I want to thank each and everyone of you for your efforts in my urgent time of need, you cannot imagine how much my spirit has been lifted from the cards and letters, the phone calls and how everyone kept up the pressure. My gratitude is really more than I can express.

My return to Lewisburg was met like a hero’s welcome, and many people came to assure me of my safety there. It is so ironic that the prisoners in a federal maximum-security prison can guarantee my safety, but the Bureau of Prisons will not. I did not say, “cannot”, but “will not” do so. You have to remember the BOP is a little brother to the FBI and they came from an illegitimate mother called the JUST-US (Justice) Department.

The desperate, dangerous nuclear power industry has dropped a $50 billion stealth bomb meant to irradiate the Obama Stimulus Package.

It comes in the form of a mega-loan guarantee package that would build new reactors Wall Street wouldn’t finance even when it had cash. It will take a healthy dose of citizen action to stop it, so start calling your Senators now.

The vaguely worded bailout-in-advance provision was snuck through the Senate Appropriations Committee in the deep night of January 27. It would provide $50 billion in loan guarantees for “eligible technologies” that would technically include renewable sources and electric transmission. But the handout is clearly directed at nukes and “clean coal.”

The Stimulus Package is explicitly meant to create jobs within the next two years. But according to sources at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, no new reactors could be licensed for construction within that time. Nor could any new coal plants. And thus the funds in this rider are to "remain available until committed." That means their "stimulus" might not go into effect for many years.

Norman Baker, who was featured in a previous Free Press article, is no longer under a court appointed guardianship. The case has been settled amicably and Mr. Baker is now living on his own in Ohio.
A retired firefighter, Baker now 82, found himself under guardianship in 2005. The Free Press article "How An Unwanted Guardianship Cost a Firefighter his Freedom & His Fortune" circulated previously on the internet.

The Fairfield County Probate Court has now terminated the guardianship, restoring Mr. Baker to competency and allowing him to regain his freedom and independence after nearly four years. Mr Baker had unsuccessfully challenged the validity of the guardianship in both the Fairfield County Probate Court and then in the Ohio Fifth District Court of Appeals. He had also filed with the Ohio Supreme Court an accusation that the Probate Judge assigned to his case was biased against him. That challenge was summarily dismissed by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer.

The Uncultured Wars – Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought.
Steven Salaita.
Zed Books, New York, 2008.

“The Uncultured Wars” comprises an excellent series of thought provoking essays, the excellence deriving from their ability to provoke thought that should be one of the hallmarks of academic works. As such Steven Salaita writes as an advocate of a position rather than pretending dispassionate objectivity, or “myth of disinterest” in Salaita’s own words. I will return to that idea later as for my own personal interests it is contained in one of his more interesting essays. Generally, these essays are well constructed, leading the reader to consider how subtle and yet how obvious racism is in the U.S., Arab/Muslim racism in particular.