Obama on immigration

Signs in San Francisco's Mission district.

Marisa Trevino at LatinaLista has up a guest post from Barack Obama on immigration issues. It is long and thoughtful. The candidate has also participated in the comments. Here's a bit from a follow up he made:

... I know that families should be at the core of the debate on immigration. We must realize that in order to fix our broken immigration policy, we must bring people from out of the shadows and provide a pathway to legalization. I also believe that any immigration reform bill that is proposed and does not focus on the reunification of families is missing the mark. It is for this reason that during the summer of 2007, I proposed an amendment to the comprehensive immigration reform bill that gave points to those who seek to immigrate and already have family in the United States. I continue to believe that comprehensive immigration reform is crucial and I have pledged to address this issue within my first year as President. It may not be politically convenient or easy, but we have to treat this problem with the urgency it demands. I stood with those calling for comprehensive reform when I marched on May 1, 2005 in Chicago, and I will stand with them as President.

Go read the whole thing.

For me, Obama's emphasis on families cuts to the heart of the discussion of what will become of the United States' huge undocumented low wage work force. Most of these folks are part of families, some of whom have papers, some of whom don't. Many have children who are citizens. Immigration is about families as much as about workers.

Primaries are different

Poll worker Albert Shaw applies a sticker on the coat of a voter on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

Primaries are different. I, for one, make voting choices during a primary on a very different basis than I use during the general election. In a primary, I let myself vote my hopes and my personal warm fuzzy feelings. In the general election, I practice pragmatic citizenship -- usually I hold my nose and revert to the choice of the "least worst" in the words of a friend's 6-year old.

San Francisco used to hold November elections that were really primaries -- unless someone got more that 50 percent there would be a run off. In those days, I got to vote for some wonderful choices for mayor: a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence and Jello Biafra, among others. Then in the next round, I'd dutifully vote for the responsible choice (unless it was Dianne Feinstein).

Now that the Democratic hopefuls have managed to arrive at pretty much a tie in the country at large, I'm afraid that the primary season is about to lose its pleasure. After the long Bush-NeoCon-KnowNothing regime we've been enduring, up to now the campaign has been fun -- as chance for disheartened voters to savor three and then two attractive candidates who offered different flavors of hope for a better country. What's not to like?

But now that we're down to the tied twosome, the season begins to demand more of a pragmatic response. We'll feel called upon to vote "responsibly". We'll have to ask ourselves which of these people will be most likely to stomp that odious panderer to the Right masquerading as a maverick that the Republicans have chosen to nominate?

A discussion of Clinton and Obama framed around our opinions concerning "electability" is not going to be pretty. It's guaranteed to undercover the underside of our national psyche, our racism and our sexism. Folks are going to say ugly stuff and think they are peddling political analysis. I'll probably do this myself.

Let's try to remember that we're all yearning to replace the monstrous people and profiteers who have been running the country. And we can only start doing that together.

Wisdom

I'm spending a few days at a New Organizing Institute training for folks who work for non-profits. We're getting exposure to lot of people who have explored various techy ways to get folks moving for peace, progress and other things people need.

Biko Baker of the League of Young Voters dropped one of the best pithy comments I've ever heard:

Non-profits don't know what winning looks like -- they just know what working looks like.

Yes. That fits too many non-profits I have known.

Baker photo is a couple of years old, grabbed from here.

Primary election day in the Mission

Been there -- done that. At 7:45 a.m., I was the only one there. Mysteriously, the lobby smelled strongly of marijuana.


Hope turnout goes up as the day goes on. This is supposed to be a record setting day.


The partisans had tacked up their last flyers 100 feet away.





Yes -- I voted for Obama. That became inevitable when Edwards dropped out. I've seen Clintons; I didn't like the first one (above all else because of his cave on welfare); I don't want another one.

But by voting for Obama, I don't say I'm supporting Obama. I'm supporting values of democracy, some equity, some decency and more rule of law through a blunt instrument that is available to me. Oh yes, Obama's a good one. But Presidents are what we, the people, make them. Should we be so fortunate as to get a President Obama, we'll have to stay on his case and push for a different, better country. Nothin' else to do.

Oil companies like to make friends

When Rudi Giuliani dropped out, big oil lost its #1, the Presidential candidate in which it had the largest investment.

Nonetheless some other candidates have done pretty well at raking in oil company cash for their campaigns.

More at Oil Watchdog. These figures are from the September 2007 disclosure filings. I imagine the totals are a good deal higher now.

Campaign tidbits: Impressions of the California Latino vote

According to many recent polls, by considerable margins, California Latinos prefer Hillary Clinton.

The New York senator leads Obama 3-to-1 among Hispanics, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

San Francisco Chronicle
January 25, 2008

I have no poll data, but I have some experience turning out Latino voters and I've been asking questions of people who are working on doing just that. Some observations:

• Clinton is clearly targeting the Latino segment of the electorate. She's making the right visits, leaning on surrogates like Dolores Huerta, Antonio Villaraigosa, and the United Farm Workers Union. People like to have attention paid to them, particularly if they are used to being ignored. She should do well among Latinos.

• Meanwhile, Obama has his own emissaries to Latino voters, notably Maria Elena Durazo, the leader of the Los Angeles Labor Council which has outstandingly prioritized organizing low wage immigrant, largely Latino, workers. His Kennedy family endorsements are also likely to carry some weight. Many immigrant households still display portraits of JFK as the iconic good American president. (I know, not my understanding of the guy, but I am just reporting what I have seen.)

• Clinton may also be hitting some notes that don't quite address California reality. She's running a TV ad that features Cesar L. Chavez talking about his grandfather. I suspect such appeals to the farm worker leader's legacy may not resonate as much as her people think. When the labor leader died, the buzz around the San Francisco Mission was: “Cesar Chavez? Oh, yeah, wasn't he a great boxer?” [Yes. Julio Cesar Chavez was a great boxer, at the time of the other Chavez's death, a world lightweight champion.] I routinely ask young Latinos whether they have heard of the United Farm Workers founder. Only the ones who have been taught about him in school seem to have a notion of his work. Many older folks, voters, may have less attachment to Chavez.

• In the past, polls have not been particularly good at capturing the sentiments of Latino voters. The most accurate polls employ interviewers who share culture with the interviewees -- in particular people who can distinguish polite agreement from real agreement. Because good polling requires skilled interviewers, it is expensive to carry out among minority segments of the electorate and frequently has not been done well. As a result, Latino voters surprised pollsters with the strength of their vote on some occasions in the 1990s. That said, I think the polling organizations are far better at conducting this difficult kind of opinion research today than they were ten years ago.

• I have an impression that many in the Latino electorate are "late deciders." Like a lot of people, they have other things to do besides think about politicians. Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL) thinks this hurts Obama.

  “When you are washing dishes and waiting tables and are working these kinds of jobs, you don’t pick up Newsweek and find out the phenomenon about Barack Obama,” said Gutierrez, who says Latinos don’t know Obama.

  Politico

  Those of us who are political junkies have a hard time understanding how very many people, Latinos and non-Latinos, overworked and comfortably off, have paid no attention at all to this election we find so gripping. This inattention could actually work for Obama -- if a positive impression of him is coming into focus just as people vote, he could surpass expectations among late deciders.

• Obama has been solidly in favor of issuing drivers' licenses to the undocumented -- he has refused to be drawn into discussing this as anything more than a practical automotive safety measure. On this issue, Obama's stance is deeply in accord with California's Latino community where most every family has an uncle or niece who is out of status.

• Staff of some of the unions that actually organize low wage workers are busily working to raise turnout among their members, not for the presidential primary, but about several initiative measures. When I ask them who their members are leaning toward, they've confirmed the polling that Clinton is very strong. "The workers remember good times under Bill and they want that back," one told me.

• Columnist Ruben Navarette Jr, who is not someone I often find myself agreeing with, thinks a lot of the buzz about whether Latinos will vote for a Black man is actually white people playing out our racism. He points out that Latinos frequently have voted in great numbers for Black mayors of major cities -- how do we think David Dinkins or Harold Washington or Tom Bradley each won their city's top jobs? Voters who belong to any kind of minority are usually pretty pragmatic voters -- after all, being in a minority means discerning who that is not one of your own will be most likely to care for your interests. Navarette quips:

  Next thing you know, pundits are going to tell us that Latinos are too macho to elect a woman president.

Obligatory Super Bowl post

Germany and Italy about to bump heads in the 2006 World Cup.

I was amused to notice that Germans look at this near national holiday of ours and warn as follows:

Watching Football Is Hazardous to Your Health

Munich hospitals were fuller than usual during the 2006 World Cup. The reason? Passionate football fans were having an alarming number of heart attacks. A new study says it's all part of being a fan.

Have heart troubles? Then you might want to skip watching the Super Bowl this Sunday.

Der Spiegel

Well maybe. But I don't think they understand how often the ultimate game turns out to be an over-hyped yawner. Their "football" provides more suspense, usually.

This one may rise above that, but I am not expecting much. Still, rooting to see the perfect season - go Pats!

Ironic juxtapostion

This is a year when both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occur in the same week.

And, as it has been pointed out: "One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, while the other involves a groundhog."

The costs of the war

The two issues that people in the United States say worry them the most are the unending war in Iraq and the state of the economy. What if the peace movement could help people understand that both concerns are different sides of the same coin? We'd be a lot more ready to exert the pressure we must on our politicians.


US Labor Against the War is offering agitators an educational slideshow, downloadable or on DVD, called "The Real Price of the Iraq Occupation," It's a pretty good tool, though a little text heavy. See it here [flash link].


The American Friends Service Committee covers similar ground in "One Day = $720 Million," an attractive, less than two minute, presentation of what could be done with the money that goes into the Iraq war. Watch and weep.

Let's hammer these messages home during this election season.

Campaign tidbit: Local money

The primary season grinds on. We read reports that Clinton collected more cash than Obama in the 4th quarter of 2007 -- but Obama has pulled in $32 million in January. The mind reels.

I thought it would be fun to look at how the candidates are doing at raking in cash here in the San Francisco Mission district. There's a cool tool available online that let's you see who gave over $200 by street address and zip code. Close enough, though when I plug in 94110, I get most of Bernal Heights as well as the South Mission.

Here's what I learned: through the end of 2007, there had been 216 contributions to aspiring Presidents from the area. Only 18 went to Republicans, 14 of those to Ron Paul.

All the others, 198, went to Democrats in this distribution:

• Obama -- 87

• Clinton -- 65

• Edwards -- 35

• Other Democrats, mostly Kucinich with a few to Richardson -- 11

The tool doesn't easily let you pull totals, but impressionistically, it looks to me as if higher dollar amounts among Clinton's donors meant about equal takes from the area. She might even have brought in more, despite having less contributions.

Now I've lived here over 30 years and I know a lot of my neighbors, but the following impressions of who gave to whom could be just idle smoke blowing. Nonetheless I offer them.

• Folks active in the local Democratic party noticeably gave to Clinton. No surprise there; she's as close as we've got to an establishment candidate.

• Somebody swept through this area, and probably the whole city, organizing real estate agents to contribute to Clinton. They were quite generous.

• Senior nonprofit managers also put out for Clinton. Many of them are senior women who probably went through some struggles of their own to win their current prominence. Their support for this accomplished woman is not surprising.

• The most obvious group among the Obama supporters were public interest lawyers. Not really surprising, given his background.

It will be interesting to see how the area votes on Tuesday. I would expect Obama to take a majority, though early votes for Edwards will cut into his lead.

Go take a look at the Fundrace tool for your area and see who your more affluent neighbors are supporting.

Campaign tidbits: MoveOn primary

So now, in addition to the California primary on Tuesday, I get to cast my vote in the MoveOn primary in the next 24 hours. If one of the two candidates left standing gets two thirds in the MoveOn vote, the organization will try to use its mobilization apparatus to help the winner, beginning Saturday.

Oddly enough, I find it harder to decide what to do in the latter vote than in the former. In the primary, now that Edwards is out, I'll be voting for Obama because he seems a hair's breadth more likely to get the U.S. out of Iraq sooner. But it is much harder for me to vote for him in the MoveOn primary -- I've still got a few hours to decide whether I can stomach it.

Here are the problems:

Barack Obama should, by rights, not get a chance to vie for MoveOn's support. The guy stuck it to MoveOn when he didn't have to. Last fall, when Republicans demanded that Congress scold MoveOn for its ad referring to Bush's Iraq commander-stooge as "General Betray-us," Clinton voted no. Obama skipped the vote. This from the guy who asks us to believe in our ability to bring real change to Washington, who claims to be "powered by hope and people like you." Guess that works unless we, the people, raise the temperature of conflict a little too high for his taste.

But more importantly, I'm not sure I like the idea of MoveOn, as an organization, throwing its weight into the primaries. MoveOn is a huge and useful part of an emerging infrastructure of technologically sophisticated grassroots pressure groups that have responded to the decay of democratic (small "d") organs of civic participation. That is, a lot of us are pissed about being shut out of our own country's decision making by a combination of straight up Republican authoritarian rule combined with Democratic cowardice. We've built some alternative megaphones on the internet and increasingly among community groups on the ground.

It is not good for these groups to become simply constituent groups entirely inside the Democratic Party. Labor has done that in some periods with early endorsements and hasn't been able to pass any progressive labor law for decades. They get taken for granted.

We don't want to be taken for granted. After November, even if a Democrat wins the White House and Democrats pick up a good number of seats in Congress, a lot of us are still going to have to be lobbing pies at officeholders from the outside if we want meaningful change.

It would be smart if MoveOn could help its members remember that oppositional role, as well as the inside role we all hope to play electing whatever Democrat emerges from the primaries. It's tough during the primaries remembering that real change is going to require both roles. The MoveOn primary only obscures that awareness.

I'll give the experienced progressive warrior who writes as Meteor Blades the last word on the conundrum that confronts progressives every four years. I think he says it succinctly.

The Abolitionists, the feminists and suffragists, the trade union organizers, the Grangers, the Jim Crow foes, the environment champions, the opponents of unjustified wars, the fighters for gay rights, the human rights advocates -– every reform movement -– began and continued its struggle outside party politics. Only after years, often decades, did the fruit of those struggles become confirmed by legislation passed by elected officials. Struggles into which people gave up their money, their energy and time, their liberty and, sometimes, their lives before politicians did more than give lip service to the causes they espoused. Without the movements, reforms never would find a place on the national agenda; without sympathetic politicians, they would never be implemented. It’s a difficult, but essential pairing.

I'm not at all sure throwing MoveOn's energies into the primaries serves the cause of keeping both parts of the pairing on track.

UPDATE, Friday am: So 70 percent of MoveOn members voted to endorse Obama. Though this wasn't what I hoped for, I do hope this increases MoveOn's influence which is ultimately a good thing.

Campaign tidbit: Habeas lawyers endorse Obama

The Administrative Review Board room is seen with eye bolts for securing detainees at Camp Delta at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba January 18, 2006. REUTERS/JOE SKIPPER

This is an endorsement that makes me sit up and take notice.

... All of us are lawyers who have worked on the Guantanamo habeas corpus litigation for many years, some of us since early 2002, and we were all deeply involved in opposing the Administration’s attempt to overturn the Supreme Court's Rasul decision by stripping the courts of jurisdiction to hear the Guantanamo cases. ...

Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration's efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration's bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo. ...

...We need a President who will restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community. Based on our work with him, we are convinced that Senator Obama can do this because he truly feels these issues "in his bones."

Full text.

It is hard for me to trust Clinton to have more than a cosmetic interest in restoring the rule of law -- you know, it gives the USA such a bad image when we torture and render... These people want me to believe that Obama has more of an interest. They are in a position to have a meaningful opinion.

H/t dday.

A new electoral coalition?

This morning Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne commented on the shape of the vote in the Democratic primary in South Carolina.

In truth, Clinton and Obama both face electoral obstacles that would naturally confront any candidate seeking to break barriers of race or gender. The South Carolina exit polls showed each running well behind John Edwards among white men. While Obama won overwhelmingly among whites under 30, he secured only 11 percent of the ballots from whites 65 and older. He won 32 percent among white college graduates but only 16 percent among whites who did not have college degrees.

Note: it is possible to win a Democratic primary without any significant support from white men.

Historian Bruce J. Schulman of Boston University took a stab at describing Barack Obama's coalition:

... like RFK, Obama has assembled an insurgent's campaign, strong among educated, affluent Democrats, energizing young voters, and simultaneously, exerting powerful appeal among African-American Democrats. That’s a formidable coalition, and one that no previous insurgent Democrat could manage. From McCarthy to Dean, minority voters have found earlier reformers cold. ...

In 2008, more than 40 states will hold primaries, awarding the overwhelming majority of the delegates. At the same time, blue-collar whites no longer form the dominant faction they long represented in Democratic Party politics.

The stirrings the Obama coalition points to have been at work in California for a couple of decades. It's worth looking at some of the history.

The California precedent
I first noticed the outline of a potential new progressive (Democratic) coalition in 1994, pouring over exit poll information [pdf] about votes cast in California against the specter of immigrants overwhelming the state (Prop. 187) on the one hand, and for Senator Dianne Feinstein on the other.

The outcome on Prop. 187 was lopsided: 59 percent for, 41 percent against. Fully 78 percent of the electorate was white (not Latino). The tiny 9 percent sliver of the electorate that was Latino voted overwhelmingly against Prop. 187 (73 percent) while Asian- and African-Americans split their votes about evenly, and most California whites supported the anti-immigrant measure.

Meanwhile, 1994 was the last election in which Diane Feinstein faced a real challenge. Hard as it is to believe now, the conventional stereotype of her was as "a San Francisco liberal" and, of course, what was still a novelty, a woman breaking a barrier for her sex. Her opponent, the conservative Republican millionaire and closet case Michael Huffington (Arianna was married to him then) darn near beat her in a race that ended up 47 to 45 percent. Huffington won among white men by a 58-35 percent margin. But although whites were the overwhelming majority of the electorate, Feinstein overcame that margin by running up huge advantages among people of color and a smaller margin among white women.

That Feinstein coalition -- huge margins in the communities of color coupled with a solid showing among white women -- has been the shape of the statewide Democratic majorities ever since. Ten years later, in 2004, people of color were a much larger fraction of the electorate -- up to 34 percent from 22 percent in 1994. And all groups of people of color were voting Democratic. Moreover, white women were also giving a large margin to Democrats. (Source: CNN exit polls.) The result: California was and is a solidly Blue state.

This has not happened because the electorate mirrors the state's demographics. It doesn't. In 2006, the Public Policy Institute of California reported how very different the racial, ethnic, age and economic situation of the population as a whole was from the slice that is the electorate:

California's electorate does not reflect the size, the growth, or the diversity of California’s population. Today, eight in 10 adults are eligible to vote but just 56 percent are registered, less than half (43 percent) belong to one of the major parties, and only 35 percent of adults can be expected to vote in the November election. Voter registration has grown at a slower rate than the population. As a result, 12 million of the state’s 27.7 million adults are not registered to vote.

Moreover, although the state has become increasingly diverse, the adults who frequently vote are predominantly white, age 45 and older, and relatively affluent. In contrast, nonvoters (those who are not registered to vote) are mostly nonwhite, younger, and less affluent than frequent (or "likely") voters.

Demographers tell us that the shape of the California electorate will change only very slowly to be more representative of its population. By 2040, people from Asian and Latin American backgrounds will constitute 63 percent of the people. Yet if these groups continue their present patterns of becoming citizens and turning out to vote, they will have a combined share of the state's voters of only 38 percent in the same year. (Source: Citrin and Highton.)

Somehow California voters, though not yet nearly representative of the state's future, have already adopted the direction that demographic change suggests they would be moving toward, even if sometimes by narrow margins. Though white men no longer hold sway in the California electorate, enough of them vote with the growing segment of the electorate that is not white to set a Democratic trend. White women vote heavily with the Democrats. A large segment of older white Californians recognize and honor the more diverse and also more economically insecure world their children experience. They consistently join with the folks who will be the new California majority to bring that majority into being before it really exists.

***

It looks to me as though the Obama candidacy is trying to birth a national coalition which, like the Democratic one in California, doesn't quite have a secure demographic base though such a base seems visible on the horizon. This coalition must, at present, attract enough support outside its obvious members to win an election. Naturally, its leading edge is young voters, folks who live closer to that diverse and difficult demographic future older folks can envision but do not so nearly inhabit.

As Schulman notes, Obama is not the first to try this. In addition to RFK, it's only fair to mention Jesse Jackson in 1988 -- at the end of 2008, will Obama have exceeded Jackson's total of wins in 11 states? That seems no sure thing at the moment.

A long-term national progressive coalition must somehow hold together most African Americans, most Latinos, probably the majority of various Asian-origin voters, and enough whites, probably predominantly female, to make a majority. Either Obama or Clinton has a very good shot at doing that in the general election. In the primaries, the lines where fissures open in that coalition -- who feels spoken to, who turns out, and who is energized -- will determine who gets to chase the big prize.

"Trust us."

Here's a 30 second lesson on why folks are pitching a fit about the FISA bill currently being pushed through Congress by Bush and his Democratic collaborators. Senator Russ Feingold explains it all to you.



I'm not that trusting. Senator Feinstein apparently is.

On running across the country

Yippee, I finally made it out of Virginia and crossed into Kentucky. I'm "running" across the country on a Transamerica route made available at the National Health Survey out of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

We have designed a transcontinental virtual trip across the United States. Each time you enter your mileage, we add it to your total and show you exactly what you would see if you had been traveling from Yorktown, Virginia to Florence, Oregon.

I began counting my mileage on this trip last August. So far I've gone 562 miles.


It is going to be a long trek. The total distance across the country is 4063 miles -- probably about 4 years of plugging along for me. Gotta keep trekking, one foot in front of the other.

The best thing about this virtual trip is that every time I add a few miles, I get a new picture of my location. My current location, outside Elkhorn, KY, is posted in the side bar. From now on, every few weeks I'll change the picture to show my current location. But don't expect fast progress -- I've got another 500 miles to go in Kentucky, so that will be another six months. It is a big country.

World eyes U.S. election

Is the whole world really watching our electoral theater? Certainly many are -- and many have more urgent things to do. A few stances I've run across:

Dire horror: Popular economic writers frequently trot out the dictum "when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold." Well maybe -- in some respects the health of the U.S. economy is so important to the world economy that this saying captures a truth. The journalist Helena Cobban reports a conversation with a Lebanese blogger which applies this perspective to U.S. elections.

He said that he felt US influence over the whole world is so great that people everywhere are strongly affected by the US political process. True enough. So he said he felt, actually, like a completely unenfranchized citizen of the US. (Correct me if I phrased that poorly, Rami.)

I told him about the theory I've expounded here a number of times in recent years, to the effect that the relationship between the US citizenry and the world's 6-billion-plus non-Americans is analogous to the apartheid-era relationship between the South African "Whites" and the country's completely unenfranchized majority...

Just World News

Certainly in many places, the amount of misery U.S. meddling and intrusion causes would justifies folks feeling they ought to get a crack at deciding who occupies the seat of power in Washington.

Frustration. Tonight I attended a meeting of peace activists during which we chewed over, again, the gap between the strong desire of a majority of the U.S. people to end the Iraq adventure and the minuscule effect of that wish on our elected representatives. A South Asian woman finally exclaimed something like "I don't get it. People in the smallest villages in India understand it is about oil and empire -- what's wrong with these people?" When it's "your empire," it is harder to see.

The dean of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy offers a variant of this:

Unfortunately, even as the world is becoming more predictable, America is becoming less so. It has one of the least informed populations on the planet, and the quality of the presidential debates on global issues has been appalling. Bhutto's death provided the candidates an opportunity to demonstrate their statesmanship toward a pivotal country. But they all failed this test, resorting to grandstanding instead. Hillary Clinton, for example, declared her longstanding friendship with Benazir but failed to mention Bhutto's many flaws. Bill Richardson excoriated President Pervez Musharraf and called for the elimination of U.S. aid to Pakistan, but failed to mention that Pakistan's long military rule was a direct result of U.S. support.

Such statements betrayed an apparent failure to grasp the complexity of the world. By and large, the candidates have wasted the opportunity to provide new intellectual and political leadership to America and the world. This is probably the greatest tragedy of the race. There has never been a greater need for new U.S. leadership, yet the candidates offer little hope that this will come any time soon.

Newsweek

Mystification. Listening to the BBC coverage of the U.S. primary season is often downright humorous. Brits interviewing Iowa farmers and South Carolina African Americans are often culturally out of their depths. Their slightly off-base coverage is a great reminder of just how large and diverse this country is.

And after all, the primary process is irrational. Why does Nevada use caucuses and not a primary vote? Because the state government would have to pay for an election process, while the state political parties pick up the tab for caucuses. Nevada's legislature chooses not pay for the expensive brand. Try explaining that to an audience outside the U.S.

And then there is the truly wacky. Some enterprising geeks put up a site called Who would the world elect? Voters name their country and are allowed one vote per computer. Unfortunately the Ron Paul nuts, unable to do anything to elect their hero, did send an awful lot of traffic to this one, producing such oddities as 441 votes for Paul from Poland. A U.S. election -- even the nuts get to play.

Will Clinton use this? Will Obama? Will Edwards?

If any Democratic Presidential hopeful is willing to publicize a clip of whoever becomes the Republican nominee from this exchange, s/he will win in November.



Can the peace movement make it worth the while of a Democrat to run against the war? If that's what the nominee thinks it will take to win, any of them will do it. And if that's what they run on, it will be easier to make the winner get out in 2009. That's our project.

St. Luke's hospital -- what way forward?

On a gray dank afternoon, community activists, union members and local pols queued up on San Francisco's City Hall steps to denounce California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC)/Sutter Health's plans to close St. Luke's Hospital in the Mission District. They've been in this fight a long time: see this and this from 2005, as well as this and this from 2007.


The event was the second press conference about St. Luke's in two days. The earlier one was not a populist event. On Wednesday, CPMC sought to preempt growing opposition to its plans by announcing a "blue ribbon panel" to determine the future of the hospital, which is the only source of safety-net care other than the county hospital for residents of the south side of the city. That press event earned only a few vague paragraphs buried on page B3 of the San Francisco Chronicle. The Sacramento Business Journal offered a fuller account, though not one that clarified the corporation's intentions.

... San Francisco Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier released a statement announcing she and San Francisco Department of Public Health head Mitch Katz had reached an agreement with CPMC on a process to "maintain" St. Luke's.

CPMC's statement used similar language, but indicated the new process would "determine the future of this fragile but vital health care institution," referring to St. Luke's. ...

Officials at California Pacific indicated the panel will review data about what services at St. Luke's are needed and what services are not, adding that it should complement and support CPMC's current institutional master plan.

"This is an important step in making sure that all voices in the community are heard," Alioto-Pier said in her Jan. 23 statement. "Maintaining and rebuilding St. Luke's and developing it into a first-class hospital for the Mission District and the Southeast section of San Francisco is my primary objective." Katz voiced support for a solution that meets the needs of the city, the community and CPMC.

Neither Alioto-Pier nor Katz gave any indication of what such a solution might be ...

The group gathered at City Hall this afternoon were a lot more definitive. They want medical care that is available to the largely non-white and low-income people who live in the Mission, Excelsior and BayView neighborhoods and they don't trust Sutter.


Supervisor Tom Ammiano whose district includes St. Luke's said it simply: "I have never known Sutter to tell the truth. They don't know what truth is. They just know that profit is."


Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi denounced the "blue ribbon panel" as "simply a warm, fuzzy way to close St. Luke's."


Union members were out in force. In addition to the nurses, United Healthcare Workers passed out a statement from its leader Sal Rosselli responding to CPMC's announced committee.

"For years, doctors, nurses, caregivers, elected officials, patients and community leaders have asked Sutter officials to commit to save St. Luke's, and they've hedged and dodged the entire time, changing their position over and over again. Now, they've been dragged to the table kicking and screaming, but they still can't say plainly that they're committing to keep St. Luke's open as a full service, acute care hospital.

"Sutter could save St. Luke's today by signing a legally binding memorandum of agreement to keep the hospital open and fully functioning. The Sutter Corporation reported $587 million in profits last year alone. They have more than enough funds to maintain and improve the hospital. The question is whether or not they have the will to protect the health of San Franciscans by keeping St. Luke's open.

"Fundamentally, we believe San Francisco would be better served by an open and accountable public process to determine the city's healthcare needs and ensure that all of Sutter's reorganization plans meet them in order to win city approval."

The organizations represented at City Hall today speak for a lot of people and they don't give up easily. When I got back from the press event, I found an email invitation which opens with this:

[We] had a conversion about Save St Luke's Hospital and what more Senior Action Network can do regarding this issue. So we decided that SAN's next Senior University would focus on St Luke's Hospital and Healthy San Francisco. Senior University is a 4-day training program for seniors and persons with disabilities on community organizing. ...

Sutter better watch out.

World's largest prison World's largest jailbreak

Palestinians cross the border into Egypt after militants exploded the wall between Gaza Strip and Egypt, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2008. Masked Palestinian gunmen blew holes into the Gaza-Egypt border wall Wednesday, and thousands of Gazans trapped in their territory by a tight blockade poured into Egypt to buy food, fuel and other supplies that have become scarce. Egyptian border guards and Hamas police took no action as Palestinians hurried over the border and began returning with bags of food, boxes of cigarettes and plastic bottles of fuel.(AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

Laila El-Haddad reports and reflects on the break out.

Last night I received a text message from Fida-"its coming down-its coming down!" she declared ecstatically. "Laila! the Palestinians destroyed Rafah wall, all of it. All of it no part of it! Your sister Fida."

More texts followed, as I received an periodical updates on the situation in Rafah, where it was 3 am.

"Two hours ago people were praising God everywhere. The metal wall was cut and destroyed. So was the cement one. It is great Laila, it is great" she declared. ...

And so once again, this monstrosity that is a source of so much agony in our lives, that cripples our movement and severs our ties to each other and to our world, to our families and our homes, our universities and places of work, hospitals and airports, has fallen through the will of the people; and sadly, once again, it will go up. Of course, [Egypt's] Mubarak has tried to take credit for this, blabbering something about how they let them open it because Gazans were starving, while arresting 500 demonstrators in Cairo for speaking their mind against the siege.

The border opening also will not provide Gazans with an opportunity to travel abroad, b/c their passports will not have been stamped leaving Gaza, but it will at the very least give them some temporary respite from the siege. ...

People often ask me why such things -- meaning people powered civil protests that can overcome even the strongest occupation -- don't happen sooner, or more often, or at all for that matter. We underestimate the power of occupation to destroy a people's will to live, let alone resist and and attempt to change the situation. This is the worst thing about occupation, whether a military occupation like Israel's, or a political one like Hosni Mubarak's in his own country.

And it is only when you can overcome the psychological occupation, the occupation of the mind, that the military occupation in all its manifestations can be defeated.

Tangled webs of misogyny

This is creepy. Or perhaps just hypocritical.

St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke said this morning that St. Louis University basketball coach Rick Majerus should be disciplined over his public comments supporting abortion rights and stem cell research.

Majerus made his comments at a campaign appearance for Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday...

"It's not possible to be a Catholic and hold those positions," Burke said. "When you take a position in a Catholic university, you don't have to embrace everything the Catholic church teaches. But you can't make statements which call into question the identity and mission of the Catholic church."

St. Louis Post Dispatch

Pretty weak identity there if a basketball coach, even a guy whose teams won 325 games at the last school he worked at (Utah), can threaten it.

But the story gets more ugly. Turns out that St. Louis U. plays its basketball games in a new arena, a building whose construction the city of St. Louis assisted by granting $8 million in tax increment financing. This help to St. Louis U. only became possible after a Missouri Supreme Court decision that such a contribution did not violate the separation of church and state,

because SLU is not an organ of the Catholic Church. Opponents of the plan had sued, arguing that the subsidy violates a church-state clause in the state constitution, but the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that SLU "is not controlled by a religious creed."

King Kaufman

For what it is worth, Majerus is a Catholic.