GUEST STAR NO. 5: Next up on Passing Through, our guest blog featuring monthly stints by some of America's top political bloggers, is Zephyr Teachout, best known as the architect of Howard Dean's 2004 Internet strategy. A visiting assistant professor of election law at Duke University, she is the former national director of the Sunlight Foundation and a researcher at the Center for Investigative Journalism in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Zephyr also co-founded the Fair Trial Initiative, a North Carolina nonprofit dedicated to training young lawyers to be capital defense attorneys. An international expert on the use of the Internet in political campaigns, she has been featured on NPR, PBS, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

PORTS FOR PEACE: Annual business activity associated with the twenty-nine strategically vital West Coast ports that run from San Diego to Anacortes, Washington, and drive the US-Asia shipping network accounts for more than 10 percent of US GDP. When contract negotiations idled the ports for more than a week in October 2002, losses ran to $1 billion daily until President Bush invoked the first Taft-Hartley injunction since 1971 to force the International Longshore and Warehouse Union back to work.

So it was with some measure of satisfaction that 10,000 ILWU members staged the broadest labor action to date against Bush's Iraq War, shutting down all West Coast ports for the daytime shift on May 1. The ILWU's long history of radicalism stretches back to founder Harry Bridges, leader of the 1934 San Francisco general strike, and includes outspoken opposition to US wars from Korea to Iraq. The May Day walkout, said the ILWU's Craig Merrilees, was a chance for port workers to "send a message to the folks in Washington that seem deaf to the overwhelming majority of Americans that want an end to the war." The action drew support from dozens of labor and peace groups--including in Iraq, where a statement signed by thirty-seven Iraqi labor leaders demanded an immediate withdrawal of US troops and expressed solidarity with workers around the world who "organised strikes and demonstrations to end the occupation."   MAX FRASER

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