Seen. Noted. Listed.

While Republicans in Congress would never stand for it, calls for Bush's impeachment are growing. The Santa Cruz, CA, city council just voted 6-1 to ask the House Judiciary Committee to consider impeachment proceedings against President Bush.

"Don't talk like a twit," urges Jonathan Rowe in an excellent piece in Yes! The Right embraces "a strong-father family. It values authority, discipline, individual enterprise, and personal responsibility. The Left, by contrast, favors the nurturing mother: support, assistance, care, cohesion, and the like." All fine, except that from time to time the Left would be well-served to "speak as though listeners matter, and that we attend to what listeners hear and not just what we want to say."

Often people are further along than we think; they just see the path in different ways. Christian conservatives, for example, have been involved in the fight to get commercial influences out of the schools—not because they hate corporations or capitalism, but because they oppose the way corporations are undermining parental authority. It’s a different way of getting to essentially the same place. There might be many such common places, if only we can speak in language that does not distance us from the people we need to reach.

Yes! also has a great interview with former Congressman and current General Secretary of the National Council of Churches Bob Edgar about the Win Without War coalition and the role of the faithful in progressive causes:

I think there are two ways to read the Bible. One is to read it with a focus on the parts that call for the Messiah to be the leader of a mighty military and separate the good from the evil. They see God as a God of judgment who will divide the good from the bad, and good people are going to survive and evil people are going to die.

The other way of reading the Scripture is to focus on the parts that teach love and justice, forgiveness and reconciliation. Even the early church had difficulty understanding Jesus when he talked about loving your neighbor, loving enemies, and caring about the least of these, the brothers and sisters on planet Earth. This other way of reading sees that nonviolent action, of the kind Martin Luther King Jr. practiced, is more powerful than violence.

More bad news for local news: Via Cursor, a disturbing story about the widespread use of video press releases or "canned news": with budget cuts and media consolidation, these preproduced sections are often passed off as local reporting when they have little to do with, and little value to, the local community. Is your local station using canned news?

One might laugh at New York's $166 million deal to let Snapple be its official beverage (the Big Snapple, get it?). But the deal also allows the juicemaker to immediately install vending machines in the city's 1,200 public schools. After January 1, machines will go into city-owned office buildings, police stations and other municipal sites.

And, to end with a little humor, the $87 billion figure Mr. Bush asked for in his address to the nation the other night is grossly underestimated--by about $55 billion.