On a Thanksgiving visit home two years ago to his family in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Jim Loney tried to explain to his father why he wanted to go to Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams.  He told his Dad about a grade school chum, Rick, sent to Afghanistan with the Canadian Armed Forces, who narrowly escaped death from a roadside bomb. 

“If Rick was being asked to risk his life as a soldier then I, as a pacifist Christian who believes that war is not the way to peace, should be prepared to take the same risks,” he recalled trying to reason with his father.

Jim returned from Iraq safely, but on a return trip this year, his father’s worst fears were realized.  On November 26, Jim was taken hostage in Baghdad, along with three CPT colleagues, Harmeet Sooden, also from Canada, Norman Kember, from England, and Tom Fox, from the U.S. 

Millions of people around the world are learning for the first time about these peace warriors.  But what few people know is that CPT members go to conflict zones like Iraq expressly stating that if they are abducted they do not want to be rescued by the military or any violent means.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke in Columbus at the World Harvest Church, Center for Moral Clarity.

Ashcroft appeared before 1200 “Ohio Pastors & Christian Leaders,” a third of whom are Black. Telling many jokes throughout his short speech, Ashcroft began by giving a brief history. He graduated from Yale in 1964 but began as “a preacher’s kid – raised in church” in Hartford, Connecticut. “I don’t want government hostile to our churches,” he explained, insisting that he is “opposed to passing laws for spirituality.” “It’s against my religion to impose my religion.” He later characterized those who attacked us on 9/11, without naming them, as “want(ing) to impose their religion” on the world.

“I can’t overemphasize the value of energized and motivated pulpits,” Ashcroft continued. “Thou and thy seed – for generations – make a difference.” Several times he urged congregants to “operate at your highest and best” level and to inspire rather than impose on others.

Imagine if Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria gave a press conference. What would it sound like?

Beria, as you may remember, was head of Stalin's secret police during one of the most infamous periods in Soviet history, the Great Purge of 1938. As head of the NKVD, or Soviet secret police, he was responsible for carrying out a massive political repression that was nominally focused on a series of "enemies of the people," such as the intelligentsia, professionals and rich peasants. In reality, however, the bloody purge - and others Beria oversaw for Stalin in later years - were simply a means for Stalin to ruthlessly consolidate his power by vanquishing his political enemies through show trials, forced labor camps, torture and, when all else failed, murder.

Climate Crisis coalitionists rallied with peace and poverty activists last night, braving an unexpected ice storm that laid a sheet of ice on roads and sidewalks.  With megaphones, signs and a flag of global Earth, 25 activists regaled holiday shoppers with parodied Christmas songs, asking them to "rethink" their consumptive habits.

Columbus joined the international community in urging the US to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions.  Rallies across the country were held in solidarity with activists who demonstrated outside the Montreal Summit on Global Warming.

Holiday Hoppers received energy saving tips to reduce their personal contriubition to global warming. Tips included: plant a tree - which consumes CO2, instead of buying plastics that use oil to make and transport; drive 55 instead of the 65 mph maximum, and donate money to homeless shelters and food banks, instead of buying fabricated gifts.

City planners were urged to bring clean energy light rail to discourage auto use, and to provide tax rebates to hybrid car buyers.

Robert Greenwald's WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price is a potent and timely effort to awaken our inner conscious consumer. But the corporate ethics malfunction that we are experiencing goes far beyond Walmart, and pervades every aspect of our lives. There is nothing new about any of this. Arundhati Roy has worked tirelessly to point out that our spending habits play a significant part in supporting corporate empires and folks like Ralph Nader have been begging us to pay attention to our complicity in corporate plundering for years.

As we stumble through the holiday season, mindlessly maxing out our credit cards, it is high time that we re-examine our own complicit spending and consuming habits. The reality is that we do have the power to commit change in the way we spend our money, not only during the holiday season, but also in the purchasing choices we make every day. There is no shortage of companies that are poster children for the bad corporate citizen award. But perhaps we can chose a few that many of us use every day, and make the choice to pick alternative products until these companies take substantive