This weekend began what should be 4 days of amazing experiences.  Washington is just a hub of energy as the Inauguration draws near.  Yesterday another woman and I from the UU Arlington Church organized a film screening of "Torturing Democracy" after the 2d service (if you follow the link, you can also watch it online.)  It's a PBS documentary that hasn't received much play...even by PBS.  It looks at the way the Bush administration rewrote the law, ignored the law, ditched the Geneva Convention...and more, in order to conduct torture and protect those who did it.  It struck me that these guys were building a police state on the back of 911.  With the panic during times of crisis, they grabbed power in the name of emergency and just kept running from, trampling, and cleancutting  the Constitution..  As I think about it, I'm surprised that they didn't see the need to create another crisis just to keep going -- thank God for only 8 years.

Then yesterday early evening about 30 of us went to a very visible piece of land at the end/beginning of the Key Bridge in Arlington and had an anti-torture vigil.  We had a bunch of signs, and a group came dressed in orange jumpsuits with black hoods -- very effective.  There was tons of traffic going by us, and people honked, gave us thumbs-up, and hung out their car windows to take photos.  The cabbies were pretty animated in our favor...'course, so many of them are from the Middle East...one demanded that Doug take this light-up Obama in a bathing suit pin to give to me-- it was funny.  

This was Doug's first protest in 40 years, and I think it brought back the good times for him:-)

All this activity meant we missed the big Lincoln Memorial concert -- it must have been great.  But, we caught some of it on TV.