The Washington Post today highlighted a truly honorable soldier, Captain Brian Freeman.

Just before Christmas, an Army captain named Brian Freeman cornered Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) at a Baghdad helicopter landing zone. The war was going badly, he told them. Troops were stretched so thin they were doing tasks they never dreamed of, let alone trained for.

Freeman, 31, took a short holiday leave to see his 14-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son, returned to his base in Karbala, Iraq, and less than two weeks ago died in a hail of bullets and grenades. Insurgents, dressed in U.S. military uniforms, speaking English and driving black American SUVs, got through a checkpoint and attacked, kidnapped four soldiers and later shot them. Freeman died in the assault, the fifth casualty of the brazen attack.

The death of the West Point graduate - a star athlete from Temecula, Calif., who ran bobsleds and skeletons with Winter Olympians - has radicalized Dodd, energized Kerry and girded the ever-more confrontational stance of Democrats in the Senate. Freeman’s death has reverberated on the Senate floor, in committee deliberations and on television talk shows.

“This was the kind of person you don’t forget,” Dodd said yesterday. “You mention the number dead, 3,000, the 22,000 wounded, and you almost see the eyes glaze over. But you talk about an individual like this, who was doing his job, a hell of a job, but was also willing to talk about what was wrong, it’s a way to really bring it to life, to connect.”

“When I returned from war, almost 40 years ago now, I stood up and spoke from my heart and my gut about what I thought was wrong,” Kerry said on the Senate floor last week as he recounted his meeting with Freeman. “I asked the question in 1971: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? . . . I never thought that I would be reliving the need to ask that question again.”

Most of the article is focused on Brian Freeman, an amazing individual who honored all of us with his service to our country.

All I can say in response is: “Message received, Brian. I will do my utmost to honor your commitment and sacrifice.”

So I’m calling all johnkerry.com bloggers: what can you do – what can we do together – to honor Brian Freeman and his many worthy colleagues and support JK’s “campaign for our country”?

Some of the JK bloggers already pitched in at the peace march in DC on Sunday. GV put together this video which features the music of a musician they met there handing out CD’s.

Watch the video and then start brainstorming below. One more death is one too many. What can we do together?

 

Newsweek published a heart-touching article about the 12 service members killed in the crash of a Blackhawk helicopter on Jan. 20, 2007, titled “The True Cost of War”.

More than 3,000 U.S. service members have now died in the Iraq war. At first it was difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the number of deaths. After four years, it is now difficult not to feel numb. In a nation without a draft, the emotional connection between the front and the home front is the weakest it has been in a major conflict in recent memory. There are so many news accounts of troops killed in combat that the details blur. The death of one soldier, or 20, loses its power to shock, except to the families of the fallen.

At some point, the way we talk about the war itself changes. We speak less and less about husbandless wives and parentless children, and instead obscure the suffering in vaguer, more distant and—guiltily—easier terms. We shake our heads and talk about the “losses.”

...the 12 Americans who died in the Black Hawk crash offer us a vivid reminder of what is happening on the battlefield, and of the cost so many families are paying when loved ones die in combat. Guard members have taken on much of the burden of this war, and those who died aboard that helicopter were like many others who have lost their lives in the fighting: ordinary people asked to do the extraordinary. They were husbands and wives, parents and even grandparents. Some relied on their faith in God, others, their faith in the commander in chief. At least one no longer believed the war was worth fighting, but carried out his duties. Together, they left behind 34 children and at least a dozen grandchildren.

As we contemplate sending more men and women like them into harm’s way, their demise leaves behind perhaps the only question that truly matters in wartime: is it worth it?

The Iraq vets who support VoteVets don’t think so. VoteVets is launching a new TV ad with some of those vets speaking out against the escalation in Iraq.

And here’s the latest AP update on US casualties:

The Associated Press, “U.S. military deaths in Iraq hit 3,084”

As of Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007, at least 3,084 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. At least 2,464 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.

[...]

The latest deaths reported by the military:

• Two soldiers were killed Sunday in a helicopter crash near Najaf.

• Two soldiers were killed Saturday in separate bombings in Baghdad.

• A Marine was killed Saturday in Anbar province.

 
:

 

Some of the johnkerry.com bloggers went to the peace march in DC today and handed out flyers about setadeadline.com. The New York Times reported that “grandmothers in wheelchairs, housewives pushing strollers, seasoned dissenters in tie-dye and veterans in uniform turned out to take their discontent to the streets.”

JK’s famous 1971 question which he asked again on Wednesday showed up as well at the peace march.

Crowd estmates ranged from 600,000 per a dailykos diary to at least 400,000 per a UFPJ march organizer to ‘at least 100,000’ per Fox News to the timid, conservative report of ‘tens of thousands’ from the New York Times and NPR. <!-more->

Enjoy the pictures…

Making another setadeadline.com sign

 

The “deciders” sent a clear message in November 2006.

 

No caption required

 

Resting up and checking out pictures after the march.

UPDATE: Just realized after reading windgoddess’s comment, that I forgot to properly credit the bloggers/photographers: GV and Karendc. Thanks very much for the photos!

 

  Let me begin by saying thanks. Thank you for your supportive comments. They mean so much to me, and to Teresa.

I said something the other day when I taped my video message to you. And I really mean it. I saw out on the trail this year just how much your blood, sweat and tears helped elect Jim Webb, Joe Sestak and Pat Murphy. Be proud of the things we accomplished together at Johnkerry.com, because it counted – it was real.

You were right there with me during the most difficult hours of the long campaigns and you were there at the best of times when we offered a hopeful brave alternative to the smallness of the last six years. Teresa in particular used to call me in hotel rooms and read me your posts – or some of the diaries that ended up all over the place – connecting with your heart and insight was really special.

It still is. I am posting here not only to thank you but I am asking for your help yet again.

Our work is yet to be done and I hope that you will put the same energy behind my efforts to set a deadline in Iraq. We have a moral mission here. I feel it as strongly as I have anything in my life. You will be instrumental to make sure young Americans don’t die for anyone’s mistakes. When I was a young man protesting another war people used to come up and say “My country right or wrong” and our reply was “My country right or wrong—when it’s right keep it right and when it’s wrong make it right.” Please help us get it right in Iraq – not a campaign for the presidency, a campaign for our country.

— John

 

I wanted to start by just saying thank you – thank you to each and every one of you who have come together in the johnkerry.com community. Thanks to you, we have a new Democratic Congress that is fighting to stop the administration’s disastrous course in Iraq, thanks to you we can be a Congress that addresses issues like climate change and health care, and thanks to you, change is coming to Washington.

Over the last two years, when you could’ve walked off the field after getting knocked down in 2004, you didn’t walk away, you kept fighting. Together, three million strong, you helped provide $14 million to more than 260 candidates, committees and progressive causes. Nineteen of those candidates received over $100,000 each in donations from our community. Just think of the special support that you helped us provide to veterans running for office – helping to make Chris Carney, Tim Walz, Joe Sestak, and Patrick Murphy members of Congress today. And because you dug in early when a lot of people said it couldn’t be done, you helped a courageous Vietnam veteran Jim Webb on his march to become the 51st Senator and give Democrats our majority in the Senate.

I hope you are as proud of what you’ve accomplished as I am. But this isn’t a time to rest on our accomplishments.

The work isn’t over. Today I hope you’ll help me with another big mission.

35 years ago, I got into public life to end a war that was wrong. I believe now as strongly as I did then that it is wrong to ask more young Americans to die for anyone’s mistakes. And I believe that a Congress that shares responsibility for getting us into this war must bear responsibility for getting us out.

Americans went to the polls and voted for change in Iraq. They sent a strong and clear message to all of us, on both sides of the aisle, that they wanted real change in Iraq. They certainly did not vote for us to sit by while some national leaders actually advocate escalating the war and sending more American troops into the middle of an Iraqi civil war. We must stand for a change in Iraq, or we don’t stand for anything at all.

This mission, this responsibility, is something all of us must accept. As someone who voted for the resolution that gave the president the authority to go to war, I feel the weight of a personal responsibility to act.

I sought the presidency to lead us on a different course. There are powerful reasons to want to continue that fight now. But I’ve concluded this isn’t the time for me to mount a presidential campaign. It is the time to put my energy to work as part of the new Democratic majority in the Senate, to do all I can to end this war and strengthen our security and our ability to fight the real war on terror.

The people of Massachusetts have given me an incredible privilege to serve in the Senate, to represent the birthplace of freedom, the cradle of liberty, and a state where in Faneuil Hall patriotic dissenters stood on principle. I want to continue representing Massachusetts, and that’s why I am running for reelection so I can use my voice all day every day to end this war and galvanize grassroots action to force Washington and our Democratic Party to live up to its responsibility.

Together, all of us, starting with the three million of you who have built this online community, must remain steadfast in protecting the principles we fought for every day of our campaign. You have a responsibility to urge those who are running this time to step up and address those issues, and particularly on Iraq to find not just a new way forward, but the right way forward.

Above all else, the mission we must all join is to end the war in Iraq.

Our first step toward that goal is to force President Bush to set a deadline to redeploy our troops.

I hope you will come to www.setadeadline.com and take the opportunity to speak out on the importance of setting a deadline to redeploy our troops and bring our heroes home. Speak out at www.setadeadline.com.

Now that a new Democratic Congressional majority has convened in the U.S. Capitol, a deadline must be set. Working together as Americans, holding leaders accountable, is our best hope to ensure that it is.

Please come to www.setadeadline.com and get on board.

Thank you,

John

The Washington Post had this to say about JK’s assessment in a review of reactions to the State of the Union speech:

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the 2004 presidential nominee, offered some of the harshest criticism of the night, saying Bush “glossed over the disastrous war and its multibillion-dollar price tag and implied again that our presence in Iraq is somehow improving the situation in that chaotic and turbulent country.”

Kerry added that he would soon introduce legislation to demand that the White House set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

The New York Times editorial board delivered a hard hitting opinion after the speech. It looks like they came to the same conclusions as JK.

The White House spin ahead of George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address was that the president would make a bipartisan call to revive his domestic agenda with “bold and innovative concepts.” The problem with that was obvious last night — in six years, Mr. Bush has shown no interest in bipartisanship, and his domestic agenda was set years ago, with huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans and crippling debt for the country.

Combined with the mounting cost of the war in Iraq, that makes boldness and innovation impossible unless Mr. Bush truly changes course. And he gave no hint of that last night. Instead, he offered up a tepid menu of ideas that would change little: a health insurance notion that would make only a tiny dent in a huge problem. More promises about cutting oil consumption with barely a word about global warming. And the same lip service about immigration reform on which he has failed to deliver.

Their conclusion had a bit of a sting.

Say what you will about the flaws and shortcomings of the two-party system. After six years of the Bush presidency, at least we know it’s a lot better than the one-party system.

 

JK issued a statement following the State of the Union address:

The President missed a golden opportunity tonight to admit that he made a mistake in Iraq and to share with the American people a plan for gradually removing our troops and allowing the Iraqis to solve the political crisis in Iraq. Instead, he glossed over the disastrous war and its multi-billion-dollar price tag and implied again that our presence in Iraq is somehow improving the situation in that chaotic and turbulent country. The Congress must stand up against Bush’s plan to escalate the war with a new surge of troops and I will be introducing legislation shortly to demand that the Administration set a date for withdrawing troops from Iraq. The President’s address came up short in other areas as well – like his idea to tax worker health benefits and his failure to seriously address the challenge of global climate change. Our economy is headed in the wrong way; wages are barely keeping up with inflation and family income is on the way down,” Kerry said.

More specifically, the President missed the mark on several fronts:

ENERGY: Once again the President only paid lip service to a meaningful energy agenda that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil. His record speaks for itself – we’re more dependent on foreign oil than ever before. Tonight the President failed to embrace bold policies to break our oil dependence. The President says the nation should reduce U.S. gas usage by 20 percent over the next 10 years, but a goal without a roadmap for getting there is useless. The President should have included more funding for hybrids and battery technology.

HEALTH CARE: Providing more people with meaningful, affordable health care is a laudable goal, but taxing worker health benefits to get there is a terrible idea. We need to increase the number of insured Americans, not play a shell game that risks coverage for those who have coverage today. As many as 35 million people could face higher taxes under the President’s plan while many millions more will face a choice of higher taxes or inadequate coverage in future. The President’s plan could actually increase the number of uninsured if employers decide to shift the entire premium cost to workers or offer only high-deductible plans.

IMMIGRATION: Once again the President called for immigration reform that includes a guest worker program. I support comprehensive immigration reform and I’m disappointed that President Bush walked away from the issue last congress in the heat of the midterm elections. I hope that he’ll work with the Democratic-led congress to make comprehensive reform a reality.

JK stood and gave a speech in the Senate the other day—a salute to a longtime Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) staffer, Nancy Stetson. The Providence Journal reported on Nancy and included a bit of the speech as well.

We’d like to share a few bits and say, “Thanks, Nancy, for showing us what is possible.”

When Nancy Stetson came to Capitol Hill, her boss recalled last week, she was “a young and idealistic doctoral student” from Rhode Island who wanted to test an idea.

In an era of presidential predominance in foreign policy, she asked, could Congress make a difference?

After long service as a little-known Senate staffer, Stetson can report that the answer is yes. Yes on prodding a major African nation to forsake the path of racial oppression. Yes on reconciliation between the United States and its onetime foes in a small Southeast Asian country. Yes to easing the afflictions of disease upon millions around the globe.

There’s a footnote to the thesis, too: without the likes of Nancy Stetson, Congress could accomplish few such things. So says her boss, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass…

<!-more-> She worked on many issues of the day including the push for US sanctions against the apartheid system in South Africa. One area on which she toiled long and hard was the development of diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

Stetson was Kerry’s right hand during the former Navy swift boat skipper’s long campaign for diplomatic actions to heal the wounds of the Vietnam War.

A prerequisite for progress was to resolve the concerns of Americans convinced that many missing U.S. fighters might still be held in Vietnam, years after the end of the war. The work was delicate and painstaking. There were remarkable scenes: Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the former prisoner of war, encountering his former North Vietnamese interrogator; lines of Americans and Vietnamese working together on excavation sites, sifting the earth for any remains of the U.S. missing. In the end, Kerry was able to settle the matter of the missing in action to the satisfaction of most Americans — and along the way accomplish much healing between the two nations.

A signal moment came during a late-night talk on the roof of the Rex Hotel in Saigon, a “kind of seedy” wartime hangout of Kerry’s. There, Kerry and Stetson and Tommy Vallely, a close friend and Vietnam veteran from Boston, hatched a plan. The framework they conceived led eventually to the crucial legislation, signed into law by President Bill Clinton, that lifted the U.S. sanctions against Vietnam.

JK recounted on the floor of the Senate that

This Vietnam Education Foundation and this Fulbright program have been instrumental in helping us to do that. And today, Vietnam is simply a transformed, extraordinarily different country. It was an innovative policy, and it was a master stroke of public diplomacy for which Nancy deserves enormous credit. Without her vision and her perseverance, we would not be able to talk today, in foreign policy, in terms that say that Vietnam is not just a war but a country. It became a country because of this kind of effort and this kind of outreach in the consciousness of Americans.

[...]

In addition to the normalization with Vietnam, Nancy contributed enormously to global health issues and to some of the most significant policies of any industrialized country against diseases of poverty. Her work on malaria, TB, and AIDS, where she fought to significantly increase the U.S. contribution to the Global AIDS Fund, were among her proudest accomplishments. People across the world today literally owe their lives to Nancy’s work.

I remember when we began that effort, Senator Helms was then chairman, and a lot of people said: You are never going to get anything through this committee. Well, with slow and steady work, we not only got it through the committee, we got Senator Helms, to his credit, to be one of the principal cosponsors of this effort.

Together with Senator Frist, we drafted the first original comprehensive plan on AIDS that passed the Senate and which became the centerpiece of how we are approaching particularly Sub-Sahara and Africa today, but really our global efforts to try to deal with this scourge that is growing, I might say notwithstanding those efforts, for lack of global initiative and effort to focus on it.

The Rhode Island paper finished their report with this:

Mr. Clinton’s normalization of U.S. diplomatic ties to Vietnam was the culmination of adventures Stetson could hardly have envisioned as a young scholar from Rhode Island.

“I thought of myself as a kid who got out of school and worked hard and did a good job,” Stetson said. Never did she imagine herself on a Saigon rooftop, brainstorming about the healing of the national wound from the war, or in the Oval Office months later helping to tell a president how it could be done.

“It was a highlight of my life,” she said, to see this harvest of some 15 trips to Vietnam, of her numberless hours of labor on the MIA issues, on the priorities of individual legislators, on the diplomatic spadework in the State Department.

“It also proved my thesis,” Stetson said, recalling the research that first brought her to the capital, “that Congress can make a difference” in world affairs.

It calls to mind Margaret Mead’s wisdom:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people
can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

 

Thanks Nancy and best wishes in your future endeavors.

 

Michael Hussey at Pushing Rope had a good eye for dialogue if not for pictures. In a post about Erik Smith and Vince Morris joining JK’s team, he noted this:

Kerry has also hired former reporter Vince Morris as his communications director. This will have conservatives screaming media bias, but I still find it funny. Besides, you guys have Fox News and talk radio locked up.

A few minutes earlier, Karl Rove had tried to float the notion that “It was one of the president’s better debate performances and one of Kerry’s worst.” But, in sharp contrast to other occasions, he couldn’t make it fly. As Lizza noted “Vince Morris of The New York Post stares at Rove and asks, “Can you say that with a straight face?”

Heh.

Yeah, we thought JK rocked in the debates too!

In a terrific summary of the SFRC hearing with Sec. Rice, Beachmom wrote a dailykos diary about some of the senators who stepped up to the plate with probing questions. She included a number of excerpts and commentary in her own unique voice. In the portion about JK’s questioning, she wrote:

Oh, Senator, we love it when you start rattling off Arabic names as if you’re talking about Mr. Smith down the street. But we shouldn’t get Ms. Rice too distracted, listening to a real thinker as opposed to that joker boss of hers, so you might want to tone that down in the future.

RICE: I agree…

KERRY: The president didn’t address it.

RICE: No, the president did address it. He talked about the need for the national oil law. And…

KERRY: The need for it, but now how it’s going to happen. And why do we have to wait three years to have that?

RICE: We are very much—well, because it’s actually a very difficult thing, Senator ….

Where have we heard that before? “It’s hard work”, you know, doing the job of the president. Or rather, maybe nobody feels like doing the work, the real diplomatic work, and what is hard work is being stuck in a room debating Senator Kerry, what with all those facts, insights, policy knowledge, and oh, the Arabic names he speaks so fluently, and no right wing noise machine to edit out his brilliance.

That was so sweet, MSNBC put it out in the form of a video called “Kerry spars with Rice”. Well done, Senator. Also, scroll down, and you will find the Hagel Q & A there, too.

We thought it was pretty good too, as was Chuck Hagel’s Q&A with Sec. Rice. Thanks for highlighting our senators on the SFRC at work, beachmom. If you haven’t read up on the SFRC hearing with Sec. Rice, this is a good place to start.   <!-more-> An Australian blogger, D W Griffith, has a lengthy analysis of what kind of response should be made towards militant Islam and he comes to the conclusion that JK had it right in 2002.

Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that “the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation”.

To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry’s more thoughtful contributions. In the struggle against terrors of various sorts over many years, police-style actions of all sorts have usually trumped conventional military force. A series of 20th-century conflicts, not least Vietnam, demonstrates that armoured brigades or infantry platoons do their best work fighting conventional battles. They cannot successfully chase down loose-knit, decentralised networks of militants. Once militants decide to avoid fighting in the open, there are few hard targets for cruise missiles to pick out. Human targets prove even tougher to identify. Most targets are surrounded by civilians who do not react well to seeing Hellfires flying through their neighbours’ windows. You have to convince civilian populations in downtown Islamabad and Mogadishu to turn militants in – a task for which Private John Kryswicki from Duluth, Michigan is almost uniquely ill-equipped. So emphasising intelligence-gathering and law enforcement – “police work”, if you like – sounded the sensible option.

[...]

It is now popular to disparage John Kerry, but it seems to me that back in 2002 he got the “war on terror” exactly right. Here’s a fuller 2002 quote, taken from, of all places, the US Republican Party Web site:

I think all of us need to focus on is the fact that the rhetoric of this war is overblown in some ways and not focused properly in others. This is not a war as we have known it. This is not a war in which there’s a front-line or the troops are going out every day on control. This is fundamentally an intelligence operation and the law enforcement operation and a diplomatic operation. On all three fronts, we have not been doing adequately.

Kerry has first-hand experience of this issue: he was among US officers arguing for counterinsurgency tactics while on duty in Vietnam. And in 2002, he was right. Our rhetoric is part of the problem. “The war on terror” is one of the silliest political phrases of recent years. Once you frame the fight against terror as a war, you almost automatically start marching down the path most likely to bring failure. You deploy troops and air support. You shoot missiles and bullets at targets. You alienate populations. You guarantee that for every terrorist and militant you kill, two more will spring up to take their place.

It’s time to end the “war” on terror, in order to win the fight.

This is not necessarily an argument for Australia or the US to withdraw immediately from Iraq: after three years of foolishness there, we have responsibilities to discharge. It is, however, an argument for a change of approach, of emphasis, of rhetoric. The formula for success against militant Islam over the next decade involves more policing and less soldiering, more investigation and less shooting…

If you’re intrigued by his reasoning then I encourage you to go read the whole post.

  Happened to see this post and comment exchange at Think Progress and thought it was an interesting take on why 2 veterans of the Vietnam war view Iraq so differently. Think Progress :

STRAIGHT TALK:

“If you get involved in a major ground war in the Saudi desert, I think support will erode significantly. Nor should it be supported. We cannot even contemplate, in my view, trading American blood for Iraqi blood.” — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), New York Times, 8/19/90.

Jay Randal made this comment on the thread:

Kerry Versus McCain On Iraq War

The Vietnam War fiasco propelled 2 veterans of that conflict to get elected to the Senate, and both desiring the presidency, but their experiences in Vietnam were different in that John Kerry learned that Vietnam was a mistake and John McCain believed it was justified.

John Kerry witnessed the horrors of warfare up close being an officer on a swift-boat, but John McCain saw it from the air as a Navy pilot and as a prisoner of war.

Kerry realized that the war was pointless to continue fighting it, but McCain saw its ending as betrayal of everything he suffered at the hands of NVA guards.

The Iraq War is another fiasco and huge dire mistake, so Kerry realizes that reality, but McCain refuses to acknowledge that and wants the war to be escalated.

President Bush lied to the American public to occupy Iraq, just like President Johnson lied to wage war in Vietnam, so the Iraq debacle must end like Vietnam.

Kerry must demand its end and McCain must wake-up!

I didn’t know that Sen. McCain drawn such a clear line in the sand in 1990.

Taylor Marsh takes Ryan Lizza to school over his piece in the New York Times about “The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat” (subscription-only)

As for John Kerry, Lizza obviously didn’t pay too close attention to the post 2004 election years, because Kerry learned his lesson and has been kicking collective ass since that point in time, regardless of the botched joke pr debacle.

Honestly, “Live by the Macho Dem creed, die by it” may be the dumbest thing ever written to analyze the current state of the Democratic Party.

You said it, Taylor.

Firespirit on DU lays out a case for JK to run again and makes some interesting points along the way.

The last two years have been horrific. Two terrible tragedies have hit the nation, both of which were avoidable and would have been avoided if not for the great mistake of November 2, 2004. The tragedy in Iraq is staggering—not just the 3,000+ American dead, but the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed, the thousands of soldiers who were wounded, the tens of thousands who experienced psychological trauma, and their loved ones.

Just as one example, Army Specialist Alyssa Peterson, one of the first who died in the war, was assigned to a facility to interrogate and probably torture prisoners of war. She died on Sept. 15, 2003, as a result of a “non-combat weapons discharge,” military jargon often used to describe a suicide. If that is in fact what happened to her - if she took her own life because the sights and sounds in that interrogation facility were too much for her to cope with - what does it say about the other soldiers who were also ordered to commit acts against their own human nature?

There are hundreds of Alyssa Petersons out there. Although the election was too late for her, how many of them would not have experienced what they did if the war had been stopped in 2005 under a President Kerry?

The soul-wrenching tragedy of Hurricane Katrina continues to this day. 2,000 people lost their lives. A booming region lost its vitality. New Orleans lost over half its population. Entire neighborhoods were abandoned to rot. A landfalling hurricane will almost inevitably have a death toll and a damage toll, but how much of this had to happen? How many people died in the storm itself because of inadequate transportation out of the city, or in the horrific aftermath because help arrived too late and too throttled by bureaucracy and low funds? How many lost all their worldly goods because no one was there to fight for them?

[...]

The damage that has been done to the American psyche is another great tragedy of the Bush administration. The administration has cynically used the threat of terrorism to terrorize America itself, and to lay waste to the institutions of democracy that we have cherished since our beginning as a nation. Americans in general do not fall for it anymore, but the damage has been done. We have been conditioned into cynicism about all who work in politics. We have come to see other Americans as the enemy. We are no longer surprised when Bush says he can read our mail without a warrant; we’re just surprised that he bothered to tell anyone about it. We are not surprised when another piece of information comes out about the rottenness and corruption of someone in a high office; we just wonder what has not been uncovered yet.

[..]

Yes, America - a thin majority of Americans - made a big mistake in 2004. But the important thing is that they know it. They know it was their mistake, too, not John Kerry’s.

 

Lots of people took note of the passing of JK’s “Duke Cunningham” bill which we wrote about earlier. Now with the passage of the Senate Ethics bill on Thursday, it is one step closer to being law.

Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily has a very complete post on this with links to the language of the amendment and details on who voted which way.

Crooks & Liars cheered the passage with this “snarkily delicious” comment:

Honestly, the name, the “Duke Cunningham Act”, while snarkily delicious, is so limiting. Given all the exalted members of the 109th Congress that have left their seat in disgrace, shall we redub it the “Cunningham/Ney/Delay Act”?

Anyone else I’m forgetting?

Iggy at The Nattering Nabob issued a short and sweet “Thank you, Senator Kerry”.

From the Dump Dolittle blog, came a similarly short and sweet note: “Kudos to Senator Kerry”.

DownWithTyranny noted the passage with a longer post about how “It has rankled me and it has rankled a lot of other taxpayers that even congressmen who have been convicted of using their offices to criminally enrich themselves are still entitled to fat 6-figure pensions.”

Jay Daverth at The Hindsight Factor in “Cutting Pensions for Congressional Convicts”:   ”...And the pendulum swings on”

 

In another reference to the sausage factory (here’s the first one), Harold at Wet Machine wrote:

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Kerry drops another good bill

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) has introduced the Wireless Innovation Act of 2007. This bill is essentially the same excellent bill to force the FCC to open up the White Spaces that Kerry, Allen (now no longer in the Senate), Boxer and Sunnunu introduced in 2006 and was later incorporated into the Stevens Bill.

The bill requires the FCC to complete its pending rulemaking on the broadcast white spaces and allocate the use for unlicensed spectrum. Given that the FCC has shifted into reverse on this and has decided to reexplore the licensed v. unlicensed question, it’s nice to see folks on the Hill pushing for this.

Stay tuned . . . .

Sounds like good advice, Harold.

 

JK spoke out on two major small business-related events, one local and one national.

At the local event he did more than speak out, he sponsored the event and spoke at it. There was lots of excitement in the air at the second Massachusetts Procurement Conference and Business Expo for small business owners held on Friday in Boston.

TV station NECN has a great video news story about it. The Boston Globe reported that JK, “Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino pledged their support for small businesses on Friday, concluding a daylong conference between suppliers and businessmen with pledges to help their [sic] foster their growth. ‘Small business is where the action is,’ declared Kerry, who is chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, and who arranged the second annual gathering at Northeastern University.”

In a separate statement on Thursday, JK spoke out about the SBA’s management woes. The New York Times reported:

The federal government’s biggest program to help people rebuild after natural disasters is on the verge of running out of operating money because of budgeting problems at the agency that runs it, the Small Business Administration.

[...]

In the Senate, Democrats have proposed major changes to the disaster assistance program, including allowing banks to make disaster loans, rather than funneling them all through the S.B.A.’s staff.

“The administration mismanaged the response to Katrina from Day 1,” Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and the new chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, said in a statement yesterday. “We need legislation to overhaul the program and make it work efficiently for every business owner and homeowner in the country.”

So what happened? Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report has a blog post which provides a little more background, albeit somewhat more irreverently than the Times. <!-more->

Here’s the deal:  the Small Business Administration decided not to ask Congress for any money to pay for running the disaster program in the 2006 fiscal year, because there was a little money left over from 2005. When some disasters struck, and some small businesses needed to rely on the disaster aid, the SBA ran into financial trouble. Now it wants a congressional bailout. As the NYT noted, the problem “highlighted a continuing pattern of mismanagement and poor planning at the S.B.A.”

How could this happen? Who’s running this agency? I’m glad you asked.

When the White House needed someone to head the Small Business Administration, he first turned to Hector Barreto, a former Republican fundraiser who had no experience or relevant qualifications. As is usually the case with Bush’s partisan cronies, the SBA was mismanaged and slammed for its poor performance, particularly in response to disaster loans.

Barreto eventually resigned, giving Bush the opportunity to find a more qualified nominee. Instead, the president went with another crony.

[Businessweek:]   Steven Preston, the little-known lawn-maintenance executive the White House tapped…to replace Hector Barreto at the helm of the Small Business Administration is stirring up some industry advocates. They say the Chicago businessman and Bush loyalist is no friend of theirs….

resume shows he has no experience as an entrepreneur and comes from a company with a reputation as a bully among some small-business owners.

Preston is a self-described “committed Republican,” which apparently was the principal qualification for the job. Put it this way, Bush’s choice to head the Small Business Administration “does not have experience running a small business.”

Now, we’re seeing the consequences of the decision….Paul Krugman noted a while back that recent history “shows that a president who isn’t serious about governing, who prizes loyalty and personal connections over competence, can quickly reduce the government of the world’s most powerful nation to third-world levels of ineffectiveness.”

Krugman was referring to FEMA, but it’s a description that could apply to so many agencies.

Thanks Steve for adding a little reality into the background on this story.

Finally, in another SBA-related story, the NAACP announced that it’s joining a discrimination lawsuit against the SBA “for discriminatory practices in the SBA’s Small Business Investment Corporation (SBIC) program.”

Diamond Ventures, an Atlanta-based partnership, filed a $100 Million discrimination lawsuit against the SBA in 2003…claiming the SBA improperly denied its application for an SBIC license and subjected Diamond to unusual standards. The agency’s Inspector General reported that, in Diamond’s case, the SBA violated its own regulations for assessing the application.

[...]

Since filing its suit against the SBA, Diamond has won a series of district court decisions, including a request for SBA’s records on SBIC applications and licensure practices, particularly for minority applicants. Diamond’s attorneys will begin analysis this week of the documents of firms that applied and were licensed by SBA.

The agency has similarly shrugged off calls for compliance by both Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the new chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, a member of the Senate Finance Committee.

In a February 2006 letter to SBA Administrator Hector Baretto, Kerry attacked the abysmal distribution of dollars to minority and women owned firms, citing his “disappointment” at the continuing trend. Hatch asked former Administrator Baretto to address the “concerns…beyond the pursuit of litigation.” Allegedly, Baretto largely ignored both senators and SBA’s new administrator has not responded to the inquiries.

So, sounds like it’s definitely time for some changes at the SBA and JK is on the job.