On New Year’s Eve, from 6 to 7 pm, dozens of Toledoans will mark the terrible total of U.S. deaths in Iraq by silently holding 3,000 lights on Summit St., between Jefferson and Madison.

"We hold three thousand lights to give that number a visual impact but how can anyone visualize tens of thousands of wounded and the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis?" asked Mary Anthony, a Toledo member of Military Families Speak Out.  Her son will return to Iraq in February for his second deployment.

Anthony added that "This New Year, the NW Ohio Peace Coalition and peace activists all over the country resolve to escalate our demands on Congress to end the occupation of Iraq and bring the troops home now.  And that means Congress must cut off funding for this war."

When Representative Marcy Kaptur’s returns to her Toledo office, members of NWOPC will take the 3,000 lights to her asking that she take them to Washington with this message: "This is what 3,000 looks like.  Bring our troops home.  Stop the deaths.  Stop the funding!"

Prof Dan Tokaji Drops Pro-DRE litigation as Moot, Calls VVPAT "Fool's Gold" says Congress should "Take a Breath" on Further Legislation

Prof./Lawyer Dan Tokaji is lead counsel in the most potentially damaging elections case in America (Stewart v Blackwell, 6th Cir.)  and he is also arguably the chief legal conjurer for a world of DRE technology, having sued on behalf of the ACLU in this case to require DREs and have them held constitutional while having paper-based punchcards and central count optical scans held unconstitutional on account of their relative residual vote rates (defined as overvotes plus undervotes). 

If anyone thinks that there is anything high minded, noble, patriotic or praiseworthy about what Dick Cheney and the Cons engineered in Iraq, they should sign up for SSI disability because they lost all brain function.

First, the 9-11 crock complete with Pearl Harbor hystrionic and media manipulation is about as credible as an invasion of purple space aliens off the Long Island Sound. That was engineered to support the fear based hellacious pretext for a world war of crusade proportion with the wierd conflation of the alleged terrorism of a secular country wholly unrelated to that still floating around nomad named Bin Laden.

The pardon of Richard Nixon by President Gerald Ford started this nation on the path that eventually gave us the Constitutional abuses of George W Bush. The current media frenzy supporting the pardon is both simplistic and illogical.

Ford pardoned Nixon before Nixon was brought to trial or convicted. The rule of law was ignored in favor of a double-standard where Presidents were not held accountable for law-breaking. The illegal activities of Nixon in the political sphere were an assault on American Democracy and should have been severely punished. Because of Ford’s outrageous pardon, Right-wing Republicans never understood how un-American the tactics of Nixon were. The current national Republican leadership is still Nixonian to their core!

"If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone 'America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership'."
---Will Rogers

"It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them."
--Noam Chomsky

With the intensity of Dale Earnhardt, Jr vying for victory in the Daytona 500, America’s mainstream media outlets have been racing furiously to imbue the citizenry of the Empire with unusually large doses of heavily choreographed agitprop.

Another unindicted US war criminal has casually ridden off into a peaceful crimson sunset. In response, pundits, talking heads, reporters and various other infotainment personnel are working feverishly to perpetuate America’s collective delusion that we embody integrity, decency, and enlightened values.