June 26th 2015—America Between Two Songs: A Poem

A joyous host assembled there

Before the solemn, solemnities of Roman Columns

Our national life on display

Lives, marriages, to be judged by the 9

            Judged, worthy

            Judged normal

            Part of the fabric of America

One of the stars on that flag.

They sang

            Oh say can you see by the dawns early light,

            What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming,

            Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,

            O’re the ramparts were watched, were so gallantly streaming?

They sang themselves

            Into our national life

Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

            O’re the land of the free, the home of the brave.

            They sang us step-by-step forward through

Jiggery-Pokery and Real Apple Sauce and other word salad by Scalia

And decades of

            Mean spirited ballot measures

Through

            Matthew Shepherd and Stonewall

Through

            Harvey Milk and closet doors

They patiently sang us through step by step to their humanity and citizenship rights

They gave proof to the night that our flag was still there.

            Yet the joy was mixed with gentle sadness

Aware of other flags

            Stars and bars

Aware of the real and experienced limits of Equality

Aware of the persistence of hate.

            Be ready for the backlash!

                        Love wins,

                                    But hate does a meeeeaaaan second place.

Aware of those 9

9 bible study attendees, 6 women, 3 men—some sort of mirror to the Supreme Court.

            Still mourning those 9

            Remembering the police lights blue and red glare

            Shots fired in there

In their sanctuary

            Does the star-spangled banner yet wave?

            O’re the land of the free and the home of the brave?

O’re a land chained to our past

A land laden by

            White supremacy,

            Selective blindness,

            Cherry picked memories.

            To this, Reverend President,

Had Church today.

Went all in today.

            The President of the United States of America talked about Grace.

            The President of the United States of America Sang about Grace.

Sang us through

Through the death dealing whitecaps

Of our national life.

            Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me

He sang

            I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see

May it be so Dear LORD

May it be

Be that blindness and amnesia

The roughshod-four-wheel-drive-snow-tire-triple-diamond-trip,

Through dangers, toils, and snares

We have already come,

            Finds us on higher ground

            May we be led home.

Home to one nation, indivisible.

Home to all humans created equal.

Home to unalienable rights.

Home to life.

Home to liberty.

Home to the pursuit of happiness.

            That a home and a country should leave us no more.

Where we all shall stand

Where the Star spangled banner yet waves

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Key Quotes continued

Below is a bit from the Obama speech you don't get when you just read the transcript.

Key quotes in Obama’s Counter Terrorism Speech

The Last Decade

I believe we compromised our basic values – by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.

We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

Lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism.

Drones

Al-Qaida’s thoughts on drones: “we could lose the reserves to the enemy’s air strikes. We cannot fight air strikes with explosives.”

This is a just war – a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense.

To say a military tactic is legal, or even effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance.

This last point is critical, because much of the criticism about drone strikes – at home and abroad – understandably centers on reports of civilian casualties. There is a wide gap between U.S. assessments of such casualties, and non-governmental reports. Nevertheless, it is a hard fact that U.S. strikes have resulted in civilian casualties, a risk that exists in all wars. For the families of those civilians, no words or legal construct can justify their loss. For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live, just as we are haunted by the civilian casualties that have occurred through conventional fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But as Commander-in-Chief, I must weigh these heartbreaking tragedies against the alternatives. To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places –like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold. Let us remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes.

It is false to assert that putting boots on the ground is less likely to result in civilian deaths, or to create enemies in the Muslim world. The result would be more U.S. deaths, more Blackhawks down, more confrontations with local populations, and an inevitable mission creep in support of such raids that could easily escalate into new wars.

The very precision of drones strikes, and the necessary secrecy involved in such actions can end up shielding our government from the public scrutiny that a troop deployment invites. It can also lead a President and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism.

Targeting Americans

Let me repeat that – not only did Congress authorize the use of force, it is briefed on every strike that America takes. That includes the one instance when we targeted an American citizen: Anwar Awlaki, the chief of external operations for AQAP.

For the record, I do not believe it would be constitutional for the government to target and kill any U.S. citizen – with a drone, or a shotgun – without due process. Nor should any President deploy armed drones over U.S. soil.

But when a U.S. citizen goes abroad to wage war against America – and is actively plotting to kill U.S. citizens; and when neither the United States, nor our partners are in a position to capture him before he carries out a plot – his citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected from a swat team.

That’s who Anwar Awlaki was – he was continuously trying to kill people. He helped oversee the 2010 plot to detonate explosive devices on two U.S. bound cargo planes. He was involved in planning to blow up an airliner in 2009. When Farouk Abdulmutallab – the Christmas Day bomber – went to Yemen in 2009, Awlaki hosted him, approved his suicide operation, and helped him tape a martyrdom video to be shown after the attack. His last instructions were to blow up the airplane when it was over American soil. I would have detained and prosecuted Awlaki if we captured him before he carried out a plot. But we couldn’t. And as President, I would have been derelict in my duty had I not authorized the strike that took out Awlaki.

But the high threshold that we have set for taking lethal action applies to all potential terrorist targets, regardless of whether or not they are American citizens. This threshold respects the inherent dignity of every human life.

Diplomacy

So the next element of our strategy involves addressing the underlying grievances and conflicts that feed extremism, from North Africa to South Asia. As we’ve learned this past decade, this is a vast and complex undertaking. We must be humble in our expectation that we can quickly resolve deep rooted problems like poverty and sectarian hatred. Moreover, no two countries are alike, and some will undergo chaotic change before things get better. But our security and values demand that we make the effort.

For what we spent in a month in Iraq at the height of the war, we could be training security forces in Libya, maintaining peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, feeding the hungry in Yemen, building schools in Pakistan, and creating reservoirs of goodwill that marginalize extremists.

Targeted action against terrorists. Effective partnerships. Diplomatic engagement and assistance. Through such a comprehensive strategy we can significantly reduce the chances of large scale attacks on the homeland and mitigate threats to Americans overseas.

The Home Front

The success of American Muslims, and our determination to guard against any encroachments on their civil liberties, is the ultimate rebuke to those who say we are at war with Islam.

That means that – even after Boston – we do not deport someone or throw someone in prison in the absence of evidence. That means putting careful constraints on the tools the government uses to protect sensitive information, such as the State Secrets doctrine. And that means finally having a strong Privacy and Civil Liberties Board to review those issues where our counter-terrorism efforts and our values may come into tension.

Ending the War on Terror

All these issues remind us that the choices we make about war can impact – in sometimes unintended ways – the openness and freedom on which our way of life depends. And that is why I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.

The AUMF is now nearly twelve years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self. Groups like AQAP must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves al Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States. Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant Presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states. So I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.

Guantanamo Bay

GTMO has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law. Our allies won’t cooperate with us if they think a terrorist will end up at GTMO. During a time of budget cuts, we spend $150 million each year to imprison 166 people –almost $1 million per prisoner. And the Department of Defense estimates that we must spend another $200 million to keep GTMO open at a time when we are cutting investments in education and research here at home.

As President, I have tried to close GTMO. I transferred 67 detainees to other countries before Congress imposed restrictions to effectively prevent us from either transferring detainees to other countries, or imprisoning them in the United States. These restrictions make no sense. After all, under President Bush, some 530 detainees were transferred from GTMO with Congress’s support. When I ran for President the first time, John McCain supported closing GTMO. No person has ever escaped from one of our super-max or military prisons in the United States. Our courts have convicted hundreds of people for terrorism-related offenses, including some who are more dangerous than most GTMO detainees. Given my Administration’s relentless pursuit of al Qaeda’s leadership, there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened.

Imagine a future – ten years from now, or twenty years from now – when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not a part of our country. Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our Founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?

Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is as we speak serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison here, in the United States. In sentencing Reid, Judge William Young told him, “the way we treat you…is the measure of our own liberties.” He went on to point to the American flag that flew in the courtroom – “That flag,” he said, “will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag still stands for freedom.”

L'état est nous: What’s at stake on Tuesday

            I remember, whenever someone would say something bad about the Government my mom would get a little flustered and respond, “We are the government.” This from a life long civil servant. She worked from the Department of Defense as the only civilian pharmacist at the NATO Health Clinic in Brussels during the twilight of the Cold War and still keeps our promise to America’s veterans at the VA to this day.

            And I believe that statement by my mom is on trial this election. Do we as a country believe that we are the government or is the government a nefarious entity that we should be afraid of?

            I vote for the first one—that government is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

            We, as the government, do together what we can’t do alone. We, as the government, protect citizens who can’t protect themselves. We, as the government, govern as we wish to live.

            We do together what we can’t do alone. For example, the government acted to keep us out of a second Great Depression. One of the ways we did that is being argued about today, whether the Federal Government should have bailed out American car companies. We did, it saved millions of jobs in the American Auto-industry. Governor Romney says we should have let private firms bail out the American car companies, yet there was neither private capital nor private will to do such a thing. Yet, for the sake of millions of Americans, there was a need to save those jobs and keep the recession from becoming a depression. So we, the government, bailed out the car companies.

            Likewise, at this very moment we in New Jersey are pretty glad America is working collectively through agencies such as FEMA to assist us in our hour of need. Governor Romney has said he would break up FEMA and either pass it’s responsibilities on to state government or privatize it. I’ll be frank, I’m glad all of America is flexing our muscle to get things done here. I’d rather have all of us working together to fix the many bruised lives instead of 1/50^th of America’s power working to bring power back and get life back to normal.

            We protect those who can’t protect themselves. There are forces, like Super Storm Sandy, that are too big for any one of us to handle on our own. In my own life, the force that is bigger than I am is being one of the 57.2 million Americans who have a pre-existing medical condition. The Affordable Care Act (aka “Obama-care”) moved we the people into collective action against the bad practice of discrimination against people with pre-existing conditions.

            Now, during the debate Governor Romney said, while he would repeal “Obama-care” on his first day in office he would make sure people like me won’t be discriminated against. Then, after the debates, he explained what he meant. He won’t allow me to be discriminated against, as long as I’m already covered, but if I go without insurance for even a month, for whatever reason, we the people will no longer protect me from discrimination. As long as I’m not applying for insurance I’m protected from discrimination.

            I prefer the other path, the one where we protect our people on good days and on bad ones too.

            Finally, we govern as we wish to live. Now, I grew up in Wyoming so, Ayn Rand (the writer/philosopher who Representative Paul Ryan claims got him interested in public service) and extreme libertarianism—do it on your own or die rhetoric—gives me a certain reflexive cuddly warm fuzzy feeling. But then I realize a dog eat dog society isn’t the kind of society I want to live in.

            After Sandy my next door neighbor could have let my cell-phone go dead, but instead when she went to her sister’s house to charge her phone she offered to charged mine there too. I braved post-storm South Plainfield on foot to check on my parishioners, not because it was my job and I’d get paid for it, but because it was the right thing to do.

            And I think we should govern based on the type of neighborhood and society we believe we should live in. For example, every four months, I send a check for $2,500 to the IRS payable to the Treasury Department. I’ve heard libertarians (sometimes even libertarians citing St. Augustine’s discussion of Piracy and Government) call that theft. I call it an investment in the society I want to live in. That $2,500 goes to our collective defense, to fulfilling our promise to our soldiers when they come home, to my aunt’s 3 adopted kids, to my older friends who have been able to retire with dignity and in good health, to ensuring healthcare for people with pre-existing conditions, and to rebuilding New Jersey and the tri-state region.
(This post does not reflect the views held by the ELCA, the New Jersey Synod, or St. Stephen Lutheran and should not be seen as a political endorsement by any church body)

Why the Affordable Care Act is so important

As a man with a congenital heart defect who has been discriminated against by health insurance providers I resemble the following remarks:


As I've said before I think there should be a 57.2 million person pre-existing condition swing vote.

10 things I learned about the Recovery Act from reading The New New Deal by Michael Grunwald

I recently bought two books, both of which I put on my nightstand. One was a small anthology of Beat Poetry the other Grunwald’s 518-page tome about the politics and policy of the Recovery Act… and I finished The New New Deal first. It is well written and genuinely a page-turner.

Here are a few things that stuck out to me from reading Grunwald’s book:

The stimulus was deeply Keynesian…—The basic idea of Keynesian economics is that the government should spend in a counter-cyclical fashion, when the private sector spends the government saves, when the private sector stops spending the government keeps money flowing in the economy by spending. On an extreme end of this, the government could pay people to dig holes and then fill them—because the point of Government stimulus is to get money out there by all means available.

… but infused with Obama’s campaign promises and priorities—Well, the administration figured a good way to get money out into the economy was to spend on things they had promised in the 2008 election campaign, especially, upgrading schools and reforming education, introducing information technology into health care, improving the efficiency of the national rail system and investing in high-speed rail, and encouraging both the efficiency of energy consumption, as well the development of alternative energies. Or to put it more simply, spending money on reforming health, transportation, energy, and education.

Making Sausage isn’t pretty, even in the age of Hope and Change—Obama’s economic advisors had done their homework when they created their stimulus proposal—all their ideas had to be timely, targeted, and temporary. It was a tight plan focused on reviving the economy and transforming it.

Then congress got hold of it.

The two main criticism of the stimulus are 1. It wasn’t big enough (from the left) and 2. It had too much pork in it (from the right). Both of these problems can be traced back to needing a 60^th vote in the Senate to override a Republican filibuster—Arlen Specter, the 60^th vote, can be blamed for both these perceived problems with the stimulus. On one hand, he required that the stimulus cost no more than 800 billion and on the other hand, he required 10 billion in funding to go toward the National Institute of Health. Some people say he cut the stimulus off 200 billion too small, and a lot of the “pork” cited by Republicans came from the NIH funding—for example research into why men don’t want to wear condoms and cocaine research on monkeys.

Our VP is… unique—Grunwald portrays Vice President Biden as somewhere between a Hipster, Elmo, and a Boxer being interviewed right after a brutal fight. He is full of bravado, wide-eyed hope, and uses literally literally in every sentence.

The Stimulus surprisingly lacked fraud and corruption—Thanks to the unprecedented transparency of the Obama administration, most clearly evident in being able to track every cent spent at http://www.recovery.gov/, the expected fraud that generally accompanies such massive amount of spending didn’t happen. The experts said there would be tens of billions of dollars of fraud—instead a total of 7.2 million was lost to fraud. In addition to transparency, lot of the grants and other types of funding were purposefully competitive (for example “Race to the Top”), which discouraged those who couldn’t compete from trying to get a “hand out.”

But what about Solyndra?—I wondered this myself, after all people compare it to Watergate… well here is the report by Darrell Issa, who once described the Solyndra loan as proof that that Obama was, “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.”

“Is there criminal activity? Perhaps not. Is there a political influence and connections? Perhaps not.” But, he concluded the administration “bent the rules for an agenda.”

What exactly did the administration do? The people granting loans pushed the decision date for granting Solyndra’s loans up to coincide with an Obama photo-op at a Solyndra plant. Later they asked Solyndra to hold off on announcing lay offs until after the 2010 election.

They were picking winners and losers because no one else was picking —we hear a lot of criticism of the government being in the loan business, because failures like the Solyndra loan will happen and the government will be out money. The reason the administration was “picking winners and losers”—that is loaning money to risky startup companies, is that no one else would. The credit crunch was real, and there was very little money flowing to new companies because the banks all became risk adverse. So again, Keynesian economics, the government decided to temporarily act as a bank because the banks weren’t acting as banks normally act.

ARPA-E is exciting—I don’t know if I’d heard of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy, the only new federal agency created by the Recovery act, until I read about it in Grunwald’s book. ARPA-E researches and funds out of the box experiments that might change the world—sort of a DARPA for energy science. For example, they gave out a lot of different grants to study using bacteria as a fuel—Electrofuels—which could change the whole energy sector. It’s Obama’s Manhattan Project.

Romney really doesn’t like the Tea Party—On two separate occasions Grunwald quotes Mitt Romney dissing the Tea Party. Romney tells a story of pulling a ferret out of his dishwasher and being bit by the ungrateful ferret. Romney believes the Tea Party is the ferret and moderates like Mitt are saving them from being boiled and battered in a dishwasher.

The Stimulus Worked—According to Grunwald’s research the Stimulus stopped a Great Depression. It kept 1.2 million Americans from being homeless, kept another 7 million from slipping below the poverty line, created 2.5 million jobs, increased the GDP from 2.1% to 3.8%, and without it unemployment would be at 12% right now instead of 8.1% (meaning instead of 12.5 million unemployed people in the US there would be 18.5 million).

The Stimulus is even being felt right here in South Plainfield, where, according to Recovery.gov, 5 jobs were created by the stimulus in the last 3 months.

Obama 2012 = Bush 2004?

I read fivethirtyeight quite frequently because I’m genuinely interested in quantifying the spin we hear about polls and the economy with charts and statistics.

One of the things Nate Silver (author of fivethirtyeight) suggested is that Obama is in a similar place to where Bush was in 2004 regarding the economy. So, I measured 2 economic indicators, the stock market and unemployment rates (and number of unemployed people), from January 20, 2009-June 8, 2012 and January 20^th, 2001-June 8, 2004 in order to compare the two candidates.

So let’s take a look.

Firstly, the stock market:

It is clear that Obama is looking much better than Bush regarding the performance of the stock market. This would indicate that if Bush won re-election based on the performance of the stock market under his administration, Obama will do the same and then some.

Secondly, the unemployment rate:

This is more of a mixed picture. On one hand, unemployment actually rose more under Bush during this time period than under Obama. On the other hand, it was also considerably lower under Bush than under Obama.

Let’s look at that same chart with numbers of unemployed people instead of %, just because it feels a little different when we are talking millions of unemployed people:

I doubt that the electorate will reward Obama simply for having lost fewer jobs (600,000 vs 3,200,000) than Bush did in a similar period of time. There are 3.7 million more unemployed people today than there were 8 years ago. If Obama received the same number of votes in 2012 as Bush did in 2004, except that those 3.7 million unemployed people voted against him, then he would lose the popular vote by 700,000 votes.  (That said if the election looks more like 2008, then Obama would still win by 5.8 million votes.)

In conclusion, if the stock market is more heavily weighed by the electorate than the unemployment rate, Obama is a shoo-in for re-election. If unemployment is a better indicator, Obama will have a much tougher election and has to hope his get out the vote effort performs like it is 2008, not like Bush's did in 2004 (or that he can convince voters that those 3.7 million jobs were lost because of Bush's handling of the economy and that Romney would run the country similarly). 

The Pre-existing Condition Swing Vote?

I saw this Obama ad today—and being a man with a heart condition and defined as having a pre-existing condition—I was moved by it.
So, that got me thinking… how many people are there with pre-existing conditions in the USA?
I googled it and came up with 57.2 Million.
131.3 million people voted in 2008.
People with pre-existing conditions make up 43.6% of the electorate (assuming of course we are all old enough to vote).
That means an elected official, protecting the rights of people with pre-existing conditions against a candidate who wishes to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, would only need to get 8.45 million people without pre-existing conditions--or 7.4% of the electorate-- to vote for them if all of us with pre-existing conditions voted for them.
That’s one hell of a swing vote!
Just sayin’.

President Obama can't get a break

Remember all those rumors that Obama was a manchurian candidate--a closet muslim intending on taking America down in the name of islamo-fascism... well now he's being accused of being a manchurian candidate--intent on taking America down in the name of the Jews!
Sigh. I think our president represents "otherness" to some folk, and the bias of what is behind said "otherness" comes out in conspiracy theories.

A faithful meditation on torture

In light of the release of information about interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists discussion of torture has re-emerged in the public sphere. I believe the voice of religious faith deserves to be heard regarding this issue. I can speak only as a young Lutheran seminarian, but let me speak.
One of the cries of Martin Luther, my faith’s namesake, was “Sola Scriptura” by word alone. The word from Christian scripture that continually comes up for me regarding torture, and the current construction of a “clash of civilizations,” are the words of Jesus, “But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
Another concept dear to us Lutherans is “vocation,” that is an understanding that what we do, what our work is, is sacred—a pastor’s vocation of word and sacrament should be as spirit filled as the vocation of a prison interrogator. Determining the sacredness of one’s calling is not a simple task. We must ask what the effects of our actions and the effects of the absence of our actions would be. If a “dirty bomb” is stopped from going off in Sydney Australia because an interrogator water boarded someone is that holy? After all preservation of life is highly laudable.
As far as my own personal piety I turn my eyes to the cross, which the man who I believe to be the incarnation of God died upon. We tortured Jesus and the approved Roman means of torture, and ultimately, execution killed him.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a theologian who attempted to kill Hitler, an act the rightness of which is still debated and could likely shed light upon acts of violence done for a greater good—said after Kristallnacht that only those churches who wept for the Jews deserved God’s grace. Echoing this I believe if I was not horrified by torture and did not see a glimmer of Jesus in the eyes of a Muslim man put in a stress position I could not call myself faithful.

I think Obama is wrong on this one

It isn't that I want our troops to be in greater danger... obviously. That said these pictures are of actions committed in the past, thus I believe owning up to this past will in fact create less danger for our troops in the present. Transparency about our wrong actions is a strong Mia Colpa that could indicate to people in Afghanistan and Iraq that we take our mistakes seriously and we intend to do the right thing...
Lets look at it from the angle of a potential insurgent. You've been taken over, you've not had consistent electricity for a long time, the toppling of the dictator didn't make things utopians. These westerner soldiers have been controlling your country for too long now. You've seen some torture pictures from Abu Girab (sp), you've heard about people flushing the word of God down toilets like its poop.
Then those who occupy your country elect a new guy, one who claims to not want to continue occupying your country. You pause and reflect waiting to see if this is for real.
He begins to open up about the use of torture. That seems good to you, maybe his other claim, that he really IS trying to get our of your country, is true. Then all of a sudden he decides not to show these pictures of torture... he reverses himself! Then you start to think, perhaps he will reverse himself on this whole occupation thing too...
I don't know, I guess I should give the president the benefit of the doubt, but to me it seems like a flip-flop and an indication to the world that we're maybe not as confident in rule of law and the idea that the truth will set us free as we should be and often claim to be.
Peace,
Chris

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton--OR Undraft-Hillary

Hello. My name is Chris Halverson; I am a Seminarian at LTSP here in Philly. I have been a Democrat since George W. Bush defeated McCain back in 2000. I have worked hard for the party in 2002 and 2004 and would have done so in 2006 as well except I was out of the country. I love this party and I am worried the way in which you are campaigning is tearing it apart.
That you have decided to throw the "kitchen sink" at your opponent is truly sad. That you insist on insulting Bill Richardson (my choice for President until he dropped out) and branding him "Judas" is not acceptable or frankly unpresidential. Your clinging to the racially charged rhetoric of cocaine was out of bounds, and your campaign’s comparison of Sen. Obama to Jesse Jackson was patronizing at best.
In short I think the longer you stay in the race the less likely there will be a Democratic President elected in 2008. This is especially true if you continue to campaign in such an embarrassing and mean spirited way. If Sen. Obama ends up being our nominee you have wounded him severely in the eyes of the American public, his rival will be able to say something like, “Even Bill and Hillary Clinton say, you are too liberal, you sell cocaine, etc.” If you are the nominee you will have so alienated everyday voters such as myself by your acidic attacks and unkind words that we are going to have a VERY hard time voting for you.
At this point you have to know the numbers are against you, the only way you can win is by overturning the will of the electorate. I’ve run the math; you would have to win 69% of the vote in ALL the remaining state in order to get ahead of Obama. If Florida and Michigan are counted in the MOST favorable way for you, by this I mean assuming any vote not actually for Obama is for you, you still need to get at least 58% of the vote in ALL the remaining states. This is not going to happen, so again the only way you can win is by overturning the will of the electorate.
For the good of the Party, and ultimately for the good of America, please quit the race, or at least act civil toward your fellow Democrat, your fellow Senator, and your fellow citizen, Barack Obama.
Thank you for your time,
Christopher Lee Halverson
If you agree with my sentiments send Hillary a letter expressing your own frustrations about the harm being done to the Democratic Party. You can send it to her campaign here: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/help/contact/

Canvassing for Obama

I canvassed for 6 hours today, and I gotta tell you I feel kinda bad for anyone who has to sell things door to door for a living. Not that people were really hostile or anything, but wandering from house to house repeating the same thing over and over, finding most doors one knocks on to be closed. It can be frustrating.
On the other hand it can also be pretty cool, it makes you feel like you've done something, if nothing else you've made the electoral picture a little clearer for those people back in HQ who are looking at the big picture.
Peace,
Chris

Obama gets popular culture in a way I don't

Recently, in response to the last debate, Obama brushed off his shoulder, and the crowd went wild. That action didn't make sense to me, but it does to a lot of other people. Here is what he was winking to:

Peace,
Chris

Obama goes after my relatives

Check out Obama go after the Mill Workers, the Steel workers, and the Union men and women.
I mean, I'm a "Latte liberal" I work with my mind, my fingers, my pen, and my mouth, he had me since Richardson dropped out, but I think this kind of empathetic talk is the kind of talk that my late Grandfather, and lots of my relatives up in Northern Minnesota would get behind.

Peace,
Chris

Martin Marty defends Wright

Just thought I'd link to the article. Martin Marty is a pretty big name to in Lutheran circles. Here are a few quotes from his article:
"The four S's charged against Wright — segregation, separatism, sectarianism, and superiority — don't stand up, as countless visitors can attest. I wish those whose vision has been distorted by sermon clips could have experienced what we and our white guests did when we worshiped there: feeling instantly at home."
"That its members and pastor are, in their own term, "Africentric" should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be "Judeocentric" or that Chicago's Irish parishes be "Celtic-centric." Wright and colleagues insist that no hierarchy of races is involved. People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace."
"But the Book of Jeremiah is so full of blasts and quasi curses — what biblical scholars call "imprecatory topoi" — that New England preachers invented a sermonic form called "the jeremiad," a style revived in some Wrightian shouts."
"Having said that, and reserving the right to offer more criticisms, I've been too impressed by the way Wright preaches the Christian Gospel to break with him. Those who were part of his ministry for years — school superintendents, nurses, legislators, teachers, laborers, the unemployed, the previously shunned and shamed, the anxious — are not going to turn their backs on their pastor and prophet."

Also notice the Al Gore style beard

I don't know, I'd only seen Richardson clean shaven before. Being of the "bearded community" myself I have to say I approve. With the beard he no longer gives off the tubby latino vibe... A beard hides a multitude of sins...
Peace,
Chris

Richardson goes for Obama

A good day for Obama. Among other things this suggests to me there could be a place for Richardson in an Obama administration!
Peace,
Chris

Rev. Moss again

The link sends you to a clip of Rev. Moss, the guy I saw preach two nights ago.
Last nights Preach with Power was good, though a little less intense. The pastor, Dr. Alvan N. Johnson, Jr, preached a sermon entitled "The Autobiography of Sin" in which he recounted large parts of the Bible from the perspective of Sin up to the point of his obituary, cause of death being Jesus' death on the cross.
It was quite good. Again the service was about 3 hours.
Peace,
Chris

child from Hillary ad is an now a young woman and an Obama supporter

I thought this was interesting, the "Red Phone" Hillary ad was shot quite a few years ago, and the sleeping girl is now 17 and an Obama supporter.