Michigan for Edwards has a video of John Edwards appearance on The Situation Room plus a transcript. They talk Iraq, and Edwards support for Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.
Well, the lesson -- you learn lessons in everything you do in life, including in political campaigns, Wolf -- is we're entering a brave new world with the net and the blogosphere. And it's a powerful world. It's a world that's going to have, and should have, a huge impact on the way we do politics in America. Because the net and the blogosphere is grass roots politics at its best. But candidates can't control what people say.
We believe in free speech in this country. This is a democracy. People have a right to express their opinions.
Conservatives who believe dissent and disagreement ought to be a crime: smacked down. Feeling frosty today: damn skippy.
Dean Barnett wrote about Amanda's apperance on MSNBC which I sadly didn't hear about, so I missed it. Sounds like it was a short deal where MSNBC was trying to milk more out of the story than still exists in order to fill dead air time. I have a suggestion, how about you guys report some actual news for a change? Just a thought. Anyway I hope she gave them a mouthful.
A post on the official blog about Elizabeth Edwards fight with cancer during the 2004 elections, something I don't recall ever hearing about.
Elizabeth's recent fight with Breast Cancer is an inspiration to anyone diagnosed with cancer. Elizabeth was diagnosed with invasive ductal cancer, the most common form of breast cancer, at the end of the campaign in fact her and John went directly to Massachusetts General Hospital after he gave his concession speech. Despite being told several days earlier that a lump in her breast could be cancerous, she stumped through 5 states for the campaign before she found out for sure.
It must take some real guts to continue through to the end of a Presidential campaign with something like in the back of your mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if it helped get her through the tough times either. Keeping yourself busy -- and I can't imagine being more busy than that -- helps keep you from dwelling on the worst-case-sceario, but it also bottles it up somewhat and when there isn't anything left to do but think about it, the dam bursts.
I'm glad she is still with us and it'll make it double sweet when Edwards wins it all in '08.
The AP has a piece on the Senator taking President Bush to task for continually fouling up opportunities to negotiate with Iran to resolve the nuclear weapons issue, instead of simply threatening them like a barbarian would. Here's the thing, nobody disagrees that the way we got played by North Korea should be a stern lesson in how to deal with nuclear weapons proliferation in the future, lessons that can and should be directly applied to Iran. We get it, what we tried before didn't work and now we've got to deal with an impossible scenario, two rather hostile nations being armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
That tacit recognition doesn't mean however that the only option left to us is to cross our arms and get ready to fight. I am so incredibly tired of the GOP's "do what what I tell you or it's war" attitude towards the world. The United States did not become a super power by throwing our weight around like some neophyte colonial power bent on dominating and then resettling every territory that disagrees with us. There are far more effective things we can do that don't involve force.
Something I heard either from the Senate or the House the other day -- I can't remember which -- some Congressperson said that as an example of what we could and should be doing is leveraging our capability to do just about anything we put our minds to, and some of these things are really not all that difficult to do and would actually help us in the process. Iran from what I understand is in the top four for oil exports in the world, yet imports nearly 50% of its gasoline from other countries because it simply cannot process the oil into gas for its own needs.
Think about what it would mean to Iran to be able to go from a gasoline importer to a gasoline exporter in terms of money and greater world influence, and we could help them do that...if they play ball on the nukes. See that? Everybody wins, because when you sit down and use the brain you were born with instead of grunting like a cave man and grabbing the biggest stick you can find, good things tend to happen.
Honestly, deals like that are not capitulation either, it's making a compromise where everyone gets at least some of what they want. That's what makes the world go around.
"The way for America to engage them on this issue is to use the economic tools available ... to make it clear if they are willing to give up their nuclear weapons we are willing to make nuclear fuel available to them," he told the AP.
If all Iran is interested in is safe nuclear power, we can help them with that, but I don't really think that is their only interest at this point. I hope it is, but honestly, having a capable nuclear arsenal means being virtually immune from foreign invasion. Do you think Bush would have hesitated to steam roll North Korea if they didn't have nuclear weapons already, or that he would have invaded Iraq, had they had tactical nukes?
The best thing about nukes -- and this is a grade school lesson from the cold war -- is deterrence. Iran doesn't really want nukes so they can use them against regional enemies, they know just as well as the rest of us that if you actually use them, then everybody loses. No, they want nukes to deter the United States, who is constantly threatening them, from invading. The faster they get them, the sooner we won't be able to touch them without glassing over the entire country, and they know that.
When George Bush was running for President the first time, and his response to how he would handle complex foreign policy such as this with absolutely zero experience and understanding of the global political climate, was to shrug his shoulders as if he'd just figure it out as he went along -- that's how we get into messes like this. Let's not do it all over again.
The rest of the fluff having been censored and/or sanitized for your wholesome protection, I'm signing off.
