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This week on Uprising:

* Reese Erlich: Obama Differs Little from Bush on Foreign Policy
* New Document Shows Vatican Knew About Sex Abuse Scandal for Fifty Years
* Black Agenda Report on New York City’s Prison System
* Is the Left Responding to the Tea Party?

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Obama Differs Little from Bush on Foreign Policy

US Admiral Mike Mullen met with tribal elders in the tiny Afghan village of Marjah this week. Marjah was the site of a major offensive by US troops intended to rout Taliban fighters, and a pre-cursor to a larger fight in Kandahar this June. Mullen’s meeting followed a surprise visit to Afghanistan by President Obama this past Sunday. Obama addressed US troops in the region, whose numbers have been steadily increasing under the President’s new policy. He also met with President Karzai in a meeting intended to convey a strong message over rampant corruption in the central government. Karzai had promised not to sign into law a 2007 bill that passed the warlord-dominated parliament providing blanket amnesty to all Afghan war criminals and human rights abusers. But recently the law simply took effect seemingly unannounced, causing an outcry among rights groups and other governments. Karzai’s own brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai is a well known drug lord operating in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar who, with government backing has remained in power. But there is another reason being cited for the President’s surprise Afghanistan visit. A week earlier, Karzai met with the leaders of Iran and China, a move that sent alarm bells ringing through the White House. President Obama has been pushing hard to garner international support for sanctions against Iran.

GUEST: Reese Erlich, Freelance foreign correspondent, who has covered the Middle East for 23 years and is the author of three books. His fourth, “Conversations with Terrorists,” will be published in September 2010. Find out more at www.reeseerlich.com.

New Document Shows Vatican Knew About Sex Abuse Scandal for Fifty Years

The international scandal around Pope Benedict and his knowledge of sex abuse cases in Germany and the United States, is not going away. Last week news surfaced of the Vatican’s decision to not defrock a Wisconsin-based priest who was known to have abused hundreds of hearing-impaired boys in the 1950s and 60s. Before being made Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the office overseeing misconduct by priests. The global firestorm over what he knew and/or failed to do, has culminated in some calling for him to step down as Pope even as some in the Catholic press are charging that the Pope is being unfairly targeted. A federal lawsuit filed in a Louisville, Kentucky court is attempting to hold the Pope responsible and question him about clergy abuse. But as a head-of-state, Pope Benedict enjoys immunity. On Wednesday the Associated Press obtained a letter written in 1963 to then Pope Paul VI by the head of a Catholic order, urging him to remove pedophile priests from active ministry. The letter, which suggests that the Vatican has known about the sexual abuse for more than 50 years, was among hundreds of documents given to the press by attorneys for victims of abuse here in California. Thousands of similar documents were to be made public in 2007 as part of a $660 million settlement with the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Members of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, gathered this week outside Our Lady of the Angels church in downtown LA, protesting the Pope’s handling of pedophile priests and the on-going delay in releasing documents about the cover-ups.

GUESTS: Anthony DeMarco, attorney representing hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse, Joelle Casteix, member of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP)

For more information, visit www.snapnetwork.org. Special thanks to Ernesto Arce.

Glen Ford is a writer and radio commentator and the Executive Editor of The Black Agenda Report. This week’s commentary is on New York City’s Prison System.

Visit www.blackagendareport.com for more information.

Is the Left Responding to the Tea Party?

Thousands of conservative Americans gathered over the weekend in Searchlight, Nevada, hometown of Democratic Senator Harry Reid, to kick off a national tour that will culminate in Washington DC on April 15th, tax day. Under the banner of the right-wing so-called Tea Party movement, activists carrying signs that read Don’t Tread On Me, rallied to condemn the Obama Presidency. Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, a Tea-Party favorite, addressed the crowds defending her recent rhetoric loaded with violent, firearms-related imagery where she urged her supporters to set their sights on “targets,” and to “never retreat, instead reload.” The provocative language coming from the right is not easily dismissed in light of yesterday’s charges against a Michigan-based right-wing Christian militia for conspiracy to murder police officers in an attempt to set of an anti-government insurgency. Chip Berlet, a Senior Analyst with the Boston-based Political Research Associates, has studied the spectrum of right-wing movements for many years. I recently ran into to him at the Annual Left Forum in New York.

GUEST: Chip Berlet, Senior Analyst with Political Research Associates

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

“Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.” — John W Gardner