archives

Thousands of low-income people in our capitol city are suffering because of medical debt. What can our elected officials do about this problem? Come to the SLC Main Library on Wednesday, May 28, at 6:30 pm to be informed about this. For more info, email Bill Tibbitts at bill@crossroads-u-c.org. The event is sponsored by the Anti-Hunger Action Committee, an organization for food pantry clients that works to get low-income folks involved in the political process.

From Rand Beers, U.S. counterterrorism adviser and current president of the National Security Network. Beers quit the NSC in protest in March 2003 five days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Progressives have a tremendous opportunity — and a real challenge — on national security this cycle. The public has decisively rejected the Bush administration's national security framework. But nothing in the public discourse gives non-expert Americans a clear understanding of what the alternatives might look like. [...]

One way to fill that gap is for progressives to begin setting out the core ideas that underlie our theory of national security — and then share specific policy positions and critiques that show what those core ideas would mean, and how they would produce results different from what we have seen in recent years. The thinking behind this two-part approach is simple: there's a crying need for sophisticated, pragmatic, deep policy thinking that returns serious, non-hyped discussions of security issues to the public eye.

The challenges we face — Afghanistan, Pakistan, energy, to name just three — have no magic solutions and will be with us for years to come. Yet there's also a need for clear-sighted, unadorned talk about why we make the choices we do and what kind of nation we want to be. That is a debate that is much less technical, but no less important, than the details of our policy in Pakistan's borderlands or how many gallons of alternative fuels we can produce by 2015. Everybody, however much or little time their lives give them to think about national security, can join a debate about what kind of country we want to be.

Read more at www.nsnetwork.org.

CNN:

The Illinois senator will appear at a rally in Iowa, where he kicked off the primary season with a January 3 caucus win — a victory that helped propel him to Democratic front-runner status. [...]

Obama told reporters Sunday that visiting Iowa "was a terrific way to kind of bring things full circle."

"We still have some contests left, but if Kentucky and Oregon go as we hope, then we think we will have a majority of pledged delegates at that point, and that's a pretty significant mark," he said. "That means that after contests in every state, or almost every state and the territories, that we have received the majority of the delegates that are assigned by voters."

The Obama campaign calculates that they need to add 15.5 pledged delegates today to have won a majority of all the available pledged delegates. Only 108 more delegates (either pledged or super) are needed for Obama to clinch the nomination.