Almost a decade after he was kidnapped and forcibly disappeared by Macedonian officials acting at the behest of the CIA, Khaled El-Masri has finally secured a measure of redress. After years of denial in Skopje (capital of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), stonewalling in Berlin and silence in Washington, the European Court of Human […]

Read more

In July 2007, George W. Bush invited the families of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to the White House Rose Garden signing of the Voting Rights 
Act. The 25-year extension of civil rights legislation enacted in 1965 passed by a 98-0 vote in the Senate and by 390-33 in the […]

Read more

“We set up phone banks and called every woman voter and ranked them according to their degree of pro-choice- ness, one to nine. Then we targeted the ones we could get to vote on the issue. We had 63 percent of the Republican women who favored legal abortion say that they would abandon DioGuardi and […]

Read more

“The court explained that the challenged at-large electoral systems had been created against the backdrop of Alabama’s ‘unrelenting historical agenda, spanning from the late 1800s to the 1980s, to keep its black citizens economically, socially, and politically downtrodden, from the cradle to the grave.’” —U.S. District Judge John D. Bates Shelby County v. Holder, September […]

Read more

No Democracy Without Reform The last election was an absolutely disgusting spectacle in Ohio, largely but not totally due to the stunning influx of TV and radio commercials from the so-called super-PACs. [“Smart Money,” Washington Spectator, December 1, 2012] Many of us just about wore out the mute button on our TV clickers! It seems […]

Read more