Pickets and plaudits.

I was on two picket lines for peace recently. While visiting supporters of The Progressive in the Seattle area on February 10, I met up with a few hardy souls at the main intersection in Mt. Vernon, which is a little more than an hour north. I found out that every workday at noon at least a couple of activists gather there to protest the Iraq War.

That Friday, I was one of six, enough to have all four corners covered.

One protester, Scott Morgan, held up a huge yellow plastic sign with the words "Impeach Them All" written in large, black letters.

Bill Johanson, who showed me a list of the eighty-one signs he has made over the years, was carrying one he hoped would stir things up a little:

"Bush Freedom Is Spelled F-A-S-C-IS-M." Protesting, he says, "keeps me going." He's seventy-seven.

Jerry Sommerseth, who gives piano lessons when he's not picketing, says he's been at this corner of Kincaid and First Street for twenty years now, starting as a protester against Reagan's war in Central America. Sommerseth gave me his business card, which says on the bottom: "War Is Terrorism."

The reaction from the cars going by was primarily positive. Deymian LeSar, who held a "Moms for Peace" sign, said that's the way it always is.

It certainly was that way on February 15 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. After talking to high school students on impeachment and before giving an evening speech on "Losing Liberties: Life in the Bush Age," I was invited at the last minute to join the Wednesday picket line at this college town.

This time there were eight of us, with signs that said, "Honor Veterans, End War" and "War Is Not the Answer."

I managed only ten minutes on the line at Eau Claire because it was about 20 degrees out, and my ears were getting red. But I left both of these lively little picket lines feeling energized.

And I thought, if even half a dozen people with protest signs could gather at the main intersection of every town in America once a week or so, we might be out of Iraq a whole lot faster.

This month, we bring you Senator Russ Feingold's impassioned speech denouncing Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping. His thunderous condemnation both of Bush and of members of Congress should go down as one of the great Senate speeches.

I don't want to slight Senator Robert Byrd, either, at least on the NSA scandal. "I refuse to go quietly into the night, abdicating my responsibility as a U.S. Senator to a secretive executive branch, which refuses to brief the Congress of the United States on its clandestine spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant--an Administration that believes it can, on its own, nullify constitutional provisions intended to protect the freedoms of millions of Americans for over 200 years," Byrd said. "James Madison advised in Federalist 47 that 'the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.' The assumption of power by an unchecked Executive, who arrogantly believes that he can seize the authority to spy on innocent Americans and wantonly violate the Fourth Amendment, is the beginning of the tyranny Madison so feared."

We offer a remedy to that tyranny--impeachment--in our Comment section.