I have to admit that I don’t have a very strong opinion about Afghanistan. I don’t understand the situation at all, I understand that, unlike Iraq, there may have been good reasons to go in, and I also understand that those reasons may or may not have anything to do with whether or not the United States should stay there and that staying there costs a lot of money and demands a huge sacrifice from our servicemen.
In any case, I was impressed with this speech about why we should get out, from my Congressman, Eric Massa:
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
***Update***
To view all of the photo posts at Balloon Juice, click the ‘photo blogging’ tag at the bottom of the post.
Cold and overcast here and I am working from home, so I am making some vegetable beef soup. So far, I’ve got the beef stock cooking, and plan on adding celery, carrots, tomatoes, leeks, potatoes, green beans, and peas.
Any ideas for something unexpected or different beyond a traditional vegetable soup?
The hard truth is: people are still afraid of this, and our opponents knew how to target their fears very precisely. They have honed it to an art – their prime argument now is that although adults can handle gay equality, children cannot. And so they play straight to heterosexuals whose personal comfort with gay people is fine but who sure don’t want their kids to turn out that way. One way to prevent kids turning out that way, the equality opponents argue, is to ensure that they never hear of gay people, except in a marginalized, scary, alien fashion. And this referendum was clearly a vote in which the desire to keep gay people invisible trumped the urge to treat them equally.
I honestly don’t know where the gay rights movement goes from here. There have been some recent successes- there seems to be some movement on DADT, an openly gay mayor was elected in North Carolina, Washington state passed a gay rights bill, Obama signed the Shephard legislation, the HIV ban was lifted, and some other victories in other states in recent years. At the same time, I understand (as much as I can) the anger and the frustration. They did the right things- they had bills passed by the legislature and signed by the governor, followed the legitimate political process, and unlike any other civil rights issue, laws are only temporary for gays and a year later it gets overturned in referendums. It has to be maddening, and I have no answers. About the only thing I can do is to stop being a jerk and openly taunting gay bloggers when I think they are doing something stupid or flailing pointlessly at the administration, because at this point I can’t think anything other than that they have every right to be pissed. I don’t know if it will work, but maybe the only recourse left for the gay rights movement is legitimate anger. Nothing else seems to be working.
The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged to end the Bush administration practice of paying for the conflicts with so-called supplemental funds that are outside the normal Defense Department budget.
The financing would be on top of the $130 billion that Congress authorized for the wars just last month.
Personally, I think it would be supremely irresponsible to act on this legislation without seeing the CBO score. I’m hoping Max Baucus and the blue dogs will get on that, because I’d like to know how this legislation will pay for itself. I suggest we put this off a few months to talk about the costs and how we are robbing future generations.
It has now been about 36 hours since the most definitive victory for conservatism ever, yet according to my sources, Obama is still President, the Senate still has 60 Democrats, and the House gained a Democrat.
I guess you have to live in the beltway or work for a cable network to truly understand election results.
A year after Barack Obama’s election stirred broad hopes for change among American voters, persistent high unemployment and the spectacle of continued gridlock in Washington threaten Democratic dominance of the political landscape.
Tuesday’s defeats in gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey not only ended a decade or more of Democratic gains in those states but also signaled possible trouble ahead in the midterm elections at the national level.
Twenty years ago, he would have at least thrown in a “stinging rebuke” or whatever the 1980s variant of the phrase was. Forty years ago, he would have written that Democrats had tears streaming down their faces.
Now all we get is some warmed over tripe about “possible trouble ahead”?
I really wish Steve Gilliard were here today, because only he could do full justice to both Bloomberg’s victory and Corzine’s failure. And while Mr. Gilliard was, IIRC, no fan of Mayor Bloomberg, he would certainly have had some useful if excoriating advice for those goo-goos who are now shocked, shocked that a rich person could be rewarded by New York City voters for a blatant attempt to buy his way into keeping office.
A letter about healthcare reform to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), apparently from former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, triggered a security scare that briefly shut down much of the Senate on Wednesday.
The typed letter, tucked inside a hand-written business envelope, appeared in Reid’s office without postage, in an outgoing mailbox bin. A Senate postal clerk noticed the envelope and alerted a Reid staffer, who in turn notified Capitol Police about 2 p.m.
A small swarm of officers responded, first shutting down the hallway outside Reid’s office and then taking the even rarer step of shutting down the wide Ohio Clock corridor that senators use for press conferences outside the Senate’s main entrance. Mindful of the ricin and anthrax attacks in 2001, teams of hazardous materials technicians were called and tested the envelope before opening it and discovering Koop’s letter.
“The staff in the Capitol in particular and on the Hill in general are very sensitive to mail that ends up in an office and hasn’t been cleared,” said Senate Sergeant at Arms Terry Gainer.
So, to review. When Pakistani citizens watch their friends and neighbors blown up by missile strikes, it is the position of this administration that they should not view it as terrorism. On the other hand, when we receive a letter without a stamp, we shut down a portion of the most powerful government in the world out of a general hysteria over terrorism.
I’m even going to go out on a limb and wager that more Af/Pak citizens have been killed by missiles than Americans have been by unstamped letters.
Also, this is excellent news for conservatives and really puts the health care reform agenda in a bad spot.
On the one hand, this is beyond stupid in the sense that a teabagger has no chance of winning in the land of herbal tea. On the other, Fiorina is a shitty candidate anyway:
A California Republican aiming to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) next year has gotten a boost from conservative Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).
DeMint announced last night his Senate Conservatives Fund was endorsing state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore over former Hewlett Packard chief Carly Fiorina. The group supports only “rock solid” conservatives, organizers told supporters on a conference call last night as election results came in.
DeVore “will work with me to shake things up,” DeMint said, and “vote the right way …stand up in our conference meetings and say, ‘Folks this is wrong let’s turn this thing around.’”
I hope DeVore busts out the industrial strength anti-immigrant hate. That always goes over well in California.
I have to admit that I’m disappointed by the media’s fairly measured response to last night’s elections. Sure, we’ve been told that two Democratic defeats in state elections prove Americans hate the Democrats in the federal government while two Democratic victories in federal elections don’t mean anything, but I’m surprised by how how little is turning up when I google obama+”stinging rebuke”. Or is that phrase no longer in circulation?
Newsweek magazine is teaming up with an oil-industry lobbying group to host an invitation-only event on climate-change and energy issues for lawmakers, just as the Senate gets set to take up legislation on the subject.
The panel discussion, entitled “Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?”, will feature Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, and, as moderator, Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman, according to an email invitation sent by a Newsweek business staffer and obtained by TPMmuckraker.
“Newsweek is pleased to be co-hosting this panel discussion with API,” says the email, which adds that “notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate” have been invited. The event is scheduled to be held December 1 in a Senate meeting room.
Email me a link to your one or two favorite pics on a photo site like Flickr (do not send the image itself please) and I will put up favorites in open threads. Send a short caption if you want one.
Ever, in the history of the country, have state Governor’s races not even in a midterm election year, but one year into an administration, been portrayed as a referendum on the President. And this is ignoring the fact that the two Democrats running for national office both won, one of which in a seat that has been in Republican hands for a century and a half, giving national Democrats one more seat than they had yesterday.
Could Chuck Todd explain to me how many votes in Congress for health care reform Chris Christie and McDonnell have? Our media is just hopeless.
So, to review, the wingnuts took a seat that would have been a win for the Republicans, so much so that the seat had not gone to a Democrat since Reconstruction and the Democratic candidates had been getting about 35% of the vote the last few elections, ran the Republican out of the race, brought their own special kind of crazy to town, and the voters rejected them handily.
Even I didn’t expect Owens to win. I seriously hope they pursue this strategy nationwide.
In other news, a Goldman employee has finally lost a job, with Corzine out in NJ. I know nothing about the election there, nor the one in Virginia, but I do know that Terry McAuliffe is not Governor. That is a good thing.
The only really bad thing is the repeal of the gay marriage law in Maine. Other than that, I’d be hard pressed to draw any conclusions from yesterday other than that Sarah Palin is still a loser. I’m sure that won’t stop the right-wing hacks from claiming this has been a bad result for Obama, but let’s face it- everything is good news for Republicans.
