Eighty-six years ago today, in the little town of Avon, South Dakota, George S. McGovern was born.
The son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister, McGovern entered college at Dakota Wesleyan Univertisy in Mitchell, South Dakota in the fall of 1940, where he began a degree in history that was interrupted by his deployment as a B-24 bomber pilot to the European theater in 1943. He flew thirty-five missions, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions during a flight in which his plane was seriously damaged.
After the war, he returned to finish his degree, then briefly studied for the seminary at Northwestern University before returning to his first interest: history.
For a few years, he taught at Dakota Wesleyan, the school where he met his wife, Eleanor, during the war, but in 1953 he accepted the challenge of the state Democratic chairman to rebuild the party in solidly Republican South Dakota.
A short stint in the House and his political work led to President John F. Kennedy appointing him as the country's first director of the Food for Peace program. He ran for and won the 1962 Senate campaign in South Dakota while suffering from an attack of hepatitis picked up from a contaminated needle used to give him a yellow-fever injection. In the White House.
An odd but mildly entertaining fact: Though the vote was largely split along party lines, several of the 24 Republicans who voted to refer Representative Dennis Kucinich's (D-OH) articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush to the House Judiciary committee had the same last name as Democratic representatives who voted for the motion!
There's
Robert Brady (D-PA) and Kevin Brady (R-TX).
John Hall (D-NY) and Ralph Hall (R-TX).
Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Tim Johnson (R-IL).
Stephanie Jones (D-OH) and Walter Jones (R-NC).
Patrick Murphy (D-PA) and Tim Murphy (R-PA).
Charles Wilson (D-OH) and Heather Wilson (R-NM).
That's a quarter of the Republicans who voted for the motion. That doesn't even take into consideration the two Florida Republican Diaz-Balarts.
Today's the South Dakota Democratic primary, and there would be no better place for Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama to announce this choice for his running mate: former South Dakota Senator George S. McGovern.
McGovern was right about Vietnam and Iraq. He spoke out in 1965 for recognition of the Cuban government, saying that sanctions wouldn't work to bring down the Castro regime. He advocated opening relations with China years before Henry Kissinger made his secret trips for President Richard Nixon. He's been a ceaseless advocate for ending poverty and hunger around the world, something that was recognized by President John F. Kennedy when he gave McGovern the reins of the Food for Peace office. He tried to warn the American public about Nixon's role in the Watergate affair even before the 1972 election, but the voters didn't listen.
"We decided to focus at the top on the issues that had been at the center of the debate since the last debate. Everything we brought up in that front section had not come up since the last debate. And they all focused on the same theme -- which candidate would be a stronger Democratic candidate in Novembber." [sic]
"This is the core question for the campaigns, and a lot of Democratic voters right now. That's why we decided to lead with it."
Interestingly enough, that's at some variance with what ABC's own poll reported today, based on data collected between April 10th and 13th.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Iraq's financial free ride may be over. After five years, Republicans and Democrats seem to have found common ground on at least one aspect of the war. From the fiercest war foes to the most steadfast Bush supporters, they are looking at Iraq's surging oil income and saying Baghdad should start picking up the tab, particularly for rebuilding hospitals, roads, power lines and the rest of the shattered country.
"I think the American people are growing weary not only of the war, but they are looking at why Baghdad can't pay more of these costs. And the answer is they can," says Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.
Ben Nelson, of course, was one of the bright lights who voted to invade Iraq in the first place.
Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz embodies the worst of the worst of his profession so far as I'm concerned. I don't regularly read him, I briefly tried to watch his CNN Reliable Sources show but couldn't take it for long, but I've seen lots of him by accumulation over the years.
But I happened to notice that he was doing one of the Post's "Live Discussion" segments today, just a little before it began, so I went and submitted a question.
Imagine my surprisae when the first question of the day turned out to be from here in Portland, Oregon! It just wasn't my question. Kurtz was asked why the pundits asked to weigh in on the Rev. Wright/Obama "controversy" have been overwhelmingly white. Kurtz brought up the fact that he had two African-Americans on his panel Sunday. Although he also had Michael Medved, and that may have been like having a whole fist on the scales.
Some days you just have to smash your monitor in frustration at the sheer stupidity of people in the party you've belonged to for nearly _ years (30 in my case but fill in your own figure).
Watch our new video and learn why real people think 51 Democrats in the Senate just aren't enough.
Are the people putting the DSCC campaign seriously counting Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) as a Democrat? Even after he's endorsed Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) for the presidency? Are they complete idiots or what?
Despite months of claims that he was in trouble in his district and a well-financed opponent supported by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, former Democratic presidential candidate and Representative Dennis Kucinich has been predicted as the winner in Ohio's 10th Congressional District.
With 41% of the precincts reporting as of 1:30AM Eastern, Kucinich has nearly a 20% lead on his leading challenger, Joe Cimperman, as well as a simple majority of the votes.
To steal from Arlo Guthrie: You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in saying their middle name's Hussein and walking out? They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in, saying their middle name's Hussein and walking out? Friends they may thinks it's a movement.
In an open letter from October 2007 now featured on the home page of the Democratic Leadership Council, Chairman Harold Ford of the DLC and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius of the Democratic Governors Association define the issues they believe the Democratic presidential candidates need to address and how they should deal with them.
In the introduction of the letter, Sibelius and Ford lay out the challenges facing the next administration, including this one:
We are engaged in what has become a civil war in Iraq -- a war we either should have won, or never have fought.
If you want proof of intellectual bankruptcy at the DLC and the Democratic party leadership, there it is. Just over three months ago -- even after learning all we have about the lies that led the US into war, the hundreds of thousands of dead, and the millions of refugees, the destruction of Fallujah and much of the rest of the country -- the bright lights at the DLC still think the war could have been "won."
Not that there was any justification for going to war in Iraq in the first place, of course.
Don't want to wait for the State of the Union speech tonight? Want to get to the drinking earlier than 9pm Eastern? Well, I can help.
A couple of years back, Stan Ridgway, the lead singer for the 1980s band Wall of Voodoo ("Mexican Radio") and his wife Pietra Wexstun put out an album called Barbeque Babylon, under their alternate band name: Drywall.
The CD has a hidden bonus track Stan composed, which is built from the 2003 SotU -- with a little bit of a beat and just a few edits to make the meaning more clear. You can go to Stan's Download page and grab it for free (look for the second entry on the page, "hidden bonus track # 16") or you can just click here and listen for five minutes and get it all over with.
After caving in to the White House on the Defense appropriations bill, and all of the claims that they needed to do it without any restrictions because Bush would starve the troops in Iraq or shut down the Pentagon without his $70 billion, now this:
Bush to Veto Pentagon Funds Over Iraq Provision
By DAVID STOUT
Published: December 28, 2007
WASHINGTON — President Bush will veto a huge Defense Department bill because of concerns by the Iraqi government that Iraqi assets in American banks could be vulnerable to claims from victims of Saddam Hussein, the Texas White House said Friday.
...
The announcement of the president’s intentions caught Democratic leaders off guard. the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California quickly issued a statement complaining that they had been blindsided by the news from Mr. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex.
Happy New Year, losers.
Update [2007-12-28 14:56:51 by darrelplant]: Might as well move the discussion over to Susan G's FP diary of the same story (but I was here first!)
Thursday's New York Times story about the destroyed CIA interrogation tapes is just another crack in the dam holding back the giant pool of crap that is the Bush administration. Everyone knows there's more there, the anticipation from most quarters has been whether the dam's going to hold until the 2008 election or whether it's going to break and cover everyone in its wake with a thick, oozy slime.
The Democratic leadership, by putting impeachment under the table before the 2006 election, has placed their bets on the dam staying intact. There's been no serious attempt to breach it in nearly a year of investigation with the super-special dreaded "subpoena power." They control the speed and depth of the investigations, and they've managed to run through almost a year without actually challenging claims of executive privilege. November is tantalizingly close.
Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero was released in August 1944, nearing the end of the third year of the US involvement in World War II. The Allies had landed at Normandy a couple of months earlier and were fighting their way through France. The war in the Pacific was still in its grueling island-hopping phase. The six-month Guadalcanal Campaign had begun exactly two years earlier with the first amphibious attack of the war.
The story of Hail the Conquering Hero is built around but not on the Marines fighting for Guadalcanal. Sitting in a bar one night, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), born the day his father was killed in battle in World War I and the descendent of a long line of military men, pays the tab for six broke Marines. They discover that Woodrow had joined the Marines a year earlier but was drummed out of basic training for chronic hayfever. Ashamed to admit his failure to his mother, he's dug himself into a hole by pretending that he was shipped off to Guadalcanal, he's broken off his relationship with his girlfriend, and he's been working in a shipyard as a clerk.
This is what happens when you don't pay enough attention to your calendar. I almost missed St. Crispin's Day.
And Crispine Crispian shall ne're goe by,
From this day to the ending of the World,
But we in it shall be remembred;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he to day that sheds his blood with me,
Shall be my brother: be he ne're so vile,
This day shall gentle his Condition.
And Gentlemen in England, now a bed,
Shall thinke themselues accurst they were not here;
And hold their Manhoods cheape, whiles any speakes,
That fought with vs vpon Saint Crispines day.
In Portland, Oregon -- a city known to the Bush family for nearly two decades as "Little Beirut" -- we've got limited options for cable service (just like most other major metro areas). In our case, it's mega-giant Comcast.
We've been toodling along with our old non-digital cable hookup for years. An Expanded Basic program has given us more than enough crap to choose from, especially with a DVR to record anything we might want. News on the three main cable networks as well as the Northwest Cable News, the Travel Channel for Anthony Bourdain, Home & Garden TV to laugh at what people call decor, the Sci-Fi Channel for mindless entertainment.
But all of that's about to change at the end of the month. Along with Oxygen and Hallmark Channel and a couple of shopping channels, as we move into the final months of the primary season Comcast is making one of the cable news networks unavailable to non-digital subscribers. Would that be GOP house organ FOX News? CNN with their steady diet of celebrity gossip and Glenn Beck? Or did I give it away in the title?
The Bush administration has been in office for almost seven years. In that time, they've lied or hidden the truth about the energy task force, the warnings they had about terrorist attacks in 2001, Iraqi WMDs and ties to al Qaeda, the cost of the war in Iraq, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, civilian casualties in Iraq, the death of Pat Tillman, torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, the response to Hurricane Katrina, progress in the Iraq war, the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity, the political motivations behind the firings of US Attorneys, and that's just a list off the top of my head. That's not a record that inspires a lot of trust from me.
So it kind of pissed me off this afternoon at a Town Hall on Iraq when I approached one of my senators after the question and answer session and asked him if he trusted this administration and he told me that he believed in the Reagan doctrine of "Trust but Verify" and told me that he was my guy in Washington to handle the verification.
It is time that the United States begin the process of withdrawing our troops, and allow a UN peacekeeping force to take over the reconstruction of Iraq.
Because nobody who ever says this will win the nomination:
This Administration has no exit strategy for removing US troops from harm’s way. It is now clear, that in their rush to war the Administration failed to adequately prepare for the post-invasion period.
Because nobody who said something like this on 25 July 2003 -- more than four years, 3,000 US fatalities, unknown Iraqi casualties, and hundreds of billions of dollars ago -- will win the nomination:
The United Nations must be brought in. Negotiations for an exit must begin now. An exit agreement with the United Nations must involve the US letting go of the contracting process.
