From an email I received from Democrats.com :

It’s now been a little over a year since the horrific Nickel Mines tragedy, when an extremely disturbed man murdered several Amish schoolchildren.

Then there’s the Amish response. They visited the man’s wife and children. They visited his father. They cried with them. They attended the man’s funeral. They donated money. They mourned others’ losses as well as their own. Anger would have been completely understandable, but instead they offered compassion.

That’s a completely different moral and emotional vocabulary than, to speak for myself, I’m used to. I understand it as a concept, I’ve tried to practice it myself at times, but I can’t say I’ve found myself in that sort of world too often. I certainly don’t see that sort of reflection or maturity tempering current war-mongering. I think it takes a particular type of petulance, callousness and vanity to eagerly clamor for violence, even when the likely disastrous consequences are intellectually if not emotionally clear. Meanwhile, it takes a certain kind of grace to face someone with that sort of attitude honestly, yet still respond in a positive way.
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It’s essential to contact your senators about opposing the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill. The vote could be any day now, and it can’t get too much attention. Contact information is at the end of this post.

As Josh Marshall explains:

Did you hear about the War on Iran Authorization bill the Senate is going to vote on perhaps as early as today? No, that’s not how it’s getting billed. But that’s what the ‘Kyl-Lieberman’ amendment is. In fact, the supporters of going to war against Iran are using exactly the same strategy with this amendment that they did to lay the groundwork for the Iraq War.

You can watch Josh Marshall break it down on TPMtv here.

As Jonathan Schwarz wrote last week:
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CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - The White House on Sunday fired back at former President Jimmy Carter, calling him “increasingly irrelevant” a day after Carter described George W. Bush’s presidency as the worst in history in international relations.

Carter, a Democrat, said on Saturday in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto had declined to react on Saturday but on Sunday fired back.

“I think it’s sad that President Carter’s reckless personal criticism is out there,” Fratto told reporters. “I think it’s unfortunate. And I think he is proving to be increasingly irrelevant with these kinds of comments.”

Carter has been an outspoken critic of Bush, but the White House has largely refrained from attacking him in return. Sunday’s sharp response marks a departure from the deference that sitting presidents traditionally have shown their predecessors.

In the newspaper interview, Carter said Bush had taken a “radical departure from all previous administration policies” with the Iraq war.

“We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war where we go to war with another nation militarily, even though our own security is not directly threatened, if we want to change the regime there or if we fear that some time in the future our security might be endangered,” Carter said.

In a separate BBC interview, Carter also denounced the close relationship between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“Abominable. Loyal, blind, apparently subservient,” Carter said when asked how he would characterize Blair’s relationship with Bush.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

Things are getting ugly when nuns protest your presence Georgie!

LATROBE, PA. - President Bush could hardly have picked a better private liberal arts college to find a welcoming audience for a commencement address than St. Vincent, a Catholic school run by a loyal former White House aide in a conservative region.

Yet consider what has taken place here since Bush was invited for today’s speech: Students vigorously debated the invitation at a town-hall meeting last month. A former St. Vincent College president wrote a scathing newspaper essay saying Bush had no place on the campus. About a quarter of the tenure-rank faculty wrote an open letter to Bush challenging the Iraq war as contrary to Roman Catholic doctrine. Several dozen people held a candlelight vigil Thursday night protesting the visit. And for several Sundays, nuns protested on the edge of the campus.

The discord, polite and reasoned as it may be, is emblematic of passions across the country as the war moves further into its fifth year, with increasing military deployments and mounting death tolls among Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops.

If anything, the debate there - at a college associated with the Order of St. Benedict and led by a man who once ran Bush’s faith-based initiative - suggests that dissent is spreading into places with little history of protest.

It also suggests that the Bush-led Republican drive to increase support among Catholics, built around Bush’s stance on abortion and other social policy issues, could run into trouble over the Catholic doctrine of a “just war.”

More at the LA Times

(AFP/Peter Muhly)

Peace in Northern Ireland finally seems to be a reality, and a very welcome one at that. On NPR program The World, Lisa Mullens had an thoughtful talk with the Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen, who passed on the intriguing line above.

For more background on the developments in Northern Ireland, here’s short pieces from NPR shows All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and a short segment from the same episode of The World. Or, if you prefer, here’s a brief AFP article.

Cullen talks about the similarities between South Africa near the end of apartheid and Northern Ireland, and how leaders from Ireland met with South Africans to discuss social and political dynamics. He speaks of talking with Mac Maharaj, who he describes as “the last ANC [African National Congress] fighter to give up.” Cullen asked Maharaj about the most important thing he told leaders from Northern Ireland. Maharaj said, “It sounds so simple, it sounds silly, but it really is: You don’t make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies, and the only way you end a conflict is to accept that premise.”
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(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Monday I received a last minute invite to a Dodgers game that night. The four of us had great seats, the best I’ve ever had a baseball game, right behind home plate, only three rows back (not counting the super special section in front of us!). Too bad the Dodgers stunk up the joint, with the Diamondbacks winning 9-1 (apparently the Dodgers had played a 17-inning game the previous day).

Two guys in front of us were really friendly, filling us in on a few players and the recent Dodgers record, making jokes, even giving us a spare beer they weren’t going to drink - and ball park beer ain’t cheap! It turns out they were both cops, from Bakersfield (about 100 miles north of Dodgers Stadium!), and probably the nicest cops I’ve ever met.

In very sharp contrast, the local news has been airing footage of the police assaulting journalists and demonstrators here in town at a May Day rally this past Tuesday. It’s a pretty big local story that only now seems to be trickling into national coverage.

Think Progress has some of the video from CNN here. Photos from The Los Angeles Times are here. Jim Swanson has a short post on it here, and will be covering it in this weekend’s Blue Herald podcast.

The Los Angeles Times featured several important stories on these events. From “Police action on journalists at melee is assailed”:
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A video thank you to Cindy Sheehan from the ever amazing Ava Lowery

Camp Casey is an amazing experience no matter what time of the year you attend. My Brother, Uncle, and I attended last August during the middle of a drought during 100 degree weather. We stayed a week and despite the heat, and some frustrations with our tent and being stuck in a tent with each other for a week, we had an absolutely amazing and truly life changing time at the Camp. My Mother and I attended again this past week for Camp Casey Easter. We met so many activists from all over the country who came to support Cindy and the peace movement. Cindy Sheehan has inspired us all to become more involved and I know personally she is one of my own role models in the peace movement. Thank you Cindy for all you have done and continue to do to inspire us. This video is just one small token of my appreciation.

Please stop by Gold Star Families for Peace and consider donating what you can to help Cindy and others continue to spread the word about this immoral war based on the Bush administration’s lies.

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

It’s hard to keep up with all the great blogs out there, but I wanted to highlight two great posts by Hilzoy over at Obsidian Wings. She’s a philosophy professor, and often writes thoughtful dissections of important stories (and debunks of major disinformation campaigns), but two of her posts in the past couple months really struck me. When pundits go on a knee-jerk anti-blog tear, I have to think - where the hell are the pundits that are producing pieces this thoughtful and thought-provoking? There aren’t many.

“Liberating Iraq” (2/27/07) considers the belated and incomplete realizations of Iraq war hawks such as The New Republic’s Peter Beinart:

Violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly. Its existence changes your destination. If you use it, you had better be prepared to find yourself in the kind of place it takes you to.

… liberation is not just a matter of removing an oppressive government. It can seem that way when you live under tyranny. Nothing is more comprehensible than people living in apartheid South Africa, or under Saddam, thinking: if only that government were removed from power, things would be better. They would have to be. After all, how could they possibly be worse?

Non-violent resistance and conflict resolution really do demand an entirely different moral, emotional and social vocabulary, utterly foreign to the insecure, unreflective neocons and their many chickenhawk allies. Imperialists and other bullies can never truly win over hearts and minds or foster peaceful coexistence - they only understand the language of domination. Even violence with “the best intentions” - if such a thing is possible! - will change the path.
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~ 40th anniversary of the historic 1967 march on the Pentagon ~
~ 4th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war ~
~ Where we will assemble on March 17th

On March 17, 2007, the 4th anniversary of the start of the criminal invasion of Iraq, tens of thousands of people from around the country will descend on the Pentagon in a mass demonstration to demand: U.S. Out of Iraq Now! 2007 is the 40th anniversary of the historic 1967 anti-war march to the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. The message of the 1967 march was “From Protest to Resistance,” and marked a turning point in the development of a countrywide mass movement.

In the coming days and weeks, thousands of organizations and individuals will begin mobilizing for the upcoming March on the Pentagon. Organizing committees and transportation centers are being established to bring people to the March on the Pentagon.

More information and downloadable flyers here