From SJ Mercury News
By Andrew Glazer

A civil rights lawyer on Wednesday demanded authorities investigate a roundup of hundreds of undocumented immigrants in what he called a desert dragnet based on racial profiling.

In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, attorney Luis Carrillo claimed U.S. Border Patrol agents only pulled over people with brown skin in the five-day operation known as “Operation Desert Denial.”

More than 600 undocumented immigrants were detained from May 19 to May 24 along Interstate 40 near Barstow.

No light-skinned people were detained, Carrillo said.

“They gave people with blue eyes and light skin a free pass,” he said.

Read More Profiling

From Yahoo News
By David Royse

Florida’s governor cautiously entered the debate Wednesday over whether rising global temperatures are to blame for an increase in the number of strong hurricanes, meeting with two researchers who say global warming is threatening Florida with a long-term future of more bad storms.

Bush met with Peter Webster and Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who published research last year showing an increase in global hurricane intensity, with a doubling of the number of Category 4 or 5 hurricanes since 1970. That increase coincides with a rise of nearly 1 degree Fahrenheit in ocean surface temperatures, they say.

They say President Bush’s administration in Washington hasn’t done enough to combat greenhouse gas emissions — and note that Florida could help by cutting emissions since it’s the fifth largest producer of such gasses in the United States.

Read More Warming

From Information Clearing House
By Cinema Libre Dist.

Shocking, honest, brave and an amazing eye-opener. Watch this movie if you really want to know what’s happening in Iraq. Shows both sides of the story about the insurgency war that you won’t see on TV. Critical of US policy, but sympathetic to the American soldiers on the ground. Historical movie.

Watch Video

From The Slate
By Fred Kaplan

A couple of weeks ago, according to the New York Observer, Sen. John McCain stood in a small back room of Manhattan’s Regency Hotel and told a group of wealthy political donors, “One of the things I would do if I were president would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit.’ ”

Someone in the room should have told McCain to do the same thing.

Then again, McCain isn’t so different from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who made a special trip to Baghdad last month with Britain’s then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw for the purpose of telling the members of Iraq’s fractured leadership, “Start governing.” She made a similar plea on a second trip, a few weeks later, this time with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “The key now is to get the government up and running — and then go about the work of dealing with the security situation, dealing with the economic situation.”

It’s reminiscent of Ross Perot’s loopy run for the White House in 1992, when he told eager voters that he’d “just take a look under the hood and fix the problem”–as if politics were like making an engine run, when it’s more like deciding where the car should go.

Read more Advice

From The Guardian UK
By Ali Akbar Dareini

The official Iranian news agency said Wednesday the U.S. offer to join in direct talks with Iran about its disputed nuclear program was “a propaganda move.” The American proposal, a major policy shift after decades without official public contact between the two countries, was made conditional on Iran agreeing to stop its uranium enrichment activities.

“It’s evident that the Islamic Republic of Iran only accepts proposals and conditions that meet the interests of the nation and the country. Halting enrichment definitely doesn’t meet such interests,” IRNA said at the end of a dispatch reporting the offer of talks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“Given the insistence by Iranian authorities on continuing uranium enrichment, Rice’s comments can be considered a propaganda move,” IRNA said.

Earlier, an Iranian lawmaker was quoted as saying any direct talks with the United States over Tehran’s nuclear program must be held without preconditions.

Read more Iran

From Common Dreams
By Betsy Leondar-Wright

It’s happening again.

The recent vote in Congress to criminalize undocumented immigrants was just the latest in a centuries-long series of government actions that have blocked people of color from gaining economic security. Employers are getting away with murder, underpaying and overworking people too vulnerable to complain. Our elected officials are not just letting them get away with it — they’re actually aiding and abetting them.

Why does the typical family of color have 18 cents for every white dollar? Literally hundreds of government actions have affected the amount of money that families have today ­ most of them not widely known. Everyone knows that the U.S. government took land from Native Americans and gave it to white settlers. And it’s widely known that some states let white slave owners profit from slave labor.

But most people don’t know that land ownership was restricted to citizens and citizenship was limited to whites in many areas throughout the 1800s. The last racial barriers to naturalized citizenship were lifted in 1952. Almost no-one realizes that one in four white Americans have an ancestor who was given Indian or Mexican land under the Homestead Act.

Most people don’t know that the New Deal excluded many people of color from Social Security because until the 1950s, those laws excluded domestic and agricultural workers, the occupations of most workers of color. The parents and grandparents of some African Americans and Latinos in the labor market today missed out on Social Security benefits. As a result, many in the younger generations are supporting their elders instead of saving for their own retirement.

Read more Wealth Gap

From BuzzFlash
Editorial

Perhaps BuzzFlash has standards that are too high.

After all, we keep saying judgments about the Iraq War should not be considered as a political “left vs. hawk” tennis match of opinions.

As John Murtha, a hawk, best articulates, this should be a debate over competence and reality.

For the third time in recent editorials, we are pointing out today that the U.S. is closing in on embracing Vietnam as a member of the capitalist country club, by sponsoring it for the World Trade Organization. As we have pointed out, it makes you wonder how any fools — like Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush — still claim we “lost” the Vietnam War because of a lack of resolve.

With Vietnam becoming a thriving center of offshoring American production jobs — and half of Wal-Mart’s goods and billions of dollars of wages going to China — what exactly did we lose?

Read more Incompetence

From The Toronto Star

More than 40,000 Iraqis have perished in U.S. President George Bush’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein and its aftermath, according to the most common estimates. With each passing day, the human cost of regime change grows.

Against this carnage, why should the world much care about the circumstances in which American troops killed 24 people last Nov. 19 in Haditha, west of Baghdad?

Perhaps because what happened in the farm town and insurgent stronghold, like the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, forces all of us to confront some of the ugly realities of this chaotic conflict.

If Iraqi eyewitnesses, American lawmakers and media reports can be believed, a few rogue U.S. Marines went on a five-hour rampage in Haditha. They shot dead unarmed men, plus women and children who were cowering in their homes, after one Marine was killed by a bomb.

Then they tried to cover up the killings. The Pentagon found out only three months later on Feb. 10 and is now asking why.

Read more Iraq

From The Nation
By John Nichols

California Congressman Darrell Issa is one of the most conservative Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. So it should come as no surprise that he offered an appropriately cautious and responsible solution for the Constitutional conflict created when members of the Bush administration ordered federal agents to raid the Capitol Hill office of a sitting member of Congress.

“We have the power to impeach the attorney general,” Issa told Tuesday’s Judiciary Committee hearing titled: “Reckless Justice: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?”

Much of the Washington press corps, which maintains a familiarity with the Constitution that is roughly equivalent to its acquaintance with the truth, dismissed Issa’s suggestion that the committee might want to consider the ultimate political sanction for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The Washington Post’s lamentable Dana Milbank, who stands ever ready to ridicule any defense of the Constitution, huffed that the California congressman was being “dramatic.”

Dramatic? Let’s hope so, because the times are dramatic, and the concerns that have been raised by the raid on Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson’s office demand a response that is equal to them.

Read more Gonzales

From CounterPunch
By Dave Lindorff

Do national and congressional Democrats have a death wish?

In the course of discussing Barbara Olshansky’s and my new book, “The Case for Impeachment,” I’m coming to the conclusion that they must. And that’s even before they do something stupid like support the nomination of General Michael Hayden to head the CIA.

Rank-and-file Democrats want–badly want–to see President Bush get impeached. So do independents. I hear it from everyone I meet. It’s the rare Democrat or progressive or even independent who says she or he doesn’t agree with the idea of impeachment, and even then, it’s because such people are misinformed themselves and think that while they personally would love to see Bush get dragged into a big impeachment investigation, the rest of America wouldn’t like it to happen.

That seems to be the wrong-headed thinking of the Democratic Party leadership. Both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have vowed that if Democrats retake the House and/or Senate, that there will be no impeachment of the president attempted. Both leaders of the House and Senate election campaigns, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) have actively worked to undermine the primary candidacies of aggressive candidates who favor impeachment. These political cowards and sell-outs claim that what the voters want is for Democrats to press ahead in a positive way with their “agenda,” forgetting that they really don’t have an agenda, and that in any event, whatever bills they pass will simply be cancelled by the president, who will simply issue a “signing statement” invalidating their legislation.

Read more Deathwish