Are mainstream churches finally standing up to the GOP’s hateful “Christian” blitzkrieg?

Right-wing church movements have been a staple of American politics since well before the 1692 witch trials at Salem. But only in the past few decades has the extremist church served as the grassroots base for a new breed of corporate totalitarianism. That unholy union has been nowhere more powerful than here in Ohio, and it has finally provoked a response from the state’s mainstream churches.

With huge torrents of cash from Richard Mellon Scaife, the Ahmanson family and other super-rich ultra-rightists, the fundamentalist church has formed the popular network that has spawned the Bush catastrophe. The totalitarian alliance between pulpit, corporation and military is unique in U.S. history.

DEMAND VOTING RIGHTS FOR KATRINA SURVIVORS

New Orleans Stands Up By Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. 4/4/2006 - Tribune Media Services
Thousands of New Orleans residents marched on Saturday to demand the right to vote. They marched across the Mississippi River Bridge where Gretna police had repelled residents as they tried to escape the horrors of Katrina. Forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans once more must march to gain the right to vote.

There's an election called for New Orleans on April 22, but the South has always had elections. After centuries of slavery and segregation, the reason for the Voting Rights Act was to defend the right of blacks to vote. The Act requires the federal government clear ahead of time - preclearance - any changes in voting procedures to protect against any trick or scheme that would dilute the voting rights of minorities in those areas of the country with a history of discrimination.

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH

The ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH by the Center for Constitutional Rights (Melville House). Impeachment Book can serve as a useful handbook. It states the case for impeachment clearly, concisely, and persuasively. It is not a polemic, and you don’t have to be an attorney to comprehend what it says. It includes:

€ the case exactly as it could be presented by the House of Representatives to the Senate . . .
€ necessary evidence and legal precedents for each article of impeachment . . .
€ what the Constitution says about impeachment . . .
€ a brief history of impeachment . . .
€ the rules of procedure . . .
€ the articles of impeachment brought against previous presidents, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, for comparison . . .
€ a “webliography” including links to numerous other resources and groups on the Web . . .

Melville House Publishing has launched a campaign on its website where people can send a copy to their congressperson and the publisher will pay the shipping and handling costs.

No clothes, no shame

With scant forethought beyond doing what his father had not, topple Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush launched his war into Iraq.  Now mired in the fourth year of this misadventure, Bush's litany of justifications has him sounding like the perpetual delinquent that thinks he can talk his way out of anything.

As shortsighted now as before, Bush spins out his broken-record mantra: "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein." If Bush can find a silver lining in a manmade disaster of his doing, surely he might be able to detect great purpose in a catastrophe of Mother Nature's making.

To wit, if a tsunami had swept up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and had gotten Saddam Hussein, but in the bargain also took the lives of thousands of Iraqis, killed over 2,000 of our troops, permanently maimed untold more, seriously damaged our nation's hard-gained reputation, and cost our people billions upon billions of dollars, we might expect George W. Bush to place much value in the devastating wall of water and to take credit for its course.

An interview with Norman Birnbaum

“Our empire in general makes us less secure since it consumes moral and material resources better used for domestic reconstruction. . .”

Norman Birnbaum served as an adviser to the Kennedy Presidential Campaign, a consultant to the National Security Council, an adviser to the United Automobile Workers, the chair of the Policy Advisory Council of the New Democratic Coalition, and as a member of the editorial board of Partisan Review. His writings include The Crisis of Industrial Society, Toward A Critical Sociology,The Radical Renewal, The Politics of Ideas in Modern America, and After Progress: A Century of American Social Reform and European Socialism. He is a member of the editorial board of The Nation, founding editor of the New Left Review and publishes frequently in the American and European press. He has a distinguished academic career including as a Professor Emeritus of Georgetown University Law Center, and teaching at Amherst College, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, the University of Strasbourg among others. He is a founding committee member of the Campaign for America's Future and advisor to members of the Congress and Senate.

Closing the secret school

Something was missing when Father Roy Bourgeois and several companions traveled through South America last month: fear.

Or rather, as he said it, almost reverently, "FEAR-R-R-R" - a big, lingering, life-shaping word, clotted with grief and inexpressible rage. As he spoke the word, it was alive with the memory of midnight knocks and disappeared loved ones, the reality of life under the oligarchies and terror regimes that subdued the poor in Latin America for so long.

When I talked to Bourgeois the other day, he couldn't conceal his wonderment at its absence: "I remember the fear that I had when I left there years ago. To see fear replaced by hope . . ."

Indeed, something remarkable is happening in the Southern Hemisphere, news of which we in El Norte get only in heavily filtered, ludicrously distorted doses. Women and indigenous people are suddenly ascending to ranks of power. In Uruguay, a former human-rights attorney is now defense minister. Unimaginable possibility is dawning, and the wounded and imprisoned of earlier decades are grieving openly for the first time and crying "Nunca mas!" - never again.

Thaksin resigns

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra resigned on Wednesday (April 5), and appointed a loyal colleague, to end anti-Thaksin street protests before the June arrival of the world's kings, queens and other royalty to honor Thailand's revered monarch.

Thaksin named Justice Minister Chitchai Wannasathit, who is also a deputy prime minister and former police general, as this Southeast Asian nation's interim prime minister.

Chitchai, 59, received a Ph.D. in Justice Administration in 1976 from the University of Louisville, Kentucky, according to his official biography.

Chitchai, considered a close friend of Thaksin, has extensive police experience including previous posts as Immigration Commissioner, Secretary-General of the Narcotics Control Board, and Interior Minister.

"I have appointed Chitchai to do my work from now on. I need to rest," Thaksin told the nation on Wednesday (April 5).

"It's not that I'm not willing to fight, but when I fight, the nation loses," Thaksin said.

"I don't need to see bloodshed among Thais. Thai blood must not paint the land of Thailand."

Thousands march in New Orleans for right for Katrina survivors to vote in the city’s April 22 election

NEW ORLEANS –– In a moment captured from a page of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, thousands of disenchanted citizens marched across the Crescent City Connection Bridge on Saturday, seeking the right of displaced New Orleans citizens to vote in the election scheduled April 22.

After fiery speeches delivered on the grounds of the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center by leaders of the civil rights movement, politicians and celebrities, such as Rev. Jesse Jackson, the president of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Rev. Al Sharpton, president of the National Action Network, and celebrity Judge Greg Mathis, the marchers crossed the Crescent City Connection Bridge, spanning the Mississippi River, where thousands of New Orleans citizens were stranded after Hurricane Katrina and the floodwaters of the Gulf of Mexico caused devastation in the city last summer.

Public energy is misdirected

What would happen if politically active progressive Americans suddenly stopped devoting their energies to drafting better sound bites, and instead directed all that time and passion into a serious and strategic campaign of civil disobedience?

I know, I know, we're constantly told that we're being out-framed and out-messaged.  Horse shit.  We're smarter than they are, wittier, pithier, more attuned to the perspectives of those we're speaking to.  But we don't own the networks and the newspapers.  They do.  Mammoth corporations with an agenda that usually lines up with that of right-wing gangsters control the microphones.  Stop the masochism!  Break a frame over your knee.  Spit out the sound bites.  Ask not how you can save a political party that doesn't want your help in a single sentence.  Ask what in your life you can sacrifice, what you can put at risk to force our government to do what we the people demand.

When war crimes are impossible

Is President Bush guilty of war crimes?

To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media.

A few weeks ago, when a class of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for a mock trial to assess whether Bush has committed war crimes, a media tempest ensued.

Typical was the response from MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, who found the very idea of such accusations against Bush to be unfathomable. The classroom exercise “implies people are accusing him of a crime against humanity,” Carlson said. “It’s ludicrous.”

In Tennessee, the Chattanooga Times Free Press thundered in an editorial: “That some American ‘educators’ would have students ‘try’ our American president for ‘war crimes’ during time of war tells us that our problems are not only with terrorists abroad.”

The standard way for media to refer to Bush and war crimes in the same breath is along the lines of this lead-in to a news report on CNN’s “American Morning” in late March: “The Supreme Court’s about to consider a landmark case and one that could have far-reaching implications. At issue is

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