Congratulations in order, Peace Fellows! DoPNV makes #2 in Obama list of priorities

[Tony Nuspl]

Thank you to all members of TPF who voted for the Department of Peace (DoPNV) initiative! Letter of Congratulations to you all, posted below, from the Peace Alliance

* Appoint Secretary of Peace in Department of Peace and Non-Violence
an initiative started at change.org by Stephen Zendt
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/appoint_secretary_of_peace_in_depa...

For the full results of the nationwide poll, go to: http://www.change.org/ideas

Also ranking high, see the following:

* Appoint a Special Prosecutor for the Crimes of the Bush Administration, Bob Fertik 's initiative--endorsed by ImpeachOK1.org, the Tulsa Impeachment Committee
* Leave Iraq Now! Clint Tomlinson's initiative
--TPF has been against the Iraq invasion since 2002, before it began, and has been educating Tulsans on the need to end the continued occupation
* Get FISA Right, repeal the PATRIOT Act, and restore our civil liberties, Jon Pincus's initiative
* US Leadership to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Globally, David Krieger's initiative --TPF includes a working group for the abolition of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal
* Bridging the Empathy Gap - Yes We Can! Jori Manske's initiative
* End the Genocide in Darfur, Jerry Fowler's initiative
* End corporate "personhood"- Ed Caccio's initiative
* Solar power: yes we can! Bob Cohen's initiative

Queremos Paz!




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Congratulations! You Did It - Press Conf at 9:00 am Eastern
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 08:01:42 -0500 (EST)
From: The Peace Alliance
Reply-To: [e-mail]

Dear Tulsa Peace Fellows...

Congratulations to each and every one of you for helping our dream, establishing a Department of Peace, win on Change.org!

We came in second place, but ALL of the top ten ideas will be featured at the press conference Friday, and the coming months.

For some of you this online contest became your passion and you nurtured our progress day and night. Special kudos to each of you, you know who you are!

Thank you could not be enough.

Others of you voted and sent the request on to your families and a few friends. Thank you as well, for each action you took.

And some of you just voted yesterday. Thanks to you as well. Honestly, it took all of us doing our part to make this moment a reality. In the process we have educated THOUSANDS of people about the Department of Peace and our campaign.

Heart Phoenix of our Board said to me today, that even if we spent $25K on a well planned advertising campaign we could not have reached as many people with our message, so passionately and powerfully. I agree whole-heartedly.

You are the miracle and I honor each of you for our partnership.

Today at 9:00 AM at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, Change.org will be announcing the top ten winning ideas to the Obama transition team. The following social network leaders will be speaking at the press conference:

* Chris Hughes, director of My.BarackObama.com and co-founder of Facebook,
* Jose Antonio Vargas, political reporter for the Washington Post,
* Joe Trippi, who was Senior Adviser to John Edwards' 2008 Presidential Campaign and Campaign Manager of Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential Campaign, and
* Lee Brenner, Political Director at MySpace.

To represent all of us, Kathy Kidd, Wendy Green, Chelsea Allinger, our new legislative intern, and Caitlin Rosser will all be at this press event.

All the ways that winning this challenge will further our mission and goals will take time to reveal.
.
This afternoon Kathy and Wendy and I met with Ben Rattray, who founded Change.org, about what this will mean in the future. We are still learning what they want to offer us to aid our campaign, but this is just the beginning. More updates to come.

Congratulations to all!

May peace prevail on the earth.

Lynn McMullen
Executive Director
The Peace Alliance

P.S. CSpan frequently covers events at the Press Club but it is not currently on their schedule. If you read this in time and wish to contact them to encourage them to cover it, the phone number is: [phone]; Fax:[phone],
email: [e-mail].

If we learn anything new about media coverage after this email goes out, we will post it on our website.

Come to our March 20-23, 2009 National Conference in Washington D.C.
Join us in lobbying our new Congress and continue to have your voice make a difference!....

The Peace Alliance
1730 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Suite 712 | Washington, DC 20036 | Tel [phone]
www.ThePeaceAlliance.org

Contact Us: [e-mail]

[Tony Nuspl]

excerpt from:  'Peace' president's war record: how Obama melted down his Nobel prize to make bullets

    16 October 2012
    Jack A. Smith

When Sen. Barack Obama ran for the presidency in 2008 many wishful-thinking Democratic voters viewed him as a peace candidate because he opposed the Iraq war.

Instead, center rightist that he is, Obama’s foreign/military policy amounted to a virtual continuation of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terrorism under a different name.

He extended Bush’s wars to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere while greatly expanding the war in Afghanistan, hiking the military budget, encouraging the growth of militarism in US society by repeatedly heaping excessive praise on the armed forces, and tightening the military encirclement of China.

Obama actually has little to show for his war policy after nearly four years. Most importantly, Afghanistan -- the war he supported with enthusiasm -- is predictably blowing up in his face. A symbol of the Bush-Obama 11-year Afghan folly is the recent 2,000th death of an American soldier, not at the hands of the Taliban but a US-trained Afghan police officer, our supposed ally.

[Meanwhile] the public uncomplainingly invests its tax money into the largest military/national security budget in the world — about $1.4 trillion this year (up to $700 billion for the Pentagon and an equal amount for national security).

http://stopwar.org.uk/index.php/usa-war-on-terror/1954-the-peace-pr...

[Tony Nuspl]

Sadly, the "peace lobby" (such as it is) will be losing an important voice, in 2013, with Rep. Dennis Kucinich being forced out of Congress by gerrymandering. Here's an excerpt from his outgoing interview with him, on DemocracyNow:

"When you talk about gun control here in America, and at the same time you’re talking about gun expansion across the world, about not only the United States exporting arms to the world and engendering wars everywhere, but our own efforts proliferating wars, that’s kind of a mixed message that inevitably is not easily reconciled.

"So we need to build a culture of peace in America. Is it possible? Of course it is. You know, violence is a learned response. So is nonviolence. And so, through education and through creating a social health safety net, I think that we can meet the challenge. And that’s one of the things I’m certainly going to be involved in as I leave the Congress, to try to broaden the debate, to look at this in a way that’s compassionate and at the same time not blaming ourselves, but recognizing that we have a culture that is very violent and that affects Americans at every level. And if we address that in a systematic way through an organized approach, using the resources and assets of government at all levels, I think that we could find a way to change from where we are today with this dismal record of one shooting after another...

"That’s why I called for, years ago, a Department of Peace, not to simply create another federal department, but to have an organized approach nationally to deal with the violence in our society.

"If there’s one thing we have to do, we have—America needs a period of truth and reconciliation, if we’re ever going to put the country back together again and achieve the level of national unity that we’re capable of. But right now we’re living on a lie. And the lie is that—that this whole national security infrastructure is necessary and that it’s necessary for us to keep expanding war around the world, it’s necessary for us to have these big spy agencies, which also interact domestically. All of this stuff shouldn’t have happened. [A decade ago] we made the wrong choices. And this is a problem for both political parties to resolve. You can always try to fix things, but you have to look at the severe impact that our inability to act, to challenge the lies that took us into war—you have to look at where it’s left us.

"You know, I did my part, which was to alert the Congress back in October 2002: Look, we were headed into a war, and there was no proof that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 or had weapons of mass destruction; [I asked:] 'What are we doing here?' But we were pulled into [the illegal invasion of Iraq] by the Bush administration, driven by neocons and the Project for the New American Century [PNAC]. All of us who were following it know exactly what happened. And, you know, that set the stage for where we are today."

Outgoing Rep. Dennis Kucinich: With 2 Parties Failing U.S., It’s on...

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/28/outgoing_rep_dennis_kucinich...