Last time, they committed treason to prolong a war.

   This time, they’re apparently trying to start one....

   The backstabbing letter sent by 47 Republican members of Congress warning Iran off a possible nuclear weapons treaty is a haunting re-run of what Richard Nixon did to Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

   Back then, Nixon was in a close race for the presidency with Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey was Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, both of them neck-deep in the catastrophic assault on Vietnam.

   By fall 1968 the war had just about undone the Democrats. Draft card burnings, huge demonstrations at the Pentagon and around the US, and a deep malaise of anger and betrayal gripped the country.  On March 31, Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek re-election. Four days later, Martin Luther King was murdered. Robert F. Kennedy was killed in June. In August the Democratic Convention in Chicago was torn to pieces.

One of the many big questions facing this country is how we are going to improve our educational system. Charter schools may not be the solution, but they seem to be here to stay. There is need for more transparency, accountability and simplicity from our charter schools in order to eliminate not just the underperforming, but the systematically corrupt.
   The charter school debate was one of the primary issues addressed at the “We Rise” rally held Wednesday, March 11 in front of the Ohio Statehouse, sponsored by ProgressOhio and Common Good Ohio.
   The key issue at the rally was the need for greater transparency, accountability and simplicity in every facet of government, especially education, to ensure that “We Rise” in ensuring student success.

The president doesn’t “love” America?

Would that it were true. Would that Rudy Giuliani’s five-star Republican nightmare actually paced the Oval Office, pondering how to disarm, demilitarize . . . defang American exceptionalism.

Would that the president felt a responsibility to the global future and, at the same time, could summon our real past, grieve for its victims and vow with every fiber of his being to atone for our history of slavery and conquest: the “white terrorism” of manifest destiny. Would that the president didn’t “love” our myths but truly hated them and felt that his obligation to the future was to help lay these myths bare and, above all, stop perpetuating them.

“The actual process of lynching was morbid and incredibly violent. Lynching does not necessarily mean hanging. It often included humiliation, torture, burning, dismemberment and castration. Victims were beaten and whipped, many times in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Coal tar was frequently used to douse the unfortunate victim prior to setting him afire.

Most people in the United States have little contact with Iran or its culture. Iran comes up as a scary threat in the speeches of demagogues. A range of debate is offered between obliterate it and pressure it into compliance with our civilized norms, or at least the civilized norms of some other country that doesn't obliterate or pressure people.

So how do Americans view Iran? Many view it, like all governmental matters, through the lens of either the Democratic or the Republican Party. The Democratic President has come to be seen as on the side of preventing a war with Iran. The Republican Congress has come to be seen as pushing for that war. In this framework, something remarkable happens. Democrats begin recognizing all of the arguments against war that ought to be applied to every war.

Last month, I attended the Ninth Annual Voting And Elections Summit in Washington, hosted by Fair Vote, The Lawyers' Committee For Civil Rights Under Law, US Vote Foundation, and Overseas Vote Foundation, each a progressive organization dedicated to the betterment of elections in the United States. The summit was indeed a gathering of very bright, motivated, devoted, and patriotic individuals and organizations, whose efforts I deeply appreciate.

It was undercut, however, by a tragic, widely shared blindspot regarding the core vulnerability of the American vote counting process, both in theory and in concrete political bottom-line fact. That process, in the computerized voting era, has become and remains unobservable, offering an open invitation to targeted manipulation sweeping in its cumulative effect.