Sami Al Hajj, 37 years old, father of a young son, Sudanese national, al-Jazeera photojournalist, having been illegally imprisoned at the Guantanamo prison camp for over five years, was released by US authorities on Thursday, May 1.

"Aside from the fact that Guantanamo Bay is a legal and humanitarian scandal, the Americans seem to be holding Al-Hajj simply because they have it in for Al-Jazeera. How else can you explain the fact that he has been held for four years without being charged while other journalists have been cleared and released in no time at all ?" (Reporters Without Borders, May 2007.)

765 American Universities have combined endowments of $340 billion.  The top ten total $100 billion.  Eleven members of SDS at the University of FL are on hunger strike to pressure administrators to invest its $1.2 billion endowment in Socially Responsible Investments.

These crazies obviously failed econ 101.  From HuffPost

At the core of the students' demand is the notion that investors are ultimately responsible for the practices of the companies in which they are invested. If profits are being made by violating human rights or international environmental norms, then investors are morally obligated to do something about it . . .

Maybe not so crazy.    

SRIs screen investments for social and environmental bad behavior.  Typically they reject weapons makers, tobacco goons, union-busters and polluters.  At $340 billion, university endowment funds could profoundly influence corporate behavior.  

Make a call to support SDS.

Bush's latest admission of approving torture meetings is the last shovelful of dirt on a camel who's back broke long ago. The facts behind it are not news, but the fact that he admitted it should be HUGE news.

''Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people'' by learning what various detainees knew, Bush said in the interview at his Texas ranch. ``And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.''

Problem is, impeachment is the classic media no-no. We can be right, and the media will only think us out-of-touch. We can have the majority of Americans agreeing that Bush should be impeached if he did these things, and the media will only think "oh, America favors impeachment if, but doesn't yet favor impeachment now - that must mean they've already judged him innocent. Old news." We can scream our heads off, and the media will only sneer at our hysteria (and there's nothing like a good sneer to infuriate people).

So how do we do this? We need strategy. I don't have all the answers, but I have some ideas. Read my ideas below, then please use this comment thread to brainstorm.

Today is the first time I've heard of Mehdi Shahbazi. It was an announcement of his death in The Mercury News via Rawstory.

This man, an Iranian immigrant who began working in the 1960s at his brother's gas station and, until recently, an owner of eight gas stations, began a battle against the oil companies that would last for two years.

His battle is over now.

I visited the Capitol Hill Hunger Striker again on Friday night and dropped off a gallon of water in a plastic jug.  It's been unseasonably hot for DC in October and it may reach 90 again this afternoon.

He's looking rather thinner.  The calorie deficit and quite brutal weather are clearly sapping his energy.

His thought process remains clear and in conversation he exudes a resevoir of determination and strength which comes through in a surprisingly powerful and oddly comforting handshake.

As we talked a few tourists stolled past, pointedly ignoring us.  He really does make people feel uncomfortable.  Which is one of the reasons he's determined to take this hunger strike beyond the ones that have come before.

How far will he go?

For three nights running I've pedaled past a thin man wrapped in a blanket on the steps of the Cannon house office building.  The light of the Capitol, yes that Capitol, illuminated his gaunt face.  Bearded and tanned in the ghostly light.

He appeared to be sleeping.  Perhaps he was in deep meditation.  No movement.  Not even the rise and fall of breath.  A blue and red tattoo, an intricate medieval cross, spread from temple to temple across his lower forehead.  Two signs stradled his half prone body.

End the War in Iraq and Please Don't Bomb Iran.

Was he dead?

Please follow me over the fold to find out ...

Days until the Living Wages Hunger Strike begins: 16
Days until the hunger strike ends: Strike ends when Camden Yards stops paying cleaners a poverty wage

Immediately afterWednesday's hunger strike announcementthe eleven workers who will strike started on the Step Up for Living Wages Tour.  The tour started at St. John's in Mt Pleasant with a lunch and planning session put on by the striker health and well being committtee.  We then headed to St Paul's by the Sea in Ocean City for retreat and planning.  Today we visited Harriet Tubman's region of birth and met with state leaders and policy makers.

Tomorrow workers will protest outside of the Maryland Stadium Authority convention center in Ocean City.

Strikers meet with health and well-being coordinator Iris to talk about health issues relating to hunger striking.

You are a cleaner at Camden Yards, a publicly owned baseball stadium. You will work all night - but first you must arrive at least 2 hours before your scheduled time. You get in line and wait.  When a shift is assigned to you, a barcoded wristband is attached to you and you are loaded onto a van.  

The loaded van waits with you and the rest of the crew waiting.  Others are still waiting in the temp agency lobby, in limbo and hoping for a job tonight.  Nobody is on the clock yet, this all unpaid wait time.  Unpaid, but required to wait - if you leave you will be taken off the shift and most likely blacklisted. The unlucky will be sent home, but must wait and lose out on finding another job someplace else.  You are all required to wait, either with your barcoded wristband or with any word.  You wait in the van or in the lobby.  You unpaid for up to two hours for each game you work.

If you want to skip right to the action items, look toward the bottom of the diary.

We'd like to think that the world in which we live is safe. In many ways, it is safe for a lot of us, but certainly not for everyone. As an academic, I want to believe that I am immune to the violence of the world when I am on campus. I think to myself that a university is a center for learning, where people learn to accept a lot of different ideas and how to deal with problems in a civilized manner.

And yet, I know better than most people that centers of learning are not always so safe. I was shot at more than once in my high school, and stabbed three times. I have known dozens of other survivors of such extreme scholastic violence, and I have studied the phenomenon. Like many of you, I watched in horror as the events of the Virginia Tech massacre unfolded just a few short weeks ago. I know all too well the importance of a strong, qualified, competent, satisfied security force on campus. And now this morning, there was another incident involving a Fresno State student (though it was off campus).

Maybe some of you remember around the end of March there were several Haitians that made it to the shore of America. And we all know the policy of "Wet Foot, Dry Foot", only applies to Cubans. I personally don't understand the distinction:

Cubans fleeing their country for democracy OK, Haitians fleeing their county for democracy, NOT OK

Explain that to me......

A long-running hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay gained several participants in recent weeks amid complaints over conditions at a new unit of the prison. All were being force-fed through tubes, Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, said Monday.

How many is "all?" Somewhere between 13 and 40, depending on the DOJ's story or the statements of defense attorneys.

"My wish is to die," 27-year-old Adnan Farhan Abdullatif of Yemen said through his lawyer. "We are living in a dying situation."

Suicide is almost always a desperate act by someone who feels helpless and hopeless.

"I am slowly dying in this solitary prison cell," says Omar Deghayes, a British refugee and Guantánamo Bay prisoner. "I have no rights, no hope. So why not take my destiny into my own hands, and die for a principle?"

The Nation

Of course there will be a number of lawsuits, and recount efforts, but the politicians and MSM will go through the motions, and the stories about the lawsuits will drop to the back pages. And then, sometime around spring of next year, when no one is looking....

  Military Doctors at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility regularly force-feed detainees who are trying to fight back in the only way they can - by going on hunger strikes.  How can physicians, who take an oath to do no harm, deal with the gap between military orders and their own ethics?
  A look at this....

In a video posted on her blog, the heartless, soulless, brainless Ann Coulter wannabe Michelle Malkin "satirizes" Cindy Sheehan's symbolic hunger strike.

"Gaining Weight on the Sheehan Plan"

It should come as no surprise that many of the comments posted by her socially retarded, involuntarily celebate admirers suggest that they're sexually aroused by the sight of the Turd Reich's second-favorite pinup girl pigging out while she cruelly mocks the grieving mother of a soldier killed in combat.

Obviously, no nice person would ever suggest that it would be cosmic justice for Malkin's own children to die as soon -- and as painfully -- as possible in an immoral, illegal, unnecessary war.

But I guess I'm not a nice person.

I found this paragraph interesting from what appears to be Cindy's blog on politicalaffairs.net:

I traveled from Venice to the frontier of Italy to the province of Udine which is right at the foot of the pre-Alps. I am here for a huge youth festival which includes many elements of social justice and peace work. It is beautiful and the air feels different from other places that I have travelled. It is strangely soft and gentle as is the natural light. However, there is not a Jamba Juice on every corner, so blended juice drinks with protein powder are impossible to find.

I couldn't find where anyone else had posted this on dailykos; forgive me if someone has.  I also did a quick scan of drudgereport, redstate, powerline to see if this was the opening offensive of some sort of smear. I didn't see any reference to this story on those sites at the time of this posting. 

Hat tip to this post on the venerable geek site digg for this.

This article is subject to the digg/slashdot effect, so I am reproducing the entire post in the fold.

Strange juxtaposition yesterday.  On the two hundred thirtieth birthday of the US of A, - two strangely related events took place.  They were oddly related by a nutritional connection - yet diametrically opposed in cultural significance.

The events involved silly gluttony in New York, and a very serious hunger strike in Washington DC.  And guess which one was covered by every single major news network, here and abroad?  You betcha....the annual Nathan's hot dog eating contest at Coney Island won hands down.   How's that for ugly

Crossposted from MY LEFT WING

This was previously posted by Damnit Janet -- reprinted with her permission.

I am full of awe and gratitude to Janet for her dedication and tenacity and compassion.

There is still time to get involved and sign the pledge.

    After naming all the Media outlets whose headlines dare question the decency of Guantanamo Bay Special Camp, Fox anchor Bill O'Reilly goes to the Source. You could not find a closer source about the camp, namely the Head Jailer. You could not find a more objective source either, because the man really takes pain to treat prisoners as objects of study. How humans detention can resolve into, quote, a « fascinating » study ? Only a strange sense of duty can so aptly forget that the subjects of his comparisons, are primarily prisoners in his own custody -- thus barring any chances that a jailer's register could be studied for anything else than his own sick state of mind. Neither prisoners, nor jailers can be compare to anything of value, in any science.
Foxnews is airing a video interview of Col Michael Bumgarner, by B. O'Reilly, inside X-Ray camp, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Only with Bill O'Reilly, of course, can TV viewers meet "the Head Jailer" of the controversial residence. Some quotes follow.