As mentioned a couple of nights ago, I will endorse candidates whom I believe will help Obama's agenda of progressive change in Congress. Tonight, I will endorse Richard Carter of Nebraska's second district. As an Iraq war vet and one of the youngest people running for Congress this election cycle, Carter understands first-hand the hardships we are facing as the result of our failed policies in Iraq, which Barack Obama warned about on Day One.
Running in one of the reddest parts of the country, Carter may be a longshot. But the goal is to tie up hundreds of thousands of dollars of Republican resources in places which are normally thought of as "safe." Carter is also an opponent of another failed aspect of the Bush/McCain legacy, No Child Left Behind. He has spoken with educators first-hand and has learned about the devastating consequences of the misguided notion of teaching to the test.
Carter has endorsed the Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. He has given an important speech on that, part of which follows:
Our brave men and women in Iraq have accomplished every mission they were given. They were told to depose a dictator, and in a matter of weeks, they removed Saddam Hussein from power. They were told to ensure we were safe from weapons of mass destruction, and they did that as well. They helped make it safe for the Iraqi people to write a constitution and elect their own democratic government, and they have helped to train the Iraqi military to protect their new institutions.
There are no more appropriate missions to assign our military in this war. Our military personnel join the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. We can no longer allow our servicemen and women to be used as a police force for hire. It is unfair to those who continue to risk their lives everyday to protect us, and disrespectful to those who gave their lives in that pursuit.
The war in Iraq has become a distraction from real national security concerns. The commanding officer in Afghanistan recently reported that he did not have sufficient troops or materials to succeed in his mission. We need to remember that we got into this war to go after Al Qaeda, the men who perpetrated 9/11. Our excursion into Iraq has directly contributed to the resurgence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Some politicians will try to tell you that it would be irresponsible to abandon that part of the world, or that we are fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here. These tired talking points do a disservice to the Armed Forces, and cheapen our national discourse.
We have personnel in Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Turkey, and several other nations in the region. Removing our troops from the middle of a dangerous civil war in Iraq hardly constitutes abandoning the Middle East.
And these politicians who want to use fear tactics to scare us into more war, and more casualties, would do well to remember that if we had been allowed to finish the job in Afghanistan, we would not be fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq at all.
Let’s be clear: the war in Iraq does not make the United States any safer; instead it has made our nation, and the entire world, a more dangerous place.
Not only is ending the war imperative to respecting our men and women in uniform, it is crucial to ensuring our national security.
We MUST bring our men and women home from Iraq as quickly and as safely as possible.
Please bookmark DMOmaha, who will be giving this community regular updates on the Carter Campaign. Carter himself will post here as well.
Women in the Central Africal Republic who are victims of sexual violence are crying to be heard:
The Monam group of rape survivors in the northern town of Bossangoa in the Central African Republic (CAR) does what it can to keep going, but morale is low and money tight.
"We've been left to fend for ourselves. We get little help from outside. Many of our members have died," the group's chairwoman, Pelagie Ndokoyanga, told IRIN/PlusNews.
Monam, which means "common good" in the Sango language, was set up in 2006 to bring together female survivors of sexual violence committed in 2001 and 2002 amid the mayhem leading up to the most recent of CAR's numerous coups d'etat that brought Francois Bozize to power in March 2003.
Marie Moudjougoto, a community activist who has helped organise hundreds of women into associations based on their home villages, professions or religious faith, used the occasion of a huge International Women's Day [8 March] parade in the northern town of Paoua to highlight how women have borne the brunt of violence in CAR and to promote the role women ought to play as the country begins to rebuild itself.
"What we want is security...let our cursed sisters who were raped, brutalised, traumatised and bereaved have peace of mind and the hope of being women, mothers, and grandmothers," said Moujougoto after some 1,500 women, grouped into their various associations, had paraded down the main street of Paoua.
Barack Obama has a clear record of fighting violence against woman both at home and abroad:
Abuse scars not only the victim but her loved ones, sending currents of violence that ripple across our society. Right now, a woman who's fled an abuser is living on the streets, wondering how long it will be efore she has to turn to crime or prostitution to feed herself. Down the street, a child has shut the door and buried his head under the pillow so he doesn't have to hear his mother's cries, and there's a good chance he will grow up to be an abuser just like his father.
Government has a critical role to play in stopping this cycle of violence. Over the course of more than a decade in elective office, I have fought to assist the victims of sexual assault. And this is a commitment I will carry with me to the White House. As President, I will pass my plan to provide millions of dollars to strengthen programs aimed at preventing domestic violence and caring for those affected by it. I will also expand government efforts to offer domestic violence counseling in urban areas. And I will ensure that we fully fund the Violence Against Women Act, an important piece of legislation that I commend my colleague Senator Joe Biden for drafting.
We also need to ensure job security for victims of sexual assault, up to half of whom report losing their jobs as a result of being attacked. In Illinois, I led the fight to ensure that victims could seek shelter or treatment without losing their jobs, passing one of the strongest job protection laws in the nation. As President, I will make this a federal law. And I will expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to give additional job security to victims who need to take time off.
Finally, combating this problem demands a sustained high-level commitment. That is why, as President, I will appoint a special adviser who will report to me regularly on issues related to violence against women. This adviser will ensure that our agenda is coordinated across federal agencies, and fully implemented.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers is protesting slave labor conditions of guest workers in Florida:
In other actions this week, Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) members will speak to classes at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and students at Wichita State University will carry buckets of tomatoes across campus to illustrate their solidarity with the workers.
Students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, will spotlight the need for a decent life for campus workers by releasing their proposal for a living wage for those workers. Meanwhile, students at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., will celebrate the life of César Chávez with a campus-wide dinner and fundraiser.
Many of the student events will support the struggle of tomato workers, members of the CIW, who are reaching out to 1 million people to sign a petition demanding that Burger King and food industry leaders improve wages for workers who pick tomatoes and help eliminate slave labor-like conditions and human rights abuses from Florida’s fields.
In January, federal officials in south Florida arrested Antonia Zuniga Vargas on a 17-count indictment, charging her with conspiring to make money off workers from Mexico and Guatemala, forging documents and committing identity theft. Vargas, along with five other co-defendants, is connected to a business operation in Immokalee, Fla., allegedly created to hold workers in involuntary servitude and peonage.
Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Doug Molloy told the Fort Myers News-Press Vargas and the others are charged with:
...slavery, plain and simple. Some of the folks have been there for years. It is the hope to send back money to their families, and they hang on to that hope. It’s just a situation that’s difficult to get out of.
The reason that employers like Burger King can get away with this is because undocumented workers are in legal limbo. They cannot complain or organize unions because if they did, they would be turned in for deportation. Under an Obama administration, undocumented workers would be given a pathway to citizenship, pay a fine, learn English, and be given a chance to become a productive citizen in this country. They would no longer be at the mercy of Burger King and other abusive employers who exploit undocumented workers in this country.
Please support RenewMO's efforts to put a Clean Energy Initiative on the ballot in Missouri this fall. Barack Obama has been a consistent supporter of alternative energy; however, for us to bring change home, we must be able to start at the local and state level. Missouri gets almost all of its electricity from coal and is still building coal plants in the state. But there is a lot of interest here in the state in renewables. Here is what the ballot initiative would do:
Currently, Missouri gets 86% of our electricity from coal --- all of which is imported from out of state. The Clean Energy Initiative is a mandatory RES that would require investor-owned electric utilities to purchase electricity from renewable sources -- solar, wind, landfill gas and biomass -- equaling at least 2% of retail sales by 2011 and increasing incrementally to at least 15% by 2021.
The Clean Energy Initiative also includes a cost containment provision to cap any potential rate increase for Missouri consumers at 1%.
The Clean Energy Initiative is being supported by Renew Missouri, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, League of Conservation Voters, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, the Sierra Club, and others.
This would also benefit local areas and schools, bringing in thousands of dollars worth of tax revenues to rural schools, who would need it the most. It would lift people out of poverty, as landowners would get income from having a wind farm on their property. If this were to pass, demand for wind farms would increase exponentially in this state. Furthermore, it would have the same kind of effect that the Minimum Wage amendment had in Missouri in 2006 -- it would turn out more Democrats and help Obama and Jay Nixon win in this battleground state.
More facts on the ground show the Battle of Basra to be a spectacular failure for the McCain Doctrine:
"This failure takes Iraq to point zero and even worse," Brigadier-General Kathum Alwan of the Iraqi army told IPS in Baghdad. "We must admit that the formation of our forces was wrong, as we saw how our officers deserted their posts, leaving their vehicles for militias."
Alwan added, "Not a single unit of our army and police stood for their duty in Baghdad, leaving us wondering what to do. Most of the officers who left their posts were members of Badr brigades and the Dawa Party, who should have been most faithful to Maliki's government."
The Green Zone of Baghdad where the U.S. embassy and the Iraqi government and parliament buildings are located, was hit by missiles. General Petraeus appeared at a press conference to accuse Iran of being behind the shelling of the zone that is supposed to be the safest area in Iraq. At least one U.S. citizen was killed in the attacks, and two others were injured.
"The Green Zone looked deserted as most U.S. and Iraqi personnel were ordered to take shelter deep underground," an engineer who works for a foreign company in the zone told IPS. "It seemed that this area too was under curfew. No place in Iraq is safe any more."
Further complicating matters for the occupiers of Iraq, the U.S.-backed Awakening groups, largely comprised of former resistance fighters, are now going on strike to demand overdue payment from the U.S. military.
This could get worse -- much worse.
John Yoo said laws did not apply to interrogators:
The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."
Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.
Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department's use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq.
Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.
I have a different take on torture than a lot of people here. During the Civil War, here in Missouri, the US set up military commissions here in Missouri to try suspected Confederate sympathizers. My theory is that sort of thing helped make the James brothers heroes because they continued to fight against the Union long after the South had surrendered. And then, there were the times when Lincoln suspended the Habeas Corpus and FDR ordered the interment of all Japanese-Americans. And, of course, there were the times during World War I where the US rounded up all the suspected anarchist, socialist, and communist groups that were suspected of being subversive to our country's interests.
It's important to recognize, therefore, that what the Bush administration is doing is nothing new. Undoubtedly, they looked back on these prior instances of arbitrary use of powers by previous administrations and thought that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing; after all, like then, we were at war with an enemy that was out to destroy us. It's not new at all.
But what is different about this is the fact that now, we are able to bring the graphic images of torture to life in a way that we never could before. And that is only healthy for us in the long run. We are able to call our leaders into account for the things that they are doing in a way that we could never dream of doing back in older times. It was a group of plane-spotters who were able to collectively figure out that we were rendering suspects around the world.
Another thing to remember about this is the fact that the Bush administration rewards loyalty above all else -- meaning blind loyalty. That means that people like Yoo are in the running for appointments within a McCain administration. That means that it is totally possible that John McCain could appoint John Yoo to the SCOTUS.
Poverty is on the rise among young people who have never gone to college:
It may be hard for primary-fatigued political junkies to believe, but the excitement of this primary season has actually been lost on some voters, specifically, the 45 percent of young people with no college experience. Those are the findings of a study released by CIRCLE in February which found that young people who had gone to college were more than three times as likely to [have] cast a ballot on Super Tuesday: 25% to 7%.
But it’s the college have-nots who have the most at stake in this election, because they have lost the most ground in the generational economic backslide. Today, the typical young male worker with a high school diploma earns 29 percent less than his dad did 30 years ago. And despite the enormous financial gains won by the mass movement of women into the workplace, the typical young woman with a high school diploma earns 6 percent less than her mom did when she was a 20-something.
Young people who’ve never gone to college are now a minority among the under 30 population, making up 45 percent of young people. That’s good news in the sense that more young people are continuing their studies. But it’s bad news in the sense that their struggles are likely to get even less attention than the modest amount paid to this generation’s economic decline as a whole.
This is why it is so important that we get behind Obama's plan to create green-collar jobs in this country, and why we need to get being the Clean Energy Initiative here in Missouri and similar initiatives in other states. Wind farms will need people with the know-how to maintain them, meaning more jobs for local areas. They will need manufacturing plants so that they will be able to get parts. Converting to a green economy will be a solution that will lift this group out of poverty and into quality jobs.
Barack Obama talks about Jeremiah Wright and more on Hardball:
The AP does a major feature article on Trinity United Church of Christ:
"Hope is what saves us," Wright said.
That message moved Obama to embrace Trinity United Church of Christ, along with its philosophy of translating faith into action. But it's a side of Wright that has been overshadowed by his inflammatory remarks about everything from race relations to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The article goes on to talk about how a young Obama joined Trinity after being skeptical of religion for a long time, on the recommendation of friends. He found a home in a church that was a pillar of the community, that encouraged activism and grassroots organizing, and one that shaped some of the values that now define his incredibly successful campaign.
The church offers a long list of services — housing and employment programs, scholarships, a ministry to people with HIV/AIDS — that mesh well with Obama's political philosophy.
"It's his deep faith in God and his desire to be an agent of change in the world. That's kind of the Trinity mantra," said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a priest at a South Side Roman Catholic church.
This is the central idea of the article: that if you look closer, being a member of Trinity isn't incongruous with Barack's expressed values.
As Jerry Kellman, Barack's long-time friend and former boss explains:
"When Barack joined the church, he wasn't giving his allegiance to Wright. He was joining a community,"
There is also the testimony of Jane Fissler-Hoffman who is a white minister at Trinity:
People familiar with Trinity compare its emphasis on African culture to the way some Catholic churches play up Irish or Italian roots. And they emphatically reject the accusations in widely circulated e-mails that the church is separatist or turns away white members.
"That's such a bunch of hooey," said Hoffman, who is white.
She tells the story of a group of young Germans visiting the church. Wright met with them before the service and prayed with them in German, she said. Later, he delivered part of his sermon in German and the choir sang in German.
"To me, it's a testimony that this is not a church that rejects people of other cultures and races," she said.
John McCain is stonewalling a bill that would extend the GI Bill to veterans:
It is pretty ironic that a POW like McCain would betray everything that he stands for in order to march in lockstep with the Bush administration. It seems that he has totally sold his soul.
John Conyers is circulating a letter threatening Bush with impeachment hearings should he invade Iran:
He is circulating a letter among his colleageus for signatures, a letter addressed to Bush letting him know that an attack on Iran will result in impeachment hearings. LET'S ASK EVERY MEMBER OF CONGRESS TO SIGN ON! I know it seems bassackwards and we want impeachment before a new war, not after, but this is a way for us to show Conyers the support that will be there any time he moves forward.
He is open to the new argument that we have been making to him, namely that impeachment hearings for Cheney or Bush (on torture, signing statements, spying, war crimes, etc, etc) would hurt John McCain's candidacy by forcing him to defend the crimes.
He is open to meeting with experts allied with us to hear their arguments for impeachment.
Barack Obama would do the exact opposite -- he would meet with all of our enemies, including Iran, to find common ground. And there is plenty to be had, especially considering the reports that it is the Iranians who are actively brokering a cease-fire in Basra after Maliki overreached there. From that, it seems that Iran wants there to be a stable Iraq just as much as we do.
Obama speaks to supporters in Philly: