Friday, July 29, 2005

Fw: Majority believes Bush misled the people

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 29, 2005 10:12 AM
Subject: Majority believes Bush misled the people

Steps forward for the impeachment movement
Majority of U.S. public believes Bush misled the people
Buses coming from all over the U.S. for September 24

Haunted by the threat of impeachment, Bush has received the news that he dreaded most.

A majority of the U.S. public doubts the United States will win in Iraq and believes Bush intentionally misled the country about Iraq's weapons capabilities, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll.

Previous Gallop polls have asked the same questions, but this was the first time that over half of those polled - 51 per cent - believed Bush deliberately misled the people when he asserted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, USA Today said.

As we reported two weeks ago, more than "two-in-five voters (42%) say they would favor impeachment proceedings if it is found the President misled the nation about his reasons for going to war with Iraq," according to a recent Zogby Poll.

The war in Iraq is one of the greatest atrocities in recent times. The Bush Administration's combination of arrogance with an utter disregard for the law requires Congress to immediately proceed with filing Articles of Impeachment. Tens of millions of people know with certainty that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other leading officials lied to them. That is why the impeachment movement has developed as a nationwide grassroots political phenomenon.

On September 24, hundreds of thousands of people will be in the streets for major antiwar demonstrations in Washington DC, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The impeachment movement is organizing a major contingent for September 24 at the White House.

ANS_J20 bleachers 

 

Undeterred by the bitter cold and intimidation tactics of the police, thousands upon thousands brought the antiwar and impeachment message to Bush's coronation, January 20, 2005.

ImpeachBush.org/VoteToImpeach.org signs and banners will be everywhere that day. Thanks to the support of so many people, the publicity and outreach campaign is in full gear and will get stronger in the weeks ahead. Supporting this campaign makes all the difference.

Listed below are some of the cities that we know are already mobilizing buses and car caravans to come to the September 24 demonstration at the White House. It is already an incredible list that will surely double in size as we intensify our work, getting out leaflets, posters, stickers as well as the phonebanking and national outreach efforts.

This is a huge, national effort and the expenses are great. Every day volunteers sacrifice their time and energy. But we can only succeed with the donations and contributions of people who believe that nothing is more important than holding Bush and other high officials accountable for their criminal conduct. Please make a contribution and tell a friend and family member to so as well. To make a contribution on our secure server, where you can also obtain information to write a check, click here. 

Cities already organizing transportation to the White House on September 24 include:
- Albuquerque, NM
- Ann Arbor, MI
- Baltimore, MD
- Bangor, ME
- Berkeley Springs, WV
- Birmingham, AL
- Boston, MA
- Buffalo, NY
- Cape May, NJ
- Charlotte, NC
- Chattanooga, TN
- Cleveland, OH
- Chicago, IL
- Cobleskill, NY
- Dallas, TX
- Detroit, MI
- Dubuque, IA
- Evansville, IN
- Fayetteville, NC
- Gainesville, FL
- Geneseo, NY
- Gulfport, MS
- Hackensack, NJ
- Harrisburg, PA
- Harrisonburg, VA
- Hattiesburg, MS
- Jacksonville, FL
- Kingston, NY
- Lancaster, PA
- Lafayette, LA
- Linwood, NJ
- Louisville, KY
- Luck, WI
- Macon, GA
- Memphis, TN
- Meridian, MS
- Burlington, VT
- Montpelier, VT
- New Brunswick, NJ
- New Paltz, NY
- New York City, NY
- Newark, DE
- Newark, NJ
- Pleasantville, NJ
- Poughkeepsie, NY
- Philadelphia, PA
- Reno, NV
- Richmond, VA
- Rochester, NY
- Sarasota, FL
- Sault Ste. Marie, MI
- Schenectady, NY
- St. Petersburg, FL
- Tuscaloosa, AL
- West Chester, PA
& many more!

J18 [Sarah] Aerial 3

500,000 people marched in DC at the A.N.S.W.E.R.-initiated demonstration on January 18, 2003.

 

Bush Lied t-shirt   Impeach Bush lawn signs.   Bumper sticker

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posted by carol wolman @ 5:20 PM   0 comments

Fw: Must all religiojn be right? by Jim Wallis

 
----- Original Message -----
From: rainbow7
To: MITCH//
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2005 11:47 PM
Subject: God's Politics: Why the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn't get it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Must all religion be Right?
Joe Loconte is on a mission to make sure all religion in America (or at least the political expressions thereof) will be dependably right-wing, like his Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation. Any moderate or, worse, "progressive" religious deviation from the Republican Party line is anathema to Joe, who feels called to stamp out such heresies.
 
 
In his recent Wall Street Journal commentary, "From Gospel to Government," published July 1, 2005, Loconte, a Heritage Foundation fellow, derides all such progressive religious groups as having "no obvious grassroots constituency," as being "composed mostly of mainline clergy and church elites who are often culturally out of step with the rank and file," and as people who "treat traditional religion with either suspicion or outright contempt." Wow. That certainly is true for the "secular fundamentalists" who exercise the same undue influence over the Democratic Party as the "religious fundamentalists" do over the Republican Party, but certainly not for orthodox Catholic and evangelical Christians (like me) who simply don't share Loconte's right-wing politics. It's hard to find ourselves in Loconte's diatribes.
 
He charges that such non-Religious Right heretics "leap directly from the Bible to contemporary politics" without the proper theological and political nuances. Interesting. Wasn't it Religious Right leaders who in a Nashville "Justice Sunday" event said that Christians who don't support all of President Bush's judicial nominees are not really "people of faith?" "Imagine my surprise," said an evangelical seminary professor from Asbury, Kentucky, at an alternative religious service when he realized that despite his biblically orthodox upbringing, he was not really a Christian unless he backed the Republican president's choices for the federal court. In his op-ed, Loconte attacked "religious progressives" for being "allied" with George Soros and MoveOn.Org when I know of no connections to those liberal funders and groups that are as direct as the Religious Right's ties to right-wing funders and think tanks such as Loconte's Heritage Foundation. Perhaps a good test of religious independence would be to examine how critical faith leaders and groups are of their natural political allies. I'd love to compare the religious left and right on that score.
 
Loconte referenced the "best-selling book God's Politics" that I wrote and accused me of deriving from Isaiah a "blueprint for government welfare spending." On that book tour (in which we spoke to the constituency Loconte claims none of us have), we reached nearly 70,000 people face to face over 21 weeks in 53 cities and reached millions more through the media. What I found was a silent majority of moderate and progressive religious people who don't feel represented by the shrill tones and ideological agenda of the Religious Right, nor the disdainful attitudes toward religion from the secular left. But they do feel that poverty is a moral value and religious issue (there are 3,000 verses on the poor in the Bible), that protecting the environment (otherwise known as God's creation) is also matter of good faith and stewardship, and that the ethics of war - whether we go to war, when we go to war, and whether we tell the truth about going to war - are profoundly religious matters. The people I met don't see federal spending as the only answer to poverty (and neither do I), but they do believe that budgets are moral documents and that all of society is responsible (public, private, and civil society sectors - including faith-based organizations) for working together to overcome poverty.
 
In a recent National Public Radio commentary, Loconte accused all churches and religious groups who had questions about the war in Iraq of being hopelessly utopian pacifists, and invoked the example of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's opposition to Hitler as the more realistic path. The problem is that Pope John Paul II, who opposed the war in Iraq, and the current Pope Benedict are not pacifists. Nor are the majority of church bodies around the world who studied the rationales for the war in Iraq (including the majority of evangelical churches worldwide) and concluded it did not fit the traditional just war categories. And Niebuhr, suggest many of his students (including his theologian daughter), would have been quite alarmed at the Bush theology in the war on terrorism, which too easily sees our adversaries as evil and us as good, denying the evil that runs through all human hearts and nation states.
 
 
So what's Joe's problem? I think he's worried about what I saw and felt around the country as I met the constituency he hopes doesn't exist. The monologue of the Religious Right is now over, and a new dialogue has just begun on the application of faith and values to politics. Joe wants the Religious Right's monologue to continue and to make sure that no serious dialogue about faith and politics in America gets a chance to really begin. His attacks do, however, serve one useful purpose. He gives credible evidence to the subtitle of God's Politics: Why the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn't get it.

 

posted by carol wolman @ 9:12 AM   0 comments

Fw: [peacemakersBiblestudy] Do not cooperate by Kjenn

Psalm 81:   9There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship any strange god.
 
The god worshiped by the Radical Religious Right is strange.  He condones torture, robbing the poor to enrich the rich, endless warmongering, manipulation of consciousness by way of lies and deceit, illegal invasion of other countries, hatred of those who believe differently, and many other crimes which the God of the Bible, the God of life, love, truth and justice, would never countenance. 
 
I am forwarding a wonderful post from our peacemakers group, with some excellent suggestions for withdrawing energy from the reign of satan which we are experiencing.
 
In the name of the Prince of Peace,  Carol Wolman 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 29, 2005 4:02 AM
Subject: Re: [peacemakersBiblestudy] loving your enemy but not loving the devil.

Excellent post.  The key is to not cooperate.  My silence back in the fall of 01 was basically a failure to cooperate with the cheerleading for war and it drove the people around me nuts.  I've become much more vocal since then.  I've also sometimes gone in early to work and blessed my coworkers desks.  Why?  Because they're not going to stand still for me to bless them in person.  Because something is obviously wrong with them but I don't know what and can't help them beyond prayer.  I see the W flying by on the interstate and I say a prayer for whoever put the sticker there.  If silence amounts to not cooperating, then keep silence.  If talking is uncooperative with evil, then talk!  I try to think of more and more ways to be uncooperative with evil.  I am thinking of writing a letter to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church USA, the archbishop of Canterbury as leaders of my church and then copy every religious leader I can think of appealing for a united effort, something everyone can do in every circumstance to demonstrate that they do not and will not cooperate with either terrorists or imperialists.  I am thinking of a monthly boycott -- no one buy anything every third weekend, the weekend to include Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the weekly holy days of the three religions causing the most trouble in all creation this year and last.  It likely wouldn't hurt business overall, but I think it might wake some business people up.  If the religious leaders who also practice ordinary common decency (not the other religious leaders and you know who I mean) called all the faithful of every religion to something, not necessarily the third weekend thing, what would happen?  Would it shame Bush and the terrorists into stopping their evil murderous crap?  Wouldn't it at least be a proclamation to the world of how many people are sick of both terrorism and war?  How many people who see that they're both merely different brands of the same, quite literally damned, thing?

Buying less or no petroleum is failure to cooperate.  Buying less or no meat is failing to cooperate.  Exercising your God-given rights is failing to cooperate.  I could go on.  We have to fail to cooperate!  When Jesus said to turn the other check, I firmly believe he meant for us to fail to cooperate when we are oppressed.  Fighting back or reacting with fear and shame were expected.  Turning the other check was not the expected reaction.  Today, turning the other check has become just masochistic.  Don't do it unless it will be seen as godly defiance, failure to cooperate.  If people are ostracizing you at work, put on your best clothes, smile, perform goofy little acts of kindness for them, and grin like an idiot when they wince and squirm.  Is there some petty spite in that?  Well, of course.  But it is also nonviolently failing to cooperate, that is, stubbornly failing to be crushed, which is what they wanted.  Then take it all the way up to ... what?  General strike?  Hunger strike?  I don't know.  I'm still working on it, but I grab every available opportunity to fail to cooperate

Debate theology if you want to, but for Jesus' sake, DO NOT COOPERATE!

Kathy Johnson
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS



posted by carol wolman @ 8:58 AM   0 comments