Ben Slade

Professor Jamin Raskin (constitutional law expert at American University's Washington College of Law and Maryland state senator) on the supreme court's recent ruling to allow unlimited corporate spending on elections (from freespeechforpeople.org ):

"American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy's enemies, whether they are slavemasters, states imposing poll taxes on voters, or the opponents of woman suffrage. Today, the Court has enthroned corporations, permitting them not only all kinds of special economic rights but now, amazingly, moving to grant them the same political rights as the people. This is a moment of high danger for democracy so we must act quickly to spell out in the Constitution what the people have always understood: that corporations do not enjoy the political and free speech rights that belong to the people of the United States."

A great article on the unfortunate scenarios that are likely for Iraq from TomDispatch.com :

To understand what Iraq will look like, recall the civil war in Lebanon from 1975-1990, a brutal struggle that left perhaps 200,000 people dead in a far smaller country. That war dragged on for fifteen years, during which Lebanon's many-sided political culture constantly realigned itself like a reshaken kaleidoscope.

From an article by Eric Alterman for The Nation:

Here is the liberals' problem in a nutshell: More than 30 percent of Americans happily answer to the appellation "conservative," while 18 percent call themselves "liberal." And yet when questioned by pollsters, a super-majority of more than 60 percent take positions liberal in everything but name. Indeed, on many if not most issues, Americans hold views well to the left of those espoused by almost any national Democratic politician.

A list of the most prominent government officials who have been kicked out because of ideological reasons can be found in an article on TomDispatch.com. From the article:

"..the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming. Often, this has been due to revulsion at the President's policies -- from the invasion of Iraq and negotiations with North Korea to the flattening of FEMA and the slashing of environmental standards -- which these women and men found to be beyond the pale.

By Peter Wallsten for the LA Times, April 25, 2005
(free registration required)

An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation's most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work

By Marjorie Cohn for TruthOut.org, Feb 15, 2005

Although the main part of this article concerns the conviction of civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart, the article includes the following disturbing paragraph:

...The same day Bush signed the USA Patriot Act into law, General Ashcroft announced an interim amendment to the Bureau of Prisons regulation, which took effect five days later, without the usual public comment period. It permits the Department of Justice (DOJ) unlimited and unreviewable discretion to eavesdrop on confidential attorney-client conversations of persons in custody, with no judicial oversight and no meaningful standards.

From an editorial in The NYTimes, Feb 2 2005 (free registration required)

One of the strengths of our democracy is that citizens are free to question the results of an election. But four lawyers who did just that in Ohio, contesting President Bush's victory, are now facing sanctions. These lawyers, and other skeptics, may not have cast significant doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome. But punishing them for trying would send a disturbing message.