Progressive Celebrities

October 9th 2007 is John Lennon's birthday, and Yoko Ono will celebrate it by unveiling the IMAGINE PEACE TOWER she built to honor him.

It is dedicated to peace and bears the inscription 'IMAGINE PEACE' in 24 languages.

Its construction and installation is a collaboration between Yoko Ono, the City of Reykjavik, Reykjavik Art Museum and Reykjavik Energy.

The work is in the form of a wishing well from which a very strong and tall tower of light emerges.

First they tried to con everybody into thinking that nobody would listen to progressive talk radio. Then when it became apparent that there was in fact an robust audience they tried to con us into thinking that nobody would support it. Of course we later found out they were working behind the scenes at the same time to get advertisers to blacklist our favorite shows. And now that progressive talk is having real political impact they are desperately looking for a way to slow it down, corrupt it, chip away at it, anything.

ACTION PAGE:
http://www.peaceteam.net/goharrison.php (Los Angeles area residents only)

All over the country they are making deliberately bad business decisions by using ownership prerogatives to shut down outlets entirely, as in Madison, WI, where people rose up in revolt enough to beat them back, or in Boston where they got away with it. But they are not just attacking entire stations, they are working to replace individual personalities where they can with weaker voices.

The Iraq Veterans Memorial

Gold Star Families Speak Out · Military Families Speak Out · Iraq Veterans Against the War · North Texas Vets · Veterans for Peace · Soldiers of Today and Yesterday · GI Special · United for Peace and Justice · Brave New Foundation

Inspired by the AIDS Quilt, the Vietnam memorial, and the New York Times biographies of the 9/11 victims, Robert Greenwald and Brave New Foundation, in partnership with numerous Iraq veterans groups, are creating a living online memorial to U.S. soldiers killed during the Iraq war. The Iraq Veterans Memorial will bear witness with the video testimonies of family, friends, co-workers, and military colleagues of those lost.....

Update: Truthout's got the prepared speech transcript for those who'd like to read it...

Part 1 - 32 min.

Moyers: We ‘Lit a Fire’ in Washington From SavetheInternet.com, January 14, 2007 By Timothy Karr

Veteran television journalist Bill Moyers opened the National Conference for Media Reform Friday with praise for SavetheInternet.com’s grassroots campaign to keep the Internet open and fair. “You lit a fire under people to put Washington on Notice,” Moyers told a packed house of more than 3,000 activists and organizers. Net Neutrality, which Moyers dubbed the “Equal Access Provision of the Internet,” became a broad public issue “that once again reminded the powers that be that people want the media to foster democracy not to quench it.”...

"We're the only people that can stop Bush now..."

Sheehan arrested outside Bush's ranch
Crawford, Texas (AP) -- Peace activist Cindy Sheehan and four other protesters [including Cindy's sister Dede] were arrested Thursday for blocking a road near President Bush's ranch, authorities said, snagging Vice pResident Dick Cheney's motorcade in the backup. Sheehan and the others lay or sat in the road about 20 minutes and didn't heed requests to move...

Here's the Anthem for the Impeachment Movement. Amy Goodman has shown it on Democracy Now! and the INN World News Report has shown it repeatedly at the end of their broadcasts. Sing along - "Let's Impeach the pResident"... by Neil Young

YouTube video... (more)

By Sean Penn

The following is a statement by actor Sean Penn given on October 2, 2006 at the Great Hall of Cooper Union, New York City. It was read by Mark Ruffalo (his co-star in "All the King's Men") at an emergency meeting of World Can’t Wait—Drive Out the Bush Regime held in response to passage of the Torture Bill and in preparation for protests happening on Thursday, October 5 in over 190 cities nationwide. http://www.worldcantwait.org

The arrogant, the misguided, the cowards would argue that an immediate pull-out of our troops from Iraq would inspire lack of confidence and the lost credibility of the United States. President Bush and his functionaries indeed have lost enormous credibility for the perception of our country internationally. Perhaps more damaging than that, they have created the greatest cultural, religious, and political divide domestically since our own Civil War.

For those of us who have long believed in the undeniable parallels between Bush's Iraq war and our nation's Vietnam mistake, the recent rise of new protest music is no surprise -- indeed, I find it to be a very encouraging sign.

Someone turned me on to this over the weekend… It's 'Dear Mr. President' from Pink's I'm Not Dead CD and you'll be blown away if you watch this video showing a live performance of the song.

Some lyric excerpts:

Here’s Meadow Soprano – mob-boss Tony’s whip-smart daughter – on last night’s episode of The Sopranos, giving her opinion of George W. Bush at the breakfast table:

“9/11, 9/11. Bush is using it as an excuse to erode our Constitutional protections and you’re falling for it.”

Before any of you ask if I’m trying to turn Democrats.com into People Magazine, let me tell you why I’m posting this. It’s a sad and discouraging thing for me to say, but I actually have high hopes that mainstream entertainment mentions of reality like this – along with the wonderful closing-argument scene from Boston Legal a couple of weeks ago – will hit a much wider audience between the eyes than we or the stenographer media are capable of reaching.