by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
A bit of YearlyKos Presidential forum liveblogging. That's Bill Richardson on his choice of Byron "Whizzer" White as a model Supreme Court Justice. Richardson said he knew JFK appointed him, and figured therefore he'd be a good choice. Something that you don't hear every day from someone running for President.
Was Chris Dodd born speaking Senatorese?
Ezra Klein gets the shout out. Hillary Clinton answers with some "first priority" mendacity [more on that later].
Edwards gets a question on the unitary executive and pledges to eliminate the worst abuses of the Bush administration. I guess it would be too much
... and, I think Atrios's link to UStream caused it to fall over. These things happen. This link seems to be functioning a little bit better.
Hillary Clinton's "three point plan on getting out of Iraq". For some limited definition of "getting out".
Richardson hits on his "no residual forces" plan. I hope the press will start running with this. But Bai focuses instead on the white-man's burden. Look: the DC press corps seems to take "withdrawl will lead to genocide" as a guaranteed. People need to think about this; is it actually a guarantee? There's a lot of violence in Iraq already; just how much work will it get? What's more, US troops will have to leave at some point, so the burden needs to be on "don't leave, or there will be a Day of Reckoning" to explain what we can do to prevent the Day of Recoking, or else own up to a century-long commitment not to just staying in Iraq, but patrolling Iraq at the cost of two to three lives per day indefinitely.
Homeland Security restructuring! I swear, if the devil himself said "I will eliminate the pointless TSA restrictions on taking your shoes of and carrying water bottles", I'd have to think about voting for him.
