The ACLU's stance on AETA, Potter writes, could be viewed as an example of history repeating itself. In 1940, the ACLU leadership passed a resolution barring communists from top positions and voted to remove Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the board because she was a member of the Communist Party. Not only was the ACLU barring communists, some ACLU leaders even supplied documents on the group's activities to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

The National Lawyers Guild, on the other hand, did not accommodate the government's demands during the Red Scare. Most of the attorneys in key Red Scare court cases were NLG members, Potter writes. "It continues to do so today. National Lawyers Guild members have been representing `eco-terrorists' in court, and the guild's executive director, Heidi Boghosian, has firmly positioned the organization on-record against the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the FBI's `Operation Backfire,' and the broader campaign to persecute animal rights and environmental activists," Potter states.

On Friday, Governor Mitt Romney had breakfast with billionaires. JOHN PAULSON, Paul Singer and Ken Langone who have dropped more than a million dollars each into the Romney “Super-PAC” Restore Our Future. As Butch said to Sundance, “Who ARE these guys?” Singer's known as "The Vulture" on Wall Street. Langone's database company came up with the list of innocent Black voters that Katherine Harris wiped off the voter rolls of Florida in 2000. But who is Paulson, a guy so dark and devious he doesn't even have a nick-name? I tried to join them ("Sorry, sir") just to ask why Romney was chowing down with the nation's most notorious billionaires and ballot bandits. Here is just a bit about Breakfast Billionaire #3: John Paulson from my new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps—An investigation of Karl Rove, the Koch Gang and their Buck-Buddies. There's a comic book inside by Ted Rall with an introduction by Bobby Kennedy Jr. Get it here now.

“What I’d like to say to mothers this Mother’s Day is, instead of going out for brunch, tell your family, ‘Let’s stay home and learn what the War on Terror is all about. Let’s learn why, for example, someone like Anwar Jawad [in Iraq] would have her whole family slaughtered on the streets by people, our troops, and why our children in the military want to get out of these countries so desperately.’” -- Author Susan Galleymore in an interview on “Democracy Now!” radio, 2009.

What do mothers and entire societies undergo when their offspring fight in wars? Social justice activist-journalist Susan Galleymore had the experience thrust upon her when she became a reluctant “military mother,” and made it her business to go forth, find out and publish her findings. Her book, Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak about War and Terror is the ambitious, stunning result.

The alarming spike in autism in recent years has sent doctors and parents on a search for answers. And while many controversies have erupted around the issue, none have gotten us any closer to a definitive explanation, and many key concerns remain unexplored. Moving beyond the distractions of the vaccine debate, The Autism Puzzle is the first book to address the compelling evidence that it is the pairing of environmental exposures with genetic susceptibilities that may be impacting the brain development of children.

Journalist Brita Belli brings us into the lives of three families with autistic children, each with different ideas about autism, as she explores the possible causes. She interprets for readers compelling evidence that environmental toxins—including common exposures from chemicals mounting in our everyday lives—may be sparking this disorder in vulnerable children. Belli calls for an end to the use of hazardous materials—like toxic flame retardants used in electronics and furniture, which have been banned elsewhere--insisting that we cannot afford to experiment with our children. The Autism Puzzle puts a human face on the families caught in between the debates, and offers a refreshingly balanced perspective.

Classified Woman “The Book the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read is a Book Everyone Must Read”

A Surreal Journey into the Heart of the Beast Called the Police State

In this startling new memoir, Sibel Edmonds—the most classified woman in U.S. history—takes us on a surreal journey that begins with the secretive FBI and down the dark halls of a feckless Congress to a stonewalling judiciary and finally, to the national security whistleblowers movement she spearheaded. Having lived under Middle East dictatorships, Edmonds knows firsthand what can happen when government is allowed to operate in secret. Hers is a sobering perspective that combines painful experience with a rallying cry for the public’s right to know and to hold the lawbreakers accountable. With U.S. citizens increasingly stripped of their rights in a calibrated media blackout, Edmonds’ story is a wake-up call for all Americans who, willingly or unwillingly, traded liberty for illusive security in the wake of 9/11.

"If no one knows if it’s making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?"

The following is an excerpt from Rachel Maddow's new book, "Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power"

"In the little town where I live in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, we now have a “Public Safety Complex” around the corner from what used to be our hokey Andy Griffith–esque fire station. In the cascade of post-9/11 Homeland Security money in the first term of the George W. Bush administration, our town’s share of the loot bought us a new fire truck—one that turned out to be a few feet longer than the garage where the town kept our old fire truck. So then we got some more Homeland money to build something big enough to house the new truck. In homage to the origin of the funding, the local auto detailer airbrushed on the side of the new truck a patriotic tableau of a billowing flaglike banner, a really big bald eagle, and the burning World Trade Center towers.

U.S. corporations that reap billions from making nuclear weapons have "a direct voice" as to "their use and deployment," according to professor Michel Chossudovsky in a recently released book.

What's more, he says, if nuclear weapons are integrated with conventional armaments, a decision to use nuclear weapons could be made by battlefield generals.

On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held at U.S. Strategic Command headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base, Omaha, Neb., that brought together more than 150 "senior executives from the nuclear industry and military-industrial complex," writes Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

Few works of contemporary non-fiction have had more lasting impact on the social consciousness of the overall society from which it arose than "The Other America: Poverty in the United States", Michael Harrington's now classic tome on the egregious conditions under which what we would now call the "underclass" lived in mid-20th century American society. With an uncommon verve and uncanny precision, Harrington painstakingly detailed the disgusting and shocking realities of life for those many millions of Americans of both color and ethnicity living lives of desperate poverty in the midst of the affluent society. Millions of readers, myself included, were shocked to discover the extent to which this world coexisted with our own, and many of the social action programs that arose in the 1960s and thereafter used this book as a kind of reference guide to the realities of poverty in contemporary society. Indeed, what is most disturbing about anyone re-reading the book is the discovery of how little conditions have changed for those who through the accident of birth, color, and ethnic origin, find themselves inexorably trapped in the vicious cycle of poverty.