We were extremely disappointed in our House Rep. Adam Smith and the 104 other Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, who voted in favor of H.R. 6304, FISA Amendment Act of 2008. They caved in to the Executive Branch by granting the giant telecoms and Bush executors’ immunity for illegal wiretapping citizens of the United States. It is a sad day for civil rights of the citizens of the United States and the 4th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Barack Obama, concurring with John McCain and Geo. W. Bush, endorsed H.R. 6304. Easy passage is expected in the Senate next week. Apparently what we have to look forward to in 2009 with the 111th Congress and Executive Branch is the mcsame. Oh, how truly I miss my Democratic Party!

Born in 1963 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, Rebecca Schneider grew up in rural western Pennsylvania in a middle class neighborhood.  Rebecca graduated from Mars High School in 1982 and Slippery Rock University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology.  During the course of attending College and working two, sometimes three jobs to pay her way, she set the course of her career when she began working in the library and currently works as a Library Supervisor for Arizona State University.

Protect your right to Biological privacy! Oppose DNA Database Act!

By Dave Lindorff

For the first 18 years of my life, my birthdays were purely celebratory occasions, but since 1968, the day has always come tinged with a shadow. April 4 is the day Martin Luther King was shot.

    I actually learned about King’s death, appropriately, in police custody, and had to think about its implications locked in a jail cell.  

I was a freshman at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and had been given an assignment in my philosophy class to write a paper on Henry Thoreau’s influence on Mahatma Gandhi, and of course through him on Martin Luther King. Being 18 at the time, and it being spring, I decided I should write the paper not at school, but at Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

By Dave Lindorff

When I lived in China in the early 1990s, there were things that you could not discuss. One was Tibet. Another was Taiwan, "referred to in my daughter's public elementary school in Shanghai as "China's largest island." Another was the 1989 massacre of students and workers in Beijing. I used to be grateful at the time that I was an American and that back home, we could talk about anything.

Except that in a way we can't. Not in public discourse, anyhow.

Take the silly broughhaha on the Right, in the media, and in the Democratic primary campaign, over the statements of Obama's "spiritual mentor" the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Everyone is all worked up--and Obama has sacked Wright from his campaign's religious advisory committee--because of some statements Wright has made that crossed an invisible line of permissible discourse.

I have no sympathy for New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the hot-shot prosecutor of call-girl operations who was hoist on his own petard, as it were. I mean, what a jerk! And aside from the hypocrisy, what a fine message he was sending to his three teenage daughters about the role of women.

Having said that, Spitzer's bust should give pause to those in Congress who are ready to hand President Bush a free pass to continue his six-year campaign of warrantless spying on Americans.

It's unfortunate that there is such a vast ignorance about homosexuality.  There is much confusion out there because people don't know what homosexuality is.  They confuse it with other things.  For instance, they think that homosexuality is about physical sex.  It isn't.  The physical sex follows from the emotional need.  You can be heterosexual and have physical sex with the same gender.  You can be homosexual and have physical sex with the opposite gender.  You can have sex with yourself. Physical sexual desire is controlled by something else entirely.

By Dave Lindorff

With a viral campaign underway via email, right-wing radio, and on the street suggesting that Barack Obama is a black “Manchurian Candidate,” secretly trained as a Muslim fanatic who will insinuate himself into the White House, thence to undermine all that we hold dear, perhaps it is time to look at the Manchurian Candidate we already have in the White House, who, together with his handler over in Blair House, has pretty much done all the damage already.

George Bush came to office in 2001 promising a new era of integrity, civility and “compassionate conservatism,” an era of humble American foreign policy, and a bi-partisan approach to government.

What did we actually get?

By Dave Lindorff,

President Bush has turned to the cheapest lies in an effort to protect himself from being exposed as a criminal in the ongoing campaign to have the National Security Agency spy at will on Americans.

Claiming—without a scintilla of evidence to back him up—that there are people planning a “much worse attack” than 9-11 on America, he says he must not only have free rein to unleash the NSA
spymasters on American telephone and internet communications, but also a grant of complete immunity from prosecution for such spying for the telecom industry.

By Dave Lindorff

Well, now we know. Scientists have documented that the Bush/Cheney administration has been a greater threat to Americans’ health and safety than Osama Bin Laden and his terror band.

Specifically, The New York Times, in its science section today, reports that a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry has found that while the risk to Americans of dying at the hands of a terrorist was roughly equal to the chance of “drowning in a toilet,” the risk of cardiovascular disease among people who are frightened about the threat of terrorism is 300-500% higher than for people who are not worried.