Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne nailed the nuclear power industry on the Colbert Show. Browne is in New York touring for his new album "Time the Conqueror." He is also suing the John McCain campaign for the illegal use of his "Running on Empty." McCain placed the song as background in an attack ad against Barack Obama. (For a full transcript and video, see this page).

The grassroots green energy movement has won a huge---but temporary---victory over the nuke power industry.

The triumph comes at the federal level, while state-wide ratepayers are still being gouged to pay for new reactors in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and elsewhere.

But it means that no new major federal loan guarantees will be designated to build new reactors at least until after the November 4 presidential election.

Since last fall the new nuke builders have been badgering Congress to vote them gargantuan subsidies and guarantees. Because they cannot compete in the marketplace with Solartopian technologies such as wind, solar, geothermal and other clean, renewable sources, no Wall Street investors have been willing to back new reactor construction.

In the fall of 2007, the nuke pushers sponsored an Energy Bill with $50 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors. But a grass roots campaign, in concert with NukeFree.org and wide range of national green groups, defeated the proposal. Not a single major environmental organization supported the hand-outs.

Hurricane Ike has made it clear that paper ballots must be made available for all voters in Ohio and throughout the nation on November 4.

Ike has blown all the way up into the Great Lakes region with devastating impact. Power has been knocked out and airports shut by gale-force winds up to 78 miles per hour. Days later, hundreds of thousands of Midwesterners remain blacked out, and casualties still mount. Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has declared a state of emergency, with up to 2 million Ohioans still without power.

A repeat performance on election day could change the course of US history if paper ballots are not universally ready.

A bitter battle now rages here in the Buckeye State over whether the Secretary of State’s office should provide as many paper ballots as voters might want.

Under current arrangements, half or more of Ohio’s may show up to the polls and be forced to cast their ballots on electronic touch-screen machines. Of 5.4 million ballots cast in 2004, George W. Bush’s official margin of victory was less than 119,000 votes.

As corporate media coverage of the presidential race becomes even more notably stingy with intrepid journalism, the mainstream press enthusiasm for "The Daily Show" seems more cloying than ever.

The pattern is now a routine feature of the media landscape: "The Daily Show" gets laudatory attention from major news organizations, where countless journalists watch like shackled prisoners in awe of Superman.

Look -- up in the media sky -- it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Jon Stewart!

While news accounts note how many viewers hold faux "news anchor" Stewart in higher esteem as a journalist than the "real" ones at the top of the media pack, there’s a sheepish quality to much of the coverage about "The Daily Show."

After all, many big-name journalists have earned their keep by describing and analyzing the embroideries of the emperor’s new clothes. It blows their conformist minds to see a network program that regularly exposes right-wing rulers without a stitch.

A recent Sunday edition of the New York Times devoted more than two full broadsheet pages to "The Daily Show," starting with a color photo of Stewart

The McCain/Palin GOP is already in the process of stealing the Ohio vote, as was done in 2004. Among those at the center of the GOP strategy is Bush Family computer operative Michael Connell, who programmed the key vote counting mechanisms that were used to give George W. Bush his second term.

Except for John Kennedy in 1960, no candidate since 1856 (James Buchanan) has won the White House without carrying the Buckeye State. No Republican has ever done it.

On October 27, 2004, we published "Twelve Ways Bush is Now Stealing the Ohio Vote" at www.FreePress.org. Despite four years of denial by the Democratic Party and the corporate media, all methods mentioned in that article (plus many more) were used in the theft that gave George W. Bush his second term.