( – promoted by SFBrianCL)

Cross Posted at Say No To Pombo and MyDD

MoveOn.org released a report this morning to publicize the costs of the Iraq War to California’s 11th District. A group of voters from CA-11 met at Richard Pombo’s San Ramon office to deliver a copy of the report to Pombo and ask him to comment on it.

Since the Iraq war began, Congressman Richard Pombo (R-Tracy) has joined Republicans in Congress to spend more than $300 billion on President Bush’s failed [Iraq] policy…  The cost of the war to taxpayers in the 11th Congressional District is more than $974 million and counting.

$974 million from CA-11 alone.  Think of the ways that money could have been spent in the district to improve the daily lives of its residents. Education. Healthcare. Transportation. Levee repair. 

But that is only one, easily calculable, cost of the Iraq war. The human cost has weighed even more heavily on the people of Richard Pombo’s district than the loss of valuable financial resources. Think for a moment of the soldiers from the district who died in this war, the many more who have been severely wounded and maimed. Think of the two young men who, right now, are sitting in the brig at Camp Pendleton awaiting trial for war crimes. 

[War’s] glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families … It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. 
—William Tecumseh Sherman

I don’t know much about these two young marines sitting alone at Camp Pendleton. I do know that they are accused of participating in the murder of an innocent civilian in Iraq. I know that they have proclaimed their innocence. I know that they have families and many good friends — Cpl. Marshall Magincalda, 23, in Manteca, and Lance Cpl. Tyler Jackson, 22, in Tracy. I know that their families and friends see a boy who loved poetry and video games, a kid who ran track and taught himself to play the guitar, an all-around good guy who was a co-worker at the local movie theater, a son who fed the homeless in a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. They refuse to believe that their sons, their best friends, could pull a man from his home, bind his hands and feet in duct tape, push him into a hole and shoot him multiple times at close range with an M-16.

I don’t know if these young men are guilty or innocent.  If they are innocent, then their country has betrayed them; and if they are guilty, their country has still betrayed them. Why? Because our leaders made a decision to enter this war of choice, to empower a bellicose and intransigent president, to continue on with no end in sight, knowing full well the terrible costs of war to all those who participate. Every student who ever sat through psych 101 knows about the Milgram experiment, knows that each of us is capable of deep, dark, horrible deeds. In the end it boils down to just one simple fact: war is hell. And yet our government continues to carelessly send our young people off to face its horrors. Before we ask our sons, our brothers, our friends, to sacrifice themselves at the altar of war, we have an abiding moral obligation to them to be certain that their suffering is absolutely and totally unavoidable. When we do anything less, we have betrayed them utterly and completely. 

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war to our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
—William Tecumseh Sherman

Around and around we go.  Schwarzenegger proposes one deal, the Legislature another, but nobody faces the real issue: we have too many prisoners.  We need real sentencing reform.

Democratic legislative leaders Tuesday presented an alternative to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans for addressing prison overcrowding, one administration officials said would force county jails to release thousands of inmates by next June.

The four bills would provide $918 million in bond and general fund financing for prison expansion, authorize the state to move 4,500 women to community correctional facilities, offer $25 million in grant money for neighborhood parole programs and allow for voluntary inmate transfers to out-of-state institutions.

But the package falls well short of the $6 billion expansion plan the governor is seeking.(SacBee 8/30/06)

We will never be able to lock up everybody.  Maybe we could look for some alternatives?

Cross posted at CAProgressive.com:

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I want to take a second and write about Karl Rove. He is a seen as a savior of the right and is hated by the left. Some may ask though, this is a site about California politics why are you talking about a White House staffer?

The answer to that is simple. The Republican party, from the top to the bottom is controlled and dictated by Rove. From the phone jamming in New Hampshire, to the tampering of machines and manufacturing of lines in Ohio to voter fraud here in California is all orchestrated by the man that holds significant power in the George W. Bush White House. In fact protégés of Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt, Matthew Dowd and gang have all been brought in to run the Ahnold campaign.

James Moore and Wayne Slater, two reporters for the Dallas Morning News, who know Rove quite well from his days in Texas wrote the best selling book Bush’s Brain. They have now come out with a new book titled “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.”

According to Publishers Weekly (hat tip: TG at Political Wire) this book is a “bold follow-up to journalists Moore and Slater’s bestseller, Bush’s Brain, takes a provocative look at how Karl Rove used George Bush’s various campaigns and presidency to engineer nothing less than the assertion of a long-term Republican hegemony and the complete dismantling of the Democratic Party.”

The argument that Rove is a danger to democracy is not an argument that will sell on a mass level, but it is a reminder of what we are working against and should prove as motivation to stay active, strong and willing to fight to November.

Well, I guess that’s what we must assume, as Arnold Schwarzenegger is loathe to debate Phil Angelides.  Check out this video about a “debate” over the Iraq War.

Dick Mountjoy, the GOP Senate nominee seems to think it will be good for his campaign to do a little rhetorical gay bashing.  Well, as if his campaign wasn’t confined to the fringes already, lock up the key and forever label him irrelevant.  In this clip, Mountjoy issues the standard “Hate the sin, don’t hate the sinner” stuff about gays and vows to fight the “lifestyle” as a  minority thinking. 

You know what, I’m really, really sick of that word, “Lifestyle”.  I read an excellent article about the term a few months ago, but can’t seem to find it.  If I do, i’ll be sure to post it. But anyway, the point is that it’s become this breezy term.  As if the millions of LGBT Americans are making some big decision.  Listen, it’s not like being “grunge” or a hippie.  So, Dick, get over it. (Like that will happen…)