Op-Ed

What would be the impact if America's campuses got as many of their 17 million enrolled students as possible registered to vote and participating in the fall campaigns? My sense, from recent youth voting patterns, is that it would make a major difference.

Commentators have been bemoaning students' political detachment for years—the separation of far too many from critical public issues. New institutions have emerged to address this, from the national higher education service learning network Campus Compact to Rock the Vote and the New Voters Project of the PIRGs. But students kept saying their actions didn't matter. Many believed that the electoral sphere was so inevitably corrupt that their participation made no sense.

This election feels different. Young voters and volunteers are surging into campaigns in numbers we haven't seen in decades. In 2006 they made the key difference in countless House races and half the Senate seats that changed hands. Their interest now is even greater. The question is whether we'll give them the tools they need to act in a way that will make the greatest possible impact.

El Congresista Dennis Kucinich, un Democrata del Ohio ha introducido 35 articulos de la acusación contra George W. Bush. Dos de los artículos tratan sobre el hecho que Bush nunca fue electo, y de hecho robó la elección de 2004 en Ohio. Los articulos deberían servir como un aviso aleccionador para la campaña de Obama ya que la elección de este año también podría ser robada.

La valentía de Kucinich en la introducción de estos artículos es subrayado por el hecho que el Congreso debería haber quitado a Bush desde hace años de su oficina. De mentir al mundo para perpetrar la guerra en Irak, a la violación de la Constitución en tanteos de derechos civilies básicos y cuestiones de libertad, a la adoptación de un regimen basado en corrupción sin precedents y robo, George Bush sería conocido como el peor presidente en la historia de los EEUU si, de hecho él hubiera sido elegido presidente.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has introduced 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush.  Two of the articles deal with the fact that Bush was never elected, and in fact stole the election of 2004 in Ohio.  They should serve as a cautionary notice to the Obama campaign that this year's election could also be stolen. 

Kucinich's courage in introducing these articles is underscored by the fact that the Congress should have removed Bush from office years ago.  From lying to the world to perpetrate the war in Iraq, to violating the Constitution on scores of basic civil rights and liberties issues, to fostering a regime based on unprecedented corruption and robbery, George W. Bush would be known as the worst president in the history of the United States if in fact he had been elected president.

Over the years, once in a great while, I’ve been surprised to cross paths with a journalist at a major TV outlet who actually seems willing and able to go outside the conventional boundaries of media discourse.

That’s what happened one day in the fall of 2005 at the Boston headquarters of the CN8 television network, owned and operated by the corporate media giant Comcast. I showed up for an interview about my book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." My expectations weren’t very high.

After all, I was setting foot in the studios of a large commercial TV channel with wide distribution of its programming in New England and beyond. And Comcast, shall we say, has earned a reputation as a voracious media conglomerate with scant interest in the public interest.

I was scheduled to appear on a prime-time nightly show hosted by Barry Nolan, a longtime TV newsman. When the cameras started rolling, it quickly became clear that he’d actually read the book -- and was willing to explore its documentation and damning implications about the use of media to drag the United States into one war after another.

Funny how we can’t seem to hear the truth until it’s uttered by a professional liar.

Thus Scott McClellan, who was George Bush’s press secretary for three years, beginning shortly after we invaded Iraq — the very Scott McClellan who personified lock-step obedience to the cause — has acquired sudden street cred as Someone To Listen To, as he tells us what we already know. Our society may not convene truth commissions, but it does publish tell-all books by ex-aides of the powerful, which feed us pieces of truth in the form of scandal.

McClellan has given the country a bit more (unwanted, embarrassing) self-awareness than it had a week ago, prior to the release and subsequent media splash of “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception.” His book raises a lot of questions, but only one that matters: Now what?

The United States maintains secret prisons on ships in the ocean in order to detain people outside the reach or even the knowledge of any system of law, the better to torture the ever-living cheney out of them. Over at the Black Commentator, Glen Ford (now at the Black Agenda Report) has been calling the Bush Cheney gang pirates for years. And the point is not just that they're criminals, but that they are outlaws, killers, and thieves who operate outside any national allegiance or system of laws or morality.

The torture ships are in the news of late, at least in England, thanks to the work of an attorney and author named Clive Stafford Smith and his organization: Reprieve ( http://reprieve.org.uk ). A report just released by Reprieve has resulted in news reports in The Guardian, Associated Press, and Reuters.

In politics, as in so many other aspects of life, anger is a combustible fuel. Affirmed and titrated, it helps us move forward. Suppressed or self-indulged, it’s likely to blow up in our faces.

With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination coming to a close, there’s plenty of anger in the air. And the elements are distinctly flammable. As Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times on June 3, "the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion."

Herbert doesn’t spread the blame evenly. And, as an elected Obama delegate to the national convention, I don’t either. But at this stage in the nomination process, the returns of blame aren’t merely diminishing -- they’re about to go over a cliff.

The anger that’s churning among many Hillary Clinton supporters is deserving of respect. For a long time, she’s been hit by an inexhaustible arsenal of virulent sexism, whether from Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews.

So, the Democratic National Committee has bent the rules for Senator Clinton and effectively given her 87 delegates and Senator Obama 63 from two states that were not supposed to be counted. That gives Clinton a grand total of 1,580 pledged (more or less) delegates, and Obama 1,711. While, technically that still leaves Obama with "the lead," there are 86 pledged delegates remaining to be awarded in Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota. This means that Clinton can still pull it out if she picks up 153 percent of the remaining delegates, an improvement on the 181 percent she would have needed to pick up if not for the Michigan-Florida deal.

Clinton clearly has the momentum. In addition, the backroom deal on Michigan and Florida's "pledged" delegates helps to blur the line between pledged delegates (awarded by actual voters and caucus goers, except in Florida and Michigan) and super delegates (awarded by Party control freaks). The distinction is, of course, blurred to virtual nonexistence by any media story covering the election, as over 80 percent of media stories now do.

Something called the "GI Bill" passed both houses of Congress with large majorities in recent weeks. It really would provide educational benefits to veterans, but it's not a bill. It's an amendment. It could be introduced as a bill, pass again with large majorities, and probably even override a veto. Or it could die from repeated vetoes after being passed repeatedly, a goal the Democrats have treated as their ideal dream outcome for all sorts of other bills over the past year and a half. Of course, even if the GI amendment is signed into law, the current president may eliminate it with a "signing statement."

It makes sense for Florida to be sanctioned by the DNC. If the Democratic Party is going to win elections, you can't have states capriciously violating agreed-on rules.  But an equally critical reason to dock its delegates is that for a relatively unknown challenger like Obama, taking on someone as massively visible as Clinton, in-person campaigning is essential, and he had no chance to do it there. Obama's campaigning has played a critical role in every contested race in his once-underdog fight, both those he won, and those where he closed the gap, though lost.