Op-Ed

There have been good reasons not to support John Edwards for president. For years, his foreign-policy outlook has been a hodgepodge of insights and dangerous conventional wisdom; his health-care prescriptions have not taken the leap to single payer; and all told, from a progressive standpoint, his positions have been inferior to those of Dennis Kucinich.

But Edwards was the most improved presidential candidate of 2007. He sharpened his attacks on corporate power and honed his calls for economic justice. He laid down a clear position against nuclear power. He explicitly challenged the power of the insurance industry and the pharmaceutical giants.

And he improved his position on Iraq to the point that, in an interview with the New York Times at the start of January, he said: "The continued occupation of Iraq undermines everything America has to do to reestablish ourselves as a country that should be followed, that should be a leader." Later in the interview, Edwards added: "I would plan to have all combat troops out of Iraq at the end of nine to ten months, certainly within the first year."

Obviously Obama and Edwards are competing with each other, but the caucuses in Iowa, Nevada, and Washington State give the two campaigns a chance to also coordinate to maximize the delegates they gain. Edwards and Dennis Kucinich actually did this in 2004 in Iowa and it played a real role in Edwards’s Iowa unexpected Iowa success. At this point he and Obama are competing with and even sniping at each other, but if they don’t stop Hillary Clinton, she still has the inside track to the nomination. And for all that Obama and Edwards have differences, I think they’re closer politically (and more progressive) than either are to Clinton, who voted for the Iraq War, supported the Kyl-Lieberman Iran vote that Jim Webb called "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream," and feel no shame in raising as much money as she can from Washington lobbyists. (Plus the regressive Democratic Leadership Council still features Hillary as part of their core circle). Both Obama and Edwards would gain by doing this, and the 2004 precedent suggests it's perfectly legal.

I was near the deadline for a column when I glanced at a TV screen. “The Suze Orman Show,” airing on CNBC at prime time, exerted a powerful force in my hotel room. And the fate of this column was sealed.

     Orman made a big splash many years ago on public television -- the incubating environment for her as a national phenom. With articulate calls for intelligent self-determination of one’s own financial future, she is a master of the long form. Humor and dramatic cadences punch up the impacts of her performances.

     Seeing her the other night, within a matter of seconds, I realized that the jig was up. How could a mere underachieving syndicated columnist hope to withstand the blandishments and certainties of Suze Orman, bestselling author and revered eminence from the erudite bastions of PBS to the hard-boiled financial realms of General Electric’s CNBC?

Of course we've long since established that they do not hate us for the reasons they say they hate us. For example, our military bases in their countries have nothing to do with it. When I mention to people in the U.S. that Italians or Czechs or Germans or Koreans are protesting new U.S. bases, the response is usually along the lines of:

"What are we building a base in Italy for? Are we at war with Italy now?"

Therefore the bases we have already built all over Italy and in 80 percent of the nations on earth, most of which nations we are not at war with, do not exist. Mention them, and the billions of dollars U.S. taxpayers spend on them, and the response is usually:

"Oh, really? That's terrible. Hey, are you going to watch the game tonight?"

Therefore, the reason they hate us must be something else. But it is obviously not the financial or trade policies we impose on other countries making it harder for people to earn a living. We know this because when people flee these policies and come here to try to earn a living we can tell by looking at them that it's entirely their own fault.

Over the years, people have often asked me what social change groups I support financially. I've pulled together an informal list and thought it just might be helpful to you and others who get my regular articles. The end of the year is often a time when people often figure out donations (though most of the groups I support are too politically engaged to be tax-deductible), so this seemed a good time to send it. Plus if you haven't finished your holiday shopping, it's fun to give people a donation in their name to a good cause, rather than one more object they may or may not need.

Many journalists qualified for the sixteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, but only a few were able to win recognition for turning in one of the truly stinkiest media performances of the year. As the judges for this un-coveted award, we have done our best to confer this honor on the most deserving.

     And now, the winners of the P.U.-litzers for 2007:

SPINNING FOR ANOTHER WAR AWARD -- Michael Gordon of The New York Times

On Thursday, Congressman Anthony Weiner told Bob Fertik of Democrats.com that he would sign onto Congressman Robert Wexler's letter to Chairman John Conyers urging the commencement of impeachment hearings for Dick Cheney. Wexler, together with Congress Members Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin, hopes to have a majority of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sign the letter.

Of the four committee members named above, only Baldwin is among the six committee members and 25 total congress members backing Congressman Dennis Kucinich's resolution for the impeachment of Cheney. The other five Judiciary Committee members are Hank Johnson, Maxine Waters, Keith Ellison, Steve Cohen, and Sheila Jackson Lee. If these nine committee members sign the letter to Conyers that Wexler hopes to deliver early in January, another 12 Democrats, not counting Conyers, will still not have joined the position of 80 to 90 percent of Democratic voters.

Ever since Hillary Clinton supported the reckless Kyl-Lieberman Iran bill, her Democratic competitors have been blasting her for her stand, and rightly so. By defining Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, a core branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization, the bill put the U.S. Senate on record as vindicating the Bush-Cheney line that Iranian proxies are part of a global conspiracy, linking Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hamas, Hezbollah, and any other enemy the administration wants to conjure up. It made a US attack on Iran just that much more possible. And Clinton's support for the bill confirmed that she has learned little from her earlier Iraq war vote. 

The people of the northern Italian city of Vicenza, with help from activists around Italy, the rest of Europe, and even in the United States, are continuing to block the proposed construction of a new U.S. military base on their soil. When a company laid underground fiber-optic cables at the site of the proposed base, activists fill a junction box with cement. When another company tried to begin the work of removing World War II era U.S. bombs from the site, activists camped out in the cold for three days and nights while allies in Florence and a small town near Naples conducted simultaneous protests in front of the company's offices. The company backed off and has suspended the work. And a small town outside Vicenza has now refused to allow the United States to construct a residential village for troops.

Recently, Italy's foreign minister assured Condoleezza Rice, and Italy's president assured George W. Bush - not for the first time - that the base will be built. And the U.S. Congress, unbeknownst to the American people, has approved the funding. But there is a reason for these repeated public assertions that everything is on track. It isn't.

Ever since Hillary Clinton supported the reckless Kyl-Lieberman Iran bill, her Democratic competitors have been blasting her for her stand, and rightly so. By defining Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, a core branch of the Iranian military, as a foreign terrorist organization, the bill put the U.S. Senate on record as vindicating the Bush-Cheney line that Iranian proxies are part of a global conspiracy, linking Al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Hamas, Hezbollah, and any other enemy the administration wants to conjure up. It made a US attack on Iran just that much more possible and confirmed that she learned little from her earlier Iraq war vote. 

But what none of the candidates challenging her have done, as far as I can tell, is use the most succinct and damning description of the vote's implications that's been expressed, when Senator James Webb called it "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream." "It could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war," Webb concluded, a description that goes to the heart of the issue, with words likely to stick in the minds of the voters. But the other candidates have to publicly quote them, and so far they haven't.