The U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs is prepared to follow in Dick Cheney's footsteps and shoot a friend in the face. I just sat through a hearing on Iran, and there is apparently universal bipartisan agreement in the committee that Iranians feel kindly toward Americans and welcome them as friends, and that Iranians should be brutally punished by the toughest economic sanctions possible. This simple truth went unstated: sanctions kill.

Who remembers this exchange on your television a decade back?

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: "We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?"

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it."

--60 Minutes (5/12/96)

When Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insists that his firing of several United States attorneys last December wasn't a political purge but merely a normal bureaucratic decision, many thousands of lawyers, judges, officers and officials surely wish to believe him. Anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the law and the Constitution in good faith -- indeed, anyone who cares about the rule of law -- can only contemplate the vandalism inflicted on our law-enforcement system by Gonzales and his deputies with foreboding.

            Unfortunately, the credibility of Gonzales -- which was never very great -- is diminishing further as the facts behind the controversial round of firings continue to emerge. While his excuses and explanations for those dismissals evaporate under scrutiny, what can be seen instead is a familiar pattern of partisan misconduct.

Greetings all,
Last night I attended the first of two training/prep meetings for the FCC hearing scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, March 7 at the Broad Street Presbyterian Church, just east of the I-70 bridge on the north side (parking in rear; COTA #16). More details can be found at the website of one of the sponsors, the "other" Free Press: freepress.net

We received informative packets about the FCC and the issues involving media consolidation, the primary focus of this hearing. It is "informal" even though 3 of 5 FCC commissioners will be in attendance, the first for Commissioner McDowell, a Republican. The others have included only the Democrat appointees but because Columbus had a grandparented exception put in place (so that the Dispatch, TV, and radio could be owned by same people), we are a unique place to discuss the limited and limiting perspectives of limited, focused ownership. This coupled with issues of competition and advertising as well as pushing out local news, even in emergencies as some communities have reported.

After the recent convictions of two Cuyahoga County Board of Election workers for felony recount tampering, Republican County Prosecutor Robert Batchelor is stonewalling efforts to investigate similar well-documented charges in Coshocton County, Ohio.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections (BOE) third-ranking employee and an assistant manager were each convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct and a misdemeanor count of failing to perform their duties during the 2004 recount. The convictions stemmed from the secret pre-counting of precincts prior to the lawfully required open recount. The convicted election workers only allowed the pre-counted precincts that matched the official results to be used in the recount. This caused the special prosecutor to tell the jury that the election recount was "rigged" in Cuyahoga.

Testimony and eyewitness reports document similar activity in several Ohio counties regarding the illegal rigging of the 2004 recount.

Charlie Crist, Florida's new Republican governor, will win points with voters across the nation for his recent proposal to abandon touch-screen voting machines. Florida's repudiation of the widely mistrusted machines could hasten an across-the-board abandonment — and thereby renew Americans' faith in the integrity of the vote.

Ever since the presidential election of 2000, Florida has been the poster child for controversial ballot counts. After the dispute was resolved, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, providing funds to replace outdated voting equipment.

Florida used its share to mothball the punch-card machines that had caused so many problems. But in many large counties, it replaced them with touch-screen systems that leave no paper trail. The drawbacks of these machines were dramatically illustrated last fall by a close congressional race in Sarasota, where 18,000 votes went unrecorded. The losing candidate, Democrat Christine Jennings, is pressing a challenge in court.