It was a 17 and 1/2 hour office occupation that began just after the lunch hour yesterday in Portland, Maine. We gathered outside the office of our Rep. Tom Allen's office at around 11am and began handing out leaflets and holding signs calling for an end to funding of the Iraq occupation. Just as we were ready to enter Allen's office to sit-in we learned that he had decided to vote against any more funding for the occupation unless there was a "withdrawal goal timeline" in the bill. Even though this was not exactly what we wanted, these timelines are non-binding, it was still progress and we decided to move on to the next target. The vote was supposed to happen yesterday but has been delayed because the Democrats' coalition is dissolving.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. military commander of the Pacific, Adm. Timothy J. Keating, met Burmese military officers in Burma on Monday for the first time, to jointly examine maps of the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy delta, during a successful delivery of the first American airlift of emergency aid.

"They met some Burmese officials at the airport, including the deputy foreign minister, and they gathered together and looked at maps," a U.S. official said in an interview, asking to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak for attribution.

Adm. Keating and other U.S. military personnel huddled with Burmese military and government officials at Rangoon's international airport in sweltering, mid-day heat.

They discussed geographical features, logistics, and the suffering of survivors on the stricken Irrawaddy River delta, where officially 28,458 people perished, and 33,416 disappeared in Cyclone Nargis.

The cyclone brought murderous rain, wind and tidal swells ashore from the Bay of Bengal, onto the densely packed delta southwest of Rangoon on May 3.

On May 3, Hector Antonio Ventura, one of the 14 people originally captured during an anti-water privatization protest in the town of Suchitoto last year, was stabbed to death in his home. Given his role as one of the accused in the high profile anti-terrorism case, Ventura’s death could likely be politically motivated, and therefore Salvadoran social movement organizations have called for a full investigation into his death.

Ventura was among 13 people charged last year under the controversial 2006 “Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism”. In February all charges against the activists were dropped, but the case demonstrated internationally the repressive nature of the current right-wing ARENA government. Other possible political murders – such as the slaying of Wilber Funes, a mayor from the leftist FMLN party – have yet to be resolved, raising fear of increased political violence during the lead up to the 2009 Salvadoran elections.

It is always good to know as a citizen that your leaders think everything is under control, for this reason I can only begin to imagine the relief people in the United States must feel when President Bush publicly acknowledges; "I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place.” I must admit however that I struggle to understand where the president is getting his data from and I dread to think what things will look like by the time he admits that “fundamentals” are not really “in place”. According to Alan Greenspan “as of right now, U.S. economic growth is at zero”, “home prices will continue to weaken” and a boom in oil prices is going to "go on forever". As he puts it, the US is “clearly on the edge.”

I remember the time when General Motors Corp. was considered a pillar of the American dream, a fundamental of the economic miracle. Now, after reporting a quarterly loss of $722 million, compared with a profit of $950 million a year earlier, and offering buyouts to all of its 74,000 United Auto Workers employees, GM is clearly not a part of the sound fundamentals which President Bush likes to describe. The same seems apparent with MGIC

“I want you to feel that Iraqi life is precious,” he told them.

Well, that’s not going to happen. Here, at the level of basic humanity, the occupation of Iraq — indeed, the entire Bush administration — begins to unravel. We can see this with excruciating clarity as requests for an apology waylay the smooth, legal cover-up (one in a series) of the latest spasm of panic and target practice by Blackwater thugs, which left 17 Iraqis dead in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in September.

Even the embedded media, so valiant in their attempts to cast the American presence as well-intentioned and, you know, doing the best it can (under the circumstances), couldn’t help but convey, as they reported on the investigation of the Blackwater killings, the humanity of the grieving Iraqis. In so doing, the coverage hinted, unavoidably, at the truth about the occupation: that we are, to put it mildly, the bad guys, that what we’re doing there is barbaric, racist, insane.