contributions

By Carl Bloice
My good friend - who’s usually right about such things - insists that in this case what is apparent is probably real. The Bush Administration really did appoint Karen Hughes to conduct a campaign to improve the image of our country in the Islamic world. There is no hidden agenda. She’s supposed to go around publicly holding court in places like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, ’listening’ and saying good things about the good people back here at home. Hughes is not carrying secret (…)

By JOEL BRINKLEY Published: October 6, 2005
MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Oct. 5 - Robert B. Zoellick, the deputy secretary of state, warned business leaders here on Wednesday that they should not continue supporting the political parties that are trying unseat Nicaragua’s president if they hoped to continue doing business with the United States.
"Your opportunities will be lost," Mr. Zoellick said he told the businessmen.
On the second day of a visit here, Mr. Zoellick also met with politicians (…)

By Marjorie Cohn
Bush has nominated his Texas crony as a stealth appointment to the Supreme Court. Although the Senate will be hard-pressed to discover Harriet Miers’s positions on the critical issues, she does have a long record of loyalty to Bush, whom she calls "the most brilliant man I ever met." Bush undoubtedly knows where she stands - and it doesn’t appear to be on the side of civil liberties.
Miers represented a string of large corporations, including Walt Disney Co., (…)

The troubled speaker attacks the prosecutor, then signs up a defense dream team.
by Molly Ivins
Jeez, that was quite a hissy fit Tom DeLay had, calling Ronnie Earle a rogue prosecutor, a partisan fanatic and an unabashed partisan zealot out for personal revenge.
Ronnie Earle? Our very own mild-mannered — well, let’s be honest, bland as toast, eternally unexciting, Mr. Understatement, Old Vanilla — Ronnie Earle? If the rest of Tom DeLay’s defense is as accurate as his description of (…)

by CONN HALLINAN
Following Norway’s Sept. 12 elections that saw a green-red coalition turn out a pro-business, anti-immigrant center-right government, the German daily, Die Tageszeitung, mused that “perhaps people in Germany could learn something from this.” It appears they did, and what they learned is likely to be repeated in Italy and France next spring.
While the U.S. press is spinning the German elections as “inconclusive; no clear winner,” as the New York Times put it, the figures (…)

Government revises bill after objections from Ciampi
The governing coalition considered revisions to a controversial electoral reform bill on Friday in response to criticism from President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi .
A quintet of ’wise men’ representing the four parties in Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right alliance met for almost three hours to discuss possible solutions to points raised by Ciampi’s office earlier this week .
The government is pushing ahead with plans to switch to (…)

"The publication of the ’diary’ of Fabrizio Gatti in L’Espresso magazine, in which, disguised as a migrant, the reporter spent 8 days in a temporary shelter and underwent a number of outrageous abuses, is further proof of our claims that shelters like the one in Lampedusa should be closed," said Refounded Communists leader Fausto Bertinotti.
"Earlier this year," he added, "our own MEP Giusto Catania reported the abuses which are perpetrated on a daily basis at the temporary shelter in (…)

by Chris Galea, di-ve news (cgal@di-ve.com)
Italian citizens living in Malta will have the opportunity to vote in Malta in the Primarie elections on Sunday, October 16th, at the Alternattiva Demokratika (AD) offices in Sliema.
The results of these elections will determine who will be the leader of the Centre-Green-Left Unione that will be facing current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the Italian national elections in six months’ time.
The politicians contesting for the Primarie (…)

BY JESSE JACKSON
After his administration’s incompetence and indifference had lethal consequences in Katrina’s wake, President Bush has been scrambling to regain his footing. He’s called for an "unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis." In religious services at the National Cathedral, he called on America to "erase this legacy of racism" exposed by those abandoned in Katrina’s wake. He’s called on Congress to appropriate more than $60 billion in emergency relief and outlined a (…)

by Will Lester WASHINGTON - Evangelicals, Republican women, Southerners and other critical groups in President Bush’s political coalition are increasingly worried about the direction the nation is headed and disappointed with his performance, an AP-Ipsos poll found.
The growing unease could be a troubling sign for a White House already struggling to keep the Republican Party base from slipping over Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, Gulf Coast spending projects, immigration and other (…)