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Mission Accomplished, May 1, Three Years On

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May 1 marks three years since George W. Bush staged his “Mission Accomplished” aircraft landing in San Diego Harbor and “delivered good news to the men and women who fought in the cause of freedom: their mission is complete and major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

As of April 27, at 3:15 p.m. EST – 2,393 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

The count of US wounded is around seven times that number, and Iraqi civilian read more

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How to Talk About Iran

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By David Swanson

John Aravosis suggests some talking points on Iran, but I’d like to suggest some changes in bold.

George Bush has decided to use Iran as a foil to help his sagging poll numbers and to help Republicans in the fall congressional elections. I’m going to discuss why this is true, and what the Dems should do about it.

Iran is ten years away from developing nukes.

I’ll say it again, TEN YEARS away. And that’s not according to some peacenik liberal, it’s according read more

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How You — Yes You — Can End the War

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By David Swanson

Simple acts and a little courage have worked wonders in the world.  Nonviolent people’s movements won democratic reforms in Russia, booted the British out of India, resisted the Nazi occupation in Denmark, drove a dictator out of El Salvador and another out of the Philippines, ended Jim Crow, crushed Soviet power in Poland, toppled military regimes in Argentina and Chile, ended Apartheid, and brought democracy to the Ukraine.  George W. is no match for a force this read more

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Debating Impeachment Among Democrats

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By David Swanson

Can you even imagine Republicans, even if they were in a minority in Congress, debating whether or not to call for the impeachment of a Democratic president known and documented as guilty of a wide range of high crimes and misdemeanors? In particular, if you can imagine that, can you imagine the Republicans who opposed impeachment arguing that they were doing so for strategic political reasons?

This is hard to imagine, because the Republicans won a majority in Congress by loudly read more

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A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World

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A Sin Against the Future: Imprisonment in the World, By Vivien Stern

This is one of the best books I’ve read about prisons, and the one which goes farthest toward suggesting how they could be minimized (not eliminated).

My first encounter with the idea that prisons might be a bad idea was in reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). He spoke of alternatives or substitutes for prison, and also for factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals, all of which he said resembled read more

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U.S. Out of Iraq: Forum Features Conyers, Woolsey, Lee, Ellsberg

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April 28, 2005

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A forum held in a US House of Representatives office building on April 28 brought together leaders of the movement to withdraw US troops from Iraq, including Congresswomen Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee, both California Democrats and Co-Chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Woolsey is the sponsor of H. Con. Res. 35, a resolution calling for the withdrawal of troops to begin immediately.
http://www.woolsey.house.gov/newsarticle.asp?RecordID=391

Woolsey read more

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What Can a Marginalized Majority Do?

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Universal health care is favored by most Americans, but proposing to create it is deemed politically foolish. Restoring value to the minimum wage would meet with approval from the vast majority of us, but politicians who make it a priority are considered a little flakey. Investing in public schools is one of our top priorities, but we’re told the money’s just not there and that we should focus on offering children other choices — we have to be practical. Most of the money that read more

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Thoughts on Criminal Justice

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December 1998
My first encounter with the idea that prisons might be a bad idea was in reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). He spoke of alternatives or substitutes for prisons, and also for factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals, all of which he said resembled prisons. But he said not one word about what such alternatives might be, and his style struck me as pretentious. So I didn’t pay much attention.

I believed, of course, that we ought to have been devoting read more

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