Contact:
Gary Murrell 2008 Exploratory Committee
R.D. Grunbaum, Treasurer
P.O. Box 342 Aberdeen, WA 98520-0342
(360) 648-2476, rd@garymurrell2008.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Exploratory Committee Formed to Unseat Dicks

Hoquiam, WA - Grays Harbor College professor Dr. Gary Murrell and other grass-roots community activists have formed an exploratory committee to "test the waters" in Washington's 6th Congressional District. The committee will assess the support for a challenge by Dr. Murrell as a Green Party candidate to long-time Democratic Congressional hawk, Representative Norm Dicks. Murrell's exploratory committee recently put up a web site at www.garymurrell2008.com to supply more information about the potential candidate's stands on issues and to introduce Dr. Murrell to potential voters in the 6th District.

"I have waited for years for someone, anyone to challenge Dick's militarism," Dr. Murrell said recently. "In November 2006, we voted for Democrats to end the disastrous Republican rule of Congress, expecting, hoping that Democrats would end the ruinous war in Iraq. They didn't. Instead, in a demonstration of colossal spinelessness, the Democrats voted to escalate the war. In a career characterized by unwavering support for the military-industrial complex, which culminated in his catastrophic vote for a blank check to authorize George Bush to make war on Iraq, Dicks never met a weapon's system he did not like, an arms maker he could not fund, nor a war he could not support. He did not serve in the military himself, preferring to let others sacrifice during his own generation's disastrous war against the people of Vietnam. Like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Clinton and Bush, Norm Dicks had better things to do; he had a career to pursue in Washington, D.C. When his Gulf of Tonkin moment came with the Iraq war vote in October 2002, he failed the test, utterly. That mistake, that calamitous lack of good judgment has resulted in the deaths of 4,000 Americans, one million Iraqis, and mountains of debt borrowed from China; some say $2 trillion when all is said and done if the war were to end today. Throughout his career, from secret appropriations to arm Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, and his votes for the Patriot Act I and II, the Military Commissions Act, which stripped Habeas Corpus from the Constitution, to his continued funding for the occupation of Iraq, Dicks has shown enormous concern for the welfare of generals but scant support for promoting the general welfare."

As a Green Party Candidate, Dr. Murrell would be able to enter the race on a more equal footing with Dicks where a Democratic primary challenger would be eliminated very early in the process because of Dicks enormous financial advantage. "Dicks has a hefty campaign war chest. Since 2001, Representative Dicks has taken more than $434,000 from war contractors for whom he has put earmarks in the federal budget," Murrell said. "Remember the $17 million 'boat to nowhere' that Dicks put into the budget for the Navy; the boat the Navy did not ask for nor want? That series of earmarks earned Dicks more than $17,000 in campaign contributions. We need to break that pipeline, that system of legalized bribery that funnels money from military contractors who get government contracts right into the campaign war-chests of sitting members of Congress," Murrell said. "Those gigantic war-chests give any challengers great pause. What we really need are publicly financed elections. We can't continue as a democracy with the broken system we now have."

Dr. Murrell's exploratory effort will attempt to determine whether there is enough interest, enough volunteers, enough staff and enough money to challenge the entrenched, corporate, Bush-Democrat.