I just watched this nice Blueprint for Change re-edit outlining part of Obama's big plan for change.

Yay! Immigration reform! Yay Data Transparency! Go Team!

Ok so now that that's all out of the way, I'd like to talk seriously about putting pressure on the new congress coming in to
end the war immediately.

I was updating the words to my anti-Iraq war song, In the Spirit this morning...

It started out with "30,000 faces disappear" - I was referring to the Iraqi civilians that were killed in our first sweep of invasions in 2003.

Well, since that time, five years have passed, and a lot more people have been killed. And I make a point to say "killed" rather than "died," because I want it to be clear that none of these people died from anything that would have happened to them had their not been a war.

This was also the point of a report published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which stated:

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The deaths from all causes—violent and non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion.

(Washington Post Story - NY Times Story)

Let's put pressure on this new congress to pass a bill on its first day back in session.

The first act of this new congress should be to declare:

1) The war is over.

2) No more troops will be sent.

3) The troops start coming home now.

Whaddaya say people? Let's make the new Democratic congress show us what they're made of, right away.

Let's make this a priority now, or I fear we're going to find ourselves spending another year protesting this new government just to get them take action to stop the war.

Let's insist that congress deal with the war as its first order of business!