Got this e-mail from Howard Dean late last night:
We will get a boost this weekend in Washington, Michigan and Maine, but our true test will be the Wisconsin primary. A win there will carry us to the big states of March 2-and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race.
This has, of course, generated no small amount of speculation in the press…
A co-chairman of U Penn’s graduate student union, GET-UP, calls on Penn’s leadership to let the ballots from ther election be counted:
Our movement is part of a larger pushback against the structural reform under way in the academic labor market. For several decades now, universities have been replacing full-time, tenure-track faculty with part-time instructors and graduate employees. Like adjunct faculty, graduate employees suffer unprofessional working conditions, crummy salaries and virtually no job security. We have little recourse if the terms of our employment are arbitrarily changed, and we have no grievance procedure if we’re harassed or abused.
We had hoped that President Rodin’s new willingness to engage with GET-UP would bring this impasse to resolution. But despite an atmosphere of cordiality and some stimulating discussion at the mid-December meeting GET-UP’s leadership held with President Rodin, the song remains the same: Penn’s graduate employees voted in a democratic election, and College Hall continues to abuse the loopholes in labor law to deny our basic rights.
The legal limbo in which graduate students at Penn, Brown, and Columbia find themselves is exactly the one which Levin has committed himself to inflict on Yale graduate students should an NLRB vote be held. While he’s argued for an NLRB process over the Card Count Neutrality on the grounds that “democracy means voting,” Levin continues to act as though he’s forgotten that democracy means counting, and following, the results of the vote.
Governor Rowland finds a cool reception:
‘In the 14 years up here … the hardest thing I had to do was to compose myself and stay in that chair,’ said state Rep. Christopher Caruso. ‘I had pondered several times getting up and walking out. I think it was a shameless spectacle.’
Standing athwart history yelling “Stop”:
President Bush condemned the Massachusetts court ruling on gay marriage on Wednesday, and conservative groups said the White House had informed them that the president would soon endorse efforts to pass an amendment to the United States Constitution defining marriage to be between a man and a woman…
“Marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman,” he said. “If activist judges insist on re-defining marriage by court order, the only alternative will be the constitutional process. We must do what is legally necessary to defend the sanctity of marriage.”
A Yale Forestry School student from Colorado, where Yale’s investment in the environmentally devastating Baca ranch scheme finally ended in response to sustained outcry in Colorado and Connecticut, calls on Yale to meet its full commitment to compensate the community and to institute the reforms necessary to stop future debacles:
In 2002, residents of Colorado found out that Yale endowment money was behind a water-marketing scheme they had spent over $1 million and three years fighting. Yale’s money, invested by the mega-hedge fund Farallon in creating a company called Vaca Partners, was used to purchase a stake in the 100,000-acre Baca Ranch in the south-central San Luis Valley. The intent of this partnership was to sell and export the ranch’s groundwater to distant urban areas — a scheme destined to have serious repercussions for the adjacent Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Not only are the Monument’s wetlands — key resting grounds for migratory birds like sandhill cranes — fed by this water, but the famous dunes themselves are held in place partly by the aquifer.
Vaca Partners’ funds were also used to fund two cynical 1998 ballot initiatives designed to limit water use by the Valley’s ranchers and farmers and enable the private marketing scheme. In this poor and heavily Hispanic rural region, agricultural water supply equates with livelihood. Pumping groundwater away for private profit would put severe stress on the already tenuous economic circumstances of communities in the San Luis region. Residents of these communities had to devote substantial time and financial resources to combating these initiatives.
I’d like to be proud to be a student here at Yale, even when I’m back home in Denver. But it’s hard to defend the actions of an institution whose closed-door investment strategies have cost Colorado residents millions of dollars, threatened to destroy a symbolically and ecologically important landmark, and nearly caused economic disaster for one of the poorest corners of the state. And it’s doubly hard when the University reneges on its commitment to make amends for this sorry situation, as it has done in the past week.
From the Times:
“I don’t understand how guys like John Kerry and John Edwards, my two opponents here in Tennessee, can criticize the No Child Left Behind Act that President Bush originated when they themselves voted for it,” General Clark told supporters, according to the news agency.
“I don’t know how John Kerry and John Edwards can claim to defend civil liberties and criticize the Patriot Act,” General Clark added. “They voted for it. John Kerry and John Edwards are criticizing the war in Iraq even though they gave him the blank check and voted for it.”
…Speaking at a rally in Seattle, Dr. Dean, who has won no states so far despite initially being regarded by Democratic leaders as the early front-runner in the race, suggested that his effect on the party has gone beyond the numerical results. The Democratic party, he said, has coalesced around his call for change in Washington, D.C., and in the party itself.
“Change is the biggest winner in the Democratic party,” he said. “Even the other Democrats in the race, the very Democrats who wouldn’t stand up to the president last year, are beginning to adopt the message of change. Today when we say that we want to take our country back, I know that the Democratic party is uniting around this message.” He added: “Never in my lifetime have we faced as critical a struggle for the heart and soul of this country, and of this party.”
The highest court in Massachusetts declared in an opinion issued today that only full marriage rights for gay couples – not just civil unions would comply with the state’s constitution, clearing the way for same-sex marriages to begin taking place by mid-May. It would make Massachusetts the first state in the United States to uphold same-sex marriages.
The court’s ruling was issued in response to a state Senate question about whether civil unions of the kind permitted in Vermont would meet the requirements of a 4-3 decision by the Massachusetts court last November that gay couples had the right to marry.
…Asked if Vermont-style civil unions would be sufficient, the opinion stated: ‘The answer is `No.’
Looks like New Mexico – along with Delaware, Arizona, Missouri, and North Dakota – goes to Kerry, who right now on TV sounds like he’s leading a PBS pledge marathon. Oklahoma is still a dead heat – the funny thing being that whether it’s called for Edwards or Clark indicates no statistically meaningful difference in the voters’ will and bears no impact on the competition for delegates…
On Larry King, Edwards is highlighting trade as his major primary policy difference with Kerry, placing himself in the Fair Trade camp and Kerry as a free-trader. A lot has changed in the past few years in the Democratic party…
CNN is calling North Dakota for John Kerry with 50% of the vote.
Joe Lieberman: “The voters have spoken.”
Now we are six.
The Times is confirming Joe-cession.
Josh Eidelson 