(We welcome back veteran Chicago journalist Monroe Anderson after an extended summer break.)
by Monoe Anderson
Watching today’s commemorations of the eight anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks, I am reminded of how badly the Bush Administration blew it. The most incompetent presidency in our nation’s history presided over the worst failure in national security since Pearl [...]

By Denis Campbell
Gary McKinnon lost both legs of his appeal this morning in UK Crown Court. A holdover from the Bush era, McKinnon faces up to 70-years in prison for hacking into Pentagon computers in search of UFO information. He suffers from Aspergers syndrome and the last hope for delaying his extradition may indeed now [...]

What the Great Depression and two World Wars could not humble, we’re now supposed to believe has been brought to its knees by fibre optic cable and hi-speed Internet access? The former Bush Administration is not the only group guilty of revisionist history. Newspapers, magazines and book publishers die off weekly by the dozens globally [...]

By Denis Campbell
Gary McKinnon of Crouch End, North London, was branded a ‘cyber-terrorist’ by the US government. In 2002 he was arrested for hacking into Pentagon and NASA computers. The US Justice, Defence and Homeland Security Departments have been fighting a seven-year long extradition battle to the USA under the 2003 UK Extradition Act. They [...]

by Jennifer LaFleur, ProPublica
 
Dan Metcalfe directed the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy for more than 25 years. He founded the office in 1981, under the Reagan administration, and retired in 2007. During that time he drafted two seminal memos on FOIA. One during the Clinton yearsinstructed government agencies to be more open and another in [...]

 
 
by Denis Campbell
 
In the mid-90s, Henry Waxman’s California 30th Congressional District was my home. Henry is the anti-LA glitz poster child. In a district that includes Beverly Hill, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Malibu, Henry’s the kind of guy who makes accountants look hip. Henry is decidedly not LA. But if you pierce the [...]

 
by Charley James
Here we go again. 
As the Bush administration did with the Patriot Act and Iraq War resolution, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke spent today trying to hustle Congress into new territory using the familiar administration tactic of hysteria. Fortunately, this time it looks as if more than a few members have read the fine [...]

As the evening closed to orchestral strains from the film ‘The American President’ playing in the background, there was not one fictional note in Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s acceptance speech before a crowd of 90,000 people at Mile High Stadium. Reflecting on the tone, all I could think of was the archetypal movie line, “now [...]

With 90-days to go, Swiftboating Season has begun in earnest as charges and counter-charges by each candidate’s camp of injecting race into the election turned the current US Presidential race into that of a popularity contest for high school class president. No. I must apologise. That characterisation demeans the thousands of young students who prepare [...]