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Sometime during the week of July 21, your representative will be voting on an amendment to the 2004 foreign aid bill that would cut or reduce military aid to Colombia.  The last time an amendment was offered to cut Colombia military aid, it lost by only seven votes—we are very close!  Please help make it a reality this time-- send an e-mail to your representative asking them to support the amendment.

To send an e-mail to your representative go to: capwiz.com/voice4change/issues/alert/?alertid=2882061&type=CO

If you have trouble with our Action Center please copy and paste the following sample letter and E-mail to Representative.

If you need to find out who your Rep. is go to www.house.gov

Sample Letter:

The Honorable__________
US House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Representative _______________,

Sometimes dreams come true.  And sometimes reality exceeds your hopes.

That happened to me---and my four-year-old daughter---at the Palace.  Thanks to CAPA, Columbus was treated to THE great Irish band in a concert that can only be described as magical, mystical, moving ... magnificent.  

About the band, there's little you can say beyond that they are the True Masters of Irish music.  The leprechaun-like Paddy (his real name), chief of the Chieftains, put it as simply as it needed to be put:  "Thank you for coming tonight.  Forty-two years, forty-two albums."

Every one of them a treasure.  For years I've dreamed of seeing the Chieftains.  They played the zoo a few years ago but I couldn't go.  Last night I almost couldn't go again.  I was just about out the door and onto my bike to head downtown when my four-year-old, Shoshanna, started to howl.  She wanted to come.  It hadn't occurred to me.  How would she handle the somewhat stiff, somewhat formal Palace?  

Driving up highway 101 south of Orick, Calif., I kept an eye out for a scenic rest area that, according to a memoir by his wife, Theodora, had once been the site of a cabin owned by Alfred Kroeber.

            It's through Kroeber that the Yurok people made their way in the world of learning, their lives distilled into a monograph and footnote. In 1900, Kroeber, the father of academic anthropology in California, began a series of encounters with the Yurok that lasted many years. Many of these Q & A sessions were at this cabin, formerly located in the scenic rest area where I was now peering under the hood of my wagon, trying to figure out why my brakes had stopped working.

The superstar columnist George Will has an impressive vocabulary. Too bad it doesn’t include the words “I’m sorry.”

     Ten months ago, Will led the media charge when a member of Congress dared to say that President Bush would try to deceive the public about Iraq. By now, of course, strong evidence has piled up that Bush tried and succeeded.

     But back in late September, when a media frenzy erupted about Rep. Jim McDermott’s live appearance from Baghdad on ABC’s “This Week” program, what riled the punditocracy as much as anything else was McDermott’s last statement during the interview: “I think the president would mislead the American people.”

     First to wave a media dagger at the miscreant was Will, a regular on the ABC television show. Within minutes, on the air, he denounced “the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime.” But the syndicated columnist was just getting started.

I don't often get the chance to witness media bias up-close and personal.  But I did on Monday night, when CNN Headline News invited me on to talk about our campaign on the weapons of mass destruction and the new Misleader TV ad.

I was scheduled to go on air a little after 9 PM EST, and I arrived at the studio early.  After checking in, I was delivered to the studio where I would be speaking from, and I sat and listened to the show.

Rudi Bakhtiar was the anchorwoman, and as the clock ticked toward nine, she gave a preview of what was up ahead.  After a short clip from our ad, Ms. Bakhtiar gave a synopsis of the scandal over the President's State of the Union claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger -- a claim now known to be based on fraudulent evidence which even the White House knew was untenable.  Ms. Bakhtiar pondered whether there was going to be political fallout from Bush's "slip of the tongue," and then invited viewers to stay tuned.

"Slip of the tongue?" I thought.  "They're letting Bush off the hook."

The Bush administration has recently announced plans to gut the widely popular Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protects 58.5 million acres of pristine national forests from most logging and road-building, and to radically change the way our national forests are currently managed by changing the National Forest Management Act.

If we're going to stop the Bush administration from letting the timber industry destroy our last wild forests, we need to take action. We expect Congress to vote soon on two amendments that would protect our national forests from these harmful proposals put forward by the Bush administration.

Please take a moment to ask your U.S. Representative to stand up for our last wild forests. Then, ask your family and friends to help by forwarding this e-mail to them.

To take action, click on this link: pirg.org/alerts/route.asp?id=11&id4=OHFreep

WASHINGTON, D.C--A Pentagon committee led by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, advised President Bush to include a reference in his January State of the Union address about Iraq trying to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger to bolster the case for war in Iraq, despite the fact that the CIA warned Wolfowitz's committee that the information was unreliable, according to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate's intelligence committee who have been investigating the issue.

The Senators and the CIA official said they could be forced out of government and brought up on criminal charges for leaking the information to this reporter and as a result requested anonymity. The Senators said they plan to question CIA Director George Tenet Wednesday morning in a closed-door hearing to find out whether Wolfowitz and members of a committee he headed misled Bush and if the President knew about the erroneous information prior to his State of the Union address.

In the coming election George W. Bush will be billed as the national security candidate.  His image in a jumpsuit on the Lincoln will be burned in America's retinas.  Polls have consistently shown that much of the public has already accepted this characterization, and many have argued that this will be an insurmountable problem for any Democrat, perhaps with the exception of General Wesley Clark.  However, the test run of the Bush Doctrine is only now unfolding in its vast implications and consequences, and a handful of extremely significant problems remain with little hint of how they will be resolved.  Several of these problems have gone largely unmentioned in both the media and on the Hill, but they may arise as serious questions if Americans are forced to decide whether the Bush Doctrine is a tenable and effective national security strategy.

The Bush Administartion's recent tax giveaway to the richest citizens of this country have left progressives scrambling for an alternative way to stimulate the economy.  Simply opposing Bush's plan is not enough.  The answer may be found in the Apollo Project, which not only promises to create two million manufacturing jobs, but also promotes environmental sustainability and strenthgens our national security.

You may have heard the news. An opportunity to block President Bush's drive to take away overtime pay from millions of Americans has just come up. Before the end of July we need to tell Congress to block the Bush overtime cuts.  We lost the vote in the U.S. House on this last Thursday but we have another chance when the Senate considers an effort to block Bush's overtime cuts. More than 8 million people are slated to LOSE THEIR OVERTIME PAY in the coming months.  

Here is what is needed in the next couple of weeks:  

First, please click on the link below to SEND AN E-MAIL TO your Senators and Representative with a copy to President Bush. Tell them to act to repeal the Bush overtime take away. www.unionvoice.org/campaign/SenateOTrider/u55xi4oj883