"we won't sit back and let some career politician/personal injury lawyer attack her patriotism."

"personal injury lawyer"? Now _that's_ an attack ad!

Farinata X,

"personal injury lawyer"? Now _that's_ an attack ad!

Except that Peter Roskam is in fact an attorney with the law firm Salvi, Roskam and Maher in Wheaton, Illinois, which acording to their own Yellow Pages display ad "Is concentrated only in personal injury," and goes on to list in bullet points: "auto accidents; slip and fall injuries; medical negligence; work place injuries; dog bite injuries; wrongful death; defective products; all other inuries."

Nice to see Tammy fighting back on this one. And that video is truly inspirational.

So what if he's a slickster PI lawyer, the fact is he is truly tasteless and will say anything to win.

Maybe I'm biased because I think Tammy doesn't get the netroots support she deserves, but this is something our community should be up in arms (up in legs?) about.

Let's show her some love. We need more members of Congress who will actually support our troops rather than leave them there until we "finish well."

Lets make it easy for readers to join in supporting Tammy. Remember, every single Democrat we can elect to Congress makes the day when Congress goes back to doing its job as an independent branch of the government that much closer.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Exactly! We must all support this fine prowar candidate! With the "Murtha Plan" in place, we can begin redistributing our troops around the globe and turn this nasty dirty icky groundwar into a nice clean airwar that we can all ignore! Just like Kosovo! Won't that be wonderful! And the Congress will be so independent that they'll grant military contracts to corporations that support democrats! YEAH! YIPPEE! VOTE FOR TAMMY!

Where do you get either pro-war, or pro air war?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Tammy Duckworth might want to reply to her opponent that "at least he has a foot to put into his mouth".

you do realize that in "cut and paste"-ing that verbatim from the roskam campaign email, that you lose all credibility, right?

This is a weak and feckless response...the campaign director should be fired, this is so wimpish...pardon me for suggesting that Ms. Duckworth and her aides should have foreseen this type of attack...after all we have Max Cleland's morphing into Bin Laden thanks to the redneck chicken hawks!

If she didn't foresee this, shame on her. If she did and all she can mount is an email to supporters, shame on her twice.

What I am suggesting is that she should have had a very strong counterattack ad "in the can" ready to run on the airwaves and in the newspapers...

Take a page out of Bubba's play-book and be ready and waiting for the inevitable!!

Ms. Duckworth has much more courage and moral authority than this weak response suggests...

I think what you meant to quote was Roskam's statement that

what the national Democrats are running on is a cut-and-run program.

Alas I must agree with Cyby9.

There's no substance to this response.

It doesn't say a thing about her position on Iraq. It just says she has made real sacrifices and her opponent hasn't, which is true but not responsive to the argument.

Say something about supporting a change of course that will allow us to win in Iraq and leave. Take up the banner of the Special Forces plan I read several weeks ago that calls for a halving of US troops to reduce anti-Americanism combined with more Special Forces troops or support a dramatic increase in troops a la the Powell Doctrine but with a deadline for success.

Jim Webb responds to these charges by arguing that we need to bring together all the regional players and get them to work with us to bring stability to the region because ultimately they're going to have to get involved anyway. His argument is actually more intelligent than that but you get the idea.

Y'know, I keep hearing about these programs to throw more (I'll use lower case for generality) special operations forces at the problem. There is a reason they are called special. Let me ignore the combat specialists for a minute, and talk about someone that can do civil affairs or psychological warfare.

The Defense Language Institute has a superlative reputation. It happened I was looking at their curriculum the other day, and, IIRC, the basic Arabic course takes 62 weeks. There are several more advanced than that. Let's say you take a college graduate in advertising or psychology, so they are prepared for the specific techniques of psychological warfare. They also need to have at least basic military training. You're easily talking about someone that takes six years from high school to be useful.

Army Special Forces prefer to recruit from people with sucessful experience in service, often recruiting from the Rangers, but just being a super-soldier isn't enough. Special Forces (who maintain a green beret is a hat, not a person) go through a very rough elimination course, as do SEALs and other units. Sometimes, no one in a class qualifies, although a fair number of well-motivated people try two or three times and get in.

General Special Forces training is close to a year, but that excludes specialty and language training. Medical specialist training is the longest at about a year. Others vary from three to six months. Add in a hard language like Arabic, and the need for experience, and again you aren't getting rapid expansion.

Rangers are technically part of Special Operations, but they are very tough, usually younger soldiers that jump out of airplanes and kick down doors -- one of their specialties is seizing airports in working order.

A very high priority, perhaps one for Democrats, is to get funding into high school for relevant language training. I was advised to take Latin and German, on the theory they would be important in medicine and chemistry. Useless. Spanish is needed, but we also need to start getting incentives for Arabic and Mandarin and Farsi and Swahili. Some high schools have them already, and I'd definitely not get rid of the Japanese classes. If we can start getting language and area studies into the secondary schools, we deal with one of the hardest problems of getting both special ops and civilian aid people.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I have to agree--what a crappy response.

This guy needs to be slammed, and those who support him needs to hear a slamming response. This wimpy response ("slick" and "cheap shot") isn't going to get any traction with his supporters and is merely another "playing to the refs" kind of politics that lost the election for them two years ago.

This guy is an ass. He should be treated like one. Take the gloves off and say:

"Peter Roskam is an ass. I'd respond to his military service if he ever had the balls to get some. For now, we'll just have to let the people of this district decide if his mocking of a legless soldier's service is the kind of representation they want."

Why don't you tell him? Roskam is an ass who has been forced to respond by hundreds if not thousands of people writing his website and phoning his office. He did so by trying to parse the mindless phrase again like the sleazy lawyer he is. Anybody who thinks his excuse for trotting out this stupid attack on all Democrats which includes his opponent, which btw has been his standard response all summer along with "stay the course", must think it's an important distinction that Bush never actually said Iraq was an "imminent" threat.

Roskam has no position on Iraq on his website. He talks about it as little as possible. Condi Rice said we have a "generational committment" to Iraq. His teenage kids will qualify to fight and possibly die in this war in a few years. You'd think he'd have something serious to say about the single most important issue of the day if he wants a seat in our People's House. By going after him we've put him on the defensive. All you armchair campaign managers and PR experts ought to quit criticizing Duckworth and her staff and email or phone Roskam with your witticisms. We can flush this guy out on an issue he'd rather not talk about. You can couch it in terms Duckworth can't in DuPage County Illinois, which the Repubs like to describe as the most Republican county in the nation. That's how we'll win. Sitting around nitpicking Democratic candidates is how we lose.

Insert snark here:

roskamforcongress.com

Insert money and time here:

DuckworthforCongress.com

If you were in highschool in Glen Ellyn or anywhere else in suburbia in the 1970s being known as gay wasn't something that was well accepted. What are you talking about?

You sound like the woman I met last week who had some article claiming Bush might declare martial law in 2008 to remain president. She thought we could beat Republicans this year using that.

Unless you have a current gay lover with video of
them in flagrant delecto on the steps of the DuPage County courthouse you're not going anywhere with this. The man has a wife and a bunch of kids he's using in his TV commercials.

C'mon, cut the PI lawyers a break. This is the exact same argument being used by the nutcase right-wingers in Alabama against democrats. The fact of the matter is that yes, some lawyers, like some people are bad-but most of them, even personal injury lawyers, are not. PI lawyers help a whole lot of people who have been hurt in ways not their fault who can't afford a 'respectable' high-price attorneys. So let's focus on that aspect- that he's just a nasty person, okay?
-a public service atty.