No more investigations please

In a December 31, 2007, editorial, the New York Times faulted the current president and vice president of the United States for kidnapping innocent people, denying justice to prisoners, torturing, murdering, circumventing U.S. and international law, spying in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and basing their actions on "imperial fantasies."

Please join the online campaign to SAY NO! TO BUSH'S FRAUDULENT IRAN WAR-MONGERING PROVOCATION! Your Emergency Action is Needed Now!

Don’t Let Washington Provoke Another War Based on Lies and Fraud! The Bush Administration has been caught red-handed manufacturing the highly publicized "provocation" off the Iranian coast on Jan. 6 when five small Iranian open-air speedboats allegedly challenged three massive U. S. guided-missile warships. The U.S. Navy has now admitted that it had spliced together the audio and video tape it presented as evidence and that the threatening voice on the video warning “you may explode” may not have belonged to any Iranian sailors. This incident was manufactured just days before President Bush departed for an eight-day trip to the Middle East, attempting to mobilize a collection of oil-rich U.S. client states against Iran and using the video as the evidence.

We must demand a People’s Inquiry to find out who manufactured this video? Who spliced

Conspiracy theorist

“We should at least get votes back on paper and get people counting them by hand.”

As innocuous as these words may sound, they make me feel like I’m on I-35 in Minneapolis, headed toward the Mississippi bridge. Ankle-deep in a presidential election year, I find myself without faith in the infrastructure of American civilization.

This is not what I’d like to be writing about. Our nation’s soul is bleeding, its future up for grabs. The candidates jockey for a mandate — our mandate — and they’ll define it as narrowly as possible unless we define it for them. How thoroughly and courageously do we repudiate the Cheney-Bush legacy? How resolutely do we move toward peace and global oneness? That’s what 2008 is all about, right?

In honor of my mother and the power of love

The last time my mother was in a hospital, an essay by Thich Nhat Hanh moved in front of my eyes. "Our mother is the teacher who first teaches us love, the most important subject in life," he wrote. "Without my mother I could never have known how to love. Thanks to her I can love my neighbors. Thanks to her I can love all living beings. Through her I acquired my first notions of understanding and compassion."

My mother, Miriam A. Solomon, died on January 20, which happened to be the seventh anniversary of the inauguration of a man and a presidential regime that she loathed. Once, several years ago, when I referred to George W. Bush as "an idiot," she made a correction by pointing out he's much worse than that; she used the adjective "evil."

At my parents' apartment, taped on the front door for a long time, a little poster said: "The America I Believe In Doesn't Torture People." The poster was from Amnesty International USA -- an organization that my mom wrote many protest letters to dictators for -- and it summed up her devotion to human decency rather than counterfeit versions of American democracy.

Don't let them get away with reading your emails

Tomorrow, the Senate will begin debate -- again -- on whether or not to give immunity to giant telecom companies that helped the NSA illegally listen to your phone conversations and read your emails.
The White House is fighting hard for their friends in the industry, but it's up to the Senate to do the right thing. We cannot allow our basic civil liberties to be ignored. Tell your Senators today that you expect them to hold the telecom companies responsible for their actions.

Tell the Senate: No immunity for giant telecom companies. True Majority

The House has already passed a version of the bill that does NOT include immunity. Now it's time for the Senate to do the same. Don't let the White House bully the Senate into trampling our basic civil liberties. While the government issued the order, it was up to the telecom companies to decide whether or not to break the law. Those that did should be held responsible. In this country it takes a warrant to listen to the private conversations of American citizens. End of story.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: his day and today

Today is Martin Luther King Day. It almost slipped past me unnoticed. In the car this morning, I caught a bit of one of his speeches. Four minutes, tops. Yet enough to get me thinking. After work, I researched which speech it was that I had gotten a tantalizing taste of. "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" was delivered at New York City's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967. I downloaded the speech and listened to it as I read along. The words flowed off the pages and out of my speakers and pooled around me, vibrant and alive. Has it really been forty years? Some days, it seems that we have made no progress at all.

When King was in his prime, I was a suburban teen, more concerned with matching my knee socks to my sweaters and skirts than I was about civil rights. It simply wasn't a part of my life. And when King was assassinated, exactly one year after giving this speech, he vanished into an overarching sadness that I dimly felt but could not articulate. I'd like to belatedly take a moment to honor a man whose vision still reverberates after all these years, if we will but listen.

Hillary Clinton's sleaze parade

Politics can be a rough game. Candidates need to hold their competitors accountable and challenge distortions and lies. And God knows, we need a Democratic nominee who's willing to fight. But Hillary Clinton's campaign has included far too many cheap shots, sleazy manipulations, and unsavory players.

New questionable actions emerge daily. You're probably familiar with many. But it's the broader pattern that disturbs me—how much the Clinton campaign seems to nurture questionable actions from her operatives, supporters, and surrogates. And how the campaign's actions go beyond drawing legitimate political lines to an all-too-Rovian instinct to do whatever's deemed necessary to take down those blocking Clinton's potential victory. Here's a representative list of actions that, taken together, offer a troubling portent for her candidacy and presidency.

Guantanamo as a symbol

11 January marked the sixth year anniversary of the establishment of the Guantanamo detention camp. Mere months after the start of the 2001 United States invasion of Afghanistan, a large cargo plane landed in a US military base in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay, bringing in a group of hunchbacked, orange-clad, blindfolded, "terrorist" suspects, apparently representing the worst of the worst. They included children and aged men, charity workers, journalists and people who were sold to the US military in exchange for a large bounty.

The debate over this notorious prison has ever since been marred by easy reductionism. The fact is that Guantanamo is neither a warranted compound holding "bad people" -- as explained by the ever straightforward President Bush -- nor is it a dark spot in the otherwise luminous US record for respecting human rights, rules of war and international treaties. If anything, Guantanamo is a mere extension of a long list of untold violations practiced by the Bush administration, which condenses the camp to being a symbol of widespread policy predicated on nonchalantly undermining international law.

The survivor, the meteor, and the champion

They all can win in the general election; therefore, the question is which will be best for our nation?  Consider:

The Survivor: Hilary Clinton has a record of change.  She also has a record of failure, a record of compromise, and a record of working with corporatists who have corrupted our system and turned it against the American people.  Clinton, in short, has the record of a survivor.  

She aspired to heroism in attempting to overhaul our health care system in ’92, but the abuse she suffered taught her to be more calculating.  Her husband had the strength and intelligence to balance the budget, but this achievement was a matter of fiscal common sense; it was not a demonstration of a moral commitment to justice and liberty for all. 

Stealing Elections

Pages

Subscribe to Freepress.org RSS