Global

Bob,

    I read your article published in the Tehran Times.  I just wanted to let you know how idiotic and illogical your article was.  I guess the "Tehran Times" was the only one that would publish such garbage, whatever the "Tehran Times" is.  I guess that is also why you are a professor at a community college, not a university.  I hope that all of the GED students are getting there money's worth of $100 per unit by sitting through your class.

Yours truly,
George

yes, that's you bob.

Taking the stage at a community center in the small Northern California town of Bolinas, a group of four musicians quickly showed themselves to be returning as a vibrant creative force centered very much in the present.

     Not that the music of Country Joe and the Fish ever really disappeared. Since the release of the band’s first two albums in 1967 -- “Electric Music for the Mind and Body” along with “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die” -- many of its songs have meandered through the memories and semi-consciousness of millions of Americans who came of age a third of a century ago.

     Now reconstituted with four of the legendary group’s original five members, the new Country Joe Band has just begun to tour. When I saw them perform, midway through April, the music was as tightly effusive as ever, with poetic lyrics mostly brought to bear on two perennials: love and death.

I hope your running for the Columbus, Iran schoolboard!

I do not argue with the Bob Fitrakis premise, but the question is why have so many waited so long?

Bob Woodward  is being praised by the talking heads (a naval term) as "likely the greatest reporter of this century", "the man who can really get the news stories no one else can" and other similar accolades. Is the purpose of a Bob Woodward to be the insiders ultimate hatchet man? Is it his job to destroy one of their own who has stepped out of line or has been used about as much as he/she can be used and  therefore needs to be replaced with the next step towards a "New" World "Order".? ("New" - There is nothing new about this, it is as old as Babylon.  "Order" since when is chaos order)

Bob Fitrakis, The Fitrakis Files: Free Byrd and other cries for justice. Columbus: Columbus Alive Publishing, 2003. 252 pp.

"When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house, and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. . . . Civil government does not consist in executions. . . . Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?"

These are the words of Thomas Paine, the greatest pamphleteer in the history of the English language.

Bob Fitrakis writes in the tradition of Paine. Free Byrd consists of articles originally published in Columbus Alive and the Columbus Free Press during the decade 1992-2002. The articles set forth specifics about several related subjects, including a number of capital cases, and the death in Franklin County jail of Michael Hiles. The two themes most thoroughly explored in these articles are, first, the unjust trial, sentencing, and execution of John Byrd; and second, the inadequacy of the Office of the Ohio Public Defender in representing Byrd and other capital defendants.

I

Lately, I have been thinking about the ways in which being a mother informs my view of the world. The question that haunts me is why the casualties of modern warfare are primarily women and children.

I am trying with little success to imagine what it is like for the mothers in Afghanistan and Iraq whose children have died in the bombing, or by stepping on landmines or from brightly colored unexploded cluster bombs that looked like toys. The children who have died because of the lack of medicine and hospitals. The children who have been raped. The children who have been detained in Guantanamo. The children who have died or will die because of exposure to depleted uranium. We have no way to know how many children have been killed or injured in these countries because our own government dismisses them as unimportant collateral damage. What we do know is that 80% of the casualties in modern warfare are civilians and that the vast majority of these are women and children.

For the millions of progressives who abandoned Al Gore in 2000 and either stayed at home or voted for Ralph Nader, what has the prospective Democratic nominee, John Kerry, got to offer?

            By now the answers are on the record. Kerry wants more troops in Iraq, and he wants austerity at home. By announcing April 9 that as president he would make deficit-reduction his prime task in managing the economy, Kerry as good as stated that he has no plans to combat America's greatest domestic problem: the lack of jobs, currently advertised in the notorious "jobless recovery." So what's left for the progressives to vote for?

AUSTIN -- There was the president at his press conference looking just like a turtle on a fence post. "They (weapons of mass destruction) could still be there. They could be hidden." Saddam Hussein is still an "ally" of the 9-11 terrorists. Hussein was still "a direct threat" to America. Oi.

            The Nation points out a charming little Bush thesis: "Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free." The infamous "some people" making this racist argument are cleverly hidden: I never heard of it before Bush trotted it out.

            I got a lovely question last week: "Why do you and your ilk (it's hard to speak for my entire ilk) hate George W. Bush so much and love Osama bin Laden?" If that's what public discussion has come down to, we really are in trouble. In fact, we're in trouble anyway.