U.S. National

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 40 years ago this month at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24 year old immigrant, is the alleged lone gunman and is presently serving a life sentence.



In a new book, An Open and Shut Case, Dr. Robert Joling and Philip Van Praag have joined a growing list of people who don't believe that Sirhan acted alone.



Joling and Van Praag, both forensic scientists, claim that after analyzing audio recordings of the assassination they have concluded that at least 13 shots were fired. The handgun Sirhan used only had the capacity to fire eight shots. They believe that there were two guns and that the fatal shot came from behind Robert Kennedy, while witnesses claim that Sirhan was in front of Kennedy. According to a March 27, 2008 ABC report by Pierre Thomas, Joling claims, "It can be established conclusively that Sirhan did not shoot Senator Kennedy. And in fact not only did he not do it, he could not have done it."


We can't just think we voted and hope we voted. We have to know we voted. And, under present circumstances, most people have no clue as to whether they voted or not. –Journalist Lynn Landes, in STEALING AMERICA

The most difficult part of making a quilt takes place inside the creator's imagination, before she ever picks up her scissors. Every step is meticulously planned; each thread, scrap, color, design, and texture has a specific role to play in the overall scheme. The skill of the quilter emerges in how well the overall design holds together, and how it connects the disparate elements into a unique and aesthetic whole.

STEALING AMERICA is just such a quilt and Dorothy Fadiman is the master artisan. She pieces together an incredible number of details to give us a stunning new perspective on what has been happening to our elections. What we might have originally thought were random events are, in fact, critical parts of an almost invisible but comprehensive plan to subvert democracy by systematically disenfranchising millions of us voters.

For Sylvia

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

–William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

Enlightened as he was, even Inge’s thinking was tainted by the toxin of ego. Who are we human animals (whose collective knowledge of our own capacity to think, learn, and know is still significantly limited), to presume to know that non-human animals do not conceptualize a Devil of sorts? And whether they are able to conjure such a mental abstraction or not is ultimately irrelevant. Objectively speaking, we human animals ARE Devils toward our non-human counterparts, whether they perceive us to be or not.

That’s right. We’re all wearing Prada. Whether we’ve winnowed our wardrobe down to a couple of items or are still amongst those who don the apparel of speciesism with the pride of a redneck whose just beaten “his woman” back into submission, we’re all complicit in the systemic infliction of cruelty, oppression, torture, and murder upon our non-human animal brethren.

Descent Into Chaos – The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Ahmed Rashid. Viking (Penguin) New York, 2008.

The Warming of the Earth

Rising temperatures are altering the earth’s climate in fundamental ways and threatening life as we know it. The preeminent climate expert in the U.S. government, and perhaps in the world, is James Hansen, who is NASA’s director of Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Hansen testified twenty years ago, in 1988, before a congressional committee on the first hard evidence that human activities were responsible for global warming, raising the concentration of carbon, a major greenhouse gas, to a level above the concentration existing prior to industrialization. Since his original testimony, many hundreds of scientifically peer-reviewed studies have confirmed and buttressed his earlier findings, and further established that fossil fuels (along with deforestation) are central factors in the  steadily rising temperature of the earth, and that the consequences are destabilizing or destroying eco-systems around the globe. Hansen commented just a few weeks ago that the relevant scientific community is now over 99% confident in confirming the reality of increasingly harmful and catastrophic global warming.

Count my vote – a citizen's guide to voting by Steven Rosenfeld

Forewarned is Forearmed

AlterNet has been around for the last ten years, bringing its millions of monthly readers the latest in award-winning, independent, investigative journalism and doing the job the traditional media abdicated long ago. This spring, they branched out and AlterNet Books was born. Count My Vote – a Citizen's Guide To Voting is one of their first offerings, written and compiled by Steven Rosenfeld, an AlterNet Senior Fellow who specializes in democracy and elections. He co-authored several books on the 2004 election including What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New Press) and Did George W. Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? (Columbus Institute of Contemporary Journalism). As a result of Rosenfeld's extensive research into what went wrong in 2004, there are few people in a better position to write the voter education guide, Count My Vote, which will hit the bookstores later this month. This is a combination sneak preview and interview with its author.

Why did you write Count My Vote?

Let’s face it, my fellow freedom and burger loving Americans. It is becoming painfully obvious that our non-negotiable American Way of Life is increasingly under attack. Yet while our meat consumption may be a wedge issue our foes are using against us, it can also be our salvation.

We are facing swarms of terrorists in the Animal Liberation Front, mobs of fanatical extremists at PETA, and hordes of Nazi-like, in-your-face vegans and vegetarians. Like deranged street prophets, they spout all kinds of nonsense about speciesism, the suffering of sentient beings, animal rights, compassion for livestock in factory farms, and other deluded ramblings.

Though we recognize their ridiculous utterances, beliefs, and acts to be those of mentally unbalanced losers who need a ridiculous cause in their miserable lives to prevent them doing the world a favor by committing suicide, how long can we afford to ignore these violent and dangerous individuals? Their numbers are growing way too rapidly for my comfort.

“In 1992, Bill Clinton put the call for universal health care at the center of his program. But, once president, his closeness to Wall Street and his intellectual dependence on Robert Rubin of Wall Street made him leery of antagonizing the insurance industry. It was President Clinton's unwillingness to confront the insurance companies that led to his failure to honor his commitment to work toward a universal health care program. . . His administration's top priorities were reduction of the federal deficit. . . and approval of NAFTA. These actions antagonized and demoralized the grassroots of the Democratic Party. Clinton lost any power to mobilize people for the establishment of a universal health care program. This frustration of the grassroots, and especially the working class, also led to the huge abstention by the Democratic Party base in the 1994 congressional elections and the consequent loss of the Democratic majority in the House, the Senate, and many state legislatures. At the root of this disenchantment with the Clinton administration was its unwillingness to confront the insurance companies and Wall Street.”

With Wall Street unwilling to finance new nuclear plants, U.S. Senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and John Warner of Virginia have cooked up a scheme to provide $544 billion - yes, with a "b" -- in subsidies for new nuclear power plant development.

Their move will be debated on the floor of the Senate Tuesday, June 3.

A Lieberman aide describes the plan as "the most historic incentive for nuclear in the history of the United States."

The Lieberman-Warner scheme is cloaked in a climate change bill -- the claim being that nuclear power plants don't emit greenhouse gases and thus don't contribute to global warming. However, the overall "nuclear cycle" - which includes mining, milling, fuel enrichment and fabrication, and reprocessing -- has significant greenhouse gas emissions that do contribute to global warming.

Moreover, nuclear power is enormously dangerous. Accidents like the Chernobyl explosion of 1986 stand to kill and leave many people with cancer. Nuclear plants routinely emit life-threatening radioactivity. Safeguarding nuclear waste for millions of years is an insoluble problem.

I’m not sure I can remember exactly where I first met Ann Feeney. Suffix it to be that Annie is the epitome of Preacher Casey in Steinbach’s great novel, “Salt of the Earth.” I know I saw her at Ravenswood, at Camp Solidarity in western Virginia, at the big steelworker rally at the WCI strike in Youngstown and at the Newport News strike. I could go on and on, but it really is true; wherever worker’s struggle for justice, it’s there you’ll find Ann Feeney!

As much as Ann’s singing for justice for working folks is a labor of love, she recently pointed out that it’s also a family tradition. At a recent show in Cleveland, Annie stated that she’d gotten a grant from the Pennsylvania Labor History Society to study, collect information on her grandfather, a hellraising Irish immigrant union leader and an associate of the great William Z. Foster. As she pointed out, what could be better than fighting for justice, singing along and getting paid to study your granddaddy?