Mid Spring Break 2008

Workout notes 13 + mile walk; last bit (mausoleum to home was 1:27; it was an effort). My course went past the gooseloop through the bottom of Glen Oak Park and through Springdale Cemetery.

My hip ended up being slightly sore.

For photos of the Springdale course, see my IVS Half Marathon Album

Candidates: John McCain will attempt to run on national security credentials. Too bad that he doesn’t seem to understand that Iran is mostly Shiite and that Al-Qaeda is mostly Sunni.

Senator John McCain’s trip overseas was supposed to highlight his foreign policy acumen, and his supporters hoped that it would showcase him as a statesman, allowing him to meet with world leaders as the Democrats squabble.

But all did not go according to plan on Tuesday in Amman, Jordan, when Mr. McCain, fresh from a visit to Iraq, misidentified some of the key players in the Iraq war.

Mr. McCain said several times during his visit to Jordan – during a news conference and a radio interview — that he was concerned that Iran was training members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training and financing Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, which is a Sunni insurgent group.

“We continue to be concerned about Iranian taking Al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back,’’ Mr. McCain said at the news conference. Asked about that statement, Mr. McCain said: “Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”

It was not until he got a whispered correction from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain on the trip, which is a Congressional delegation, that Mr. McCain corrected himself.

“I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda,” he said.

Mr. McCain has based his campaign in large part on his assertion that he is the best prepared candidate to deal with Iraq, and the Democrats wasted little time in jumping on his misstatement to question his knowledge and judgment. [...]

I’m sure that this inspires confidence. Imagine the wingnut reaction had Obama said that.

But Obama did weigh in:

n a brilliant pivot away from race, Obama capitalized in North Carolina this morning on McCain’s confusion yesterday about the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda:

Now we know what we’ll hear from those like John McCain who support open-ended war. They will argue that leaving Iraq is surrender. That we are emboldening the enemy. These are the mistaken and misleading arguments we hear from those who have failed to demonstrate how the war in Iraq has made us safer. Just yesterday, we heard Senator McCain confuse Sunni and Shiite, Iran and al Qaeda. Maybe that is why he voted to go to war with a country that had no al Qaeda ties. Maybe that is why he completely fails to understand that the war in Iraq has done more to embolden America’s enemies than any strategic choice that we have made in decades.

The speech was given as a major policy presentation on Iraq, on the anniversary of the invasion. Major points he made (full PDF available):

* End the war in Iraq, removing our troops at a pace of 1 to 2 combat brigades per month;

* Finally finish the fight against the Taliban, root out al Qaeda and invest in the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, while making aid to the Pakistani government conditional;

* Act aggressively to stop nuclear proliferation and to secure all loose nuclear materials around the world;

* Double our foreign assistance to cut extreme poverty in half;

* Invest in a clean energy future to wean the U.S. off of foreign oil and to lead the world against the threat of global climate change;

* Rebuild our military capability by increasing the number of soldiers, marines, and special forces troops, and insist on adequate training and time off between deployments;

* Renew American diplomacy by talking to our adversaries as well as our friends; increasing the size of the Foreign Service and the Peace Corps; and creating an America’s Voice Corps.

Now if you go to Obama’s pdf document that I listed, I won’t blame you if you roll your eyes and mutter “same old promises”. But Obama actually did author a US Senate bill that was eventually signed into law that went along these lines: it was his “Congo Bill”.

Obama, who was sworn into office in January 2005, spent much of his time in the Senate taking a high-profile position as spokesman for Democrats’ efforts to overhaul congressional ethics standards, including his own bid to make Senate colleagues pay the full charter rate, rather than first-class airfare, for rides in corporate jets. The effort drew the ire of such senior senators as Ted Stevens of Alaska, whose state is so big that corporate planes are often the only way to get around. Senate leaders included that jet travel requirement in a lobbying practices and disclosures bill signed into law in September 2007.

But as a member of the minority party, Obama also worked across the aisle with Republicans to push several measures that became law in 2006.

Working with Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Obama won enactment of a law creating a single, searchable database of all federal contracts, grants and loans.

He also partnered with senior Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, the former chairman of the Foreign Relations panel, to sponsor legislation to strengthen international efforts to destroy conventional weapons, though it did not advance out of committee.

Separately, Obama was lead sponsor of a bill to provide relief and promote democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was signed into law in December 2006.

This bill did much:

Ending the Conflict in Congo

An estimated 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo began. Nearly 80 percent of Congo’s 56 million people live in extreme poverty and more than 70 percent are undernourished. The United Nations has its largest peacekeeping force in the world in the Congo, and in the summer of 2006, the country held competitive national elections for the first time in more than 40 years.

Senator Obama wrote and passed legislation to build on this historic election and promote stability in the country. Senator Obama revamped U.S. policy in the Congo to include a commitment to help rebuild the country, develop lasting political structures, hold accountable destabilizing foreign governments, crack down on corrupt politicians, and professionalize the military. The bill also authorizes $52 million in U.S. assistance for the Congo, calls for a Special U.S. Envoy to resolve ongoing violence, and urges the administration to strengthen the U.N. peacekeeping force.

“It was a source of considerable encouragement to learn that the Congo Bill which (Senator Obama) graciously initiated and sponsored was recently passed and signed into law (S.2125). This is an important and most welcome development for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) at this critical juncture of its history.”

– William Lacy Swing, U.N. Special Representative in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Indeed, Obama was the primary sponsor of this legislation (S.2125) that passed Congress on December 8, 2006, and became law on December 22, 2006. In a June 25 column for The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof wrote that Obama was “among the few prominent American politicians who have focused on the war here [in the Congo].”

Ok, what about Hillary Clinton? She has been in the US Senate one term longer, but has gotten some stuff passed into law.

From the last reference:

Upon the bill’s passage, The Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York, published an editorial titled “Clinton helps remedy a threat to sick children.” From the November 24, 2003, editorial:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has won a victory for children with passage of a bill that will ensure that drugs are safe and effective for kids to take.

Incredibly, it took an act of Congress to guarantee that drugs widely used by children will be studied, tested and labeled for safety and efficacy. The Pediatric Research Equity Act passed the House last week after previously winning approval in the Senate.

When Clinton’s husband was president, the Food and Drug Administration adopted a “Pediatric Rule” in 1998 that required drug manufacturers to provide guidelines for the safe use of their products by children. The FDA in March 2002 announced it would suspend enforcement of the rule. The agency later reversed its decision, but a court blocked the rule in October 2002 because Congress had not authorized the FDA to enforce it.

So Senator Clinton and other advocates for childrens’ health introduced legislation this year that should give parents the peace of mind they deserve.

She also deserves credit for her work on CHIP and SCHIP:

ast year, before that endorsement, he was quoted by the Associated Press as saying something quite different, which the Globe did not note in its story:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Oct. 6, 2007: The children’s health program wouldn’t be in existence today if we didn’t have Hillary pushing for it from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In that same story, The AP’s Beth Fouhy concluded, “While Kennedy is widely viewed as the driving force behind the program, by all accounts the former first lady’s pressure was crucial.” She quoted Nick Littlefield, who had been a senior health adviser to Kennedy, as saying, “we relied on her, worked with her and she was pivotal in encouraging the White House to do it.”

The AP’s assessment is backed up by others we consulted. Adam Clymer, former chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, covered the legislative maneuvering and also wrote about it in a 1999 book, “Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography.” Clymer wrote that Kennedy “worked with” Hillary Clinton to get White House support for a Senate measure to grant $24 billion for the new program, rather than the $16 billion approved by the House. “With strong administration support, the $24 billion stayed in,” he wrote. Then, when the bill finally passed, Kennedy “credited the President, the First Lady, [Senate Democratic Leader Tom] Daschle, Marian Wright Edelman, head of the Children’s Defense Fun, and Hatch. …”

Clymer, in an exchange of e-mails, told FactCheck.org:

Adam Clymer: On balance, I would say of course Kennedy and Hatch deserve most of the credit, but Hillary helped by making sure the Administration stuck with the $24 billion in [the Senate-House] conference. She didn’t write the legislation but she played a significant role in getting it passed.

Other accounts at the time the legislation was passed and since give Clinton substantial credit. The pro-Republican Washington Times newspaper credited (or perhaps more accurately, blamed) Hillary Clinton for the program in a 1997 article. The paper said it had obtained documents from 1993 showing that the White House “plotted” to push a “Kids First” insurance program if Mrs. Clinton’s universal health care proposal failed.

Washington Times, Aug. 6, 1997: The plan signed into law yesterday by Mr. Clinton and pushed by the first lady is a duplicate of the 4-year-old health care task force idea, except that it is paid for by a 15-cent tax on cigarettes.

One of the co-authors of the plan, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, credited Mrs. Clinton for her “invaluable help, both in the fashioning and the shaping of the program.”

Years later, when Clinton was first running for the Senate, Kennedy’s aide Littlefield was still giving her credit. The New York Times quoted him as saying, ”She was a one-woman army inside the White House to get this done.” He said that when President Clinton himself was showing reluctance to back the new legislation out of fear it would upset a budget deal with Republicans, “We went to Mrs. Clinton and said, ‘You’ve got to get the president to come around on this thing,’ ” and she did. [...]

So, yes, she has exaggerated some of her claims, as I have been happy to point out. But evidently, this is not an instance of that.