Truthdig tips its hat to the Navy lawyer who on Dec. 11 won a major ACLU award for his successful defense in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court case that dashed Bush administration efforts to try terror suspects in special military courts.
This week Truthdig salutes the Rev. Joel Hunter, who recently resigned as president of the Christian Coalition because the group was unwilling to accept his agenda on global warming, poverty and AIDS. While we don’t endorse Hunter’s stand on choice and gay marriage, we admire the consistency of his pro-life position. As the pastor himself says, “unless we are caring as much for the vulnerable outside the womb as inside the womb, we’re not carrying out the full message of Jesus.”
Truthdig salutes the individuals and organizations that swept the Democrats to victory: the members of the Democratic leadership, and the progressive netroots. Kudos all around.
Truthdig salutes all the journalists, activists and researchers who have been working to expose the security flaws of electronic voting machines—an underappreciated endeavor that is essential to the safeguarding of our democracy.
Truthdig salutes Michael J. Fox, who reacted with grace when right-wing hate-machine Rush Limbaugh accused the actor of faking the symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease in order to curry political favor for stem cell research.
Truthdig salutes Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear agency, who warned the world that up to 30 more countries could soon possess the technology necessary to produce nuclear weapons.
This week Truthdig celebrates the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and the Center for International Studies at MIT as well as The Lancet for their commitment to documenting the real number of Iraqi deaths that have resulted from the 2003 U.S. military invasion of Iraq.
Truthdig tips its hat this week to Bob Woodward, whose book “State of Denial” plowed over much-trod territory and still managed to surface plenty of fresh headlines. (Video and more after the jump...)
Truthdig salutes the MSNBC anchor, whose strident monologue at Ground Zero last week ripped to rhetorical shreds the assertion of Vice President Cheney that critics of the government “validate the strategy of the terrorists.” (Jump for video and a full transcription, along with other fiery clips)
Truthdig salutes Rocky Anderson, the Salt Lake City mayor who spoke out against the war and reminded the world that “blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.” Anderson welcomed Bush to his city with a fiery protest speech and these searing lines: “A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating president.”
Truthdig salutes Ann Beeson, the American Civil Liberties Union officer and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in ACLU v. NSA, the case that persuaded a Detroit judge to order a halt to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Truthdig salutes Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Democrat who has compiled and released a 371-page report that attempts to detail every alleged instance of wrongdoing that the Bush administration made during the run-up, prosecution and aftermath of the war in Iraq.
Truthdig salutes the 86-year-old Supreme Court justice who wrote the majority opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the military tribunals Bush set up to try Guantanamo detainees. But more important, this decision, in the words of a Yale law professor, “effectively undermines the Administration’s strongest claims about Presidential power,” and may constitute the legal framework necessary to halt the more egregious of Bush’s civil liberties-infringing programs—like warrantless wiretapping and holding terrorism suspects without trial.
Truthdig salutes Ron Suskind, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer whose most recent book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” stripped down Vice President Dick Cheney’s counter-terrorism philosophy to its Strangelovian essence: If there is a 1% chance of a terrorist attack, America must respond as though it is a 100% certainty.
Click here for disclosures from the book, Suskind TV appearances, links to other writings and biographical information.
Truthdig salutes Pa. Rep. John Murtha for his sustained leadership in demanding a pullout of U.S. troops out from Iraq. Particularly inspiring was his conduct during Thursday’s congressional debate over the war. A GOP congressman all but called Murtha a coward, and the 38-year Marine veteran thundered back a response that sent the congressman scurrying for cover. In doing so, Murtha again demonstrated the Republican fallacy of equating a call for withdrawal with weakness. It’s a lesson more Democrats could stand to learn.
Truthdig salutes the 12 jurors who sacrificed four months of their lives to sift through the lies of former Enron chiefs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, convicting them on 25 counts of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. Interviewed after the case, jurors were incredulous that the two former titans were unaware of the crimes at their company. “Skilling was supposed to be a hands-on individual,” one juror told a newspaper. “It’s hard to believe a hands-on individual wouldn’t know what was going on.”
Truthdig salutes New School University graduating senior Jean Rohe, whose commencement speech at Madison Square Garden on Friday preemptively struck against the address that Sen. John McCain was due to deliver directly after her.
Click here for links to the speech, biographical information on Rohe, and the instantly infamous response by one of McCain’s staffers in which he insulted Rohe’s graduating class and called her an “idiot” in print.
Truthdig salutes Leslie Cauley, the USA Today reporter who broke the blockbuster story about the NSA’s program to amass the records of every phone call made in America. Her scoop laid waste to President Bush’s assertion that his domestic spying targets only a handful of suspected terrorists living in the U.S. In the wake of her story, GOP Sen. Arlen Specter is calling for congressional hearings.
Truthdig salutes Ray McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran who articulated the outrage of a nation by publicly and heroically challenging Donald Rumsfeld’s lies about Iraqi WMD.
Click here for the full report.
Dennis Kucinich on the Democrats’ Bailout Betrayal
