Iraq War

For decades, Republicans have won the battle on wedge social issues at the polls in suburban districts, while Democrats quietly tried to shoo those wedge issues away. But Democratic candidates in tough districts are slowly coming to openly support equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and they are being led by a new crop of unlikely pioneers — military veterans. DFLer Ashwin Madia is one such candidate.

The redoubtable folks at the Uptake have posted the entire U.S. Senate debate between Norm Coleman, Al Franken and Dean Barkley. You can watch the whole thing in one dreary sitting if you’re a glutton for energy policy discussions and political bickering. But they’ve also made it available in a more palatable question-by-question format. I thought the most interesting part of the evening was the two questions focusing on foreign policy, with Barkley and Franken taking turns teeing off on the pinata presented by the incumbent’s unflagging support of the Iraq war. Watch the clips after the jump:

This week at the 6th District congressional debate in Stillwater, Michele Bachmann hailed last year’s “surge” of troops to Iraq as an unmitigated success, saying it has done “what no one thought was possible.”

Not so fast. Here are five things Michele Bachmann and the “surge” evangelists aren’t telling you.

Republican incumbent Rep. Michele Bachmann and two challengers who hope to unseat her to represent Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District in Washington met in Stillwater Wednesday evening for the first candidates’ forum. In front of a standing-room-only crowd, Bachmann, DFL-endorsed El Tinklenberg and Bob Anderson, the unendorsed Independence Party candidate, sparred mainly over the economy, although energy, the war in Iraq and the Stillwater lift bridge each garnered some attention.

The best line of the night came when Tinklenberg criticized Bachmann on her offshore and ANWR drilling proposals: “The strategy that she has proposed of ‘Drain America First’ is a bad strategy.”

HuffPost has assembled a short video of the passage from Friday night’s debate when Barack Obama ran down a laundry list of John McCain’s errors in judgments about the Iraq War, inserting clips of McCain’s own contemporaneous words on the subject. And all in less than two minutes. Recommended.

Police would like to to paint 23-year-old Monica Bicking, whose home was raided on Saturday, August 30, as part of a preemptive strike against RNC protesters, as a “terrorist.” But her brother, Ian Bicking, has come out to speak in support of his sister, whom he says was arrested in an attempt to preemptively suppress the protests at the Republican National Convention.

Jeff Patersen, founder of the California-based organization Courage to Resist, was the first US soldier to refuse to return to duty in Iraq during the Gulf War. Here he speaks out on behalf of veterans who have resisted stop-loss and violated their terms of duty in order to express dissent over the current Iraq war.
Listen: [...]

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its final report (PDF) today on misstatements by President Bush and members of his administration in the lead up to the Iraq War. The committee contrasted statements by the Bush administration with the intelligence reports at the time. The report’s finding square with what the American public has [...]

John McCain — who in the past few months has made a number of flatly false claims about the Iraq War (most memorably, about Shi’ite Iran training Sunni al Qaeda members, and the terms of the April ceasefire in Basra) –  has inserted foot in mouth again, telling a Wisconsin crowd yesterday that the Bush [...]

There’s something mordantly funny about watching the stenographers and voice talent of the Washington press corps fulminate about Scott McClellan’s admissions regarding the paper-thin pretexts on which the Iraq War was sold by the White House. You get the feeling they resent his flouting club rules more than anything else. Did they not wait their [...]