It looked like it was business as usual for President Barack Obama on the first day of his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, as he spent five hours golfing with Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank and chairman and CEO of UBS Group Americas. Wolf, an early financial backer of Obama’s presidential campaign, raised $250,000 for him back in 2006, and in February was appointed by the president to the White House’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Economic recovery for whom?

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August 25, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Sitting on death row in Georgia, Troy Davis has won a key victory against his own execution. On Aug. 17, the U.S. Supreme Court instructed a federal court in Georgia to consider, for the first time in a formal court proceeding, significant evidence of Davis’ innocence that surfaced after his conviction.

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August 19, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Imagine the scene. America 2009. Eighteen thousand people have died in one year, an average of almost 50 a day. Who’s taking them out? What’s killing them? Terrorism is not the culprit here: It’s lack of adequate health care.

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August 12, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Though Barack Obama first called the Honduran military’s removal of Zelaya a coup, his administration has backpedaled. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Zelaya’s attempt to cross the Nicaraguan border into Honduras “reckless.” Could well-placed lobbyists in Washington be forging U.S. foreign policy?

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August 05, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard. The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

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July 29, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, knows much about the color line—not only from his life’s work, but from life experience, including last week, when he was arrested in his own home."

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July 22, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare. He’s a whistle-blower. Potter, the former chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA, recently testified before Congress, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”

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July 15, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Nonviolent activists and Muslims are held in draconian conditions, while the man charged with killing Dr. George Tiller trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.

July 09, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. It was led by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a military facility that has trained some of Latin America’s worst torturers, murderers and human rights abusers.

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July 01, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column

Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.

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June 24, 2009  |  Filed under Weekly Column