President's Message
The wake up call we received when the Primary Election results were published is that the Republicans are energized and raring to get out and vote. In the Senate, we have one Democrat running against two Republicans.
Too many Democrats are saying that Meek can’t win so we should vote for Crist. To maintain Democratic control of the Senate, we need 50 Democratic senators. By abandoning Meek, we insure the loss of a vital senate seat.
If, worst case scenario, the Republicans take back the majority in the Senate, Charlie Crist will jump out of his moderate costume and back into his old Republican self. Don’t be fooled. A few vetoes made in his frantic chase for votes cannot negate a lifetime of far right, anti-Choice, anti-Educations stands.
In the Governor’s race, Alex Sink will face Republican, Rick Scott who is famous for having been CEO of the Columbia Hospitals corporation when they had to pay a huge fine to the federal government for having stolen billions of dollars from Medicare by fraud. Our role is clear. Our September Get Out the Vote Meeting is the chance to talk with the candidates and set our agendas for the final push. High turnout insures victory.
We have to energize Democrats and that large group of small or no party voters to get out and vote for our Democratic candidates. Many of the first-time 2008 voters have to get to the polls. They were a critical group in turning Florida blue and electing Obama.
I know that every member and friend of this club will vote. Let’s extend ourselves to help give others a reason to vote the entire Democratic ballot. We worked very hard to get Amendments 5 and 6, basically anti-gerrymandering amendments, onto the ballot. Now we have to insure that we get the 60% of the vote needed to pass them.
“Activism need not be a profession in itself. It can be in the writing of a letter to the editor or to your congressperson; it can be in taking part in a local action or a national one or for that matter, a worldwide one; it can be in attending a rally or marching in a parade; it can be in any form, freely expressing your grievance or your hope.”
Studs Terkel
Palm Beach Democratic Club
PO Box 665
Palm Beach, FL 33480
* Name
* E-Mail
Address
City, State, Zip
Get Active & Stay Active
ALERTS:
9/3/10 Constitutional Amendments on November Ballot: YES on 5 & 6....NO on all others
8/4/10 Congrtessional Committee on lowering deficit has SocialSecurity & Medicare on chopping block but not the war.
6/17/10 74 Democrats sold you out by signing an indusrty-backed letter telling the FCC to abandon 
efforts to protect internet traffic. Sign the petition at credoaction
efforts to protect internet traffic. Sign the petition at credoaction"Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom."
Jim Hightower
Let's work together to move the Democratic Party back to its job of representing the people who worked to put them in office.
We need 2 parties in America.
A Win....Now we have to consolidate.
The Fair Districts petitions were successful and will appear on the November 2010 ballot as Amendemnt 5 and Amendment 6. Get the word out to vote the entire ballot.
YES on 5 & 6....NO on all others.
Get Active & Stay Active
We must complete our voter file update. Please help. The usual time you need to spend is 20 minutes to a half hour.
You will be saving the national, state, county and local Democratic Parties a huge amount of sorely needed money. If we don’t do the update, our mailings will be sent to people no longer in our area. That is wasted postage and printing costs.
Have you requested your ‘Absentee/Vote at Home Ballot’ yet? If there’s a storm or the car won’t start or you have a cold, you may not be able to get to the poll. Be safe. Phone 656-6200 ext: 2 or request it on the internet: http://www.pbcelections.org
Remember that the Primary is on August 24th. There are some important races which will be decided in the primary. Next month we will publish the names of those running in the primary. There may also be extremely important amendments then. The Republicans in Tallahassee like to place amendments on the primary ballot because fewer voters turn out. Don’t take a chance on losing your vote
Show Us the Money
So often are the certitudes and pronouncements of the chattering class simply mistaken that they must always be treated with deep skepticism. That is especially true when anything important is at stake, from the arguments for invading Iraq several years ago to today’s economic stagnation. Whatever the conventional wisdom tells you must be true is almost certainly false.
The choral complaint emanating from every mainstream-media outlet and the mouth of nearly every mainstream pundit is that the federal government is spending too much and that the public will not stand for it anymore. “We must bring deficits under control!” they tell us. “The American people distrust government because spending is out of control!” they cry. Rick Santelli, the loudest mouth on the CNBC business cable channel and a revered figure in the tea party movement screamed, “Stop spending!”
Demands for the government to stop spending usually come with a caveat: Stop spending on everyone except me. A self-styled conservative in Congress who hates spending will vote against extending unemployment benefits, then vote to protect federal subsidies to wealthy corporate farmers. Other conservatives fight against increased spending on mass transit, new schools or infrastructure, while promoting bloated weapons programs that the Pentagon doesn’t even want because the contractor has donated to their campaign or operates a manufacturing plant in their district. Cut spending, except on my priorities, no matter how wasteful.
The demands to slash government spending at this stage in the economic recovery are profoundly in error. While one pundit after another warns of the risks of growing deficits, none of those potential risks is imminent. Instead, the nation and the world face the risk of a renewed recession, worse than the last, just as the country sank into recession again in 1937, following the first signs of growth after the Great Depression. Corporate investment and consumer confidence aren’t nearly strong enough to provide the number of new jobs needed and only when employment begins to move sharply upward will revenues grow and deficits start to shrink.
Cutting spending is not just bad economics; it’s bad politics, too. The Obama administration’s stimulus spending last year was just enough to prevent the Great Recession from deepening into another depression, but not nearly enough to lift the country toward full recovery. Lacking the courage of their traditional convictions, the president and his Democratic Congress tried too hard to please the Republicans, the conservatives and the Washington press corps. Trimming the stimulus too much and refusing to push hard for a second round makes the Democrats look weak and leaves too many working families in distress.
The publicity about the tea party movement has fostered the misleading notion that most Americans oppose spending to put the country back to work. In fact, as Michael Lind pointed out recently in Salon.com, the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll shows that a substantial majority favor more spending rather than less. That survey reported 60% support “more government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy,” with fewer than 40 percent opposed.
For Democrats hoping to stem their expected November losses, that poll contained an important message. Fully 83% of Democratic voters and 52% of independents said they support a second round of stimulus spending while 61% of Republicans were opposed. The nearly 40% of Republicans who favor more spending are most likely to be white working-class males who have lost their jobs or fear losing them. Why are Democrats missing the opportunity to motivate their own base, while appealing to independents and disaffected Republican workers?
They are listening too closely to the conventional wisdom, that’s why—and as always, it is leading them in the wrong direction.
From truthdig article by Joe Conason
of The New York Observer.
Candidates for the McChrystal Treatment
From article by Robert Scheer
It’s time for the president to concede that the economy is at best stagnating and at worst about to take another steep nose dive. I don’t know if we are headed for another Great Depression, as Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman dared suggest, but it is clear that the Obama strategy, inherited from Bush, of bailing out Wall Street in the forlorn hope that it would repair the economic damage the fat cats inflicted on the rest of us has not worked.
The housing market remains in dire shape, and with it the nest eggs of Americans who are responding by squelching their appetite for consumption. The Wall Street hustlers were made whole, but not so the people whose home mortgages the banks are foreclosing, or businesses and their customers looking for the credit that the banks had promised to free up.
The president conceded that our economy is still 8 million jobs in the hole. With deficits running wild, Republicans get to claim that six months more of unemployment insurance to 1.7 million people whose benefits have ended is more than we can afford. A $34 billion outlay to people who would spend the money instead of using it as the big banks have done with far larger bailout funds. That the R’s are hypocritical when they say we don’t have the money to help ordinary folks but Obama has embraced GOP strategy. Failures of the bailouts to improve the economy, along with the cost of two wars, are now his problems.
We need hotshots, Geithner and Summers to grant damaging interviews to Rolling Stone. Perhaps then Obama would fire them. It is bizarre that the two who did so much to wreck the economy, were put in charge of salvaging it. Their records should have provided a warning that their economic outlook begins and ends with the demands of Wall Street. Geithner, as head of the NY Fed, led the $180 billion bailout of AIG, which the documented record of that travesty by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission revealed, was a scam to pass taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs and other large banks that had created the problem. And it was Clinton’s treasury secretary, Summers, who pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which guaranteed “legal certainty” for the toxic derivatives. He told Congress: “the parties to these kinds of contracts are sophisticated financial institutions that appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. …”
For that very convenient insight, Goldman Sachs rewarded Summers with $200,000 for 2 speeches he gave to its executives while he was advising candidate Obama. The new financial regulations proposed by this administration and soon to be signed into law let Goldman et al off the hook.
There is enormous, justifiable outrage out there over the antics of a runaway Wall Street that is not being held accountable. Obama could tap into that outrage by taking his cues from Russ Feingold, one of eight senators to vote against the Clinton-backed repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which protected the economy. Feingold voted against the Bush bailout and is now breaking with Obama on his so-called financial reform:
“The bill does not eliminate the risk to our economy posed by ‘too big to fail’ financial firms. It does not restore safeguards which separated Main Street banks from big Wall Street firms. The bill should have included reforms to prevent another crisis. Regrettably, it did not.” Obama’s record on the economy is even worse than his performance in Afghanistan. A reversal of course is much in order. If he doesn’t get the message now, the voters will give it to him loud and clear come the November midterm elections.
Only 41% of Americans Believe US Can ‘Win’
The nine-year conflict in Afghanistan has become “the forgotten war” for many Americans, a complaint increasingly heard among US troops there. But this week’s sacking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal puts Afghanistan – and especially how the fight against the Taliban is going – squarely back into public thought and concern.
Polls show that most Americans agree with Obama: McChrystal had to go, but they’re far less supportive of the conflict itself, weary of what’s become the longest war in US history. A plurality of 48 percent now say ending the war in Afghanistan is more important than winning.
Put another way, the percentage of Americans who disapprove of Obama’s Afghan policy has nearly doubled in four months. The same Newsweek poll finds that “46 percent of respondents think America is losing the war in Afghanistan (26 percent say the military is winning). A similar plurality think the US is losing the broader war on terrorism (43 percent vs. 29 percent)…”
Part of this has to do with the nature of a counterinsurgency (COIN) effort – a phrase and acronym which has been around at least since the early days of Vietnam. Even when it works, counterinsurgency can take years. The two most recent major examples – France in Algeria and the US in Vietnam – hardly worked. Hearts and minds must be won, not only in the war zone, but at home as well.
In naming Gen. David Petraeus as McChrystal’s replacement, President Obama emphasized that there would be no change in war policy or strategy. The goal is still to defeat the Taliban, develop Afghan army and police forces, and seriously consider withdrawing US forces in little more than a year from now. But as Tony Karon at time.com points out, “the mounting difficulties facing that strategy were certainly a primary driver of the internecine backstabbing that was laid bare by the Rolling Stone article that got McChrystal fired. Violence is on the increase, the Taliban is hardly in retreat, both Pakistan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai continue to hedge their bets, and NATO allies want out,” Karon writes.
“The idea that the war can be handed over to Afghan security forces anytime soon appears fanciful. And prospects for turning things around by next summer, the administration's putative target date to begin drawing down, are looking grim.”
Unsettled public opinion on the conflict in Afghanistan – where US combat casualties have been increasing – is reflected in Congress, which must approve war funding. “The president and congressional critics, long on a collision course over the war in Afghanistan, are hurtling ever faster toward each other since the ouster of Gen. McChrystal, and doves on Capitol Hill are feeling a little tougher right now,” reports Politico.
Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan predicts that conservatives may “start to peel off” as well. “Not Washington policy intellectuals but people on the ground in America,” she wrote this week. “There are many reasons for this. Their sons and nephews have come back from repeat tours full of doubts as to the possibility of victory, ‘whatever that is,’ as we all now say.”
Noonan continued: “The other day Sen. Lindsey Graham, in ostensibly supportive remarks, said that Gen. David Petraeus … ‘is our only hope.’ If he can't pull it out, ‘nobody can.’ That's not all that optimistic a statement.”
From a Brad Knickerbocker article in the
Christian Science Monitor
“It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it. “
Eleanor Roosevelt
What Eisenhower Could Teach Obama
In the Oval Office Pres. Eisenhower told his advisers, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Several months later, he issued his warning about the military-industrial complex.
Now the United States finds itself with no way out of increased military deployments and expenditures, and no evidence that President Obama has a firm hand on the national security tiller. A central problem for the nation is the increased power and influence of the Pentagon over the foreign and national security policies of the United States.
By contrast, Eisenhower ignored the hysteria of the bomber and missile gaps in the 1950s claimed by Senators Symington and Kennedy and key advisor Paul Nitze, chief author of the Gaither Report which called for unnecessary increases in the strategic arsenal.
Eisenhower ignored cries for increased defense spending. He cut the military budget by 20% between ‘53 and ‘55, balancing the budget by ‘56. He started no wars and clashed with the military mindset. He knew the generals were wrong in proclaiming “political will” as the major factor in military victory.
He would have shuddered when Gen. Petraeus proclaimed US political will as the key factor for success in Afghanistan. Eisenhower was willing to limit the military’s influence. All the presidents from Kennedy to GW Bush deferred to the military and often resorted to the use of power instead of diplomacy and statecraft.
Obama finds himself in a position where the military wields far too much influence on Capitol Hill, too much of our depleted Treasury; and has the leading policy voice. He would do well to take heed of the philosophy and advice of Eisenhower who understood America’s infatuation with military power.
Excerpt from article by Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College and the U.S. Army.
What Eisenhower Could Teach Obama
In the Oval Office Pres. Eisenhower told his advisers, “God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do.” Several months later, he issued his warning about the military-industrial complex.
Now the United States finds itself with no way out of increased military deployments and expenditures, and no evidence that President Obama has a firm hand on the national security tiller. A central problem for the nation is the increased power and influence of the Pentagon over the foreign and national security policies of the United States.
By contrast, Eisenhower ignored the hysteria of the bomber and missile gaps in the 1950s, claimed by Senators Symington and Kennedy and key advisor Paul Nitze, chief author of the Gaither Report which called for unnecessary increases in the strategic arsenal.
Eisenhower ignored cries for increased defense spending. He cut the military budget by 20% between ‘53 and ‘55, balancing the budget by ‘56. He started no wars and clashed with the military mindset. He knew the generals were wrong in proclaiming “political will” as the major factor in military victory.
He would have shuddered when Gen. Petraeus proclaimed US political will as the key factor for success in Afghanistan. Eisenhower was willing to limit the military’s influence. All the presidents from Kennedy to GW Bush deferred to the military and often resorted to the use of power instead of diplomacy and statecraft.
Obama finds himself in a position where the military wields far too much influence on Capitol Hill, too much of our depleted Treasury; and has the leading policy voice. He would do well to take heed of the philosophy and advice of Eisenhower who understood America’s infatuation with military power.
Excerpt from article by Melvin A. Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army.
Items Overlooked in Commercial Media
Where are our priorities? Just wondering about the waste of our funds in the War Without End. This is just one small example of the weakening of the fabric of our lives. Of the more than 600,000 bridges around the US, more than 25%, or 151,394 of them, have been declared either "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete" by the US Department of Transportation.
At the current rate of repair, it will take more than 150 years to fix them all. By then more will surely be in need of mending. This is just one small example of the weakening of the fabric of our lives. Happy motoring!
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service: "Contrary to a news media narrative that Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian nuclear weapons program, according to a former CIA officer.
Dahr Jamail, Truthout: "Gulf Coast fishermen and others with lost income claims against British Petroleum (BP) are outraged by a recent announcement that the $20 billion government-administered claim fund will subtract money they earn by working on the cleanup effort from any future damage claims against BP.
This move, according to lawyers in Louisiana working on behalf of Louisiana fishermen and others affected by the BP oil disaster, contradicts an earlier BP statement where the company promised it would do no such thing."
Let's give Congress our marching orders
by Jesse Jackson
Will the U.S. once more sacrifice economic justice at home for war abroad? Dr. King used to say that the bombs dropped over Vietnam exploded in America's cities. The war on poverty was lost in those jungles. And now? The war in Afghanistan is now in its eighth year. Vice President Joe Biden told "This Week" that our policy is "going to work," but "all of this is just beginning. And we knew it was going to be a tough slog," so "it's much too premature to make a judgment" about how we are faring.
Just the beginning after eight years? We are spending $100 billion a year on Afghanistan, with U.S. casualties rising, and with no noticeable progress on the ground. The government that we support is noted for its corruption and ineffectiveness. Our military is trying to do nation-building in a country whose warring tribes unite only to expel outsiders.
The drones releasing bombs over Afghanistan are falling on our cities here at home. More than 20 million workers are unemployed or underemployed. States and localities are facing another round of severe cuts, with some 300,000 teachers and educational workers about to face layoffs. Unemployment of young African-American men without college nears 40 percent.
We desperately need Congress to act -- to extend unemployment benefits, to forestall debilitating cuts in schools, teachers, Medicaid and basic services, to finance the rebuilding of America in everything from bridges to fast trains to a smart electric grid that will make us more competitive and put people to work.
But war drains our Treasury, takes the lives of our citizens and requires the attention of our leaders. Now our politics is turning perverse. Conservatives rail against deficits and block action on jobs in the Senate. Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell says that we don't have to offset tax cuts for the wealthy with spending cuts, but leads his party's filibuster against extending unemployment benefits unless they are "paid for." The supplemental for Afghanistan passes; the supplemental to keep teachers working is blocked.
Across the country, there is a growing divide between the elites in Washington and the American people. In a poll for Politico by the firm Penn Schoen
Why Did Obama Fire Dan Choi?
By Amy Goodman [
“As we mark the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq,” President Barack Obama said this week, “a grateful America must pay tribute to all who served there.” He should have added “unless you’re gay,” because, despite his rhetoric, weeks earlier the commander in chief fired one of those Iraq vets: Lt. Dan Choi.
Choi is an Iraq War veteran, a graduate of West Point and a trained Arabic linguist. I ran into him the day after he received his official discharge. We were at the Netroots Nation conference in Las Vegas, a gathering of thousands of bloggers, activists and journalists. Though Choi had known the discharge was coming, he was still shaken to the core.
Read the entire article at truthdig.com
Department of Homeland Security
This is like the blob...It just keeps on growing and grow8ng. It was created by GW Bush to "simplify the process and get all information under one umbrella."
Well...too bad. Under the Bush-Obama aegis it now has thosands of so-called government agencies handling security. AND over a thousand privatized agencies security agencies.
How much safer are you feeling?
