Democrats shift gears on Iraq

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By Mike Soraghan
The Hill

Congressional Democrats searching for a message that will resonate on the Iraq war are preparing an argument that getting troops out of the conflict is the only way to rebuild a spent military.

It’s a less ambitious argument than the “Out-of-Iraq now” proposals put forward last year, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other top Democrats believe it will allow the party to criticize the war without being seen as criticizing those fighting it. It could also help Democrats to portray themselves as protecting the military and national security.

The Pentagon’s commanders have repeatedly testified that the Iraq war is straining the military, and Democrats say they can take that foundation and add the extra step of saying the strain is the reason to withdraw troops.

“This is about America’s security,” said Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.). “We have an Army that can’t deploy anywhere else in the world.”

Or, as a staffer put it, “You can’t rebuild an engine while you’re driving along at 60 miles per hour.”

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Does the United States really favor torture?

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By Stephen Laurence
Greenville

Some five years ago, in the days leading up to our invasion of Iraq, a local peace advocate carried a sign outside Greenville’s federal building asking “Are we what we say we are?” as a nation. More recently — about a week ago, in fact — a former U.S. House Speaker implored public radio listeners to carefully consider the relationship between our rhetoric and our actions.

An ongoing debate about the acceptability of torture as an interrogation technique has led to passage of the Intelligence Authorization Act, with a provision that bans torture through its reference to the U.S. Army Field Manual. Regrettably, Sen. Lindsey Graham opposed use of this standard for civilian intelligence gathering; Sen. Jim DeMint voted against the final legislation; and President George Bush threatens to veto it.

While we often boast of being the most democratic and most pious of nations, the rest of the world watches our actions and recognizes the frequent hypocrisy between what we say and what we do. Abu Ghraib is one example. The high civilian casualty count in Iraq is another. Guantanamo is yet another. And now we have representatives of the United States, including the “leader of the free world,” condoning torture — albeit couched in more acceptable language — with the ultimate outcome of the issue being uncertain.

Torture is completely indefensible on moral and ethical grounds. Most faith communities specifically condemn inhumane acts toward others. The New Testament of the Christian Bible quotes Jesus calling on us to love our enemies and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. The United States has been party to the Geneva Conventions since their inception in 1864. And our “greatest generation” punished enemy soldiers and officers found guilty of torture during World War II.

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The South behind bars

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Let’s do the numbers

Total number of adults incarcerated in America: 2.3 million

Total number of adults incarcerated in China: 1.5 million

Rank of U.S. incarceration rate among all nations: 1

Rank of South’s incarceration rate among all U.S. regions: 1

Percent increase in South’s incarceration rate in 2007 alone: 2.8

Rank of Texas’ incarceration rate among all U.S. states.: 1

Year in which Florida is expected to run out of prison space: 2009

Percent of American adults in prison or jail: 1

Percent of all men age 18 or older: 2

Percent of white men age 18 or older: 0.9

Percent of Hispanic men age 18 or older: 3

Percent of black men age 18 or older: 7

Percent of black men age 20 to 34: 11

Percent of white women age 35 to 39: 0.3

Percent of Hispanic women age 35 to 39: 0.4

Percent of black women age 35 to 39: 1

Amount states spent on corrections in 2007 alone: $49 billion

Percent which that amount has increased over the past 20 years, adjusted to 2007 dollars: 127

Percent increase in adjusted spending on higher education over that same period: 21

Minimum amount Texas is expected to save over the next two years from prison reforms that expand drug treatment and change parole practices: $210 million

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Statistics taken from “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” by The Pew Center on the States, available online here.

This is the time to reject nuclear arms

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By Glenn Carroll
Coordinator, Nuclear Watch South

Without a word of public debate, nuclear weapons became a seemingly inevitable fact of life and death on our planet. After World War II ended with two single bombs destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Bomb became big business with vast factory complexes on government reservations in several states across the country.

A government agency, now called U.S. Department of Energy, was formed to oversee private contractors who churned out no less than 30,000 nuclear warheads over the next four decades and established the nuclear industry as an economic force in human affairs.

A people’s movement to “Ban the Bomb” formed instantly in response to the wartime bombing of Japan, and to the “test bombings” on the lands of the Western Shoshone Nation in Nevada and Utah and the Pacific islanders of the Moruroa Atoll.

From protests on the street to civil disobedience at weapons sites, the public has been vocal and insistent that our only reasonable option is to abolish nuclear weapons. Indeed, in 1996 the World Court issued a landmark decision defending this basic ethic when it declared the manufacture, possession or use of nuclear weapons to be illegal.

The Cold War bomb factories were built in secret in the 1940s and 1950s. They operated without public oversight until the Cold War ended in 1991, when crumbling Russian and U.S. nuclear bomb factories and reactors were forced to shut down.

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Vote for me – I have clean pee!

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An appropriately titled “Joint Resolution ” (S 1070), would make candidates for public office and judges pass a test for illegal drugs before they could run for office.

The resolution calls for changing our state’s constitutional requirements for holding public office. Currently all voters who aren’t ex-felons or who haven’t violated election laws can serve. Sen. Harvey Peeler (R-Cherokee) has been pushing the resolution since 2006. He now claims that Tootin’ Tommy Ravenel’s coke bust shows the need for such a constitutional amendment (you surely remember that Tootin’ Tommy, our State Treasurer, was popped in 2007).

In the 2006 election cycle, Eckerd Drug Stores were Peeler’s number one corporate contributor, and pharmaceutical industry contributions were his third-ranked campaign donors at $4,800, behind health professionals and the Republican Party.

“If you can’t pass a drug test, you should not be in public office,” Peeler said in a press release announcing the resolution.

The question, of course, is whose drugs, Sen. Peeler?

What’s next? Are we going to have to pee in a jar before we can vote? If I want to elect someone who takes an occasional toke, versus the opposition who adjusts his or her mood with prescription drugs, it would seem a citizen’s constitutional right to do so.

An IQ test may be more appropriate.

Legislator wants to allow guns in State House

First-term legislator Rep. Keith Kelly (R-Spartanburg) may have the solution to partisan gridlock. Kelly has proposed a bill (H 4243) to allow legislators with concealed weapons permits to pack heat on the floor. Yup. This could really help cut down on the number of uncontested legislative seats (we’re number 1 in incumbents having no opposition).

Again, how ’bout that IQ test?

Birth control reality check

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Cheers and Jeers of the Year
BirthControlWatch.org

1. Jeer: The Cost of Birth Control on College Campuses Skyrocketed

When Bush signed the Federal Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, few knew it would scale back access to contraception for the group of people who need it most: college-age women. But that’s just what it did. It eliminated incentives for pharmaceutical companies to offer contraception at a discount to college health centers. In 2007, those centers ran out of their reduced-rate stock and were forced to increase prices to cover the new inflated costs. For many college women, birth control prices went up 900 percent – from $5 to $50. Since college women already have the country’s highest rate of unintended pregnancies, making contraception less affordable for them was a plan for disaster.

2. Cheer: Governors Said No to Abstinence-Only Money

In 2007, Colorado and New York joined the movement to reject federal funding for school programs that teach abstinence as the only sure way to prevent pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases and provide inaccurate information about birth control. With the addition of these two important states, a total of 14 states have now rejected efforts by the federal government to promote inaccurate, ideology-based and ineffective abstinence-only programs. As a result, more than a third of the funds available under this federal program are going unclaimed or unused. The 14 states are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

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Moving women from bench warmers to captains

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By Linda Tarr-Whelan

Sometimes progress is measured by half-court movements. When I was in school, girls played basketball by different rules than the boys. We played on a half-court and could only dribble three times before passing the ball. Girls were regarded as too fragile to run the distance. Now, tell that to the women in the WNBA.

It’s good to measure positive change, like women’s full court professional basketball. Recognizing these changes is what we celebrate in March as Women’s History Month. But I’m done with simply celebrating where we’ve been. Instead, it’s time to look at March as more a celebration of our future: let’s call it “Women Making History Month.”

Old stereotypes still stand in our way. Even today, only two-thirds of adults in this country think a woman could be president, according to a CNN/Opinion Research survey. Meanwhile, state legislatures — the farm teams for future leaders — have only one-quarter representation by women, a pitiful ratio that has remained unchanged for a decade. The U.S. ranks 69th in the world for women’s legislative representation with only 16 percent women in Congress.

We’re missing a lot and it doesn’t have to be this way. The leaders of some countries have realized that it really does matter who makes the decisions. They see what our leaders have not yet recognized: having more women at the top is good business and smart politics. For example, in Norway, women make up 36 percent of the members on corporate boards, while in the U.S. progress seems stalled at not quite 15 percent. How did Norway they do it? In 2003, Norway passed a tough law that requires all public companies to ensure that their boards are 40 percent women. By 2007, 85 percent of their public companies met the mark.

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SC congressional delegation fails its children

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The Children’s Defense Fund Action Council (CDFAC) released its 2007 Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard, which grades every member of the House and Senate based on 10 key votes affecting children. The Scorecard showed some important legislative successes but noted some missed key opportunities to improve the lives of children in 2007, including Congress’s failure to override President Bush’s veto of legislation to extend health coverage to 3.1 million more uninsured children.

South Carolina’s Members of Congress collectively voted to protect the well-being of children only 41 percent of the time in 2007, ranking 47th among all 50 states.

The CDF Action Council website has put the entire Scorecard online, including an interactive database to find how each individual legislator in each state voted, as well as rankings of the best and worst Members of Congress and State Delegations. You can access all of these tools here.