Back in the 1960s, Time and Life had many subscribers. These magazines dropped plenty of photos about the reality of war onto tens of millions of coffee tables across the country, every damn week.
And, Walter Cronkite made sure that Mr. and Mrs. America had a close-up view on tv during the dinner hour.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos, Docudharma and Firedoglake
Hat tip to Henry Porter and the other diarists who posted on the videos and photos yesterday of the repatriation of service members slain in Afghanistan.
Henry wrote of how enraged he is that war criminals of the previous administration are walking free, of the pain he felt when he encountered a young disabled veteran, and that he finds "a measure of comfort in the hope that unlike his predecessor, this president has the courage, the character , the compassion and the judgment to make his decisions based on the best possible information and advice available to him."
It is not often that we are able to see photos depicting the cost of war to our troops and their families. Few people encounter our disabled veterans. The face of war is rarely seen.
During the war in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite made sure that Mr. and Mrs. America saw plenty of the reality, during the dinner hour.
Sensitivity to the wishes of our soldiers and their families must prevail over other considerations.
And, there are some soldiers and families who have been willing to share images of their sacrifice with us.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
Cross-posted at Daily Kos, Docudharma, and MyDD
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In the Wall Street Journal on September 13, the two Repubs and one former Democrat wholeheartedly endorsed sending more of our troops to eat $#!t sandwiches in Afghanistan.
We are confident that not only is it winnable, but that we have no choice. We must prevail in Afghanistan.
snip
However, we need more than the right team and the right strategy. This team must also have the resources it needs to succeed-including a significant increase in U.S. forces.
This is a live blog from the front porch at Sen. Dick Durbin's office in Springfield, Illinois. See the last paragraph for details about the location.
Posted at Daily Kos, Docudharma, and OpenLeft.
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It doesn't matter whether you like or dislike the CIA. (Personally, I view the professional gathering and analysis of information about military adversaries as a crucial, non-debatable function.) But a person doesn't become a CIA station chief by some kind of dumb accident. You have to be smart, and very capable.
And here's three former station chiefs who served in Afghanistan and Pakistan who explain why our large scale military occupation in Afghan is dead wrong.
The U.S. job market may be showing signs of life, according to a report issued by the Labor Department on Friday. The unemployment rate dropped in July, something no economist expected. Under the most optimistic interpretation, the news indicates that the worst of the recession is finally behind us. But the scenario isn't really so rosy, as our government has yet to relieve the foreclosure pandemic. Even if unemployment is leveling off, there will be no economic recovery if the the foreclosure problem isn't fixed.
July's unemployment rate only fell from 9.5% to 9.4%, and even the most bullish Wall Street economists think the rate will hit double digits by the end of the year. The fact that July's tiny drop in unemployement counts for good economic news says a lot about how severely the economy has deteriorated over the past year and a half.
But when you dig a little deeper, the numbers get worse. As Tim Fernholz explains for The American Prospect, even though the unemployment rate dropped, the nation's economy actually shed 247,000 jobs in July. The rate was pushed down because 400,000 people gave up looking for a job in July; as such, they are no longer included in the statistic. So, while we "only" lost 247,000 jobs, we also lost 400,000 workers.
The government also adjusts its job loss figures for seasonal developments. When the Labor Department says we lost 247,000 jobs in July, that isn't the actual number-it's the number relative to what the Department considers a normal July. This summer has been unique for the U.S. economy, and especially in the case of the automobile industry. Auto companies usually lay off workers in the summer: The factories close while companies prepare the next year's models. So many factories were already closed earlier this year that the seasonal shutdowns haven't really happened this summer. Even though car companies laid people off in July, the government's seasonally adjusted numbers marked an increase in car manufacturing jobs.
Things get even more complicated when you include the Cash for Clunkers program, which started on July 24. The plan offers people up to $4,500 to trade in their gas guzzlers for more fuel efficient new car. Whether the program helps the environment is somewhat controversial, but there is no doubt that it has created a lot of unusual demand for new cars. As Ed Brayton notes for The Michigan Messenger, the government's plan to pump an additional $2 billion into the program has analysts predicting a big boost for manufacturers in July and August.
So we don't really know if the labor market actually improved last month, or if the report is just an exaggeration of statistical anomalies resulting from the recession itself, or even some of the government's recovery efforts. But as Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, even if the numbers come with a healthy dose of uncertainty, it's still better to see them come in good than bad. "There hasn't been encouraging news on the job front in quite a while, and given the severity of the economic crisis, today's report offers at least some relief," Benen says. "The job numbers beat expectations, the overall unemployment rate declined, earnings went up, and the manufacturing sector improved."
But even if unemployment is finally slowing down, the housing market remains awful. Foreclosures are significantly outpacing the administration's efforts to help troubled borrowers. The Treasury Department released a report last week indicating that only about 9% of the borrowers eligible for relief under the government's anti-foreclosure plan have actually received any aid-and even here the numbers are juiced to make the program look better. The administration only includes borrowers who are already at least two months behind on their mortgage payments in the group of eligible borrowers, when in fact any borrower in danger of "imminent default" is supposed to be eligible. Much of the problem, as I argue in a piece for Salon, is that the plan relies on private-sector debt collectors to identify distressed homeowners and get them help, something these companies have never been very interested in doing. All in all, just 235,247 borrowers have received assistance under the Obama plan, while foreclosures increased to 1.5 million in the first six months of 2009, with 2.4 million expected for the entire year and 9 million by 2012.
Writing for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll emphasizes that a much better policy option is available than the current tack. Rather than ask the banking industry to voluntarily adopt the administration's plan without any consequences, we should put "homeowners' fate in the hands of a neutral arbiter, like a bankruptcy court judge . . . [It] would go a long way toward stemming the tide of foreclosures," Kroll writes.
Thanks to a bizarre legal loophole, mortgages cannot be modified in a bankruptcy proceeding if the owner actually lives in the house (investment properties, on the other hand, can be written off). In other words, if a predatory loan is driving you bankrupt, a judge can't do anything about it in bankruptcy court. Congress has tried to change this rule a few times over the past year, but the bank lobby has stymied those efforts. The most recent legislative push failed overcome a Senate filibuster in April, but the political momentum may be changing as foreclosures get increasingly out of hand.
As Mike Lillis notes for The Colorado Independent, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., plans to bring back the legislation if the banking industry doesn't get serious about helping borrowers fast. Many of the companies letting borrowers fall into foreclosure received billions of dollars in bailout money over the past year, and some even agreed to help borrowers as a condition for taxpayer support. But reform doesn't just depend on the banks. Peter Dreier argues in The Nation that citizens need to publicly protest for stronger economic reforms.
Foreclosures are terrible for the economy. They wreak havoc on families' lives, wipe out personal savings, lower the value of neighboring properties and put more homes on the market, further lowering home prices nationwide. If we cannot stop foreclosures, the economy cannot recover. If job losses are finally moderating, that's great news. But it would be much better to see job losses stabilize and see the banks we bailed out actually do something to avert foreclosures.
Over at Huffington Post, Professor Lawrence Lessig (whom I work with in advancing public funding of congressional elections) gives people something constuctive to do with the anger over last week's bankruptcy vote:
If you think special-interest influence in Congress perverts our public policy, last week saw an outrage that vindicates that belief entirely.
Sen. Dick Durbin offered a bill that would allow families at risk of losing their homes -- but with an ability to pay their mortgage if their monthly rates were lower and extended over more years -- to legally get that option.
The very banks that taxpayers kept alive with billions in bailouts had the audacity to spend millions lobbying Congress to oppose this bill. They also showered politicians with campaign contributions.
The bill was defeated. Senator Durbin declared that banks "frankly own the place." Will you continue to support politicians who support this corrupt system? Or will you demand that any politician you donate to support reform?
Thousands of people are telling members of Congress they won't get a dime from us unless they co-sponsor Senator Durbin's Fair Elections Now Act to overhaul congressional campaign financing. It would replace our broken system with citizen-funded elections, a hybrid of public funding and small-dollar donations.
Already, our strike has withheld over $1.25 million from politicians (based on contributions last cycle). It's also been featured by ABC, NBC, the Associated Press, Politico, Huffington Post, and others.
Now is the time to send politicians a message that we absolutely demand they change the system.
I sense that a lot of people are sick of just venting. And are sick of the current system. Wanted to make sure you saw there is a campaign you can tap into to fix it.
Still unclear as to who is pushing the delay: The culprit behind the delay can still be best described as "centrist Democrats" and "the financial services industry." As of this time, there are still few other specifics. I have heard second hand rumors that the New Democrats coordinated the delay in order to "flex some muscle." This would make sense, since the New Democrats have been public about feeling left out of the state of play in the House recently, and have indicated that they are going to target financial services regulations as a means of regaining influence. However, trying to get even more specific than "New Democrats" has been difficult, as the individual names I have heard behind the delay and water down effort are contradicted by my different sources.
On Ellen Tauscher: Two days ago, I asked Open Left readers to contact Representative Ellen Tauscher's office, urging her to stop listening to the financial services industry, and start listening to threatened homeowners. Her communications director contacted me today to point out that she voted in favor of the rule on HR 1106, which implies support. Also, I was told that Tauscher has not met with one member or representative of the financial services industry on this bill, but did work closely with the Judiciary committee which sent the bill to the House floor. In the extended entry, I provide a list of ways that her office indicated she was working to "strengthen" the bill, rather than "water it down."
A more complicated relationship: This week, on a couple of occasions, I have implied a crude, quid pro quo relationship between centrist Democrats and corporate PACs. The actual relationship, of course, is a bit more complicated. In particular, many centrist Dems simply see eye to eye with the corporate lobbyists who funnel PAC money their way, and no real arm twisting is needed. The corporate PACs are simply supporting like-minded individuals, many of whom have a background in the industry (such as Representative Tauscher, who worked on Wall Street). These Representatives are rarely working at the behest of the industries in question, and are instead simply working toward shared, usually pro-corporate goals on their own.
Durbin's slip-up: Yesterday, Senator Durbin , the sponsor of the Senate version of the bill, told a reporter that he was willing to water down the legislation so that it would only apply to sub-prime loans. While he might have been taken out of context, or simply been speaking in error, given the 60 vote threshold in the Senate it is likely that is what will happen to the legislation by the time it is delivered to President Obama's desk. Because of the current political climate, the goal of centrist Democrats and the banking industry is not actually to defeat the bill as they did in the past, but simply to narrow it and water it down. Depressingly, that effort is likely to succeed.
Obama administration to the rescue?: The best chance for keeping the legislation strong and applicable to as wide a range of homeowners as possible comes from the Obama administration itself. On Monday, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan will speak to House Democrats, and make a direct appeal for not narrowing or otherwise watering down the cram-down legislation. The administration does hold a lot of sway with congressional Democrats right now, and is riding high in the polls, so this appeal might just work. Let's hope so.
This bill is another test of the Obama administration's ability to sway center-right Democrats and Republicans. Unlike the stimulus, let's hope that no concessions are made without an actual promise of votes. Also, this vote should be a great test of whether or not members are voting with corporate interests, or with the interests of their constituents.
Ten days ago, we reported on Open Left that bankruptcy "cram-down" mortgage relief would not appear in the stimulus, but would appear in a different piece of legislation later this year. Despite our reports, the fight over bankruptcy "cram-down" legislation in the stimulus did not actually end ten days ago. As recently as Thursday, House Democrats will still fighting in to include the measure in the stimulus, and Senator Dick Durbin, the leading proponent of the measure in the Senate, was denying that President Obama was opposed to including the measure in the stimulus.
However, any lingering doubt about the fate of bankruptcy "cram-down" reform in the stimulus can now be put to rest. Senator Durbin has confirmed that President Obama opposes including the measure in the stimulus, and favors including it in later legislation instead (more in the extended entry):
Yesterday, David and I both blogged about passing mortgage related bankruptcy reform in the stimulus package (see David's post and my post). The specific legislation we are seeking to include in the stimulus is, in the House, HR 225 from Representative Brad Miller and, in the Senate, S 61 from Dick Durbin. The legislation will allow bankruptcy judges to re-write mortgages according to current home values rather than inflated "bubble" values, thus allowing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people to keep their homes over the next two years. It is good legislation that will help lots of real people, and start putting the country back on track toward a post-bubble economy.
Here is the state of play on this legislation:
Senator Durbin is leading the charge to have the legislation included in the stimulus package. Considering his Senate position (ranking behind only Reid) and his close relationship with President-elect Obama, and that he is reportedly taking the inclusion of this legislation in the Senate as his personal mission, there is a good chance he can succeed. However, at this time, there is no definitive word that he has succeeded.
In the House, Brad Miller is basically a one-man campaign for this bill. Representative Miller and his staff are basically the only people around and available for this campaign. He is out-resourced by the opponents of the bill, as the next bullet point discusses.
In late 2007, Miller's bill was defeated by an alliance of Blue Dogs and the banking and realtor lobbies. At the behest of the National Association of Realtors, which gives more money to congressional candidates than any other PAC in the country, and which has 28 people working on the Hill full time as either lobbyists or researchers, sixteen Blue Dogs sent a letter to the House leadership asking them to spike the bill. The end result was that the bill was delayed, severely watered down, and ultimately deemed insufficient by the bill's sponsor, Brad Miller. There is every reason to expect a similar effort will be attempted to spike the bill this time around. And, as I already noted, the realtors and their Blue Dog lackeys have a lot more resources than Dick Durbin and Brad Miller, who are operating this campaign almost entirely by themselves.
To prevent this attempt to pass mortgage related bankruptcy reform, and thus a partial repeal of the odious Bankruptcy Bill of 2005, the strategy is simple: try to get as many Representatives and Senators supporting the inclusion of this legislation in the stimulus as possible. However, recognizing the relatively small size of our activist base here on Open Left, we can't just expect readers here to call their members of Congress, and the end result to be that enough members feel sufficiently pressured from their constituents to back the inclusion of this legislation in the stimulus. Instead, we have to be more selective in our targets, and choose carefully where we target our pressure.
So, my first idea is for Open Left readers to try and get all of our Better Democrats, for whom we raised money in 2008 and who are now members of Congress, to become sponsors of the bill and support its inclusion in the stimulus. Donna Edwards (MD-04) and Alan Grayson (FL-08) are already sponsors of H.R. 225, so they are spoken for. However, there are five members of the House and Senate from the Better Democrats page that have not yet sponsored either HR 225 (if they are House members) or S 61 (if they are Senators). Here are those four, along with the phone numbers of their Washington, D.C. offices:
The idea behind targeting these five is that, even though few of us are constituents of these five members of Congress, most of us can call as donors to one or more of these five members of Congress.
So, please, politely contact one of these five, and leave a message asking for to become a co-sponsor of either HR 225 (for House members) or S 61 (for Senators). Additionally, urge them to support the inclusion of this legislation in the stimulus package. If they ask for your constituent information and you are not a constituent, indicate that you were a donor to the 2008 campaign of that member of Congress.
Don't worry about it being after hours in D.C. If no one answers, leave a message-it will still be heard. Also, remember that we are entering a new era in D.C. where pressure like this can actually work. For example, Obama shelved his stimulus business tax cut proposal today, after Senators and grassroots alike raised their voice. Hopefully, we can get a few more sponsors for these bills as a result of this action. If it works, we can more onto more targets.
So the debt-laden Tribune Company, owner of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, went bankrupt; that's not a surprise, the newspaper business is in dire straights and this company has been in trouble for years. But the details here are fascinating. The Tribune took on most of its debt recently, in a transaction taking the company private put forward by billionaire conservative Sam Zell, who is widely known in media reform circles as one of the single worst influences on media policy in the country.
The FCC actually tried to block this transaction on the grounds that taking the Tribune private would require them to relax cross-ownership requirements. Zell's contempt for journalism in general and his employees is legendary, with one clip online showing Zell cursing out a journalist employee asking him a question at a public forum. This extended to financial self-dealing, with Zell financing most of the deal by borrowing against the employee pension and stock ownership program. He himself only put $315 million into the total $8.5 billion deal.
The Teamsters, Common Cause, and the Media Access Project all argued that the sale of the Tribune would damage local communities, and with Zell's overleveraged strategy combined with immediate layoffs, they were right. But the FCC ignored their points and allowed Zell to proceed anyway. The question is why, and the answer, as usual in DC, is a mixture of influence peddling and social ties.
Last year, Emanuel and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging the agency to act quickly on the sale of Tribune Co. to real-estate magnate Sam Zell. The lawmakers said the FCC shouldn't allow its review of its media- ownership rules to delay completion of the transaction.
Both Dick Durbin and Rahm Emanuel received substantial donations from the predominantly right-wing Zell, with Emanuel having an especially close set of ties. Zell gave to him for his contested 2002 primary slot, after Emanuel had just finished his stint as a Chicago investment banker. Their social worlds are so close that Emanuel actually attended the strongly pro-Israel school that Zell built. None of this is to allege some sort of conspiracy, as local media barons tend to have a great amount of power everywhere. In fact, the story, while fetid, is only different because Zell combined several forms of acceptable legal corruption in one set of egregious moves.
Much to his credit, Obama stayed out of Zell's orbit. Zell was a huge McCain donor and blamed Obama and Clinton for the sour economy. That month, of course, in the throes of a debt-laden company, Zell still found time to throw himself an 800 person birthday party in a 'tented fantasyland' with the Eagles providing the entertainment.
So while there is a lot of hand-wringing at the newspaper business dying, there's almost no focus on how egregiously mismanaged and corrupt these companies often are. The New York Times (and until its sale the Wall Street Journal) were framed as 'family dynasties' akin to public trusts, though how nepotistic control of powerful for-profit media corporations is some sort of public trust is a mystery. Local newspaper publishers often have strong public policy preferences, such as ending inheritance taxes, and they use their newspapers to pursue them. Zell's horrific legal theft from his employees, his unseemly political influence with high-level Democrats and Republicans, his financial gamesmanship, and his general contempt for the product itself are just particularly obvious.
One of the key players in fighting to strip Lieberman of his committee chairmanship is Dick Durbin, and Obama has just convinced him to let Lieberman keep his gavel. Here's Howard Fineman:
But I`m now told after having gone through a horrible week or so, where he was mourning the death of his 40-year-old daughter to congenital heart disease, he`s come out of that and looked around and, also, heard what Barack Obama has had to say, and Durbin is now saying he`s willing to give Lieberman a chance.
I think that`s going to go to a vote next week but I bet that Lieberman gets to keep his committee chairmanship because Obama has signaled that he wants him to.
Here is a quick round-up of Lieberman related news:
No new public Lieberman supporters. Yesterday, I identified eight Senators as likely Lieberman supporters. Five of the eight--Inouye, Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Pryor and Salazar--are both Gang of 14 members, and were also public supporters of Lieberman in 2006 even after he lost the primary to Democratic nominee Ned Lamont. No surprise on these five, as they have regularly and actively undermined the Democratic caucus in the past. The other three are Evan Bayh (former DLC chair), Chris Dodd (fellow nutmeger), and Tom Carper of Delaware (the other public Lieberman supporters in 2006). This is relevant because it shows there is nothing remotely surprising about the Politico article on Lieberman's support group. Everyone mentioned in the Politico article is drawn from these eight, which is actually a good sign. If the Politico couldn't dig up any public supporters not from this group of eight, then Lieberman has not grown the size of his supporter group.
Media narrative on Lieberman willfully misleading, or just plain ignorant?Kagro X discusses how the Washington Post continues to frame the Lieberman fight as a struggle over whether or not to keep in the caucus, rather than the accurate struggle over whether or not he keeps the chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee. Given how pro-Lieberman the traditional media was during the 2006 Senate campaign, this sort of willfully misleading writing would not come as a surprise. However, I'd like to throw out a different possibility: the traditional media is actually plain ignorant of the details on the current fight. Keep in mind that the Washington Post considered states where Obama was leading by 7% or more "toss-ups," but states that McCain was leading by less than 5% "Lean McCain." They only changed their electoral map at my urging. So, it is entirely possible that the Washington Post is just bad at this, and is allowing their desired view of the world--evil lefty activists trying to excommunicate Lieberman--get in the way of understanding the actual course of the fight.
Durbin shifting to Lieberman? The most disturbing report of the day is the news that Senator Durbin, #2 in the Democratic leadership, might be shifting his support to Lieberman. This report is all the more disturbing because it comes from Howard Fineman, who was the earlier source indicating that Durbin wanted Lieberman to lose his committee chair. Flipping Durbin might be just the support that Lieberman needs, both because it gives him a foothold within the leadership and because of Durbin's close, Illinois ties to Obama. When we had the entire leadership, a large pool of Lamont supporters, and a large group of freshman to rely upon, I really liked our chances to win this fight. However, if Durbin has flipped, then Lieberman probably has at least an even chance of retaining his chairmanship.
Six days until the vote on Lieberman. Now, more than ever, we need to keep up the pressure on our Democratic Senators. Make contact with one here.
Now I am not one who thinks members of legislative bodies need attend every single vote, as they have other valuable duties that do not relate to casting ballots in the chamber. I am forgiving about them skipping some votes when running for higher office. I certainly defended Kerry from such silliness in 2004. After all, it's not as if Bush wasn't diverting a great deal of executive branch time toward running for re-election, just because his record can't be congealed into a handy percentage of votes attended and missed, doesn't mean there aren't consequences to the number of hours a President spends electioneering instead of presidenting. I can hardly resist noting that to conservatives, there is no practical difference between activities geared to seeking power and those geared toward exercising it. We didn't need Scott McClellan to note that the Bush team has erased even the lip-service to a distinction between policy and politics.
That all said, when a Senator is running for President against another Senator, it does seem pretty fair to compare their voting attendance records, and more meaningfully, note which votes they attend and skip. To that end, after reading a pretty decent AP piece today on Durbin's Democratic radio address, I discovered they (and everyone else) buried the lead: John McCain skipped a decisive, time senstive vote which resulted in a key funding measure for Medicaid failing to achieve cloture against yet another anti-democratic Republican filibuster. He was the deciding non-vote.
There is a rumor going around that Harry Reid will step down as majority leader either at the end of this year to focus on his re-election campaign, or in three years after he retires from the Senate. While I should emphasize that I have nothing to back up this rumor, it does raise the interesting possibility of a new campaign for majority leader in either one year or three years that is worth discussing.
The obvious candidates for majority leader would be Durbin, Schumer, Dodd, and the loser of the 2008 presidential nominating contest. Durbin is the second highest ranking Senate Dem, obviously giving him a path to become majority leader. Schumer has been head of the DSCC for a while, and after 2008 at least 15 members of the Senate will have been newly elected under his watch. Dodd narrowly lost a campaign for majority leader following the 1994 elections, with Daschle only edging him out by one vote. There has also been talk online of finding a way to make Dodd the majority leader. Finally, the loser of the nomination campaign will be the junior Senator from either Durbin's or Schumer's state, giving him or her a possibility of putting together a coalition of presidential endorsers plus Durbin and Schumer supporters. The latter seems to be an especially strong possibility if Obama becomes President, potentially giving Clinton the inside track to become majority leader. After all, would President Obama and Majority Leader Durbin be an overdose of Chicago politics (or President Clinton and Majority Leader Schumer be an overdose of New York City politics) dominating Washington D.C.?
This could just be idle speculation, but if Harry Reid steps down, who would you want to see replace him as Senate majority leader? Take the poll in the extended entry.
What happens in Podunk shouldn't stay there. Or at least if it does, the Democratic Party Establishment, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, the Blue Dogs among us, will have won one more unrecorded battle against those of us who want real change.
What's happening most immediately in the IL-14 corner of Podunk (a term I use here to describe anything not directly inside the DC Beltway) is a primary and a special primary on Tuesday, between the DC insider "pick" for our district, an attorney who is a relative newcomer to both politics and our area, and John Laesch, the nominee against Denny Hastert last time out, and the only progressive in the race.
At this point, I'd call it a significant bellwether for the upcoming Congressional elections that virtually no one outside of IL-14 is paying much attention to in the glare of the presidential race, as well as a bellwether event in the battle for control of the party. So while I don't expect this diary to get much attention, I want to leave a record of what has happened in this primary. Bellwethers, however unobserved at the time, sometimes have a way of becoming useful history for those who follow.
"It was not easy to be against that war back when we cast that vote in October of 2002," Durbin said. "I was one of 23 who voted against the war. Barack was supportive - one of the few candidates speaking out strongly against it in Illinois.
"If President Clinton had opposed that war as strongly as Barack Obama at the time, it would have helped a lot of us who had voted against authorizing an invasion."
Bill Clinton has repeatedly questioned whether Obama was against the war at the time of the war vote, despite obvious evidence that he was.
Senator Dick Durbin says he'll resist President George W. Bush's demand that Congress shield telephone companies from privacy suits until lawmakers are told how carriers aided the warrantless wiretapping of Americans after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The president wants to grant phone companies such as Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc., and Sprint Nextel Corp. protection from private lawsuits. The companies have been named in 36 suits seeking billions of dollars in damages for giving the government customers' private calling data.
``I am not for blanket immunity until we understand what this program has been about,'' Durbin, the Democrats' No. 2 Senate leader, said on Bloomberg Television's ``Political Capital with Al Hunt.''
It's amusing to watch the Senate Democrats and House Democrats creatively figure out how to stand up for something. The Republican Party leadership is basically a gang of criminals, and dealing with a culture of intense bad faith is psychologically difficult. That said, these people have been kicked in the head enough times that they should know what's coming.
The only thing that matters is whether a Democratic Senator is willing to let the current FISA fix lapse. Is Durbin going to go that far? Will he filibuster a bill with telecom immunity? Probably not. But at the last the conventional wisdom around the need for telecom immunity in the Senate seems to be ratcheting down.
This is a special edition of Strategery, which usually appears every other Wednesday on OpenLeft.
One of the major reasons why Democrats have not yet been able to pass legislation slowing down or ending the Iraq War is because they have remained within their archetype (aka. the role low-information voters perceive them as reflexively playing). The strongest bills they have proposed have all been straight-up "antiwar" bills - that is, they bring the troops home to end the war and that's about it. True, that IS the antiwar movement's goal (a goal I wholeheartedly support) - but the problem with it as the stand-alone legislative strategy is that it doesn't allow Democrats to play outside their antiwar archetype on Republican turf, nor does it make the average Republican incumbent all that uncomfortable, because it doesn't force Republicans to make a choice between loyalty to Bush and loyalty to their conservative base.
Right now, the antiwar movement's strategy is a battle of attrition. Keep pushing standalone antiwar bills, and hope that public opposition to the war will force Republicans to peel off. It certainly may work - but to echo Robert Redford's famous line in The Candidate, there is a better way - at least in terms of a legislative strategy that gets our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible.
Think for a moment about which issue Republicans have been trying to one-up and out-conservative each other on...Got it in your head? Right - it's illegal immigration. On that issue, the least offensive Republican proposal from a racist/xenophobic perspective has been the effort to beef up border security. A look at recent congressional votes shows that beefing up border security has the widest bipartisan support among all the immigration-related proposals being considered.
So here's the concept (which, though I'm not 100 percent sure, I don't think has been tried yet in Congress): How about when Congress reconvenes in September, Democrats bring a bill to the floor of the House and Senate mandating that, say, 25,000 National Guardsmen be taken out of combat in Iraq and be immediately redeployed to guard America's porous domestic borders - both southern and northern? If Democrats wanted to get even more creative, they could additionally mandate that some of these National Guardsmen being redeployed be immediately sent to forest fire emergency zones - many of which are in Republican states right now.
Think this through for a moment. All of a sudden, the illegal-immigration-obsessed Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican Party, which also happens to be the most reflexively pro-war wing of the GOP, would be forced to choose either the Iraq War or beefed up border security. All of a sudden, we would be having a debate about two very real, very pressing priorities, rather than theoreticals and hypotheticals, and we would be discussing exactly how the misuse of our National Guard as a wing of the regular Army harms our ability to deal with the domestic challenges the National Guard was originally established to deal with.
With the war so unpopular, far-right, law-and-order, "tough on immigration" conservatives would be hard-pressed to vote against this kind of bill, potentially providing a veto-proof majority in support of it. And if they didn't vote for it, Democrats would have a flip-flop campaign ad all set for 2008. You can just hear the voiceover: "The Republicans who told us they support border security voted against Democrats' bill to secure our borders."
Obviously, this is not an ideal way to end the war. As Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said, there are very legitimate concerns about the downsides of militarizing our domestic borders. But Durbin has also said that "Democrats are willing to support any reasonable plan that will secure our borders, including the deployment of National Guard troops." And most if not all would be willing to accepting the potential downsides of an increased military presence at our border (downsides which could be minimized if managed properly) as the price to end the war in Iraq.
And that is precisely what this bill would do. With Bush having recklessly stretched the military so thin, taking 25,000 national guardsmen out of the Iraq deployment rotation would compel an end to the war.
In the legislative arena where making law is making imperfect sausages, this is a strategy designed to break apart the Republican coalition by playing offense on their archetype as "tough on immigration" conservatives. Rather than pursuing only the attrition strategy of digging in on the antiwar archetype and hoping public pressure converts a few Republicans (a strategy that could take months of even years), Democrats have to target one GOP weak point that will make Republicans decide between Bush and their base. This strategy laid out here does precisely that, and would have the very real potential of getting a wave of Republicans to vote yes, thus getting our troops out of Iraq right now.
UPDATE: For the record, I feel it is important to reiterate that this is not ideal, but it is a legislative strategy that tries to use the imperfect world within Congress to get something done on the most pressing national security issue of our generation - and in a way that leverages the most bipartisan piece of the divisive immigration debate to make it happen. There is no doubt that the Tancredos of the world use the border security issue to mask their underlying and deplorable racism, and thus I think we all understand why many immigrant rights advocates now hear the term "border security" and automatically think that the person saying it is just trying to shroud a racist instinct in something more politically palatable. But I think this is a very important point: I think, for instance, taking money from racists, surrounding yourself with racists makes you a racist, and proves that you are using talk of "border security" as a way to shroud a racist agenda. But I don't think that simply being for better border security at all of our ports and borders means you are automatically racist. That alone does not make you a racist - it just makes you concerned about national security. You can quite legitimately be for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who are currently here, for increased legal immigration, and against the growing anti-Hispanic racism in this country while also believing it's a problem that thousands of miles of our northern and southern borders are completely unsecured. Furthermore, I think if people are automatically accused of racism merely for bringing up the concept of improved border security at ALL of our borders - I think that hurts not only the ability of us to discuss these issues rationally, but hurts the credibility and the case of those who are very courageously trying to fight racism.
The art of the legislative arena - an imperfect arena at best - is to find a way to stay true to your own ideals, while wedging the other side into the position of feeling like they HAVE to support you. The least offensive thing that the Tancredo wing has hung its hat on is better border security. Now, we all KNOW that this wing uses border security to SHROUD its racist motivations - no one denies that. But what I'm proposing is calling their damn bluff. They say they aren't racists and really just for "controlling the borders?" Well, OK, here's what they publicly say they want - now are they going to vote for it or not? Cross-posted from Working Assets
