OBAMA-RAMA

I listened to Obama's South Carolina victory speech last night. Quite a big win over Hillary. Near the end of the speech, in one very interesting phrase, he dropped something that I thought will be important to watch. After using the word change about 400 times during the bulk of the speech, just near the end, he tempered it all by saying something to the effect that "change would be slow to come". No one noticed as they were madly waving their campaign signs with the word CHANGE emblazoned on them. Is he sending a signal to the powers that be that he will not get "out of control"?

His new slogan is Yes We Can (Si Se Puede). Maybe it will morf into Maybe We Can or Sometimes We Can, or Slowly We Can. Let's watch how it goes.

I went to a Maine Veterans for Peace retreat at the Chewonki Foundation on Friday night and all day Saturday. We slept in a yurt that was heated by a very small wood burning camp stove and we took turns in the middle of the night stoking the fire. The place actually stayed quite warm. We had a nice meeting, elected Dud Hendrick as our new president, and reviewed several projects that are now underway. We also watched a really excellent film called Soldiers of Conscience. I'd highly recommend it.

One of our upcoming projects is a March 11 Congressional Candidates Forum on Military & Foreign Policy that will be held at the public library in Portland. We have six candidates Democrats running for the First Congressional District seat nomination and the top five of them have agreed to come to the event. Jack Bussell from Maine VfP and I have been organizing the forum and we now have a dozen peace and justice groups from across the district co-sponsoring it. It should give us a great opportunity to see how the candidates deal with each other and these important issues in front of a big audience.

Today we are having a pot luck supper at our house. We are going to start a regular monthly potluck on the 4th Sunday here. Sometimes we will have a speaker, sometimes music, sometimes a video, and other times just chat with each other. We've had a great response to the idea. It seems to be snowing south of here and that might impact attendance as one friend from Kennebunk sent an email saying she would not likely come as a result of the weather.