Today I had my day in court.
On February 17th, I was arrested after saying "The American people voted to end the war in Iraq" as I was walking out of the Senate gallery. The Senate was debating the non-binding resolution to admonish Bush's "troop surge", and I felt obligated to speak truth to power in order to remind America's elected officials that they were largely ignoring the will of the People.
So, after months and months of delays, I finally got my jury trial. My lawyer argued that I really didn't disrupt anything because I did not interrupt any Senators speaking. He did his best to convey that I did not intend to disrupt the business the Senate. However, the jury did not take long to find me guilty for Disruption of Congress.
I was a little disappointed, but I must say that I did not regret what I had done in the Senate on that day in February... the Senator's needed to hear those words. In fact, the good thing about my trial is that the prosecution was forced to repeat my words, "The American people voted to end the war in Iraq" over and over again... those words are forever in the court record!
Anyway, the prosecutor told the judge I should be put on probation and should serve 5 days in jail.
I got a chance to speak to the judge, and I told her that although I did not want to go to jail, I respected that I was found guilty of a crime that required her to punish me. I also promised her that I would not speak in the Senate again until I was elected by the people of Missouri to the United States Senate.
The judge said she would hold me to my promise that I would only speak in the Senate when I am an elected official. She also said it seemed clear to her that I broke the law, but it wasn't really much of a violation, and that she felt the decision could have gone either way depending on the particular jury. In the end, she fined me the maximum fine of $500 and told me that if I ever came back to her court under similar charges, she would make sure I served REAL jail time if I were convicted.
This blog is pretty much done, but I do want to say that a whole bunch of my friends were there to support me... CODEPINK women and our allies are the greatest people in earth!!! The good news in all this is that the judge said that my "stay away" order would be vacated when my fine was paid... and it literally blew me away when Ann Wright came up to me with the entire amount of the fine for which all of my great friends had pitched in to pay. So, we marched right up to the finance office and paid the fine!
So, now I am off to give a presentation at a conference in Vermont tomorrow, then will continue traveling the east coast lecturing to college students in my Transforming Traditional Politics tour.
Keep the faith...
Peace & Freedom
Midge
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12 comments:
If I lived in Missouri I'd vote for you Midge!
It's been a tough week for pink. But I feel pinker and prouder than ever before. Go CodePink !
Midge-
my skilled activist friend -TAKE Roy Blunt's seat soon!!
Missouri needs a leader for the people I VOTE FOR Midgelle Regina
MISS YOU MIDGE!!!!!!
<3 January
Why is it that all the news from the top down,"so to speak" cannot be challenged by anyone other than those approved by the administration?
Midge rocks!!
Those senators know you're there and they are scared, scared, scared, because they know you're right. They are doing what they can to silence you but they know that the truth is coming and they are the ones that are powerless. We are the people and our voices will be heard. We move forward in peace, together, with our voices strong, our heads held high and our fines PAID IN FULL!!!
Have a great trip,
see you soon,
jim
But you didn't speak "truth to power" because you have freedom of speech.
Speaking "truth to power" means something when you could be shot for doing so, like what would happen to you in North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela if you were to say things against their leaders on their soil. But here in the USA, you are free to speak without worrying if the leader is going to have you killed for it (unless you're some type of kook who actually believes you could be), so "truth to power" doesn't apply, nor will it, despite what you foolishly believe.
Midge, please.
You didn't get arrested for what you said. You got arrested for "disrupting congress". There is a difference. When you break a law you can expect consequences, but you still retain the right to break the law in this country.
RW, just because you say it doesn't make it true. The phrase "speak truth to power" entered our language in the 1950s when a group of Quakers (a pacifist religion) used it in a pamphlet describing the act of telling those in power the truth. The group of Quakers said that the phrase has been long used in the Quaker tradition. So, the threat of being shot does not enter into "speaking truth to power." All you have to do is do a little research before you comment, and you can actually tell the truth!
If I live in MO I would vote for you and any other communist on the ballot! End this war and throw out the corporate capitalist pigs. We need real leadership from people like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez here in the US. And we need to support our Palestinian brothers and sisters against Israel which is the real terrorists in the world!.
The Liars March for Tyranny and Oppression: Commie Claws are Coming to Town
Kerri Houston
The media is already characterizing the protesters as “anti-war activists” and their organization as “peace groups.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. They are communists. They are not in favor of peace; indeed, they are hell bent on inciting a communist revolution here in the United States.
Because there aren’t enough of them to occupy an entire city block, they snatch the well meaning into their grasping clutches by misrepresenting their true agenda and hoodwinking college students, grandparents, and soccer Moms with a social conscience into participating in their rallies. Afterall, a rally with only 10 people is, well, a meeting held outside.
So far the media either has not discovered the true nature of protest organizers, or it is generally unwilling to report it.
Communism is a failed political ideology spawning government sponsored terrorism responsible for the murder of over 100 million souls and the unimaginable misery of hundreds of millions more during the 20th century. Its political leaders have sanctioned genocide, giving us the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the intentional starvation of 10 million Ukrainian peasants in 1933 by Josef Stalin. Millions of innocent Chinese were starved by their communist government resulting in reports of horrifying stories of villagers sacrificing children as a food source.
Modern communists recognize that most people find murderous thuggery distasteful. They wisely do not want to be associated with the brutal realities of past and present communist dictatorships of Stalin, Castro to Kim Jong Il. They have therefore hidden their real agenda behind ideals of which we all approve, such as “peace” and “justice.”
United for Peace and Justice is the chief sponsor of the Inaugural protests and it is run by Leslie Cagan, a longtime communist activist and devotee of Fidel Castro who was active in the American Communist Party commencing in the Vietnam War era. She was also a member of the Communist Party USA’s Committee for Correspondence. Her goals are the promotion of communism and the destruction of the current U.S. system of democracy.
UPF was deliberately formed as a false public and “moderate” voice to shield the American Marxist movement. Their water was originally carried by A.N.S.W.E.R., a communist front “anti-war” organization that was the brainchild of the Stalinist Workers World Party, but when A.N.S.W.E.R. showed its true colors at one too many anti-war rallies, the organized Left became nervous, prompting the formation of United for Peace and Justice with Ms. Cagan in charge.
Formal members of the Peace and Justice Coalition include state chapters of A.N.S.W.E.R., Committees for Correspondence, Communist Party USA, Communist Party of Vietnam, Ruckus Society, Not In Our Name (NION), September Eleventh Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow, MoveOn, the Communist Parties of Maryland, New York and Indiana, The Exploding Goldfish, Tennessee Guerrilla Women, Code Pink and the Marxist Feminist Lesbian Jamaican Radical Poets.
One of the leaders of A.N.S.W.E.R. is President Johnson’s former Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, an outspoken communist activist who has volunteered for the Saddam Hussein defense team. He founded an organization that supported former murderer Slobodan Milosevic and current murderer Kim Jong Il. He is a director of the post-Trotsky Workers World Party and claims that Osama bin Laden is a victim of U.S. terrorism. He believes that our government deliberately set out to make Islam its enemy so that we had a reason to build more things that go boom.
Brian Becker, another protest organizer and member of UPJ’s partner A.N.S.W.E.R was recently found in North Korea proudly denouncing the U.S. for “war crimes” against that country’s citizens while accusing our soldiers of committing mass murders. He is also a member of Clark’s organization and the anti-Semitic Workers World Party, which incidentally, is on the FBI’s terrorist watch list.
Code Pink, another “anti-war” organization hiding its ideology, is run by communist associate Medea Benjamin. Code Pink has primarily chosen women to lie to, taking advantage of the genuine concern that some homemakers and grandmas have about the Iraq war and using them to add voices at local protests.
Benjamin’s main claim to fame is organizing the violent 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in which she used the Marxist World Worker’s party to help supply bodies. The ensuing riots injured innocent bystanders, caused millions of dollars of property damage for business owners and taxpayers, and left many out of a job. A long time friend of Cagan and Central American communists, Ms. Benjamin was instrumental in the founding of Peace and Justice.
Ms. Benjamin also has formed a group in Baghdad called Occupation Watch dedicated to demoralizing U.S. troops by encouraging them to abandon the Iraqi people and obtain discharges under false pretenses. She was also behind placing in Baghdad the pre-war “human shields” whose dedication to the cause was quickly revealed when they headed for high ground just prior to shock and awe.
UPJ’s partner Not in Our Name is a group with connections to the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party. Communist activist Clark Kissinger was an instrumental member of the 1960’s violent Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers and founded an organization dedicated to halting U.S. security interests during the cold war. He is a co-director of NION.
Parents, if your well-intentioned college student is participating in a “peace” protest on Inaugural Day, these are his or her partners.
They are not patriotic Americans who love peace and hate war. They are unpatriotic Americans who love communism and hate us. Human freedom is their enemy, and they have snared thousands of uninformed protesters into their web.
They are brilliantly deceptive as they cleverly incorporate their communist beliefs into activism that they cover in a mainstream cloaking device. But if they are so dedicated and proud of their beliefs, why do they strive to hide them?
Communism was, and continues to be, a plague on mankind. It has caused incalculable economic and ecological destruction as well as extinguishing the human spirit of millions of our global neighbors, past and present.
As today’s communist movement ironically uses the freedom of speech stripped from those under communist rule to ruthlessly and deliberately promote their agenda, we must never forget those who have suffered under its hands.
In our own act of irony, let’s commit a positive act of compassion by taking an active step to honor communism’s victims. Thank them for reminding us of the tyranny that is communism and go to www.VictimsofCommunism.org to donate some of your ill-gotten gains of evil capitalism for a monument to be built in Washington that reminds us of a brand of human suffering we must never allow again.
That’ll really hack them off.
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