Op-Ed

On Saturday, December 10, in London, England, leaders of the peace movement against the Iraq war from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Iraq will meet to strategize.  There is hope that the tide has already turned against the occupation, and that a coordinated international effort will be able to mobilize sufficient public pressure to bring the war to a complete end. 

If you can make it to London, sign up here: http://www.stopwar.org.uk

If you can't make it, I think I have an easy second-best course of action for you.  One of the speakers at the opening session in London will be Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., and at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam.  Phyllis has just published a book called "Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S. Power." 

You can buy it here: http://www.interlinkbooks.com/BooksC/challeng_empire.html

"Advice to Retirees: Embrace the future," syndicated columnist Tad Bartimus recently wrote in my local Seattle paper. Sounds good, but for Bartimus the future was a layoff, in a corporate cutback, from a 25-year career at the Associated Press news service. Faced with the Hobson's choice of agreeing to it or losing all health care access and pension benefits, she suddenly had to find ways to reinvent herself and survive, with less than half of her previously promised pension. She explores how her situation echoes the predicament of more and more Americans, like those who took middle-class futures for granted at companies such as General Motors, Delta Airlines, and Ford, but who now scramble to get by at jobs paying a fraction of the wages they were used to. America's social contract is being ripped apart, she writes-then she backs off to counsel individual adaptation and seeing life as "a banquet," where we need to savor even the unexpected courses.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The Lord Impersonator is back again. This fella reappears every couple of years and causes no end of trouble. The jokester goes around persuading feeble-minded persons he is the Lord Almighty and that they are to do or say some perfectly idiotic thing under his instructions.

One of the worst cases we've had in Texas was the time the Lord Impersonator convinced 20 people in Floydada to git nekked, get into a GTO and drive to Vinton, La., where they ran into a tree. Seein' 20 nekkid people, including five children, come out of a GTO startled the Vinton cops. The nekkid citizens all said God told them to do it.

Quite a few people have been mishearing the Lord lately. The Rev. Pat Robertson thinks the Lord told the people of Dover, Pa., they shouldn't ask for His help anymore because they elected a school board Robertson doesn't like. And Rep. Richard Baker of Louisiana said right after Hurricane Katrina that "we finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did it."

"What's more moderate than exploring the truth?  Is there really partisanship in truth?...We don't need to be afraid to use the word impeachment.  It is the process that was set up.  It's not a bad word.  It stands for accountability.  It is the system of justice in our political system…There's nothing radical in that." -- TONY TRUPIANO

While no congressional incumbent has yet introduced articles of impeachment or a resolution of inquiry into grounds for impeachment of Bush and Cheney, numerous 2006 candidates are committed to doing so.  I know because they're contacting ImpeachPAC, a political action committee I work for which was recently created to support pro-impeachment candidates.

Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

The stench of panic in Washington hangs like a winter fog over Capitol Hill and drifts down Pennsylvania Avenue. The panic stems from the core concern of every politician in the nation's capital: survival. The people sweating are Republicans, and the source of their terror is the deadly message spelled out in every current poll: Bush's war on Iraq spells disaster for the Republican Party in next year's midterm elections.

Take a mid-November poll by SurveyUSA: In only seven states did Bush's current approval rating exceed 50 percent. These consisted of the thinly populated states of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi. In 12 states, including California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan, his rating was under 35.

You have to go back to the early 1970s, when a scandal-stained Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's. Like Bush, Nixon had swept to triumphant reelection in 1972. Less than two years later, he turned the White House over to Vice President Ford and flew off into exile.

Since Bill Moyers retired, I watch PBS pretty rarely. I remembered why when I saw the NOVA special on New Orleans, "The Storm that Drowned a City." It gave some useful chronology, but in an hour-long program on the genesis and history of the storm, they avoided raising even the possibility that the Bush administration may have contributed to the disaster.

I waited and waited for discussion of global warming's potential role in fueling Katrina's ferocity. Finally, near the end, this science-focused show spent maybe a minute quoting a scientist suggesting a possible link, and then quickly undermined his words by having the prime expert they kept coming back to dismiss the connection. They didn't even try to link Katrina to the broader pattern of global climate change-related disasters, like increases in tornadoes, floods, droughts, and forest fires. (A year before Katrina, Swiss the world's second largest reinsurance company, warned of a potential $150 billion annual toll from these kinds of disasters). The NOVA show just kept repeating the same loop of scientists saying, we dodged the bullet before, but it's headed for us now.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving. But a mere soupcon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. We are abundantly blessed with lemons. Let us make lemonade.

I am grateful for the extraordinary number of readers who sent along their ideas on How to Fix All This. The ideas ranged from the sublime to the practical, from the universal and global to the price of milk. The country is teeming with good ideas, all of which we need.

I was particularly intrigued by this thought from peace activist Gen Van Cleve: It's 2009 and the Bush people are gone, leaving in their wake fury, suspicion, distrust -- basically, our name is mud, whether we've left Iraq by then or not. Most of the rest of the world considers us: A) insane, B) imperialist and C) morons. What to do?

Remember when John F. Kennedy announced that America would go to the moon within 10 years? That we would put all our technological, scientific and government expertise into making a grand project happen? And we did.

When Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our blessings -- or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money.

During the middle of the day on Friday, I spent an hour or two on a conference call with activists and congressional staffers discussing next steps to end the war.  We planned, among other things, to organize support for Congressman John Murtha's bill, H.J.Res. 73, which he introduced on Friday.  The bill resolves that:

"The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.  A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy."