PDHblog
This is a place for members of Progressive Democrats of Hawai‘i to express their thoughts
and exasperations about political happenings. The opinions and views are not necessarily
those of PDH's steering committee or membership as a whole.

Update

I need to preface this post with an acknowledgment of Sen. Inouye’s service to our country in general, and Hawaii in particular. To quote from Trapper John’s blog today,

Dan Inouye is one of the greatest living Americans. That ought to be stated at the outset of any post which is critical of the man. Inouye is a bona fide war hero — a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient — who lost his arm fighting for a nation which was simultaneously interning thousands of his fellow Japanese-Americans. He’s a son of immigrants, who after the war joined with a number of other Nisei veterans to found Central Pacific Bank — a venture which helped provide capital to scores of Japanese-Americans in Hawai’i unable to obtain loans from other sources. And he was the first Japanese-American elected to the US House of Representatives, and subsequently the first Japanese-American elected to the Senate. I was lucky enough to live in Hawai’i for a few years, and one of the first things I learned upon moving to Honolulu was how justifiably revered Dan Inouye is in the islands. He’s a truly remarkable American.

That said, I know that back during the last Ice Age when Hawaii and Alaska became states, Sen. Inouye and Sen. Stevens became BFF. But really, now that Stevens’ corruption has been exposed, and Democrats need a more than paperthin majority in the senate, why does Sen. Inouye continue to honor this friendship with this kind of support? I have no objection to their remaining friends, but there ought to be some limits. For details, see this blog:

Why is Daniel Inouye Raising Money For Senator Toobz?

By: Jane Hamsher Wednesday April 30, 2008 12:01 pm

And then also take a look at the remainder of Trapper John’s blog at DailyKos

Dan Inouye, Heartbreaker

by Trapper John, Wed Apr 30, 2008 at 12:40:13 PM PDT

This is the same Senator Inouye who was one of the Gang of 14 who enabled the nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court to be approved. BTW, some of the other members of that gang? Sen. John McCain, and Sen. Joe Lieberman.
Bob

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) has launched a campaign called “Healthcare Not Warfare“. Essentially the idea is to encourage people to speak out in droves, calling on our U.S. Congress to prioritize funding for healthcare, specifically by passing H.R. 676, rather than continuing to fund the war.

Coincidentally, this clever animation just reached my inbox via two different sources. It illustrates how money can gain you access to lawmakers while, “regular Bill” sits around waiting to be heard. In particular, he wants to reform the American healthcare system. Check it out.

http://www.wisdc.org/crock.php

OK… counts are in, so people are connecting the dots and speculating as to what the official delegate counts may be. We know that Hawai‘i awards delegates proportionally rather than winner take all… should be simple to figure out, right?

Statewide tallies were roughly 75% Obama to 25% Clinton. We have 20 delegates that are allocated proportionally… split that 3/4 to 1/4 and you get 15 Obama delegates and 5 Clinton delegates… right? Wrong. As you may have seen in the media accounts (Hon Adv, Star Bull), based on the preliminary vote counts that have yet to be verified, the projected delegate count sits at 14 Obama and 6 Clinton.

It is a tad more complicated to figure out than one may think on the surface of things. Read more if you want to know more about the geeky aspects of delegate allocation… (more…)

As a precinct president, I helped staff my Democratic Caucus in Honolulu (District 25), and it was a phenomenal night! I brought a friend with a disability and arrived early, about 5:30 (voting was to begin at 7 PM). At that time, almost everyone there was a volunteer worker, but soon people coming to vote were arriving early. People had gotten word of a possible huge turnout. We had a huge line of new voters, and another huge line of people registering as Democrats for the first time– so many that we ran out of Democratic Party registration forms! If we had designed the influx better, we might have had a third line for registered voters who are already members of the Democratic party, but weren’t sure which precinct they were in (we could have processed everyone faster.) Some came expecting to vote early, registered, and then had to leave before voting even began.

Everyone had to go to their precinct table to await the official time for the caucus vote, 7:00 - 7:30 PM. Our tables were filled to overflowing. Some precincts quickly ran out of Precinct Sign-in forms, and I barely had enough. The procedure was that when the District Chair gave the go-ahead, everyone had to get a ballot from a precinct officer and vote. Unfortunately, we had no microphone or loudspeakers in the room full of hundreds of people! The poor district chair had to try to shout over the din to let us know when it was time to vote. Once balloting started at 7:00, there was mayhem for a while. There were FOUR names on the ballot: Clinton and Obama, of course, but also Kucinich and Edwards, even though they had dropped out, and “Uncommitted.”
(more…)

A few more thoughts to put down about last night’s Democratic caucuses that didn’t make it into my last post. Perhaps best that they are split anyway… the last one was full of elation, this post will have some of my gripes and annoyances.

I went to bed last night thinking that considering the chaos, there seemed to be relatively few complaints. Most people seemed to understand that we were doing our best. I have been perusing other blogs that posted reports from different locations last night and just got around to checking Jerry Burris’ reports at HA. Many comments coming in are from people complaining about their site’s lack of preparedness. Let me respond to one that was directed at my district. I think these complaints are probably representative of how many others felt across the State. I can only speak for myself, but I imagine my response is likely similar to that other organizers across the State would make as well. (more…)

I hardly know where to begin. The turnout last night was insane. Unheard of. Probably will never happen again. Amazing. Plenty more adjectives come to mind.

Maybe it is because I am exhausted (didn’t get to bed till 3am after helping tally the votes at HQ) and still in shock that I survived the onslaught of turnout in my district… But I am actually quite emotional when reading the results today. It is not often that I feel moved to tears of joy when reading about politics. Like I said, probably best attributed to lack of sleep.

That said, I am very happy about how things turned out last night. In District 20, where I am the chair, we had over 1000 people turn out to vote. Four years ago, even with a large influx of Kucinich voters (including myself), there were 128 ballots cast in the District 20 caucuses. Last night, 1028 ballots were cast. Statewide, over 37,000 votes were cast. That has never happened before, and I think it is safe to say it will never happen again. The factors that combined to create the huge turnout last night are unlikely to come together in the future. A candidate with a history in Hawai‘i. A national race so close that Hawai‘i “matters.”

A few thoughts on what all this may mean… (more…)

The leadership role of our Sen. Inouye in the FISA issue has been little discussed, but intrepid blogger “emptywheel” has dug up some information:

The entire Congress was not briefed on the program

Aside from those members who have, at one point, been members of the Gang of Eight (Harman no longer is, and Pelosi has had two roles in it), just three members of Congress got briefings on the program before Risen and Lichtblau revealed it. The day after the hospital confrontation, Tom DeLay got a briefing, probably so he could tell Cheney that even he could not force through a bill authorizing the illegal program.

And, December 1, 2001, Daniel Inouye and Ted Stevens–as the ranking members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee–got a briefing, presumably so they could authorize the NSA to pay the telecoms tons of money to wiretap Americans. (Bill Young and John Murtha got briefings in 2006, after the Administration started briefing more members of the intelligence committees presumably in response to the Risen-Lichtblau revelations.)

Tom DeLay is, thankfully, moot. But the Inouye briefing is interesting in that he was one of the sane* Democrats who repeatedly voted with Republicans in support of trashing civil liberties and privacy.

*[A commenter suggested a typo here, thinking that emptywheel probably meant to write “same”, not “sane”.]

The FISA “ball” is now in the House’s court, and of course President Bush is promising hellfire and damnation if the House doesn’t agree to rubberstamp the Senate’s FISA-gutting bill. Obligingly, 21 conservative Blue Dog Democrats have endorsed the Senate-passed bill, but Inouye does not appear to be one of them.

Commenting on emptywheel’s blog, JimWhite wrote

Inouye’s behavior on this is truly puzzling. I just checked his ratings on Progressive Punch. Overall, he is 32nd in the Senate. On topics directly related here, he is 23rd on corporate subsidies, 24th on government checks on corporate power, 19th on human rights and civil liberties and 27th on making government work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. Only on war and peace, where he is 37th, is he appreciably below the middle of the Democrats.

Clearly, from the Progressive Punch ratings, Inouye is voting well out of his character on retroactive immunity. Also, I have noted earlier a high correlation of being in on early briefings on these programs and being out of government entirely. I continue to wonder if we still have only a very tiny part of the true scope of what has been going on in these programs, given the inexplicable impact of these briefings on the subsequent political careers of those taking part. If any documents survived these briefings, historians will have full employment for a very long time once classification expires.

Emptywheel replied to another commenter,

I have a gut feel (and a half-written post) that Lockheed is actually a major player on this program. They’re top recipients include Inouye, Mikulski and a fwe of the other Senators who voted for this.

If it’s true, it would be pretty stunning, since Comey is Lockheed’s Chief Counsel.

So, what’s up with Sen. Inouye?

Bob

Glenn Greenwald wrote an important blog today on the subject of bipartisanship, which seems so earnestly desired by many. Here is what he found:

“bipartisanship” is already rampant in Washington, not rare. And, in almost every significant case, what “bipartisanship” means in Washington is that enough Democrats join with all of the Republicans to endorse and enact into law Republican policies, with which most Democratic voters disagree. That’s how so-called “bipartisanship” manifests in almost every case.

So no matter what Obama and Clinton say, “bipartisanship” does not look appealing from a progressive point of view. (more…)

The withdrawal of Dennis Kucinich, followed by today’s announcement of Edwards’ “suspension” of his campaign, forces progressives to assess our diminishing options in the Democratic presidential race. We have choices to make as individuals, and PDH has a choice to make as an organization. And the imperatives may not be the same.

So let me talk about the options facing PDH. Given my sense of opinion within our group, I can see 3 possible options: (more…)

In the wake of Monday’s votes on cloture of several bills to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), it was heartening to see both senatorial presidential candidates, Obama and Clinton, vote “no” on the first cloture vote with Sen. Dodd and almost all other Democrats.

Of the remaining presidential candidates, Edwards, with some encouragement from the netroots, got it first. In a letter sent out on January 24, customized for each state, he wrote, (more…)