"To address the war in Iraq as unwinnable is ludicrous, the only issue is the resolve of the people and how many believe the misinformation pandered by the far left"  (Marty Scott, News & Advance, Aug. 22).

Contrary to promises, we are LESS SAFE here at home since the US invasion of Iraq: al-Qaeda is more active and dispersed than before the war and the US presence in Iraq breeds extremist violence and puts our service people in harm’s way. According to figures from the Brookings “Iraq Index” and the Institute for Policy Studies, as of November 2003 the number of resistance fighters in Iraq was estimated at 5,000; as of March 2007 the estimate is 70,000.

Furthermore we have seen and are seeing the dire consequences and strategic nightmares that then former Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney predicte4d in an April 15, 1994 interview:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

CHENEY: No.

Q: Why not?

It's been two years.  And America's media is about to have another tear-gasm over New Orleans.  Maybe Anderson Cooper will weep again.  The big networks will float into the moldering corpse of the city and give you uplifting stories about rebuilding and hope.

Now, let's cut through the cry-baby crap. Here's what happened two years ago - and what's happening now.

This is what an inside source me.  And it makes me sick:

"By midnight on Monday, the White House knew.  Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched.  Nobody."

The charge is devastating:  That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it.  But this was not just any source.  The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

The “ahhh” of familiar pleasure I felt as I accelerated cut off abruptly as I watched the gas-mileage readout on my sister’s new Camry plummet.

How dare the requirements of fuel-efficient driving presume to contradict the habits — and unacknowledged godlike joys — of a lifetime of gasoline consumption? I looked at my sister, a “hypermiling” neo-enthusiast, who seemed to be wagging her finger at me (she wasn’t, but I’m sure the impulse was there), and said, “Nanny state.”

At least I uttered it as a joke — that grating, illuminating expression of adolescent politics and individual triumphalism. Libertarians. You gotta love ’em. They survey the human landscape and wince at . . . a government that cares too much, in a bumbling, overreaching way, of course, and tries to protect us not merely from thieves and terrorists and snake oil salesmen but from ourselves. They hate seatbelt laws and anti-smoking laws and picture government not as a shifting coalition of organized, often malign interests, but as a self-righteous scold.

St. Louis -- A young man from Palestine and another from Israel riveted 400 U.S. military veterans to their seats last week in this city on the Mississippi River.  What captivated the audience was their recent decision to put down the guns they’d pointed at each other for years.    

The two members of Combatants For Peace addressed the mid-August national convention of Veterans For Peace, a 7,000 – member organization dedicated to abolishing war.

Yonaton Gur, a 28 year-old Israeli journalist and Tel Aviv University student spoke first. 

“My grandfather commanded the Israeli Navy during the 1967 war, my father was an officer in Israeli Army Intelligence, and I grew up on a kibbutz.”  But, he explained, “I also grew up in the 90’s, with a more peaceful perspective following the (1993) Oslo Accords.”

Last fall in Jena, the day after two Black high school students sat beneath the "white tree" on their campus, nooses were hung from the tree. When the superintendent dismissed the nooses as a "prank," more Black students sat under the tree in protest. The District Attorney then came to the school accompanied by the town's police and demanded that the students end their protest, telling them, "I can be your best friend or your worst enemy... I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen."

A series of white-on-black incidents of violence followed, and the DA did nothing. But when a white student was beaten up in a schoolyard fight, the DA responded by charging six black students with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

It's a story that reads like one from the Jim Crow era, when judges, lawyers and all-white juries used the justice system to keep blacks in "their place." But it's happening today. The families of these young men are fighting back, but the story has gotten minimal press. Together, we can make sure their story is told and that the Governor of Louisiana intervenes and provides justice for the Jena 6. It starts now: