At the heart of what is often touted as the mightiest empire in world history, it's not a pretty sight at the start of July. After a few chipmunk squeaks from the White House a couple of weeks ago about there being somehow a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq, the news rolls in that it's as bad, if not worse, than ever.

Bomb explosions in Baghdad wipe out scores of ordinary people in a single minute, the motive advertised -- maybe truthfully -- as sectarian hatred, between Shia and Sunni. The entire country, with the exception of the Kurdish provinces in the north, is transfixed with terror, as people flee neighborhoods because they are in the wrong religious faction.

Come to a road block and you don't know whether it's a unit of Iraqi police, a unit of Iraqi killers disguised as police, a group of U.S. soldiers intent on revenge on anyone because one of their buddies just got blown up by a roadside bomb.

The world's headlines are filled with one terrible story after another about atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces. The latest is

A few days ago the Clean Money Elections bill, AB 583, died a quiet, lonely death in a California State Senate committee. This bill would have given candidates for public office a choice in financing their campaigns: Do what they do now, which is solicit and accept large donations from wealthy individuals and corporations or, they could collect only small, individual donations and receive public financing. More importantly, this bill would have given us voters a choice too. We would have been able to vote for a Clean Money representative able to vote his own conscious or for the usual, Pay to Play politician.

The wonderful thing that happened a few days ago was not the demise of the Clean Money Bill. No, that was awful. But the California Nurses Association, anticipating the moral failure of our elected representatives, sponsored a Clean Money initiative. 620,000 concerned California voters signed their petition and a few days ago, Proposition 89, the “Clean Money and Fair Elections Act” qualified for our November ballot. Regular Californians, you and I, will be able to vote on this issue and, if it passes, no corporate shill will be able

For some reason, the grunt's love song made the brass cringe:

"I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me . . . as the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally."

Cpl. Joshua Belile had a recording contract and everything, but, uh-uh. No singing Marine's gonna be regaling America with the sadistic pleasures to be had in occupied Iraq, no sir, not with all the atrocity investigations going on these days, and the dirty truth of our Middle East adventure oozing into the coverage of even the most administration-sympathetic media outlets.

Last week I wrote a column about horror on the macro level in Iraq: the likely serious health consequences resulting from widespread use of depleted uranium munitions, constituting a crime against not just the Iraqis but the whole world, because of airborne radiation poisoning. This week, horror on the micro level is once again making the news, with the arrest of Steven Green, a recently discharged GI, in connection with the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, along with the murder of her parents and 7-year-old sister, four

While the rest of you were celebrating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I was keeping an eye on Karl Rove -- because someone has to.

A "Bush Signals Shift in Stance on Immigrants" headline is the early warning sign that we're about to get an all-out immigrant-bashing campaign for the fall, complete with xenophobia, racism and blaming the weakest, least powerful people in the country for everything that's wrong with it.

House Republicans, who know a good socially divisive issue when they see one, are perfectly happy to blame illegal workers for everything. Trade policy, repealing taxes for the rich, corruption in Congress -- it's all done by illegal workers. Everywhere you look in this society, there's a bunch of people named Gomez and Ramirez, all of them making decisions from the top -- in charge of the Pentagon, heading the military-industrial complex, deciding the rich need tax relief, in charge of this stupid war, making decisions on Wall Street.

States and local jurisdictions did not take sufficient action to mitigate risks.

Black Box Voting has provided the following to VoterAction.org for its litigation. This will become a public record via the litigation filed by Lowell Finley. Because public officials who have received the unredacted reports have failed to take this risk seriously and arrange for appropriate mitigations, and because Black Box Voting believes this information is of critical public interest for pending litigation and citizen actions, we are releasing it publicly now.

HERE'S AN INFORMAL SYNOPSIS OF THE UNMITIGATED RISKS IN THE DIEBOLD TSX:

A huge risk to the integrity of elections is a contaminated bootloader. Here's why: If you own the bootloader, you own the machine. The source code for the TSx, along with the technical data package, have been publicly released since 2003. Estimates are that it would take approximately three months for a reasonably skilled programmer to design a working malicious bootloader.

You cannot clean a maliciously designed bootloader with the mitigations performed so far by state officials (replacing programs