contributions

By Daniel Patrick Welch
It is well known that American kids traditionally score well below their foreign counterparts in geographic knowledge, and Africa seems to be perennially at the bottom of what they know. The reasons for this shameful lack of interest or insight are many and varied, especially given the US’ current position in the world, but a few problem areas are easy to explain.
It is unlikely in any society, for example, that kids would outpace their teachers, parents, (…)

By Mary MacElveen
Excuse me for once again coming down hard on my party’s leaders when it comes to the “Bush War” in Iraq, but I along with many others are becoming increasingly angry that the Democratic Party is NOT showing a sign of force, but complicity when it comes to this war. That is not to say that all of our Democratic leaders are supportive of this president, but when you have Mike McCurry a former Clinton White House press secretary stating this in a Washington Post article, (…)

Thursday, August 18, 2005 Love Your Country? Demand Impeachment.
It was Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth President of the United States and a Republican, who famously said in 1918, "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Put differently, and in modern context, blind, unquestioning faith in President Bush is not only (…)

Cindy Sheehan (mother of a soldier slain in Iraq), Jim Massey (ex-Marine recruiter) and others reveal the true impact of No Child Left Behind’s military recruitment in our high schools. With no end in sight to the increasingly lethal American occupation in Iraq, this is the single-most important film for concerned parents and citizens to see. Watch the 11-minute film and then take action to "opt our kids out" at LeaveMyChildAlone.org.
Created by Mainstreet Moms and Working Assets
Watch (…)

By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes Pacific edition, Friday, June 17, 2005
WASHINGTON - Several parents of soldiers killed in Iraq visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ask for congressional hearings on the Downing Street memo, which one mother called President Bush’s “Watergate.”
Critics say the document, which contains minutes from a meeting in July 2002 between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and top aides, shows that Bush was determined to go to war with Iraq and ignored evidence (…)

by Ben Frank
Monday 22 August 2005
Ann Wright announced tonight that Caravans will be leaving Camp Casey in different directions August 31st heading to Washington, stopping all over the country to organize for the March on Washington on September 24th.
Why?
Labor Day is a huge travel holiday... why not advertise Crawford, Texas as the site of the Great American Campout this Labor Day Weekend. I don’t know for sure, but in all likelihood our vacationing President will stay thru the (…)

Leaderless on the left
by Gary Younge
The myth of Rosa Parks is well known. The tired seamstress who boarded a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man has become one of the most enduring legends of the civil rights era. Her subsequent arrest started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement. It transformed the apartheid of America’s southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal and turned a (…)

PRESS RELEASE: Galloway Tour
British MP George Galloway Announces September Tour of United States to Speak Against War in Iraq
George Galloway is Respect party MP for Bethnal Green and Bow in East London. He recently electrified the United States with his appearance at a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on May 17, when he turned the proceedings intoa condemnation of the war in Iraq.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer described Galloway’s speech in the Senate as "a blistering (…)

Statement of Protest and Solidarity with Northwest Strikers
Submitted to Portside by Peter Rachleff
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Sisters and Brothers:
As I am sure you know, 4,400 mechanics, cleaners, and custodians represented by the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association have been on strike for 4 days at Northwest Airlines. The issues they are facing will soon face all of us. They have dug in for a substantial fight and they intend to win, despite NWA’s "preparations" which have been lauded on page (…)

Chinese Detainees Are Men Without a Country
By Robin Wright
In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China’s communist government — not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.
More (…)