The following are excerpts from an editorial Wausau Daily Herald. Read it and then our comments.
An hour with Rep. Dave Obey is an hour in a graduate-level political science seminar . . .
. . . you'll come to appreciate the mastery of context and details that distinguishes the nation's ablest public servants from the rest of the pack.
We wish more professional politicians spoke their minds that way. Obey's candor . . . is refreshing.
We suspect that the episode also reflects the lingering frustration of Obey and other experienced legislators from both parties who grew impatient over the past decade of congressional affairs managed by ideologically driven newcomers. Obey is a policy professional, more interested in getting things done than scoring political points.
And he is a pragmatist.
We at the newspaper are fortunate, and we know it. Our jobs enable us to spend quality time not just with Dave Obey but with our U.S. senators, the governor and lieutenant governor, members of the state Legislature and other public officials. It's a wonderful perch.
We emerge from the sessions with Obey - those 500-level poli sci seminars - knowing that we're lucky to be paid observers of one of the great congressional careers in the nation's history, distinguished not just by length of service but by deep intelligence, wisdom and passion - precisely the qualities the United States needs to lead us out of Iraq while protecting the lives of our soldiers.
We've often contended Obey has the press in his hip pocket, and this proves it - we even left out much of the kissing up the Daily Herald did to Obey in this editorial.
This You Tube incident isn't one isolated incident of Obey's temper and character, it's a perfect example of it. People all over Washington and the Seventh District have been berated by Obey for disagreeing with him for nearly four decades. Obey got away with it for years because he so carefully controlled his contacts with the media (do you think for one second Obey would have gone off and even cursed at these people had it been in a meeting with writers for the Daily Herald?) and because there wasn't a vehicle like You Tube.
It isn't "refreshing" as the Herald characterizes it, it's disheartening to think this man is our Representative in Washington because he certainly doesn't represent the character of the people of Wisconsin.
An hour with Rep. Dave Obey is an hour in a graduate-level political science seminar . . .
. . . you'll come to appreciate the mastery of context and details that distinguishes the nation's ablest public servants from the rest of the pack.
We wish more professional politicians spoke their minds that way. Obey's candor . . . is refreshing.
We suspect that the episode also reflects the lingering frustration of Obey and other experienced legislators from both parties who grew impatient over the past decade of congressional affairs managed by ideologically driven newcomers. Obey is a policy professional, more interested in getting things done than scoring political points.
And he is a pragmatist.
We at the newspaper are fortunate, and we know it. Our jobs enable us to spend quality time not just with Dave Obey but with our U.S. senators, the governor and lieutenant governor, members of the state Legislature and other public officials. It's a wonderful perch.
We emerge from the sessions with Obey - those 500-level poli sci seminars - knowing that we're lucky to be paid observers of one of the great congressional careers in the nation's history, distinguished not just by length of service but by deep intelligence, wisdom and passion - precisely the qualities the United States needs to lead us out of Iraq while protecting the lives of our soldiers.
We've often contended Obey has the press in his hip pocket, and this proves it - we even left out much of the kissing up the Daily Herald did to Obey in this editorial.
This You Tube incident isn't one isolated incident of Obey's temper and character, it's a perfect example of it. People all over Washington and the Seventh District have been berated by Obey for disagreeing with him for nearly four decades. Obey got away with it for years because he so carefully controlled his contacts with the media (do you think for one second Obey would have gone off and even cursed at these people had it been in a meeting with writers for the Daily Herald?) and because there wasn't a vehicle like You Tube.
It isn't "refreshing" as the Herald characterizes it, it's disheartening to think this man is our Representative in Washington because he certainly doesn't represent the character of the people of Wisconsin.
posted by ObeyOut2006 at 7:14 AM
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Scientist Accuses White House of 'Nazi' Tactics
WASHINGTON -- A government scientist, under sharp questioning by a federal panel for his outspoken views on global warming, stood by his view today that the Bush administration's information policies smacked of Nazi Germany.
James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, took particular issue with the administration's rule that a government information officer listen in on his interviews with reporters and its refusal to allow him to be interviewed by National Public Radio.
"This is the United States," Hansen told the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. "We do have freedom of speech here."
But Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) said it was reasonable for Hansen's employer to ask him not to state views publicly that contradicted administration policy.
"I am concerned that many scientists are increasingly engaging in political advocacy and that some issues of science have become increasingly partisan as some politicians sense that there is a political gain to be found on issues like stem cells, teaching evolution and climate change," Issa said.
Hansen said the Bush administration was not the first in U.S. history to practice information management over government scientists, but it has been the most vigorous. He deplored a "politicization of science."
"When I testify to you as a government scientist," he said, "why does my testimony have to be reviewed, edited and changed by a bureaucrat in the White House?" Sitting beside him was one of the bureaucrats Hansen was talking about: Philip Cooney, chief of staff to the White House Council on Environmental Quality from 2001 to 2005.
Cooney, an official of the American Petroleum Institute before going to the White House, acknowledged having reviewed some of Hansen's testimony as part of a long-standing practice designed to result in consistency.
Cooney was asked about changing "will" to "may" in prepared testimony describing the impact of human activity--particularly the burning of oil and coal--on the Earth's temperature. He said his edits were based not on political views but a 2001 report by the National Academy of Sciences.
"I offered my comments in good-faith reliance on what I understood to be authoritative and current use of the state of scientific knowledge, and for no other purpose," Cooney said.
Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) didn't buy that. He said the basis of Cooney's editing changes was not scientific evidence but "loyalty to a person who had appointed you to a political position."
Some of the sharpest exchanges came between Reps. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the committee, and a Republican member, Mark Souder of Indiana. Souder said the Democrats' approach made "a mockery of the hearing process."
Online at: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-climate20mar20,1,1206407.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
By Joel Havemann, Times Staff Writer 1:05 PM PDT, March 19, 2007
U.S. Public's Support of Iraq War Sliding Faster Now
WASINGTON- Support among Americans for the Iraq war began to slip just weeks after US troops breached Baghdad and toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein.
But since last fall, the downward slope has become precipitous, with doubts spreading from Democrats and independents into the Republican core of support.
As the nation takes stock of a war it embarked on four years ago Tuesday, those who regret that decision now outnumber supporters by 14 percentage points.
Accelerating the slide, say opinion analysts, were bipartisan criticisms of US war policy by the Iraq Study Group and concerns that the mission has been obscured by civil war.
To some, the tumble in support simply shows weak knees, a lack of resolve in the American character. To others, it suggests a fall-off in trust of the Bush administration.
Opinion analysts, though, give a more nuanced picture, noting that the public is continually reevaluating the stakes in Iraq – and assessing whether the costs of sticking with the fight have become higher than the stakes are worth.
It's a calculation with which Kathy Gier of Hutchinson, Kan., is all too familiar.
"I think a civil war is going on there, and it makes me profoundly sad," says Ms. Gier, a Republican. Some 55 percent of Republicans have come to the same conclusion on civil war, according to a Harris Poll in January.
This mother of three speaks supportively of her daughter's past service in Iraq as an Army helicopter pilot. "I was more adamant [that the war] was the right thing when she was there," she says during a phone interview.
But Gier no longer sees the wisdom of the invasion, a change of heart that came slowly and imperceptibly. "I thought it was the right the thing to do for a really long, long time, and I think it's pretty evident that it didn't work," she says, though she holds out hope for a "limited democratic process" and doesn't want to abandon the government there.
On the eve of the conflict, Gier had reservations about the reasons for going to war. "I supported the president's decision because I kept thinking that he must know more than we do."
Democrats and independents with similar doubts before the war trusted President Bush far less, making support from both groups softer. But the partisan divide in public opinion – evident almost from the war's onset – has also helped Mr. Bush carry those who trust his leadership through evolving justifications for the war, says Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego.
"There's a huge partisan division on the war, and it's far larger for this war than for any previous military engagement going back to World War II," says Dr. Jacobson.
Republicans form a large majority of the 40 percent of Americans who stand by the decision to go to war, versus the 54 percent who do not, according to the Pew Research Center in Washington. Until recently, GOP support has held fairly steady in the face of the long exodus of independents and the early departure of Democrats.
In an address Monday, Bush urged Americans to be patient. The mission to help the Iraqi government secure its capital will take months, and fewer than half the troop reinforcements being sent have arrived in Baghdad, he said.
The presidential plea isn't likely to carry much weight with Keith Fraser, a Demo- crat whose support for the war faded long ago. "I wasn't a strong believer for very long, probably that first year," says Mr. Fraser, a retired naval officer in Swanzey, N.H. "I really look back upon it as being a very naive time for me."
Mr. Fraser did not vote for Bush in either election. But on the eve of the Iraq war, he found himself cautiously optimistic that the invasion would take care of a troubled situation left unresolved from Operation Desert Storm. And Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations stirred up anxieties lingering from 9/11, he said in a phone interview.
"The absence of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] was the first chink in the armor," says Fraser. "Once you start to question that, then you begin to question other things, like was Al Qaeda sitting at the right arm of Saddam Hussein? You just began to wonder, is everything you're hearing the truth?"
Failure to find WMDs also affected Frank Hilts, a retired cop from Stone Mountain, Ga. Early in the war Mr. Hilts believed that invading Iraq not only was morally right, but also that it was crucial for national security and the war on terror.
After it became clear that no major caches of WMDs would be found in Iraq, Hilts, an independent who voted for Bush in 2000, went from cautious support to outright calls for impeachment, for shielding the "real" reasons for going to war as well as for mishandling the operation.
The view that the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about WMDs has become more pervasive over the course of the war and is now held by 54 percent of the public, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll this month.
"It isn't really our war anymore," says Hilts, adding that Americans are now stuck refereeing a civil war.
Good news from Iraq has boosted support for the war at different junctures – although temporarily. The capture of Mr. Hussein, elections, and the killing of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, all caused spikes in war support.
The spikes, say analysts, represent public reevaluation of either the costs or the benefits of the war, or both. Support rose after the first Iraqi election in January 2005. Voter turnout exceeded expectations, boosting Americans' optimism about the prospects for democracy in Iraq.
Optimism about progress plays a big role in the public's weighing of a war's costs and benefits, says Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University professor who studies US public opinion and the use of force.
"The rising costs [of war] matter a lot, if you're not making a lot of progress. The rising costs matter less if you are making a lot of progress," says Professor Gelpi. "There have been a few good events that have punctuated the scene from time to time, but that has all occurred against a steady backdrop of bad news all the time."
Until recently, the war's true believers have not been affected much by that steady drumbeat of bad news.
"Those who think the war is a good idea have a much more optimistic notion of the progress on the ground than those who don't," says Jacobson at UC San Diego. "But among Republicans ... optimism has really slid dramatically since September."
The share of Republicans who say the war is going well has fallen from 77 percent to 51 percent over the past year, according to Pew. That decline in Republicans' optimism spells trouble, according to Gelpi's model, for future support levels of the war.
Others look at the very short-term impact of good news in Iraq and suggest that the rising toll – in the form of casualties – plays a more decisive factor. But the White House can take little comfort in this view, too, because modern US history shows that war support declines over time as casualties mount.
The public-opinion trend lines for the wars in Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea follow a remarkably similar pattern, notes John Mueller, author of "War, Presidents, and Public Opinion." The Iraq war has seen many fewer casualties than the other conflicts, yet public backing has fallen by about the same amount. To Dr. Mueller, that's evidence that the American public values the Iraq conflict less than previous wars.
By Ben Arnoldy, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Tuesday Mar 20
Online at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20070320/ts_csm/afouryears;_ylt=AkdEcxEofblcig7KvpegZ0HMWM0F
From OBEYOUT'S favorite paper, The MJS:
By Mike Nichols March 11, 2007
Is "Hell" A Cuss Word Anymore?
It's just where we're headed if people like Dave Obey can't be blunt without having to apologize .We beg and beg and clamor and pray for forthright politicians who will tell it like it is, say "no" to people's faces instead of acting like weasels and sycophants; and what happens when they do?
They get hoisted up onto "YouTube" and TV news runs a 10-second sound bite that makes them look crazy. They are labeled unhinged potty-mouths and forced to apologize for cussing or shouting in order to be heard.
Witness the overblown kerfuffle involving Congressman Dave Obey.
Obey has apologized for yelling at some anti-war activists the other day.
He was busted on tape saying "hell" three times, referring one time to "liberal idiots" and suggesting some guy trying to debate how we got out of Vietnam - something Obey knows a little about - was maybe "smoking something illegal."
His biggest sin, though: stopping in the first place.
Obey is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and he's a little busy right now trying to end a war. The woman who stopped him in a hallway, Tina Richards, at first only wanted to know whether he had seen a "poem" by her son, who served in Iraq.
A poem? What the hell do I know about a poem? is what you'd expect a busy person responsible for billions of dollars and on his way to a meeting to say.
Not Obey.
"I honestly don't know," he replied, sounding tired, as anti-war activists taped him. "I'm so buried in appropriations bills."
Richards went on to tell him that her son had tried to commit suicide and it took six months to get an appointment at the VA.
Obey, who is himself a liberal Democrat but is not Bill Clinton, didn't emote with a quivering lip. He did, however, talk in a reasonably empathetic voice until the Missouri woman changed the subject with a truly baffling question.
She asked if he was going to be voting "against the supplemental."
That's shorthand for the supplemental spending bill on Iraq.
"Absolutely not," he responded, pointing out a somewhat significant fact. "I am the sponsor of the supplemental."
"To continue the war?" asked Richards.
This is an irksome refrain for Obey, who has been targeted by anti-war protesters lately.
Obey, as he said to Richards, hates the war; voted against it to start with. Voting against the supplemental, he pointed out, though, would deny funding for things like body armor and veterans hospitals - which actually seems pretty germane to what she appeared concerned about in the first place.
Voting for it would set timetables for redeploying troops.
"We're trying to use the supplemental to end the war," Obey told Richards. "But you can't end the war if you vote against the supplemental. It's time these idiot liberals understand that."
Richards didn't like that. She later called Obey's mention of idiot liberals "really inappropriate."
Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, then accused him of using "the worst cuss words in the book," and called him "Dirty Mouth Dave," which (I'll just apologize for this right now in order to expedite things) seemed even more idiotic.
I'm not even sure "hell" is a cuss anymore.
It's just where we're headed if people like Dave Obey can't be blunt without having to apologize.
Online at: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=575944
At last.... a rational un-political look at Obey... if he had listened and supported these whacko-green-liberal treehugging freaks, ObeyOut would have ripped him for that....
As someone posted in another comment: You people DO suck, You have no true intestinal fortitude and truly need to stick with your Log Cabin cousins and Gay/Christian leaders that are taking us down this losing road into the wilderness...
Obey twisted himself around to embrace these people. Claiming he opposed the war at the beginning and saying he was the first to call for Rumsfeld's resignation. But when they didn't go along with his way of handling it, he freaked out and berated them. If you listen to Obey through the whole video, he says the F-word when going in the door. And yes, that would be a curse word.
Liberals have cut and paste skills, we're happy for you. Hopefully one day you can step up to the big boy table and have an intelligent argument.
Obey is a communist! See anyone can name call and be mean. The best part of Obey's rant is that it's against far left types just like the ones on this site who come on here to defend him.
Republicans Intent On Dividing the Country
By Brian Tumulty
Posted March 9, 2007
WASHINGTON — A video in which Rep. Dave Obey refers to some of his colleagues as “idiot liberals” is being used by Republicans to highlight disarray among House Democrats over the Iraq war.
Obey fired back Friday, saying Republicans are using the video to divide the country.
"Leave it to them to exploit the war any way they can," said the Wausau Democrat, whose recorded confrontation made national news. "The fact that this story is being pushed by people in the Republican leadership demonstrates that they will stop at nothing to cynically try to keep those of us who want to change direction on that war divided."
The six-minute video clip — shot Monday in the hallway of the House Rayburn Office Building — was posted on the YouTube Internet site by Grassroots America, a peace and social justice organization opposed to the Iraq war. Watch video here
It shows an exchange between the Wausau Democrat and antiwar activists led by Tina Richards of Salem, Mo., over the $103 billion supplemental spending bill President Bush has requested to help pay for the continued cost of the war and an escalation of troops.
“We’re trying to use the supplemental to end the war,” Obey tells the activists on the video, after they ask him to oppose it. “But you can’t end the war if you vote against the supplemental. It’s time these idiot liberals understand that.”
Ed Patru, spokesman for the House Republican Conference, said the video demonstrates there is “utter chaos” among Democratic lawmakers. “What transpired on that video is symptomatic of a much deeper issue, rampant disarray, indecision and political posturing that exists among Democrats on the one issue that they promised to lead,” said Patru.
Richards, reached on her cell phone today as she continued to lobby lawmakers, said she was surprised that Obey showed such disdain for his antiwar constituents and fellow lawmakers.
“I’m against this war and, this has now, I guess, made me a liberal,” said Richards, whose 23-year-old son is facing the likelihood of a third tour of duty with the Marines in Iraq and wants an immediate pullout of troops.
Obey, for his part, issued an apology this afternoon for yelling at the activists. “I respect their passion on the issue,” Obey said in a telephone interview. “I wish they would respect mine. The fact is we are both frustrated about that war and that led to an argument we never should have had because we both want to see an end to U.S. involvement in that war.”
But Obey made no apology for characterizing some Democrats as “idiots” or for offending them.
“I think that anyone who thinks that I can wave a magic wand and produce 218 votes to pass an immediate cutoff to the war in the teeth of presidential opposition is, in fact, an idiot,” he said.
Obey said that during his legislative career he’s offended “thousands” of Democrats. “That’s my job if someone asks me to do something outrageous,” he said. ---
Again, it seems that our own Republican Leadership can only attack like a toothless pitbull rather than offer ANY constructive ideas on how to get us out of Vietnam II. I think it is time for a leadership change in our distict, and this site proves it.
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