Progressive Democrats of America is working with United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the nation’s largest antiwar coalition with 1,400 member groups, to organize activities on the 5th anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.

March 19, 2008 will mark the passage of 5 years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the beginning of the 6th year of war and occupation.

PDA will work with UFPJ in calling for and supporting a set of activities on and around the 5th anniversary that will manifest the intensifying opposition to the war:

March 13-16, Winter Soldier: UFPJ member group Iraq Veterans Against the War is organizing historic hearings March 13-16 in Washington, DC. Veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqis and Afghans, will tell the nation the real story of this war. UFPJ is helping local groups and individuals plan events that directly link to and amplify the Winter Soldier hearings, from which we hope to have a live video feed available so that communities around the country can gather to watch and listen.

March 19, Mass Nonviolent Direct Action in Washington, DC: UFPJ is organizing for what we hope will be the largest day of nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience yet against the war in Iraq. The coalition is working to have delegations from all 50 states take part in this massive day of action.

March 19, Local Actions Throughout the Country: Congress will not be in session and so our representatives and senators will be in their home districts/states. The coalition is encouraging those who are not able to make it to Washington on March 19 to organize local antiwar actions. These events will vary in location or character, and they will all be tied to the actions in Washington and sending the same message to the policy makers: It is time to end this war and occupation!

More information about these activities can be found at the new website UFPJ has created for the 5th anniversary efforts: Five Years Too Many.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) started his questions by asking about the President’s Article II powers under the Constitution. Do you think that the President can break any law he pleases because he’s the President — including, say, statutes banning torture?

“I can’t contemplate any situation in which this president would assert Article II authority to do something that the law forbids,” Mukasey shot back.

Think Progress: Full List of Bush Lies

SOTU: Bush Is Forced To Withraw Troops From Iraq Because Of Weakened Military

Bush said: “When we met last year, our troop levels in Iraq were on the rise. Today, because of the progress just described, we are implementing a policy of ‘return on success,’ and the surge forces we sent to Iraq are beginning to come home.”

FACT — SURGE HAS WEAKENED THE MILITARY: Army Chief of Staff General George Casey warned that “the current demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply” and also that “the surge has sucked all the flexibility out of the system.” Yesterday, Gen. Petraeus “said the Pentagon wants to bring troops home quickly to reduce the strain on the armed services.” [WSJ, 1/17/08; CNN, 1/28/08]

FACT — THE LONGER WE STAY IN IRAQ, THE MORE OUR MILITARY IS BURDENED: “It’s going to take us three or four years and a substantial amount of resources to put ourselves back in balance. … The question is, when does the conflict end?,” said Army Chief of Staff George Casey in October. [General Casey, 10/9/07]

A handful of Florida voters are reporting technical glitches and other problems in counties using touch-screen voting machines. Early reports indicated the problems were small, and critics of the machines so far have not raised major alarms.

The office of Rep. Robert Wexler, a south-Florida Democrat who is a leading critic of touch-screen machines, received only a few complaints Tuesday morning and passed those concerns along to the state’s supervisor or elections, a spokeswoman tells RAW STORY. But so far the congressman and his staff do not see large-scale problems developing.

“We haven’t been getting flooded with calls,” said the spokeswoman, who works in Wexler’s DC office but is not authorized to speak on the record. Two people called his Florida offices and one call was received in Washington, she said.

“If we’d started to get calls from lots of constituents … we’d be all over it,” she added.

After Tuesday’s election, Palm Beach County, part of which Wexler represents, will phase out its touch-screen machines in favor of paper optical-scan ballots.

Florida news outlets reported some delays in opening polling places and malfunctioning machines in at least one precinct.

“There has been a major failure of the voting, at least at this precinct. … None of the machines worked,” Rabbi Richard Yellin, who was first in line at his polling place in Boynton Beach, told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Yellin said he had to leave the precinct to attend a service at his synagogue and planned to return later in the day.

The Palm Beach Post documented glitches at other polling locations as well. Someone mistakenly shut down voting machines at a precinct in Delray Beach and another polling place in Boynton Beach opened nearly an hour late, according to the paper.

The Palm Beach County elections supervisor, Arthur Anderson, pronounced himself a “satisfied customer” after what he said was a smooth vote at his own polling place, but reporters had to take his word for it.

“[U]nlike his predecessor, former Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore, Anderson would not allow reporters to follow him into the polling place to verify that the machines had all been booted and to observe any problems voters might be having,” the Post’s Ron Hayes reported. “He insisted journalists remain 150 feet from the polling place, although that demarcation was not clearly marked outside.”

MSNBC’s Kerry Sanders reported a “minor irritation” for voters at a half-dozen polling places in Broward County, when voting machines failed to read voters’ drivers licenses to verify their identities. The machines have been repaired, and elections officials told Sanders that voters had the opportunity to vote, although they had to wait longer than expected.

In Dade County, touch-screen systems also caused a few problems, Sanders reported. Computer chips voters have to be inserted into the machines, but some voters were given chips that did not properly register which party’s primary they wished to vote in.

“Minor problems,” Sanders said. “Certainly not the problems we’ve seen in Florida in years past.”

By Congressman Robert Wexler

Tonight, President Bush will issue what will thankfully be his final State of the Union address; but, little of what he says can be trusted.

For the past seven years, we have watched as America has moved steadily backwards. We have become a nation that is less free and less fair. We have become a nation that no longer values the right to privacy and has tragically retreated from our cherished foundations.

Nothing George W. Bush says tonight will change the sad reality of the America he has given us:

- Our economy teeters on the edge of recession while property taxes spike and homeowners are losing their homes at record levels; - Our educational system is broken and our teachers are abandoned; - Our roads and bridges languish in disrepair, while our borders and ports remain under-inspected and insecure; - Our most basic ideals about law and justice have been tossed out, as our President uses fear to pursue his reckless agenda; and - We remain mired in Iraq – a war built on lies and manipulated intelligence.

Nowhere in American history - not even Watergate - have we been confronted with an Administration so ambivalent about the truth and established law.

A recent nonpartisan study found that the Bush Administration lied over 900 times in the prelude to the Iraq war, misleading us on nearly every critical issue.

It is time that we reclaim this country and undue the damage wrought by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Democrats in Congress must stand up and lead – no matter the cost.

We need to finally act on the promises of the 2006 election and stop at nothing to bring our troops home from the Iraq. If we do not act Bush will install a permanent US presence in Iraq and John McCain’s vision of a 100 year US occupation will become reality. (Click here to read my recent editorial on the Failure of the Bush Surge in Iraq.)

It is time that we faced up to our global responsibilities and begin to prevent global warming. In the richest nation on earth, it is long past time that we provide health insurance to every single American.

We must aggressively pursue impeachment hearings for Vice President Dick Cheney due to serious allegations of abuse of power including illegal wiretapping, torture, and deliberate lies to bring us to war. Click here to see my recent speech on the floor of the House calling for impeachment hearings.
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Progressive Democrats of America
By Tom Hayden, PDA Advisory Board member

Pushed by powerful voter sentiment, the leading Democratic presidential candidates all talk of ending the Iraq war, and the November election seems headed toward a showdown with a Republican committed to a long-term war and occupation.

But it’s not necessarily true.

The press, the politicians and much of the public have embraced a paradigm that equates ending the Iraq war with the phased withdrawal of American troops from combat roles, a position favored by the top Democratic candidates. Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to her campaign statements, would withdraw most or all of them in five years though she “hopes” to withdraw them sooner, and Sen. Barack Obama would do the same in 18 months. Former Sen. John Edwards has recently espoused a more rapid and complete withdrawal timetable.

Overlooked is the fact that if and when those combat troops withdraw, U.S. counter-terrorism units will remain indefinitely to fight the Iraq-based al Qaeda along with other undefined “terrorists.” There also are American advisers who will continue training roles for the Iraqi army and police, and will be embedded in the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a Shiite stronghold widely criticized for torture, detention without charges, and other human-rights violations. There will be armed forces to protect the diplomats in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest embassy in the world. Finally, these units will require “force protection” by additional American troops.

To sum up, if all American combat troops ever are withdrawn, there still will remain 50,000 to 100,000 Americans involved in a low-visibility, dirty war in Iraq, just like those that involved death squads in Central America in the ’70s, or the earlier Phoenix program in South Vietnam, in which the Viet Cong infrastructure was decimated by assassinations and torture. Top American advisers in Baghdad today operated the El Salvador counter-insurgency and have praised the Phoenix program.

This, in fact, already is happening. The Baghdad regime is described by a source in the Baker-Hamilton report as a Shiite dictatorship. The recent lessening of violence in Baghdad largely is due to the ethnic cleansing of its Sunni population. At least 50,000 detainees are imprisoned today without charges or trial dates. The United States is paying Sunnis to fight Sunnis, funding the Shiite-dominated security forces, and has increased its bombardment from the air by fivefold since last year.

Morality aside, there is no certainty that transferring combat duties to the Iraqi army, with embedded U.S. advisers and trainers, will succeed in stabilizing Iraq any time soon. Nor will inevitable revelations of human rights abuses in Baghdad’s secret prisons salvage America’s ruined reputation in the world.

The silence of the candidates and the media toward this U.S.-created, U.S.-funded, U.S.-armed Frankenstein in Baghdad perhaps reflects a bipartisan establishment fear of “losing” Iraq. Such fears resonate strongly in American politics in favor of Republicans, from the acrimony over “losing China” in the ’50s to the continuing polemics over who “lost Vietnam.” It may also be rooted in an unspoken consensus on securing a an American advantage in the sharing of the Persian Gulf oil supplies.

David Letterman interviews John Edwards Jan 22, 2008.

Natural Resources Defense Council

Click to Protest!

We’ve got to stop the Bush Administration from rushing through the sale of oil and gas drilling leases in Alaska’s prime polar bear habitat — before it makes a final decision about protecting these imperiled bears under the Endangered Species Act.

Sign the message below and tell your Representative to support the Markey bill (H.R. 5058) that will reverse these new oil and gas lease sales for the sake of polar bear survival.

Polar Bear Protection Delayed. Oil Drilling Okayed. Click to Protest!

Bad news: the Bush Administration has delayed its long-awaited decision about whether or not to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. The deadline for a decision was January 9th.

In the meantime, the administration has given the go-ahead for the sale of oil and gas leases in prime polar bear habitat — the Chukchi Sea off of Alaska — on February 6th.

Coincidence? We don’t think so.

We’re taking the Bush Administration back to court to win polar bear protection. And I’m asking you to make your own voice heard against new oil drilling in polar bear habitat.

Click to Protest!

For more coverage of Dennis Kucinich, go to the Openers blog.

View London

The Foreign Office has been ordered to publish an early draft of the controversial dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

An information tribunal has ruled that the unpublished document, which was a precursor to the final dossier on Iraq’s alleged possession of WMDs, must be made public.

The final document, which was issued by then prime minister Tony Blair in September 2002, was at the centre of a government scandal after accusations that the dossier had been ’sexed up’ in order to encourage support for an invasion of Iraq.

Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was also found dead shortly after he was named as a media source for a documentary into the composition and collection of the information contained in the papers.

On February 9th 2005, a request was made under the Freedom of Information Act by Christopher Ames, a researcher, to view the draft.

But the Foreign Office had previously refused to allow the document to be viewed and may yet appeal to the High Court in order to avoid having to relinquish its confidentiality.
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