Washington D.C. — By a vote of 348-71, the U.S. House of Representatives voted March 16 to spend 67,000,000,000 dollars more for open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the fact that a growing majority of the people they represent believe the war is wrong.

In an eleventh hour effort on March 15 to appeal to the conscience of the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, six peace activists took their case to his office on Capitol Hill where they read the names of U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed in the war, and negotiated with Hastert’s staff for a meeting with the Illinois congressman.

The six were part of a 34 day campaign named “The Winter of Our Discontent” organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence (Voices). The campaign includes 34 days of fasting, civil disobedience, Capitol Hill vigils and lobbying, to demand the U.S. end the occpuation and its economic and military warfare against the Iraqi people.

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"We have a responsibility to promote human freedom. Yet freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen."

The more I ponder these words, the deeper my confusion grows - at the consciousness that confabulated them, at the futility of any possible response. And so the war enters its fourth year, impervious to its own unpopularity, disabling critics with the irony it generates.

In the context of what can only be called worldwide despair, the Bush administration has issued a National Security Strategy white paper oblivious to the extent that it fits the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results each time.

The report's assemblers proudly announce to the nation that they have learned nothing, hoisting one more time the flag of pre-emption, as though no one will notice how tattered and blood-stained it is: ". . . we do not rule out the use of force before attacks occur, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack."

Dear Editor: The New York Times saw fit to assign two reporters to the aftermath of the Belarus election. Their article cites American objections to the official outcome, a landslide victory for incumbent Aleksandr Lukashenko. The Times article cited international observers who disparaged the election as "rigged" and "...held under widespread repression."

But when similar objections were raised in the United States immediately following our own presidential election in 2004, The Times ignored them, except to publish a single front-page article a week later that disparaged "conspiracy theorists." Since 2004, mountains of evidence have surfaced about hackable election machinery and impossible discrepancies between exit poll results and the tabulated vote that favored incumbent George W. Bush. The Times has similarly ignored this unpleasantness. 

Evidently, rigged elections are only possible outside the borders of the United States.

America has spoken, and for George W. Bush, it's not pretty. Asked to use one-word answers to describe how they felt about the president, an astounding 48%--virtually half the country--said "incompetent," "idiot," and "liar." The Pew Research Center survey released this week shows a stark contrast to how Americans answered the same question three years ago, when positive one-word descriptions of Bush, such as "honest" and "integrity," far outnumbered negative ones. In the current poll, only 28% used positive words. And previously used superlatives like "excellent" or "great" were virtually non-existent.

The survey casts Bush's overall approval rating at a pathetic 33%. With a few more dead soldiers and a civil war in Iraq, combined with a couple of more political blunders like Harriet Miers, the ports deal and illegal NSA wiretappings, the president just might find himself facing single digits in the not-too-distant future.

Other highlights of the survey include:

-Only 42% now approve of Bush's job in handling terrorist threats, an 11-point drop since February.