By Bill Rau for www.consumersforpeace.org

Washington, D.C.
February 5, 2007

The arrests started just five minutes after people
entered Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) office in the
Senate Office Building. The first of a planned
three-month series of occupations of U.S. legislators’
offices was designed to demand specific action to
quickly end the U.S. war in and occupation of Iraq.

About 50 people, representing nearly twenty
participating organizations, took part in the
nonviolent civil disobedience. Both TV and print media
covered the event.

The nonviolent actions will re-occur over the next two
to three months, both at the U.S. Congress offices and
the state offices of Senators and Representatives.
Also, on February 5th, events were held at McCain’s
office in Phoenix and the state offices of the two
senators from Illinois— Barack Obama and Richard
Durbin, the Senate Majority Whip.

The occupation called upon Senator McCain—as it will
in all subsequent actions—to:

· Publicly declare that he will vote against further
funding for the war and occupation;
· Introduce legislation to provide full benefits and
quality health care to returning service men and
women;
· Introduce a companion Senate Resolution to
forthcoming HR Resolution 508;
· Introduce legislation to provide funds for
reconstruction in Iraq by neutral humanitarian
organizations.

According to Zanne Joi, a member of Code Pink: Women
for Peace, the occupation of Senator McCain’s office
was designed to appeal to his conscience, as he had
been subject to violence as a prisoner of war in Viet
Nam.

Joi said that arrest was a risk necessary to
demonstrate people’s commitment to ending the U.S.
military actions in Iraq. Speaking outside McCain’s
office, Gael Murphy, also of Code Pink, said that
arrest was less a risk than was taking no action
against the war.

Following a briefing and making plans to deal with
potential arrests, the demonstrators gathered in the
hallway outside of Senator McCain’s office. Photos of
Iraqis affected by the war and occupation were
displayed. The names and ages of both Iraqis and U.S.
military personnel killed during the occupation were
read out. The naming continued as they entered
McCain’s office. After each name, others chanted, “We
remember you.” Another song included the line: “Cut
the funding for the war, or we’re going to block your
door.”

Nine people were arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police
who knew of the planned action beforehand. The police
woman who met the group when it first arrived was very
accommodating, clear but flexible in her directions
about noise and keeping a path clear in the hallway.
Another officer dismissed the complaints of a McCain
staffer to stop the photography in the office. “She
has a right to take photographs,” the officer was
overhead to say to the staffer. At the same time, the
ten or so police who broke up the occupation were very
specific and official when they ordered people to
leave the office or face arrest.

Those arrested were led away in hand constraints.
Among them were Kathy Kelly and Jeff Leys of Voices
for Creative Nonviolence which has organized the
campaign. During the occupation of McCain’s office,
one member of the group kneeled on the floor with a
black hood over his head. His T-shirt read, “Shut down
Guantanamo.” He, too, was arrested.

It was hard watching people being led away, hands
cuffed behind their backs. But I admired their
continued vocal statements against the war as they
were taken down the hallway and eventually to jail for
processing.

For me, observing the occupation (a word that neatly
parallels, but in contra-distinction to the Iraq
occupation) was a rare event. I tend to avoid much
interaction with “law makers,” except for an
occasional letter to my senators and representative.
On one level, I admire the determination and courage
of people who regularly voice their opposition to so
many harmful U.S. policies and actions. At the same
time, I wonder: Does it change congressional
direction? Aren’t most members of Congress so embedded
with corporate views of well-being and U.S. “rights”
in the world that they don’t see alternatives to
narrow visions of “national security”? While I tend to
dwell on those “big” issues, it is good to see and
hear small and large groups clearly express viable
alternatives through nonviolent actions.

February 5th was chosen as the date to kick off the
campaign as it was the fourth anniversary of Colin
Powell’s speech at the U.N. during which he made false
and distorted arguments to justify the invasion of
Iraq in 2003. It also was the day that the U.S.
administration asked Congress for another $100 billion
to continue the war.

A number of local actions are being organized for
February, March and April as a part of the campaign.
More information is available at the website of the
Center for Creative Nonviolence
(http://www.vcnv.org/), Occupation Project.

***
We thank ConsumersforPeace.org for submitting this article for
publication by Traprock.

The views expressed in this article are those of the writer, and do
not necessarily reflect the views
of Traprock’s core group members, staff, volunteers or supporters.
Traprock Peace Center,
as an organization, does not take a position on civil disobedience.

by Greg Sargent
Talking Points Memo
Feb. 3, 2007

http://www.tpmcafe.com/user/gregsargent
Okay, it looks like one big news org is finally getting a little bit
tough with John McCain. The /New York Times/ has just posted a piece
pointing out

that many of the advisers he’s hired — from his ad men to his senior
aides — are people McCain’s aggressively faulted in the past for
launching political attacks that he said at the time were over the line.

The /Times/ points out that McCain has hired:

*** Mark McKinnon, Russell Schriefer and Stuart Stevens as his ad men —
but McCain complained in 2000 that the ads those men helped make for
Bush distorted his record.

*** The ad-making firm of Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm — which worked
on his 2000 campaign, but which also made the ads for the Swift Boat
Vets against John Kerry in 2004, which McCain called “dishonest and
dishonorable.”

*** Terry Nelson, a GOP operative who played a key role in launching the
infamous “bimbo” ad against former Tennessee Senate candidate Harold
Ford. Another of McCain’s advisers has faulted that ad.

One highlight of the piece: The /Times/ observes that these hires come
as McCain “transitions from being a onetime maverick to a candidate
seeking to gather his party around him and create an air of
inevitability about his prospects for winning nomination.”

“Onetime maverick” — exactly right. As in, /not/ a maverick this time
around. If only the other news orgs would follow the /Times/’ lead…

Read this WITH LINKS at:
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/feb/03/mccain_hiring_advisers_he_once_disparaged_as_overly_negative

CROATIA’S GHOSTS STALK THE BALKANS STILL

JULIA GORINThe Baltimore Sun jegorin@erols.com

George W. Bush recently echoed Vice- President Dick Cheney’s support for Croatia to join the European Union, a bid that has been stalled because of the former Yugoslav republic’s slowness to prosecute its 1990s war crimes, and its failure to ensure protections for minorities, including returning Serb refugees.

But Croatia’s problems go a lot deeper than the Balkan wars of the Clinton era. Consider the fact that the country faces the possibility of being excluded from the 2008 European soccer championship. The reason: When an Italian team’s fans taunted the Croatian team’s fans by waving Yugoslavia’s old communist flag at a match last August, the other side formed a giant human swastika and gave Nazi salutes.

Old habits are hard to break. “In World War II, Hitler had no executioners more willing, no ally more passionate, than the fascists of Croatia,” A. M. Rosenthal wrote in The New YorkTimes in 1998. “They are returning, 50 years later, from what should have been their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. TheWestern Allies who dug that grave with the bodies of their servicemen have the power to stop them, but do not.”

In 1995, the London Evening Standard’s Edward Pearce wrote that “you can understand Croatia best by saying flatly that if there is one place in the world where a statue of Adolf Hitler would be revered, it would be Zagreb,” Croatia’s capital.

And The Washington Times reported: “A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rushout, lining the road with their right arms raised in a Nazi salute as they chant, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Mobs chase minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods. Europe in the 1940s? No. Croatia in the 1990s.”

Last month, Croatian TVbroadcast video of a speechmade 10 years ago by Stjepan Mesic, now Croatia’s President. Mr. Mesic is seen saying, “This thing they’re asking Croats to do: go kneel [in atonement at a Croatian concentration camp.] We have no reason to kneel anywhere. We Croats won twice in World War II, while all the others did it only once. We won on April 10, [1941], when the Axis powers recognized Croatia’s independence [by creating the Fascist Independent State of Croatia], and we won after the war since we once again found ourselves with the victors.”

Such were the “allies” to whom retired American generals were dispatched in the 1990s to train against the Serbs and help restore Croatia to its Hitler-defined borders. (We later did the same for Kosovo, whose independence Washington continues to push for.) One has to wonder at the ubiquitous “Nazi” analogies hurled at the Serbs — the designated villains of the Balkans. It was Croatia, not Serbia, which was a trueto-life Nazi state where thousands of Serbs, Jews and other “undesirables” died in Second World Warera concentration camps (withassistance from Bosnian Muslims); and which as recently as 1995 ethnically cleansed 350,000 Serbs.

To placate the European powers, Croatia has finally apprehended two of its most notorious criminals from the Balkan wars, Ante Gotovina and Branimir Glavas. The move is unpopular because, as withBosnian and Albanian Serb-killers, Croatian Serb killers are national heroes.

While “Serb” has become synonymous with “war criminal” to the world, Croatians, Albanians and Bosnians accused of war crimes get acquitted, or get convicted and released to a hero’s welcome, or go unpunished and pursue political careers, as is the case withindic ted war criminal and Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku (and RamushH aradinaj before him). All the while, the United States has refused to admit its 1990s alliance not only withN azi nostalgists but, in Bosnia and Kosovo, withM uslim forces supplied and trained by al-Qaeda and Iran.

The Serbs weren’t angels, but they are the only Balkans players to have admitted as much and actively done something about it. The media, our policymakers and our pundits still refuse to take a messier but more accurate view of the Balkans. Nazism is not “part of the ugly past.” It was not a bout of madness that has been straightened out. The undead are among us.

Julia Gorin serves on the advisory board of the American Council for Kosovo

by Frank Rich
The New York Times
January 28, 2007

Hillary Clinton has an answer to those who suspect that her “I’m in
to win” Webcast last weekend was forced by Barack Obama’s Webcast of
just four days earlier. “I wanted to do it before the president’s State
of the Union,” she explained to Brian Williams on NBC, “because I wanted
to draw the contrast between what we’ve seen over the last six years,
and the kind of leadership and experience that I would bring to the
office.”

She couldn’t have set the bar any lower. President Bush’s speech was
less compelling than the Monty Python sketch playing out behind it: the
unacknowledged race between Nancy Pelosi and Dick Cheney to be the first
to stand up for each bipartisan ovation. (Winner: Pelosi.)

As we’ve been much reminded, the most recent presidents to face Congress
in such low estate were Harry Truman in 1952 and Richard Nixon in 1974,
both in the last ebbs of their administrations, both mired in unpopular
wars that their successors would soon end, and both eager to change the
subject just as Mr. Bush did. In his ’52 State of the Union address,
Truman vowed “to bring the cost of modern medical care within the reach
of all the people” while Nixon, 22 years later, promised “a new system
that makes high-quality health care available to every American.” Not to
be outdone, Mr. Bush offered a dead-on-arrival proposal that “all our
citizens have affordable and available health care.” The empty promise
of a free intravenous lunch, it seems, is the last refuge of desperate
war presidents.

Few Americans know more than Senator Clinton about health care, as it
happens, and if 27 Americans hadn’t been killed in Iraq last weekend,
voters might be in the mood to listen to her about it. But polls
continue to show Iraq dwarfing every other issue as the nation’s No. 1
concern. The Democrats’ pre-eminent presidential candidate can’t escape
the war any more than the president can. And so she was blindsided
Tuesday night, just as Mr. Bush was, by an unexpected gate crasher, the
rookie senator from Virginia, Jim Webb. Though he’s not a candidate for
national office, Mr. Webb’s nine-minute Democratic response not only
upstaged the president but also, in an unintended political drive-by
shooting, gave Mrs. Clinton a more pointed State of the Union “contrast”
than she had bargained for.

To the political consultants favored by both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Bush,
Mr. Webb is an amateur. More than a few Washington insiders initially
wrote him off in last year’s race to unseat a star presidential
prospect, the incumbent Senator George Allen. Mr. Webb is standoffish.
He doesn’t care whom he offends, including in his own base. He gives the
impression — as he did Tuesday night — that he just might punch out his
opponent. When he had his famously testy exchange with Mr. Bush over the
war at a White House reception after his victory, Beltway pooh-bahs
labeled him a boor, much as they had that other interloper who refused
to censor himself before the president last year, Stephen Colbert.

But this country is at a grave crossroads. It craves leadership. When
Mr. Webb spoke on Tuesday, he stepped into that vacuum and, for a few
minutes anyway, filled it. It’s not merely his military credentials as a
Vietnam veteran and a former Navy secretary for Ronald Reagan that gave
him authority, or the fact that his son, also a marine, is serving in
Iraq. It was the simplicity and honesty of Mr. Webb’s message. Like
Senator Obama, he was a talented professional writer before entering
politics, so he could discard whatever risk-averse speech his party
handed him and write his own. His exquisitely calibrated threat of
Democratic pushback should Mr. Bush fail to change course on the war —
“If he does not, we will be showing him the way” — continued to charge
the air even as Mrs. Clinton made the post-speech rounds on the
networks.

Mrs. Clinton cannot rewrite her own history on Iraq to match Mr. Obama’s
early opposition to the war, or Mr. Webb’s. She was not prescient enough
to see, as Mr. Webb wrote in The Washington Post back in September 2002,
that “unilateral wars designed to bring about regime change and a
long-term occupation should be undertaken only when a nation’s existence
is clearly at stake.” But she’s hardly alone in this failing, and the
point now is not that she mimic John Edwards with a prostrate apology
for her vote to authorize the war. (“You don’t get do-overs in life or
in politics,” she has said.) What matters to the country is what happens
next. What matters is the leadership that will take us out of the
fiasco.

Mr. Webb made his own proposals for ending the war, some of them
anticipating those of the Iraq Study Group, while running against a
popular incumbent in a reddish state. Mrs. Clinton, running for
re-election in a safe seat in blue New York, settled for ratcheting up
her old complaints about the war’s execution and for endorsing other
senators’ calls for vaguely defined “phased redeployments.” Even now,
after the Nov. 7 results confirmed that two-thirds of voters nationwide
want out, she struggles to parse formulations about Iraq.

This is how she explains her vote to authorize the war: “I would never
have expected any president, if we knew then what we know now, to come
to ask for a vote. There would not have been a vote, and I certainly
would not have voted for it.” John Kerry could not have said it worse
himself. No wonder last weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” gave us a
“Hillary” who said, “Knowing what we know now, that you could vote
against the war and still be elected president, I would never have
pretended to support it.”

Compounding this problem for Mrs. Clinton is that the theatrics of her
fledgling campaign are already echoing the content: they are so
overscripted and focus-group bland that they underline rather than
combat the perennial criticism that she is a cautious triangulator too
willing to trim convictions for political gain. Last week she conducted
three online Web chats that she billed as opportunities for voters to
see her “in an unfiltered way.” Surely she was kidding. Everything was
filtered, from the phony living-room set to the appearance of a
“campaign blogger” who wasn’t blogging to the softball questions and
canned responses. Even the rare query touching on a nominally
controversial topic, gay civil rights, avoided any mention of the word
marriage, let alone Bill Clinton’s enactment of the federal Defense of
Marriage Act.

When a 14-year-old boy from Armonk, N.Y., asked Mrs. Clinton what made
her “so inspirational,” it was a telltale flashback to those
well-rehearsed “town-hall meetings” Mr. Bush billed as unfiltered
exchanges with voters during the 2004 campaign. One of those “Ask
President Bush” sessions yielded the memorable question, “Mr. President,
as a child, how can I help you get votes?”

After six years of “Ask President Bush,” “Mission Accomplished” and
stage sets plastered with “Plan for Victory,” Americans hunger for a
presidency with some authenticity. Patently synthetic play-acting and
carefully manicured sound bites like Mrs. Clinton’s look out of touch.
(Mr. Obama’s bare-bones Webcast and Web site shrewdly play Google to
Mrs. Clinton’s AOL.) Besides, the belief that an image can be tightly
controlled in the viral media era is pure fantasy. Just ask the former
Virginia senator, Mr. Allen, whose past prowess as a disciplined,
image-conscious politician proved worthless once the Webb campaign
posted on YouTube a grainy but authentic video capturing him in an
embarrassing off-script public moment.

The image that Mrs. Clinton wants to sell is summed up by her frequent
invocation of the word middle, as in “I grew up in a middle-class family
in the middle of America.” She’s not left or right, you see, but exactly
in the center where everyone feels safe. But as the fierce war critic
Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, argues in a must-read
interview at gq.com, the war is “starting to redefine the political
landscape” and scramble the old party labels. Like Mrs. Clinton, the
middle-American Mr. Hagel voted to authorize the Iraq war, but that has
not impeded his leadership in questioning it ever since.

The issue raised by the tragedy of Iraq is not who’s on the left or the
right, but who is in front and who is behind. Mrs. Clinton has always
been a follower of public opinion on the war, not a leader. Now events
are outrunning her. Support for the war both in the polls and among
Republicans in Congress is plummeting faster than she can recalibrate
her rhetoric; unreliable Iraqi troops are already proving no-shows in
the new Iraqi-American “joint patrols” of Baghdad; the Congressional
showdown over fresh appropriations for Iraq is just weeks away.

This, in other words, is a moment of crisis in our history and there
will be no do-overs. Should Mrs. Clinton actually seek unfiltered
exposure to voters, she will learn that they are anxiously waiting to
see just who in Washington is brave enough to act.

~~

And, I might ask: Why is it that the SAME media whores who yell,
“dynasty” whenever Hillary’s presidential candidacy is mentioned NEVER
uttered that word when Bush 43 was running in 2000… NOR do they
mention “dynasty” whenever they put forth the notion of a Jeb Bush
presidency.

Jeb Bush’s brother is president, Jeb’s father was president, Jeb’s
grandfather was a senator. That smells of “dynasty” to me. And they are
all the wholly-owned subsidiary of the same corporate criminals.

There is almost nothing worse that could happen to America than to have
another Bush in the White House … nothing.

When you think of Jeb Bush, think of Terri Schiavo.

When Jeb Bush says, here, that it is terrible how much money the federal
government has been spending, who the heck does he think has been in
charge of this country for the past six years?

Republicans AND his brother.

THEY are the ones who have plunged us into unsupportable debt.

THEY are the ones who started this war of choice in Iraq.

THEY are the ones who held NO oversight hearings, did NO investigations,
asked NO questions.

THEY are the ones who allowed contractors to have “cost-plus” contracts
in Iraq, which means that whatever the contractors say they have spent
gets reimbursed plus a guaranteed profit. What incentive was there to
hold down costs or operate efficiently? Were lobster and champagne
standard menu items for the staffs in those corporations with the
“cost-plus” contracts?

Is turning a budget surplus into a budget deficit a “Conservative” goal?

Well, that’s what these Conservative creeps have done?

Do NOT ever trust a Bush … they are a family of LIARS and CHEATS.

We must NEVER have another Bush in the White House.

Never.

And do not be fooled by this cool baloney that’s he’s not thinking about
2008 … do not rest for a moment … he could ride in at the last
moment on his white steed as the “savior of the party.”

And he will certainly be looking for his first opportunity to run for
president.

It’s like cockroaches … they never go away … except they hate the
light.

Shine a light on every evil thing that Bush family has done and never
let another one hold public office.

———————————————————-

*Jeb Bush Rallies Conservatives at Summit*

Non-Candidate Shows Ability to Excite the Party

by Zachary A. Goldfarb
The Washington Post
January 28, 2007

At a time when the conservative movement is looking bereft, humbled
by midterm-election defeats and hungering for a presidential candidate
to rally around, Jeb Bush delivered yesterday in Washington a resounding
endorsement of conservative principles, bringing his audience repeatedly
to its feet.

In his lunchtime remarks to the Conservative Summit, Bush struck every
conservative chord, blaming Republicans’ defeat in November on the
party’s abandonment of tenets including limited government and fiscal
restraint.

“Don’t take offense personally if I get mad at Congress,” the Republican
former Florida governor began. “It’s important for us to realize we
lost, and there are significant reasons that happened, but it isn’t
because conservatives were rejected. But it’s because we rejected the
conservative philosophy in this country.”

He added, “If the promise of pork and more programs is the way
Republicans think they’ll regain the majority, then they’ve got a
problem.”

Bush’s speech prompted three standing ovations from the audience of
hundreds at the National Review Institute’s conference at the JW
Marriott Hotel, reflecting the widespread concern among conservatives
that exorbitant government spending led to the loss of majorities in the
House and Senate and concern about whether Republicans would again
embrace the traditional principles.

To Ed Gillespie, a prominent lobbyist and former chairman of the
Republican National Committee, Bush’s two terms in Tallahassee — where
he developed a reputation as a tax-cutter and staunch spending hawk —
exemplified conservative politics at its best, and what makes for a
compelling presidential candidate.

“For those who are worried if you can put forward a vigorous
conservative policy agenda in a state like Florida and still get elected
and still be popular: Our keynote speaker left office with approval
ratings above 60 percent,” Gillespie said.

“If he were former two-term governor Jeb Smith, he might be in Des
Moines today,” Gillespie said, alluding to presidential hopefuls’
campaigning.

Bush says he will not run for president in 2008, however, and
conservatives continue to look for a candidate to excite their interest.

“So far there’s definitely a lukewarm feeling about the field, but it’s
still early, and conservatives want to see how these guys run. And it’s
still possible that one or the other of the candidates will really
inspire conservatives,” said Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review.

Two men eyeing the GOP’s conservative base as a platform for a
presidential candidacy also gave speeches yesterday. In the morning,
former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) addressed the conference, and
former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney was scheduled to speak last
night. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, mentioned as another
presidential possibility, is expected to speak this morning.

Gingrich, the architect of the 1994 “Republican revolution” that saw the
GOP win control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, sharply
criticized his party.

“You have a Republican Party that resents ideas,” he said. “We worked
for 16 years to get a majority, which was thrown away.”

Gingrich, who received a warm reception, said he will not make a
decision on running until much later this year.

Huckabee, meanwhile, might form an exploratory committee as soon as
tomorrow. Romney, already exploring a bid, is criticized by some
conservatives for the liberal social views he expressed in the 1990s.

With little disagreement at the conference about the prudence of the
president’s strategy for Iraq, the war appeared not to figure into the
thinking of conservatives as an issue that could further cost the GOP.

At a Friday night panel on the state of conservatism, commentator Laura
Ingraham argued that Republicans — if they are to have any chance of
winning in 2008 — must wake up to the fact that Democrats are embracing
politicians such as Sen. James Webb (Va.), a gruff military veteran who
delivered his party’s response to the State of the Union on Tuesday by
attacking President Bush’s Iraq plan while offering a populist economic
message.

“We have to be careful with conservatives not to remain in an echo
chamber,” Ingraham said. “The party that comes off as the party that
represents the American worker best is the party that wins in 2008.”

Read this at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/27/AR2007012701171_pf.html