Duty to Warn

The perpetual war on women’s lives continues unabated. The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows protestors to continue to terrorize women at abortion clinics and South Dakota’s ban on virtually all abortions (with other states threatening to do the same) are the latest assaults on women’s human rights in this country. In addition, almost immediately after signing the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), President Bush promptly turned around and submitted a budget that proposed cutting funds to the vital services that are provided for by this important piece of legislation.

The arrogant disregard for women’s human rights however is a global phenomena. Hundreds of women die every year from AIDS the complications of childbirth because there is no profit in helping them survive. Women throughout the world are also victimized by a perpetual pandemic of sexual violence including infanticide, female genital mutilation, rape and sexual slavery.

As a progressive ‘yellow-dog’ Democrat who happens to work in the Ports for New York Harbor find it urgent to speak on the current Dubai fiasco. 

Republicans and Democrats alike have taken aim at this takeover of the operations at six U.S. Ports to a company owned by Dubai Ports World, of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Dubai Ports World is buying the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, a British-owned firm which has contracts to run cargo terminals in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, and New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS, LA Carnival 2006...As a mild sociopath with a fear of crowds and parades, I had been awaiting this event with a mixture of childlike anticipation and abject terror. Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, marks the end of the revelry that is the month of February, and the last day before the Catholic holiday of Lent. While Carnival is celebrated all over the world, no city does it with quite the same degree of lewd abandon as does New Orleans. This yearly celebration of all things sensual and insane normally attracts tens of thousands of visitors from all over the country as well as bringing out the entire local community; indeed, nearly everyone in the city spends all year planning and anticipating the Month of February, preparing costumes, planning drinking routes, collecting and ordering beads and other “throws”...however, this Mardi Gras also marked the six month anniversary of the devastation visited upon the Gulf Coast by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Detroit hosted Super Bowl XL in February amidst a city staggering with nearly 50,000 abandoned houses and a 14.1% unemployment rate. Police swept the homeless off the streets to project a goodly image to the world.

The essence of football is the strategic and violent struggle for monopoly control of land, with the winner taking all.

And that's what happened in Detroit's Poletown 25 years ago this month. Poletown Michigan made national news as the Michigan Supreme Court agreed to consider whether or not Detroit could demolish a vibrant multicultural neighborhood to build a General Motors Cadillac plant.

Under pressure from GM, the City of Detroit had declared in 1981 that it could take private property and transfer it to a profit making corporation under the U.S. Constitution's 5th Amendment, which said that land should be taken for "public use." Traditionally the eminent domain clause had been interpreted to mean using sovereign power to build a public good like a road, a library or school, not a Fortune 500 corporation. Poletown residents fought back fiercely, but the MI Supreme Court gave Detroit/GM the green light.

Sudden Death

In mid-June 2003, when former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's criticism against the White House's use of pre-war Iraq intelligence started to make national headlines, Vice President Dick Cheney told his former chief of staff and close confidant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to leak classified intelligence data on Iraq's nuclear ambitions to a legendary Washington journalist in order to undercut the charges made against the Bush administration by the former ambassador.

On June 27, 2003, Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, became the first journalist to whom Libby leaked a portion of the classified National Intelligence Estimate that purportedly showed how Iraq tried to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger.

This story is based on interviews with current and former administration officials who work or worked at the CIA, the State Department and the National Security Council. All of the individuals are familiar with the events that took place in the days that led up to Libby's meeting with Woodward and other journalists in which the NIE was discussed.

As each new season brings more waves of higher-tech digital products, I often think of Mark Twain. Along with being a brilliant writer, he was also an ill-fated investor -- fascinated with the latest technical innovations, including the strides toward functional typewriters and typesetting equipment as the 19th century neared its close.

Twain would have marveled at the standard PC that we take for granted now. But what would he have made of the intrusiveness of present-day media technology -- let alone its recurring content?

It’s getting harder and harder to drive out of cell-phone range -- that is, if you really want to. And judging from scenes at countless remote locations, many people would rather not forfeit 24/7 phone access for conversations that involuntary eavesdroppers hear half of. (Virtually always, it seems, the more boring half.)

AUSTIN, Texas -- South Dakota is so rarely found on the leading edge of the far out, the wiggy, the California-esque. But it has now staked its claim. First to Outlaw Abortion This Century. The state legislature of South Dakota, in all its wisdom and majesty, a legislature comprised of sons and daughters of the soil from Aberdeen to Zell, have usurped the right of the women of that state to decide whether or not to bear the child of an unwanted pregnancy. THEY will decide. Women will do what they decide.

These towering solons, representing citizens from the great cosmopolitan centers of Rapid City and Sioux Falls to the bosky dells near Yankton, are noted for their sagacity and understanding. When you think "enlightenment," the first thing that comes to your mind is "the South Dakota Legislature," right?

As well it might. The purpose of the law is to force a decision from the United States Supreme Court, where the appointments of John Roberts and Sam Alito have now shored up the anti-choice forces.

On a cold, cloudy night, the lines threaded all the way around the Ohio State campus. News that Kurt Vonnegut was speaking at the Ohio Union prompted these “apathetic” heartland college students to start lining up in the early afternoon. About 2,000 got in. At least that many more were turned away. It was the biggest crowd for a speaker here since Michael Moore.

In an age dominated by hype and sex, neither Moore nor Vonnegut seems a likely candidate to rock a campus whose biggest news has been the men’s and women’s basketball teams’ joint assault on Big Ten championships.

But maybe there’s more going on here than Fox wants us to think.

Vonnegut takes an easy chair across from Prof. Manuel Luis Martinez, a poet and teacher of writing. He grabs Martinez and semi-whispers into his ear (and the mike) “What can I say here?”

Martinez urges candor.

“Well,” says Vonnegut, “I just want to say that George W. Bush is the syphilis president.”

The students seem to agree.

“The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” Vonnegut adds, “is that Hitler was elected.”

In its coverage Thursday of the latest White House Katrina scandal, the New York Times has unbelievably missed the entire main story that President Bush lied to Americans when, four days after the Hurricane hit, he declared on ABC's Good Morning America that"I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." But a new videotape released Wednesday by the Associated Press clearly shows the president, along with Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, being warned the day before the storm struck that the levees in fact were in serious jeopardy. Yet the Times' story makes absolutely no mention of this contradiction. In fact, its opening paragraph is so way off the mark as to almost exonerate the Bushies over their inept response to the storm:

"A newly released transcript of a government videoconference shows that hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal and state officials did not know that the levees in New Orleans were failing and were cautiously congratulating one another on the government response."