Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video documenting the lies that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq War to the American public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge. I've watched an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most important thing I can say about it is: Watch PBS from 9 to 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 25. Spending that 90 minutes on this will actually save you time, because you'll never watch television news again – not even on PBS, which comes in for its share of criticism.

Find a house party where you can watch the show and take action:
http://www.freepress.net/content/partysearch

The Ohio Community Computing Network encourages you to oppose Ohio Senate Bill 117 (see below). This bill would eliminate local franchising for video services. There are many ramifications to the passage of this bill including: elimination of PEG access channels (we provide telecourses and share guest speakers on Educational Access), disincentives to build broadband in rural and low-income areas (effecting our ability to serve these areas), removal of local consumer protection (no service requirements, support of community networks, etc.), removal of local control of rights of way (ATT can put a big ugly switcher station on your tree lawn), loss of local revenue, perhaps a quarter million dollars annually in Columbus (pick the City service you want to see cut)

April 14th was without doubt a turning point in the movement to prevent catastrophic climate change. Many tens of thousands of people in all 50 states took action on Step It Up day. We demanded that Congress move now to cap and begin reducing the carbon emissions that are dangerously heating up the earth, toward the goal of 80% reductions by 2050.

I actively supported these actions. I was a leader of the N.J. Climate March April 13-16 which supported them. Bill McKibben and the young people from Middlebury College who called for and coordinated this campaign deserve tremendous praise.

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote– from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves – must be added to the growing congressional investigations.

Many days after the mass killings at Virginia Tech, grisly stories about the tragedy still dominated front pages and cable television. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale -- the war in Iraq -- ebbs and flows. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the chronic evasions of the American media establishment.

In the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of official American violence overseas is a routine assumption.

“The first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence,” George Will wrote on April 7, 2004, in the Washington Post. But three years later, his Newsweek column laments: “Vietnam produced an antiwar movement in America; Iraq has produced an antiwar America.”

Current polls and public discourse -- in spite of media inclinations to tamp down authentic anger at the war -- do reflect an “antiwar America” of sorts. So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that’s reserved for American warriors in American society.