I hope your running for the Columbus, Iran schoolboard!

Bob Fitrakis, The Fitrakis Files: Free Byrd and other cries for justice. Columbus: Columbus Alive Publishing, 2003. 252 pp.

"When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house, and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. . . . Civil government does not consist in executions. . . . Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?"

These are the words of Thomas Paine, the greatest pamphleteer in the history of the English language.

Lately, I have been thinking about the ways in which being a mother informs my view of the world. The question that haunts me is why the casualties of modern warfare are primarily women and children.

I am trying with little success to imagine what it is like for the mothers in Afghanistan and Iraq whose children have died in the bombing, or by stepping on landmines or from brightly colored unexploded cluster bombs that looked like toys. The children who have died because of the lack of medicine and hospitals. The children who have been raped. The children who have been detained in Guantanamo. The children who have died or will die because of exposure to depleted uranium. We have no way to know how many children have been killed or injured in these countries because our own government dismisses them as unimportant collateral damage. What we do know is that 80% of the casualties in modern warfare are civilians and that the vast majority of these are women and children.

AUSTIN -- There was the president at his press conference looking just like a turtle on a fence post. "They (weapons of mass destruction) could still be there. They could be hidden." Saddam Hussein is still an "ally" of the 9-11 terrorists. Hussein was still "a direct threat" to America. Oi.

            The Nation points out a charming little Bush thesis: "Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free." The infamous "some people" making this racist argument are cleverly hidden: I never heard of it before Bush trotted it out.

            I got a lovely question last week: "Why do you and your ilk (it's hard to speak for my entire ilk) hate George W. Bush so much and love Osama bin Laden?" If that's what public discussion has come down to, we really are in trouble. In fact, we're in trouble anyway.

Yes, there is a 'grocery list' of grounds on which to impeach President George W. Bush.  However, impeachment starts in the House of Representatives and, at the moment, the House is controlled by Republicans.  We're all focused on getting President Bush out of the Whitehouse in November (and rightfully so).  But, let's not forget about getting back the House and the Senate.