Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of GoLeft TV and Air America’s Ring of Fire talks with former Alabama governor Don Siegelman about the political motivations behind his prosecution.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat, and Committee Members Linda Sánchez (D-CA), Artur Davis (D-AL), and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) announced three critical actions today in the Committee’s investigation into allegations of selective or poltiically-motivated prosecution in the Justice Department.

The Members today invited Karl Rove to testify before the committee, urged the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate those allegations and demanded that Attorney General Michael Mukasey provide additional documents in the case.

Today’s actions result from the Committee’s majority staff report, also released today, which details the cases, interviews and documents they have reviewed since the Committee began its investigation last year.

“There continue to be numerous complaints of selective or politically motivated prosecution since our investigation began last year,” Conyers said. “The actions we are taking today, including calling Karl Rove to testify, are an effort to get to the bottom of this matter.”

Today’s announcement stems from the Committee’s 2007 oversight hearing on selective prosecution, during which testimony was heard and documents were entered into the record regarding cases from Alabama, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Since the hearing, majority committee staff has continued its investigation with interviews and document collection about additional cases across the country.

“While this report is extensive and significant progress has been made in our investigation, many facts remain unknown,” Conyers said. “The Justice Department has simply not been forthcoming and I feel the only way to move this investigation forward is to seek further independent investigation and testimony from Karl Rove, who appears to be the missing link in a chain from the White House to the Justice Department.”

More information is available on the House Judiciary Committee’s Website.

The News is Buried by the Pope’s Visit to America

See the Complete Works of Charles Darwin

by Glynn Wilson

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species, the controversial book that set forth the theory of evolution and changed religion and science forever, is among a large collection of private papers now published on the Web with free access by the public for the first time.

Charles Darwin’s Private Papers Published Online

It is somewhat ironic that the news was buried in the United States by the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, who is trying his best to save the Catholic church from extinction by admitting that the massive clergy sex abuse scandal was ‘badly handled’, duh.

I could not help but laugh at Wolf Blitzer and the other talking heads who, in the absence of any knowledge of what they were reporting on, talked about how the pope and the Catholic church were “for freedom and democracy.” What?

You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know enough history to realize that the Catholic Church has been as tied up in the quest for world monarchy as all the kings of Europe. The church has lost influence over the world’s masses just as the kings of old.

At least our wannabe king, George W. Bush, did not kiss the pontiff’s ring when he met him at the airport. Bush’s ignorant embrace of the pope is not about science or religion, though. It is about politics. The Republican Party would like to keep getting a share of the vote from some of the 64 million people living in the U.S. who claim to be Catholic.

But when all is said and done, the news about Darwin is far more interesting and important, since it marks the first time such a considerable collection of such important scientific papers have been made available through the Internet to the great masses of people on the Web.

According to the Cambridge University Library, the release on darwin-online.org.uk is the largest in history, comprising some 20,000 items and 90,000 images.

“This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, director of the project. “His publications have always been available in the public sphere – but these papers have until now only been accessible to scholars.”

The collection includes thousands of notes and drafts of his scientific writings, notes from the voyage of the Beagle when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution, and his first recorded doubts about the permanence of species.

It also contains photographs of Darwin and his family, newspaper clippings, reviews of his books and more, including caricatures and notes from his boyhood musings on birds.

Publication in 1859 of Origin of Species – after years of prevarication – established Darwin as a leading scientific thinker. He was already known to the public after publication of The Voyage of the Beagle.

The book sparked a major public debate, including a bitter denunciation from the Church of England, which regarded the book as heretical, as did the Catholic Church, although in recent years, the church has tried to change its anti-science image by acknowledging the book’s contribution to human understanding of science.

“Darwin changed our understanding of nature forever,” van Wyhe said. “His papers reveal how immensely detailed his researches were. The release of his papers online marks a revolution in the public’s access to – and hopefully appreciation of – one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science.”

Well, not if the Pope’s attendance of a baseball game gets more attention by the corporate news media.