“Students for a Free Tibet has been focused on the Beijing Games for over eight years. You can read about their efforts on their website, where they present their version of China’s slogan, One World, One Dream.”
You can learn more at Students for a Free Tibet’s home page: http://studentsforafreetibet.org.
Originally uploaded by Lindsay Beyerstein.
This weekend, The New York Times Magazine includes a piece on Steve Gilliard, a Democratic blogger who died this past June at the age of 42. Steve was the author of The News Blog, which remains in our blog roll. The powerful and moving piece by Matt Bai covers Gilliards life as a writer, historian, and searing critic of the war in Iraq.
Ahem.
I’m very happy to announce that I have been offered and accepted a position on Senator Chris Dodd’s presidential campaign. I moved to Washington DC on Sunday and today is my first full day in Dodd HQ. From this point forward I will only be publishing my writing in an official capacity for the Dodd campaign on its blog and on progressive blog community sites around the net.
A bit about the job. I will be blogging for the campaign alongside my friend Tim Tagaris and others. More specifically, I will be traveling with Senator Dodd as he campaigns around America. I will be posting videos of Senator Dodd and the people he meets at campaign stops nationwide. In many ways my job will be to give the American public an unprecedented window into the Dodd campaign.
The question most of you are probably asking yourselves is “Why Chris Dodd?” I believe that America needs a leader who can solve the problems facing our country with poise and conviction. Thanks to the Bush administration’s failures, our next president will enter office will little margin for error. I believe Chris Dodd is best person to fill this national need because he’s already doing it. By standing up to the Bush administration and calling for an end to the Iraq War, by fighting to restore the US Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, by protecting Americans working families from predatory lending, by strongly opposing the nominations of John Bolton, Sam Fox, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, by working to increase make college education affordable through Pell Grants, Senator Dodd has repeatedly lead through his actions. That’s what America needs today - action, not rhetoric. That’s why I’m going to work for Senator Dodd.
As an activist and I writer I have spent the last two and a half years blogging about the things I want Democratic politicians to do in service to America. In Chris Dodd, I find a man who has time and time again done the right thing without having to be asked. I deeply respect his active commitment to democratic ideals in a time when we’ve watched far too many politicians shirk their responsibilities to the American public. I look forward to helping him win the Democratic nomination and become the next President of the United States.
Check out my first post on the Dodd blog.
Technorati Tags: Chris Dodd
I am currently on an extended hiatus from blogging at Emboldened.
I began blogging in 2004 in the aftermath of the election. At the time, the Baltimore Group was designed to promote discussions between friends but it quickly transformed itself into the driving force behind my personal political evolution, even serving as the vehicle for my career. The more passionate I became about the issues facing this country the more involved I got, working first to help campaigns around the country develop web campaigns and then serving as Deputy Finance Director for a progressive Democrat running in a heated primary. Throughout that period I wrote extensively and grew to love the blogosphere for its substance and its community. It never bothered me that my writing failed to attract a massive following akin to the giants of the netroots because my participation was enough to earn all the benefits of the community: challenge, self-reflection, inspiration, and purpose. I will always be immensely proud of myself for the years I spent dedicating my free time towards participating in my democracy.
Of course, I also began blogging at the same time I was applying to law schools. I was accepted to Boston College Law School just as my political activities and my blogging were taking off, so I deferred for a year. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. When I got to BC Law last September I carried with me all the experiences of the previous two years ready for the challenge and excited to learn the language of the law. Initially, I was able to blog and study. The first months of law school are filled with intense discussions about the law and politics, so it was natural that I delved into the Military Commissions Act in both my on- and offline lives. Eventually, though, I started to fall behind just couldn’t keep up my writing. As most bloggers know, once you let yourself off your posting schedule it’s easy to let your blog do dry. My last post here was in mid-April.
This post, then, is merely a formality; I took a hiatus from Emboldened a while ago.
In the end, though, I am thrilled to have to make this decision. That law school has taken precedence is good news. It means I love it and am overwhelmingly happy to be pouring myself into my education. Moreover, I am still blogging at the student-run Eagleionline.com, a terrific and unprecedented resource for the BC Law community, and occasionally at the blog of the American Constitution Society, of which I am an Editor at Large (and chapter president).
Before closing I should mention two things: First, I want to congratulate Matt on his recent success. He is in the early stages of a tremendous career in politics. I also want to thank you, Matt, for Emboldened, our little project that has meant so much to me and to our friendship. Second, as I said earlier, I am immensely proud of my blogging here at Emboldened–if not every word, then at least the spirit behind this whole project stands for a very important period in my life.
Thank you to everyone.
I’m starting to think that Rudy Giuliani is not going to take the path most observers thought he would take with regards to abortion. Giuliani’s socially moderate positions, particularly his wishy-washy support for abortion rights as long as the courts say so, are generally perceived as a vulnerability that will make him less appealing to conservative Republican primary voters. At some point Giuliani would have to walk back some of his past statements in support of Roe v. Wade and disavow his efforts as mayor of New York to expand funding for abortions for women who could not afford. If effect, Giuliani would have to engage in a kabuki dance for the Republican base to convince them that they are all knowing and he had erred.
The most blatant confrontation between Rudy Giuliani’s abortion beliefs and the gilded position held by most of the Republican Party on the issue was last week at the Simi Valley GOP debate. In that setting Giuliani waffled on whether he thought it would be acceptable for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. Giuliani said it would OK if they did and OK if they didn’t, while reasserting his contention that abortion rights should be decided on a state by state basis.
Besides failing to convey any personal conviction to any ideology, Giuliani’s answer struck me as a signal moment in his campaign. Maybe he isn’t going to pull a Full Romney and change his state belief on abortion to improve his chances to win higher office. Yes, it is admirable that he will retain his soft support for abortion rights while running for president, but from a purely political standpoint this has to be viewed as reducing Giuliani’s chances of winning over Republican primary voters. Worse still, with Giuliani falling in many polls, unexpected steps counter to the desires of the base could really mean Giuliani will be finished soon.
Giuliani wants to shift the focus of the debate away from abortion:
Rudolph W. Giuliani told a gathering of conservatives Monday that his campaign could be boiled down to two major themes: national security and economic security.
Mr. Giuliani did not cite values as a theme, which is unusual for a major Republican presidential candidate, and the omission seemed especially striking Monday, coming as it did just hours after a report that he and his former wife had donated $900 to an abortion rights advocacy group and provider.
The potential to damage his relationship with the conservative base surely grew yesterday as Giuliani had a somewhat confrontational appearance on conservative pundit Laura Ingraham’s radio show.
“My idea of a choice is that it should be a real choice and that ultimately, then, you have to respect a woman’s consciousness,” Giuliani told Ingraham and listeners on 340 radio stations nationwide. “I think life is enormously important, but so is personal liberty.”
…
When Ingraham ended the segment with a standard line about his returning again, a clearly agitated Giuliani responded: “I would love to come back, but you’re going to have to ask me about the war on terror and what we do about the economy, which is after all what most citizens ask me about.”“Well, conservatives are citizens, too, Mayor Giuliani!” Ingraham responded. “We’re citizens, too.”
The exchange with Ingraham is revealing in that it shows that Giuliani thinks he really can run a campaign for the Republican nomination for president without devoting time talking about abortion. He does not think it germane to the debate he wants to have, so he ends up insulting the Republican base.
Giuliani does not want to talk to conservatives about abortion rights and his beliefs on how abortion should be legislated in America. Getting a clear answer from Giuliani in front of a hostile audience (GOP debate & Ingraham’s show) is difficult. He just doesn’t want to talk about his known weak spot and, at the debate in particular, he gets petulant when pressed for answers. This is not a recipe for success.
Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential election, abortion, Laura Ingraham, Rudy Giuliani
ANOTHER Kennedy is about to run for public office. At his Newport fund-raiser the other night, Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.) told a Page Six spy his brother, Ted Kennedy Jr., who lives in New Haven, is eyeing a Connecticut congressional seat. “Patrick says support for his brother is building, and Ted Jr. was recently praised for his and his wife’s environmental work by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal,” our source added. Meanwhile, Patrick has passed on backing Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for president in favor of Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) - not surprising, as Dodd is a longtime family friend and supporter of Patrick’s mental-health agenda.
Kennedy is a Democrat and a New Haven resident. Unless there’s a pending retirement no one knows about, the only seat Kennedy would be considering a run for would be against Chris Shays in the CT-04.
Does anyone know anything about Ted Kennedy Jr?
Joe Hallett of The Columbus Dispatch reports that Ohio Senator George Voinovich recently approached former Secretary of State Colin Powell and tried to get him to run for the GOP’s nomination.
Sen. George V. Voinovich visited former Secretary of State Colin
Powell about a month ago and urged him to seek the Republican
nomination for president in 2008.Powell, who resigned after President Bush’s first term, balked.
“He
said he had given his service to this country, and his wife’s a little
bit reluctant about doing it,” Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, said
Wednesday during an interview in his Capitol Hill office.“I told him it’s time to re-up.”
Voinovich, who is given to public displays of emotion, then paused and got teary-eyed as he continued speaking about Powell.
“I
said, ‘You have a moral obligation and I have a moral obligation, and
this country is running out of time. And if you’re running out of time,
then I’m running out of time, and I think we have a moral obligation to
try to leave a better legacy than it looks like we’re going to leave to
our kids.’ ” [Emphasis added]
Voinovich’s concern about how he and Powell’s rubber stamping of the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan will reflect on their personal legacies is truly touching [/ world’s smallest violin]. I agree that he and Powell do have a moral obligation to leave a better legacy for America than the string of failures via lack of principle in their opposition to the disasters their party has brought America to. Barring any of Powell’s actions during tenure as Bush’s Secretary of State who sold the Iraq War to the world, he might even make a better candidate than the dozen-odd hacks and has-beens that make up the Republican field now.
But Voinovich and Powell are deluding themselves if they think now’s the time for Powell to save his legacy and fix the problems facing America and the Republican Party stemming from Iraq and Bush’s war on terror. Powell owns these failures just as much as Condi Rice, George Tenet, Don Rumsfeld, and the raft of other neocon administration officials. It’s not exactly a prime platform for saving your reputation by launching a presidential campaign.
I don’t know if Powell will do well as a candidate. He once noted, though, that he was picked to sell the war because the only person who polls higher than him in America is Mother Teresa. So who knows. I just don’t relish the thought of this man trying to make himself into a saint to save America from a problem that he helped create.
The New Haven Register editorial board doesn’t go as far as the Danbury News-Times call for Gov. Rell to fire her embattled chief of staff Lisa Moody, but nonetheless rips Rell and calls for the legislature to close the loop hole that currently allows the governor’s CoS to fund raise for Rell politically while working on the state’s clock.
Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s defense of her chief of staff’s latest campaign finance transgression misses the point completely. M. Lisa Moody, the chief of staff, has once again used her public office to raise campaign money for her boss.
Her conduct violates Rell’s own ethics policy as well as the spirit of the law that prohibits classified state workers from engaging in political activity at work.
Rell says it was entirely proper for Moody to turn over a state list of arts and tourism officials to the manager of her re-election campaign, since the list is a public record. The campaign used the list to mail out requests for campaign donations.
Whether the list is a public record is irrelevant. The concern is that Moody and other members of Rell’s staff used the governor’s office for a private, partisan political purpose.
…
The law bars such campaign solicitations from other state workers. It does not cover the governor’s chief of staff. The chief state’s attorney eventually decided not to charge Moody with either perjury or contempt for her legislative testimony.If Rell has no intention of curbing Moody’s use of the governor’s office as a campaign cash machine, the legislature should act. It needs to close the loophole that allows Moody to raise political money on state time. For good measure, it needs to clarify any vagueness in the law that might allow Moody to escape perjury or contempt charges the next time legislators try to get an honest answer from her. [Emphasis added]
Rell’s willingness to apologize for Moody’s unethical behavior is truly startling considering how Rell first rose to office in the wake of John Rowland’s lawless administration. Rell’s continued comfort with having someone who has repeatedly broken the public trust remain on her staff and thus on the state’s payroll is infuriating.
Connecticut voters deserve an administration, regardless of party affiliation, that respects the value of the money paid into the state’s coffers. That should be true of every line item on the budget, but particularly true for the governor’s chief staffers. We do not deserve to be asked to pay the salary of crooks, weasels, and hacks while they perpetrate the behavior that defines them as crooks, weasels, and hacks.
If Rell cannot recognize that the state’s need for an ethical, honest government outweigh her personal loyalty to this Karl Rove wannabe, Rell should be forced to suffer for her decisions. I’d hope that members of Connecticut legislature take being lied to as an affront to them personally and as representatives of the people of Connecticut. It’s time for them to reign in what is becoming an increasingly lawless administration in the Governor’s office.
Technorati Tags: Jodi Rell, Lisa Moody
Chris Richter, national coordinator of the John Cox campaign (whatever that means), wants me to do something. From my inbox:
On Tuesday, May 15th, there will be the second Republican Presidential Debate and Republican Presidential Candidate John Cox has not been invited. We are asking our supporters to call both Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Party and ask why Mr. Cox is not being included in the debate, and demand that they include him since he is on the South Carolina Republican Presidential Primary Ballot. It is important to point out that in South Carolina he won the Aiken County Republican Party Straw Poll, and that he came in 5th place overall after 4 recent County Republican Party Straw Polls in South Carolina.
SC Republican Party: Mr. Katon Dawson (State GOP Chairman) Phone: (803) 988-8440
Fox News: Ask to speak to someone who is in charge of the upcoming Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina on May 15th. Phone: 1-888-369-4762.
Cox is on the ballot for the primary in South Carolina. He’s won straw polls there in a couple of small towns. He has an operation there. There’s no reason Cox should not be in the GOP debate if he’s on the GOP ballot.
Come on South Carolina - the Democrats let Gravel into the debate, you should let Cox in. What are you afraid of?
Yesterday I posted on an editorial from a local Iowa paper that gave Sen. Chris Dodd a very positive review. The post started a small discussion about the viability of Dodd and who the top tier candidates are. I was going to include this as a comment on it, but it grew long. I think it merits a larger discussion and would like to hear your thoughts on where the netroots stands with regards to furthering the success of presidential candidates who aren’t considered to be in the top tier by the mainstream press.
I think it’s really sad that the one place where all candidates should be given a fair shake based on what they’ve done and what they stand for — the blogosphere — has fully adopted the same conventional wisdom that is put forth by people like Chris Mathews, Adam Nagourney, and the staff of The Politico. Namely, that the Democrats have a three person race between Clinton, Obama, and Edwards and no one else stands a chance.
Blogs should be capable of challenging that assumption and enable other people to receive the same internal consideration as the bigger names. In this cycle, the ones who lose out are Richardson, Dodd, Kucinich and Biden. From what I’ve seen, bloggers have generally been willing to swallow the CW pill that says these four are not serious candidates and thus don’t need to dedicate attention to them.
Yet within these four are the three Democrats in the race with the strongest positions on ending the war. Richardson has called for zero residual forces. Dodd supports Reid-Feingold — something Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Edwards have not done or said they would do. Kucinich has been for defunding the war for years.
Bill Clinton and Howard Dean succeeded because grassroots activists took them seriously when the mainstream press did not. I find it sad that this cycle the grassroots, particularly grassroots pundits on the blogs, has shown no real willingness to part ways from the mainstream press assessment of who is viable and who is not.
If the second tier candidate - the issue candidate - is dead, it is we who have killed it.
Cross posted at My Left Nutmeg.
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