While I will be out marching Saturday and Sunday, weekend marches every six months are NOT going to get the corrupt politicians to do ANYTHING.

It's time to take our country back, brothers and sisters!

Get out your camping gear and plan on a long summer vacation in our nation's capitol.

Nothing short of a non-violent second American Revolution is going to force the corrupt elites out and allow US to restore OUR constitutional republic.

The truth shall set us free. Love is the only way forward.

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It´s time we realized that neither major political parties want to bravely and uncompromisingly defend the interests of the people, and that both of them are very much self-serving. Only WE, the PEOPLE, can change this. I seem to remember a day in October, 1967, when pacifists surrounded the Pentagon, and an exorcism ceremony was performed. I don´t think it would be a bad idea to do that again at this point! -- although I would include the White House in the exorcism...

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It's going to work about as well as the last Danny Glover/Susan Sarandon publicity stunt. Remember how effective that was at getting their attention? Half a million "protesters" didn't even make the front page of most newspapers.

For those silly Dem fans foolishly clinging to the idea, with all hope against hope, that Corporate Party Lite is going to right this wrong, it's time to get on board the reality express. Naw, forget it. Don't bother shutting down interstates or boycotting big corps. Make sure you pay your taxes in full like good little enablers. April 15th is drawing near - tick tock, tick tock. Don't actually risk anything or embarrass yourselves by speaking out. And no, I won't be paying my taxes this year in case you're wondering.

I just keep forgetting. As much as you complain about the war and all the atrocities associated with it, you aren't in any way directly affected by this headline: "57 dead, 160 injured in Baghdad bombings". The vast majority of you are still gainfully employed and even enjoy a few minor indulgences. Shit, you won't even demand nationalized health care so why should you bother standing for something as important as anti-imperialism, or to set our sites a little lower for the time being, the ever-so-slight curtailment of government power. And how about ending the corptocracy that aliments itself on the corpses of war dead? Sometimes I get the impression that most of you don't give a shit that your tax dollars are being used to kill innocent people and give assistance to others that would do the same.

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i remember the civil rights march on washington and encampment in the mall. an effective and unavoidable protest that worked for civil rights.

i've been thinking for quite awhile that going down there and camping out on their doorsteps is the only way to make them belive we really mean it. apparently voting isn't really the voice of the people. i guess we need to speak louder.

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I think that our elected officials will do nothing to expose the truth about 9/11 until a critical mass of people in this country become aware that elements of the United States government were involved in the planning and orchestration of 9/11. One way to achieve this critical mass is for people in this country to be willing to speak up about this truth in their daily lives. One way to speak up is to wear a button or a T-shirt or to put a bumper sticker on your automobile that points to the truth that 9/11 was an inside job.

Just imagine if these 9/11 inside job bumper stickers, T-shirts and buttons started showing up in everyone's daily life. The general population would start asking more questions and demanding answers.

With that in mind, I have opened up an account on www.zazzle.com. I have created a T-shirt, button and bumper sticker which are displayed below.

If you want to start speaking up in your daily life so that other people start learning about the truth regarding 9/11, please look at the products shown below. You can purchase these items as I have designed them as displayed below or you can change the design or logo in any way you wish.

Go to http://www.bushstole04.com/911/zazzle.htm

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there are so many symptoms of the disease wracking our nation, it's easy to lose count... a criminal war in iraq, complicity in 9/11, war planning for iran, torture, extraordinary rendition, domestic spying, voting fraud and voter supression, no-bid contracts, cronyism, corruption, the failure to re-build after katrina - where do you stop...? the most important thing, the most critical thing, beyond all else, is to remove these people from office before they can do any more damage... yes, we need the truth about a lot of things, and maybe it's a chicken and egg situation... we can't get rid of them until we have the full truth... but, i do know this... they have to go... 6+ years has already been way, way too long... we simply can't wait until january 2009...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

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Rather than march on the Pentagon, participants should send a handwritten letter protesting the Iraq War to their senators and representative in Congress. That will REALLy get the attention of Capitol Hill.

War protesters who won't take the time to write such a letter are nothing more than phony patriots.

Hugh E. Scott, Vietnam vet, registered Republican, Goldwater conservative and the creator/editor of www.King-George.biz --the only website with hardcopy proof of White House corruption.

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At the Rayburn House Office building today, the House Appropriations Committee held "PUBLIC" hearings regarding the continued funding of the Iraq and Afghanistan atrocities. Except the PUBLIC was not allowed in, and we got arrested for trying.
In a disgraceful exercise in deafness and clearly pre-scripted charade, the House Committee today voted to GIVE BUSH ALL THE MONEY. And MORE than all the money. A LOT more.
More of OUR money. OUR money.
There was and is ONE question- do we continue the genocide, or do we stop ?
Instead, while thousands more defenseless victims die in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and hundreds more cannon fodder American rapists in training are shot to pieces; while millions of lives fester in poisonous genocidal purgatory--
The entire exercise was specifically designed to NOT address the question
To NOT acknowledge much less debate the real issue, to NOT speak for all of us, and to NOT allow us to speak.
At every opportunity, the Congressmembers, particularly the Democrats, changed the subject.
Our elected pigs at the trough larded up what should have been simple yes or no legislation with a hodgepdge of pork barrel giveaways and porcine political payoffs meant not just to re-corpulize their contributors' coffers and surely their own, but to The debate was of spinach and cell phones, amendments and perfecting amendments, and amendments of the perfecting amendments. Anything but what should have been The Debate.
We, (the group formerly known as) The People have been systematically denied the truth for years. Of course. We know that.
As anyone with even a barely working working bullshit detector must admit by now, the election of 2006, and the election of Democrats as a purported opposition, has been proven to be a shadow puppet show, designed to reassure us that ours is a working participatory Democracy.
But- what we must realize is that not only do we have no voice, we are being systematically denied even the bare semblance of a debate.
We can no longer expect or depend on or WAIT FOR anything to be done by anyone else- certainly not these pigs--no candidate, no party, no media, no courts, no movement is going to do our job for us.
We must do it ourselves.
Each of us. One at a time. We must - each of us -- act from what we know is right. Not from what can be done, or is possible, or even what others deem legal.

This weekend, hundreds of thousands of people will demonstrate and protest. Thousands here in DC, and thousands more elsewhere.
None of it will matter.
We are scheduled to gather and march to the Pentagon. We are being told to assemble near the outskirts of town, and walk OUT of Washington, in the opposite direction from Congress and the White House, where the bloody business of war and genocide is being decided without our participation.
And have a rally.
None of it will matter.
Not the signs or the speeches or the t shirts or the chants.
Not the pseudo-celebrities or barely identifiable voices in the wind.
The only thing that matters now, is STOPPING the machine.
No further evidence is needed that Congress, and The Democrats, are giving Bush the money, and prolonging the atrocities.
No further evidence is needed that we are not only refused a voice, but refused any debate of the issues.
The March to The Pentagon needs to turn itself into a March to the belly of the beast-- and a massive non violent lie-in in the streets of DC, bringing business as usual to a halt.
Our model must be Gandhi's march to the sea, not the twenty ineffectual anti war blahblahs since 2001.
They have done nothing.
There is no more time for nothing.

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It is wrong to hide behind the lie and excuse that "protest doesn't make a difference." It is wrong to despair because "they're not listening to us." And it is wrong to dismiss the real danger of a new war against Iran simply because Bush is having so much trouble in Iraq.

How the hell does protest work? I'm all about dissent and resistance, but how is cramming half a million, or even a million people into Washington D.C., or in this case, the Pentagon, putting any pressure or furthering our demands at all? Protest is not resistance. We need to move to civil disobedience and direct action.

We also need to stop blaming this on Bush and the Republicans and start realizing that you can't topple a house by taking off the roof, we need to look at the foundation of these problems and start attacking those where we can. We have a system that maintains a need for war and we need to abolish that system.

I mean, why would the 'Crats or 'Pubs care about protests? They benefit from this war, otherwise they would've ended it by now. Protest for the sake of it is meaningless. We need to start thinking strategically about organization, our goals and what means we're going to take to get there. The Right is organized and kicking the hell out of us, we need to start getting organized at least as effectively as they are and turn this around, before theres nothing left to fight for.

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Yes, march because politicians haven't listened to you! And maybe after THIS protest they will finally start listening to you! They didn't listen after the last one... or the one before that.. or the one before that... or the one before that. But I'm sure you can get them to listen by doing the same thing again.

Now, folks.. isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result???

Or maybe you can take the advice being given now to so many... get involved in partisan politics... form a PAC.. raise money for your issue... be a part of the system! And then you can watch all the interests that outfund you by billions and outstaff you get what they want while you spend even more effort to please please pretty please get government to listen to you.

Or.......

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Here come the hippies!! A lot older, a little better dressed and probably smokin' better dope. Going to the sit-in!!...WOO! HOO! Hope its warm enough for them to take their clothes off and jump in the tidal pool just as the next winter event rolls into the Capital. The vision of a few thousand aging, balding ex-hippies turning blue in the cold snap makes me smile real big. Hopefully the war will come to a successful conclusion and that our men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan won't have to deal with the traitorous behavior of all the goofy liberals, mostly in the DEMONcratic party, who would like to see the U.S. lose the war for their misguided ideology. As far as history goes...this is the most successful military campaign this nation has ever had. When it is over Iraq will be a free and sovereign nation just as Germany and Japan are today. Fortunately we have the play book of the children of the 60's and 70's so we know how to counter them. Besides....In the 60's and 70's we had much better protest music than the CRAP they play today.

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Marches/protests won't work. How about an all out tax boycott?
April 15th is coming up. NOBODY FILE!! Bring down the IRS. After all, it's OUR tax dollars supporting this evil government.

Or a massive country-wide work stoppage?
One week in the USA where NOBODY goes to work.

Money talks.

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I think a week-long work stoppage would be a safer way to send a message. The not-paying-taxes-idea would probably end up in people getting arrested. UGH.

Where is the most effective way to bring these bastards down and end the war?

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With the extreme nut cases running the show in D.C. these days
who knows how low the bar for terror suspects will drop.
We could all end up on their list one day and then it would
probably be too late to do anything about it. Give 'em an inch,
they'll take a yard. It's like soil erosion. Sometimes it's irreversible.

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Global Research

The national popular resistance in Iraq, in defending the whole of humanity against a culture of force, deserves our recognition and support, writes Hana Abdul Ilah Al-Bayaty

The illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq is not only the biggest crime of recent history, it is the original sin of the 21st century, a depravity. In its war on Iraq, the United States has sought to destroy Iraq as both a state and a nation. It decimated an entire class — the progressive middle class of Iraq that had proven its capacity to manage Iraqi resources independently and to the benefit of all; it killed nearly a million while sending millions more into exile; it orchestrated death squads and looting and invented new horrors in torture and rape; in the name of bringing democracy, it brought material destruction on a mass scale to a people, aiming also to erase their identity, memory, culture, social fabric, institutions and forms of administration, commerce, and everyday life; it even attacked Iraq’s unborn generations with the 4.7 billion-year death of depleted uranium. It has engaged in civilisational genocide as well as its own moral suicide. Force, however, does not dictate right. The brutality of power and imperialism has been definitively exposed while the project for a new American century has utterly failed. The consequences for American and international history are conclusive. The world order that formed around erstwhile US liberal values has evaporated.

The US invasion and occupation of Iraq is a military, economic, political, moral and cultural disaster for Americans and the world. US military failure has been demonstrated by the inability of the best funded and most sophisticated armed force in the world to defeat the resistance of a small country and its poor people tired of 13 years of sanctions, exposing war as useless. While the Americans may attempt to secure their presence in Iraq, they cannot destroy the belief of Iraqis that they have the right to live as any other people in the world, free and independent and sovereign in their land and over their resources. Occupying Iraq is an economic disaster because the costs of the war for the United States have increased beyond any economic gain it could have from controlling Iraqi oil. Politically, the occupation is a disaster for the United States because no one in the world can argue that it is playing a progressive role. US neoconservatives and imperialists are... refusing to be subject to international law and replacing it with the law of the jungle. How can the world — Americans included — be identified with such a savage enterprise as the war on and occupation of Iraq?

Arabs are not strangers to neo-imperial attempts to prevent their development. They recall the systematic demonisation of their popular movements: the attempted toppling of the democratically elected Syrian government in 1956 for being "communist", the characterisation of Nasser as a "fascist" when he nationalised the Suez Canal, the criminalisation of the Iraqi Baath Party, referred to as "Nazis", when it refused to surrender control over Iraq’s resources. Even the Palestinian and Lebanese people who heroically struggle against occupation are considered "terrorists". We know well what are colonial policies in general and in this region in particular. The US always pretends to defend the rights of a minority — whether its demands are justified or not — in order to control the majority. In Iraq, since 1991, the US appealed to Kurds and Shias to rebel, trying to insinuate that those who govern them are Sunnis. Anyone with intellectual honesty knows that the Baath Party was neither sectarian in its thinking nor in its membership...

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about the purpose of mass protests. The objective of a protest should never be to "persuade" or "pressure" elected officials.

The purpose of protest is to keep the issue in the public eye, win more people over to your side and give encouragement to people who are on your side so they are more willing to speak out at work, among family and friends and to their representatives.

Experienced protest organizers know this. It doesn't matter whether people in Washington "listen to" the protesters. The point is to get to the elected official's constituents - who will listen to you - so that those constituents bring pressure on their representatives. And that's why thousands of local protests, all over the country, can sometimes be more effective than one massive march on Washington.

This method works, but it takes time, and while it's taking time, people are dying. Yes, it's frustrating, but let's not make the mistake of thinking protests are worthless. The public's attitude about the war today is very different than it was four years ago - or even last year - and the antiwar movement, including those marches, had something to do with that.

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I went down to Washington DC in January for what turned out to be an incredible march around the capitol. Half a million of us marched that day and were treated to some quite incredible speeches.

Yesterday, I went down to Washington again, this time to march on the Pentagon. It was bitterly cold and we met up with an awful counter-demonstration that seemed to be comprised primarily of veterans. They were holding a lot of signs, such as the ones that said "support our president". But the sign they were carrying that absolutely floored me read..."PEACE SUCKS". That's right. One of their signs read "PEACE SUCKS". I had to look a second time because I could NOT believe what I was reading. Luckily, there was a line of police between us and them because it would have been rather unnerving to walk past them, otherwise.

Towards the end of the march, when those of us who had to leave sought to do so, we discovered that the closest metro stop - the Pentagon - had been closed. I assume it was done courtesy of either the Pentagon or the Police. Either way, it was a long walk in bitter cold to a metro station.

Those of you who complain and bitch about marches because you think they do no good - what would you have us do? 40 years ago I spent a lot of time marching to end the War in Vietnam, never thinking I'd have to do that again in my lifetime. Now, I write emails and letters and make calls. I go to demonstrations when possible. I talk to people every day - I have lots of buttons on my bag and this provokes discussion.

I have talked till I'm blue in the face about impeachment of Bush and Cheney and the rest of the gang, but it does no good. The people with the power to impeach refuse to do so. They are falling down on the job. Why? I don't know. But it grieves me beyond belief to see the downfall of the Democrats.

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