Russ McBee

Think back to the spring of 2005, just three and a half years ago, before this presidential campaign started. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. The Democrats in the Senate were more or less powerless to stop the GOP from running the country into the ground, and seldom exercised their right to filibuster ...

In 1990, Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act which ordered a state to set more stringent limits on air pollution if that state determined that the Clean Air Act was insufficient inside its borders. The monitoring requirements and sufficiency determination were not optional; states were required to make this determination. In 2006, ...

Salim Hamdan was convicted today of providing material support to terrorists in a sham kangaroo court convened at Guantanamo. His ''trial'' included the admission of inflammatory, irrelevant evidence such as the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, neither of which he was accused of knowing about. Evidence derived through torture ...

David Neiwert, who has written extensively about eliminationist rhetoric from the right wing against liberals, had this to say about Sunday's tragedy in Knoxville: In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of ...

Yesterday, a senseless act of non-random violence struck this city. A man, mad at the world and blaming liberals for his personal ills, targeted the innocent congregants of a progressive church in Knoxville, killing two and wounding seven. Like everyone else in Knoxville, I've spent the last couple of days in a state of shock over this. Described ...

Foreign Policy has a short but fascinating interview with former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who was the chief architect of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia. He discusses the recent arrest of the fugitive Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadzic, and its parallels with the recent indictment of Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan ...

This morning, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts. As SCOTUSblog said: The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so ...

Two stories came out today on the deepening problem of unwarranted and unconstrained domestic surveillance in the ongoing War On Your Liberty; each of the two stories contains assurances by government officials that don't even pass the snicker test. The first story takes place at the state level, where we find this: Intelligence centers run by ...

As a consequence of this debacle in our local government, Knox County Commissioners are under a court order not to violate the Sunshine Law again, under penalty of fines and possibly even jail time. Given the events of the last year and a half in this county, one would think they'd have sense enough not to discuss the public's business in private ...

Today's updates on the continuing decline: The six Guantanamo detainees who are slated to be tried by the Bush administration's kangaroo courts are now facing the death penalty; if that's their sentence, they'll be executed at Guantanamo. The charges, the torture-derived evidence, the trials, the rules of procedure, the judge, the jury, the ...