House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer spoke Tuesday morning in a large private room (the Columbus Room) at Union Station in Washington, D.C. and took questions. He had no answers for the questions I put to him.

Hoyer's topic was fiscal responsibility, and he said that his proposals -- which were all pure vagueness -- would be appropriate to enact "as soon as the economy is fully recovered." Don't hold your breath.

Hoyer, as is the custom, bragged about cutting and trying to cut particular weapons systems. So I asked him how he could have neglected to mention two closely related points (as is the custom):

1-He's been increasing the overall military budget.
2-He's been funding the escalation of war completely off the books.

He replied that all such issues should be "on the table." But he did not explain his failure to put them there or suggest how he would act on them.

None of the assembled Washington Press Corpse followed up.

But two people did ask good questions about why in the world he would want to go after Social Security or Medicare. One guy asked why we couldn't go after Wall Street instead. Hoyer mumbled about passing regulatory reform, and blamed Bush.

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Americans who voted for peace last November but are getting only more war are becoming increasingly disillusioned.

The majority of Americans, polls show, would slash the military budget by over 30 percent yet President Obama has increased it by four percent. A majority of Americans want U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan but the Pentagon will garrison 50,000 in the former country indefinitely and dispatch perhaps 20,000 more shortly to escalate the war in the latter.

Since voting doesn’t bring the desired change in national policies, people wonder what they can do individually. The answer is quite a lot. “Things have gotten bad enough in the minds of enough Americans that there is an opening for creating a mass movement for real change, and that movement is already growing all around us,” writes citizen/activist David Swanson of Charlottesville, Va., in his new book “Daybreak”(Seven Stories Press). Swanson is cofounder of the anti-war After Downing Street Coalition.

He ticks off a number of examples where grass-roots citizen groups won a round vs. the Establishment:

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