Thom Hartmann

The Gonzales confirmation is not just about the torture memos. It's much bigger than that. If Bush continues to roll back human and civil rights - and the installation of Alberto Gonzalez as America's chief law enforcement officer is very much a part of his campaign to do so - we may be facing a "Pastor Niemöller moment" sooner than most of us could have imagined.

Jeff Taylor is one of Vermont's three electors - representatives elected by the citizens of Vermont to vote for President of the United States. He and his two peers have joined the electors of several other states in signing resolutions asking their state's congressional delegation to protest the Ohio slate of electors. "If they can have fair elections in Kiev," Taylor told me, "why not in Cleveland?"

It's Christmas week - Adolf Hitler's favorite season after he declared an official merger of church and state - and, ironically, conservatives are using the occasion to mount a new and bizarre attack.

What if there really was no need for much - or even most - of the Cold War? What if, in fact, the Cold War had been kept alive for two decades based on phony WMD threats? What if, similarly, the War On Terror was largely a scam, and the administration was hyping it to seem larger-than-life?

Antonin Scalia, the man most likely to be our next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, turned history on its head recently when he attended an Orthodox synagogue in New York and claimed that the Founders intended for their Christianity to play a part in government.

"Never again!" says the slogan in an email I received from an activist friend. "Never again will we allow a stolen election in the USA!" But how are we going to stop it?

There was something odd about the poll tapes. (And it always seemed to favor George W. Bush...)

Mea culpa.On November 6th, I submitted an article to Common Dreams that - based on interviews I'd done with a Florida Democratic candidate for Congress and information and people he'd pointed me to analyzing Florida's vote - suggested that small Florida counties may have been digitally "flipped" to benefit George W. Bush. The editors of Common Dreams published my article.

Take heart. Democracy has come under assault in America before, we've survived, and the nation actually became stronger for the struggle.

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up.