Organizers say about 100,000 commuters pass the billboard in Stratford each day. The billboard - 14 feet high and 48 feet wide - was sponsored by Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice, which describes itself as a statewide interfaith network of religious leaders created in 2002.
14 by 48 is pretty darn big. Car-dealer, casino, fast-food big. I'm sort of familiar with the area - drove through there a couple weeks ago. Chris Shays had a huge billboard along the same interstate, in Stamford I think. Lists all his nice qualities, where the northbound traffic (in a location prone to daily volume-generated jams) can spend some quality time pondering them. This group's putting a billboard up calling him on his vote is better than tagging his with "torturer".
The group, Reclaiming the Prophetic Voice, has its website here.
This is what they say about themselves:
We are a Connecticut statewide interfaith gathering of religious leaders and people of faith, joined by our belief in the God of justice and love, who calls us "to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God." In this time of crisis and war, we believe that walking humbly with God requires us to advocate and practice nonviolent love, in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
We recognize that we are living within a culture of violence and that the war outside our country is intimately linked to domestic policies that leave the marginalized ever more vulnerable. We are committed to promoting an alternative to this culture of violence.
Their site has an image of the billboard, and there's a .pdf of it available, here. I think that's a real photo, too.
What does Joe Loserman have to say about this? In the Courant:
"This is just another example of the kind of mudslinging partisanship that Joe Lieberman wants to remove from our debates about how best to keep our nation safe," said Lieberman spokeswoman Tammy Sun.
Yeah, Joe Tortureman, these folks strike me as real partisan mudslingers.
And, after the fact, Chris Dodd now tells an Iowa campaign stop he regrets being talked out of a filibuster of the Torture Bill. How convenient. From the sounds of it, he's speaking to the choir, but without his heart in it.
By way of comparison to what our soldiers do in Gitmo and elsewhere, in today's Hartford Courant there's a report on the guilty pleas of two adults, to child abuse charges. The father was sentenced to a year in prison and five years of probation. The mother will get six months in prison and five years probation. As is routine, they avoided much longer sentences by pleading guilty. From that article:
"Through interviews with the boy's two older brothers, police confirmed the 3-year-old had been kept in a bedroom with a bottle to urinate in. He said he broke his arm climbing on a milk crate while trying to get out of the room."
Arguably, this kid was being treated better than any of the prisoners at Gitmo, and surely better than the high-value prisoners held in secret jails. There's no indication he was deprived of sleep or otherwise assaulted - just locked in his room. And, he probably had some toys or something while in his room.... Still, Mommy and daddy will go to jail for what they did to him.
This comparison is not to minimize child abuse - rather, it is to highlight just how brutal the conduct of those Bush uses to carry out this continuing atrocity is, and how brutalized they (and we) have become.
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FWIW- this is my first diary here. Please rate and/or comment and let me know thereby, how I'm doing.... Thanks.
