Peoria County Democrats

Peoria County Democrats President's Day Dinner: Ollie's Personal Experience and Perspective

2006-02-21T13:50:00.000-06:00

This will be a quick post talking about the Peoria Country Democrats dinner.

I was excited as Senator Dick Durbin was scheduled to speak. We (Barbara and I) got there early, put our money down and sat in the "cheap sets" near the back.

The whole evening was fun. I got to meet many of the candidates (which I'll list in my next blog post). Governor Blagojevich paid us a visit. I got to shake his hand as he walked in; I didn't have enough guts to blurt out "I hope that you endorse us in November." (note: I am backing Edwin Eisendrath for the Democratic nomination. That is my (Ollie's) personal preference; I am not speaking for anyone else. For my take on the governor's race, see: my personal blog entry.) To see why I am backing Eisendrath, click here. )

Blagojevich got a polite but lukewarm reception; someone tried to get a "4 more years" chant going but it didn't take.

On the other hand, Senator Durbin was widely applauded. I got to shake his hand as well, and to tell him I was proud to have him as one of our Senators.

As far as his remarks: I don't know if I'll get the text; but it was basic meat and potatoes Democratic stuff, which was delivered with conviction and energy.

I do want to make one remark. We do have a congressional candidate, Steve Waterworth (U. S.) who is taking on Ray LaHood (whose antics you can read about in Willy Nilly )in the 18'th district. Unfortunately, though the DCCC at least mentions Mr. Waterworth, it has given him little support, even in terms of advice. I understand why the DCCC must try tp spend its money wisely and that Mr. Waterworth only got 30% of the vote last time around (though 36% in the City of Peoria, where he outpolled the much better funded Senate candidate Alan Keys by 7 points!). But they should at least have some sort of "handbook of hard lessons for candidates in tough races" to give to people who want to give the time and effort to try!

Peoria County Democrats President's Day Dinner and Politics: Part I.

2006-02-21T13:48:00.000-06:00

Senator Durbin was the featured speaker at the Peoria County Democrats President's Day Dinner. His remarks were well received; he got standing ovations before and after, and his remarks were interrupted by frequent bouts of applause.

From the Peoria Journal Star:
http://www.pjstar.com/stories/022106/TRI_B921340K.044.shtml

Durbin blasts Bush on multiple fronts

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

BY SARAH OKESON

OF THE JOURNAL STAR

PEORIA - The evening started with a joke about Dick Cheney's hunting, and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin went on to criticize the Bush administration for lapses in everything from coal mine safety to preventing war profiteering.

Durbin spoke Monday night at the Itoo Hall to more than 500 people at the Presidents Day Dinner held by the Peoria County Democrats. His speech repeated some of the points he made last month in a speech at the National Press Club.

"My job in Washington many times is to give them hell," Durbin said. "When we speak the truth to the American people, we win elections."

Durbin, who voted against America going to war, said the United States is spending more than $2 billion a week on the war in Iraq. Durbin said he has voted for what Bush wants to spend on the war despite his misgivings about the start of the war.

"If that were my son or daughter over there in uniform, I would give them everything they needed to come home safely," he said.

But Durbin said the government should set up a commission similar to the Truman Commission, which then-Sen. Harry Truman headed in World War II to investigate corruption.

"Time and again the Halliburtons of the war have been guilty of profiteering," Durbin said, referring to the company where Cheney was chief executive before he was elected vice president. "They have shortchanged the troops. They have shortchanged the taxpayers."

Durbin also criticized Part D, Medicare's prescription drug plan.[...]

(Durbin's ideas for Medicare reform can be found here:

http://www.pjstar.com/stories/022106/TRI_B920F0HC.053.shtml )

[...]

Durbin said he recently visited the Viper Mine near Williamsville, which is owned by International Coal Group, the same company that owns the Sago Mine in West Virginia where 12 miners died after an explosion Jan. 2....[...]

He noted that 130 mine inspectors have been cut during the Bush administration across the country.[...]

Sarah Okeson can be reached at 686-3251 or sokeson@pjstar.com.

-------------------------------------------------------

As I noted earlier, Governor Blagojevich visited Peoria. He spoke at the airport and also spoke briefly at the dinner. He had a polite but lukewarm reception at the dinner. This piece talks about his apperance at the Peoria Airport.

http://www.pjstar.com/stories/022106/TRI_B920PN4Q.007.shtml

Facing downstate battle

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

By MOLLY PARKER

of the Journal Star

PEORIA - Through sporadic cheers of "four more years," Democrat Gov. Rod Blagojevich told a Peoria crowd of the party faithful that he needed another term to "finish what we've started."

"It's hard to see all the good that we've done," Blagojevich said Monday at the Greater Peoria Regional Airport, his last stop on a two-day tour announcing his re-election campaign. "But it's there, in hospitals, in clinics, in classrooms, in paychecks, in factories and corner stores."

That may be so, but when it comes to winning another term, Blagojevich is going to have to find himself in places where he's been hardly seen: across downstate Illinois.

In 2002, areas outside Cook County helped crown Blagojevich the victor in a crowded Democratic primary field.

Today, there are supporters wondering what they got in return. In cities and villages downstate, Blagojevich carries a reputation (not meant as a compliment) of being "Chicago-centric," a theme that has resonated from his decision not to live in the governor's mansion in Springfield.

But that decision has simply become the metaphor, says Kent Redfield, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield.

"He's got a lot of fence-mending to do downstate," Redfield said. "His numbers are not good."

Joe Berardi, a Canton alderman, is one of those longtime Democrats who supported Blagojevich in 2002 but has now turned luke-warm on the governor.

"For him to not even live in Springfield, it's just sort of like he's snubbing his nose at downstate people," says Berardi, noting he had high hopes for major school funding reform and other economic development initiatives to help his struggling town, few of which came to fruition.

"You get him past Interstate 80 - sure he might know where it is - but it's like he's saying 'I'm not going to live down there with people in the cornfields.'"

Likewise, Scott Schifeling, president of the union which represents District 150 teachers, said teachers who once supported the governor are changing direction, miffed that he under-funded the pension systems.

"When you start messing with teachers' retirements, their livelihood, it ceases to become a political issue and becomes a personal issue," said Schifeling.

But Blagojevich scoffed at the notion that his downstate support is waning.

"I feel good about where we are," he said on his way out the door.[...]

In a statement that seemed conciliatory in nature, Blagojevich said, "Along the way, I learned a thing or two."

"I pushed hard. Sometimes I pushed, maybe, too hard," he said. "But I did it because there are people across our state . . . who need our help."

And attendees said Blagojevich hasn't gotten credit where deserved for the things he's done in Illinois, including for areas downstate. For instance, he expanded health care for children, rolled out new stipulations for schools, and created Opportunity Returns, a program aimed at job creation, they noted.

Kelly Street, president of Local Boilermakers Union 484 in Meredosia, said members have been locked out of a plant there for eight months because of a contract dispute. A new state law signed by Blagojevich allows union members in such situations to now collect unemployment benefits, he said.

[...]

Molly Parker can be reached at 686-3285 or mparker@pjstar.com.

Other Journal Star Columns worth reading include:

http://www.pjstar.com/stories/022106/REG_B920MPBA.049.shtml

Governor hopefuls pile on Topinka

GOP candidates blast front-runner's ethics plan

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

By DEANNA BELLANDI

of The Associated Press

CHICAGO - Republican candidates for governor on Monday lashed out at front-runner Judy Baar Topinka on ethics after a wide-ranging radio debate that was tame compared to the criticism heaped on Topinka afterward.

The other major candidates, state Sen. Bill Brady and businessmen Jim Oberweis and Ron Gidwitz, blasted Topinka over campaign contributions and for proposing an ethics reform package over the weekend that they say doesn't go far enough.

Topinka wants to stop businesses with state contracts worth $25,000 or more from making campaign contributions to the officeholder who awards the contracts. Bidders on contracts worth $10,000 or more would have to disclose campaign donations to the lawmaker awarding the contract.

Campaign contributions by people who do business with the state have been a hot-button issue in this election because Gov. Rod Blagojevich has awarded contracts to campaign donors and given state jobs to political insiders, although he was elected on a promise to clean up state government.

"Twenty-five thousand-dollar limitations do not end the problem," Brady said.

Brady says people should be allowed to give a candidate no more than $2,000 and political committees limited to $5,000. Gidwitz says he will not accept campaign contributions from state contractors or employees. Oberweis has pledged not to accept any contributions as governor from companies doing business with the state.

Topinka said she isn't asking to completely bar campaign contributions from state contractors because she's not a millionaire like her opponents, who can bankroll their runs for office.

"I have to be able to compete," she said in defending her ethics plan. She also challenged her opponents to release 10 years of their tax forms.

Topinka was not in the room for most of the attacks on her, which came as Gidwitz, Oberweis, Brady and a lesser-known candidate, Andy Martin, took questions from reporters.

The four repeatedly called on Topinka to join them, including Martin, who at one point broke in to song to entice Topinka to make an appearance.

"If she's afraid of us, how is she going to handle Blagojevich?" Oberweis asked.

Topinka eventually appeared and talked to reporters, joking that "the boys have had enough time to beat up on me behind my back."[....]

Appelate Judge Race: 3 Democrats in the primary:

http://www.pjstar.com/stories/022106/TRI_B91S8I6G.009.shtml

Three Democrats seek appeals court bid

Winner will face Naperville Republican for 3rd District vacancy

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

BY HALEY MURRAY

OF THE JOURNAL STAR

PEORIA - Three Democratic hopefuls will face off in the March 21 primary for a chance to fill a vacancy on the 3rd District Appellate Court.

Judge Vicki Wright of Tampico, Judge Lance Peterson of Morris and attorney Thomas O'Neal of Peoria announced their candidacy last year. The winner in the primary will face Republican Michael Powers of Naperville in the fall election to replace retiring Judge Kent Slater.[...]

Edwin Eisendrath (gov. candidate) to speak in Peoria

2006-02-09T17:22:00.000-06:00

I regret that I didn't have more notice but here goes:
(Cross posted at the Daily Kos)
Note that I am not necessairly down on Governor Blagojevich. But he does have someone contesting him in the primary: Edwin Eisendrath . Site: http://www.eisendrath2006.com/ He will be speaking in Peoria, IL tomorrow, 10 February, at 5:30 pm.

Join us for an Education Forum

Hosted by Midstate College

Featuring Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate

Edwin Eisendrath

Meet Edwin Eisendrath and hear him speak about the future of education in Illinois.

When:

Friday, February 10th

5:30 pm

Where:

Arlene H. Bunch Business Center, Room 300

411 W. Northmoor Road

Peoria, Illinois

To RSVP or for more information, email

MidstateRSVP@eisendrath2006.com

Alito and local politics

2006-01-31T07:41:00.000-06:00

The Alito nomination is headed toward success (from their point of view) and so our state legislature races become even more important!

I feel that we should stress this when we are trying to recruit volunteers to go door to door, phone bank, put up yard signs and so on.

I hope to see everyone on President's Day!

And, from me only, a "hat tip" to Senators Obama and Durbin for standing tall.

Some Local Political Reading

2006-01-29T05:26:00.000-06:00

I've been snooping around cyberspace this morning and came across some interesting sites of local interest:

This site is written by a young man who is no Ray LaHood fan:

http://worldofwillynilly.blogspot.com/

More about Mr. "I am squeaky clean but won't accept too much more from lobbiests":

http://www.districtblogs.com/blog.asp?State=IL&District=18

And the site of the Democratic challenger:

http://www.waterworthforcongress.com/

I am going to try to get urls for candidates for the Illinois House and Senate put up here as well.

One of our own in the National News!

2006-01-23T05:59:00.000-06:00

One of our own is in the National News The Nation magazine.

Jan Schakowsky Thu Jan 19, 2:28 PM ET

The Nation -- If you want to make Americans of all stripes mad, tell them about the billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks our government gives to companies that outsource jobs, exploit workers (both here and overseas) and dodge taxes. Tell them about Accenture, for example, which advises other companies how to outsource jobs overseas while avoiding its fair share of tax payments by incorporating offshore in Bermuda. Yet like many other US corporations, Accenture continues to qualify for tax breaks, and it currently has more than $500 million in government contracts--courtesy of taxpayers. Meanwhile, urban communities and small towns are devastated by plant closings. Often these plants are owned by profitable corporations like Maytag, which moved its Galesburg, Illinois, plant to Reynosa, Mexico, in 2004, leaving 1,600 workers without their good-paying jobs. The number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has fallen all the way back to the level it was in 1945. And our government continues to provide carrots--and no sticks--to companies harming our economy.

To end this race to the bottom, we must stop rewarding outsourcers and tax dodgers, and start rewarding companies that care about America and American workers.

A sensible proposal to create "Patriot Corporations" was developed by Bill Edley, a former State Representative in Illinois, and political scientist Robin Johnson of Monmouth College. Funded by rolling back all of President Bush's tax cuts and recouping taxes lost through corporate offshore loopholes, the Patriot Corporations program would be entirely revenue-neutral and voluntary. It would give significant tax advantages and shareholder incentives to corporations that agree to create a real partnership with American workers. Patriot Corporations would also move to the front of the line for federal contracts--no small incentive.

To qualify, corporations would have to produce at least 90 percent of their US-sold goods and services in the United States. They would also have to:

§ limit top management salaries to 100 times the lowest-paid full-time worker;

§ spend at least 50 percent of their research and development budgets in the United States;

§ operate a profit-sharing plan for all employees, contribute at least 5 percent of payroll to a portable pension fund and pay at least 70 percent of the cost of a standardized and portable health insurance plan;

§ agree to neutrality in employee organizing drives;

§ be in good standing with EPA, OSHA and NLRB regulations;

§ and agree not to price-gouge consumers.

Companies that meet those standards are the ones that deserve carrots. With Patriot Corporations we can create a new class of companies as committed to American workers as they are to selling goods in the American market. And we can create a new patriotic ethic in America--one that unites workers and their employers in the mutual goal of building a stronger, more prosperous, more democratic business sector that can vigorously and proudly compete in the twenty-first-century global economy.

Governor Rod Blagojevich's State of the State Address

2006-01-18T13:16:00.000-06:00

This is too long to post all of it, but here is a link:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/18/131250/121

I know that the Governor has had his share of problems. But remember that the good things that have happened occurred because the social priorities in our state are very different from those in Washington at this time and there is a reason for that. The state legislature elections are important!

Here is a key excerpt from the Governor's address:

"We have turned things around, dramatically changed priorities, and the results are clear.

Illinois is now the only state that guarantees access to affordable, comprehensive health care for every single child.

Illinois now leads the nation in making health care available to working men and women. 400,000 people who didn't have health care three years ago now have health care today.

Illinois now does more than any other state to help senior citizens pay for the high cost of prescription drugs.

We're now a state that has invested more money in its schools in the last three years than any other state in the Midwest, and more money in our schools than 43 other states across the nation.

We raised graduation standards for the first time in 21 years so that students will learn more.

And to help children start learning sooner, we've dramatically expanded pre-school, putting us among the top three states in the nation.

We're now a state that led 44 others in job creation in the last year - a state where businesses are investing and industries like coal are coming back to life.

We're now a state where crime has fallen by nearly 7%, and a state that has a homeland security record better than almost any other.

We are well on our way to being the only state to convert its entire tollway to Open Road Tolling. That means drivers no longer having to stop or even slow down just to pay a toll.

And today - Illinois is a fairer state - than we were three years ago. We're a state that guarantees more rights and more opportunities to African Americans, to Latinos, to immigrants, to women, and to gays and lesbians - in short, more opportunities for men and women across our state who for far too long have been denied an equal chance to live a better life.

Ladies and gentlemen, Illinois is now a state where more people have health care, where we have more money and higher standards for our schools, where crime is down and where jobs are up. By working together, and making tough choices, we were able to do all of this while eliminating a $5 billion budget deficit, and without asking people to pay more in taxes.

And we did all of this despite policies coming out of Washington that have been indifferent and sometimes even hostile to the very people we've been trying to help.

When the federal government stalled or took steps that have hurt working and middle class families, we've consistently stepped up and filled the void.

When Washington wouldn't raise the minimum wage, we did.

When Washington wouldn't guarantee women equal pay for equal work, we did.

When Washington tried to strip overtime pay from workers we made it clear that here in Illinois - overtime pay still means time and a half over forty and double time on Sundays

This administration in Washington supports tax breaks and pursues trade policies that encourage companies to move jobs overseas.

If you're a factory worker or an engineer, a medical technician or a customer service representative, a software designer or a stock analyst, you can walk into work one morning and find out that you've been replaced by someone in another part of the world. Their trade policies have resulted in nearly one million American jobs being sent to other countries.

That may be acceptable policy in Washington. But it's not in Illinois. They send jobs to India. We brought OfficeMax to Naperville. They send jobs to China. We helped Chrysler expand in Belvidere. They send jobs to Indonesia. We brought Pella Windows to Macomb."

Al Gore's Speech

2006-01-17T14:43:00.000-06:00

There are many places on the internet to get the text of Al Gore's Martin Luther King Day speech, and this will be yet another one! It was outstanding and doesn't take that long to read.
Source: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=24447&mode=&order=0

By the way, though some might find the name "smirking chimp" disrespectful, it remains an excellent source of progressive thought from mostly non-mainstream media sources.
By the way, Congressman Barr is a conservative Republican from Georgia (retired from congress and the CIA) who is very concerned with civil liberties.

The text of Vice President Gore's speech:

Albert Gore Jr.

The following is the transcript as prepared for delivery.

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens - Democrats and Republicans alike - to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped - one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that "the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the "kind of surveillance" we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically - and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: "To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress."

This is precisely the "disrespect" for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case.

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer - even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: "This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle "at substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts."

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America's representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled "constitutional crises." These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure," he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: "[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation ... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety."

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to "last for the rest of our lives." So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is - ironically - accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. "It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in."

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, "a power over a man's support is a power over his will." (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands - notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process - by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive - a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not - and I do not - we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire - no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the "greatest deliberative body in the world," meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: "Why is this chamber empty?"

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing" this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole - both House and Senate - the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are - collectively - still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We - as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here" - must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will."

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the governed."

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can't check an abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing - all over the country - with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march - when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, "The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing - especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive - and not just superficial - hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, "Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."

16 January Meeting

2006-01-16T19:50:00.000-06:00

Every month, there is a meeting of the Peoria County Democrats on the third Monday. This time, business was light. Topics of discussion were the new voting machines as well as our trying to find a new "home". Also, both candidates for George Shadid's soon to be vacated State Senate seat were there: Dave Williams and Dave Koehler.

The food was quite good.

Next month is the annual President's Day meeting (much larger; typically 300 people) with a speaker.

Senator Obama and the Daily Kos

2005-10-01T16:03:00.000-05:00

I frequently read and post on the Daily Kos, which is the largest liberal blog in the United States.
There are a variety of opinions there. But a common theme appears to be that Democrats who depart from what is precieved as "leftist orthodoxy" are bad, bad bad.

Senator Obama posted an interesting response (Daily Kos has a policy that you can use whatever is posted there)

Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party
by Barack Obama
Fri Sep 30th, 2005 at 07:38:41 PDT
Update [2005-9-30 10:38:41 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando. Since it is not our normal practice to promote diaries from our representatives, I think I should explain why I chose to promote Senator Obama's diary. Simply put, Sen. Obama's diary addresses in substance an issue that has been a major focus of discussion in our community. Given the source, the topic and the specific thoughts, and the discussion sure to ensue, it is my judgment that promotion was the right thing to do.

I read with interest your recent discussion regarding my comments on the floor(1, 2, 3) during the debate on John Roberts' nomination. I don't get a chance to follow blog traffic as regularly as I would like, and rarely get the time to participate in the discussions. I thought this might be a good opportunity to offer some thoughts about not only judicial confirmations, but how to bring about meaningful change in this country.
Maybe some of you believe I could have made my general point more artfully, but it's precisely because many of these groups are friends and supporters that I felt it necessary to speak my mind.
Diaries ::
-->
Barack Obama's diary :: ::
There is one way, over the long haul, to guarantee the appointment of judges that are sensitive to issues of social justice, and that is to win the right to appoint them by recapturing the presidency and the Senate. And I don't believe we get there by vilifying good allies, with a lifetime record of battling for progressive causes, over one vote or position. I am convinced that, our mutual frustrations and strongly-held beliefs notwithstanding, the strategy driving much of Democratic advocacy, and the tone of much of our rhetoric, is an impediment to creating a workable progressive majority in this country.
According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists - a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog - we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party. They have beaten us twice by energizing their base with red meat rhetoric and single-minded devotion and discipline to their agenda. In order to beat them, it is necessary for Democrats to get some backbone, give as good as they get, brook no compromise, drive out Democrats who are interested in "appeasing" the right wing, and enforce a more clearly progressive agenda. The country, finally knowing what we stand for and seeing a sharp contrast, will rally to our side and thereby usher in a new progressive era.
I think this perspective misreads the American people. From traveling throughout Illinois and more recently around the country, I can tell you that Americans are suspicious of labels and suspicious of jargon. They don't think George Bush is mean-spirited or prejudiced, but have become aware that his administration is irresponsible and often incompetent. They don't think that corporations are inherently evil (a lot of them work in corporations), but they recognize that big business, unchecked, can fix the game to the detriment of working people and small entrepreneurs. They don't think America is an imperialist brute, but are angry that the case to invade Iraq was exaggerated, are worried that we have unnecessarily alienated existing and potential allies around the world, and are ashamed by events like those at Abu Ghraib which violate our ideals as a country.
It's this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts' confirmation hearings. A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don't think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee). While they hope Roberts doesn't swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.
A plausible argument can be made that too much is at stake here and now, in terms of privacy issues, civil rights, and civil liberties, to give John Roberts the benefit of the doubt. That certainly was the operating assumption of the advocacy groups involved in the nomination battle.
I shared enough of these concerns that I voted against Roberts on the floor this morning. But short of mounting an all-out filibuster -- a quixotic fight I would not have supported; a fight I believe Democrats would have lost both in the Senate and in the court of public opinion; a fight that would have been difficult for Democratic senators defending seats in states like North Dakota and Nebraska that are essential for Democrats to hold if we hope to recapture the majority; and a fight that would have effectively signaled an unwillingness on the part of Democrats to confirm any Bush nominee, an unwillingness which I believe would have set a dangerous precedent for future administrations -- blocking Roberts was not a realistic option.
In such circumstances, attacks on Pat Leahy, Russ Feingold and the other Democrats who, after careful consideration, voted for Roberts make no sense. Russ Feingold, the only Democrat to vote not only against war in Iraq but also against the Patriot Act, doesn't become complicit in the erosion of civil liberties simply because he chooses to abide by a deeply held and legitimate view that a President, having won a popular election, is entitled to some benefit of the doubt when it comes to judicial appointments. Like it or not, that view has pretty strong support in the Constitution's design.
The same principle holds with respect to issues other than judicial nominations. My colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin, spoke out forcefully - and voted against - the Iraqi invasion. He isn't somehow transformed into a "war supporter" - as I've heard some anti-war activists suggest - just because he hasn't called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops. He may be simply trying to figure out, as I am, how to ensure that U.S. troop withdrawals occur in such a way that we avoid all-out Iraqi civil war, chaos in the Middle East, and much more costly and deadly interventions down the road. A pro-choice Democrat doesn't become anti-choice because he or she isn't absolutely convinced that a twelve-year-old girl should be able to get an operation without a parent being notified. A pro-civil rights Democrat doesn't become complicit in an anti-civil rights agenda because he or she questions the efficacy of certain affirmative action programs. And a pro-union Democrat doesn't become anti-union if he or she makes a determination that on balance, CAFTA will help American workers more than it will harm them.
Or to make the point differently: How can we ask Republican senators to resist pressure from their right wing and vote against flawed appointees like John Bolton, if we engage in similar rhetoric against Democrats who dissent from our own party line? How can we expect Republican moderates who are concerned about the nation's fiscal meltdown to ignore Grover Norquist's threats if we make similar threats to those who buck our party orthodoxy?
I am not drawing a facile equivalence here between progressive advocacy groups and right-wing advocacy groups. The consequences of their ideas are vastly different. Fighting on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable is not the same as fighting for homophobia and Halliburton. But to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.
Beyond that, by applying such tests, we are hamstringing our ability to build a majority. We won't be able to transform the country with such a polarized electorate. Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of the issues this country faces are hard. They require tough choices, and they require sacrifice. The Bush Administration and the Republican Congress may have made the problems worse, but they won't go away after President Bush is gone. Unless we are open to new ideas, and not just new packaging, we won't change enough hearts and minds to initiate a serious energy or fiscal policy that calls for serious sacrifice. We won't have the popular support to craft a foreign policy that meets the challenges of globalization or terrorism while avoiding isolationism and protecting civil liberties. We certainly won't have a mandate to overhaul a health care policy that overcomes all the entrenched interests that are the legacy of a jerry-rigged health care system. And we won't have the broad political support, or the effective strategies, required to lift large numbers of our fellow citizens out of numbing poverty.
The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.
Let me be clear: I am not arguing that the Democrats should trim their sails and be more "centrist." In fact, I think the whole "centrist" versus "liberal" labels that continue to characterize the debate within the Democratic Party misses the mark. Too often, the "centrist" label seems to mean compromise for compromise sake, whereas on issues like health care, energy, education and tackling poverty, I don't think Democrats have been bold enough. But I do think that being bold involves more than just putting more money into existing programs and will instead require us to admit that some existing programs and policies don't work very well. And further, it will require us to innovate and experiment with whatever ideas hold promise (including market- or faith-based ideas that originate from Republicans).
Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will. This is more than just a matter of "framing," although clarity of language, thought, and heart are required. It's a matter of actually having faith in the American people's ability to hear a real and authentic debate about the issues that matter.
Finally, I am not arguing that we "unilaterally disarm" in the face of Republican attacks, or bite our tongue when this Administration screws up. Whenever they are wrong, inept, or dishonest, we should say so clearly and repeatedly; and whenever they gear up their attack machine, we should respond quickly and forcefully. I am suggesting that the tone we take matters, and that truth, as best we know it, be the hallmark of our response.
My dear friend Paul Simon used to consistently win the votes of much more conservative voters in Southern Illinois because he had mastered the art of "disagreeing without being disagreeable," and they trusted him to tell the truth. Similarly, one of Paul Wellstone's greatest strengths was his ability to deliver a scathing rebuke of the Republicans without ever losing his sense of humor and affability. In fact, I would argue that the most powerful voices of change in the country, from Lincoln to King, have been those who can speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.
In that spirit, let me end by saying I don't pretend to have all the answers to the challenges we face, and I look forward to periodic conversations with all of you in the months and years to come. I trust that you will continue to let me and other Democrats know when you believe we are screwing up. And I, in turn, will always try and show you the respect and candor one owes his friends and allies.
(Cross-posted on the Senate blog: http://obama.senate.gov/blog/.)

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Upcomming Events

2005-09-02T22:47:00.000-05:00

On Monday Spetember 19 at 6:30 PM the Peoria County Democrats will have the 3rd Monday Meet-up at the Itoo Hall on Farmington Road.

On Saturday the 24th of September the Peoria County Democrats will have the Annual Picnic at the Itoo Hall on Farmington Road gates open at 11 AM with Lunch served at 12. The LR Band will play.

3rd Monday Meetup

2005-08-12T23:05:00.000-05:00

Monday August 15 the Peoria County Democrats will have their 3rd Monday Meet-Up. At 6:30 PM at the Itoo Hall on Farmington Rd. Supper will be available for $8. After a brief meeting we will be screening the short video "OutFOXed" Come out for good times with god friends. All are welcome.

Democrats on Parade

2005-08-12T21:03:00.000-05:00

The Peoria County Democrats will have an entry in the Brimfield Parade Saturday August 13th. If you are interested in participating Please meet at the east side of Brimfield at 12:30.

Illinois governor's race

2005-08-12T20:57:00.000-05:00

The list of GOP challengers for governor is certainly growing.

Regardless of whom the GOP manages to dredge up, we ought to consider how current GOP governors are treating their working class constituents:

"Several Republican governors are trying to weaken organized labor in the one place it has remained strong: representing public employees.

First-term Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt rescinded collective-bargaining rights for state employees this year, undoing an executive order issued by a Democratic predecessor, and has eliminated a state board overseeing union elections for public employees. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a former Bush White House budget director, overturned an executive order that for 15 years provided collective-bargaining rights for that state's public employees. And Maryland's Robert Ehrlich, backed by the state Supreme Court, suspended a 2% pay increase unions had negotiated for state employees with his predecessor."

For a link to the complete story (posted on the Huffington Post via the Wall Street Journal):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/2005/08/three-gop-governors-attac_5458.html

Ollie, who is on vacation in Austin, TX. Austin is in Travis County, which is one of the relatively few Texas counties that went for Kerry in 2004. Others include a Houston county, several in the south border regions, the one containing Big Bend national park, and El Paso.

How we can win at the national level

2005-08-08T08:37:00.000-05:00

I wish the national leaders of our party would read the following:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/fred-stembottom/this-is-angry-i-am-yelli_5257.html

This is a post from a truck driver which explains why the GOP has had some success with this group of people.

I am not suggesting that we abandon our core principles but rather we shine our spotlight on issues that may be of concern to the vast majority of working class people.

London Bombing and our Response

2005-07-13T11:21:00.000-05:00

I think that the following is well worth reading: (taken from Wes Clarks PAC site)

Al-Qaeda has changed; Bush strategy also needs to shift.

By Wesley ClarkUSA TodayJuly 11, 2005

As the follow-up reports emerge from the strikes on the London transit system, it's not too early to begin drawing the implications for our own security efforts.

In the first place, whatever the merits of the war in Iraq, it should be clear that we still face a threat at home. Already there have been concerns that some terrorists have left Iraq to return to Europe. Moreover, Islamic anger about the U.S. actions in Iraq, as well as the continuing conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, feeds terrorist recruiting worldwide.
But al-Qaeda has evolved since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
Relentless pressure by the CIA, Special Forces and many other national intelligence and police efforts has made the old, centralized structure of al-Qaeda unworkable.

And we need to keep up the pressure. But al-Qaeda's new threat is decentralized. Thursday's attacks in London have all the earmarks of such a "franchise" operation, locally planned and resourced with relatively modest means, emulating al-Qaeda without the vulnerabilities of centralized resourcing and direction.

Preventing attacks probably can't be accomplished by the administration's preference for taking out "state sponsors." And it's going to be very difficult to employ military means. National intelligence efforts, special police activities and local community policing efforts, which focus on identifying and targeting terrorist individuals and organizations, are required.
Defeat the ideology

But fighting terrorism at home isn't just a matter of "killing terrorists." Terrorists aren't born that way. They are created by their interaction with their surroundings. To win this war, we must defeat the ideology of terrorism, depriving angry young people of their ability to justify their hateful actions in the name of Allah.

This will require not only strong Islamic condemnation of terrorists and their acts, but also a winning dialogue within Islam to defeat Koranic interpretations seeking to justify the use of force against innocent people. We need to encourage "moderates" in Islam to debate, to proselytize and to win over potential terrorists. They are the only ones who can do it.

Out of State Republican PAC plans anti-Durbin ads in Peoria-Revised

2005-07-02T16:30:00.000-05:00

From the Illinios Rapid Response Team: (with new stuff added on July 3)

URGENT ACTION: If you live in or know folks who live in Champaign,Peoria or Rockford we're going to need all the help we can get -- please let us know if you're able to do anyof the following actions. Also, please contact RapidResponse directly if you or someone you know hasaccess to TV production facilities.

il@rapidresponsenetwork.org

The Chicago Tribune is reporting a right-wing group called "MoveAmerica Forward" is planning to air ads attackingDurbin over his Gitmo remarks and his apology for same...

TV ads to blast Durbin for Guantanamo commentsBy Sam Singer, Chicago TribuneJuly 2, 2005http://tinyurl.com/dt9wp

ACTION 1 Call, email, write or fax to the three Illinois TVstations (ESPECIALLY if you live in those markets).Contact friends and family to do the same.Voice your displeasure that they would even consideraccepting money to air ads from out-of-stateright-wing political hacks seeking to defame our great senior Senator.

WCIA (CBS-3) - Champaign,IL Website: www.wcia.com

Phone: (217) 356-8333 Fax: (217) 373-3663Address: 509 S Neil St Champaign, IL 61820

Jim Gee -- News Director Rus Hamilton -- Vice President; General Manager

WMBD (CBS-31) - Peoria,IL Website: www.wmbd.com

Phone: (309) 688-3131Fax: (309) 686-8650Address: 3131 N University St Peoria, IL 61604Kevin Harlan -- General Manager Brent Lonteen -- Assignment Manager Chris Manson -- News Director

WREX (NBC-13) - Rockford,IL Website: www.wrex.com

Phone: (815) 335-2213Fax: (815) 335-2055Address: PO Box 530 Rockford, IL 61105Kim Carney -- Program Manager John Chadwick -- Vice President; General Manager Maggie Hradecky -- News Director

*** ACTION 2 ***As I mentioned earlier, if you or someone you know isin the TV production field and has access tofacilities please contact Rapid Response for Illinoisimmediately. Discussions are underway with mediaplacement organizations to develop a grassroots-basedresponse. (And no, we're not looking for free help,unless you can offer it.

This is a follow-up to yesterday's alert. Progressive organizations hope to have response ads up on the airbut we should do other actions too...If you live in Champaign, Peoria or Rockford (or know folks who do live there and can ask them to help), please keep track of the Durbin attack ads beingfunded by the regressive group "Move America Forward."

Reference...TV ads to blast Durbin for Guantanamo comments By Sam Singer, Chicago Tribune 7/2/05http://tinyurl.com/dt9wp

Please note details of the ad including the showduring which it aired, the time of day and (if youcan) which commercial was it during that break (1st,2nd, 3rd, etc). EMAIL YOUR NOTES to Rapid Response for Illinois atmailto:atil@rapidresponsenetwork.org

IF YOU CONTACT these TV stations consider that SenDurbin never actually referenced our brave troops.Rather, he was discussing the unAmerican and immoraltorture which this conservative administration (WhiteHouse and Pentagon civilian leaders) have condoned. And, he was reading DIRECTLY from an FBI agent'sreport on the immoral and unAmerican torture -- which included being hogtied in chains; left in a room with no cot, chair or even toilet; lack of food or water;and the often-overlooked fact that these prisoners were forced to defecate and urinate on themselves because of being chained up and not having a toilet(or even so much as a hole in the floor). According to the Tribune story, these unbalanced adsfrom out-of-state partisan hacks ignore these facts infavor of slurring our Senator.

Aaron Schock Resigns From School Board

2005-07-01T21:27:00.000-05:00

State Representative Aaron Schock announced today that he is resigning from the Peoria District 150 School Board. Does this help, or hurt his re-election chances as 92nd State Representative?

U. S. Supreme Court: Democrat Response to New Opening

2005-07-01T16:29:00.000-05:00

Posted with permission from the Dailykos:

Supreme Court: What You Can Do RIGHT NOW by dividing Fri Jul 1st, 2005 at 13:00:27

Whatever happens with the Supreme Court nomination battle that is about to ensue, it's going to happen fast. Here are some things you can do right now:

If you have a cell phone, sign up for People at the American Way's Mass Immediate Response site. This way, you'll be able to receive text message action items instantly as events break. (If you signed up during the nuclear option fight, you'll need to re-sign up.)
Also sign up with the Save the Court, another PFAW website devoted specifically to this issue.
Recruit friends and family members to the cause.
Write to the President, telling him he should choose a consensus candidate to replace O'Connor.
Contact your Senators to tell them the same thing.
Sign MoveOn's "Protect Our Rights" petition.
Contact members of the media and tell them you think Bush should nominate a consensus candidate. PLEASE be polite, be brief (200 words or less), and don't do copy-and-paste jobs - put things in your own words.
Visit the Daily Kos article.

Where have all the Yellow Ribbons gone?

2005-06-29T10:12:00.000-05:00

It seems to me I'm seeing fewer and fewer yellow ribbon car magnets these days. - I might see only 2 or 3 on the way to work. In the past, I used to see tons. This is really just an impression as I have no data to back this up.
It would have been fun to have charted the "Ribbon to car ratio" over the course of President Bush's war in Iraq and we would have probably seen it trend like this:
Back in 2003 it was probably quite high when we were hearing such optimistic reports as : "My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."
But as time went on and all of those statements proved to be so much ridiculous claptrap, the ribbon density undoubtedly decreased. News of Halliburton's no-bid contract probably had some negative impact (unless you happened to be one of the lucky Halliburton stockholders). We probably saw a further decrease when it came to light that $9 billion of our hard earned taxes had "disappeared" in Iraq.
Every time President Bush asked for an additional $80 Billion for Iraq, the ribbon ratio probably took a hit.
Additional depletion of the number of Yellow Ribbons came from folks reflecting upon the ratio:

WMD's found: 0
Dead GI's: 1740+

Now we've reached the point where the majority of Americans dissaprove of president Bush's war and that sentiment appears to be reflected in the number of ribbons we see.

Take a look around and see if you think the number of ribbons are waning.

Democrats and National Defense

2005-06-29T09:53:00.000-05:00

In an article in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barns concludes that we Democrats are about to self-destruct because: "When faced with a choice between supporting or criticizing the use of military force along with a strong national security policy, Democrats often side with the critics. Which is how they fall into the trap, which leads to electoral defeat"

He is off of the mark here. Where it is true that Democrats are indeed among the critics of how this administration is conducting the war in Iraq, most are not calling for an immediate pull-out nor even a set time table.

For example, Senator John Kerry made several suggestions on how to correct much of what is wrong in this New York Times op-ed piece. Note that he is offering a critique of how the war is being conducted; he is not advocating a retreat of any kind.

Read what the Senate Democratic leader Harry Ried says in his response to the President's speech. Read where Senator Dick Durbin says that having a definite timetable for withdrawing the troops is a bad idea (Peoria Journal Star article).

The tired old ploy of painting the Democrats as "weak on defense" just isn't going to work this time.

Senator Durbin's Gitmo remark

2005-06-26T19:04:00.000-05:00

Remember the fuss over Senator Durbin's Gitmo remark? Remember the partisan calls for him to resign?

Senator Durbin recently visited a Peoria VFW post; the Peoria Journal Star's Elaine Hopkins reports:

PEORIA - U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., received a cordial welcome from the Illinois Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention at the Peoria Civic Center on Saturday, and in returned pledged to fight for benefits for veterans and soldiers.

He spoke to the audience of almost 300 at the event and received a standing welcome from most in the hall and a standing ovation at the conclusion. Durbin's talk was interrupted three times by applause. There were no hecklers or protesters.

The senator's recent remarks linking the treatment of prisoners at the Army's Guantanamo Bay prison with Nazi and other police-state tactics sparked anger from many groups, including the VFW. But he has apologized for any misunderstandings and did so again to the VFW audience.

(To see the rest of Hopkins' article click here.)

So much for terminally offending veterans.

Beating Aaron Schock may not be that hard!

2005-06-24T18:16:00.000-05:00

This may turn out to be a little easier than anticipated. Poor Aaron seems to be upsetting his brother Republicans. Take this blog entry for example. Chris Rhodes seems a bit upset with Aaron for plagiarizing one of his websites. First take a look at this (specificaly the intro) and then take a look at Aaron's website . Notice any similarities? LOL! This is a brazen theft of another's work. Given this example of Schock's "integrity" it might be fun to comb through some of his accademic papers at Bradley to see if there was a pattern of plagiarism! - Are you up to that challenge, Aaron? Honestly Aaron, we've come to expect theft and dishonesty from the Republican party in general - but at least you should have the decency not to rip off your fellow Republicans!

Some more amunition to use against Schock comes from reading the entries in his blog - I highly recommend checking this out as it provides an insight in to the intelectual depth of Aaron Schock's mind. (Sorry, that really was a cheap shot.)

Ready for even more fun? Let's take a look at who gave Aaron Money and see if we can draw a connection between that money and some of the issues Schock champions.Our first stop is the State Board of Elections web site. Surfing through all the contributors, we start to see a theme... Lots of Doctors, Medical Organizations, and Insurance companies are all cozying up to Aaron. Hmmm... I wonder if there is any connection between their money and the fact that several of the issues he is championing concerns Medical Malpractice? In fact he even has a link on his page to some Medical lobbying group!

Corruption in politics is nothing new - but what is really incredible is how low Aaron "sell out price" is! It looks like $8,000 is his threshold! Need Aaron to push a law through for you or even place a link on his website? Get 4 friends to pool together $8,000 and all of a sudden, Schock is very interested in your cause.

2005-06-23T09:16:00.000-05:00

President Bush's $27,500 "Birth" tax

I was thumbing through the internet yesterday and came upon The National Debt Clock. The National Debt is a computation not only of the $400 Billion deficit that President George Bush has run up in his 5 years but also the projected interest payments to cover this debt. Currently our National Debt stands a little shy of $8 TRILLION but climbing every day.

$8 Trillion is so huge that conceptually it's hard to grasp, so let's do some manipulations so we can begin to appreciate the enormity... How about calculating your personal stake in President Bush's debt? A rough estimate of the U.S. population is 290 million. Dividing $8 trillion by 290 million gives us $27,586 for each man, woman, and child. Thus, the instant a baby is born he/she is immediately burdened with a $27,500 debt, essentially a "Birth" tax. And thanks to President Bush, a family of 4 owes a whopping $110,000.

How on earth did President Bush turn the surplus that was handed to him by Bill Clinton into the "Mother of All" deficits? In his defense, the economy heading south was part of it. However there are many things he did which exasperated the situation. A significant factor was President Bush's $280 Billion (so far!) war in Iraq (incidentally, over $8 billion of which is unaccounted for!) - and your family's stake in that missing $8 Billion is $108. His tax cuts for the wealthy was another (Did Bill Gates really need the $90,000 George Bush gave him?) And before you get too excited about the $200 tax cut President Bush gave you last year, consider this: at the rate of $200 a year, it will take you 550 years to pay down your $110,000 portion of the "Bush National Debt"

2005-06-22T21:54:00.000-05:00

92nd State House District

Which Democrat gives the party the best chance of defeating Aaron Schock? Why?