contributions

With a chill in the air and frost on the pumpkins, it’s the spookiest time of the year. Out of a trunk from the attic and a bag from the cellar, 2004’s Scariest Halloween Costumes are here!
by Dan Savage and David Schmader
Photographs by John E. Hollingsworth
A Do-It-Yourself Guide to This Season’s Quickest, Least Expensive, and Spooky-Ookiest Halloween Costumes
Florida’s Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines
Give Democrats in your neighborhood the chills with this adorable (…)

A major terrorist attack could easily serve as the pretext for setting the draft in motion.
By Sen. Tom Harkin
President George W. Bush may or may not have a secret plan to reinstate the draft. But this is besides the point. The deteriorating facts on the ground in Iraq, plus the Bush doctrine of acting pre-emptively and unilaterally against hostile regimes, will soon leave him no choice. If Bush is re-elected, he will have to restart the draft.
Indeed, Bush has already imposed stage (…)

By Laura King Seeing any potential heir as a threat, Arafat never groomed a successor. Now observers fear a violent power struggle.
Jerusalem - Whenever someone close to Yasser Arafat has dared to try to persuade him to do something he didn’t want to do, the famously temperamental Palestinian leader has had a favorite reply.
"Mish waatu," he would say in Arabic. "It is not the time."
Sometimes he would utter it lightly and dismissively; other times he would scream it in (…)

By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON - U.S. Army Corps of Engineers commanders awarded a lucrative contract extension to Halliburton Co. this month by circumventing the organization’s top contracting officer, who had objected to the proposal, according to documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Corps of Engineers’ chief contracting officer, questioned a decision by commanders to award a contract extension to Halliburton, the oil services (…)

Please Broadcast this to Anyone you know who may be "Undecided":::
Nader’s Former Advisors & Former Running Mate Winona LaDuke Urge Support for Kerry!!!
In Swing States— Start Swinging!
Some of us love Ralph Nader. Some hate him. Some voted for him in the last presidential election. Some of us did not. But now let’s join together on Tuesday to vote Bush out of office. That means voting for Kerry.
I’ve recently joined Noam Chomsky, Phil Donahue, Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower, (…)

By Chris Floyd
Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult — a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will — undergirded by the cult’s supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith — is likewise openly declared: "Empire." You think this is an exaggeration? Then heed the words of the White (…)

Dear America,
Now that John Kerry has demonstrated himself to the American people as rational and statesmanlike leader, especially compared to the histrionic, contorted and ugly evasions evinced by President Bush during the three debates that were his to loose, hopefully we have embarked on a journey that will culminate in a change of government in the USA.
Just as the rest of the world sits amazed at the malaise that has seized America since Bush took office and which has manifested (…)

BRITISH spy novelist John Le Carre has branded US President George W. Bush America’s most "universally hated" leader and urged voters to kick him out of office next month.
The author of global best sellers such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy launched the stinging attack on the US leader and his war in Iraq in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times.
"Probably no American president in history has been so universally hated abroad as Bush: for his (…)

Never in the history of humankind has an election had so much at stake
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinche
Dear friends,
As a journalist who has the good fortune to write for an international journal with millions of readers around the world, I have the individual responsibility to inform you of the feeling in the international community regarding the outcome of the election on November 2nd.
As citizens of the United States of America, who have the power to endorse or to dismiss the policies (…)

A helpful primer courtesy of MoveOn.org
They’re doing it again. In Nevada, a Republican contractor has allegedly ripped up thousands of Democratic registration forms.(1) In Florida, Jeb Bush has purged tens of thousands of legitimate voters - mostly black, mostly Democratic - from the rolls because their names are similar to a felon’s.(2) In Ohio, the Republican Secretary of State has been so uncooperative that a federal judge said that he “apparently seeks to accomplish the same result in (…)