The climax of the big demonstrations against President Bush on his recent London jaunt was the toppling of a papier-mache statue of the commander in chief -- a reprise on the carefully staged pulling down of Saddam's statue in Baghdad earlier this year. If those London jokesters had tried this in Miami during the recent protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, it's a pretty safe bet they would have been gassed, tasered with electric stun guns, battered with rubber bullets, arrested and charged with felony counts costing them thousands until a judge threw the charges out.

Problem: Raw sewage is a serious health threat, yet the City of Columbus has allowed illegal sewage spills for years.  Instead of fixing the problem, the City has spent our money on risky sewer expansions.  As a result, there have been over 10,000 reported cases of sewer back-ups in Columbus basements over the past five years, exposing our neighbors to diseases like E. coli and Hepatitis C.

Now the City Council is considering a historic sewer rate increase, but hasn't created a long-term plan to make sure we fix our sewer problems.

Solution: The City of Columbus must work with the Sierra Club and other concerned citizens to develop an effective and enforceable sewer investment plan. It 's time for Mayor Coleman and City Council to stop sewage overflows - for our families, for our future.

Action Needed: Please contact Mayor Coleman and the Columbus City Council today and ask them to join with Columbus residents to create a sewer plan that works.

Deadline for responding: Please take action by 30 December 2003.

To send a message, please click the link below:

Reuters is one of the more independent wire services. So, a recent news story from Reuters -- flatly describing American military activities in Iraq as part of “the broader U.S. war on terrorism” -- is a barometer of how powerfully the pressure systems of rhetoric from top U.S. officials have swayed mainstream news coverage.

     Such reporting, with the matter-of-fact message that the Pentagon is fighting a “war on terrorism” in Iraq, amounts to a big journalistic gift for the Bush administration, which is determined to spin its way past the obvious downsides of the occupation.

     Here are the concluding words from Bush’s point man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, during a Nov. 17 interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” program: “The president was absolutely firm both in private and in public that he is not going to let any other issues distract us from achieving our goals here in Iraq, that we will stay here until the job is done and that the force levels will be determined by the conditions on the ground and the war on terrorism.”

     Within hours, many of Bremer’s supervisors were singing from the same political hymnal:

Thanks to millions of real American patriots (peace, freedom, and environmental activists from every walk of life) the truth about the ugly goals of the murderous Bush regime are being widely recognized.

In the face of the raucous and near-constant barrage of Republican neo-con lies and deceptions, as broadcast to us by the handful of fanatical right-wing billionaires that control our mass media, learning the truth about Bush is perhaps the greatest demonstration that our evolving democracy is still functioning.

Each day, on the Internet, on public radio and television, from the few remaining courageous journalists in the mass media, and from the many in the burgeoning alternative media, we learn more about the deceptions and depravities that are the core of the Bush vision for world domination by economic and military coercion. Recently, we learned that the same Bush that staged a chauffeured landing on an aircraft carrier is really an unprosecuted military deserter and the first president to don a military uniform while holding office. Were any of our troops in Iraq or elsewhere to desert from the military in the