Karl Rove’s Poison Pill

Tonight when Karl Rove makes his New Year’s resolution, I’m betting it has something to do with helping Hillary Clinton win the Democratic nomination. Rove’s suggestion of her inevitability has been picked up like a mantra by the GOP, Rove’s surrogates and even many in the media. Rove knows there is only one way for the Republicans to win the Whitehouse in 2008 and that is to divide the country.

Let’s face it. This country is roughly 1/3 conservative, 1/3 liberal and 1/3 moderate. It’s the middle 1/3 who choose a president. A Clinton nomination would be so polarizing; there is no way that the moderate middle will cross over to vote for her. Of course, the Republicans could also nominate a polarizing person, increasing the likelihood of a third-way political party led by Bloomberg and company.

As an independent voter in Iowa I’ve got a ringside seat to the fight for the presidency and I have to tell you it’s pretty ugly. I have supported Republican candidates in the past – before they decided that torture is a moral right; habeas corpus is an inconvenient legal technicality; and that they have the right to declare anyone they choose to be an enemy combatant. At the same time, as a moderate voter, I can’t see myself supporting Hillary Clinton for president.

So, now the choice for the Democratic Party is clear:

• There’s a divisive Hillary Clinton nomination.
  
• There is battlin’ John Edwards. I think he’s an amazingly good man. I supported him early on, but he’s run a take-no-prisoners campaign, and that’s not what it takes to unite the country. Sorry, John.
  
• And there’s the one candidate who stands for uniting red states and blue states – Barack Obama. Obama is the middle way. He is the one who can win my vote.
  

Failure by Filibuster

It’s the end of the year and a good time to take stock of what we’ve accomplished over the last year. What were you hoping the Democratically-controlled Senate would have accomplished in 2007?

• Addressing global warming and energy independence?
  
• Universal healthcare?
  
• Closing the income gap?

If you had your heart set on any of these priorities, you must feel mightily disappointed. You might wonder why Congress didn’t do more. Well, the answer can be found in a simple set of numbers - 49, 51, 60, 62, 110, 134, 1973, and 2008.

There are currently 49 Republicans and 51 Democrats in the Senate. It takes 60 votes to override a filibuster (technically, vote for cloture), which the Republicans used an unprecedented 62 times to block all business in the Senate. In fact the 110th Congress is on a record-setting trajectory to force a cloture vote 134 times, the most since the cloture option was implemented in 1973. Well, there’s a cure for that – vote your priorities in 2008.

The graph below, from an article published by the Campaign for America’s Future, puts the blame squarely where it belongs on the shoulders of the Republicans and their strategy of Block and Blame.




According to Block and Blame: The Conservative Strategy of Obstruction in the 110th Congress, “So far in just the first session of the 110th Congress, Republicans have required cloture votes against filibusters 62 times. The Republicans are on pace to force 134 cloture votes, more than double the recent historical average…”

Did you get that? The Republicans are using the power of the filibuster to choke the legislative process. Republicans promised to end gridlock and instead they delivered roadblocks. They promised bipartisan cooperation. Instead they gave us partisan obstructionism

Call it what you will – Roadblock Republicans, The Grand Obstruction Party, Failure by Filibuster – but in the end it’s the American people who pay the price for party politics.

We might have been let down by the Senate’s performance in 2007, but in 2008, it’s payback time. Vote for a president who represents your priorities and give him or her a Senate who will represent you, not party politics.

Now is OUR Time

NOW is the time to make a difference, and YOU are the one to do it. Our children are watching what we do. What legacy are you going to leave them? The writers of the history books will look at this time and report on what the American people did. How will history treat you?

Why Now?

Let’s think about this moment in the context of history:

• Our government holds prisoners without charge for years at a time.
  
• The gap between the rich and poor widens every day.
  
• The government searches our private information without a warrant.
  
• The earth warms, the ice melts and our lives hang in the balance.
  
• The Bush-Cheney Whitehouse authorizes the torture of prisoners – and then orders the destruction of evidence.
  
• We are fighting a war based on intelligence failures, enmeshing us in a civil war.

If you’ve listened to Barack Obama speak more than once, you’ve probably heard him quote Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., using the phrase “the fierce urgency of now.” Have you ever wondered about the context of that phrase? You can read the entire speech here, but if you don’t want to plow through the entire speech, then at least read this one paragraph:

“We are now faced with the fact, my friends that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood-it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’ There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.’”

- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam," address delivered to the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam, at Riverside Church, New York, NY, 4 April 1967. You can hear an audio recording of the entire speech here.

As Barack Obama said at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner,

“I am running in this race because of what Dr. King called ‘the fierce urgency of now.’ Because I believe there is such a thing as being too late – and that hour is almost upon us. America, our moment is now.”

This is the time, and you are the key.

It’s About You

Not only is this the time, but you are the one to make a difference. This is the chance to change the conversation – to take back our country from the special interest groups. This is our chance to win, but it is up to us.

If you want to understand your role in healing our nation, watch this video. Here is Barack Obama on February 11, 2007, in his own words, telling us what it is that he is trying to do. He says:

“I want to win, but I don’t just want to win. I want to transform this country. And the only way we are going to do this is if YOU make this a vehicle for your hopes and dreams.”

“Ultimately, the country changes when millions of people come together and their voices speak out on behalf of change.”

“When ordinary citizens are awakened, they accomplish extraordinary things.”

Do you get it? This race isn’t about Barack Obama. This race is about us – We the People. This is our chance to rise up and to be heard. The time is now, the place is here and the person to make a difference is you.

Why I support Barack Obama for President

With less than a week to go before the Iowa caucuses, I'm fired up and ready to go! Here is why I support Barack Obama for President in 2008.

1. Barack Obama stands for change – He has run his campaign without taking money from lobbyists. You can’t be part of the system and change the system.

2. Barack Obama has shown sound judgment – he is the only leading candidate who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning – even when it was profoundly unpopular.

He’s the guy who said, Hey, wait a minute. The emperor has no clothes.

3. Barack Obama will restore America –

• He will restore America’s rightful place as a world leader in human rights and civil liberties. We can’t lead if we’re trampling on the very values we were founded on.
• He will restore the rule of law after the shameful performance of the Bush Administration.
• He will restore the unity of the United States of America after the divisiveness of the last eight years.

Change, Judgment and Restoring the America I believe in - that is why I support Barack Obama. I hope you will too.

Choose Hope over Fear

This election comes down to a simple choice: Do you want to live a life of love, or do you want to live a life of fear? I'm going to tell you how I have chosen, but first I have to tell a little story.

Several years ago I was seeing a counselor to help me sort through some issues. At one point she asked me the typical, “…and how do you feel about that?” question. As she saw me struggling to come up with a word that would perfectly describe my nuanced feelings, she offered this suggestion. “Don’t try to come up with the perfect word. Just think of feelings as four primary colors – sad, mad, glad and scared. Which one of those are you feeling?” That helped a lot. After spending a lifetime learning a thousand different words for “happy,” I finally had a simple way of expressing how I felt.

For several years I continued to use this simple four-color method for sorting through my feelings. After a while I began to simplify this system further until I realized that, for me, all of my feelings came down to two – love and fear. I have found it useful to ask myself, “Right now, am I coming from love, or am I coming from fear?”

I want to live a live that comes from love, but there are a lot of forces that are working in the opposite direction. Who told me to be afraid?

There is an entire news industry whose job is to milk my glands with dire threats and imminent dangers. Someone once told me that “the body cannot absorb the amount of grief produced by our modern 24 hour news channels.” I believe that.

There are the K-Street lobbyists who would rather win a battle for funding than to really help and educate the American people. Richard Feldman, a former lobbyist for the NRA said in his new book Ricochet, “Drawing nice clean lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to battle over makes for far more successful direct mail solicitations than actually solving problems.” How sad.

Unfortunately, some presidential candidates want us to be afraid – they want us to fear Latinos and gay people and the Jihadist who is lurking around the corner. They want us to suspect the motive of their fellow public servants and to believe their opponent in the race is the anti-Christ. Their dark scary ads warn us of the weakness of their opponents and the imminent danger brought on by voting for them. Their message is, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Well, I choose not to live in fear. I have chosen a candidate of hope – one whose message comes from love and not fear. I have chosen to caucus for Barack Obama.

Barack Obama speaks of the importance of faith, telling us “But over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people's lives -- in the lives of the American people -- and I think it's time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.”

He reminds us that justice is in OUR hands. He said “Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the crowd of thousands and said ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.’ He's right, but you know what? It doesn't bend on its own. It bends because we help it bend that way.”

He calls us to service, saying “I am here today to…invite you to take hold of the future of your country. Because your own story and the American story are not separate - they are shared. And they will both be enriched if we stand up together, and answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century.”

Faith, hope, love, justice, service…these are the reasons I support Barack Obama. I hope you will too.

Score: Republicans 1, People negative 59.1 billion

It's interesting to watch the debate on the Alternative Minimum Tax…and by “interesting” I mean the same kind of detached dread that one must feel if one is awake in an operating room as one’s right hand is amputated.

In 2006 the freshly minted Congress, in an act of sanity restored the "pay-go." That’s the simple premise that if we are going to authorize spending money, we’ve got to figure out what we’re not going to spend somewhere else.

Spending money is about choices. This is a simple fact of life that you and I have to live by every day. If I buy the new iPod 16Gig Touch (at nearly $400), I am not going to go buy a new laptop this month…or groceries either, but that’s another story. In economics it’s known as opportunity cost. There are only so many resources to go around, and if we spend those resources in one place, we’ve got to figure out where we are not going to spend money.

Here are the sad facts that no one seems to be willing to say out loud. As I write these words, the US federal deficit is $9,176,331,074,081.58 ($9.2 trillion), and it continues to rise by over $1.5 billion per day. Oh, I forgot to add, if you include unfunded Social Security, Medicaid and other empty government promises, the actual debt is more like $59.1 trillion. Since there are 303,818,150 US citizens, that means that every man, woman, boy and girl you know owes $194,524.26. For a family of four, that means you owe $778,097.03 over and above the taxes you’re already paying.

Go find someone you love, look them in the eye and explain how you’re going to repay the $194,524.26 you owe. With all of the talk by the Republicans about “tax and spend” Democrats, it’s interesting that they are perfectly willing to be “deficit and spend” Republicans. And by “interesting,” I mean…well you know.

OK, so now we understand the situation. Perhaps that explains why the House of Representative insists that, to fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), the money has to come from somewhere. No more deficit and spend.

But in the Senate, where the Republicans have used the power of the filibuster to block all business, a compromise was reached that fixes the AMT, but further runs up the debt. The House is stuck between their promise of fiscal responsibility and a hand grenade with the pin pulled. In the end the House will have no choice but to cave on this issue and fix the AMT without offsetting funds.

So, the Republicans are going to win the spin war. They’re going to make it look like the Democrats are the ones who are holding up your tax break while the deficit rises uncontrollably. Score that one, Republicans 1, the people 0…or more correctly, a negative $59.1 billion.