Choosing Hope

Turning the Page on Torture

2009-01-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

By virtue of one of Obama's first executive orders, America has turned the page on torture, and restored much of the moral authority her previous leader had so recklessly discarded. Obama aptly harkened back to the wisdom of our Founding Fathers noting that they insisted we should "observe core standards of conduct not just when it's easy, but also when it's hard"

Not surprisingly, this order and the one closing the detention center at Guantanamo within a year are being hailed internationally and by human rights organizations here in the United States. As someone who worked vociferously to block the nomination of Alberto Gonzales four years ago, based on his authorship of rules loosening our compliance with the Geneva conventions when interrogating suspects, I am delighted and relieved that our new President wasted no time in righting these wrongs. I am especially happy with the unequivocal language of the order, and its application across all branches of government and the military.

It will be interesting to watch reaction in the coming days and weeks from those in the CIA and the military who are or were most impacted by such policies. The outgoing CIA chief, Michael Hayden, defends the now banned procedures, and the outgoing Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Michael McConnell, has repeatedly claimed that enhanced interrogation was critical in obtaining needed intelligence over the past six years. These men, however were Bush appointees. The story changes it seems when talking to career CIA agents who are more closely involved with interrogation.

Dan Froomkin in his most recentWashington Post column quotes an experienced interrogator of terrorists

"'It [Obama's order] is a significant step toward saving American lives,' said Air Force Reserve Maj. Matthew Alexander - the lead interrogator of terrorists who betrayed Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before his 2006 killing.

"'When I was in Iraq, the No. 1 reason foreign fighters said they were coming into the country to fight was Abu Ghraib,' said Alexander, author of 'How To Break A Terrorist.'"

Retired CIA officer, John Kiriakou, has an even more sweeping positive reaction to Obama's executive order:

Kiriakou said that the reaction to Obama’s harmonization of interrogations policy would get “a very positive reaction” inside the CIA. “There are people at CIA who engaged in what were certified as enhanced [interrogation] techniques, but were never supportive of it,” he said. “This should make people very happy. No one wants to be in harm’s way [legally]. Despite what the Bush White House and Bush Justice Department said was legal, I think people at the CIA understood that this was not legal and [the techniques] were torture.”

Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of CIA operations in Europe during the Bush administration’s first term, agreed. “These people aren’t monsters,” Drumheller said. “They were doing what they were told, and what was the policy of the [Bush] administration.”

Though apologists for the "enhanced interrogation techniques" championed by the Bush Administration will fret aboutimagined lost intelligence resulting from limiting interrogation to humane techniques, they do not do justice to the success of many perfectly legal interrogations, or wish to acknowledge the real harm done to our national interest, our international reputation, or the interrogators themselves when limits are not uniformly enforced and understood. They scoff at a desire to "curry world favor", as if we are not harmed by failing to so, but instead are greatly helped when we lead by example, and generate global good will rather than hatred and animosity.

Human Rights First offers this contrast of reality vs. portrayal of interrogation on TV. Watchblog's own Stephen Daugherty competently debunked the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques in a December article.

The task force that Obama created did leave the door open for future creation of a separate set of guidelines for CIA interrogation of high risk detainees, so that high level terrorist operatives cannot use the Army Field Manual as a blueprint for preparing themselves for resisting interrogation. Obama did not equivocate, however, in asserting that no US operative, employee, or agent would engage in torture, humiliation, or degradation in their treatment of our prisoners.

With the stroke of a pen, the most grievous policy of our recent past has been reversed, and we have returned to the principles on which we were founded.

Gregoire; Goldmark; No on I-985

2008-10-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

Washington State Friends,

Now that ballots are in our hands until that moment we attach a stamp and commit them to the US Postal Service, or drop them in a ballot collection drop box on election day, I want to share my own observations.

Once again Washington State is just "blue enough" that I think we can be pretty confident that Obama will carry our state, (and I hope the nation), but several other races are far too close for me to relax, and I hope you will join me in trying to influence these.

You see in my Title the three races I see as the important biggies:

Gregoire 4 Governor -- Peter Goldmark 4 Lands -- NO on Eyman's i-985 Gregoire is excellent enough to support enthusiastically!

Early on my own support for our incumbent Governor was rather luke warm, though I never doubted she would be my clear choice over Dino Rossi. As the race remained surprisingly close, however, I did some research and discovered Rossi's attach ads to be viciously scurrilous, misleading, and downright false. Further, there is ample evidence that Governor Gregoire has been an outstanding administrator of our ship of state, receiving high marks from several sources.

Having heard a number of Obama supporters expressing doubt about Gregoire, and even a friend who asked "What has she really done?", I want to provide links squelch those doubts, answer Rossi's charges, and encourage you all to be full-throated in your enthusiasm for supporting Christine Gregoire in her very tight re-election campaign. She doesn't agree with me on every issue, and hasn't initiated as progressive an agenda as I might prefer, but she is clearly a highly competent administrator, who ought to be ahead in our state by landslide margins but is not. But she lacks charisma, Rossi is clever, and Gregoire's campaign has not be effective in answering his charges.

I have collected these talking points in answer to Rossi's charges:

Tribal Gaming Compact
Projected Deficit
National Economy
Keeping Kids Safe
Foster Care

In addition to what you can read about the deficit there, let me add that these projected deficits of such size for following biennia are hardly anything new, and Gregoire has solved them before. We certainly don't want Rossi's values to be those guiding our policy when cuts have to be made.

Gregoire accomplishments listed at her website

Finally, however you may want to explain it, our state by many measures by Forbes magazine, the Pew Foundation, and other groups is rated one of the best in the nation.

Pass this map along to anyone you know who believes otherwise. It can't be said to be partisan, as Utah, one of the other two states with the best rating has a Republican Governor and Legislature.

Peter Goldmark for Lands Commissioner

The media does not bring nearly enough attention to this vital statewide elective office which oversees our Department of Natural Resources, manages state owned public lands, provides direction for the protection of our shorelines, and is responsible for a significant source of income for the state by sale and lease of Washington school land.

Peter Goldmark is an exciting candidate for this office, who brings a diverse background, clear intellect, and a positive mission to this race in challenging a Republican opponent, Doug Sutherland, who has supported the desires of extractive industries in allowing them insider knowledge of public lands going up for auction in advance of the public. Sutherland allowed Weyerhauser to clear cut on many state lands pretty much wherever they chose to, often on sensitive slopes, such as those in Lewis County which washed away causing increased devastation in those awful floods a year ago.

Because Goldmark is a rancher from Eastern Washington, he doesn't carry the "Puget Sound liberal environmentalist" stigma so prevalent for many Democrats in those more conservative areas of the state. In fact he has been endorsed by the Yakima Herald, and certainly ran better than Gregoire in conservative areas during the primary. He is in fact sound environmentally with strong endorsements from conservation groups, and is a microbiologist who has attended and contributed to global climate change meetings in Asia. Sutherland, in contrast, has been on record as a climate change skeptic.

Goldmark narrowly was running behind the incumbent in the primary, but if we can spread the word about his qualifications (he is also a former Director of Agriculture for the State) in the Puget Sound region where he has less name recognition, there is every reason to believe that he should win this election.

NO on I-985 -- Tim Eyman's latest attempt to hamstring us

My ballot arrived with this near the top, and it is not nearly obvious enough that this is a Tim Eyman initiative, and an especially bad one at that.

You can find out all about it here.

Mostly, PLEASE, just make sure everyone knows I-985 is an Eyman initiative!

Additional notes:

I am an enthusiastic backer of I-1000.

I will definitely vote NO on I-1029, which is a well-intended measure that just doesn't come close to meeting my very high bar for supporting initiatives. It's costly and complicated, with a high potential for undesirable unintended consequences.

There are good things in it which would be worth urging our legislators to enact, but as a package it is not the sort of thing that makes sense to legislate by public initiative.

I encourage you to learn about Randy Dorn's candidacy and qualifications to be Superintendent of Public Schools.

Kitsap residents, I encourage you to vote for Jeanette Dalton over her unqualified opponent for Kitsap County Superior Court.

Finally, mailing your ballot early will eliminate all of those pesky Get Out the Vote reminder calls in the final weeks. And just to be safe - do not mail your ballot on the final day. Mail dropped off on Bainbridge sometimes does not get postmarked until it arrives to be sorted in Tacoma. If it is already late in the day on Monday, November 3rd, I think you are better off dropping your ballot at one of the ballot drop-off locations.

Senate: looking ahead & party balance

2008-10-18T12:34:00.000-07:00

The Democratic pickup in the Senate is looking bigger than first expected, but Republicans need not be too glum long term. If they return to more traditional conservative values, stop alienating moderates, and act honestly as a minority party, they will make a comeback. Otherwise another party WILL step in to fill in the void.

We face so many huge challenges and problems currently. Have we come to the end of American Exceptionalism? Will we enter a worldwide depression? Will climate change overtake the planet disastrously? Doing our level best to answer all of these questions in the negative should be our focus.

Nonetheless, some people worry about one-party rule. The structure of our politics pretty much guarantees that some form of opposition will gain traction, so I believe such concerns are overblown. The Republicans just a few years back thought that they had an opportunity to establish a permanent majority. I confess that I was worried that Bush's willingness to ignore the Constitution might lead to real disenfranchisement of any opposition, and set the stage for something close to a coup. But the pendulum is swinging, and appears to be swinging pretty hard right now.

Which brings me back to Congress. Let's assume for the moment that Obama will win - not a guarantee but a likelihood. What will it mean for our nation if the Democrats are virtually filibuster proof in the Senate, and significantly extend their lead in the House? Many conservatives are genuinely worried that "the liberals will go wild", and more and more you hear talk from the right about impending "socialism". We liberals are entertaining some hopes that finally some actually liberal policy positions can be given the chance that they have been denied since Reagan's ascendancy.

To those who fear balance will be lost, consider that balance takes various forms. The obvious Party balance between executive and legislative branches, or between the two houses of Congress are not likely to be present for the next four years. But there still is a time balance in play.

It is not necessarily best that divided government be the order of the day for all times. Periods of time with one party or the other in both elected branches do present the opportunity to actually implement plans that otherwise face gridlock. Our democratic process for replacing politicians means that even when one party has both Congress and the Presidency, some caution needs to be exercised if those positions are to be maintained.

There is also ideological balance within parties. In order to win seats, the Democrats have run increasingly conservative candidates in known conservative districts and states. A truly socialist agenda is not likely when so many Democrats in the Senate are far more conservative than moderate and liberal Republicans of 30 or 40 years ago. And in the House, disaffection with the ruling party can change the majority in fairly short order, with every position standing for re-election every two years.

Because of six year terms, it is easier to look further ahead in the Senate, to possible party changes. Let's look at this election, that of 2010, and that of 2012, and even 2014, to see what we can anticipate.

This year the Democrats WILL expand their lead, and this was virtually guaranteed already when the current class of Senators was elected in 2002, an extraordinarily good year for Republicans. With the current economic crisis, and sullying of the Republican name brand, the extent of Democratic expansion has changed from 4-6 seats, to more likely 7-8 seats, and an outside chance of as many as 11, if Chambliss of Georgia, McConnell of Kentucky, and Wicker of Mississippi were all to be defeated.

In 2010, the party affiliation of Senators whose terms are up for re-election is more evenly divided, with similar numbers in safe vs non-safe seats for both parties. Depending on what happens between now and then, either party could pickup a few seats on up to a maximum of 8 or 9, though I would guess the net change to be 2 or less.

In 2012, the Republicans will almost certainly pick up multiple seats. Depending on outcomes this year and two years from now, this is their next realistic opportunity to pick up a majority. Given the likely larger than expected Democratic win in this election, 2014 will be yet another election in which Republicans should again make gains in the Senate. Again contingent upon their ability to return to more traditional conservative values, while avoiding alienating moderates, Republicans have a very high likelihood of becoming the majority party in the Senate by 2014.

My crystal ball pretty much ends there, as so much depends on intervening events which cannot be foretold.

Logically, the Senate is the body which is most likely to be Republican, since the less populated states of the Plains and Intermountain West, tend to be more conservative, while the House with heavier urban representation, should logically be easier for the Democrats to retain.

The importance of time balance, especially in the House has been hammered home with the corruption of the Democratic reign of some 40 years up to the Gingrich Revolution of 1994, and the subsequent corruption of Republicans developed over their 12 year reign from 1995 to 2006. If we can get redistricting reform enacted which reduces gerrymandering and the creation of safe seats, that would greatly reduce the likelihood that either party could retain control in the house in such long runs that corruption perverts the process as much as has happened in recent times. Iowa has set the standard for redistricting reform, and other states should follow suit. Look to Maryland(D), Florida(R), and Texas(D then R) as gross examples of partisan gerrymandering gone bananas, though it can be found in most states to one degree or another.

As I hinted in my opening, it is still possible that the Republican Party implodes and can't agree on its fundamental principles, losing its grip on enough of the electorate that it really does relegate itself to obsolescence. I think that is unlikely, since it is in a better position than any other party to right its ship and remain the dominant second party in America. The Democratic Party in spite of its recent successes is also at risk if it remains stodgily dependent on constituencies that are taken for granted, and doesn't demonstrate more political agility than it sometimes does. Should either party truly stumble though, other parties will surely enter the vacuum created, and opposition politics will remain in place for years to come. Personally I would be delighted to see another party replace the Republicans as the second dominant party, but I'm surely not holding my breath for that day. Rs and Ds are likely to remain the tags we see next to candidates' names on the ballots for many election cycles to come.

Improving American Justice

2008-09-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I blogged about the case of Troy Anthony Davis, not only here, but on other forums as well. Fortunately the U. S. Supreme Court in emergency session yesterday gave Davis a reprieve, at least until next Monday when they are scheduled to decide whether they take Davis' final appeal, and if they do, at least until it is resolved.

One of my posts yesterday, at PoliWatch, drew the response - and I paraphrase:

With all of the crises we face at this time, who really cares about justice for one man? You have lost your sense of proportion.

Here is my reply:

Thank you for daring to ask the salient question! And I do mean that sincerely. Why indeed should I focus on the case of one man? That question is in fact in the back of my head when I write these articles. With injustice rampant around the globe, wars ravaging hundreds of thousands, millions dying from hunger, fundamental rights denied those who are not in power, and a whole host of issues here in the United States that impact huge swaths of our population, and indeed nearly every one of us ultimately - What does it matter?

Why Troy Anthony Davis?

I am pleased to answer that question.

We tout our system of justice as exemplary and fair and deliberative. "Innocent until proven guilty"; "everyone gets their day in court"; "the blind eye of justice"; "justice will be served"; American justice should be among the best in the world. Now, of course there will be hiccoughs - instances where local corruption perverts the proper delivery of justice.

If the case of Troy Anthony Davis were only that - a rare and local instance, where perhaps overzealous prosecutors coerced witness testimony - then you would be right to suggest that my focusing on it would be a disservice to more important topics for discussion.

I don't believe it is a hiccough.

For me, Davis' case is symptomatic of a number of fundamental problems with criminal justice in the United States. Yes it is extraordinary in bringing together many of these issues in one case, but that is what makes it noteworthy.

Now let me quickly add here that there is also a lot that is right about our system of justice. There are many extraordinarily talented police officers and detectives who follow the book and get good results, and many fine and talented prosecutors and judges who combine knowledge of the law with an earnest desire to serve justice who are a credit to our system.

But I believe there are some systemic issues and prevailing mistaken attitudes which are poisoning our system, and this case highlights a number of them.

Capital Punishment
The most obvious for most readers is the very presence of capital punishment. For me it is not the most important issue here - but it is clearly the one which speaks loudest to the most.

When there is a chance (and there is always a debate in quantifying that) that the convicted person facing extermination might be innocent, would we not be better off simply taking the death penalty off the list of possible punishments, as have most of the worlds nations?

Pressure to Gain Convictions
Next there is a pervasive attitude which prioritizes conviction over justice. Whether it is haste and impatience, or an ego driven desire to run up the number of convictions one can claim, there is little denying that many in law enforcement and prosecution succumb to the pressure to solve every case, and are too willing to overlook contravailing evidence which might suggest that their first suspicion was wrong. Now some of that is just human nature, which is bound to show up in any system of justice. But I contend that a renewed emphasis on the deliberative intent of our justice system, and a reduction in incentive to just find somebody to charge and convict, could go a long way toward reducing the haste which often results in wrongful convictions.

This is the area where I see the issue as being far broader than just the case of Troy Anthony Davis. In fact the capital punishment aspect of his case unfortunately obscures a much broader issue. How many innocent people (regardless of whether Davis is innocent or not), are suffering the grave and extraordinary punishment of spending years or the rest of their lives behind bars, simply because some cop, or prosecutor, or judge, or jury, or combination thereof, was too impatient to come to a conclusion which resolved the case? How much have we as a society lost by not having these people be productive members of society rather than a drain on our resources?

This is not just the fault of law enforcement and the courts. We really are all to blame for bringing this pressure on the system to come up with convictions, no matter whether they are correct.

Resistance to Correct Miscarriages of Justice
It has always been one of my pet peeves, that once convicted, justice usually becomes anything but swift when newly uncovered contravailing evidence suggests that we might have locked up the wrong person. Troy Davis' case highlights this concern strongly. It is plain to me that there was sufficient contravailing evidence early in this case to suggest that a new trial should have been granted at any of numerous points along the way. When such evidence is strong enough, I believe that is cause for the immediate release of the prisoner. We now have technology such as electronic ankle bracelets which could serve as a precaution against the suspect skipping town before their new trial. If Davis gets a
new trial, and his conviction is overturned, then assuming that he is innocent, he still would have suffered a very grave injustice. Based on the percentage of cases which have been overturned with exonerating DNA evidence as a result of the Innocence Project, we have every reason to suspect that there are a large number of prisoners who are wrongly incarcerated in these United States.

Racism / Classism / Influence
Finally it is never wrong to point out that we must always struggle to keep justice blind, and avoid the influence of race, class, and position in both who law enforcement suspects, and how we administer justice, and how we sentence the convicted. It is impossible to eliminate influence, no matter how perfect a system of justice might be. But eliminating such influence should be the beacon for which we aim, and evidence as shown by the statistics of who is incarcerated, and who isn't, strongly indicates that we fall far short of the mark.

In Conclusion
Individual stories make for compelling cases which individual readers can comprehend. I find the case of Troy Anthony Davis to be compelling. No doubt that is partly because I am a native Georgian, and also because I have heard the compelling testimony of his sister broadcast on my community radio station here in the Seattle area. I am pleased that the U. S. Supreme Court has given him a reprieve from his sentence, at least until next Monday when they decide whether or not to hear his last appeal, and if they do until they resolve the case.

The individual story allows the reader to connect at a more personal level with issues which we all should be concerned with. The media often gives undue attention to certain cases because of their celebrity or sensationalism, whether that be O. J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, or Paris Hilton. Those cases often distract us from more important issues.

I contend that in contrast to those, the case of Troy Anthony Davis has the potential to bring our attention to issues worth facing. If we care about our system of justice, then we all should care.

Troy Davis' Last Chance

2008-09-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Supreme Court is in emergency session reviewing the case of Troy Anthony Davis according to CNN.

This is a story of a likely wrongful prosecution which I've been following since Amy Goodman brought it to my attention about a year ago. So I was dismayed yesterday morning to wake up to the news that Davis' execution for the 1989 murder of a police officer was scheduled for this evening. Then I got busy and woke up this morning to the same news. I had planned to at least make a phone call yesterday. A man's life was in the balance, and I forgot!

Of course I was extremely unlikely to have any effect. Though I grew up in Georgia, I no longer live there. At this point we can only pray that a stay is granted, or better still a new trial. I am thoroughly convinced this man is innocent, but how anyone can suggest that there is not a reasonable doubt after 7 of 9 witnesses recanted is quite beyond me.

My earlier posts on the case are here and here.

My Quick Sheet

2008-09-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

As PCO (Precinct Committee Officer) for my precinct, I've created a "quick sheet" to hand out to my neighbors as I canvass for Obama, Gov. Gregoire, and Lands Commissioner Challenger Peter Goldmark.

We all already get tons of mailers from so many campaigns, that I hate to add to the paper - so it had to be small, informative, and cover issues people might not know about.

I decided it would be excessive to yack on about every single Democratic Candidate, so I focused on the races I felt are most important, and give out web site URLs where recipients can start their research for those, and for those important "non-partisan" races and initiatives, for which I'm not lacking an opinion.

Attaining brevity is my biggest challenge, but I managed to fit readable type on a half sheet (though you'll have to click on the image below to make it a readable size), and stuck my modified version of the Washington Post graphic showing the impact of the tax plans of our two Presidential candidates on the other. I print two to a sheet, and cut them down the middle.

Flip side rotated:

The Washington Post image while very informative at a glance, unfortunately has the potential to reinforce some of the faulty stereotyping that the free market fundamentalist right (and libertarian) elements in this country do of liberal policy. Because the graph shows CHANGE in taxation after the Bush tax cuts to the very wealthiest individuals expire, some will look at it and wrongly interpret it as radical wealth redistribution. In the original image, the problem was exacerbated by the width of the lines showing tax increases for segments of the population representing 1/1000th and 1/100th of the total population being just as wide as the lines showing the tax reductions for much larger portions of the population. So I made those lines much thinner and widened the other ones to partially make up for this visual misrepresentation. I also highlighted the salient summary points in circles to the side. Finally you should note that the totals at the bottom show averages as a mean, heavily weighting the tax increases for the very wealthy rather than giving the median tax cut for those families that fall in the middle in terms of income. What's interesting about that, is that shows that Obama's plan is much more fiscally responsible in providing revenue, while still advantaging a huge percentage of the population in ways that will really help them.

Because I'll be handing these out, I hope to make some of these points as I go. You should feel free to make your own quick sheet for your own district and use this graphic if you like in your own canvassing. There is a 2-up pdf of the graphic here.

Failed Economic Philosopy

2008-09-17T09:37:00.000-07:00

Obama:

What we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed.

In contrast McCain yesterday morning repeated his quip that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong"
oops! McCain later yesterday: "We are in a total crisis."

And the Republicans, including John McCain, want to privatize Social Security. At least the Democrats (and a few Republicans who got an earful from their constituents) stopped that disaster. Can you imagine if Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and AIG were taking care of some huge chunk of that public trust?

Obama has it right - and he's been consistent. It's "I still need to be educated [on the economy]" McCain whose message bounces around to suit the latest story. Looking at his record, however, he has a consistently deregulatory approach.

After years of relaxing the rules for financial institutions, and failing to properly enforce those which remain, the party which decries any liberal inclination to tighten regulations as "socialist" is essentially nationalizing troubled corporations, allowing taxpayers to take on the risk, while bailing out the speculators. Sure Democrats collaborated on this disaster, but Republicans, free market fundamentalists, and the greed-heads on Wall Street have led the charge. I expect we will see a few sacrificial lambs among the worst of the speculators, but plenty of folks will flee the scene with millions while tens of thousands of victims will face foreclosure or worse as a result of this fiasco.

And yet McCain claims Obama will "raise your taxes", in spite of independent analysis of the two campaigns' promises which shows Obama's plan lowers taxes MORE than McCain's for over 80% of Americans.

courtesy Washington Post; Alchemy Today; and a study by the Tax Policy Center

McCain's charge is only true if he is talking to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and even then the raise in taxes is only based on allowing Bush's tax cuts to expire. Calculate your estimated tax cut under the two plans to discover whether McCain is talking to you.

America wake up! McCain only has your economic interests at heart if you earn over $300,000 annually, and even then what good is tax relief if the economy is falling apart around you. I don't think he wants to screw up, but he doesn't even have a clue who he should surround himself with for economic advice. His pal Phil Gramm was his chief economic advisor up until a week after Gramm opined America had become "a nation of whiners", inflicted with only a "mental recession".

Obama in contrast picks his people based on their intellect, and includes many who don't always agree with him. Now there's a refreshing change.

The AIG rescue is only the latest shoe to drop. America we can't afford much more of this. It's time for real leadership. It's time for new inspiration. Obama is clearly our best hope. As he says

The dream of the American people must not be endangered anymore!

Being Partisan without Partisan Blinders

2008-09-16T09:14:00.001-07:00

What is best for our nation? What is best for our society? What is best for our planet?

In a complex world, there is no one simple answer to such questions. World views can help us shape how we approach solving the world's problems, but those views can also blind us to solutions that others may offer.

If you consider yourself a Republican, you may be convinced that most Democrats are more interested in seeing Republicans fail than in working across the aisle to solve problems. If you consider yourself a Democrat, you may be convinced that most Republicans are more interested in seeing Democrats fail than in working across the aisle to solve problems. Many Independents and supporters of third parties are convinced that partisan blindness in both parties has stalemated Washington's ability to solve anything.

We partisans are often guilty as charged. But not always. It is possible to be partisan without partisan blinders. But it takes discipline.

It is easier to remove the blinders in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. I can honestly say that in the days following 9/11 seven years ago, I was looking to our President - to MY President - with great hope that he would make good decisions, based on sound reasoning and a long view of the future. The polls which showed Bush's approval climb to 90% in the aftermath of that crisis are testament to the fact that most Democrats were NOT wanting Republicans to fail at that frightening moment in history. Even among the 10% who continued to express disapproval of Bush, I am quite confident that a large fraction did not WANT him to screw up. 90% approval did not mean that the country was momentarily mostly Republican, but rather that we were Americans first. It was an expression of hope that we would rise above partisanship.

Within two or three years after 2001, we returned to a state of deep division, and now seven years later we remain largely divided on where to go from here, in spite of having two candidates who both profess the intent to put country ahead of party. There have been times when I confess to wishing that a particular (usually Republican, but sometimes bipartisan) economic policy would fail, because I felt so certain that it was part of a larger policy direction which I saw as directly harmful to large segments of the populace. It's rather like hoping that your child who has an obvious gambling addiction does not have a run of luck luring him into taking foolish risks with larger portions of his nest egg.

In the arena of foreign policy, however, I have never been so cynical. As convinced as I was in 2003 that invading Iraq was an awful blunder, I truly prayed that those weapons would be found, Saddam would be toppled to the cheers of Iraqis, and order would be restored to Iraq in a fairly democratic fashion. I feared with good reason that it would not be so neat, but what transpired eclipsed even my fears. When the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were revealed in 2004, I was deeply saddened, but still hoped that Rumsfeld would quickly resign or be dismissed, the policies which nurtured such atrocities would be unambiguously repudiated by the Bush administration, some of our international reputation would be restored, and then surely we would elect a Democrat to the Presidency to restore it further. When I and many fellow Democrats were calling on my party in 2007 to be tougher about funding the war at current levels and demanding a commitment to a withdrawal process, and Bush responded instead (after the Democrats' capitulation) with a plan for a surge, I thought that was foolish. I believed it was too little too late, but nonetheless, I hoped in spite of my fears that it would work. Honestly, I have been relieved at the reduction in violence that has resulted since, certainly in part due to the surge. Though there is plenty of evidence that serious political problems remain unresolved in Iraq, the resultant reduction in violence may put us in a better position to draw down our overstressed troops. I am happy with good news, even if it may be spun politically to the advantage of those who advocate policies that I disagree with.

You can always find cynics or partisans who are so blinded by their own world view that they will spin ANY news to the advantage of their ideology. That is true of any party or any world view, so the existence of these cynics is NOT evidence either against or for whatever ideology they are trying to advance. Often we focus on the cynics or the demagogues or the corrupt politicians as if they prove the wrongness of their side, rather than recognizing that we should instead debate the issues directly. Often that focus is cynically intentional, due to the historic success of straw man arguments in lieu of solid analysis.

Partisanship is not evil in and of itself. I still believe that government ought to play an important role in regulating industry to protect the concerns of employees, consumers, and our environment. I believe my party is more likely to advocate such a role than is the Republican Party. But when Republicans and conservatives counsel that we must pay heed that regulation does not cripple the natural ability of markets to provide goods to consumers at competitive prices, we should see the truth in that and be willing to compromise accordingly, and make sure that new regulations are not too onerous or restrictive.

On a whole host of issues, from civil liberties - to foreign diplomacy - to a healthy partnership between science and government - to the rights of workers to engage in collective bargaining - and so on, I am more inclined to take a more liberal position and agree with Democrats more often. But that doesn't mean that I cannot also respect reasoned conservative cautions against excesses which might give too much authority to government or honor the rights of some to the detriment or danger of others. I am proud of my liberal values, but that doesn't mean that I don't have conservative values as well. Bush and Republican Congresses of the past have angered me often by their dismissive disdain for liberal values which I cherish, but they have angered ME as well for their abandonment of some of the best conservative values which they supposedly espouse.

This year we face a choice between candidates who both claim to represent a break from the partisan politics of the past. I will be heartily endorsing and arguing in favor of Obama whose speeches and writing eloquently and closely reflect my own beliefs and values. I will also be pointing to reasons to be suspicious that McCain and Palin will not be likely to become the change agents they claim, as they surround themselves with lobbyists and Republican partisans with heavy ties to politics as usual, and often when researched, real political corruption.

But let me also here confess to two things which my fellow partisan Democrats will cringe to read. I have no crystal ball assuring me that if he is elected that Obama won't capitulate to forces that honor the status quo, the influence of big business, and the most powerful lobbying groups of the traditional Democrats. In fact I am pretty certain he won't be able to completely avoid such influences, as we can already see in his pragmatic inclusion of advisors suggesting some of that. But the extent to which his campaign has been financed by many different individuals gives me real hope that he will be able to chart new ground in breaking with lockstep adherence to DLC initiatives or the politics of the past.

And secondly, as much as I worry otherwise, if McCain is elected you may be assured that I will be praying that his ascendancy to an executive role will free him to truly break with the past, root out corruption in government, return to his previous positions against torture, and against irresponsible tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans, and challenge his own party where they are unduly influenced by money. In terms of policy positions, I will necessarily be disappointed, because McCain will be aligned with positions I believe to be flawed, but if he is true to his "maverick" persona, and a Democratic Congress can act as a balance, that would truly be a step forward from the Bush years.

So I have risked having my own words used against me. For some that is a cardinal sin of politics. But I do so for this reason: I ask readers of this column or any other to bear in mind that every writer will tend to reveal that which supports their beliefs and not their doubts. The person behind those words may be an ideologue incapable of seeing any alternate view point, but maybe they are not. Perhaps that writer who seeks to convince that Obama is a disaster waiting to happen, or that McCain is a sure ticket to World War III, actually hopes they are wrong should the candidate of their fears be elected. In this post, let me assure all that I will hope for the best regardless of whom we elect this November. In future posts, I may not sound so much that way.

Fellow liberals, conservatives, libertarians, communitarians, greens, Americans, and humans, Peace be with you all, and may wisdom guide our electorate and our future leaders.

Another Deregulation Disaster

2008-09-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

Eight years of Bush-Cheney have given us ample proof that simplistic allegiance to the mantras of free market fundamentalism give way to economic disaster. As Henry Paulson, pragmatic Treasury Secretary, moved to have the government take control of mortgage lending giants Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, it is harder and harder to defend privatization and deregulation as the cornerstones of sound economic policy.

Of course none of this stopped most Republicans at their recent convention from acting like they still carry the torch for smaller government and freer markets. Economic ideologues steeped in the language of the supremacy of the market over government controls aren't likely to admit that blind adherence to their philosophy by so many since the Reagan years has cost us dearly.

I'm sure we will continue to hear about the evils of "burdensome regulations" proposed by Democrats and liberals. Conservative Senator Bunning of Kentucky amusingly called for the resignations of Paulson and Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke, saying "they have taken the free market out of the free market." Bunning has clearly sipped too much of the free market fundamentalism Kool-Aid.

But don't misunderstand. There IS plenty to criticize in the Paulson plan. Senator Obama while he generally supports the plan, expressed concern that we "not allow government intervention to protect investors and speculators who relied on the government to reap massive profits." Economist Max Fraad Wolff speaking on Democracy Now! this morning pointed to the government assumption of risk without fully taking over the institutions, and the likelihood that the government will end up taking on the role of a collection agency, gathering debt from homeowners to pay off debt to investors, foreign and otherwise. The help for struggling homeowners is meek in comparison. He offers a quick history lesson, and some amusing insights into Governor Palin's comments about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is definitely worth a read.

Make no mistake that regulations can be burdensome. Often the mega-corporations which write them make them unnecessarily complicated, disadvantaging smaller firms who might want to compete. But if you are still convinced that deregulation and privatization are always necessarily better, let's review some recent troubles which had their genesis in deregulation:

Sub-prime lending

Wall Street investment scandals

Media consolidation

Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, etc corporate scandals

Yes, of course, there were also criminal acts involved in many of the corporate scandals, but deregulation allowed so much wrongdoing to go on legally, that disaster was simply bound to happen sooner or later.

Our economy is complicated. We need the best and the brightest conferring to determine the role government can play in regulating markets sanely. Not with some ideological pablum whether from the Heritage Foundation or the Socialist Labor Party.

America should be ready for some sane re-regulation. Regulation which allows markets enough freedom to flourish, but denies corporate bosses the authorship of all the rules. There is no reason that regulation can't be both stronger and less complicated. First we need to check the influence of lobbyists.

Fortunately both Presidential campaigns have decried the influence of lobbyists. I'm more inclined to go with Obama who has refused lobbyist money, than McCain who has former lobbyists as key campaign staffers. I understand that it's not all black and white. Obama's campaign is not void of lobbyist influence, and McCain has on occasions stood up to lobbyists. But on balance Obama will have less campaign obligations to lobbyists, and McCain may have significant blind spots where the former interests of his staffers are concerned. I'll hope for the best regardless who wins.

More importantly, America needs to turn the page, and say good bye and good riddance to the failed mantra of deregulation for deregulation's sake.

Jim Leach On Our Troubled Times

2008-08-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

While the tone of the Democratic Convention's opening night was pretty predictable, there were some surprises. Ted Kennedy's capacity to deliver a rousing address on the heels of his brain surgery, and the rhetorical gifts of Obama's wife, family, and in-laws were displayed. Former Republican Congressman Jim Leach provided a lesson in history and civics.

I focus on Leach's speech, not because it was riveting - it definitely was not that - but because his perspective represents an honest assessment from a practical politician who is no longer in the game. PBS pundits were quick to dismiss him as an anomaly among Republicans. But among Republicans in my own family and circle of friends, I see important chords and connections. Our political process has been poisoned, and people of vastly differing ideologies can agree about that, even when they agree about little else.

As quoted in the Iowa Independent Leach said

“In troubled times, it was understood that country comes before party,” Leach said after listing several examples of bipartisanship in U.S. history.

“Little is riskier to the national interest than more of the same,” he continued. “America needs new ideas, new energy, a new generation of leadership.”

“Hence I stand before you,” he concluded, praising both his own party and the party whose delegates he was addressing, “proud of my party’s contributions to America’s history, but, as a citizen, proud as well of the good judgment and good people of this party in nominating a transcendent candidate, who I am convinced will recapture the American dream and be a truly great president.”

The great irony of the 2008 election to this observer is that BOTH presidential candidates seem painfully aware of how our poisoned process constrains politicians time and again from acting in the public interest, even when as individuals that would be their first choice. I believe both Obama and McCain genuinely want to reform the process, yet as Senators and as Presidential candidates both are themselves trapped to a large extent within the poisoned process. Once elected, Presidents have more latitude to act independently, but still face enormous inertia in the machinery of government, pressure from their party, and during first term, concerns about being reelected.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of real policy differences between McCain and Obama, that will result in different choices being made. It is an error to assume that just because your party's candidate takes a position different from your own that it is a result of their failure to stand up to some powerful interest. Sometimes they genuinely have a different opinion. But there is no denying the enormous influence that the power establishment has on our policy, regardless of which party is in power.

On Iraq policy, I expect either McCain or Obama to follow through on their campaign promise, and in both of those cases I believe they genuinely believe in their own plan. Obama will change the mission and McCain will not. Ironically the practical effect may be little different, as neither will withdraw precipitously, but both are likely to withdraw all but a residual force within their first term. On foreign policy generally, I think Obama is more likely to seek diplomatic solutions, while McCain will be quicker to resort to military solutions. Either will employ both tools, but the tipping point will be different.

But on other issues, both candidates have bent to the pressure of their parties and/or powerful corporate interests. McCain's stated commitment to uphold all of the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans, in spite of having derided them in the past, is certainly a case in point. I really don't believe McCain has truly had a change of heart, but his party demands he stay in lockstep with their anti-tax dogma. I suppose that as President he may move to his more natural position, but at this point that would be a broken promise.

Obama capitulated on giving telecoms immunity for their role in Bush's surveillance program. He painted his reversal as a practical political compromise, so there is no implied promise that future decisions around surveillance programs or corporate accountability will be reflected in that decision.

In a McCain Presidency it would be telling to discover whether his "maverick" inclination to support environmental causes will be seriously compromised by his indebtedness to corporate polluters who might balk at policies they consider bad for their bottom line. In an Obama Presidency it would be telling to discover whether he enacts the bold structural changes [many outlined in this multipage pdf] that are needed to create real opportunity for the working poor and transparency in government, or if they will take a back seat to political expediency and corporate pressure.

There is no crystal ball to tell us just how much either man might succeed in breaking out of the "politics as usual" mode. Cynics will tell us not at all, while dreamers may imagine transcendent change. I may be a registered Democrat, but I am an American first, and it is my hope that some significant transformation will take place regardless of the winner this November. Clearly Obama's vision as laid out in The Audacity of Hope and his speeches is more aligned with my own. Many Americans, such as Jim Leach, who may not agree with some of the particulars are nonetheless inspired by his aspirational message.

In the next two weeks we have the opportunity to hear these two candidates address their conventions and set the tone for the election. As flawed as the process is, I believe we have a better choice this year than we have in quite a long time. It's a good thing too, because we certainly live in troubled times.

Obama's Luck Is America's Opportunity

2008-06-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

We often take our good fortune for granted. Especially the luck we are born into, can easily be forgotten even as we take advantage of our heritage, our citizenship, and our freedoms. I have always felt extraordinarily fortunate to be an American. Today America is lucky!

Barack Obama freely acknowledges the role that fortune has played in his rise to political prominence. Of his campaign for the U.S. Senate in The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote:

My campaign had gone so well that it looked like a fluke. ... Not one of [my Democratic opponents] ran a negative TV ad. ... My Republican opponent was felled by a divorce scandal. ... Later, some reporters would declare me the luckiest politician in the entire fifty states. Privately, some of my staff bristled at this assessment, feeling that it discounted our hard work and the appeal of our message. Still, there was no point in denying my almost spooky good fortune.

Geraldine Ferraro during the just concluded primary campaign famously declared that Obama was lucky to be in his position, and would not be so if he were white. In fact Obama's mixed race heritage is part of who he is, and thus part of the context from which he can powerfully declare that we should "eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." Would Clinton have been the presumptive front runner in this campaign if she were not the wife of a previous President? Did that make her lucky? One could suggest that McCain is "lucky" to have been a POW because it is part of his story which gives him credibility today.

Luck comes and goes, but only fools fail to take advantage of that which falls into our laps. America, after 8 years of a disastrous presidency, a huge stroke of fortune has fallen into our lap. Obama's luck is our luck. And here is why:

We have evolved a political system which has many advantages, but in which honesty in politicians is routinely punished. Absolute candor is political suicide, and every successful politician, including Barack Obama understands this. Most of us shade the truth to our own advantage in our every day lives, and share that which puts us in a good light more than that which does not. Unfortunately years and years as a politician, causes the most successful to become so adept at this game that they become less and less aware of how dishonest they have become. Obama is quite skilled at choosing his words in such a way that his message appeals to a broad spectrum of Americans. He's good at the political game, and his candor is not absolute. But the brevity of his political life and the luck he has had in rising to this level without more and nastier political opposition mean that he has retained more candor than we have come to expect from our Presidential candidates. For many Americans - even many who do not share Obama's political philosophy - that makes his message refreshing, and a breath of fresh air compared to what we've come to expect.

Obama is politically savvy enough to weave in pieces of the sound bites which help sell the message, but when taken in whole paragraphs, he also makes sense and his message is coherent and at its heart truthful. "Change" sells, so the word is employed over and over again - and we can roll our eyes - but that's politics. What I care about is that his aspirational approach is inspiring hope, his intellect backs up those aspirations, and his realism tempers his methods.

McCain complained about Obama referring to McCain's bid as Bush's third term, but when you take the whole of what Obama said, for instance in his speech last night in Minneapolis, you find that he is honest about the distinctions between Bush and McCain. Americans by a large majority ARE disillusioned with the policies of George W. Bush, and it would be politically foolish for any Democratic candidate NOT to point to the many policy similarities between Bush and the promises of McCain. But more than the simple sound bite, here is what Obama actually said:

Because while John McCain can legitimately tout moments of independence from his party in the past, such independence has not been the hallmark of his presidential campaign.

It's not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush ninety-five percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year.

It's not change when he offers four more years of Bush economic policies that have failed to create well-paying jobs, or insure our workers, or help Americans afford the skyrocketing cost of college -- policies that have lowered the real incomes of the average American family, widened the gap between Wall Street and Main Street, and left our children with a mountain of debt.

And it's not change when he promises to continue a policy in Iraq that asks everything of our brave men and women in uniform and nothing of Iraqi politicians -- a policy where all we look for are reasons to stay in Iraq, while we spend billions of dollars a month on a war that isn't making the American people any safer.

McCain is a very different person than Bush, and should he become President, I still have some hope that he will bring much needed reform to that branch of government. Either of these candidates seems likely to bring some more transparency back to the executive branch. But McCain is still tied to the policies of his party, and Obama is offering a clean break from that without insisting on a lock-step partisan agenda that will cement the divisions in this nation. From the prologue of The Audacity of Hope:

I am a Democrat; my views on most topics correspond more closely to the editorial pages of the New York Times than those of the Wall Street Journal. I am angry about policies that consistently favor the wealthy and powerful over average Americans, and insist that government has an important role in opening up opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody's religious beliefs--including my own--on nonbelievers. Furthermore, I am a prisoner of my own biography: I can't help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives.

But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don't work as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers. I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military. I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.

Undoubtedly, some of these views will get me in trouble. I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book--namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

I for one, feel very fortunate to have a major party nominee for the Presidency who can write with such candor, and I am equally committed, should he be elected to hold him to his implied commitment to avoid the pitfalls of success. America, today we are lucky and have a great opportunity to turn the page. Tomorrow and in the coming years we will need to continue to work to cash in on this opportunity. Citizenship does not end at the ballot box.

End Our Rogue Nation Status!

2008-05-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

Over one hundred nations agreed this week to outlaw cluster bombs. But along with Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel, the U.S. opted out of the agreement. These munitions infamously kill and maim disproportionate numbers of non-combatants, and are prone to leave behind live fragments which can detonate months and years later.

In yet another embarrassing break from an international movement toward a saner and more humane consensus, our government has chosen to defend the indefensible, and support the manufacture of weapons primarily used by our military and those of the other holdout nations. Whether on banning torture, rights of habeus corpus, or actions in response to global warming, this administration again thumbs it nose at international attempts to address serious issues of human rights with common sense agreements.

We have become one of those rogue nations we claim to oppose.

With respect to torture and global warming at least, there is good reason to hope that the next administration, whether led by Obama or McCain, will steer us back toward the mainstream of the community of nations. This has nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative arguments, but rather with common decency. The rule of law, whether it be state, national, or international, best serves us when abhorrent extremes are marginalized. Such laws and treaties need not be perfect to have some positive impact. Sure, some of the signatories to these agreements do so only for propaganda purposes, but that's no reason to oppose them. In fact, by being on record, nations may held to account later when their actions do not match their commitments.

Though some of his more recent votes have been disappointing, McCain has been outspoken in the past in opposition to the Bush administration's relaxations of the prohibitions against torture. We can hope that should he become Commander in Chief he would be truer to his earlier sentiments and move us toward a more enlightened foreign policy.

Disappointingly however, both McCain and Clinton voted against an unsuccessful Feinstein amendment in 2006 which aimed to limit the deployment of cluster munitions in proximity to civilian populations. Obama voted for the amendment. If our government's voice joins the majority strongly in support of banning such capriciously destructive weaponry, one can imagine the pressure on other holdout nations to join such treaties would be greatly increased.

People versus Systems

2008-04-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

After watching the outstanding rented movie "Children of Men" the other week, I viewed the 'mini-documentary' that came as an extra feature, entitled "the Possibility of Hope". Though a bit disjointed, it included commentary from a number of futurists, activists, and thinkers, including Naomi Klein, whose compassionate and insightful analysis is well worth sharing.

When people fall in love with what seems to be a perfect theory, a set of rules, and they love those rules more than they love people or places. In fact they begin to see the messy reality of life as interfering with the beauty, the imagined beauty, that exists only in their text, only in the sacred texts, whether they’re economic texts, or religious texts, or some dream of racial purity. I think we need to fear people who love systems more than people because the flip side of the love is the hatred for anything or anyone that interferes with the realization of that system, and this is the other thing about dangerous utopias, is that they can’t coexist with other ideas. They need the whole stage.

In her recent book, "The Shock Doctrine", Klein exposes the role of free market fundamentalism in what she has coined disaster capitalism. I find it compelling that Klein's quote above can serve equally well as an indictment of free market fundamentalism or strident Marxism.

Well formulated systems can be essential for guiding societies toward affluence, justice, fairness, and progress, but if we worship the system and forget its purpose, extraordinary pain and suffering can result.

I revere my nation's Constitution because it has by and large guided us toward becoming a more just society even than the one that our founders originally wrought. People are right to be wary of trifling modifications to that document, which may solve some perceived problem of the moment, but may not stand the test of time. Nonetheless, it is extraordinary that it has lasted so long without a rewrite, and only infrequent amendments. I think it may be worth exploring some cautiously approached methods for revisiting that document - if not in the near term, then in preparation for future strains on it. We should want to preserve that which has made it so durable, and perhaps some judiciously prepared amendments are all we will need, but the value of a Constitution lay in its ability to sustain the most honorable precepts on which it was founded, not in any inherent sacredness.

Last December, I watched with interest an interview with Sanford Levinson, author of "Our Undemocratic Constitution". While I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon, the subject is certainly worthy of discussion.

Four Years On

2008-04-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

As I approach the fourth anniversary of starting this web log, I offer a little self-indulgent look at its history. I generally try to avoid this sort of thing, but in considering whether it's worth continuing an endeavor which gathers no profit and has a clearly limited influence, I made a couple of observations which I'll now share.

In the run up to the 2004 election, I was a man possessed - convinced we stood at a critical crossroads with an opportunity to resoundingly set aside a disastrous presidency. When that didn't happen, my effort had developed a life of its own, and I continued to post, but over time found other uses for my time, and the posts waned. Nonetheless I've felt compelled to keep this going at a lower level. Here's a month by month histogram of my posts since the inception of Choosing Hope:

In the background I have utilized a couple of utilities to track visitors and how they've found me. I've tended to write about subjects that I feel don't get enough attention, and often focus on individuals who are not as widely covered elsewhere, though I write plenty about those who do have power and influence. It is interesting to me to find which individuals that I've written about have been drawn the most visitors to my site by way of search engines. After weighing a couple of such measures, I came up with the following list of the 48 individuals that have led people here, starting with the most frequent - perhaps a surprise:

Craig Watkins
Bill Moyers
Walker Willingham
George Bush
Barack Obama
Muhammad Yunus
Dick Cheney
Troy Anthony Davis
Rush Limbaugh
Vaclav Havel
Rosa Parks
Harry Emerson Fosdick
Holly Near
Hillary Clinton
Paul Loeb
Cory Maye
Martin Luther King Jr
Dennis Kucinich
Jimmy Carter
Dumisani Maraire
Margaret Mead
William Haynes Holmes
Russ Feingold
Jim Hightower
Johan Olav Koss
Anthony Kennedy
Donald Rumsfeld
Robert Byrd
Maher Arar
Tom DeLay
Laura Denyes
Molly Ivins
Alberto Gonzales
Upton Sinclair
Bud Cummins
Joey Cheek
Amy Goodman
Ronald Reagan
Thomas Friedman
Cedric Jourde
Richard Rodriguez
Ted Kennedy
Richard Nixon
Margaret Atwood
John Kerry
Wangari Maathai
Cindy Sheehan
Nancy Pearcey

There are some jarring juxtapositions there, but I'll take my place between Bill Moyers and George Bush without complaing. ;-)

Georgia Supreme Court fails justice

2008-03-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

In a follow up to a story I reported here in November, the Supreme Court of the State of Georgia rejected by a 4-3 vote, Troy Anthony Davis' request for a new trial. Davis was sentenced to die for the 1989 murder of a Savannah, Georgia police officer. He has maintained his innocence from the outset, 7 of 9 witnesses have recanted their testimony, no physical evidence tied him to the murder, and there is a credible different suspect for the crime. Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears wrote the dissenting opinion. She agreed with the majority that recantation testimony is inherently suspect, but maintained that:

If recantation testimony, either alone or supported by other evidence, shows convincingly that prior trial testimony was false, it simply defies all logic and morality to hold that it must be disregarded categorically.

Unfortunately, common sense was in the minority, as happens all too often in these times.

Winter Soldiers Ignored

2008-03-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

How is the mainstream media dealing with the inconvenient tragedies brought to light by Iraq war veterans who gathered over four days last weekend in Maryland? They are ignoring them. Five years after the invasion of Iraq, and nearly 4000 dead American soldiers later, many brave individuals have brought their poignant testimony to an event that deserves more exposure.

War is hell - always. At rare and tragic times in human history war is surely necessary. But ignoring its tragic reality creates a climate in which war is entered into far too easily.

We honor the dead soldiers as we should. The financial cost of war gets a fair amount of attention. But the tragic results of war are far more numerous than those two awful tally sheets.

Winter Soldier II, sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), mirrors an earlier event from 1971 at which John Kerry famously testified. War hawks love to mock these events as "far left" gatherings, and consider the testimony of these veterans as treasonous and "un-American". The dozens of veterans who have chosen to speak understand how they will be unjustly vilified because of that choice, and yet their conscience demands no less of them. We can be sure that they are only the tip of the iceberg, among returnees whose humanity has been challenged in ways that it never should.

The "Rules of Engagement" for the Iraq war have been exposed as an ever shifting standard, and the extent to which they have been followed is often in flux, and largely depending on the mindset of the military leaders of individual operations. Soldiers who returned for many tours of duty related the generally declining standards as time wore on, as soldiers and leaders became hardened by their experiences. The nature of the battle, where the enemy was often difficult to identify, made tragic deaths and maiming of innocents more and more commonplace with time.

Democracy Now has been airing this testimony this week, and will continue that tomorrow. IVAW has live blogged the event. I challenge you to listen or read and tell me that these soldiers are lying, or that their experiences do not challenge notions of decency in how this war is being waged.

One sample piece of testimony came from Corporal Washburn of the Marines:

Something else we were actually encouraged to do, almost with a wink and a nudge, was to carry drop weapons or, by my third tour, drop shovels. What that basically is, is we would carry these weapons or shovels with us, because in case we accidentally did shoot a civilian, we could just toss the weapon on the body and make them look like they were an insurgent. Or, you know, like my friend here were saying, we were told by my third tour that if they were carrying a shovel or—you know, and a heavy bag, if they were digging anywhere, especially near roads, that we could shoot them. And so, we actually carried these tools and weapons in our vehicles in case we accidentally shot an innocent civilian, and we could just toss it on them and be like, “Well, he was digging. I was within the rules of engagement.” And this was commonly encouraged, but only behind closed doors. It wasn’t obviously a public announcement that they would make. But, yeah, it was pretty common.

This is nowhere close to the most shocking testimony I've seen, but it is indicative of the layers of disconnect between the reality and the official, and between the official and the "ideal". No one expects that war will not be accompanied by horror, but when the horrible becomes sanctioned to one degree or another by a White House Counsel, or a military directive, or a commander's prerogative, we guarantee that the horror will become pervasive.

It is not easy to pay attention to this tragedy. The mainstream media knows that it is easier to simply ignore Winter Soldier II, and the questions which it raises. They have an election to cover and celebrities' misdeeds to watch. Meanwhile innocent citizens continue to be killed and maimed, our reputation continues to be dragged to greater depths, and soldiers return home with injuries both physical and psychological which will impact them for life, and a training in violence that in many cases will haunt us once again.

We cannot learn if we will not look.

Cross-Ideological Appeal

2008-02-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

Obama's appeal to voters across the ideological spectrum is positively the best thing about his candidacy. It certainly arouses suspicion among a fraction of liberals and progressives, and exasperation among a fraction of conservatives, but it makes perfect sense. Liberalism and conservatism coexist within every decent thinking human being.

We have been taught to think of ideology as a linear continuum between left and right. It has been my song and dance since I started writing here to point to the fallacy of that notion, even though I occasionally fall victim to it myself. There was a kernel of truth in that famous quote of Churchill's, but unfortunately he framed it in such a way as to reinforce a false dichotomy.

Churchill wrote “Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.” Today I counter that any mature adult who lacks all conservative values has no brain, and any who lacks all liberal values has no heart.

Watchblog's conservative editor Dana Tuszke has come out for Obama. This does not mean that she has abandoned her deeply felt conservative values. My wholehearted support for the same candidate does not mean I'm not still the champion of liberal and progressive causes that I've always been. It's not that either one of us is compromising on some mushy middle, though some will insist that's exactly what we're doing. We both see in one human being a principled man who can understand and empathize with both sides of an issue, but still take a position and defend it. As Paul Siegel points out, we don't have to agree on every point.

Obama has a demonstrated ability to work across the aisle to create substantive legislation. He did so in the Illinois legislature on a regular basis, including getting Republican support for the requirement that all police interrogations in homicide investigations be recorded. You can see in that single July, 2003 press release from Illinois' Republican Governor Blagojevich, that Obama's name is mentioned prominently in connection with three different pieces of legislation. Concern about police misconduct is typically labeled as a liberal cause, but when the solution addresses the concern directly without tying law enforcements hands too severely, reasonable conservatives can get behind it, because after all it serves no one for hidden misconduct to result in prosecutions of the wrong people. By having the concern of a liberal while understanding the legitimate concerns of conservatives, Obama was able to broker a deal which worked and satisfied a working majority from both sides.

In his short tenure in the United States Senate, Obama has crafted major legislation in concert with Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana to address nuclear proliferation, and significant reform legislation with the very conservative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma enforcing greater transparency in federal spending. Both these bills have passed. Perhaps neither is perfect, but both address real and pressing concerns that people across the political spectrum may share.

Three years ago I wrote of the need for cross-ideological alliances. In Obama, Americans of different stripes are seeing a bridge to span those differences and seek solutions that acknowledge the legitimate concerns of differing perspectives. It's not that every solution Obama suggests will be the magic bullet that solves some problem once and for all. He is certainly not that delusional, even if some of his supporters may be. But an approach to problem solving that lays off of vilification, concentrating instead on cooperation is sorely needed. To have such an approach be at the core of a presidency bodes well for our future.

Americans, there is no need for you to stop being liberal or conservative or moderate. Even radically liberal or radically conservative ideas should be gladly put on the table and debated. Radical thinking has helped humankind on more than one occasion. When people rail against extremism, they should instead be attacking orthodoxy. It is the inflexible thinking which insists that ideas coming from outside one's own perspective are therefore worthless which paralyzes us. Talk to people who disagree with you. LISTEN to people who disagree with you. My great hope for an Obama presidency comes not from a naive belief that his message of hope will translate into a perfect set of policies. My great hope comes from a belief that he can be a catalyst for us to move beyond our differences and slowly replace the attitudes of "my way or the highway" with a genuine concern for our future and our descendants' future.

Yes We Can!

No Other Choice

2008-02-10T21:52:00.001-08:00

I just belatedly posted two articles that I had previously posted only at WatchBlog, giving them the dates of their authorship there. In fact, there's been little difference in content in the last several months between what's been posted here, and what you would find linked at my Watchblog page. Perhaps it's a better use of my time to publish at a site which gets a modest amount of traffic, rather than one that gets very little. But Choosing Hope remains my own little corner of the "blogosphere" and I suppose I am loath to abandon it entirely. Also I see that it continues to get some traffic - much of it lately from one particular reader in Tempe, who seems to be systematically reading everything I've written. I'm flattered. Tempe, you should drop me a note. Also thanks to Adrian for your latest comments to my December posting.

The Obama article actually preceded by a couple of weeks my own stepping up of activity on his campaign. I think I was talking myself into it more than anything else. Mustering one's enthusiasm for a particular candidate's campaign requires greater suspension of skepticism the later into life we are, but I'm bound and determined to remain an idealist at heart as long as I possible can. I read screeds from the left damning Barack for his associations with establishment military folks. Many (not just the left) point to his rhetoric as being a little too pat, a lot too vague, and failing to take on hard issues directly. (I don't know what they expect in a stump speech.) I understand the concerns about how effective he can be once in office, as some remind me of the difficulties Carter had in implementing his agenda, or more sinisterly point to the fate of JFK, to whom Obama has been compared.

But I ask, just who am I supposed to be for? If I am to choose hope, as the title of my blog implies, how can I do anything but embrace this campaign whose central theme is about just that?

So most of what I've written lately has been in the form of emails, whether to Obama elists, relatives in Georgia, friends and neighbors, or Democratic party people. Perhaps over the next few days, I'll share some snippets. Or give a report from the caucus I chaired here in Washington State yesterday, where we sent 5 Obama delegates and 1 Clinton delegate on to the Legislative District caucus.

It has certainly been enjoyable to let go and be surrounded by all this enthusiasm, youthful and otherwise. A very nice birthday celebration for me, indeed.

Sorting out Superdelegates

2008-02-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Are they an anti-democratic outrage or a reasonable protection against an even more undemocratic brokered convention? Born out of the rancor which was the messy Democratic convention of 1968, the introduction of superdelegates is getting more attention this year as the race for the nomination remains close.

I have heard concerns expressed among some fellow Obama supporters that the superdelegates who are party insiders, are heavily skewed toward Clinton, and will tip the nomination to Clinton, even if Obama wins a clear majority of the other delegates. That scenario, in my view, is highly unlikely. Some have misreported the percentage of superdelegates as being close to or even over 40%, when in fact the actual percentage is 19.6%.

Still, that is certainly enough superdelegates to tip the nomination in a different direction than the duly elected delegates in a close campaign such as this one. Such a development would be a huge public relations disaster for the Democratic Party. Party insiders understand that, and I am confident there would be tremendous pressure on superdelegates to avoid it, regardless of which candidate would be affected.

Currently among the 796 superdelegates, 211 are pledged to Clinton & 128 are pledged to Obama, while 457 remain unpledged. (Other counts vary, but not substantially.) Clinton's lead in superdelegates therefore CURRENTLY is larger than her total lead. However, if Obama starts to pull ahead in future contests, but not enough to clinch the nomination with regular delegates, there will be strong pressure on the superdelegates to swing his way rather than create a situation where Clinton gets the nomination solely because of her backing by party regulars. In fact there would be pressure on previously committed Clinton superdelegates to switch rather than create a controversy that would damage the party and hurt the nominee's chances in November.

Call me naive, and I could be wrong, but actually I think practical politics will save us from this fear. That's not to say that I think Obama will win. Clinton still has a huge advantage from the inside machinery. But I believe she'll need to win the majority, or very close to the majority of the regular delegates to win the nomination.

Superdelegates may yet present the party with a PR dilemma if the race remains very close, with different methods of determination showing a different candidate ahead. For instance, what if Obama gains a small 10 to 50 vote lead among the regular delegates, but Clinton can point to a small but real popular vote margin among actual voters in the combined primaries? Or what if Clinton can claim she would have the regular delegate lead by sitting the Florida and Michigan delegates, even when ceding all of the uncommitted delegates to Obama, but Obama is clearly faring better in more recent head-to-head polling against the Republican nominee, as he is currently trending.

While I am confident that a significant number of the superdelegates will be motivated to support the candidate that the public feels has earned the nomination, if both candidates can stake convincing claims to that title, then all bets are off.

People will continue to challenge the logic of even having superdelegates, but we should remember that its genesis stemmed from concerns about brokered conventions, in which the winner can be determined in back rooms, and ultimately have far less to do with who the rank and file have voted for. The thinking was that by having party regulars, a large number of whom were duly elected by their own constituents, constitute a significant minority of the delegates, these folks could be counted on to follow popular trends to help to give a clear leader the majority, when multiple candidacies have split the delegate count sufficiently to otherwise keep that from happening. Since Edwards, the only additional candidate likely to have received significant numbers of delegates, dropped out before Super Tuesday, it turns out the the superdelegates are unlikely to play that role this year.

On Being Balls Out for Obama

2008-01-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

It is a challenge for someone like me to throw my unqualified support behind a single contender for the presidency who is actually given a reasonable chance of winning that contest. My own views include a number of unpopular opinions, and American politics is usually unkind toward anyone with the guts to stand up for such ideas. Barack Obama may on balance be more conservative than I am, but he eloquently gives voice to a central concept in my own political thinking.

“To me, the issue is not are you centrist or are you liberal. The issue to me is--Is what you’re proposing going to work? Can you build a working coalition to make the lives of people better? And if it can work, you should support it whether it’s centrist, conservative, or liberal.”

From the time I heard his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in which he eloquently challenged the conventional notion that we are a nation divided, and that there is little point in bridging our gaps or understanding our adversaries, but rather that

we worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states

I realized that here was someone who was finally giving voice to a powerful alternative to the false dichotomy which has divided us.

Even so I realize that inspirational oratory alone does not make a president or a leader. Political reality demands specific actions, proposals, compromises, and the ability to not only say the right thing but to work with a variety of players to make things happen. I am able to live with Obama's hybrid answer to health care which is not as bold as the plans I would prefer put forward by Kucinich or even Edwards, or his shying away from supporting gay marriage as I would. My tentativeness in supporting such a candidate probably lies more in being convinced that he can successfully drive through those programs where we are in agreement, and make progress on many fronts.

Obama's website does a good job of laying out his positions on issues. His commitment from the outset to rely on individual donors rather than institutional or corporate donors, puts him along with Edwards and Kucinich in the position of being less indebted to the moneyed interests which so many Americans, left, right, and center would like to see play less role in our politics. Having read his "Audacity of Hope", I am convinced of both his sincerity and his intellect.

Some liberal or progressive skeptics worry that Edwards is right that there is a battle to be joined against the corporate bigwigs, and Obama's inclusive approach is naive. Pitching the struggle as a battle, however, may be the naive position, which sets up yet another either/or formulation that will ultimately fall to the moneyed interests. I'm more inclined to agree with this assessment that

the sheer force of [Obama's] empathy and skills as a communicator, would broaden the political landscape and convince moderate Republicans and Independents to back progressive policies they ordinarily wouldn't go for.

Obama's promise to give the corporations "a seat at the table" when issues impacting them are discussed, is not the same as allowing them to set the agenda. I'm convinced that Obama can make it clear to those representatives that certain assumptions they once were able to make are no longer possibilities. It only makes sense to invite the participation of those who understand the current structures when seeking new solutions.

Last summer in talking with others who attended with me an Obama stump speech, the decided Obama supporter among them asked me whether I was "balls out" for Obama. Perhaps suffering from an affliction common among those of us in the second halves of our lives, my response was qualified. But now, with my own state caucus only 5 weeks away, this progressive has decided that it is time to declare my unmitigated support for Obama, without reservation.

Parties, Primaries, & Presidential Politics

2007-12-31T12:06:00.000-08:00

There is both good and bad in the way we select our nation's chief executive. The dominance of two political parties, a rather weird primary system, the influence of money on the process, and an electoral college system in lieu of a direct popular vote all seem to fly in the face of democratic ideals. We could do worse, but we could also do much better.

It is rather disquieting to realize that here, over a year away from the installation of a new president, an event in Iowa is likely to profoundly shape the prognosis for many contenders' chances to vie for that office. Those of us who do not live in early primary states can rightly question why a supposedly democratic process gives disproportionate influence to the citizens of a couple of relatively less populated states.

Now, I have nothing against Iowa or New Hampshire, and I would not characterize the primary process as tyrannical in the same way that radical thinker, O. T. Ford, does in his essay on the matter. Nonetheless, he raises a serious issue, and I do think we would do well to challenge the notion that these two states should retain their special status in perpetuity. And yet, there is actually something I like about this process. By "de-nationalizing" this small piece of the election, we are afforded an opportunity to observe the candidates ability to appeal directly to voters in settings where the pundits, the parties, and the Madison Avenue image-makers, take second fiddle to ordinary folks in town halls and public meetings.

As the essay author points out, Iowa and New Hampshire are not terribly representative of our nation as a whole, but there are some positives worth noting. Both generally score well when states are ranked in measures of quality of education. (Example 1 / Example 2) Looking at Iowa, we see a state which has an exemplary method, using an independent commission and strict rules, for drawing Congressional boundaries, thus avoiding the political gerrymandering which is rampant in most states. And Iowa does have a wholesome, middle-American image which lends to a belief that its residents will serve as reasonable evaluators of the presidential contenders. Still there is something fundamentally undemocratic about a process which puts the power to winnow our field of candidates in the hands of the citizens of the same handful of states each and every election year.

Most Americans who are familiar with our electoral college, can't help but be struck by its anti-democratic nature, and the effective disenfranchisement of minority views in non-competitive states. Again it is the citizens of a handful of states which are regularly competitive between the two major parties who get most of the attention, and hence have effectively more leverage in getting their agendas prioritized in Washington. There are mechanical and constitutional arguments for retaining the electoral college, but really it's downright archaic, weird, and unfair.

There is no constitutional basis, however, for the party system, the primary system, nor the influence of money on politics. Our elections do provide a mechanism for the voting public to keep bad leaders from retaining power indefinitely, and in that regard we should be grateful that puts us in better stead than the people in many of this world's nations. Even when evidence of institutional fraud suggests that close elections may have been incorrectly swung to the benefit of the ruling party of one state or another, so far it seems that fraud is insufficient to swing the outcome of a race which is not already close. Sadly, however, being able to oust one's leaders is not enough, when there is not a sufficiently democratic process in place to give us all a real voice about what the alternatives might be.

We are fortunate in these United States to be able to openly discuss the need to further democratize our process. We will be more fortunate still if we can move beyond discussion and actually implement improvements in spite of the political inertia which stands in their way.

Paul Loeb's Latest on Hillary

2007-11-30T09:11:00.000-08:00

As much as I typically enjoy expounding on Presidential politics, I've been rather mute of late, feeling rather ambiguous about my own preferences. Kucinich continues to represent for me the most honest voice defending the values most important to me, but I'm enough of a realist to see that 1) he won't win, & 2) if he could, those forces in opposition to his vision would succeed in thwarting his efforts. Obama possesses an oratorical gift, a uniting vision, and fine intellect, but has failed to capture my imagination as I hoped he might, and has been disappointing in a few particulars. Edwards says a lot of the right things, but I don't fully trust him. Dodd and Biden are both smart and either would stand head and shoulders above the disaster currently occupying the White House, but neither is going to gain the traction to get there. Richardson maybe has an outside shot, and would make a good President, but I really think he's already looking to be the VP choice. Then there's Hillary. Competent and with a lot of connections, I can try to talk myself into thinking she won't be so bad, and at least will likely make many excellent appointments. But I cannot deny the palpable disappointment I feel that she will likely be the Democratic nominee. Hence I will simply publish here Paul Loeb's latest article:

===================================================================
Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Disappointment
by Paul Rogat Loeb

When Democrats worry about Hillary Clinton's electability, they focus on her reenergizing a depressed Republican base while demoralizing core Democratic activists, particularly those outraged about the war, and consequently losing the election. But there's a further danger if Hillary's nominated--that she will win but then split the Democratic Party.

We forget that this happened with her husband Bill, because compared to Bush, he's looking awfully good. Much of Hillary's support may be nostalgia for when America's president seemed to engage reality instead of disdaining it. But remember that over the course of Clinton's presidency, the Democrats lost 6 Senate seats, 46 Congressional seats, and 9 governorships. This political bleeding began when Monica Lewinsky was still an Oregon college senior. Given Hillary's protracted support of the Iraq war, her embrace of neoconservative rhetoric on Iran, and her coziness with powerful corporate interests, she could create a similar backlash once in office, dividing and depressing the Democratic base and reversing the party's newfound momentum.

Think about 1994. Pundits credited major Republican victories to angry white men, Hillary's failed healthcare plan, and Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." But the defeat was equally rooted in a massive withdrawal of volunteer support among Democratic activists who felt politically betrayed. Nothing fostered this sense more than Bill Clinton's going to the mat to push the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Angered by a sense that he was subordinating all other priorities to corporate profits, and by his cavalier attitude toward the hollowing out of America's industrial base, labor, environmental and social-justice activists nationwide withdrew their energy from Democratic campaigns. This helped swing the election, much as the continued extension of these policies (particularly around dropping trade barriers with China) led just enough Democratic leaning voters in 2000 to help elect George Bush by staying home or voting for Ralph Nader.

No place saw a more dramatic political shift than my home state of Washington. In November 1992, Democratic activists volunteered by the thousands, hoping to end the Reagan-Bush era. On Election Day, I joined five other volunteers to help get out the vote in a swing district 20 miles south of Seattle. Volunteers had a similar presence in every major Democratic or competitive district in the state. The effort helped Clinton to carry the state and Democrats to capture eight out of nine House seats.

But by 1994 grass-roots Democratic campaigners mostly stayed home, disgruntled. In Washington State, there were barely enough people to distribute literature and make phone calls in Seattle's most liberal neighborhoods, let alone in swing suburban districts. Republicans won seven of our nine congressional races, and reelected a Senator known for baiting environmentalists.

The same was true nationwide. I spent that campaign season traveling to promote a book on campus activism, staying with friends long involved with progressive causes. Everywhere I went, critical races would go to the Republicans by the narrowest of margins. Yet my friends and their friends seemed strangely detached, so disgusted with Democratic politics that they no longer wanted anything to do with it. Surveys found that had voters who stayed home voted, they would have reversed the election outcome. Even a modest volunteer effort might have prevented the Republican sweep.

To prevail in close races, Democrats need enthusiastic volunteer involvement. This happened in 1992, and then again in 2006. If Hillary is the nominee, she's likely to significantly damp this involvement, especially among anti-war activists, many of whom are currently saying her candidacy would lead them to sit out the election entirely. She'll also draw out the political right in a way that will make it far harder for down-ticket Democrats in states like Kentucky and Virginia where the party has recently been winning. In a recent Pew poll, she had both higher unfavorable and lower favorable ratings than either Obama or Edwards. A July Fox poll (of citizens, not Fox viewers), 29% of voters (including 27% of Independents and 5% of Democrats) said they would "never vote for her under any circumstances," compared to just 6% overall saying the same about Obama, and less than 1% about Edwards. And a November 26 Zogby poll, (albeit one using some new methodologies) now shows her trailing the major Republican candidates, while Edwards and Obama defeat them. So she might not win at all, despite Bush's disastrous reign.

But even if she does, she is then strongly likely to fracture the party with her stands. She talks of staying in Iraq for counterterrorism operations, which could easily become indistinguishable from the present war. She backed the recent Kyl-Lieberman vote on Iran that Senator James Webb called "Cheney's fondest pipe dream." She supported at least one regressive version of the bankruptcy bill and the extension of Bush's tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. If her contributors are any guide, like those she courted in a $1,000-a-plate dinner for homeland security contractors, she's likely to cave to corporate interests so much in her economic policies that those increasingly squeezed by America's growing divides will backlash in ways that they're long been primed to by Republican rhetoric about "liberal elitists." And if Democrats do then begin to challenge her, the relative unity created by the Bush polities will quickly erode.

Because the Republican candidates would bring us more of the same ghastly policies we've seen from Bush and Cheney, I'd vote for Hillary if she became the nominee. But I'd do so with a very heavy heart, and a recognition that we'll have to push her to do the right thing on issue after issue, and won't always prevail. We still have a chance to select strong alternatives like Edwards (who I'm supporting) or Obama. And with Republican polling numbers in the toilet, this election gives Democrats an opportunity to seriously shift our national course that we may not have again for years. It would be a tragedy if they settled for the candidate most likely to shatter the momentum of this shift when it's barely begun..

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

Theft of Our Airwaves

2007-11-29T23:22:00.000-08:00

In what is truly a case of the privileged few versus the muzzled many, the FCC wants to further expand the consolidation of our media, which is already dominated by the broadcasting giants. Chairman Kevin Martin earlier this month proposed a relaxation of the rules against newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership within the same market area. And he's trying to rush its enactment before the holidays, by ending its comment period on December 11.

Martin is well aware that there is overwhelming widespread objection to media consolidation, as was evident at the last public hearing on the matter which I attended in Seattle on November 9th. Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Trent Lott (R-MS) have been leading the effort in the Senate to oppose the FCC's attempts at further consolidation.

Democratic FCC Commissioners Michael Copps & Jonathan Adelstein have been consistent voices at the FCC in favor of the public interest and against consolidation, but the Republican majority have ignored the overwhelming opposition even within their own party, and consistently sided with big media. Prior to Kevin Martin, it was Michael Powelll who did big media's bidding. But before you think I'm impugning only Republicans in the sellout of OUR airwaves to Big Media, consider that Powell was appointed to the FCC by Clinton in 1997, more than a year after Clinton himself signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a massive overhaul of the laws governing media ownership, which resulted in unprecedented consolidation of media.

Back in those days not too many people outside the industry were paying attention to the dry subject of media regulation, but Clear Channel Communications for instance went on a buying spree with the elimination of the 40-station ownership cap, and now owns over 1200. Rupert Murdoch, Disney Corporation, AOL-Time-Warner, and others have been subsequent beneficiaries of this monumental legislation. In the name of deregulation and "free" ownership, we have created a situation where smaller operations without huge capital are squeezed out, local stories get short shrift, and our news sources have become homogenized. It turns out those restrictions actually served to empower the little guys. Minority ownership is down; local ownership is down; and bots are running radio stations controlled from thousands of miles away, saving money for the owners, but not serving the needs of the public consumers of media.

Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has become a champion of derailing the consolidation train, in part due to a literal train derailment in his home state in 2002, when 210,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia was spilled near Minot. Authorities were unable to contact KCJB, the designated emergency broadcaster in a market where six of the seven commercial stations are owned by Clear Channel who typically pipe in broadcast material from elsewhere.

I'll warrant that the current deregulation is small potatoes compared to the monstrosity that Clinton signed into law, but it does include some back door provisions that make it worse in reality than it is on its face. We need to push lawmakers to go in the opposite direction and create incentives for more local and diverse control of all media. One step toward further consolidation is not the answer, no matter how Martin might spin it (pages 5&6). The time is short for contacting your members of Congress on this, or registering your comment at the FCC (click on Media Ownership ...-Docket 06-121.)

For more background on media consolidation, few have poured as much energy into this issue impacting our democracy as Bill Moyers, who offers a primer here. A great timeline of events related to media consolidation can be found on PBS's NOW website.

Troy Davis, Justice, and the Death Penalty

2007-11-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

Innocence Matters!

So proclaims the website dedicated to the exoneration of one death row inmate in Georgia. Whether one believes that the death penalty is ever appropriate, or in the innocence or guilt of that particular inmate, we should all agree that indeed innocence does matter.

As we examine the case of Troy Anthony Davis, we should care very much whether an innocent man was convicted of a crime which substantial evidence seems to indicate was committed by someone else. It is also worth examining several broader questions. Does the desire to gain convictions skew investigations to buoy the first plausible solution to the exclusion of other possibilities? Once convicted of a crime, are the barriers to considering continued claims or evidence of innocence too steep? Should the certainty of guilt be even higher for the application of the death penalty? When if ever is the death penalty appropriate, or as the American Bar Association claims, do inconsistencies and flaws in our system of justice warrant a moratorium on capital punishment?

Ironically, it may be his death row status which ends up triggering a new trial for Davis, with the possibility of exoneration. Yesterday, the Georgia Supreme Court heard arguments for and against granting such a trial, with an expected decision to be rendered sometime early next year. This observer sees a real need for re-examination of the process for granting new trials in cases where either faulty investigations, over zealous prosecution, coerced testimony, recantations, or new evidence casts doubt on former convictions - whether or not the death penalty is involved. That doesn't mean opening every case where an inmate claims innocence, or making it too easy for outside organizations to force trials when the case is not strong. But justice is not served by keeping the innocent behind bars in the name of having "someone" pay for the crime, upholding the standing of police or prosecutors, or appearing tough on crime.

The Innocence Project is doing great work in using DNA testing from former convictions to exonerate many who have been unjustly imprisoned. But physical evidence is not always available, as in the case of Davis, and common sense suggests that wrongful convictions are at least as high in such cases where eye-witness testimony is likely to have played a major role.

I am not claiming to know that Troy Davis is innocent. My window on the case is limited to what I've heard on radio, read online, and heard in conversation with Laura Moye, who is deputy director of Amnesty International's Southern regional office. I acknowledge that I am a long way away, and may have been swayed by the fact that "Davis' supporters were good at 'marketing' their cause", as DA assistant David Lock told Georgia's justices. Still, based on what I have learned, it seems more plausible that alternative suspect Sylvester "Redd" Coles is the actual perpetrator. And it is very difficult to accept that a new trial should not be granted in light of the recantations of 7 of the 9 original eyewitnesses. From a Savannah Morning News account

"If the prosecution witnesses are recanting to that extent and that they possibly perjured themselves, then the Supreme Court is doing the right thing [in considering whether to grant a new trial]," said William "Rusty" Hubbarth, vice president of the pro-death-penalty Justice For All in Austin, Texas. "I have never heard of a case like this where you have five or six witnesses recanting."

A Tragic Night

When off duty police officer Mark MacPhail responded to a commotion near a downtown Savannah Burger King at 1 AM on Aug. 19th of 1989, he discovered a homeless man, Larry Young, being pistol whipped. Before he had a chance to draw his pistol from his holster, Larry Young's attacker, seeing the officer's badge, shot and killed him. Witnesses hearing the shots saw three men fleeing the scene. This account, one of a series of five recent articles about the case appearing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, gives what appears to be a fair summary about what is known about the sequence of events that evening, and what Troy Davis and Redd Coles each claim to have occurred. Davis' proximity to the site of two shootings on the same evening understandably directed suspicion his way, but the wantonly murderous behavior he is accused of, seems to fit better with Coles prior and subsequent behavior than with that of Davis. And two of the recanting witnesses have signed affidavits declaring that Coles was also present at the party earlier in the evening near to where another man was shot and injured. Why would Davis brutally assault the homeless man, when even Coles admitted that it was he who had the initial argument (over a beer) with him? Why did Coles show up at the police station with a high paid lawyer to finger Davis in the crime? Why did Davis so readily return from his subsequent trip to Atlanta when he discovered he was the subject of a manhunt, unless he felt confident that he would be absolved of the charges.

7 of 9 Recant

But the most compelling case for granting a new trial comes from the sworn affidavits recanting earlier testimony which implicated Davis, and suggesting police coercion in obtaining that testimony. The unfortunate homeless man who was the victim of the beating was detained by police for over an hour when he most needed medical attention. In pain and somewhat inebriated he finally signed a statement written by police without reading it, in order to gain his own release. Reading the details of each recantation, it is difficult to believe prosecutor's claims that Davis' family was able to pressure all of these witnesses to recant earlier testimony, risking perjury, not to mention the wrath of the still free Coles, simply out of sympathy for a man on death row.

Troy Anthony Davis has been in prison now for 18 years. That alone would be an extraordinary sentence for what, if his story is true, may have been a case of keeping bad company and using poor judgment in the aftermath of gunfire. And yet a new trial is all he currently is asking for.

The appeals process has been yet another story in this case, where procedural reasoning seems to trump new reasonable doubt, whether in the state's habeas court denial of his petition in 1977, or the impact of provisions of the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 signed into law by Clinton, which restricted the power of federal courts to correct constitutional error in criminal cases, or the Federal 11th Circuit Court's denial of Troy's appeal in 2006, or the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to hear his case.

This case has now gotten strong media attention, yet it is still not clear that a defendant who likely deserves at least a second trial will get one. How many other cases languish in obscurity where innocent prisoners will never receive a fair trial when they were originally denied one? In many cases - hopefully a large majority of them - our justice system where one is innocent until proven guilty works beautifully. We have a justice system which on the whole is worth fighting for, and is far better than that which existed in earlier centuries, or does exist in many places around the world. But two factors which stand as a threat to proper justice remain the inordinate influence of money and connections on the process, and the growing simplistic tough on crime attitude which vilifies the accused too early in the process, values numbers of convictions over certainty of justice, and turns a blind eye all too often on instances of police or prosecutorial misconduct.

Process matters. Complexity matters. Motive matters. Truth matters. Certainty matters.

Innocence matters.

We Are All Socialists!

2007-11-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

Or at least a vast majority of us are.

I could have as easily titled this piece "We Are All Capitalists!", with an identical qualification.

The point is, that with the exception of a few rigid extremists on either side, most of us acknowledge by our daily activities some acceptance of the fact that the capitalist model works quite well for many things in life, while a socialist model works for others. Too many, especially on the far right, but also on the far left, have tried to make this into an either/or dilemma, when it really ought to be about AND.

Here in the United States and much of the Western World, we have settled on an economic model which is predominately capitalist, with a few socialist elements. I happen to think that is probably the best choice. I love pointing out to those who find my views to be radical, that this ought to place me - in an economic sense, at least - a little to the right of center.

But for many, the commitment to an economic model has become imbued with a moral element which simply isn't appropriate. It is quite true that economic models, if they become grossly imbalanced, can allow ghastly things to happen which DO have a moral element. Such awful scenarios have been played out many times in history. China's Cultural Revolution and the Indonesian extermination of the East Timorese are but two examples abetted by economic imbalances of different origins.

We need to be more concerned about what works, and be willing to draw from models which have succeeded before, without ascribing evil intent to any suggestion which can be remotely associated with an ideology that we disagree with. The public sector of our economy exists for a reason, and most Americans agree that it has its place. Schools, the Post Office, police, fire departments, parks, and resource management are integral parts of our society which operate predominately on a socialist model, with some incentive-based balancing elements. That doesn't make the participants in that part of the economy radical commies foaming at the mouth, any more than those working for or running our corporations must be evil capitalists intent on stealing from the poor to line their own pockets.

We operate in a mixed economy, and should be wary of those whose commitment to an economic model trumps practical considerations in determining how to structure our various institutions. It seems that the folks at the Heritage Foundation would have us privatize every institution rather that acknowledge that occasionally (often!) the public good is better served by public institutions with public accountability. It's not that privatization is NEVER a good idea, but that it's certainly not ALWAYS a good idea.

When I look around me in 2007, there's not much left that hasn't been privatized or partially privatized that needs more privatization. I'm far more often alarmed by the extent of privatization that has occurred already. Naomi Klein, recent author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", appearing on Democracy Now yesterday, said

The last frontier for the privatization of the state is the privatization of ... core state functions. You know, the only thing left that hasn’t already been privatized and outsourced is -- and this is pre-Bush administration -- is the army, is the police, are the fire departments. And these core state functions are really seen as the last great privatization free-for-all. It’s already entered healthcare. It’s already entered water. It’s already entered electricity, the media.

Those of us who are inclined to argue for de-privatizing some of that which has suffered from over privatization are frequently accused of being "far left" even when what is sought is simply movement back towards the way things were 20, 40, or even 80 years ago. And when someone like me suggests that in certain arenas, such as health care, we should simply acknowledge the net public good which could come from moving more fully to a socialist model, then in the eyes of some I might as well have suggested selling their children to work for Kim Jung Il.

Among the current crop of Presidential candidates, only Dennis Kucinich is bold enough to suggest that we need a single payer system for health insurance, even though in countries where such systems are standard, even political conservatives generally acknowledge the public good which they serve. I supported Kucinich's bid for the Democratic nomination four years ago, but recognizing that his selection would be undeservedly polarizing, was rather excited about the possibility that Obama might be less beholden to corporate interests than someone like Clinton, while speaking the language of unity which we desperately need, and hence center us. It is rather sad to me that Obama is obliged to take an improved but still timid approach to health care when it seems clear to me that something bolder is called for.

So call me a socialist if you like - I'll not deny it. But don't be surprised after we spend some time together, if I call you one too.

Writing Chuck about Mukasey

2007-11-02T15:10:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I feel the need to engage in probably futile exercises, just so I can go on record. Today I sent the following web email to Senator Charles Schumer:

Change your mind - vote against Mukasey!

Neither Senator from my state of Washington is on the Judiciary Committee, so I feel compelled to write you on the matter of Michael Mukasey's nomination to be the chief law enforcement officer of our nation. Regardless of how nice he may be, Mukasey's equivocations under questioning demonstrate that he is unfit to take over as Attorney General, where a clear moral compass is needed more than ever in the wake of the errors left behind by Alberto Gonzales.

Arlen Specter and Lindsay Graham know Mukasey is not fit, but they will likely capitulate to the pressure of being Republicans. You do not have that handicap. Listen to your mother, talk to those like Sheldon Whitehouse who have made the necessary decision, and bring along others like Dianne Feinstein, in order to keep Mukasey's nomination from having to even go to the floor of the main Senate.

It's not just the bit about waterboarding. Mukasey has been equivocating all over the map, and you know it. Admit you were wrong, and do the right thing!

Thanks to you and your staff for taking the input of concerned American citizens such as myself.

Charles Schumer seems to exemplify for me exactly the wrong way to be a liberal. He's strident and stubborn in defending entrenched party positions, while he bends in exactly the places where liberalism can best take the moral high ground. Nonetheless, he's pretty effective and powerful, and we cannot lightly brush him off.

Why must Russ Feingold and his kind be so rare?

Mountaintop Pillage

2007-09-14T17:23:00.000-07:00

The naked land reveals the naked truth. The greed of millionaires trumps the health of the poor, the purity of the water, and even the beauty of the hills. In an under-reported story, the Bush administration has made yet another rule change assaulting the environment and enriching the polluters. The practice of mountaintop removal will no longer be hampered by those pesky environmental rules designed to protect our waters.

Photo courtesy Vivian Stockman / www.ohvec.org
Flyover courtesy SouthWings.org

Couched in language which might initially incline a reader to think it is protecting the environment, the new proposed rules actually redefine terms, and reinterpret former acts of Congress, in such a way that mining operations which engage in the surface coal mining technology known as mountaintop removal are exempt from the 1983 requirement that prohibits mining activity within 100 feet of streams. In fact this practice routinely buries streams and valleys by tons of rubble, known as "excess spoil", which is stripped off the top of coal seams running through the tops of hills and mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky, and western Virginia.

The current rule change is subject to a 60-day comment period which will expire on October 23, though those looking for a response to their comment had best post it to OIRA_DOCKET@omb.eop.gov before September 24. Folks at the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition have created this page of suggestions for citizen action.

So if the rule change is new, then how is it that about 1200 miles of streams have been tainted by this process (700 miles simply buried) since 1992? According to Vernon Haltom of Coal River Mountain Watch,

What happens is the permitting agencies grant variances, and they grant variances just pretty much willy-nilly. All the coal operator has to do is request a variance, and they’re granted pretty easily. Unfortunately, you know, this rule change would remove even that requirement.

The latest rule change is simply the latest in a series of changes which further undercuts environmental safeguards of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). The lengthy new document, which is actually surprisingly readable, arguably does remove logical ambiguities from the original act, but ever in the direction of allowing practices which are suggested as possible where another part of the Act would logically prohibit them.

Viewing photographs of this obvious desecration, one might wonder why it isn't front page news, frequently reported by the mainstream press. Alternatively one wonders, "Well what's the other side of the story?" In fact Google searches of CNN, ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC, and Fox News consistently turn up surprising few hits on "mountaintop removal", in spite of the fact that is the acknowledged name of the practice. Neither can one find any bevy of editorials supporting this indefensible practice, though occasional editorial support of coal liquifecation technologies implicitly approve the practice, as mountaintop removal (MTR) provides much of today's raw materials for that process.

Furthermore I scoured the online versions of the local press from such places as Beckley, WV and Pikeville, KY. Very little in the way of articles on the process appear, though there were numerous letters to the editor almost unanimously in staunch opposition to the process. The Charleston Gazette did a better job of covering it, with an earlier series, and a recent editorial by Allen Johnson declaring the destruction of the mountains to be a moral issue. Johnson, of Christians for the Mountains, was featured on a recent episode of Bill Moyers' Journal which investigated the issue.

Well then, is it the jobs MTR is providing which is producing such silence on this destructive practice? In fact, it has the opposite effect on employment as the process uses bigger machines and fewer people than traditional mining practices. Vernon Haltom again:

You know, we hear about coal being cheap. Well, coal is not cheap when you consider all the externalized costs that are borne by these communities. It’s really -- it is unbearable. And so what you have, you have depopulation, you have decreased jobs. Mountaintop removal requires fewer miners, and therefore fewer jobs.

Really it boils down to wealth and influence. Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, has no lack of ties and connections to government and the regulators, while Ed Wiley, citizen of West Virginia, walked all the way from Charleston, West Virginia to Washington, DC, and still could get no hearing. Carmelita Brown can look up the hill at Blankenship's home, and yet her water frequently ran dark brown with contaminants from ground water ruined by Massey's irresponsible mining practices. Only after thirteen years of documenting the contamination and battling the authorities, did Brown and 300 other families get clean municipal water piped into their homes. Of course that doesn't fix the ground water contamination which continues apace, and will only accelerate when this rule takes effect. It doesn't fix the air pollution caused by the blasting which exposes the seams of coal, to the tune of 474,000 metric tons of explosives used in West Virginia alone in 2005.

The Administration's own report (page 3) acknowledges that there were 1079 excess spoil fills approved in Kentucky, 375 in West Virginia, and 125 in Virginia between October 2001 and June of 2005. These are those exemptions already granted for filling in creeks, which will no longer be necessary when the new rule goes into effect. The new language may remove ambiguity about what is and is not allowed (pretty much the polluters can do as they please), but the constraints, now often amount to vague suggestions that excess spoil and adverse environmental impacts be minimized, rather than enforcing specific standards. There remains the constraint that the spoil not be dumped into valleys lower in altitude than the lowest part of the seam to be mined, but that's easily skirted by making sure some mining occurs in a seam lower than the intended dumping area.

The champions of the free market love to claim that market forces can work to protect our environment, but when the distribution of wealth is so extremely skewed it just doesn't work that way. Billionaires buy the regulations they want, and the impoverished are left with no leverage. This isn't supply and demand; it's corruption pure and simple. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are on the take, but there is little question that the Bush Administration is front and center when it come to cementing the advantage for the wealthy elite.

Remembering

2007-09-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

We were shaken.

We felt united.

We reflected on what was really important.

I say we, because in many ways it felt like "we", however individual and personal my own reaction may have been on that Tuesday morning six years ago. My own resolve to recommit myself to a greater purpose than simply making money and entertaining myself was a personal one, and yet in the days that followed our national tragedy, I held to the notion that out of this tragedy, comparable personal transformations throughout the nation and beyond were planting seeds for transformative movements of which few of us were even yet conceiving.

Much of my usual political filtering was dropped. When President Bush spoke, I really listened, believing that our shared loss transcended our partisan differences. It's not that I expected Bush to become liberal, or suddenly share my views on domestic policy, the environment, social issues, and so forth. But surely tragedy might beget honesty, and shared values could become our focus in response. And I was heartened by much of what I heard. The words were sober. The call on Americans to refrain from scapegoating those of Arab descent were welcome words, worthy of Presidential speech.

We needed a leader, and for the moment, in spite of our political differences, I believed we had one.

Six years later, after more contentious elections, dirty politics, and the usual influence of money on power, it is easy to be cynical and dismissive of the notion that individual transformations, borne of personal reactions to 9/11, might hold any hope for a brighter future. Certainly Karl Rove opportunistically played the 9/11 card to spawn divisiveness, rather than to inspire unity, and others on both sides of the political aisle responded in kind. But in 2006 Rove's plan finally backfired, and while reactions on the surface may all look to be partisan posturing, and the red vs. blue of a divided nation, I wouldn't sell short the power of memory.

I'm not giving up on the idea that personal transformations rooted in one moment may bring fruit in another. Ask not what ideology spawned the transformation or the activity which grew out of it, but rather whether it contributes to a brighter tomorrow. There are now over 300 million Americans. Our potential remains unknown. In the words of Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

America, remember! You are not perfect, nor never have been, but you have long represented the land of the possible. Terrorists and ideologues cannot crush our spirit. Neither should a few missteps in response. Let us respond as befits a great people. Keep hope alive, work together, engage in open dialog, innovate, and thrive.

The Radicalism of Rigidity

2007-08-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

What makes an idea, an ideology, a politician or a political party too extreme or too radical? The language of left, right, and center applied to politics reinforces a misapprehension that there is a linear measure against which any idea or politician can be measured to determine whether they are extreme or "centrist". But dangerous radicalism can raise its head anywhere along the mythic spectrum, as can worthy concepts.

In great works of art, it is the interplay of darkness and light, of bright colors and muted tones which lend to their wholeness and beauty. Some masterpieces are dark, others light, but regardless of where the overall tone of the piece lies, it is the variation within it which give it meaning and make it work for the viewer. And so it is with politics. Ideas are our color pallet, society's institutions, whether government or private, are our paintbrushes. Precious few ideas by themselves are terribly dangerous, but any idea over applied with rigid fanaticism will likely have bad results. It doesn't matter whether the idea comes from Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, John Locke, Adam Smith, or John Keynes; rigidity and the unbending application of any narrow set of precepts to solve every problem is dangerous and almost always bound to have disastrous, even if unintended, results.

I am unabashedly liberal, and by some accounts in certain areas - extremely so. But I recognize that truth can come from anywhere, and I KNOW that certain conservative ideas have far too much merit to be ignored or dismissed out of hand simply because they are conservative. I'm a big believer in using a full pallet in painting our democracy. Let's work together and see what works, don't be afraid to try new ideas, or to mix old ideas in new combinations. As they say the devil is in the details, and reasonable people will disagree with each other on how to proceed. I wouldn't presume in a single article to provide THE answer to solving our problems. What I will suggest with some confidence is that we should be wary of those who prescribe adherence to a rigid agenda in addressing those problems. And rigid agendas can come not only from the far right or far left, but can just as easily come from the center, from libertarians, neoliberals, neoconservatives, etc. etc.

A recurring theme in my criticism of the Bush administration has been that it's not how far right they are, it's how far wrong they are. Well, my belief is that what has been so wrong is precisely that rigidity in applying a narrow set of precepts, from a canned set of talking points to every policy on every front. When you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.

Monday in the Democratic column at Watchblog, Paul Siegel wrote a commentary arising from his reaction to the coal mining tragedy in Utah, in which he attacked the rigidity of the popular ideology which holds sacred the primacy of the free market in determining government policy. I remember being struck by how "on target" the piece was, only to discover how utterly repulsed some readers were by that article, declaring disgust and an inclination to vomit because of it. Upon rereading the article, I understood better this reaction, and realized that Paul and his commenters approached the subject with different understanding of the particulars of this case (and I think the exposure of the those particulars will largely vindicate Paul), but also see that Paul erred in seeming to imply that the rigidity he attacks might be applied generally to all conservatives. I'm confident that Paul would agree with me that such is not the case, but rather that the talking points of the conservative movement in this country over the last three decades, as encapsulated in the commentary of such ideologues as Rush Limbaugh, do attempt to prescribe such dangerous rigidity.

Limbaugh in fact is a master at exploiting the misapprehension I spoke of at the beginning of this article in leading his listeners to assumptions about the reasonableness of some ideas and solutions as opposed to the "radicalness" of others. People on the left are just as guilty of the same technique and honestly that bothers me just as much. But let's look again at some of Paul's specific language to see why his suggestions are in fact the moderate ones. In his key summary paragraph, Paul acknowledges that "Ownership, free markets and self-reliance are all good." That statement certainly does not come from the radical left. He goes on to say "But they must be modified occasionally. Ownership cannot get anywhere without people to do the work. Free markets must be regulated for the interest of the average person. Self-reliance must yield to working as a community for the common good." In other words, Paul wants us to use a full pallet of ideas in working out solutions that - well - work! Now some were offended that Paul put words into the mouths of conservatives in parodying the rigidity which he and I see have dominated the conservative movement, but for many movement conservatives those words are all too close to what they are trying to imbue into the conservative American psyche. When someone in all seriousness comments that "If the government has no power to regulate the economy, their(sic) is no corruption", it is evident that in many cases they have succeeded in implanting such rigid thinking.

Save SCHIP for Children's Sakes

2007-07-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

Nearly everyone professes a desire to renew the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), set to expire in September. Disagreement persists on funding levels & sources, qualification thresholds, and state discretion for variances. Is this a healthy policy debate, or a platform for ideological grandstanding? For the sake of children's health, let's hope SCHIP is funded at levels to protect the truly vulnerable.

There is a policy debate here worth having, but hold on there and look at the scope and the big picture before allowing the ideologues to drag us into minutiae. SCHIP (pronounced ess-chip) is a program which America's governors agree across party lines has benefited the hard working families most deserving of health insurance for their children that they otherwise simply couldn't afford. Everyone agrees that renewing the program for five years at the current level of $25 billion for five years is not enough. The White House wants to limit the expansion to an additional $5 billion, the Senate's bipartisan version expands the program by $35 billion and the House version (HR 3162) by $50 billion. Co-author and conservative Republican Senator Orrin Hatch's made this statement on the floor in favor of the Senate version (S 1893).

The White House is attempting to don the garments of fiscal restraint in threatening a veto of excessive Congressional expansion of SCHIP. Ahem...

In 2003, Bush famously signed into law the most expensive health bill in our nation's history. That bill with a stated price tag of $400 billion over 10 years, almost didn't pass, as Tom DeLay had to coerce one fiscal conservative with a political threat against his son to get the necessary vote. Later we learned that the administration already knew that the price tag was being understated by over $100 billion, but the actuary with that information was being muzzled by his boss, so Congress might pass it. Never mind that the biggest beneficiaries of this bill were the pharmaceuticals and HMOs, much more than the seniors it was supposed to benefit, who in spite of all that government spending were actually going to have their out of pocket costs increase. Multiple sources now tell us that the actual cost to taxpayers of this gargantuan largesse to big pharma and HMO will exceed $1 trillion dollars, though the White House denies them. Note, however, the quiet admission that the cost is over $500 billion.

Yes some perspective is in order.

So this administration wants to trim $30-45 billion off of a program which directly benefits the underinsured in the name of fiscal responsibility, when four years ago it was willing to lie about the cost of a program it supported to the tune of $135 billion, when many of those dollars are an indirect benefit, which simultaneously lined the pockets of the executives who really have Bush's ear.

Yes I understand that the 2003 program is showing a 10 year cost, whereas the 2007 SCHIP graph is showing a 5 year cost - but still look at the difference between columns 5 and 6, which the Administration is declaring a willingness to veto over, compared to the difference betwee columns 2 and 3 which the Administration was willing to LIE over. When it comes to cost control this administration has no credibility whatsoever. It simply says whatever it wants for political reasons, with no apparent regard for the public good.

When all is said and done, this war the President started will likely cost us over $2 trillion dollars, dwarfing further the bars on the graph above - and that doesn't even attempt to assign a value to the lost lives of soldiers and civilians, or the damage to our national image across the globe.

Yes there is a policy debate worth having about SCHIP. From Kaiser to the AARP to pundits to policy journals, folks are weighing in with the specifics. Maybe the House version needs to be scaled back or includes earmarks which don't belong there. I'll take Orrin Hatch's word for it that in the Senate version, "my Democrat colleagues made sacrifices in endorsing this bill and in sacrificing program expansions they so dearly advocated". I personally might prefer the House version, but this President ought to be convinced to sign some compromise - perhaps close to that bipartisan effort in the Senate. I would urge my Congressman to work to present a bill that can be quickly approved, but one which accounts for the realities that the working poor and the working lower middle class must face in health care. Some states have already run out of funds, and in instances children may be literally dying because their parents can't afford the procedures they require.

Republicans are correct about one thing

2007-07-19T07:27:00.000-07:00

The Democratic overnight session forcing Republicans to engage in a real filibuster was more theater than substance. Nonetheless it was theater which afforded the Democrats the opportunity to show the 60% of Americans who believe that funding of the war SHOULD be tied to deadlines for withdrawal, that they- Congressional Democrats - finally get it.

A lot of the commentary from pundits about the war and American opinion misses the point, but when you hear that the Congress is "tone-deaf" or that they are "behind the American public" on this issue, that's essentially correct. Back in late May, the Congressional Democrats in both houses capitulated, and gave Bush pretty much the funding bill he wanted, instead of relentlessly insisting on including a deadline, and forcing Bush to continually veto funding in order to avoid any deadline. The erroneous thinking was that the public would ultimately blame Congress in such a standoff which risked resulting in the troops not being funded at all. My argument at the time was that among the majority who oppose the war, Bush would take the blame in such a standoff. The contrary view seemed to be based in part on public reaction following the government shutdown of 1995 in which Clinton would not sign a bill with Republican conditions he did not want, and the government temporarily shutdown. The public blame at the time went to Congress. I say such reactions depend on the particulars, and the recent CBS/NYT poll suggests a majority of Americans would have approved of Congress insisting on deadlines in May, in spite of April polling which suggested the opposite. Clearly the Democrats' lack of spine in standing up to Bush is the major factor in bringing Congressional approval levels so low.

Now let me be perfectly clear. Majority opinion does not make that opinion correct. In February 2003 I was part of a vocal minority within America opposing our invasion of Iraq. We were correct.

If some action is right, then time will vindicate standing firm in spite of public opinion. Bush still hopes for such historic vindication in spite of all evidence and common sense which suggest otherwise. In May the Democrats did not need to fund this madness, and should have stood firm because it was right, not because the public would approve. Instead they guessed about public opinion, and allowed Bush to deepen the quagmire without conditions. Now that they are down to the low 20s in public approval, maybe they're finally getting it.

Bringing cots into the Senate chamber was most definitely political theater. It was welcome theater, and long overdue.

Stop-Loss: Bush's Ugly Draft

2007-06-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

One courageous soldier, holding vigil in Bellingham, Washington (more coverage here), is discovering that most of the people he talks to don't even know what "stop loss" is, or believe that it only refers to a certain kind of stock trade. In fact the Bush administration's indefensible and immoral use of the military's stop loss policy is a despicable mistreatment of the volunteers who comprise our armed services.

The stop loss policy allows the military to retain soldiers past the time of their contract in times of national emergency. In a real national emergency that makes sense. The only national emergency we have now is one of Bush's own creation, and it is not going to be addressed - indeed it is only being exacerbated - by forcing our volunteer soldiers to remain in the line of fire past the time of their contract. The only emergency being addressed is the political emergency of Bush vainly attempting to save face while denying the reality that his "liberation" of Iraq has been a colossal failure.

Soldiers are being called back to third and even fourth tours of duty, and kept past the time stipulated on their contracts for one simple reason. There aren't enough volunteers to support this boondoggle, and no one other than Charlie Rangel has the gumption to suggest an honest draft to supply the fresh troops that would be necessary to support keeping the former level of troops in the Middle East, much less a surge. Meanwhile Ahmadinejad laughs while we rattle our sabres, because he knows our military is now stretched too thin to provide any real threat against Iran.

When news of the stop loss program first broke, I was surprised by the lack of outrage and coverage of it. Still, outside of the military, it is a little known necessity for fueling this insane war. There are signs that it is gaining traction as an issue, though, as it erodes support for the war in the very camps where support has traditionally been strongest. In fact it has generated such a spate of lawsuits and backlash in the ranks that Defense Secretary Robert Gates is ordering that plans be made to minimize its use.

The surge and the widespread objection to it has been well reported. Some have suggested that if we really want to give the military option a chance to succeed we would need a far greater surge than the President has ordered. The elephant in the room is that we CANNOT supply such a huge surge without a real draft, and that we can only support the current levels, surge or no surge, by mistreating the very soldiers we supposedly honor.

We must demand that President Bush support our troops by bringing them home in an orderly fashion - and soon.

Capitulation

2007-05-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately there is nothing else to call it.

It's being said a million times in a million ways - and hopefully the media and the Democratic leadership will wake up to the fact that it's not just the "loony left" who want to see Congress stand up to this Administration and insist that we begin exiting from their insane and failed military boondoggle in Iraq.

An accidental similarity in title of one of my posts of a year ago with a recent opinion piece by Mark Buchanan published by the New York Times, has led me to that article which seeks to explain the disconnect between the media's "conventional wisdom" about the feelings of the American people and the breadth and depth of what they really feel. It's an interesting read, but with the Times odd policy of making opinion available only by subscription, I can point you instead to this reproduction of it.

I try to regularly watch Washington Week in Review, largely because it keeps me in touch with the DC pundits' "conventional wisdoms", but I frequently bristle at what they choose to cover or ignore, and at the characterizations of perfectly reasonable beliefs as being "fringe". Dan Balz is particularly nauseating - but I digress. Of course if you pay attention to the sponsors of this "public television" offering, one quickly sees big oil, big agribusiness, and military contractors. Who are we kidding? Brancaccio's NOW and anything Bill Moyers does in contrast is funded solely by foundations or socially conscious businesses.

So I sit here heartsick and dismayed that the Democratic leadership was so gutless that it could not come back with a bill that mandated a sane exit as a contingency to funding. It's even more sickening that so many Democrats voted for this capitulation - both in the House and the Senate.

Certainly I called both my Senators (Murray and Cantwell) to express my dismay, and my Congressman (Inslee) to applaud his courage.

Still, I think it is important not to come unhinged. By all means, let us point out that people are dying due to these decisions, but let us be aware that this is but one vote, and our continued engagement can still play a role in subsequent votes. I am not abandoning the Democrats over this, nor will I drop out. The voice of dissent is growing. To use it effectively we must continue to be involved - not drop out in disgust.

The Democratic leadership has sadly ceded the Republican talking point that a vote against an unreasonable funding resolution is a vote against the troops - we must not cede the talking point that only the leftwing fringe would do otherwise. That is provably not the case, but the more of us who come unhinged, the easier it will be for the opposition to paint us as such.

Choose hope - stay resolute - adopt a calm anger

We are here to stay.

Recycling Thugs & Ideologues

2007-05-04T08:01:00.000-07:00

John Fife's interview on Democracy Now a couple of weeks ago got to the crux of the criminality and inhumanity of the Bush administration. It's a simple reflection of the criminality and inhumanity of the Reagan administration. Reagan was Commander-in-Chief for eight years and is now largely celebrated, while being reviled only by a few of us. If Reagan could get away with it and be so honored, Bush figured he should be able to do the same. It is really at the heart of why I'm so saddened and perplexed at what is accepted behavior by our leaders in this country which celebrates values of liberty and opportunity for all.

The ideologues and thugs from the Reagan era are just being recycled by Bush. Fife brings up the prime examples of John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams. When will we ever learn.

Fife's interview was preceded by a report on the arrests and charges being brought against members of the humanitarian aid group, No More Deaths. I highly recommend both the report and the interview.

Democrats: Don't Be Timid!

2007-05-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

The veto on the war spending bill is now official, and the ball is in the Democrats' court.

Now is the time to pressure our Democratic lawmakers not only to hold their ground but to be even more assertive. Bush has already refused your compromise: take something away.

When a petulant child misbehaves, no one advises the parents to compromise with him. That would reward the bad behavior and encourage more mischief. Bush may not be a child, but he certainly acts like one. Frankly I'm happy for this veto. The embedded timelines in the bill gave Bush far too much latitude to simply ignore them. The American people are fed up. If the Democrats can get a tougher bill to pass, it will be the President who is then up against the wall. As time is running out his veto would become the thing that denies support for the troops.

It has always been this president and his administration who is most guilty of not supporting our troops:

Insufficient body armor(Just one of many reports)
Stop-loss extensions of tours of duty(example of a mother's protest)
Recalling soldiers for third redeployments(current search of Google news for sample stories)
Insufficient training for national guard sent for service
Not taking care of our returning veterans(Fox News, no less)

If the Dems can't get sufficient support for making the redeployment out of Iraq mandatory, then they should add more conditions IN SUPPORT OF THE TROOPS based on the foregoing. They should not remove language calling for redeployment out of Iraq, also IN SUPPORT OF THE TROOPS, in order to make Bush's signing more likely.

The conventional wisdom says the timetable will be removed in favor of more solid benchmarks. That is based on the reality that the vote on the last bill was close, and some Senators seem unlikely to be willing to hold their ground. The conventional wisdom can change if enough of those Senators and Congresspeople hear from their constituents demanding that they not cave in to a president intent on defying the will of the people. If the Democrats stay tough, the charge that they are not supporting the troops will not have sticking power.

It has become quite evident that it is Bush who will not support the very troops who he is asking to risk their lives for his misadventure. Support our troops. Demand that they be brought home!

Kucinich is right - Cheney must go

2007-04-30T20:44:00.000-07:00

It's a sad fact that politics frequently results in the appointment of people unfit for the duties of their office. Libby, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Safavian, Foggo, and Mike Brown, are among the Bush appointees who have already left under a cloud of disapproval and/or scandal. But the most dangerous of the lot is only a heartbeat away (if that) from the Presidency. Congressman Dennis Kucinich is right: It's time to remove Cheney from power.

Mere growing disapproval of Cheney is not sufficient cause for removing him from office, but Kucinich details plenty of supporting documents for all three articles of impeachment in his House Resolution 333. It's a shame that only candidates mocked by the media, or retired politicians, seem to have the courage to speak the truth.

Immediately after the election, I cautioned restraint, suggesting that a positive agenda must come before recriminations against our outlaw executive branch. Today I still agree with Woody Mena that positive legislation needs to be front and center of the Democratic Congress' agenda, and must be advanced at least as aggressively as investigations into Republican wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, we cannot continue to ignore the elephant in the room. It remains clear that the Vice President is stubbornly committed to a reckless and violent foreign policy. His approach has permeated the disastrous decision making which has been the hallmark of Bush's foreign policy. Bush asks for us to give their "new strategy" a chance, but there can be no real new strategy until he clears house. Gates has been a huge improvement over Rumsfeld, but the attack dog is still pulling the levers.

The Bush apologists will insist that "even the Democrats" were convinced that WMDs were there. But if there was anyone in the White House who had reason to doubt it, it was Cheney. His repeated trips to CIA headquarters were an obvious attempt to collect exactly the intelligence which suggested the worst, while ignoring all intelligence to the contrary. Perhaps Bush was misled, but Cheney continues to push the case for an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, long after all serious scholars have dismissed the possibility.

Then there is the probable criminal conduct surrounding the blown cover of Valerie Plame. The day Libby was indicted, it was an outrage that Cheney did not resign. The second in command should be above suspicion. An honorable man could have spoken of the need to avoid the appearance of impropriety. A guilty man needs to stay put to cover his tracks. Patrick Fitzgerald may not have found the smoking gun to prove Cheney's criminality in a court of law, but he didn't mince words when he stated "there is a cloud over the vice president."

If this vice president is not lying, then he is seriously self-deluded. Either way, he ought to go.

EPA Action: Tardy, not Premature

2007-04-13T08:33:00.000-07:00

If the Bush administration were honest, they would have renamed the Environment Protection Agency as the Corporation Protection Agency. Last week the Supreme Court sided with Massachussetts and other states in declaring that the EPA may regulate greenhouse gases. Yesterday EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson said the agency was looking at options, but it was premature to talk about it.

Premature indeed! When it comes to protecting our environment, this administration has always been a day late and a dollar short. It's a shame too. Even now the EPA is loaded with good people committed to protecting our environment, but often when scientists are ready to issue reports contrary to wishes of corporate big wigs in bed with the administration, those scientists are muzzled. When enforcement threatens the profits of companies too cozy with the Republican establishment, enforcement is defunded. And when regulating greenhouse gas emissions might cost Detroit too much, well the EPA Administrators assigned to rein in the environmental "excesses" of the rank and file declare that EPA lacks the authority to do so.

The Bush administration seems to have no problem exceeding its authority when it comes to abbrogating individuals' civil liberties in the so-called war against terror, but exercises illogical restraint on its authority when curbing corporate behavior that may risk our collective future.

The Supreme Court dealt a rebuke to that logic last week, when it instructed the EPA that it did have authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and would be required to defend lack of such regulations on a scientific basis.

With all due respect to Linda Greenhouse, coastal dwellers in future generations will be far less concerned about John Roberts' trepidation about the legal doctrine of 'standing' than they will about excess corporate control of government if that is not reined in before their communities are inundated.

My Apologies to Senator Byrd

2007-03-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

In a post on March 7, I lambasted the Senate for its silence back in February and March of 2003, when it had become apparent that Bush was determined to invade Iraq in spite of unfinished inspections by the UN, widespread global disapproval, and wealth of evidence that it was an awful idea. I cited Russell Feingold of Wisconsin as the sole voice of reason. Well after making essentially the same post yesterday at Watchblog, reader Phillipe called my attention to this speech by Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, which concludes:

... to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.
Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq -- a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 -- this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare -- this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.
We are truly "sleepwalking through history." In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.
To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is "in the highest moral traditions of our country". This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our mistake was to put ourselves in a corner so quickly. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.

The whole speech is worth a read. Byrd was not some brilliant prognosticator -- he was merely stating the obvious. There are quite a few other Senators who should be hanging their heads in shame.

Another Day to Let Your Opposition Be Known

2007-03-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

Find a rally, vigil, or protest in your area!

Responsibility for Sweatshops and Child Labor

2007-03-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

When I hear stories, such as the awful conditions under which young teenagers in Guatemala are forced to work to prepare products for export to the United States market, I feel despair that objections to the facilitation of such outrages by lauded free trade agreements are dismissed as the ravings of lefty loonies.

I don't claim to know that such abuses would be less in the absence of these agreements. Indeed that is a question not sufficiently answered by the Democracy Now report. But I don't believe the pretense of ignorance on the part of the corporations in this country about these abuses. At some level it is appropriate that we be bothered by the extent to which our comfort is made to depend on the misery of others.

If free trade can be used as a lever to force changes and better conditions for the oppressed in distant lands, I'll gladly hail that. But the extent to which these stories must find their expression in the alternative media suggest a willing complicity in need of greater exposure. Thank you Amy Goodman, for your role in making these stories more widely known.

Whatever you may believe about what make the best trade policies, it is not extreme to decry the abuse of under aged workers, or any workers, in the service of providing cheaper goods for the privileged among us. If that's how capitalism works, then capitalism is broken.

Looks Good So Far

2007-03-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

Following up on my Mauritania post, the news so far is promising.

The final paragraph speaks to the uncertainty yet ahead:

The critical moment will come when the army must return to the barracks, according to Cedric Jourde, a political scientist at Ottawa University who closely follows Mauritanian politics. He said it remained to be seen to what extent the military would "accept to be subordinated to a non-military head of state" and civilian government.

Good Luck, Mauritania

2007-03-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

And sometimes luck has more to do with outcomes than people like to acknowledge.

In just a few hours the West African nation of Mauritania will begin holding its first legitimate presidential election. In this case Mauritania's good fortune was the good will and integrity of Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who took the reins of power in a military coup in August of 2005, ousting strongman Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Ould Taya who was in Saudi Arabia at the time, attending King Fahd's funeral. Vall pledged to bring democracy, liberate the press, and hold national elections within two years.

True to his word, the press is no longer muzzled, an independent judiciary appears to be established, and a constitution is in place guaranteeing basic liberties and intended to prevent dictatorships. Many involved in the overhaul have urged Vall to stay, but like our own George Washington who refused to stay in power, Vall will not hear of it.

"The problem for Mauritanians is that for the first time in their lives, they don't know what the outcome of the election will be ... Psychologically it's very hard. It terrifies them," said Col Vall, who before the coup headed the country's national police."But it's a fear that must be overcome."

Promises are cheap, and dictators frequently refer to their nations as democracies, holding phony elections periodically to fabricate legitimacy. It's no wonder Mauritania was presumed to be no different, showing as red for undemocratic on this map I created a year ago based on the research of OTFord at the Stewardship Project. Perhaps it can follow in the footsteps of Liberia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Malawi which have made progress toward democracy in the last 15 years, and soon be colored blue.

What I really don't know is whether the institutions Vall has created in 17 short months are strong enough to withstand the temptations of a newly elected president to return autocratic rule to a country where such has been the norm. A dense field of 19 candidates (none constitutionally allowed to be associated with previous dictators) complicates the equation as this West African nation approaches its new day of hope.

Mauritania, good luck!

Bill Moyers speaks again

2007-03-08T19:10:00.000-08:00

Regular readers (those few of you) know that I'm a huge devotee of Bill Moyers. But if you're looking for his recent speech on income inequality which he delivered at the National Conference for Media Reform, you probably want to go here. I'm pleased to find out about it myself - not because I saw it featured somewhere on TV or a major publication - but because my blog has suddenly been hit predominately by folks looking for it.

If that's you, you're probably looking at my set of posts referencing Moyers, so come back and visit. I had the pleasure of attending a lecture he gave here in Seattle two years ago. You can read my report several articles below.

And remember, if there's any way to do so: always choose hope!

Loving & Hating the U.S. Senate

2007-03-07T12:00:00.000-08:00

Equivocation must be one of the defining qualifications for a career in politics. Learning how to take a stand while not offending those who disagree is often a hallmark of any successful politician, but with few exceptions Senators have elevated this skill to an artform.

As we approach the four year anniversary of the disastrous decision to invade another country with insufficient provocation or planning, I've been thinking of the Senate's role in that disaster, and searching for documentation about just what they were up to in the weeks before the invasion.

In October of 2002, by a 77-23 vote, the United States Senate authorized the President to use the U.S. Armed Forces against Iraq. So 23 Senators shared my distrust of this President to prudently make such a decision. That said, I can understand the concerns around reports of Saddam's weapons program and a complete lack of trust in his government which could lead some Senators plenty wary of war to legitimately feel it was in the interest of national security to give our President latitude to make that decision without the ordinary Congressional restraint. I disagreed then, and I think history has already proved me and the 23 right, but there is a difference between the authorization (an act of trust) and the decision to invade (an abuse of that trust).

My own Democratic Senator, Maria Cantwell, who voted for the authorization very capably equivocated in her press release at that time, declaring among other things:

If, for some reason, the U.N. Security Council does not act, I will expect the President to make a major and aggressive diplomatic effort to enlist other partners around the globe in doing the right thing to stop the Hussein threat. ... Mr. President, my vote for this resolution does not mean that I am convinced of the Administration has answered all the questions. I believe the following issues must be addressed before the U.N. or the U.S. move forward with military action.

First: Continued Multilateral Approach. [followed by details...]
Second: Successful Military Strategy. [followed by details...]
Third: A Postwar Commitment Strategy. [followed by details...]
Fourth: Fighting the Broader War on Terrorism. [followed by details...]
Fifth: Maintaining Middle East Stability. [followed by details...]
Sixth: Protecting Iraqi Civilians. [followed by details...]

Mr. President, I hope our vote tonight and the President's multilateral efforts lead to a successful result where we would not need to use them. But if we do, these men and women will meet the task with professionalism, conviction and resolve.

Mr. President, I do not now, nor have I ever believed that military action is a preferred method to address international conflict. But sometimes it is necessary.

Cantwell covered her tracks, and could rightly claim that the President's actions in taking us into war in March of 2003 did not meet the test she found implicit in the resolution. In my view more of those constraints needed to be explicit within any such resolution at the least. Sadly though, in the final days leading up to the invasion when it became increasingly clear that the administration would not wait for the UN Inspectors who had not yet finished their job, there was far too little outcry from Senators (e.g. exhibit Cantwell's lack of outcry here or here) objecting to the administration's abuse of their authorization. I'm not impressed by the claim that they were rolled by Powell's act at the U.N., or Bush's lies at the State of the Union address. In spite of sharing the general sense that Colin Powell was honorable and upright, the whole business smelled fishy enough to me that February of 2003 saw me thus:

There were Senators on both sides of that vote who should have been crying foul, but as has too often been the case, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin gave us the lonely voice of reason,

I believe that the administration has not made clear to the American people, however, the magnitude of the task the country is setting for itself – not only with regard to the military engagement, but with regard to occupation and reconstruction.

His resolution called on the President to further report to congress before sending troops to war, explicitly calling out many of the same requirements Cantwell found implicit in the resolution. Feingold's resolution was read twice then referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Most of our Senators are extremely bright. I believe most of them really do care about serving the interests of our nation. But this invasion didn't pass the smell test for me or millions of people around the world, and yet this body was strangely mute.

Many in the anti-war crowd have damned them for the October resolution, but I damn them even more for their February-March 2003 silence. How could it be so blazingly obvious to this citizen and millions of others around the world, and yet draw scarcely a peep out of the senior legislative body of the republic leading the charge to war?

We can speculate that those who voted for the resolution felt obliged to accept the Administration reports, and that they and others who voted against it chafed against the possible repercussions of appearing less than fully supportive of the troops whose lives would be on the line. Fear that the campaign might be fully successful and draw to a nice conclusion no doubt muted some who figured their political careers would come to an abrupt end if they questioned Bush and ended up on the wrong side of what might become a wildly popular war.

Oh, the timidity! Have they learned nothing? They can't even adopt a resolution against a "surge" in 2007 that clearly does NOT have popular or congressional support.

Feingold remains the shining star

You may surmise that I dislike every other Senator, but it's not true. Many garner my admiration for one reason or another. But when it comes to speaking one's truth without equivocation, Russell Feingold stands alone.

The PATRIOT Act: 96-Russ

It's pretty sad that only one Senator could bring himself to vote against a massive bill being rushed through the chamber before anyone had time to read it. Feingold hadn't had time either, but he read enough to find Constitutionally questionable provisions that many now agree should never have become law.

I'm not the only person out here who finds strength of character appealing. Feingold should be the standard. And look - he doesn't even come from one of the solidly blue states. Wisconsin has elected and re-elected this darling of progressives across the country, not because he is liberal, but because he is genuine.

Senators, your job is not to worry about the political calculus of every move you make and every word you say or write. Your job is to take care of our nation and represent your values honestly to your constituents. Show your character and your voters just might surprise you.

The Stench at Justice Expands

2007-02-28T13:16:00.000-08:00

We can now add Western Michigan's Margaret Chiara to the list of U.S. Attorneys who have been forced out by the White House and Alberto Gonzales. Watchblog's American Pundit put two and two together last month when San Diego's Carol Lam, who helped put Republican crook Duke Cunningham behind bars, was forced out. Gonzales may insist that no ongoing investigations are being jeopardized, but why then are we seeing the wholesale replacement of their own appointments by Bush loyalists? I smell something rotten.

And then there's the lies, and of couse the innuendo. Sure these positions are by nature political appointments, whose holders serve "at the pleasure of the President". They were appointed originally by this administration and have stepped down gracefully. But Bud Cummins of Eastern Arkansas, the first to go last year to make room for a Karl Rove aide, broke his silence after testimony in January by Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the six U.S. attorneys in the West and Southwest had been dismissed for "performance-related" reasons:

They're entitled to make these changes for any reason or no reason or even for an idiotic reason. But if they are trying to suggest that people have inferior performance to hide whatever their true agenda is, that is wrong. They should retract those statements.

Six of the seven earlier fired attorneys had positive performance reviews. Cummins is scarcely alone in his reaction to McNulty's insulting testimony.

You can visit ePluribusMedia for more fine articles detailing the recent firings and their implications: The Gonzales Seven; Gaming the System; and links to separate articles about each one.

Speculation about Chiara's departure include that it had something to do with previous clashes with the administration on the death penalty which she opposes. From the Grand Rapids Press article:

Federal prosecutors serve at the discretion of the president and may be dismissed for any reason, or no reason at all. Most serve for the duration of the president's term and expect to be replaced when a new party sweeps into office.

"The timing is suspicious for anyone to leave on their own will and in the middle of a term when they were appointed by the sitting president. That alone makes it unusual," [Grand Rapids lawyer, Jon] Muth said. "I can't imagine it being performance-related."

James Brady, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District, is concerned by the possibility Chiara could be connected to the recent dismissals.

"There's no question we're concerned that politics may be involved in these types of decisions," he said. "In the (other forced resignations) there was nothing but praise until some political trouble started."

Chiara opposes capital punishment, although she has vowed to uphold such laws.

The PATRIOT Act has a provision which gives the current Attorney General authority to appoint any provisional replacement U.S. Attorney for the remainder of the Presidential term without Congressional approval. Alberto Gonzales was confirmed in a controversial Senate vote back in January of 2005. He came in with the odor of being a primary architect of the policies that weakened our government's previous strong stance against torture, calling the Geneva Conventions quaint prior to the exposure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Even Republican Lindsey Graham of the Senate Judiciary Committe hearings during that confirmation expressed his dismay at a published Gonzales memo, stating:

when you start looking at torture statutes, and you look at ways around the spirit of the law, you're losing the moral high ground

Graham lacked the cojones to stand behind his principles and deny Gonzales' nomination, as he or Arlen Specter or any single Republican had the power to do, in what ended up being a 10-8 committee vote along party lines to forward the nomination to the full Senate.

And now that same morally crippled chief law enforcement officer of the land defends his capricious firings of 8 U.S. Attorneys in recent months, on shaky grounds. Gonzales is the one who should be fired. The stench smells from coast to coast.

Craig Watkins turns prosecution on its head

2007-02-25T20:31:00.000-08:00

Innocent people shouldn't be imprisoned.

Well, duh! That statement on its face will draw agreement across the entire political spectrum. But most folks in the prosecuting business don't seem to agree, when it means releasing prisoners their office successfully convicted. Newly elected Dallas, Texas district attorney Craig Watkins gets kudos for allowing common sense to trump possible embarrassment.

We've all heard the maxim "better 10 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be convicted." Some have stretched 10 to 100, and what the best number is can be honestly debated or discussed. The constraints put on law enforcement and prosecutors in gaining convictions, when fairly observed, do lessen the likelihood of punishing the innocent in many jurisdictions across the U.S. when compared to earlier times or other countries not sharing our presumption of innocence for the accused.

But once convicted, the shoe is clearly on the other foot.

Even prior to conviction the pressure to solve crimes too often leads police and prosecutors to seek convictions with too much zeal when the guilt of the accused is far from certain. Common sense tells me that zealotry will be manifest in some jurisdictions with a troubling regularity, and that where that is the case district attorneys will resist tooth and nail any attempt to exonerate the convicted.

Of course we want crimes to be solved and the guilty to be caught. We want police and prosecutors to work hard at their jobs to bring justice to criminals. But a crime is better unsolved than solved incorrectly. The attitude of "somebody's gotta pay" too easily transmutes into "anybody's gotta pay".

Enter Craig Watkins.

Actually first came DNA fingerprinting, then came the Innocence Project.

Everyone except the guilty ought to be happy about advances in DNA testing and its use in criminology. Barring tampering with evidence, the likelihood of identifying perpetrators correctly in serious crimes has gone up many fold since the days of my youth. Those behind bars for years who have steadfastly maintained their innocence now have new hope of exoneration. That along with the dogged determination of the Innocence Project founded in 1992 to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing. District Attorneys haven't exactly been champing at the bit to provide evidence to the Innocence Project to assure that any their office has wrongly convicted are exonerated. Many jurisdictions destroy evidence after some length of time, while a few dishonest ones no doubt destroyed lots of evidence once they became aware of an interest in reinvestigating claims of false convictions. As stated on IP's website:

Most law enforcement officers and prosecutors are honest and trustworthy. But criminal justice is a human endeavor and the possibility for corruption exists. Even if one officer of every thousand is dishonest, wrongful convictions will continue to occur.

Even honest DAs often aren't anxious to learn that even one of the defendants that they worked so hard to convict might be exonerated after a lengthy prison sentence. That may be why it took the election of an outsider to the DA's office in Dallas to finally produce a DA who will partner with the Innocence Project of Texas to review the cases of 354 inmates who have requested DNA testing.

Watkins, who has seen two men exonerated by DNA since taking office Jan. 1, describes his decision as a no-brainer.

"We had to make this move," Watkins said Friday. "We're going to do things right in Dallas County and right some wrongs that have been done in the past."

DNA evidence has exonerated 12 Dallas County men since 2001, which is more than all but two states, according to the Innocence Project.

A 13th man, James Giles, is expected to be exonerated within the next few weeks, Watkins said.

Thirty-four Dallas County inmates have received DNA testing since being convicted. Eleven saw their guilt confirmed and six are still going through the testing process. In five cases, the DNA testing was inconclusive, according to the district attorney's office.

Dallas County has been the site of an inordinate number of exonerations in part because the laboratory prosecutors use holds onto biological evidence for up to 25 years, said Jeff Blackburn, director of the Innocence Project of Texas.

Other labs across the state often destroy samples after convictions, he said.

Innocence Project lawyers and staffers will work with law students at Texas Wesleyan, Texas Tech, North Texas, University of Texas at Arlington and Southern Methodist to identify the most likely candidates for exonerations.

No tax money will be used to pay for testing, Watkins said.

This observer sees the potential for seismic repercussions across the country with greater scrutiny of prosecutors who have overseen multiple false convictions. Where there are a few there are likely to be many more. I'm certain Dallas County isn't the worse case, though the exoneration of 13 out of 35 hints strongly of either police or prosecutorial misconduct or both there.

The Innocence Project keeps a track record for many states based on previous exonerations and current state laws on compensation for exonorees, DNA access, and the recording of interrogations. You can click the map here for your state or state of interest.

Hillary & the Politics of Disavowal

2007-02-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

So I'm a bit behind the news cycle, but nonetheless feel compelled to post something about the overblown flap between the Clinton and Obama campaigns. First, I have a hard time believing that Hillary did herself any favors by calling the country's attention to the Maureen Dowd column and David Geffen's remarks. If she is the nominee, she will require the support of millions of American voters who are less than enthusiastic about her, so why should she explicitly attack the earnest criticisms of such a person, suggesting that such a free expression constitutes "the politics of trash".

Frankly Geffen's remarks ring true to this observer. I still would be likely to vote for Clinton over any Republican candidate, but I would be just a little less happy doing so now given her acid reaction to an opinion that closely reflects my own.

I've never been a fan of the politics of disavowal, which arguably may be more often a liberal ailment than a conservative one. Let's worry about policy statements, and what people do, not about what their friends say.

We Are the Deciders!

2007-01-31T22:35:00.000-08:00

In her memory, I think we should all be out in the streets banging pots and pans tomorrow.

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on January 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

-Molly Ivins, 20 days ago

August 30, 1944 - January 31, 2007

More Bush Power = More Transparency?

2007-01-31T12:44:00.000-08:00

Not bloody likely!

In yet another attempt to grab lost power, our secretive Administration announced two weeks ago that it will expand the review power of the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to include all guidance documents released within all Federal Agencies. Incredibly OMB spokeswoman Andrea Wuebker claims that the change will increase "the quality ... and transparency of agency guidance documents."

OK, this may not seem like a big deal, and it is not even close to the most outrageous thing this Administration has done, but it is illustrative of their consistent underlying desire to always control the message and make sure that decent public servants within the federal government cannot undermine Bush's political aims by doing their jobs responsibly. Now there is nothing wrong with OIRA taking the time to review the work going on within various agencies, and challenging documents they may feel are politically motivated or inaccurate. But the effect of this rule change is to create more hoops for agencies to go through before releasing guidance documents of any kind, making sure that each is first vetted by officials whose primary concern is political.

Already, the Bush Administration has taken huge advantage of Clinton's original executive order which prompted oversight review of all proposed regulations, to make sure that they were all "properly" vetted by the legions within Bush's executive branch who look after the interests of his pals in the boardroom. As OMB Watch noted last year, "the role of OIRA in rulemaking is often far more pervasive and substantive than the executive order circumscribes." We also already know that when science uncovers inconvenient facts, political appointees have free rein to reword scientific papers to suit political expediency. Now that WAS outrageous!

Don't you know Bush just hates it when such stories break? Well they figure maybe fewer inconvenient findings will ever make it to public eyes if every guidance document requires more paperwork and vetting before even being released. Transparency indeed! The intention here is just the opposite.

Congressional Replacement Therapy

2007-01-28T19:31:00.000-08:00

I was way too busy around election time to properly enjoy the wealth of good news that 2006's election entailed.

Each committee chair exchange is cause for celebration in these quarters; the combined effect is more glee than I can handle in a single post.

Henry Waxman, from California's 30th Congressional District has supplanted Virginia's Tom Davis as chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Even as the ranking member he was a thorn in the side of military contractors taking advantage of government largesse, from exposing or documenting the no-bid contracts for Halliburton to the excessive charges by Parsons for shoddy and delayed work. Now he's got sub-poena power.

And there are lots of details:

(May 2005-present)
(Feb 2004-May 2005)
(Apr 2003-Feb 2004)
(Mar & Apr 2003)

We Right-of-Center Liberals

2007-01-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

As reality has finally descended onto mainstream political discourse in America, the occasional continued chirpings of staunch Bush apologists has taken on more of an other-worldly, cornered-animal, delusional gloss than they had when mainstream attention gave them undeserved legitimacy. Surely it's only a matter of time until national policy will catch up with that reality. In the meantime, I will chuckle every time I see Democratic politicians referred to as "far-left liberals" or socialists.

There are many measures of conservatism and liberalism, but none of them have much relation to whether one acknowledges that our decision to occupy Iraq was the colossal error that most now realize it to have been. Pro-war Lieberman and newly anti-war Brownback should serve as testament to that.

But of all the measures used to measure ideology, the one most often employed is the extent to which one adheres to a market economy model vs. a centrally planned economy model. Some think capitalist vs. socialist, others command economy vs free enterprise, communist vs laissez-faire, but each is an expression of the same dichotomy, though there are many different flavors at each end and in the middle.

Most reasonable people today would acknowledge the problems associated with strict adherence to either extreme along this continuum, and in fact all western democracies have some form of mixed economy which combines elements from each. In these United States we have Social Security, Medicare, a nationalized Postal Service & defense, highly regulated utilities, a Federal Reserve, anti-trust laws, a minimum wage, and many other elements which distance us from a pure market economy, but market forces still remain the driving force for our economy as a whole. We have chosen a market economy with an overlay of some planned elements to keep in check some of the excesses associated with unreined free market capitalism, exposed in an earlier age by writers such as Charles Dickens and Upton Sinclair.

The really remarkable thing in America is the extent of agreement across more than 90% of the political spectrum with our choice of a market based mixed economy. From Dennis Kucinich to Orrin Hatch we are agreed on this. It is not surprising that even very conservative Americans who may think of themselves as pure free marketeers will concede that some aspects of central planning currently in place are desirable. It is somewhat more surprising given the excesses of corporatism evident today, that there aren't more who advocate moving to a planned model with market driven elements. But most of us recognize the dangers associated with ceding too much planning power to a central agency, and have witnessed from afar the far graver excesses of such central power when Stalin ruthlessly purged and punished dissent, or when Mao megalomaniacally exerted his power in the now defamed Cultural Revolution. Some democratically elected governments in Europe have enjoyed some measure of success with a more planned economy, but still I agree with most of my fellow Democrats that we are best served retaining a market based system, even as we advocate for more reasonable controls to counter corporate excess.

By definition, along this economic measure of left and right, a belief that we should retain a market based mixed economy, makes the vast majority of Democrats and liberals in America right of center. At the very least charges that we are far-left, fringe, or socialist are simply laughable. A democratic socialist perspective, far more common in Europe, ought to be a perfectly respectable one, and I think it sad that such views are routinely mocked or worse considered traitorous, in spite of my belief that America is better off retaining a market based model. The more purist views trotted out by the Heritage Foundation, Richard Viguerie, or Grover Norquist surely strike this observer as more extreme than those of a European style democratic socialist.

Ah well, I can live with that as long as America can continue the process of refinding her center, and begin to marginalize the divisive policies foisted upon us by the boardroom bought Republican leadership which at least no longer controls the agenda in Congress. Perhaps she can also find greater civility in political discourse as politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle respond to the disgust of the voters with the status quo and find language that can unite us, in spite of retained differences.

Can Obama Obliterate Limbaugh's Legacy?

2007-01-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

It seems almost silly at this stage, 20 month before the next Presidential election, to be getting too excited or too committed to any particular candidate for that office. Already I posted my allegiance to Russ Feingold here the very day after the midterms, only to have him declare his intention NOT to run mere days later. By the time Congressman Dennis Kucinich, my choice in the primaries of 2004 declared his candidacy, I had decided to hold off and wait for a Democrat who not only shared most of my values, but also had a credible chance of being taken seriously.

And so it was in the midst of reading Obama's Audacity of Hope that I (& thousands of others) received this email from the Senator, announcing his intention to form a presidential exploratory committee, writing:

...challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics. America's faced big problems before. But today, our leaders in Washington seem incapable of working together in a practical, common sense way. Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions.

In reading his book, it is apparent that Barack Obama more often takes a more moderate tack than what I might, but what I share with him is a passion about the pressing need for people, including politicians, to hone their ability to listen to conflicting perspectives and truly weigh what their adversaries are correct about, rather than derisively dismissing that adversary by association with some aspect of their belief or their affiliation with people or causes which the viewer finds either contemptible or ridiculous.

Mockery has always been around, and its use, whether in satire or a stand-up comedy routine, can lend new perspective, shaking sense into those who might otherwise too easily accept authority's explanation for the status quo. Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, though far too subtle in technique for today's standards, caricatured the Irish wealthy class' indifference to the poor in the 18th century. Jesus' General and Scrappleface capably carry the form with wry humor from two very different perspectives into the modern blogosphere.

But the extent to which modern politicking routinely leans on derision as the modus operandi for motivating its allies to action has poisoned political discourse in America. Even if Barack Obama doesn't win his party's nomination, having an eloquent voice directly challenge the "talking points" formulaic approach to winning by dividing might have a contagious effect on the race as a whole, as Americans yearn for a hopeful message, void of the scorn of the cultural wars.

Which brings me to Limbaugh's legacy. Wasn't it Rush that made an artform of holding up the orthodoxies of politically correct liberalism to ridicule? He was good at it too - and there were orthodoxies there that were laughable enough in their own right. Never mind that they did not represent the thinking of the majority of liberals - mockery worked. When a coworker by proximity introduced me to Limbaugh's tirades in the early nineties, I was struck by his then obsessive fixation with Sally Jessy Raphael as the exemplar of liberalism gone amok. Huh? I was a self-identified liberal, but I found Raphael's tawdry obsession with often morally skewed freaks distasteful at least, if not as repugnant as the antics of Springer or later Povich. Limbaugh successfully conflated liberalism with immorality in the minds of his faithful following, and aside from helping to spawn an ugly brand of lock-step conservatism, with orthodoxies at least as absurd as those he was so adept at exposing or fabricating among carefully selected liberals and academics, he also promoted derision as the chief tool for political discussion and argument.

Today, while my car was in the shop, the loaner car I drove was tuned to Limbaugh, whom I've pretty much avoided since getting more than my fill in 1992 & 93. While I occasionally tune into liberal talk radio today, I recognize what it borrows from Limbaugh's legacy. Today though, I took the opportunity to flip back and forth between Rush and Thom Hartmann. I might usually agree with the analysis of Hartmann, and often his conclusions, while rarely agreeing with Limbaugh, but both are skillfully pandering to many listeners' appetites for derision of their foes, and I won't mind a bit if both are marginalized by a central core of Americans hungry for more civility with a focus on possible solutions to our problems, rather than a mentality of winning at any cost.

That does not mean that everyone should be a centrist. No! No! No! America and the world will thrive best when thoughtful people from diverse perspectives are allowed to contribute their ideas and skills to our common destiny. Feingold on the left and Oklahoma's Tom Coburn on the right are more valuable to the Senate in my estimation than the more moderate, and arguably more powerful, Chuck Schumer is or Bill Frist was. The former are genuine representatives of their constituencies, not panderers to talking points and political expediency. Americans are sometimes surprised when seemingly huge political divides are bridged, like Orrin Hatch and Ted Kennedy coming together to promote legislation, but they shouldn't be. Obama understands this interplay, and has already had remarkable success at playing the political game while retaining a compelling voice for goodwill and the promotion of common values.

I'm also hungry for great oratory, and was too young to appreciate that of JFK. We've really not had a great orator for a President since JFK. Good speeches here and there from almost every President, including the current one, but a great orator - that would be a welcome change. Obama does not reflect my views perfectly, but in large measure where we differ, his electability is enhanced by that difference. I've read enough and seen enough to be convinced that America would benefit from his candidacy if not his presidency, and have accordingly already sent him that message in the form of a few dollars. Now is the time to do so if you agree, as his expected announcement is expected to come on February 10 (auspiciously my own 50th birthday).

So while the pundits legitimately may question Obama's foreign policy experience, let me leave by quoting this prescient passage from a speech that he gave to an anti-war crowd in 2002, before most of his expected Democratic opponents who happen to have been in the Senate voted to authorize Bush's blank check for taking war to Iraq:

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.... The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors...and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

We sure could have used some of THAT inexperience in the oval office in the Spring of 2003!

The Egalitarian Ideal

2006-12-30T19:29:00.000-08:00

Is egalitarianism an unattainable, and thus naive, pointless abstraction, or is it a principle central to the American ideal? Politics always involves an interplay between philosophical abstractions and pragmatic concessions to reality. That is as it should be. We err terribly if a recognition of non-attainability leads to the abandonment of ideals.

In our personal lives, horizons are necessarily limited, and lofty goals often must be scaled back or altered in order to set new goals which are indeed attainable. Sadly for some, that means abandoning not only the unattainable goal, but also the worthy ideal which buttressed it. But for others it means balancing the ideals with realism, and achieving something that can make a difference, rather than overreaching and achieving nothing, or giving up and substituting lofty goals with cynical opportunistic ends.

Our nation's history serves as a testament to the worthiness of the egalitarian ideal, boldly written into our Declaration of Independence, but incrementally approached as two centuries saw the extension of the vote to non-land owners, then an end to slavery, then women's suffrage, and further progress in the mid-twentieth century in the rights of minorities. As Martin Luther King Jr, who participated in creating that progress noted in 1967, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." Formalization of an ideal, such as that written into the Declaration of Independence can have a lasting influence in moving toward that ideal, however unattainable the ultimate manifestation of the ideal can be.

Of course, there will always be inequities. There is wisdom in the oft heard counsel that "life isn't fair" and we do well to recognize that early. But that does not mean that fairness should be thrown away as a value, nor does it justify mistreatment of our fellow human beings, just because absolute equality is unattainable. No matter how much someone may buy into the notion that making things fair is a hopeless proposition, it always seems they will still be acutely aware when they are not dealt a fair hand.

The egalitarian ideal has been held up by people of various political stripes throughout America's history, and adopted broadly in many parts of the world as a worthy goal. No philosophy or party has the market cornered on it, nor do I wish for that, but for much of the last century Democrats have been more consistent than Republicans in holding it up as central to the American dream, and it is largely due to that emphasis that my own identification has remained that of a Democrat throughout my adult life. My party's candidates stumble and fail frequently enough, but the egalitarian ideal remains an American ideal to which I hope the Democrats can hold fast as we approach the future.

And let us all, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and others alike, continue to hold ideals and vision as a beacon to guide our policy and politics as we grapple with the realities in our imperfect world.

Happy New Year!

Yunus: Poverty is a threat to Peace

2006-12-14T07:08:00.000-08:00

The Nobel committee chose wisely this year when they awarded the Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, whose Grameen Bank revolutionized credit and proved that poor women of Bangladesh were better credit risks than wealthy men in suits from New York. Yunus' acceptance speech last weekend, heard on Democracy Now, tells the story worth repeating:

"This year's prize gives the highest honor and dignity to the hundreds of millions of women all around the world who struggle every day to make a living and bring hope for better lives for their children. This is an historic moment for all of them. By giving us this prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has given important support to the proposition that peace is inextricably linked to poverty. Poverty is a threat to peace.

World's income distribution gives a very telling story. 94% of the world income goes to 40% of the world population, while 60% of people live only with 6% of the world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day.

The millennium began with a great global dream. World leaders gathered at the United Nations in 2000 and adopted, among others, a historic goal to reduce poverty by half by 2015. Never in human history had such a bold goal been adopted by the entire world in one voice, one that specified time and size.

But then came September 11 and the Iraq war, and suddenly the world became derailed from the pursuit of this dream, with the attention of the world leaders shifting from the war on poverty to the war on terrorism. ’Til now, over $530 billion has been spent on the war in Iraq by the USA alone.

I believe terrorism cannot be won by the military action. Terrorism must be condemned in the strongest possible language. We must stand solidly against it and find all the means to end it. We must address the root cause of terrorism to end terrorism for all time to come. I believe that putting resources into improving the lives of the poor is a better strategy than spending it on guns.

Peace should be understood in a human way, in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace, we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to live decent lives. The creation of opportunities for the majority of the people -- the poor -- is at the heart of the work that we have dedicated ourselves during the past 30 years.

I became involved in the poverty issue, not as a policymaker or as a researcher. I became involved because poverty was all around me, and I could not turn away from it. In 1974, I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine that was raging in Bangladesh. Suddenly, I felt the emptiness of all those theories in the face of the crushing hunger and poverty.

I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease. That brought me face to face with poor people’s struggle to find the tiniest amounts of money to support their efforts to eke out a living.

I was shocked to discover a woman in the village, borrowing less than a dollar from the money lender, on the condition that he would have the exclusive right to buy all she produces at the price that he decides. This, to me, was a way of recruiting slave labor.

I decided to make a list of the victims of the money lending in the village next door to our campus. When my list was complete, I had names of 42 victims, who borrowed a total amount of $27. I was shocked. I offered this $27 from my own pocket to get these victims out of the clutches of the money lenders.

The excitement that was created among the people by this action got me further involved in it. If I could make so many people so happy with such a tiny amount of money, why shouldn’t I do more of it? That’s what I have been trying to do ever since.

The first thing I did was try to persuade the bank located in the campus to lend money to the poor. But that didn’t work. They didn’t agree. The bank said that the poor are not creditworthy. After all my efforts for several months, when it failed, I offered to become a guarantor for the loans to the poor.

When I gave the loans, I was stunned by the result I got. The poor paid back their loans on time, every time. But still, I kept confronting difficulties in expanding the program through the existing banks. That was when I decided to create a separate bank for the poor. I finally succeeded in doing that in 1983. I named it Grameen Bank or Village Bank.

Today, Grameen Bank gives loans to nearly 7 million poor people -- 97% of them are women -- in 73,000 villages of Bangladesh. Grameen Bank gives collateral-free income-generating loans, housing loans, student loans and micro-enterprise loans to the poor families and offers them a host of attractive savings, pension funds and insurance products for its members.

Since it introduced them in 1984, housing loans have been used to construct 640,000 houses. The legal ownership of these houses belongs to the women themselves. We focused on women, because we found giving loans to women always brought more benefits to the family.

In a cumulative way, the bank has given out a loan totaling about $6 billion. Repayment rate, 99%. Grameen Bank routinely makes profit. Financially, it is self-reliant and has not taken donor money since 1995. Deposits and own resources of Grameen Bank today amount to 143% of all outstanding loans. According to Grameen Bank's internal survey, 58% of our borrowers have crossed the poverty line.

Grameen Bank was born as a tiny homegrown project run with the help of several of my students, all local girls and boys. Three of these students are still with me in Grameen Bank, after all these years, as its topmost executives. They are here today to receive this honor you gave us.

This idea, which began in Jobra, a small village in Bangladesh, has spread around the world. There are now Grameen-type programs in almost every country in the world.

The photo of the weaver comes from this 2002 article on Yunus and microcredit from Sustainable Times.

John Haynes Holmes & Harry Emerson Fosdick

2006-11-12T17:07:00.000-08:00

Two forward thinking theologians active in the early part of the twentieth century have been brought to my attention recently. Harry Emerson Fosdick began his ministry in the Baptist tradition of my own upbringing, while John Holmes Haynes started his ministry in the Unitarian tradition which I have now adopted in its Unitarian Universalist incarnation. Both were outspoken liberals within their traditions, creating some uproar in their day, but also engendering a dedicated following of progressive religious thinkers.

Reading their brief biographies points up the extent to which we share the same battles simply in different garb as those of our forebears, and that those on both sides of these battles have their foibles as they do their inspiration. Anyone with insight into the lives of either of these two, or perhaps on any interaction between them is invited to comment here.

Keep it Simple, Congress

2006-11-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

Already I have some more advice for the new Democratic majorities in Congress.

Write some really simple legislation.

Americans are already disgusted with the "I'll scratch your back, if you'll scratch mine" system of governance in which bills become absurd conglomerations of disparate issues which no one wholly agrees with and no one wholly disagrees with. With majorities, Democrats have an opportunity to just say no to that process, and put bills in front of the President which are popular with the American people and carry no baggage that spoil their central theme.

Minimum wage is a great example. Democrats should avoid the temptation to fill a minimum wage bill with liberal riders. Make the President's veto, if he dares, mean exactly that he thinks it's ok for employers to pay sub-poverty wages.

Reverse the worst of the Republican legislation of the last 12 years a piece at a time. There's so much to do - make each piece of it as simple as possible. Allow the government to negotiate the best prices with pharmaceuticals for prescription drugs. Reverse the media consolidation rules which squelch diversity of opinion broadcast over TV and radio. Etc, etc, etc. One at a time the American people can come to understand that Democratic leadership is in their best interest. But only if the Democrats deliver that leadership.

No doubt Bush will be dusting off his veto pen at long last, but maybe there's a limit to the number of popular bills that an unpopular president can get away with vetoing. Opportunities abound; I'm choosing hope.

Russ Feingold, 2008: A Principled Progressive

2006-11-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

[Update 12 Nov: Russ Feingold on Saturday, 11 November 2006, withdrew his name from consideration for the Democratic ticket for 2008. Who can blame anyone for not wanting to go through a grueling campaign, much less actually have to run the executive branch of government. If he says he's out, I believe him - Feingold has always been a man of his word. I maintain the central sentiment of this message nonetheless. A principled stand for progressive values, consistently applied can win the respect of the American people, even when those values are frequently deemed to be "more liberal" than the average American. Dare to dream!]

Whew!

A 12 year stranglehold on the lower chamber of our Congress by the greed-driven faction of the Republican party has been decisively broken. The grown ups (hopefully) can now set the agenda, and reasonable Republicans can participate.

So why wait on looking toward 2008?

It's time to break the right-left dichotomy myth as well.

Principled Progressive values are common sense compassionate values which in their simplest form are shared by the majority of the American people.

Russ Feingold has represented those values consistently with integrity and grace.

They'll say he's "too far left". Let him speak. America is ready to listen.

They said Howard Dean's 50 state strategy was nuts. It wasn't. Dean has been a great nuts and bolts leader of the Democratic Party.

Russ Feingold can be an inspirational leader of our great nation.

Dare to dream!

Fire Rumsfeld, Jail Cheney, Impeach Bush!

2006-11-08T07:43:00.000-08:00

Nay, do it not ye Dems of the new majorities.

However little doubt you may have that those criminal miscreants deserve such fates, the agenda of the 110th Congress must not and will not be consumed with recriminations, but rather with doing the necessary business of this nation which has been so woefully neglected over the last six years.

At this time, expedience must trump justice. The not-so-perilous Nancy Pelosi realizes it well, and in spite of the hue and cry from the right over her misperceived extremism, all indications are she gets it, and will successfully negotiate the balance between overplaying the Democrats' hand and governing too timidly.

Investigations will occur, and rightly so! But the emphasis will be (or should be) on uncovering corruption that has remained hidden, not on targeted witch hunts of particular individuals.

Front and center instead will be popular measures like raising the minimum wage, retracting the ban on negotiating prices with big pharmaceuticals, breaking the link between lobbyists and legislation, and finally enacting all the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. "Drain the GOP swamp", Ms Pelosi, America won't find it so controversial.

As for the title actions of this post? Well this observer suspects Rumsfeld may see the writing on the wall and take care of the first himself by resigning without giving Bush a choice in the matter. Calls for his resignation or dismissal are already much broader than ever, coming from scarcely ideologically driven sources. Bringing our Vice President to justice for his lies and reckless policies may never happen. He will be shamed by history, however, when all is said and done, as will his boss who delegated his responsibilities in foreign policy to a naive band of fools whose hubris led to a destabilization of the Middle East which we will have to live with for years to come. I'm afraid the Dems don't have the magic glue for fixing that pot, much less the authority to do much if they did.

Still I will savor this moment, knowing that the repudiation of the power corrupt Republican leadership was shared by liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike. This is still, on balance, a conservative nation, but we learned last night that shutting out voices of reason from the other side can only last so long. I don't think Democrats will make the same mistake, at least not now. And perhaps conservatives will learn in the next two years that the principled cravings of progressive Democrats are not as out of touch with mainstream American values as they have been led to believe.

My Land, Your Land, Our Land

2006-11-04T14:30:00.000-08:00

My home state of Washington must fend off an atrociously crafted property rights initiative, I-933, in next Tuesday's election. A recent poll suggests cause for great hope in both this race and the other initiatives in my state. If it proves true, I believe it will be the first time ever that I voted on the winning side of every initiative here.

Property rights measures often succeed by appealing to Americans' notions about property ownership and the American dream. "Property fairness" is the rallying cry of its supporters. My own predisposition is to be very distrustful of property rights movements, which are often motivated by greed and selfishness at the expense of the public good. That doesn't mean I cannot acknowledge instances where simplistically crafted regulations constrain reasonable uses of people's land creating justifiable resentment against government. But the answer doesn't lie in a simplistically crafted initiative voted on by the public at large, rather than having elected representatives hammer out the details to mitigate problems with existing regulation.

Even the Yakima Herald-Republic in conservative eastern Washington farm country was able to recognize the problems with an initiative approach to solving these complex issues:

About the most positive thing we can say about Initiative 933 is that it is a good example of why it's bad public policy to write complex state laws by initiative -- absent the give-and-take of debate and compromise in the legislative arena.

No doubt their predisposition on property rights differs considerably from mine, but even so we've come to the same conclusion.

The down side to having such strong predispositions is that I'm less inclined to become as fully informed as I might about issues where I'm more doubtful of my own stance. I reacted strongly against an online libertartian-right "voters guide" sent me by a libertarian leaning friend. While I am sufficiently informed to be quite certain that I-933 would make bad law, that certainty has hampered me from doing the background research to make that case to someone who doesn't share my predispositions.

Hence my follow up answer to her was couched in some uncertainty:

I don't pretend to be an expert, but my impression is that 933 proponents claim that the state, counties, and municipalities frequently write regulations which are in abridgement of the state constitution because they do devalue the property without compensation, and that their initiative simply enforces the constitution.

I believe some claims of devaluation are specious, some are correct, and some are debatable. For just about any issue one can find gray areas. In my opinion this initiative gives ammunition to any property owner whose personal interpretation of any post-1996 regulation leads him/her to believe there property has been devalued to sue for damages or to have the regulation overturned. Having encountered folks I deem as "property rights yahoos" in action before, that has me seeing red. Lots of these folks are motivated by greed and get their undies in a bunch at some perceived injustice when reasonable regulations spell out that there are certain uses prohibited of their land. Some may even seek compensation for potential profits they are being denied that they really didn't even intend to take advantage of.

If someone buys land at some point when regulations at the time of purchase allow them to build a residence and regulations change to disallow that, then I believe the current constitution should come into play to protect their interests, and they should either be allowed to build or be compensated for takings. Again, I'm not an expert, but I believe such cases don't require this initiative. While there may be cases where an owner has been unreasonably hurt by regulation, and deserves redress, this initiative is not the silver bullet for providing that redress. In spite of a few exceptions written into 933, its language adopts a far too broad approach which in the completely accurate words of the No campaign "goes too far, and costs too much."

I further acknowledged that there are some cases of eminent domain abuse, such as the Kelo decision, where I actually sided with the conservative justices. The public good argument didn't fly in that case for me - rather it seemed like a municipality caving to moneyed interests. Especially in an instance where the result of the decision is to force someone out of their own home so it can be developed into a condominium to be sold to wealthier people.

So I am not always kneejerk reactive against property rights, but an early fondness for William Faulkner and the Native American sensibility about the land and ownership do cause me to cast a wary eye toward those for whom property rights is their most burning issue. So while I won't be burning the paperwork that the bank has given me regarding my investment in a certain plot of land, I will always regard it with a certain bemused attitude toward the concept that human beings own little pieces of the earth's crust. Any piece of land is part of a system which takes precedence over anyone's putative ownership of that piece. An ownership system is fine as long as ownership obliges the owner to appropriate stewardship of their holding. The land after all will be around long after we depart.

Thanks to Land Use Watch from neighboring Oregon for the pointer to the recent encouraging poll.

Death penalty thrown out in Cory Maye case

2006-10-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

Coincidentally, I happened upon today's daily podcast at the Cato Institute, a site I rarely visit, which featured news on the Cory Maye case which I highlighted here back in January and February of this year.

The good news is that the death penalty was thrown out in this case. In the podcast Radley Balko explains three possible actions that the current presiding judge could take. He could refer the case directly to resentencing; he could override the jury's verdict and declare Maye not guilty (which Balko says precedent would clearly allow, and perhaps even dictate in this case), or he could schedule the case for retrial, which Balko believes to be the most likely scenario.

I highly recommend the podcast, a compelling interview with Balko.

Maher Arar, I'm profoundly sorry

2006-09-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

Just how many letters of profound apology are owed to innocent victims of our overzealous policies supposedly aimed at curbing terrorism? And how much animosity and likely future terrorism has been created by these misguided policies?

Khaled el-Masri, I'm profoundly sorry
Maher Arar, I'm profoundly sorry

I'm profoundly sorry that my government abdicated its responsibility in determining your innocence, and instead sent you to foreign lands where you were tortured and brutalized and made to confess to acts which you did not do. My government still seeks to excuse their criminal negligence against you and your loved ones, but I do not excuse them. Please forgive my fellow Americans for too long tolerating this sort of behavior from their government.

el-Masri and Arar are the two on this list of examples (scroll down) of extraordinary rendition who are clearly innocent. Many of the others there were apprehended on arguably flimsy evidence. In any case America should be about due process, and abdicating our responsibility to deal with likely terrorists because "wink, wink" these other governments without our scruples might be able to extract confessions, is a morally bankrupt and counter productive policy.

Oh, but we have Alberto Gonzales' assurance that:

Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria, I'm not aware that he was tortured, and I haven't read the Commission report. Mr. Arar was deported under our immigration laws. He was initially detained because his name appeared on terrorist lists, and he was deported according to our laws.

Some people have characterized his removal as a rendition. That is not what happened here. It was a deportation. And even if it were a rendition, we understand as a government what our obligations are with respect to anyone who is rendered by this government to another country, and that is that we seek to satisfy ourselves that they will not be tortured. And we do that in every case. And if in fact he had been rendered to Syria, we would have sought those same kind of assurances, as we do in every case.

Mr Gonzales you are a moral cripple who should be disbarred, let alone be sitting as the chief law enforcement officer of our land. That's harsh language against someone who appears so reasonable, and no doubt would be incapable of inflicting torture on anyone himself. But it was Gonzales who as chief counsel to the President was architect to internal policies weakening our commitment to the Geneva Conventions, referring to them as "quaint" and giving cover to those who created the environment for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, many against entirely innocent Iraqis who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

If Gonzales had any decency we would be expressing profound regret at the pain and suffering caused to innocent families trapped by the web of his own making. But instead he defends, denies, and asks us to believe that the government is satisfied in every case that such extradited prisoners will not be tortured.

But they were. Time and time again. Why send them except because we know that these other governments are not constrained as we are? And we are far less constrained already because of your policies? When will we renounce this madness? And still Bush stubbornly fights members of his own party to weaken our commitment against inhumane and degrading treatment. Canada's Harper could use some lessons in humility as well.

This is surely beyond the pale, and I just don't get those who don't understand that.

WA State Supreme Court Race Results

2006-09-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

Of the major TV websites, it looks like King5 has the best primary night election coverage of those important races for Supreme Court.
At the moment Gerry Alexander vs John Groen is too close to call, the incumbent holding a 5 point edge with 25% counted. It looks like the presence of the extra candidates will cause a run-off to happen in the race between Susan Owens and Stephen Johnson, and nutcase Burrage will fail to get on the court.

It would be interesting to do in depth polling of the 22% of people who are voting for one of the other 3 candidates in the Owens-Johnson race, since Owens and Johnson by all previous reports were really the only serious candidates. Are these folks contrarians, guessing, or might those who voted for the other Johnson just be mixing up the names.

Well my fingers are crossed for Alexander - Groen seems downright creepy to me. We'll still have to drum up support for Owens in the General election in November.

Codifying Prisoner Mistreatment a Grievous Mistake

2006-09-18T16:41:00.000-07:00

Stephen Daugherty wrote an excellent article on WatchBlog yesterday which did a great job of covering the bases on why writing in exceptions to (clarifying, according to Bush) the Geneva Conventions when it comes to humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners is just awful policy on so many levels. I highly recommend the full article, but suggest that you just skip the comments section.

A Time for Partisanship

2006-09-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

We should yearn for dialogue, not stridency; for calmly deliberated, rational solutions in public policy, not do-nothing bickering between shrill ideologues which leaves us with the status quo.

Frustration in America is palpable across the political spectrum. People with very different ideas about what direction is best are rightly annoyed that partisan divisiveness has engendered a climate of distrust.

Appealing to that frustration can result in some pretty compelling political advertising by candidates from any party who claim to represent a sensible deliberate approach to governance while attacking partisanship as a divisive source of political gridlock.

In my state of Washington, Republican candidate for Senate, Mike McGavick, is airing such a set of commercials. But I know that McGavick supports policies which run counter to my idea of good governance. (And his implication that incumbent Senator Cantwell is an exemplar of partisan divisiveness is dishonest. Cantwell's biggest problem may well come from the pacifist sensibilities of the liberal leaning Puget Sound electorate, many of whom were upset with the extent to which she supported Bush's Iraq policy.) More importantly, independents and moderate Republicans need to understand that in order for real dialogue to be restored, one-party control of government must be squashed.

That's right -- partisanship, specifically Democratic partisanship, is desperately needed right now to bring some balance to government so that dialogue can return.

Jack Whelan at the After the Future, summed it up brilliantly in a pair of posts (1) & (2) a month ago. Please read them both!

. . . moderates play right into the hands of the far right which hopes that no one mounts a serious opposition to their agenda. The longer the hard right can keep the moderates diverted in "reasonable" conversation, the more time it gives it to consolidate power. That's why moderates need throw their support to partisan Democrats, whether they like them or not. There is no other way to create a potent counterbalance to the power-grabbing agenda of the right. The right works hard to present a reasonable facade, but feels no need to negotiate or compromise unless it is forced to do so, and at the moment there is no political power potent enough to force such negotiations.

So my point is that moderates, if they really understood how serious the threat we are facing, would have no choice but to become partisans in opposing the current power grab by the far right. There is no way to communicate the seriousness of this threat moderately. And since moderates are inoculated against immoderate language, they cannot hear the alarm because it is alarmist. As such they are vulnerable to manipulation by the far right who achieve their ends precisely by playing moderates for the moderates that they are.

. . . There are no moderates in one-party systems; there are only collaborators. ... I consider myself a centrist, but I know many readers consider me alarmist. ... And I am particularly alarmed that moderates are still sitting on the fence because they think that's the grownup, reasonable thing to do. On the contrary, it's time to get alarmed, very alarmed.

Someone reading only this, or for that matter only Jack's articles might well complain that we have not cited the evidence that requires such an alarm. But I have to wonder what box such a person must have been living in for the last 5 years.

It's a Big Time in America

2006-09-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

That was Jim Hightower's catchphrase last night as he entertained, agitated, and communed with an activist rich community last night in Seattle's Town Hall.

Hightower never minces words in his indictment of the powers that be who misuse their wealth and power to separate themselves from the rest of us, but what secures my admiration of him is his unrelenting optimism in spite of his often dire analysis. He finds the underlying progressivism in the fabric of America, even among those who think of themselves as conservative. Of Republican mothers he comments, "Guess what? They don't want pesticides on their babies' food."

"We don't have to create a progressive movement, we just have to go out and collect it up!"

There were zingers aplenty.

America depends on its agitators to beat out the dirt.

The bigwigs are "gettin' so rich they could air condition hell, and I tell you what ..."

When the Bushites tell the poor about their number of jobs they created, one working poor woman respond "I know, I have 3 of them!" (Then Hightower went on the expose that myth noting that Bush has created the fewest jobs of any president since Hoover.)

He quoted fellow Texan Bill Moyers who has noted that "the delusional is no longer marginal."

He made fun of himself, noting that at an earlier point in his career he decided to "stop running for office, and start running his mouth."

But beyond the barbs, Hightower's optimism takes over. He told the faithful that "pursuit of egalitarianism is America's true path." He doesn't pretend that the road will be easy or that it will be short. He reminded us that suffragists Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton never lived to get the vote themselves. But what they wrought brought America one step closer to its egalitarian destiny. Hightower referred to the "prairie fires of rebellion across America" today - "It's a big time in America!" and he quoted the Chinese proverb, "Those who say it can't be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

He talked about how lucky he is to be able to travel all over America and meet the people who are getting things done. He thanked the crowd - not for coming to hear him, but for being on the front lines of the fight to retain our democracy. He thanked the sponsors. He thanked the Seattle Peace Chorus who had warmed the crowd up with several rousing songs of hope. He took a moment to remember the recently passed Ann Richards, another rabble-rousing Texan who made a real difference in moving that state forward in an earlier decade. His words were a accompanied by a genuine warmth, a warmth that was felt by a number of us lucky enough to meet him before the main event. Jim Hightower is the real deal, not just a blabbermouth ideologue looking for attention. He understands that the struggle is not about ideology, it's about truth.

All of us are going to be wrong sometimes, and sometimes partial truths can lead well intentioned people to disastrous decisions. But other times it's pretty obvious what's going on, and if we're all too timid to say it the powerful will continue to run roughshod over us. Timidity is certainly not among Hightower's shortcomings. We can always count on the sharp-witted Texan to give it to us straight in his "Lowdown", regulary aired on many public radio stations. But if you ever get a chance to see him live, don't miss it. Hightower live is a helluva treat.

"Exquisite Hypocrisy"

2006-09-10T17:15:00.000-07:00

That's how Noemie Maxwell captioned the photo of unqualified Washington State Supreme Court candidate John Groen in her excellent article, Buying Justice & Lying About It over at Washblog.

This [Groen] is the man who touts his "eighteen years (of) experience before the Washington Supreme Court, advocating for property rights," He's raised, $276,061.56 for this race, according to Washington's Public Disclosure Commission records. Much of it's from from lumber, construction, and development interests. Scads of it was poured into the campaign right before a June deadline that made such contributions illegal. SDS Company, for example, which provided $25,000 right before that deadline, is a lumber company from Klickitat County. Then we've got $25,000 from the principals of another development company, Sundquist Homes. And so on.

Gerry Alexander, our current chief justice, known as a moderate, adhered to the letter and spirit of Washington's law and has raised only $47,581.60. Alexander, according to King County Bar Association, is exceptionally well qualified.

We have only a week to expose the hypocrisy of those attempting to buy justice for their narrow well-moneyed interests. I fear Susan Owens is in particular trouble in her race against a better qualified (better qualified than Groen is faint praise) property-rights ideologue, Stephen Johnson who has secured several more media endorsements in his attempt to unseat the incumbent, who bravely sided with the minority in the recent high profile case on gay marriage. Hopefully, nutcase Jeanette Burrage's reputation will keep her from unseating the outstanding sitting justice Tom Chambers.

In the long term, we need to get our state to revisit a system which allows a primary vote to be the final determinant for these important offices, but all we can do now is to make sure our friends and acquaintances are informed and don't let the real "activist judges" take over the court for the building industry.

Resources include
Voting for Judges
Public Disclosure Commission

The Election of Judges

2006-08-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

Once again in my state of Washington, important Supreme Court Judges are about to be chosen in a likely low-turnout primary. Once again right-wing "property rights" advocates are attempting a stealth campaign to get their frequently under-qualified ideologues who do not represent the majority of our electorate into these powerful positions.

I fear the same sort of thing is happening across the country, as studies show that in recent elections money is being pumped into these judicial campaigns at unprecedented levels. Personally I question the wisdom of popularly electing judges. I want qualified judges who have gone through a thoughtful review process, not pretty faces who are good at waging an election campaign. Further, the majority of the electorate simply isn't interested in doing the research necessary to make a truly informed decision.

My short-term message to Washington voters is to reelect incumbent justices Owens, Alexander, and Chambers, and incumbent appeals judge Becker. My longer term question is can we work toward changing our silly system of electing judges in which unqualified candidates such as Jeanette Burrage are even allowed to run, and special interest money is allowed to hijack our judicial process?

Nationwide, most states do elect justices, though in many of those the vote is a referendum on retaining an already appointed judge, thus largely avoiding the danger of unqualified ideologues bypassing a more professional review. Of course appointments can result in bad choices as well, so I'm not sure what system is best, only that the popular election system currently in place in Washington and nearly half the other states is badly flawed. Here is a snapshot of the system in place in each of the states back in 1995. I do not know how much it may have changed since then. Here is a more recent document (pdf) with somewhat different information about the courts in all the states.

Bill Moyers: on Faith & Reason

2006-08-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

Though I taped the whole series, I was delighted to find the complete transcripts on line just now, in easy to read & easy to print format:

1 - Salman Rushdie
2 - Mary Gordon and Colin McGinn
3 - Jeanette Winterson and Will Power
4 - Anne Provoost and David Grossman
5 - Richard Rodriguez and Sir John Houghton
6 - Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis
7 - Pema Chodron

Thank you Bill, for coming back to public television. America desperately needs your calm wisdom and openness. I couldn't blame you personally for leaving NOW after making it one of the finest investigative acts on television, but shortening the show to half and hour accentuated my disappointment. And I was aghast that an ideologue such as Kenneth Tomlinson could spend our tax dollars to try to "prove your liberal bias". You got it right when you fired back:

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican Party gets. That's because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

Hey, I know you won't do it, but I've long harbored the same wish that Molly Ivins recently expressed in an op-ed piece:

imagine, if seven or eight other Democratic candidates, all beautifully coiffed and triangulated and carefully coached to say nothing that will offend anyone, stand on stage with Bill Moyers in front of cameras for a national debate … what would happen? Bill Moyers would win, would walk away with it, just because he doesn’t triangulate or calculate or trim or try to straddle the issues. Bill Moyers doesn’t have to endorse a constitutional amendment against flag burning or whatever wedge issue du jour Republicans have come up with. He is not afraid of being called “unpatriotic.” And besides, he is a wise and a kind man who knows how to talk on TV.

I wonder how much mail Moyers has received since Ivins posted his P.O. Box at the end of her article. I think I should send some love his way. What a gentle soul.

Knowledge is Best Defense against Terrorism

2006-08-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

In the days and weeks following 9/11, what always struck me as missing in the response was a clear message to the terrorists that they had used up that method of operation. Not because of new security measures at airports, but because the method was now common knowledge. What happened on the Flight 93 was proof, that given knowledge our citizens can be relied upon to react as necessary.

Terrorists depend on secrecy in their planning. If one week before 9/11 the plans for hijacking planes with box cutters & running them into buildings had been announced, and such warnings given regularly at all airports, then I dare say 1) the terrorists wouldn't have even tried it & 2) if they had other passengers would have fought them before they were ever able to get to the cockpit. Not that there might not have been lives lost, but the plot would have been foiled.

Just how surreptitiously could a person or persons carry out this new threat of mixing ingredients on planes.

Chertoff said the terrorists planned to bring various bomb components in a benign state aboard the planes and combine them once the planes were aloft to create and detonate explosive devices. Sources tell CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart that these chemical bombs would have been set with timers to go off simultaneously.

Must the government step in to protect us from ourselves and prohibit everyone and their grandma from taking shampoo in their carry-ons? Ironically these restrictions probably won't last - but they will create terrible inconvenience for millions of passengers at the very time when they are probably least necessary: right after everyone knows of the plan and terrorists would be least likely to follow through with it.

It seems now is a good time to remind ourselves of JFK's "Ask not" quote.

Senators Tester & Lamont? Let's hope!

2006-08-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

If I lived in Connecticut, I'd certainly have voted for Ned Lamont yesterday. Some people think that makes me radically left. That's just funny. There may be pieces of my world view which are radical by today's standards. Thinking that Ned Lamont will make a better Senator from Connecticut than Joe Lieberman sure ain't one of them. If Tester and Lamont both prevail in November, maybe we can boot the DLC - the so-called centrist; but in point of fact spineless - arm of the party out of its role of vetting who makes a good Democrat.

Don't let people label you as extreme for taking a sane stance. Progressives have become the moderates in America.

The Salient Condition

2006-07-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

Amos Oz, longtime Israeli peace activist, whose 2003 account of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations brought a human face to both sides of that debate, last week defended Israel's recent incursions into Lebanon "as long as this operation targets mostly Hezbollah, and spares, as much as possible, the lives of Lebanese civilians".

I must ask Mr. Oz if his salient condition has been met when I read reports from Human Rights Watch such as this account of Israel's use of cluster bombs corroborated elsewhere in the media and not denied by Israel. I find less, but some recent corroboration for the Lebanese President's accusation that Israel is employing white phosphorus as a weapon. The characterization of Israel's recent military operations as targeting mostly Hezbollah, certainly seems well off the mark.

I'm more than a little troubled by Oz's phrase "targets mostly" anyway. I would have opted for "strictly targets, with an emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties." If a significant minority of the targets are not demonstrably Hezbollah or terrorist, and the munitions used against those that are are prone to inflicting indiscriminate civilian casualties as well, then I find this action indefensible. Certainly Amy Goodman's daily broadcast summarizing events in Lebanon on Democracy Now leaves this listener horrified, even as others are appropriately horrified by the indiscriminate shelling of Haifa by Hezbollah.

Here is an interview Amy conducted with Noam Chomsky and others in the early days of the conflict. I know Goodman and Chomsky will be dismissed by right leaning pundits as extreme or "far left", but while I'll not take every word they say at face value, I cannot dismiss so easily the voices they bring to us which the mainstream media so easily ignores.

Gitmo & the SCOTUS decision revisited

2006-07-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

Jack Grant of Random Fate asked this salient question 10 days ago:

In what twisted universe is it that the President of the United States has to be TOLD by the courts that an extra-legal prison that uses “stress positions” and other “coercive” means of interrogation is not only ill-advised in a war that depends more on image than on casualties but also completely contrary to the most fundamental of American values including the rule of law?

I've been catching up a little on some blogs I used to frequent but had dropped the habit. Jack and the "Rev. Gisher" are always good for keeping both sides of our political divide on their toes.

Opposition to Tyranny

2006-07-17T23:35:00.000-07:00

Ideologues of all varieties often think of themselves as opposed to tyranny. And so they ascribe to opposing ideologies a tendency to produce tyranny. On this point they may be largely correct, while remaining blind to the tendencies of their own ideology to do the same.

Years ago I took on the mantle of liberal, and still I like it as well as any - though arguments can be made that progressive is the better label for the ideals I ascribe to. And so it was that "conservative" philosophy was what supposedly stood in opposition to my ideals, and indeed it has been rare that I could rightly be described as conservative. And yet I have often found individuals who self-label as conservative to be decent folk as genuinely committed to principles founded on moral behavior as many of my liberal colleagues who are quite genuinely committed to principles of equity and opportunity for all.

During my college years I still recall the excitement with which a friend extolled a new ism, which seemed to capture the piece of liberalism which was true and right, but without some of the naivete often ascribed to it. I listened, not fully convinced, to his description of libertarianism which in the late 70s was far less well known than it is today. Certainly the notion of individualistic freedom which was already engrained into me as an American was appealing. It seems that only a few days or weeks later, that the same friend came back disillusioned, describing these libertarians as nothing more than laissez-faire capitalists minus the puritanical authoritarianism of our caricature of traditional conservatives.

Reagan co-opted the economic piece of libertarianism and branded the Republican party with it, much to my dismay, but undeniably to the political advantage of Republicans who now tapped into a whole new constituency raised in a more permissive generation not likely to go back to the more restrictive brand of conservatism, but amenable to this new animal. But it is this economic libertarianism which I now find more pernicious than the stodgy old-fashioned conservatism, and more in opposition to my own ideals.

But there are pieces of truth in any way of thinking. What we should agree on is that tyranny must be avoided. Libertarians seek to avoid the tyranny of big government, liberals seek to avoid the tyranny of big business, conservatives the tyranny of permissiveness, et cetera. The ideals always feel principled, but the reality is that mundane concepts like checks and balances remain the best weapon against encroaching tyranny, and at any given time the greatest threat of tyranny lies in the hands of whomever it is that holds the most power. Jack Whelan, at After the Future writes:

in the world we live in the real threat of tyranny comes not from the political sector, but from the economic. For me the fundamental flaw in Libertarian thinking is its failure to recognize this. Tyranny derives from the abuse of power, and so it follows that the greatest threat to freedom comes from those who have the greatest concentrations of power. Look around you. Does that power lie in the hands of Liberal congressmen and professors? Of course not. It lies with those factions within American society which have enormous economic power. And the greatest threat to American democracy lies not in the power of big government if it serves the will of the broad electorate, but in the power of big government if it serves the will of those with enormous economic power.

The Libertarians fixation with freedom and economic prosperity seems to blind them to how their emphasis of them leads to problems with the distribution of power. They seem not to care at all about the dangers associated with the growing concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands. They seem not to realize how that concentration of power is the direct result of their hard work to pull back government power as a counterbalance to economic power. The kind of crony capitalism that we're seeing in Washington now is not caused by a failure of conservatives to live up to their ideals; it is the inevitable result of economic power moving into the territory from which good government has retreated. If the government won't stand as a counterbalance to economic power, it inevitably winds up being coopted by it. And then neither principled conservatives nor principled Liberals get what they want--they both have to deal with a big, bloated government serving the needs of big pharma, big oil, or the big companies that make their money from military spending.

He also points to an excellent article at Washington Monthly by Alan Wolfe "Why Conservatives Can't Govern"

Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to right-wing convictions. . . . A conservative president and an even more conservative Congress must be repudiated to enable genuine conservatism to survive. . . . [They say the Bush presidency failed] because Bush and his Republican allies in Congress borrowed big government and foreign-policy idealism from the left. . . . Of course, many of these dissidents extolled the president's conservative leadership when he was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted with the failures of communism in Cuba, China and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism had never been tried. If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.

The brilliance of liberal democracy as conceived by our founding fathers was that it spoke to ideals but relied on the mundane instruments of checks and balances to keep new tyrannies at bay. If it needs any tweaking, that should be based on any new imbalances that may creep in. It's why I am often a broken record here concerned about corporate wealth and power, for surely that is the primary clear imbalance in our own country, and by extension to a large degree throughout the world, which of course has plenty of pockets of extreme tyranny of other descriptions which are also to be despised. One tyranny cannot justify itself simply by spending some of its energy in opposition to another tyranny. I suspect Osama bin Laden is genuinely appalled by Western profligacy even as he is blind to the horrific nature of his response to it. We should rightly oppose the tyranny of bin Laden or Saddam or Mugabe or Kim Jong Il, but we needn't therefore champion the growing disparity of power in our own country just because it can be manipulated in opposition to the former -- even if it had been done more competently.

Right now the most important thing we can do as Americans is to preserve our democratic institutions and insure that we retain pluralism and restore trust in our vote counting mechanism. We are certainly due for a correction - if that correction is made unavailable by corruption and tampering with our democratic processes it will be huge loss not only to America, but to the world at large as well.

Damned Week

2006-07-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

Violence in Mumbai.

Violence in Iraq.

Violence in Lebanon & Israel.

Violence in Sri Lanka.

May the peacemakers persevere. It would be so easy to give up in this world.

I'll take solace in knowing that for many the week past was a damned good one. Celebrations must be allowed in the midst of horrors, else we cannot refuel to fight future horrors. Current horrors will always be with us, whether open or hidden. This past week just seemed especially bad.

And so it was good to see Bunnatine Greenhouse almost giddy over the Army's announcement finally that Halliburton's gig as a no-bid contractor has been cancelled.

But let's not forget the pain of those who lost so much this week. And let's not abandon the peacemakers.

Shine on You Crazy Diamond

2006-07-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

I always thought of him as relatively obscure, but Syd Barrett's passing is receiving huge attention among bloggers. Says something about the staying power of a good tune. Since I heard this on the midday news, his tunes and those of Pink Floyd about him have been bouncing in my brain. I see it was noted that the other members of the band always made sure he received his royalties. Would that society at large so reliably take care of her casualties.

"I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it."

Mexican Election Follow-up

2006-07-03T15:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's national election in the United States of Mexico, are still officially too close to call, but with 98% of the vote counted, fiscal conservative Felipe Calderon appears to have a 1% edge and is speaking confidently. Concerns about unrest on the heels of a narrow Calderon victory are not yet laid to rest, but populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stated:

Have patience. We are always going to act responsibly. If we lose the elections I will recognize that. But if we won the vote, I'm going to defend my triumph.

If the results hold up, there will certainly be those who suspect a stolen election, regardless of Obrador's own stance. Let's hope frustration does not descend into violence. If fraud seems very likely, perhaps Ukraine's Orange Revolution can serve as the model. I fear Americans are still just too comfortable to follow that model if and when our elections become systematically stolen.

Idolatry: the Symbol over the Referent

2006-06-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Shall we protect our nation and our freedoms, or is our flag more important?

Earlier this week, the Senate came within 1 vote of wasting the time of legislators the country over by advancing the "cause" of a Constitutional Amendment to ban the desecration of the flag. My thanks go out to the 34 Senators who saved us from this nonsense - and shame on the 66 (or most of them) who voted for it.

Mark Kleiman stated it succinctly:

The notion of writing a restriction on freedom of expression into the text of the Constitution ought to offend every patriot. To pledge allegiance to the Flag instead of "the Republic for which it stands" is the political equivalent of the sin of idolatry: confusing a symbol with its referent, to the extreme of elevating the symbol above the referent.

The Bill of Rights is as central to that Republic as anything could be: surely more central than the Flag. So to deface the Bill of Rights in order to defend the Flag is political idolatry at its worst.

Then he goes on to allow that while sullying our Constitution is an offense, a statute against flag burning, if found constitutional would not be so objectionable. I can't agree - it would offend me - but I do see his point, and do agree with him that if the aye votes on the amendment by a few swing state Democrats help them retain their seats, that is probably worth it. Really it's the Republicans that ought to know better and speak sense to the American public. Few have much backbone when it comes to confronting the deep-seated emotional illogic which consumes so many Americans around reverence for the flag.

Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Robert Bennett of Utah, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky were the lone Republicans willing to defend the Constitution rather than pander to false patriotism. Mitch McConnell's statement shows that there is a way to frame such a vote, and still do the requisite pandering anyway. It also shows that this is not an ideologically tied position. McConnell and Bennett are not among the more moderate Republicans. In fact, I recall that in 1989 when the Supreme Court held that anti-flag burning statutes are unconstitutional, it was arch-conservative Scalia who cast the deciding vote.

So enjoy your Fourths, folks - wave your flags - attend your parades, but watch out for any demagogues who try to impugn the patriotism of any of the 34 who avoided idolatry this week.

Turbulence on our Southern Border

2006-06-28T06:37:00.000-07:00

Mexicans this weekend face a difficult choice as they try to read the tea leaves as to what a radical change of course would really mean. Those who genuinely long for reforms aimed at supporting the aspirations of the poor and weakening the grip of the wealthy and powerful on the purse strings of the country must be tempted by the populist promises of López Obrador, candidate of the Party of Democratic Revolution. But concerns that his numbers don't add up, and that his programs would wreck the economy, or that his messianic message would usher in a cult of personality damaging to democratic ideals are giving pause to many.

In 2000, Vicente Fox came in and ended 71 years of rule by the PRI, ending an era dominated by corruption. His business friendly policies were hardly welcomed by populists or the left. Felipe Calderón is the standard bearer of Fox's party, PAN, and promises stability. Recent polls show him trailing Obrador, but only by a few points. PRI candidate, Roberto Madrazo, is painting himself as the moderate between extremes on the right and the left, but trails the leaders in the polls by 8 or 9 points. PRI remains Mexico's largest party, but years of corruption have earned them plenty of distrust.

The possibility of an Obrador victory is at once the most exciting outcome and the scariest. Who can reliably predict how such changes will play out? When Robert Mugabe was elected President of Zimbabwe 26 years ago on the strength of a populist message there was great celebrating, but it took very little time for his rule to betray signs of tyranny, and today Zimbabwe stands in ruins while Mugabe lives in walled splendor as was sadly reported on last night's Frontline on PBS. My guess is that Obrador is genuine in his pronouncements now, but is he realistic or would his policies work?

The right will no doubt reflexively pull out the standard repeated failure of socialism meme and declare that Obrador would be a disaster, but as ever it will depend on the details, not on the putative ideology of the leader or his party. For now, anyway, there does not seem to be the fear and loathing from the usual quarters in U.S. politics against Obrador as we have seen against Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Evo Morales of Bolivia. Of course he hasn't been elected yet.

An additional fear that hangs over this Mexican election is that Obrador is already accusing the ruling party of attempted fraud, so even if Calderón prevails, some see the likelihood of unrest in the wake of such charges.

Patriotism & Treason

2006-06-27T17:23:00.000-07:00

When I wrote of the thin, thin line the other week, perhaps I should have defined it as the line between patriotism and treason. So thin sometimes it practically overlaps. I'm grateful not to have faced such a choice myself, but this is staying near the front of my consciousness. Saturday I chanced to be in a passenger car at the Dupont exit overpass where Thank You Lt supporters held banners over the interstate, and counter protestors nearby equated Watada's refusal with treachery. And in the mail that day I received my copy of Mission Rejected. A generally sympathetic blogger wrote privately

Just one tactical note: if the Democrats start supporting mutinous soldiers, it doesn't matter what we say about he minimum wage; we'll be the minority party forever.

Maybe so, but what constitutes mutiny in a questionable or worse war, and cannot people better understand a human story than an abstraction? I have the advantage of being far removed from the official voice of the Democratic party, but just how much pussyfooting should the official party do?

Stand in contrast, Dems - what you've been doing ain't been working.

Remember Muqtada al-Sadr?

2006-06-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Zarqawi is gone, and even I am glad for that. But in terms of influence, Muqtada al-Sadr may be scarier. Unfortunately, his death, I fear would backfire. Read the transcript [scroll down to In Depth: Dispatch From Iraq] of Fareed Zakaria's interview with Nir Rosen which aired two weeks ago on Foreign Exchange. It still chills me. In whose hands are we placing lethal power?

Minimum Wage Must Go Up

2006-06-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

If there is any issue that Democrats ought to be able to unite behind without ambiguity, and know that they have a clear huge majority of Americans with them, it has to be insistence on an increase in the minimum wage. Libertarian and Republican arguments exist in opposition to the minimum wage, and I'm not opposed to their being aired and limited exceptions to a new reasonable minimum wage be part of new legislation, but it's a huge failure for the Democrats that they cannot succeed in getting this most fundamental requirement that the American worker be treated humanely written into law. Because unambiguously, paying an adult trying to support a family $5.15 an hour for full time permanent work is inhumane.

One exception I might allow, would be that temporary jobs could pay as little as $6 an hour, to allow for summer jobs for high schoolers, or retirees (such as campground managers). But the law should explicitly prohibit replacement of permanent positions with sequential temporary positions as a means of skirting the minimum wage increase. Courts should provide quick judicial review of such claims, and human judges should be able to quickly discern cases in which a corporation is misrepresenting a job as temporary.

A $9 minimum wage is a modest demand, and industries which rely on cheaper labor must adjust, because they are disrespecting their workers in paying the current minimum wage. $9 ia a large enough shift from the current obscene $5.15, that a phase in over 2 to 4 years is tolerable. Alternatively we could go with Senator Kennedy's proposal for now, and insist on another step later when Democrats control one or both branches of Congress.

I think the only reason Democrats are not strongly enough pushing this issue, is that it is not front and center for the establishment Democrats. Most of these Democrats in higher offices are affluent and sufficiently removed from poverty to be susceptible to the arguments from their libertarian leaning colleagues. They should get a clue. This issue plays well with the rank and file, including many cultural conservatives who left the party for Reagan in the eighties. Lots of these folks are just aching to come back now that the Republican elite has been exposed themselves as the aloof and privileged lot that they are. We don't need elitist Democrats focusing on cultural issues and ignoring the poor.

You will hear the argument that most of the minimum wage jobs are going to people looking for supplemental income who don't rely on it for their living. Whether it is most or some, it is obscene that anyone living in poverty is working full time. Listen to Dan's story. If the law causes two supplemental jobs held by people not relying on them to disappear for every one full time worker that it provides with a living wage, that is a clear net gain.

Others will talk of the inevitable siphoning of American jobs to outsourcing overseas. Yes this is a problem and raising the minimum wage will exacerbate it, but solutions must be found to put all Americans to work who are willing and able to work at a wage which will support them and boost the economy. Raising the minimum wage fixes a clear injustice and is easily understood. Outsourcing is already a problem which needs its own solutions. Keeping a minimum wage which has only been adjusted (and quite inadequately) for inflation since sometime in the seventies is quite simply immoral. The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage is 26% lower in 2004 than it was in 1979, and there are real questions whether a minimum raise hike even causes a loss in jobs.

Do the right thing - call your representatives in Washington.

Resources:

Current state of minimum wage across the country

Boston Globe article

Center for American Progress article

Addenda:

I see now that Ezra Klein posted about this last week.

He references this graph:
Which convinces me that my $9 suggestion is too high - I really ought to research before I post a guess such as that. It looks like Kennedy's proposal was right on the mark.

In spite of its clumsiness, my article drew a lot of good discussion over at Watchblog.

Unfortunately the Senate couldn't muster the will to do the right thing yesterday, and yet this vote suggests that they DID pass it (Required for Majority 1/2; Amendment agreed to) - but then later it was withdrawn?. What's going on here? The CNN article attests to the 52-46 vote in favor of the amendment, and yet says

sixty votes were required because the plan was proposed as an amendment to an unrelated defense bill.

So 80% of Americans want it, and Republican Senators Chafee, Lugar, Collins, Snowe, Coleman, Specter, DeWine, and Warner joined a solid Democratic caucus to give this a majority, but presumably because the majority party controls the agenda, it can only be appended to an unrelated bill causing it to need 60% to pass. Sounds like minority rule to me.

Mission Rejected

2006-06-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

Since my previous post about Lt Watada's refusal to deploy to Iraq, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now has been featuring soldiers' stories and the resistance to serve by those in the military who oppose this war.

She interviewed Peter Laufer, whose new book, Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq covers the subject broadly.

I've long intended to do a bit of research on the topic of military war resisters, but found that information hard to find. Peter Laufer explained in the interview that hard numbers are really hard to come by, since most soldiers who refuse deployment or redeployment are keeping a low profile, and the military is not interested in highlighting the issue.

Those cases we do hear about, many of which are listed here, are really subjecting themselves to harsh scrutiny for the cause which they believe in. Many others simply go AWOL, but whether their reasons constitute a resistance to the Iraq war for cause is not clear.

One early resister was staff sergeant Camilo Mejia, who served in Iraq, and then applied for conscientious objector status after discovering first hand what the war was really about. Those who casually dismiss such examples as simply cowardly are unlikely to have read the words of some of these heroes or to have thought through the issues very thoroughly.

Camilo Mejia, from his statement upon receiving the "Courageous Resister Award", August 2004:

I am only a regular person that got tired of being afraid to follow his own conscience. For far too long I allowed others to direct my actions even when I knew that they were wrong....To those who have called me a coward I say that they are wrong, and that without knowing it, they are also right. They are wrong when they think that I left the war for fear of being killed. I admit that fear was there, but there was also the fear of killing innocent people, the fear of putting myself in a position where to survive means to kill, there was the fear of losing my soul in the process of saving my body, the fear of losing myself to my daughter, to the people who love me, to the man I used to be, the man I wanted to be. I was afraid of waking up one morning to realize my humanity had abandoned me.

Other resources:

Kevin Benderman defense committee

Psychoanalysts against the war

Sir, No Sir a film

The Thin Thin Line

2006-06-12T22:16:00.000-07:00

For most of us, everyday choices present modest dilemmas in which we may choose between two sets of potential outcomes with variable good or bad results.

Military personnel, however, are faced with a duty to follow orders which may have grave consequences. Where is the line beyond which that duty to obey becomes a duty to refuse the order? Certainly there is such a line. No reasonable person would suggest blind duty to obey orders for instance to kill one's fellow soldiers. And yet the military would not work if all orders became optional, and soldiers could disobey any order they thought wrong. Perhaps this is all spelled out quite clearly in the military code, and yet it is hard to imagine there not being circumstances where a soldier might suspect (without being certain) that following an order constitutes a greater crime than disobedience. And then there are cases where one person's certainty counters that of another.

Lt. Ehren Watada has made a very difficult choice.

It is the duty, the obligation of every soldier, and specifically the officers, to evaluate the legality, the truth behind every order — including the order to go to war.

Detractors will point out that Watada enlisted in 2003 after the risk of being deployed to Iraq was quite clear. But since that time the illegality of that war has been made clear to many who did not see it before.
Watada has received substantial support from numerous organizations and individuals who are standing by him, and an online petition supporting his decision is being circulated.

Dan Kirkdorffer, of On the Road to 2008, has been closely following the Watada story here, here, and initially here.

I've long known I never had the right make up to be a soldier. To submit so thoroughly to the authority of others does not come easily when I'm so imbued with notions of independent thought and intellectual freedom. As abhorrent as I find war, I cannot deny the necessity for organizing militaries for the defense of nations, and can see the case for leaving the option of war open as a last resort. I understand the need for a command structure which demands rote loyalty in order for such an enterprise to work. But we must defend a soldier's right to question some orders, including some entire campaigns. Otherwise leaders have carte blanche to engage our troops to their own ends with impunity.

Earlier soldiers such as Kevin Benderman and Carl Webb have been drawing that line. Now a commissioned officer has joined them. America's conscience is being tested, and it will take more than just committed pacifists to bring us around to sanity. When our leaders take us into questionable military adventures, is it any wonder that our military is stretched too thin and morale is low? We risk not having a ready response when the cause is just at some point down the road.

Go here for a military blogger's perspective on this case.

National Humility

2006-06-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time I dreamt that perhaps hundreds or thousands of people would regularly stop by here to soak in my pearls of wisdom, but there are advantages to relative anonymity. It's less of a big deal if I take extended breaks from writing (sorry though, to those of you who wish I would post more often), and I really don't need to worry so much about delivering messages that will backfire, and hence be used against the causes that I care about. I've also come to realize just how many excellent writers and thinkers there are out there, most of whom never get the lucky break to become widely read. It's wonderful that we have this vehicle for sharing ideas, and I'm pleased to see the current widespread outcry from disparate corners of the blogosphere to protect "net neutrality" from undue corporate control.

Recent revelations about the atrocities apparently committed by a few Marines in Haditha got me to thinking about the national humility we need to adopt, a subject which gets far too little attention precisely because any politician approaching it would fear a swift and strong backlash reaction and accusations of being unpatriotic. The mere fact that many such subjects become politically taboo damages our ability to have honest and open dialog, because politicians are constrained to finding popularly acceptable frames within which to make the case for whatever it is they are advocating.

It's quite acceptable for ministers to preach about humility as a virtue, and for individuals to seek an appropriate balance between positive self esteem and humble recognition of their own limitations. But to talk about the need for our nation to find such a comparable balance between marketing the ideas which have made us great and recognizing that we don't have every answer and often have much to learn from other cultures and other experiments in governance is a sure way to be dismissed by many as unpatriotic and unworthy of attention, if not traitorous.

Why can't we celebrate that which is wonderful about our traditions and simultaneously seek to improve on them and recognize our limitations without worrying about drawing such vitriolic scorn? In fact what is wonderful about our system of government is that it attempts to grant great freedom to the individual while providing checks and balances against any one group or portion of government gaining too much control. This brings me back to that wonderful quote by James Madison:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

But people today confuse the greatness of our system with the goodness of our people. While growing up in a democratic context in which respect of our fellows is an inherent value can provide a template for decent behavior, at heart we are no more or less human than anyone else on the planet. In the stress of war, Americans are no different than anyone else, and some will tragically misbehave. Abu Ghraib and Haditha should be wake up calls for a little national humility. The justification of torture, or at least of inhumane and degrading treatment of suspects in custody is born of a misapprehension that Americans can be trusted, simply because they are Americans. If national humility were accepted as a desirable counterweight to our national pride, then we would likely avoid such hubris.

A Google search of "national humility" turns up a few interesting hits, but few American politicians since Lincoln who openly call for it. One exception I found extolling national humility was surprisingly Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who quotes former Democratic Senator William Fulbright who said:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor.

I also found a portion of a sermon which acknowledges a practical reason for not extending such a humility too far, but nonetheless to apply some national humility wisely:

We must be careful to extend the analogy of personal humility to national humility with great care, for in many respects the analogy does not hold. Governments have a responsibility to protect that individuals can set aside in a spirit of self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, the American government can conspicuously put others first by making sure that profits on oil, for instance, are fairly distributed in a country before the oil is taken out, and can make sure that poor nations in Africa have the most advantageous condition for the development of their agriculture in a world market.

Finally, I shall leave you with this article in Common Dreams by Thom Hartmann in which we see that Jefferson like Lincoln understood the need for a national humility. It suggests to me that the current taboo against acknowledging that we don't have every answer is stronger now than it was in the first century of our nation's existence. This article was written in advance of our last presidential election in which Hartmann asks whether we will choose the path of empire or the path of democracy. We made a grievous choice, as I've noted before, but it's not too late for humbler choices to follow. Let us recognize that representative democracy by its nature is both noble and humble.

Knowledge, Security, Privacy, & Trust

2006-05-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

The NSA's newly revealed database of phone call records won't generate any outrage from me. I felt the wiretapping uncovered a few months ago was clearly illegal, and holding Congressional hearings on that was appropriate. But really my concern is not with the surveillance so much as with its potential misuse. If our government was composed of gods, it wouldn't really be troubling if every secret was known, but it is of course composed of human beings so requiring documented justification for surveillance is certainly reasonable. If the government has to be more open about its activities, that prevents it from abusing the privilege. When secrecy is rampant already, I don't buy the argument that eliminating oversight is necessary for security. Indeed security is damaged if insiders become compromised through bribery or self-interest, and that secrecy is used to protect those from whom it is supposed to protect us. The FISA solution made a lot of sense by providing oversight without wide knowledge, and so the Administration's bypassing of it requires more public oversight in spite of any perceived risk.

This newly revealed program which gives access to a database which can be queried if real terrorist numbers are discovered, sounds like a very defensible program in the right context, but Bush defenders should hardly be surprised that it arouses major suspicion in the context of a secretive administration which regularly flouts the law, misleads the public, and manipulates the press. Still I want to be careful about flying off the handle and declaring that the existence of this database is an outrage. It is not. Misuse of the database might range from somewhat unethical to truly outrageous, but the potential for it to be used only in the interest of security does exist, and I wouldn't want to deny the method forever and for all time simply based on my mistrust of Bush and his minions.

What I really want is a government I can trust. Imagine a program where every infant born or immigrant to our shores got DNA sequenced and that information was retained in a secure database for future medical decisions and law enforcement. That would frighten most libertarians and civil libertarians to the core, and with good reason. But ideally it would be a wonderful asset if guarding against its misuse were taken seriously, and we could feel assured that it would only be used appropriately. This would be great, not only for victims, but for the wrongly accused, where DNA evidence could exonerate them. And what a deterrent to crime when you know that any found DNA can pinpoint you to a scene or weapon. In the long run it would be worth developing the system to guard the system against misuse, in order to benefit from it. I'm not going to push for it any time real soon, however.

Having a searchable database which records billions of phone call records is pretty small potatoes on the Big Brother meter, certainly compared to my DNA suggestion above. Rather than going ape over its existence, I believe the appropriate response is to continue to demand accountability by the executive branch for how it uses any such program. There may be cases where approval of further surveillance needs to be done by a secret court such as FISA, but approval needs to come from independently created sources which shouldn't be too chummy with those making the requests, and there is a strong case to be made that FISA is not sufficiently independent. That the NSA bypassed the required step in the earlier revealed wiretapping, in spite of that, feeds the distrust that more and more Americans are feeling for the current crop of leaders.

Turning Congress & the New Silent Majority

2006-05-02T08:56:00.000-07:00

I came of age politically when Richard Nixon was President, and dissent against the Vietnam war and his Presidency was noisy and noticed. Nixon spoke of the "Silent Majority" of Americans who were not outspoken and remained at home, presumably supporting his policies. Noise is more apt to draw attention, and one could sense Nixon's petulant indignation that these objectors got all the press, while regular folk went about their business unnoticed.

The conservative movement which has been building since that time learned that lesson, and has been all about creating noise of a different sort. Like the antiwar movement of the 60's, this one represents a minority, but unlike that movement, the conservatives have their base already entrenched in the power elite. There is some new noise on the left, but the "new silent majority" is one of cynical distrust of all politicians. It is an ideologically mixed majority, but if the question was the generic one of trusting politicians, the answer would be pretty overwhelming.

I'm not much interested in silent majorities. They prove nothing about what is right or wrong - but it is worth noting their presence when electoral results are used to prove a point about what "most people" believe. I'm much more interested in honoring the few committed individuals who act on their conscience to make real differences that silent majorities don't care to make. But we live in a nation where political power is real and does make a difference. So it makes a difference to me who wins these contests, even if it means supporting the campaign of someone I may view as "the lesser of two evils."

Which brings me to Congress - turning Congress, that is. There are those who just want to "throw the bums out", and they can make a compelling argument that if incumbents became an endangered species due to the distrust of voters, that in itself would engender real reform. But they stand no chance of convincing me that voting against my Democratic Congressman is any way to make a positive difference. Right now we are stuck with two parties in national elections, and there is a difference. While there are flaws all around, the Republicans in power are a scary breed - not as individuals, but as a group and as a force for maintaining the current imbalance of power and wealth.

I don't buy the suggestion that putting the Democrats in power would represent no change. Even to the extent that Democratic politicians are also beholden to the money that puts them there, there is not the same strict allegiance to a corporate agenda which pays only lip service to the public good while being truly committed only to a program of, by, and for the established plutocracy. Some readers who have been peppered with the language of the failure of socialism, will roll their eyes at this suggestion, but the evidence seems clear enough to me. It's as if those in power use Marxist critique as a script for their behavior so that anyone who calls them on their misbehavior will sound like a Marxist, and thus be discredited. My own belief that the personal incentives inherent in capitalism lead to productivity and innovation which tends to be absent in a strictly controlled egalitarian economy, doesn't mean that Marx did not correctly identify some of the ills of Capitalism. Western liberalism, while not perfect, represents a better method of addressing some of those ills than Marxist revolution.

At least the Democrats are obliged to act like they represent common folk, even when we know it's often not true. The Republicans' focus on being steadfastly opposed to any hint of liberalism or mandated controls on business assures that the economic interests of common folk will be subjugated to the almighty power of the boardroom. Common sense balance is discarded in favor of ideological purity.

The rules of Congress give so little power to the minority party, that Republican control of the House has become the primary roadblock to any chance of economic justice for the growing population living in poverty in the United States. It is why at this point in time I would vote for any Democrat over any Republican in any Congressional race, regardless of my opinion of the individuals involved.

There has been a lot of attention lately to the possibility that the House could change hands this year. Even many Republican strategists are conceding the possibility, though there remain many reasons to doubt it will happen. It's not a very sexy issue, but it is very substantive, and if the right set of progressives get energized around the effort, there is potential for a very real stanching of the growing power of the corporate elite. Turning Congress is not enough -- progressive vigilance will need to follow -- but moving the leadership of the House to the Democrats represents a huge step in the right direction.

Keeping Bitterness at Bay

2006-04-25T07:01:00.000-07:00

If we choose hope we are making a commitment to stave off bitterness. We cannot always succeed, and even when we do, we should be careful not to condemn the bitterness of others in the same way that we must speak out against violence, greed, and injustice. Good people who give up are not the enemy. Indeed bitterness and cynicism are often the byproducts of a former idealism which collided headlong with terrible realities.

Here I choose to celebrate the possibility of a better world, the fulfillment to be had in the effort to bring it about, and the connections and friendships made along the journey. Recently I've been most inclined to shake my head in dismay at the news which is most reported on, and the apparent absence of a coordinated and hopeful uprising against the tide of corruption and greed which seems to be strangling our government and the corporate media from which most of us receive the news of the day. This dismay has unfortunately played a part in the absence of posts here, and for that I apologize - especially to those of you whose kind words have kept me from abandoning the project altogether.

It turns out that one doesn't have to hunt too hard, especially in this information age, to find seeds of hope in the fields of despair, and so I will endeavor to take up the task again, if not daily at least on a weekly basis. Now some on the left have taken pleasure from the continuing deterioration of Bush's popularity, and while I confess that the dismal poll numbers give me hope that a larger share of us are no longer fooled by the spin, mere dissatisfaction does not a movement make. We need positive messages for positive change.

When the immigration reform protests and marches took place, my initial reaction was why does this issue mobilize so many while similar efforts on behalf of peace or fairness to workers or poverty relief or saving our environment can't seem to get traction, when those causes have been so utterly betrayed by our government and our media. As much sympathy as I felt toward the very real human beings threatened with felony status for their honest efforts to improve their lives, and the likely trickle down ethnic discrimination against legal residents whose heritage groups them in the minds of the prejudiced with those who "steal our jobs", the complexity of immigration issues cuts both ways, and I longed for such activism on other fronts.

Paul Loeb writes compellingly on this issue and delivers a hopeful epilog to his analysis:

Immigration politics are complicated-- flooding this or any country with cheap labor can and will drive down wages, especially when unions are being busted and undocumented workers live in fear of deportation. If we don't create enough global justice so desperate people don't continue leaving their homes in search of a glimmer of hope, then all but the wealthiest will succumb to the worldwide race to the bottom. But as the signs at the march reminded us, we're all children of immigrants, except for the Native Americans. And those marching and chanting reminded those of us who are legal because our ancestors immigrated earlier on that even in the land of Microsoft, we are tied with the people who pick our crops, build our houses, clean our office buildings, tied in what King called "an inescapable network of mutuality...a single garment of destiny."
...
Why can't we have these kinds of marches to challenge the war or global warming, or all of Bush's arrogant reign? Anti-war marches were huge before Bush went into Iraq, since then far more disappointing, even as the polls steadily shift. Maybe it's because those more comfortable sit behind our computers too much and believe we can do all politics with the click of a mouse.. Maybe the issues feel abstract or intransigent. Unless you have a son or daughter over serving it doesn't hit home nearly as much as the raw callousness of Congressman Sensenbrenner's plan to make 12 million people instant felons, as well as anyone who gives them water or food, education or medical care. ...

Here the stakes were clear, immediate, and people turned out despite the risk of being deported, because if Sensenbrenner's bill had gone through, as might well have happened without these marches and outcries, then life would have gotten instantly far harsher and crueler. So for those of us who didn't march but claim to act for justice, we need to heed the lives of those these voices represent, and do what we can to ensure they are heard. We also need to link this issue of fundamental human dignity to all the threats that make it difficult for people to simply live and flourish on this earth. Maybe by finding their voice and courage, those who marched in America these past weeks can teach the rest of us how to come out of our own shadows and fears and join across our own divides.

I've come close to chiming in on other issues. When Rumsfeld came under increasing heat (Isn't it simply obvious that the whole lot of them should have long since resigned in shame?), when Bush changes his mouthpiece by replacing McClelland (Who really believes that a different spin has any positive effect on a failed policy), when mainstream news reports, most recently 60 Minutes, yet another voice corroborating the obviously established fact that the Administration chose intelligence to fit its policy to attack Iraq rather than the other way around (How is this an iota different than reporting that was readily available on-line before the last election?).

But discontent with the Bush administration is nothing new, and it was getting plenty of attention, even in the mainstream media. Piling on just adds to cynicism, and shouldn't this site be about providing a positive alternative?

And so it was that I was much heartened by David Brancaccio's interview last week with singer/activist Peter Gabriel. In spite of being involved with a project highlighting many of the worst cases of human abuse, mistreatment, and genocide, Gabriel remains committed to a brighter future which seeks to curb such atrocities. Brancaccio contrasted Gabriel's hope, with the bitterness which Kurt Vonnegut exhibited on a previous interview on NOW. I recalled my disappointment with that episode which I had been looking forward to at the time. Vonnegut, like Twain, who became very bitter in his later days, can be forgiven his bleak outlook given his years of keen observation, but his bleak vision for our future has its only utility in the possibility of waking up some to alarming trends. Twain and Vonnegut may be proved right in the long run - certainly it is easy to imagine a falling apart as has happened all too often in many human societies - but it is a practical matter that I continue to put my ideals first and believe in the possibilities while keeping that bitterness at bay.

We need each other's help in this effort. Again thank you to those whose kind words have helped me recently.

A Local Effort

2006-03-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

Part of what kept me away from posting more regularly here over the last month was prioritizing my attention toward the passage of a local school construction bond and technology levy in my own school district. My focus on Choosing Hope has never been local, so those efforts went elsewhere, both online and out in the community. Both measures passed handily, in spite of the onerous 60% Yes vote required for their passage in our state.

While it was certainly gratifying that this particular local vote went as I wished, after the election I was disappointed to discover (via Noemie Maxwell's reporting) that our state legislature - specifically the Senate - once again failed to act to relax the requirements for these types of votes in the future.

I wrote nearly a year ago about the patently illogical requirements for these bills' passage, and what I perceived to be an overreaching by supporters of reform, when a modest improvement might significantly improve the odds that popular bonds and levies pass. I'm very impatient with tactical or procedural impediments to lawmakers coming together to bring obviously needed reform to a system. Advocates for relaxing the requirements have been working this issue for years, and clear majorities in both legislative chambers support some form of reform, but the legislature has yet to present a required constitution change to the voters for statewide approval.

Personally I wouldn't even mind something greater than simple majority - say 54 or 55% - along with the removal/change of the illogical validation requirements, though I understand well enough the simplicity of arguing for simple majority. We should figure out what will pass and get it out there, instead of having the issue tied up for years. Dan Steele, of the Washington State School Directors’ Association, explained the procedural logistics of not bringing last years vote up when failure was expected, since leaving it alone automatically gets it reintroduced for this year's session. This year though, any bill not passing would have to be reintroduced with a different number to next year's legislature which will be a changed body based on this year's elections.

As for our local measures, there was a somewhat coordinated opposition, complete with yard signs and blog posts here and here. As with any issue not all objections were specious, nor were all supporters grounded in truth and logic, but I was close enough to the needs of the district to be convinced that failure of either of these measures would be devastating.

Now I'll have to keep my eye on the ball to make sure my own voice is heard in time NEXT year when the legislature should be looking at levy reform again. Many school districts struggle to muster the 60% required vote, or enough votes to validate the election. Quite a few have failed with a 58 or 59% Yes vote.

Feingold does not shy away from truth

2006-03-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

Russ Feingold consistently follows his conscience rather than bending to political expediency. His modest call for censure of President Bush would pass overwhelmingly but for the fact that most senators behave in the opposite manner and must weigh the political calculus of supporting Feingold's call before doing what's right. Maybe this poll will help them along. It's truly laughable that Frist (of the Schiavo stunt) would decry the move as a political stunt.

Even if you don't see the secret surveillance program which bypassed the required FISA warrants as anywhere close to the most outrageous act of our outlaw government (and I would agree), it is a clear case where the law was broken, yet Bush unapologetically defends his lawlessness. This administration must be censured and Feingold correctly asserts that enough is enough.

Yesterday, mcjoan at DailyKos, made this discerning post, in which she called out these earlier words of John McCain:

Mr. Chief Justice, I intend to vote to convict the President of the United States on both articles of impeachment. To say I do so with regret will sound trite to some, but I mean it sincerely. I deeply regret that this day has come to pass.

I bear no animosity for the President. I take no partisan satisfaction from this matter. I don't lightly dismiss the public's clear opposition to conviction. And I am genuinely concerned that the institution of the Presidency not be harmed, either by the President's conduct, or by Congress' reaction to his conduct.

Indeed, I take no satisfaction at all from this vote, with one exception--and an important exception it is--that by voting to convict I have been spared reproach by my conscience for shirking my duty.

The Senate faces an awful choice, to be sure. But, to my mind, it is a clear choice. I am persuaded that the President has violated his oath of office by committing perjury and by obstructing justice, and that by so doing he has forfeited his office.

Of course, McCain was speaking in 1999 about a different President, but those words could work brilliantly from a moderate Democrat's standpoint today.

On a less serious note, I laughed when I first heard of the government's request to seek data from Google on common internet search strings. Right away I did Google searches for "Bush should be impeached" and "Cheney should be jailed", hoping to drive those numbers up. I suppose the reduced request probably turn up such numbers, but overstepping the bounds of what data this administration would mine would certainly not surprise me.

For those of you who have been checking in here periodically over the last several weeks, I do apologize for my silence. The good news is that a lot of others have been picking up the slack. I'll likely never be a daily blogger, but I still would like to avoid multiple week gaps. Life does dictate otherwise from time to time.

Previous Choosing Hope articles which reference Russ Feingold:
Comity Prevails
Thanks to Senators opposing Gonzales
Anticipating the Firestorm
Give 'em Hell Harry
and
my comment on Feingold at "What is Liberalism?"

Widening Our Circles

2006-02-19T18:42:00.000-08:00

In the sixties Paul Simon sardonically wrote and sang:

I have no need of friendship
friendship causes pain
Its laughter and its loving I disdain
...
I touch no one and no one touches me.

I am a rock, I am an island
And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.

Of course, no one is truly an island, yet there is no denying that widening our circles of friendship and love does invite more pain into our lives. This weekend, my own beloved community experienced the brutal shock of that truth as two were lost to senseless tragedy and two more injured and orphaned. We could shrink into our shells in a futile attempt to insulate ourselves from further pain, but no instead we reach out and invite even more. For it is within our beloved communities that we find healing, which is so much more important than the avoidance of pain. In faith we widen our circles even further. As one of those so tragically taken from us said two years ago:

We all have the power to create a positive life. When you look within and find the glimmerings of what brings you energy and joy, say yes to those inklings, even though you don’t know where that path will take you. Faith and trust are qualities we must all embrace if we are to hear our directions from God or our guiding spirit.

The wounds from two such positive lives ended far too soon will not heal quickly for the very many souls whom they have touched. But they will be best honored if, in time, we can say yes to those glimmerings, those inklings, to joy and to hope.

Goodbye Ken
Goodbye Kathy

What if it was his daughter?

2006-02-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

If true, this is horrifying.

According to Iraqi officials, U.S. officials delayed the scheduled release of six female prisoners whom they knew had already been found innocent because of [American journalist Jill Carroll's] kidnappers' demand for their release. Then they refused to speed up the review of the files of the five remaining female prisoners, in violation of a policy of giving priority to females in the review of detainee files for release.

Jeanne's title of this post at Body and Soul would be fully warranted, and I am afraid that it is. That Jill Carroll's pleas may have actually delayed the release of women prisoners slated for release anyway has gotten scant play in the American press, though I did find this passage in a January 22 news release from Reuters:

As U.S. and Iraqi forces hunted for kidnapped American reporter Jill Carroll, Iraq's Justice Ministry said six women prisoners held by U.S. forces would be released within a week.

Carroll's abductors threatened to kill her if all women prisoners in Iraq were not freed.

A joint Iraqi-U.S. review board approved the release of the women on Jan. 17, before the kidnappers made their demand, but U.S. officials then apparently delayed freeing them so that it did not look like they were giving in to the hostage-takers.

"They delayed their release because of the connection with the kidnapping of the American journalist," a Justice Ministry spokesman said.

Truly I understand the tragic necessity of allowing the worst, in order not to set the precedent for further kidnappings if it becomes apparent they are successful. But to delay a process that would have happened anyway, just to assure that no one thinks there is capitulation is unconscionable. We can always declare it to be unrelated to the demand, especially when it is.

Even most conservatives will jump on callousness this severe, as is evident by the unpopularity of this RedState diary. When will they come to recognize that callousness in our Republican leaders?

Jill Carroll, I hope you make it back, and that your captors are eventually brought to justice.