Drama doesn't stop in high school

Looking over the events that make up the last year of Senator Kristen Gillibrand’s political life, it may appear that she is fighting for her spot as Queen Bee in a competitive suburban high school. Since taking Hillary Rodham Clinton’s seat as New York senator in mid- December, unimpressed New Yorkers have watched Senator Kristen Gillibrand accumulate one failure after another. Even with her summer fighting for “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and anti-abortion Stupak amendment to the health care reform bill, Senator Gillibrand could not seem to catch the attention of her public. The public appeared to have forgotten about her.

Gillibrand is not eeking out her place amongst a group of pre-teen girls, however. Her latest nemesis comes in the form of conservative Harold Ford, a former Tennessee congressman who plans to run against her in the primaries. The tides have slowly begun to change as New Yorkers compare her viewpoints against Ford’s extremely conservative takes on gay marriage and abortion rights. According to a hopeful account presented in The National Journal Online, the percentage of New Yorkers who said they hadn’t heard enough about Gillibrand dropped from 58 percent to 44 percent.

Gillibarnd seems to have quite literally been born into and for her position. Born in Albany and raised upstate New York, Senator Gillibrand now lives on the banks of the Hudson River in Hudson, New York, with her husband, Jonathan Gillibrand, and their two young sons, five-year-old Theodore and one-year-old, Henry. After attending Albany's Academy of Holy Names, Senator Gillibrand graduated in 1984 from Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, the first all women's high school in the United States. A magna cum laude graduate of Dartmouth College in 1988, Gillibrand went on to receive her law degree from the UCLA School of Law in 1991 and served as a law clerk on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. During the Clinton Administration, Senator Gillibrand served as Special Counsel to the United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Andrew Cuomo. She then worked as an attorney in New York City before becoming a Member of Congress.
Job creation and economic development have always been Senator Gillibrand’s top legislative priorities. Using her seat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator Gillibrand has worked to increase investment in infrastructure, rural broadband, health care information technology, and renewable energy, and worked closely with the Obama Administration and Senator Charles Schumer to ensure that New York gets its fair share of federal dollars.

Most recently, Gillibrand has been making headlines as she and Ford square off about hot-button issues like health care and job creation. At the same time, each is struggling to avoid personal tax questions. But taxes are only part of the mini-campaign as each side attempts to highlight jobs that each Democrat has held that might not play very well with primary voters.

The Gillibrand campaign threw the first stone, charging that Ford needs to clarify whether he paid New York taxes on his income as vice chairman of Merrill Lynch before becoming a full-time resident here. Ford, after several days of confusing answers, says he has. The attack continued as the Gillibrand campaign referenced Ford’s banking connections, "New York depends ... on Wall Street executives to report their income honestly and appropriately," said Gillibrand adviser Jefrey Pollock, clearly playing up the deep public distrust toward Wall Street.

Not to be outdone, the Ford campaign followed with its tax-related rebuttal, saying Gillibrand needed to release all tax returns dating to her time as a "tobacco lawyer." Garnering public attention is not something with which Gillibrand has always struggled. The reference made by the Ford party is to a multiyear stretch in the 1990s in which Gillibrand defended tobacco giant Philip Morris against charges it had lied about the dangers of smoking. Lawyers working the case did so by choice and Gillibrand has since faced questions about campaign contributions made by those in the tobacco industry. "How much was the unelected senator paid to help big tobacco cover up the addictiveness of nicotine?" asked Ford spokeswoman Tammy Sun. "Did she file tax returns for her windfall on behalf of big tobacco?"

One of her recent political stands Gillibrand has taken up is that of Public Option in Obama’s health care reform plan. After a failed attempt last year, Gillibrand and 15 other senators are trying to revive the plan for a government-backed insurance plan. This revival has come in lieu of budget reconciliation, which would mean that the plan would be allowed to be passed with only 51 senators backing it rather than the former 60.

“Despite New Yorkers being widely opposed to the Democrats’ plans for health care reform and the ‘public option,’ Senator Gillibrand continues to align herself with the extreme left-wing of her party,” state GOP chairman Ed Cox said in a statement to the New York Post. “By urging parliamentary-style trickery and backdoor measures, Senator Gillibrand attempts to ramrod through healthcare legislation that would bankrupt New York State and cripple the country’s health care system.”
The Ford camp, anxious to perpetuate any argument, has said, “First, Senator Gillibrand became one of only seven Senators to vote for taxpayer funding of ACORN, and now she joins the gang-of-four supporting an esoteric rule-making device after failing to make their case to the voters. New Yorkers need a Senator who will legislate and govern in their interests, as opposed to the far left of the Democratic Party.”

While the future remains uncertain, Gillibrand has responded in turn. Making the case that ignoring the health care crisis is simply not an option. Her campaign has stated, “Ed Cox, Harold Ford, and the entrenched special interests all ignore the fact that New Yorkers support President Obama’s plans to reform health care.”

Recent polls put Gillibrand ahead of Ford. "The areas where he is most vulnerable and most out of step with New Yorkers are areas where she has led in her first year in the Senate," said Gillibrand spokesman Matt Canter. A Siena Research Institute poll found that Ford has 16 percent amongst Democrats in comparison to Gillibrand’s 42 percent.

Jameel Jaffer Connects the Dots

On February 25^th, day two of "Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy: A Social Research Conference at The New School," Jameel Jaffar, a litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union and Director of the ACLU's National Security Program, spoke on the dynamic between the government’s “strong” interest in secrecy and the “public’s interest in transparency.”

“Information should be public, except when it shouldn’t be,” Jaffer said in the beginning of his segment. Thus emphasizing that the government follows general rules and maintains a vague understanding on what should be withheld from the public. The public’s attitude towards the link between public transparency and good government, or democratic ethos, is central to the assumption of democracy.

The government takes grave measures to keep things guarded. Jaffer mentions Cheney’s One Percent Doctrine, which operates on the basis that even if something appears to have a 1% threat it should treated as a full on threat. Along the same premises is the Mosaic Doctrine, which is the thought that even innocuous information can “be dangerous and used against us.” So even if an individual piece of information may seem trivial it can be part of a greater picture, therefore dissemination of any given information appropriated by should be restricted.

Limits Of My Knowledge

I went to the keynote speech given by Seymour Hersh. His speech consisted of what he called a "world tour" where he talked about all the political hot zones concerning the U.S. Things that stuck out: the U.S. is still using torture, but the current (?) brand of torture is not as bad as it used to be; the U.S. is using secret prisons for detaining terror suspects; the U.S. is retailing assassinations as it has since I don't know; finally, there is no evidence of weapons in Iran.

So... It would appear that America is kind of... evil? As a silly, naive twenty something, I feel like the subjects Mr. Hersh covered belong to a world of adults that I have yet to inherit. It depresses me to think that some of my college peers will ascend to levels of sophistication where they will hold unjust sway over the civil rights of others. And somehow I will be part of that grumbling go-nowhere conversation where I am shouting from the base of that ivory tower that will become an attic, waiting for the man who was a kid to remember a perhaps fictitious time when we might have been friends, or peers, or dishwashers without any deluded to concern as to how either might usurp the corrupt seat of adulthood. I don't follow the news, but I knew vaguely about all the topics Mr. Hersh discussed. Without doubt, my generation is the bride to be of the tortured torturer. "Good night and good luck."

This was interesting

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/essay-15/

Limiting Knowledge in Democracy: Philip Kitcher

Note - Whoever is our "Tech Master", feel free to cut this with a read more link. I'm still a little fuzzy on how to do it and this write-up is sort of long!

---

I found the lecture by Columbia University Professor Philip Kitcher really interesting. It concerned arguments for and against the limiting of knowledge in democracy, and he framing his argument by using the philosophies of writer John Milton and philosopher John Stuart Mill. Both suggested the idea of an equal playing field for truth in falsity to interact so that people could make a final assessment on the two.

What it boiled down to, he said, was the idea of "Freedom of Inquiry" - an idea that the people of a democracy have the freedom to pursue their own good in their own way without impeding of the good of others. In order to obtain this good, truth and knowledge are important as they guide us to make decisions which aid in finding this good in our lives. In other words, we should be on an equal playing field, all of us, in terms of finding out for ourselves what is good, and the only way for us to know is to be given straight truth.

The conflict nowadays, according to Kitcher, is that the free discussion of truth gets in the way of good, and this is because of ignorance (he, at this point, put a Fox TV/News logo up on the projection screen). Ignorance, he said, gets in the way of good in a multitude of ways: Remedial Ignorance (as in, you have enough background to consult sources and make decisions. Indirectly remedial would be that you know the experts who have this background) and Irremedial Ignorance (You cannot even determine the experts, who in some cases base their information of the motivations of people or certain views). Disputing the expertise of those discussing these topics calls into question the idea of expertise itself. According to Kitcher "There is an ethical responsibility for people who of themselves as pursuing free inquirers"

In this case, knowledge is invested in Journalists, Academics and Scientists. To Kitcher, they are responsible for finding out information for purely people, so they can "pursue their own projects in their own way".