Democracy

It has been two years since Congress suppressed an overview of the risks to people from chemical plant explosions. Dangerous chemical plants, they argued, were potential terrorist weapons, and if terrorists knew which ones were most dangerous, they would target them. Congress also ordered the Justice Department to produce a report by August 2000 on how to protect chemical plants from terrorists and make them less dangerous. A year after that deadline, the report is nowhere to be seen.

Portland, Oregon resident Susan Hager's daughter Morgan was one of three U.S. citizens hospitalized in Genoa as a result of unprovoked violence by Italian police against protesters at the Group of 8 summit meeting. In the early hours of July 22, 92 young people were dragged from their beds by squads of Italian anti-riot police officers who kicked them, pummeled them with clubs and threw them down stairs. Emergency room doctors said a number of the injured would have died without treatment.

Did General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who signs the checks for the folks at NBC News, ask NBC chief Andrew Lack to call the presidential election in favor of George W. Bush well before the election was actually over? According to Representative Henry Waxman, Welch did pay a visit to the NBC control room that night last November, cheering whenever Bush was ahead and griping whenever Gore took the lead. At one point he asked a staffer, "What would I have to give you to call the race for Bush?" And he was ultimately the one who gave the order to actually do so.

The belated discovery that George W. Bush's campaign applied two disparate standards for counting overseas ballots in Florida -- liberal for Bush strongholds and stringent for counties carried by Al Gore -- underscores again the huge advantage that the well-funded conservative news media gives the Republicans. "By having a powerful media of its own -- from TV networks to nationwide talk radio, from news magazines to daily newspapers -- the conservative movement can give its stamp to events during the crucial few days when the public is paying attention," writes Robert Parry.