http://web.archive.org/web/20061005044746/http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/so-is-torturing-a-daughte_b_29538.html

WOW!!

What an arrogant prick I was back then, eh!! :D

Michale.....

Speaking of blogging, yesterday was my fifth anniversary doing so, after being invited to post on the Huffington Post way back when (you can decide for yourself whether I've gotten any better at it, by reading my first column).

Wish we still had that WOULD YOU TORTURE YOUR DAUGHTER HuffPo commentary intact.. :D That was a wild ride... :D

Michale.....

Why must we put aside our arrogance??

"Of course I'm arrogant! I've EARNED it! What's your excuse?"
-Q

Americans have earned the right to be arrogant. There isn't a country on the face of this planet that hasn't benefited from the USA's existence. Every nation on the planet owes the USA for something..

Yea, I know, I know... I need to work on my humility... :D

i do agree with you that he doesn't adequately address the foreign policy solution when some leaders simply will not respond to the dictates of logic or reason. if not the threat of military force, what instead?

Yea, that's kind of what I thought as well.. He says sanctions don't work and that military force is unacceptable so, as you say, what's left?

Gravel seemed to be saying "It's not NK's or Iran's fault. It's the USA's fault for making them want Nuclear Weapons."... That's in line with the "Blame USA for everything" bent that the speech had...

finally, you ignored what i thought was the best part of the speech, support of a national initiative. maybe that's not the perfect solution, but there has to be some way for individual voters to circumvent the will of politicians and powerful fund-raising organizations, be they corporate, labor or otherwise.

Yea, especially when we see Obama prostrating himself to Wall Street donors..

Obama Seeks to Win Back Wall St. Cash
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/politics/13donor.html?_r=1&ref=politics

You gotta admire the blatant chutzpah... Obama demonizes Wall Street (mostly deserved) at every opportunity, yet doesn't seem to have a problem with taking their (in his eyes) ill-gotten money...

Is this the Hope and Change we voted for??

i forgot one thing. while watching clips of nancy pelosi and debbie wasserman-schultz, i kept chuckling to myself about how insistent they were that weiner should be pulled.

Now THAT was funny!! :D

Here's what's confusing me... Early Friday (or was it Saturday??), I read reports that Pelosi had gone on record as saying that it's up to Weiner and his constituents whether he stays or goes. Hours later, Pelosi led the pack demanding Weiner's departure..

Such track changes simply MUST be dangerous, eh?

Michale.....

hyuk hyuk hyuk,
~joshua

i would just as soon not have gravel as president, but your characterizations of his speech are just plain inaccurate. nowhere did he call americans "lazy, fat, stupid and wrong," or anything vaguely resembling that.

We are a moral and fair-minded people. As a nation, we must put aside our arrogance and demand that our leaders work together with other nations and peoples, treating them as equals.

that is NOT hating on the USA, just asking us to face the reality that we're not smarter or better than everyone else. there's a huge difference. i do agree with you that he doesn't adequately address the foreign policy solution when some leaders simply will not respond to the dictates of logic or reason. if not the threat of military force, what instead?

finally, you ignored what i thought was the best part of the speech, support of a national initiative. maybe that's not the perfect solution, but there has to be some way for individual voters to circumvent the will of politicians and powerful fund-raising organizations, be they corporate, labor or otherwise.

~joshua

I am sure you won't find this surprising but I wasn't much impressed..

It seemed to follow the standard liberal litany that America and Americans are bad and at the cause of all of the world's problems...

One really can't win over people by telling them how lazy, fat, stupid and wrong they are...

His stance on scumbag nations acquiring nuclear weapons is also very misguided.. Gravel seems to put forth the idea that, once again, the US is at fault for NK and Iran wanting nuclear weapons. He seems to espouse the idea that, if we were just nicer to those countries, they wouldn't feel the need for nuclear weapons. That concept is so misguided, it's dangerous.. Gravel seems to miss the point that some leaders are simply evil. Not misunderstood, but just evil..

How long do you think Tel Aviv will exist once Iran has a nuclear weapon and the reliable means to deliver it?

While I do agree with Gravel that sanctions are useless, I don't agree that Use Of Force is equally counter-productive. As we saw in Iraq and in Libya, UOF is sometimes the ONLY logical response to a problem.. To be sure, UOF shouldn't be the FIRST option, but to discount it completely is to give away your enemy very valuable intel..

That is EXACTLY why the US wouldn't eliminate a First Strike option during the Cold War.. And it's what kept the (uneasy) peace during all those years. When it comes to responsible nation states, the MAD doctrine is definitively effective, as history shows us..

All in all, the USA is damn lucky that Gravel wasn't elected president.. This country would be quite a bit different today if he had...

Michale.....

Congressional pay is an invisibly small part of the federal budget. It should be raised to a level that would allow non-millionaires to have the job if they could get it -- along with other changes that would make it possible for non-millionaires to get the job in the first place.

I would have to disagree...

I mean, think about it...

Doing something like this would be a HUGE PR coup for lawmakers..

If it was not any big deal, politicians could do this 'withhold pay' thing and reap huge rewards from marketing it...

The fact that it hasn't been done indicates to me that it's more of a hardship then might be indicated..

My guess is that Congress Critters have automatic payments made based on their monthly paycheck... Things like gas cards, dry cleaning, etc etc are auto-paid on their payday...

If that payday were to be disrupted, Congress Critters would have to scramble and make sure all those monthly bills are paid....

SOMETHING is causing them not to want to put forth such legislation.

Because, if there was no hardship attached to it, you can bet they would do it in a stone cold minute, political animals that they are...

Michale.....

The way I hear it, Republicans aren't demonizing "the fastest-growing demographic in America,"

Unless you are calling ILLEGAL immigrants a "demographic"....

A "demographic" which, I might add, is legally not even supposed to be a voting demographic...

Regardless, the vast number of Independents and many on the Left as well are firmly in the Republicans camp when it comes to ILLEGAL immigrants...

. Panetta is the ultimate wonk, and is a pro at this sort of thing, and every news story I've read or heard about his hearings ends with some version of "... and, of course, he will have no problem being confirmed by the Senate." That's a pretty impressive thing to say these days, especially for anyone Barack Obama names to his cabinet.

I saids it before and I'll says it again.. Panetta is a political animal... He's a number cruncher, a bean counter... Yea, I know, I know... He got Bin Laden..

Even a broken watch is right, twice a day...

But, having said all of that, Weiner's clinging on to power after the revelations of the past few days is disappointing indeed.

He will be a gift to the GOP that just keeps on giving...

"Next week, California politicians are going to face two stark choices: pass a budget on time, and put it on the governor's desk... or your paychecks will stop. This new law was passed by a citizen referendum, and this is the first time it will be an issue in the perpetual budget negotiations in the Golden State. I call on all members of the United States Congress to pass a similar law at the federal level. If you don't pass a budget on time each year -- and complete all the appropriations bills necessary -- then you don't get paid until the job is done. And after the job is done, you can't award yourself the back pay retroactively. Any member of the House or Senate who doesn't support this simple concept is quite obviously not fit to serve office because they want to get paid even when they don't do their jobs, which offends me deeply."

This is something that every American who is not a politician, can get behind.

This is probably the ONE thing that everyone here *AND* The Tea Party would agree on... :D

"I call upon the Obama administration to do the right thing for over 22,000 prospective immigrants who are trying to play by America's rules in how they enter the country......

I would have to agree with this one as well..

If the immigrants played by the rules and were told they "won" then they should be allowed to immigrate..

The Obama Administration dropped the ball on this one..

"I see that New Jersey's governor finally decided that the taxpayers of his state shouldn't have to pay the expenses of him taking a helicopter ride to his son's baseball game or to a political event. It took Chris Christie a few days of scorn, but he finally decided to reimburse the state for such frivolities. It's hard to be a 'man of the people' when you are escorted in 'New Jersey One' to a Little League game, I guess. At least he finally paid the expenses, but it sure took him a while to realize how fiscally irresponsible he was being with his taxpayers' money, didn't it?"

Sorry, I gotta call foul on this one...

Sure, the PERCEPTION looks bad...

But Christie merely hitched a ride on a flight that was already going to happen...

"Space A" as we used to say in the military..

In fact, if he didn't hitch a ride on the chopper that was already flying, he would have had to be driven there and that WOULD have cost the taxpayers money, not to mention contributing to {{cough}} {{cough}} human caused global warming (yet the planet is cooling)...

So, all around, Christie did the RIGHT thing by his constituents...

Michale.....

Well, thank you for the kind words, and for reading even after a week of mostly nothingness. I still haven't figured out what happened to the auto-poster...

dsws -

Our family has always pronounced it "Why-gant" (rhymes with "Why can't?" if that helps). But then, Ellis Island trimmed it by a few letters, and we've been Americanized for generations... you're right, though, following strict Germanic rules, it would start with a "V" sound.

As for the rest of your comment, I'm going to conveniently blame my stance on the jetlag. Heh.

-CW

"If you don't pass a budget on time each year -- and complete all the appropriations bills necessary -- then you don't get paid until the job is done"

I've disagreed with the whole don't-pay-Congress thing before, and I will again. Congress is too much of a millionaires' club already. If you can't afford to maintain a residence in your home district and another one in the DC area (an expensive housing market), you're ineligible to serve in Congress.

As it is, the pay is small enough not to matter to the millionaires who represent us. But in principle, one faction in Congress shouldn't be able to hold members' income hostage to the outcome of some legislative decision. Article I section 6 only says the pay is to be set by law, and can't be augmented with the salary of patronage offices. The "which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected" is for the president.

Congressional pay is an invisibly small part of the federal budget. It should be raised to a level that would allow non-millionaires to have the job if they could get it -- along with other changes that would make it possible for non-millionaires to get the job in the first place.

I'm not sure what happened this week. The three speeches that were supposed to automatically run on Mon/Tue/Wed somehow didn't post correctly, so I guess you guys have had a week of staring at the same article.

Mea culpa.

I've manually posted the last three speeches, if anyone is still interested, and still haven't figured out why the Clinton, Kucinich, and Gravel speeches didn't post the way they all did the week before.

In any case, I was too exhausted yesterday to post a column, so here's today's FTP for whoever is still out there checking the site.

Perhaps, to make up for it, I'll post something this weekend. No promises, but I'll try to stay awake.

-CW