Blogging from the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly About Something Else

So, first blog post. No one will be probably be reading this yet, but I'll try to do a good job just for practice's sake. I'm writing from Montecristi, where I'm observing the last two days of Ecuador's Constituent Assembly. I'll have an article on that out tomorrow.

As I'm zoning out from the specifics of the proposed Electricity Law, I've been reading up on Obama's recent world tour.

He's in Israel and the Occupied Territories today. While he met with both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, he took pains to emphasize that he would in no way break with the US's longstanding support for Israel, hell or high water. Obama was quoted in The New York Times saying, “The most important idea for me to reaffirm is the historic and special relationship between the United States and Israel. One that cannot be broken. One that I have affirmed throughout my career and one that I will intend to not only continue but actually strengthen in an Obama administration.”

In other news, Robert Dreyfuss has a good piece in The Nation on Obama's foreign policy, pointing out that while less dangerous than Bush, there are no plans to downsize our bloated military budget or move away from maintaining the Pax Americana. There's also a good interview with him on Counterspin. 

I also wanted to draw folks' attention to a particularly obnoxious article from last week's New York Times. Most of the time, the Left is just invisible in the corporate media. And when we do show up, the entire article is always musing over how marginal we are. Let's see, opposing the Iraq War, supporting universal healthcare, a high minimum wage and a clean environment, backing abortion and gay rights...Oh, wait, a majority of Americans support these things!

And how about the Civil Rights Movement, Women's Suffrage, the eight hour work day and the weekend? Just marginal events undertaken by marginal characters. 

They also quote Kari Chisholm, a centrist Democratic computer nerd and strategist in Oregon who represents just about everything wrong with the Party: "They believe their ideology is the only idealism and Obama’s is very mainstream. I’m not surprised they’re getting a little cranky. They’ve always been kind of cranky. A mainstream Democrat has always been too mainstream for them.” 

Kari, at least we believe in something. I have never known you to stand for anything aside from fervently enmeshing yourself within establishment circles. What is it, exactly, that drew you to politics? To win? But to win what, exactly? Write to the Times here and ask them to stop being such jerks...