http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheH...05/schumer.html

Frankly, I'd be very suspicious of any Democrats who don't support Dean and would want to know what actually is in their personal agenda!

http://thenation.com/search/search.mhtml
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Results 1 - 10 of about 333 for 'open letter to howard dean' (0.08 seconds)

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=2356
(excerpt)
For those who believe that America needs to change course, Tom Hayden's open letter to Howard Dean appealing to him not to take the antiwar majority of the Democratic Party for granted is an eloquent and important document. Read it, share it.
April 26, 2005
Dear Chairman Dean...

Why? Your with us or you are not? I think Dean has some good ideas, but he seems to have bought into the nonsense that the war "is a job we should finish", when he was of the mind it was a bad idea to start with. Most Democrats want us to leave Iraq ASAP, not prolong a painful and pointless excercise in enemy building, while killing and maiming Americans and Iraqis alike.

This antiwar sentement is the one held by the majority of Democrats, so it would seem this is the "personal agenda" of millions of American Democrats. Should we apologise for asking the leadership to pay attention?

I'd be very suspicious of any Democrats who keep holding fast to the "Republican Light" tactic, since that lost us the majority in the Senate, and then the Presidency. Lets not go for the trifecta.

As a Vietnam vet, I don't like Tom Hayden, never have, and never will. He's a pussy. Always has been, and always will be.

That being said, and with those cards on the table, it is a really great letter, one in which my heart says, "What he says is true," but which the practical part of my brain says is absolutely impossible. Bush pushed us off this cliff and, unlike Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote, we can't just stop and go back.

Bush has already lost the war- which we knew he would from the day he first took us in. The Downing Street Memo discredits his agenda from Day One. We can make such moves as Hayden suggests once we regain the Senate in '06. With all that has happened this week, and with all the problems facing this Republican administration, that is actually a possibility; a far cry from November. Our day will come when we can force the issues. Until then, we simply cannot pack it up and go home. Bush, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Rice and all the rest of the neocon thugs will have to answer, but right now this is their dance.

The search results don't transfer - please cut and past 'open letter to howard dean' onto the linked page search box -

Received this 'open letter to Howard Dean' in an email -
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050516&s=kucinich
|posted May 3, 2005 (web only)
An Open Letter to Howard Dean
Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich

moments AFTER contributing $$ to DSCC in response to solicitation by another email, leading to acute personal insight into Salute_Liberty's comment (until Thursday's glimmer-of-hope Senate vote caused my regret to be SUSPENDED).

Of course we can pack it up and go home. We stay and do what? Die more? Kill more? Make more enemies? If we leave now we will achieve what we will if we stay, only we will have more dead and be deeper in debt. Bad ideas implemented are harmful, bad ideas prolonged are a disaster.This war is, was, and will be wrong as well as unconstitutional no matter what.

We have invaded a country that was not and is not a threat to the USA under false pretenses, a clear violation of the Constitution, and even though you can't tell sometimes, we are a Constitutional democracy.

repeat post

Thanks, Veritas, for drawing our attention to these letters. And, I'm glad you're participating in the forum.

Hayden's letter is terrific. I like Howard Dean and think he's a breath of fresh air, and Hayden is right.

I also really like Schumer.

He has a strong voice in the senate.

That's neither the point nor the issue; there isn't really any argument. Pragmatically however, we can scream and rant all we want- we are the teapot in which the tempest wails. We cannot stop funding; even if all 45 opposition senators voted to cease funding, the house and the 55 senate majority would prevail. Do you think Bush is going to quit now? We could pack it up and go home if there were someone in office who had the will to do that. We don't have that, and won't for at least three more years.

The soonest we can have an impact is 2006. If we regain the senate, we can stop funding- or at least not approve funding without demanding things like exit strategies and dates. The Holy Grail of '06 would be to regain control of both houses; then Bush, Cheney, and the whole cabal would be impeached, convicted, and thrown into the darkest, dankest dungeon permitted by the law- of whatever country we might chose to send them.

Provoking, as Hayden suggests, a response based upon immediate withdrawal, can accomplish nothing. His complete lack of pragmatism is what makes him so dangerous to the Democratic Party, and is what has pissed me off since the 60's. His head is perpetually in the clouds while his shoes are in the mud.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php...id=2829&print=1
APOCALYPSE SOON
By Robert S. McNamara

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2800817_pf.html
washingtonpost.com
House Proposes Commission to Assess Nuclear Forces

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 29, 2005; A09

The House Armed Services Committee has proposed appointment of a civilian commission to help the Pentagon determine how to integrate nuclear and nonnuclear weapons in planning the nation's strategic strike forces for the next 20 years.

Since the Bush administration put forward its Nuclear Posture Review in December 2001 that called for transitioning from a nuclear-dominated strategic force to one with major conventional components, the Defense Department has wrestled with how to achieve that goal. The challenge is how to modernize or replace the Cold War strategic strike triad of bombers and land- and sea-based long-range missiles and its thousands of accompanying high-yield nuclear bombs and warheads. One goal of the posture review, according to the House committee report, was to develop capabilities "that would lessen the overall United States dependence on nuclear weapons."

Inclusion of the commission proposal in the fiscal 2006 defense authorization bill, approved by the House Wednesday, illustrates congressional concern that there is a lack of basic future planning for the nation's nuclear arsenal in the aftermath of the posture review, a theme promoted over the past year by several House members including Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), who chairs the appropriations panel that funds the nuclear weapons programs.

"I think the time is now for a thoughtful and open debate on the role of nuclear weapons in our country's national security strategy," Hobson said in a speech in February. "Until we have a real debate and develop a comprehensive plan for the U.S. nuclear stockpile and the . . . [nuclear] weapons complex, we're left arguing over isolated projects."

The 12-member commission, which would be appointed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after consulting with the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, would help identify the requirements for the new, mixed strategic forces and the changes then to be made in the nuclear stockpile based on threats extending to the year 2025. The panel would also deal with restructuring the present nuclear weapons manufacturing complex, which was established almost 50 years ago to build thousands of warheads. It now requires a thorough overhaul but awaits a determination as to how large a stockpile of nuclear weapons the United States plans to maintain.

The proposed commission would consider "policy, force structure, [nuclear] stockpile stewardship and estimates of threats and force requirements," the House committee said in its report released last week. Included in those categories would also be how today's strategic intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance programs, most of which rely on satellites originally designed to look down on Russian missiles, should be redirected.

The panel, whose members would be selected based on expertise in various aspects of nuclear strategy, would be authorized to hold hearings. It would report back to Rumsfeld 28 months after its first meeting, and he would give Congress a report one year later on what actions he had taken or planned to take based on commission recommendations.

Confusion over the administration's nuclear weapons program is reflected in the differing views of the goals of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, a $9.4 million item in the fiscal 2006 budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) budget. Originally put in last year's appropriations bill by Hobson, it replaced a Bush administration plan to research new concepts for making nuclear weapons more effective against bunkers holding chemical or biological weapons.

Hobson redirected the money for research to develop new components for warheads in the stockpile, aimed at keeping them reliable and safe without the need for nuclear testing, which has been halted. In testimony before a Senate Armed Services subcommittee April 4, Linton F. Brooks, administrator of NNSA, said the fiscal 2005 RRW money had not been spent, and the administration now proposed using the program to help "develop and produce by the 2012-2015 time frame a small build of warheads . . . without nuclear testing."

Brooks's testimony raised concerns among arms control experts and some members of Congress that the administration was using RRW to go back to its original idea that new warheads were needed. In a Congressional Research Service report on the RRW program, released last week, Steve Henry, deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, described the RRW program as a possible means to replace aging components and at the same time relax some of the Cold War design requirements for high nuclear yields. Henry stressed the goal was "to reduce the likelihood of resumption of nuclear testing," not eliminate that potential need.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services panel, was one of those who feared the administration approach would make testing inevitable. Therefore, she and others added to the committee legislation some goals for RRW, one of which "is to further reduce the likelihood of nuclear testing." In a statement last week, Tauscher referred to that as a "mandated" objective.

And from COUNCIL FOR A LIVABLE WORLD,
http://64.177.207.201/pages/91_10.html
http://64.177.207.201/pages/8_677.html
Nuclear bunker buster - Part 1 (Also known as Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator or RNEP): Last year, in an unexpected clear-cut victory, Congress knocked out the entire Administration’s request for $27.6 billion to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons to destroy deeply buried targets. This year, the Administration came back with a slimmed down request for $4.0 million in the Department of Energy budget and $4.5 million in the Air Force budget. The generally hawkish House Strategic Forces Subcommittee yesterday eliminated all the Energy funding, adding a comparable amount of funds to the Air Force budget for work on a conventional (non-nuclear) version of the bunker buster. House Armed Services Committee Democrat Silvestre Reyes (TX) called it taking the "N" out of "RNEP," or the "nuclear" out of nuclear bunker buster. This statement recalls a remark by the late House Armed Services Committee chairman Les Aspin who boasted during the first Bush Administration that his committee had taken the "Star" out of "Star Wars," moving national missile defense to a basic research and development program rather than a bells and whistles program on track to deployment.

Nuclear bunker buster - Part 2: The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, led by Ohio Republican David Hobson, also zeroed out the Department of Energy funding of $4.0 million for the nuclear bunker buster. Hobson is the chairman who was responsible for killing the program last year and cutting it back the previous year.

Nuclear bunker buster - Part 3: The full Senate Armed Services Committee, it its markup of the annual Defense Authorization bill yesterday -- just to confuse things a bit further -- declined to fund the Air Force bunker buster, but did approve the Department of Energy’s $4.0 million.

Needless to say, all these decisions are subject to further review in the coming weeks

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Aren't you concerned that the DOE is 'privatizing' our nation's nuclear weapons research facilities?


Speaking out forcefully for peace must be done NOW.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php...id=2829&print=1
"A Moment of Decision
We are at a critical moment in human history—perhaps not as dramatic as that of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but a moment no less crucial. Neither the Bush administration, the congress, the American people, nor the people of other nations have debated the merits of alternative, long-range nuclear weapons policies for their countries or the world. They have not examined the military utility of the weapons; the risk of inadvertent or accidental use; the moral and legal considerations relating to the use or threat of use of the weapons; or the impact of current policies on proliferation. Such debates are long overdue. If they are held, I believe they will conclude, as have I and an increasing number of senior military leaders, politicians, and civilian security experts: We must move promptly toward the elimination—or near elimination—of all nuclear weapons. For many, there is a strong temptation to cling to the strategies of the past 40 years. But to do so would be a serious mistake leading to unacceptable risks for all nations."

Robert S. McNamara was U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 and president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.



It's not just about Iraq -
is the public hearing about these policy decisions either?