contributions

Why does AP lie in their headlines?
U.S. Says Airstrike on Iraq House Kills 5
By NICK WADHAMS, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The United States military acknowledged dropping a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house outside the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, killing five people. But the man who owned the house said the bomb killed 14 people - including seven children.
The strike in the town of Aitha, 30 miles south of Mosul, came hours before a senior U.S. Embassy official (…)

by Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman
Together, grassroots/Internet activists have just moved three major American mountains.
On January 6, we forced an angry Republican-dominated Congress into an unprecedented confrontation with the Truth about Ohio’s stolen election, about dubious vote counts nationwide, and ultimately about an electoral process worthy of zero public trust.
America’s progressive grassroots further showed it could prompt the "democratic wing" of the (…)

... the elections could deepen the conflict by leading to greater alienation of the Sunni minority from the Shia and Kurds.
Asked if he shared that view, Mr Bush replied: “Quite the opposite. I think elections will be such an incredibly hopeful experience for the Iraqi people.
... “I think we’re making great progress,” Mr Bush said, making no reference to the rapidly mounting death toll among US troops and Iraqi security forces.
Reiterating what he has referred to before as his (…)

By Alan Woods
While the whole world mourns the fate of the thousands killed and made homeless by a natural disaster in Asia, a man-made disaster is continuing to spread death, destruction and misery in an ancient country on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris.
Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld and Powell shed crocodile tears over the victims of the tsunami and wring their hands in public. They send a few millions in “aid” to demonstrate their “humanitarianism”, but are spending tens of billions on (…)

by Robert Thompson A rather ignorant speechwriter for the intellectually challenged President of the USA, with little respect for the meaning of words, whose name I understand to be David Frum, invented the expression "Axis of Evil" without thinking very deeply as to either what an axis was or for that matter how one can define evil. However, the world can now see a triumvirate of evil on course towards its aim to hand over all power to its corporate sponsors. Each of the two pillars (…)

Senator Johnson says Bush’s Social Security plan is a crap shoot
1/6/2005 4:39:17 PM
Cindy Davis
The outline of the President’s plan to reform Social Security is already causing a South Dakota senator some concern.
Democratic Senator Tim Johnson says he sees several problems with changing the formula for Social Security benefits.
He says the President’s outline includes borrowing from foreign nations to make up for a $2 trillion dollar deficit.
He also claims it would lower (…)

John Kerry, like Al Gore before him, does not deserve the presidency of the United States.
This is not because they are incompetent politicians. This is not because they lost their elections. No. It’s because despite winning, Gore and Kerry refused to claim what was rightfully theirs.
Yesterday, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), along with a dozen other House members, formally objected to the choice of Ohio’s electors. There is ample evidence that this election was just as crooked as (…)

by Tim Wheeler
WASHINGTON During confirmation hearings on Alberto Gonzales nomination as Attorney General, senators should question him about a recently uncovered memo that George W. Bush ordered the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other military prisons around the world, several human rights groups suggested last month.
The groups, who joined in an ACLU Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit, which won release of the memo and other incriminating documents, are (…)

Focusing on torture as the main objection to Alberto Gonzales’ taking over as Attorney General distracts us from his greater sin: his attempt to give the president the power to imprison Americans incommunicado and indefinitely, without recourse to courts or lawyers. Such contempt for our civil rights shows that Gonzales cannot be trusted to protect them.
The White House, with Gonzales as legal adviser, argued for this unchecked and arbitrary power in two cases, all the way up to the US (…)

In three national elections over the past 13 months, the official count was sharply at odds with an independent national exit poll. As in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, U.S. exit polls projected a clear victory for the challenger. John Kerry was projected to win the national popular vote by a 2 percent to 3 percent margin and was ahead in nearly every closely contested state. Of course, the official counts, as in the other nations, showed an almost mirror image victory (…)