Truth is the weapon of Bush's self-destruction: The Superpower Of Peace has the ultimate force

“If we look at history, we find that in time, humanity's love of peace, justice and freedom always triumphs over cruelty and oppression….”
The 14th Dalai Lama

“The Truth shall set you free.”
Jesus Christ

My life as a rabbi

Asked to a recent wedding in Virginia, the proud parents asked if I would do some sort of officiation. It would be my second inning in this role, having acted as priest/judge at a rural splicing here in the North California backwoods some years ago. On that occasion I wrote up a laicized version of the wedding ritual in the 16th-century "Book of Common Prayer," shorn, of course, of the bit of her obeying him. Then the couple nipped into a back room where there was a real judge on hand to make it legal.

            This time, beside a pond in a green field in rural Virginia, there was no judge, but none was necessary since the couple had already eloped back in January, getting married on the bus the bridegroom's film collective uses on their cinematic ventures.

            Why, you ask, would anyone ask a raffish antinomian of Sixties vintage to preside at any ceremony beyond the increasingly familiar occupation of helping throw the ashes of some deceased lefty comrade over the back of a boat or off the top of a mountain? Maybe it's all those years on the road, giving booster talks to radical groups, raising money for all

Anti-war music


People's Liberation Front releases Anti-War Maxi-CD.
Killa Pancake samples the beats
Dr. Bob, voice. For a sample, download.

Order Now

Also check out new anti-war songs by:

The Beastie Boys:
www.beastieboys.com

Zach de la Rocha and DJ Shadow:
www.marchofdeath.com

John Mellencamp:
www.mellencamp.com

REM:
www.remhq.com/
finalStraw/finalstraw.html

Paris:
www.911timeline.net/
whatwouldyoudo.htm

Jynks:
www.jynkz.com/music_protest.html

'This perverse episode'

AUSTIN, Texas -- Watching some dipstick the other day on Fox News carry on with great certainty about Hillary Clinton and her evil motives -- and I don't think this guy actually spends a lot of time tete a tete with Mrs. Clinton while she reveals her deepest thoughts to him -- I wondered, "Lord, when are these people going to get over it?"

            I think the answer is never, because most people have a very hard time forgiving those whom they have deeply wronged. I know that's sort of counterintuitive, but think about some of the bad divorces you have known. When we have done something terrible to someone, we often need to twist it around so it's their fault, not ours.

            So we continue to suffer this deformity in our public life because of what Sid Blumenthal calls "this perverse episode," the scoundrel time.

            Just last week, The Wall Street Journal, reminded of the Vince Foster suicide by Mrs. Clinton's new memoir, "Living History," wrote a nasty, callous, defensive editorial. It's a classic of the genre of exculpating yourself by blaming others. Since Foster named The Wall Street

Initiative Petition Drive to Restructure Columbus City Council:

          PEER also announced that it will lead an Initiative Petition Drive to amend the Columbus City Charter.  The Initiative will allow voters to elect an as yet undetermined number of district or ward representatives in addition to the current seven "at-large" council members.  The goal of the Initiative Petition Drive is to ensure comprehensive representation for all of the neighborhoods within the City.  

  PEER supports a public policy agenda featuring truly representative government and efficient planning for Columbus and Central Ohio.  PEER thus supports growth policies which allow for commercial and residential development but which also promote the reuse and redevelopment of the central city while preserving key environmental assets in the area.  

 

Trust, war and terrorism

In a democracy, leaders must earn and retain the public's trust. No matter how loudly those leaders proclaim their dedication to fighting terrorism, we must not flinch from examining whether they are trustworthy.

On March 17, 2003, in a major address to the American people, President George W. Bush declared: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." On April 10, in a televised message to the people of Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair said: "We did not want this war. But in refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam gave us no choice but to act."

Before and during the war on Iraq, we heard many other such statements from top officials in Washington and London. Ostensibly they justified the war.

Among the horrors of that war are weapons known as cluster bombs. I use the present tense because now -- months after the Pentagon and the British military dropped thousands of cluster bombs on Iraq -- they continue to explode, sometimes in the hands of children who

White House Silenced Experts Who Questioned Iraq Intel Info Six Months Before War

Six months before the United States was dead-set on invading Iraq to rid the country of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, experts in the field of nuclear science warned officials in the Bush administration that intelligence reports showing Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons was unreliable and that the country did not pose an imminent threat to its neighbors in the Middle East or the U.S.

But the dissenters were told to keep quiet by high-level administration officials in the White House because the Bush administration had already decided that military force would be used to overthrow the regime of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, interviews and documents have revealed.

The most vocal opponent to intelligence information supplied by the CIA to the hawks in the Bush administration about the so-called Iraqi threat to national security was David Albright, a former United Nations weapons inspector and the president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, D.C. based group that gathers information for the public and the White House on nuclear weapons programs.

Britain -- not quite a parallel media universe

LONDON -- The people of Britain and the United States are living in parallel, yet substantively different, media universes. Bonds of language and overlaps of mass culture are obvious. But a visit to London quickly illuminates the reality that mainstream journalism is much less narrow here than in America.

One indicator of a robust press: Nearly a dozen ideologically diverse national daily papers are competing on British newsstands.

Granted, the picture isn't all rosy. Tabloids feature lurid crime headlines and include exploitive photos of bare-breasted women. Several major newspapers reflect the distorting effects of right-wing owners like Rupert Murdoch (who has succeeded in foisting the execrable Fox News on the United States). And the circulation figures of Britain's dailies show that the size of press runs is inversely proportional to journalistic quality, with the Sun at 3.5 million and the Daily Mail at 2.3 million -- in contrast to two superb dailies, the Guardian (381,000) and the Independent (186,000).

Yet the impacts of the Guardian and the Independent, along with

Budget imbalance

AUSTIN, Texas -- In the "physician, heal thyself" department, please note the response of White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer to a bulletin from North Korea that said: "The intention to build up a nuclear deterrent is not aimed to threaten and blackmail others, but to reduce conventional weapons. North Korea hopes to channel manpower resources and funds into economic construction and the betterment of people's living."

Fleischer piously replied: "Perhaps from this glimpse of North Korea acknowledging that its own people suffer as a result of North Korea's policies, it will help North Korea to now make the right decisions. And the right decisions are to put their people first, to feed their people, to get health care to their people ..."

Not only should feeding the people and getting health care to the people be more important than a nuclear program, it should even be more important than tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy. The United States now spends $400 billion a year on the military -- that's 50.1 percent of all discretionary spending (non-discretionary includes Social Security, Medicare

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