Washblog

Adam Smith (WA-09) posts to Daily Kos

Adam Smith and Dennis Kucinich wrote a diary today urging that the White House Iraq Group be investigated.  It seems to be lacking action items for us, and is mostly informational (their resolution was blocked), but it's still good to see the Rep from the 9th posting on a blog.

Now if we can just get someone from his office to understand they need to stay around and answer comments!  Baby steps, baby steps...

Click here to read the diary.

Hungry for Peace: Fasting on the Capitol Steps

Two days after the massive rally in Washington D.C. on a Saturday in September,  in a "Spartacus" moment, 366 persons expressed their support for the cause invigorated by Cindy Sheehan by sitting in and being arrested outside the White House.  Several of those arrested were from Washington State including Jody Tiller.

The cause is not going to fade away and Jody is one of the reasons.

Tomorrow (Monday, 10/31/05) Jody Tiller will formally bring to an end a fast on the capitol steps in Olympia - a fast she began a week ago, surviving merely on sips of water. The hi-lite of the fast-breaking will be presentation of petitions to Governor Christine Gregoire at 3:00 pm.

Jody invites all of us to join here.

This afternoon my wife, Lietta and I drove to Olympia to  visit briefly with Jody and express our support as members of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO Washington Chapter).

Jody's breaking of her fast will include delivery of petitions to encourage the governor to bring our National Guard troops home from Iraq immediately.

[Jody]

"I am beginning a seven-day fast on Tuesday, October 25th, 2005 with the intention of encouraging Governor Gregoire to demand the withdrawal of Washington State National Guard troops from Iraq. I will sit on the steps to the Washington State Capitol building during daylight hours with my friends and fellow citizens who want our troops home. Come for the week, a day, or an hour and join me so that Governor Gregoire sees support from her constituents for bringing our troops home now.

I invite you to pledge your solidarity.

Fast at home, fast at work, fast at school and join me on the stairs of the Capitol Building. We could invite Senators and Representatives for water brunches. This will be a joint effort to publicize the horror of war and to take a stand where we will be heard.

Do not stand by and allow this war to go one more day without doing something powerful."

November is the time when millions of Americans are enthusiastically content to join in our football worship as  spectators in a spectator sport.

Jody Tiller is offering us an opportunity to leave our seats in the bleachers and get out on the field where the more of us leave the stands and get on the field, the more likely we are to affect the outcome.

The steps of the state capitol .... Monday (Halloween) afternoon at 3:00 p.m.

Be there!

Arthur Ruger

Editor: Military Families Speak Out - Washington State

Prince William to join military, Jenna and Barbara party on....

"Prince William learned today that he won a spot at Britain's elite military academy at Sandhurst to train to become an army officer.

William, 23, will follow his younger brother Prince Harry into the training college." from: Prince William to enter military academy.

Like Prince William and Prince Harry of Britain, George Bush's daughters grew up in wealth and stand to inherit a sizable amount of money (and if Jenna and Barbara's dad has is way, they won't be paying a cent of taxes on the money). Like Prince William and Prince Harry, Jenna and Barbara grew up in a family closely associated with leading their country.

William and Harry have done their share of partying and living the high life. The difference between the two sets of siblings? William and Harry grew up thinking that privilege also has responsibility, Jenna and Barbara grew up in a family where privilege is something to be milked for all its worth.

And where did Jenna and Barbara learn their sense of duty? Right at home...

Big Time Patriot

We think the time to take further action regarding bringing our National Guard troops home is now.

Filling in for another MFSO Pac NW member who had already intitiated contact with an aide to Governor Gregoire, I this to that aide as a follow up on 9/16/05.

I never received a response or acknowledgment and have decided to go public with the letter.

Dear Sir,

In the interests of time (yours and mine) on a workday where I suspect you are busy, I've chosen to use the email to convey the current purpose and desire of Military Families Speak Out - Pac NW chapter.

The question of the deployment of Washington National Guard troops as well as NG troops nation-wide is back on the front burner. It's a more significant issue in light of Hurricane Katrina as well as the growing positive response to the questions raised by Cindy Sheehan outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Support for the war in Iraq has now fallen below 50%. Growing support for and positive actions taken in agreement with  Mrs. Sheehan and the current Bring Them Home Now bus tour headed toward Washington D.C. reveal the shifting mood of our national and state voters.

Three days ago, the city of Chicago passed a resolution demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home now. The vote was 29-9. Yesterday the the city of Philadelphia did the same thing (the vote was 16-1). In Pittsburgh earlier this week  the United Steel Workers announced their support and a demand that the  troops be brought home now. Yesterday the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia took the same step.

Hurricane Katrina has morally empowered every state governor to initiate action aimed at returning the NG home where they belong. The proportion of NG troops required by the Bush administration in Iraq as a percentage of the overall troop strength there is an embarrassing testament to the folly of the incursion. On-going revelations of lies and deception used to obtain support for the Iraq venture in the first place are not going to die down - rather will continue as this president's support remains in freefall. The notion that somehow a need to complete the now-discredited Bush "mission" is no longer politcally supportable. The time has come for the citizens and leaders in each state to intitiate the actions needed to bring about change.

MFSO, as I hope you know, does not have as its agenda a non-support of the military. Rather, we consider holding leadership accountable for decisions that place our  loved ones in harm's way as a patriotic duty that equals a soldier's obligation to defend the country and follow the chain of command. Troops cannot do that in full confidence if they do not bear with them the confidence that citizens at home are "watching their backs;" supporting them fully but making sure the leadership is kept honest. That's the basis of democracy and patriotism.

We are proud of our governor and support her in her role.

MFSO members on the Bring Them Home Now bus tour include Northwest members  Stacy Bannerman and Lietta Ruger who have been speaking publically from city to city as the buses near D.C. Currently a western tour is being planned and a visit with the Governor is what we hope to arrange with you.

My wife, Lietta Ruger, is on the Central bus in the BTHN tour and has met with reps of Senators Bayh and Lugar in Indiana, Dewine and Voinovich in Ohio and Specter and Santorum in Pennsylvania so far. Her impressions have been that consistently, the Republican Senator's reps have been evasive, attempted to short-circuit or deflect questions and divert the discussions in an effort to waste time. At the end of the interview with Senator Lugar's rep, Lietta asked him to have the Senator call her.

"Why would I do that?" he replied, "You are not his constituent."

"Because I have something to say to him." she replied.

I am also the President of Local 970 of the Washington Federation of State Employees and am aware of the direction national union support for our troops has taken.  I've met Governor Gregoire, have heard her speak to our union convention, and am therefore aware that she is not ideologically opposed to what we citizens who speak out in support of our NG troops have been saying.

We think the time to take further action regarding bringing our National Guard troops home is now. We believe the our Governor would be willing to hear us out and that we represent a powerful, willing and public advocacy in support of her taking action regarding our State National Guard troops.

Reference: Military Families Speak Out Pacific Northwest

Dying to Preserve the Lies

Chicago City Council urges immediate withdrawal of U-S troops from Iraq

Bloomington Resolutions Oppose Iraq War, Patriot Act, Seek Higher Minimum Wage

Philadephia resolution:Click for copy in PDF

Pacific Northwest Portal's WASHBLOG:Lietta Ruger: Bring Them Home Now Tour Notes 9/5 - 9/8

Thank you for taking time to read this.

Please get back to me via email or telephone (360-942-7311)

Arthur Ruger
Bay Center WA

Bush: It's important for me to go on with my life

Bush will go on with life -- Birmingham News 

While U.S. sons and daughters labor and bleed in Iraq,  while mothers weep at his door, while the people of Iraq bear unutterable pain, while Siberia melts... here's what Mr. Bush is up to on a typical day:  #61#

A nap, a two-hour bike ride, fishing, lunch with Condaleeza, some reading, and a Little League game. 

This behavior is so far beyond either decency or viciousness that I'm at a loss to come up with a category. It doesn't seem like active evil, though it certainly is evil.  Hannah Arendt may shed some light. Here's her stance on Eichmann -- of Nazi Germany fame:

"Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims' suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking, of having an internal dialogue with himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a basis for judgement, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims. This connection between the complicity with political evil and the failure of thinking and judgement inspired the last phase of Arendt's work, which sought to explicate the nature of these faculties and their constitutive role for politically and morally responsible choices. " (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

We have to give Mr. Bush credit for behavior so heartless, so bad, so dark, that people who desperately desire to not see the plain truth will have to fight even harder to maintain their denial till, we hope, denial cracks from the strain and falls away.

Lietta Ruger, Crawford Texas and fire ants

   

Arthur Ruger posting for wife, Lietta #61#

Military Families Speak Out Pacific Northwest

Update: Phone calls with Lietta.

When she first arrived there, Lietta's first impressions included remarks about the repeated appearance and "drive- bys" of the secret service,

"You could always tell which cars, usually driving fast, were Secret Service. They're the ones with the tinted windows."

The firm but friendly authority and respect demonstrated by the local police. She has yet to speak one word against how they have struggled to maintain order while enforcing the law which seems to mostly have to do with local private property owners' right, crowd control and occasional elements of "national security" actions at the behest of the feds.

For example, when Bush drove by to his barbeque date, the Sheehaners were required to stay inside a boundary marked by yellow tape, (in my mind I saw the crime scene tapes like on TV). When I called it a corral, she hastened to disagree, telling me that it was neither tiny nor confining, but a way of keeping tabs on everyone. As soon as the royal coach had passed, they were given some sort of "all clear" and allowed outside the boundary.

The fire ants have been a problem and Lietta's plague. Having suffered from numerous bites, she was finally put into a motel last night to give her some relief. Although not stampeded by her bites, she may go see a doctor there and asked this morning for her med insurance info from me. I read somewhere else that Cindy slept one night in a trailer because her particular tent was infested with the critters.

The number of supporters at the site has ballooned enormously and the newest on-line photos from an assortment of sites showed that country road full of vehicles arriving and parked all along both sides "in the ditch."

Another video I watched on-line last night shows the crowd appearing to be at least as large as the entire Rolling Thunder Festival at Magnuson Park in Seattle where Mike's (MVP) gang and Doug and Linda set up a marvelous MFSO Booth right next to theirs with an incredible large black and white ”George! Talk to Cindy!" banner coupled with a slightly smaller blue and white “MFSO Pacific Northwest" banner that dominated the festival site.

Per Lietta, as the number of arriving people has increased, more and more opportunities for rallies and public statements occur. Yesterday, at a rally in Crawford itself, Lietta talked of people lining the streets when Cindy and supporters arrived for a rally at the local high school. After Cindy made a major statement which Lietta felt "throws down the gauntlet more," others spoke (including L).

There was an opposition group in Crawford making noise and shouting but they were not as many. The other interesting thing was her observation that the behavior of the anti-Cindy protestors was loud and disrespectful. I asked her if she was telling me that they were acting like junior high schoolers opposing the adults and she laughed and said, "Well ....."

Lietta also talked about how it appeared that the number of pro-Bush supporters seems to owe its size to incentive-recruiting: getting them to show up for a "reward" like a barbeque, beer. Etc ... she wasn't sure about it.

Regarding the pro-Bushers, Lietta felt that "pro-Bush" was not as accurate as anti-Cindy in that the most apparent purpose was not to support or defend Bush's war, but a platitude thing that seemed a shallow appeal to support the president. In that regard, she declared that many among our group felt that in their actions they were showing total disrespect for the actual military victims of the war in shouting "We Don't Care, We Don't Care, We don't care" ... which, when interpreted as their open gesture of support of Bush equates to "and HE doesn't care either!"

Lietta described as wrenching, for many - especially Iraq and Viet Nam Era veterans to see that kind of behavior from adults smiling, marching back and forth waving tiny flags and acting in an openly belligerent manner - a total contrast to the sobriety and seriousness of the single issue at hand.  "In harms' way" becomes totally disregarded in the interest of a false loyalty or ideological viewpoint that shoves aside our natural spiritual inclination to value the life of each human being.

In reality, the insincerity of Bush is reflected in the insincerity of those supporting him, whether waving little flags, laughing and yelling at Camp Casey or broadcasting distorted blather on national TV.

I've updated her on how Washington State seems to have adopted Lietta Ruger as its current Washingtonian at the front. Friday' Seattle PI (Lifestyle) article (by Ms. Paynter) entitled "Northwest Woman joins the Texas Peace Corps" thrilled her. Remember, she hasn't seen any of this as she has no on-line or media access.

I said in an earlier update that filling in for her online has taught me that I will NEVER wonder what she does all day. But this week I have seen the sheer mountain of news about Cindy and her supporters including numerous references to MFSO and its supportive role as well as not infrequent mention of Lietta by local news and all the bloggers who know of her.

Yesterday at Rolling Thunder I spent time with 2 bloggers including the founder of Pacific Northwest Portal (which is a syndicated blogging group with a powerful regional as well as national reading audience), Andrew Villanueve: http://www.nwprogressive.org/portal/

and Brian Moran who publishes Washblog:
http://washblog.typepad.com/main/

Brian has previously requested that Lietta write posts to his site as a guest contributor because of their values.

She is in some ways astounded by the breadth of public awareness that is flowing out of this Crawford Moment and at the same time not surprised by the manifest awareness of those of us who pay attention to these sorts of things.

In closing, I'll tell you that she still has not eaten a "sit down" meal (something she says she'll no longer take for granted) and is still running up our cell phone bill (grin) taking some of the overflow calls, the numbers of which are far too many for Cindy to handle herself. Our own Lisa Gill is heavily involved in this overflow as she has been tasked with managing responses to Cindy's emails which, per Lisa, average about a 1,000 per day. Washington, one of the bluer of the blue states, is a significant player in this drama people and folks like Lisa, Georgia and Lietta are only part of that activity.

Monday, an MFSO caravan leaves for Crawford - the same day Lietta flies home. It's the old story about the uprising of the rebel alliance.  "One leaves and ten takes her place." Go you guys!

In addition, like many others in Crawford who have drawn the attention of their home states, more and more local media from those home states are calling for updates and observations from their "hometown kids".

They realize that major pronouncements from Cindy will be publicized nationally by several sources, but that a response for their own local audiences has more impact from stories about local citizens who have joined the Texas Peace Corp headquartered at the crossroads of a farm-to-market road and the rest of the world somewhere outside Crawford, Texas.

Weekend Notes

We're approaching Tuesday, August 2nd - the date of the special election in Ohio's 2nd Congressional District, where a recently returned veteran from Iraq named Paul Hackett is running against Jean Schmidt - a Republican who blindly follows Bush on every single line. OH-02 is a very conservative district that voted overwhelmingly for Bush, but then again, Hackett is a unique nominee.

The race is looking very close - Daily Kos has the details. This would be a great morale booster for Democrats, and it would prove that Dems can win in Republican territory, if we were to emerge victorious on Tuesday.

Other notes: Michael Hood of blatherWatch is debunking the latest garbage the other side is putting out about Air America. The latest falsehood the other side is stirring up is that Air America stole money from poor children (follow the links to blatherWatch, and you'll understand what this is about, and what it isn't about).

Finally, I was interviewed for a 710 KIRO Local News segment that ran Saturday morning about the $220 million Congress has allocated towards the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

U.S. lawmakers have warned the allocated money may disappear if Initiative 912 passes.

You can listen to the two audio clips here (one is the shorter segment, and one is the extended segment). 

What the 'highest priority' is at the VA

While wounded Iraq vets continue to suffer long delays in processing disability claims and endure ongoing shortages in available heath care treatment, guess what honchos at the VA were fretting about.

Turns out that the boss's picture wasn't up at all VA medical centers and clinics. So while the Government Accounting Office estimates that delays of 119 days in processing claims of disabled vets are the norm, it's a less than 60 day delay in posting the official portrait of the big cheese that provoked a storm of bureaucratic concern.

From the weekly conference call held May 27 among senior VA officials, as quoted by militaryproject.org:

DEPUTY UNDERSECRETARY LAURA MILLER: As you know, many of our facilities, medical centers, CBOCs and  other offices have a picture of Secretary Nicholson prominently displayed.

Unfortunately ... there are many facilities that currently do not have the picture displayed. I am aware that the mailings of the pictures occured on April 22 ...

Dr. Perlin and I cannot stress the importance of this enough. We are asking that you give this your highest priority. We will continue to ask for daily updates on the status until we are assured that all of our facilities have a current picture displayed.

Nicholson, by the way, was the author of the April 5 letter to senators saying, "I can assure you that the VA does not need [additional funds] to continue to provide timely, quality service ..."

Lying Republican scumbag.