The event on the House floor Wednesday (March 10) was monumental -- the first major congressional debate about U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since lawmakers authorized the invasion of that country in autumn 2001. But, as Rep. Patrick Kennedy noted with disgust on Wednesday, the House press gallery was nearly empty. He concluded: “It’s despicable, the national press corps right now.”

Sure enough, the Thursday edition of the New York Times had no room for the historic debate on its front page, which did have room for a large Starbucks ad across the bottom.

Despite the news media and the lopsided pro-war tilt on Capitol Hill (reflected in the 356-65 vote Wednesday against invoking the War Powers Act), antiwar organizing has a lot of hospitable terrain at the grassroots. National polling shows widespread opposition to the Afghanistan war effort -- a far cry from the dominant lockstep conformity in Congress.

To the Editor:

Your Feb. 26 editorial “The Voters Will Pay” opposes a merger between manufacturers of electronic voting machines, but avoids the question of why we use them at all. As you say, “numerous studies have shown that electronic voting machines are particularly vulnerable to software glitches, intentional vote theft or sabotage.”

In a real democracy, there is no room for such shortcomings, especially when there is no reason to tolerate them. Having observed the fiasco in Ohio in 2004 firsthand, I believe that the conclusion is unavoidable that we need universal hand-counted paper ballots.

They are not perfect. But they are cheaper, trackable and subject to far fewer abuses than the electronic systems that have failed us so badly in recent years.

Harvey Wasserman
Bexley, Ohio, Feb. 26, 2010

The writer has co-authored four books about election protection.

Susan Harman, who by now deserves some kind of medal and who will be joining in a protest of John Yoo on March 19th, questioned Jay Bybee yesterday about his crimes. Here's her report:

"Yesterday Jay Bybee sat with the 9th Circuit as they modeled appellate court for 140 law students at the University of NV's law school in Las Vegas. I sent out a plea to PDA's Vegas list of edresses, and about 10 people responded. Of them, two showed up with signs and we handed out Impeach Bybee postcards and talked with the law students as they waited to get through security to go inside. I was appalled at their ignorance and/or lack of outrage. Two older students said he was a friend (he lives in Henderson, just outside Vegas), and a young one said his parents were friends of Bybee.

"We finally got inside, and listened quietly to the cases, as usual. We were ready to speak out at the end, but instead they announced they would hold a Q&A for the students. We moved down to the second row, and I asked the first question:

There is a saying that there is nothing wrong with being knocked down, but it is when it becomes more comfortable being down than getting back up it is time to give up. For several decades, the American workers keeps getting knocked down as corporation after corporation move good, middle class jobs to third-world companies claiming poverty, even at a time when companies are reaching record profits. But the Whirlpool workers at the Evansville, Indiana plant, along with over 5,000 other working Americans, stood back up and decided they don't want to be knocked down anymore.

A rally hosted by the IUE-CWA and led by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka took place Friday, Feb. 26 with a simple message: The American Middle Class is being eroded by corporate greed.

"Whirlpool is a bad corporate citizen who is twisting this country's desire to reduce energy usage and using it to export jobs. We are pushing hard to ensure that good intentions on going green don't help fund loss of good manufacturing jobs," said IUE-CWA President Jim Clark.