Impeachment petitions are to be delivered to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert at 9 a.m. Monday, May 1, according to David Swanson of ImpeachPac.Org.

Ellen Tenney of Rockingham, Vermont, will present the Speaker of the House, Room 235 of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C., with petitions from three towns in Vermont calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush. The towns each passed resolutions to send the petitions.

“These are the first of many petitions from towns, cities, and possibly states across the nation that will be arriving at Congress’s door,” Swanson said. “They are presented under the guidelines of Jefferson’s Manual, Section 603, and will be referred to a House Committee, probably the Judiciary, for consideration.”

Similar resolutions have now been passed by at least 13 cities and towns, and have been introduced in three state legislatures, with more expected this week.

Information on this procedure and a list of cities and states where resolutions have been introduced or passed, as well as a list of members of the Citizens Impeachment Commission, who are available for interviews, can be found at: ImpeachPac.Org.

by Glynn Wilson

It’s blackberry winter in Alabama with cloudy skies and cool temperatures and there’s not much light for shooting bird pictures. Plus, the spring migration is about over anyway.

So it’s a good time to read and/or catch up on weekend programming on C-SPAN, where you can learn allot about what’s going on in the world beyond the suburbs.

It’s always funny and somewhat instructive to watch the annual White House correspondents dinner at the National Press Club building in Washington, D.C., especially for a credentialed Congressional reporter who has attended events there myself.

Last year on a trip there I met a lot of interesting people, including some of Hunter S. Thompson’s editors and friends - and the famous White House shill reporter and gay male prostitute, Jeff Gannon.

It was interesting to watch President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura flee the building as soon as the dinner program ended after the spoof conservative comedian Stephen Colbert reamed the president while pretending to support him as his hero. It was also seriously funny to watch Bush lookalike comedian Steve Bridges do Bush better than Bush.

Bush Faces Press With Comedian Lookalike

Earlier in the evening, however, there was an interesting program on C-SPAN’s Book TV, which featured MediaChannel’s Rory O’Connor interviewing Danny Schechter, who calls himself the “news dissector.”

Schechter’s new book When News Lies: Media Complicity and The Iraq War is billed as “an up to date indictment of the role media played in promoting and misreporting the war on Iraq.”

According to the MediaChannel.Org Web site, “It is an analysis of how and why the media got it wrong that pinpoints the failures of journalism and the collusion of media companies with the Bush Administration.”

“Most of the anti-war movement focused on the crimes of the Bush Administration ignoring the mainstream media, its far more effective accomplice,” says Schechter, a former network producer with ABC and CNN. “The government orchestrated the war while the media marketed it. You couldn’t have one without the other.”

With the book you also get a feature-length DVD of the prize-winning film WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception), which chronicles the media war fought alongside the military campaign and the struggle to stand up for truth and a foreword by acclaimed media writer and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, along with prefaces by independent Iraq reporter Dahr Jamail and information warfare specialist Colonel (Ret) Sam Gardiner, a war analyst for the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

The film WMD, distributed on DVD by Cinema Libre Distribution, won top documentary prizes at film festivals in Austin Texas, Denver Colorado and Durban, South Africa.

For more information and to see the trailer narrated by Academy Award winner Tim Robbins, visit wmdthefilm.com.

Or check out Schechter’s media watchdog site, MediaChannel.Org.

It has long been my position that the media and the press need critics from the left as well as the right. As an investigative reporter who got into the news business at a time when then-President Ronald Reagan had the press on the ropes and the Moral Majority had the media on the march to the right, I have watched with great angst as this trend has continued under the fear-mongering Bush administration.

It is unclear whether the media and the press in this country will take up the call and respond to this criticism, or whether all the new alternative media sources will supplant them. But it is clear that large numbers of people are disgruntled with the mainstream media and turning to alternative sources for news online.

According to a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the World Wide Web continues to grow as a source of news for Americans. One-in-four, 24 percent, list the Web as a main source of news. Roughly the same number, 23 percent, say they go online for news every day, up from 15 percent in 2000; the percentage checking the Web for news at least once a week has grown from 33 percent to 44 percent over the same time period.

We say long live the press, the Internet, the First Amendment and the United States of America. But the media critics are right. The corporate media is complicit in this war and the damage this administration has done. The public should hold them accountable and raise hell about it.

Famous anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan recently wrote an article about a teenage girl from Alabama named Ava Lowery, the daughter of one of the Locust Fork’s early readers. Ava makes videos for the Web about the war and the Bush administration for her Web site, PeaceTakesCourage.Com.

Peace Takes Courage
by Cindy Sheehan

I have a new friend. She is a 15-year-young peace activist named Ava Lowery. She is disgusted with the war and with the Bush regime, and she has started to use her talents for animation to make cartoons that oppose Bush and the war in Iraq.

She first came to my attention when I read an article about all of the ugly hate mail she is getting on her site for a particularly poignant and brilliant animation she has called: “WWJD.” It is a heartbreaking piece that has a child singing “Jesus loves me,” and during the song she shows pictures of dead, wounded, bloody and screaming Iraqi children. She wanted to show how Jesus loves Iraqi children also, which is apparently a frightening concept to the people who practice Bushianity.

For this inspired bit of courageous matriotism, Ava has been the object of intense and horribly ugly hate emails and not too subtle threats to do her bodily harm. As soon as I heard about her troubles, I emailed her, and she phoned me right away so we could talk.

Even before I went to Crawford last summer, I was the object of these attacks by many people who touted themselves as Christians doing God’s work. The attacks are rabidly obscene and horrible in their rage and just downright meanness. There are entire web sites dedicated to assailing me and my character and where such comments as “Someone ought to do the world a favor and shoot the bitch in the head to shut her up” are common. During Camp Casey, we had to refer more than one death threat to the FBI.

One particularly wicked threat was sent to me the night before I testified at Congressman Conyers’s Downing Street Memo Hearings in June, I got an email from a man who said that he hoped that my other three children would die. I think these people level pretty harsh punishments at other people who are only exercising their freedom of speech, when the person who is responsible for killing American soldiers and executing innocent Iraqi children and making them orphans is touted as a fine Christian man.

God help anyone who speaks out against the anti-American Bush regime that condones torture and use of chemical weapons of mass destruction. God help anyone who refuses to be silenced in the face of our government that commits war crimes and crimes against humanity. The individuals who call 15-year-old girls and Gold Star Moms vile names and threaten our lives are the lowest denominator in our society, and these people are the ones who need to be marginalized and stopped. Open and honest discourse in our society is welcomed and encouraged, and our differences are only eclipsed by our commonalities, but obscene and destructive assaults on fellow human beings only adds to the violence in our already all too-violent society.

Ava is not calling for a violent overthrow of our government, nor is she the one who is being obscene. Ava is not the one who sent our troops into harm’s way, thus condemning the innocent people of Iraq to death and heartache. Ava is only showing the images that have been brought to the world by BushCo, and the people who crassly try to intimidate a 15-year-old girl are threatened by the truth and should be ashamed of their support of the disorganized crime mob in DC and ashamed of the way they talk to a young lady who is doing her best to make the world a better place.

How many scandals will it take for the 32 percent of the population who still support murder and mayhem dressed up in suits and ties to wake up and honor people like Ava and not trash them?

Ava is one tough and compassionate cookie, and she needs our support and love. Please go to her site, PeaceTakesCourage.com , and drop a note of support to our little sister in peace. Her type of behavior needs to be encouraged, emulated and rewarded, and I can guarantee you, she will be one of the first recipients of a Camp Casey Peace Prize for young activists.

I honor Ava and I am proud to be her friend. She is a true American who wants to grow up in a country that is honorable and just. This is her right, and she is properly claiming it. I hope she inspires you to do the same.

Originally published by Truthout.

Here’s an angle on immigration we haven’t seen covered in the mainstream media - and a demonstration of the Internet’s power.

Bernardita Carteño Corral of Guerrero, Mexico, reads the The Locust Fork and periodically sends “warm greetings” via e-mail with a special message from women and children there asking the U.S. government to close the border with Mexico and send their men back to them.

Dear friend, Please CLOSE THE BORDER to Illegal Migration and send our men back to Mexico where we need them to help us with our jewelry production. We did not want them to go to the United States. They said they wouldn’t be gone so long, that they were going to get money and come right back, but they have been gone for a long time and we want to ask for your help in returning them to their homes and loving families.

Bernardita Carteño Corral
Domicilio Conocido
Tecalpulco Guerrero Mexico

She even has a Web site where you can turn for more information and to see their art and jewelry…