In Support of Weakness on National Security
By David Swanson

A senior staff person for one of the most progressive and courageous members of Congress recently advised a room full of peace activists that they won’t be able to persuade Democrats to oppose the war simply by showing them polls finding that a majority of Americans oppose the war. Rather they must assuage the Democrats’ fears of being called “weak on national security.”

But that’s not possible. Opponents read more

Well, that’s the official due date anyway.

The Relevance of Marching
By David Swanson

David Corn, www.davidcorn.com, published an article today on his site and on www.tompaine.com arguing that last weekend’s march on Washington to end the war was a waste of time and money and energy and won’t help end the war. I disagree, but think Corn makes some useful points.

Corn’s arguments include:
1-these marches always result in debates over how many people showed up
2-not enough people showed up
3-there’s read more

By David Swanson

Imagine you could take years and years to carefully study political history, that you could read numerous sources of political news from around the world, that you could do your own research into declassified government documents and little known areas of information, and that you could travel extensively so that you might compare various societies and governments in the current day.

If you can get someone to pay you or feed you while you do all of that, then by all means do it. read more

PDA Communications
By David Swanson

Tim has asked me to help with developing a national network for PDA communications, meaning a group of people at the national level, and others at the state and local levels, working together to make our voices heard. I’m hoping that this discussion today will produce some ideas for this and some volunteers to help with it.

I’ve worked on some projects that used a network of local volunteers to communicate, including AfterDowningStreet and Kucinich read more

Civil Resistance at the White House
By David Swanson

PHOTO GALLERY

I got to the White House around noon and found hundreds of people gathered awaiting the arrival of marchers who planned to get themselves arrested protesting the war.

I ran into Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace, who showed me the paperwork from his arrest early this morning at the Pentagon. He said he’d been one of 41 people arrested between 6:30 and nearly 7:30 a.m. at the Pentagon. Three Veterans for Peace members had read more

Introduction of Cindy Sheehan, Recipient of Pacifica Radio’s Unvarnished Truth Award
By David Swanson

I came to know Cindy Sheehan in May, and

By David Swanson

Numerous media organizations regularly poll members of the public on whether they approve of the President’s job performance. Uniformly, these polls show a dramatic upsurge in approval of Bush immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, but a decline in approval following Hurricane Katrina.

Working in favor of national sanity is the fact that the hurricane is more recent than the airplane attacks. While it seems distinctly unlikely that people will yet begin read more

Yuppies and the Peace Movement
By David Swanson

PART 1

The single biggest reason that the peace movement is not larger and more aggressive is that people with one foot in it are focused on trying to be respectable in the eyes of the corporate media, for their own sake and

By David Swanson

I came to Crawford today, and it’s a little different from DC in several ways, but mostly it’s hotter. I’ve been to both Camp Caseys, and am blogging this from the cool of the Crawford Peace House. At Camp Casey 1, I went across the road and talked to the half-dozen pro-war protesters. (There are police in the middle who have declared that there must be no interaction, but I didn’t ask their permission.) I asked the pro-warers what they would tell Cindy read more