The thickest plank of McGovern’s 1972 platform, the one that carried the weight, was anti-war. George McGovern was the first member of the U.S. Senate to explicitly denounce U.S. policy in Indochina, and it’s safe to assume that were he still in the Senate, he would have been the first to denounce the Bush administration’s plans in Iraq. But as it stands, McGovern is no longer an elected official, and his opposition, and whatever influence it may have, comes now from the mouth of an elder statesman, a World War II hero, the collective imagination’s anti-Nixon transported into this anxious echo of belligerent Nixonian daydreams. George McGovern isn’t running for anything. He can say anything he wants. And here he is, riding a second wind in Stevensville, Mont., saying to Brad Tyer, editor of Missoula Independent, pretty much the same things he said 30 years ago: Stop hitting. Feed the hungry.
Nigel Jaquiss of Willamette Week and Pete Kotz of Cleveland Scene are awarded special citations by the Education Writers Association.
State and local governments have known about it for 15 years. So why are Hopkins residents still living with gasoline-tainted water? Columbia Free Times' Amanda Presley looks into the lack of action on the potentially toxic water in rural Hopkins, S.C., which is predominantly black and low-income. "Rosa Nowell, who used to live in a home where [a state agency] found contamination, asks how long the wells have been affected. It’s a question no one at the meeting can answer. 'That’s where I raised my children, from babies,' Nowell says. 'We were there.'”
Joe Lieberman, a Democratic hawk for war in Iraq, keeps a crystal dove in his Hartford, Conn., office. This gave peace activist Christopher Allen-Doucot hope when he led a delegation to present Lieberman with their views. Allen-Doucot "unveiled his photographs of starving, bullet-riddled Iraqi children, gathered from his repeated trips to sanction-plagued Iraq, and Lieberman found himself face to face with the consequences of the policies he so vocally supports." The senator's response? Sadness in private, silence in public, Dan Levine writes in the Hartford Advocate.
