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"Devastated by the results of the 2004 election, I was looking for a group that would help unite progressive Democrats with others, like the Greens, to form a 'big tent' for those who believe in social justice and peace. . .PDA has proven to be a creative, dynamic force for everything from electoral reform to ending the war in Iraq."
- Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, Global Exchange
Published May 6, 2008, on Truthdig.
In the increasingly unlikely event of a McCain-Clinton election, folks who care about the peace issue would have serious reason to worry. Both of these candidates are inveterate hawks, and what we would be up against is a choice between the neoconservatives and the neoliberals as to who could be more adventurous in getting us into unjustifiable foreign wars.
Both not only voted to authorize President Bush’s irrational invasion of Iraq but also have failed to apply those lessons to the real challenges we face, particularly concerning Iran. On the one hand, we have Sen. John McCain’s wildly inane “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” singing refrain, and on the other, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s commitment to “totally obliterate” Iran in response to any nuclear attack by Tehran on Israel. [more]
Last weekend I traveled to Phoenix, AZ, for a PDA fundraiser with Norman Solomon at the home of Dan and Sharon O'Neal. It's always great to go to Arizona. It's the cradle of PDA. It was a little house on Bird Lane, and Tim Carpenter welcomed us there four years ago saying, "Welcome to PDA Worldwide Headquarters!"
Board Member Joel Segal, one of our first D.C. supporters and senior legislative staffer to Congressman John Conyers, used to chide us for not having a D.C. address, saying it was necessary to have credibility on the Hill. When we started in '04, the Democratic Party was just beginning to feel the western winds. But our starter Arizona address is a great part of our history. It was a harbinger—coming from the left-hand side of the heartland. It is ironic—because the right-wing revolution started in Arizona, with Goldwater, and is in its last hour with the nomination of old-guard Arizona conservative John McCain. [more]
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) invited several current and former Administration officials to a May 6 hearing to explore the development and legal approval of Bush administration torture policies and other potential abuses of executive power.
Among those invited were former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, chief of staff to the vice-president David Addington, and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin. Professor John Yoo of the University of California, Berkeley, author of a March 2003 memorandum concluding that U.S. law does not bind the president when he orders interrogation of detainees, has also been invited to appear.
Recent news reports place White House decision makers and top administration officials, referred to as the “Principals,” at the center of the planning and approval of interrogation plans for U.S. detainees. These accounts describe a disturbing back-and-forth between Department of Justice legal advisors and these so-called “Principals” in which department legal advice was crafted as a supposed “golden shield” to immunize those conducting the harshest of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. [more]
Barack Obama’s triumph on Tuesday night was a victory over a wall that pretends to be a fly on the wall.
For a long time, the nation’s body politic has been shoved up against that wall--known as the news media.
Despite all its cracks and gaps, what cements the wall is mostly a series of repetition compulsion disorders. Whether the media perseveration is on Pastor Wright, the words "bitter" and "cling," or an absent flag lapel-pin, the wall’s surfaces are more rigid when they’re less relevant to common human needs and shared dreams.
"We’ve already seen it," Obama said during his victory speech in North Carolina, "the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along." [more]
Published on May 6, 2008 at Politico.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is about to lead her party into a major showdown over Iraq funding by violating two Democratic campaign pledges in one fell swoop.
To the critics, whether anti-war activists or House Republicans, Pelosi has made her feelings clear: Get over it.
This week’s maneuvering over a $200 billion war spending bill has revealed Pelosi self-confidently playing what she believes--with increasing evidence--is a strong hand. [more]
Published May 4, 2008 by Marin Independent Journal.
In these stormy times for Democrats, some unpleasant gusts from national crosswinds are blowing through Marin. Most people in this largely progressive area remain eager to evict Republicans from the White House--while the extended battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is generating a cascade of worries.
This is Obama country. Marin's primary voters went for him over Clinton by 56 percent to 38 percent - his widest margin of any county in the state. At the same time, many solid Democrats who strongly support Clinton can be found throughout the county.
As an elected Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the 6th Congressional District, I've been unhappy about the deteriorating tenor of the campaign during April. In an editorial after the Pennsylvania primary, the New York Times wisely urged Clinton "to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election." [more]
Published on May 5, 2008, by the OC Register.
Sixty-three years ago this week, what was left of Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending Europe's agony in World War II, the largest and arguably most horrible war in human history. Since then, the victory over Adolf Hitler has rightfully been celebrated as the salvation of Western democracy.
In the West, that epic struggle from the beginning has been cast as good vs. evil, the enlightened Franklin Roosevelt and courageous Winston Churchill vs. the despicable Hitler. The victory is widely seen as belonging to Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, with a nod to Churchill's pluck. This view is shared by the vast majority of Americans and most Western historians of the Cold War period. [more]
Published on Sunday May 4, 2008, by The New York Times.
The economic slowdown has swelled the ranks of people without health insurance. But now it is also threatening millions of people who have insurance but find that the coverage is too limited or that they cannot afford their own share of medical costs.
Many of the 158 million people covered by employer health insurance are struggling to meet medical expenses that are much higher than they used to be - often because of some combination of higher premiums, less extensive coverage, and bigger out-of-pocket deductibles and co-payments.
With medical costs soaring, the coverage many people have may not adequately protect them from the financial shock of an emergency room visit or a major surgery. For some, even routine doctor visits might now take a back seat to basic expenses like food and gasoline. [more]
Published Apr 22, 2008 on Truthdig.
How proud the Clintonistas must be. They have learned how to rival what Hillary once termed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” in the effort to destroy a viable Democratic leader who dares to stand in the way of their ambitions. The tactics used to kneecap Barack Obama are the same as had been turned on Bill Clinton in earlier times, from radical-baiting associates to challenging his resolve in protecting the nation from foreign enemies. Sen. Clinton’s eminently sensible and centrist—to a fault—opponent is now viewed as weak and even vaguely unpatriotic because he is thoughtful. Neither Karl Rove nor Dick Morris could have done a better job.
On primary election day in Pennsylvania, even with polls showing her well ahead in that state, Hillary went lower in her grab for votes. Seizing upon a question as to how she would respond to a nuclear attack by Iran, which doesn’t have nuclear weapons, on Israel, which does, Hillary mocked reasoned discourse by promising to “totally obliterate them,” in an apparent reference to the population of Iran. That is not a word gaffe; it is an assertion of the right of our nation to commit genocide on an unprecedented scale.
Shouldn’t the potential leader of a nation that used nuclear bombs to obliterate hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese employ extreme caution before making such a threat? Neither the Japanese then nor the Iranian people now were in a position to hold their leaders accountable, and to approve such collective punishment of innocents is to endorse terrorism. [more]
Plans were announced today for a major national anti-war assembly in Cleveland, Ohio, in June. The National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation is set for the weekend of June 28-29, 2008, in Cleveland and is open to all those opposed to the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq.
"May 1st marks five years since the 'mission accomplished' speech by President Bush on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier," said Greg Coleridge, spokesperson for the National Assembly organizing committee and director of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee. "In the past five years, the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. More than 4 million Iraqis have been injured or displaced. More than $500 billion U.S. tax dollars have been wasted. The U.S.-led war and occupation has been a military, human, and economic disaster." [more]
PDA, in a nation-wide media release, announced the endorsements today of Ed Fallon in Iowa's Third Congressional District, and Harry Taylor in North Carolina's Ninth CD, bringing the total number of national endorsements to fifteen. Endorsed candidates will benefit by being part of PDA's coordinated campaign strategy, which includes a door-to-door component. Each candidate received their endorsement after following the PDA endorsement policy, which begins with a local chapter endorsement.
Here's the list of PDA endorsed candidates: [more]
My husband, Jim, let me know two people were coming over to watch a movie, UNCOUNTED: The New Math of American Elections. I debated about asking him if I had to be there, then I decided to be supportive and watch the movie, too. Jim told me it was a film about the election process.
I was stunned by the events outlined in UNCOUNTED. When people (mainly Democrats) said there had been a problem in the last few elections, I attributed it to sour grapes. WRONG!
In the two weeks that followed our initial viewing, we scheduled four additional showings at our home. A total of 40 people--friends and people from the community--attended.
At the last showing there were 25 people (Republicans, Democrats and Independents) in our living room. We laid down ground rules, which said that this would not be a forum for debate; rather, we were coming together as Americans. We were coming together to safeguard something we all hold dear--our right to vote and have our votes counted accurately. UNCOUNTED was well received by members of both parties. People, who at the beginning said they thought the facts were slanted, were outraged by the end.
The results so far are: [more]
Former PDA Board member Jeff Cohen, in his book Cable News Confidential, tells the tale of Phil Donahue's dismissal from MSNBC as Bush rushed to war in Iraq--because he was an anti-war voice, which the network felt did not fit the mood of the nation. In other words, Phil Donahue, one of America's most popular talk show hosts and commentators, was purged to make way for the Bush agenda, and for war.
He went on working. And he has emerged with a stunning documentary, “Body of War,” that tells the story of Iraq vet Tomas Young, who was paralyzed from the chest down when he was wounded in that war. Many PDAers have probably met Tomas, as I did, in the course of anti-war work. His spirit of truth and courage shines from his eyes, and Phil and producer Ellen Spiro captured it in this film. The title, a figurative and literal evocation of its subject - “Body of War” - shows the flesh-and-blood reality of war's effect. [more]
For several years now, the news media have identified healthcare and the war in Iraq as key issues in American politics. But very little of the reporting or the punditry goes beneath the buzz-word surfaces to the human realities that span from local hospitals to a faraway war.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” Martin Luther King Jr. said 40 years ago, “is approaching spiritual death.” Today, nearly one in six Americans has no health insurance, and tens of millions of others are woefully under-insured--while the war in Iraq continues to further skew the U.S. government's budget priorities.
By launching the national “Healthcare Not Warfare” campaign, Progressive Democrats of America is moving ahead with a grassroots opportunity to turn from warfare to healthcare for all. While growing ever since it came into existence four years ago, PDA has been working with--and, more often, pushing--Democrats in Congress to end the occupation of Iraq. And, integral to its progressive program, PDA has been mobilizing support behind H.R. 676, the bill to create a universal single payer system to guarantee healthcare for all. [more]
If you subscribe to MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL for your email provider, then you should be aware of recent and not so recent developments with these companies, and why, as a progressive activist you should move to gmail or some other provider as soon as humanly possible. Not a very appealing idea is it? Read on.
A few years ago, Yahoo and AOL both implemented a high-speed toll lane for delivery of their emails. Business senders can pay a fee per email to ensure their communications are delivered quickly. For those of us like PDA, who get classified as business because of the size of our lists, this fee is too costly, so we get relegated to the slow lanes in the delivery of emails, which appears to open doors for other monkey business by these companies. [more]
A new 7-point Progressive Agenda will be delivered this Saturday to tens of thousands of Americans demonstrating nationwide for U.S. troops out of Iraq and no attack on Iran.
Progressive Democrats of America, along with a coalition of groups, will be distributing the “Progressive Challenge 2008” agenda by the thousands at more than a dozen demonstrations across the country.
Endorsed by leading peace and justice advocates such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Jim Hightower, Jackson Browne, Mayor Rocky Anderson, Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Tom Hayden, “Progressive Challenge 2008” will be utilized in the coming months by activists to confront candidates for office, including presidential candidates. [more]