Define “idiot”
[The sub-text of this is an attack on the Green Party, of which Paul Franklin is a leading member, having been elected to the Live Oak School Board. -Thomas]
http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/2003/March/01/edit/let.htm
Farr wasn’t there
Your Feb. 16 story, “Protesters march, fill Mission Plaza,” inaccurately reports that Rep. Sam Farr was a speaker at our Feb. 15 peace rally. While Rep. Farr attended the rally, he wasn’t a speaker. The Santa Cruz Peace Coalition made a decision not to invite him due to his poor voting record. It was perceived that his record these past 10 years too generously supported the U.S. military and various campaigns to render destruction/death upon the citizens of other countries. His vote in April 1999 authorizing the to conduct military air operations and missile strikes against Yugoslavia (S CON RES 21) is a case in point. During this air campaign a television station was targeted and destroyed and the civilians within were killed, reflecting a gross disregard for the Geneva Convention on war.
His consistent support of several billion U.S. tax dollars to wasteful military appropriations is an example of Sam’s tenuous grasp of the value of peaceful diplomacy. In 2001, he received a grade of F in wasteful military spending from a statewide advocacy group. He has supported Plan Colombia (a war on indigenous people disguised as a war on drugs) and NAFTA (an economic tool for institutionalizing violence against the working class in Mexico and the United States).
For these reasons and more, we declined to have Rep. Farr speak. Sam’s vote against the use of U.S. forces against Iraq (HJ RES 114) in October 2002 is certainly a vote in support of the global peace movement which I and other embrace. An invitation to the podium of our next peace rally is up to him: no to ever-larger military budgets; no to Colombia-supported terrorism; move to rescind NAFTA, Plan Pueblo Panama and the FTAA. We hope he’ll join us in our efforts to forever silence the guns of empire and extend the hand of peace.
JOE WILLIAMS AND PAUL FRANKLIN
SANTA CRUZ
http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/2003/March/19/edit/let.htm
Twisted logic abounds
I was appalled to see the self-righteous letter from two so-called leaders of the Santa Cruz Peace Coalition recently in which they proudly proclaim their role in prohibiting Congressmember Sam Farr from speaking at the recent peace rally in Santa Cruz.
These sectarian idiots are not speaking for the 7,000 citizens who were demonstrating their opposition to war with Iraq. A successful peace coalition should be in the business of building the largest, broad-based opposition to the impending war possible. As one of the handful of members of Congress voting in opposition o Bush’s drive for a first-strike, unilaterally declared war in Iraq, Sam Farr is certainly worthy of our support and admiration. His principled opposition to the USA Patriot Act and willingness to be the first member of the U.S. Congress to attend a town hall meeting about the war also make him a leader of the growing anti-war movement at this point in time.
The fact that we may disagree with his position on a number of other issues does not allow us the luxury of trying to write him out of the peace movement. This is the kind of sectarian, holier-than-thou politics which led to our president begin George Bush rather than Al Gore.
And how Mr. Argue, who spent most of last year in jail for punching a police officer, thinks he has the moral standing to criticize Mr. Farr for Farr’s ostensible lack of humanitarianism requires a logic too twisted for me to get my head around.
Mike Rotkin
Santa Cruz
