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Democratic Central
Progressive blogging in Central Virginia
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Mon May 12, 2008 at 17:04:42 PM EDT
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From the Tom Perriello campaign:With events in Danville, Collinsville, and Charlottesville, the Perriello for Congress campaign launched its volunteer tithing initiative, unprecedented for a political campaign. The campaign will tithe 10% of all its volunteer hours to community service projects around the district. The campaign has logged more than 1,700 volunteer hours in total; over the weekend, volunteers kicked off the initiative by tithing 42 volunteer hours and moving forward, will tithe 10% of its hours.
"I was raised to believe that a strong faith is a lived faith that must be made clear by our deeds. I want my campaign for Congress to reflect those same values," said Tom Perriello. "That is why we are asking our campaign team to commit 10% of their volunteer hours to local charities to reflect the value of service to community and to country."
Perriello campaign volunteers launched the volunteer tithing initiative in three locations around the district. In Charlottesville, volunteers worked on constructing a house for Habitat for Humanity. In Collinsville, they brought groceries to the local post office for the "Stamp Out Hunger" food drive. In Danville, they served food to the hungry at a local church.
Tom Perriello is the Democratic candidate for Virginia's fifth congressional district. Born and raised in the district, he is a national security analyst and has founded faith-based organizations.
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Mon May 12, 2008 at 16:40:32 PM EDT
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| At Bloomberg, they actually talked to some people who know these things, and here is what they tell us about campaign finance law:
1. A provision of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law says that candidates who drop out of the race cannot raise money after the nominating conventions to repay themselves for personal loans. Hillary Clinton has loaned her campaign $11.5 million; if she can't pay it back between now and then, she'll just have to eat it.
2. The Obama campaign can't give the Clinton campaign significant money; the best that they can do is to ask their supporters to give the Clinton campaign money. Obama supporters who have maxed out to Obama may be willing and able to do so. It is highly unlikely that Obama would ask his smaller donors to do so.
In the past, victorious candidates have helped their vanquished opponents pay off campaign debts. Supporters of Clinton, helped Tom Vilsack after he dropped out of the race last year. And McCain's backers gave to Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a failed Republican contender.
3. There is one tricky -- though legal -- tactic Clinton could use to pay off debts to others, though not to herself.
Through March 31, she had collected $23 million in donations designated for the general election. This represented roughly 10,000 donors who gave her the maximum of $2,300 for the primary season and another $2,300 for the general election. Campaign finance law requires that the money received that has to be used for the general election must be identified and kept separate from the primary money, and that it must be returned to the donors if the candidate does not get the nomination.
Hillary could ask those donors to redirect the contributions toward her 2012 Senate re-election campaign rather than the 2008 presidential race. The Senate campaign could then pay off the current debt to vendors and consultants, including her campaign manager, Mark Penn, to whom she owed $4.5 million through March 31.
In the past, such donations could have also gone to pay back a candidate's personal loans. The 2002 law, which banned corporate, union and unlimited individual contributions to campaigns, put a stop to that. It limited such repayments to $250,000.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/... |
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Mon May 12, 2008 at 16:14:58 PM EDT
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From Delegate David Toscano -- In anticipation of Amtrak National Train Day on May 10th, Delegate David J. Toscano announced several significant rail initiatives that will likely affect the Charlottesville/Albemarle area. First, the recently passed state budget includes $2.2 million in new money per year for major roadbed improvements to the CSX railroad lines operated by the Buckingham Branch, which serve passenger rail from Washington to Chicago through Charlottesville. "If we can improve the roadbed, we can increase the speed and efficiency of trains, thereby providing a higher level of customer service to Amtrak passengers," Toscano said. "This funding represents a major investment in this process." The Rail Enhancement Fund, created by Governor Warner, will receive $26 million in fiscal year 2009 and continuing appropriations in the future. This fund directs investments to freight and passenger rail improvements that will have significant public benefits. The Rail Preservation Program, which benefits Short Line carriers, will receive $3 million.
Second, the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT) will complete a Statewide Rail Plan by July 2008 which will include considerations of improved passenger service and a process for determining the appropriate balance of resource allocation between the movement of freight and passengers on Virginia's rail system. Citizens are encouraged to comment on the plan. These recommendations shall be completed no later than September 30, 2008. The final report will be submitted to House and Senate Committees by December 15, 2008.
Third, DPRT and Amtrak have identified two potential opportunities to expand passenger service in Virginia. One of these is the corridor from Lynchburg to Washington DC. It has an estimated ridership of 33,100 per year and would require $1,863,000 yearly for operations. Delegate Toscano is working with representatives up and down the Lynchburg-Washington DC corridor to gather support for funding of this initiative.
"This is an exciting time to be closely involved in increasing rail service in the Commonwealth," Toscano stated. "Rising fuel prices have placed more emphasis on our need to establish and expand our ability to move both people and freight economically and efficiently. A stronger rail system would help get both passenger cars and freight trucks off the roads and would encourage tourism and economic growth in areas served by the new trains." |
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Mon May 12, 2008 at 08:00:00 AM EDT
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| The Battle of Palmito Ranch, also known as the Battle of Palmito Hill and the Battle of Palmeto Ranch, was fought on May 12 - May 13, 1865, during the American Civil War. In the kaleidoscope of events following the surrender of Robert E. Lee's army on April 9, Palmito Ranch was nearly ignored. It was the last major clash of arms in the war.
Early in 1865, the two sides had made a gentlemen's agreement that, in Texas at least, there was no point to further hostilities. By that time, most Union troops had pulled out from Texas for campaigns in the east. The Confederates sought to protect their remaining ports for cotton sales to Europe, as well as importation of supplies, but they were basically cut off from the rest of the Confederacy by the fact that the Union forces controlled the Mississippi all the way down to the Gulf. Texas was largely irrelevant, and the Texans were, for the most part, glad to be out of the war. They could go back to farming and smuggling and making money. The Mexicans tended to side with the Confederates due to a lucrative smuggling trade.
Why the needless battle even happened remains something of a mystery. Neither local exports of cotton nor Mexican smuggling had a significant effect on the war.
Union commander Col. Theodore H. Barrett had seen little to no combat during the war, and some historians believe that he wanted to bolster his political desires after the war by establishing a reputation as a war hero, possibly reasoning that most of the opposing candidates he would likely later face during an election would most likely be former military men.
Col. Barrett and his men were stationed at Brazos Santiago, a coastal encampment that was nominally there to guard the entrance to the Rio Grande. It is about 10 miles from Brownsville, Texas. Barrett sent out an expedition, composed of 250 men of the 62nd U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment and 50 men of the 2nd Texas Cavalry Regiment under the command of Lt. Col. David Branson, to the mainland, on May 11, 1865, to attack reported Rebel outposts and camps. They were delayed by foul weather, and their attack was greatly delayed.
At 2:00 a.m. on May 12, the force surrounded the Rebel outpost at White's Ranch, but found no one there. Exhausted from hiking through the storm all day and half the night, Branson had his men hide themselves in a thicket and among weeds on the banks of the Rio Grande and allowed his men to sleep. Around 8:30 a.m., people on the Mexican side of the river informed the Rebels of the Federals' whereabouts. Branson promptly led his men off to attack a Confederate camp at Palmito Ranch. After much skirmishing along the way, the Federals attacked the camp and scattered the Confederates, most of whom were simply surprised to learn that there was fighting to be done in the area. The Confederates were still under the impression that whatever may have been happening in other parts of the Confederacy, they had informally agreed not to fight in Texas.
Branson and his men remained at the site to feed themselves and their horses, but the appearance that afternoon of a a larger Confederate force caused the Federals to retire back to White's Ranch.
Branson sent to Barrett for reinforcements, and Barrett led 200 men to the battle at daybreak on the 13th. The augmented force, now commanded by Barrett, started back towards Palmito Ranch, skirmishing most of the way. At Palmito Ranch, they destroyed the rest of the supplies not torched the day before and continued on. Having no particular strategic objective, and having no reason to be out getting shot at, when the Confederates brought up some artillery, the Union soldiers decided to head back to their encampment at Brazos Santiago, getting back at 4:00 am, on the 14th.
This was the last battle in the Civil War. Native, African, and Hispanic Americans were all involved in the fighting. Many combatants reported that firing came from the Mexican shore and that some Imperial Mexican forces crossed the Rio Grande but did not take part in the battle. These reports are unproven.
There were 118 Union casualties. Confederate casualties were "a few dozen" wounded, none killed. Like the war's first big battle at First Bull Run, which also yielded little gain for either side, the battle is recorded as a Confederate victory. Texas armies formally surrendered on May 26, 1865; Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered his forces in the Trans-Mississippi Department on June 2.
Private John J. Williams of the 34th Indiana Volunteer Infantry was the last man killed at the Battle at Palmito Ranch, and probably the last combat casualty of the war. Fighting in the battle were white, African, Hispanic and Native American troops. Reports of shots from the Mexican side are unverified, though many witnesses reported firing from the Mexican shore. |
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Sun May 11, 2008 at 12:00:00 PM EDT
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God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place...[God will say:] And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power. When this whole Jeremiah Wright business broke, I heard some white commentators longing for the good old days of black preachers who were more responsible, who didn't hate America, who were the "right kind" of preacher. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. Why can't Wright be more like Martin Luther King, they asked?
Well, he is.
The quote above is from Dr. King. From the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church on February 4, 1968, talking about the war in Vietnam. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Wright may have been off the wall on the Centers for Disease Control and HIV/AIDS, but he is very much a part of the mainstream of black preachers in his criticism of U.S. foreign policy.
Do the people who wish that Wright were more like King know King that well? Or are they dealing with a sanitized view of Dr. King gained from watching 45 second snatches of the "I Have a Dream" speech?
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Sun May 11, 2008 at 08:00:00 AM EDT
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| Daniel Ellsberg was an American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers. He was prosecuted for releasing the information, and in September, 1971, while charges were pending against him, government agents broke into the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, hoping to find evidence that they could use against Ellsberg. On May 11, 1973, the U.S. District Court Judge presiding over the Ellsberg trial, William Matthew Byrne, dismissed all charges against him, based on governmental misconduct.
Ellsberg had a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard, and then he served as a company commander in the Marine Corps for two years. When he finished his stint in the Marines, he became an analyst at the RAND Corporation.
Contrary to the later mythology that the Republicans and supporters of the Vietnam War tried to set forth, Ellsberg was a committed Cold Warrior. When American troops went to Vietnam, he went to the Pentagon as a civilian. He was on duty on the evening of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, reporting it to McNamara. He then served for two years in Vietnam as a civilian in the State Department, and became convinced that the Vietnam War was unwinnable. He further believed that nearly everyone in the Defense and State Departments felt, as he did, that the United States had no realistic chance of achieving victory in Vietnam, but that political considerations prevented them from saying so publicly. McNamara and others continued to state in press interviews that victory was "just around the corner." As the war continued to escalate, Ellsberg became deeply disillusioned.
After returning from Vietnam, Ellsberg went back to work at the Rand Corp. As a Vietnam expert, he was invited, in 1967, to contribute to a top-secret study of classified documents regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War that McNamara had commissioned. These documents, officially compiled as "The History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on the Vietnam Policy," later became known collectively as the Pentagon Papers. Because he held an extremely high-level security clearance, Ellsberg was one of the very few individuals who had access to the complete set of documents. They revealed that the government knew, early on, that the war would not likely be won. The papers showed that high-ranking officials had a deep cynicism toward the public and no concern for the loss of life and injury suffered by soldiers and civilians.
The report was completed on January 15, 1969, but was not made public. Ellsberg hoped that a new Nixon Administration might be willing to release the report, since it put the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations in a very bad light.
But on September 26, 1969, Ellsberg became persuaded that Nixon was not interested in seeing the truth come out either. Six Green Berets were accused of murdering a South Vietnamese interpreter, Thai Khac Chuyen, whom they believed was a North Vietnamese collaborator. The Green Berets killed Chuyen and dropped his body in the South China Sea. The CIA, irate at the murder, alerted senior military officials, and the Army began courts-martial proceedings against the six. However, the White House convinced CIA Director Richard Helms not to let any of his agents testify at the trials; without their testimony, the Secretary of the Army decided that the trials could not continue. White House press secretary Ron Ziegler told reporters that "[t]he president had not involved himself either in the original decision to prosecute the men or in the decision to drop the charges against them."
Ellsberg was horrified; he was convinced that President Nixon and his aides were indeed involved in the decision to stop the CIA from testifying in the case. He had access to the report; a RAND safe contained one of only fifteen copies of that document. Ellsberg and his friend Anthony Russo got access to a Xerox copying machine, and they began secretly making their own copies of the document. |
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Sat May 10, 2008 at 13:52:43 PM EDT
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Matt Stoller just wrote a very interesting article about Obama's efforts behind the scenes and in front of the scenes to consolidate the levers of the various party actors and interdependent progressive groups.
It is a very fascinating read, no, a must read. I do not know how I feel about some of the things that they are doing, but nonetheless they have a very concise and almost shockingly deep strategy.
One thing is for sure, this is not going to be the Kerry campaign where they were still trying to figure out what states they were going to contest in September and still working on their messaging in October.
Key quote:
The primary has been exceptionally good for party building. Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.
You know all that old-style Washington politics preventing real change? As hard as it might be to handle, in a lot of ways he means that those of us who believe in partisan hard edged combat are part of an outmoded system. It doesn't actually divide cleanly; old hand Tom Daschle is a key figure and likely to be Obama's chief of staff, and Artur Davis is likely to be his Attorney General. These are old school Democrats, and Obama's machine is full of the Congressional wing of the party that lost out in 1992 to Clinton and his people.
This isn't a criticism; again, Obama made his bet that the country isn't into ideological combat and wants a politics of unity and hope, and he has won at internally. In terms of the 'Iron Law of Institutions', the Obama campaign is masterful. From top to bottom, they have destroyed their opponents within the party, stolen out from under them their base, and persuaded a whole set of individuals from blog readers to people in the pews to ignore intermediaries and believe in Barack as a pure vessel of change. It's actually very similar to Clinton from 1994-2000, where power and money in the Democratic Party is being centralized around a key iconic figure. He's consolidating power within the party.
Go read this article:
http://openleft.com/showDiary.... |
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Sat May 10, 2008 at 10:32:22 AM EDT
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| John McCain has a problem with abortion.
The national polls have, for the last 10 years at least, shown that the hard-line, "all abortion should be illegal" approach garners at most 20% support. http://www.pollingreport.com/a... Polls have been remarkably consistent -- about 20% believe abortion should always be illegal; about 25% believe that abortion should be illegal except in certain limited cases (the question doesn't ask, but rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother are the usual cases). About 55% believe that abortion should generally be legal; the breakdown between "always" and "almost always" usually comes down to limitations on how long into the pregnancy the abortion should be permitted. Republicans are not much different; a CBS/New York Times poll taken in 2003 found that only 28% of Republicans were totally anti-abortion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Between 60% and 70% of those polled would oppose reversing Roe v. Wade. http://volokh.com/posts/113719...
McCain has not been as staunchly anti-abortion as his fundy friends would want. In 2000, in a debate with then-Governor George W. Bush, they clashed very directly over the fact that he wanted the Republican Party platform changed from "no abortion ever" to "abortion is OK in the case of rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother." http://abcnews.go.com/Video/pl... In an April 14, 2007, appearance, he reiterated his view that the Republican platform should be changed. http://blogs.abcnews.com/polit...
Of course, the Republican platform has not been changed, and it is extremely unlikely that it will be. That means that McCain will have a tough position to take in the fall. It seems pretty clear that McCain is not going to change his position; first, it would be very hard to do at this point without seeming ridiculous. Second, it wouldn't pick up any votes. No one who thinks that the Republican platform is worth bleeding and dying over is even thinking of voting for Barack Obama. BUT -- those who bleed and die over the Republican platform are the hardcore campaign workers. -- the folks who go door-to-door in battleground states, who make the phone calls, etc. If they decide that there are fish in ponds calling their names on a September afternoon, they won't be making phone calls.
My prediction is that McCain will NOT flip on this (the ABC News headline to the contrary notwithstanding -- http://abcnews.go.com/Politics... ), that he will NOT push for the change, that he will NOT make a platform fight, and that he will instruct his delegates to say little or nothing about the abortion plank.
The fact is that what matters is not the overall opinion polls, but a very small subset of the numbers -- a subset that the pollsters rarely check on, but which matters a great deal to politicians.
The question is whether abortion is a "salient" issue. Is it an issue on which voters will decide how to vote? And the fact is that abortion is a salient issue for only the people at the extremes of the debate. Here are the only political questions that matter:
1. If you were otherwise inclined to vote for John McCain, would the fact that he supports the right to have an abortion if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or if it was necessary to protect the life of the mother, cause you to vote for Barack Obama instead? Best guess -- very few of the voters would say "Yes."
2. If you were otherwise inclined to vote for Barack Obama, would the fact that John McCain supports the right to have an abortion if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or if it was necessary to protect the life of the mother, cause you to vote for John McCain instead? I suspect that the answer is that no more than a handful of people would say "Yes." A group called Republican Majority for Choice tries to argue that McCain must change the platform: "If he doesn't change the platform, then he's being the same kind of hypocrite that he accused Bush of being in 2000," said Jennifer Blei Stockman, the co-chairwoman of Republican Majority for Choice. "To not accept abortion in cases of rape and incest, give me a break. That's sick. That's inhumane."
"And the life of the mother?" she added. "These are things that we can't even put our arms around because they are so inhumane." But do they vote for Barack Obama instead? I doubt it.
3. If you knew that John McCain had supported the right of a woman to have an abortion if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or if it was necessary to protect the life of the mother, but that under pressure from the fundamentalist Christians he changed this long-held opinion to pick up some political support, would this cause you to be more likely to vote for Barack Obama instead? I suspect that the answer, for a LOT of people, would be "Yes."
McCain has built this reputation (ill-deserved) as a "maverick" based on his supposed willingness to buck his party's establishment. He would be throwing that reputation right down a rathole if he changed his political position on this. Politically, it is not a bad thing for him to say to Parsley and Hagee and others, "This is as good as you are going to get this election cycle; get over it." |
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| Mad About Gas Prices? |
High gas and oil prices are brought to you by Virgil Goode. We can't really promise that Tom Perriello will bring lower gas and oil prices, but he certainly can't do worse.
To find cheap gas in your area, click on the image and go to the site...
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