His tenure denial was atrocious. Throw him some love:

normanfinkelstein.com
finkelgate.com

In Israel, it is illegal to call for the laws to be applied equally to all its citizens regardless of religion. If you support a national government for its citizens and not for “Jews all over the world”, you are prohibited from forming a political party. There’s your ‘democracy’ in the Middle East for you…

Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian-Israeli member of Knesset from the Balad party has been charged with secret accusations and has given up his seat. While the charges are being kept secret, they aren’t hard to figure out: Bishara has openly called for equality in the political sphere for all Israeli citizens.

Sonja Karkar lays it out:

All of Israel’s one million plus Palestinian residents — the survivors and descendants of the 1948 Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine — have long felt discriminated against, despite Israel paying lip-service to their democratic rights. They also felt on the sidelines of what was being played out in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, that is until Azmi Bishara, the outspoken political leader of the National Democratic Assembly (NDA) or Balad in Israel and a Knesset member, began campaigning for the collective rights of Palestinians. His vision is not just for change inside Israel, but involves an all-inclusive civil rights struggle against political Zionism — the racist and colonialist policies that have dispossessed, marginalised and oppressed all Palestinians for almost 60 years. This is what Israel is at pains to put down by any means. It cannot afford to have someone like Azmi Bishara rallying people to his way of thinking. Now, after many attempts to muzzle him, Israel has finally succeeded in getting him to resign from the Knesset and to stay out of the country.

by Sarah Shields

“Has anyone told you that you look like Gandhi?” my companion asked Professor Sami al-Arian. Al-Arian was sitting behind a plastic wall, wearing striped prison clothes and speaking into two telephones.

It was easy not only to see the resemblance, but also to feel it. Dr. al-Arian has a strikingly similar smile, Gandhi-like eyes and the same lean frame as he finished the first week of his hunger strike. More remarkable, after being both prosecuted and persecuted, he maintains his confidence in the rule of law, the American system of justice and the basic goodness of his persecutors. And he has come through it all with his good nature and sense of humor, despite his weakening condition.

Dr. Sami al-Arian has now spent four years in jail, three of those in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. In December 2005, despite years to prepare the case against him, and an estimated $80 million dollars of American tax money to pursue it, Dr. al-Arian was acquitted of eight of the 17 charges against him, including conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to murder and maim people abroad, conspiracy to support a foreign terrorist organization (two counts), mail fraud (two counts) and obstruction of justice (two counts). After agreeing in a plea bargain to a single charge in exchange for being released and deported, more than a year after his acquittal he is still imprisoned. We visited him at Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, where he is being held for contempt of court for refusing to testify in an unrelated matter.

Most people forget that the Bill of Rights actually starts at 0, not, as is commonly thought, with #1. The Fathers probably made a bad marketing choice starting with 0, but it was long before counting had been invented, so it’s understandable. Amendment 0 gives the president the powerful power to create definitions to words and stuff. [That's the actual text, not my wording.]

Washington Post: Bush Defines Marriage As Man and Woman We can all sleep easy tonight, thanks Mr. President!

Lewis Black disagrees:

Mighty Seek blogged about Apple trying to remove the word “pod” from the English language. Do a Google search, they are actually trying to assert that the word “pod” has now come to be associated with Apple regardless of the context it is used in.

What a load of bullshit. I love Apple computers and iPods and I’ve talked several people into buying them. Corporate-facist tactics like this make me reconsider. The word “pod” was around a lot longer than the “iPod” and it will probably be around long after the Apple company has left the Earth.

Mighty Seek is proposing a boycott on iTunes until Apple drops this crazed overreaching. Check out Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle until Apple gets its shit together and stops harrassing law-abiding Americans and Britains.