Well, it's certainly been an eventful couple of weeks, hasn't it?

We're back on our regular weekly schedule here after returning home from our second trip this month (this one to Netroots Nation), after which I can firmly conclude that flying, these days, sucks. Big time. Sigh.

Personal travel observations aside, though, plenty has been happening elsewhere in the political world while all the Lefties where having fun in Minneapolis. So much has been happening that I'm bound to miss at least one or two of them, for which I apologize in advance. By next week, we'll be back up to our usual fighting trim here, and promise that not so many things will be falling through the cracks.

Speaking of fighting trim, the president made news on two of our wars in the past few weeks. Oh, excuse me, Libya is now officially not a "war" or even "hostilities" anymore, according to the White House. Um, OK. More on this in a bit, of course. This news was soon overshadowed by Obama's announcement of his withdrawal schedule for Afghanistan. Out of roughly 100,000 American troops currently in the country, 10,000 will be out before the end of this year and another 23,000 will come home by next September. This equation did not please the anti-war crowd or the pro-war crowd, it should be mentioned, but the jury's still out on what the public at large thinks of it. Again, much more on this subject in a bit.

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[Note: Part 1 of this article ran Tuesday.]

[UPDATE: This article has been updated. The incorrect information in the third paragraph has been corrected. We apologize for the error.]

Before we get to the main subject today -- the Netroots Nation speeches and presentations -- we've got to briefly revisit what we talked about in Part 1 of this article, because we forgot a few things. Such is the nature of conventions, and their aftermath.

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Later today, President Obama is going to address the nation on the subject of the Afghanistan war. Specifically, he's going to make good on a promise made a year-and-a-half ago: to begin the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan next month. The big question everyone's been speculating about in the run-up to this announcement has been how big a reduction the president will announce.

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I have to admit, up front here, that I find these sorts of columns seriously boring and annoying when I run into them online myself, so I can personally understand if you just decide to skip today's column altogether.

Last week, I attended the Netroots Nation blogfest in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Below are my disjointed ramblings about the experience of attending the conference. I'm not even going to try to "cover" the conference as straight news, since pretty much all of it is available online as video (of both the keynote speeches as well as the breakout sessions). If you're interested in "what happened" or "what was said" then I'd advise just watching the videos on your own.

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Along with a horde of Lefties, I was in Minneapolis this past week. But what I didn't realize was that a Minneapolis journalistic landmark was about to hit a milestone. One that I would trust more than any other news organization to adequately deal with that bizarre "landmark hitting a milestone" metaphor I just used (one can only imagine the headline they'd come up with, something along the lines of: "Jon Stewart Attacks Freeway Sign in Bizarre Case of Road Rage"). I speak (of course) of The Onion, and its recent one-thousandth issue -- which (as of this writing) is freely available as an actual printed newspaper on the streets of Minneapolis. More importantly, I also speak out in favor of the push they used this historic issue to launch -- to get their own Pulitzer Prize.

The Onion, of course, is satire. They were doing fake news long before Jon Stewart was even on the air. Being satirical, their campaign for a Pulitzer is heavily laced with humor. Humorous or not, though, they've got a serious point.

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[Program Note: OK, since I've been away, and since June has been a (shall we say) "sub-par" month for us here in terms of posting things in a timely manner, I'm going to run a rare late-Sunday column for your edification. This is, in some ways, a mea culpa for the break in service last week. Also, it seemed appropriate, since I've been away so much this month that I pretty much completely missed commenting on the continuing saga of Anthony Weiner. So, while Weiner's case was a bit more unique (no hookers were even involved), I thought it time to dig this column out from three years ago, which I wrote in the wake of the Eliot Spitzer scandal. You may also wish to check out a follow-up column I wrote entitled "On Whores" in November of 2009. In any case, this column somehow seemed appropriate, given the mainstream media frenzy in the past few weeks....]

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Our apologies, but for the second time this month, there will be an interruption in columns here at ChrisWeigant.com. This time around, we'll be traveling to the Netroots Nation blogger convention for the remainder of this week.

What this means is no column today, and quite likely no column tomorrow. I can't promise anything for the rest of the week, but if I can find the time to write and to post, perhaps I'll write down a few observations from the conference.

The good news is that this will be the last of these interruptions in service, and starting next Monday, our regular schedule of one column posted late every weekday will return on a regular basis.

We do apologize for the intermittent service this month, and ask our faithful readers to bear with us until next Monday. Thanks in advance for being understanding.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

The Republican presidential field for the 2012 presidential election will be on full display this evening, as CNN airs the second nationally-televised candidate debate, this one from the early-voting state of New Hampshire. Since the first debate was a little light on heavyweight candidates, this is the first chance a lot of Republican primary voters will have to assess the biggest names in the race.

All the major candidates will be participating tonight, with the exception of Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin. Perry and Palin may not even be candidates -- neither has committed to running as of yet, even as speculation abounds over whether they'll jump in or not. Most observers expect Huntsman to announce very soon now, but he has taken a pass on tonight's debate.

But for those folks who haven't been paying much attention, we're going to run down the lists of contenders, loosely grouped in my own arbitrary categories. As always, the names within the categories are presented in alphabetic order, to avoid any showing of favoritism in placement.

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Having just gotten back from a trip abroad where the news was dominated by the story of a politician facing severe consequences (and the end of his political career) for his sexual misconduct, I opened up the pages of the American news to find... well, pretty much the same thing.

While France digests the criminal trial of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, back home in America John Edwards is also slouching towards a courtroom, in a desperate bid to retain his legal license by beating the rap on campaign finance charges -- and that was the minor political sexual misconduct story of the past week or so.

The major political sexual scandal was a full-blown weenie roast. Or, to be more accurate, a Weiner roast. This is technically not exactly the same thing as a wiener roast, but it certainly is close enough for the late-night comedian in all of us, right? The word "wiener" is an American bastardization of wienerwurst, German for Vienna sausage. The vulgar slang definition came later, of course. Anthony Weiner spells his last name differently, and it probably should properly and Germanically be pronounced as "whiner," but (as previously stated) this is still close enough for everyone in the headline-writing business. Perhaps I'm overexplaining this, which you can chalk up to the fact that I confess to being sensitive about the whole "ei" versus "ie" thing, for obvious reasons (like the fact that when I set up my website I had to register "chriswiegant.com" along with the correct spelling, so that everyone could still find it).

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).

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[Program Note: While I'm on vacation, I thought it would be fun to jump back about four years here. Because the 2012 presidential campaign is not going to be very interesting on the Democratic side, we're going to take a look back at when it was a real race, last time around. For the next eight days, we will be repeating our "Campaign Speech Series" from 2007, when we printed the full text of a speech given by every Democratic candidate. You can read the original introduction to this series to see the details of how it was put together, if you're interested. While we realize that these speeches are not exactly relevant to where we stand today, we still thought it'd be worthwhile to run them while we're on hiatus here. Regular columns are currently scheduled to return June 9th.]

Mike Gravel

http://www.gravel2008.us/index.php

Stepping Back From Imperialism:
Redirecting American Foreign Policy

St. Anselm College, Manchester, New Hampshire
11/1/06

The United States is the largest economic unit in the world. Responsible stewardship of our economy requires that we maintain our superpower status, not only in terms of military capability, but in equally important areas such as the strength and solvency of our economy, the educational and physical health of our population, and a firm commitment to our moral principles and spiritual values. Strength in all these areas is vital to maintain our superpower status.

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