Category Archives: National News/Commentary
Bursey files for relief from free speech conviction
Today, attorneys for SC Progressive Network Director Brett Bursey filed a writ of coram nobis, usually translated as “the error before us,” in Federal District Court in Columbia, SC. A coram nobis petition applies to persons who have already been convicted and have served their sentence. Such motions cannot be used to address issues of law previously ruled upon by the court but only to address errors of fact that were not known at time of trial or were knowingly withheld during and after trial from judges and defendants by prosecutors, and which might have altered the verdict were they presented at the trial.
The writ argues that the government withheld evidence of White House involvement in segregating peaceful protestors from from supporters of President Bush at presidential rallies. Bursey was arrested at a Bush rally in Columbia in October 2002 for refusing to be segregated from the general public.
“I said at the time of my arrest that the Secret Service was being used as an armed political advance team by the president,” Bursey said. He filed discovery motions and subpoenas during his trial for any White House directives to the Secret Service, but the government successfully moved to deny his efforts, calling them a “fishing expedintion.”
A recently discovered Presidential Advance Manual instructs the Secret Service to do what Bursey alleged they did to him. “There are several ways the advance person can prepare a site to minimize demonstrators. First, as always, work with the Secret Service and have them ask the local police department to designate a protest area where demonstrators can be placed, preferable not in view of the event site or the motorcade route.” (pg. 32, Presidential Advance Manual, see below).
Slave labor not a thing of the past
Before you open the link and read the story, see if you can guess in which country migrant workers where chained, beaten, and forced into debt.
Clayton Seufert, Charleston
Bhutto holds Musharraf “responsible for her death”
Women’s studies: still relevant?
By Kendall Anderson
Minnesota Women’s Press
Founded in the late ’60s, the academic discipline of women’s studies has now expanded to include gender and sexuality studies as well as racism, environmental equity and peace studies. With all these changes … is women’s studies still relevant?
Boy have we come a long way baby (and girl do we have a long way to go).
That’s what many scholars and graduates think about women’s studies, the multidisciplinary field that sprang from the women’s movement of the 1960s. Founded and nurtured amid social activism and rampant gender discrimination in the late 1960s, women’s studies programs are now offered at more than 700 U.S. colleges and universities. The discipline’s success has also brought challenges, among them the everlasting question of relevance. There is a lack of knowledge among some students about the discipline, scholars say.
“Female students today have so many opportunities: Their mothers work, they’ve seen female senators and maybe, soon, a female president, so they think the women’s movement is done,” said Prof. Joanne Cavallaro, chair of women’s studies at the College of St. Catherine. She pointed out that though white middle-class American women have more opportunities, “If you look at the statistics around the world on women, that’s obviously not true.”
Nearly four decades after it was founded, women’s studies is undergoing a kind of redefinition, said Jacquelyn N. Zita, an associate professor in women’s studies and former department chair at the University of Minnesota. Along with proving the field’s relevance to students who sometimes lack historical perspective, Zita and others work to keep society at large educated about what a feminist lens can bring to our complex issues of the day. Both goals must be accomplished at the same time women’s studies leaders protect their programs and grow their historically low funding in an increasingly competitive academic world.
At Christmas, remembering those lost to war
By Wade Fulmer, Columbia
War veterans and other victims bombed, maimed, or mentally disabled may be able to tell you where he or she and fellow soldiers were on a Christmas Day, what they were doing, or what they were remembering about their last time at home with family. Often, they may not remember details of their destructive traumas, may not want to return to where one was, or may only numbly exist while still in the politicians’ war that bleeds them and their families. They were, are, so far away, and if they return they yet dwell in that war place of interventionist hell. Soldiers seek to serve by noble duty, to move one more day closer to home, and to return to family. In faith and horror they live to survive one day at a time, to come home, and to bring their fellow soldiers home, at least alive if not well.
Generation Spears
By Cristina Page
The Spears family can’t be shocked by much these days, not with Britney in every tabloid. Still the recent news seemed to unsettle them. Their 16-year-old daughter Jamie Lynn is pregnant. And while no bad news is unprofitable for the Spears (it is rumored Jamie Lynn, a TV star in her own right, was paid one million dollars to break the news in OK! Magazine), this particular note of fame does appear to have taken the family aback. (“I was in shock. I mean, this is my 16-year-old baby,” her mother told OK!) It seems that no matter how well-to-do, (or bizarre) the family, it’s always a tragedy to have one’s child’s adolescence taken away by pregnancy. While Jamie Lynn Spears is not your average teen, her situation is becoming a more common experience for many girls of her generation: premature parenthood.
A Center for Disease Control (CDC) report released this month reveals that in 2006 there was a dramatic rise in teen births among 15 to 19 year olds in the United States bringing to a grinding halt a steady 14-year decline. In fact, Jamie Lynn’s situation exemplifies a reversal of many positive trends that began in the 1990s. Specifically there was a steep drop in abortion and unwanted pregnancy rates. During this period even sexual activity among high school students declined significantly. And those teens who were having sex — as would an average of half of them would before graduating high school – were more likely to use protection.
Now these gains are slowing or reversing. Sadly, these reversals seemed inevitable. After all, since 2000 we have turned away from using every strategy that the previous decade proved effective.
NOW’s naughty list: stereotyping toys
by NOW President Kim Gandy
For what I hope is the last time in 2007, I find myself asking: What year is this again?
I’m not talking about abstinence-only education, or Bush’s appointment of birth control opponents to high ranking reproductive health positions, or even “purity balls” (although I may have to get to those someday soon). No, I’m talking about toys.
‘Tis the season for abundant toy advertising and shopping, so naturally the NOW office has been abuzz about the ubiquitous “Rose Petal Cottage” TV commercials. If you haven’t seen these ads, count yourself lucky. Honestly, if I didn’t know better, I would think they were beamed in from 1955, via some lost satellite in space. Or maybe it’s a deeply subversive parody that a clever (and rich) band of feminists snuck onto the airwaves in heavy rotation.
Christmas in Fallujah
Billy Joel & Cass Dillon
No wonder young people don’t vote
By Tom Hanson
I wonder if anyone recalls the original campaign promises. Back when George Bush would raise his right hand as if taking a solemn vow and announce he would restore “honor and integrity” to the White House if elected. Sometimes he would alter the phrase ever so slightly, making it “dignity and honor” or other variations of the same three words.
With today’s Internet, we can easily check on some of the original statements. How about Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 2, 2000, offering:
“On the first hour of the first day, he will restore decency and integrity to the Oval Office. They will offer more lectures and legalisms and carefully worded denials. We offer another way, a better way, and a stiff dose of truth.”
Those were followed by the words of President Bush himself dated Sept. 23, 2000.
“Just because our White House has let us down in the past, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen in the future. In a campaign that’s going to restore honor and dignity to the White House……”.
Lack of Ethics 101
By the time 2005 rolled around, those words seemed a distant memory. At that time, the indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for perjury and obstruction of justice charges had seriously tarnished the view point that Bush might bring a higher level of ethics to the Oval Office. One poll taken at that time indicated that by a three-to-one ratio, Americans felt that honesty and integrity had declined under the Bush administration and the president’s 34 percent rating for ensuring high ethics in government was actually lower than that of Bill Clinton when he left office.