A historic day

Thank God for Barbara Boxer! In agreeing to challenge the Ohio tally at the Electoral College, Boxer joined what she called "the fight for electoral justice."

It's a fight that grassroots groups have been waging for years, demanding uniform standards, paper trails, and other reforms, such as instant runoff voting.

Praise to David Cobb, the Presidential candidate of the Greens, who was instrumental in challenging the vote count, with a helping hand from Air America, Harvey Wasserman, and other muckraking journalists.

Praise to Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones and Representative John Conyers for leading this battle in the House. The investigation that Conyers headed up, as the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, lent great credibility to this issue.

"We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio Presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters," said the report of the Democratic Judiciary staff: "Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousands of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards."

And praise to all the House members who had the courage to stand up and denounce the low-down Republican tactics that were disenfranchising predominantly African American voters.

When Representative John Lewis, hero of the civil rights movement, stood up and said, "Our electoral system is broken. There is something wrong in our democracy," only the most hardhearted could not be affected.

But there were plenty of white Republicans showing off their hard hearts. And they were filled with scorn and condescension and dismissiveness.

There was Tom DeLay, hardest of them all, denouncing the "irresponsible tactics" of the Democrats.

He's one to talk! He's the prince of irresponsible--not to mention improper and possibly illegal--tactics.

But there was nothing irresponsible about disputing the tally in Ohio and defending the precious right to vote.

January 6 was a historic day. It was the day Democrats began to fight back.

The tsunami that took the lives of more than 150,000 people in Asia was a natural and unnatural disaster.

The vast majority of the dead were poor people, those who subsist as small fishermen, those who live in ramshackle huts on or near the beaches, those who service the tourist industry for a paltry wage.

And while such a brutal force of nature would have exacted a terrible price in any event, the magnitude was compounded by man-made factors.

"Principally as a result of their poverty, developing countries are especially vulnerable to natural hazards," noted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in a report ten years ago. "Events which would cause limited damage and few casualties in a rich country often cause extensive damage and substantial loss of life in a developing country context."

Half the world's working population makes $2 a day or less. They live where they can, often in the path of the next hurricane, earthquake, or tsunami. They cannot afford the high rent of the high ground.

Poverty, an unnatural disaster, accompanied this natural one, and the combination was enormously lethal.

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