[Peace-discuss] Re: "Peace of the Pie" -- visiting Tim Johnson's Champaign office on Friday?

[Karen Medina]

Stuart Levy wrote:
>> The Dept. of Peace campaign 
>> "Giving Peace a piece of the pie".
>> we have an appointment with Phil Bloomer at Tim Johnson's office (Friday 5/11) at 10:30am.

John Wason wrote:
>So how did this go, Stuart?

Karen Medina now writes:
About as well as expected. Phil, Tim Johnson's Press Secretary, was welcoming and polite. While he had heard of the concept, he was not at all familiar with the status nor the details of the proposed bill for the "Department of Peace". He was asking things like "who are the co-sponsors?" and "where is it right now?" and "how far will it actually go?".

It was good that Stuart had printed out a copy of the current bill to give to Tim Johnson's staff.

The pies were a hit.* 

There were 5 of us in the guest list. Joy from Houston Texas, who was visiting family here, brought her mother and father along. And then Stuart and I were there. Joy's father, John Thompson, was a WWII veteran, and seemed to have been in the military as late as the 1960's as well.  

"We had a fairly long meeting, at least half an hour.
We talked about the promise of the DoP, about peace, about civility, about the Iraq war, veterans' concerns, etc."**

To document our visit, as part of the national campaign, Stuart had brought along a digital camera and one of the staff people took a picture of the 6 people and the 2 pies.  The previous paragraph was a quote from Stuart's report,  which was much shorter than my description. 

Phil did his job well. He presented Johnson in a good light, highlighting issues where Johnson had voted on issues that we were likely to be impressed by. For instance, Johnson was against the January surge of troops in Iraq, and he does want out troops home as soon as possible. Johnson voted against the recent bill to fund the troops, as he pointed out that even Kucinich voted against. We pointed out that it was for opposite reasons though. Kucinich voted against it because he thought Bush should get no funding, Johnson voted against it because Bush should have no timeline restrictions. Phil did point out that Johnson is in favor of benchmarks. Phil also pointed out that Johnson does have friends on both sides of the aisle.

I, rather brashly, pointed out that the US Department of Peace would be in accordance with Tim Johnson's personal philosophy of how to get things done. Tim is open to talking to just about anyone and counts few as foes because they just might make a good friend.

-karen medina
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Footnotes:
* Joy had added a written message in frosting to the top of the store-bought defrosting cheesecake pies. I am not sure what they said, but am guessing something like "Peace wants a piece of the pie."
** We did take the opportunity to voice our disapproval of several other issues including 1) the blank check that Bush has for the occupation of Iraq, 2) that our troops are there, 3) the cost of the occupation, 4) the poor state of veterans facilities, 5) how the veterans of previous wars saw that the invasion of Iraq was wrong and ill-tought out from the beginning.