We will have a table at the Taos Solar Music Festival. We need a group of volunteers since it is a 3-day event. Entry fee for the Code Pink table is $60. Please help. It will be loads of fun and great music.
June 27, 28, 29th..

We had a table at the local Earth Day Celebration, April 20th at Kit Carson Park. It was way too windy for our giant puppets, but we persevered despite wind gusts just about picking up the table. Lots of signatures were gathered on our petitions.

Code Pink taos recently sponsored and helped to organize a panel of experts speaking about the proposed expansion at Los Alamos National Lab (to 80 to perhaps 200 more plutonium bomb pits per year). The event, entitled Nuclear Bombs in Our Backyard, was at the TCA on April 23rd and was well received. The panel was exquisite, a very informative evening. We will soon have a DVD of our expert panel for those of you who missed it. The film shown that evening, Do It for Uncle Graham (on the history of the nuclear weapons complex in NM) is available to be veiwed at the Peace House. Thank you to all of you who volunteered to help!

Several fellow Code Pinkers (Josie Lenwell, Gaia Mika, and others) go to the Pink House in Washington D.C. periodically to disrupt "business-as-usual". Contact Josie for info on that 751-0407. Also check out www.codepinkalert.org

Here are some of Code Pink Taos' past activities…

Our local group, during Jan, Feb and March '07, worked with the NM legislature, tracking legislation such as the Impeachment Bill SJR5, which would have mandated that the federal government spend time debating the need for investigation and impeachment of George W and Cheney. Unfortunately, our Democrats let us down with a sneaky procedural move to avoid debate on the floor. Boooooooooooo!

Local Code Pinker, Marilyn Hoff, wrote a draft of a law to test Veterans for Depleted Uranium contamination, which the feds, most often, refuse to do, Our Veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with unexplained illnesses. Depleted Uranium is used extensively now in almost all of our weapons systems and is contaminating our soldiers and the Iraqi population as well as the air, water and soil in Iraq and Afghanistan. Members of Code Pink Taos promoted this D.U testing legislation. An allocation of $40,000 was made by the legislature to test Veterans for D.U. here in NM. Ours is the 1st state to allocate funds for this. If you know NM Veterans tell them that the NM Department of Health, Epidemiology Department is now doing D.U. testing, free of charge, for Veterans.

Code Pink members also supported the Dine' native people in fighting an $85 million tax break for new coal plants being planned in the NW corner of NM, and also opposed a Senate Memorial to "remove obstacles" to uranium mining & milling in NM. These bills died. Yaaaaaaaaaaay!

We support a NM Office of Peace. The bill will be reintroduced in Jan,'09.

We've created 3 giant puppets ...Amy Goodman, Rosa Parks, and Sadako Sasaki (the little Japanese girl who started the tradition of folding paper cranes for peace). The puppets made their debut at the March 17th, '07 anti-war protest. The real Amy Goodman had a chance to meet our puppet of herself in November at the Lannon Foundations' event on global warming with Amy Goodman and Tim Flannery.

Code Pink Taos has held and participated in about 5 protests to the Iraq War. We have an e-mail list of around 200 people (and 50 phone-only). We do tabling periodically with petitions & local announcements at CIDS. We have several petitions including one asking Governor Richardson to bring the National Guard home (which he has the authority to do). We have over 700 names on that so far. Bringing the Guard home is also a National Code Pink campaign. We have an anti-recruitment in schools petition, people's ratification of Kyoto, a stop LANL's expansion petition and others.

Code Pink Taos is a member of the Taos Peace House, where we have our table with literature and petitions. We pay our membership with a time-slot (Wednesdays, 3-6). We need volunteers to fill that slot to keep the Peace House open for regular hours. Also need volunteers to help with events, tabling and phone calls to those who don't have e-mail. Please volunteer and meet some great fellow-peacemakers.

We collect money for the women in Iraq through Madre. Their sister organization is setting up women's shelters for women who are fleeing so-called "honor killings", oftentimes for having been raped. This situation has become much worse than before the occupation, since the U.S. has put extremist clerics into power and the Family Law which gave women rights in Iraq, has since been repealed. Please donate. Any amount will help.

Your ideas are welcome. Don't feel shy about sending in your ideas for Code Pink Taos by e-mail or phone. 751-4130 Peace, Jeanne.

What is CodePINK?
CodePINK is women and girls (and men who believe in humane values and who respect & honor women's leadership)
CodePINK values diversity, collaboration and empathic listening
CodePINK imagines a world where the people come together and find the courage to lead; where truthful, moral leaders inspire courage and action; where leaders listen to and act on behalf of the people and make choices for humanitarian reasons
CodePINK visualizes a world made safer through the hard work of treaties and diplomacy
CodePINK acts to preserve the environment for our planet, for our offspring and for generations to come
CodePINK prioritizes health care, quality education and quality of life
CodePINK knows that war destroys, prison destroys, violence destroys
Code PINK believes in non-violence as the way to peace
CodePINK anticipates a world where differences are shared and celebrated, and where "enemies" take on a human face.