Ken Plum: Repeat of a sordid history

Ken Plum

The Virginia General Assembly may be about to repeat an unfortunate chapter of its history by passing bills that will have the effect of suppressing voter participation.  Although the bills are justified by the proponents as preventing voter fraud, no examples of voter wrongdoing have been shown. At the turn of the 20th century Virginians…

Chris Graham: Breaking down the McDonnell-Romney endorsement

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The cynic’s view could be that Bob McDonnell is jumping on the Mitt Romney bandwagon with his endorsement today of presumptive GOP presidential nomination frontrunner Mitt Romney. If you believe that Romney is not only the frontrunner but the all-but-declared nominee, then the Virginia governor would be guilty of bandwagon-jumping. But then there’s this hard…

Remarks by Obama, Al-Maliki at joint press conference

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PRESIDENT OBAMA:  Please have a seat.  Good afternoon, everyone. When I took office, nearly 150,000 American troops were deployed in Iraq, and I pledged to end this war, responsibly.  Today, only several thousand troops remain there, and more are coming home every day. This is a season of homecomings, and military families across America are…

Sanford D. Horn: Catholic crosses crux of crazy complaint

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Following the ousting of several North African leaders in recent months in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, and the dissolution of their respective tyrannical regimes, panic set in around the western world as those nations are pursuing the installation of Sharia Law. What is infinitely more disturbing here in the United States is that Muslims are…

Presidential address on jobs

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Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country.  We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse. This past week, reporters have been asking, “What will this speech mean for the President?  What will it mean for Congress?  How…

ACLU seeks details on government’s phone tracking

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In a massive coordinated information-seeking campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and 33 other affiliates across the nation today are sending requests to more than 375 local law enforcement agencies large and small demanding to know when, why and how they are using cell phone location data to track Americans. The Virginia affiliate…

Sam Gbaydee Doe and Al Fuertes: Two SPI learners/teachers who keep coming back

For both Sam Gbaydee Doe and Al Fuertes, the vocation of peacebuilding was forged in the trauma of civil war. In Doe’s native Liberia, 10 percent of the population perished. For Fuertes, growing up on the Philippine island Mindanao, one of the world’s longest recent wars seemed “a given.” Now, over more than a decade,…

Fuel for extremism is beyond Bin Laden, EMU prof says

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Pakistan-based graduates of Eastern Mennonite University say U.S. military policy in their country has fed extremism and that, sadly, such extremism may not subside with the death of Osama bin Laden. That was a major finding of EMU professor of peacebuilding Lisa Schirch, who was in Pakistan last week, researching and consulting with Pakistani peace…

Chris Graham: Heritage

Chris Graham

I’m a Southerner. I have an accent. Hell, I work for a rasslin’ company. No question I’m Southern. Got two cousins named Junior, an uncle named Boogie, et cetera. Here’s where I go controversial being a Southerner – that crap about the Civil War being about states’ rights is, well, yeah, crap. It doesn’t take…