Russ McBee

As the sun finally begins to rise and banish the darkness of the Bush years, we continue to witness an alarming chain of eleventh-hour regulations emanating from the White House. The latest of those offenses against decency was published today: The Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to ...

Diebold (now called ''Premier,'' since their previous name has become radioactive) has admitted that their electronic voting machines contain a critical flaw which can drop votes: A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to ...

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 ...

Thirty-one members of the US House of Representatives seem to think the establishment of an American theocracy is a more urgent matter than any of the economic, military, or environmental problems we face. Those 31, including Tennessee's own resident wingnut Marsha Blackburn, have co-sponsored HR 598; the bill's stated purpose is: Supporting ...

Those three words are among the traits sadly lacking in the Bush White House; today's New York Times editorial holds nothing back in speaking the truth so many Americans refuse to hear: There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of ...

In light of recent trends toward less privacy and more intrusive government surveillance power, it was something of a surprise to read this article: Federal prosecutors withdrew a subpoena of Amazon.com's records of customers who purchased used books after a Wisconsin judge warned that ''rumors of an Orwellian'' probe could ''frost keyboards ...

This week, the UN's Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (the ''Third Committee'') approved a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty; the resolution will go to the full General Assembly for consideration, possibly as soon as next month. Of course, the United States voted with the medieval contingent: The ...

In 1999, Scott McNealy, the notoriously arrogant and self-absorbed chairman of Sun Microsystems, said, ''You have no privacy. Get over it.'' His profits come first. Your privacy is a remotely distant second. His greed trumps your rights; after all, he does represent a corporation, and we all know that corporate rights trump individual ...

One year ago today, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This malignant, perfidious law gives the president the authority to suspend habeas corpus for anyone he chooses. It also sanctifies the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture. For a full year now, our country has been deprived of one of its most ...