A Winning Strategy?
Topic: State Of The Union
I was just reading an article which I found on BuzzFlash.com by TBogg, who calls himself, "...a somewhat popular blogger," entitled, "Welcome to our world". It seems that the consensus is that the Republicans are going to have a hard time in the interim elections.

My advice: I wouldn't break out the champagne just yet. Yes, Bush does have a horrendous approval rating but so does congress. The key to remember is that it is as a whole. If you ask people what they feel about their individual representatives they're not that disapproving. Why you ask? It's the same thing you have heard The Indy Voice say over and over again. In fact, you heard a little squeak of it by Howard Dean just recently. The Democrats are pinning their hopes on a Presidential/Republican meltdown and why they are in the process of getting it, they consistently fail to do 2 things. The first is to offer the country a solution that moves us to the left and the 2nd is they all can't sing the chorus in unison,

"THIS IS WHAT YOU GET WITH REPUBLICANS!!!"

What do you get? Why do you even have to ask?

WAR, DEBT, AN ECONOMY THAT LOOKS GOOD BUT IS A HOUSE OF CARDS, POLLUTION, JUNK SCIENCE, HIGH TAXES FOR THE POOR AND MIDDLE CLASS, BRAZEN TALK WITH LITTLE SUBSTANCE, CRONYISM, LIES, DECEIT, FASCISM, ETC., ETC., ETC.

My prediction: the Democrats only gain a couple of seats but not enough to make any kind of difference.

When 2 boats race you can't bet your money on the boat who's anchored and hope the other sinks. You'll never win because while the other boat may sink, yours is going nowhere.

POSITION:
Topic: Hopefully Humorous
TITLE:

Mom, Mommy, Mama, Ma, Dad, Daddy, Dada, Pa

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Long term, team players needed, for challenging permanent work in an often chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24 hour shifts on call. Some overnight travel required, including trips to primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in far away cities.

Travel expenses not reimbursed. Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

The rest of your life. Must be willing to be hated, at least temporarily, until someone needs $5. Must be willing to bite tongue repeatedly. Also, must possess the physical stamina of a pack mule and be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat in case, this time, the screams from the backyard are not someone just crying wolf. Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges, such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets and stuck zippers. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks. Must be willing to be indispensable one minute, an embarrassment the next. Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices. Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Must assume final, complete accountability for the quality of the end product. Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION:

None. Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills, so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE:

None required unfortunately. On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION:

Get this - you pay them! Offering frequent raises and bonuses. A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because of the assumption that college will help them become financially independent. When you die, you give them whatever is left. The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS:

While no health or dental insurance, no pension, no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and no stock options are offered, this job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth and free hugs for life if you play your cards right.

Thanks MaryBob, you should know!

Flying A Flag of Desire Doesn't Make It So
Topic: By Paul Loeb

OUT OF THE SHADOWS—THE SEATTLE IMMIGRATION MARCH
By Paul Rogat Loeb

People marched because families and futures were at stake. Seattle didn’t have a half million marching for immigrant rights, like Los Angeles or Dallas, or 300,000 like Chicago, But 25,000 marched for fifteen blocks through the heart of our city, packing the streets. “I heard it on the radio,” people said. “I heard it at my church.” “I heard it from a friend.” Students came on chartered buses from farm towns 40 miles away. One family drove ninety miles after hearing on the nightly news that a march was going to happen and traffic might be swamped. Except for some students passing the word through MySpace and scattered social justice listservs, this march didn’t rely on the on-line networks that have become the activist standard. It built on more intimate networks, and as coverage rippled out, people came and brought others, affirming that this was now their country too, and they wanted to be treated with dignity and respect.

“It moved me to tears to see people coming out of the shadows to find their voice,” said my friend Jay Sauceda, a community activist who grew up poor in South Texas. “There are so many people in this situation,” he said. “They’ve been so quiet. Now they’re marching.”

“We’re hard workers, not criminals,” said the signs. “We aren’t terrorists.” “Don’t separate us from our families.” They proclaimed “Liberty, Equality and Dignity” and showed pictures of crops that they picked. Children paraded in strollers, teenagers laughed with their friends, elderly women helped each other walk step by step. The march was mostly Latino but also Korean, Filipino, Somalian. The rainbow tilted brown, but it was still a rainbow of participants.

There’s been a lot of flag brandishing for blind patriotism these days. The sea of American flags here were part political strategy—a more salable image than a sea of Mexican flags. But they also felt proud and celebratory. People carried them high, waved them again and again to say that they were Americans too and ask that this country honor promises of refuge and hope. The flags felt so far from the “we’re number one” belligerence of sealed-off Bush rallies.

The marchers chanted in Spanish, waved signs in English, speaking to each other and to those who watched from the sidelines. “Si, Se Puede,” they chanted, “yes we can,” the call of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers and Latino social justice movements ever since. The yes they called for was to be treated with dignity, to no longer be invisible people used for every job at the bottom and discarded when convenient. “I work hard. I get good grades. I’ve lived here since I was five,” said a high school senior. “Why should I and my family have to go back?”

Immigration politics are complicated-- flooding this or any country with cheap labor can and will drive down wages, especially when unions are being busted and undocumented workers live in fear of deportation. If we don’t create enough global justice so desperate people don’t continue leaving their homes in search of a glimmer of hope, then all but the wealthiest will succumb to the worldwide race to the bottom. But as the signs at the march reminded us, we’re all children of immigrants, except for the Native Americans, who had two local leaders leading a blessing before the march began. And those marching and chanting reminded those of us who are legal because our ancestors immigrated earlier on that even in the land of Microsoft, we cannot separate our fates from the fates of those who pick our crops, build our houses, and clean our office buildings, that we’re tied in what King called “an inescapable network of mutuality…a single garment of destiny."

The march may not have found perfect policy solutions-- the ideal path to citizenship, the ideal way to respond to those who’d want to make this land their home without making things worse for others already at the bottom, the ideal way to pass and enforce workplace laws so employers pay a decent wage for all. But it was more about recognizing those who participated and all they spoke for as having a core human dignity, being fellow children of God, worthy of respect and gratitude for their innate worth and for the labors that serve us all. It was about their giving themselves a face and a voice.

Why can’t we have these kinds of marches to challenge the war or global warming, or Bush’s appropriation of the divine right of kings? Anti-war marches were huge before Bush went into Iraq, since then far more disappointing, even as Bush’s polls continue to drift downward. True, Air America has a fraction of the reach of Spanish radio, and the Catholic churches that helped mobilize so many in their congregations here, have been silent on most issues except abortion. But maybe it’s also because those more comfortable sit behind our computers so much that we come to believe we can do all politics with the click of a mouse. Maybe the issues feel too abstract. Unless you have a son or daughter over serving, Iraq doesn’t hit home nearly as much as the raw callousness of Congressman Sensenbrenner’s plan to make 12 million people instant felons, as well as anyone who gives them water or food, education or medical care. Maybe we just haven’t taken enough time to organize all the diffuse anger about Bush, beyond complaining to our friends.

Here the stakes were clear and immediate. People turned out despite the risks of being deported, because had Sensenbrenner’s bill had gone through, as might well have happened without these massive outcries, life would have immediately gotten far harsher and crueler. So for those of us who didn’t march but claim to act for justice, we need to heed the lives these voices represent, and do what we can to ensure they are heard. We also need to link this issue of fundamental human dignity to all the threats that make it difficult for people to live and flourish on this earth. Maybe by finding their voice and courage, those who marched in America’s cities these past weeks can teach the rest of us how to come out of our own shadows and fears and join across our own divides.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association, and winner of the Nautilus Award for best social change book of the year. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time.

See www.paulloeb.org

To receive his monthly articles email sympa@onenw.org with the subject line:
subscribe paulloeb-articles

IT'S A GIRL!!!
Topic: Personal
The Indy Voice is now a proud papa.

Genavieve Lee was born April 4th, 2006, weighing 7 pounds, 15 1/2 ounces and 19 1/2 inches long.

Mr. and Mrs. Indy Voice are really tired but very happy!

Dust Atop The Mountain
Topic: Iraq
THE CIA AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION
CLEARLY KNEW THROUGH IRAQ'S OWN FOREIGN MINISTER THAT
SADDAM HUSSEIN DID NOT POSSES WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Wow, all this on NBC Nightly News! What's next, reporting on the Downing Street Memos? How about reporting on "The Project for a New American Century?" Wouldn't that be something? They could highlight the stated motivations for war by the senior members of this administration years before 9/11. Maybe they could interview the men and women who were on the ground in Iraq in 1991 and ask them if they saw thousands of tons of weapons being destroyed? As part of the report they could go back and interview the U.N. weapons inspectors who, despite surprise inspections, found nothing.

Who knows, maybe they could even report on the debilitating sanctions that crippled Iraq for 12 years. They could report on how those sanctions rendered the Iraqi government powerless to even feed their own people. Hey, they could even do an entire expose on how our government imposed a no-fly zone on the skies directly above Iraqi soil and how Iraq wasn't even a threat to countries directly abutting it.

But the truth is that this NBC report is but particles of dust atop the overwhelming mountain of evidence that is already available for any thinking person to conclude that WE WERE AND CONTINUE TO BE LIED TO BY OUR GOVERNMENT!

Glutton for Punishment
Topic: State Of The Union
Even though Feingold's call to censure the liar-and-thief Bush doesn't have a spit ball's chance in hell, I figured we should give the Visigoths guarding the gate the message that we've had enough. When you sign the petition try something like,

"Hypocrisy destroys political parties.
Clinton broke the law and there were consequences
and Bush has broken the law and there have been none.
Patriots put their country before their party."

Please sign the petition to,

Censure
(then Impeach, Convict and Imprison in Guantanamo - it would be nice)
the deceiver, liar, criminal and terrorist,
George W. Bush

I did.

A Country In Need...
Topic: State Of The Union
Let me be honest with you, I only vote for Democrats because the alternative is well, stupid. Don't get me wrong though, some of the Dems possess just slightly more brain cells then the ding-a-lings of the goose stepping persuasion. Take this censure motion by Russ Feingold. At the present moment Russ is the closest thing to a Democrat that I can stomach right now but the idea that your going to get any type of censure motion passed in the barbarian controlled Senate is flippin nuts! Even when it has become readily apparent to anyone with eyeballs that Bush is a conservative-in-name only, the cons still love him. They will support him long after he mounts Condi on the podium during the state of the union and they'll still over shine that spot on their car where they put their ass-lickin Bush sticker.

But the problem isn't that Feingold is a do-do, the problem is the Democrats that condemn him. The Repubs win with guys like Bush because believe it or not in the ears of the American people they talk a better game than the Dems. The average American can't even spell "censure" no less have any idea what it is but that doesn't mean that the truth underlying the proposition can go unspoken without notice. The American people want to hear a firm position. Dems attacking Feingold is yet another clear failure that should have been a major victory. A strong liberal Dem stands up and the capitulators put their tail between their legs, wet their pants and bark at the smart dog. They did the same thing to Murtha.

I got news for those Dems that "expect" support from the American people, you're not going to get our votes by default. Just because the Repubs are destroying this country doesn't mean that the average Joe is going to give the Dems the same opportunity. We're not going to sit around and wait for you to grow a backbone. The Dems are only going to get so many chances to look like pussies before they're equated with cowardice. In the minds of many that threshold has already been surpassed.

Let's face the scary proposition that it is looking more and more like the Repubs are going to be the ones running this country for the foreseeable future DESPITE their massive failures. The reason is clear. Dems have not offered a concise and opposing voice to those presently bankrupting our country. The American people know it but they also believe that they have no where else to turn and at the moment, they may be right.

So what can we do? Besides getting involved and supporting Liberal candidates wherever they may be, my advice is to give the next Democratic politician walking down the street a swift kick in the ass to show him exactly what this country needs.

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
Topic: Iraq
If you're a self-confessed liberal you've heard it all before. You've been called every meaningless name in the book; "traitor," "Commie," "Unpatriotic," "Un-American," and even "bleeding-heart liberal" (like it's a bad thing).

I wish that just once I could get an honest answer from a conservative. I'd like to ask them if they ever get tired of cutting down so-called "liberal" arguments by attacking the person and not the proposition. Just once would I like an honest answer to the question of whether or not they see the blatant stupidity in using personal attacks against arguments that they do not agree with because there are going to be times when doing so may be downright dangerous to their well-being. I would love to know if they can think of a time when these personal attacks just won't work because the person they'd be attacking just may be one of them. I mean guys like Pat Buchanan and Paul Craig Roberts don't agree with the majority of conservatives on the war in Iraq and they're not traitors, are they?

What about the men and women serving in our armed services? If an overwhelming number of our troops didn't support the mission would they be considered Un-American? I'm curious, would they be called pinko-commies? If 25% of them thought that we should leave Iraq right away would they be called terrorist appeasers? How about if more than half thought that we should either leave immediately or in 6 months, would conservatives attempt to shame them by trying to label them as Unpatriotic? What if almost 3 quarters of our troops believed that we should pull out of Iraq within the year? What would they call them then? Would they hang on old standbys like "traitor, commie, or an Unpatriotic bleeding heart dove" or would they get more creative and call them fools who want to make sweet homosexual love to Bin Laden while a picture of Hillary hangs on the pinko colored cave wall overlooking it all?!?

According to the results of a Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll released today, that's exactly what our troops serving in various branches of the armed forces are thinking. I'd like to see these conservative chickenhawks personally attack the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division.

I have just one last question for all the personally condemning conservatives out in la-la land,

"How can you support our troops
when THEY don't support the mission?"

---

For more information see,
U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006

Our Troops Should Leave Iraq Yesterday!
Topic: Iraq
The problem that many don't seem to understand is that not only did we directly cause the chaos in Iraq by failing to fully understand that war means killing innocent people who's families and friends aren't too thrilled about the idea and are presently violently seeking retribution and justice but what most fail to understand is that our presence in Iraq IS THE PROBLEM! It is clear that we owe the Iraqi people a huge economic and moral debt but we do not need to repay them by fostering the chaos and the forces of violence and extremism. We're the "petri" in the dish on which the disease is growing. Pulling our troops out of Iraq doesn't mean that we abandon what now has become our responsibility.

Leaving Iraq means that we have to use all of the peaceful resources at our disposable to right our wrong. We could utilize the energies of our greatest minds and biggest hearts to formulate a holistic novel solution for fixing many of the problems that exist there, such as paying for the reconstruction of Iraq by empowering the Iraqi's to do it themselves and bringing in experts from countries that had nothing to do with its present destruction and chaos. That would be a good first step and just 1 small piece of the puzzle. The U.S. could strengthen the UN as an institution so that it could provide non-profit humanitarian relief to the country. We could work to fight the corruption, greed and power lust that is not only responsible for the problems in our own country but also the reasons for the continuation of Iraqi sectarian violence. We could work through groups that already exist around the world whose goal would be not to further their own self-interest but to help the Iraqis to have a little dignity and self-determination. We could step aside and logistically and financially support the operations of a massive worldwide humanitarian mission to Iraq.

This is what I mean when I say our troops should leave Iraq yesterday.

We could help the Iraqi's in the U.S. by actively helping them claim their need for justice against the political masters that brought this scourge upon them. We could castrate those forces in our country that believe violence is always the simple answer by educating our population to understand that more patient alternatives exist to solve world problems that while not as glamorous as the "Mother Of All Bombs" is sustainable and uniquely human. In the same vain we could work towards castrating the forces of the "big-dick" military-industrial boys who's only success at solving world problems has been to fuck-up things around the globe. Or we could just stick with what we know and send troops and drop bombs on innocents everywhere in the world where we see a problem and hope and pray for a different outcome. But that I believe is the definition of insanity.

The Loaded Gun...
Topic: Hopefully Humorous

As my father would say,
"That's not nice...
it's true but it's not nice."

(Thanks Brian, I always knew you had latent Republican leanings.
Ewwwwww!
That's just so unnatural!)