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(CNSNews.com) - The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing has cut off all funding for Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, USA Today reported. According to the newspaper, "A person familiar with NASCAR's internal decisions confirmed that the racing organization has not paid Jackson's group any money in 2003 and doesn't plan to." USA Today reported that NASCAR has given a total of $250,000 to the Rainbow/PUSH sports division, generating criticism from conservative groups and racing fans, who see the money as appeasement. As CNSNews.com reported earlier, Bill Shack, a board member of Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, said auto-racing organizations such as...

AS PRESIDENT Bush winds up his five-nation tour of Africa, perhaps it's time to revisit that annoying question of whether he should have apologized for slavery. The president started off his tour in Senegal, where he visited the slave castle on Goree Island. Several newscasts quoted Bush when he called slavery a "sin," but added that he didn't issue a blanket apology for slavery. That apology has been a demand of some African-Americans for the past several years. Should Bush have apologized?

I became a tad agitated the other day. I was sitting in my joint -- The Mother Lode Steakhouse and BBQ -- minding my own business, when some guy decided it was his sworn duty to involve me in a political discussion. Now you have to understand, I rarely discuss politics in person. I write about it, I analyze it, I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and smoke the liberal wimps from here till next Tuesday. But, such is only one tiny segment of my life. When I write, I'm a writer. When I'm doing BBQ, I'm...

Last week's Supreme Court decisions, allowing states to use racial preferences to promote blacks and striking down the Texas anti-sodomy law, testify to three decades of failure of Republican presidents to restore that court to constitutionalism. Anyone who still thinks this court is conservative deludes himself and deceives those people who have voted, again and again, to stop these renegade justices from imposing their ideology upon our society. Consider. Of the nine sitting justices today, seven were nominated by Republicans. Two of the seven, John Paul Stevens, named by Ford, and David Souter, a Bush I nominee, voted not only...

DULUTH -- The controversy generated by Thomas Bieter's proposed lawsuit against me and the Weekly Reader here in Duluth for publishing a series on the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone seems to have missed the point. In those columns, I lay out the evidence, much of which is in the public record, that has led me to the belief that this was an assassination and that the White House may have been involved.

Memo on abortion and liberal bias by Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll, May 22, 2003 To: SectionEds Subject: Credibility/abortion I'm concerned about the perception---and the occasional reality---that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer. The apparent bias of the writer and/or the desk reveals itself in the third paragraph, which characterizes such bills in Texas and...

<p>There is growing fear among Democratic strategists that George W. Bush is making gains in their party's base, especially with minorities and labor. If true, this could be the most important political sea change in America in 70 years.</p> <p>Donna Brazile, the black turnout specialist who ran Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, has been telling the Democratic National Committee and anyone else who will listen, "don't take African-Americans for granted" because their loyalty is eroding and Mr. Bush is courting them aggressively.</p>

Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, has been suspended for two weeks from writing for the paper, the Columbia Journalism Review has learned. The news comes after the Times published an Editors’ Note Friday clarifying Bragg’s handling of a front-page feature story last June in the small, oyster-shucking town of Apalachicola, Florida. Earlier in the week, a reader had written to the Times expressing concern that Bragg had never been spotted in Apalachicola. According to the Editors’ Note, and Bragg himself, it was Bragg’s intern at the time, J. Wes Yoder, who did all the...

MONTREAL -- Prime Minister Jean Chretien says Canada is a better country than the United States because we've got gun control, abortion rights and no death penalty. Chretien issued the shopping list of Canada's virtues at his final Montreal fundraising dinner last night. "This is why we have gun control in Canada, because we are a different society ... We don't have big debates on the rights of abortion because we decided a long time ago in Canada it is the choice of women, which is not the case in a lot of U.S. states. 'DIFFERENT SOCIETY' "That is why...

<p>FOR all you conspiracy theorists out there, I've got a hot new one for you: Based on the available evidence offered over the past few days, it appears key Democrats on Capitol Hill are secretly in the employ of the president and his political adviser, Karl Rove.</p>

HUMAN RIGHTS organisations expressed increasing concern yesterday over the treatment of the captured Iraqis on the American “deck-of-cards” list of most-wanted regime members. Their intervention came after the detention of three more senior officials on Wednesday, including the former chief of military intelligence and the former head of the country’s military air defences. Their arrests brought the total to 11, but the Bush Administration is refusing to disclose where or in what conditions they are being held. The whereabouts of Abu Abbas, the Palestinian behind the 1985 hijacking of the cruise liner Achille Lauro, who was arrested by US special...

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Criticizing "the politics of ideology, anger and attack," while urging support for troops deployed abroad, former President Bill Clinton got a warm reception Monday from a national labor convention. "Nothing I did in the White House would have been possible without you and the other people in the labor movement," Clinton said, basking in applause from 4,000 representatives of the Laborers' International Union of North America. Clinton, addressing a traditional Democratic power base, criticized the Bush administration for turning what he said was a projected $5.8 trillion federal budget surplus when he left office into a...

WASHINGTON, April 8 — When they hand out all the medals for the Iraq war, I hope they save one for the best press secretary. I’ve got someone special in mind. Torie Clarke? Nope. Ari Fleischer? Try again. NO, THE BEST P.R. flak, the guy who gave the best quotes, who used the most illustrious picture words and the snappiest action words, who encapsulated the day’s action and message into simple pithy sentences was ... drum roll, please … Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. He’s the mother of all press secretaries. From “Today, the tide has turned, we are...

BASRA, Iraq, April 8 (UPI) -- Something fundamental has happened to the British and U.S. media during this war. Those who have spent time on the front lines with the coalition troops, whether embedded with individual units or traveling independently through liberated Iraq, have learned to love the military. Time after time, they saved our necks. They put our soft-skinned vehicles behind their armor when the shells came in. They told us when to duck and when it was safe to move. They shared their food and water with us, and were embarrassingly grateful when we let them use our...

I know I swore off Tom Friedman criticism — as well as Maureen Dowd criticism — but I'm going to backslide, just a little. In his Sunday column, he wrote the following flabbergasting passage. Or rather, it would be flabbergasting, if it weren't typical of Friedman, part of whose shtick is that "extremists" on "both sides" of the Arab-Israeli conflict are to blame for perpetual heartbreak. ". . . the Israeli and Palestinian mainstreams spent the last 36 years, since Israel's victory in 1967, avoiding any clear decision over how to govern [the territories]. So those extremists who had a...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Foreigners acting as "human shields" in Baghdad said on Friday they sense success in their mission to preserve vital facilities in the Iraqi capital. The Western volunteers, who hope the war in Iraq is now entering its final stages, believe their presence at water and power plants around Baghdad since before the war began has prevented U.S. and British planes bombing the facilities. "The plants we are staying at have not been bombed so far," Ingrid Termert, a retired teacher from Sweden, told Reuters in the Iraqi capital. "Water and power in Basra have been hit in...

DUVALL — Listeners of conservative radio station KVI-AM (570) are going pre-emptive against the peace movement, crashing rallies and overwhelming them with their numbers to where peace demonstrators complain that the informal rules of engagement have been violated. "It seems a little bit like a cheap shot, when they target your time and place," said Dave Meeds, 62, of Monroe, who held a "Power Corrupts" sign this week several hundred yards south of the intersection of the Woodinville-Duvall Road and Highway 203. If nothing else, the encounters are reshaping the protest landscape and in some cases have resulted in conflict....

An Australian human shield who has just left Baghdad says the Iraqi people do not want Coalition troops to help free them. Massive coalition air attacks on the capital have angered most of the city's population, former New South Wales government adviser Donna Mulhearn says. After six weeks in Baghdad, Ms Mulhearn left the war zone for Amman in Jordan yesterday. "Many civilian sites had been bombed. I visited patients in the hospitals and I wanted to get the message out back home," she said. Ms Mulhearn says she has seen civilians with horrific injuries including children suffering burns and...

WASHINGTON, April 1 (UPI) -- Animal-rights activists want U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to order the military to stop using dolphins and other animals to detect mines or chemical attacks in the war in Iraq. In a letter sent to Rumsfeld on Tuesday, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contends that the troops deserve the best defense but that using animals this way is cruel and may cost lives instead of saving them. The request follows reports that a 33-year-old dolphin, named Takoma who was charged with hunting for mines in the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr,...

American forces fought their first heavy engagement with Republican Guard units defending Baghdad last night as they forced their way across a vital bridge over the Euphrates. In battles up and down the Euphrates valley, the allies regained the initiative as aircraft and missiles bombarded key locations in Baghdad, 50 miles to the north, in the heaviest raids of the 12-day war. The fiercest fighting was on a front from the sacred city of Karbala in the west through Hiwaniyah to Hillah in the east, where units of the 3rd Infantry Division, supported by the 101st Infantry Division and backed...