The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is a treaty which bans nuclear testing and puts into place a verification system to alert the international community in case of a nuclear explosion. Ratification of the CTBT is expected to come up for vote in the Senate later this year. Faith leaders around Ohio are asked to support this treaty in letters to Senator Voinovich. Please contact Connie Gadell-Newton of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) at cgadellnewton@gmail.com or (614) 288-1082 and she would be happy to come speak with your Church or community group about how to get involved with this issue.

The same types of machines that helped put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000, and “re-elect” him 2004, may now decide who wins the all-important “60th Senate seat” in Massachusetts. The fate of health care and much much more hang in the balance.

As Bay Staters vote to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, most will be marking scantron ballots to be run through easily hackable electronic counters made by Diebold/Premier.

A paper ballot of sorts does come through these machines. But the count they generated was seriously compromised in the Florida 2000 election that put George W. Bush in the White House. Similar machines played a critical role skewing the Ohio 2004 vote count to fraudulently re-elect him.

In 2004, Lucas County (Toledo) Ohio, incorrectly calibrated Diebold scantron machines left piles of uncounted ballots in heavily black districts in the inner city.

The Free Press also found that on optiscan machines in Miami County, Ohio the reported totals were significantly higher than the actual number of people who signed in to vote.

Several years ago we started a community garden where I live. We worked at it quite energetically. We got more and more people involved. Much of the hardest work involved digging irrigation ditches to bring water to the soil.

We made progress slowly. We brought water to little corners of the garden. But the work was exhausting, and some people burned out and needed to take a break. Usually they'd be back within a year and working shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of us again.

The work was hard but extremely enjoyable. The camaraderie of it was a benefit whether or not the garden was yet prospering. It was very properly called a community garden.

Then the rain dancers arrived. And most of the people who had been toiling joined the rain dancers. We were to have rain aplenty for four years if we rain danced just right, rain we could rely on and believe in. And the digging could finally cease.

Well, most of our energy went into the rain dance, and it produced the most stupendous rain dance any of us had ever seen. And it rained. It rained no more than normal, but people squinted to see signs of hope

This is a thought provoking if not fully developed work on the ongoing situation in Palestine/Israel. Avi Shlaim has compiled a set of his writings from previous publications that in a broad way cover the events of the region, with a brief look at the Balfour Declaration before jumping forward to look at the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and its resulting sequence of events.

Avi Shlaim self professes to be of the school of revisionist historians and his writing fully supports that claim. Throughout the writing one of the themes is the Israeli use of military power to solve its problems, a solution much preferred to negotiations and compromise. A corollary of this is that when negotiations were used, they were mainly as a mask to delay a solution while the ongoing status quo built more settlements and evicted more Palestinians from their homes and farms, especially after the 1967 war.