I would like to take this opportunity to thank Congressman Mike Thompson D- CA and Denny Rehberg R, MT for introducing this new bill to help the veterans used in chemical weapons and other toxic exposures from 1963 thru 1973 in Operation SHAD/112.

This was one of the most classified programs the government was involved in, they did not even admit that it took place until the late 1990s, unlike the chemical weapons experiments and drug tests conducted at Edgewood Arsenal from 1955 thru 1975 and the biological weapons experiments conducted at Fort Detrick known as Operation Whitecoat from 1955 thru 1973.

Now is the time for Hilary Clinton to take a bold position that in one brilliant, courageous stroke shows the nation that she is more willing to pursue true reforms of the two-party plutocratic political system than Obama is.

I wrote this last year right after Al Gore appeared on Capitol Hill to give testimony about the effects of climate change and how the climate crisis is now and will effect this planet. Today is one year since that testomony wherein he explained that the Arctic ice cap should it all go will not come back in any timeframe relevant to the human species. However, I still don't see the urgency that needs to be seen by enough of US to begin doing what we must to mitigate this.

Just the other day, Mr. Gore not only launched The Climate Project-India to continue the worldwide grassroots education many need to inspire action, he also stated in a videoconference that business was leading politicians on this. That is because he is in the private sector spurring on the change that needs to come from the right sectors in order for political will to have that tipping point. Yet, where is the support for all of the work he is now doing on this? How far have we come in one year's time to really stand up for this planet? It is sad to see that my skepticism regarding Congress was true.

I have reported many times about how the Republican Parties in Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky were about the most corrupt political establishments in America. One that I have been missing is the Alaska Republican Party. I think it is time I turn northward to discuss what is going on in Alaska.

At the epicenter of Alaska corruption seems to be the Alaska oil services company Veco Corp. Veco, until its recent buyout, was an oil pipeline service and construction company. Perhaps Veco would like to be best known for the fact that it carried out a great deal of the clean up efforts after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But this is not the only thing they were known for. They were known for illegal influence on Republican politicians.

"When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil."~~- Thomas Jefferson

Each new year ushers in a myriad of "Top Ten" lists -- 10 best things, 10 worst things, things we need to do, things we did but shouldn't have -- and this year, even a hilarious list of WTF? things popped up.  I'll admit I'm not as well organized as those who progress in 10-step increments.  My problem is narrowing the atrocities down to 10 -- and then narrowing those 10 down to a single year.  I'm confident I could compile a really neat list if I could decide which in the tangle of loathsome assaults should be Number One.

With an endless, futile and costly Iraq war, a stinking economy and most Americans seeing the country on the wrong track, the greatest national group delusion is that electing Democrats in 2008 is what the country needs.

As self-professed champion of the Constitution presidential candidate Ron Paul has missed a monumental opportunity to educate Americans about the criminal behavior of Congress in violating their oath of office.  Even more important, he has not taken advantage of his 15 minutes of fame to promote the nation's first-time use of what the Founders gave us in the Constitution in case the public lost confidence in the federal government - the Article V convention option.

Here is Dennis Shulman's story about living as a blind man in a sighted world.

It's a moving and honest account of his struggle to not only live with but transcend his disability.

And it's about how and why his disability is leading him to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009.

As Dennis notes in his story, the list of individuals with disabilities in the U.S. Congress--both past and present--is tragically short. It's time we begin to lengthen this list and help individuals who--merely because of their disabilities--have historically been denied access to America's most hallowed chambers.

Of course, Dennis is also much more than a man with a disability. To learn more about him, check out Shulman for Congress.

Before I answer this question, I would like to first thank all the commentators for their interest in my disability and their questions about the obstacles I have faced.

I lost my vision gradually throughout my childhood so that, while I could still read large print when I was ten or eleven, I could not when I was thirteen. Using a cane became necessary in my junior year of high school.

By the time I went to college (Brandeis) and grad school (Harvard) I was totally blind.
I started at Brandeis in 1968. These were the pre-personal computer dark ages. For all people, the personal computer has radically changed their lives; for blind folks, this change is downright revolutionary.

Author Note. The following essay was co-authored with Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis division counsel.

Among the most important public health advances of the past century has been the development of potent vaccines against dangerous and life-threatening illnesses. Polio, tuberculosis, and measles quickly come to mind. Through a process of inoculation, a small dose of the pathogen is intentionally administered to the patient which induces immunity against the full-blown disease.

In a similar way, social scientists have demonstrated that attitude inoculation can be used to prevent the transmission of hazardous beliefs and behaviors from one person to another. For example, research reveals that adolescents can more effectively resist pressure from cigarette-smoking peers if they are given role-playing opportunities in which they rehearse their responses to students pressuring them to smoke.

But today we are in urgent need of an inoculation campaign against an entirely different threat to our nation's health--namely, the Bush administration's exploitation of its "global war on terror" to eviscerate the rule of law and our constitutional checks and balances; to prolong the disastrous occupation of Iraq; and to lay the groundwork for military strikes against Iran. Ever since the tragic events of 9/11 six years ago, the White House has promoted this agenda by working non-stop to spread a simple yet infectious idea: All actions taken by this president and his representatives are necessary to protect the United States from future catastrophic terrorist attacks.

The Progressive Democrat Newsletter grew out of the frustration of the 2004 election. Having organized protests against the Republican Convention, I found I had a core of activists who were looking to me for support after Bush "won" re-"election". My carefully thought out suggestions as to where we could go from that defeat led to this more-or-less weekly newsletter.

This week I discuss a very personal conflict with Homeland Security. Yes...my wife is at the center of a battle for our Civil Liberties and my diary about that on Culture Kitchen went platinum with WELL over 12,000 reads in one week. I also cover recent Republican attacks on our troops, Rudy Giuliani's campaigns disguting exploitation of 9/11, and I put out a personal appeal to you to help us here in NYC take one more Congressional seat: NY-13.

The progress being made in our 4 1/2 year war of terror on Iraq is phenomenal. So impressive are our recent gains that the "top tier" Democratic candidates who have lined up in competition to become the heirs of this great struggle for freedom, for Middle Eastern democracy, for oil and gas rights for western corporations and of course for lucrative contracts in arms sales and private security for campaign contributors, last night went way out on a limb and declared their goal of removing our troops from the quagmire in Mesopotamia by the end of their first term in office in 2013.

Despite their boldness, they did not report whether or not they could guarantee the colonization of Mars, a cure for cancer, or flying pigs within that time frame.

I've heard it said that the ideal political candidate is the individual who neither wants nor needs to hold public office. Instead, the ideal candidate is the individual who serves simply because he or she feels a civic and moral responsibility to do so.

This individual is Dennis Shulman,
a Democrat running for New Jersey's fifth congressional district seat in the United States House of Representatives.

So, who exactly is this ideal candidate? As a longtime student in Dennis's classes and congregant at his services, I believe I'm in a unique position to answer this question.

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal as well as the Independent Bloggers Alliance, The Peace Tree, the Out of Iraq Blogger's Caucus and Wordlwide Sawdust.

Political schemes are afoot as congress anticipates the report to be delivered by David Petraeus this Monday. Our pitiful and pathetic democracy has been reduced to outsourcing its national security policy to a general with a history of erroneous assessments about progress in Iraq. This is what Petraues wrote in his opening paragraph for an op-ed in the Washington Post on September 26, 2004:

"Helping organize, train and equip nearly a quarter-million of Iraq's security forces is a daunting task. Doing so in the middle of a tough insurgency increases the challenge enormously, making the mission akin to repairing an aircraft while in flight -- and while being shot at. Now, however, 18 months after entering Iraq, I see tangible progress. Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up."

The Founders of our nation and the Framers of our Constitution surely did not foresee the day when, of the federal government's three branches, the public would have the least confidence in Congress.  In fact, the public has a little less confidence in Congress than it has in HMOs.  At 14 percent, the fraction of Americans with a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress is the lowest in Gallup's history of this measure -- and the lowest of any of the 16 institutions tested in this year's Confidence in Institutions survey.  The Supreme Court received 34 percent confidence and the awful presidency of George W. Bush received 25 percent - nothing to be proud of.