Massachusetts: Get Fired Up and Vote!
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Monthly Archives: January 2010
Letter From Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I post the the link to his inspirational Letter From the Birmingham Jail.
I have heard about the letter, but this is the first opportunity that I have had to actually read it.
It was sent to me in a request for aid to Haiti from Progressives For Haiti. As with all things like this that I post, this link is only for informational purposes. Of course you decide whether or not to follow the link. If you do follow the link, you decide what to do in response to the information you find there.
Obama Aid to Yemen Could Risk Backlash in Arab World
Follow this link to the story posted on the McClatchyDC web site.
This just adds to the story in my previous post Dire Situation In Yemen.
I never thought I could imagine it, but now I can. Someday, I can see President Obama standing before a press conference saying, “Why do they hate us so?”
The news story finally hit me over the head with the obvious. The attack on the U.S. Navy ship Cole, was perpetrated in Yemen. That I knew. It just didn’t strike me forcefully enough how long has been our record of trouble with Yemen, how connected this was with Gitmo prisoners from Yemen, and the al-Qaida bomb plot hatched in Yemen. Previously, I had carelessly said that al-Qaida has moved their operations from Afghanistan/Pakistan to Yemen. The point is that they have had an operation in Yemen for a long time. They didn’t just move it there.
The discussion in the Coakley/Brown/Kennedy debate is sounding better and better on Coakley’s part. Let me take up where I left off in a previous post with David Gergen’s question.
- Gergen:
- Would you then send troops into Yemen where al-Qaida is?
- Coakley:
- No, That’s exactly the point. This is not about sending troops everywhere we think al-Qaida may be or where they are training. We have all kinds of resources at our disposal including CIA, our allies who work with us. The focus should be getting the appropriate information on individuals who are trained who represent a threat to us and use the force necesary to go after those individuals.
34:30
- Brown:
- Let me explain once again what the mission is. The mission is to make sure that the Taliban and al-Qaida do not join forces, move on Pakistan, get nuclear weapons, and export them around the world number 1. And to think that al-Qaida is not everywhere we’re talking about and we should not be going and addressing these very real concerns is naive.
- Coakley:
- I think it is naive to think that we have the troops to send everywhere and they are the best way to go after people who are terrorists who disappear into the night who do trainings and who get on planes frankly with bombs in their shoes and other pieces of clothing.
Maybe we need Martha Coakley to go to Washington to explain a better way to fight this war with al-Qaida in a way that does not build an even larger force of terrorists who hate us.
Thomas Geoghegan argues (persuasively) that the filibuster is unconstitutional 3
In Thomas Geoghegan’s 11 January 2010 op-ed in the NY Times (Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution) argues that the Senate’s use of the filibuster subverts the U.S. Constitution and the intent of our Founding Fathers.
[T]he Senate, as it now operates, really has become unconstitutional: as we saw during the recent health care debacle, a 60-vote majority is required to overcome a filibuster and pass any contested bill. The founders, though, were dead set against supermajorities as a general rule, and the ever-present filibuster threat has made the Senate a more extreme check on the popular will than they ever intended. (…) [The filibuster is] a revision of Article I itself: not used to cut off debate, but to decide in effect whether to enact a law. The filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.
Read Geoghegan’s analysis of Article I and the Federalist Papers. He then continues,
So on the health care bill, as on so many other things, we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.
He suggests several approaches to dispensing with the procedural filibuster.
If the House passed a resolution condemning the use of the procedural filibuster, it might begin to strip the supermajority of its spurious legitimacy. It’s the House that has been the great victim of the filibuster, and at least with such a resolution that chamber could express the grievance of the people as a whole against this usurpation by a minority in the Senate.
The president of the Senate, the vice president himself, could issue an opinion from the chair that the filibuster is unconstitutional. Our first vice presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, felt a serious obligation to resolve the ties and tangles of an evenly divided Senate, and they would not have shrunk from such a challenge.
We citizens could also demand that our parties stop financially supporting senators who are committed to the filibuster, and we ourselves could deprive them of fund-raising dollars.
And we needn’t rule out the possibility of a Supreme Court case. Surely, the court would not allow the Senate to ignore either the obvious intent of the Constitution.
Whether any such approach works, the founders would have expected us to do something about this unconstitutional filibuster. In Federalist No. 75, Hamilton denounced the use of supermajority rule in these prophetic words: “The history of every political establishment in which this principle has prevailed is a history of impotence, perplexity and disorder.” That is a suitable epitaph for what has happened to the Senate.
-RichardH
Volunteer for Martha Coakley
In the video below, President Obama explains why we should volunteer for and support Martha Coakley.
Follow this link to the request from the President for action on our part.
Monday night I made calls from a phone bank in Worcester to urge voters to go to the polls and vote for Martha Coakley. As many of my friends may know, I normally do not really like to use the telephone. I made this exception, because I thought it was that important. These phone banks continue until the election in case you want to give it a try too.
Consider How Well We’ve Done Against Terrorism Since 2001
Follow this link to the commentary by Mark W. Lowenthal posted on the McClatchyDC web site.
Mark M. Lowenthal is the president of the Intelligence & Security Academy. From 2002-2005, he was the Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production.
He makes the point that I have made several times that fixing the failure to analyze massive amounts of data is not done by increasing the amount of data.
Our efforts to get more data remind me of an old Sesame Street routine.
Customer: I’ll have bacon and eggs and orange juice for breakfast.
Server: We don’t have orange juice.
Customer: Then I’ll have cereal and orange juice
Server: We don’t have orange juice.
Customer: Then I’ll have pancakes and orange juice
Server: We don’t have orange juice
.
.
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Martha Coakley Nails It In The Debate
I first posted the link to the final debate video in my post on this blog titled Final Debate in Massachusetts Senatorial Special Election.
On the Worcester T & G message board, I got into a discussion about something that Coakley said during the debate.
The anti-Coakley crowd pounced on what they thought was a big gaffe. We argued over exactly what she said, but until this morning I had not understood exactly how good her comment actually was.
The conversation with the moderator, David Gergen went something like this (as well as I could transcribe it):
Coakley: If the goal was and the mission in Afghanistan was to go in because we believed the Taliban was giving harbor to terrorists, we supported that. I supported that goal. They’re gone. They are not there any more. They are in Yemen, apparently Pakistan. Let’s focus our efforts in where al-Qaida is and not …
Gergen: Would you then send troops into Yemen where al-Qaida is?
We went into Afghanistan because al-Qaida had a safe haven there and they used it to plot the attack on 9/11. We wanted to eliminate the people who planned and helped carry out this attack.
So now, we are bogged down with thousands of troops in Afghanistan out of the fear that al-Qaeda might come back to Afghanistan if we left there. Did anybody but Martha Coakley make the connection that the failed Christmas bomb plot was similar to what drove us to Afghanistan, but it did not come from Afghanistan? The plot was hatched in Yemen.
The plot could have been foiled by good intelligence and police work instead of using our military, but it was not foiled that way.
Perhaps we have our focus in the wrong place. Well, what do you know, that is what Martha Coakley said.
Good out of the box thinking Martha. Prior to this exchange I had been a reluctant supporter of President Obama’s plan to escalate the troops in Afghanistan. Now I am beginning to have third thoughts. While we worry about al-Qaida’s possible return to Afghanistan, they have already moved their base of operations. A military response to al-Qaida is never going to be nimble enough to get the job done.
Which Way To Sturbridge
Follow this link to the Worcester T & G article Brown says Coakley not tax-cut candidate – – Kennedy wants deep spending reductions.
I particularly liked the comment:
Some of the questions were like,
If you were trying to travel from MIT in Cambridge to Sturbridge, should you have turned right or left at the Canadian border?Brown and Kennedy argued over the direction. Coakley made the mistake of trying to explain what was wrong with the premise of the question.
She would have been better off by going back to the basics and explaining that you just get on the Mass Turnpike, head west, and get off at the Sturbridge exit.
The fact that I posted that comment has nothing to do with my liking it, of course. 🙂
Open Letter To Coakley Campaign
I am sorry to say that I found the last debate very unsatisfying. I was very hard pressed to think how Martha Coakley could have handled the two bozos without coming off looking like Al Gore correcting George Bush.
I finally think I figured out what the problem is. Brown and Kennedy are throwing out so much junk that it would take anyone longer to explain what is wrong with what they are saying than it would take to just explain what is right with what the Democrats and Coakley herself are trying to accomplish.
Rather than refute what either of the other two had to say by referencing anything they had to say, she need to explain how the plans are going to work. She did squeeze in a little of how the Health Care plan and the rescuing of the economy are tied together. How fixing the health care system will save money and help business to prosper by taking off some of the burden of the cost of supplying health care insurance to their employees.
Incidentally she would be touching on all the points to knock down what Brown or Kennedy are saying.
She could talk about how a healthy economy is boosted by business doing what they are supposed to do and government doing what it is supposed to do. There are investments such as education, helping funding basic research, building and maintaining infrastructure, and formulating and enforcing laws and regulations that are what the government does. If government doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain, then businesses has a very difficult time doing what they should be focusing on. During the past decade we have been underfunding the government end of things (except for over funding war). Things are getting out of balance and need to be put back in balance.
She could dominate the conversation and keep the other bozos from interjecting their craziness. Once you let them set the message, it is very hard to get it back. The other candidates could be forced to talk on her terms about what is wrong with her explanation. Then they would be suffering the problem that she is now suffering.
Final Debate in Massachusetts Senatorial Special Election
Follow this link to the final debate in the Massachusetts Senate special election.
I think it was a pretty useless debate myself.
Scott Brown spouting numbers that he either doesn’t understand or if he does, he does not want you to understand.
There is not much Martha Coakley can do without coming off looking like Al Gore correcting George Bush. We know how well that turned out. She is the successful politician, I am not. I just hope she knows the best way to handle the other two bozos.
There is hardly a need to say much about Joseph Kennedy. He knows so little about how the economy works or what power a single Senator bucking the other 99 Senators has, that he might as well run for Senator of Alice’s Wonderland.
The only hope is that the electorate is smart enough not to want to be bamboozled by such foolishness.
The poll numbers seem to be showing that except for the readers of the Worcester T & G, the voters of Massachusetts have this figured out.