Duty to Warn

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.

King Fossil Fuel has ruled: there will be no Senate debate on global warming this year. And Joe Lieberman's greenwashed campaign gift for John McCain is a no-go.

On June 6 the Senate failed to override a Republican-led filibuster against the bi-partisan Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. It was a stunning victory for a coal-oil-gas industry that will resonate through the presidential campaign and deep into next year's new presidency and Congress.

The legislation was complex and controversial, involving a wide range of potential strategies to fight the climate crisis. At its core were "cap-and-trade" schemes establishing a federal bureaucracy meant to control emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Proposals introduced by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) promoted renewables and efficiency, among other things. Waiting in the wings was a series of amendments which may have set aside roughly a half-trillion dollars for funding new commercial reactor construction.

Keene, NH -- More than nine hundred Antioch College alumni and former students, faculty and staff called for the resignation of Antioch University Chancellor Toni Murdock and Board of Trustees Chair Art Zucker.

The 900-plus signed onto a petition circulated by an alumni group, Antioch College Action Network, that is being presented to Antioch University trustees at their June 5-8 meeting in Keene, New Hampshire.

In June, 2007, under the direction of Murdock and Zucker, the Antioch University Board of Trustees voted to suspend operations at Antioch College effective June 30, 2008, triggering a remarkable outpouring of alumni organizing and fundraising to keep the College alive. Last month, after nearly six months of negotiations, the board narrowly rejected a deal with alumni major donors which would have allowed the College to continue operating.

Alumni involved in the negotiations have said the University negotiating team, led by Murdock and Zucker, repeatedly obstructed a resolution.

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.

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."

Like racial profiling, the so-called Watch List hinges on a false premise that people commit crimes because of their racial, ethnic or religious background.  This false premise caused huge suffering to African America, Japanese Americans and now Arab and American Muslims. The worst part of this is the assumption that practicing Islam, never mind being an activist at that, gives one an appetite for terrorism.  In the process, people who are in good standing who did not commit nor had a criminal record are treated as "posing a threat to civil aviation or national security" or as "potential enemies of the state".

Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported last year that since 2003, a database that stores names of "individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States" has quadrupled from 100,000 to 435,000. I am sure the numbers now are way higher.  The question is that if the US has these many "terrorists" or "dangerous people," then we have a real and huge problem that cannot be solved by a watch list that selectively targets people.

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.