Nice, polite, calm...

KANANASKIS, Alberta -- Make that a big Canadian, "Oh dear." These nice Canadians, whom George W. Bush once managed to triumphantly identify as "our most important neighbors to the north" are famous for their reticence. Canada, Land of the Understatement. I once proposed their national motto should be: "Now, Let's Not Get Excited." Not that I would ever generalize. I attribute their commendable phlegm to being too cold to waste much energy and regular ingestion of oatmeal.

        Nice, polite, calm, reserved, chock full of common sense and living next to us -- what a fate. For them, it's like having the Simpsons for next-door neighbors. A few years ago, during the height of our national meltdown over Monica Lewinsky, a host on the Canadian Broadcasting Co.'s evening news program began an interview by gingerly asking me, "So, having another of your little psychodramas down there, eh?"

Polluters reach the line in the Red Desert sand

It's time to draw a line in the sand of Wyoming's Red Desert. The White House is proposing to let some of their biggest campaign contributors in the oil, gas and coal industries drill more than 1500 wells across a wilderness that was once a famous passageway for the Pony Express - the Jack Morrow Hills in the Red Desert in Wyoming. The Hills are also home to North America's largest antelope and desert elk herds and the site of rare prehistoric rock art painted over 2,000 years ago.

I wish I could tell you that this proposal is just about drilling in one place, but it's not. It's a trial balloon to test our strength. If the polluters can get access to an area as historically and ecologically sensitive as the Jack Morrow Hills, they'll know that with enough political pressure and campaign donations, they'll be able to drill, mine, and log just about anywhere – even in national monuments.

A Time of Butterflies and Bombers

We saw butterflies turning into bombers. And we weren't dreaming. At the time when the Woodstock festival became an instant media legend in mid-August 1969, melodic yearning for peace was up against the cold steel of American war machinery.

The music and other creative energies that drew 400,000 people to an upstate New York farm that weekend rejected the Vietnam War and the assumptions fueling it. Thirty-five years later, the Jimi Hendrix rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner could still serve as an apt soundtrack for U.S. foreign policy, with bombs bursting in air over urban neighborhoods across much of Iraq.

A Woodstock reunion, scheduled for Aug. 20-22 in the town of Bethel, N.Y., comes while the gap between the nation's commander in chief and huge numbers of its citizens is enormous.

Among those on the bill for the 35th anniversary event is the Country Joe Band. Its four musicians were original members of Country Joe and the Fish. No doubt the band's upcoming Woodstock performance will include "Cakewalk to Baghdad," a caustic tune based on boasts -- from

Global Apartheid and America’s New Racial Domain

In 1900, the great African-American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, predicted that the “problem of the twentieth century” would be the “problem of the color line,” the unequal relationship between the lighter vs. darker races of humankind.  Although Du Bois was primarily focused on the racial contradiction of the United States, he was fully aware that the processes of what scholars today describe as “racialization” – the construction of racially unequal social hierarchies characterized by dominant and subordinate social relations between groups – was an international and global problem.  Du Bois’s color line included not just the racially segregated, Jim Crow South and the racial oppression of South Africa; but also included British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial domination in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean among indigenous populations.

Don’t Believe the Hype; Terrorist Warnings Just Another Way Bush Will Steal Election

It’s official. I’m a conspiracy theorist.

I’m probably one of thousands -- maybe tens of thousands -- who believe President George W. Bush will do anything to retain control of the White House. It’s not safe to have a healthy dose of skepticism like this these days. But this has to be said. I don’t believe the country is going to be attacked by al-Qaeda anytime soon. I don’t care how specific the so-called threat is. I don’t care how many targets have been identified. I don’t care how solid this new information is. I don’t buy any of it. What I do believe is whenever Bush’s approval ratings start slipping the president’s administration issues a terrorist warning saying an attack is imminent. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Consider the evidence.

This past Memorial Day weekend right through mid-June Bush’s approval ratings yo-yoed due to bad news coming out of the war in Iraq. By mid-June, 51% of Americans disapproved of the way Bush was handling the war in Iraq, up about four points from May, according to polling results from Zogby, Gallup and Pew.

About the Democratic convention

Amen,

Ask Molly...

If the Geneva Conventions somewhere allow for the beheadings and torture of Non Combatants. Sit back and write about flower arrangements or something like that. If you have never fought for more than a good parking spot, than shut up and sit down. You have no Idea, except of course from reading the ramblings by another who has never been there.

Mark A. Shells
South Carolina
14 year Military Veteran

Presidential elections 2004: Not as big a deal as they say

Freshets of creativity and excitement pulsing into the nation's bloodstream and improvements in the general quality of life have nothing to do with the presidential elections rolling around every four years, which rouse expectations far in excess of what they actually deserve. As registers of liberal or conservative political potency, American presidential elections seldom coincide with shifts in the tempo of political energy across the country. As vehicles for the ventilation of popular concerns, they are hopelessly inadequate and should be severely downgraded on the entertainment calendars.

From Attica to Abu Ghraib -- and a Prison Near You

A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, "who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages." Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal force behind a 26-year civil action lawsuit that won a $12 million settlement.

Smith's life changed forever on Sept. 13, 1971 -- the day when New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered 500 state troopers to attack the upstate Attica Correctional Facility, killing 29 inmates and 10 guards held as hostages. The raid wounded at least 86 other people.

The media coverage was atrocious. Outright lies were front-page news, "informing" the public that prisoners had slit the throats of hostages when the troopers' assault began. Corrective facts came later, with much smaller headlines, after autopsies revealed that no throats had been cut. Only when their claims were exposed as deceptions did top state officials admit the truth.

Smith, known as "Big Black," figures prominently in a full-length

Kerry makes a strong case for Nader

 From where I was sitting, John Kerry's performance at last week's Democratic Convention was the most powerful argument yet offered for voting for Ralph Nader. And the fact that Michael Moore dropped to his knees over the weekend in the company of Bill Maher begging Nader to withdraw only fuels my certainty. Across this year Moore has swiveled from Wesley Clark to Kerry, denied to Jay Leno that he supports the Democrats and fibbed about his advice to Nader in 2000, so who wants to be in the same corner as him, assuming he stayed in one corner long enough for anyone to identify it? Here's John Kerry, offering himself as a man of war, as a former prosecutor, as a candidate who hasn't got one single substantive, useful idea about turning the U.S. economy around and improving the overall state of the world. The only difference from Bush he can identify is that he went to Vietnam, killed Vietnamese and collected a bunch of medals, which some of his Navy colleagues who fought there at the same time say he didn't deserve.

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