Find the poll in the Links section to the lower right. Suggestions for better tipping points are welcome.
Stirling Newberry reported: "Want to know what is going on around the blog space related to Clark? The Centrist coalition has "Clarkbot" which gathers the day's posts - but be forewarned, it's everything and Clark bloggers aren't shy about weighing in on every aspect of the campaign..."
Rick Heller, the programmer/publisher of the Centrist Coalition has provided me with a link that brings up a week of Clarkbot posts.
"To Sir With Love" is only a month old, more or less the same age as the campaign which inspired it. I started out with Blogger, because I've always enjoyed the Google Tool Bar and the "Blog This" button lured me in.
After a week, I discovered RSS and realized that without syndication the blog was in a cul-de-sac. It took another few days to convert the Blogger messages to Movabletype, import the Blogger posts, and tweak the stylesheet.
Finally, I started submitting the feed URL to indexes such as Feedster. Within a day or two, Rick's Clarkbot picked up on the feed and "To Sir With Love" was on it's way. So to link directly to the Clarkbot, see the permanent link in the Links section to the lower right.
Cheney and Rumsfeld have been quietly building their own private army. Once WKC hits his stride on the mainstream issues, watch him go after pork in the military budget. The growth of PMC's, "private military companies," is just as snarky as the voting machine mess to come and should be an area of reform where Clark can take the lead.
"One PMC," Richard Reeves tells us, "called DynCorp. . .was the employer of the three security guards killed by a bomb as they guarded American diplomats in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday. When you call to ask questions about DynCorp, you are referred to the State Department, which does not discuss the trade secrets of private companies."
In other words, private companies doing the public's business are not accountable to the public. It is a big business now. DynCorp alone, with 23,000 employees, had at least $2 billion in federal contracts last year. Two more facts: PMCs are a $100 billion industry, most of that money coming from taxpayers; one in 10 Americans doing military work and occupation duty in Iraq are actually civilians working for PMCs. They are called contract employees now -- flying and maintaining military helicopters around the world, among other things. Once upon a time they would have been called mercenaries.
A month ago, a DynCorp pilot was shot down and killed by ground fire in Colombia. What was he doing? None of your business. More than a dozen of DynCorp's employees have been killed in Colombia, and even their families can't find out what they were doing there. ...Three Northrop Grumman employees whose plane crashed or was shot down are being held hostage somewhere in Colombia. What were they doing? None of your business. But it must have been interesting stuff, because our State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to their rescue.
PMCs are one face, a veiled one, of the accelerated privatizing of the government of the United States. The idea, of course, is to save money -- Dick Cheney was the first to push the idea when he was secretary of defense during the first Gulf War -- and to avoid accountability. Corporate executives are not answerable to congressional oversight committees or to reporters babbling about the public's right to know. Under this system, the public has no rights.
Another face of the new privatization was revealed briefly last week on the Maryland side of the Potomac. It was not Page One news that the U.S. Navy, under a White House "competitive sourcing" program, was deciding whether a private contractor could take over the work of 21 kitchen workers at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
The 21 people, some of whom have been there for more than 20 years, are officially "disabled." They are mentally retarded. The U.S. government has given them a life.They live in group homes or have managed to buy their own homes, living with their parents or other relatives -- productive lives made possible by government policy. They are among 1,734 mentally retarded people making between $9.42 and $12.80 an hour under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Compassionate conservatism is giving capitalism a bad name and crushing democracy under its vicious heel. For shame, Mssrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. General Powell should hope with the rest of us he doesn't have to serve this band of thieves for another four years.
Conservative Kaus indirectly supports Clark and Lieberman's decision to pass on Iowa.
Will the decision of Sen Joe Lieberman and Gen. Wesley Clark to bypass the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses undermine that proud, venerable institution? Here's hoping! The Iowa caucuses are highly unrepresentative, media-created event. In 2000, for example, only little more than a tenth of the state's registered Democrats--forget about Independents--attended the party's meetings. All of the caucusers, as always, seemed to be members of the teachers' union, the National Education Association. Every four years this tiny minority pushes the Democratic candidates way to the left, so they can spend the rest of the year scrambling to make themselves palatable to the actual voting public. ... In fact, the only non-incumbent Democrat who won Iowa and actually went on to win the White House was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter put the caucuses on the map. The state's unimpressive track record in the ensuing years has gradually dulled its luster, and this could be the year the hype collapses completely....