“I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes.”

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s none other than “the Filipino Monkey,” now doing voiceovers for the Pentagon!

More bad melodrama in the Gulf, I’m afraid. And war with Iran is still a no-go, but the bellicose among us keep trying. It’s nothing new. The recent bizarre non-incident between U.S. warships and Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz — apparently Pentagon-edited for media consumption to create the illusion of provocation — has been justifiably compared to the bogus 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, which became the pretext for 10 years of war in Vietnam, but it evokes historical patterns that run deeper than four decades.

America is awash in suspect and stolen elections. Since January, 2001, the nation has been saddled with an unelected chief executive. The consequences have been predictably horrific.

Along the way, three US Senate contests in 2002 and numerous other Congressional and local elections have been subjected to partisan disenfranchisement of qualified voters, and vote counts that smack of theft and fraud.

Even now the primary in New Hampshire is rightly being challenged to do an expensive but necessary recount procedure that could and should have been avoided.

As has been shown in the Free Press and elsewhere through the stolen 2000 and 2004 presidential contests, there are scores of ways by which elections can and have been rigged and ripped off in this new century. And there are scores of cures that can be put forth.

But we believe they can boil down to a basic three:

1. AUTOMATIC VOTER REGISTRATION, WITH SIGNATURE VERIFICATION:

These are some of the words of Martin Luther King Jr.:

"The nonviolent strategy has been to dramatize the evils of our society in such a way that pressure is brought to bear against those evils by the forces of good will in the community and change is produced. The student sit-ins of 1960 are a classic illustration of this method....

"So far we have had the Constitution backing most of the demands for change, and this has made our work easier, since we could be sure that the federal courts would usually back up our demonstrations legally. Now we are approaching areas where the voice of the Constitution is not clear. We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights.

"The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income....

"The past three years have demonstrated the power of a committed, morally sound minority to lead the nation.... Even the presence of a vital peace movement and the campus protest against the war in Vietnam can be traced back to the nonviolent action movement led by the Negro."

Takoma Park, MD – A dozen national organizations, joined by 68 state and local grassroots groups from across the country, filed comments to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) yesterday expressing strong opposition to the risks inherent in the proposed high-level radioactive waste dumpsite targeted at Yucca Mountain, Nevada and its associated waste transport plans through 45 states. This marks the latest effort by dump opponents – some of whom have been active against the Yucca dump for nearly three decades – as the DOE has pledged to file its long-delayed construction and operating license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) by June 30, 2008.

“The Bush administration’s rash rush to begin the Yucca licensing proceeding is a blatant attempt to make the dump a done deal before the next, potentially anti-dump, President enters the White House,” said Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, a national watchdog on nuclear power and radioactive waste issues.