International

Today President Gordon Gee of The Ohio State University is cowering in his office, denying a meeting with representatives of student group Free the Planet! OSU and fellow supporters of The Grassy Narrows First Nation. Protesters serenaded the building with a drum circle, chants, banners, and signs. Chants included: "Gordon Gee, yes you could, stop buying old-growth wood!" and "Tell me what solidarity looks like! This is what solidarity looks like!"

About two hours ago, five students at Ohio State began a sit-in to demand ethical standards for the purchase of wood and paper. Members of Free the Planet!, a student group on campus, vow to stay until President Gordon Gee signs an agreement to stop the University from buying wood products obtained from Indigenous conflict areas and to include more recycled content in paper and lumber used on campus. (More about Grassy Narrows here: http://freegrassy.org/

Police are reportedly on the scene, but have not indicated any intent to arrest at this point.

I’ll admit it. I’m attracted to the candidacy of Barack Obama. I’m attracted to his fundamental message of inclusion, hope, and progressive change. He’s built a campaign on cross-cultural and multi-generation grassroots movements and community building, and I believe Obama personifies what this nation desperately needs after eight years of George W. Bush: a radical change in direction.

This election will be about how WE THE PEOPLE bring change. And, for the first time in American history, we’re seeing the possibility of an election that is about something different than political dynasties and rich white men. We’re seeing the possibility of an election that would reestablish the Horatio Alger-inspired idea that any American can grow up to be president.

For those in the Central Ohio area who have not already had the pleasure of listening, WCRS, also known as Simply Living Radio, started broadcasting on a five hour per day schedule in late June 2007. Broadcast hours are currently from 3-7 pm Monday through Friday. The low power FM (LPFM) signal is found on two frequencies, 102.1 and 98.3. The 98.3 frequency is broadcast from southwest Columbus and has a stronger signal. This is actually a “translator” beacon provided by the generous support of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism which publishes The Free Press in Columbus. Westerville is the location of the 102.1 broadcast tower and is the “home signal”. WCRS instantly became the LPFM station with the largest metropolitan market in the country!

 Less than 30% of conservative activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference “strongly support” him

(Manassas, VA, February 9) Richard A. Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, today released the results of a true random poll of 1,000 conservative activists attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. CPAC is the nation’s largest annual gathering of conservatives, and was chosen by former Gov. Mitt Romney as the place where he announced his withdrewal from the GOP presidential race on Thursday.

The first question asked of the 1,000 conservative activists was: “In your opinion, is Senator John McCain a true conservative?”

The results:

Yes                 197      (19.7%)
No                   595      (59.5%)
Undecided    208      (20.8%)

In their focus on the electoral horse-race, the media have ignored a key difference between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- the positions of their foreign policy advisors on the Iraq war. As political scientist Stephen Zunes points out in Foreign Policy in Focus, Clinton's key advisors overwhelmingly supported it, while Obama's opposed it. The differences in their positions on whether to go to war mirror those of the two candidates. They also give a sense of how Clinton and Obama are likely to deal with the immensely difficult foreign policy challenges they'll face if elected, including dealing with Iraq.

From Zunes's revised version of his article:

The president makes the decisions, but who advises the president? We know Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle insisted to Bush that American forces would be treated as liberators if we went into Iraq. McCain has surrounded himself with people likely to encourage him to follow a similar disastrous path if he becomes president. But what about Obama and Clinton?

Did you think the 2000 election was stolen? And that maybe something was wrong in 2004 as well? Are you wondering what effect election fraud had in 2006? Do you want to know what really happened and how it�ll affect this year�s election? If you answered 'YES' to the above questions, then you need to host a DFA-Uncounted House Party on February 13th. From your house party, you'll be able to call in to a very special conference call with filmmaker David Earnhardt and DFA Chair Jim Dean.

Uncounted is an explosive new documentary that shows how the election fraud that changed the outcome of the 2004 election led to even greater fraud in 2006 - and now looms as an unbridled threat to the outcome of the 2008 election. This film examines in startling terms how easy it is to change election outcomes and undermine election integrity across the U.S. We have free copies of Uncounted on DVD to send to the first 200 House Parties with 10 RSVPs before February 6th.

Uncounted House Party Info

From day-one of the crisis that has gripped Kenya this year, much of the mainstream media has been quick to label the violence “tribal warfare,” while the top US envoy to Africa called the Kenyan clashes “ethnic cleansing.” The problem with those terms is that they don’t actually explain anything. Yet many people hear the words “tribal warfare” or “ethnic cleansing” and assume that people’s identity is the root of the violence in Kenya.

We live in a time when the notion of a “clash of civilizations” passes for political science and an us-versus-them mentality (“you’re either with us or with the terrorists”) is the basis of super-power foreign policy. The crudeness of those ideas makes it hard to remember that, while identity can be mobilized in the service of hatred, a person’s “tribe,” ethnicity, or religion does not cause or motivate violence. 

So what does? In the case of Kenya, tribal categories are a short-hand for describing people’s unequal access to political power and economic resources.

In "Chicken Doves" Matt Taibbi correctly denounces the phony, monied, Democratic-front antiwar movement without acknowledging the real one. United for Peace and Justice, and other organizations serious about peace, struggle against a corrupt Congress, a pseudo peace movement with lots more money than we have, and reporters like Taibbi who pretend that a major movement that is actually working for peace with projects like this one upcoming in March: http://resistinmarch.org does not exist.

Taibbi correctly condemns the Democrats' past year of not really trying to end the occupation of Iraq. But he fails to acknowledge that they still have almost another whole year left in which they could quite easily act if they wanted to. Millions of us will continue pushing them to cut off the funding, with no help from Taibbi and other journalists who buy into the pretense that it is already 2009.

Taibbi does not spell it out, but here is why the Democrats' claim of powerlessness is false: