I wrote this two days ago, but wasn't able to post it until now. I am now back home in Colorado:

Afghanistan

We just landed in United Arab Emirates.  Sorry I've been slow to reply on my Iraq posts, but it was because I was in Afghanistan the last two and half days.  I wasn't allowed to announce it ahead of time but now that I am back on "friendly" soil I can share my experiences as part of a Congressional Delegation visit to Afghanistan.

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From an undisclosed location somewhere in the Middle East...

I am writing most of this entry from the backseat of a helicopter bound to Mosul from Baghdad. Wearing my flak jacket and helmet, grasping my laptop and typing, I see the Iraqi landscape beneath us, my earplugs protecting me from the roar of the blades and wind.

Scratch our destination.  Due to weather, we actually didn't make it to Mosul and had to land and spend the day at an Air Force Base in the middle of Iraq.  We are near where the Tigris and Euphrates split at Joint Base Balad, home of the 332nd, the descendents of the famed Tuskegee Airmen.

We spent the day learning about the airbase (which is a likely candidate to remain in operation after the "withdrawal" and visited the air command center, saw a Predator (unmanned drones), visited their hospital, and their chapel where their chaplain happens to be one of the few Rabbis in the Air Force.

We had lunch in the expansive mess hall and I sat at a table with servicemen from other parts of the country and listened to their experiences and opinions drinking purified water from the Tigris that they bottle on campus!

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Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) Middle East CODEL: Iraq, Part I
From an undisclosed location somewhere in the Middle East...

When I first visited Iraq in November of '07, I flew commercial to Jordan and the Baghdad, crammed into coach the whole way.

This time, on a Congressional CODEL, we flew business class from Dulles to Kuwait, where I sat next to a contractor from KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary accused of various human rights abuses and contracting abuses.

As we settled in, we started to chat and he asked me whether I was going to Kuwait for business or pleasure.  I responded business.  We are not supposed to tell anyone ahead of time about these trips, so when he asked what my business was I murmured "e-commerce" in response.

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"In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors."ABIGAIL ADAMS TO JOHN ADAMS, MARCH 31, 1776

One of the most important pieces of legislation we'll soon be acting on in Congress is a national economic recovery package. A large portion of the new federal spending--perhaps  as much as 20 percent--will be focused on infrastructure construction, including transportation and school projects, energy efficiency improvements, and green economy investments such as smart grid expansions.

While President-Elect Obama is to be applauded for proposing a recovery plan that focuses on a wide number of areas, including education and healthcare,  the proposed infrastructure spending in the plan overwhelmingly benefits men and won't be of much help to unemployed women. In 2007, only 9.4 percent of the 11.9 million workers in the construction industry were female and in major infrastructure occupations with an employment base of 100,000 jobs, women held only about 3.9 percent of jobs. Without efforts to increase workforce diversity, this could lead to a massive shift of hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from women to men.

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With Prop 8 passing in California and various other civil rights-restricting ballot initiatives passing elsewhere, direct democracy has been receiving a strong rejection by the gay community nationwide this year.  But someone who could potentially be one of their greatest allies in all of politics not only accepts direct democracy, but is urging its expansion to the rest of the nation (currently, some form of direct democracy, whether it is initiative and referenda or something similar, exists in about half of the states in the US).

The man I am talking about is Jared Polis, the Democratic Congressman-elect from Boulder, Colorado.  Voted into office this November 4th, he is the first openly homosexual man non-incumbent elected to Congress.  And yet he still believes that expanding ballot initiatives to the national level would make American government better.

This would be more than just a website's name - it would be real direct democracy in the United States.

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