Can't Resist

Two more quotes from a couple of morons.

Among residents, Denise Savoy, a nonsmoker whose father smoked five packs a day and died of emphysema at age 78, opposes the ban, unconvinced of the health risks.

“Doctors are trying to say all these kids have asthma, ear infections,” Ms. Savoy said. “You know what — I had one ear infection in my life. My kids spent a lot of time around my dad, and my oldest two children had lots of ear infections and tubes in their ears, but my youngest two had none of it. My father was fine until about the last year and half of his life.”

She also worries that smokers might have withdrawal symptoms while driving and cause accidents.

...

“I’ll just do my business elsewhere,” said Steward Atwood of Machias, who quit smoking 10 years ago and regularly shops in Bangor. “It’s a right being taken away from people.”

Again I'm fascinated to see that people think they have a right to do this, but the other one is even better. I just love these guys who say "It didn't affect mmmm... that guy, so it must be crap that it's bad for you." Or "My father smoked 5 packs a day and died at 78 FROM SMOKING and I'm not convinced of the risks." Imagine how long this guy (who was apparently extremely healthy except for the emphysema that killed him) would have lived if he hadn't smoked.

New Frontier of Smoking Bans

Bangor, Maine (along with a few other cities that have followed its lead) has banned smoking in cars while children are present.

[The ordinance] has delighted some and angered others and prompted complaints about invasion of privacy and even threats to boycott the city, Maine’s second-largest. The ordinance, which takes effect on Jan. 19, allows the police to stop cars if an adult is smoking while a child under 18 is a passenger. The smoker can be fined $50.

“I’ve heard people say it’s the smoke police or the Gestapo,” said Mayor Richard D. Greene, a pack-a-day smoker[.]

Love the reactions here. "Gestapo." "Smoking police." "Invasion of privacy." The country is moving toward a total ban, and sure, it's going to take a while to get there, but it's going to be fun to watch these guys complain when we ban smoking in their houses.

This one is my favorite:

Gary Nolan, a spokesman for the pro-smoker’s group, The Smoker’s Club, said such bans and court decisions were based on “junk science.”

“At some point these busybodies have to stop,” Mr. Nolan said. “If we can give our rights up to personal property, the nose of the camel is in the tent and there’s no telling how far we can go. I’m telling you the high-fat craze is next.”

Newsflash, folks: You do not have a right to smoke.

You want a right to smoke, write your congressman. See if you can get a constitutional amendment passed. Hell, see if you can get one suggested. I dare you.

A few of the other skirmashes in the war effort:

At least seven states, including several with large numbers of smokers like Texas, Oklahoma and Alaska, prohibit or sharply restrict smoking around foster children in homes, cars or both. Some require homes or cars to be smoke-free for 12 hours before a foster child enters.

Judges determining parental custody and visitation have, in more than a dozen states, ordered a parent not to smoke around a child. An Ohio court last year gave custody of a 6-year-old boy to his father solely because the boy’s mother and her fiancé smoked.

Tenants in apartments have won several recent efforts to get smoke-free buildings or areas, or curtail secondhand smoke from neighboring apartments. In August, after requests from residents in Michigan, First Centrum Communities, which has housing complexes for the elderly in six states, made all its buildings smoke-free. A recent ruling in a New York case said landlords who allow tenants to be exposed to secondhand smoke could be violating obligations to make apartments habitable.

One more quote, from an article I'm clearly enjoying:

Another council member, Susan Hawes, a nonsmoker who is a medical assistant, opposed it. “We have so many people telling us what we can and cannot do in our own lives,” Ms. Hawes said. “Are we going to come back and say, ‘If you don’t get your child out there once a week to exercise ...’ ”

I think it's fascinating that all of the nay-sayers are focusing on possible government meddling with obesity as the next step in their fantasized parade of horribles. The government is attacking one of the ways we're dooming our children to lead shorter, unhealthy lives, they may go after the next major lifestyle killer next. Is that the argument? Are we really saying: "My God! What will we do if our government keeps trying to protect us? And our children?! Next they'll tell us we can't beat them! Or murder them in their sleep! Where have our freedoms gone?!"

It sure would be horrible if the government took a hand in trying to curb our propensity to let smoking parents teach their children to grow up and become smokers, who will teach their children... etc. And it'd be awful if we took an active interest in stemming the horrifying tide of obesity in this country. We've got to nip this thing in the bud!

Oh, and just for the record, there are laws that mandate that kids get a certain amount of exercise a week. They're called truancy laws. You must send your kids to school. Every school has a PE requirement. The government's already involved in this. And smoking is prohibited at school as well.

Priorities

Fabulous article at the Times about what we could have done with the money we've spent on our failed efforts in Iraq. It really highlights the differences in the priorties of Republicans and Democrats:

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

...

In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so.

With Republicans making the decisions, we don't get any benefit for our dollars. We just get an unpopular war, 3000 dead Americans, 35000 dead Iraqis, and a deficit problem that rivals and beats the worst trouble Reagan got us into in the cold war. Speaking of which: I'll take tax-and-spend any day over over spend-but-don't-tax-and-let's-see-where-that-gets-us.

Leading the Pack on Ethics Reform

Senator Obama (along with Sen. Russel Feingold who deserves equal praise, but who does not appear to be in the '08 field), unsatisfied with the steps the Senate was prepared to make in its ethics overhaul bill helped to strengthen that bill by adding amendments that gave it some teeth.

The party leaders began by teaming up to introduce a much weaker bipartisan bill, and lawmakers in both parties acknowledged behind-the-scenes resistance to strengthening it. But many found amendments to strengthen the bill — a number of them offered by Senators Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and Barack Obama of Illinois, both Democrats — politically difficult to oppose.

He's one of the leaders in the fight to clean up Congress.

Bad Plan, Generals Say

It's not just anti-war liberals who don't like Bush's plans to escalate the conflict. "Too little too late," say his own generals, calling the plan "a fool's errand."

The American effort in Iraq has gone badly because the United States did not understand the consequences of deposing Saddam Hussein, said Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency. He said the principal beneficiary of the war was Iran and Al Qaeda, not the United States.

“There is no way to win a war that is not in your interests,” he said.

Cure for Cancer: Prevention/Detection

The cancer rate is dropping. Er... That's misleading. The rate has been dropping for some time. By which, I mean, the percentage of the population that dies due to cancer is going down, but because of the general population increase, the actual numbers have continued to rise. Well, not anymore. 2006 was the second year in a row that the actual numbers have gone down. Fewer people died of cancer in 2006 than did in 2005 and fewer in 2005 than 2004. That's saying something.

"Why?" you ask?

Experts are attributing the success to declines in smoking and to earlier detection and more effective treatment of tumors. Those have caused a fall in the death rates for breast, prostate and colorectal cancer — three of the most common cancers. [emphasis mine]

Take that Phil and R.J.

Now if we can just get a law passed putting those guys out of business.

Scooter Libby on Trial

Jury selection in the I. Lewis Libby trial began today. He's the guy who's being accused of lying to investigators who were looking into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Now he's trying to pick a jury in a town where the democrats outnumber the republicans 9:1 (and most of the Republican tenth works in the White House or on the Hill and is probably disqualified because they know the defendant personally).

Among the voir dire highlights... A venire member was had this to say of the Administration's prewar intelligence:

''I think they were, I guess, as honest as they could be,''

Can't blame the White House for the fact that they had to lie to us. That's on us. They were trying so hard but, you know, there are just some things we can't handle and shouldn't know. Like the fact that the whole reason for the war was a sham. Can you imagine what the American public would have done with that kind of information? They might have decided not to support it, for God's sake!

Whew!

Dodged a bullet there.

Run Obama Run

Barack Obama is running for president!

That is, today he announced that he plans to announce his candidacy for President of the United States in February. He has opened an exploratory committe, which gives him the ability to begin to raise money, captialize on the stunning wave of public support he's been receiving of late and test the waters before making it official in February.

His stated goal in the campaign: To change politics.

Give'm hell, Mr. Senator.

New Orleans v. Crime

In the wake of Katrina and delays in rebuilding the city, the citizens of New Orleans march against crime and make their voices heard about a laundry list of complaints regarding the ongoing failurs of elected officials (local and otherwise) in the past year and a half. There's an interesting article about it here, and here you can find the first hand account of one of the participants.

Alligator Tears? Tears of Regret?

The President gets misty at the Medal of Honor ceremony.

Early in the day, in an emotional ceremony at the White House, Mr. Bush awarded he Medal of Honor to the family of Cpl. Jason Dunham, a marine from Scio, N.Y., who was killed in Iraq in 2004 when he threw himself on a grenade to save the rest of his unit. The president began crying during the ceremony. It was the second Medal of Honor proceeding to come out of the Iraq war.

I don't know why this seems slightly disingenuous to me. I'm usually not the type to speculate about whether even someone like the President is morally bankrupt enough to fake an emotional show at something as important as a posthumous Medal of Honor ceremony, but seriously, it's not like this death couldn't have been avoided. I think it's more likely that Bush's mind was on all of the young men that have died as a result of his obviously failed policies.

The Escalation Debate in a Different Light

The Times paints a rather different picture of the discussion leading up to the decision to escalate the war in Iraq, and though it's different and slightly more encouaraging than the account given at the Salon, it's still not what I would call a rational decision.

The administration, the article says, had several choices that eventually boiled down to A) Pull out (which is what everyone wanted and it was what we expected) and B) Pushing harder with more troops (which wasn't very likely and we didn't expect it). The President, overriding the concerns of the Joint Chiefs and his own generals, the American people, the Congress and the Iraqi government, picked B. "Why would he do such a thing?" you may ask...

Over the past two months those diametrically opposed options — adding American troops, or pulling back to let the Iraqi factions fight it out — marked the boundaries of a vigorous debate inside the Bush administration. At one point, as Mr. Bush, Mr. Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the newly appointed secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, weighed their options, the president asked his deputies, in effect: “Why can’t we just pull out of Baghdad and let the factions fight it out themselves?”

...

One senior official involved in the discussions said that Mr. Bush’s instinct toward the start of the review process — and that of others — was to consider a withdrawal from Baghdad, allow Iraqi-vs.-Iraqi fighting to settle itself, and dedicate United States forces to focus on pursuing Qaeda fighters. “As you peel that back and look at it, it just doesn’t war-game out for you,” said the official. “You’re supposed to go flying through Baghdad looking for Al Qaeda, and when you see ethnic cleansing going on look the other way?”

In the end, the official said, Mr. Hadley’s teams concluded that an American withdrawal from Baghdad would “crater the government.”

It doesn't war-game out for you. Why aren't we doing what the American people demand? It doesn't war-game out for you. Ah. That's clearer, then.

Why are we inflicting more troops on an Iraqi government that doesn't want them? Pulling out would crater the government... that wants us gone.

Why aren't we following the recommendations of our generals on the ground in Iraq? Because the National Security Adviser thinks he knows better.

Okay. Well, at least we know the reasons now.

Genesis of the Escalation

Sidney Blumenthal at Salon.com offers a chilling narrative about how the "surge" escalation came to pass.

Some highlights.

The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton Commission even before its members gave him their report. "Although the president was publicly polite," the Washington Post reported, "few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new 'way forward' in Iraq. How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme. As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamored of the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton."

Donald Rumsfeld had been sacrificed as the secretary of defense, but his replacement, Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA and member of the ISG, turned from skeptic into team player. The Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. John Abizaid, head of Central Command; and Gen. George Casey, commander in Iraq, all opposed the "surge" as no answer. Cheney and the neocons saw their opposition as the opening for purging and blaming them. The Joint Chiefs were ignored and sidelined,
Abizaid was forced into retirement and Casey was removed (sent into internal exile as Army chief of staff). Their dissent, leaked to the Washington Post for appearance in the paper on the day of Bush's "surge" speech, was an extraordinary gesture by the senior military leaders to distance themselves from impending failure.

Also intriguing is the discussion about the differences between the Clinton Administration's approach to Bosnia and the Bush Administration's approach to Iraq, outlined in last night's speech.

In Bosnia and Kosovo, full sovereignty was not granted through an election -- to this day -- which would have turned over the country to one of the three contending religio-ethnic groups and fomented opposition insurgencies. Instead, the U.S. led in organizing a broad range of international partners and institutions in creating a structure of stability that is a basis for gradual democratic development. By contrast, the election Bush promoted in Iraq was political grandstanding in the name of "democracy" that incited the exclusion of Sunnis and aggravated civil warfare. Almost everything in place in Bosnia and Kosovo is absent in Iraq. The former is an example of U.S. leadership, the latter a case study in amateurish blundering. Moreover, Bush has turned "democracy" into a synonym for failure.

More on the Speech

The Caucus has a pretty good sum-up of the different reactions to the speech from the left and the right.

The part I think is the most interesting is a quote from a conservative site, Powerline Blog:

“The administration,” the site continued, “has bought itself a window of time, at least until the 2008 campaign heats up, to try to achieve discernible signs of progress. While the new strategies sound to me like good ideas — one wonders why some of them weren’t implemented some time ago — the more important factor, I think, is sheer persistence. The President will persist; let’s all hope and pray that he succeeds.”

What exactly does that mean, that the administration has bought itself a window of time? There's two years between the mid-terms and the next presidential election, so we don't have to care that we lost? I mean, that's it, isn't it? Public opinion is overwhelmingly against us, but let's see Congress stop us. We don't have to about-face now. We can make things worse as long as there's a chance that we could turn this around before we'll be held politically accountable. As long as we hold the White House, losses in Congress don't matter, public opinion doesn't matter... Nothing matters but the fact that we still hold a position of power and we're willing to use it to our own ends.

MyDD was right. This is tyranny. That post, by the way, is worth a read.

Bush's Speech

The President steps up our presence in Iraq, despite everybody's better judgment. Bob Shrum at Hardblogger has some comments on the speech, some of which are amusing and most of which can't be taken seriously. Nevertheless, he does a good job of pointing out just what is so frightening about this new plan. Witn no light in sight, we plunge further into the tunnel. At least this time Bush is telling us up front that we're going to lose more American lives. Probably thousands more. If we're lucky we'll realize it before we get to the 57k number.

AP says 70% Oppose Escalation

New poll numbers.

Seventy percent against sending more troops to Iraq (and that's just Americans, see below for how the Iraqi leadership feels about it). Thirty-five percent confident the war was a good idea to begin with.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., warned Thursday that any solution to the Iraq problem must have public support. Harking back to Vietnam, he said: "No foreign policy can be sustained in this country without the informed consent of the American people. They've got to sign on."

Smoke-Filled Rooms in the Past

If you wanna give yourself lung cancer, take it outside. The House of Representatives bans smoking inside. Now if we can just get them to ban it outside too.

This Just In: Paying Your Employees Is Good!

Who'd'a thought that paying your employees would be good for business?

Nearly a decade ago, when voters in Washington approved a measure that would give the state’s lowest-paid workers a raise nearly every year, many business leaders predicted that small towns on this side of the state line would suffer.

But instead of shriveling up, small-business owners in Washington say they have prospered far beyond their expectations. In fact, as a significant increase in the national minimum wage heads toward law, businesses here at the dividing line between two economies — a real-life laboratory for the debate — have found that raising prices to compensate for higher wages does not necessarily lead to losses in jobs and profits.

Idaho teenagers cross the state line to work in fast-food restaurants in Washington, where the minimum wage is 54 percent higher. That has forced businesses in Idaho to raise their wages to compete.

With Washington stealing their workforce, Idaho business are entering a new kind of competition. Instead of competing for customers by lowering prices, goods quality and services, they're competing for employees by raising wages.

Hmmm... I wonder if all the Idaho kids that are working in Washington also spend some of their money there?

And this is great:

Mr. Fazzari employs 42 people at his pizza parlor. New workers make the Washington minimum, $7.93 an hour, but veteran employees make more. To compensate for the required annual increase in the minimum wage, Mr. Fazzari said he raises prices slightly. But he said most customers barely notice.

He sells more pizza, he said, because he has a better product, and because his customers are loyal.

Emphasis mine.

I bet his employees are more loyal than the average as well.

What ever happened to the days when people were loyal to their employers because they were afraid that if they weren't they wouldn't be able to find as good a job as they had somewhere else? What ever happened to the days when you could work in the same place all your life and count on your boss to take your needs, your family, your kids into consideration when making decisions about whether or not to cut expenses in the form of cutting jobs?

And by the way...

“Are you kidding? There are so many jobs nearby that pay way more than minimum wage,” said Jennifer Stadtfeldt, who is 17 and lives in Coeur d’Alene, which is just a few minutes from Washington. She pointed out that Taco Bell, McDonald’s and other fast-food outlets in her town were posting signs trying to entice entry-level workers with a starting pay of $7 an hour.

...if McDonald's is doing it, you know it's profitable.

This, though, is my favorite part.

But other business groups argue that an increase would hurt consumers and workers at the low end.

If you raise the minimum wage, you'll hurt poor poeple because prices will have to go up to compensate.

Hmmm... Raise the minimum wage so that people at the lowest end of the spectrum are making more money and... people at the lowest end of the spectrum will be harmed. Does that seem... odd? If it resulted in lost jobs, that would play, but the rest of the article says that's unlikely. If the argument is just that they'll have to pay more for goods, well, won't they have more money to pay with? At worst it'd be a wash. Raise the prices for goods to offset the costs of higher wages and you could say that people are just paying back what they're getting over the long haul, except for the fact that this isn't a closed economy that only caters to people who make minimum wage. Other people with higher wages can be counted on to take up some of the slack of the higher prices, which, again, means that the lowest end is benefited by the increase. Not harmed.

White House Alone on Surge, Literally

I find this to be simply amazing.

Congress doesn't want an escalation.

The American people don't want an escalation.

Iraq, for the love of God, doesn't want an escalation.

The only people who are in favor of this are the ones who actually work in the White House, and, for the President, that appears to be enough. Just another example of his "I'm doing what I wanna do no matter what the country wants" attitude.

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“The government believes there is no need for extra troops from the American side,” Haidar al-Abadi, a Parliament member and close associate of Mr. Maliki, said Wednesday. “The existing troops can do the job.”

It is an opinion that is broadly held among a Shiite political elite that is increasingly impatient, after nearly two years heading the government here, to exercise power without the constraining supervision of the United States. As a long-oppressed majority, the Shiites have a deep-seated fear that the power they won at the polls, after centuries of subjugation by the Sunni minority, will be progressively whittled away as the Americans seek deals with the Sunnis that will help bring American troops home.
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They don't want us there at all. And honestly, who are we fighting and what are we fighting for? The Shiite majority wants to take control of the country without our help or intervention (and probably to take a little revenge on the Sunnis) and the Sunnis are blowing up car bombs in the streets. Who are we trying to protect? The Shiites that can protect themselves now that they're in power? The Sunnis who are trying to kill us?

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Shiite suspicions of the American troop increase reflect a tectonic shift in the political realities here. Shiites, the principal victims of Saddam Hussein’s repression, had joined with Iraqi Kurds in hailing the American-led invasion in 2003, seeing it as opening their way to power. But once they consolidated their control through two elections in 2005, they began distancing themselves from the Americans, seeing their liberators increasingly as an impediment to the full control they craved.

By contrast, moderate Sunnis, who were deeply alienated by the American occupation at an earlier stage of the war, are now looking to Americans for protection, as Shiite militias have moved into Sunni neighborhoods in a deadly cycle of revenge. On Wednesday, moderate Sunni politicians hailed the idea of more American troops.
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Seriously. What's the plan here?

John McCain's Foot

Shooting it... sticking it in his mouth... Whatever.

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RUSSERT: Go back, Senator, to 2002. The administration saying we would be greeted as liberators. John McCain saying you thought success would be fairly easy.

MCCAIN: It was.

RUSSERT: In all honesty…

MCCAIN: It was easy, it was easy. I said the military operation would be easy. It was easy. We were greeting as liberators. Look at the films of when we rolled into Baghdad.
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The Iraqi people sure do have a funny way of greeting their liberators.

Fantastic

http://littledemocrats.net/

Vietnam II, the Search for an Exit Strategy

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

...the American people tried to get their leaders to get out of Vietnam because it wasn't our fight and because it wasn't worth losing tens of thousands of American lives over. The hawkish response was always the same. If we leave it'll be a defeat. It'll embolden the communists. It'll be the first domino on a track that will lead to the obliteration of Western ideals, democracy, apple pie and mass consumerism. How did we get back here again?

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White House officials are keen to portray the new policy as a compromise between two extremes. On one side are the John McCains of the world, demanding big numbers of new troops for extended periods in Iraq. On the other side are the antidependency Democrats, demanding a phased withdrawal, or a timetable for withdrawal, to shock the Iraqis into action. (The White House dismisses the third option of rapid withdrawal as simply a form of defeat.)

...

The White House says the president will explain the consequences of defeat and withdrawal: bolder terrorists, civil war, conflict throughout the region.
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This just in: The United States is not good at occupying foreign countries.

The same column includes a breakdown of some recent Gallup numbers, including:

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Recent polls show it’s a tough sell. The latest Gallup poll for USA Today shows that 36 percent approve of the idea of “a temporary but significant” troop increase; 61 percent oppose the idea. The White House believes those kinds of numbers will decline once the president makes his case and rallies a Republican base that has drifted away from him in recent months on the issue of Iraq.
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That's two to one agin'it George. Try to keep up.

What Mid-terms?

Thanks to Matt Stoller at MyDD for bringing my attention to this.

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To the current White House occupants, the mid-term elections were not a democratic means to validate or reject candidates and by implication, the policies they advocate or oppose. Instead, the elections were an obstacle in time, a temporary restraint on the President’s ability to tell the truth and reveal what his intentions were all along.

...

The election is over, but it’s results almost don’t matter now. Just as the message before the election was designed to convey the notion that the policy was in support of eventually withdrawing US troops, so the consistent message since the election has been about the need and options for increasing troops and escalating the war. Yet nothing that occurred on the day of, the day before, or the day after the elections changed a single reality in Iraq itself. The election was not a signal that their policy had failed, any more than it was a mandate to withdraw; to this Administration, it was a release from further political constraints. And a plan that could not even be hinted at before is now about to be implemented.

...

Short of removal from office, how do you force a willful and deceitful President to stop making war and endangering thousands of people?
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It's amazing to me that this is what's happening and I think the quoted question is a good one. Obviously I don't think there are any grounds for removal in Bush's case, since I don't know that there's any evidence that he's committed any "high crimes and misdemeanors." Also, my understanding of the constitution is consistent with the dismay that the question embodies. Congress can't tell the President what to do on the front lines.

The system was set up that way specifically in response to the Framers' perceived need for the country to speak with one voice when speaking to foreign powers. The President's voice. That we might have a President who can come away from a mid-term election like we had in November and blithely shrug and say "Just try and make me withdraw. Nanny-nanny boo-boo," was something I didn't see coming even from the present administration.

Making Sense of the '08 Field

Great article comparing Obama, Clinton and Edwards based on their voting records in the senate.

I was looking for something that might help me pick between them, since all three are or have at one time been someone I'd like to see in the White House (yes, even Clinton--though I said I didn't want her to get the nomination, I always followed it with, "but I think she'd make a great president if she were electable").

Clinton v. Edwards

On the basis of the article's breakdown of the difference between the two (I must confess, I tried to make sense of the linked chart and couldn't, so I'm going by the conclusions the author made) I'm leaning towards Edwards, I think. On every issue except the nominations and campaign finance, I agree with him.

I like that Edwards is calling his decision to vote for the war a mistake. I like the idea of exploring ethanol. I didn't like NAFTA and if this thing with Chile and Singapore is going to be another vehicle for exporting jobs to foreign countries and giving tacit approval to American companies to employ child labor at 15 cents and a bowl of gruel a day, I'm against it too. As for the taxes, I thought the tax cuts were a horrible idea, the deficit is out of control, and I don't know why any sane senator would vote against rolling some of that back if it's possible.

On the ones were I agree with her: Just working on the assumption that anyone Bush proposed for any position that required senate approval was probably a bad call, I like that she fought him more often than Edwards did. And on campaign finance, I'm always in favor of limiting the role private, monied interests play in politics for all of the usual reasons (makes candidates feel like they owe their supporters and gets people into office who have a decided bias in favor of protecting the interests of the richest Americans).

That said, maybe Hillary is taking a few slightly more conservative stances in the Senate because she wants to look like she's a little closer to center than she really is (as her husband did right up until he took the oath of office). That would be forgivable if there were any chance that the stances she's taken would actually make her more electable, but I can't see that they have. And it's possible that her fights on the nominations were more personal than political and that Edwards's stand on campaign finance was based on First Amendment concerns (which is a real reason to vote the way he apparently did). Without more information it's hard to tell for sure, but I think it means I don't like Hillary quite as much as I thought I did.

Clinton v. Obama

On the energy issues (this time it's nice to have a few words of support for their positions) I can understand Hillary's position, but I still side with Obama both times. On the ethics reforms, again, while I can understand that Hillary might have voted against the office of public integrity for good reasons (bugetary reasons, for example, or the fact that it would be staffed with Bush administration appointees who might not be all that motivated actually to do anything about public integrity) I still side with Obama in thinking it would have been a good thing and that if the ethics overhaul didn't have any teeth without it, it deserved a protest "nay." On the Taxes stuff, again Clinton voted with the republicans while Obama voted not to extend the ill-conceived cuts.

On the two last points I side with Clinton. Again with the fighting the Bush administration on nominations, and I don't know why it's a good idea to let senators practice medicine while in office, but I can certainly understand wanting to keep them focused on the job they do for the American people.

Again I find that the sum of my reactions to the differences between Clinton and her likely opposition makes me think that I like her a little less than I thought I did.

Edwards v. Obama

The article didn't compare the two because they never served together (Obama came in in 2004, right when Edwards was going out), but I think I can sum up my feelings about this pretty succinctly, nevertheless. In fact I can do it in four words.

Edwards had his shot.

He couldn't get the nomination when he was up against Kerry, and Kerry is a hell of a lot less "the real thing" to use West Wing parlance than either Obama or Clinton. I was an Edwards man in '04, but I don't think he's got any better shot at landing the nomination in two years than he did then.

So, I guess that makes me (at this point in the earliest parts of way to early to decide) an Obama man. Tacitly. For the moment.

It'll be fun to see how things shake out.

Just Say No...

...to escalation.

In both the House and the Senate, Democrats prepare to pass resolutions telling the President he's on his own. Hoping to get the point across without running headlong into constitutional questions about the President's power to wage war, senators and representatives plan to send a message that this is the wrong move, and that it's not what the country wants.

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Democratic leaders said Tuesday that they intended to hold symbolic votes in the House and Senate on President Bush’s plan to send more troops to Baghdad, forcing Republicans to take a stand on the proposal and seeking to isolate the president politically over his handling of the war.

...

In both chambers, Democrats made clear that the resolutions — which would do nothing in practical terms to block Mr. Bush’s intention to increase the United States military presence in Iraq — would be the minimum steps they would pursue. They did not rule out eventually considering more muscular responses, like seeking to cap the number of troops being deployed to Iraq or limiting financing for the war — steps that could provoke a Constitutional and political showdown over the president’s power to wage war.

...

“If you really want to change the situation on the ground, demonstrate to the president he’s on his own,” said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. [D-Del.], chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “That will spark real change.”

...

But Republican officials conceded that at least 10 of their own senators were likely to oppose the plan to increase troops levels in Iraq. And Democrats were proposing their resolution with that in mind, hoping to send a forceful message that as many as 60 senators believed strengthening American forces in Baghdad was the wrong approach. Democratic leaders said they expect all but a few of their senators to back the resolution.
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Sixty senators is a mandate. Especially when they come from blue states, I'd argue, because, with the exception of Texas, all of the most populous states are blue. It might be fun to break down exactly what percentage of the population those sixty senators represent and send that information to the White House with the resolution opposing the "surge." I wonder if the President and Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman could still say, in the face of that sort of evidence to the contrary, that the mid-terms were not a referendum on the war in Iraq.

In November, we didn't just ask for a different war policy. We demanded a policy that will bring this war to its conclusion.

Bush asserts authority to read your mail

Sharp limits have been placed on the government's power to open mail since the 1970s, when a congressional committee investigating abuses found that, for three decades, the CIA and FBI had illegally opened hundreds of thousands of pieces of U.S. mail. Among the targets were "large numbers of American dissidents, including those who challenged the condition of racial minorities and those who opposed the war in Vietnam," according to a report by the Senate panel, known as the Church committee. Also surveilled was "the mail of Senators, Congressmen, journalists, businessmen, and even a Presidential candidate," the report said.
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In the shadow of these historic abuses and despite these well-established protections...

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President Bush signed a little-noticed statement last month asserting the authority to open U.S. mail without judicial warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases, prompting warnings yesterday from Democrats and privacy advocates that the administration is attempting to circumvent legal restrictions on its powers.

Glass Ceilings, Speakers, Hillary and Barack Obama

Flippantly, I've said many times that "I don't like it, but there's a glass ceiling. There just is." When I first heard of Sen. Clinton's possible presidential aspirations, I said to my self (and to others), "God help us if the DNC is stupid enough to nominate her. In a time that we need real change and real candidates to help make that a reality, please don't let us nominate someone who's unelectable. There's a glass ceiling. I don't like it. Look, if you ask me to sign something that says there shouldn't be one, I'll sign it. Put it to a vote, I'll vote for it. But what I won't do is play ball. It's there and it's not going anywhere."

Could it be that times are really changing? Is it possible that, in a year when the two most talked about presidential hopefuls are a black man and a woman, one or both of them might actually prove to be electable? I'm still not sure.

While I agree that Rep. Pelosi's historic ascension to the third highest leadership position in the United States (or at least third in the order of succession if you count the President as first) is remarkable, I still think that there is serious cause for concern. The main reason for that is simple. Pelosi wasn't elected by the people. Sure, she was elected by their representatives, but I think we all know (or at least hope) that between those representatives and the people they actually represent lies a buffer of education, cosmopolitan awareness and political savvy that may not be the same thing as enlightenment, but that can, in some lights, fool the eye.

It is my guess that very few Members in the House of Representatives would either consciously or unconsciously base (even in part) their votes for speaker on reservations about whether or not a woman could do the job. Most likely, I hope, that decision is made in that chamber based upon who has the political clout to get the job and the muscle to get the job done.

While I hope that that is also true for the vast majority of the voting American public, I can't help but wonder if there might not be enough of a minority that would let sex or race affect their decisions to tip the scales the wrong direction in what is likely to be a very devisive, contentious and extremely close race in 2008.

I will say, though, that I've stopped making the glass ceiling comment. True, I stopped making it because I started wondering if my joking about it wasn't just as bad as telling a truly misogynistic or racist joke (in that it perpetuates the stereotype or the wrong-headedness even if it's meant to critique it), but even if I hadn't, I'd stop now. As Pelosi said, it's looking more and more like the sky is finally the limit.

Words of Caution

Escalation Is Not The Answer

As the New Year approaches, we are told that the President is considering the deployment of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in the desperate hope of subduing the burgeoning civil war there.

This is a chilling prospect that threatens to compound the tragic mistakes he has already made over the last four years.

In 2002, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because I felt it was an ill-conceived venture which I warned would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost, with undetermined consequences." I said then that an invasion without strong international support could drain our military, distract us from the war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East.

Sadly, all of those concerns have been borne out.

Today, nearly three thousand brave young Americans are dead, and tens of thousands more have been wounded. Rather than welcomed "liberators," our troops have become targets of the exploding sectarian violence in Iraq. Our military has been strained to the limits. The cost to American taxpayers is approaching $400 billion.

Now we are faced with a quagmire to which there are no good answers. But the one that makes very little sense is to put tens of thousands more young Americans in harm's way without changing a strategy that has failed by almost every imaginable account.

In escalating this war with a so-called "surge" of troops, the President would be overriding the expressed concerns of Generals on the ground, Secretary Powell, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the American people. Colin Powell has said that placing more troops in the crossfire of a civil war simply will not work. General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East, said just last month that, "I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future." Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have expressed concern, saying that a surge in troop levels "could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda" and "provide more targets for Sunni insurgents." Once again, the President is defying good counsel and common sense.

As I said more than a month ago, while some have proposed escalating this war by adding thousands of more troops, there is little reason to believe that this will achieve these results either. It's not clear that these troop levels are sustainable for a significant period of time, and according to our commanders on the ground, adding American forces will only relieve the Iraqis from doing more on their own. Moreover, without a coherent strategy or better cooperation from the Iraqis, we would only be putting more of our soldiers in the crossfire of a civil war.

There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up.

That is why I believe we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq, and others who have a stake in stabilizing the country - that ours is not an open-ended commitment. They must step up. The status quo cannot hold.

In November, the American people sent a resounding message of change to the President. But apparently that message wasn't clear enough.

I urge all Americans who share my grave concerns over this looming decision to call, write or email the President, and make your voices heard. I urge you to tell them that our soldiers are not numbers to add just because someone couldn't think of a better idea, they are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends who are willing to wave goodbye to everything they've ever known just for the chance to serve their country. Our men and women in uniform are doing a terrific job under extremely difficult conditions. But our government has failed them so many times over the last few years, and we simply cannot afford to do it again. We must not multiply the mistakes of yesterday, we must end them today.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

Waterworld on the Horizon?

I blame Kevin Costner.

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Eight of the 12 warmest years on record have happened since 1990, and the big culprit for the overall trend has been global warming, said David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist at Rutgers University.



“You can’t explain this without including the enhancement of greenhouse gases,” Robinson said.
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We're starting to see the effects of this stuff in real time. The world is changing right before our eyes, and not for the better.

And the Al Gore movie didn't even show in the theaters down here.

...But Global-Warming is a Myth

The ski industry is all but shut down this winter due to record high temperatures. Much like last year's winterless calendar did, I think this probably means we're in for a hell of a hot summer. Again. Whoopie.

60 Dead in Downtown Austin

In one terrifying night the downtown Austin pigeon death toll reached sixty, and no one seems to know (or care) what caused the horrific tragedy. One witness, Polly Pigeon, 15, recalls the morning after. "I woke up to an empty nest and called out for my mother, but she didn't answer." And never would she do so again. Polly's mother Paula, her father Pancho and her brother Petey were all among the mysteriously dead yesterday morning.

Also lost to the tragedy were Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon, perhaps best known for their appearance in the Neil Simon play "The Odd Couple."

A moment of silence will be observed at noon today.

War: Goals and Execution

Patrick Armstrong at Hurricane Radio has some remarkable insights about how this country should prepare before taking up arms against another, and what it should be prepared to do. I'll reproduce the first two on the list.

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1. Overwhelming Force/Powell Doctrine. If we're not willing to put enough troops on the ground to win the thing, at the onset of hostilities, we are not ready to go to war. We may go to war with the Army we have, but we usually go on the understanding that reinforcements will be along d'rectly, with more guns and better planes.

2. Total War. If the American public is not ready to watch us destroy enemy cities from the sky, shell enemy cities into rubble and burn an enemy nation's entire infrastructure to the ground, we may not be ready for war. Because that's war. That's what the enemy would do to us if we give them the chance. FDR was totally against carpet bombing enemy cities, right up until Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us. Facing the two greatest military-industrial machines the world had yet seen, FDR then decided, screw 'it, bomb the @#$! out of 'em. That way, when we take over enemy nations with our overwhelming force, the population is cowed and defeated and they know they are beaten.
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The truth is, in the present war, we weren't ready to destroy enemy cities from the sky. At least I wasn't. I can remember standing in the law library at SMU and watching the execution of the shockingly callously named "shock and awe" strike and hating my country, or at least my president. And even that wasn't really the destruction of Baghdad. It was (supposed to be) a vast array of surgical strikes designed to cripple the Iraqi military in preparation for a (we hoped) quick land war to conquer the country, cut off it's head, and make it a better place.

We went to war, that day, not with Iraq, but with Saddam Hussein, and there is a huge difference. What we were in that for was not warfare, but assassination. It was elaborate and perhaps poorly conceived, but it was assassination nevertheless. Our goal was to get rid of Saddam Hussein and I think we all sort of thought that, after that, things would be better. Call that short-sighted, complain about the need for better planning, better intelligence, better diplomacy, more patience, whatever, but the truth is we expected the rest of the country to fall in line and so we didn't want to destroy it in the process of cutting the cancer out.

I think Patrick's right. I think that means we weren't ready for this war. Or it means that war isn't what we should have done. If assassination is what the country wanted, that's what it should have gotten. We should have sent someone in (thirty seals, or whatever it would have taken--I'm not a war guy) to kill the bastard and be done with it.

Then we could have sat back, scratched our chins and said, "Hm. That's odd. I thought they'd just write a constitution and start holding biennial elections. Who saw civil war coming?" without committing 140k American troops to the conflict. Then we would have had the chance to ask, as an American foreign policy question, "Are we willing to go in there and clean up that mess?" as we've gotten to ask about every other civil war we've intervened in or declined to intervene in.

Maybe you're thinking this is a bad plan because it puts us in the position of being able to ask whether or not we want to clean up a mess that we made, but the truth is, Iraq is not our mess. Even now it's not. Yeah, we helped make things worse there by removing the madman they'd allowed to cow them into submission, but things were pretty damn bad already and in the end a country's own population is responsible for its leaders. We proved that. The French have proved that. The Russians have proved it twice.

The Iraqis were responsible for getting rid of Saddam. When they didn't do it, we did it for them. Now they're responsible for getting themselves out of the mess they let him make. We should give them the chance. If, in five years, they've proved they don't have what it takes and they're still fighting, then we should think about going back and picking sides. Until then, our responsibility is to our troops and their families.

McCain and Lieberman get protested

Big shock.

What I thought was interesting about this article was the quote from one of the protesters.

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Unlike protesters in the vein of Cindy Sheehan, Mr. Matzzie [a protester] expressed confidence that the new Democratic majorities would take sufficient action on the issue.

“We were very helpful to the Democrats getting elected,” he said. “And they know it.”

(Caucus readers have been weighing in heavily on our earlier post by Jeff Zeleny, who wrote of the letter sent today by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to President Bush, in opposition to any possible troop surge that the administration might be planning to announce next week. Republicans, like Senator Jon Kyl, of Arizona, have already raised objections to the letter, saying it’s premature to diss the president’s plan before it’s even outlined.)
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I tend to agree. I have serious doubts that the new Congress is going just going to stand around and nod like a bunch of yes-men when Bush unveils his plan to step up rather than scale down the hated conflict.

I also wanted to respond to what McCain said in one of the earlier-linked articles.

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“If we fail in Iraq, there’s somehow the belief, that I don’t quite comprehend, that we just come home and then it’s over” – in the same way U.S. troops came home from Vietnam in the mid-1970s.

The difference, McCain argued, was that “the Vietnamese didn’t want to follow us” to attack the United States itself.

He said writings by Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar indicate that “they want to follow us home, that the next target is Saudi Arabia and the next target is the United States.”
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Well, that's a great theory, John. But how about this: If Bin Laden's still alive, and still in control of a massive force of followers that actually has the ability to come after us at home, let's let him prove it by going after Saudi Arabia first, as he apparently wants to do. Is there any reason to believe that the war to defend ourselves (or Saudi Arabia, anyway) when that happens will be as unpopular as this one is? Is there any reason to think fighting in Iraq will make it less likely that Bin Laden and Omar will follow through on their threats? Have you, finally, discovered some link between al Qaeda and Iraq?

Well, have ya?

Here Here

“Our troops and their families have already sacrificed a great deal for Iraq,” [Sen. Harry] Reid said. “They have done their part. It’s time for the Iraqis to do their part.”

Lieberman, too

It looks like Lieberman's doing some foot shooting too.

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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., say that, at a minimum, another three to five brigades should be sent to Baghdad and one more to Anbar province. About 3,500 to 4,000 troops are in a brigade.
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It's gotta hurt him even worse, since, ostensibly, if he runs, he'll be running as a democrat. This makes one wonder, though, if it might not be his plan, at this point, to abandon the party completely. But, hey, turn-about is fair play, right? Maybe he's planning to put an (R) by his name in two years if he runs again, or in six years, if he's still looking to keep his senate seat at that point.

McCain Shoots Foot?

Looks to me like McCain has decided to take himself out of the 08 race early. Two months after the biggest political upset in decades, where a solid majority (which some might call a mandate) made their opinions on Iraq known, McCain is calling for a substantial and sustained surge in troops in Iraq. Maybe he thinks the country turned against his party just because we thought the Bush administration had failed in Iraq, but I think there's real reason to believe that a good portion of the group that helped to usher in the new age of democratic leadership at the midterms is also angry and disillusioned about the fact that the war is still going on, regardless of whether or not it's going well. Choosing now to come out in favor of a position more hawkish than Bush's appears to me to be political suicide.

8 Days a Week

The Caucus has a post about a few grumblings on the Hill regarding the new five day work week, and a few commenters have taken issue with the fact that it seems critical of a democrat complainer, but it's the comment from an unnamed "Hill Staffer" that I thought was interesting.

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Working for a Congressman, I work 50-60 hours a week. And I can tell you that even with the “3 day” weeks last year my boss worked many more hours than I did.

They have back-to-back meetings throughout the day, and then in the evening they attend various fund-raising and campaign events.These sorts of events aren’t optional - they speak at organizations galas (ranging from the American Lung Association to trade groups, etc). Their fundraising events are mandatory as well - realistically speaking, an under-funded candidate has a meager chance of winning an election. (Don’t even get me started on how badly we need public financing of elections!)

In addition, imagine the demands on Members from distant states, particularly Hawaii and Alaska. Is it realistic to expect them to travel home every Friday evening and return 48 hours later? This new workweek will make it much more difficult for Members to attend meetings with constituents in the District, and I fear that it may become more difficult for them to keep in tune with the pulse of their districts.

— Posted by A Hill Staffer
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The question was asked if it's realistic to expect them to travel home every Friday and return 48 hours later. While I agree that traveling from Washington to California or Alaska or Hawaii and back once a week would be a seriously difficult thing to do, my question in return is: Why on earth would you want to do that? The legislative session doesn't last for the entire year, if I'm not mistaken. These guys get long holliday periods during which they could return to their home states, fund-raise, get the "pulse" of the district, etc. They could bring their families with them, like most people who get important, out-of-town jobs.

While I'm glad to hear that the three-day work week didn't really mean that congressmen and women really only worked three days out of the week (and I never really thought it did) I feel like I have to why they feel the need to try to live in two places at once on a weekly basis. We live in an information age. Constituents can communicate with representatives in the Amazon, if that's where they are, instantly and en masse, and these guys are having trouble getting the pulse of their districts? Do they live in districts where there's no internet access? Who's coming to see them in person back home who can't reach them with concerns in Washington? As for the fund raising problem, I don't know what to say about that (as I don't have any experience with fund raising) but I have to wonder if this is really something that has to be done on a daily basis, and even if it is, does the representative/candidate need to be at every event in person?

All I'm saying is it sounds to me like these guys have dug this hole for themselves by refusing to say to their constituents, "Look, I just can't come home every week. I'll see you in a couple months and you can tell me all about your problems then. In the mean time, I'm going to go off and do what you elected me to do."

Inspiring Words

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Ceremony

November 16, 2005

Washington, DC - U.S. Senator Barack Obama today delivered the following remarks at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award Ceremony and commemoration of Robert F. Kennedy’s 80th birthday.

Thank you. It’s an honor to be here today, and I’d also like to congratulate Stephen Bradbury on his award and on all the wonderful work he’s been doing on behalf of the people of New Orleans.

I come to this with tremendous humility. I was only seven when Bobby Kennedy died. Many of the people in this room knew him as brother, as husband, as father, as friend.

I knew him only as an icon. In that sense, it is a distance I share with most of the people who now work in this Capitol – many of whom were not even born when Bobby Kennedy died. But what’s interesting is that if you go throughout the offices in the Capitol, everywhere you’ll find photographs of Kennedy, or collections of his speeches, or some other memento of his life.

Why is this? Why is it that this man who was never President, who was our Attorney General for only three years, who was New York’s junior Senator for just three and a half, still calls to us today? Still inspires our debate with his words, animates our politics with his ideas, and calls us to make gentle the life of a world that’s too often coarse and unforgiving?

Obviously, much has to do with charisma and eloquence – that unique ability, rare for most but common among Kennedys, to sum up the hopes and dreams of the most diverse nation on Earth with a simple phrase or sentence; to inspire even the most apathetic observers of American life.

Part of it is his youth – both the time of life and the state of mind that dared us to hope that even after John was killed; even after we lost King; there would come a younger, energetic Kennedy who could make us believe again.

But beyond these qualities, there’s something more.

Within the confines of these walls and the boundaries of this city, it becomes very easy to play small-ball politics. Somewhere between the partisan deadlock and the twenty-four hour news cycles, the contrived talking points and the focus on the sensational over the substantive, issues of war and poverty, hopelessness and lawlessness become problems to be managed, not crises to be solved. They become fodder for the Sunday show scrum, not places to find genuine consensus and compromise. And so, at some point, we stop reaching for the possible and resign ourselves to that which is most probable.

This is what happens in Washington.

And yet, as this goes on, somewhere another child goes hungry in a neighborhood just blocks away from one where a family is too full to eat another bite. Somewhere another hurricane survivor still searches for a home to return to or a school for her daughter. Somewhere another twelve-year-old is gunned down by an assailant who used to be his kindergarten playmate, and another parent loses their child on the streets of Tikrit.

But somewhere, there have also always been people who believe that this isn’t the way it was supposed to be – that things should be different in America. People who believe that while evil and suffering will always exist, this is a country that has been fueled by small miracles and boundless dreams – a place where we’re not afraid to face down the greatest challenges in pursuit of the greater good; a place where, against all odds, we overcome.

Bobby Kennedy was one of these people.

In a nation torn by war and divided against itself, he was able to look us in the eye and tell us that no matter how many cities burned with violence, no matter how persistent the poverty or the racism, no matter how far adrift America strayed, hope would come again.

It was an idealism not based in rigid ideology. Yes, he believed that government is a force for good – but not the only force. He distrusted big bureaucracies, and knew that change erupts from the will of free people in a free society; that it comes not only from new programs, but new attitudes as well.

And Kennedy’s was not a pie-in-the-sky-type idealism either. He believed we would always face real enemies, and that there was no quick or perfect fix to the turmoil of the 1960s.

Rather, the idealism of Robert Kennedy – the unfinished legacy that calls us still – is a fundamental belief in the continued perfection of American ideals.

It’s a belief that says if this nation was truly founded on the principles of freedom and equality, it could not sit idly by while millions were shackled because of the color of their skin. That if we are to shine as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, we must be respected not just for the might of our military, but for the reach of our ideals. That if this is a land where destiny is not determined by birth or circumstance, we have a duty to ensure that the child of a millionaire and the child of a welfare mom have the same chance in life. That if out of many, we are truly one, then we must not limit ourselves to the pursuit of selfish gain, but that which will help all Americans rise together.

We have not always lived up to these ideals and we may fail again in the future, but this legacy calls on us to try. And the reason it does – the reason we still hear the echo of not only Bobby’s words, but John’s and King’s and Roosevelt’s and Lincoln’s before him – is because they stand in such stark contrast to the place in which we find ourselves today.

It’s the timidity of politics that’s holding us back right now – the politics of can’t-do and oh-well. An energy crisis that jeopardizes our security and our economy? No magic wand to fix it, we’re told. Thousands of jobs vanishing overseas? It’s actually healthier for the economy that way. Three days late to the worst natural disaster in American history? Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.

And of course, if nothing can be done to solve the problems we face, if we have no collective responsibility to look out for one another, then the next logical step is to give everyone one big refund on their government – divvy it up into individual tax breaks, hand ‘em out, and encourage everyone to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own schools, their own roads, their own levees…

We know this as the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism – every man or women for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford – tough luck. It allows us to say to the child who was born into poverty – pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It let’s us say to the workers who lose their job when the factory shuts down – you’re on your own.

But there is a problem. It won’t work. It ignores our history. Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity.

Robert Kennedy reminded us of this. He reminds us still. He reminds us that we don’t need to wait for a hurricane to know that Third World living conditions in the middle of an American city make us all poorer. We don’t need to wait for the 3000th death of someone else’s child in Iraq to make us realize that a war without an exit strategy puts all of our families in jeopardy. We don’t have to accept the diminishment of the American Dream in this country now, or ever.


It’s time for us to meet the whys of today with the why nots we often quote but rarely live – to answer “why hunger” and “why homeless,” “why violence” and “why despair” with “why not good jobs and living wages,” “why not better health care and world class schools,” “why not a country where we make possible the potential that exists in every human being?”

If he were here today, I think it would be hard to place Robert F. Kennedy into any of the categories that so often constrain us politically. He was a fervent anti-communist but knew diplomacy was our way out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He sought to wage the war on poverty but with local partnerships and community activism. He was at once both hard-headed and big-hearted.

And yet, his was not a centrism in the sense of finding a middle road or a certain point on the ideological spectrum. His was a politics that, at its heart, was deeply moral – based on the notion that in this world, there is right and there is wrong, and it’s our job to organize our laws and our lives around recognizing the difference.

When RFK made his famous trip to the Mississippi Delta with Charles Evers in 1967, the story is often told about the destitute they encountered as they walked from shack to shack. As they walk into one with hardly a ceiling and a floor full of holes, Kennedy sees a small child with a swollen stomach sitting in the corner. He tries and tries to talk to this child again and again, but he gets no response, no movement, not even a look of awareness. Just a blank stare from cold, wide eyes so battered by poverty that they’re barely alive.

And at that point we’re told that Kennedy begins to cry. And he turns to Evers and asks “How can a country like this allow it?” and Evers responds “Maybe they just don’t know.”

Bobby Kennedy spent his life making sure that we knew – not only to wake us from indifference and face us with the darkness we let slip into our own backyard, but to bring us the good news that we have it within our power to change all this; to write our own destiny. Because we are a people of hope. Because we are Americans.

This is the good news we still hear all these years later – the message that still points us down the road that Bobby Kennedy never finished traveling. It’s a road I hope our politics and our country begin to take in the months and years to come. Thank you.

Soldier Email

I was trolling through some old documents on my computer and I came across something I wrote back in February that I thought might be fun to share with someone. Since I'm quite certain no one will ever read this, I'm in no danger of having fun by posting it here, but I thought I'd do it anyway. It was a response to the old email that was circulating back then that showed Sen. Hillary Clinton shaking hands with a less-than-thrilled soldier. If you haven't been sent the email, you can find it here.

The text that I take issue with (which was attached to the email that was sent to me, but which is not on the cite linked above) is as follows:

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If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000.

The rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000.

That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws inthe nation, than you are in Iraq.........................Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington.
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Here's my response.

First of all: Who wrote this? How do we know that this soldier is really giving a sign of ‘coercion’? How do we know what he meant by it? Is he trying to tell us that Hillary has a goon squad with a gun to his head just off camera? Or is he trying to tell us that one of his superior officers asked him, or even ordered him to pose for this picture? Why would anyone do that?

In all likelihood he’s just making a joke, right? And for a soldier in the United States Armed Forces, to agree to have his picture taken with a United States Senator and then to make a joke out of it and attempt to humiliate that Senator before the country seems, at least to me, to be a joke that’s in rather poor taste. One might even say that it treads very close to the line between bad taste and blatant disrespect for one’s country, or at least for this Senator and the office she holds. And for a group of people known for their patriotism, the military, it seems to me, should be more careful about showing such a lack of respect if they wish to be taken seriously.

This is the group that I’m told day in and day out to support. Bumper stickers. Billboards. Television commercials. Yellow ribbons. Soldiers are dying, we hear. Support our soldiers, they tell us. Many of these bumper stickers say “Support the president and our soldiers” which seems to me to be a compound command with two contradictory instructions. How can you both support Bush, who is getting soldiers killed at a rate of like 25 a day, and the soldiers he’s sending to their deaths? But I’m unpatriotic for asking such questions, right? This soldier who mocks a US Senator for fun, though… he’s the model of patriotism.

Also the math here strikes as a little fuzzy. The point that’s being made is that it’s more dangerous in Washington than it is in Iraq. Interesting statement. Bold. I like it. But let’s take a moment to take a closer look.

It says that over the course of the last 22 months 2112 people have been killed in Iraq. That’s a strange statement to make. Why pick 22 months? We invaded Iraq almost four years ago. As it turns out, this was written in July of last year (long before this picture was added to it, but that’s neither here nor there), so they’re only talking about the first 22 months of a war that threatens to continue indefinitely. But, that’s okay, right? Cause this is a safe war with a death rate that’s low when compared to the nation’s capital with it’s really strict gun laws. Right? So we can stay in Iraq forever and it’s actually safer to fight this war than it is to go out for coffee across the street from the Whitehouse… Right? Hmmm.

We’re told that the death rate in Washington is nearly 25% higher at 80 deaths per 100k. Is that in the last 22 months? Is that in the last five minutes? 80 per 100k over the course of what time period? Wouldn’t that be helpful information in evaluating the argument this guy’s making? Well let’s find out. First we need to know what we’re comparing it to, so let’s break down the Iraq numbers. If it’s 60 per 100k in Iraq and there are 160k (1.6 x 100k) soldiers in Iraq, that means we must have lost 96 (1.6 x 60) men in Iraq in the first 22 months. That seems a little low. Especially since the email admits to losing 2112. Odd. Something’s wrong.

You can figure out what it is by dividing 2112 by 1.6. You get 1320. Why did I do that? Because if it’s 2112 for 160k, then it’s 1320 for 100k, and if you divide 1320 by 22, you get 60. Bingo! He’s not saying we lost 96 men in 22 months. He’s saying we lost 96 EVERY MONTH for 22 months. Jebus. And DC is worse?

I did some looking stuff up on the web, and I don’t claim that any of the following numbers is accurate, but you’re more than welcome to do your own research and see what you come up with. The population of DC in 2004 was 553k. We’re told that 80 people out of 100k die from firearms in DC. I’m assuming he means per month, since it was per month in Iraq. So, that’s 80 x 5.5, carry the 1.. That means there are 440 shooting deaths in DC a month. A MONTH. This IS a dangerous place to live. That’s 5280 shooting deaths in DC a year. Jeez, that’s a lot! In case it doesn’t seem high to you after spending your adult life watching the evening news, I should point out for comparison’s sake, that in 2003 the total number of homicides in the entire state of New York was a piddling 889 (about 4.6 per 100k) and in Texas it was only 1364 (about 6.1 per 100k).

But back to DC. Things are bad in DC. Indeed, we have to assume that as bad as things are in DC, they must be getting worse and FAST! The number of homicides in 2003 in DC was just 198 (about 35 per 100k). What does that mean? Let’s backtrack. This thing was written in or around July of 2005 and purported to include 22 months of activity in DC in its figures. That would put the start of the area covered in or around August of 2003. Even assuming that ALL of the deaths that occurred in 2003 were firearms-related, these numbers are still rather ominous. DC has gone, in the same 22 months we’re talking about here, from being a town where 198 people are killed over the course of an entire year, to a town where 440 are killed by firearms every month.

Yeah. That’s some horse shit.

The truth is it’s a LOT more dangerous in Iraq. It’s a whole lot easier to get killed over there than it is in any of the fifty states. Indeed, the firearms related homicide rate for the entire country is only about 6.24 per 100k (2001). It’ll be higher in the cities, of course, because the national average takes into consideration the high crime areas and the low crime areas. That’s why the numbers are so disparate between Texas and DC and between New York and DC. Texas and New York are states. DC is a tiny part of a huge city, and it’s the worst part. Comparing the firearms death rate in Iraq to that of DC is like comparing it to ‘Compton’ or ‘Watts’ or ‘The 5th Ward’ or ‘Queens’. You’re comparing the war zone in Iraq (which we created) to the perpetual war zones in America (which, arguably, we created through years of slavery, oppression, bigotry and social injustice). And STILL Iraq is the clear winner.

By the way, let’s take a closer look at that too. Remember how I said that the gun-homicide rate is only 6.24 per 100k? That may not seem like a lot, but it is. It’s a HUGE number. First off, consider that the population of the US is about 300 million. 300M divided by 100k is 3000. That means you get your gun-death rate by multipolying 3000 x your 6.24 up there. That’s 18720 gun related homicides a year in this country. And here things really are getting worse. That 6.24 number is up from 3.72 per 100k in 1993. And it doesn’t take long to see that things are already far worse here than they are in other parts of the world with civilized gun-control laws. Just to name a few industrialized states with mandatory gun registration laws:

• Japan has 0.03 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• England has 0.07 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Scotland has 0.19 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Spain has 0.19 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Ireland has 0.3 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Germany has 0.21 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Italy (including Sicily, the birthplace of the Mafia) has 1.16 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Israel (a country waging a war on terror on its own soil) has 0.72 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• France has 0.55 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Even Northern Ireland (the terror capital of the world before the Middle-east stole the title) has only 3.55 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.
• Canada, which doesn’t have mandatory registration, is the nation that all the Charlton Hestons in the NRA point to when they say “Guns don’t kill people”. Canada has a lot of guns too. 26 percent of Canadian households boast at least one firearm (next to America’s 41 percent, though, this seems less significant). Even Canada has only 0.6 gun-related homicides per 100k annually.

One question we might ask ourselves here is why does Canada, which has almost as many guns per capita as we do, have so few deaths? Because they’re less free? Er… No… They’re a democracy, just like we are. It could be the weather. It could be the fact that they have fewer minority citizens (by which I mean citizens who have been historically and systematically disenfranchised by a fearful majority). It could be that they have fewer poor people. It could be a lot of things. I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer on this, but it is important to mention Canada as the counter example in the gun argument. They do have guns and they don’t tend to shoot each other.

What’s important to realize here is the fallacy of using this as an example of proof that ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’. Yes, it’s true: In Canada, people kill each other less often than they do down here. But that has NO effect on the argument that people would shoot each other less here (where people seem to want to kill people a lot) if fewer people here had guns.

Oh, and by the way, Canada changed that law in 2003 and now has mandatory gun registration. We are virtually alone in this. And do you know why? Because people are afraid that if you make people register guns the next thing that will happen is that the government will come and take them all away.

It’s not infrequent that you hear gun-nuts quoting “Adolf Hitler’s famous 1935 speech”: “This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future.”

Sobering thought. Nobody wants to follow Hitler into anything, right? Just a couple problems with this.

• Hitler never said this. This quote doesn’t appear in the text of any speech Hitler ever made that was recorded, and by 1935 every speech Hitler made was recorded. Also: the Nazis didn’t have a major gun registration legislation pass in or near 1935. They did apparently have some gun legislation pass in 1938, but it only further restricted possession and trade of military grade weapons.
• The Nazis never took all the guns away from their people (except the Jews, and it isn’t the Jews who are complaining about gun control in America, it’s the red-neck hillbillies who are in NO danger of being sent to concentration camps).
• Does anyone really think that a bunch of red-neck hillbillies with 22s are going to be able to stand up against the Military might of the United States if they decide to come for their guns? Does anyone think that if every Jew in Nazi Germany had had a hunting rifle the Holocaust would have been prevented? Get real folks.
• The protection that we have against getting sent to concentration camps is our legal system, not our citizen militia.

Nevertheless, this is the fear. If we register guns and take stock of ballistics tests and so forth for the sake of aiding law enforcement, we can kiss all our freedoms good-bye because it is the right to bear arms that guarantees every other right. Not the right vote. Not the right to speak freely and discuss political ideas. Not the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Those rights are just window dressing. If Billy Joe Jim Bob in Alabama can’t have his modified M16, we’re all doomed.

You know what’s funny about that? I’ve never owned a gun in my life. I don’t plan ever to own a gun in my life. And yet, despite my woefully inadequate efforts toward self-defense, I’ve never been silenced by my government, no matter how much I disagree with it. Neither, by the way, has Billy Joe Jim Bob, and it’s not because the secret service during the Clinton Administration (with which he undoubtedly disagreed vehemently) was afraid of his guns. This fact, I’m sure, they would have been happy to prove to Billy Joe to his complete satisfaction if he’d ever threatened the president with them.

Let’s take a moment to take another look at murder rates in this country. I said that Iraq dwarfs DC and DC dwarfs Texas and New York. Let’s look at a few more. Texas’s murder-rate (6.1 deaths annually per 100k population) is tied with Illinois’s as the thirteenth highest in the country. Well, let’s just look at the top twenty:

1. Louisiana 12.7
2. Maryland 9.4
3. New Mexico 8.9
4. Mississippi 7.8
5. Nevada 7.4
6. Arizona 7.2
7. Georgia 6.9
-- South Carolina 6.9
9. California 6.7
10. Michigan 6.4
-- Arkansas 6.4
12. North Carolina 6.2
13. Texas 6.1
-- Illinois 6.1
15. Tennessee 5.9
16. Kentucky 5.7
17. Alabama 5.6
-- Alaska 5.6
19. Florida 5.4
20. Virginia 5.2

Notice anything funny about that list? With the exception of California, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Alaska, Arizona and New Mexico, all of those states can be considered ‘Southern’ states. Any thoughts on why it’s this particular group that’s claimed those top slots? Well, I have a theory about Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Alaska. They’re wastelands with miles and miles of nothing and then one or two big cities here and there. Naturally that’s going to skew the numbers in those states, making their over-all death rates look more closely like those of their biggest towns. California? Well.. they’ve got L.A. Illinois’s got Chicago. Michigan’s got Detroit. Florida’s got Miami. The rest are all places with a bunch of hillbillies who love their Second Amendment.

Of the top twenty murder-rates in the country, four are pretty easily attributable to one really big, notoriously violent city, four are attributable to extremely small, spread-out populations and twelve are Southern states. I don’t have a breakdown of which states have the highest rates of households with guns, but you know what? I bet it’d look pretty damn similar. It’s important to focus here on what that means. These are murder rates, not gun-related death rates. But they correspond, it seems to me, to the places where we expect to find the most guns. Cities and the South. Two plus two equals: The more guns you have, the higher your murder rate’s gonna be.

But let’s get back to the email. We’re told Washington has a high firearms related death rate. We’re told that Washington has strict gun laws. So what’s the point the email’s trying to make here? That gun laws are bad because they don’t prevent 100% of deaths? That we would have fewer deaths if we had fewer laws? Cause that seems contradicted by the data I just gave you. Are we just mocking gun laws for the sake of mocking them?

No. This is an unintentional acknowledgment that strict gun control does bring down the numbers of firearms-related death. The email says: “you are about 25% percent more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation’s Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation…” The only reason to say that is if you are playing to expectations that stricter gun control laws can be somehow related to lower expectation of getting shot and killed. Which, by the way, is just obvious for everyone on the planet who isn’t actively trying to convince himself otherwise.

Consider this: Between the years 1981 and 2000, firearms were involved in the killing of 663,914 people. Almost two thirds of a million people died by the gun in this country in twenty years. 27,470 were accidental deaths. 281,904 were homicides. The rest were suicides.

27,470 deaths could have been avoided if the people who made these mistakes hadn’t had access to firearms. With the homicides, I suppose there’s an argument to be made that if you want a guy dead you’ll find a way even if you can’t find a gun, but the truth is it’s a lot harder to murder 281,904 people in twenty years if you don’t have millions of guns in circulation. And it’s a WHOLE lot harder for 354,540 people to kill themselves if they can’t shoot themselves in the head. Pulling a trigger is a LOT easier than jumping off a bridge, or swallowing a bottle of pills, or slitting your wrists and making it the twenty or thirty minutes it takes to bleed to death without changing your mind and seeking help.

I’ve known three people who tried to commit suicide in my life. All three were unsuccessful. Two of them tried to do it with pills. They both made it to the hospital, got help, and live happy productive hormone-free lives now. The third shot himself in the throat, severed his spinal cord and will spend the rest of his life as a quadriplegic because HE had access to a gun

If you’re more worried about homicide, than suicide: It’s also a lot harder to pull of a drive-by knifing, than it is to geek a few guys from the next block over in a drive-by shooting. And it’s very seldom that an innocent bystander is killed near a knife fight. People survive knife wounds more often than gunshot wounds even when they are the intended victims. The list of bad goes on and on and on here.

But, one last time, let’s go back to the email. I think we can assume that even the guy who wrote this thinks killing is bad. He compares DC to Iraq unfavorably because of his insane argument that more people die there. There is an implicit argument against gun-control, but it’s based on the faulty assumption that it’s not effective.

But even if we assume that he’s right, and that gun control isn’t effective, does that mean the people who want to run it up the flag pole just to make sure (and maybe save a couple tens of thousands of lives in the process) are evil? I mean, take another look at who it is we’re mocking. A gun enthusiast? Someone who just hates gun control and who’s really pro-crime and pro-indiscriminate-shooting-death? No. We’re mocking Hillary Clinton, a Senator who’s well-known to be anti-gun and pro-gun-control. It seems to me that there’s a little hypocrisy in there somewhere. Not to mention the disrespect I spoke of earlier.

Well. Rant finished. It will be interesting to see if THIS gets emailed willy nilly around the country. I guess I don’t expect it to. It’s not pithy, or funny, and for some reason logical, factual responses to mean-spirited, intentionally misleading propaganda are rarely kicked around and around the conservative echo-box as much as the stuff it responds to.