veterans

This is a pretty substance-heavy Quick Hits. Any one of the items here should merit a full blog post. There's just not enough time, damn it! Not enough time . . .

• CNN Money has an almost great segment on how the economic downturn may be driving young voters to the polls. My only quibble - in the final line the reporter claims that in the past "young people were eager to register, but not to vote." That's just not true. 80% of registered young voters actually cast a ballot on election day. Registration is the problem, not turnout. Or, as I've been saying - higher youth turnout is not about curing apathy but increasing access. (h/t Chris Kennedy of Rock the Vote)

• In the wake of GOP voter suppression efforts that have ensnared young people and veterans in Montana, Forward Montana has launched Montana Voter Suppression (.org), a website to track, report, and prevent voter suppression efforts in the state. Earlier today, the group also held a protest in front of the office of MT Rep Dennis Rehberg's office. Rehberg's chief of staff, Erik Iverson, is the Chair of Montana GOP, the group behind the voter challenges.
• Speaking of voter suppression, Nancy Scola and Allison Fine have a spectacular post over at Tech President detailing how Twitter could be used as an election protection tool.
• GQRR has a new poll out, this time of women. The results show that unmarried women, including many young women, are the key to Obama's success among that demographic. Unmarried women are supporting Obama 62 - 33%. So much for the "Palin Effect."

• In Kansas, Jim Slattery is embarking on a campus tour to drum up youth support for his Senate campaign. All down-ballot candidates should consider this if they want to ride the youth wave to its fullest. As much as we'd like to think they do, Obama's coattail don't necessarily extend all the way down the ballot.
• Veterans group IAVA issued it's congressional score card today, and John McCain earned a big fat D. The Disabled Veterans of American didn't score him much better, giving the Senator a 20% rating. So much for supporting the troops.

• Hat tip to Tony Cani, the Political Director of the Young Democrats, for catching the most cynical youth story of the week. From the conservative Washington Times:
  

  Republicans can keep young voters who support Democratic nominee Barack Obama at home by giving their young relatives and friends gift cards to iTunes and Starbucks that are good only on Nov. 4, election day.

  “That’s the only way to keep them away from the polls,” said Kellyanne Conway, president of The Polling Company, during a breakfast with the delegates at their hotel near the University of Minnesota.

  Tony has the appropriate response.

• That last gem comes courtesy of a speaker addressing the Virginia delegation at the Republican National Convention. But I don't think the Virginia GOP needs any help suppressing the youth vote, they're already doing a bang-up job of that, according to this New York Times article. A local registrar near Virginia Tech is improperly and inaccurately threatening students with the loss of financial aid if they register to vote in the state.
• Meanwhile, in another swing state, the Ohio Secretary of State is actually doing her job and is taking precautions to prevent voter suppression at the polls in November.
• Everyone should read Glenn Greenwald's post about why McCain and Palin can lie with impunity on the stump.
• On September 18th, the Center for American Progress is hosting an event on Millennials and how they will reshape the electorate. RSVP here.
• AEI has their own event on Millennials as well. Let's say that their take is not so optimistic. Details and RSVP here.
• The WE Campaign, 1 Sky and Green for All are teaming up for a day of action to promote Green Jobs Now. So far there are 232 events scheduled for September 27th.
• YP4 is offering an online course (Free!) on how to fight the Religious Right. The course begins Sept. 15th.
• YP4 is also recruiting a new class of Fellows. Find out more here.
• The New York Times has an interesting piece on the state of the money-race, including an interesting bit about Obama donors collecting checks that will go to the state parties in Battlegrounds.

Hat tip to Rock the Vote:

Over the course of this summer, Rock the Vote activists wrote thousands of emails to their Congressmen and women, asking them to co-sponsor the Veterans Voting Support Act and overturn the ban on voter registration drives.

Yesterday, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs overturned the ban:

Veterans officials said that they would welcome state and local election officials and nonpartisan groups to hospitals and outpatient clinics to help register voters but that such assistance needed to be coordinated by those facilities in order to avoid disruptions to patient care.

Over 1,049,398 people aged 18-29 have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Young veterans are a crucial part of the young voter movement. We've got one month left to register voters. Let's make sure we reach the young veterans that are recovering in government facilities.

Great, great news.

First some youthy news:

• Two articles are out today on polling. The Michigan Messenger does a great job analyzing a PEW study on the demographics of cell-only and "cell-mostly" users and how pollsters are dealing with under-represtentation of these demographics in their polling. If that's a little too data-geek for you, Campus Politico has a good "polling 101" story that might be a little more your speed.
• At Tapped, Tim Fernholz questions the effectiveness of a voter registration drive launched this week by the Hip Hop Caucus.
• Matt Zeitlin at PushBack follows up on that post, noting that celebrities are not an effective way to move young voters to the polls.
• Teaming up with SPIN, CMJ, and others, Head Count has launched a 90 day voter registration challenge. They hope to register 100,000 voters by the end of the 90 days. You can watch a video of SPIN at the Warped Tour interviewing an artist about the program here.
• NDN notes Connecticut Democrats are out-registering Republicans among young voters by 4.3 - 1. That registration and turnout advantage might help Democrats defeat Republican Chris Shays in the fall. Shays is the lone Republican congressman in New England.
• South Carolina young Republicans are not feeling the love from John McCain, and Young Republicans nationally are having a tough time drawing young people to the convention.
• Meanwhile, Young Democrats are thriving in delegate-rich Florida.
• Tech President argues that 2008 is a boring year in tech/politics. While 2004 and '06 saw huge paradigm shifts in how we organize, 2008 is all about refining those practices.

Some less-youthy, but very interesting news:

• Democrats are getting ready to spend $20 million to register and GOTV latinos.
• The Nation writes about MoveOn's 10th birthday and how far the organization has come.
• A new study by the RAND Corporation tells us the obvious - to win the war on terror, we need to stop fighting the war on terror.
• Finally, the Washington Post has a front-page story basically calling "liar liar pants on fire" on the McCain campaign for their latest ad attacking Sen. Obama.

I'm mostly still off the grid but had to pop back in to share this with you. Vote Vets just announced the launch of an Emerging Leaders program to help (mostly) young veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan get elected to state and local office in a bid to build the Democratic foreign policy bench. Add this to the growing roster of organizations that help train new, young candidates for public office.

Here's what they had to say:

[W]e learned very quickly that the key to building a long-term, progressive cadre of national leaders with on-the-ground foreign policy experience is to have a "deep bench" as they say in sports. In order to win House and Senate seats for years to come, we have to be able to put up candidates that have years of political experience under their belts. And as we've seen over the past two, just being an Iraq vet doesn't cut it in the hyper-competitive world of Washington politics.

That's why we've devised a "farm team" of progressive candidates with hands-on national security experience. We've created a program for like-minded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans called Emerging Leaders. In this program, we recruit vets with little to no political experience and promote them in state and local races. We've also incorporated a number of Iraq and Afghanistan who have already won state and local races in the past few years. The idea is to develop seasoned leaders who are more than capable of not only running for federal office in the coming years (should they choose to), but of winning. By cultivating their political careers at the earliest stages, we'll help them to become U.S. senators and members of Congress down the road.

These veterans will eventually become the answer to the McCains, Grahams, and Liebermans of the world when it comes to the question of whether or not to start a war.

Here's the inaugural class:

New Candidates

• Stephen Webber: Iraq Vet - Running for Missouri State House
• Jason Kander: Afghanistan Vet - Running for Missouri State House
• Miranda Norman: Iraq Vet - Running for Oklahoma State House
• Richard Riggs: Iraq Vet - Running for Oregon State House
• Donald Bortz: Iraq Vet - Running for Oakland County (Michigan) Commissioner
• Alex Cornell du Houx: Iraq Vet - Running for Maine State House
• Glenn Ray: Iraq Vet - Running for Arizona State House
• Allan Branstiter: Iraq Vet - Running for North Dakota State Senate

Elected Officials

• Harold Naughton: Iraq Vet - Running for re-election to the Massachusetts State House
• Joe Rice: Iraq Vet - Running for re-election to the Colorado State House
• Allen Vaught: Iraq Vet - Running for re-election to the Texas State House
• McKinley Bailey: Iraq and Afghanistan Vet - Running for re-election to the Iowa State House
• Steven Fulop: Iraq Vet - Jersey City, New Jersey City Councilman
• Steve Hobbs: Iraq Vet, Washington State Senator

I mentioned this in a comment yesterday, but thought it was worth an individual post. Over the course of the last four years, the notion of "The Troops" and what it means to support them has undergone a radical transformation. In 2004, supporting the troops meant putting a yellow magnetic ribbon on the bumper of your car. During the '04 election, the troops were a bludgeon used to beat back Democrats and brand any opposition to the war as unpatriotic - indeed at times it was suggested that dissent was synonymous with giving comfort and aid to the enemy (a treasonous offense).

Since then, we've had four years of conservatives exploiting the troops as weapons and sheilds to fight their political battles, all the while short-changing them on the resources they need to safely execute their orders and build a middle class life once they leave the service.

First came the revelation that Private Jessica Lynch was used as a propaganda tool by the administration to create a war hero and drum up support for the conflict. Then came Cpl. Pat Tillman's death under friendly fire and the subsequent cover-up. Just this year, CREW uncovered shocking evidence that the Veterans Administration was purposefully blocking its administrators from diagnosing and treating PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan vets. And all the while we've had reports that the administration failed to provide our troops the resources they needed in the field. Most recently, it was revealed the VA is blocking voter registration in their facilities and disenfranchising some of our most vulnerable troops.

It hasn't been all bad, though. We've made progress in the last 4 years as well - usually thanks to the Democrats. Early in the primaries, both Clinton and Obama sat down for serious - televised - discussions with young vets about the progress of the war, PTSD, health and education benefits, and more. To my knowledge, this was the first time since the war began that we had an honest national dialogue about what it truly means to support the troops. After a long fight, Democrats passed the 21st Century GI Bill, despite objections by both President Bush and Senator McCain.

Today, those successes continue as the Veterans Affairs Committee and the VA - after much hemming and hawing - plan to launch a massive campaign to raise awareness about and prevent suicide among our veterans.

Culturally, we are in a new space as well. Movies like Stop Loss, and In the Valley of Elah have created a much more complicated - and truer - vision of the troops and their experiences than the sanitized, heroic archetype paraded across the airwaves by political pundits. This trend, too, continues, most recently with the release of Generation Kill, by the creators of The Wire.

Changes to the cultural and political landscape now offer us a huge opportunity to permanently remove the troops as a weapon in the conservative arsenal and create more policies that provides real, tangible support for those who fight on our behalf. For me, this is a big part of a revamped foreign-policy. Young people - as troops, as activists, as now-respected members of the electorate - can help drive that change. This is a huge opportunity for us as a party and as a generation to do right by our peers and put our country back on track.

Originally posted by Kat Barr on the Rock the Vote blog. Cross-posted with permission.

If you’ve ever read my blog posts, gotten me talking about voting rights and our democracy, or heard me ramble on about the miracle of a country founded on “we the people” (sorry if you have), you’d know I can get pretty seriously patriotic about America and the rights we have as voters to shape it.

So that’s why when I saw this article, and this one from last week, I was seriously pissed.

Here’s the background: a while ago, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs banned voter registration drives at its federally-run facilities across the country, including nursing homes, homeless shelters, and rehab centers.

The V.A. claims the “Hatch Act” prevents their facilities from allowing registration at V.A. facilities. But as Senator Daniel Akaka, chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, stated yesterday, that is bogus.

And as numerous democracy advocates have pointed out, state-run agencies are actually required by law to offer voter registration to clients, and a 1994 Executive Order said federal agencies may do the same.

Yet the V.A. still refuses to budge.

Wow. Banning the most basic action of a democracy from centers helping and housing men and woman who have been fighting for democracy. It makes my head spin.

Why do I care so much? Outside of the fact that this is completely convoluted, the V.A.’s action will disproportionally impact thousands of young Americans recently returned from serving in the Middle East.

Three-quarters of the men and women who have died fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan were under 30 years of age. Thousands of veterans are young Americans who could be participating in a presidential election for the very first time. Young Americans are giving their lives for our country.

To erect a barrier to allowing these young veterans, and all veterans, from registering to vote and participating in our democracy is wrong.

It should be the other way around. Just like state-run agencies – from food stamp offices to the Department of Motor Vehicles – are required to register their clients to vote, federally-run V.A. facilities should do the same. Centers should be helping their constituents update their registration address, get registered, and ensure they are given the tools for active participation.

I remember back in ’05 when I heard that solidiers stationed in Virginia were being (illegally) required to fill out additional paperwork to register to vote in the state. That was outrageous.

What the V.A. is doing is ten steps beyond outrageous.

There are hundreds of nonpartisan organizations working their tails off to register voters this year – let them come and register our veterans! Or better yet, encourage V.A. facilities to register their clients themselves. All it takes is one piece of paper and five minutes to help make sure another American has his or her say in their own future and that our democracy lives up to its incredible potential.

This is really disturbing. ABC News is reporting that the government is testing drugs with possible violent and suicidal side effects on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD. Worse, it failed to notify those veterans of these possible side effects:

Mentally distressed veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are being recruited for government tests on pharmaceutical drugs linked to suicide and other violent side effects, an investigation by ABC News and The Washington Times has found.

The report will air on Good Morning America and will also appear in The Washington Times on Tuesday. (click here to read the Washington Times coverage of "Disposable Heroes")

In one of the human experiments, involving the anti-smoking drug Chantix, Veterans Administration doctors waited more than three months before warning veterans about the possible serious side effects, including suicide and neuropsychiatric behavior.

"Lab rat, guinea pig, disposable hero," said former US Army sniper James Elliott in describing how he felt he was betrayed by the Veterans Administration.

Elliott, 38, of suburban Washington, D.C., was recruited, at $30 a month, for the Chantix anti-smoking study three years after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He served a 15-month tour of duty in Iraq from 2003-2004.

Months after he began taking the drug, Elliott suffered a mental breakdown, experiencing a relapse of Iraq combat nightmares he blames on Chantix.

"They never told me that I was going to be suicidal, that I would cease sleeping. They never told me anything except this will help me quit smoking," Elliott told ABC News and The Washington Times.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

• First, I've been remiss in reporting that Mike Lux at Open Left is calling on all netroots progressives to work their asses off to register high-school seniors before they graduate. He's even got some ideas on how it might work. - Open Left
• Hillary Rosen, former head of the RIAA (and proponent of taking students, seniors, and assorted toddlers to court over filesharing) is now running the political operation at Huffington Post. WTF? - Boing Boing
• The Democrats are proposing that we pay soldiers who are stop-lossed into service (aka back door draft). Sounds good to me. - Daily Kos
• Ben Adler gives us a brief history of Drinking Liberally on the week in which the organization celebrates its 5 year anniversary. Congrats to Justin and Matt for all their accomplishments. - The Politico
• Georgia10 takes a stab at outlining what Ted Kennedy means to the Millennial Generation. - Daily Kos
• What can we expect from Generation "Z" ? - Profy.com
• Google: Viacom's YouTube lawsuit threatens the net. - Mashable!
• And finally, Joe gives us a run-down on the state of the race and why it's OK that the Clinton campaign keeps chugging along. And congrats to Joe on scoring the AlterNet gig. I believe this means that all 3 people who served as Web/Communications Director at MFA are now in the employ of AlterNet.

The new GI Bill was just passed in the House. From an IAVA email:

You did it. Just a few minutes ago, the House of Representatives passed the new GI Bill by a vote of 256-166, as an attachment to the emergency supplemental. Click here to view the full list of who voted for it and who voted against it.

Earlier this week, we told you that the new GI Bill was facing opposition from a small group of Representatives in the House, who were threatening the bill despite its deep bi-partisan support.

We asked for your help, and you stepped up to the plate. Thousands of you took action by calling your Representatives, signing the petition at www.GIBill2008.org, and spreading the word to your friends and neighbors. Today, your dedication paid off and together, we made history.

There's no question that your efforts had an impact. Referring specifically to the group of Representatives that were standing in the way of the bill, known as the Blue Dogs, the Politico, a Washington-insider newspaper, said that "there had been erosion among Blue Dogs in the face of pressure from veterans groups."1 The leadership you demonstrated in fighting for this bill shows that IAVA is a force to be reckoned with.

The new GI Bill has widespread support among Democrats, Republicans, and all of the major veterans organizations. But the legislative process is a long one, and it's your dedication that keeps it going during these crucial stages.

Next week, the Senate will have to vote on the bill as well. After that, it will go to the President's desk for his signature.

We'll keep you updated via email, but for the latest news, just visit www.GIBill2008.org.
Thank you again for standing with us. The support we're getting in this fight has been truly inspiring.

Sincerely,

Patrick Campbell
Iraq Veteran
Legislative Director
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America