Author: Carnacki

Someone shot this video with a cellphone on Feb. 1 when WV-02 Democratic candidate Anne Barth made her Eastern Panhandle announcement in Martinsburg and just posted it on YouTube. This is great to see and I hope the campaign uses YouTube a lot because Barth is a great candidate.

Here’s Clem’s post from this same Feb. 1 event.

I spoke to a union guy last week at the gym, who saw her at this event and at her speech before the West Virginia AFL-CIO. He thought Barth was wonderful here, just after she filed, and he raved about how polished she has become in such a short time.

Those who saw rightwing Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito’s speech at the Rotary Club recently reported she could barely string sentences together and seemed to know little of current events in the state or of issues pending in Congress. It will be great fun watching these two clash in a debate.

More on Anne Barth here.

Warning: graphic, hateful language is quoted below.

This is one of those diaries I begin to write and delete to start over and delete and start over again.

I know what I want to say, but I’m trying to swear off profanity laced tirades.

It’s about women.
Or rather, it’s about those who hate women.

I don’t understand it. I don’t know what to do about it. I know I’m very protective of my daughters. But how the hell are we going to end misogyny?

There’s women like Charlotte Allen who hate other women. Then there’s people like this:

COOKIE JILL IS A FAT CUNT. TIME TO RAODTRIP TO SANTA BARBARA & LET BITCH KNOW TO SHOW SOME RESPECT FOR THE DEAD
commented by Anonymous

Do you know what horrific thing jillian did to prompt such anger?

Already Diaried
by Carnacki.

That’s it?!? Someone wrote a repeat diary on the death of Gary Gygax, another points out it’s “already diaried” and that’s worth physical threats?!?

Except –

In this case, the commenter had the audacity to be a woman – a crime punishable by threatening language.

It occurs so often it even has a term: blogging while female.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “Green Meal-mobile heading to Santa Barbara”:

Hey, thanks for posting that the Gygax diary was a repeat. Really important you did that. I hope you die cunt & we don’t post too many diaries about it. Fuck you bitch

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “Green Meal-mobile heading to Santa Barbara”:

EXACTLY ANON, SHUTUP BITCH!

Harold has left a new comment on your post “Green Meal-mobile heading to Santa Barbara”:

Spot on, show some respect you cookie eating fuckwit. We should chase this whore around Kos so she learns to show some fucking respect for the dead & get a fucking life. What kind of sick loser plays diary police over this, fuck you

Harold has left a new comment on your post “Green Meal-mobile heading to Santa Barbara”:

Moreover it looks like there are other blogs & her AIM, let’s drive this cookie freak into a hole so she learns to show some fucking respect

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “Green Meal-mobile heading to Santa Barbara”:

WHORE

You see, teacherken also pointed out it was already diaried. Different gender, different reaction.

Was it even “disrespect to the dead”? Of course not. Her comment was as innocuous as could be.

My diary on Gary Gygax’s death included the line “Unfortunately the cleric won’t be able to resurrect” which could be considered much more disrespectful. Yet did I receive any hate mail or comments? Of course not. The type of cowards who leave such comments only feel safe enough to do it to women and only then anonymously.

Cowards. Punk ass cowards that if they said something like that in my presence I’d go Billy Jack on them.

Those comments weren’t coming from rightwing misogynists. They apparently came from our side of the political spectrum.

To ignore such behavior will simply send the signal that it is condoned.

Too much of that behavior is condoned already. These are not isolated examples. Similar comments can be found here too often in the hidden comments and sometimes not even troll rated.

Digby recently turned the comments off on her blog because of such remarks.

Yeah, give the cunt some smelling salts and tell her to make you a sandwich.
Beatthebitch | 02.07.08 – 9:09 pm | #

I can’t even read the comments of YouTube any more without seeing dozens of examples.

I love The Pixies and while surfing around one night with my daughters, they wanted to watch this. It has since become one of their favorite videos.

And here’s a fairly typical comment:

i dont know so many peoples view this video … is so stupid and this video had no sence … lol FMM stupid girls and ugly …

and this

r those guys or girls this song sucks big peinis

I do not claim to know how we solve this, but I think it can be done. Long ago men thought nothing of sexually harrassing women at the work place either through their words or by physically groping them. Now such behavior appears to be rare – still too frequent, but from what women I work with say much less than in the past.

Shrugging it off as just the behavior of trolls is to bury our heads in the sand and to give them free reign.

As Gary Gygax, the co-founder of Dungeons and Dragons, would know, sometimes monsters must be dragged into the sunlight to slay them.

Unfortunately the cleric won’t be able to resurrect.
From Wired:

Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, and went on to create the Dangerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventure RPGs, as well as a number of board games. He also wrote several fantasy novels.
“I don’t think I’ve really grokked it yet,” said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. “He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers.”

It’s been decades (!) since I gathered with friends around a table to play D&D. Now a cultural icon of my youth has passed. Since many of us here are of a generation to have played the game, I thought it worth noting.

Hat tip to Paul of Cthulhu, who notes he had recently interviewed Gygax for his Yog Radio pod cast. Hopefully the interview will air soon. Paul does an excellent job with his horror interviews.

I attended the meet and greet in Shepherdstown Friday evening for West Virginia’s new Democratic candidate for WV-02 Anne Barth. About 200 people packed the event, a great turnout for an event on such short notice and on a day when the weather involved a freezing rain.

The room was packed, but I saw many familiar faces from Democratic and progressive groups from across the Eastern Panhandle. Some of my favorite people from the Kerry-Edwards campaign in ’04 are among her staunchest supporters and think highly of her.

I got a great first impression from her. She’s just six days into this race and she’s got a solid stump speech. What I really liked about her speech is how she weaved her personal background in smoothly to show how it shaped her career in public service. But what I liked most about her stump speech is she goes straight at Capito – politely, almost quietly, yet landing the lines that drew sharp distinctions between herself and her Republican opponent. Capito is a backbencher who has supported Bush’s agenda against the interests of West Virginians and Capito has worked against the rest of the West Virginia delegation in Congress. Barth did a great job of pointing that out in her speech and those lines drew the most enthusiastic response.

I spent most of my time speaking to Berkeley County Democrats about county issues. We’ve also got some great candidates running in Jefferson County and (note to self) I’ve got to write up a post about them.

I did not get a chance to go over a checklist of issues with Barth. While her campaign has hit the ground running, it is just six days into it. As eager as I am to find out where she stands on a wide variety of issues, some patience is required. As soon as her web site is up, either I or someone here will link to it.

But from what I saw, there’s a lot to like in Barth as a candidate. She was poised, she was personable and there’s a solid network of supporters for her in the Eastern Panhandle. This is where the battle for WV-02 is going to be decided because this is, unfortunately, Capito’s base. To defeat Capito, and Clem and I have said this all along, a successful candidate can’t just rely on voter turnout in the more Democratic counties and ignore the Eastern Panhandle. That’s not worked in the previous campaigns. A successful candidate has got to peel away voters from Capito here by going after her here.

Barth assured the party loyalists that she’ll be in the Eastern Panhandle a lot. She has good friends to stay with in the Eastern Panhandle who can build the kind of friend-to-friend GOTV that is much more effective than traditional stranger-to-stranger canvassing and phonebanking.

This region is Capito’s strongest point and Clem and I are just stealing a play from Karl Rove’s playbook when we say the best way to beat her is to attack her where she’s strongest. Barth came across as a candidate who’ll take the fight to Capito while keeping a charming, winning smile on her face the entire time. That’s going to make Barth a formidable ball carrier* now that the football has been handed off to her.

…

* Since I’m breaking out the football metaphors anyway, I’ll repeat a story I’ve told before because I think it fits.

Make no mistake, it’s an uphill fight against an opponent that has campaign coffers filled from the corporations and rightwing conservatives she’s supported in Congress. In terms of size, Capito is a much bigger opponent.

Long ago in a land far away, I played on football team for a small high school where our biggest lineman weighed just over 200 pounds and our opponents came from much larger schools with much, much bigger players.

And every Friday night, our head coach gathered us together before our games and said:

“Boys, it’s not the size of the dogs in the fight that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dogs.”

My senior year we went 9-1 and won the league championship. Our only loss was to Oak Hill, which won because of extremely questionable officiating on their home field (not that I hold a grudge two decades later — the bastards.)

The other teams may have been taller and outweighed us, but nobody, not even Oak Hill, ever out hit us.

I got the sense tonight that Capito might out spend Barth, might pull out every dirty Republican trick in the book to try to stop her, but there’s no way she’s going to out play Barth, who after 21 years on Senator Robert C. Byrd’s staff knows the ins and outs of West Virginia politics. There’s a lot of desire to win in Barth and desire and heart can take you a long way.

I just read at Eschaton that billionaire Mike Bloomberg’s phony draft campaign has only collected just over 3,000 signatures.

I thought, “What would be the best way to embarrass him?”

And then it struck me: collect more online signatures than him.
Here’s my pitch:

At this point billionaire Mike Bloomberg, despite a massive marketing campaign and phony draft movement for president, has just 3,000 some signatures. I want to show a middleclassed horror blogger with a slighty insane reputation can draw even more signatures.

Here’s where you sign the petition to embarrass Bloomberg.

Here’s my qualifications to serve as president:

…

Yet even with those credentials, I’d still make a better president than Bloomberg. I’ve never embraced torturers and I’ve never cheered George W. Bush.

But let’s face it: if someone with no money and a horrific reputation can collect more signatures despite Bloomberg’s drawn out, phony Unity 08 effort, that would have to be terribly embarrassing to him and his handlers.

That’s a good enough reason to sign the petition as any.

At this point in the rule of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, I thought I had reached shock fatigue. We’ve seen illegal invasions, torture, unprecedented levels of corruption, a warrantless wiretapping on a nationwide scale, and an erosion of national credibility on everything from the environment to the rule of law.

Yet this morning I read a story that filled me anew with fresh outrage and I think exemplifies the horrors – the absolute horrors – of this administration and the political ideology behind them.

The article is in Vanity Fair’s November edition, The People vs. the Profiteers. (If this was diaried earlier this month, my apologies. I did a search on several key words and did not see it. Vanity Fair is a very thick magazine and I read it from front to back so I usually read it spaced out over the entire month).

In it, the writer, David Rose, covers how an attorney, Alan Grayson, has led a campaign against government corruption. He’s done so for 16 years. In the past the Department of Justice often allied with him to root out corrupt officials. But when it has come to the Iraq war, the DOJ has thrown up roadblock after roadblock.

In this administration corruption on a massive scale is a statistic. It’s an example Rose uses from among the cases that is the outrage.

Consider the case of Grayson’s client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root. Spun off by Halliburton as an independent concern in April, KBR is the world’s fifth-largest construction company. Before the war started, the Pentagon awarded it two huge contracts: one, now terminated, to restore the Iraqi oil industry, and another, still in effect, to provide a wide array of logistical-support services to the U.S. military.

In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck-a “reefer,” in contractor parlance-at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad’s airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.

The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. “Inside, there were 15 human bodies,” he recalls. “A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again.” The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers’s colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: “On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly…. The inside of the trailer was awful.”

(As an aside, I have smelled the sickly scent stench of putrified corpses more times than I care to recall. It is one of the worst smells in existence. I cannot imagine what 15 trapped inside a metal trailer for two weeks in the desert heat would have been like.)

Under any consideration, the rule of civilian or military regulations or laws, religious taboos, and basic human decency, there are prohibitions against carrying food and water in the same containers that had been used to carry human corpses – yet alone putrid corpses.

But that is exactly what is being done in Iraq. To our soldiers. With our tax dollars.

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice-ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers’s grisly discovery. “You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn’t even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.-the public warehouse center-several times. There’s nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded.”

This is where a Republican ideology leads us. The for-profit contractor used a refrigerated tractor trailer permeated with human remains in the wood floor and on the floor itself to carry ice and probably food.

Profit over people – even when it comes to the troops they claim to support. They outsourced a basic government service of the feed and care of the troops for a for-profit enterprise which didn’t care about their health or human decency.

It came down to a shortage of refrigerated trucks. Rather than buy more, Kellough Brown and Root kept it running from corpse hauling to food hauling. Conyers was fired by KBR for not being a “team player.”

How KBR treated Conyers would itself be an outrage but after hauling ice for human consumption with the remains of putrid corpses, anything KBR does under that pales in comparison. The entire story is well worth a read, including how the DOJ is using a provision of the whistle-blower law probably to keep incidents like this rather than to investigate them as it should.

Grayson has hope that one day the deep-rooted profiteering and corruption of the Iraq war will come to light.

There are a few encouraging signs that a day of reckoning is drawing near. Committees in both the House and the Senate have held hearings on contracting in Iraq, and several plan to hold more. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has introduced a War Profiteering Prevention Act, which would make it much easier to investigate corrupt contractors and call them to account. And in August, the news that tens of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces had vanished or been stolen prompted the Pentagon to announce that its inspector general, Claude M. Kicklighter, would lead an 18-person team to investigate “contracting practices” in Iraq.

In the more distant future, a Democratic administration might open up the vaults and expose the American public to the scale of what has been looted. “What we have seen up to now is the worst of the worst in terms of a deliberate cover-up,” Grayson says. But if and when it comes to an end, he thinks it’s entirely possible that Congress will appoint a special prosecutor-one whose targets might one day reach “an extremely high level.”

We can only hope. But I think the stench will linger forever.

I’ll leave the analysis to one of the market experts like bonddad or Jerome.
No link yet. Will update as soon as one is available.

The Times

NEW YORK — Wall Street investors were reeling after the Devil, the largest procurer of souls for sale, sold off many of the largest names in his portfolio.

Among those souls now back on the market were those once owned by Vice President Dick Cheney, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Guiliani, and television commentator Ann Coulter.

“I bought these souls as an investment years ago, but now they’re nearly worthless,” said the Devil in a press conference in Hell. “Really, what’s the point of me holding on to these investments when I’ll get them in the end for free?”

Wall Street was shaken by the big sell off, believed to be Satan’s largest.

“Battle scarred investors are going to avoid investing in people eager to sell their souls after this sell off,” said market analyst Stephen Vincent Benet of investment company Ferris Baker Watts in Washington, D.C.

The Devil’s decision to unload the majority of souls he acquired could send ripples throughout Wall Street, Benet said.

“If you look close at the details, you’ll see this hurting the share prices of stocks in the defense industry and big Oil,” Benet said.

The Devil said his sell off was sparked by Limbaugh calling soldiers opposed to the Iraq war as “phony soldiers.”

“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” the Devil said. “I mean that literally. I had camels carrying all of Limbaugh’s sins around.”

The Devil said his move should not have surprised investors.

“They should have realized a sell-off was coming when John McCain tried to sell his soul for the Republican presidential nomination and I wouldn’t buy,” the Devil said.

“I’d realized for some time the souls of many rightwingers were damaged goods,” the Devil said. “I realized I’d been holding on to them for sentimental reasons. Afterall, they’d done so much for me over the years to promote greed and war. They’ve worked hard to keep people downtrodden and in misery. I felt I owed them, especially Limbaugh. But I’ve got to look out for myself or I wouldn’t be me, you know?”

“Hey John, so are you going to enter the race or not?” I asked back in the spring as I stood outside near my grape arbor.

“I don’t know [my real name],” he said. “I’m thinking about it. Someone on the Internet is pushing for me to and the DCCC has called.”

I told him the person on the Internet pushing for him to run was me. And I knew the DCCC was interested because our site meter on the old site was filled with DCCC.org visits coming in off Teh Google looking up information on him.
Some of you might remember in 2004 I worked hard mainly on the Kerry-Edwards campaign. I wrote diaries about it (here’s one example, my first ever recommended diary, West Virginia by DCDemocrat and Carnacki, appropriately on Halloween.

I didn’t work much – some canvassing and phone banking for the WV-02 candidate in the 2004 race.

We lost the presidential and the WV-02 race even though we had better candidates in both.

I did all I could in 2006 for Mike Callaghan, the Democratic challenger in WV-02 to beat the faux moderate Shelley Moore Capito, daughter of the federally convicted former Republican Gov. Arch Moore. We lost big, 57-42.

I met wvablue (Clem here) at a campaign event and the two of us became close friends, one of several great friends I’ve made through Daily Kos.

Instead of quitting, the two of us kept working. We didn’t stop with the 2006 election. The day afterwards we were already at work on the old site and with our offline meetings at Waffle House working to lay the groundwork for the 2008 race.

There wasn’t a Democratic or progressive group blog for the state. So we made one. We tried to draft fellow West Virginia Christy Hardin Smith from Fire Dog Lake to run, but she did not want to uproot her family. (Don’t worry, along with Howie Klein, we still have plans for drafting her for an office in the future, even if I have to forge her name on the candidacy papers…mwhahahah…Oh don’t act so shocked and pretend you haven’t committed election fraud in the past eith…you haven’t? Uh, never mind.)

So I thought who would give us the best chance at beating Shelley Moore Capito in WV-02?

I’ve known John Unger before he ran for office and liked him then. As my State Senator, I’ve touted him on the blog before (here’s one example from 2005).

In very Republican Berkeley and Jefferson counties, Unger won against a well financed and popular Republican challenger Jerry May (Berkeley 65 percent, Jefferson 67 percent).

wvablue and I looked at the math. If Unger could match Callaghan’s numbers in the rest of the WV-02 and hold his own in his home turf, because of the high density of the Eastern Panhandle Unger would beat Capito.

Now John is more socially conservative than I’d like on two issues: abortion and gay marriage. Both of those issues are important to me and I’m still working to persuade him to my point of view on them.

The truth of the matter is in this district, my ideal candidate would get crushed. My ideal candidate wouldn’t have a chance.

John does have a chance. CQ has just downgraded Capito’s chances. The DCCC has named this race one of the top challenger races so they’re committed and they wouldn’t be committed if they didn’t think he could win.

How often have those of us in the netroots complained that the Democrats don’t listen to us.

John is listening to us. On many other issues important to progressives – the Iraq war, respect for the U.S. Constitution, access to healthcare for every one, protecting labor rights, protecting the environment, opposition to torture, finding alternative sources of clean energy, helping the poor, he’s on our side.

So going back to those depressing days of November 2006. wvablue and I had several goals: find a viable candidate to run. We did that.

Get the DCCC in our race. We helped do that.

Get the Big Boys of Blogging paying attention to the race. We helped do that (clem is wvablue here. See also Kos’s Capito’s in the crosshairs and here.

I know a lot of us are disappointed in the performance of our Democrats.

But I know John. We’ve met with him several times. He’s joined us at Waffle House and talked politics with us from the early evening until 2 a.m.

He’s a guy who worked with Mother Theresa as a volunteer helping the poor and flood victims.

He took a year off from college to do it. Think about this a second if you don’t think John is committed to making the world better: he was the first person from his family to go to college. And he took a year off from doing so to spend a year as a volunteer in India. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar. In 2003 he worked with a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Save the Children that followed the troops in after the invasion to do humanitarian work.

Some people talk about helping others. John’s done it.

The rightwingers in West Virginia mock Unger as “St. John.” He has a reputation as an independent voice in the state legislature when it comes to ethics issues.

Meanwhile let’s look at Shelley Moore Capito. Although she calls herself “independent” she’s voted consistently with Bush and the most extremist corporate agenda when it comes to the Iraq war, worker rights, and warrentless wiretapping.

She was the leading recipient of Tom Delay’s illegal PAC funds and formed a PAC with Republican Congressman Mark Foley while he was being a sexual predator of Congressional pages and she was one of three members on the Page Board. Her aides have been linked to Jack Abramhoff scandals and she was a recipient of campaign contributions from the Utah mine owner who wanted to reopen the collapsed mine back up for operations before the bodies were recovered and who has a history of fighting against safety regulations.

Capito is the Zelig of Republican scandals. You name it and she’s in the background. Is it because she’s clueless or turns a blind eye to wrong doing as with the Foley case? Is it because she’s willing to do anything to maintain her seat and help the Republican Party?

I don’t know what’s in her heart. I just know I’d rather have John Unger representing me in Congress.

But forget everything I wrote about Capito and Unger. Donate to his campaign because I’m tired of her. I’m physically and mentally tired of her.

Don’t do it for Unger. Don’t do it for the Democrats. (You know my thoughts on them. Don’t do it to eliminate someone like Capito who’ll vote for endless war and occupation.

Do it for me.

Do it because I spend two or more hours a day slogging it out at West Virginia Blue trying to help the grassroots and the state netroots. And a lot of my time is spent having to counter Capito’s bullshit lies.

No really, if we don’t knock her out of office now, she’s going to run for U.S. Senate in the future – or governor. Who knows? She’s the only big name Republican in West Virginia. And I am sick of writing about her.

Everyone else is asking for money now for their candidate. I’m asking for me. If I ever made you laugh about Wild Monkey Sex or smile with a happy story or you appreciated something I wrote on equality for gays, help me out here.

Unger is very close to meeting his fundraising goal for the quarter. As someone who helped get him into this thing, I’d love to be the one to put him over the top.

I ain’t got no money and if you can’t give I understand. But if you can, do me a favor and donate today.

Because I don’t want to write about Capito after the 2008 election.

If you can afford to donate, please donate. Any amount will help. $5, $10, $50, whatever you can afford. I’ll also assure you that Unger’s campaign won’t spend the money frivolously. I know because he’s a tightwad when it comes to spending money on campaigns. People had to sign out for his State Senate race yard signs so he could get them back after the election. So a $1 in this race will stretch a lot farther (further?) than in other races.

West Virginia Blue marks its first anniversary today, but the conception of it began much longer ago.

I began blogging on Daily Kos in the run up to the 2004 election. From there I branched out to Booman Tribute, skippy the bush kangaroo, the predecessor of Street Prophets, Political Cortex and other sites. I read Eshaton, Billmon, Hullabaloo and of course Steve Gilliard’s The News Blog.

And of course the countless diarists and commenters here, the people who make up the life and energy of the site.

These are the sites that helped shape my views and hone my debate skills. I had become a fairly proficient and popular diarist – but there are many diarists who could do what I do on those sites.

Where I saw a need was to create something similar to those liberal Democratic group sites for West Virginia.

Since then, with the help of BlogPac, we’ve moved to a Soapblox platform, which makes it easier for people to sign up for an account and join the debate.

When I launched West Virginia Blue, I really just wanted a place for West Virginian bloggers to gather.

But the ambition for the site grew with the need. There was no real platform to call the West Virginia media when they’d print GOP myths as facts in their columns and editorials. Writing a letter to the editor allows them to control the length and the decision to run it. The same was true of the active right wing blogs in the state. Their lies could go unchallenged because other blogs on the left did not want to appear partisan in nature.

I met my blogmate Clem (wvablue on Daily Kos) before a Mike Callaghan debate. We began too late in that campaign to make a difference. But we kept meeting and talking. The day after the 2006 election, we were already discussing how to lay the groundwork for the 2008 race.

We believe in good, effective government, reproductive rights, the U.S. Constitution, access to good healthcare for all regardless of economic status, a clean environment, higher government investment in education and infrastructure, the separation of church and state, opposition to torture and ending the Iraq occupation.

Those views led the former executive director of the West Virginia GOP to give us a “Thinking Blogger” award and to call us a “far left” site. If we are far to the left, then so are the majority of West Virginians and the American people. I carry the label of liberal proudly. We liberals come from a proud tradition of caring for the lives of workers and ordinary people who believe in freedom from tyranny in its many forms.

West Virginia Blue began as a site to really support the 2006 election. But the day after we lost our bid to elect Mike Callaghan in WV-02, Clem (wvablue here) and I discussed how to lay the groundwork for the 2008 race and beyond.

As a Democratic blog, we’re not afraid of praising or criticizing our elected representatives when deserved or needed regardless of party.

So here’s to us on the blogging edge of state and local politics. We celebrate our first anniversary milestone, but the road ahead of us is long. And West Virginia, it’s wild and wonderful too.

Cross posted from West Virginia Blue.
Pro-Iraq war Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito spent a day in Iraq and now she’s an expert.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito has just returned from an unpublicized trip to Iraq and Kuwait.

Though Capito, R-W.Va., had to tread around mostly in full military armor in 116-degree heat, she said the visit helped reinforce her confidence in U.S. efforts there.

She flew into Baghdad earlier this week accompanied by a Republican delegation of Reps. John McHugh, N.Y.; Frank LoBiondo, N.J.; Douglas Lamborn, Colo.; and Gus Bilirakis, Fla.

After arriving in Baghdad, she then went to Fallujah and back to Baghdad.

“We wanted to get a firsthand sense of how things are going,” said Capito in a telephone interview just hours after her return to the U.S. on Thursday. “We talked with leadership and the troops on the ground. My overwhelming impression initially was how proud I am of the men and women in uniform.”

snip

She was mostly impressed with the turnaround of Fallujah, a city 43 miles west of Baghdad and notorious for a 2004 attack on four American contractors who were dragged from their cars, beaten, set on fire, pulled along the streets and hung from a bridge.

“Seven or eight months ago, we wouldn’t have been able to come here,” Capito said. “The level of violence has decreased dramatically. It’s very encouraging, but I still realize it’s a very dangerous situation.”

The U.S. delegation met with Fallujah city government officials. They acknowledged that while the violent atmosphere has lessened, progress remains needed for the political system.

Author, Daily Kossack and Iraq war veteran The Angry Rakkasan wrote a diary about Congressional delegations going to Iraq for the “fact finding” tour:

This is how it happens: A desperate Republican goes to Iraq looking for something-anything-to justify the continuing presence of American troops there.  The Republican stays for a week (give or take), and then returns home as if he or she were Moses coming back from Mount Sinai, carrying to the American people stone tablets engraved with The Ultimate Truth About Iraq.

And of course, this Ultimate Truth About Iraq is learned by the Republican in the chow hall, on the secure base, with the hand-picked soldiers sitting at the table.

This is what Senator Jim Webb rightly  called the “dog and pony show.”  For those who don’t know, that’s an old military expression used to describe how troops are often forced to put on a “show” for visiting politicians or VIPs to convey just how swell everything is going on the front lines.

Politicians or VIPs who’ve served in a combat zone know this.  Sadly, the rest visit the troops in a state of blissful ignorance.

The story does not say what day she was in Iraq, just that it was earlier this week. Somehow in reporting she saw “progress,” Capito and the Daily Mail reporter Jake Stump forgot to mention this happened also this week perhaps on the day she was there:

Hospital officials in northwestern Iraq have told TIME that the death toll from Tuesday’s blasts in Qahataniya may exceed 300, making the multiple suicide bombings the deadliest terrorist operation in the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein. One hospital is saying that there are at least 500 bodies and that 375 people are injured. That report, however, cannot yet be verified.

snip

Since then, the massive “surge” of U.S. and Iraqi troops in and around Baghdad has made the Iraqi capital safer than before from such bombings – but terrorist groups have stepped up attacks elsewhere. There have been a number of attacks in northern Iraq, which had enjoyed a long spell of peace before the start of the “surge.”

Tuesday’s bombings were also a reminder that even successful U.S. military operations can have a short shelf life – a sobering thought for Bush Administration officials and independent analysts who have recently been talking up the successes of the “surge.” After all, the area around Qahataniya was the scene of a major anti-insurgent operation barely two years ago. In the fall of 2005, some 8,000 American and Iraqi troops flushed a terrorist group out of the nearby town of Tal Afar in an operation that was a precursor to the “clear, hold and build” strategy that underpins the current “surge.” A few months later, President Bush cited Tal Afar as a success story for the U.S. enterprise in Iraq.

There have been several attacks in and around Tal Afar since then; last March, two truck bombs killed more than 100 people in a Shi’ite neighborhood in the town. The bombings in Qahataniya were a deadly reminder that the terrorists have not gone very far away. 

And she failed to mention this:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Despite U.S. claims that violence is down in the Iraqi capital, U.S. military officers offer a bleak picture of Iraq’s future, saying they’ve yet to see any signs of reconciliation between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims.

Without reconciliation, the military officers say, any decline in violence would be temporary, and bloodshed could return to previous levels when the U.S. military cuts back its campaign against insurgents.

The downbeat assessment comes despite a buildup of U.S. troops that began five months ago and has seen U.S. casualties reach the highest sustained levels since the United States invaded Iraq nearly 4 1/2 years ago.

U.S. officials say civilian casualties in Baghdad are down by half. But they wouldn’t provide specific numbers, and statistics gathered by McClatchy Newspapers don’t support the claim.

The number of car bombings in July actually was 5% higher than the number recorded last December, the statistics show, and the number of civilians killed in explosions is about the same.

Daily Mail reporter Jake Stump. He’s still under the illusion that Gen. David Patraeus is going to write the report.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, top commander in Iraq, informed Capito that areas of the country have undergone vast improvements. Petraeus is slated to give Congress a report next month that addresses whether the troop surge strategy is working. The general has stated that it could take until the summer of 2009 to attain security in Iraq.

The report is really going to be written by the White House. Dan Froomkin of the White House Watch at WashingtonPost.com:

The “Petraeus Report” — the supposedly trustworthy mid-September reckoning of military and political progress in Iraq by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker — is instead looking more like a White House con job in the making.

The Bush administration has been trying for months to restore its credibility on Iraq (as well as stall for time) by focusing on Petraeus — President Bush’s “main man” in Iraq — and his report to Congress. But now it turns out it that White House aides will actually write the “Petraeus Report,” not the general himself.

But it does appear as if Capito now knows what it is like to suffer. She had to wear a helmet and body armor in the 116 degree heat for a little while and “endured” a 14-hour flight from Kuwait back home.

But maybe her suffering was much worse:

Capito said she gave soldiers opportunities to spill their concerns or frustrations over the war, but none complained.

Or maybe they know that Capito doesn’t listen. Maybe they know that whatever the reality is in Iraq, she’s going to say she has “concerns” and then keep voting to keep them occupying Iraq in the middle of a civil war forever.

We need a Congressional representative who is smart enough not to fall for the “dog and pony shows.” We need a Congressional representative who listens.