Iraqification and Downplay of the War, but the Mission Will Continue

According to the AP, as reported on CNN, republicans have a new plan for Iraq, or more accurately, a new 2008 U.S. election plan for Iraq. Pretending to narrow the US mission in Iraq without doing much of anything at all, the key to their plan is to look like they are doing something about their mess, make Democrats feel they have to go along with it or get nothing at all and look like they are the obstructionists opposing republican (fake) bipartisans, and all while allowing Bush to remain the Decider.

The stated goal is to "...to end the U.S.-led daily patrols in the streets of Baghdad and restrict troops to fighting al Qaeda terrorists and training Iraq security forces." The problems I see are: First, there is no agreement on who exactly comprise the al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq, their strength and their leadership. Would our soldiers be fighting windmills while arming the real militants? Second, we've supposedly been training the Iraq security forces for years now to no avail. Why will it be better in the future? A third possible problem will be how they will get around Baghdad safely without patrols.

Sorry, this is just more of the same from republicans desperate to win in 2008 without making any substantive changes in their support for the Bush administration. republicans obstructed an up or down vote in the Senate on Iraq withdrawal in 2008, but they manipulated the war-complicit press that dubbed the Democrats the obstructionists. Mark Kirk continues to flirt with the press on his wish to "wind up" the mission, but still votes to keep it going. Now the charade goes further, but charade it remains. The mission in Iraq is to stay in Iraq.

After hearing from George McGovern this past Saturday, doing a little research on the 1972 Nixon smear campaign against him and reading about the new republican plan for Iraq, I wondered: Are republicans just planning the same fake end to the Iraq War they tried to make of the fake 1972 peace in Vietnam to get Nixon re-elected?

Remember 1968's "Peace with Honor" that morphed into "Vietnamization of the War" in 1972? "Peace with Honor" was Nixon's 1968 campaign pitch. I was in gradeschool at the time, but I remember hearing it over and over again and remember that even my 9 year old self wondered why honor was more important than the thousands of young boys dying before our eyes on the news every night and what sort of honor can be won by more senseless death. By 1972, I was in Jr. High, Bush was avoiding serving in Vietnam and we had "Vietnamization", not too much different than the Peace with Honor that eluded us after the 1968 election and the current republican plan for Iraqafication.

As the 1972 election approached, smear of McGovern was in full swing as his common sense was translated into surrender and in October, just before the election, we were told that Kissinger was close to an agreement with N. Vietnam. Peace was at hand. Everyone was going to be made happy and after the televised strife of 1968; there would be no surrender and the war would go away if we just stopped focusing on it. Problem was that the Kissinger peace still required a lot of maneuvering that he was unable to control as promised and it ultimately led to more bombing of N. Vietnam. It wasn't a real peace, just wishful thinking and campaign happy talk. My concern with this new republican plan for Iraq is the same as it simply prescribes more maneuvering we are unable to control, and while it may quiet criticism of the war, it will not quiet down the actual war. It's a campaign ploy not much different from Peace with Honor and Vietnamization. Watergate finally ended Vietnam, but while we have more than our share of current impeachable offenses we have a Congress afraid to act.

Congress has to act to end the war and to end the criminality of our current administration and since we don't seem to have it now, we have to elect that Congress in 2008 and eschew candidates that do not represent real change. More of the same with a few bones thrown to us isn't good enough. republicans distanced from Bush are not good enough. We need to elect Democrats, but not only Democrats. We need to elect Democrats who represent real change.

Sen. McGovern's Plans for a Growing and Thriving Nation

Sen. McGovern gave us 10 issues he would tackle if he were running for president today:

1. Comprehensive health care for every American. He'd keep it simple--a one line law--extending Medicare starting with the children and extend it every year or so until everyone is covered.

2. Build the fastest, safest, cleanest and most comfortable passenger and freight railroad service and create jobs in its doing.

3. Paid higher education for all qualified students because higher education has become a crisis for the middle class and the GI bill paid for itself in the increased taxes from the increased incomes.

4. Withdrawal of all American soldiers from Iraq.

5. Reduce Pentagon spending 5% every year over the next 10 years because it is not weak on defense to not give the Pentagon everything it requests and it already has about twice what it needs.

6. Create a national energy policy that involves conservation, alternative sources of energy and environmental progress with Al Gore as the czar.

7. Cancel the remaining tax cuts for higher income individuals to use for education and transportation.

8. Prohibit any individual, corporation, union or other private entity from contributing to federal elections because nothing else will happen until that is done.

9. Balance the budget and pay down the national debt for lots of reasons including the wishes of his conservative republican parents who believed in a balanced budget.

10. The President must swear to uphold the Constitution and carry out his platform.

McGovern lived accusations of being weak on defense. Nixon, the guy we chose over McGovern, was supposed to be strong on defense, but accomplished nothing other than killing 21,041 American soldiers and up to 1.5 million Vietnamese from 1969 to 1974, and low and behold, the dominoes failed to fall along with Saigon. When will Americans learn to look at defense demands and claims with a jaundiced eye?

McGovern's plans are hopeful. They are plans for a growing and thriving nation. Take a look at republican plans for our country and you see plans for a sinking nation where it's every man, woman and child for himself and herself.

Sen. McGovern had a few interesting stories. More later.

A Good Day

Today, I had the privilege of teaching a class on how to do Internet legal research and later I had the further privilege of listening to George McGovern speak to the Tenth Dems. I'm going to write a lot more about Sen. McGovern's speech tomorrow, but just a bit tonight about both events because they were both very heartening.

I was very excited about the interest in the legal research class because I wondered if people would care about a class that concentrated on procedure, law and the actual governing of our country, how to find law, what went into its passage and how to make sense of it. That sort of education is certainly not the priority of our current leadership and not what the media ever talks about. The Bush folks don't want people to understand laws and regulations and legislative history. The de-education of America has been a strategic initiative of the republican party because if people really knew and understood what they were doing, they would never agree to it. The media does not trust us to understand or even be interested in it.

It was an intense class and although I worried that people might become impatient with it and me, the reality was that they seemed very happy to go through the paces and talk about the little codes that follow the bill number and what they mean, the rules on debate and who commitees work, look at Jefferson's Manual on parliamentary procedure and committee reports. People in our district are interested in governing and not just the photo ops. That's a lesson for Mark Kirk.

Then, as a special bonus, I was able to go to the Tenth Dems Summer Fundraiser where George McGovern was the keynote speaker. I'll admit, I did not know what to expect. I was only in Jr. High when he ran and pretty much remembered him as the candidate that was raked over the coals by what we didn't understand then, but understand all too well now to be the right wing swift boat machine.

I was very impressed with the former Senator. His speech was very heartfelt, strong and dignified. Truth be told, we'd have all been better off with a President McGovern than we ever were with the crew we got. This is a man who spent his entire life in the service of this country from his service in WWII to his work against hunger with the UN. This is the kind of person we should want serving our country. Someone who wants to make it a better place, not someone who's just looking for a career, power and wealth. After the speech, a friend made a comment that stuck with me. He said that they tried to make McGovern look like an extremist, but he really is very representative of middle America. He served in WWII, was educated under the GI bill and then spent his life trying to do the right thing.

What McGovern gave us today was a clear and concise plan to get the country back on track. Check back tomorrow for the details.

Congratulations are in order. Ross Nickow won the George Rosenblit Award for volunteerism and State Rep. Dan Kotowski of the 33d District won the Ab Mikva Award for his outstanding service for better gun laws.

Mark Kirk Supporters: Don't Like the New-Sun? How About The Tribune?

Back home, it's evident that Iraq is not one of Kirk's favorite things to talk about.

At the chamber luncheon in Northbrook, Kirk offered updates on everything from crackdowns on Internet pedophiles to efforts to keep raw sewage out of Lake Michigan. It was only when asked by a chamber member that Kirk discussed the
war.

Kirk said rather than ignoring the issue, he's simply trying to address what he believes are the major concerns of his constituency. "I think most people would agree with me that they want to wind up this mission," he said. "My constituents ask way more questions about things like immigration."

Earlier this week, I reported on a June article in the News-Sun about how Mark Kirk goes out of his way to avoid talking about Iraq and is refusing to discuss the infamous meeting with Bush and Rove. Now, it's the Republican-supporting Chicago Tribune that points to the same issue in an article that appeared on Thursday in the Metro Section titled Kirk faces war on many fronts The North Shore, once heavily Republican, has changed. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has taken notice.

Thing about the above quote from the Tribune article is that Mark Kirk first used the line "My constituents ask way more questions about things like immigration" after the July 4th parades when he was confronted with large crowds holding the Iraq Summer Signs reading "Keep 'em Safe Bring 'em Home Iraq War Wrong Way. I'm not the only one who observed that incongruity between fact and Kirk's comment as Matt Stoller reported on the same in Open Left on July 10, 2007.

Could Mark Kirk need new contact lenses? Could he need new lenses for those rose colored glasses? More likely, he feels he can ignore it and it will go away. Denial. Well, if you want to look at an example, denial has not been working so well for Alberto Gonzales.

Mark, I keep telling you and you never listen, facts are stubborn things. Your constituents want to talk about the Iraq War with you. Immigration is the issue your leader, George W. Bush wants you to discuss, but he does not live in or even near the Illinois Tenth. Bush is not your constituent. We are your constituents and for years we have tried to schedule meetings with you, we've run events on the topic and invited you to attend, and we've stood in streets holding up signs, for years now, all on the Iraq war, not immigration, not the Internet and not your suburban strategy, that is your campaign strategy, not our concern.

I've tried to tell Kirk, the News-Sun has tried and now even the Chicago Tribune. If the Daily Herald is next, maybe Kirk will listen because as we've seen, it's not a good idea to piss them off.

FBI Mining Data on You--and will give you a terrorist score

I don't remember the term "person of interest" from law school and cannot think of a single law that creates it as a legal term of art, federal or state. I still think that a suspect needs to be charged and tried as envisioned by all freedom loving people from the time of the Magna Carta until 2001 when Bush was appointed President. However, the press has gotten the public used to the term in reports of high profile crimes over the years and now people accept it as a legal status. This media sexy, but extra-legal status soon will be visited upon all of us as the FBI has recently determined that it will protect us by using data it collects on us to give us each our very own terrorist Q score which will be used to prioritize people as person(s) of interest by the degree of terrorist each of us has in us. I wonder if they will color code it like the terror alert, a whole new color basis on which to discriminate against people. Here is the Justice Department's report to Congress on the program and here is a bit about the goals of STAR:

The objective of STAR is to help analysts determine whether an individual or group of interest may be associated with terrorism by producing a risk assessment score based on a series of indicators of potential terrorist behaviors. STAR processes the results of predicated database queries pertaining to persons who may merit further inquiry. STAR's terrorism risk assessment score helps prioritize and focus the analyst's attention on particular individuals, who might require more in depth individual analysis. STAR does not label anyone a terrorist. It only alerts the analyst that further assessment may be required. It is the analyst who decides if the person or group represents a significant terrorism threat. He or she then sends a lead to a JTTF or to an FBI field agent to assess the information to decide if further action is warranted. In effect, STAR runs a simultaneous series of database queries against a number of data sets, a process that the analysts currently run manually. Automating these queries makes the research and assessment processes more timely and accurate.

Your terrorist score will be based on "government, airlines and commercial data brokers such as ChoicePoint." ChoicePoint is a company that does background checks for employers, insurance companies, patients seeking information on doctors, consumers who have had their identities lifted and such. They also search for missing children. I don't know anything about them and can imagine situations when a background check would be helpful, but they seem to worried about their image. Here is their myth debunk sheet. I don't think this FBI program helps them much on Myth no. 1.

Another source of data suggested to be used is information from employers. An angry employer could really do a number on an ex-employee by creating or exaggerating information on him.

Since the airlines seem to have trouble keeping track of our luggage, and in the Atlanta airport seem to have trouble keeping track of which gates their own planes are at, I wonder how reliable their data is and what their criteria are. The TSA terror watch list (famous for listing small children) will also be used as a source of data. Even less comforting is that reports to congress on this program come from the fact and truth challenged Alberto Gonzales Justice Department.

This program is not limited to non-citizens because of possible associations between foreign suspects and American citizens. The Gonzales Justice Department claims that the program is legal under the Fourth Amendment are based on the lack of expectation of privacy we should have in this type of data. What is interesting about their legal citations on this aspect of the law on the Fourth Amendment is that most of the citations are from long before this sort of data collection and mining was possible and the only recent cases from 2005 (drug sniffing dog) and 2006 (DNA samples in a rape case) have nothing to do with this type of electronic collection and mining of data.

Do you think we'll start seeing commericals for companies that help you change your terrorist score... "I'm thinking of a number...."

How will Mark Kirk vote on Rep. Lee's Bill to Stop Permanent Bases in Iraq? Guess

UPDATE UPDATE: More bizzare than I attributed to them, republicans went for Lee's bill because they are going to build the bases (actually, have (are) already build(t)(ing) the bases-- see here too) and they are just not going to call them permanent bases because they may go away in a century or two. They are going to call them enduring bases. So republicans were free to pretend they ever vote against a Bush administration initiative. I'll agree with Boehner that it was just another political stunt, not one by the Democrats however. Lee is sincere on this bill and has been pushing this issue for a long time. Maybe this is the political concession Kirk and friends got from Bush and Rove in their now infamous meeting a couple of months ago. They got to vote for something they can point to in their 2008 campaigns that makes them look like they are taking a stand to end the Iraq mess at some point and it won't change a thing as their bosses in Washington require.

UPDATE: House votes for Lee's bill. Kirk's been reading the blog apparently. Wonder if his followers who argued in the comments here that he should vote no will be mad at him.

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There is supposed to be a vote today on Barbara Lee's bill to prevent permanent bases in Iraq, a la the S. Korea model touted a few weeks ago by the White House, H.R. 2929. What's particularly interesting about Lee's bill is that is chronicles in reverse order the lies of the Bush administration and how they slowly evolved into some veiled truthtelling. They started out claiming that there were no designs on permanent bases and later began the talk that such bases would only make sense based on what happened in S. Korea, otherwise known as the war that never exactly ended.

That's the MO of republicans. Lie to curb objections to their bad policy and lull people into a false sense of what their plans are, and then slowly ramp up talk about what that really wanted to begin with when few are paying attention. The S. Korea model is exactly what they were always going for, war without end, and this time they get a global battlefield so they can use it as an excuse to deprive US Citizens of their Constitutional rights to Due Process.

Kirk will not go for Lee's bill because it would force the Bush administration to live with their originally stated intent which of course was never their intent, just the sales pitch. I predict an under the bed moment for Kirk today when this bill comes up for a vote, and since it might thunderstorm, I also predict an under the bed moment for Democat.

Mainstream Media Catches Up: Why is Kirk so Chatty on the Lake, but not on Iraq

Well thank you very much and it's about time. The Lake County News-Sun asks the question I've been asking for years: Why is Mark Kirk so chatty on local issues, but mum on the major national issue of the day, Iraq:

It's been more than a month since Congressman Mark Kirk joined 10 other congressional Republicans in a "come-to-Jesus" meeting with President Bush over the war in Iraq, its direction and its realities. Since then, the troop surge is in full force and the congressman still hasn't reported on what he told the president. Kirk certainly hasn't been a shrinking violet when it comes to visiting Lake County, most recently to see that Gate 4 at Great Lakes Naval Base actually was open. But since that Oval Office sit-down with the president, he has been silent on what he told the commander in chief, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Bush political adviser Karl Rove.

And multi-kudos to them because they get what that meeting with Bush was all about too:

Of course, the presidential session was not so much about how the Iraq war goes, but the shakes congressional Republicans are getting as the war drags on, the American people become more weary and the 2008 elections loom ever closer.

And hugest kudos to them because they get what Congressman Kirk's job is far better than he:

A month ago we asked the congressman to reveal what he told the president, because he should be telling the people who elected him the same.

The article further points out that Dan Seals has been up front with the District all along on the war. We don't have to beg Dan to talk about Iraq. We don't have to dig around to gleen his position from his other writings and speeches. We don't have to worry about conflicting promises he might have made to out-of-district donors and special interest groups. Nope, Dan says what he says and means what he means and says the same thing to everybody.

The News-Sun is going to wait for Congressman Kirk to answer their question. Let's pack them a pile of sandwiches and some bottled water because they are going to be waiting a long time.

The silver lining to all this (and it's no small lining at that) is that the IL Tenth has a news outlet that is not merely cheerleading for a failed war and failed policy and is willing to ask some questions. If this keeps up, I might actually be able to retire at some point.

Bad Leadership Leads to Careless Society

Yesterday afternoon, I was walking in the city and noticed a young woman in a black SUV rolling through a stoplight aimed at a rather large crowd of pedestrians. She kept moving, albiet slowly, and the crowd disbursed around her vehicle, so no one was hurt as she completely ran the red light in a crowded rush hour downtown scene. I wondered what was going through her mind as she continued to allow her vehicle to move forward into a crowd against the light. Then, I noticed she was looking squarely at, not the road, not the pedestrians and not the red light, but her blackberry completely oblivious to what was going on around her and she never even glanced up even as traffic ahead of her started to go faster with a light change ahead.

One success of Bush's ownership society is that Americans have taken to heart what their leaders display every day, they truly no longer care about each other. Once the land of community barn raisings and neighborhood watch, we now feel free to do whatever seems most interesting, satisfying or comfortable in the short run with complete disregard for the effect of our actions on others or even the long term effects on ourselves and our own families. It's the Mark Kirk "I've got mine, so don't give me no death tax" attitude. It's the same thing that allows a company to pay so very little attention to its products in production that they are deadly. It's caveat emptor in stores, in restaurants, and on the streets.

I was listening to the canned meat recall information on the news this morning and noticed that the instructions to consumers were to thrown out the products in double bags. The company was taking no responsibility for disposal or refunds. Rather than increasing USDA and FDA food inspections and demanding product purety, I imagine they'll try to sell us detectors so we can detect botulism or anti-freeze in our foods, toiletries and pharmaceuticals. The national health care plan will probably be a coupon for a medical book. For the next war, they'll probably just hand everybody a gun and say go to it. It's interesting, if sad, to watch how quickly the ownership society devolved into The Jungle and I anticipate it will end up in Lord of the Flies. Americans, as all people, need good leadership, but what we got is selfish greed. Time to become our own leaders.

Bill of Wrongs

One of the main principles of the Constitution as amended by the Bill of Rights is that We the People are not to be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Due process of law is supposed to mean a court proceeding with all the requirements of subject matter and personal jurisdiction (basically notice that you have to come to court and defend), other rules of procedure and the rules of evidence. Under the Bush administration, however, the bill of rights has been bullied from us about as easily as lunch money is bullied from the playground. The latest example is in the even further expanded and amended version of Excutive Order 13303. In this latest expansion, we are now subject to seizure of our property, if the Bush administration deems that any of us are undermining his efforts in Iraq. Since Bush's judgment of what undermines them has included congressional debate and the historical peaceloving tradition of the Quakers, that means that just about anyone could be subject to this order.

I've heard Bush's cheerleaders argue that this order is intended to be limited to non-US-Citizens on the battlefield or directly assisting those on the battlefield, but you have to remember that Bush considers his war on terror as being fought on a global battlefield that includes your backyard. As for limiting it to non-US-citizens, you have to read the order itself and such a reading proves that the order does not limit seizure to exclude US citizens. In fact, there is a definition of "United States person" in the order assigning the meaning of "any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person in the United States," but the seizure mechanism is not limited to exclude these "United States persons." The powers go to any person who has commited the listed offenses as determined by the Secretaries of the Treasury, State and Defense--his appointees under his (and Cheney's) control.

I've also heard that, even among the opposition, those who are acknowledging that the newly expanded Executive order includes US citizens, there is a sense that they won't object because they feel they can watch it's implementation to make sure there is no abuse.

Uh, right.

We either want to give up our rights like lunch money to the local bully or we'll finally decide to impeach.

Society vs. the Ownership Society

UPDATE: More homegrown botulism. The chili sauce recall has spread to canned meat.

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Last week I reported on Dick Durbin's bill to improve food import safety. The bill wasn't available at the time, but it is now. You can take a look at it here. Durbin's proposal creates income to be used to pay for increased inspections of food imports and inovations in technology to help detect food adulteration with special priority for detection of intentional adulteration. Dick Durbin wants to prevent your kids, your dog, your cat, and you from getting sick and support food safety innovation.

Enter the opportunist, Mark Kirk in need of food safety photo op. I guess he's been reading the blog and has figured out that people in the district are a tad bit upset with his food exporting buddies in China, the ones he told anything goes in the US other than copyright violations. Trying to take the wind out of my posts, he's introduced the Import Safety Act of 2007 , H.R. 3100. (The GPO page is down. I'll link when it comes back up.)

The amendment merely ups the penalties under Section 331 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 21 USC Section 331. He does something similar with the Consumer Product Safety Act, 15 U.S.C. 2070(a) relative to toys. Kirk's big idea is pretty much in line with Bush's Ownership Society, we get to own the effects of food borne illness and defective toys while the treasury gets to own penalties if they can collect them. Now that's what I call taxation without represenation because I don't think people in the district want to get sick first and have the government collect later.

While Dick Durbin wants to prevent illness for bad food imports, Mark Kirk would never inconvenience his food export buddies with any fees or preventative measures. As for the increased penalties in Kirk's bill, I don't think the people who put out these defective products expect to ever pay any fine because they don't expect to be caught. Remember the anti-freeze laden toothpaste was counterfeit.

I think it's time we tell Mark Kirk that the Illinois Tenth is not interested in forcing the Ownership Society into our food safety and give him no kudos for such a feeble effort. The real answer is in stepped up inspections and technology to make it more effective and practical.

Breaking: Mark Kirk afraid of puppies?

From Iraq Summer:

"Eight fully-uniformed officers from the Glenview police department were on hand to protect Congressman Mark Kirk today when he visited a Humane Society event in the town’s Gateway Park. The officers joined multiple members of Kirk’s staff at "Pet Protection Day,” where local pet owners learned about local services, pet care issues and animal protection legislation."

Is Congressman Kirk afraid of puppies? kittens? hamsters? gold fish? or his constituents who wanted to invite him to discuss the Iraq War with him at a peaceful townhall meeting? I'd guess the latter, but there could be a Fido or Fluffy still honked off at the defective imported wheat flour he encouraged when he told the Chinese that our only issues were intellectual property violations.

From other sources I hear that kudos belong to the Glenview police who handled the whole thing with appropriate restraint despite urgings from Kirk's staff that they arrest citizens merely seeking an audience with their Congressman in a peaceful manner. It's good to know that while Kirk and his staffers cheer the idea of a police state, our local police aren't ready for that yet.

Exactly What Madison Was Talking About

Bush to grant full immunity from all prosecution to his administration. What will they do with it?

This is the exact sort of tyranny of which James Madison spoke when he expressed this concern:

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. ~~James Madison

What is remarkable to me reading some of the comments placed on this blog by Kirk shills is their agreement that Americans should dump the very government that brought freedom and success to this country so guys like Mark Kirk can stay in power forever and they can keep a policy of regressive taxation and push the middle class into dependent poverty. I guess Kirk and his ilk want to live in a totalitarian state. Will the people of the Illinois Tenth agree?

Think I'm overstating the point? Guess again and see who thinks the situation is far worse than what people think it is.

Lessons Learned About Tyrants Forcing Compromise Through War

First, New Yorkers learned that just because a guy has a lot of money to buy a bunch of campaign ads and lots of GOTV does not mean they have to vote for him. The infrastructure of New York City is falling apart, but they keep electing tax and keep republicans because they have the money to buy the campaign ads.

Now, we learn that tainted toothpaste is not just for prisoners, the mentally ill and poor people and can make its way to the affluent places like Illinois Tenth. (The article would not link, but you can find it by searching the Daily Herald archive for "toothpaste" and find the article titled "Phony Colgate found in Arlington Heights.") What I don't get is how phony colgate finds it's way through the distributions channels. Don't the stores know from whom they are purchasing their products, or don't they care?

If you have one of those paid online New York Times subscriptions, you can read how Paul Krugman did something scary, he ate a salad and for free you can read Rick Perlstein's article about what he's calling "e-coli conservatism." While Bush and Cheney's buddies walk away with the national treasury in the form of military contracts so we can lose in Iraq for a longer period of time, the FDA conducted 47% fewer safety inspections and guess what? Those benevolent corporations managed to make 47% of their products less pure, less clean and less safe. Go figure. When you've had your fill of all this information, you can work your way to Jim Harkness' article about the breakdown of regulation for an industrial model that treats your food like computer parts.Then there is the one about our new faith-based food safety system wherein the FDA and USDA simply have faith that the melamine in the pork won't kill you, at least not right away. This gives a whole new meaning to saying grace before supper. If you are not mad enough yet, read this one about the extra FDA funding spent on bonuses to keep the Bush administration executive branch cronies from jumping ship back to industry.

Robert Scheer writing for The Nation reminds us that we were warned about leaders like these a very long time ago. Back then, they called them tyrants. We call them conservatives.

Bush betrayed Congress, which in turn betrayed the American people--just as Madison feared when he wrote: "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it compromises and develops the germ of every other."

Hiding Under the Bed in the Senate

To me the most stunning aspect of the republican filibuster of the Levin-Reid Amendment is that the press has shown that they still love the war. Apart from a couple of reports on MSNBC and NBC, I have noticed only mischaracterization of the event as happened yesterday morning on Good Morning America. The press is not going to report the truth, so I've come to the conclusion that the only people who can stop the madness of the tyranical Bush administration are the People themselves. To stop that from ever happening, the Bush administration sacrficed even the chance clean victory in Iraq to keep the effect of the war on most people to a minimum guarantying that they will sit on their collective patooties and let it happen.

There is no strategy to succeed in Iraq or in the so-dubbed War on Terror as Joe Lieberman would have us believe, so even if you believe we are spreading democracy or preventing them from delivering their (nonexistent) WMD to terrorists, the Bush administration is a failure.

Harry Reid tried his best to move the Senate to action last night by embarrassing republicans who tell their constituents that they want the war to end and then vote differently, but that was unlikely to work because republicans simply cannot be embarrassed because they have no shame, just unmovable loyalty to the cash cow known as war. I hope Harry produced some eyeopening moments for the few Americans who stayed up all night watching C-Span, but to see any change in this mess we have allowed Bush to create, the average Americans who went to sleep after the nightly re-run of Everybody Love Raymond will have to stand up and demand their representatives represent them and the America we grew up with, not the nightmare Bush is trying to create.

I saw Senate employees setting up a lot of cots for the all-nighter and can only think they were for republican Senators to hide under.

How to Succeed in War Without Really Trying

The Rand Corporation has recently released a report suggesting that we simply need to advertise better in Iraq and Afghanistan. They suggest we better market security and democracy like corporations market foot powder and dental floss with expectation management of civilians and marketing blogs that phrase and critize the US because, as corporations have found, including some controlled criticism makes it seem more authentic even if it isn't.

Maybe instead of sending the energizer bunny to the region, we should just keep some of the promises we made to the Iraqi and Afghan people like rebuiding the infrastructure in Baghdad and helping women gain independence free from threat in Afghanistan. Now that we've destroyed their institutions and stolen their oil, maybe we could leave Iraq to allow them to at least diffuse the problems caused by the American occupiers. Now, that we've destabilized the entire region, maybe we could go back to Afghanistan and help them eliminate the re-constituted al Qaeda. The problems in Iraq and Afganistan are not perception, but reality. Consumer product oriented marketing would only highlight the dishonesty with which the Bush administration has treated these people.

Rand just doesn't get what US corporations also fail to understand as they sell us tainted peanut butter and germ-y spinach, and what Mark Kirk mistakenly thinks he's successfully passing off in the district as real representation (real press events for fake heroics). First you need a quality product, then you worry about marketing it. Event those steeped in Bush's war propaganda cannot explain why he didn't just try to win the Iraq war rather than just turning it into a quagmire and take out bin Laden rather than making him a regional folk hero.

I don't think they need contests for the best anti-American slogan and death squad logos in Iraq and Afghanistan, they need honest problem solving from the nations of a cooperating world. On the other hand, Captain Crunch might do a better job than Bush's loyalist generals.

The people are the only censors of their governors.... give them the full information of their affairs

I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors; and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people, is to give them the full information of their affairs through the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. ~~ Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, 1787

Examples of supression of discussion are everywhere since Bush and Kirk first took office. Bush refuses to answer questions and prevents members of his administration from talking with inappropriate uses of executive privilege and commutation of felony sentences. Of the most recent examples in the Bush administration, and probably the most loathsome is the assertion of executive privilege to stop investigation of the death of Pat Tilman. On a lighter, but not less worrisome note, members of Congress cannot call the President a liar, even if he is one. I wonder if they can call him veracity challenged.

Closer to home, Congressman Kirk hides under the bed consistently avoiding all hard questions about Iraq, and as we recently saw, my cat under the bed analogy is not too far off the mark because he had his staff hiding from a small group of senior citizens in the dark in a locked office to avoid an invitation to a listening session on Iraq.

There have been several postings around the Illinois blogs, including this one, about Jay Footlik's position about Iraq and recent disagreement with Daily Herald reporter Eric Krol about his recent statement on the topic. Krol reported on Thursday, July 12, 2007 that "Footlik said he doesn't necessarily support a 'hard and fast deadline' for withdrawal, but thinks Congress has to force President Bush to come up with "something close to a deadline." Footlik responded by Letter to the Editor printed on Sunday July 15, 2007 (and as posted on Archpundit):

I am writing to correct the record. A July 11 article, “Kirk gives surge credit,” printed a partial quote of mine out of context and, as a result, misrepresented my view on the Iraq war. The author repeated this error in his blog on the Daily Herald’s Web site on July 12.

In speeches and interviews throughout the district, my position on this war has been clear: It’s time to bring our soldiers home — safely and responsibly. Firm deadlines are usually not the preferred option for warfare, but this war is like no other.

This president has demonstrated such a cavalier attitude toward the new Congress and such a disregard for the overwhelming desire of the American people that a firm deadline for withdrawal is simply the only way to force him to change this disastrous policy.

I suggested by comment on Arch that perhaps one could understand Footlik's position on Iraq by studying my July 31, 2006 post about an event at which Footlik spoke to the Moraine Township Democrats. Jay spoke and the post was written long before his position was in controversy and before Footlik decided to make a run for Congress.

From studying that post more thoroughly, I can tell that Footlik has not changed his position on the President's conduct of the war, but there was one thing I was not sure about, Footlik's comment that it is a mistake for Democrats to talk about Iraq as an issue in and by itself. At the time, I thought he meant that decisions on the war should be made in conjunction with decisions about the entire region, including the creation of an international force to deal with all the threats in the region, including the Middle East. I guess I could be wrong. There is no way to see inside someone's head. So, I recently asked Footlik to explain what he meant. He didn't really remember saying that and that is understandable because it was a year ago, but he thought about it for a few minutes and said that he probably meant that he did not think that Democrats should discuss or perhaps dwell on how we got into the war. I guess, Footlik can think about that for a while and decide whether or not that was what he meant, or more importantly, what he now means, and I am not going to criticize him for that at all because it is hard when someone reads back your words one year later.

Nonetheless, I'm going to give Footlik and my readers my view on the issue of what we can and cannot or should and should not discuss on the topic of Iraq. I fall squarely in the discuss everything, including how we got into Iraq, camp. I don't see how we can not and find our way out. First, there is the stubborn insistence by Bush and Kirk that we stay in Iraq no matter what. I've observed that it seems like the original mission in Iraq was to get into Iraq and the mission in Iraq now is to stay in Iraq. I don't think we will ever get past that if we don't uncover and discuss the real reasons we were led there in the first place. Many have speculated and even produced good evidence that it was the oil, or a grudge W. Bush had because Hussein made an attempt on the life of H.W. and some believe that the neo-cons are testing their ownership society economy on the Iraqis. While there is evidence out there for all of this, until there is a general acceptance of truth based on unrefuted evidence or even better, facts ultimately admitted, we will never get beyond argument on the topic to real solution. Until we know the real original motive in Iraq, we will never be able to fix it.

Second, the original reasons we got into Iraq coupled with the lies used to get us in might just have something to do with why we virtually abandoned Afghanistan that sorely needed our attention after September 11, 2001, allowed Bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora not long thereafter, allowed Pakistan to harbor him for years and allowed al Qaeda to regain strength which is at issue now as Bin Laden is back in the movie-making business and our official ally, the Musharraf government of Pakistan is currently at risk. Bush still clings to the ideas that al Qaeda in Iraq is the same as the original group now living around the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and that al Qaeda is strong in Iraq, but not in Afghanistan or Pakistan even though that is universally disputed outside his administration. Why does he continue to say that despite all the evidence? Why did he over and over again ignore his generals' advice and why does he apparently continue to do so even with his loyalist, Petraeus? It's important because we are still living by it whether true or not or whether we like it or not.

Third, the way we got into Iraq also affected our national government as people have been persuaded to ignore the old wisdom of Ben Franklin and trade their freedom for a mere promise of security. We got into Iraq the same way our congressmen (except Russ Feingold) were persuaded to vote for the Patriot Act and the same way the Bush administration took away our habeas corpus rights and the same way we allowed our phone companies to be directed to use their technology to spy on us.

No, I think we still need to discuss how we got into Iraq so we can figure out how to make it right and how to set our own national government back on the right track.

Intrigue in the Illinois Tenth

I think most of us think of our home district as a pretty normal place, people working, kids going to school, housewives, househusbands and retirees out shopping, lawnmowers running, the whole Americana thing. Not so much last Friday when a group of citizens went to visit their Congressman's office. They knew he wasn't there, but they wanted to deliver to Congressman Kirk a friendly invitation to a townhall meeting on the topic of Iraq, just a listening meeting. There were no video cameras running and no indicia of drama, just a few constituents, mostly senior citizens.

That's when they found out that there is intrigue in the Illinois Tenth.

The office was locked and dark. After a while, someone peered around the door holding it closed so none in the group could enter. It seemed to observers in the group that the inhabitants of the office were trying to pretend they weren't there and that the man holding the door seemed very nervous, "as if he was under orders not to admit us." He said everyone was in a meeting and refered to the small band of constituents as "people from OUTSIDE!"

That's Bush/Cheney/Rove style secretive government. We get to pay their salaries and they get to hide from constituents as if we were all playing Spy v. Spy rather than trying to run this country as the Constitutional Democracy it was intended to be.

Ketchikan Alaska Tells Mark Kirk to Buzz Off and Time To Wish Democat a Happy Birthday

As you know last year, Kirk created a lot of press for himself with his legislation against a bridge intended to be built from Ketchikan, Alaska to a nearby island on which sits the airport and land intended for some needed development. He called it the bridge to nowhere, but it was not quite to nowhere as I explained in my June 9, 2006 post. They have a housing crisis in Southeast Alaska and need the infrastructure to grow in places where mountains and water make it very difficult.

Recently Kirk claimed the savings from the killed bridge as his contribution to the poor on inadequate foodstamp diets, but it appears that the bridge is on again, so even that was untruthful. We could have told the folks in Ketchikan not to worry as Kirk has had a pretty poor success rate for legislation over the years, but they decided to fight back a bit anyway, at least one resident did in his letter to Sit News that can be viewed here. The writer took a swipe at Illinois, but ok, touché. This was my favorite line of the letter:

I'm a lifelong Republican, but am now considering becoming a Democrat along with a lot of Alaskans because of Mark Kirk.

On a lighter note, today is Democat's Birthday! She's 15 and going strong no thanks to the USDA and FDA, but pure luck as I never fed her the tainted brands of catfood. She hates having her picture taken, so here's an old one of her lounging around on a Sunday morning. She'd make a terrible politician, but probably a pretty good president by comparison.

S. 1776: Independence from tainted food

On Thursday, Dick Durbin introduced S. 1776, a bill to amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to establish a user fee program to ensure food safety, and for other purposes. No doubt the Kirk republicans are mad about anything that charges business anything, but I for one like my food and Democat's food free from anti-freeze. The full text of the bill isn't available yet, but Durbin spoke about in to the Senate in introduction (You can find it in the July 12 congressional record. I couldn't directly link due to query string):

Mr. President, I rise today to introduce legislation to strengthen the ability of the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, to ensure the safety of food imported into the U.S. The volume of food imports has increased significantly in recent years, from $45.6 billion in 2003 to $64 billion in 2006. According to the USDA, imported food accounts for 13 percent of the average American's diet, including 31 percent of fruits, juices, and nuts; 9.5 percent of red meat; and 78.6 percent of fish and shellfish.

This upward trend in imported food has been accompanied by an increasing number of health and safety incidents related to imported food products. In the past 6 months, we have seen what appears to be the intentional contamination of wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate with melamine, which is an industrial product that should never find its way into food products. In addition, we recently learned that a significant volume of imported fish products from China have been contaminated with chemicals and residues, including Malachine green and Nitrofuren. We have found imported Chinese toothpaste in the U.S. that was contaminated with diethylene glycol, which is a toxic component used in antifreeze.

Unfortunately, the FDA currently lacks the resources and authority to adequately determine the quality and safety of food imports, inspect an adequate volume of imported food, and rapidly detect and respond to incidents of contaminated imports. This legislation would take several steps to correct these problems.

First, the bill would impose a fee for the FDA's oversight of imported food products. These fees would generate revenues to be used for inspections of imported food and critical food safety research. The legislation directs the FDA to use some of this funding to perform cutting-edge research to develop testing technologies and methods that would quickly and accurately detect the presence of pervasive contaminants such as E. coli and listeria. The legislation would also establish a food importer certification program that would require foreign firms and governments to demonstrate that their food safety systems are equivalent to ours.

What has been made clear through the pet food recall and other outbreaks of foodborne illnesses is that the FDA is a severely underfunded and understaffed agency. Much of the responsibility for overseeing and inspecting the safety of imported food rests with the FDA. However, due to fairly flat budgets and increasing responsibilities, the number of inspectors looking at these shipments has actually decreased from more than 3,000 inspectors in 2003 to the present level of around 2,700 inspectors.

The Centers for Disease Control, CDC, estimates that 76 million Americans become sick from foodborne illnesses each year. More than 300,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die each year. Less than 1.5 percent of imported food is inspected by the FDA and the FDA lacks the resources and authorities to certify the standards of our trading partners. This situation presents an economic, public health, and bioterrorism risk to the U.S.

The FDA office that is responsible for regulating more than $60 billion of imported food, the Center for Food Safety and Nutrition, CFSAN, is also responsible for regulating $417 billion worth of domestic food and $59 billion in cosmetics. All of this activity is regulated by an office for which the President requested $467 million in fiscal year 2008. Only $312 million of that amount would be for inspectors. We clearly need to review FDA's funding to make sure that it has the resources necessary to safeguard the 80 percent of our food supply that it is responsible for regulating. For this reason, a group of my colleagues and I sent a letter earlier this year to the Agriculture Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds the FDA, asking for a significant increase in the level of funding for the FDA foods program.

But imports present a special challenge. It may cost more to ensure the safety of food produced in other countries, and the logistical challenges are greater. It is important that we supplement the FDA's budget with additional funding streams to make sure that it has the resources necessary to safeguard our food supply from contaminated imports. Specifically this legislation would direct the FDA to collect a user fee on imported food products, for the administrative review, processing, and inspection costs borne by the FDA. The legislation would use that funding to bolster FDA's import inspection program, which currently inspects less than 1.5 percent of all imports. It would also fund critical research into rapid testing technologies for detecting foodborne pathogens.

Lastly, this bill would establish an imported food certification program. Today, any country and any company can export food products to the United States as long as they inform regulators of the shipment. No checks are performed to ensure that the producer has adequate sanitary standards. The FDA does not ensure that trading partners have equivalent regulatory systems or inspect overseas plants when problems arise.

When the FDA does want to investigate an outbreak, it can be delayed by uncooperative foreign governments. For example, during the pet food recall, U.S. regulators were delayed three weeks in their request for visas to inspect facilities.

This new program would mark a watershed change in the food import safety posture of the U.S. This bill says that if you want a slice of the lucrative U.S. market, you have to comply with the same common-sense standards that apply to U.S. food producers. You have to have equivalent food safety systems and processes in place to those of the U.S. You need to give U.S. regulators access to your facilities and records so they can check your safety record without unnecessary delay. In addition, U.S. regulators would have the power to revoke the certification of a company or country that fails to comply, and to detain products that fail to meet U.S. standards.

For too long, we have gone without a solid safety standard for imported foods. Instead, our regulators jump from alert to alert and recall to recall. This legislation would close these loopholes that allow dangerous imports into our country and put a solid, proactive system in place to protect our food supply.

I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.

It's evident from recent problems that the free marketplace is not free because the deck is stacked against consumers. There are no real choices as we can only choose from what we are given and what information we are given. The USDA and FDA originally said that there is "no acceptable level" of melamine and cyanuric acid in human food and then backed off when wider contamination of food intended for human consumption was found. The FDA not only needs more funding and organization as Sen. Durbin observes, but an attitude adjustment.

Take a look at this post at TPM cafe by Jared Bernstein. He seems to agree with me that there is some virulent form of capitalism being pushed on us, he calls it a "virulent and lame version of conservative argumentation". He feels the argument is failing under the weight of its own nonsense describing how the Harry and Louise commercials won't work this time as the employer based health care system is fragmenting and efforts to raise the tax rate on hedge funds managers is succeeding because of the evident unfairness of our current tax structure that taxing teachers and firemen more than hedge fund managers.

I thank Senator Durbin for working to get anti-freeze out of our food and feel that the mere existence of the situation that required it proves that the virulent capitalism or conservatism is a failure for the people of the U.S. and not worthy of any argument in its favor.

No Surprises--Kirk Votes to Support Bush and Lied About Intelligence--and Footlik Gives His Story to the Wrong Person

It made it to the comments before I got home Thursday night, but I'll put the news up top because it deserves it and thanks to the commenters who posted it: Mark Kirk gave the Illinois Tenth nothing to think about with his vote to support the Presidents (Bush/Cheney/Rove) and not the troops by voting to keep them in the middle of a civil war indefinitely. Same old. Same old. Looking at the roll call which shows Democrats and republicans in different font types, it's stunning to see that republicans in Congress continue to walk in lock step with this failed administration despite all evidence concluding that it has failed to gain control over either al Qaeda or Iraq. All that talk about republicans breaking ranks sort of falls apart when you look at the vote.

Another non-surprise is Bush's attempt to lie his way out of news this week that both the Iraq War and the War on Terror have failed, including a military intelligence report concluding that the strength of al Qaeda has been largely restored to pre- 9/11 levels, even and a draft report to Congress concluding that none of the political, economic and other reform benchmarks have been met. Rather than trying to switch to a strategy that might reduce the damage or heaven forbid actually work to ease tensions in the region, Bush chose to provide a report including what have been called delusionally inaccurate accounts of progress, blame the American people for having war fatigue and again make the long ago debunked assertion that the Iraqis are the same people who attacked us on September 11, 2001. See here for another debunk of Bush's rosey claims and here for some history on progress in Iraq and it is interesting to see how Condi went from talking to Maliki about the "importance of making progress on national unity and reconciliation" to most recently devoting herself to the game of golf.

As for Kirk's deceptions, not long ago he was talking about winding down our effort in Iraq and supposedly talking to Rove about how damaging the war has been to his re-election campaign. Now, of course he's back to his old favorite, "stay the course". Now, there is something else to think about. Thursday night, I had the opportunity to attend an event where decorated Vietnam Veteran, Bob Emerson spoke. Mr. Emerson related a story about the February meeting he attended at Kirk's church wherein Kirk claimed that the CIA misled the president about Iraq's nuclear intentions. Emerson, not wanting to embarass Kirk in public, copied an article he was carrying around and slipped it to him after the event. Kirk folded it up unread responding with some snippy remark about George Tenent being a frat boy and doing whatever the President wanted.

The article Mr. Emerson gave to Kirk and that Kirk ignored was a December 25, 2003 Chicago Tribune report entitled CIA was disregarded in uranium claim (available for purchase from the Chicagotribune.com archives for $3.95). The article related the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board conclusion that Bush's State of the Union Address claim about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain nuclear materials was "questionable" (the Niger claim--now commonly know to be false). Specifically, the article stated that "the White House was so anxious 'to grab onto something affirmative' about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable." So much for Mark's insider intelligence information.

My final non-surprise is that Jay Footlik never responded to my question. No surprise as the Footlik campaign made it clear, at least in my opinion, that they were not interested in the grassroots, their campaign being more about interest group money. They did respond to Herald reporter Eric Krol and, at least it appeared to me, pissed him off as he recently reported that Footlik had said "he doesn't necessarily support a 'hard and fast deadline' for withdrawal." Now Footlik's position seems to be altered. Footlik should have given me the story. I'd have been nicer about his shift of view because I see nothing wrong with joining the majority of Americans who believe it's time to put an end to the madness of the Iraq war.

House is Debating HR 2956 Now! Will Mark Kirk Vote to Bring the Troops Home?

Check status here.

Still no answer from Jay Footlik on my question (and he is still welcome to respond), but Dan Seals put out a press release to set forth his position. The Dan quote from the press release is:

It’s time for Representative Kirk to do the right thing and vote to bring our troops home. This bill will help the Iraqi government to stand on its own, while ensuring the safety of our troops. The status quo has not worked and will not work. It is past time for the Iraqi government to stand on its own two feet, and for our troops to come home.

Of course, Mark Kirk is welcome to send a statement and I'll print it in full, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for one.

Reading Between the Lines

Could Michael Chertoff's gut be playing politics with our brains or do you think it's trying to do what his republican mouth won't, warn us that the republican party's War on Terror is failing? Maybe he's just auditioning for right wing radio or part of that group of repubicans that really wants to see another attack.

What do you think Mark Kirk's office was telling poor folks on food stamps when spokesman Eric Elk responded to their request for help against anticipated presidential vetos of the 2008 Labor, Health, Human Services and Education Appropriations and the Feeding America's Families Act of 2007 with this comment: "Congressman Kirk is focused on ensuring children and family services are not under funded because of wasteful government spending like the bridge to nowhere and bailing out spinach farmers."? I'd guess that's a no(wonder why he didn't mention that federal funding of the bridge is going forward anyway). Kirk's feeble and self-centered representation is a far cry from the real representation from representatives who recently lived the foodstamp diet and found it inadequate.

What do you think it means that Kirk, after supposedly confronting presidents Rove and Bush (was president Cheney there too?) about the Iraq war and earlier claiming to constituents that it was time to wind down, now claims, as a person working in the Pentagon, that the surge has had success? I'd be a little concerned about that claimed insider knowledge of his. We've heard that one before. Maybe Kirk's well fed stomach should have dinner with Chertoff's gut, but don't spend more than the food stamp limit. We The People won't be able to afford it after paying for your failed Iraq war so we don't have to fight them over here.

The same Herald story that reported on Kirk's new favor for the surge reported that Dan Seals has called for a troop withdrawal. However, Jay Footlik apparently said something diferent to the Herald Reporter, Mr. Krol. What do you think Footlik meant when he said "he doesn't necessarily support a 'hard and fast deadline' for withdrawal."? Please Jay, tell us, would you vote for H.R.2956 if you were in Congress now? If not, would you support another bill or introduce your own troop redeployment or withdrawal bill and if so what would it say?

Kirk Looks for Bed to Hide Under

Thanks for pointing this out, Hawkeye.

I don't know why anyone would be at all surprised by Kirk running away from questions about Iraq. He clearly lied to his constituents for years about his insider knowledge of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that he knew were there and we were simply idiotic children for not understanding. He's avoided all serious talk with constituents, avoided town hall forums and avoided requested private office discussions. He's even avoided the larger discussion with members of his base on the effect of the Iraq war on the region requiring all discussion focus on the narrower issue of fearmongering about Israel.

The people of the Illinois Tenth have been very open to the idea of Kirk coming to speak to them about the war and have invited him to many events, but he's avoided them at all costs, likely not because he really believed in it and was proven wrong. He knows that there would be some understanding of that. More likely and I believe from looking at his votes and behavior over the years because he knew all along that the Iraq war was built on deception for other purposes of the republican party, Karl Rove's permanent majority.

Kirk is a political opportunist who could care less about the veteran from whom he ran or the soldiers he's neglected to appropriately equip through his votes. He's been running for years, stopping only when he can throw a couple of pork bucks at a vet or two for a photo op.

No, Kirk running from a vet with questions about Iraq is nothing new. Time for the Tenth to stop rewarding him for running for office on the "Who me?" platform.

That's why you make good decisions on the front end

There are no good options in Iraq. I've said this before -- there are bad options and worse options. That's why you make good decisions on the front end, so you don't end up being in these kinds of situations that we're in right now. ~~Barack Obama, June 10, 2007

We are to expect a vote this week on Ike Skelton's Responsible Redeployment from Iraq Act, HR 2956 (not yet on GPO). The bill requires reduction of the troops beginning not later than 120 days and committees a comprehensive United States strategy for Iraq by January 1, 2008.
Russ Feingold announced he will shortly introduce an amendment to the Department of Defense Authorization bill to be called Feingold-Reid legislation requiring redeployment start within 120 days with most troops redeployed by March 31, 2008, after which funding for the continued military operation in Iraq would end.

I prefer the Feingold approach, get out and stop funding, because Bush/Cheney/Kirk have been clear on their comprehensive strategy for Iraq from the beginning, get in and stay in at all costs (oh, except if it costs Mark his seat).

While many will argue these bills are not perfect, some arguing too soon and others arguing not soon enough, Obama captures the issue. We let a bunch of self serving, self enriching liars take control of our government, failed to ask questions and demand answers when stonewalled and once in it is terribly hard to get out.

It's probably time to call Mark Kirk and ask him to get out from under the bed (well, that's where Democat goes when she's scared) and support redeployment. While you are at it, you might want to ask him if you can see that intelligence he saw and we didn't.

It's also time to push for better education in this country because one issue on the front end for republicans was to end the idea that quality, universal free public education was a good thing. From the days of the GI bill which uplifted this country and our economy, we have devolved to Reagan 's characterization of education as elitist to the Bush administration's outright denial of science, de-funding college tuition loans and grants and pushing minorities out of the picture to the point where now they have finally succeeded in their roll-back of Brown vs. Board of Education. We've let ourselves become the children left behind. Democratic government requires citizen participation and citizens have to be able to ask questions, issue spot, red herring spot and we are falling down on the job. We have to make better decisions on the front end and one of those decisions would be to educate our children so they can make better decisions down the line.

False choices and some facts

republicans will argue until they are (ironically) blue in the face that Americans cannot have access to affordable health care because it will limit our choices. AT&T spent a chunk of change this past winter to advertise their need to be freed from obeying municipal laws regarding cable television contracts to give us more choices. We are told that free trade is better than fair trade to preserve our market choices. We are also told that we have to choose between security and our basic civil liberties and between taking care of people and our planet and having a growing economy. It's amazing that so many people and companies are interested in our choices, in fact so interesting that we need to ask ourselves if they want to preserve their own choices and not our.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addressed the false choice between our planet and our economy at the Live Earth event yesterday:

Now we've all heard the oil industry and the coal industry and their indentured servants in the political process telling us that global climate stability is a luxury that we can't afford. That we have to choose now between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other. And that is a false choice.

In 100% of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy --- if we want to measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon how it produces jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, how it preserves the values of the assets of our community and how it averts the catastrophe of global warming.

If, on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay for our joyride with denuded landscapes, with poor health, with huge cleanup costs and with climate chaos which is going to amplify over time and that they will never be able to pay.

Environmental injury is deficit spending. It is a way of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity on to the backs of our children. Climate change is upon us. Its impacts are going to be catastrophic and we are causing it. The good news is, we have the scientific and technological capacity to avert its most catastrophic impacts. We only need the political will.

Is good environmental policy good economic policy? One way to find out is to review the NASDAQ Clean Edge Index which tracks public companies specializing in developing environmentally friendly technologies. Clean Edge was started in 2001 by Ron Pernick and Joel Makower. Makower wrote a report called The Clean Revolution in 2001. The index was started in May 2006 by Clean Edge and NASDAQ.

Not so ironically, the Dow Jones just started a clean technology newsletter calling it a "greatly underserved market".

Apparently, while rabid republicans and global warming contrarians (see the Kirk connection) were working overtime to attack Gore's event, investors (bet a bunch of republicans in the group) were busy snatching up Clean Edge rated companies.

Don't listen to what they tell us peons down on the ground, watch where they put their investment dollars.

Reject Fearmongering on Iraq, Iran and Israel

So we wake up to our Sunday morning New York Times and find that they want the returning Congress to set a quick timetable to bring our troops home from Iraq "without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit." Maybe in Monday's paper they will apologize for their part in the sale of the war to the American people. Colin Powell is also out there touting his work to stop the invasion. Sorry, Colin, it's a little lost on me because you never bothered to tell the American people what you knew, not then and not even later when things first started to go bad. You could have saved more lives, American and Iraqi, but you didn't want to rock the boat; didn't want to lose your status. Well, you lost it anyway and failed to do the right thing that could have been your silver lining.

It's still pretty quiet on the Mark Kirk apology front too. He knew better than his constituents who wrote him asking him to vote against war. He saw the intelligence that we did not see. He admonished both Perritt and Goodman in debates for their challenging him on the need to go into and stay in Iraq. He couldn't get away with it when he debated Seals, but still no realism on Iraq from Kirk in that debate either when he tried to tie the Iraq war to his fearmongering on Israel and insulted his constituents by claiming we were "between stay the course and a plan for defeat". No, Mark that was you. We never wanted that course to begin with and when you got us into it, we worked tirelessly to get us out.

As you all know, Kirk recently made a small and politically motivated attempt to at least look like he wanted a new strategy in Iraq so he could distance himself from the Bush administration for his 2008 campaign. Blasted by both sides, he crawled back under the bed only to surfact last week at district Independence Day parades where he was confronted with his own war record when a group called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq passed out signs (similar to the one pictured above) and literature about his war voting record around the parade routes. We saw more than dozens of these signs on the parade route in Deerfield and later I heard Kirk stopped dead in his tracks as he made the right turn from Deerfield Road and Waukegan Road in Deerfield.

The New York Times editorial goes on:

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

We can add outright crime to demagoguery as all responsible get off for the crime of outing of active, covert CIA agent Valerie Plame seeking real WMD in Iraq and covering it up. We can also add calls for more terrorist attacks, not in the chatter of jihadists, but the chatter of republican radio talk giving platforms to washed up repubican politicians seeking to keep the Rovian dream of one party takeover through fear alive.

I've said before that the 2008 election will be about who we are as a people. On the issues of Iraq, Iran and the Middle East, we have to decide if we want to be a people driven by fear used by Washington insiders as a tool for their own political and/or monetary gain or a people driven by the evidence, reason and compassion. I call for the people of the Illinois Tenth District to reject candidates who use fearmongering on these issues, particularly Israel, to gain their own political foothold. We need to take these issues out of the politics as sport arena and develop realistic strategies to reach the goal of bringing peace and stability to the region. We need to get out of Iraq now leaving no permanent bases and turn our efforts to building coalitions of nations willing to work for stability in the region. Then, we need to elect a new Congressman who will do the people's business in the House of Representatives and not put his political career maneuverings over the doing our business.