Katherine Stewart Exposes the "Good News Clubs" (tags)
They bill themselves as "nondenominational Bible study" groups for grade-schoolers, but according to investigative reporter Katherine Stewart, the Good News Clubs are just part of a broad-based campaign by the radical religious Right to turn public schools into arenas of religious conversion. They've already won virtually complete permission from the U.S. Supreme Court to run roughshod over the separation of church and state, and religious organizations — especially anti-woman, anti-Queer Fundamentalist ones — have become a 900-pound gorilla able to push themselves into any public school they want to crash.
United States government, 2005: If it walks like a goose… (Part II) (tags)
Part I (http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/020905Drolette/020905drolette.html) compared Bush administration actions to the first seven of fourteen “basic characteristics” Laurence W. Britt claims (in his article “Fascism Anyone?”) typify fascistic regimes. Here’s a similar look at the list’s back end:
All the President's votes? (tags)
A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican - corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive
UK Independent reports Republicans use E-voting systems to steal elections (tags)
If much of the worry about vote-tampering is directed at the Republicans, it is largely because the big three touchscreen companies are all big Republican donors, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into party coffers in the past few years. The ownership issue is, of course, compounded by the lack of transparency. Or, as Dr Mercuri puts it: "If the machines were independently verifiable, who would give a crap who owns them?" As it is, fears that US democracy is being hijacked by corporate interests are being fuelled by links between the big three and broader business interests, as well as extremist organisations. Two of the early backers of American Information Systems, a company later merged into ES&S, are also prominent supporters of the Chalcedon Foundation, an organisation that espouses theocratic governance according to a literal reading of the Bible and advocates capital punishment for blasphemy and homosexuality.