Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

Clinton was making her first campaign swing through this early nominating state, which twice voted for Bill Clinton for president. She met with key activists and held a raucous town hall meeting with 1,500 cheering backers and hundreds of journalists.

"I have said clearly and consistently for quite some time that I regret the way the president misused the authority," said Clinton. "He misled Congress and the country on what he was seeking and what he intended to do."

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) AUTHORIZATION. The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports showed that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al-Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September the 11th, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare.

Of course, history is not without genuine insurgent successes. Fidel Castro’s victory in Cuba is probably the best known, and there was the IRA’s partial triumph in 1922, as well as Algeria’s defeat of the French between 1954 and 1962. But the list of failed insurgencies is longer: Malayan Communists, Greek Communists, Filipino Huks, Nicaraguan Contras, Communists in El Salvador, Che Guevara in Bolivia, the Boers in South Africa (twice), Savimbi in Angola, and Sindero Luminoso in Peru, to name just a few. If the current U.S. administration maintains its will, establishes security in Baghdad, and succeeds in building a functioning government and army, there is no reason that the Iraqi insurgency cannot be similarly destroyed, or at least reduced to the level of terrorist thugs.

Similar misunderstandings persist over the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan, the other supposed example of guerrilla invincibility. But it was not the mujahidin’s strength that forced the Soviets to leave; it was the Soviet Union’s own economic and political weakness at home. In fact, the regime the Soviets established in Afghanistan was so formidable that it managed to survive for three years after the Red Army left.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics completed its annual task of quantifying the decline of the labor movement. There were actually 326,000 fewer union members nationwide in 2006 than in 2005, despite an increase of 2,348,000 working Americans.

According to BLS, there are fewer than 15.4 million union members, or 12.0 percent of the U.S. workforce. Union membership among private sector employees dropped to 7.4 percent, which the New York Times reports is the lowest percentage since the early 1900s. It bears noting, however, that BLS does not count the self-employed in these statistics, and virtually all of these must be non-union.

The Small Business Administration estimates there were 19.8 million self-employed individuals with no employees in 2005, although about 30 percent of these are "moonlighters," holding a second job in which they would be counted in the BLS statistics. Even so, that would add nearly 14 million more non-union working Americans to the total labor force, reducing the union private sector saturation rate to below 6.6 percent.

There are now 8 million private sector union members and 7.4 million public sector union members. At the current rate, there will be more government union members than private sector union members before the end of the decade.

At a town hall meeting in Des Moines, the state capital, on January 27, Clinton said: "I believe we"ve got to take a strong stand on limiting our dependence on foreign oil. And we have a perfect example here in Iowa about how it can work with all of the ethanol that's being produced here."

...

But as a Senator from New York, Clinton has voted at least 17 times against measures promoting ethanol production, the RNC noted.

During a question-and-answer session in 2004, Clinton was asked about "her outspoken opposition to legislation that would double the use of ethanol as a gasoline additive," the Des Moines Register reported at the time.

"She was momentarily stumped by a question as to why she opposed the ethanol mandate, but then said she was concerned that it would raise gasoline prices for her constituents."


Clinton reportedly said: "I have to look to first protecting and supporting the needs of the people I represent right now."

In 2002, Clinton even signed a letter that read in part: "There is no sound public policy reason for mandating the use of ethanol."

In his speech last Wednesday, Bush declared to a joint session of the U.S. Congress that "I congratulate the Democrat majority." Some Democrats were incensed he did not say "Democratic." The party's proper name is the Democratic Party.

Republicans for years have dropped the last two letters of the name as a slight to the party. Bush's prepared text of his speech had the proper pronunciation, but when he delivered it he made the mistake.

Snow said Bush meant no slight.

When Consumer Reports magazine compared coffee from mega-chain Starbucks with java from three fast-food restaurants, the surprising winner was – McDonald’s.

The magazine had trained tasters sample a medium cup of black coffee from McDonald’s, Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, and found the best cup of joe under the golden arches.

Giuliani changed the primary mission of the police department to preventing crime from happening rather than merely responding to it once it had occurred. His police chief, William Bratton, reorganized the NYPD, emphasizing a street-crimes unit that moved around the city, flooding high-crime areas and getting guns off the street.

Bratton also changed the department's scheduling. Crime was open for business 24 hours a day, but most detectives, including narcotics cops, had previously gone off duty at 5 pm, just as criminals were coming on duty. No more.

The department brought modern management techniques to its new mission. It began compiling a computerized database to track the city's crime patterns and the effectiveness of the NYPD's responses to them. That database, known as Compstat, helped police target their manpower where it was needed, and in due course it became a national model.

The department drove authority down to its precinct captains and emphasized that it expected results from these top managers. Bratton replaced a third of the city's 76 precinct commanders within a few months. "If you were to manage a bank with 76 branches every day, you would get a profit-and-loss statement from the bank," explained Giuliani. "After a week or so, you would see branches that were going in the wrong direction, and then you would take management action to try to reverse the trend. That is precisely what is happening in the police department."

I'm Senator Jim Webb, from Virginia, where this year we will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown ? an event that marked the first step in the long journey that has made us the greatest and most prosperous nation on earth.

Let me simply say that we in the Democratic Party hope that this administration is serious about improving education and healthcare for all Americans, and addressing such domestic priorities as restoring the vitality of New Orleans.

We are looking for affirmative solutions that will strengthen our nation by freeing us from our dependence on foreign oil, and spurring a wave of entrepreneurial growth in the form of alternate energy programs.

The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared.

Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth, even though the productivity of American workers is the highest in the world.

Our manufacturing base is being dismantled and sent overseas.

The House just passed a minimum wage increase, the first in ten years, and the Senate will soon follow.

We've established a tone of cooperation and consensus that extends beyond party lines.

With respect to foreign policy, this country has patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years.

Many, including myself, warned even before the war began that it was unnecessary, that it would take our energy and attention away from the larger war against terrorism...

The war's costs to our nation have been staggering. Financially.

The damage to our reputation around the world.

We need a new direction. Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos.

But an immediate shift toward strong regionally-based diplomacy, a policy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.

I am reminded of the situation President Theodore Roosevelt faced in the early days of the 20th century. America was then, as now, drifting apart along class lines. The so-called robber barons were unapologetically raking in a huge percentage of the national wealth. The dispossessed workers at the bottom were threatening revolt.

Roosevelt spoke strongly against these divisions. He told his fellow Republicans that they must set themselves "as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand as against demagogy and mob rule on the other." And he did something about it.

As I look at Iraq, I recall the words of former general and soon-to-be President Dwight Eisenhower during the dark days of the Korean War, which had fallen into a bloody stalemate. "When comes the end?" asked the General who had commanded our forces in Europe during World War Two. And as soon as he became President, he brought the Korean War to an end.

And tonight, I have a high privilege and distinct honor of my own -- as the first President to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madam Speaker.

A future of hope and opportunity begins with a growing economy -- and that is what we have. We're now in the 41st month of uninterrupted job growth, in a recovery that has created 7.2 million new jobs -- so far. Unemployment is low, inflation is low, and wages are rising. This economy is on the move, and our job is to keep it that way, not with more government, but with more enterprise.

First, we must balance the federal budget. (Applause.) We can do so without raising taxes. (Applause.)

What we need to do is impose spending discipline in Washington, D.C.

Next, there is the matter of earmarks. These special interest items are often slipped into bills at the last hour -- when not even C-SPAN is watching. (Laughter.) In 2005 alone, the number of earmarks grew to over 13,000 and totaled nearly $18 billion. Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate -- they are dropped into committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You didn't vote them into law. I didn't sign them into law. Yet, they're treated as if they have the force of law. The time has come to end this practice. So let us work together to reform the budget process, expose every earmark to the light of day and to a vote in Congress, and cut the number and cost of earmarks at least in half by the end of this session.

Blah blah blah fix Medicare and Medicaid -- and save Social Security.

Now the task is to build on the success, without watering down standards, without taking control from local communities, and without backsliding and calling it reform. We can lift student achievement even higher by giving local leaders flexibility to turn around failing schools...

We need to expand Health Savings Accounts.

Blah blah secure our border blah blah

We must continue changing the way America generates electric power, by even greater use of clean coal technology, solar and wind energy, and clean, safe nuclear power.

Let us build on the work we've done and reduce gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years.

Our success in this war is often measured by the things that did not happen. We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented, but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States. We uncovered an al Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America. And just last August, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean. For each life saved, we owe a debt of gratitude to the brave public servants who devote their lives to finding the terrorists and stopping them.

Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country.

What every terrorist fears most is human freedom...

In order to make progress toward this goal, the Iraqi government must stop the sectarian violence in its capital. But the Iraqis are not yet ready to do this on their own. So we're deploying reinforcements of more than 20,000 additional soldiers and Marines to Iraq. The vast majority will go to Baghdad, where they will help Iraqi forces to clear and secure neighborhoods, and serve as advisers embedded in Iraqi Army units. With Iraqis in the lead, our forces will help secure the city by chasing down the terrorists, insurgents, and the roaming death squads. And in Anbar Province, where al Qaeda terrorists have gathered and local forces have begun showing a willingness to fight them, we're sending an additional 4,000 United States Marines, with orders to find the terrorists and clear them out. (Applause.) We didn't drive al Qaeda out of their safe haven in Afghanistan only to let them set up a new safe haven in a free Iraq [emphasis added]

Dikembe Mutombo grew up in Africa, amid great poverty and disease. He came to Georgetown University on a scholarship to study medicine -- but Coach John Thompson got a look at Dikembe and had a different idea. (Laughter.) Dikembe became a star in the NBA, and a citizen of the United States. But he never forgot the land of his birth, or the duty to share his blessings with others. He built a brand new hospital in his old hometown. A friend has said of this good-hearted man: "Mutombo believes that God has given him this opportunity to do great things." And we are proud to call this son of the Congo a citizen of the United States of America.

There were two important lines about Iraq that Speaker Pelosi (along with many her Democratic colleagues) declined to applaud at all. One was the president's call for us to "find our resolve, and turn events toward victory." The other was his statement that "nothing is more important at this moment in our history than for America to succeed in the Middle East [and] to succeed in Iraq."

One of Libby's assertions is that, “I didn't lie to anybody, I just forgot what I had said and what and when. There were a lot of things far more important than this that were going on,” so he wanted to bring in a memory expert, and the judge said no. Why would the judge allow some people on the jury who have admitted their dislike for the administration when that could clearly influence their thinking? Why would the judge prevent the defense from revealing that Valerie Plame was not an undercover agent? In fact, more precisely, why would he not allow the defense to question her status at the CIA? Yet, Fitzgerald is free to talk about the war in Iraq. But the defense can't bring up Valerie Plame. I don't know that this is political on the part of this judge; I don't know the judge. I don't know him that well. You know, when you think of -- and we all do -- when you think of trials and the legal system, we think "fair." This doesn't seem fair. Now I sound like a whiny lib, but the judicial system is something else entirely.

"Anyone who has watched her remarkable trajectory can have no doubt that she'll do whatever it takes to win the presidency. I wish she felt the same way about the war," Liz Cheney, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said in an opinion article in The Washington Post.

...


"I suppose Hillary Clinton's announcement was a sign of progress. In 2007, a woman can run for president and show the same level of courage and conviction about this war of her male colleagues have," Cheney wrote. "Steel in the spine? Not so much."

Prince Charles has booked the entire first-class and business class section of a jumbo jet to fly to New York - to pick up an environmental award.

He is travelling by scheduled flight - instead of a chartered or private jet - to reduce his carbon footprint, reports the Daily Mail.

But the Prince and his 20-strong party will travel exclusively in the first and club class sections where there are 62 seats.

This means their carbon footprint is three times what it would be if every seat was used.

The Prince is to receive the Global Environmental Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School's Centre for Health and the Global Environment.

Currently there is a diary near the top of the recent diary list that attacks Hillary Clinton for a supposed bigoted comment. The sources the diarist cites are not credible, to say the least, and are more correctly described as right wing websites.

I will not link to this diary as 1) I expect it to be deleted by diarist soon, and 2) I will not spread such filth any further.

But this does raise an opportunity to discuss the First Rule of the Primary Wars. It is expected that there will be diaries criticial of any and all candidates during this time. No one can complain about that. Indeed, your candidate will not be our nominee unless he or she can survive our scruntiny. But, when writing such diaries critical of a candidate, you may not now or ever use source material that emanates from the right wing or Republicans to support your criticisms or attacks.

If your source is NewsMax, delete the diary.

If your source is Insight, delete the diary.

If your source is Drudge, delete the diary.

If your source is Free Republic, consider suicide.

Daily Kos will not be used as a Right Wing echo chamber, for they already have enough echo chambers of their own.

One of the Democrats who extolled an increase in the minimum wage reminded listeners that these workers "had not gotten a raise in 12 years." Well, that's misleading. It makes it seem that hundreds of thousands of workers have been toiling away at $5.15 an hour for more than a decade. Not so. Again, the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] reports that 63 percent of minimum wage workers receive a raise after the first year of employment. Only 15 percent are still receiving the lowest wage after three years on the job.

The BLS also found that part-time workers are far more likely to be paid minimum wage than full-time employees. Only 1.2 percent of full-time, year-round employees earned $5.15 an hour or less in 2005.

Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?

The high crime rate didn't help either. The affluent South Vietnamese merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by large black kids from the local public-housing project.

Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.

Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he wasn't related to, much less count on the government for an even break.

If the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn't be so proficient at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might still have their own country.

An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis Fukuyama's 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity. Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans, and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians, only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.) Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously attributed much of America's success to its "forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America."

Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians. According to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, "The rise of Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army." And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, "Perhaps the most vivid example of the 'blackening' of enlisted culture is seen in religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the service racially integrated."

Boxer lit into Rice on Thursday with bitter diatribe during a heated line of questioning before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee looking into Iraq policies. At one point, Boxer turned to the broad question of who pays the ultimate price for war. Rice has never married and has no children.

"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young," Boxer said. "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

"I don't know if she was intentionally that tacky, but I do think it's outrageous. Here you got a professional woman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barbara Boxer is sort of throwing little jabs because Condi doesn't have children, as if that means that she doesn't understand the concerns of parents. Great leap backward for feminism," Snow told FOX News Talk's Brian and The Judge.

"I spoke the truth at the committee hearing, which is that neither Secretary Rice nor I have family members that will pay the price for this escalation. My point was to focus attention on our military families who continue to sacrifice because this Administration has not developed a political solution to the situation in Iraq."

Sen. Barbara Boxer rescinded a certificate honoring a member of a Muslim advocacy group after his national organization was accused on conservative Web sites of supporting terrorism.

"We made a bad mistake not researching the organization," the California Democrat said. "My organization created this problem. I caused people grief, and I feel terrible. Yet I need to set the record straight, and I'm setting the record straight."

...

Basim Elkarra, executive director of the council's Sacramento chapter, received a certificate from Boxer's office in November "in recognition of (his) outstanding service." Elkarra said the award reflected his group's bridge-building efforts with Christians, Jews, minority groups and the FBI.

But Boxer's communication's director, Natalie Ravitz, sent a letter Dec. 21 withdrawing the certificate after the senator was criticized on conservative Web sites. Ravitz said that former members of the council had been sentenced to prison and that CAIR had refused to label Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations.

While CAIR did condemn one specific attack committed by Hamas -- the particularly gruesome Netanya Passover massacre in March 2002 -- it pointedly omitted any reference to the terrorist organization. (Interestingly, CAIR's press release also avoided acknowledging that the bombing occurred in "Israel," writing instead that the attack happened in "the Middle East.")

As for Hezbollah, CAIR has never condemned any of that organization's many terrorist attacks. During the month-long war last summer, CAIR issued at least eight condemnations of Israel and America -- but not one of Hezbollah.

Given repeated opportunities to do so by outlets such as The Washington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CAIR has flatly refused to denounce either. Asked point-blank by Newsweek just last month to condemn Hamas, CAIR Executive Director and cofounder Nihad Awad demurred, dismissing the question as "the game of the pro-Israel lobby."

I'm curious to know if Gerald Ford did anything good during his term. All I know about are one controversial event - the Nixon pardon - and two really bad moves - the idiotic assumptions behind the Whip Inflation Now campaign (debunked in the inflation chapter in Free to Choose), and the appointment of John Paul Stevens to SCOTUS.

Well, I suspect you're right. But follow down the years from the Silent Generation Democrats to those for whom the 1968 election was their first or second chance to vote. The year started with Gene McCarthy's bite out of LBJ in New Hampshire ... but did the young Democrats get "Clean Gene" or Bobby Kennedy into the White House? No--not even Hubert Humphrey, seen as a sell-out of his original Happy (Liberal) Warrior self for his loyalty to LBJ and the Vietnam War.

Then Nixon went and cleaned McGovern's clock in the 1972 election. We boomer young adults felt pretty much entitled to a victory for the presidential candidates of our choosing, and hated Nixon for destroying the illusion that we were the real Americans and could change the world. Ergo all the vilification of "Silent Majority" Americans as not only uptight, but clueless ... Compare, e.g., those calling Bush II "our worst president ever" while Dhimmi Carter is still living and kissing up to murderous dictators.

And don't forget our cultural revulsion at the squeaky-clean Nixon kids.

Meanwhile, I don't think people who shared our revulsion (and dismay!) really cared that much about Nixon either way. He wasn't a Ronald Reagan, who evoked either admiration or the same combination of political and cultural antipathy--amplified at least one order of magnitude with each victory (starting, don't forget, with his two terms as Governor of California).

But see the recently reprised theme of the 1968 episode of Tom Hanks' "From the Earth to the Moon": what people wanted was for things to stop being so sucky, for and end to the uproar and division. Ergo Ford's "Our long national nightmare is now over." The nightmare being radical venting, incl. demonstrations, being at full throttle. He brought the Nixon impeachment drama to resolution ... and continued with mediocre economic policies, which cleared the way for Carter's worse policies.

Don't know that I have a clever remark, but I think your thesis is right on.

Beth covered it, leaving me to answer the secondary inquiry of whether Ford did anything good (I note only that anybody who's read Caro's bio of LBJ wouldn't likely be impressed by any of the Nixon Admin's shenanigans, but see the more biographical works of Charles Colson for some perspective). I've got a couple of answers to the question of Ford's accomplishments, both based on the idea that there's a lot more continuity of policy across Administrations than their partisans care to admit:

1. Signed the Helsinki Accord. Carter's human-rights policy was largely a follow-on to this.
   
2. More fuzzily but also perhaps more importantly -- and yes, this is just my perception -- Ford set the stage for significantly more laissez-faire domestic policies.

I see JFK/LBJ/Nixon as being relatively more interventionist, which Ford began, even if just barely, to turn around. (The heavy lifting got done, like it or not, by Carter: lotsa dereg, a capital-gains tax cut, and the really big decision, which was the appointment of Paul Volcker to the Fed.) But Nixon and Ford were two very different species of Republican.

We'll never know what might have been if the KC convention in '76 had been able to somehow heal the rift between Ford's and Reagan's supporters, over 1/3 of each of whom vowed to vote for Carter if their man didn't get the nomination. I suspect, though, that it would have made less difference than some people like to think.

A final comment, which almost answers the first question ... consider, for a moment, the difference between the '72 and '76 elections: we went from choosing between a crook and an idiot to a race between a couple of the cleanest guys around, in one Presidential election cycle. That generation we loved to hate knew how to turn things around after all.

According to the Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis in his book "The Cold War: A New History" (2005), "[Leonid] Brezhnev had looked forward, [Anatoly] Dobrynin recalls, to the 'publicity he would gain... when the Soviet public learned of the final settlement of the postwar boundaries for which they had sacrificed so much'... '[Instead, the Helsinki Accords] gradually became a manifesto of the dissident and liberal movement'... What this meant was that the people who lived under these systems - at least the more courageous - could claim official permission to say what they thought."

Congratulations to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats, who begin their new control of Congress today. They also deserve full marks for paying attention while in the minority, because it's clear Democrats learned a few things from Tom DeLay--to wit, how to rush through legislation without any minority participation or public debate.

House Democrats plan to pass a pile of legislation in their first 100 hours, bringing the measures quickly to the floor without committee hearings. These are issues they campaigned on last year and that do well in polls at first blush, such as a higher minimum wage, price controls on prescription drugs and "ethics reform." The rush is supposed to show Democratic resolve to get things done, but it's enough to make us wonder if they're afraid that some of their ideas won't hold up under scrutiny.

"The struggle in which we are engaged is as vital to our future today as was the outcome of the Civil War to our nation in 1860 (sic). The goal of these locusts is to impose their will on state after state until they have completely demolished government as we know it. There is a time for every generation to rise to the call – when the very existence of our nation, our state, our values, our culture and our public schools are threatened with extinction." – Nebraska State Education Association Executive Director Jim Griess on Initiative 423, a ballot measure that would have limited state government spending to previous years' amounts, with allowed increases for inflation and population growth. (October 2006 The NSEA Voice)