Last week, Fox News zombi... er, viewers were treated to an apparent expose of workers at ACORN giving advice and assistance to conservative activists claiming to be a pimp and prostitute. Of course, Fox took liberties with the facts, claiming the pair was never kicked out of the ACORN offices they visited (they were, police reports were filed, too) and pushing an allegation that one of the ACORN workers killed her husband (she didn’t).

Beck, Hannity, Fox and Friends, and the usual cast of conservatives immediately started the drum-beat to strip federal funding for ACORN, and right on cue, Congress approved a measure to deny federal funding to the group.  Of course, Wisconsin’s resident right-wing bloviators jumped on the chance to score cheap political points – Sen. Ted Kanavas (R-Brookfield, but wishes it were Texas) and Rep. Bill Kramer (R-Waukesha) demanded state agencies report about any state contracts with ACORN. Then this morning, the Wisconsin State Journal skewered US Rep. Tammy Baldwin for voting against the bill to de-fund ACORN.  They cite ACORN’s IRS problems and the alleged voter registration fraud (which doesn’t matter ‘cause Mickey Mouse doesn’t vote!!)  as reasons why the organization should be stripped of its paltry $53 million in federal funding since 1994 – that’s a whopping $3.5 million a year.

Sigh.

What about $5.73 billion? -- that’s 1449 times as much, just fyi -- That’s how much Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR took from US taxpayers from 2003-2006 for reconstruction in Iraq. Yet when it was revealed that a contractor for KBR in Iraq was gang raped by her co-workers in Iraq, did the Wisconsin State Journal or Fox News or Glenn Beck or conservatives leaders fall all over themselves to stop the taxpayer-financed gravy train to Halliburton? No. 

Two Madison college professors with religious backgrounds, who have worked tirelessly to change the world, will be honored for their lifetimes of activism on Oct. 3 by the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice (WNPJ), a statewide network of 170 organizations working for social change.

Joe Elder, a Quaker peace activist who is a University of Wisconsin professor of sociology and Asian studies, and Esther Heffernan, O. P., a Dominican nun who is emerita professor of social science at Edgewood College, and a widely respected leader on prison reform and criminal justice issues, will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards at a reception following WNPJ’s annual fall assembly at the Goodman Community Center in Madison.

Seven others will be honored with Peacemakers of the Year awards. Two veterans, Iraq veteran Jason Moon, of Milwaukee, and Vietnam veteran Will Williams, of DeForest, won in the adult category.  Senior citizen winners are Elaine Kinch of the Racine Coalition for Peace and Justice and Don Hoffman of Rapids Citizens for Peace in Wisconsin Rapids. Youth awards will go to Dartanian Lewis of Milwaukee and Josh Bartz and Jannett Arenas, both of Madison, for volunteer work with WNPJ member organizations.

Esther Heffernan, 80, began her lifelong social activism in the 1940s as a University of Chicago student working for interracial justice.  She describes her research in a Washington, DC women’s prison as “life-changing.”  It resulted in, Making It in Prison: The “Square,” the “Cool” and “The Life,” published in 1972”, a book considered a seminal work in the field, which continues to serve as a resource to those who set corrections policy.

Her promise to the women in the Washington, DC prison to make their lives visible to others has shaped her deep involvement in criminal justice reform over the last several decades, especially on issues of women in prison and rehabilitation upon their release.

She is currently chair of the Task Force on Money, Education and Prisons, seeking change in Wisconsin’s criminal justice system; a board member of Family Connections that brings children monthly to visit their mothers at Taycheedah Correctional Facility; and a member of the Dane County Task Forces on Disproportionate Juvenile Minority Confinement and on Racial Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System.

Joe Elder, 79, informed his draft board during the Korean war that he would go to jail rather than be inducted. Two years later he became a Quaker. With other Quakers, he has carried secret messages between authorities in conflict in India and Pakistan; North Vietnam and Washington; North Korea and Washington; and Tamil Tiger militants and the government of Sri Lanka. 

During the Vietnam War, he delivered medical supplies a hospital in Hanoi, and after the war helped organize Madison Quakers, Inc. which has built a peace park and a school in My Lai, and provides micro-loans to village and ethnic women in Vietnam.

Deeply committed to internationalism, as a UW professor in Sociology and Languages and Cultures of Asia he has encouraged countless students to broaden their horizons, learn languages and live and study in other countries.  He has long served on Wisconsin's Governor's Commission on the United Nations.

Elder, also committed to inter-faith dialogue, in 1995 was one of the founders of the International Committee for the Peace Council that includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Mairead Maguire and the Dalai Lama. During the past decade the Peace Council has met in world trouble spots such as Chiapas and Jerusalem to listen, learn and provide an interfaith presence.

Peacemaker of the Year winners:

Jason Moon, 35, is a leader in Milwaukee’s chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Veterans for Peace (VFP) and the board of VFP’s Homeless Veterans Initiative to find and assist homeless veterans in the Milwaukee area.  He testified at the national Winter Soldier hearings in 2008, at which Iraq and Afghanistan veterans told of their experiences.

Will Williams, 65, a member of Madison’s Veterans for Peace chapter, uses his own experience in Vietnam to speak and counsel young people about the realities of military service and challenge promises of recruiters.  He has spoken across the state, linking peace, prison reform, and immigrant rights.  

Elaine Kinch, 70, Elaine was one of the founders of the Racine Coalition for Peace and Justice, and a member of the Central America Solidarity Coalition..She has traveled on peace missions to Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chiapas and last winter to the Middle East, where she lived with a Palestinian family in Israel and helped harvest olives, to learn more about the situation there.

Don Hoffman, 70, a retired probation and parole officer, became a leader of Rapids Citizens for Peace in 2006, establishing monthly peace vigils on the bridge in Wisconsin Rapids.  .One of his projects was to get Democracy Now! on a local cable television station.

Dartanian Lewis, 13, a student at Blessed Savior Catholic School in Milwaukee, has been volunteering at Casa Maria Catholic Worker house for homeless families.  He has worked on a wide range of social justice issues – peace, worker rights, firearms violence, medical supplies for Cuba, protection of the rainforests, and help for Darfur. He sells fair trade chocolate at churches and events to raise money for those projects. 

Josh Bartz, 28, a board member of OutReach, Madison’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community center, created a program (OutThere) to address the need for youth programming and social and support opportunities for LGBT people ages 18-24. It has become  a weekly program of outings, games, discussion groups and movie nights.

Jannett Arenas, 22, a Madison Area Technical College and UW-Madison student, is a co-founder and organizer for Alcance, a student organization focused on supporting access to higher education for Madison area Latino youth.  She has helped to build the Madison Chapter of Voces de la Frontera, working on immigrant rights issues of in-state tuition, drivers cards, and the national DREAM Act to provide undocumented students a path to citizenship. 

The Peacemakers of the Year presentations will be at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 3 at Goodman Community Center, 149 Waubesa St., Madison, at the conclusion of WNPJ’s annual Fall Assembly, which begins at 10 a.m.  A special reception to honor Joe Elder and Esther Heffernan will be held from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the same location, with speakers and music and Capital Times columnist John Nichols as emcee.  All events are open to the public.

Just a few choice selections from twitter about adulterer & former "rising star" GOP Governor Mark Sanford:

The Pro-Family Values Party: Larry Craig, Mark Foley, David Vitter, John Ensign, and now SC Gov. Mark Sanford. (progressflorida)

It's interesting to discover that the governor who didn't want stimulus funds was getting stimulated elsewhere! (robschendel)

Gov. Sanford: "marriage should only be between a man, a woman, and another woman from Argentina." (walterolson)

So, does a career go down the toilet the other direction in Argentina? (socratic)

1999: Sanford votes to BAN gay adoption 2009: Sanford, a father of 4 sons, spends father's day with his mistres. (progressflorida)

At least Gov Sanford's foreign policy isn't suffering... (rodrigoduarte)

Couldn't have said it better myself. The "family values" party disintegrating before our very eyes. 

On Friday OWN executive director Scot Ross had the opportunity to be on WPR's The Week in Review facing former GOP Lt. Governor Margaret Farrow. Among the topics was our nation's health care system. During the debate on public health care, Farrow made the outrageous claim that the reason young adults can't afford health care is because they choose to drive more expensive cars. You can listen to Scot's rebuttal and and the rest of the debate here.

With this mobilization the Wisconsin National Guard will have approximately 300 soldiers and airmen on duty. Later this month more than 3,000 Wisconsin Army National Guard soldiers from across the state will deploy with the 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team for a mission in Iraq. Another 75, headquarters soldiers of the Tomah-based 732nd Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, will be mobilized in May 2009, also for deployment to Iraq.

The authority under which the Wisconsin Guard were deployed to Iraq was the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress in 2002. That AUMF limited authorized military action to two purposes: 1) to force Iraq to comply with then extant U.N. Security Council resolutions; and 2) to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat allegedly posed by Iraq.

Now that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power and we know that Iraq does not have - and never had- any weapons of mass destruction, the original mission has been completed and the 2002 AUMF is not in force. Therefore, there is no legal basis for sending the Wisconsin National Guard to Iraq.

This campaign is really about following the law as set forth by the U.S Congress. With this legislation, the states can begin to reassert their historic national defense responsibilities and to honor the Constitution's genius for distributing power over issues of war and peace.

Having a newly elected administration in Washington does not change the need for this legislation. In fact, this is exactly when we should emphasize the rule of law as a moral and practical requirement to the use of military force. This is an opportunity to close the door on eight years of presidential lawlessness, and to set our national defense policy on a better track.

In a development that should surprise no one, the lame-duck Bush Administration continues its refusal to comply with Federal records retention laws that require the White House to save and archive all electronic communication. And worst of all, no one knows how many emails are missing, or how we can get them.

A recent inquiry into the archiving process of the National Archives and Records Administration led by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has turned up an incomplete and sorely-lacking plan that raises serious questions about just how many email the Bush Administration is hiding, and the limited avenues the American people have to recovering those messages.

According to the plan, obtained by the Raw Story, the Archives are planning for “50-100 times the volume of electronic materials and formats not previously dealt with.” Fine. We all understand that email and other e-communications have exploded during the Bush years, and such difficulties should be planned for.

But further on in the report, the Archives says it is "confident that it has the ability to ingest the Bush emails, [but] the timing of this ingestion is dependent on the completion of any ongoing restoration project for the MS Exchange emails undertaken by the EOP."

Little known fact: the Bush Administration totally dismantled the Automated Records Management Systems (ARMS) almost IMMEDIATELY after taking office, and implemented a new program utilizing MS Exchange, which has proven to be unreliable as between 5-10 million emails have been deleted from the White House servers. Are we ever going to see those emails or what’s in them? Maybe we’ll get an inside-the-Beltway look at the attorney firing scandal. Or maybe we’ll see who was talking to who about the war in Iraq and Abu Ghraib. Or maybe, if the lamest-duck-we’ve-ever-had Bush Administration have their way, those messages will be lost forever in cyberspace…

The Bush Administration being secretive and unwilling to comply with simple open records requirements? I’m not surprised and you shouldn’t be either.

Even though I’m hardly surprised when a corporate hotshot at WMC is caught talking out of both sides of his mouth (yes, HIS – still only 2 women on the board…), the size of John Torinus’ bullocks must give him trouble walking.

Friday, Oct. 17, is Iraq Moratorium day.

The Third Friday of every month is designated as a day to interrupt our daily routines and take some action, individually or collectively, to call for an end to the war and occupation of Iraq.

In Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Coalition for a Just Peace and Peace Action-Wisconsin sponsor a rush hour downtown vigil from 5 to 6 p.m. at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Water Street.  People fill all four corners, hold signs, flags, and banners, leaflet pedestrians, and interact with drivers who show their support for getting out of Iraq.  

If you can't do that, consider taking some individual action.  There are lots of ideas on the Iraq Moratorium website:  http://www.iraqmoratorium.com/indiv_actions.htm

The Milwaukee action is one of a dozen or more across Wisconsin, which are listed here:  http://iraqmoratoriumwis.blogspot.com/

You'll find a full listing of events across the country here:  http://iraq-moratorium.blogspot.com/  Since it began in September 2007, there have been nearly 1,500 Iraq Moratorium actions in 42 states and 236 communities.  Join us.