contributions

By JULIET MACUR WASHINGTON - For 25 days at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Specialist Danielle Green wondered if anyone could ever understand. But on the 26th day, a nurse told her: "A new female patient came in today. You have a lot in common."
"Really?" Specialist Green said, and the nurse nodded.
Like Specialist Green, the new patient was a 20-something firecracker, a 5-foot-8 former college basketball player, an Army soldier in the military police serving in Iraq.
Like (…)

by Stephen Soldz
There are various explanations for what went on at Abu Ghraib. The official US position is that a "few bad apples" among the reservist military police (MPs) there went out of control, violating orders to treat the prisoners humanely — "Animal House on the night shift," as former defense secretary James Schlesinger described it.(1) The MP defendants claim that they were following orders to soften up the prisoners as a prelude to interrogation. Investigative journalists have (…)

Prosecutor to probe Cuyahoga County recount
2 written complaints allege problems in ’04 presidential election
By Stephen Dyer
Beacon Journal staff writer
CLEVELAND - Erie County Prosecutor Kevin J. Baxter is investigating whether the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections broke the law in its recount of ballots from the November presidential election.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor William Mason appointed Baxter as a special prosecutor in the case because the board of elections is Mason’s (…)

by Ben Frank
If you listen to all five audios, you will understand that beyond doubt, something fishy went down in Ohio. The point being that there were tons of irregularities, glitches and even intentional fraud, yet the media AND the democratic ’leadership’ dismissed this as something to fix for next time. The proof of the stolen election is in the coverup (and of course all of the facts that were covered up).
If there was nothing wrong, then these problems would have been addressed by (…)

I never miss the Al Jazeera cartoons, which are almost always right on the money.
After the passing of Pope John Paul II, Al Jazeera published a mildly critical cartoon alluding to the lack of action by the vatican in many world events. However I was quite surprised to realize that after the first day, the publishers modified the cartoon. I wonder if other viewers noticed the same thing.
Why were these changes made and who made the final decision??
Claude-Woof

“All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair.”
President George Bush said that, and I agree with it. Free and fair elections cannot, by definition, take place under the occupation of a foreign regime. Yet Bush trumpets the recent Iraqi elections held under an American occupation 10 times the size of Syria’s. He holds one standard for the military that he oversees and quite a different standard for (…)

Some lawyers claim the U.S. is guilty of crimes against humanity
by Charlie Smith
Serving tea in her kitchen in her home on Vancouver’s West Side, Gail Davidson seems more like a friendly neighbour than a wild-eyed revolutionary. Davidson, a grandmother, laughs easily, enjoys gardening, and speaks with a remarkable absence of egotism. In this setting, it’s hard to comprehend that she is a key figure in an international campaign to hold U.S. President George W. Bush accountable for (…)

With George Bush’s Approval Rating Now At The Lowest Level Of Any Incumbent President Since World War II, Are The Hard Times And Absurd Lies Finally Getting Through To Americans?
by Martin Graham On the weekend prior to the November elections, I moved. One of the movers who packed up my goods felt obliged to offer me some political insight. "Don’t get me wrong," he explained, "I don’t care for either of these guys, but you just don’t change presidents in the middle of a war."
Since I (…)

by Lisa Hoffman The votes of at least 1 in 4 U.S. soldiers and overseas voters in last fall’s election never were counted. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by the National Defense Committee, a private, pro-military organization that surveyed local election offices across the country about the number of absentee votes cast and counted in the Nov. 3 election.
In all, more than 30,000 of the 131,000 absentee ballots sent by troops and expatriates to 760 local elections offices (…)

• The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
• The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
• One-third of our science teachers and one-half of our math teachers did not major in those subjects. (Quoted on The West Wing, but you can trust it - their researchers are legendary.)
• Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the Earth. Seventeen percent believe the Earth revolves around (…)