Category: Minnesota Politics

by Paul Bartlett

John Kline purports to represent the people and best interests of the second congressional district. He's a phony. Every fiber of Kline's being is antithetical to the history and values of our area, of Minnesota and of the upper Midwest.

As a reverse carpetbagger from Corpus Christi, Texas, Kline takes his marching orders from fellow Texan, the infamous and corrupt Tom DeLay. He also takes money from DeLay.

Many of us cherish our progressive history. The American progressive movement has roots throughout the upper Midwest. Progressives are deeply concerned with the welfare of our communities, our schools, civil rights for all of our citizens, conserving our natural resources and national assets, protecting our environment, not bullying those who disagree with us, and not passing hopeless debt and environmental degradation to future generations.

We are not naive tree-hugging idealists. To the contrary. We recognize that good government cost money, and unlike Kline and his crowd, we believe that taxes must cover the cost of government. Kline, Bush and DeLay love to spend money .... somebody else's money. We believe that the debt policies that Kline supports are immoral, that it is unconscionable to stick our kids and grandkids with the GOP's runaway borrow and spend binge.

Ask yourself, do you want Minnesota to look like Texas? Do you want Minnesota to function like a third world country? Do you want a broken school system, dilapidated communities, unpaved roads, littered highways, and extreme poverty? Well, John Kline does.

Category: World Politics

Quotes from Dick Cheney through the years... our own version of Baghdad Bob


I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."

At the Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991

"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many."

At the Discovery Institute in Seattle, August,1992

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam now has weapons of mass destruction."

--8/26/2002

"My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." -

--3/16/2003

[In response to "We have not been greeted as liberators."] "Well, I think we have by most Iraqis. I think the majority of Iraqis are thankful for the fact that the United States is there, that we came and we took down the Saddam Hussein government. And I think if you go in vast areas of the country, the Shia in the south, which are about 60 percent of the population, 20-plus percent in the north, in the Kurdish areas, and in some of the Sunni areas, you'll find that, for the most part, a majority of Iraqis support what we did."

-- Sunday, Sept. 14, 2003 on Meet The Press with Tim Russert.

"If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

-- Sunday, Sept. 14, 2003 on Meet The Press with Tim Russert.

"America has shown we are serious about removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction."..."We now know that Saddam Hussein had the capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction.... We know he had the necessary infrastructure because we found the labs and the dual-use facilities that could be used for these chemical and biological agents. We know that he was developing the delivery systems, 'ballistic missiles', that had been prohibited by the United Nations."

-- Fundraising dinner in New Mexico, February 6, 2004


"The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there's clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror."

--At the Vice Presidential Debates, October 5, 2004.

"What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action."

--Vice Presidential Debate, October 5, 2004

"I think we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time," Cheney said. "The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

--on Larry King, June,2005

Category: US Politics

by Dave Mindeman

Ok, let's have a show of hands. Who condones lynching? No one? I didn't think so... but it was interesting how the Senate resolution to apologize for Senate inaction against lynching, played out.

Terry Neal wrote some interesting background in the Washington Post. If you look at how it all developed, you realize how far we still have to go with race relations in America. When the resolution came to the floor, Senator Frist decided that a voice vote was in order, since there was no opposition. (There is some confusion about whether a roll call vote was requested or not). Very few Senators were actually on the floor, so it became official quite uneventfully. However, the key sponsors Sen. George Allen (R-Va) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La) wanted to still get every Senator on the record and called for each individual Senator to sign-on as a co-sponsor. Most did so immediately -- a few others signed on the next day.... but 11 Senators (all Republicans) held back.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with not signing on as a co-sponsor. That does not indicate a "pro-lynching" bias. It is, however, a very symbolic type of "inaction" that can lead to a broad interpretation of intent.

Mr. Dean was particularly interested in Sen. Thad Cochran's (R-MS) take on the issue. Sen. Cochran is a deep south Senator with a deep south mentality. His answer to reporter inquiries was, that he didn't feel he could apologize "for something I did not do". A Mississippi paper also got Cochran on the record:

"I don't feel that I should apologize for the passage or the failure to pass any legislation by the U.S. Senate," Cochran told the Clarion Ledger of Jackson, Miss. "But I deplore and regret that lynchings occurred and that those committing them were not punished."

A logical enough response except for the fact that the Clarion Ledger paper also pointed out:

"Cochran had previously co-sponsored measures "apologizing for the U.S. government's mistreatment of American Indians and Japanese Americans" -- neither of which he was directly responsible for."

The other 10 Senators who were conspicuously absent were:

Sen. Lamar Alexander (TN) Sen. Robert Bennett (UT)
Sen. John Cornyn (TX) Sen. Michael Enzi (WY)
Sen. Judd Gregg (NH) Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ)
Sen. Trent Lott (MS) Sen. Richard Shelby (AL)
Sen. John Sununu (NH) Sen. Craig Thomas (WY)

When you look at that list, you can see some of the political posturing involved. Both of the New Hampshire and Wyoming senators are involved -- they have very few minorities in their consituencies and no need to offend potential donors that have less than enthusiastic views on minority legislation. I liked Senator Enzi's explanation though, he said that "in general (he) doesn't co-sponsor bills that don't give specific legislative action or direction to a specific agency". Sure...

Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi senators have little to lose in looking more "deep south". Sen. Lamar Alexander was bit of a surprise here but his excuse was that "he is pushing a different measure condemning lynching, while celebrating the accomplishments of African-Americans". I guess it was too much to ask him to sign on to both measures. Sen. Kyl is not considered much of a friend to the minority community with his immigration stances... and Sen. Bennett is just a conservative nut who's against everything Democrats are for.

Politics is sometimes more about symbolic gestures than about votes. Apologizing for the lynching atrocities done in the the south decades ago isn't a question of being for it or against it. We are really not talking about the past... it is about what the past is doing to hold back progress for the future. The Apology for Lynching resolution spoke volumes on that.