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

[John W.]

Thank you for the excellent summary, Karen.

John


At 01:14 PM 5/12/2007, Karen Medina wrote:

>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
>--
>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-thought out from the beginning.