The Day John McCain Lost My Vote

The day when John McCain lost my vote is when he did not vote for a bill that would have made waterboarding an illegal tactic for the CIA to utilize.

Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.

I have seen various videos of individuals being waterboarded and it is most definitely torture. A State Department official once stated that he wanted to go through it before he supported it or opposed it. After he went through it, he said it was the most terrifying experience of his life and it is indeed torture.

How can Senator McCain abandon one of his strongest beliefs that the United States should not torture? Has he forgotten the days when he was tortured? I do not think that is possible, but I think he wants to win votes in his party rather than stand for a human rights issue. He has said he would rather win the war than win an election. Apparently, he would rather win the election than outlaw torture.

After World War II, the United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers who water-boarded others. We ended WWII with such a high moral authority and now it has been eroded.

Additionally, as started by President Clinton and used by the Bush Administration, the CIA uses extreme tactics such as extraordinary rendition.

The Wikipedia definition: the apprehension and extrajudicial transfers of a person from one state to another, particularly with regard to the alleged transfer of suspected terrorists to countries known to torture prisoners or to employ hard interrogation techniques that may rise to the level of torture.

The CIA “renders” a person to a different country (often a country that uses torture such as Egypt and Syria) in order to interrogate an individual. The is one story where an Islamic guy was “rendered” because the CIA interpreted one of his phone calls wrong. The CIA believed that the guy was talking about airplanes to a friend. He then was rendered for 18 months or so. This guy was not talking about airplanes, but rather tires. The words for airplanes and tires are similar in Arabic, which tirat means tires and tairat means airplanes. This sounds more like an “erroneous rendition.”

This practice violates the spirit of the United States and numerous international treaties, which when signed and ratified by the United States, the treaties are just as significant as the United States Constitution.

Now would John McCain continue this process to win this war that he cares so much about?

- Jen

Still a Hillary Girl

I know this is yesterday news, but I am going to blog once about my disappointment with the primary race.

There are both gracious Senator Clinton supporters and Senator Obama supporters and there are also some not-so-gracious Senator Clinton supporters and Senator Obama supporters. Obama supporters need to stop telling Clinton supporters to get over it and Clinton supporters need to stop threatening to vote for Senator McCain.

And I am TIRED of hearing that Senator Obama has a "Hillary Problem." It is disturbing to called a problem and we're not going to go run to Senator McCain. I am sorry, but Senator McCain is not the champion of women's rights. His Supreme Court nominees would make progress harder, and I am NOT talking about abortion rights; there is more to modern day feminism than abortion noise.

Both candidates received over 18 million votes across the country; it was a close race. But if the Democratic Primary was like the Republican Primary, Senator Clinton would have won. Republicans use the “winner-take-all” strategy, that if an individual wins the popular vote of the state, he receives all the pledged votes. Alternatively, Democrats split up the pledged delegates by percentage of the popular vote.

My point is that Senator Clinton could have won and she came close. I understand that life is full of rules that must be followed. But that dimension of her momentous run made it much harder to move pass the loss.

I like Senator Obama and there are no great differences between the two candidates besides age, race, and gender. But I have been slow to “fall in love” with him like I did for Senator Clinton.

During the primary, Senator Clinton stood by her Iraq war vote and Senator Obama ran to the left. Now Senator Obama is running back to the center, like ALL politicians do during primary and general elections on their respective sides. But it makes me angry because Senator Clinton lost votes for her centrist position. She stood firm for various reasons, but an obvious reason was to stay closer to the middle, as to not alienate people during the general, not do what Senator Obama did. Besides, Senator Obama was lucky to have not been in the Senate when it authorized invasion; he even admitted to the great Tim Russert in 2004 that he did not know how he would have voted if he had to make that Senate vote. He did not have all the intelligence and reports that Senator Clinton did. I thought it was a cheap line during the primary election, but it worked for him, he is the nominee. From the LA Times:

Many women who support Obama say they were torn, but are unapologetic about their choice. For many, the decision turns on one vote cast by Clinton in 2002:
for the bill authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq.

Earlier this year, a group calling itself “New York Feminists for Peace and Barack Obama,” circulated an online petition that was a nuanced endorsement of the Illinois senator. It was so popular that the words “New York” were dropped from the name, and the effort went national.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/02/nation/na-feminists2

When a race is close, it is easy to look back and see where votes were lost and ask what if. But she lost. It is time to move one with Senators Obama and Biden.

-Jen

Defeating the Communists with Candy

Kind of.

Author Andrei Cherny wrote about the Berlin airlift in his new book The Candy Bombers. Mr. Cherny works in the Arizona Attorney General's Office, in the division I interned last summer. It is interesting how themes repeat throughout history and only if we could learn from them. After WWII, the United States was the moral authority and leader in the world with its impeccable performance with difficult situations. It is too bad the United States, in recent years, has given the world a reason to question its moral authority, with Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, water boarding (note that some Japanese soldiers during WWII were prosecuted for water boarding US troops, it is most definitely torture, thank you Senator McCain for voting for the torture bill), extraordinary rendition, the "CIA torture flights" and other things. The US did not do this kind of low-level stuff during WWII, which that War was perhaps the biggest threat to modern democracy. Remember the Nuremberg Trials to prosecute the Nazis? Seems like amuch better idea than locking "terrorists" up in some random prison.

Story about Mr. Cherny's book in The Washington Post today:

From Berlin to Baghdad

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; Page A15

The city is in dire straits -- its economy shattered, its citizens desperately hungry. Random violence is rising, electricity is sporadic. Three years after the invasion, hope for a brief occupation has faded. The mission is to build democracy from the ruins of dictatorship, but sober analysts question whether a flaw in the national character makes freedom unattainable.

This is not Baghdad 2008 but Berlin 1948, which makes the reunified German capital a particularly fitting venue for Barack Obama's speech tomorrow. The lush Tiergarten where Obama will speak was then a wasteland where Berliners struggled to grow vegetables in the shadow of the bombed-out Reichstag.

Sixty years ago this month, Berlin stood on the pivot point of history. The Soviet Union choked off food and fuel for the western sector of the divided city. The United States launched an improbable mission to supply it by air.

And a Utah farm boy named Hal Halvorsen, flying C-54 Skymasters in the relentless shuttle, made an impulsive promise to the scrawny children gathered behind the barbed wire fence at Berlin's Tempelhof airport: He would drop some candy for them. Operation "Little Vittles" eventually delivered tons of chocolate, attached to tiny parachutes fashioned from handkerchiefs.

The story of the Berlin Airlift and Halvorsen's mission is told in "The Candy Bombers," a new book by Democratic strategist Andrei Cherny. If the plural of anecdotes is not data, the stacking of historical analogies is not sound policy. Yet, as Cherny writes, "Their story has powerful resonance for our own time. In confronting the Berlin blockade, America went to battle against a destructive ideology that threatened free people around the world. In a country we invaded and occupied that had never had a stable democracy, we brought freedom and turned their people's hatred of America into love for this country, its people, and its ideals."

The lessons of the Berlin Airlift are anything but simple, which is what makes it such a useful historical moment. Cherny's book is something of a Rorschach test on Iraq: The message readers receive may depend on the mindset with which they arrived.

Thus, Obama can rightly point to the airlift as evidence that maintaining America's moral voice is an essential component of its foreign policy. The United States stands to gain as much from a modern-day Candy Bomber as it risks losing from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Those who doubt the capacity of government, in the aftermath of Katrina, to mobilize quickly and implement deftly can take heart from the example of organizational whiz Bill Tunner, who turned a slapdash operation incapable of supplying Berlin into a precision drill that kept the beleaguered city going through a long winter.

The rest of the article can be read at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/22/AR2008072202113.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

-Jen

Support the Troops

Throughout history, patriotism ebbs and flows. In recent years, if one spoke out about the country, the individual was “not patriotic” and this angers me. This term is thrown around as an insult to undermine what an individual is advocating. The Founding Fathers (though those wives who stayed home on the farm should be given more credit too, but that is a blog for another day), would believe that dissent is the ultimate form of being patriotic. We should be thankful for their dissent, because, but for them standing up for what they thought was right, the United Kingdom would still be our “Mother Country.” (I am currently watching the HBO series on John Adams…)

This brings me to “support the troops.” This is an insult that is also thrown around. If you speak out against the war, then you don’t support the troops. If you don’t agree with the war, you do not support the troops. This is disrespectful and detracts from the troops. I believe there are different ways to “support the troops.” Putting a magnet on a car is not the only way to show support. Supporting the troops is not wearing a flag pin or putting your hand over your heart. Those simple actions are a great way to show support, but the actions can be superficial if that is it. Senator Obama should not have to give a speech about being patriotic; he has shown his love of our country through his public service as a politician and he has done nothing to permit such questions of his dedication.

Senator Clinton, a few years ago, helped sponsor a bill that would have given permanent health care to any individual who was served our country in this capacity, but it was laughed at. And there have been others. Additionally, the new GI Bill has been greeted with resistance from various republicans and Senator John McCain. Any soldier who serves our country should be welcomed home with the same opportunities our WWII troops were given.

What brings me to this topic, as being my first real blog topic, is an article on CNN, “Homeless veterans face new battle for survival.” It is noted that veterans make up almost a quarter of the homeless population and this number is expected to rise. Individuals dismiss the homeless population as being lazy and not deserving of any help. But the homeless population is made up of primarily veterans, former foster care children, individuals who are mentally ill, and others. It is embarrassing that the richest country in the world cannot take better care of its veterans, (the state of some VA hospitals is terrible, we can do better). The federal government is the most competent organ to address this issue; the individual donative person cannot fix these types of problems. They served their country, their country should serve them.

With that, Happy Fourth of July!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/02/homeless.veterans/index.html

-Jennifer