“We are turning to socialism and away from God!” Joseph Grab said as he stood amid the thousands who gathered on Capitol Hill today to attend Michele Bachmann’s “House Call” protest against the health care reform bill. Grab, a retired engineer from Hershey, Pennsylvania, was clutching a leather-bound King James in his hand and a green sign that simply said “Pray” in the other. “This bill is going to include murdering babies, it’s going to bankrupt us, and it’s going to make totalitarianism grow,” he said gravely.
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev
(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)
In its extraordinary decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health last month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a prohibition on same-sex marriage violates the Massachusetts constitution. While the court drew some support from federal precedents, its decision was plainly grounded in previous interpretations of the state constitution and its distinctive guarantees of equality and liberty. The U.S. Constitution was not involved; it was state--not federal--law that formed the basis for this ruling.
There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses or police and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Sometimes neighbors would hear the short, sharp sound of gunfire and then nothing, a silence you can't describe unless you've heard it, which if you're lucky you haven't.
ON DECEMBER 7, 1982, I met with five Nicaraguans and two Americans in an executive suite at the Four Ambassadors Hotel in downtown Miami to rehearse for a press conference we would be holding the next day. The Nicaraguans were prominent (and in my case not so prominent) opponents of the Somoza and Sandinista regimes who were to be introduced as directors of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), that is, the contras. The Americans were CIA agents. The one in charge, known to us as Tony Feldman, was accompanied by Thomas Castillo, one of his several assistants.
