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2006 will offer up Nixon-era nastiness and a chorus of calls to impeach Bush
WASHINGTON - In the first weeks and months after 9/11, I am told by a very good source, there was a lot of wishing out loud in the White House Situation Room about expanding the National Security Agency’s ability to instantly monitor phone calls and e-mails between American callers and possible terror suspects abroad. “We talked a lot about how useful that would be,” said this source, who was “in the room” in the (…)

by Bob Nichols
Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter charged Monday that the reason Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony Principi stepped down earlier this month was the growing scandal surrounding the use of uranium munitions in the Iraq War.
Writing in Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169, Arthur N. Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law in New York, stated, “The real reason for Mr. Principi’s departure was really never given, however a special report (…)

Flashback from Nov 4
By a margin of 53% to 42%, Americans want Congress to impeach President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,200 U.S. adults from October 29 through November 2. (…)

By Tom Robbins
As if the striking transit workers didn’t already have enough enemies, bad blood between Transport Workers Union Local 100 and its national parent body spilled over into a Brooklyn courtroom today where a lawyer for the national union condemned the ongoing walkout as unreasonable and unauthorized.
Appearing before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Theodore Jones who was considering whether or not to levy massive fines for the walkout, lawyer Peter DiChiara said that TWU (…)

I wrote the following for the forthcoming issue of L.A. Weekly:
When the U.S. Senate last Friday refused to renew the liberticidal Patriot Act — with its provisions for spying on Americans’ use of libraries and the Internet, among other Constitution-shredding provisions of that iniquitous law — it was in part because that morning’s New York Times had revealed how Bush and his White House had committed a major crime.
By ordering the National SecBush_dark_mood_1urity Agency — the N.S.A, so (…)

By Wayne Barrett
Would this strike be happening if Governor George Pataki were running for re-election next year? Would Mike Bloomberg’s city be shut down if the expiration date on the Transport Workers Union’s contract were September or October, when he reached pre-election settlements with half a dozen city unions?
If your answer is no to either question, then you believe, as anyone with a memory in New York knows, that politics is the only explanation for this maddening and (…)

By Michael Flynn
President Bush’s “comprehensive strategy” on border security aimed at preventing “people from coming here in the first place,” announced last month, does nothing to address the growing phenomenon of global migration. What’s more, it leaves Mexico to clean up a mess it didn’t make.
According to the UN’s Global Commission on International Migration, the number of people worldwide living outside their country of birth has doubled in the past 25 years, rising to more than (…)

By: Simone Baribeau
Caracas, Venezuela, December 19, 2005-In Colombia’s latest move to ease ongoing tensions over the country’s political refugee policy, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe publicly condemned a meeting between Venezuelan dissident generals and Colombian intelligence.
“Our [military intelligence] has no business meeting with military officers who have left the Venezuelan Army and who now have problems with the Venezuelan government,” said Uribe.
After Venezuela’s ephemeral (…)

President Bush has admitted that he has authorized the use of surveillance upon American citizens and residents. He has argued that he has the authority to do so, that he has balanced the need to spy on us and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, his claims do not withstand scrutiny.
Firstly, the spying upon Americans without probable cause, due process and a warrant supported by evidence and sworn before a competent magistrate violates the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th and 14th Amendments of the US (…)

To my kind and gentle reader, please be patient while I conjure the spirit of Shakespeare, to call Bush a liar.
It was a dark and stormy afternoon as I went to my computer and googled, Shakespeare, in the news option. It was the beginning of November and a new book was just released titled ’The Truth Will Out’ claiming that Shakespeare was Sir Henry Neville . One of the authors is named Rubinstein and a search of his background associates him with the Intelligent design movement. This (…)