What an honor to be in Cuba for the first celebration of One Billion Rising!

150 of us from the United States had travelled to Cuba with CODEPINK: Women for Peace in the largest delegation of Americans to visit Cuba since the December 17, 2014 announcement of opening of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

Realizing that our delegation called “To Cuba With Love” would be in Cuba on February 14, Valentine’s Day, we asked our host organization the Cuban Institute with the Peoples (ICAP) if there was a venue in Havana where we could dance in the worldwide campaign to end violence against women.

The dynamic ICAP director and member of the Cuban Parliament Kenia Serrano suggested that we have the dance at the annual Cuba International Book Fair held in the San Carlos de la Cabana fortress, the scenic fort located across the harbor from Old Havana.

Dance at a Book Fair we asked?

As media ownership converges and technology “unites” us, the concept of national identity grows ever easier to exploit — and therefore, I fear, increasingly, and dangerously, simplistic.

This is the war on terror. This is the war on crime. They march on, despite the magnitude of their failures. They march on . . . because America is tough. America is exceptional.

If our news and mass-entertainment outlets valued complexity and expansion of the national IQ, we wouldn’t go to war. We’d be building our lives on the far side of fear and the far side of cynicism, which is the only place where peace is possible.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to hear that Congress members will skip Netanyahu's speech no matter what reason they offer. Here are some of them:

It's too close to Netanyahu's election. (That doesn't persuade me. If we had fair, open, publicly funded, un-gerrymandered, verifiably counted elections, then "politics" wouldn't be a dirty word and we would want politicians to show themselves doing things to try to please us before, during, and after elections. I want them acting that way now, even with our broken system. I don't want the U.S. interfering in Israeli elections, but allowing a speech is hardly the same as backing coups in Ukraine and Venezuela or giving Israel billions of dollars worth of weapons every year.)

A month after former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling was convicted on nine felony counts with circumstantial metadata, the zealous prosecution is now having potentially major consequences -- casting doubt on the credibility of claims by the U.S. government that Iran has developed a nuclear weapons program.

With negotiations between Iran and the United States at a pivotal stage, fallout from the trial’s revelations about the CIA’s Operation Merlin is likely to cause the International Atomic Energy Agency to re-examine U.S. assertions that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.

In its zeal to prosecute Sterling for allegedly leaking classified information about Operation Merlin -- which provided flawed nuclear weapon design information to Iran in 2000 -- the U.S. government has damaged its own standing with the IAEA. The trial made public a treasure trove of information about the Merlin operation.

Texas Baptists confirm Obama’s comments about Christian crimes

The American torture president and self-professed Christian, George W. Bush, gratefully accepted an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from the Christian-ideology-based University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Texas, on February 11, in a “public” event that was closed to most of the public. The only direct media coverage allowed for the event was by Fox News and the college public relations team.

Even though it might have been headlined as “Christians Honor War Criminal,” there were apparently no national news stories about the former president’s award. Five days after the fact, the Washington-insider publication, the Hill ran a short summary noting that Bush had said, “Evil is evil.”