Three protesters, a half-dozen signs and a missing petition
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1942
By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“People walk past and say, ‘I’m glad you’re doing something,'” said Marty O’Malley, a Forest Hills council member who has attended more than 100 anti-Iraq war events, as he stood in front of Democratic U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle’s Downtown office last week with the small gathering of activists.
“I want to shake them and say, ‘http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3921!?’"
After $500 billion in spending and 4,000 military deaths, this was supposed to be an election year dominated by the war.
Both Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, support a withdrawal, while Sen. John McCain, a Republican, argues that the U.S. risks losing Iraq to terrorist groups and Iranian influence if troops leave before the country is stable.
In Washington, D.C., Congress is preparing to consider President Bush’s latest emergency funding package for the fighting, with a price tag of $108 billion.But a worsening economy has easily overtaken Iraq as the top concern for voters, according to a New York Times/CBS poll released last week. Only 17 percent of respondents picked the war as the “one issue” they’d like to hear the candidates discuss more.
Americans still have strong feelings about the conflict: 62 percent want the next president to pull out of Iraq within a year or two of taking office, the poll said. Yet war opponents and supporters are having trouble getting the public’s — and the media’s — attention.
A March survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press discovered that just 28 percent of Americans knew the approximate number of U.S. deaths in the war.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08126/879189-84.stm