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Today's
Stories
November 8,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Still
No Jobs
Roger Burbach
Bush
v. Chavez: the Imperial President Meets the Bolivarian Democrat
Stan Goff
Jimmy Massey, Ron Harris, and Ambush Journalism
November 7,
2005
Dick Reavis
The
Origins of Mr. Danger
Jason Leopold
Cheney and the Cover Up: the Vice President Lied
Dave Lindorff
What Country was Bush Talking About?
Eli Stephens
A Tale of Two Generals: the Lies of Colin Powell
David Swanson
The Bush-Cheney Ethics Refresher Course: a Syllabus
M. Junaid Alam
An Interview Stan Goff
Matt Reichel
Paris Uprising: a Rebellion in Real Time
Naima Bouteldja
Paris is Burning
Jeff Halper
Israel
as an Extension of American Empire
Website of the Day
Dispatches from Paris
November 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Storm
Over Brockes' Fakery: Guardian Fabricates Chomsky Quotes
Lawrence R.
Velvel
Lying,
Law Schools and Executive Power: What Senators Should Ask Alito
Diana Johnstone
Srebrenica: a Response to Certain Criticisms of My Essay
Roosa / Nevins
The
Mass Killlings in Indonesia, 40 Years Later
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Missing
the Bus: When Conscience Bows to Calculation
John Ross
The Zapatistas' Otra Campaign for Mexico's Presidential Elections
Mike Whitney
Globalizing Sadism: the United States of Torture
Mark Engler
Will Big Business Turn On Bush?: the Economic Nightmare Unfolds
Juliano Mer-Khamis
They Shoot at Children, Too
Ron Jacobs
When Gen. Westmoreland Visited
Jill S. Farrell
Bird Flu and the Posse Comitatus Act
Missy Comley
Beattie
Trent Lott's Untroubled Sleep
Mitchel Cohen
People of the Dome, Revisited
Evelyn J. Pringle
Bush-Cheney and Big Oil's Big Summer
Reza Fiyouzat
Signs of Life or Last Gasp? Structural Problems in the Democratic
Party
Charles Sullivan
When Courage Fails: a White Southerner on Rosa Parks
Zachary Richard
Return to Louisiana
Ben Tripp
Beginning of the End? Don't Start Cheering Just Yet
St. Clair / Vest
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
November 4,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Blood
on the Tundra, Betrayal in the Rotunda: Losing ANWR
Dave Lindorff
A Majority Now Favors Impeachment: If He Lied, He Must Be Tried
Phillip Cryan
Crackdown
in Colombia
Christopher Brauchli
Katrina and Tax Breaks for the Very Rich
William S.
Lind
Exit Strategy: You Can't Stay the Course in a Lost War
Daryl G. Kimball
Of Madmen and Nukes
George Beres
Laurels for Negroponte?
Peter Montague
Why We Can't Prevent Cancer
November 3,
2005
James Petras
The
Libby Affair and the Internal War
Saul Landau
Torn
Families and Shot Down Planes: a Cuba Story
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
An Occurrence at Gretna Bridge
Michael Dickinson
Bang! Bang! You're Deaf! Sonic Weapons Over Palestine
Joshua Frank
Sham Behind Closed Doors
Remi Kanazi
Dancing with Perseverance
Reza Fiyouzat
Taxation or Racketeering?
Website of the Day
CIA Leak Investigation: Bigger Fish, Deeper Water?
November 2,
2005
Cockburn /
St. Clair
Holy
Alito!: Not as Crazy as Scalia, But Just as Bad
Robert Oscar Lopez
Saving Rosa Parks from American Hypocrisy
John Walsh
The Philosophy of Mendacity: From Leo Strauss to Scooter Libby
Brian J. Foley
Why Most Americans Don't Care About Gitmo (and Why They Should)
Ramzy Baroud
Rolling Back Syria
M. Junaid Alam
What Moral Values?
Todd Chretien
Judgment Day for the Governator
Bruce K. Gagnon
The Democrats' Slap Happy Day
Website of the Day
Hands Off Dave!
November 1,
2005
Ron Jacobs
An
Interview with Kent State's Dave Airhart
Gary Leupp
The Plame Affair Leads to Rome
John Ross
Days
of the Dead on the Border
Bill Quigley
Why
Are They Making New Orleans a Ghost Town?
Joseph Nevins
From a Boundary of Death to One of Life
Dave Lindorff
Thinking About Impeachment
Linda S. Heard
Bashing Syria: Another Trojan Horse from the UN?
Heather Gray
Thank You, Mrs. Parks
Michael Dickinson
To Di For: Charlie and Camilla Cross the Pond
Jeffrey St. Clair
Kent State: Wise Up and Back Off
October 31,
2005
Elaine Cassel
Libby's
Lies
Mark Weisbrot
Pop Goes the Bubble: Bernancke and the Fed
Mike Whitney
Carry On, Patrick Fitzgerald
Norman Solomon
After the Libby Indictment, the Press Acquits Itself
Farooq Sulehria
Trading Weapons While Kashmir Burns
Nicole Colson
Scapegoating Immigrants
Madis Senner
Dhafir Sentenced to 22 Years: Another Erosion of Civil Rights
Paul Craig
Roberts
Scooter
and the Neocons
October 29 / 30, 2005
Cockburn /
St. Clair
The
Libby Indictment: Gotterdammerung for the Bushies?
Peter Linebaugh
The
Wedges of Hephaestus
Tim Wise
Framing the Poor: Katrina, Conservative Myth-Making and the Media
John Chuckman
Bushspeak: Dark and Garbled Words
Steven Higgs
Green Hoosiers: Forging a New Democracy in the Heartland
Brian Cloughley
The Fifth Afghan War
M. Shahid Alam
Israel and the Consequences of Uniqueness
Nikki Robinson
Crack Down at Kent State
Ralph Nader
Let the PIRGs Begin!: Student Activism Thrives
Joe DeRaymond
Requiem for Bethlehem Steel?
Joshua Frank
Karl's Great Escape: Did Rove Rat on Scooter?
Laura Santina
Tongue-Tied on Iraq: Why Aren't the Dems Screaming Bloody Murder?
Fred Gardner
Death of an Organizer
Michael Dickinson
Insult Your Country
Ron Jacobs
Autumn in America
Dr. Susan Block
Fear and Sex: a Halloween Greeting
Vanessa S. Jones
Self-Portrait, 1994. Bronte Beach
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Marbet, Gardner, Ford, Albert, Engel, Krieger & St. Clair
Website of
the Weekend
Red State Update
October 28,
2005
Jared Bernstein
Inflation
Up; Wages Down: Fastest Decline in Wages on Record
Virginia Tilley
Embracing
the Anti-Aparthied Movement in Israel/Palestine
Phil Gasper
The
Race to Execute Tookie Williams
Jennifer Matsui
It's Mardi Graft Time!
Manual Garcia,
Jr.
Is the US Really Against Torture?
Monica Benderman
In the Name of Justice
Jason Leopold
Fitzgerald
Focuses on the Forgeries
Dave Lindorff
Suddenly, Bush Endorses Right of Fair Trials
Otober 27, 2005
Saul Landau
The
Scandal Isn't the Leak, But the Illegal War
Stuart Hodkinson
Bono
and Geldoff: "We Saved Africa" Oh No, They Didn't!
Ingmar Lee
Stop
the Troops!: No Glory or Honor in Iraq
Lila Rajiva
License
to Bill: Gates Does India
Ilan Pappe
The
Last Moment of Hope
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Waiting for Fitzgerald
Michael Donnelly
Look Who's Talking Now: the GOP on Perjury
Ron Jacobs
Escape the Weight of Your Corporate Logo
Cockburn / St. Clair
White House in Meltdown
October 26,
2005
Kathy Kelly
For
Whom They Toll
Gary Leupp
Dialectics
of the Plame Affair
Mike Marqusee
Empire of Denial
Eric Ruder
War Crimes in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Constitutionally Divided Nation
Joshua Frank
Fitzgerald v. the Bushies: Hold Your Elation in Check
J.L. Chestnut, Jr.
The Legacy of Rosa Parks
Website of
the Day
Decent Work in America: the 2005 Work Environment Index
October 25,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Condi
and Syrian Regime Change: Could Somebody Recommend a President?
Ken Sengupta / Patrick Cockburn
Attack on the Palestine Hotel
Conn Hallinan
Sleight of Hand: Iran, India and the US
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Pulling the Court Strings
Jackie Corr
Barbara Bush: Poster Gorgon of the Houston Astros
Robert Day
Talk to Strangers
John Sugg
Judith
Miller and Me
October 24,
2005
Dave Lindorff
Revoke
Judy Miller's Pulitzer
Michael Donnelly
Shades of Iran/contra
Patrick Cockburn
A Nation Stands on Trial
Mike Whitney
Apres Rove
Norman Solomon
Iraq is Not Vietnam, But...
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Palestine
October 22
/ 23, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
When
Divas Collide: Maureen Dowd v. Judy Miller
Billy Sothern
Letter
from the Circle Bar, New Orleans
Saul Landau
Bush, an Assessment
Ralph Nader
An
Open Letter to Bush on Harriet Miers
Behrooz Ghamari
Whose Justice Does Saddam's Trial Serve?
Brian Cloughley
Bush the Strategist: Pyrrhus Without a Victory?
Diana Barahona
Venezuela's National Workers' Union
Fred Gardner
Dershowitzed!
Lee Sustar
What the War on Terror is Really About
Patrick Cockburn
Murder of Saddam Trial Defense Lawyer
Laura Carlsen
Mexico City Seamstresses Recall 1985 Quake
James Petras
China Bashing and the Loss of US Competitiveness
Joshua Frank
Invading Iran: Who is to Stop Them?
Manuel Garcia,
Jr.
Disasters are Us
Michelle Bollinger
When Abortion Was Illegal
Missy Comley
Beattie
CSI: Iraq
Kona Lowell
Intelligent Design: Making High School Fun
Ben Tripp
Tanks for the Memories
Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening To This Week
Poets' Basement
Albert and Engel
Website of
the Day
Indictment Watch
October 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
The
Democrats' Abortion Hypocrisy
Winslow T. Wheeler
Paying for Their Mistakes: Incompetence, Deception and the Defense
Budget
Col. Dan Smith
The Destruction of the National Guard
Norman Solomon
Media at Crossroads: 25 Years After Reagan's Triumph
Madis Senner
Abusing Katrina
Michael Donnelly
Richard
Pombo: DeLay in Cowboy Boots
October 20, 2005
Dave Lindorff
Impeachment
Comes to NYC
Ray McGovern
16
Fatal Words: Cheney's Chickens Come Home to Roost
Jeremy Brecher
/
Brendan Smith
Attack Syria? Invade Iran?: By What Constitutional Right?
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Refuses to Recognize Court
Kevin Zeese
Was the Iraqi Constitution Vote Fixed?
Ross Eisenbrey
Millions Would Lose Pay and Protections Under Enzi Amendment
Randy Shields
James McMurtry Makes It in Dayton
Justine Davidson
Prosecuting Bush in Canada for Torture: a Small Victory
After Lucas
Cranach
Judy and Holofernes
Joe Allen
The
Scandalous History of the Red Cross
October 19,
2005
Christopher Reed
Koizumi and the Rape of Nanking
Stephen Soldz
Bush
and Avian Flu: the Excuses Begin to Fly
Chet Richards
War
and Intelligence
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam on Trial
Scott Richard
Lyons
Multicultural
Columbus?
Ralph Nader
An Interview with Rev. William Sloane Coffin
Website of
the Day
Shocking Video: Why Birds May Be Taking Viral Vengeance on Humans
October 18,
2005
Chet Flippo
Merle
Haggard: "Let's Get Out of Iraq"
Ron Jacobs
Dual Devotions: the Catholic Church and the US Flag
Keeanga-Yamahtta
Taylor
A Tale of Two Cities: From DC to Toledo
Dave Lindorff
Judy Miller: Little Miss Run Amok
Virginia Rodino
A Winter Patriot: Reflections on the Antiwar Movement
Thomas Healy
The Weather in Goshen: Still Radical After All These Years
Ralph Nader
A New New Orleans
Stephen Lendman
The Sorrows of Haiti
Patrick Cockburn
On the Eve of Saddam's Trial: a Divided Iraq
October 17,
2005
Peter Linebaugh
Spinoza
and the Black Limos
Norman Solomon
Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State
Cockburn /
Sengupta
"If
the Sunnis Don't Like It, That's Their Problem"
Mike Whitney
Miller's Confession: Last Gasp Before Indictments?
Uri Avnery
Iraq Now: What Awaits Samira?
Harold Pinter
Torture & Misery in the Name of Freedom
Website of
the Day
Al Joudi v. Bush
October 15
/ 16, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ayatollahs
of the Apocalypse
Patrick Cockburn
"This Constitution Won't Get Me a Job"
Saul Landau
Two Terrorists and a Lush: Osama, Posada and Bush's Drinking
Neve Gordon
"Beyond Chutzpah": Exposing Grave Moral Distortions
Moshe Adler
Poverty in New York City
Christopher Brauchli
Lynndie England's Burden
Diane Farsetta
The Emperor Doesn't Disclose: the Fight Against Fake News
Sam Husseini
Notes on Current Reporting About Judith Miller
Monica Benderman
From Chaos to Conscience to Peace
Mickey Z.
POW Abuse by US: Nothing New Going On Here
Douglas C.
Smyth
George W. Bush, the Honorius of Our Time
Lee Sustar
Will Delphi Bust the UAW?
Fred Gardner
Cannabinoids Arrive in Realm of Established Fact
Elizabeth Schulte
A Former Panther's Georgia Campaign: an Interview with Elaine
Brown
Joshua Frank
Will the Democrats Save Harriet Miers?
David Vest
Down with Formalism! Up with Values!
Ben Tripp
Epistle II: the Reawakenign
Poets Basement
Engel, Albert, Ford and Louise
Website of
the Weekend
The
Hidden Canyon
October 14,
2005
Farrah Hassen
A
Somber Ramadan in Syria
Ron Jacobs
The
Black Panthers: They Haven't Forgotten; Neither Should We
Sasha Kramer
USAID
and Haiti: the Friendly Face of Imperialism?
Katrina Yeaw
The Student Struggle in Italy
Nicole Colson
Bird Flu: Militarizing Health Care
Raúl Zibechi
Survival and Existence in El Alto
Nikolas Kozloff
Hugo
Chávez and the Politics of Race
Website of the Day
LA Filmmakers Cooperative
October 13, 2005
Jeremy Scahill
Mr.
Bush Goes to Tikrit (Sort Of)
Jeff Birkenstein
A
Thoreau for Our Time: Why Cindy Sheehan Matters
Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher
Harriet Miers: Bush or the Constitution?
Stan Cox
Did You Know This About Iraq?
Anis Memon
The Curious Case of Russ Feingold
Gary Leupp
Miller, Libby and the June Notes
Dave Zirin
A Tribute to August Wilson
Matthew Koehler
America's Endangered Forests
Werther
The
Two-Headed Monster
Website of
the Day
Hurricane Song
October 12, 2005
Omar Waraich
Britain
and the Quake: Mean and Stingy
William Cook
Voices
Behind the Entombment Wall
Phil Gasper
Countdown
to a Legal Lynching
Dave Lindorff
Impeachment Now and Then: Clinton, Bush and the Polls
Matt Vidal
Capital, Power and Class
John Gautreaux
New Orleans will Never be the Same
Diana Johnstone
Srebrenica
Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for War
Mark Weisbrot
The IMF Has Lost Its Influence
Brian J. Foley
Gitmo Tribunals Endanger Public Safety
Website of
the Day
Columbus Day Lies
October 11,
2005
Roger Morris
/ Steve Schmidt
Strategic
Demands of the 21st Century
Lila Rajiva
Live from New Orleans: Abu Ghraib
Bill Quigley
New
Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again
Paul Craig Roberts
Natural Born Liars
Dave Lindorff
Recruiters in Schools: No Lie Left Untried
Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Suspect Thy Neighbor
Mitchel Cohen
Showdown at Chuck E. Cheese
Tariq Ali
Pakistan will Never Forget This Horror
Website of
the Day
L'Heure Americaine
October 10,
2005
Cindy and Craig
Corrie
Rachel's
Words Live
Joshua Frank
Washington's War Dems
Gideon Levy
The Beautiful Life Without Arafat
Alan Wallis
The Fight for Free Speech at Union Square
Mickey Z.
In Defense of Liars
CounterPunch News Service
Vermont Independence Convention
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Police State is Closer Than You Think
Website of the Day
Dylan's Chronicles
October 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Rhetoric
and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People
Ralph Nader
Katrina
and the Growls of Greed
Jennifer Van Bergen
New American Law: Legal Strategies in the Dharfir Case
Saul Landau
An Oily Religious Dream
Jeff Halper
Setting Up Abbas
Lenni Brenner
The Millions More Movement and Zionism
Nikolas Kozloff
Bird Flu and Bush
Brian Cloughley
Training Soldiers in Iraq
Alice Slater
A Nobel Prize for Chernobyl?
John Gautreaux
A View from Cajun Country
Fred Gardner
Does the Controlled Substances Act Mean What It Says?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Leveethan Approach
M.G. Piety
Rot in the Ivory Tower: Collusion, Cover-Up and Kierkegaard
Tom Gorman
The Hitchens Doctrine
Mike Whitney
Bunker Days with George
Aseem Shrivastava
Beyond the Wasteland: Lessons from Afghanistan
Ben Tripp
Religion, an Epistle
Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Ford
October 7,
2005
Larry Johnson
The
Plame Case: the Real Issues
Will Youmans
Why
Do We Hate Our Freedom? Recruiters and Thugs on Campus
Dave Lindorff
Bird Flu: Evolution or Intelligent Design?
Judith Scherr
Haiti's Children's Prison
Russell D. Hoffman
Nukes for Peace, Revisited?: Nobel Prize Debacle
Jared Bernstein
Katrina and Jobs
Jennifer Van
Bergen
New
American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir
Website of
the Day
FBI Witchhunt
October 6, 2005
P. Sainath
"Take
That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal
Idol Again
Scott Parkin
When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged
Paul Craig
Roberts
Blundering
into Syria
Andréa Schmidt
Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion
Dave Lindorff
Easy
Money in the Big Easy
Joshua Frank
In Defense of Lew Rockwell
M. Junaid Alam
Jackboots at George Mason
Matthew Koehler
Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot
Robert Pollin
Is
the Dollar Still Falling?
October 5,
2005
Heather Gray
Militarization is Not an Answer for
Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines
Robert Jensen
Is
Bush a Racist?
Ramzy Baroud
Bush's Final Choice: America or
the Empire
Col. Dan Smith
Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything
is Bad"
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds Laughs Last
Paul Craig Roberts
Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons
Took Over
Alan Maass
Doing
the Right Wing's Dirty Work
October 4, 2005
Nikolas Kozloff
Shocking the Two Party System:
a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt.
Mike Roselle
Houston,
You've Got a Problem
Joshua Frank
The Scoop on Harriet Miers
John Chuckman
War
Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say
Alan Farago
Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers,
Hurricanes and the Keys
Mickey Z.
An
Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski
Christine & Ethan Rose
Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims
Gary Leupp
An
Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History
Website of the Day
Rodney
Crowell on Bob Dylan
October 3,
2005
Vijay Prashad
Desperation at Holyoke
Paul Craig
Roberts
Condi
Rice: Gunslinger
Joshua Frank
An Interview with Cindy Sheehan
Seth Sandronsky
The
Hiring Crisis for Black Teens
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Great Green Scare
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November 8, 2005
A
Cautionary Tale for Election Day
Voter Beware
By JIM McGRATH
It's Election Day, and I can't stop
thinking of John Kennedy O'Hara, whose sad and bizarre tale in
the polling places and the courtrooms of New York ought to be
a warning to all Americans. His story is simple: O'Hara, who
grew up and lives still in Brooklyn, New York, was a good citizen.
He voted in every election he was eligible to vote in since the
age of 18 - it was a point of pride for a once geeky civics student
who when he was just 11 years old handed out fliers for George
McGovern - and as a young man he tried to run for office, tried
to better the system. Five times he ran unsuccessfully, for the
New York city council and the New York state Assembly. As thanks
for his effort, the earnest kid became, on the cusp of middle
age, a disbarred attorney and convicted felon, an official second-class
citizen whose future had been seemingly forever darkened. And
the decade-long prosecution in the case of the People vs. John
O'Hara now has some chilling ramifications for each of the 11
million or so people eligible to vote today across New York.
It means they, like O'Hara, could face felony prosecution for
stepping into a voting booth. In fact, anyone who might vote
anywhere in the United States today could find themselves with
a prosecutor on their tail.
It's been four and a half years
since I came to know O'Hara, a one-time rising Wall Street lawyer
who at 44 is now bankrupted and jobless. When in April 2001 he
telephoned my office in the editorial page department of the
Albany Times Union, the paper of record in the state capitol,
he was alternately articulate and earnest, desperate and incredible,
at once deadly serious about his plight and unable to keep from
laughing at its absurdities. It turned out this stranger on the
phone, who reassured me this wasn't some crazy hoax, had clashed
with the Democratic bosses in Brooklyn just often enough that
the bosses had to make an example of him. His most unforgivable
act of rebellion in the backbiting world of Brooklyn machine
politics was to demand in court that the U.S. Department of Justice
step in and order the suspension and rescheduling of the Democratic
primary election in 1996. The '96 voting, such as it was, had
been a fiasco, with tens of thousands of voters disenfranchised.
Voting machines throughout Brooklyn arrived as late as ten hours
after polls were supposed to open. The Village Voice called it
"the worst electoral debacle in modern city history"
and a federal judge reviewing the case - finally ordering a new
election - wondered whether the election had been purposely stolen
(much as some people still suspect, with no small supply of evidence,
that those 20 electoral votes at stake in Ohio last year were
similarly commandeered). It was a lawsuit by O'Hara that brought
about a new election. His heroism left him more of an enemy than
ever to the Brooklyn establishment. An aide to Brooklyn State
Assemblyman James Brennan, a particular nemesis of O'Hara's,
told a reporter seven years later, "John O'Hara deserved
some sort of street justice; that's what a lot of people wanted
to mete out." A month after the electoral debacle of September
of 1996, O'Hara was indicted. The same aide to Brennan tried
to defend the indefensible this way: "If there was anybody
who should have been selectively prosecuted, it was John Kennedy
O'Hara."
His arrest had come at the
hands of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles "Joe" Hynes,
a powerhouse prosecutor who served Brooklyn's political bosses.
The charge was a strange one: O'Hara had voted from what prosecutors
contended was an illegal residence. It was the address of his
then-girlfriend, fourteen blocks away from an apartment he'd
kept for almost 25 years. O'Hara says, to this day, that he was
effectively, and legally, living in both apartments. But he was
voting from just one of them. The evidence backed that up, with
financial records and testimony from neighbors attesting that
he frequently stayed at the address in question. The district
attorney's office, however, insisted that the girlfriend's address
was a sham that failed to meet the legal standard of a "principal
and permanent residence to which [he] had always intended to
return," as the court record put it.
A five-years ordeal of conviction,
reversal, reinstatement and appeal - three trials in all - left
O'Hara guilty of a felony, stripped of his license to practice
law (his means of survival), fined $20,000, sentenced to five
years probation and 1,500 hours of community service. He had
been reduced by political attrition to a life that only faintly
resembled all that he had aspired to through college and law
school and his rebellious, abortive career as a politician.
On that April day of 2001,
O'Hara was making his pitch to me at the editorial board -- a
common enough act of last resort - because his case was pending
before the highest court in New York, the oddly and perhaps misleadingly
named Court of Appeals. O'Hara took a special delight in pointing
out that he was the first person to be successfully prosecuted
for illegal voting in New York since 1873. His compatriot in
crime, he gleefully told me, was Susan B. Anthony.
O'Hara's story checked out.
So the Times Union ran with an editorial urging the court to
stop an abuse of justice that had rendered what was unbelievable
into something unforgivable. The editorial boards of the New
York Daily News and the New York Sun - not exactly papers itching
to side with the likes of O'Hara against an often-vengeful prosecutor
like Hynes - followed with denunciations of the case. Even Harper's
Magazine published an 8,000-word cover story on O'Hara's saga.
But O'Hara's plea to the high
court fell on deaf ears among the justices at the Court of Appeals,
who, incredibly, upheld his conviction. Since then, the injustice
has been magnified by the indifference to it. The New York Times
editorial page has never said a word about him. Neither Howell
Raines nor his successor as editorial page editor, Gail Collins,
appear the least bit troubled that the precincts of Brooklyn
are home to a political prisoner.
Today, O'Hara fights on, in
a struggle ever more daunting. The setbacks accumulate - the
Supreme Court declined to hear the case in January of 2004, and
a New York State judge last month rejected his claim of selective
prosecution - while his legal options erode. O'Hara is left paying
his public penance cleaning out garbage cans in a city park,
across the street from where he went to high school and unrecognized
by the people whose votes he used to seek.
Election day, of course, is
depressing enough, given the miserable voter turn-out and the
near 100 percent incumbency of so many legislatures (the worst
example probably being the U.S. Congress). O'Hara's case makes
it even more so. Today marks one more election in which O'Hara
can't vote. It's an indignity that rivals any other miserable
lesson about American politics.
When I last interviewed O'Hara,
in September, two things stood out in the kitchen of his apartment.
There was the usual pile of weeks-old and months-old beer cans,
and there was a voting notice from the New York City Board of
Elections. The city government still had him on the list of citizens
entrusted with enfranchisement.
O'Hara could legitimately be
among those voters, if only he'd given in just a bit. Indeed,
People vs. O'Hara could have been plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor
and would today be long-settled and forgotten. But O'Hara felt
that he had no choice but to stand his ground. He couldn't stomach
the example he'd otherwise be setting. What might DA Hynes and
the corrupt elected officials he served do next?
O'Hara's legacy, of one legal
defeat after another, carries its own legal precedent, of course
- one that goes well beyond Brooklyn. Clearly, voters can now
be prosecuted anywhere in New York State, if they can't prove
something as chimerical as a "principal and permanent residence.''
By refusing to hear O'Hara's case, the Supreme Court brought
national implications to his plight. What happened in New York
conceivably could happen elsewhere.
Bennett Gershman, a Pace University
law professor, recognized as much two years ago as O'Hara awaited
word of his last-ditch appeal. The lesson for anyone involved
in the political system in New York, he said, is, "There
but for the grace of God go I.''
The polling place where I vote
in Albany is not more than a few blocks from the state capitol
where he had hoped to serve. Such aspirations have left him,
at just 44, a battered man.
If that doesn't frighten you,
what does?
Jim McGrath is the chief editorial writer for
the Albany Times Union. He can be reached at: jmickgee@aol.com
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