From the District inbox:
Long Beach, CA– Black-listed peace activist and retired U.S. Army colonel Ann Wright will promote and sign copies of a new book she co-authored, Dissent, Voices of Conscience, at Los Altos United Methodist Church on May 30. Wright was one of three officials to publicly resign from the U.S. State Department in [...]

Rachel Powers hangs out with Iraq War vets at the local VA Hospital, just in time to remember the 4,071 Americans who won’t be around to celebrate this Memorial Day
On March 20, 2003, the first American soldier left a boot print on Iraqi soil in the battle to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Monday will be the [...]

Local soldiers share their Iraq experiences at Winter Soldier Project Fundraiser
The Winter Soldier Project Fundraiser, hosted Sunday by First Congregational Church of Long Beach, was surprisingly well-attended considering that the somber event took place right smack in the middle of an absolutely beautiful Spring day, approximately 10 hours after many of us forgot to move our clocks [...]

First Congregational Church of Long Beach will play host Sunday to Iraq veterans eager to talk about the war they saw; a war rife with death, anger, courage and lies. In anticipation of that event—a fundraiser to send the same vets to speak in Washington D.C.—we asked several of them to tell us their stories. [...]

Top Republican OK with deaths
Early this week in a meeting with constituents, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) shared his thoughts on U.S. deaths in Iraq: “Nobody is happy about losing lives but remember these are not draftees, these are full-time professional soldiers.”
I look forward to the howls of outrage on Fox News– the Fair [...]

‘Redacted’ is the first important fictional film on the Iraq occupation

After Pfc. Jesse Spielman was sentenced to 110 years in prison for his role in the rape and slaying of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, and the murder of her parents and 5-year-old sister, Spielman’s own sister, Paige Gerlach, screamed: “I hate the [...]

Anatomy of a conservative attack dog
In any other circumstance, police harassment of an American gun owner and war vet would become a conservative fable, burnished into a action-packed tale of liberal bureaucrats feasting on the body of a true hero, evidence of American weakness and the triumph of feminism. But Adam Kokesh, a gun owner [...]

They might be trolls, maybe
You dig into a story expecting something big. On this one, I guess, I was digging for a giant of local conservatism and discovered a mere troll. Turns out Raoul Deming is real–maybe surreal–and that he lives somewhere on the East Coast and that, sure, he’s just a museum piece somebody [...]

Angry guy attacks Iraq war critics in, like, 7 comments
Steve Lowery is better at harvesting nuts than this thing. His recent post on the decision to ban Iraq War critics from Saturday’s Long Beach Veterans Parade brought anti-antiwar critic “Raoul Deming” to thedistrictweekly.com. Deming writes, “Thank God Long Beach stood up for our [...]

One of the odd aspects of the current controversy over the Long Beach Veterans Day Parade is that anti-Iraq War veterans group are considered “political”, and therefore unacceptable, while pro-Iraq War veterans groups, like the American Legion, are seen simply as social organizations, and welcomed with open arms. But if the American Legion isn’t a [...]