GEORGE FARAH Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, was featured on Friday’s “Now with Bill Moyers” [see: www.pbs.org/now/politics/debates.html]. He said today: “Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush promised the American people a series of engaging presidential debates, but the major party candidates’ lawyers have drafted a binding contract that virtually eliminates…

Ayad Allawi spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress this morning. He spoke of “the values of liberty and democracy.” For general information on Allawi, see the resource Disinfopedia. Here are some relevant articles: The New York Times, “Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90’s Attacks” (June 9, 2004) by Joel…

JULIANA ZUCCARO Zuccaro is a student at the University of Arizona and a member of the Network of Feminist Student Activists, which runs student voter registration drives. She said today: “We were registering students when we were interviewed by Fox News reporter Natalie Tejeda, who claimed that we were committing ‘unintentional felony’ by registering out-of-state…

BEV HARRIS KATHLEEN WYNNE ABBE WALDMAN DELOZIER, VICKIE KARP Black Box Voting and the National Ballot Integrity Project Task Force announced Wednesday that they “have been able to hack into both Diebold’s and Sequoia Voting Systems’ voting machines.” Harris is the executive director of Black Box Voting. Karp is a board member with Black Box…

Heads of state, including George W. Bush, address the U.N. General Assembly today. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan recently stated the invasion of Iraq “was not in conformity with the U.N. Charter from our point of view, from the Charter point of view, it was illegal.” Here are some relevant excerpts from the U.N. Charter:…

DARCY RICHARDSON Richardson is completing a four-volume work on third parties. The first volume, Others: Third-Party Politics From the Nation’s Founding to the Rise and Fall of the Greenback-Labor Party, was released earlier this year; the second volume will be released in October. Richardson said today: “While pro-Bush forces helping independent candidate Ralph Nader get…

As independent candidate Ralph Nader and the Libertarian and Green Parties are fighting court battles to get on the presidential ballot in various states, the following analysts are available for interviews: RICHARD WINGER Editor of Ballot Access News, Winger said today: “Since the 1890s, when ballot access laws first came into existence in the U.S.,…

BRIGALIA BAM Dr. Brigalia Bam is the Chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa. She is the former General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. She said today: “We are civic leaders, parliamentarians, diplomats, academics, electoral officials, journalists, and veteran election monitors. We come from 15 countries on all five continents.…

The U.S. government has been making demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program. On Thursday afternoon State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher was asked about “Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli whistleblower” and his proposal that “there be a trade-off between the Iranian nuclear program and the ending of the Israeli one.” Boucher declined to comment on the proposal. When…

JOHN HICKEY John Hickey is the executive director of the Missouri Progressive Vote Coalition. He said today: “While John Ashcroft was governor of Missouri, he vetoed two bills that were designed to equalize access to voter registration between St. Louis County (then mostly white) and St. Louis City (then about 50 percent African-American). Ashcroft’s vetoes…