Someday the Democrats may learn an important lesson about the collective wisdom of the media in the nation's capital: On important questions of policy and politics, the Washington press corps is almost always wrong. They are full of firm opinions about everything from clothing, haircuts and marital problems to political tactics, but the safest course is to ignore their advice.

            At the moment, the most popular line among the certified pundits is that the congressional Democrats are too zealous in probing Bush administration corruption -- and specifically the apparent politicization of the federal law-enforcement system by the White House and the Justice Department.

            On television and in print, Washington's wise folk warn that if the Democrats insist on dragging Bush deputy Karl Rove up to Capitol Hill to testify about the purging of eight United States attorneys, the public will turn on them. These finger-wagging journalists insist that Democrats must "legislate" rather than "investigate."

"If my competitor were drowning, I’d stick a hose in his mouth and turn on the water."
--Ray Kroc

"…a funny, jowly, canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a corporate jet and a private yacht. At sixty-seven, he is unrepentant in the face of criticism. He describes himself as a "tough man in a tough business"….."The animal-rights people," he once said, "want to impose a vegetarian's society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are neurotic.""

--Jeff Tietz’s description of meat processing magnate, Joseph Luter III (from his Rolling Stone article, "Boss Hog")

This will be quick. We're almost out of time. If you have a fax or a phone and ten minutes, your democracy needs you. At 10:00 tomorrow (Thursday 3/29) , the well-meaning, but misinformed members of the House Adminstration Committee will be marking up Rush Holt's HR. 811. This bill is called the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007. Many many election integrity activists and groups have serious problems with the bill. It cannot, it must not pass as it stands.

All you have to do, is print up the Thirteen Issues with the Holt Bill and fax it to the congressional offices in the column on the right. If you can't fax, call. Please, please, do something.

13 ISSUES with the HOLT BILL

"Hacking Democracy" on DVD See it and Weep

Read "Cheated!" - the graphic novel about Ohio 2004, that illustrates the true events

There's only one reason a man with a wife with incurable breast cancer and two small children at home should be running off to run for president.

         Not because he wants the job, or even because she wants it for him.

         Because she wants it for them.

         Of course, the obvious explanation for why a man whose wife's cancer recurs would keep running is that he's too ambitious to give it up. After all, presidential candidates never see their wives anyway. Why let it interfere with a campaign that is going well enough? We're used to political marriages that put family second to ambition.

         But I don't think that's it in John Edwards' case. First of all, it's not true. He was willing to give it up. Second of all, he didn't have to give it up forever, just for this time, against two very strong contenders no less.

Al Gore has leapt to center stage with well-founded concerns about global warming. He has been gratefully successful in publicizing the fact that there is a virtual library of irrefutable evidence that carbon dioxide levels are rapidly rising in our atmosphere, that this is being caused by human beings, and that the potential impacts are catastrophic.

What's not being said is that the solution to the problem---the necessary transition to Solartopia, a world based on renewable energy---is also the key to the future of our economic well-being, and would be whether global warming was a problem or not.

In short: even without the dire disaster of climate change, a transitioning to green power is the only hope our global economy has for future prosperity.

Indeed, moving to an industrial system that runs on wind, solar, bio-fuels and other renewable sources, along with increased efficiency, including a revival of mass transit, can and will do for the global economy in the next 25 years what the computer/internet revolution has done for the last.