If you haven’t read Keith Olbermann’s amazingly well-written special comment on why Bush and Cheney should leave office now, point, click and get on over there NOW!

Today is Blogblast for Peace/Peace Globe Day and bloggers worldwide are displaying their globes in the name of peace. It’s been a rough week with some family issues and I haven’t been feeling all that peaceful. I decided to share the peace of someone else I know.

Jim Wallis and his lovely wife are two of the most peaceful (or at least peace-promoting) people I’ve ever met. Jim runs Sojourners and is the author of “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” On the eve of the Iraq war, Jim’s was meeting with leaders from many different faiths trying to encourage the Bush administration to make a different choice. His wife went into labor in the middle of that meeting and his son was born as the troops marched into battle. I used to worship with them but now I just read the newsletter and blog, both of which fill me with hope for the future and a sense that there are people out there who will and can change this world.

Jim and Sojourners are currently hosting a presidential forum on faith, values and poverty and are encouraging voters nationwide to consider these issues as they cast their vote in 2008.

Pledge to Vote Out Poverty

Martin Luther King Jr. famously warned that a “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Yet despite King’s caution, we are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a disastrous war in Iraq while 37 million Americans are living in poverty and 3 billion people worldwide live on less than $2 a day.

This election season, we can answer Jesus’ call to care for the “least of these” by demanding that candidates go on the record with real plans for addressing poverty in the U.S. and around the world.

Please visit Sojourners and tell your representative, regardless of the party, that this issue is foremost on your mind going into the election.
Dona Nobis Pacem

As of today, the federal government has spent $419,602,000,000 on the war in Iraq. How on earth can the government turn a blind eye to these poor women in Mississippi whose children are dying at an increasing rate due to healthcare cutbacks and lack of access to quality prenatal care. How can they ignore the devastation that STILL plagues New Orleans?

Now even the Iraqis themselves are using mass protests to tell Bush to withdraw the troops from Iraq.

“The occupier supported Saddam and helped him to become stronger, then removed him because his cards were burned,” he said, using an Arabic expression to note that Saddam Hussein was no longer useful to the United States. “The fall of Saddam means nothing to us as long as the alternative is the American occupation.”

Think their cries will penetrate Bush’s thick skull? I’m thinking… no.