“My name is Dankpannah Dr. Charles Ghankay Taylor, the 21st President of the Republic of Liberia.” Taylor’s first words on the witness stand, seemingly a statement of the simplest facts, already hinted at his country’s tortured past.

I didn’t even hear him coming. Perched on the side of the steps leading into Fort Greene Park on Willoughby, I was too busy tapping away on my iPhone like the dopamine junkie that I am.

Like the man says, “It’s déjà vu all over again.” Unless the State Legislature intervenes, on May 31, facing a more than $1.8 billion budget gap for 2009, the MTA will hike the base fare for NYC’s subways and buses to $2.50.

The setup is simple. One prison closes, another opens. The prisoners are transferred. A packet of letters is found. Well, three packets.

Brooklyn native Mark Winston Griffith has been a community activist in Central Brooklyn since the early 1990s. Among other projects, he helped launch the Central Brooklyn Credit Union and the Central Brooklyn Partnership; and from 2005 to 2007, he was the co-director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project.

As term limits and elections loom—with much of the current City Council scheduled for eviction in 2009—Mayor Bloomberg (along with more than a few members of the council) has indulged in an achingly long flirtation with the idea of repealing the limits that stand between him and a third term.

It starts with someone like Milagros Munoz. She has lived in East New York for nearly all of her 46 years.

In the long twilight of the U.S. of A, nobody has been younger or closer to heaven than the Students for a Democratic Society.

Like many people—at least, that’s what I tell myself these days—I wrote Naomi Klein off when she first appeared on the scene in the late 90s. There were too many earnest activists toting around No Logo, her surprise million-plus bestseller on the buzzword of that bygone day: “globalization.”

Anderson Fils Aime kicks back and tells me a story.
Back in May of this year, a month after he’d begun working as an organizer for the Pratt Area Community Council, he was at a community meeting when a woman approached him. “A resident comes in with this package saying, ‘My landlord’s trying to raise my rent.’ I say, ‘Well, are you in a rent-stabilized building?’ She says, ‘I don’t know, I just got this thing from DHCR [Division of Housing and Community Renewal].’”

The news came with a knock on the door just before 6 a.m. One of Max Abelson’s neighbors was out in the hall. Had he heard? It was all over the news. Starrett City was on the block.

Just when you thought we might finally pull out, the President is surging. The last time Bush fils dipped into the Viagra and pumped 20,000 troops into Iraq (for the last round of elections in fall ’05, both the number of daily attacks and U.S. casualties spiked.

Most of the reviewers of State of Denial have been polite enough not to mention how Woodward’s shifting
perspective neatly mirrors Bush’s poll numbers.

With over 500,000 visits a day, DailyKos is not just (in one ranking) the second most popular blog on the net. It’s also one of the main sites where the Democratic faithful are rallying, where they get the latest updates from the front lines, where they hash out their vision of what the party should be, their plans for victory.