Breaking News: Man takes hostages at Clinton campaign office

Let's all hope for a peaceful outcome.
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A man claiming to have a bomb was holding one or more hostages at Hillary Clinton's campaign office Friday, police said.

The man had what appeared to be a bomb strapped to himself, said Bill Shaheen, a top state campaign official. The two hostages were volunteers, Shaheen said.

Clinton was not believed to be in the office at the time.

Authorities were sending a tactical bomb unit to assist local police, and the area was evacuated, said Maj. Michael Hambrook of New Hampshire State Police. A nearby school also was in lockdown.

Bill Clinton Tells Iowans He Opposed Iraq From Start

I have to admit Bill Clinton (Slick Willie) was a better president than Bush, but he was a supporter of the war in Iraq and he blazed the path to the war in his own presidency. His own sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 INNOCENT CHILDREN. Now he tells us he is against the war in Iraq? Can we trust someone who lied to us before? The images below are a testament to his lies.
Former president Bill Clinton said yesterday that he "opposed Iraq from the beginning," glossing over the more nuanced views of the war he has expressed over time. Clinton made the remarks while campaigning for his wife in Iowa -- a state where many Democrats are against the war -- and as he expressed bitterness over getting a tax cut with money that could have been spent on the military.

But past remarks made by the former president do leave open a question about how fervently Clinton opposed the war at the outset and before it grew widely unpopular. In immediate hindsight, Clinton did not sound like a fierce critic.

"I supported the president when he asked for authority to stand up against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Clinton said on May 18, 2003, during a commencement speech at Tougaloo College in Mississippi.

SCHIP and GOP stupidity

In writing my part 2b, there was a big chunk I was leaving out when it came to health care, which the NYT article touched upon.

That economic populism extends, for many candidates, to a new emphasis on expanding health coverage. Congressional Democrats who lived through the Clinton administration’s failed effort to create a national health insurance plan, which many believe was a crucial factor in the Democrats’ losses in 1994, have been wary of broad health legislation for years. (And being in the minority, they were unable to do much about it, regardless.) But the class of ’06 is adamant that something major can, and will, be done.

As noted in the NYT article, expanding health care is an economic populist issue. The battle over SCHIP was a prime example of that. Even some Republicans admitted that Bush vetoing the SCHIP expansion and House Republicans helping him sustain the veto was going to hurt the GOP in a major way in 2008.

Other Republicans are concerned about the political cost the debate over SCHIP could have in November 2008. “What will happen is they’ll lose the override. They’ll make cosmetic changes and our guys will cave,” Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) said Tuesday during an appearance at the National Press Club. “And at what cost? Our guys will get beaten up ... SCHIP is a dumb fight.”

And denying children health insurance just sounds so... cruel.

It was back in 1993, as the Clintons prepared to roll out their new universal healthcare plan, that Bill Kristol wrote a memo to fellow conservatives and Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill warning them that their goal must be to "kill," not amend, the Clinton plan. "Healthcare," Kristol wrote, "is not, in fact, just another Democratic initiative ... . It will revive the reputation of the ... Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

That's why bloggers call him William "The Bloody" Kristol. Of course, it'll be the GOP that gets bloodied up when ads like this really start running all over the country, say, in October 2008.



But how effective will those kinds of emotional ads be? Is the public really behind this effort to expand children's health insurance, even if it means paying higher taxes? Why, yes. I did a detailed diary on this very issue back in July, focusing on the New York Times/CBS News poll (.pdf). Check out these numbers to see what Americans really think.

Should government guarantee health insurance for all?

      Yes    No
Now   64%   27%
2000  62%   29%
1996  56%   38%

Would you favor or oppose expanding this program to include ALL uninsured children?

      Total  Rep  Dem  Ind
Favor    84   72   93   82
Oppose   11   21    5   11
DK/NA     5    7    2    7


Yes, even 72% of Republicans favor expanding SCHIP. But the nail in the coffin is the final question that completely destroys the GOP's talking point about higher taxes, which is absolutely fundamental to their core ideology. Of the 84% of Americans that said they'd favor expanding the SCHIP program, they asked this question on taxes.

What if that meant you would have to pay more in taxes? Then, would you favor or oppose expanding the government program to include all uninsured children?

      Total  Rep  Dem  Ind
Favor    80   79   82   80
Oppose   15   17   14   15
DK/NA     5    4    4    5

80% of 84% is 67.2%. So over two-thirds of all Americans would favor personally paying more taxes in order to insure the uninsured children in this country. There was basically no difference in the partisan breakdowns for this question. (This is also assuming exactly 0% of that 11% that would oppose expanding the program in the first place, and that 5% who weren't sure, would want their own taxes raised to pay for it; otherwise the 67.2% would be even higher.)

Now, that poll was from July. And it's only one poll. Any given poll can be an outlier. Well, in October, the Washington Post/ABC News poll basically verified everything in the NYT/CBS News poll.

Bush and the Republicans may also be headed for a political setback from the fight over the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), even if Congress does not override Bush's threatened veto.

More than seven in 10 in the poll support the planned $35 billion spending increase, and 25 percent are opposed. About half of all Americans "strongly" support the increased spending; 17 percent are firmly against the additional funds. Eighty-one percent of Democrats, 69 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans are in favor.

Scroll down to Question #9 for the SCHIP question. The respondent was informed that the expansion would be paid for via an increase in cigarette taxes. Given that information, along with quick pro and con statements, a whopping 72% of Americans supported the SCHIP expansion that Bush vetoed last month, including a supermajority of 61% of Republicans.

Enough House Republicans stuck with Bush in helping him sustain the veto, even though 44 Republicans did cross the aisle to join Democrats on the veto override vote. For that, they should suffer the consequences at the ballot box in a major way next November. We're just gonna have to help remind voters of this, over and over again. :-)

Part 2b: Populism and 2006

OK, so before I get to part 3, as an addendum to part 2, I came across this New York Times article written the weekend after the midterm elections. It came up in the GOP's meme that the elections were actually somehow a "victory" for conservatism. Hah! Markos and DemFromCT (who's taught at UCLA previously) both dispelled that myth quite nicely. The Financial Times even got it.

Defeated Republicans have found solace in the fact that many of their victorious Democratic opponents are "social conservatives". They point to James Webb, who surprised everyone by winning the bitter and close Senate race in Virginia on Thursday, giving his party a majority of one in the upper house tom complement its decisive victory in the House of Representatives.

However, neither Mr Webb nor the majority of the Democratic freshmen who won elections this week can so easily be fitted into that category. Punching the air and holding up the dusty boots of his son who is serving in Iraq, Mr Webb told cheering supporters in Arlington that his election was as much a vote for economic fairness as it was for a change of course in Iraq.

....

One or two of his colleagues, including Bob Casey, the new senator for Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, a Democratic representative for North Carolina, are "pro-life" but the large majority of new Democrat lawmakers support the woman's right to choose.

More significantly a majority of the intake, including Mr Webb, are economic populists who are deeply suspicious of free trade and quick to blame China and other developing countries for the loss of US jobs. Some, such as Sherrod Brown, the new Democratic senator for the key Midwest state of Ohio, which has lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs since Mr Bush came to power, won the election virtually on that issue alone.

"We will focus on economic fairness in a country divided too much by class in an age of the internationalisation of American corporations," said Mr Webb in a victory rally speech that devoted more to the economy than all other themes combined. "At a time when profits are at a record high and wages are at a low, we will focus on bridging the class divide."

The New York Times got it. The headline of that article was Incoming Democrats Put Populism Before Ideology. In interviewing many of the new freshmen Democrats, they came to this conclusion:

Many of them say they must also, somehow, find a way to address the growing anxiety among voters about a global economy that no longer seems to work for them. There is a strong populist tinge to this class.

....

Conservatives tend to highlight the conservatism in the new class as a sign that Democrats are essentially ceding ground to the right on issues like gun control and abortion.

But many of these freshmen Democrats are hard to pigeonhole ideologically. Even among the most socially conservative, there is a strong streak of economic populism that is a unifying force.

Heath Shuler, for example, the former professional football player and newly elected House Democrat from North Carolina, is anti-abortion and pro-gun, but sounds like an old-style Democrat on economic issues.

“I was taught at a very, very young age about faith and personal responsibility, and through that, that responsibility was about helping those who cannot help themselves,” Mr. Shuler said. “If you look at what the Democratic Party stands for, it is about helping others who can’t help themselves.”

Like other Democrats, he supports legislation to increase the minimum wage and make college tuition tax deductible. He also opposes trade agreements that he says have led to a 78 percent loss in textile industry jobs in his state.

Similarly, Ms. Boyda of Kansas, a first-time office holder who relied on lengthy newspaper inserts to make her case to the voters, said, “The rural economy has been left out.” She added: “A lot of my district feels a great deal of insecurity about their jobs, their health care, their business, their family farm. They feel like they’re just kind of hanging out there.”

Carol Shea-Porter, a social worker and new House member from New Hampshire who considers herself a populist, said, “The theme of my campaign was, I’m running for the rest of us.” She added that no matter how much the Bush administration boasted of job growth, her voters “understood those were Wal-Mart jobs.” And, she said, “They understood when they talked about the stock market boom, that half of Americans aren’t even in the stock market.”

Jim Webb, who defeated Senator George Allen of Virginia, campaigned heavily on the idea that the middle class was increasingly at risk in an age of growing inequality. Bob Casey, who overwhelmingly defeated Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, said he looked forward to “a really intensive focus on health care that I hope to be a part of.”

That economic populism extends, for many candidates, to a new emphasis on expanding health coverage. Congressional Democrats who lived through the Clinton administration’s failed effort to create a national health insurance plan, which many believe was a crucial factor in the Democrats’ losses in 1994, have been wary of broad health legislation for years. (And being in the minority, they were unable to do much about it, regardless.) But the class of ’06 is adamant that something major can, and will, be done.

....

Representative Sherrod Brown, who is moving to the Senate from the House after beating Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio, argued: “Tell me a whole lot of Republicans won’t work with us on finding a way for middle-class kids to get a college education, to vote for embryonic stem cell research, to raise the minimum wage. John McCain is already out there talking about prescription drug issues.”

The entire article is well worth the read, with additional interviews and quotes from freshmen Dems Dave Loebsack (IA), Steve Kagen (WI), Ron Klein (FL), Ed Perlmutter (CO), Gabrielle Giffords (AZ), Joe Sestak (PA), and Tim Walz (MN).

Finally, some more on Mr. Shuler and the others from former Bruin Dem Ezra Klein (who's getting more and more TV time on MSNBC now, woo-hoo!), who debunks even more of that win-for-conservatism myth.

What it does have to do is punch back against the remarkably coordinated and quick campaign from the right (and sometimes the right includes the left) seeking to paint this election as some sort of victory for ... conservatism.

The ideological spectrum is a tricky thing. Take Heath Schuler, exhibit A in the rightwing Democrats meme. He's a cultural conservative, no doubt. But however far right he drifts on those issues -- which, under a Democratic Congress, he won't be voting on because they won't be brought to floor -- he's notably left on economic issues. Today, for instance, he's giving a press conference under the auspices of the United Steelworkers with Great Liberal Hope Sherrod Brown, where they'll discuss the need for new trade policies and their success in making active opposition to NAFTA a winning issue. That's not centrist Democrat. It's not moderate liberal. That's populism, kids, and it's leftier than polite company has allowed for quite some time.

So is Shuler right-wing? Seems like a tough case to me. Sherrod Brown? Liberal as they come. Defeating South Dakota's abortion ban initiative? Passing Missouri's stem cell initiative? All those progressives who toppled liberal Republicans in the Northeast? Somebody think they won in the blue bastions with roaring conservatism? Meanwhile, the most conservative of the serious Democratic challengers this cycle, Harold Ford, went down to defeat. Bravely fought race, tough environs, etc. But with an out-and-out liberal winning Ohio and a right-of-center Democrat losing Tennessee, we're really going to call this election for conservatism?

I don't think so. That distorted interpretation is being promoted by an array of right-wingers and self-styled centrists anxious to constrain the new majority's perceived range of motion. Some of them are conservatives trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Others are "centrist" Democrats look to grad defeat from the jaws of victory. Both are, for ideological reasons, afraid that a Democratic majority will govern like...Democrats.

Keep all this in mind about where the message of economic populism can get us.

This Message Brought to You By Homeland Security

Man + box turtle, question mark?

Yes!!! These videos are now online on the Daily Show website!! This first one was one of the funniest videos in all of 2004. Sadly, it turns out Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) did not actually say that part. It was written by a speechwriter, and included in the press packet that went out to reporters, but Cornyn at least had enough sense to remove that portion when he gave the actual speech.



The second was one of the best examples of Jon Stewart exposing Fox News for how they use the question mark to shape opinion and make insinuations, all while posing as a real news network. CNN isn't much better in this regard.

GOP's dirty tricks on CA electoral vote caught on video at UCSB

Erik Love of the Courage Campaign has the story. At UCSB, these petition gatherers are asking students to sign a petition involving money for cancer research. Awwwwww.... who wouldn't sign that? But then they ask the students to sign two or three more other papers underneath, with a rubber band holding the papers together right where the text of the petition is, so the student can't read the rest, unless they first remove the rubber band. And unless they're suspicious, they usually don't.

Here's the video of them on the UCSB campus.



Notice that they do say what the petition is for, but only says they're "trying to redistrict the electoral college". WTF does that even mean? You "redistrict" congressional districts after a census (and mid-decade too, if you're Tom DeLay). The guy is spewing nonsense, hoping he's not caught in his bullshit. And while it's not on video, the student interviews show that those guys are lying to UCSB students about what the petitions are truly for, which is a crime under California election law.

Hopefully the Courage Campaign will go back with hidden cameras, posing as UCSB students (or get real students to help them out), and capture these guys on film openly lying about the petitions. Because these people need to be sitting in prison for pulling a dirty trick like this.

The stench of 15 rotting corpses

Maybe this isn't the post you want to read right before Thanksgiving, but it is important to highlight the corruption and fraud and waste that's going on in Iraq.

Vanity Fair has a very disturbing story about massive fraud and war profiteering by Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary, including the nauseating tale of a container with rotting corpses being used to store ice for our soldiers. Read the whole story, if you dare.

Consider the case of Grayson's client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root. Spun off by Halliburton as an independent concern in April, KBR is the world's fifth-largest construction company. Before the war started, the Pentagon awarded it two huge contracts: one, now terminated, to restore the Iraqi oil industry, and another, still in effect, to provide a wide array of logistical-support services to the U.S. military.

In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck—a "reefer," in contractor parlance—at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad's airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.

The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. "Inside, there were 15 human bodies," he recalls. "A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again." The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers's colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: "On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly.... The inside of the trailer was awful."

It is not unheard of for trucks in a war zone to perform hearse duty. But both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption. According to the U.S. Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, "Contact with whole or part human remains carries potential risks associated with pathogenic microbiological organisms that may be present in human blood and tissue." The diseases that may be communicated include aids,hepatitis, tuberculosis, septicemia, meningitis, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow.

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice—ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers's grisly discovery. "You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn't even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.—the public warehouse center—several times. There's nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded."

As late as August 31, 11 weeks after trailer R-89 was emptied of the putrefying bodies, a KBR convoy commander named Jeff Allen filed a mission log stating that it had carried 5,000 pounds of ice that day. This ice, Allen wrote, was "bio-contaminated." But to his horror, on that day alone, "approx 1,800 pounds [were] used."

Conyers and Logsdon say that R-89 was not the only truck that was loaded with ice after being used as a mortuary. They attribute this state of affairs to a chronic shortage of trucks brought about by systemic failures in KBR's operation. The firm had purchased some 200 reefers in Iraq, but only a quarter of them worked. "We had crap-assed trucks they'd bought from local dealers," Logsdon says. "Often you'd be driving one they'd pieced together from several just to get it on the road." He and other former KBR workers say that even new vehicles, some of which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, often broke down because of an absence of affordable spare parts. Instead of paying to repair them, the company often burned disabled trucks in pits or by the side of the road. Conyers tried repeatedly to draw his superiors' attention to these and other alleged abuses, but to no avail. (In an e-mailed statement, KBR denied that it "did or does" order defective vehicles, adding that it disposes of equipment only with "the approval of designated Army personnel.")

Even more disgusting is that the Department of Justice would be trying to stonewall Grayson's investigations.

Person of the Week: Republican Senator Chuck Grassley

Calm down,there's a good reason why a Republican Senator is the Person of the Week .

____

Senator Chuck Grassley is turning heads in Washington for going after the so-called Money Ministries who take advantage of their tax-exemption. I personally think religious institutions should get no tax exemption, but this is better than nothing.

Excerpts are below. Full article is here. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1684552,00.html

"On the website for their ministry based in Newark, Texas, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland commit to "teach Christians worldwide who they are in Christ Jesus and how to live a victorious life." And they appear to be victorious in theirs, with books in 22 languages, a global crusade schedule and a TV show reaching millions. No less a luminary than presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is advertised to appear on the show for six days straight to discuss "character in the Bible."

Huckabee might want to opt out. On Nov. 6 the Copelands got a saw-toothed, 42 point questionnaire inquiring into their own character from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Finance. Grassley wanted to know how Kenneth Copeland--who as a church leader pays no taxes but is expected to plow revenue back into the public welfare--got a private plane and whether flights to Hawaii and Fiji qualified as business trips. Grassley sought credit card receipts and the numbers of the church's offshore bank accounts.

Copeland wasn't Grassley's only pen pal. He also wrote to the Revs. Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Eddie Long, Joyce Meyer and Paula White, in total six televangelists who are part of an evangelical subculture known loosely as Prosperity gospel. "Recent news reports regarding the possible misuse of donations made to religious organizations" prompted the probe, Grassley wrote. The ministers' responses are technically voluntary, but the Senator has asked for them in a month and has mused that the replies could lead to testimony under oath. If so, Grassley could end up wiping out what some consider a kleptocracy but what is certainly the public face of a popular theology."

"The larger conservative Christian community has not been supportive. "Grassley has a shotgun, and lead is spraying all over the place, but I'm looking at the good that can be done," says Marvin Olasky, editor of the evangelical weekly World. J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine, where some of the six advertise, hopes all can prove their innocence, but he adds, "If God wants to use a Senator to help the American church clean up its act, then I say bring on the Reformation."

But should Grassley play the role of Martin Luther? Some see Grassley's acts as a religious vendetta, launched by a white-bread Evangelical who doesn't get the group's view of rich pastors as a sign of divine grace. Grassley has hinted that his purpose may be to revamp tax laws to keep up with rapacious preachers. Remarks Charles Haynes, senior scholar with the First Amendment Center: "I'm worried that [the six] might be used to push for stringent transparency regulations that would affect all religious groups. They are extreme, and extreme cases can lead to bad law."

Grassley rejects the criticism. "We're not looking at doctrine. I don't know much about the words Prosperity gospel," he says. But he acknowledges that religious-freedom concerns may make an investigation a "little more difficult to defend." Fellow Senators--"I won't give their names"--have asked what they should tell the preachers. Says Grassley: "My answer was, 'Tell them to do what all the other nonprofits do--answer my letter.'" And hope for a different kind of grace.

Part 2: The Democrats' Da Vinci Code in 2006

This is a follow-up to Part 1, which introduced the must-read David Sirota piece on economic populism. He wrote that in December 2004. What I'll do here is extend his examples to the 2006 midterm elections, and how the themes he described played out even more this time around. Look at what happened in some of the key Senate races last year.

Ohio

This is a two-fer. Congressman Ted Strickland had consistently won in a red district, and was now looking to run for Governor. Yes, Ken Blackwell (R) had major issues with the voters stemming from what he did to disenfranchise voters in 2004 as Secretary of State, and outgoing Governor Bob Taft (R) was insanely corrupt. But Blackwell didn't just lose. He was CRUSHED by Strickland, who got over 60% of the vote in a key swing state.

But fine, you say, Blackwell was hated. OK, how about Sen. Mike DeWine (R)? He was not tainted with any of the corruption that was hovering over other Ohio Republicans. Sherrod Brown (D) was one of the most progressive members of the House, and was the leader in the Democratic effort to block CAFTA. (That was the infamous vote that passed 217-215 when the GOP-controlled House deliberately kept voting open well past the 15-minute alloted time, and got Robin Hayes (R-NC) to swich votes at the last minute, and then shut down voting.) Again, the theme of fighting for the working class appears here.

Even the bloggers didn't realize this message. In an infamous posting, Markos Moulitsas, founder of DailyKos, railed against the Democrats when hearing of a memo that said Democrats wanted to run on the economy instead of Iraq. It turned out to be a bit misleading. Certain campaigns were, like Sherrod Brown's. I gotta toot my own horn here, I called it back then when the blogs were freaking out over the memo on the economic issues. So, was Brown hurt by focusing on an economic populist message? Hah! He cruised to a 12-point victory over DeWine, 56%-44%.


Vermont

Bernie Sanders is so far left, he's a socialist. But fine, you say, it's Vermont. Ah, but he was still able to win the conservative (and very anti-gay) "Northeast Kingdom" in Vermont by hefty margins too as a pro-gay rights candidate. And when Jim Jeffords (a Republican-turned-Independent) retired, Sanders upgraded to the Senate. How did he do in his Senate race against "Richie Rich" Tarrant (R), a corporate Republican if there ever was one? He got over 65% of the vote, winning a majority in every single county in the entire state. Even the Republican areas voted for Sanders over the corporate shill.


Virginia

Most of us remember this race for the infamous "macaca" moment from George Allen (the shame of UCLA, even if he only was here for his freshman year). Or about how Jim Webb (who attended USC before going into the Navy and then Vietnam) was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy who had only recently left the Republican Party and become a Democrat. Much was made of Jim Webb's strong military credentials, and how his son was serving in Iraq. But if you watch the videos from his stump speeches, day in and day out, the war was actually secondary to his main theme: economic populism. He highlighted over and over the disparity in worker pay as compared to CEO pay, railing against corporations that were destroying the very fabric of our country. And when he finally ended George Allen's political career, look at what he wrote in the conservative op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal the following week. It's titled Class Struggle, and it holds back nothing in slamming corporations for their misdeeds and greed. Or how about his response to Bush's 2007 State of the Union address? Don't remember it? Yeah, his speech fell down the memory hole. You should have seen the looks on the CNN anchors' faces after he finished, it was like he had exposed their entire corporate organization for what it was. And BTW, since Republican pundits keep saying the 2006 elections were a "victory" for conservatives by touting Webb's win (as if Allen wasn't???), keep in mind Webb opposed the gay marriage ban ballot measure that PASSED by a sizable margin in Virginia last November.


Montana

Organic farmer Jon Tester lived paycheck to paycheck his whole life. He is an unabashed economic populist with a libertarian streak. His campaign was similar to that of Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer (D), whose winning 2004 campaign David Sirota worked on as a consultant.


Tennessee

Talk to Democrats from the state, and they'll tell you that infamous ad of "Harold, call me!" was just one of several factors in Harold Ford's defeat. That ad alone did not cause Ford's defeat. Now head of the DLC, Ford did everything Sirota warned against in his campaign, playing up the "corporate Dem" factor to the max. And so we now have Senator Bob Corker (R).



This carried true in the House too. Keep in mind all these districts were Democratic pick-ups that had been voting for Republicans for quite some time. Read this piece by fellow Bruin Dem Ezra Klein on the "conservative win" myth. Specifically, Heath Shuler (D-NC), who may be conservative on social issues, actively opposes NAFTA and is, whaddaya know, an economic populist! Jason Altmire (D-PA), another surprise win, campaigned on what you could call "health care populism", specifically railing against the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and also opposing the free trade agreements NAFTA and CAFTA. Steve Kagen (D-WI), a noted allergist, ran on a platform of providing affordable health care to all Americans, calling it "No Patient Left Behind", and has refused to participate in the Congressional health care plan until all Americans have affordable health care. Tim Walz (D-MN) was a graduate of Camp Wellstone, a training program geared towards pushing a progressive agenda, named after the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who was about as progressive as you could get. John Yarmuth (D-KY) used to publish an alternative weekly in Louisville. Interestingly enough, he co-founded the paper with then-Louisville basketball coach Denny Crum, who of course you should all know played at UCLA for John Wooden.

As Mike Lux wrote:

The campaigns that tended to win last year were the aggressive, populist outsider campaigns. Sherrod Brown, Jon Tester, and Jim Webb each upset their opponents by running those kinds of campaigns, while Harold Ford played defense and lost. In Pennsylvania, establishment defender Lois Murphy lost while aggressor Patrick Murphy won. In Kentucky, establishment defender Ken Lucas lost while populist aggressor John Yarmuth won.

Also in Connecticut, of the three Democrats challenging GOP incumbents, the one who didn't want to be associated with Ned Lamont, CT-04's Diane Farrell, lost her race to incumbent Chris Shays, while the other two Dems knocked off the incumbent. As Tim Tagaris wrote:

I didn't lose a wink of sleep over her loss. She spent more time figuring out ways to get Ned Lamont literature out of canvass bags than she did trying to pull her voters.

Time and time again, we saw the message of populism triumph last November, and those "establishment" candidates trying to take over Republican seats fared much more poorly. The House candidate then-DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel poured the most money into was Illinois' Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War vet who lost both her legs. You would think that would've been an incredibly powerful message, even in a Republican district. But her campaign was pretty much all about Iraq. Pete Roskam ran a standard Republican campaign, and won.

So what does this mean for 2008? That will be answered in part 3.

Who Dunit?

With 53 days left until the Iowa caucus, vicious tactics seem to be increasing in frequency and scale. On the Democrats side, the Hillary campaign may or may not have damaging information that they may or may not be spreading around Democratic circles. (The column that started it all) Could be true, could be a Republican tactic to divide, but either way I do not trust Robert Novak after the Valerie Plame debacle.

Then there are the Republicans. As much as I hate dirty campaigning, I have to admit that I am amused when they use swift-boat tactics on one another.

Apparently someone has been push polling (pretending to poll, but really trying to influence voters) in Iowa and New Hampshire. Eight years ago, President Bush's campaign allegedly used push polling to insinuate that John McCain had an illegitimate black daughter. Nowadays, someone is using push-polling to highlight Romney's flip-flopping and make bigoted remarks about Mormonism. (Politico article).

I would actually love to know who is behind all of this. Unlike 2000, there are so many different players with different motives. My favorite theory is that this is done by the Democrats because they are most afraid of Mitt Romney. Setting aside my hatred of Romney- that is just silly. I think Giuliani would be a tougher fight. I even think Huckabee would be a more serious challenge- and not just because he has Chuck Norris on his side.

Bets on who's behind the anti-Romney, anti-Mormon push polling?

Send Sen. Feinstein a Message!

Dear fellow Californian,
Last week, every member of the Senate had a chance to take a stand against torture. Most Democrats did—they opposed the nomination of Michael Mukasey for Attorney General because he left the door open to torture. He wouldn't, for example, say whether water-boarding—an interrogation technique that simulates drowning—constituted torture.
But Senator Feinstein wasn't with the majority of Democrats—she actually cast a pivotal vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm him.
And that's not all. In recent months, Senator Feinstein backed the president on issues ranging from right-wing judges to immunity for phone companies that broke the law.
Now, California Democrats—led by our friends at the Courage Campaign—are seriously organizing to get her attention. They've launched a grassroots campaign to ask the California Democratic Party to officially censure Senator Feinstein when its executive board meets this weekend.
We only have a few days before the meeting, so it's important to make our voices heard right now. Can you sign the Courage Campaign's petition asking the California Democratic Party to censure Senator Feinstein? Click here to sign:
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3163&id=11668-8580774-ubHeUo&t=1
Only 29% of Californians—and just 9% of California Democrats—approve of the president, but Senator Feinstein has sided with him on key issues.
On Torture: Senator Feinstein recommended Michael Mukasey for Attorney General, despite his refusal to call the practice of water-boarding "torture."1
On Judges: Senator Feinstein was the deciding vote to confirm Judge Leslie Southwick,2 even though Southwick had ruled that a white employee couldn't be fired for using a demeaning and offensive racial slur towards an African-American co-worker. Southwick also took custody of an eight-year-old girl away from her mother, because the mother was living with another woman in a "lesbian home."3
On Wiretapping: Now Senator Feinstein says she is going to support immunity for phone companies that helped the Bush administration illegally spy on the phone calls and emails of innocent Americans.4
When Senator Feinstein sides with President Bush and the Republicans on key issues like these, she not only goes against what a majority of her constituents want—she gives cover to other weak Democrats, too. This means it's even harder for Congress to make progress on the critical issues that so many voters care about.
Senator Feinstein isn't up for election again until 2012, but we can't afford another 5 years of this. She needs to hear from Californians that she needs to start siding with them—not George Bush.
A censure from the California Democratic Party is the strongest way to send that message.
Can you add your name to the Courage Campaign's petition asking the California Democratic Party to censure Senator Feinstein? Click here to sign:
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3163&id=11668-8580774-ubHeUo&t=2
Let's send Senator Dianne Feinstein a message she can't ignore.
Thanks for all you do,
–Wes, Ilyse, Joan, Carrie, Tanya, Marika and the whole MoveOn.org Political Action Team
Thursday, November 15th, 2007

CNN debate: the Las Vegas disgrace

Remember that final question about diamonds vs. pearls? Well, it seems that student wanted to ask a serious question about the Yucca Mountain, but CNN wouldn't let her.

Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred "diamonds or pearls" at last night's debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

"Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN," Luisa writes. "I was asked to submit questions including "lighthearted/fun" questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago and was the finalist for the Truman Scholarship. For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was APPROVED by CNN days in advance."

Here's CNN's defense.

But in the network's defense the spokesperson also says that the girl wasn't "forced" to ask it. She submitted the question in advance -- it was her question -- and voluntarily agreed to ask it. CNN selected the question and asked her towards the close of the debate if she wanted to ask it. She said yes.

As MissLaura sarcastically notes:

Oh, well then, that's ok! No problem with a so-called news network focusing on the appearance and devotion to consumerism of the first serious female presidential candidate ever. I'm so glad they cleared that up. Otherwise I might have had to question my faith in the awesomeness of CNN.

From a Las Vegas Democrat who was in the audience, though, she was very disappointed in the audience reaction of booing Hillary's main rivals when they started criticizing Hillary. Even the Hardball crew the next day noticed the intense pro-Hillary crowd. Chris Matthews even said the audience was "clearly prompted" in favor of Hillary, and later also said this on Friday's show:

"Anybody who boos on Peruvian trade deals, and has enough emotion to boo that one, clearly was prepped. Why would you boo about Peruvian trade in Nevada??"

He also talked about that "ringer" in the audience who was deliberately trying to shout down Obama when he was responding to questions early on. It got bad enough that Wolf Blitzer had to ask the audience to stop it. It didn't.

After the debate, many people were upset that a close friend of the Clintons, James Carville, was not disclosed as a Hillary supporter when he was doing the post-debate analysis. The New York Times even picked up on it, and CNN's president has apologized for the error.

CNN executives said they routinely reminded viewers of Mr. Carville’s affiliation in his segments. On Thursday, Anderson Cooper, the CNN host who moderated the round table, said, “I should point out David Gergen was an adviser in the Bill Clinton White House, as, of course, was James Carville.”

That was not enough for Jonathan Klein, the CNN president who said in an interview that the disclosure fell short.

“He’s not on the Hillary payroll, but he’s on the Hillary bandwagon, and that should be disclosed as much as we can,” Mr. Klein said. “I wasn’t comfortable with it myself as I watched it.

“He has disclosed all of this previously and repeatedly on our air,” he continued. “He happened not to last night, and it’s an unfortunate omission.”

All in all, it was a disgrace for CNN.

Krugman on Social Security

When it comes to Social Security, today's column by Paul Krugman has him not-so-happy with one of our frontrunners. The column is titled Played for a Sucker. Obama supporters may want to avoid this piece.

But the “everyone” who knows that Social Security is doomed doesn’t include anyone who actually understands the numbers. In fact, the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided.

As Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, put it in a recent article co-authored with senior analyst Philip Ellis: “The long-term fiscal condition of the United States has been largely misdiagnosed. Despite all the attention paid to demographic challenges, such as the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation, our country’s financial health will in fact be determined primarily by the growth rate of per capita health care costs.”

How has conventional wisdom gotten this so wrong? Well, in large part it’s the result of decades of scare-mongering about Social Security’s future from conservative ideologues, whose ultimate goal is to undermine the program.

Thus, in 2005, the Bush administration tried to push through a combination of privatization and benefit cuts that would, over time, have reduced Social Security to nothing but a giant 401(k). The administration claimed that this was necessary to save the program, which officials insisted was “heading toward an iceberg.”

But the administration’s real motives were, in fact, ideological. The anti-tax activist Stephen Moore gave the game away when he described Social Security as “the soft underbelly of the welfare state,” and hailed the Bush plan as a way to put a “spear” through that soft underbelly.

Fortunately, the scare tactics failed. Democrats in Congress stood their ground; progressive analysts debunked, one after another, the phony arguments of the privatizers; and the public made it clear that it wants to preserve a basic safety net for retired Americans.

That should have been that. But what Jonathan Chait of The New Republic calls “entitlement hysteria” never seems to die.

....

Which brings us back to Mr. Obama. Why would he, in effect, play along with this new round of scare-mongering and devalue one of the great progressive victories of the Bush years?

I don’t believe Mr. Obama is a closet privatizer. He is, however, someone who keeps insisting that he can transcend the partisanship of our times — and in this case, that turned him into a sucker.

....

We all wish that American politics weren’t so bitter and partisan. But if you try to find common ground where none exists — which is the case for many issues today — you end up being played for a fool. And that’s what has just happened to Mr. Obama.

There's some more good commentary on the Social Security issue here.

Krugman: Edwards gets it right on health care

I was pointed to this February column by Paul Krugman when John Edwards first unveiled his health care plan. If you want to know what Krugman thinks about Edwards' plan, his column is titled Edwards Gets It Right.

At first glance, the Edwards health care plan looks similar to several other proposals out there, including one recently unveiled by Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But a closer look reveals extra features in the Edwards plan that take it a lot closer to what the country really needs.

Like Mr. Schwarzenegger, Mr. Edwards sets out to cover the uninsured with a combination of regulation and financial aid. Right now, many people are uninsured because, as the Edwards press release puts it, insurance companies “game the system to cover only healthy people.” So the Edwards plan, like Schwarzenegger’s, imposes “community rating” on insurers, basically requiring them to sell insurance to everyone at the same price.

Many other people are uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost. So the Edwards plan, again like other proposals, offers financial aid to help lower-income families buy insurance. To pay for this aid, he proposes rolling back tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000 a year.

Finally, some people try to save money by going without coverage, so if they get sick they end up in emergency rooms at public expense. Like other plans, the Edwards plan would “require all American residents to get insurance,” and would require that all employers either provide insurance to their workers or pay a percentage of their payrolls into a government fund used to buy insurance.

But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.

People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, “will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.” This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, “the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.”

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Yes, that includes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to “build the consensus first,” will really be willing to take on this issue again?

Yes, since then, Hillary has come out with a plan that looks largely similar to Edwards' plan.