I recently sent some e-mail to David Scott (D-Ga) about Barney Frank's H.R. 5842 and just got this reply back from him.

I am unsure if he will actually see this reply to it, or if he has any real time to "waste" on such an "unimportant and trivial topic which there isn't any time for right now and will detract from real issues and might possibly cause the Democrats to lose every election for the rest of our lives!!!!!!!!".

Or some other such usual nonsense I have to listen to when I bring this topic up.

But I do it anyway. That's activism.

In the Age of Reagan, in 1987, the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” was rescinded, opening the way for talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, and unfettered bias. This doctrine had made media offer “equal time” to opposing views, and Democrats want it reinstated. I think people who like the ranting of Sean Hannity probably don’t want to listen so long to David Combs; a Rush Limbaugh “dittohead” shouldn’t be forced to listen to me. But, right-wing blowhards rousing rabble as their stock-in-trade don’t know when to quit, being in the business of mongering outrage.

Thanks to Sarah Lane at EENR for supplying the links in this entry.

When the Supreme (Kangaroo) Court upheld an unconstitutional poll tax last week that was passed in the form of a voter suppression law in Indiana, some people (like Injustice Antonin Scalia) were quick to dismiss the horrendous effects. But as that state held its primary yesterday, reports about voters being turned away because they did not have the poll tax began coming out.

Twelve elderly nuns—NUNS, for crying out loud—were told they could not vote because they didn't have the required state or federal ID card. They are all in their eighties and nineties. Vietnam and Gulf War I veteran Russell Baughman was denied his right to vote, because his identification wasn't considered good enough.

There is a time in the life of every writer when you find yourself fearing that you have become a robo call phone machine--repeating the same message over and over with diminishing results.

That's how I felt after eight months of silence after labeling the credit crisis a "subcrime" scandal, lashing out at the fraudulent activity at its core and calling for the investigation and prosecution of wrong doers. Almost no media outlets accepted this way of framing the problem, although, as usual, the British press was ahead of its American cousins in putting the blame on the bankers, not the borrowers.

I was reading Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo, by Murat Kurnaz, when I came across a passage about Kurnaz being subjected to gruesome electric shock torture at the hands of America's brave volunteer warriors. After passing out and being tossed back in his cell to sleep it off, Kurnaz was soon awakened by harrowing screams.

He saw two valiant American soldiers hitting a man who was lying on the ground-his head wrapped in a blanket. Five more patriotic heroes eventually joined in on the beating, hitting the man's head with the butts of their rifles and kicking him with their heavy boots. "Then," says Kurnaz, "they walked away, leaving him lying there."

In 2007 320 people in LA made a complaint about police officer conduct in choosing to search them.

The LAPD reviewed the incidents themselves, of course.

The totally unpredictable results await!

Bush Confesses to Waterboarding. Call D.C. Cops!

"Why are we talking about this in the White House?" John Ashcroft nervously asked his fellow members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee. (The Principals were Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General Ashcroft.)

"History will not judge this kindly," Ashcroft predicted.

"This" is torture. Against innocent people. Conducted by CIA agents and American soldiers and marines. Sanctioned by legal opinions issued by Ashcroft's Justice Department. Directly ordered by George W. Bush.

I interviewed former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman for an hour Tuesday in the second hour of my radio program on Air America. These are blockbuster allegations of election fraud against Rove and the Bush Justice Department that go way beyond what he said on CBS's 60 Minutes last month.

Listen to the full audio here.

And here's the transcript...

I’ve been engaged in social justice advocacy for more than twenty-five years. Throughout those years, I have seen how important a fair and accurate criminal justice system is to our society. When crimes are committed, we should have a system that will determine the truth. Unfortunately, time and time again, the system gets it wrong.

Earlier this month, Glen Chapman of North Carolina became the 128th prisoner on death row to be released since 1972. The courts found that detectives committed perjury at Chapman’s trial and withheld potential evidence of his innocence from his defense attorneys. The forensic evidence was so bad that one of the two homicides pinned on Chapman may in fact have been a drug overdose. Chapman, who spent 14 years behind bars, was also a victim of bad defense lawyering.

Thanks go out to Linda Milazzo for posting these.

http://www.youtube.com/v/hbmXekebQ5M

http://www.youtube.com/v/gL2O5s2dGak

The videos linked to above are of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, effectively admitting on Larry King's program that she is chummy with a mass murderer and dictator. That is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, dissing the mother of a soldier killed in her friend's war of choice, because she has "a day job."

And what job is that, exactly? Aiding and abetting tyrants -- war criminals -- as they continue to torture, wage illegal war, spy on us, and collapse our economy. And that's not even half of the list of crimes committed by the shrub-gargoyle regime.

Cross-posted from my blog at Campaign for America's Future.

Today I wrap up my series on Progressives and Liberals, Movements and Political Parties. In the first entry of the series, I explained what I think distinguishes progressives from modern American liberals, and the distinction to be made between a movement and the political party (or parties) through which it acts. In the second, I went into some detail on short and long term strategies, how we can use strategic campaigning to influence more Democratic candidates to run leftward, progressive campaigns.

"The 82nd," the man ahead of me in the security line at the Kansas City airport said. He was 64 and white, very Hank Hill and not the kind of guy you'd typically see chatting up a skinny 20-year-old Latino dude. But they were both veterans. Common ground is a given.

"I was in the 82nd too," the kid told the old man. I looked down. The kid's legs were gone. He was standing on metal. Implausibly and heartbreakingly, white Converses adorned the tips of his prosthetic legs. High tops.

On the other side of the metal detector, I caught up with the young vet (Iraq? Afghanistan?). HomeSec was giving him the whole treatment: arms stretched out, the wand, stern expressions and stupid questions. The wand beeped and beeped. The TSA guy scowled. "I've got titanium all the way up my spine," the kid explained.

Barney Frank has filed legislation to decriminalize marijuana possession.

While decriminalization, in and of itself, is not going to solve the problem associated with the black market, it might - possibly - result in police finding something else to do with all that time they waste every year arresting 800000 Americans for no good reason.

A Lawsuit Brought by Passengers Trapped on the Tarmac Without Basic Necessities

— from FindLaw

This column is Part Two in a two-part series on this subject. Part One appeared recently on this site. - JT.

At the outset of the Summer 2008 travel season, as many readers will be well aware, airlines left countless thousands of passengers stranded. The delays and cancellations occurred because airlines had unconscionably failed to keep planes in compliance with safety regulations, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had finally been embarrassed by whistleblowers into taking action.

Debacles like this remind us that this deregulated industry cares little about its cargo. Indeed, in this series of columns, I have been focusing on merely a small part of the problem faced by average air travelers, by considering the frequent failure of the commercial airlines to consider the needs of its passengers when it strands them on an airport tarmac for endless hours.