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With all the recent happenings with the economy, you didn't forget about our expensive, awesome war in iraq, did you?? Or who knows, maybe that possible future business with Iran is still on as well?
Well, spend about 2:15 of your time to listen to Sarah Silverman in this public service message, reminding us all to do what we can (from here):
What is the Iraq war costing you? What can local government do? What is the Montgomery County Peace Resolution?
These questions will be discussed at a Town Hall Meeting on Sept. 22 entitled "Can Montgomery County Help End the War?"
County Executive Isiah Leggett will moderate, and speakers will include Columbia University economist Dr. Brendan O'Flaherty and Institute for Policy Studies Fellow Karen Dolan.
Cosponsors of the forum include County Council members Valerie Ervin, Nancy Floreen, George Leventhal, Duchy Trachtenberg, and Marc Elrich.
I suppose the odds are not too high that as soon as you graduate high school, you might get sent to Iraq where you can supposedly defend freedom. That's because we don't have a draft, which if we did, we might not have a war, or we might see it differently. Furthering that argument, if we were forced to pay for it NOW, we might not be having it either. But closer to home at Annapolis HS, we learn that three students who briefly sat down in a hallway to protest the war, got cuffed by police and sentenced to ten days of suspension.
Okay, let's put this into perspective. More US soldiers have died in Iraq than there are students that go to Annapolis HS. We have been fighting in Iraq for longer than it takes someone to graduate high school. We let students go to high school, then we ship them off to Iraq to kill and be killed. Our schools suffer from lack of funding, our economy is teetering, the dollar is weakening, people are losing their homes, our international prestige is sliding away, gas prices are soaring, many AHS students live in housing projects where they hear gunshots--and get shot and even murdered.....and we have to lock up a few students for sitting in a school hallway.
Contrast this to the Vietnam era when we had a draft and for most purposes, had to pay for the war. The young people went nuts, and their protests eventually brought about an end to the war. And our country seems to have collective amnesia about every lesson we should have learned from that folly. So, after all these years in Iraq, trillions squandered and many thousands dead,we seem to forget all the lies foisted upon us by Bush and Cheney Incorporated. Instead, we take a few students who sat down peacefully and suspend them for ten days.
Perhaps, yes perhaps, if cooler heads prevail, we'll get a massive student protest going and maybe we'll shut the whole school down for ten days. That might make a point. As the parent of an Annapolis HS student, I'm all for it. It might make the lessons my son is learning about US government and history all the more meaningful. And if he gets suspended for ten days, we'll go visit all the war memorials in Washington, stroll among the gardens of stones at Arlington, visit our Senators and Congressman to protest. He might learn more than he does in school. Read about it in The Capital.
Donna Edwards has not been sitting on her laurels lately: She was at the Take Back America conference in DC currently going on, talking about the progressive movement's place in Democratic politics:
She said that “if being a progressive means wanting to have health care for all of us … an energy policy that says we can protect the environment and create jobs ... that we never should have been in Iraq to begin with” then she was proud to call herself a progressive.
The need for an independent progressive movement, she said, was made clear after the 2006 election when Democrats who had taken control of Congress with a mandate to end the war in Iraq began to backtrack. “it became the politics of the usual when they came back to Washington.”
“In 2008, the voters get it, and it’s time for members of Congress to get it, too.”
She said that during the conference she will join with a number of other candidates and foreign policy experts to lay out what she called a responsible plan for getting out of Iraq.
But, in the long term, she said that as a new member of Congress she welcomes progressives helping her stay true to the platform that got her elected. “I’m counting on you to have my back in the United States Congress,” she said.
She has also partnered with other progressive candidates for Congress, as well as some military leaders, to present a new plan to not just bring the troops home from Iraq, but to develop a new American foreign policy that makes future Iraqs less likely. Check it out.
The Department of Defense announced today the death of three soldiers who were supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. They died Feb. 20 in Baghdad, Iraq, from wounds suffered when their vehicle encountered an improvised explosive device in Baghdad on Feb. 19. They were assigned to the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
Killed were:
Sgt. Conrad Alvarez, 22, of Big Spring, Texas.
Cpl. Albert Bitton, 20, of Chicago.
Spc. Micheal B. Matlock, Jr., 21, of Glen Burnie, Md.
For more information media may contact the Fort Campbell public affairs office at (270) 798-9966.
Hard on the heels of his Friday 25Jan joint guest appearance with Donna Edwards on Washington DC public radio station WAMU-FM, Mr. Wynn broadcasted a robocall to at least some of us in MD-04 -- I received it on my land-line phone in Prince George's County on the afternoon of Saturday 26Jan. In this call Mr. Wynn sought to rebut his critics' charges that his vote for the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill has hurt a lot of folks with home mortgages and debt problems. If you've heard him on this topic recently - e.g., in the aforementioned radio interview (live-blogged by Isaac Smith and commenters here) - the contents of this robocall don't really provide anything new. But here's a transcript, just for the record:
Hello, this is Congressman Albert Wynn. I understand that everyone is concerned about the foreclosure crisis and the economy. My opponent wants to play on your fear, and convince you that I'm to blame. That's nonsense. What she doesn't want you to know is that I'm working to solve the problem. First, I'm a cosponsor of a bill to help people restructure their loans. Second, I'm drafting a bill to protect the credit rating of people who've already lost their homes to foreclosure, and need a fresh start. And third, this week I joined Reverend Jesse Jackson and Civil Rights leaders in a meeting with the head of the Federal Housing Agency [sic*]. We demanded refinancing assistance for victims of predatory subprime loans. I'm Albert Wynn, and I just wanted you to know the facts. Thank you.
.....*He presumably meant Federal Housing Administration, judging from this WaPo article Isaac linked to here.
Mr. Wynn's disingenuous claims of innocence in this matter have been dealt with in a number of blog posts, including an excellent response by Andrew Kujan. With respect to information on the general nastiness of the 2005 Bankruptcy Bill, so much detailed criticism has been posted - both contemporaneously with the 2005 Congressional deliberations, and in the months and years subsequent to that - that the effort of delving into that information feels like trying to sip water from a fire hose at full blast. To see that Mr. Wynn ignored all the prescient criticism of the bill in 2005 makes his vote even more shameful. Presumably he has invested his thirty pieces of silver wisely.
Some discussion of recent campaign mailers comes after the jump, as well as some comments on Friday's WAMU interview.
I haven't received any campaign literature from my Congressman for awhile (first one received Feb-2007 and second one received Jul-2007), so was slightly taken aback to find something from him in my mailbox (rec'd Thursday 17Jan.). And while doing the scanning, image uploading, and editing for this post on that mailer, I received yet another mailer the next day, pretty much on the same theme (I hope to post that one later, in the interest of completeness if nothing else). We'll see what Saturday's mail brings, to see if Mr. Wynn went for the threepeat.
As for Thursday's mailer - it was a single 8.5" x 11" semigloss sheet, card stock (I believe that's the term), printed on front and back. Thumbnail links to scanned images are provided after the jump, but below are descriptions of the basic contents.
FRONT: Heading the page, in large fonts, a statement that "32,360 Support Congressman Wynn's effort to IMPEACH CHENEY", followed by one of the many readily available unflatttering head shots of CrashCart, and some more subdued text in the background concerning Halliburton-related malfeasance. "IRAQ" in large red font is also printed on the front, as a single lonely noun, with no context provided (not that any is needed, though).
BACK: At the top is the statement "Our Quickest Path Out of IRAQ is With Albert Wynn", followed by a photo of a hand touching names on the Vietnam War Memorial, and an invitation to "Support HR 333, Congressman Wynn's Effort to Impeach Vice President Cheney." After that come a number of statements (bullet items in two columns, basically), mostly related to the need to get out of Iraq, hold the Administration to account, and direct money from warfighting to domestic needs.
As promised, images after the jump, along with some commentary...
CQ and a number of other sources are announcing that Democrats plan to capitulate to Bush's demands on 11 of the 12 remaining appropriations bills.
The spending bills, combined, are $22 billion over Bush's FY2008 budget request. An initial offer to "split the difference" - so, $11 billion over his budget - was rejected via Jim Nussle, White House Budget Director.
It appears that the House will draft an omnibus spending bill that will fall within Bush's budget request. And no, they're not taking Rep. David Obey's (D-WI) suggestion to strip out all the earmarks to meet that goal.
The House bill will contain $30-some-odd billion for the war in Afghanistan. When the omnibus reaches the Senate, another $70 billion will be added for the war in Iraq. That $70 billion by the way, comes free and clear of any sort of timetables, benchmarks, standards, or accountability.
Why is this bad? The big reasons:
1) The federal government is currently running on a continuing resolution. In 2006, Congress failed to pass the FY2007 spending bills so they punted and funded all government programs at FY2006 levels.
This caused hiring freezes, delays and reductions in outlays to states for defense-related planning (e.g., BRAC in Maryland), and lower outlays for federal-state share plans like the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and more. It also meant that, essentially, most agencies took a hit since inflation rose and funding did not.
2) No strings attached to yet more war funding. According to the CBO, we've spent $640,000,000,000 on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we reduce troops to 30,000 by 2010, we're looking at an additional $570,000,000,000. If not, we're looking at another $1,055,000,000,000 dollars by 2017. Neither of these figures include the cost of the administration’s initiative to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps, which CBO estimates will cost $162,000,000,000 over the 2008–2017 period.
I am appalled that the Democrats are going to eat their own - namely the 73 members of the Out of Iraq Caucus (of which Elijah Cummings and Albert Wynn are members). I anticipate being further appalled when some of the 73 go back on their word and vote for this monstrosity.
I am appalled that the Democrats are going to allow domestic programs to continue to bear the brunt of an ill-conceived war, one in which our administration destroyed evidence of torture that was under FOIA request by the ACLU in the Southern District of New York.
I am appalled that the Democrats are probably going to roll back good, progressive policy in the omnibus, like weaking or repealing the Mexico City Policy, to get the thing signed into law so they can go home to their districts by Christmas.
I am embarrassed for the party. I am embarrassed to call myself a Democrat.
Edited to add: As I guessed, language weakening or repealing the atrocious Mexico City policy will NOT be included in the omnibus bill. Apparently Nancy Pelosi believes that Congress' "first and foremost" responsibility is to negotiate a spending bill "that will be signed" by President Bush.
