Browse small town newspapers exactly as they were printed in a database searchable newspaper archive. High resolution grayscale scans of exceptional quality from 1800s to 2005 are presented in image form with full text search.

Small Town Newspapers is a fantastic resource and dovetails nicely with Shirah's post today on Op-Eds.

As Auntie Em always sez "All politics are local."

Bloggers, you may be a letter to the editor writer, but have you ever through about writing op-eds? Writing an op-ed is similar to writing an lte (just longer and not in response to an article or lte) and similar to writing a post or diary on a blog (just more disciplined in terms of length and no links). Local newspapers often like to carry op-eds by local writers, so don’t assume op-ed writing is only for established pundits.

Writing op-eds is a valuable way to share your knowledge and research with the public and to be heard on issues of international, national, and regional concern. They can be fun to write. You may get close to instant feedback through letters to the editor or letters from the public directly to you.

So here are some suggestions, honed through the years, for writing op-eds.

Last year, while millions were wrongfully being paid to private defense contractors, the Bush administration was gagging the public employees who knew most about this abuse. While critical federal security jobs were fraudulently being given to private contractors at inflated prices, public employees and their unions were barred from challenging the waste of public funds. Public employee and public union expertise is critical weapons in the fight against corruption, waste, and inefficiency. Yet the Bush administration and Republicans legislators are preventing them from being heard about misuse of public funds or breaches of public trust when government contracts out work to the private sector.

At the White House Press Gaggle this afternoon, Scott McClellan had his skinny white ass gift wrapped and handed to him during questioning about Senator Frist's apparent flip-flop on stem cell research.

Read the transcript below the fold followed by a summary of the usual bizarro questions coming from the White House press corps.

Just when you think it's two steps forward for the American media, they take three steps back. Sigh.

The public has a lot of information available on just how bad privatization is for the public. Think Halliburton's obscene Iraq profits and failure to perform. Think Diebold and the selling off of our rights to an election we can all acknowledge as free and fair.

These are not aberrations. They are business as usual. But for some reason, outright fraud, misfeasance, and worse is totally off the radar screen.

Step up. Tell us what what's going on in your neck of the woods.

Open Source Radio will be hosting a discussion for bloggers affiliated with the Progressive Bloggers Union—of which Unbossed is a proud member—on the White House's refusal to release additional photographs documenting abuse of detainees at Abu Gharib.

The program airs tonight from 7-8pm EDT.

You can stream the broadcast at WGBH Boston, call toll-free at 1 877 673 6767 and/or participate in the discussion at Open Source Radio's blog.

There's a new zine on-line, and it's been carrying thoughtful pieces on labor this past week: MRzine. It was launced July 14 - Bastille Day.

Among what's up this past week are posts by a wide range of important labor theorists, activists, and academics. UAW leader and activist Jerry Tucker has been filing his Reports on the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention.

From the WaPo:

Mars Inc. said yesterday it is holding "serious discussions with large pharmaceutical companies" about the development of a line of cocoa-based prescription drugs that could help treat diabetes, some forms of dementia and other ailments.

The McLean candy and food conglomerate for more than a decade has pursued research on the possible health benefits of cocoa flavanols, compounds contained in one of the basic ingredients of chocolate.

As about 20 Mars-funded researchers gathered in Lucerne, Switzerland, to discuss their latest findings, the company announced that it foresees a possible line of pharmaceuticals growing out of the work and that it was being pursued by drug companies interested in the medical applications of cocoa.

Chocolate as a treatment for diabetes? Are you kidding me? Is that a little like advocating folks eat buckets of extra crispy KFC to combat heart disease?

Today is the 15th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It didn’t get enacted all by itself. Unions, union members, union members’ money, and their involvement in politics are an important part of this story.

We all owe a lot to union power and union member involvement as citizens of our democracy. And that's not even counting what they do in terms of dollars in workers' pockets.

When we hear the terms "Federalist" v. "Anti-Federalist" today, we are not talking about the same sorts of folks as were involved in the founding of the US.

Today those terms refer to the far right group, The Federalist Society. Bush is bent on nominating judges who are members. He has refused to allow the ABA to rate judges, something that has long been done - and done by a nonpartisan and experienced group. In fact, the Federalist Society has an ABA Watch section - keeping an eye on the ABA as if it were some far left group.

Apparently Roberts now denies any connections with the Federalists - but they still love him.

But there is so much more to this group, so let me show you around a bit.

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Launched in May 2004, Media Matters for America put in place, for the first time, the means to systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation — news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda — every day, in real time.

Considering the complicity of many in the media to serve as wholesale propaganda distribution channels for The White House, Media Matters is an indispensible resource for all progressive-thinking Americans.

Rep. Diana DeGette CO-1 released a statement yesterday opposing the re-authorization of the USA PATRIOT Act that I think bears posting here in its entirety.

I write about workplace issues from a liberal point of view, and I am always happy to hear from employers, and especially business owners. We tend to link business owners with the Republican Party. So when I get comments from them, I want to pick their brains.

I’m including a sample of comments I’ve received to various posts to give you an idea of what I’ve heard on posts analyzing conservative positions on taxes, business friendly climates, and health care during the past couple months.

What do you business owners / employers think about these comments?

And for all of us, any surprises? Are these issues we should be taking on / facing up to?

A few months ago, I wrote Blogging at Work? What you need to know, posted at unbossed and at Daily Kos.

From the comments I got (especially those attached to the Kos diary), it was clear that most bloggers - make that most people - think they have both more and fewer legal rights than they do. Studies by Professor Pauline Kim found that 90% of workers in the study thought they had more legal protections against unjust firing than they actually did. That about fits with reactions to the Blogging at Work comments.

Believing you have more rights than you do can get you in trouble and even fired. But not knowing you have rights is just as bad.

So let me ask you folks here:

Has your employer ever told you do not talk about your pay or any other term of employment? If you employer did this, did you think: “OK.” or “Hell, no. That’s illegal.”

O my merry band. What a week it's been for George Bushieboy and his droogs, hanging at the WhiteHouse Milkbar playing all keen and vicious with the ultra-politics.

Things are changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read and all, everybody distracted by Roverdover in the spotlight.

O Karl's a real horrorshow filthy fighter and very handy with the press. But with everybody creeching 'bout the leaking, Georgie and the lads are really getting on with the job.

What's it going to be then, eh?

We all have irrational parts to the way we see the world. Often we aren't even aware of these illogical parts of our psyches hidden deep within. But, I have to say, the area of federal and state government finance is constructed out of ideas that wouldn't wash at Hogwarts.

Funny, considering how their allies, the Christian conservatives are very iffy about Harry Potter.

Yet, with highways and taxes, education, and in so many other areas, they seem to assume that saying it's so makes it so.

I've been writing on highways recently, but let me take up education in the blue state of Michigan.

Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing today at 2:30pm EDT.
Contact your senators. Info on the flip:

What does the new National Counterterrorism Center have in common with:

• $8.8 billion dollars in unaccounted for Iraq reconstruction funds?
• allegations that the former Coalition Provisional Authority was involved in election fraud?
• chaos in the training of Iraq's security force?

Meet Vice Admiral John Scott Redd. He's having a Senate confirmation hearing tomorrow and you're invited.

UPDATE: In 2006, the Colorado legislature passed HB 1003, which took away from toll road (but not railroad or utility) corporations their power to condemn property. That bill also outlawed "non-compete" agreements (in which traffic on public roads is deliberately impeded in order to drum up business for toll roads), first exposed here in Unbossed.

A previous article about privatization and toll roads stated:

"To build a highway means acquiring a large amount of contiguous property in a specific location. Governments can do this through the power of condemnation, but private purchasers have only the power of offering enough money to persuade property owners to sell."

Not in Colorado!

In Colorado, some corporations have the power to condemn your property.

Part I may be found here.

Part I looked at the push for privatization of roads and the problems encountered with privatized roadways. The pro-private roads lobby has said that they cannot make a profit on roads unless they are given noncompete agreements. This Part examines the use of noncompete agreements in both public and private toll roads.

The poster child for noncompete agreements is California SR 91. The private contractor and the state agreed that public highways near SR 91 would not be maintained or improved until the year 2030. In other words, the state was to allow the state highway to crumble for decades, forcing the public onto the private toll road. But California found it could not leave the roads to deteriorate and endanger drivers’ lives. When the state fixed the nearby roads, the private owner sued for breach of contract, and the public learned the true cost of the private road. The public was furious and turned against the project and the government that had agreed to it.

More Than One in Four Non-elderly Women Delay or Forgo Medical Care Due to Costs

Large Percentages of Women Say Their Doctors Haven’t Talked About Diet, Exercise, Smoking, STDs, or HIV

These are but a few of the findings of a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Women and Health Care: A National Profile.

It should be no surprise that Kaiser finds that a substantial percentage of women cannot afford to go to the doctor or get prescriptions filled. Those who are in good health are fortunate. Those with health problems do not get adequate levels of preventive care. For those who are sick, poor, or uninsured, the challenges are enormous.

Below are a few of the findings:

High up on the Right Wing Think Tank agenda are toll roads, privatized toll roads if possible. But the truly interesting action in support of privatized roads is with publically owned toll roads. (See Part II) There, state and local governments, under the lash of tax cuts, are testing methods for making toll roads profitable.

First, on the privatization scene.

With great fanfare and fresh undies, I am announcing—exclusively to Unbossed readers, you lucky ducks!—my official Stop Peeing Your Pants Over Karl Rove™ campaign.

As the liberal blogosphere—of which I humbly consider myself a member—continues to work its collective panties into collective bunches over Karl Rove with an obsessive-compulsivity matched only by the 2003-04 Dean-Clark primary war, one can only imagine the fiscal, legislative, and policy mayhem being pursued by an unscrutinized White House, Senate and House, lo these last few weeks.

And now for something completely different:

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Michigan may be the state with the most bitter and destructive partisan politics around. The state legislature is controlled by far rightwing representatives. Governor Jennifer Granholm is a moderate Democrat who has tried to work with the legislature, but the legislature is on a take no prisoners rampage.

They are rabidly anti-tax = starve the beast republicans Most recently they have decided to sell off the state's tobacco settlement for pennies on the dollar rather than collect the amount of taxes needed to run the state. They have slashed state budgets so low that they have cut past the bone in state education. Teachers are leaving the state in droves.

All that was just prologue. The Republicans think the can defeat Granholm. Any strategy will do - even outright lies. Who would catch them? Even if they were caught, the public would yawn at all this as he said-she said - damn them all tactics that turns people off.

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 was launched as the first US lunar landing mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The next day, after a 76 hour flight traveling 240,000 miles, the lunar module Eagle manned by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon.

Millions around the world were bouyed by Armstrong's speech: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

That flight and subsequent ones heralded an era of innovation in the scientific community and sense of pride in the American public which was still deeply entrenched in the Cold War and emerging social struggles embodied by civil rights demonstrations, Vietnam War protests, and counter-culture youth movement.

Today, 36 years later, NASA is rocked with a space exploration program in question—technically, ethically, and fiscally. With the latest glitch in the Discover mission, is it time to end manned space travel?

Private good - Public bad. Private good - Public bad. Private good - Public bad.

That is the Bush Administration mantrum.

The Bush administration doesn’t care if you can’t do the job, if it involved national defense, if the public employees can do the job.

You did not see this story in your headlines, unless you read the Federal Times or the subscription-only Bureau of National Affairs Government Employee Relations Reporter. On July 12, 2005, it reported a story titled: DLA Employees Barred From Competing In Study, Despite Contractor's Performance

Daily Kos diary by environmentalist and posted with permission.

We take our daughter to the Taos Clinic for Children and Youth.  There, she sees a doctor named Silvia Villareal. Dr. V is from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. She's about 5ft tall, a comedian. Dr. V works in a mix of both alopathic and homeopathic medicine and is the best doctor I have ever seen.  

Dr. V and her partner, Dr. Loretta Ortiz y Pino, run the Taos Clinic to serve 15,000 children from the poverty-stricken counties of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Being a writer and professional environmentalist puts my family in a very low income bracket.  My wife and I cannot afford health insurance. Our daughter is on Medicaid. Drs. V and O accept all Medicaid patients that come their way. They turn no one down.

Drs. V and Ortiz could be making an ass-load of money elsewhere, instead, they've dedicated themselves to our community. But, in George Bush's America, people like Drs. V and O are best put out of business and the Medicaid children sent home. It looks like they will have to close their doors August 31, 2005.

I caught this report from the CBC today:

A suspected terrorist was forced to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog during his interrogation at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military investigators said Wednesday.

...The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, said FBI agents had raised their concerns to [Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey] Miller about the treatment of Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

...Schmidt said that to get al-Qahtani to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, forced him to dance with a male interrogator, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it.

He was also strip searched, threatened with dogs, forced to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

But Schmidt said no torture occurred and that Al-Qahtani was provided food, water and medical care.

W. Caleb McDaniel, a graduate student in the department of history at The Johns Hopkins University, is not only a blogger at Mode for Caleb and Cliopatria, a group blog for historians, he argues that blogging has a long and distinguished American pedigree. He says that blogs today have much in common with 18th and 19th century reading and journal-keeping practices. So here is a bit of what McDaniel says in: Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading

For political junkies, like myself, some days just seem surreal.

What with the Corporate-owned Media™ hyperventilating like a couple of horny teenagers in the backseat of Dad's Buick over Karl Rove, hurricanes, and the London terror suspects, what's a vapid blonde teleprompter reader to do to relieve a little stress?

So what do you do to blow off a little steam after a tough day?

It's the archetypal island photograph with deep shimmering azure seas, impossibly white sugar sand, and gently swaying coconut palms.

All I need is a hammock, a fruity drink with minature umbrella, and a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eh?

A new study, Effects of the Federal Estate Tax on Farms and Small Businesses by the Congressional Budget Office, shows that the Estate Tax does not hurt family farms and businesses.

The Senate will soon vote on repealing the Estate Tax. This study has important information for those of us in states like Colorado, whose Senators may soon vote in favor of repeal.

ALl of us rely on government records and data. For most of us, most of the time, this information is invisible but a powerful force nonetheless. I often rely on government information in what I write - both in blogging and in my nonvirtual life.

So while storing and maintaining government information may seem on the wonkish, niche side, it is worthwhile knowing that a big project is afoot that means life or death for this data.

Take a look around the Internets™ and you'll discover some amazing sources of information on a variety of political and policy subjects. Though the current flavor-of-the-month term 'reality-based politics" leaves me a bit cold—er, whose reality would that be, again?—I am definitely a proponent of knowledge seeking and perspective broadening in political discourse and policymaking.

Every Sunday beginning today, I will feature on the sidebar a new (or at least, new to me) website that seeks to expand a Progressive body of thought. You and I may agree with the content and context of the sites. And we may not.

As a blog, my aim is to make Unbossed synonymous with free-thinking dialogue—not a site that fosters name-calling, litmus tests, tinfoil theories, and divise tactics that pit us against one another when the REAL enemy is the PNAC—the cabal of oligarchic imperialists devoted to global military expansionism and dismantling of traditional social policy programs that enable an economically healthy and vigorous middle class.

We'll test historic liberal ideals against pragmatic modern political action. And hopefully, we can capture here the same sense of awe that a ten-year-old girl holed up in her bedroom in Cleveland, Ohio felt when she opened Colliers Encyclopedia Book "A" for the first time and a magical, confusing, comforting, and inspiring world opened up before her.

Check out the Unbossed Website of the Week on the flip.

As I travel around my Congressional District to organize predominantly rural communities for the coming mid-term elections I have been especially struck by the reasons folks became politically active.

Some got involved for the first time in their lives out of concerns about the war and kitchen table economic issues. Or were simply motivated by the effectiveness of web-fueled movements, like DFA, MoveOn, and others. And some renewed their long-held interests in politics and public service last year in order to advance changes in a very broken system.

Others are political stalwarts nurtured during the socio-cultural movements of the '50s, '60s and '70s. They've remained active, especially in rural Democractic Party politics, out of pride, necessity, and the sense of family built from being a minority party for many decades.

Lastly, I've begun to notice a group—far more endemic on websites than in real life, thankfully—that seems to wear their political cynicism and poisonously divisive punditry on their sleeves like a badge of honor.

This weekend, MoveOn is hosting Progressive Movie Night to gather folks together to develop local plans to counter the radical rightwing push for ultra-conservative Supreme Court appointments.

The film for the party I'm planning to attend is none other than:

After the G8 meeting, the tragedy in London, and apparent terrorist threat in Birmingham, England, why do I feel like I'm going to a documentary and not a satirical dramatization of Cold War megalomania?

The Republicans in many state legislatures are convinced that we should run a state on the cheap. It reminds me of Maria, a woman I met at a party a few years back where everyone had a boat. Her father ran his boat on the cheap. He'd use olde bent nails instead of hooks. Maria hated going out sailing, until she went out with R and J. Maria said that as they were on the water, she asked them what was this thing they were doing - it couldn't be sailing, because it didn't hurt.

Cheap is cheap. And we see the effects of years of cheapness throughout our beautiful states. The crumbling infrastructure that is all around us is about to all on our heads, and yet we keep cutting.

Last year the Department of Labor finally pushed through major changes in the way overtime is applied. This was a very controversial rule. DOL received 75,000 public comments on the changes.

DOL claimed that, despite the radical changes, only 644,000 employees would lose their right to overtime pay.

Critics of the overtime changes, such as the Economic Policy Institute could not replicate those results. EPI’s analysis found that if the “proposal became law, more than 8 million workers would lose overtime protection.”

We owe the answer to Rep. George Miller (D-CA-7). Miller asked the General Accountability Office to investigate some of the research DOL relied upon.

Privileges - especially journalistic privileges are much in the news these days. It is an important issue but also one that is widely misunderstood. So as a pubic service, here is a brief outline of

This morning I wrote my penpal in London - we first met four years ago but first met when we were 10 and started writing one another. I recall how it felt on September 11, 2001 when I woke up in California just after 6 am to hear that planes were crashing into buildings. It felt so far away and so close. I spent the day being supportive of my students, many of whom were Arabs and Muslims. At night I crashed.

I recall scrolling through a website of photos from around of the world of people lighting candles and sending love and caring. I wept the whole time. I tried to find that website again, but the best I could find was a broken link from here way, way down at the bottm. All the other websites about 9-11 are about American jingoism and about God's plan for America. So much has changed.

I wrote my penpal to send love and caring, because I remember how much that meant to me. She wrote back that they are well, but her daughter, now a new doctor is being battered with the horror of treating so many injured. Her hospital is in the middle of it all.

I wish we lived in a world that could send them the love and caring I craved and needed on 9-11.

I wish we lived in a world that cared more for the suffering of the people in Iraq - people who are being killed every day as they go about the process of just trying to live.

So this is an invitation to place words of peace, consolation, love and caring to those who live in grief in a torn world.

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but there's something fishy about the recent announcement proposing debt relief for Africa's poorest nations. When the G8 leaders announced the plan, it was greeted with almost universal delight, as well it should.

Crippling debt is an enormous problem for impoverished nations and wiping that debt out is something to be encouraged, lauded, and celebrated. In fact, I'd love to hold hands with Bob Geldof, Bono, and the G8 leaders and sing Kumbaya -- okay, maybe not all the G8 leaders, but you know what I mean. I like happy news.

But there's a problem with the G8 announcement. There are nefarious strings attached -- conditions set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, whose president is neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq invasion.

These conditions have the potential to make the relief worse than the debt itself.

The G8 summit officially starts today, and the countries' leaders have already heard from Live 8 musicians and many others about the importance of fighting poverty in Africa. With the leaders having already agreed in principle to dramatic debt-relief efforts, it's likely that summit participants will be able to claim some success on the poverty front.

When it comes to global warming, though, the outlook's not so rosy. Bush doesn't think the world's largest producer greenhouse gases should agree to cut its emissions, and it's impossible to solve the climate problem without US involvment.

Maybe the issue of global warming needs a Live 8 concert of its own.

Congress enacted the Wagner Act, otherwise known as the National Labor Relations Act, in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression. The NLRA legalized collective bargaining for United States private sector workers. It was not the first US labor law. Nine years, Congress gave the right to bargain collectively to railroad workers in the Railway Labor Act (which now covers airline workers).

The US was not even the first country to legalize collective bargaining. New Zealand has that honor nearly a half century earlier when it passed the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894.

I argue that what makes the NLRA important and special is not just that it legalized collective bargaining but that it gives us a roadmap to create a better society. I argue that the NLRA’s policies map to values of industrial and social democracy, solidarity, social and economic justice, fair wages and working conditions, equality, and industrial and social peace. Even more important, the NLRA's policies embody values that were intended to, and still can, transform our workplaces and our society.

^{Andy Warhol's depiction of Ingrid Bergman as Sister Benedict, in The Bells of Saint Mary}

Come, brothers and sisters. Confess your sins begat from the long Independence Day weekend, heretofore to be known as National Blow Shit Up Day.

You shall be absolved. One and all.

The G8 leaders meet this week in Scotland and, if you're like most people, you know the meeting is important, but the details probably leave you feeling less than inspired. I promise that if you watch The Girl in the Cafe, you'll never feel the same way about a G8 Summit again.

Michigan Peaceworks is a great example of what a local community can do. The billboards that have been posted on the freeways were actually conceived of by soliciting ideas from the public. You can see an example here

Today, on the 4th of July it is running a powerful signature ad throughout the State of Michigan. For the graphic version, including signatures, look here.

For the text, see below. You can "sign on" by passing the links and message around.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness

In politics, we are often caught in a tug of war between theory and experience, between what experts or pundits say and our own experiences. It's often hard to know which is correct. Sometimes common experience is just plain wrong. Take the thousands of years in which everyone knew that the earth was the center of the universe. In some variations it rode on the back of a turtle. And for some the earth is still the center of the universe.

But while experience is not always correct, it is not always wrong either. Sometimes it is theory that leads us astray.

What I am urging is: Use what you know. It matters.

Yesterday, in the sweltering heat of downtown DC, scores of local residents gathered to rally for equal rights. We didn’t know yet that Sandra Day O’Connor had thrown already-established rights into jeopardy by announcing her retirement; we were there to demand that our own disenfranchised group be granted a right that all other US citizens enjoy. We gathered in Freedom Plaza on that particular day because the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was holding its annual meeting, and we wanted world leaders to pressure the US government on our behalf.

Colorado State of Mind is a Denver/Rocky Mountain PBS locally-produced current affairs talk show. This week's topic: Has the so-called Downing Street Memo been downplayed or ignored by the American media?

The responses from the media panel were fascinating exercises in ass-covering and cognitive dissonance.

Came across a nice summary of prospective SCOTUS nominees posted at Slate this morning. Tip o' the hat to my buddy over at Seven Cent Nickel.

In the meantime, there has always been a misguided but prevailing school of thought that the SCOTUS is above dabbling in politics (aside from the internal machinations of the Court). Justice O'Connor's announcement of her intention to resign upon confirmation of a successor has set political junkies and SCOTUS watchers into a tailspin.

What I find most fascinating about this story is not so much the speculation on potential nominees but the inside baseball of O'Connor's decision pre-empting the expected resignation of a gravely ill Chief Justice. Forget for a moment, the evident appointment of two Supreme Court Justices by the Worst.President.Ever.™ and his NeoCon puppetmasters which will have generational effects on civil liberties and will remain the final arbiters of Congress' increasingly corporatist legislation. PUHCA, anyone?

As if we didn't already know of the corrupt, megalomaniacal, and oligarchic aspects of the Executive and Legislative branches. Now coupled with Frist's Filibuster Nuclear Option last Spring, Justice O'Connor has further pulled back the curtain to reveal the SCOTUS wizard desperately trying to keep up appearances of an apolitical, stoic jurisprudence when none such ever existed.