Duty to Warn

Each year the Congressional Progressive Caucus releases a weaker and weaker budget proposal. This year they asked for input first. I sent them this and communicated with them about it, so I know they read it. An excerpt:

Bring spray bottles of pink liquid to military recruitment offices and displays.
Spray them.
Tell potential recruits: Be all that you can be. And this could be you.

“Pink mist. That’s what they call it.
“When one of your mates hasn’t just bought it,
“but goes in a flash, from being there to not.
“A direct hit. An I.E.D. An R.P.G. stuck in the gut.”

Those are lines from a play called Pink Mist written in verse by Owen Sheers about three young lads from Bristol who sign up for war in Afghanistan.
Read it. Perform it. It begins like this:

“Three boys went to Catterick.
“It was January,
“snow pitchen on the Severn,
“turning the brown mud white,
“fishermen blowing on their fingerless gloves,
“the current pulling their fishing lines tight.
“That’s how it was the morning when
“the three of us did what boys always have
“And left our homes for war.”

“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” –Orwell

The U.S. government has reached the bottom of the barrel. Having packed every square inch of the National Mall with monuments to every war they wanted to admit to, including the wars on Vietnam and Korea, and including the two world wars, our dear leaders have decided that another World War I monument is needed, and that it will be built in Pershing Park (named in 1981 for a World War I general by then already sufficiently forgotten).

Washington, D.C., March 1, 2016 – The nationwide nonpartisan Election Protection voter hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE received more than 2,000 calls as voters in 12 states made their voices heard during the Super Tuesday presidential preference primaries and caucuses. The hotline received a steady stream of calls throughout the day with voters seeking information as well as assistance on a range of issues resulting from poll worker misinformation, voter ID problems, overcrowded polls, long lines and ballot shortages.

“We received hundreds of calls across the country on our 866-OUR-VOTE hotline from voters who want to participate in our democracy,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “I spoke with one voter for over 20 minutes in Cobb County, Georgia who was not given notice that his polling place was temporarily moved and when he got to the new site, he and many other voters found a dark, unmarked building with no signs of any activity. Our experience on Super Tuesday shows that much work remains to be done to strengthen our voting process across the country."

It’s Monday night at Dempsey’s, a perennial Democratic Party meet-up spot in downtown Columbus. The Ohio presidential primary is five weeks away. Powerful members of the Franklin County Democratic Central Committee are meeting to plot strategy against an unprecedented grassroots attack upon the Party’s ward leaders. The ward leaders are the ones responsible for the official Party candidate endorsements.

Even more unfathomable than a populist revolt among local Dems is what’s going on in the back room at Dempsey’s. The room is packed with political supporters of a 74-year-old self-proclaimed “democratic Socialist” – an independent Senator from Vermont running for president. Many are doing electoral major party politics for the first time and were unaware of the local powerbrokers they just squeezed past. The folks in the back room all have one thing in common – they’re feeling the Bern.

The millions of people in the United States who are denied equal rights because they are immigrants have vast stockpiles of wisdom and rich culture to share; they engage in more strategic and courageous activism than do non-immigrants; and without any doubt they would vote better than do the "legal" people of South Carolina if only they were permitted to vote. The mistreatment of these people shortchanges every U.S. enterprise and reduces civil rights, paychecks, public safety, sense of community, and basic levels of morality for everyone.

he official version of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s death at a remote Texas luxury resort during the night of February 12-13 is that he died of natural causes, in bed alone and without any witness, time of death unknown. While there’s little forensic evidence to support this or any other conclusion, there’s even less evidence to challenge it. What, after all, is not credible about a 79-year-old, overweight man with heart disease and other medical issues dying in his sleep after overindulging at a dinner party for forty people?

Bernie Sanders can absolutely win the Democratic Party’s nomination. He’s still way behind Hillary Clinton in a number of Super Tuesday states. But you have to have worked on or followed presidential campaign politics to understand the power of momentum. If you ask any campaign leader which they’d rather have, the lead or momentum, they will usually choose momentum.

Leads can dissolve quickly in the face of momentum. Nationally, Hillary Clinton used to lead Sanders by an average of about 20 percentage points. But in the wake of Sanders’s surprising performance in Iowa and his 22-point margin of victory in New Hampshire, the latest Quinnipiac poll shows he and Hillary are statistically tied across the country.

How did this happen? Did people suddenly remember they didn’t like Hillary Clinton? No. Many are suddenly finding out that they actually like Bernie Sanders — a lot.