President Bush has vetoed the Iraq emergency supplemental spending bill — including a timetable for withdrawal of troops — that Congress had sent to him. Here’s the transcript of what he said.

United for Peace and Justice, as well as Americans Against Escalation in Iraq – a coalition including MoveOn.org Political Action, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, Working Assets, the Campaign for America’s Future, the Service Employees International Union and other groups – are staging hundreds of rallies today and tomorrow to protest the veto.

In the Bay Area, MoveOn members and others will rally:

“The November election was a mandate to end the war – when President Bush vetoed this bill, he vetoed the will of the American people,” MoveOn member, schoolteacher and Alameda resident Maya Sandoval said in a news release. “It’s time for our leaders to end this war and bring our troops home safely. Rep. Pete Stark must stand firm against Bush’s veto.”

Veto reactions from some local House members and others, after the jump…

Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, said the President’s veto meant “rejecting his administration’s own benchmarks and the Pentagon’s own standards for readiness and rest between tours of duty” as well as denying funding to troops in the field.

Said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland: “Rather than change course, the administration offers only increasingly desperate rhetoric about victory and surrender. The fact is that you cannot ‘win’ an occupation, just as there is no way for the United States to ‘win’ an Iraqi civil war. The American people get this. They recognize that this failed policy is making our nation and the world less safe, even if the Bush administration refuses to.”

Said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco: “We had hoped the President would have treated it with the respect that bipartisan legislation supported overwhelmingly by the American people deserved. Instead, the President vetoed the bill outright and, frankly, misrepresented what this legislation does. This bill supports the troops. In fact, it gives the President more than he asked for for our troops; they deserve it. They have done their duties excellently; they have done everything that has been asked of them, all of this without, in some cases, the training, the equipment, and a plan for success for them. The President wants a blank check. The Congress is not going to give it to him.”

Americans United for Change immediately launched this new television commercial:

UPDATE @ 4:50 P.M. TUESDAY:Rep. Pete Stark, D-Fremont, called the veto “yet another slap in the face to the American people. By wide margins, the public would like to see our troops removed from harms way. Though the bill Congress passed didn’t go far enough to bring our troops home immediately, it would have been a significant improvement over President Bush’s stay-the-course strategy. I will now encourage my colleagues to withhold funding entirely. A President intent on killing American troops and Iraqi civilians without end deserves not one more penny of taxpayer money.”