The Rag Blog

An Iraqi pilgrim finds kindness in the ‘Triangle of Death’
By Hussein Kadhim | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Wednesday, March 5, 2008

KARBALA, Iraq — With thousands of other Shiite Muslims, I walked through the infamous “Triangle of Death” where suicide bombers, presumably Sunni extremists, had attacked fellow pilgrims two days before.

Our trek covered 50 miles from Baghdad to the holy city of Karbala, and we passed through 14 cities, places best known as scenes of death, division and destruction.

On this, my second pilgrimage since the Americans overthrew Saddam Hussein, my fears turned to amazement as complete strangers, Sunnis and Shiites alike, opened their doors to me. The poor passed out food and sweet tea they could hardly afford.

I began the walk as a spiritual journey, a personal opportunity to feel close to Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, who was martyred in the year 680. By the end, I found the spirit of my nation in roadside tents, modest homes and gifts of food.

The walk and the religious ceremony of Arbaeen commemorate the life of the great man for whom I’m named. The people of Kufa asked Hussein to save them from the oppressive rule of the Umayyad Caliphate, but then they betrayed him. During the battle of Karbala, Hussein was beheaded along with 71 of his followers, and the women and children were imprisoned.

According to Shiite tradition, on the 40th day after his death his son, Ali ibn Hussein, returned his father’s head to his body, and it was buried with his body in Karbala. Arbaeen commemorates that day, and about 10 million pilgrims converged on the city this year to mourn his death and commemorate his life.

My pilgrimage started in central Baghdad, where I crossed the Jadriyah Bridge with dozens of other people. Tents were set up on the side of the road, where neighborhood volunteers offered us food and drink. I picked up a boiled egg sandwich and orange juice and tucked away biscuits and juice in my bag for later.

In Saidiyah, the scene of fierce battles between Sunnis and Shiites, and Dora, a neighborhood where al Qaida in Iraq once targeted passing Shiite pilgrims, towering concrete walls brought me comfort. Two days before my walk, someone had thrown grenades into the crowd, killing three people, pilgrims like me.

It took me three hours to reach Baghdad’s gate in the south, where the road leads into what’s called the Sunni “Triangle of Death”. Around me, women clutched their babies, little boys walked close to their parents and the elderly marched on. At prayer time, I stopped at one of the roadside tents to pray.

A young man sat with his two-year-old daughter in a stroller. Her legs were limp. She couldn’t walk, and he was penniless.

“I can’t go abroad to treat her, I don’t have the money for such a trip,” he told me. “I hope that walking to Karbala with my little baby will give her the Imam’s blessing to help her walk.”

Here, in the Triangle of Death, I saw the greatest kindness.

Read all of it here.

Let’s Pay Tribute to the Spectacular Wrongness of William F. Buckley
By David Michael Green / AlterNet / March 5, 2008

William F. Buckley was a smart man, that’s for sure.

He could throw around more ten-dollar words than his beloved Catholic Church has sinners (even excluding the priesthood). He knew all the right places to ski and the proper wines to drink while listening to this concerto or appreciating that symphony. A product of privilege right down to the French boarding schools he attended, Buckley was as sophisticated, erudite and insightful as they come.

Except on the subject of politics, that is — which just happened to be his life’s great work.

And aren’t we lucky for it?

I mean, what can you say about a guy who wrote “General Franco is an authentic national hero” at the same time he found Dwight Eisenhower too liberal to endorse for president? What are we to make of a lover of democracy who called whites in the American South “the advanced race,” entitled to prevail politically even if they were numerically inferior, and who even left the door open to using violence toward that end?

Heck, for that matter, what can be said of someone so culturally perceptive that he could write, “The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music.” (Was it the “We’re more popular than Jesus” quote that rattled you Bill, or were you just jealous about all the screaming chicks?)

What can we say about a guy this spectacularly wrong? Probably he got it best himself when he noted, “I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.” As it turned out, he got a lot of practice.

Buckley is often credited with being the father of modern conservatism (pardon the oxymoron) in America. It is said that before he founded the National Review in 1955, there was essentially no such movement in the country. It is said (no less than by Reagan himself), that the line is drawn directly from Buckley to Goldwater to Reagan. (For some completely inexplicable reason, conservatives usually leave off Gingrich and Bush the Younger from that genealogy.)

Buckley was an astute observer of the human condition, despite keeping, shall we say, a certain polite distance from most of the poor humans who happen to find themselves stuck in that sometimes challenging condition. He was once asked by NPR’s Terry Gross whether being raised in European boarding schools and being a member of Yale’s notoriously elitist Skull and Bones Society hadn’t left Buckley a trifle, um, out of touch with real people (the hoi polloi, that is, as they’re referred to at the Club)? Au contraire!, he skillfully parried. Buckley did a lot of reading and therefore understood people quite well!

So well, indeed, that he came out in support of segregation during the era when the civil rights movement was the most important, the most consuming political question of the day. So who do you think history will judge to have gotten this question right, eh? — Martin Luther King Jr. or Bill Buckley? One could say that Buckley’s position was just about the most spectacular example ever recorded of the missing of a historical train. There was Ol’ Bill (who actually didn’t even have the excuse then of being old), standing on the (whites only) platform, watching the Morality Express go whooshing by.

But then, wasn’t missing just such trains precisely the point of conservatism?

Buckley certainly thought so. In the essay with which he launched the National Review, he committed it and the conservative movement to the project of “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Yep, that’s actually a bona fide quote from the man himself. If that sounds a bit anachronistic as the grand rallying cry for a modern political movement, you’re — ahem — still not getting it, I’m afraid. The thwarting and reversal of progress is precisely the point of conservatism.

After all, progress is scary. Progress is difficult. Progress is messy. And progress means having to share.

So Buckley launched a movement to yell “Stop!” and they all did, and they were grandly successful, as a matter of fact. For three decades, conservatives have ruled America and stopped progressive change in its tracks. Moreover, they’ve worked assiduously to undo those achievements that so many of us took for granted as the very markers of civilization itself.

Sometimes they have only wanted to unravel a couple of decades worth of history, as when they oppose civil rights, women’s rights or environmentalism. Sometimes it is more on the order of a century, as when they seek to dismantle social safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes their handiwork goes back several centuries, as when they find First Amendment ideas such as separation of church and state to be troublesome, or when they object to that whole pesky checks-and-balances thing. But sometimes it is the work of an entire millennium they wish to unravel, as they rip up the inconvenient notions of democracy itself, expressed as far back as the Magna Carta.

So, how ’bout it folks? Anybody here excited to return our society to the gleaming days of the 12th century? Watch where you step in the street! I mean, um, the latrine. Well, what’s the difference, anyhow? And monarchy is really not so bad after all, you know — once you get used to it. It only has a bad name because it gets treated so unfairly by the liberal press. You know, like George W. Bush.

Read the rest here.

From Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog

American Flies Five People From Chicago to London

It is estimated that each passenger produced 43 tons of CO2 – consuming enough fuel to carry a Ford Mondeo around the world five times.

Operating the near empty flight is estimated as having cost American about £30,000. But a spokesman said it had no alternative.

“With such a small passenger load we did consider whether we could cancel the flight and re-accommodate the five remaining passengers on other flights.

“However, this would have left a plane load of west-bound passengers stranded in London Heathrow who were due to fly back to the US on the same aircraft.

“We sought alternative flights for the west-bound passengers but heavy loads out of London that day meant that this was not possible.”

Richard Dyer, Friends of the Earth’s transport campaigner said: “Flying virtually empty planes is an obscene waste of fuel. Through no fault of their own , each passenger’s carbon footprint for this flight is about 45 times what it would have been if the plane had been full.

“Governments must stop granting the aviation industry the unfair privileges that allow this to happen by taxing aviation fuel and including emissions from aviation in international agreements to tackle climate change.”

Source.

From Jesse James Retherford / The Rag Blog

Lupe Valdez, gay hispanic sheriff of Dallas County, at Gay Pride Parade

Source.

From Harry Edwards / The Rag Blog

No Standing to Lecture on Justice
By JACOB HORNBERGER

U.S. officials are hopping mad over the outcome of a criminal prosecution in Iraq. Two Iraqi officials who had been accused of kidnapping and murder walked out of an Iraqi court Monday as free men after the prosecutor moved to drop the case for lack of evidence. The two men were former Iraqi Health Ministry officials. The case was being tried in the multimillion-dollar Rule of Law Complex, which is quite a site to behold.

Why were the American officials, who chose to remain anonymous, so angry and upset? Because the prosecutor’s decision was not in accord with what American officials felt should have been done. They felt that the defendants should have been prosecuted and convicted. According to one anonymous U.S. official quoted in the Washington Post, the dropping of the charges “shows that the judicial system in Iraq is horribly broken.”

One obvious question arises: What business do U.S. officials have intervening in Iraqi judicial matters? But a much more important question arises: What standing does the U.S. government have to be lecturing anyone, including the Iraqis, on a proper judicial system?

After all, let’s not forget the U.S. government’s model “judicial” system in Cuba. It’s “principles” include:

1. The accused are denied the right to an independent judiciary to preside over their case. Instead, the trials are conducted by military tribunals headed by biased U.S. military officials who answer to President Bush as their commander in chief.

2. Trial by an impartial jury is not permitted. The guilt or innocence of the accused is decided by military officials who have to answer to President Bush as their commander in chief.

3. The judges get to make up the rules of procedure as they go along, producing a perfect model of arbitrariness at every step of the proceeding.

4. The accused are denied speedy trials. Some of them have been incarcerated for several years without trial.

5. The accused are tortured into confessing their guilt.

6. Evidence acquired by torture can be used to convict the accused.

7. Hearsay evidence is admissible to convict the accused.

8. Defendants are not guaranteed the right to confront their witnesses and cross-examine them.

9. Cruel and unusual punishments, including torture, can be inflicted on the defendants, even before conviction.

10. Defendants are denied the right to habeas corpus.

In fact, it’s entirely appropriate that this despicable and shameful kangaroo system is located in Cuba because it is quite similar to the one run by Fidel Castro’s minions on the other side of the island. One thing is for sure: the U.S. government’s model “judicial” system in Cuba flies in the face of every procedural principle of due process enunciated in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Also, it’s ironic that the judicial complex in Iraq is called the Rule of Law Center, given it would be difficult to find a better example of a violation of the “rule of the law” than the U.S. government’s arbitrary post-9/11 power to send accused terrorists either down the federal-court route or the kangaroo military-tribunal route.

We also shouldn’t forget the U.S. government’s kidnappings, torture, rendition, torture-through-proxy, indefinite incarceration, murder, disappearances of detainees, spying, and warrantless searches, along with its practice of granting immunity to U.S. officials and their compatriots in the private sector who commit such crimes.

The best thing that U.S. officials could do is close down their kangaroo “judicial” tribunal system at Guantanamo Bay, transfer all prisoners to the jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts, leave the Iraqi people alone, and stop lecturing the world on law and justice. It would be a good first step toward restoring America’s moral standing in the world.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Source

Arms Dealer’s Planes Flew U.S. Missions in Iraq
By Justin Rood and Maddy Sauer

Viktor Bout Was an International Fugitive at the Time His Planes Were Used by the U.S.

06/03/08 “ABC News ” — — When U.S. officials announce the arrest of a notorious arms dealer and drug-runner this afternoon, the fact that his planes flew U.S. supply missions in Iraq will likely go unmentioned.

In a January 2005 letter to Congress, then-Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted the Defense Department “did conduct business with companies that, in turn, subcontracted work to second-tier providers who leased aircraft owned by companies associated with Mr. Bout.”

At the time, Bout was already a wanted international fugitive. Intelligence officials had considered Bout one of the greatest threats to U.S. interests, in the same league as al Qaeda kingpin Osama bin Laden. Interpol had issued a warrant for his arrest; the United Nations Security Council had restricted his travel.

But that didn’t stop U.S. government contractors from paying Bout-controlled firms roughly $60 million to fly supplies into Iraq in support of the U.S. war effort, according to a book released last year by two reporters who investigated Bout. And it didn’t prevent the U.S. military from giving Bout’s pilots millions of dollars in free airplane fuel while they were flying U.S. supply flights.

From 2003 through at least 2005, Pentagon contractors used air cargo companies known to be connected to Bout to fly an estimated 1,000 supply trips into and out of Iraq, according to “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Plans, and the Man Who Makes War Possible” by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. A Pentagon spokesman confirmed to the authors that the military gave 500,000 gallons of fuel to Bout’s pilots.

In an interview Thursday, Farah said he understood Bout may have worked on behalf of the U.S. government as recently as last year.

Read it here.

Who leaked the details of a CIA-Mossad plot against Iran?
By Yossi Melman

06/03/08 “Haaretz” — — The Bush administration is prolonging the hunting season against journalists. The latest victim is James Risen, The New York Times reporter for national security and intelligence affairs. About three months ago, a federal grand jury issued a subpoena against him, ordering Risen to give evidence in court. A heavy blackout has been imposed on the affair, with the only hint being that it has to do with sensitive matters of “national security.”

But conversations with several sources who are familiar with the affair indicate that Risen has been asked to testify as part of an investigation aimed at revealing who leaked apparently confidential information about the planning of secret Central Intelligence Agency and Mossad missions concerning Iran’s nuclear program.

Risen included this information in his book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” which was published in 2006. In the book, he discusses a number of ideas which he says were thought up jointly by CIA and Mossad operatives to sabotage Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

One of these ideas was to build electromagnetic devices, smuggling them inside Iran to sabotage electricity lines leading to the country’s central nuclear sites. According to the plan, the operation was supposed to cause a series of chain reactions which would damage extremely powerful short circuits in the electrical supply that would have led to failures of the super computers of Iran’s nuclear sites.

According to the book, the Mossad planners proposed that they would be responsible for getting the electromagnetic facilities into Iran with the aid of their agents in Iran. However, a series of technical problems prevented the plan’s execution.

Another of the book’s important revelations, which made the administration’s blood boil about James Risen, appeared in a chapter describing what was known as Operation Merlin, the code name for another CIA operation supposed to penetrate the heart of Iran’s nuclear activity, collect information about it and eventually disrupt it.

Operation Merlin

The CIA counter proliferation department hired a Soviet nuclear engineer who had previously, in the 1990s, defected to the United States and revealed secrets from the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. His speciality was in the field of what is called weaponization, the final stage of assembling a nuclear bomb.

The scientist was equipped with blueprints for assembling a nuclear bomb in which, without his knowledge, false drawings and information blueprints were planted about a nuclear warhead that was supposedly manufactured in the Soviet Union. The plan’s details had been fabricated by CIA experts, and so while they appeared authentic, they had no engineering or technological value.

The intention was to fool the scientist and send him to make contact with the Iranians to whom he would offer his services and blueprints. The American plot was aimed at getting the Iranians to invest a great deal of effort in studying the plans and to attempt to assemble a faulty warhead. But when the time came, they would not have a nuclear bomb but rather a dud.

However, Operation Merlin, which was so creative and original, failed because of CIA bungled planning. The false information inserted into the blueprints were too obvious and too easily detected and the Russian engineer discovered them. As planned, he made contact with the Iranian delegation to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and handed over to them, also as planned, the blueprints.

Read all of it here.

Israeli Researcher : Moses High on Psychedelics

Source.

Five YouTube Videos Show US Soldiers At Their Worst. Axis of Logic says they show them at their best.
Mar 5, 2008, 21:06

The Digg story “U.S. Soldier throws puppy off cliff” had, at last count, 5,527 votes. Digg commenters, never a demure crowd, aren’t holding back their rage. One comment, itself voted for 540 times, reads “Wow. I hope he got shot in the face later that day.”

This video exposes something about the dehumanization of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan that most of us don’t want to think about. Here are five more videos that show just how far gone our troops are.

A warning: These videos are explicit and — with the known correlation between violence toward animals and violence toward other humans in mind — savagely disheartening.

To see the other videos, click here.

Here are two important articles discussing the Democratic presidential race and especially the destructive turn the Hillary Clinton campaign has taken, much of it under the direction of Mark Penn. These pieces put current events in a little perspective.

Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog

Hillary, And a Little History
By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair / CounterPunch / March 5, 2008

The race for the Democratic nomination now lurches on to what is already being billed as the next major battleground in Pennsylvania on April 22, and any Democrat with any memory of kindred blood lettings in the past should shiver as history begins to repeat itself. After eight disastrous years of Bush, with a candidate like John McCain, who says he knows nothing the economy and thinks the US will be in Iraq for the next 100 years, almost the only way any Democratic nominee can lose the presidential face off in the fall with be a protracted internecine battle, ultimately decided by the Democratic convention in the last week of August.

The press is blaring tidings of a great Clinton comeback in Ohio and Texas last night, both states in which she had twenty point leads in late February. But in terms of delegates Obama is ahead by what appears to be an insurmountable margin. The only way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination is to savage Obama with calumnies, bloodying him to a point where the Clintons can make the case to the super delegates in the convention that in a race against McCain Obama has already been fatally wounded.

It’s a course to which the Clinton campaign is now totally committed, exactly along the lines advocated by Mark Penn, Hillary’s pollster and chief strategist. Penn’s policy has been the antithesis of any grand coalition of the kind put together by Roosevelt in the 1930s. Already in South Carolina the Clinton campaign was willing to throw the black vote overboard. In Texas Clinton deliberately exploited Hispanic-black animosities.

Obama has plenty to be rueful about. He managed the astounding feat of being on the defensive in Ohio about trade, at the hands of a Clinton. The history of the late 1980s and 1990s was the Clintons at the head of the Democratic Leadership Council, arguing that the free trade agreements were essential to America’s future. Ohio, devastated by job flight was treated to the spectacle of the Obama campaign failing on this very issue, because Obama shrank from making the full case against what Clinton did to working people in the 1990s. He could have slaughtered the Clinton record on Hillary’s disastrous effort at health care reform, on the trade agreements, on the welfare bill, on the well- documented fact that the people who did well in the Clinton era were the rich. He was too innately cautious to play the populist card and he paid the price.

The adulatory press coverage that Obama enjoyed throughout February took the edge of his campaign and left it flatfooted when Hillary had the effrontery to claim that Obama was the one who had to do the explaibing on NAFTA. Obama was similarly slow to counter Hillary’s decision to play the national security card, telling the voters that the American people would be safe in either her on John McCain’s hands but not those of the young senator.

If Obama could not swiftly counter by pointing out that Clinton bought the Bush line on the war hook, line and sinker, doing no independent checking of her own, then his prospects of standing up to McCain don’t look too rosy. A campaign has to be ready to throw mud and there’s mud by the barrow load for Obama to throw at Clinton but in the end she was the one who put him on the defensive.

In 1968 the antiwar forces came to the convention in Chicago fired with the sense that their candidates, Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, had crushed Hubert in the primaries. But just as Richard Daley’s police battered the protesters, so too did the party machine crush the antiwar forces and force Hubert Humphrey down their throats inside the convention hall. Humphrey was never able to reunite the fractured party and lost to Richard Nixon.

In 1972 the party bosses never accepted George McGovern, who finally accepted the nomination at three am in Miami and was sabotage by the Democrats and the AFL-CIO and crushed by Nixon in the fall.

Not learning from this, the Democrats saw Teddy Kennedy launch an insurgency against Jimmy Carter in 1980 which spluttered all the way to the convention, where Kennedy refused to concede and drew blood from Carter until the bitter end. A weakened Carter went down before Reagan in a terrible rout for the Democrats.

The Clintons have never been confused their own political fortunes with those of the Democratic Party. In 1996 and 1998 Bill Clinton refused to release campaign surpluses from his own war chest to help elect Democrats to the House and the Senate. Obama’s campaign has most certainly rallied blacks and the young to the Democratic Party. These new recruits will surely melt away as they see the party machine grind the politics of hope in the dirt.

McCain couldn’t have hoped for a better day.

Source.

From David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

Hillary Plays the Gender Card:
The Democrats and Identity Politics
By Robert Parry / Consortiumnews.com / March 6, 2008

The campaign press corps missed what may have been the most important comment in the Feb. 26 debate – when Hillary Clinton reminded women that their chance of electing the first female president was slipping away.

“You know, obviously, I am thrilled to be running to be the first woman president, which I think would be a sea change in our country and around the world, and would give enormous… [applause] … you know, enormous hope and, you know, a real challenge to the way things have been done and who gets to do them and what the rules are,” she said in the debate.

The impact of this appeal to women to rally around one of their own – combined with well-coordinated negative attacks on Barack Obama – worked wonders in the March 4 contests, much like a similar strategy helped Clinton overcome a surprise loss in Iowa with a rebound victory in New Hampshire.

Sen. Clinton has vowed not to play the gender card – sometimes even as she was playing it – but it may represent the strongest suit in her political deck. In Ohio, in particular, she used it to reestablish her electoral dominance among middle-aged and older white women.

On March 4, Clinton won Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, while Obama carried only Vermont. But what was striking – especially about the Ohio exit polls – was how Clinton solidified her hold on white women and trounced her black male rival among white voters in all but the youngest demographic group.

Overall in Ohio, white women went for Clinton by 67 percent to 31 percent, but the numbers were surely even higher among older white women when one looks at the rejection of Obama among white voters 30-years-old and over.

Though white voters 17-to-29-years-old narrowly favored Obama, 48 percent to 47 percent, whites 30-to-44-years-old voted for Clinton by 60 percent to 40 percent; whites 45-to-59-years-old backed Clinton 66 percent to 32 percent and whites over 60 favored Clinton by a whopping 72 percent to 24 percent. [See CNN’s Ohio exit poll.]

So, at least for now, the Clinton campaign strategy has achieved two key goals – to play the gender card in a positive way to unite white women behind Hillary and to play the race card in a negative way to “ghetto-ize” Obama as the “black candidate” who is somehow unsettling to whites.

By defining Obama more by his race, the Clinton campaign also gained an important wedge issue that helped drive Hispanic voters to Clinton’s side, a development that proved important in Texas. [See CNN’s Texas exit poll.]

In addition, the Clinton campaign’s sub-rosa attempts to dirty up Obama by planting negative stories about him in friendly media outlets – as well as “working the refs” by insisting that the press corps needed to be more critical of Obama – contributed to Clinton’s success by helping to generate more critical coverage of the Illinois senator.

While the Clinton strategy finally seems to be clicking, it has alarmed some Democratic leaders who now view this summer’s convention in Denver as likely to be a showdown between two bitterly divided camps.

Hillary Clinton has made clear she will insist on the nomination even if she trails in elected delegates, and Obama’s side is sure to be furious if the “establishment” rips the prize away from its candidate. Whoever emerges the bloodied victor will face a daunting task of reuniting the party and defeating Republican John McCain in November.

Identity Politics

The Democrats’ descent into “identity politics” was always a danger for a party with two trailblazing candidates representing the first serious chance for a black or a woman to be elected president. But the slippery slope largely was avoided prior to the Iowa caucuses.

Obama shunned overt references to race, instead stressing his appeal as a candidate who could bring unity to the country. Clinton slid into gender appeal only on occasion, like when she was confronting criticism for a controversial vote on declaring Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a “global terrorist organization.”

On Nov. 1, 2007, after a bruising Democratic debate against male rivals, Clinton returned to her alma mater, Wellesley College, and declared that “in so many ways, this all women’s college prepared me to compete in the all boys’ club of presidential politics.”

Clinton then urged Wellesley students to help her win the presidency. “We’re ready to shatter that highest glass ceiling,” Clinton said. [NYT, Nov. 2, 2007]

But it was only after Obama stunned Clinton with a decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses that she laid down the gender card in spades.

In New Hampshire, Clinton presented herself as an embattled woman facing unfair treatment. On Jan. 7, a day before the primary, her voice cracked when responding to a question about how she managed to hold up.

“It’s not easy, it’s not easy,” Clinton responded slowly in a softer voice than she normally uses. “I couldn’t do it if I did not passionately believe it was the right thing to do. It’s very personal to me.”

As her eyes grew moist, she added, “It’s about our country, it’s about our kids’ future.” Her wet-eyed moment – a woman daring to show her vulnerable side – immediately became a campaign turning point.

Read all of it here.

From Jim Baldauf / The Rag Blog