I’m almost 65 years old, so I’m part of a huge demographic.  Since the 1960’s, it has seemed to me  as if whatever I became interested in suddenly became really BIG, thanks to the huge number of women who are so much like me.   Civil rights and  an end

This is so exciting!  Senator Patty Murray wants my advice–she actually wrote to me yesterday!  Here is her email: Deficit Reduction: I Want to Hear from You Over the next few months, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction will need to find a balanced approach to addressing our debt

The big story today in my hometown’s weekly newspaper is this: “Love & Cancer: Boiler Room rallies to help couple – he has cancer; she’s stuck in U.K.” The story on the website is brief–http://ptleader.com/main.asp?SectionID=36&SubSectionID=55&ArticleID=30053 , so I’m copying the expanded version, from the print edition, below. Here is the gist

Today is Hiroshima Day, but instead of observing it as a national day of mourning and repentance, we in the U.S. believe our unleashing of nuclear war on the defenseless civilians of Hiroshima was a necessary sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to end the war without our

Hiroshima I am the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto A graduate of Emory College, Atlanta, Pastor of the Methodist Church of Hiroshima I was in a western suburb when the bomb struck Like a sheet of sunlight. Fearing for my wife and family I ran back into the city Where I saw

Mario Vittone, a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer who now writes on water safety, has written the most important thing you’ll read this year: “Drowning Does Not Look Like Drowning.” http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/ Click on the link, read the article, and then read the comments.  Many of the comments are accounts of near-drownings,

A few months ago, I was watching this great performance of  “Asimbonanga (Mandela)”  by Johnny Clegg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGS7SpI7obY&feature=related Asimbonanga (Mandela) and thinking about the power that songs like this can have in people’s struggles for justice.  This song helped bring down apartheid in South Africa, and I wished that there were

I think about Bradley Manning and his suffering constantly. He is so young, younger than my youngest child, who is 25. I am sickened by what is being done to him, and have been trying to think of something I could do to help him. This morning I woke up realizing that I can take advantage of living on one of the few “busy” streets in Port Townsend, WA. So I got some fluorescent yellow posterboard and a permanent marker, and made big signs that read, “OBAMA–stop torturing Bradley Manning.” In the past when I have put up signs in my parking strip, the signs have soon been stolen. So I put my new signs in my car, in the windshield and back window, and left the car parked on the street.

Am I worried about vandalism? Of course I am. But it is past time to stop letting fear keep us quiet while our government is destroying people’s lives. I’ll have to take the signs down when I’m driving, but I’ll put them back in the windshield and back window wherever I am parked. I want to encourage people here to think about the torture that is being inflicted on Bradley Manning, and to make them aware that it is Obama who is responsible for it.

If enough people wake up and start objecting to the torture that Commander-in-Chief Obama is inflicting on Bradley Manning, maybe we can save this young hero’s sanity. I am hoping that other Firedoglake readers will consider putting up their own signs calling out Obama on his torture regime. If I lived near where Manning is imprisoned, I would be spending time protesting in front of the home of the commander who is orchestrating the torture. Public shaming in their communities–at their homes and churches– might make life a little less comfortable for the torturers, and might help them wake up. Manning shone a light on U.S. war crimes. We need to keep that light shining, and to focus it on all those who cooperate and collaborate with crimes against humanity.

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