One thing interesting this cycle is the recognition of some candidates that they have the power through their campaign to do good beyond themselves.   We have seen this with Charlie Brown, Democratic Congressional Candidate in CA-04 with his Veterans Charity Challenge.  And of course we all know about the Obama campaign and its cooperation with the DNC to register more voters.

Now let's add Tom Periello, Democratic Congressional Candidate in Virginia's 5th CD, against the noxious Virgil Goode.  Tom, who is a founder of the progressive faith movement, is tithing volunteer hours.

Keep reading to see what I mean.

"Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive," Obama said in the North Carolina speech. "We've already seen it . . . pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along."

That's the message: Attack me; attack my pastor; attack my wife; bring it on. I'm ready.

The quote is from a piece entitled, as is this diary, Mr. Cool's Intensity by David Ignatius, whose Washington Post columns are often about international affairs.  The column is interesting in what it has to say about Obama.  I will explore it a bit, and per usual, offer a few thoughts of my own.

yesterday I wrote about Eugene Robinson's column about Hillary Clinton, in which he described her as arrogant but not a racist.  Today we see two more prominent black columnists also unload on her, again neither choosing to call her a racist, but each being more than a little dismissive.   Let me offer a brief clip from each above the fold.

From Derrick Jackson's Clinton's diminishing of black voters:

There is no way you can say in the same sentence, "hard-working Americans, white Americans," without diminishing black Americans as lazy.

  And from Bob Herbert's Seeds of Destruction his first line:

The Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.

I will somewhat explore each column and also offer a few words of my own.

so says Eugene Robinson in a column today entitled The Card Clinton is Playing  As per usual with Robinson, as those who watch him on MS-NBC know, he offers keen insight and an ability to sum things up precisely.   Note especially his penultimate paragraph:

Clinton's sin isn't racism, it's arrogance. From the beginning, the Clinton campaign has refused to consider the possibility that Obama's success was more than a fad. This was supposed to be Clinton's year, and if Obama was winning primaries, there had to be some reason that had nothing to do with merit. It was because he was black, or because he had better slogans, or because he was a better public speaker, or because he was the media's darling. This new business about white voters is just the latest story the Clinton campaign is telling itself about the usurper named Obama.

Just the latest story. . .

and the order implies nothing.
This was originally composed (and posted) as a comment on the front page story by kos (Paying off her debts? VP?) which discusses vp possibilities.  I realize lots of other people are offering their ideas, so I figured why not me.   For what it is worth

1. I was actively involved in Webb's campaign and remain in occasional contact with him through Virginia politics

2. I have met and talked with Richardson on several occasions, and have followed his career fairly closely.

3. I have had one conversation with Sebelius, at a fundraiser for Obama in conjunction with the National Governors' Association meeting here in DC.  I was able to observe her there.  I also heard her speak at the DNC winter meeting in DC in 2007.  And I have watched her career for a while.

So below the fold I will offer my thoughts and observations.

That quote is a line from Bob Herbert's very incisive column this morning, entitled Doing the Troops Wrong.   The column is in support of the new GI Bill introduced by my junior senator, Jim Webb.  The title is derived from the attitutes of the Bush administration and John McCain in opposition.  

This is an action diary.   I want to you to read the column.  Perhaps you can cut and paste it into an email or print it out for a fax, highlighting the key passages.  

Let me give you SOME guidance on important parts.

Today, the United States, fearing a geo-political setback that will undercut the broader "war on terror," is putting the diehard goal of military "victory" ahead of the diplomatic initiatives that alone can enable the reconstruction of Iraqi society. The needed spirit of cooperation among Iraqi factions, and from other nations, will never materialize as long as the United States pursues the fantasy that its armed might will at last prevail. Once again, diplomacy is being rejected in favor of war. This is insane.

Both my title and the quote above are from a column appearing in today's Boston Globe.  Written by James Carroll, it is entitled The new immorality of Iraq war.    My quotation is from the 2nd paragraph.  You can get a clear sense from the first and last sentences of the opening paragraph:

INSANITY is defined as repeating one mistaken action again and again, each time expecting a better result that never comes.  . . .

Diplomacy was once again rejected.

 I want to focus on the insanity of rejecting diplomacy.

First, most of the inmates were probably innocent all along, but Pakistanis or Afghans turned them over to America in exchange for large cash rewards. The moment we offered $25,000 rewards for Al Qaeda supporters, any Arab in the region risked being kidnapped and turned over as a terrorism suspect.

Second, torture was routine, especially early on. That’s why more than 100 prisoners have died in American custody in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

Ponder that for a moment.  Realize that most Americans have little awareness of either truth, but both are well known elsewhere, particularly in the Muslim world.  

Then perhaps you will read Nicholas' Kristof's A Prison of Shame, and It's Ours.  That is the starting point of my thoughts for the day.  But there will be more.

Most of the electorate understands that the U.S. is in sorry shape, which is why more than 80 percent of poll respondents say we’re on the wrong track. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has nothing to do with any of that. The idea that his nonsense may shape the outcome of this election is both tragic and absurd.

That is the concluding paragraph of Overkill and Short Shrift, Herbert's NY Times column today, in which he calls us all to account, the press for its focus, and the American people for continuing to focus on something of little importance.  As he notes:

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

You should read his column.

And because you can, I am not going to write that much about it, but rather about us, the press, and our politics.  

Originally I was not going to go.  It is near the end of the school year.  And I looked at the sponsorship and the keynote speaker and thought it really was not worth it.  But then yesterday I got a personal invitation which referred to here, telling me

Your experience mobilizing interest at the grassroots through Daily Kos is an invaluable contribution to this forum.

It is a bloggers' summit on Education, lead by Strong American Schools, which upperates under the banner "ED in '08" (yeah, I know, I see "ED" and I start thinking of ads for male enhancement products).  

So let me explain why at first I was not going to go, and why, under pressure from my wife, I have decided I should.  And remember, because you read what I write on education, I get to thank (or blame) you!

Since March 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of eggs has jumped 35 percent. A gallon of milk is up 23 percent. A loaf of white bread has climbed 16 percent. And a pound of ground chuck is up 8 percent. Overall, U.S. food prices in 2008 are expected to rise 4 to 5 percent, about double the increases of recent years. And while the total rise is far less drastic than elsewhere around the world, the sharp hike for staples means everyone is feeling the pinch.

For most in the US we have not fully felt the impact of the Global Food Crisis in anything like the way it has hit other nations.  Perhaps we might be like the woman featured at the beginning of today's final article in the Washington Post Series, Crimping, Scrimping, Saving, who no longer buys organic meat and buys organic milk only for the small child.  If that is the most serious impact upon our lives it may not feel like a crisis.  Perhaps we need to recognize how lucky we are.

Across the country, ethanol plants are swallowing more and more of the nation's corn crop. This year, about a quarter of U.S. corn will go to feeding ethanol plants instead of poultry or livestock. That has helped farmers like Johnson, but it has boosted demand -- and prices -- for corn at the same time global grain demand is growing.

And it has linked food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records, pulling up the price of anything that can be poured into a gasoline tank. "The price of grain is now directly tied to the price of oil," says Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group. "We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they're beginning to fuse."

The words are from the fourth and penultimate article in the Washington Post series on the Global Food Crisis.  This is entitled Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars and is subtitled "As farmers feed ethanol plants, a costly link is forged between food and oil."   That cost may be more than the world - and humanity - can bear.

At Stephen Fleishman's busy Bethesda shop, the era of the 95-cent bagel is coming to an end.

Breaking the dollar barrier "scares me," said the Bronx-born owner of Bethesda Bagels. But with 100-pound bags of North Dakota flour now above $50 -- more than double what they were a few months ago -- he sees no alternative to a hefty increase in the price of his signature product, a bagel made by hand in the back of the store.

"I've never seen anything like this in 20 years," he said. "It's a nightmare."

IT seems like a small thing, the price of a bagel breaking a dollar.  But it is symbolic, and good fresh bagels are important in the Washington Jewish community.  So perhaps it is appropriate that this is how the third of the Washington Post's series on the Global food crisis begins.  Today's article in this important series is entitled Emptying the Breadbasket, and subtitled "For decades, wheat was king on the Great Plains and prices were low everywhere. Those days are over."  This brings the crisis home to the U. S. and our role in helping to create it.

is the title of the second part of the Washington Post series on the Global Food Crisis.  Subtitled "Mauritania, and much of Africa, relies on imported food. As trade breaks down, destitute people face tough choices," it focuses particularly on that poor country as it tries to demonstrate the dimensions of the spreading problem.  Like the first part, about which I wrote yesterday in Hunger, today's piece has accompanying tables and sidebars to illustrate the depths of the problem.  For now consider just this applicable to Mauritania:

The price of sorghum, a major staple used to make porridge, has jumped 20% in six months, a sharp rise in a region where more than 60% of the people earn less than a $1 a day.

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high.  The world's poor suffer most.

  That is the subtitle of a piece called The New Economics of Hunger which takes 3 of the four columns of my Sunday Washington Post's front page, above the fold and slightly below.  When one jumps to the continuation on page A22 the subtitle reads "The Anatomy of a Massive Price Shock."   At the very top of the page, above the title, one sees a black box with the words all in caps: GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS  If one examines the online version, one sees the same Accompanying this lead story is another piece on the front of the Outlook section entitled A Full Plate Today, Uncertainty Tomorrow  Clearly the issue of hunger is now of concern in our national capital, as the Post has validated the issue

Norman Borlaug, Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M, received the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in developing and propagating more productive and disease resistant strains of wheat and other grains.  This contributed to the so-called Green Revolution, about which he notes

From 1965 to 1985, the heyday of the Green Revolution, world production of cereal grains — wheat, rice, corn, barley and sorghum — nearly doubled, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion metric tons, and cereal prices dropped by 40 percent.

Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.

But now the world's wheat supply is under great threat, at the same time as rising fuel petroleum prices and the conversion of corn to ethanol are also creating problems for price and availability of grain.   Much of the world potentially faces a real food crisis.  

My title is a quotation from Hillary Clinton's attack on TUCC, the currently recommended diary by Kid Oakland, as thoughtful a writer as there is in the blogosphere.   The words appear at the end of his piece in this setting:

Clinton has also shown that she thinks that attacking an opposing candidate's house of worship is fair game in a televised debate.

In that, Hillary Clinton is deeply, grievously, morally wrong. She is also practicing heinously destructive politics.

  practicing heinously destructive politics

I think we will increasingly hear those kind of statements from thoughtful Democrats.  But I want to back almost two months to some similar statements, offered before the controversy over Rev. Wright, and then look forward.

"We do not provide equal access to a high-quality education to every child in this nation. And even though we have made strides in this direction, we have miles to go before this task is complete. There is a pressing need to redesign our schools to meet the demands of a global 21st century society in which knowledge and technology are changing at a breath-taking pace, and new forms of education are essential for individual and societal survival. Yet, our current policy strategies are constraining rather than enabling the educational innovation our school system needs. Indeed, the path we are pursuing promises to leave our schools, as well as our children, behind."

That is a quotation from a new report entitled "Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education"  that was released yesterday by the Forum for Education and Democracy on the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the federal report on education which initiated much of what is wrong in our educational policy.

Please keep reading.