Bill Richardson

Dispatch NYC 9:00P EST

The vaunted February 5th Primary is upon us! I’ve gotten to be in NYC to cast my vote in person and a good thing because I’m still undecided. Problem is the Democratic Congress has been so ineffective it becomes a tossup as to voting for either candidate. Hope and Change is a slogan leftover from the November 06 campaign. It’s looking mighty unappetizing to me!

I sat down and made a short list of each candidate strengths and weaknesses. As you can see it didn’t help much.

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is horrifying in terms of its violence against the people of Pakistan - and terrifying in terms of the possibility of Pakistan spinning into chaos with loose nukes and murderous fundamentalists.

Of course I can't add any insights into the who and why and the consequences for Pakistan and the world - nor can many Americans.

But let me add my $.02 on one topic in the news - which U.S. Presidential candidates will benefit the most.

Without a doubt, those candidates are Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, and Ron Paul.

Why? Because they are the three candidates who want to get out of Iraq quickly and completely, and let the Iraqis solve their own problems, rather than continue the bloody, expensive, and self-defeating U.S. occupation.

Among the Democratic Presidential candidates, Richardson, Kucinich and Gravel are the only candidates who want to remove all of our troops.

Interestingly, Richardson just moved ahead of John Edwards to third place in New Hampshire, and he's gaining on Barack Obama towards third place in Iowa.

Congratulations to OpenLeft's Chris Bowers and MSNBC's

By David Swanson

Two presidential candidates, Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel, spoke Tuesday morning at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama and John Edwards were expected later in the day, and Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich on Wednesday.

Richardson got loud applause. He focused on climate change, Kyoto treaty, a plan to reduce pollution by 20%, lower demand for oil by 50%, and raise fuel efficiency standards to 50 mpg, and require that 50% of our electricity come from renewable sources, and reduce greenhouse admissions by 80 percent. The crowd loved it. "If we can wage wars over weapons of mass destruction, we can find the will to stop the mass destruction of our planet."

After listening to the questions asked by Brian Williams in South Carolina at the first debate of announced Democratic presidential contenders, one has to wonder how much worse the moderation would have been if it had been on the Fox Network.

There was hardly an inane smear, knock, superficial or unfair attack made against any of these candidates that Williams did not go OUT of his way to highlight or demand that they defend themselves against. We had the price of haircuts, misquotes about positions on Palestine, ties to Walmart, not to mention an entire segment on Giuliani's despicable "die under Democrats" rhetoric from yesterday, instantly elevated to the status of accepted mainstream gospel and framed as such. If most of the questions had been prefaced with the words "Karl Rove says" their slant could not have been more obvious. Even the questions selected from viewer emails seemed to be selected with that criteria in mind.