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House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) invited several current and former Administration officials to a May 6 hearing to explore the development and legal approval of Bush administration torture policies and other potential abuses of executive power.

Among those invited were former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, chief of staff to the vice-president David Addington, and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin. Professor John Yoo of the University of California, Berkeley, author of a March 2003 memorandum concluding that U.S. law does not bind the president when he orders interrogation of detainees, has also been invited to appear.

Recent news reports place White House decision makers and top administration officials, referred to as the “Principals,” at the center of the planning and approval of interrogation plans for U.S. detainees. These accounts describe a disturbing back-and-forth between Department of Justice legal advisors and these so-called “Principals” in which department legal advice was crafted as a supposed “golden shield” to immunize those conducting the harshest of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. [more]

Barack Obama’s triumph on Tuesday night was a victory over a wall that pretends to be a fly on the wall.

For a long time, the nation’s body politic has been shoved up against that wall--known as the news media.

Despite all its cracks and gaps, what cements the wall is mostly a series of repetition compulsion disorders. Whether the media perseveration is on Pastor Wright, the words "bitter" and "cling," or an absent flag lapel-pin, the wall’s surfaces are more rigid when they’re less relevant to common human needs and shared dreams.

"We’ve already seen it," Obama said during his victory speech in North Carolina, "the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along." [more]

PDA has been a consistent voice against war. We supported HR 4232, The End the War in Iraq Act, and HR 746, The Safe and Orderly Withdrawal Act. We have protested, lobbied, made phone calls and written letters. We've fought against the war since our birth in 2004, and we helped elect the Democratic Congress in 2006 to end the occupation of Iraq.

It still rages on. Do we continue the fight or do we give up?

In a game of political one-upmanship, the Democratic House will vote this Thursday to authorize more money to fund the violent occupation of Iraq.

Do we give up the fight, or do we dig in?

Democrats want to tarnish Republicans by forcing them to vote against veteran’s benefits and unemployment insurance extensions in an election year, a strategy developed by Democratic leadership. [more]

Published on May 6, 2008 at Politico.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is about to lead her party into a major showdown over Iraq funding by violating two Democratic campaign pledges in one fell swoop.

To the critics, whether anti-war activists or House Republicans, Pelosi has made her feelings clear: Get over it.

This week’s maneuvering over a $200 billion war spending bill has revealed Pelosi self-confidently playing what she believes--with increasing evidence--is a strong hand. [more]

Recent evidence backs notion that Soviets did the heavy lifting in WWII

Published on May 5, 2008, by the OC Register.

Sixty-three years ago this week, what was left of Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending Europe's agony in World War II, the largest and arguably most horrible war in human history. Since then, the victory over Adolf Hitler has rightfully been celebrated as the salvation of Western democracy.

In the West, that epic struggle from the beginning has been cast as good vs. evil, the enlightened Franklin Roosevelt and courageous Winston Churchill vs. the despicable Hitler. The victory is widely seen as belonging to Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, with a nod to Churchill's pluck. This view is shared by the vast majority of Americans and most Western historians of the Cold War period. [more]

Published May 4, 2008 by Marin Independent Journal.

In these stormy times for Democrats, some unpleasant gusts from national crosswinds are blowing through Marin. Most people in this largely progressive area remain eager to evict Republicans from the White House--while the extended battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is generating a cascade of worries.

This is Obama country. Marin's primary voters went for him over Clinton by 56 percent to 38 percent - his widest margin of any county in the state. At the same time, many solid Democrats who strongly support Clinton can be found throughout the county.

As an elected Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the 6th Congressional District, I've been unhappy about the deteriorating tenor of the campaign during April. In an editorial after the Pennsylvania primary, the New York Times wisely urged Clinton "to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election." [more]

Published on Sunday May 4, 2008, by The New York Times.

The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.

Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be - often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.

With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline. [more]

Published May 2, 2008 on Huffington Post.

Five years ago, President Bush dressed up in a flight suit for a self-congratulatory photo op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner that proclaimed "Mission Accomplished". Certainly, the war was not over then and victory was not achieved. The mission has been redefined several times and what the president hopes to accomplish in Iraq is unclear.

Five years after "Mission Accomplished", the costs to human life continue to build. Since then, nearly four thousand brave American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, and over 5 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons have been forced from their homes.

Five years after "Mission Accomplished", the strain on our economy is becoming unbearable. Congress has appropriated over $500 billion, and we are spending an average of $245 million a day in Iraq. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate economist, has estimated the total costs to our economy, including caring for our veterans and rebuilding our military, will top $3 trillion dollars. The cost of the Iraq war to the average American family this year will be $16,000. [more]

Published Apr 22, 2008 on Truthdig.

How proud the Clintonistas must be. They have learned how to rival what Hillary once termed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” in the effort to destroy a viable Democratic leader who dares to stand in the way of their ambitions. The tactics used to kneecap Barack Obama are the same as had been turned on Bill Clinton in earlier times, from radical-baiting associates to challenging his resolve in protecting the nation from foreign enemies. Sen. Clinton’s eminently sensible and centrist—to a fault—opponent is now viewed as weak and even vaguely unpatriotic because he is thoughtful. Neither Karl Rove nor Dick Morris could have done a better job.

On primary election day in Pennsylvania, even with polls showing her well ahead in that state, Hillary went lower in her grab for votes. Seizing upon a question as to how she would respond to a nuclear attack by Iran, which doesn’t have nuclear weapons, on Israel, which does, Hillary mocked reasoned discourse by promising to “totally obliterate them,” in an apparent reference to the population of Iran. That is not a word gaffe; it is an assertion of the right of our nation to commit genocide on an unprecedented scale.

Shouldn’t the potential leader of a nation that used nuclear bombs to obliterate hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese employ extreme caution before making such a threat? Neither the Japanese then nor the Iranian people now were in a position to hold their leaders accountable, and to approve such collective punishment of innocents is to endorse terrorism. [more]

Published on Friday, May 2, 2008 by The New York Times.

Third period at Paul Robeson High School in East Oakland was pretty much what you might expect on a sunny Thursday afternoon at the end of the term: distracted students, talk of graduation and nearly silent response to teachers’ questions.

Until, of course, the topic turned to the recent cuts in the state’s education budget.0502 06 1

“We don’t have any money because it’s all going to the war,” said Ashley Lawless, a 18-year-old senior who moments before had been obsessively fixing her hair. “And now they’re shutting all this stuff down.”

That kind of angry outburst may have been precisely the point of a daylong act of educational disobedience undertaken on Thursday by about two dozen teachers across Oakland, who set aside their normal lesson plans in favor of topics like the war in Iraq, racial inequality and a recent 10 percent cut in the state schools budget. [more]

Major National Anti-War Assembly to be Held in Cleveland in June

Plans were announced today for a major national anti-war assembly in Cleveland, Ohio, in June. The National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation is set for the weekend of June 28-29, 2008, in Cleveland and is open to all those opposed to the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq.

"May 1st marks five years since the 'mission accomplished' speech by President Bush on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier," said Greg Coleridge, spokesperson for the National Assembly organizing committee and director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee. "In the past five years, the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. More than 4 million Iraqis have been injured or displaced. More than $500 billion U.S. tax dollars have been wasted. The U.S.-led war and occupation has been a military, human, and economic disaster." [more]

Tim Carpenter will be interviewed by Tom D'Antoni and Art Levine Thursday, May 1 at 6:30 PM on BlogTalkRadio.com, a social radio network. Listen to the interview here.

The show D'Antoni & Levine launched last Thursday, April 24. Guests John Bonifaz, Legal Director of Voter Action and PDA Advisory Board member; Jonah Goldman, National Campaign for Fair Elections; and Celeste Taylor, head of Pennsylvania's People for the American Way discussed election integrity, voter suppression, and included a post mortem of the recent Pennsylvania election. Listen to it here.

Tom D'Antoni, a Portland Oregon resident, is a writer and TV Producer/Reporter. Tom has written for many national and local newspapers and magazines, has been a national and local TV story producer, and he's been a network radio talk show host. Tom offers an outside-the-beltway perspective. [more]

PDA, in a nation-wide media release, announced the endorsements today of Ed Fallon in Iowa's Third Congressional District, and Harry Taylor in North Carolina's Ninth CD, bringing the total number of national endorsements to fifteen. Endorsed candidates will benefit by being part of PDA's coordinated campaign strategy, which includes a door-to-door component. Each candidate received their endorsement after following the PDA endorsement policy, which begins with a local chapter endorsement.

Here's the list of PDA endorsed candidates: [more]

Decision Will Harm Eligible Voters, But Leaves Door Open To Future New Legal Challenges

April 28--In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today rejected a challenge to Indiana's most-restrictive-in-the-nation voter identification law. The American Civil Liberties Union's case, Crawford v. Marion County Election Board --consolidated with Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita--is an appeal of two lower court decisions that upheld the state's law requiring voters to present government-issued photo IDs in order to vote. The ACLU argued that the Indiana law creates an unconstitutional burden on voting rights.

"Today's decision minimizes the very real burden that Indiana's voter ID law places on tens of thousands of eligible voters who lack a government-issued identification while accepting at face value Indiana's unsubstantiated claim of voter fraud," said Ken Falk, Legal Director of the ACLU of Indiana and lead counsel on the case. [more]

Last Friday morning I called Congressman Murtha's office to communicate my outrage that Murtha, Pelosi, Hoyer and the rest of the House leadership planned to push through another $170-billion dollar Iraq War supplemental, some $70 billion more than Bush requested--all with no timelines or benchmarks or any semblance of accountability or restraint.

Murtha's aide told me the Congressman, Chair of the Defense Subcommittee, hopes to get the supplemental approved by Memorial Day--but, darn, they're getting a ton of calls from angry people and why don't those people hound the Republicans. My response? The last time I checked it was the Democrats who were in the majority in the House and it was the Democrats who controlled whether or not a supplemental went to the floor for a vote. [more]

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