Over 100 San Francisco antiwar activists protested against the Iran blockade bill, HCR 362, at Nancy Pelosi’s house on Saturday. The protest was emotional, and three people were arrested for trespassing.
This coverage was the lead story on KRON Channel 4’s evening news. The main speaker is Marc Joffe, a local libertarian supporter of Antiwar.com.
Update: Here is an additional report from Janet Weil of CODEPINK:
Three activists arrested for breaking through police barricades around Pelosi’s Pacific Heights mansion and “dying in” on her walkway.A strong, heartfelt, focussed coalition action with great music, signs with photos of Iranian children, an altar with symbols of Iranian culture, many banners and signs including on H Con Res 362 and $400 million for covert ops in Iran!
At a powerful “No War with Iran” action at Pelosi’s Pacific Heights home, code pinkers Toby Blome and Phoebe sorgen (yes, lower case s) and peace organizer David Hartsough were arrested during the Die-In. They broke through the police barricades around Pelosi’s home (no, she was not home — she was in Austin, Texas being protested by Austin CODEPINK!) to lie down as examples of the death that will come to yet another country if the build-up toward war is not halted.
Medea Benjamin and Leslie Angeline were among the dozen or so representing CODEPINK. They joined over 60 others from Action Against Torture, DASW, World Can’t Wait, Western States Legal Defense and probably other organizations. FM DJ Soul of 104.1 in Berkeley spoke out powerfully during the Die-In.
A strong, heartfelt, focussed action with great music, signs with photos of Iranian children, an altar, many banners and signs!
When Toby was being walked to the police car in handcuffs, she called out in a strong but anguished voice, “Pelosi, not another war!” The crowd warmly cheered and applauded the courage of Toby, Phoebe and David.
At the end of the gathering, Medea, just back from DC, said that we need to call Pelosi’s office on Monday to demand that she withdraw H Con Res 362 which calls for a naval blockade of Iran, and that East Bay pinkers need to contact Barbara Lee’s office to get her to step up public opposition to the resolution.
Nancy is a traitor ("Impeachment is off the table") and shouldn´t be allowed to sleep. As Ron Paul has pointed out Resolution 362 and 580 in the Senate are War Resolutions. Have they just collectively lost their minds ?
This video makes it so obvious that Bill O, and those like him, are not conservatives or liberals at all. They are simply the WAR PARTY. She was a great debater and did very well against Bill's name-calling and diversion tactics.
Let Nancy sleep!
Yes ! Let her sleep while thousands die ! We wouldn’t want to disturb anyone would we? Certainly not someone who calls themselves “Fear of Future”. I fear for our future but I’m doing something about it. Join World Can’t Wait, Drive out the Bush Regime, Code Pink and others as we work to change the future to one without fear !!!!!
We tried a vigil outside the house of my DEMOCRATIC congressman. Didn’t work.
I’ve told all “my” elected representatives (all Democrats) attack Iran, or even blockade it, and I will personally dig-up every speck of dirt in your lives and hound the press until they report it.
That shouldn’t be hard since “my” congressional reps. are a trio of opportunistic, Israel-first, scumbags, but I guess that could adequately describe almost every member of Congress.
One of “mine”, Dianne Feinstein, has a husband whose company made a killing (pardon the pun) off of the Iraq invasion after SHE SAT ON THE SENATE “INTELLIGENCE” COMMITTEE and told us that she had intelligence that Iraq had WMDs! What she actually had was intelligence that if we invaded Iraq her family would become immeasurably richer.
How these people can sleep at night is beyond me, and that’s why I’m not voting for Obama — I am not certain that he won’t start “military actions” on other countries at the behest of Israel and the military/industrial complex, and I feel that I have too much blood on my hands (unwillingly) already.
I do encourage others to vote for Obama, after explaining why I’m not. A McInsane presidency is too frightening to imagine. And I’m going to drain my vote away by voting for Barr.
Whatever did happen to Ron Paul? What did he do with our donations? Any word on him speaking at the GOP convention?
And you encourage people to vote for Obama when you can’t bring yourself to do so? I understand the general concept since I’ll encourage people to vote for Nader or Baldwin when I can’t vote for either out of conscience. But to encourage someone to vote for either Obama or McCain nullifies every well motivated impulse in your strategy. The problem is the system, not that one or other of these reptiles is to be prefered over the other. In my view, we can do better than simply an anti-McCain vote.
Since I do know more about U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy than most of my circle, I first tell them why I’m not voting for Obama, but then also balance that with the positive side of an Obama vote. Things like Supreme Court justices who might actually not continue to shred the Constitution.
I do not think that Obama was sincere in his FISA vote: it was politically expedient for him not to appear “soft on terror.” I think the man is intelligent enough, especially given that he’s a Constitutional scholar, to realize that we need to reinstate the Bill of Rights ASAP.
While I think that this whole “Obama is the second coming” has gone to his head, I do think that if he becomes president he will work to set the country back on course. I think that Michelle Obama is very level-headed, and will act as a stabilizing influence. In fact, I wish that she were running. Same with Elizabeth Edwards.
McCain, on the other hand, is, in my opinion, flat-out crazy. We will be bombing Iran, Syria, Pakistan, name Israel’s perceived enemy here _______ within minutes of him taking the oath of office.
We will see the further collapse of our economy as all our funds go to war, further destruction of our Bill of Rights in this never-ending “War on Terror” i.e., “War on Islam for Israel” and our children will die tragic deaths on one of possibly dozens of foreign battlefields.
I have some hope that Obama’s saner side will prevail, even against the Israel lobbies. But I myself, after voting for the lesser of two evils for the last few decades, cannot vote for him. My friends might feel differently and at least they’ll know the facts before they do vote.
With all respect to you personally, I can’t share your comfort in a balanced vision of Barak Obama. In the last month and a half, the man has proven himself as erratic as McCain is crazy. You’re not compelled to accept erratic or crazy, you know. If you can tolerate a play on words, Nader is neither, and neither is Baldwin. And as to the likelihood of his disentangling himself from his AIPAC sponsors, I’d not want to ground my hopes in anything along those lines. Play back his speech at their Congress last month a couple of times and see if you can tell still yourself that his “saner side” is likely to prevail. Like all of these insects, he will do what is expedient.
A post simply to declare my solidarity with the protestors. This was no enemic, lets-all-be-mad-at-the-perfidious-Democrats-but-get-behind-Obama-anyway, Glenn Greenwald style protest. This one was an authentic, outside-the-box protest. I only hope that this kind of thing absolutely mushrooms. As the system continues to teeter and as the country pushes deeper into the oil/dollar/credit/de-industrialization mess, more and more people will see that direct action of this kind is the only way to dismantle the structures over against which they are otherwise powerless. We are long past hoping in elections and parliaments. They have been turned into vehicles of suppression. What we need is a new constitution and an entirely different way of organizing ourselves.
The problem is the system.You have two parties that differ from each other artificially.They play musicall chair each two or four years.But not any fundimental change comes from either.They have a lock on power in this country.The election is a farce where a small minority of either party is able advance its candiadtes.The majority of the American public do not care or know what’s going on,nor is bothered by it.But it still believe in the system!
Pelosi is a traitor on her own people: before the election she promised to be anti GWB and do something to end the wars. After the election she was just screwing her voters. Somebody should make her responsible for her lies!
W.
Pelosi does not represent her constituency which is the S.F. Bay Area. The views in that area of the country are to the left of her’s, so it’s clear she doesn’t give a fig about representation. But then neither do most members of the D.C. political establishment, the mass media, including the papers of “record the NY Times and Washington Post, etc. Pelosi exemplifies everything wrong with the Democratic Party today, which is that it is not an opposition party to the Bush administration but in alliance with it.
However, to be fair to Pelosi, if you think she’s bad, listen sometime to Jane Harman. She is slightly to the left of Joe Lieberman.
Barak Obama–well, he could have maybe, maybe been someone akin to J.F.K. (without J.F.K.’s intellect and wit) but he turned out to be Bill Clinton in African American drag. He and his wife are going to make all of us “take more responsibility” and “work harder”? And when did it become necessary to evangelicize at every single turn to be President of the United States.
What a yawn of a political campaign this has turned out to be.
Ah yes–“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
So much “sacrifice” in the air. All of it, as far as the governing elite is concerned, for other people. Or, as the old Uncle Sam recruiting posters used to say, “That means you!”
Besides the fact that he is a Democrat, Obama’s most serious problem in my opinion no one has mentioned to date–to wit, he is legally trained. But this observation will be lost on most of the ideologues, left and right.
At any rate, today’s comedy:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. economy will need months to recover from a growth slowdown caused by a home mortgage crisis, turmoil in financial markets and high energy prices, Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson said on Sunday.
Twelve months in a year, right? How many months in a decade?
Actually, in my far from humble opinion, it’s a tossup whether the US “economy” will ever recover, and certainly not the way the present financial, economic, political, and foreign policy “elite” are going about it.
Not only have they not got any workable answers, they are, in their present incompetence, not even capable of asking the right questions.
As I said, I am not going to vote for Obama, but I think that his message about taking more responsibility and working harder are very good ones.
In my 44 years I have seen what I consider a seismic change in the American character. My generation, and we were children during Vietnam, are almost paragons of virtue compared to people in their twenties and teen-agers. I thought we were somewhat degenerate and lacked values, but it’s nothing compared to now.
Even my teen-age nieces and nephews, who were raised very responsibly, are sucked into this “culture” of Facebook, MySpace, Wii, gossip sites like TMZ, and non-stop text messaging. The idea of a summer job has never occurred to them, much less the ones I had, like mowing lawns and working as a dish washer at Wendy’s. They never go outside unless it’s organized sports.
To some extent I blame their parents, but, on the other hand, my teen-age nieces and nephews have actually done really well for themselves compared to other teen-agers. I see almost no intellectual curiosity and willingness to work hard among their friends.
Bush mentioned in one of his State of the Union addresses that he wanted a service economy, but he and his corporate cronies aren’t even going to get that — Americans don’t want to work, much less do hard work. We feel entitled, and the generations after mine seem to feel even more entitled, so I do think that Obama is right to stress working harder and taking responsibility.
Our economy is collapsing, and if we attack Iran under Israel’s marching orders, we all might have to be mowing lawns, or doing some kind of barter economy, very soon.
I could not disagree more.
The incompetent elite, who are the real offenders in regard to not wanting to do any hard or serious work, rather than appearing to do it, just “stole”, ironically under the heading “Capitalism” and “privatization”–and “stole” is the right word–just stole at least one third of anything one might have accumulated in USD. And the program is to steal even more, while promulgating Thatcher’s “traditional values” for the hoi polloi.
More important, the American currency itself, as well as the American economy, is based on nothing but debt and credit, and, contrary to various slogans, even more so, in regard to consumerism and advertising and credit and war, on the right and among the supposed “Capitalists” than among the leftists, which beyond a few pensive Marxists and Socialists, does not exist in the US.
Are you familiar with the work of R. D. Laing? In a psychiatric context, he made the interesting observation that schizophrenia is, in some instances, a rational response to the irrationality and hypocrisy of what was in his day the British “family.”
One posits a political and generational analogue–nihilism or seeming nihilism, may be the only rational response to the utter incompetence and irrationality of what has become the close to utter lunacy of the American nightmare.
Buy now, pay later? Why not live now and not pay at all?
“In my 44 years I have seen what I consider a seismic change in the American character. My generation, and we were children during Vietnam, are almost paragons of virtue compared to people in their twenties and teen-agers. I thought we were somewhat degenerate and lacked values, but it’s nothing compared to now.”
Sad to say, the problem you cite has been in process for longer than 44 years. I’ve had 68 years to consider it and it certainly had a presence when I was young. What is different today is that there is no longer a commonly accepted ground anchoring notions of truth in the culture. Indeed, any notion of truth at all outside one’s own version of it seems the rare exception. And the outcome: A nation of sociopaths.
What we’re witnessing is the playing out of the solutions the Enlightenment posed as a way of dealing with the crisis with which competing ideas of morality presented European culture in the wake of the Reformation. In the absence of a common moral standard, “reason” was posited as the one universally acceptable basis for moral judgment and with it the imposition of scientific methodology on all intellectual activity. The thought that truth might be something given, something revealed, rather than something derived was accorded short shrift. I won’t have to tell you, of course, about the impact the Enlightenment has had on the standing of both the Jewish and Christian religions in Western life. At best, they are regarded as quaint curiosities by most. But now we have the Enlightenment and its methodology to judge, don’t we, and we can see it in the prevailing relativism and the fact that your “teen-age nieces and nephews … are sucked into this “culture†of Facebook, MySpace, Wii, gossip sites like TMZ, and non-stop text messaging”. When no higher purpose is assigned to life than the evaluation of facts, life turns in upon itself and becomes sterile, even self-punishing. Having rejected priests and rabbis, the West now finds itself in the hands of the regnant psychologists and we’re just beginning to experience the shortfall.
A mind, obviously, who has not been allowed, and likely has not allowed itself, to read deeply or with understanding Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Kazantzakis, among many others.
It is exactly the Englightenment itself that is under attack, by the priests of every competing, shallow, hypocritical and illogical pistis, including that of supposed homo scientificus.
Hello Eugene,
Not sure I’m following. What “mind” has “not been allowed, and likely has not allowed itself, to read deeply or with understanding Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Kazantzakis”? The reference is a bit obscure, I’m afraid.
BTW: tomorrow, Monday, July 21, is another national call-in day to Congress to protest against H. Con. Res 362 and Senate Res. 580 (the Iran war resolutions)
Number for the Congress’ switchboard (ask for your Representative and Senators’ offices from there):
202-224-3121
I call Bulls**t, Inappropriate Moralistic Panic and Melancholy of the Past! If you consider the times of 60 years to be somehow better than “now†you must have led the nicely sheltered life of nicely white guy sitting pretty in western world. The fact that religions are considered quaint? Thank God For That! I don’t need no challenged guy in robes telling me what I must consider pure and proper or what the current crimethought is.
Why, of course, Fear Of The Future, who could possibly imagine some “challenged guy in robes” telling you what you “must consider pure and proper”. And the nerve of those passe religions inserting some silly idea of God in your rightful place! I mean, where do they get off anyway?
Well, John, at least you didn’t call Schopenhauer an “atheist”.
Eugene,
Frankly, I fail to see the specific relevance of Schopenhauer to anything I’d said above, Eugene. And as to “a mind that has not been allowed, and likely has not allowed itself, to read deeply or with understanding Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Kazantzakis”, we’ll have to explain somehow, I suppose, my past interest in the theology of Karl Rahner without reference to German philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Well, John, one supposes, we could start with Aurelius Augustinus on Regulus.
From there, one supposes a detour through Al Ghazali, to the Bishop of Rome and the First Vatican Council perhaps?
Interesting Council indeed–interesting.
There is also the bon mot of Voltaire on the mountaintop and if we talk at any length I will have trouble not mentioning iconoclasm among the Armenians (there wasn’t any, but why?) and Charles Sanders Peirce.
“Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Kazantzakisâ€. So anyone who has not read or mastered the works of these philosophers and also has the temerity to disagree with EC is de facto wrong? Given EC’s ridiculous statements re: Austrian economics and his frequent pompous condescension one must regard his writings as a mixed blessing ( he often does hit the mark and he could outscoop Drudge at times). Arguing from authority, anyone? Poor EC is so full of himself that several writers who have dealt with his misstatements regarding the Misean School ripped into his economic fallacies and then stated that they would have nothing more to do with him on the topic since he could not get his arguments straight. Liberty ST
Simon,
You know, I hadn’t even realized that I’d ventured into some philosophical equivalent of a gated community when Eugene launched out with the Schopenhauer business. If I’d had anyone specifically in mind – and I hadn’t – it more likely would have been, say, Kant, Compte, Schilling, Hegel and Marx. The idea had been to fashion the complaint around a view that embraced reason and scientific methodology as the sole avenue to truth, without question the prevailing view at the present time. A culture with such limited access has all the merit of resistance to a hazardous waste initiative in the former Czechoslovak Peoples Republic.
EC’s hand-waving builds strong wrists, John Lowell. I appreciate your posts. “You’re a funny bloke, Eugene, but I’ll admit that you’re a good bhisti” ST
Robes?
I like you, Eugene. We’ve agreed on much over the last several months and its been a pleasure to get to know you. And that would have been true even if we hadn’t agreed, frankly. But you really must understand that even those who hold you in such regard aren’t reasonably going to able to manage a response to an ancane entry like “Robes?” Egad, man must you be this unexpressive?
Indeed, John, we do agree on much.
I was referring to your “challenged guy in robes” as a response to “fear of the Future”.
My tendency is not to blame the young for the hypocrisy and pathological emptiness the old have bequeathed them, and to which nihilism, or seeming nihilism, is often the most rational response.
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is as pertinent in that context as a Schopenhauer, a Nietzsche, or, in a much different manner, a Kazantzakis.
And, incidentally, mentioning that you did not call Schopenhauer an “atheist”, which was once a reflex among certain of the “theologians”, was a compliment, if lightly put.
It is, merely by the way and perhaps beyond the understanding of most, my inability to accept Hegel as anything but a very learned clown, that prevents me from adopting Marxism save as a critical and analytical tool. One supposes, if really pushed, one might play at the devilish and tongue in cheek “bad faith” of Sartre in that department.
Sartre’s existentialism, on the other hand, is seriously logically flawed, so why bother?
The grosser ideologies of the last century are dying or dead, including “Capitalism”. This will take some time to unfold.
R.D. Laing was a profoundly interesting fellow, and in a sense one of the first real “anti-psychiatriasts”, though he may have denied that name.
His work, which included a first-rate piece of poetry, “Knots”, is well worth the time and effort.
I am no fan of Gregory Bateson, whose thinking is very mixed, but his positing of the “Doublebind” in a specific familial or social setting is also key.
Politically speaking, the United States Constitution is, at least in part, a document of the Englightenment, and it is exactly that which is being attacked, most cunningly by the Straussians.
It is also no secret just how anti-Englightenment the Roman Catholic Church has been over the past few centuries, including the dog and pony show that was the first Vatican Council.
My reference to Aurelius Augustinus on Regulus is more pertinent than it appears perhaps.
That Strauss’ “Athens and Jerusalem” is pulling a Zionist rabbit out of an otherwise empty Old Testament hat does not mean that any more genuinely held version–Paul on the Areopagus–is necessarily more persuasive.
In some ways the early Christians, Pauline or not, were the nihilists of their time. What many Romans could not accept was not what they were saying, but their very Judaic claim to exclusive, divinely revealed possession of it.
Strauss and his followers, a very shallowly educated lot, have tried to turn the same claim, not even sincerely held, to their own uses. The argument is that the masses need to be manipulated by their sort of “philosopher”, and religion is a useful tool, so why not ply the “divinity” of the Old Testament.
It is easy enough to read this in some of the ex-Trotskyite “Neo-conservatives” as turning Marx’s opium on its head.
Like Parsley and Hagee they have a soothing snake oil to sell.
It is debatable which is the least debilitating kickapoo, not only to the consumers, but to those intimidated by the supposed holiness a label sporting so many traditional icons.
So is opened much too long a discussion to be perpetrated on anyone here, however instructive it might be.
It is an old gambit you play in regard to Fides, and the reference to Regulus and Aurelius Augustinus once again pertains.
To keep it very short, one wonders whether you have read Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith–surely his best and most significant work, and hard-edged despite the perfumed style he picked up at the Harvard of that day.
Hello Eugene,
And with these elucidations, comprehenson.
The breadth here is exhaustive with the lynchpin, of course, Laing’s concept, with which, I might add, I have some familiarity. Of Laing, and of your applying of him here, I would have this to say: While nihilism may be an understandable response to the “hypocrisy and pathological emptiness the old have bequeathed” the young, it is by no means the only or the healthiest response. For their sake, I don’t think we simply settle for it. Despair is not an end in itself, neither is it even valid, for suffering always points to something better, something to which it compares itself. And this awareness of something better is innate, it comes with the territory. In Catholic theology it is called “the natural desire for God”, a concept that was quite pivotal in the early 20th century debates over the relation of nature and grace which so profoundly effected the outcomes at the Second Vatican Council. And it is precisely here that we understand both why it is that the Enlightenment’s vision of an exclusive reign of reason has made nihilism the only possible recourse for humanity and come to regret the jettisoning of the priests and the rabbis. At best the promise of reason is ambivalent; in it there are both atom bombs and miracle cures. No so with faith.
Eugene,
“To keep it very short, one wonders whether you have read Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith–surely his best and most significant work, and hard-edged despite the perfumed style he picked up at the Harvard of that day.”
I’m unfamiliar with this work, Eugene, although not unfamiliar with Santayana.
Attacking Iran will finish off the U.S. empire — not that Iran could kill the USA, but the chaos that will ensue is going to be the final straw that kills the economically-sick USA. Everybody in the Govt knows that, but they will still do it because they have kowtowed to Israel-firsters.
Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein have failed us miserably. Feinstein is safe for a couple of years, but Pelosi needs to be voted out of the House. Let’s all get behind Cindy Sheehan for Congress 08! We can make this happen if we want it bad enough, and every awake person should by now want it bad enough. What a disgrace to the Bay Area!
Voting is highly overrated. I don't vote any more because I refuse to participate in the kabuki dance. That said, there is ONE election that we should all be interested. What better way to show our contempt for the system, the warmongers, the MSM, et al, than by sending Cindy Sheehan to congress and defeating that horrible Pelosi. Maybe, just maybe, the next spineless twit to become Speaker will, at least, think twice before screwing the people. Send $10, $20, or $50 to Sheehan and she can win. Let's face it, Obama is showing, daily, that he will be Bush II light.
Obama a ‘constituional scholar’? The man hasn’t a Const.-respecting bone in his body. Name the legislation that he has proposed that would pass original intent scrutiny. BHO was fought against gunownership since he was knee-high to an Orc. Other than having a palpable animus toward whites, what makes his wife any better? Both of them have milked the AA system to get where they are – let’s see their PSAT, SAT, AP, and LSAT scores if they are so brilliant. The odious pair are nothing but anti-white socialist bigots who hope to sleaze into the White House on BO’s black heritage. Even the meglomaniacal Spitzer had double-barreled 800’s or close on his SATs’. The system that gave the US BO and war-pig McInsane is hopelessly broken and needs to be eliminated post haste before our economy and worse are destroyed. ST
Why don’t they protest in front of AIPAC’s offices, or in front of the Israeli embassy?
That’s where the policy’s coming from, and that’s the political reason it can’t be stopped. That’s why the Democratic party is useless as an “opposition”.
But of course, we all know what happened to Rachel Corrie. Nobody’s going to get seriously hurt protesting in front of Pelosi’s house, even if they trespass over barriers like these protesters are doing, desperately trying to make themselves heard.
But just try doing this at the Israeli embassy. They’d mow you down in one second, claiming their sacrosanct “self-defense”, and no American politician, nobody in the Israeli-occupied US government, nobody who wants to keep a job in DC, would dare to speak up for you.
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There’s an annual AIPAC dinner in the San Francisco Bay Area each December. Local peace groups have protested it before. We need to step it up in December 2008 and get media coverage as we did with last weekend’s die in.