Pinal County Greens Hail End of Iraq War, "A Useless, Catastrophic Mistake"

Apache Junction, Ariz., Dec. 15 -

Today the Pinal County Greens passed a resolution hailing the end of the Iraq War, "a useless, catastrophic mistake that never should have happened and which wasted American and Iraqi lives and resources."

"With the end of U.S. military actions in Iraq," said Richard Grayson, Pinal County Greens co-chair, "we end a miserable chapter in the saga of the United States as a failed empire. This was an entirely unnecessary tragedy foisted on the public by Republicans and Democrats alike, with the Green Party, always against the war, offering a lonely voice of sanity amid the 2002-03 rush to war based on lies."

Grayson said he spent the day when the war began at an antiwar service at St. Maurice Roman Catholic Church in Dania Beach, Florida, with the parish's priest and fellow members of the group Peace South Florida and others aligned with the Catholic organization Pax Christi.

Grayson ran as a write-in candidate for Congress in Florida in 2004 on a platform calling for an immediate end to the Iraq war.

"We never thought the war in Iraq would last this long," Grayson said, "but the war in Afghanistan, broadened by President Obama, has gone even longer. The Pinal County Greens call for an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the failed war in Afghanistan, too."

The Pinal County Greens are members of the Arizona Green Party in Pinal County, which, according to 2010 U.S. Census figures, is America's second-fastest-growing county.

Pinal County Greens: Like Conor Oberst and Desaparecidos, We Believe SB1070 and Other Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Youth Republican Laws Are Unacceptable

for Telemoonfa

Today's New York Times notes the obvious, gathered from the 2010 census, that we are in

a changed American landscape, with whites now a minority of the youth population in 10 states, including Arizona, where tensions over immigration have flared, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“This is a huge demographic transformation,” Mr. Frey said. “A cultural generation gap is emerging.”

The growing divide between a diverse young population and an aging white population raises some potentially tricky policy questions. Will older whites be willing to allocate money to educate a younger generation that looks less like their own children than ever before? How will a diverse young generation handle growing needs for aging whites?

The rapid change has infused political debates, and they have been noisiest in the states with the largest gaps.

Arizona is the leader, with whites accounting for just 42 percent of its young people, compared with 83 percent of its residents 65 and older, according to Mr. Frey. Over all, the state’s Hispanic population nearly tripled between 1990 and 2009, and is now a third of all residents.

The Pinal County Greens and the Arizona Green Party will respond to the needs of all Arizonans, unlike the right-wing bastards in the legislature who have declared war on the state's youth. As young people turn 18 and are eligible to vote, the radical Republicans' days in power are numbered.