Here’s a non-scientific curiosity poll, getting the sense of readers of Irregular Times and to stoke discussion and debate on the Democratic Debate of January 31, 2008:

Answer the poll, then justify your answer by adding a comment. Let’s talk and listen to one another.

There’s nothing snazzy for me to say about the Democratic debate going on right now, because there is no snazzy Jerry Springer moment. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have spent their time so far engaged in policy talk that is low in heat and high in light, drawing the largest distinction between the two of them as a set and the train wreck of the Republican policy agenda. I’m enjoying the substance of this free-form debate. Who knows if that will change as the debate progresses, but I sure do appreciate what’s going on right now.

8:54 pm Update: The discussion is still substantive, productive, empirical, and reasonable. This is audibly frustrating CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who is trying to goad the candidates into a fight. There’s another 30 minutes to go, but there’s not much time for a fight to break out and to be resolved. I’m glad to see that the affair is being treated by the candidates with the seriousness governance deserves.

9:16 pm Update: Caaaaan you feeeeel the loooooove toniiiiiight, it is where we aaaaaaaaaaare…. my, my. What a comparative lovefest. I do believe these candidates have figured out that no matter who wins the presidential nomination, the other of the two ought to be the vice president on the ticket.

Sometimes, it really takes a Republican to put things into perspective. While the Democratic presidential candidates have been arguing about whether to get America out of Iraq in a year, or within four years, or soon but without a specific timeline, John McCain appeared up in New Hampshire and told a crowd of people that, when considering the Bush White House’s plan to keep American soldiers in Iraq for 50 years, his reaction is to “make it a hundred”. A hundred years.

American soldiers occupying Iraq for a hundred years. That’s not a war. That’s not even an occupation. That’s colonization.

Consider that, by the time John McCain’s plan for a hundred years of Americans controlling Iraq would be over, almost one-third of United States history would have been spent with American soldiers in Iraq. Our children’s children’s children’s children would be fighting in Iraq.

What for? For what purpose does John McCain think that Iraq would need American soldiers for a hundred years? It wouldn’t be to defeat Osama Bin Laden, that’s for sure. Does McCain really expect us to believe that it would take one hundred years to establish democracy and security in Iraq? No, I think it has something more to do with oil.

Well it’s easy for a 71 year-old man to propose committing American soldiers to fighting halfway around the world for one hundred years. Under McCain’s plan, he would be 171 years old before American soldiers came home from Iraq. John McCain sure won’t be around that long, but my children just might be. We can do better for them. We have to do better for them.

No one who proposes committing the American military for an operation that lasts one hundred years is fit to be Commander-In-Chief. For the sake of the current generation of young Americans, and the next four generations, America needs to say no to McCain’s plan for a hundred year war.

Channelling Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger:
If you saw the path we’re on,
then you’d know this can’t be won,
It was never worth the blood we spilled at war.

100 years, 100 years, 100 years, 100 years, 100 years.
McCain wants us in Iraq 100 years.

The podcast version.

Over at Donklephant, former Unity08 Vice President Bob Roth (who now writes from the e-mail address info@draftbloomberg.com) declared that:

Unity08 was not a process of tranfering, redirecting, re-allocating, re-structuring, re-constituting, or re-organizing into a pro-Bloomberg effort. No member information or money was moved from one organization to the other. They are completely separate organizations.

Unity08 Founder Douglas L. Bailey also insisted in his opening news conference earlier this month that the Draft Bloomberg Committee is “totally separate” from Unity08 and the two used their contacts with The Hill to arrange an interview there in which they also insist that the Draft Bloomberg Committee and Unity08 are “completely separate.”

“Completely separate.” “Totally separate.” “Completely separate.” Huh. Really now. They’re proclaiming this idea very loudly, aren’t they? But is it true? Well, we already know that Unity08 purchased the draftmichaelbloomberg.com domain name back in July of 2007 when Unity08 swore it wasn’t the stalking horse for any candidate. The Draft Bloomberg Committee initial filing with the IRS shows that Bob Roth isn’t the only Unity08 executive who has magically moved over to the Draft Bloomberg Committee — Unity08 corporate executives Doug Bailey, Gerry Rafshoon and N. Shilpi Niyogi have as well.

And, oh, dear, look at this. According to the Draft Bloomberg Committee IRS filing made January 15 2008, its business address is:

919 18th St NW Suite 650
Washington, DC 20006

According to the Unity08 IRS filing made January 30 2008, its business address is:

919 18th St NW Suite 650
Washington, DC 20006

Oh, my! What a coincidence! I mean, what do you think the chances of that are?

919 18th St NW in Washington, DC is a very rich place to have an office. Check out the neighborhood:

My, my. Just down the block from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the White House! Who managed to pay the rent for the office of both of these completely separate fake-grassroots no-people people’s movements?

Both of these organizations claim to still be in operation, and they also claim to be “completely separate,” but they report the same business address in their IRS filings. How is this possible?

My theory is that they’ve managed it just like in that old Laverne and Shirley episode, with them dividing the room down the middle with masking tape. Also, they try very hard not to look at each other, and put in ear plugs so they can’t hear one another’s meetings and phone calls. But that’s just my theory for which I have no evidence. Use of UFOs may also be involved.

Just keep mumbling “completely separate” to yourself and after a few hours it will all begin to feel better.

This is just a quick informative note to let you know that the report combining information on Unity08’s finances for the 3rd and 4th Quarter of 2007 has been posted today to the IRS. I’ve downloaded a copy of the report and posted it here for review. Links to the all the IRS reports from 2006 through now are at the Unity08 Watch page.

I’ve just started looking at the report myself, and will write more on the subject later. But here’s the heads up for the rest of you who are interested, especially (hello, Associated Press? Reuters? Anybody in Mainstream Media Land?) those who are curious about how this mysterious transition from Unity08 to Draft Bloomberg occurred.

I have a tech question for those of you out there who host websites using CPanel, which has recently upgraded itself. In that upgrade, there’s a “File Manager,” which is new and supposedly better, and a “Legacy File Manager,” which is the old version of the uploading-and-editing tool.

Does anyone out there prefer the new CPanel File Manager? I use the Legacy File Manager myself because it works. The new File Manager, on the other hand, is slow when it works, and more often than not simply doesn’t work. It contains scripts that take a very long time to load, and two times out of three they don’t load at all. Instead, the File Manager hangs up, making it impossible for me to do work on that or any other tab on my browser. After about three minutes of sitting there, staring at the computer screen, wondering what will happen next, I get a pop-up message asking me if I want to stop these mysterious unnamed scripts or keep waiting for them. I stop the scripts with hesitation, remembering the experience of Windows 95 and the instabilities that can result from doing so, but I really don’t have any choice. Then I continue on with the new File Manager, and after a few more minutes the problem resurfaces.

Yeesh! I can anticipate what some people might tell me: is it your browser? Have you tried flipping the Smiggledy Settings under Tools-Options-Toe Jam-Confirm-Don’t Click This-OK You Clicked It-Options-Toe Jam-Apply? Perhaps you should reformat your hard drive using the Nuclear-Mode-On settings and then stick a paper clip between your nostrils to increase reception range before trying again? But I’ve encountered this problem on both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. The rest of the fly-halfway-to-Mars tech “solutions” might allow me to jerryrig something together to make the new File Manager work, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the real solution is to have a program that works on all browsers across a wide variety of settings and without the paper clip skewered into your septum. Maybe I’m missing something, but the old Legacy File Manager seems to do that. Why the need for a new program that doesn’t work?

Last night, Disaster Dan warned us of the risk of invasion by a gigantic spider from the planet Mercury. No, not David Bowie’s spiders from Mars. Think warmer.

There’s a more serious problem with Mercury here on Earth. There’s more of it in the fish we eat than we have been led to believe.

An independent study conducted by Oceana has found that levels of mercury in fish sold to be eaten by humans in the United States exceeds what has been reported by the Food and Drug Administration, often exceeding the “action level” that would enable the FDA to remove certain species of fish from grocery stores as a health hazard.

Combine this news with the ecological crisis of crashing fish populations in the world’s oceans, and there’s good reason to avoid eating seafood altogether. Another disturbing report on marine ecology this week tells of a sudden collapse in Chinook salmon populations on the Pacific Coast. The sparse salmon runs will lead orcas and other salmon predators elsewhere, leading to drops in the populations of other fish as well.

A gem from yesterday’s testimony of Michael Mukasey before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Senator Edward Kennedy: Would waterboarding be torture if it were done to you?

Attorney General Michael Mukasey: I would feel that it was.

Mukasey went on to explain that although he’d feel it was torture if it was done to him, waterboarding isn’t necessarily torture in general.

This is classic Bush administration morality: heavens, if it’s done to me, it’s wrong, but it’s all right for other people. This is an extention of the morality that made it OK for the Bushes to spy on the most intimate details of your life while you couldn’t get the simplest details of your own government’s activities.

It also shows a willful obfuscation of the law on torture, in which torture is defined by the effect on the subject: pain, fear of pain, and the threat of imminent death. If the procedure creates pain, fear of pain, or the threat of imminent death for Attorney General Michael Mukasey, then it’s torture under federal law. If the procedure creates pain, fear of pain, or the threat of imminent death for any other detainee, then it’s torture under federal law. The law recognizes no distinction according to the privileged status of the subject of waterboarding. Only Michael Mukasey does. That makes him a dangerous Attorney General.

(Source: New York Times January 30 2008)

Living here in Ohio, I don’t have the opportunity to vote in any presidential primary until March (although it is nice that I do have the opportunity to vote in a primary at all, considering that I am an independent with no party affiliation). The upside of the lack of opportunity to vote right now is that I don’t have to decide who to vote for right now. I can sit back, wait, consider, ponder, consider, wait and ponder some more. If you’re one of the majority of Americans living in the 22 states holding primaries on Tuesday, you don”t have the luxury of time. You either have to pick a candidate to support or you have to decide to sit out the election, leaving the decision to someone else.

If you are a registered voter in one of the “Super Tuesday” states, have you made your decision about who to vote for, or are you still undecided? If you’ve made your decision, who’s your candidate? And if I may be so bold as to pry further, how come?

Come, let us figure this whole thing out together! Share.

A quick informational post on two debates this week, the last before next Tuesday’s huge set of primaries:

Tonight, Wednesday January 30: Republican candidates debate, 8 pm Eastern, on CNN cable TV and streaming online video at CNN.com and the Los Angeles Times website.

Tomorrow Night, Thursday January 31: Democratic candidates debate, 8 pm Eastern, on CNN cable TV and streaming online video at CNN.com and the Los Angeles Times website.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey is testifying right now before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Word is that Senators will ask him, again, to indicate whether waterboarding is legal or constitutional. Expect Attorney General Mukasey, again, to refuse to answer the question.

Think about that: The top law enforcement official of the United States America will refuse to indicate whether an act of torture is against the law. This representative of the Bush administration will refuse to say that this act of torture is illegal. How far the Bush administration has dragged this country from its moral center!

Watch or listen to an audio feed of Mukasey’s testimony here.

Update: Yep, Michael Mukasey has just told the Senate that he will not tell anybody whether waterboarding is illegal. The top law enforcement official of our nation will not say whether waterboarding is illegal. What a sick and twisted man in a sick and twisted administration.

John Edwards is dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination for President later today. After a strong second-place tie with Hillary Clinton in Iowa, Edwards kept on losing ground as public perception became, still with only a minority of the primary election over with, that the race was merely between Clinton and Barack Obama.

Will it help Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama more? One could make an argument either way, depending on whether one believes that John Edwards took away some of the anti-Clinton vote from Barack Obama or that Edwards took away some of the anti-Obama vote from Hillary Clinton. Maybe it works both ways, and so it’s a wash.

Just because John Edwards is dropping out of the race for President doesn’t mean that he’s dropping out of the race for Vice President. If the Democratic race were rational, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would team up no matter which one won the nomination. However, the Democratic race is not rational, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seem to have as much need for each other as a parakeet and a toothbrush.

So, John Edwards comes up as the vice-presidential choice for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton because, well, he isn’t Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

For that reason, though we’re keeping up our campaign items for John Edwards for a few days more, just for Edwards supporters seeking souvenirs, we’ll be keeping our items featuring John Edwards as a running mate online at with shirts at Skreened and at CafePress under both Obama and Clinton until either Clinton or Obama makes a final announcement about who the running mate will be.

The New York Times has an excellent article this morning about the 527 organizations that are working on behalf of, but with apparent independence from, the Barack Obama for President campaign.

With a little bit of a wink and a nod, Barack Obama pleads with people who donate to these groups, such as Vote Hope and PowerPAC, to donate to his official presidential campaign instead - so that his political consultants can take their cut of the money, perhaps. Yet, Barack Obama must know that such donations to an official political campaign are often impossible, due to campaign finance law.

Consider the donation of $95,000 to Vote Hope and PowerPAC by lawyer Steve Phillips. Phillips is able to casually toss out that amount of money in part because he is the son of a billionaire. “We have a chance to make an impact… You need a dedicated organization with a dedicated revenue stream.”

Yes, wealthy people like Steve Phillips have a special ability to make an impact, with their dedicated revenue, that the rest of us don’t have. That’s because the right wing Supreme Court last year made invalid part of a campaign finance law that blocked 527s, with their secret and unlimited sources of money, from getting involved in political campaigns for public office. Now, 527s can spend as much money as they want to, and take money from whatever people or corporations they want to, and they don’t have to tell where their money comes from.

So, Steve Phillips can now donate $95,000 to Vote Hope and PowerPac, whereas if he were donating to the Barack Obama campaign, he could only donate a little bit over two thousand dollars, and no more. With 527s able to operate without the restrictions of the official campaigns, wealthy people like Steve Phillips are able to buy as much influence over the presidential elections as they care to.

Other power brokers that once were held back by campaign finance law are also now able to buy their way in. Corporations can give. And what about churches?

Yesterday, I wondered how Barack Obama managed to perform so much better in the South Carolina primary with heavy churchgoers than with voters who only occasionally go to church and those who never go to church. The New York Times article this morning provides what could be part of the answer: Vote Hope and PowerPAC paid for targeted radio advertisements promoting Barack Obama in South Carolina. Those radio ads featured ministers from South Carolina churches.

The 527 organizations provide these church leaders with a legal loophole. Because their churches have tax exempt status, these ministers are not allowed to use their churches’ special tax-free power to promote political candidates. But now, it seems that the ministers are using their special status, facilitated by taxpayers, to support 527s, which in turn support political candidates. It’s the equivalent of having a fake offshore corporation in the Bahamas to avoid paying taxes.

And what about church money? Is church money going into 527 organizations, which in turn promote presidential candidates?

Well, we don’t know. We can’t know. 527s can take money from wherever they want to, including tax-exempt organizations such as churches, and are under no obligation to reveal where their money comes from. Churches could be donating money to 527s, which then spend that money to promote presidential candidates, and we would never know about it. Sure, it’s against tax law, but if the donations are undisclosed, then how’s the IRS ever to find out about it?

Churches are at risk, when they are led by unscrupulous preachers, of being used as shadow fundraising operations for political campaigns. In this sense, the rising power of 527 organizations in the presidential campaign does not just threaten our government’s independence from influence of wealthy individuals and corporations. The separation of church and state is threatened as well, as political candidates find that their fortunes rise and fall according to the success with which they pander to wealthy and influential churches.

We now know that Barack Obama’s victory in South Carolina took part with the assistance of church leaders, and that the core of his votes came from habitual churchgoers. How much longer, with this growing involvement of churches in presidential campaign, will it be before no candidate will be able to become President of the United States without approval from the nation’s most powerful churches?

The mechanisms are in place. The churches now only have to learn how to use them.

Hillary Clinton has won the Florida Democratic primary with what looks like 50% of the vote and an impressive 17% or so (the results are still coming in) margin of victory. Some presidential candidates with a name that rhymes with “A Frock for Mama” may say that the Florida primary is merely a “beauty contest” because no delegates for Florida are to be seated at the Democratic nominating convention at the end of this summer. But come on now, of course they will be, because the Democrats don’t want to rhymes with “Miss Off Portidians” for the national election. And even if they weren’t to be seated, the votes of Floridians would matter because they indicate how a significant portion of Democratic Americans feel about the Democratic Party presidential candidates. You know, The People. They, the We, except with better suntans.

There’s been another night of record primary turnouts for the Democrats. Hillary Clinton explained the turnout (and the occasional infighting) this way: “This has been an intense election because people really care about what’s happening to our country.” I hope that is true, because there really is a lot that needs to be fixed about this country.

I’d like to share with you Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech tonight. While Barack Obama’s speech last week was conceptually broad, talking about opening up the process of democracy to bring in everyone and finding the place in us that sets aside cynicism and believes in the possibility of positive change again, Hillary Clinton was much more grounded, and much more specific. While Obama’s speech moved me, I still found myself asking “How?” How will that change come about? What in particular will be done? Hillary Clinton left no doubt in this regard, organizing her speech around a series of “I believe statements”:

“I believe everyone who works full-time in America should bring home an income that lifts that person out of poverty, and gives them and their children a better chance.”

“I believe that every man, woman and child has a right to quality, affordable health care.”

“I believe that every child has a god-given potential that we can help to develop if we have universal pre-kindergarten and we have a school system that is not so worried about giving tests as making sure our kids can learn.”

“I believe that our tax system should be fair for everyone. It is wrong that people making $50,000,000 a year on Wall Street pay a lower percentage on their taxes than a teacher making $50,000 in Florida.”

“I believe that it’s time for us to begin to bring our troops home from Iraq as carefully and responsibly as we can.”

“I believe that it’s important we do everything to promote better relations in our hemisphere with all of our neighbors, and that we continue to support democracy in Cuba.” [hello, Florida issue!]

“I believe that we can, working together, feel pride and progress in our country again.”

“I believe that public office is a trust, and I will get up every single day worrying about you, your families, your future. I think it’s time we again had a president who put the American people first, and that is what I will try to do.”

Watch the speech for yourself:

The last two “I believe” sentences were an appeal to the Obama-style sense of political process and inclusion. But the rest of the statements were about a substantive agenda. I encourage you to try to find any substantive agenda in Barack Obama’s victory speech from last Saturday. Appeals to our better angels are important, but Hillary Clinton has put her agenda specifically on the table with her speech, as she has in the past. It’s easy to agree with someone whose agenda is niceness and healing. Someone who says what she’ll do, specifically, is making more of a commitment to us as citizens.

I’m beginning to think of Barack Obama’s candidacy as an appeal to procedural liberalism, the description of how we ought to build coalitions, how we ought to proceed with respect for the rights and dignity of others. And I’m beginning to think of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy as an appeal to substantive progressivism, a particular policy concern with equal opportunity not just in law but in education and economics as well, and with the practical resolution of conflict rather in mind rather than the procedural concern about which paths toward a resolution are more pure or just. Trying to reduce either candidate to being only procedurally liberal or only substantively progressive is to miss something, I think. But these are the patterns I see.

What do you see?