Feature Archives

Chicken John and Josh Wolf are stepping in to the ring and trying to raise enough money before Friday, August 10th, to run for mayor. Many progressives had been pushing for Matt Gonzalez, Ross Mirkarimi, or Chris Daly to run against Gavin Newsom, who has so far raised $1.6 million for his mayoral campaign.

After weeks of pressure from President Bush, both the House and Senate approved the Protect America Act of 2007, which rewrites the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The new law sharply alters legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States, and moves the power to approve the international surveillance from a special intelligence court to the attorney general.

Following Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's refusal to consider the impeachment of George Bush, Cindy Sheehan has announced she plans to challenge Pelosi for her seat in Congress. Sheehan writes, "At the end of this day, Speaker Pelosi has not supported impeachment and has not upheld her oath of office to 'protect and defend' the Constitution... The Middle East is rapidly falling apart under this regime and our country is sliding rapidly into a state of one-branch tyranny while our 'heroes,' the Democrats, fiddle."

On July 23rd, Cindy Sheehan's deadline for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to introduce articles of impeachment against George Bush and Dick Cheney ran out. Hundreds of supporters gathered there and marched on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, ending in a siege of Rep. John Conyers's office and several arrests. In solidarity, several people gathered in Mike Honda's Campbell, CA office. A similar action happened later in the day at the office of Zoe Lofgren in San Jose.

On June 9th, 2007, Silicon Valley Impeachment Coalition held an impeach "spell-in" where people laid down in San Jose City Hall Plaza to spell IMPEACH with their bodies. Merriam Kathaleen, one of the organizers, explained, "we have come together to work specifically for impeachment because we believe that the next war can only be stopped by the impeachment and trial of those that brought us this one."

A Rancho Cordova fundraising event for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was delayed three hours on Thursday, May 31 while the Sacramento County bomb squad investigated a coffin brought to the area by antiwar protester Stephen Pearcy. About 20 protesters showed up and organizer Pearcy brought along his usual displays, including his mock coffin with a U.S. flag draped over it.

Every year, over 800,000 pets end up in shelters in California. Taxpayers spend $250 million to house these abandoned cats and dogs and then euthanize the majority of them. Proponents of the Healthy Pets Act, a mandatory spay/neuter law, point to the wide availability of free and low-cost spay/neuter services and say it is a common sense solution to the problem of pet overpopulation. Advocates of the bill massed in Sacramento in support of the proposed law.