... are brilliant and have a feeling for the law. But what about a feeling for justice? Do they even see injustice? And if so, do they believe that the power of the Supreme Court should be used to remedy injustice? Do they read the Constitution generously?

Saturday, November 5, 2005
The Republicans' Gathering Storm
(3 comments) In 1994, Democrats were hit with the political equivalent of "the perfect storm" which enabled Republicans to pick up 62 House and Senate seats and seize control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 42 years. For today's beleaguered Republicans watching the gathering clouds anxiously, the good news is that the forecast does not call for another perfect storm in 2006. The bad news is that, instead, they face something much worse.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Torture: It's the new American way
(3 comments) During the Cold War, we thought we knew what distinguished us from our Soviet bloc enemies. We did not have a gulag; we did not imprison and torture our enemies. But the war on terror has distorted our national values. We have used some of the same tactics we once decried. The Soviet Union's legacy of terror lives on, its tactics embraced by some of our leaders. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to insist that the McCain amendment, which prohibits U.S. personnel from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, should not be applicable to the CIA. Somewhere in Moscow's Novodevichyi cemetery, Khrushchev is probably laughing inside his grave.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Democrats Move to Exploit Iraq Missteps
(3 comments) Outnumbered on Capitol Hill, Democrats are embracing the little power they have in the GOP-controlled House and Senate by using procedural techniques to highlight Iraq troubles and issue blistering critiques of Bush's war policies.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
U.N. Audit: Halliburton Owes Iraq a Refund for Poor Work, Price Gouging
(3 comments) "The Bush administration repeatedly gave Halliburton special treatment and allowed the company to gouge both U.S. taxpayers and the Iraqi people," Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a statement on the new audits. "The international auditors have every right to expect a full refund of Halliburton's egregious overcharges."

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Alito: Favoring Big Business at Expense of Workers & Investors
(3 comments) His extensive paper trail of 15 years of opinions reveals a jurist deeply skeptical of claims against large corporations ... with few exceptions, he has sided with employers over employees in discrimination lawsuits and in favor of corporations over investors in securities fraud cases.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Bush administration's moral compass is lost
(3 comments) Mired in political corruption of one variety or another, hamstrung (economically and spiritually) by an unjust war, and publicly shamed by the most despicable display of institutionalized racism since the slave era, as demonstrated in the unforgivably inept early response to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration has lost whatever moral voice it might have had ... The immorality (by any religious tradition's measure) of the proposed $50 billion budget reconciliation package is brazen. If enacted, it would prove only to increase the suffering of the already-struggling poor, including tens of thousands who lost everything along the Gulf Coast. Maybe immoral isn't the appropriate word. Downright evil is a better description.

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Alito: An Overall Record in Support of Discrimination
(3 comments) "Alito has been a judge a long time, and it would be incorrect to say that he always rules against victims of discrimination," Chemerinsky said. But he added: "Overall, his rulings are far more for defendants than for plaintiffs in discrimination cases. There are many more troubling decisions than encouraging ones in trying to predict where Alito would be as a Supreme Court justice in discrimination cases."

Saturday, November 5, 2005
Senators Take On Bush With Torture Ban Proposal
(3 comments) "If necessary — and I sincerely hope it is not — I and the cosponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails," McCain said on the Senate floor. "Let no one doubt our determination."

Friday, November 4, 2005
A Cheney-Libby Conspiracy, Or Worse? Reading Between the Lines of the Libby Indictment, by John Dean
(3 comments) Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Faith and Fraud, by Jonathan Schell
(3 comments) A factitious picture of the world built up by the Bush Administration over its five years in power is now going to pieces before our eyes. Great jagged spikes of reality, like the crags of the iceberg that ripped open the staterooms of the Titanic, are tearing into it on all sides. The disrespected world of facts, an exacting master, is putting down this governmental insurrection against its ineluctable laws.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Governors chafe at greater military role
(3 comments) Several governors are fuming over a Bush administration suggestion that the active military take a greater role in disaster response, calling it an attempt to usurp state authority over National Guard units ... "I'm going to stand up among a bunch of elected governors and say, 'Are we going to allow the military without a shot being fired to effectively do an end-run coup on civilian government? Are we going to allow that?'" [Montana Gov. Brian] Schweitzer said. "We're going to have a little civics lesson for some leaders who are apparently out of touch in the military."

Friday, November 4, 2005
As Thousands Protest in Streets, Bush Makes Deals in Argentina
(3 comments) MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina -- A crowd of 10,000 protesters chanting "Get out Bush!" swarmed the streets of this Argentine resort today, hours before the hemisphere's leaders sat down to debate free trade, immigration and job creation ... Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez ... [said] he was "inspired" by the protesters, who ... oppose the U.S.-led negotiations to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas stretching from Alaska to Argentina ... But Bush seemed to be winning over supporters ... 28 of the 34 countries participating in the summit had [reportedly] agreed [behind closed doors] to relaunch trade talks as early as April.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Congress & Administration Eliminate Crucial Habitat Protections
(3 comments) The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would eliminate federally protected critical habitat on 150 million acres of largely undeveloped public and private land. The Senate could act on the legislation by year's end. But even without legislative action, the Bush administration is eliminating critical-habitat designations around the country.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Do More Work, Earn Less Pay: "Productivity Up, Labor Costs Drop"
(3 comments) U.S. workers in recent years have been pressed to produce more, although often for modest wage increases that have helped keep their employers' costs down ... U.S. business productivity — measuring worker output per hour — surged at an annual rate of 4.1% in the July-to-September period, the Labor Department reported. It was the strongest increase in more than a year and far surpassed expectations. Meanwhile, unit labor costs — what it costs businesses to produce a given output for a set amount of labor — declined at an annual rate of 0.5% in the quarter, the department said. It was the first drop in this key indicator of corporate profitability since the second quarter of 2004.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified
(3 comments) [According to Gen. Nicolo Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, which has been accused of having been the source of the forged documents] ... an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino ... [was] the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program ... Mr. Martino ... [was reportedly] a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency" ... News reports have quoted him as saying he obtained them through a contact at the Niger Embassy here [Italy] ... the false documents were [reportedly] produced and disseminated by one or more people for personal profit ...

Friday, November 4, 2005
Former Head & GOP "Monitor" of PBS Removed from Its Board
(3 comments) Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the former head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was forced to step down as a member of its board on Thursday evening. The move came after the board began reviewing a confidential report by the inspector general of the corporation into accusations about Mr. Tomlinson's use of corporation money to promote more conservative programming.

Friday, November 4, 2005
DeLay Asked Lobbyist Abramoff to Raise Money Through Charity
(3 comments) Representative Tom DeLay asked the lobbyist Jack Abramoff to raise money for him through a private charity controlled by Mr. Abramoff, an unusual request that led the lobbyist to try to gather at least $150,000 from his Indian tribe clients and their gambling operations, according to newly disclosed e-mail from the lobbyist's files.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Senate Passes Budget With Benefit Cuts and Oil Drilling
(3 comments) Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said, "This bill is a reflection of the Republican Congress's commitment to pursue a path of fiscal responsibility." It will, Mr. Gregg said, reduce the deficit and save roughly $35 billion over the next five years. Democrats said the savings would disappear and the deficit would increase if Republicans carried out their plan to cut taxes by $70 billion later this year.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Dressed for Success, Primed for Failure
(3 comments) Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Brownie fretted about his attire while New Orleans drowned. This would make a great sitcom if the results weren't so tragic.

Friday, November 4, 2005
Bush Arrives for Hemispheric Summit, Planning to Pitch Free Trade
(3 comments) MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina ... The Bush administration had hoped the meeting would help revive stalled plans for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, a zone that would stretch from Alaska to Argentina ... Across the region, half a dozen populist leaders have been elected in recent years, often supported by constituencies that blame U.S.-backed economic policies, private investment and international trade as sources of continued poverty and widening income disparities.

Friday, November 4, 2005
First the CBS News Poll, Now the WP-ABC News Poll: Most Don't Trust Bush
(3 comments) For the first time in his presidency a majority of Americans question the integrity of President Bush, and growing doubts about his leadership have left him with record negative ratings on the economy, Iraq and even the war on terrorism, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows. On almost every key measure of presidential character and performance, the survey found that Bush has never been less popular with the American people. Currently 39 percent approve of the job he is doing as president, while 60 percent disapprove of his performance in office -- the highest level of disapproval ever recorded for Bush in Post-ABC polls.

Friday, November 4, 2005
In Louisiana, Worker Influx Causes Ill Will
(3 comments) "People from other states, we appreciate their help," said Aubrey D. Cheatham, a union electrician from New Orleans who believes he lost a job to lower-paid workers from outside Louisiana. "But everybody else is getting work, not us."

Friday, November 4, 2005
StopTheNRA E-Mail Campaign vs. "Machine Gun Sammy" Alito
(3 comments) The same White House that just last week gave special legal protection to the gun industry, that refuses to bar terrorists from buying guns, and that broke a campaign promise and put Uzis and AK-47s back on America's city streets ... [now] nominate[s] "Machine Gun Sammy" to the highest bench in the land! In 1996, when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the authority of Congress to ban fully automatic machine guns, Judge Samuel Alito dissented. Yes, he voted to loosen the restrictions on machine guns. Click the Headline Link (above) & E-Mail your senators vs. Alito!

Friday, November 4, 2005
More People Now Believe in Aliens on Earth Than Approve of Bush in White House
(3 comments) Dick Cheney ... has a 19 percent approval rating. How low is 19 percent? ... [he] is now 18 points behind the number of people who believe alien beings have secretly contacted the U.S. government ... Scottie McClellan, however, can still spin things: Bush only trails the aliens by two points.

Thursday, November 3, 2005
Senate backs drilling in Alaska refuge
(3 comments) Senate opponents to drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge failed Thursday to strip the measure from a massive budget package as supporters of exploration argued that the oil is needed to help break America of its import habit. Environmentalists, who believe strongly the refuge should continue to be off limits to oil companies to protect the area's wildlife, had acknowledged that it was a long shot to get the provision killed and now are concentrating on defeating the overall budget bill.

Thursday, November 3, 2005
Behind the Scenes for the Alito Hearings: Gang