A Year of #45. My Year of Resistance.

Many other resisters were organizing to descend upon the public meetings of regime-supporting Congressmen & women, a great many of whom did not want to face or hear from their constituents. That was true  of many Members from Carolina, and still is of some. But one exception, in early May, was Republican Rep. Mark Walker from the Sixth district, has been drastically gerrymandered to make Walker’s reelection seemingly safe. So on a May morning he decided to hold a public meeting, and since I had business out that way, I decided to drop in on it — not to speak, since I’m not a resident, but to observe.
A staffer shoved a ticket into my hand when I entered. As I sat down, it was announced that tickets would be drawn from a box to choose questioners.
And the first ticket drawn was — mine?? 
What? It was true. So I stumbled up to the microphone, trying to think quickly of a question that might get past his well-practiced talking points.
Somehow I succeeded. Walker had previously been a preacher, and so I asked him if he believed in the Ninth of the Ten commandments, the one against “bearing false witness” (i.e., telling lies.) A bit puzzled, he said he did. 
So then I asked what he thought about the tally the Washington Post had been publishing each week since inauguration, tracking and documenting #45’s lies, which were running at about 5 per day. Was he okay with that?

Now Walker was really befuddled. As he stuttered, it appeared he might not be exactly sure what the Washington Post was, and he certainly didn’t know anything about this tally. But after much backing and filling, and under my prodding, he did finally manage to come out more or less foursquare against telling lies, without being more specific. Not his best performance.

Other questions were mostly about health care, aka Obamacare, which he was against. As an accidental resister, I felt afterward that I had done okay that morning.

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From “Quakers & Resistance” — Tom Fox Paid the Price

            Who killed the unarmed Quaker peaceworker Tom Fox in Iraq? And why?
            Few other than the ones who pulled the trigger know the truth, and one wonders how much even they understand. Speculation abounds, of course, with many of my more left-leaning friends imagining a CIA-sponsored conspiracy to silence these noisy pacifist dissenters. Yet from the reading and interviews I have done, the most likely guess seems much more mundanely sordid: it was probably all about money.
            The videos showing Tom and the others were issued by a previously unknown group, “The Swords of Righteousness Brigades.” This name is very likely a fake, a cover for a criminal gang, which simply kidnaped them for ransom. There was, as John and I learned while keeping our vigil, a sizable kidnaping industry in Iraq. Many Iraqis have been thus abducted for profit, as well as citizens of numerous other countries.
            James Loney felt the ransom was wanted to help finance the guerrilla insurgency. Many other observers feel that while the kidnapers are Muslims, and many have likely suffered from the invasion and occupation, these crimes appear to be only loosely connected to religious or political grievances. Rather, they are more a specimen of organized crime gangs mushrooming in a devastated and lawless society.
            From this “profit-seeking” perspective, taking CPT team members was not a particularly good “investment”: the group has pledged not to pay, and not to ask anyone else to. Moreover, none of the four had a personal fortune to plunder. But the gang likely figured that regardless of such brave declarations, given enough pressure, someone would eventually cave in and pay. (Harmeet Sooden, a fellow hostage with Tom, later told a New Zealand press conference that he suspected a ransom had been paid for him and the other survivors, despite vehement government denials.)
            But if the kidnapers were after money, why kill Tom? There are a number of hypotheses:

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