SEATTLE -- Ricky Clousing, a Sergeant in the U.S. Army, and a veteran of the Iraq War who has been AWOL for a year announced today at the Veterans for Peace convention in Seattle that he will turn himself in later today at the gates of Fort Lewis and face whatever punishment the military chooses to impose.

  Clousing said he did not apply for conscientious objector status because he is not certain he would oppose every possible war, such as one fought in self-defense.  He said he has spent the past year trying to figure out how to turn himself in, that the military has refused to comment on his status and that he is now choosing to force them to deal with it. 

 

Ned Lamont's primary victory over Joe Lieberman may turn out to be a key moment in stopping the Bush Administration's destructive policies. But that depends on what the rest of us do.

Lieberman, as a majority of Connecticut's Democratic voters just acknowledged, was Bush's fiercest Democratic ally, not just on the Iraqi war, but on issues from the bankruptcy bill to his regressive energy bill, tax plans, and judicial nominations, not to mention Terri Schaivo. The question now is whether Lieberman can hold his seat through a divisive third party run. Citizens throughout the country can play a crucial role by pressuring key elected leaders and organizations that initially supported him to switch their support. Some of this has already begun to occur, with Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer's strong statements that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will fully back Lamont, and Hillary Clinton's donation of $5,000 from her PAC. But the process needs to be taken still further.

Though Lieberman's announced that he'll run as a third party candidate, that isn't set in stone. His chances of splitting the party enough to win in

The Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization (BRAVO) is continuing to collect used cellular phones as part of a resource program designed to enhance services to survivors of violent crimes. This effort involves collecting cell phones that are viable and preferably manufactured within the past 3 years. BRAVO has been collecting cellular phones for remanufacturing for the past 5 years. This effort is a great way to support BRAVO with very little time commitment! Any individual or organization that has cell phones they wish to donate should contact BRAVO and we will arrange to retrieve the cellular phones from your location. For more information, please contact BRAVO at 614-294-STOP (7867), or 1-866-86-BRAVO.

BRAVO works to eliminate violence perpetrated on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identification, domestic violence and sexual assault through prevention, education, advocacy, violence documentation and survivor services, both within and on behalf of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.

Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive -- fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.

In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.

By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years -- and probably more like a full decade -- away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms.