Analysis

On Election Day 2005, Seattle’s voters resoundingly approved an advisory measure for an American right to health care, Ballot Measure 1. The vote was 69 percent yes to 31 percent no. It capped a two-year effort by volunteer activists from two small community organizations in Seattle: the Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans (PSARA) and Health Care For All-Washington (HCFA-WA).

Across the front pages of several of this nation’s newspapers came the recent announcement that the Bush administration had embarked on another adventure in its “war against terrorism.” Referred to as the “Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative,” this effort involves an annual budget of $100 million as well as the deployment of troops and advisers to help prosecute the fight against terrorism in Africa.

Just before Christmas, Vice President Dick Cheney, his face fixed in its perpetual Scrooge-like scowl, flew home from the Middle East to cast a tie-breaking Senate vote for a budget reconciliation bill that cuts human needs programs by $40 billion while showering the rich with another $70 billion in tax cuts.

Faced with growing popular demand to end the Iraq war and bring American soldiers home quickly, and pressed by November elections that will decide the composition of Congress through 2008, the Bush administration has begun to talk about withdrawing some U.S. troops. “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down, President Bush said last November. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said present U.S. troop levels would not be needed “for very much longer” because Iraqi forces were becoming more effective.

A handful of American intellectuals actually understand the ins and outs of the great ripoffs of American economics and cultural values in the past 26 years.

The case of accused enemy combatant Jose Padilla gets more bizarre with every passing month. Rather than being a case that would establish the government’s right to arrest even U.S. citizens on U.S. soil and imprison them forever without trial or access to an attorney, it is beginning to look like another public relations disaster for the Bush administration.

Routine administrative and legal procedures are often subject to manipulation, never more so than when Cuba’s enemies manipulate them.

The USA Patriot Act, major parts of which have to be reauthorized by Congress before the end of the year, has run into unexpected trouble, with both Democrats and some Republicans balking on conceding powers desired by the White House.

President George W. Bush is continuing his lies to justify the unjustifiable. In a Nov. 30 speech crafted to contain a brewing rebellion against his failed Iraq policy, he led off with a long-discredited whopper, alluding to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and linking them to the Iraq “battlefront.” As we know, there was no Iraqi involvement in 9/11. But since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, terrorist attacks have increased worldwide, especially against Iraqi civilians.

CLEVELAND — Ohio voters roundly defeated four proposed constitutional amendments on the ballot on Nov. 8. Simply stated, the amendments dealt with absentee voting (Issue 2), campaign finance laws (Issue 3), how election districts are drawn up (Issue 4) and how elections are run (Issue 5).