I spent a day meeting with Congress Members and their staffers, urging them to end the occupation of Iraq, and having them tell me they would never "defund our troops."  In the evening I watched Paul Haggis's new film "In the Valley of Elah."  I walked out stunned, shaken, far more angry than I'd been, and convinced that we shouldn't be asking Congress Members to end the occupation, we should be asking them to watch this movie.  If any Congress Member were to watch this movie and allow another dime to "fund our troops" we would at least be clear in our duty to have that individual locked up for the safety of those around them.

Washington, DC -- We've endured seven years of cascading failures from 911 to Iraq enabled by rigged elections and supported by a decadent set of politicians who lack the will to even fight for themselves. 

But let's not lose hope.  We’ll get a Democratic majority in Congress.  They'll do something!  We’ll be out of trouble in no time.  Plus, we’ll have the type of investigations we need to get the real solution in place – impeachment.  It will be like a Roman triumph – the Truth enters the Capitol to the cheers of the people all across America.

We tried that. It failed.

Now it's up to us, the people, who are ever so inconvenient to the rulers of this country.  We, the citizens, are the last line of defense against the complete removal of any form of freedom and security that we now retain. 

We’re the last line in a defense that to date has never truly formed.  How can you have a strong defense if there’s no communication?  The corporate media has done a sterling job of masking the very information that would have made the current insanity impossible. 

The poster exploits the howling demons of our culture. It’s my morning smack-in-the-eye, bright gold, four feet high, dominated by a female in stark silhouette striding resolutely into the wreckage of post-apocalypse Las Vegas. She wields a wicked-looking blaster in each hand.

The ad, for the movie “Resident Evil: Extinction,” occupies the spot on the elevated train platform where I await the start of my daily commute to work. This is not a movie I’m going to see, but I can’t avoid feeling the impact of its throbbing message: Justice cometh, and she has a nice butt, and she’s armed.

Wow. The gears mesh — yet again! — on the perfect delusion. For entertainment, we hop ourselves up on sex and road rage, and fantasy bleeds into reality. The result is an armed, frightened society and a high-tech war on terror that promises to cut a terrible swath of destruction across the planet before it runs out of, so to speak, gas.

Reading his “Letter From Baghdad” column in the New York Times on Sept. 5, you’d never know that Thomas Friedman has a history of enthusiasm for war. Now he laments that Iraq is bad for the United States -- “everyone loves seeing us tied down here” -- stuck in the “madness that is Iraq.” And he concludes that the good Americans who have been sent to Iraq will not be deserved by Iraqis “if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”

     The column, under a Baghdad dateline, is boilerplate Friedman: sprinkled with I-am-here anecdotes and breezy geopolitical nostrums. For years now, the man widely touted as America’s most influential journalist has indicated that his patience with the war in Iraq might soon run out. But, like the media establishment he embodies, Friedman can’t bring himself to renounce a war that he helped to launch and then blessed as the incarnation of virtue.

St. Louis – His government broke his heart but it could not break Air Force veteran Charles Powell’s spirit.  Fighting back tears, the 64 year-old vet stood tall and resolute in front of 400 of his comrades, describing in verse the final steps of a painful disillusionment.

Each summer during the national convention of Veterans For Peace, time is reserved for a Veterans’ Speakout, where any member can rise to say whatever is on their mind.

When the veterans gathered in 2002, prior to the invasion of Iraq, George Bush and the hawks of Washington were pounding away on the war drums.  That year, Powell, who had served on a Titan ICBM launch crew during the Cuban missile crisis, read his poem titled, “I Won’t Let Them Take My Flag.”  He noted the warmongers were “again waving my flag” as a buildup to invasion, and he countered what he felt was a manipulation of the national symbol with the following lines reminiscent of the great Langston Hughes.