Press Kit

Speakers Available for the World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime

To arrange
interviews, please contact our press office at 866-973-4463

DEBRA
SWEET is the
national coordinator of World Can’t Wait(Drive Out the Bush
Regime. She has been active since the 60s, when as a teenager she made
national
news for challenging Nixon on the war in Vietnam at a White House
reception. For her story, from an article in Madison’s Capital
Times, go to: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0925-27.htm

SUNSARA
TAYLOR, an initiator of World Can’t Wait, speaks frequentlyon college campuses
and radio, and has been guest on Air America and Fox talk shows such as Hannity
& Colmes. She writes for Revolution newspaper. Click here to hear her on Air America’s Malloy and see an EPK with Fox
TV clips.

DR. WARREN
HERN is one of the few brave abortion doctors who performs late-term abortions.
He has a clinic in Boulder, Colorado and is the author of Abortion
Practice, the first and only single-author medical textbook concerning
abortion, and a leading fighter for women’s reproductive rights.

REV. LUIS
BARRIOS, assistant clergy at the City University of New York, recently returned
from New
Orleans post-Katrina. He is a
weekly columnist for El Diario and a leading figure in New York Spanish
speaking communities.

CA STATE
ASSEMBLYMAN MARK LENO, California State Assemblyman for San Francisco, author of the Gay Marriage Bill
in California. He recently published an article
on World Can’t Wait in San Francisco Bay Guardian. Go to: http://www.sfbg.com/40/12/x_oped.html

NY SENATOR
TOM DUANE, State Senator from New York City. Social justice advocate.

CAMILO
MEJIA is a conscientious objector, war resister, and recent Iraq war veteran. He was the first soldier to publicly come out
against the war in Iraq and spent 9 months in the brig for
refusing to return to Iraq.

TRAVIS
MORALES was encamped in front of the White House with The World Can’t Wait-
Drive Out the Bush Regime for 3 weeks before November
2, 2005.
He is a longtime Chicano activist who has appeared on Univision, Telemundo, in
El Diario and other Spanish language publications. Travis is a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA in the Bay Area.

BOOTS
RILEY is co-founder of the hip-hop group, the Coup. He is the group’s primary
producer arranger and songwriter. Boots
created PSA’s and ads for the World Can’t Wait, including the paid ad that Hot
97, the #1 hip-hop radio station in New York City, refused to air.

ANN WRIGHT
quit a 27-year career as a US diplomat and military officer in
March 2003 in a public protest of the invasion of Iraq. She helped run Camp Casey in Crawford with Cindy Sheehan
this past August. Go to: http://www.usabroad.org/2004/09/radio_ann_wrigh.html

LARRY
EVEREST, has been a journalist on the Middle East for the past 25 years and is the author of Oil, Power and Empire:
Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda.

MILES
SOLAY sings lead vocals for the band, Outernational. Go to outernational.net

JUAN TORRES son was killed in the war in Afghanistan. He has said, ‘In my country when you have a
fascist president come to power you take to the streets and drive him
out.’ Juan was arrested at the gates of
the White House with Cindy Sheehan and other World Can’t Wait organizers.

ABIGAIL BAYER is a school bus driver who organized other Houston
bus drivers to caravan 38 buses to New Orleans
to rescue survivors. But when they arrived, authorities wouldn’t let them
help. Instead, their buses were
commandeered by the military, and eventually returned to Houston
empty. Abigail: ‘I didn’t come to New Orleans
to carry [the military] around, so they can do their shoot-to-kill orders. I
came to pick up people and take them to a safe place.’

TYLER CURTIS and GAVIN RADERS are students at UC Berkeley
who disrupted Prof. John Yoo’s class at UC Berkeley wearing Guantanamo
jumpsuits and bags over their heads. Prof. Yoo wrote the policy for the Bush
administration justifying policies in use at Abu Grahib and Guantanamo
prisons. Both are facing possible arrest for disorderly conduct and disrupting
classes.

SARAH
ESCUDERO is a 9th grader at Reseda
High School in Los
Angeles who faced a possible expulsion for organizing
students to express themselves on November 2.
She has been cleared of penalties but dozens of other students have been
suspended, expelled, and arrested.

SAMANTHA
HAMLIN is a student organizer at Columbia College in Chicago, that heavily participated Nov. 2.
She has worked with On the Ground and has done a lot of progressive community
work.

SIMONE LUMINOSA
Notre Dame
High
School student in New York City who helped organize her school to
express themselves on Nov. 2.

Why the world can’t wait by Mark Leno

*Mark Leno represents San Francisco in the state assembly. This oped appeared in the Dec. 21-27 issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

The
horror, lies, corruption, deceit, death, and destruction of the
Bush-Cheney administration have all evolved to a scale beyond any of
our worst nightmares. Our once-great nation has been reduced to a
preemptive war machine, squandering our limited national resources on
its imperial conquests while our domestic needs are left unattended.

This administration, aided by the one-party rule in Washington,
DC, has traded governing for propaganda, allowed a treasured major city
to decay in its own ruins, allowed the Department of Homeland Security
to feed the voracious, petty appetites of lawmakers, replaced science
with superstition, transformed torture into policy, enriched the most
privileged by indebting future generations, and ignored the urgency of
global warming ( while doing everything in its power to supplant our
democracy with a theocracy.

While referencing every national concern back to 9/11, the
Bush-Cheney administration has underfunded domestic port security by $1
billion and the need of our first responders by $98 billion. While
declaring education among his top priorities, President George W. Bush
has shortchanged the No Child Left Behind Act by $9 billion. In the
midst of a national health care crisis, five million Americans have
lost their health insurance since Bush took office. Food stamps to
prevent malnutrition, student loans providing access to higher
education, and indigent medical care are all at risk to allow for
further tax cuts to the nation’s wealthiest. Women’s reproductive
rights and health issues have been reduced to a political football.

Under Bush’s leadership, corruption has become the newest fashion in
Washington. The likes of Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Scooter
Libby, Randy (Duke) Cunningham, and Karl Rove have set new standards of
deceit, greed, and intolerance.

And then there is the war in Iraq. After hundreds of billions
of dollars have been carelessly and shamelessly spent on sole-source
contracts to Halliburton and other presidential cronies, Iraq’s
infrastructure is in near shambles. International terrorists have found
a new and welcoming home, while our own national security is arguably
at greater risk than before September 2001.

Though the darkness has seldom appeared so absolute, the
disenchantment of millions of Americans is beginning to find
articulation. The World Can’t Wait, a national movement to drive out
the Bush regime, is exhibiting extraordinary leadership in harnessing
and directing the myriad oppositional voices within our land. Having
successfully executed numerous street demonstrations across the country
Nov. 2 and with a full page New York Times ad last week, the World Can’t Wait is in need of your immediate attention and support to continue its efforts.

In this dire situation, politics as usual will not do. Each of
us has the responsibility, if not the obligation, to participate in
this collective effort. We will spend many years repairing the damage
Bush has already done to our economy, the environment, the health of
our urban centers, and to our international reputation. The question we
all need to ask is, at what cost do we suffer three more years of this
abusive administration? Don’t we all agree that the world can’t wait
three more years?

If everyone reading this piece were to visit
www.worldcantwait.org and to take the next step, we would make a
significant impact. Whether you are able to make a contribution of any
size, volunteer your time in organizing a response in your community to
Bush’s State of the Union address in January, or share this information
with everyone in your e-mail universe, I urge you to get involved. The
reigning powers are counting on our being too disgusted, discouraged,
and disheartened to challenge them in any creative fashion. They
believe they can continue their assaults unimpeded.

A recent Ipsos Public Affairs poll indicates that by a margin
of 50 percent to 44 percent, Americans believe Congress should consider
impeaching President George W. Bush if he did not tell the truth about
his reasons for going to war. Let’s hold Bush accountable. Engage
today. The world can’t wait!

Wildly Spinning Alternative Worlds: Both Sides Ready for Alito Hearings

By Marcia Davis

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, January 6, 2006; C01

Parallel universes are real, and don’t let anyone tell you
different.

Political debate, in its own way, has always offered us
evidence of this, but it takes simultaneous and opposing news
conferences on the same floor in the same building just doors away from each
other to really drive home this alternative-reality thing.

And when the subject is the direction of this nation’s
highest court, on the eve of next week’s Supreme Court confirmation
hearings for the controversial nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., well, even
Rod Serling might run into a little trouble trying to keep up.

In one room at the National Press Club yesterday was
Concerned Women for America, accompanied by a fairly long list
of female fellow travelers who had come to speak in favor of the judge. Just
down the hall and around the corner was the National Alliance for
Justice, with several law professors who, armed with a letter signed
by nearly 500 of their colleagues, had come not to praise Alito but to
bury him.

In one universe, the judge with a 15-year record on the
bench is a saint, a black-robed legal eagle, “a man of integrity,
intelligence and judicial experience” — and restraint — who will
interpret rather than reinvent the Constitution. In the other world,
he is a judicial activist from outside the legal mainstream trying
to disguise himself as a moderate. He is a man who would
endorse “strip-searching a 10-year-old” and a judge willing to give
the executive branch unchecked powers over Americans and their civil
liberties.

In one universe, that 1985 memo in which Alito expressed
his opposition to Roe v. Wade is a 20-year-old document that
tells us little about the way he would handle abortion cases.

In the other, it is a document that speaks volumes about his
judicial intentions.

In one, the American Bar Association’s highest rating for
Alito is a gold standard. In another, although it can’t be discounted,
it is more a stamp of approval on his qualifications rather than
any real commentary on his jurisprudence.

Don’t be fooled into believing that these universes are just
the manufactured worlds of political opposites. What they
reflect is a real division over just how we Americans understand the
Constitution.

As more than one constitutional scholar has noted, we have
yet to agree on just what the Constitution means. Is it a document
meant to be interpreted as the Founders originally intended? Or is it
alive, a dynamic operating system for an ever-morphing society?

The days leading up to Alito’s hearing have been filled with
the kind of political spitfire and spin that was absent from John
Roberts’s hearing last summer, when his confirmation was successfully
promoted as a fait accompli . Washington in recent days has been in full
form, with the left and the right pushing to frame the debate.

That push has arrived at a time when the Bush administration
is battling its way through low approval ratings, complaints
about its spying program, corruption scandals and that dogged war.

Alito’s hearing offers a new arena in which to fight it all
out.

Yesterday, it wasn’t just CWA or the Alliance on the march. At 11, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) hosted a briefing in which he
outlined the issues he believes the country should be concerned about
regarding Alito. At noon, about a half-dozen black
conservatives, including several ministers and Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell,
were at the Press Club, too, announcing their support for Alito. An
hour later, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was on the Hill
telling a roomful of supporters that it was going to hurt Alito if he
tried to do the bob and weave that Chief Justice John Roberts
executed so well last summer.

Somewhere in all that,
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) was to hold
a conference call briefing on Alito. And yesterday evening
the Christian Defense Coalition and a national coalition of
clergy were to stand outside the Hart Senate Office Building “to
consecrate” Room 216 Hart, where Alito’s hearings will open Monday.

Parallel universes, of course, must have their common
denominators. Most news conferences look the same: a
row of serious-Washington faced folks standing behind a lectern waiting their turn at
the microphone. If they are lucky, the audience is filled
with journalists and not just true believers.

If they are really lucky, there might be a little spice.

CWA got lucky yesterday when protesters — members of a
group called The World Can’t Wait — interrupted the news conference.
Just minutes into the event, four protesters stood in front of the
lectern and flashed the audience. They opened their coats to reveal
gowns doused in fake blood, all the time shouting, “Women will
die!” The reference, of course, being that if Alito is confirmed, it
could eventually turn back the clock on abortion rights.

“We have heard the same tired rhetoric that women will
die,” CWA’s Jan LaRue said, holding up what she said was a flier from
David Souter’s confirmation process on which it said that women
would die.

“The American people are tired of the same
attacks.”

Down the hall, the law professors didn’t have protesters to
play off, but it didn’t stop their volley of zingers.

Questions that revolve around issues of executive power will
be critical in the process, said Professor Peter Shane of Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

“I’ve been able to convince people of that in recent
weeks,” he deadpanned, “especially on the phone.”

Later, in the same room where CWA held its news conference,
seven black conservatives gathered. Five members of the Coalition
of African American Pastors were joined by Roy Innis, the civil
rights activist who over the years has emerged as a staunch
conservative, and Blackwell, who moderated the session.

“We’re here to support a good man,” Blackwell said
as each praised Alito and the clergy members said they represented an
emerging black religious voice concerned about traditional moral values.

At one point, a young woman identifying herself as a member
of an opposing group challenged them on Alito’s membership in a Princeton alumni group that was unwelcoming to blacks and women.
“If we were not good enough for Alito, why is he good enough for
us?” she asked.

She noted the momentary silence, but it didn’t take long
for Blackwell and others to respond.

And so it goes when parallel universes meet.

Contents:

Speakers Available for the World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime

Why the world can’t wait by Mark Leno

Wildly Spinning Alternative Worlds: Both Sides Ready for Alito Hearings

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