The following message was received by a STARPAC supporter and posted with her permission...On Jan 7, 2016, at 12:34 PM, [name withheld]
0 Comments
Des Moines, Iowa -- STAR*PAC, Iowa’s Stop the Arms Race Political Action Committee, today announced its endorsement of Martin O’Malley for the Democratic Party nomination for President. STAR*PAC’s Central Committee voted unanimously to endorse Governor O’Malley for new foreign policy leadership.
“Martin O’Malley will bring the new leadership our country needs to wage peace in the world as well as here at home,” said STAR*PAC chairperson Tom Leffler. “We urge citizens to attend Democratic Party caucuses Feb. 1 and caucus for Martin O’Malley. “ Leffler said STAR*PAC selected Martin O’Malley for his effective record as Governor of Maryland, and for his advocacy of fresh thinking and a new approach on foreign policy. “O’Malley supports the means of waging peace that STAR*PAC stands for,” Leffler said. “Governor O’Malley knows the peril of beating the drums of war, and would adopt a more far-seeing foreign policy approach to peacefully elevate America’s strength at home and abroad.” ... [Click on button below to view/print the entire release.] Senator Rand Paul answered several peace related questions posed by us and others at a meet-up in Altoona, November 12. Click on each button to hear his responses.
The Martin O'Malley campaign has responded to our Key Questions with specific answers. Compare his answers to those of Bernie Sanders found elsewhere on this page. Martin O'Malley answered questions before a crowd today at his "Meet and Treat" event at Inspired Grounds Café in West Des Moines. Among them were four that addressed topics on our list of key questions. We captured his comments as voice recordings. What do you propose to address the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis? What are your views about military spending? What is your overall foreign policy framework to address Middle East conflicts? Can we overcome the hateful comments made about immigrants by some Republican candidates?
At a rally held at Drake University October 14, Rand Paul made a few comments and took two questions. In his initial comments, he spoke against military involvement in the Middle East asserting that the US has no direct strategic interest engaging in a conflict among various factions there. He also countered critics about whether he is an isolationist, saying he advocates active diplomacy with hostile nations; while his critics often oppose that approach. "Those who refuse to engage in diplomacy are the real isolationists."
One of the questions posed from the students pertained to how we can manage the influence of transnational corporations. Paul responded in terms of limiting influence of corporations. While he supports the United Citizens ruling, which pertains to election spending, he surmised that it would be constitutional to have a condition of any federal contract with a corporation that they would not be able to spend any money lobbying the federal government. As reported by the AFSC Governing Under the Influence project, Paul indicated he was unfamiliar with legislated mandates to detain undocumented immigrants including quotas for private detention facilities, nor with the proposed legislation to remove the quotas. Attached here is an edited interview prepared for broadcast on The Torch, FM Radio 98.3, Saturday, October 3, in host Sarah Beckman's 9:00 a.m. program.
The following recordings captured responses at the Latino Festival in Des Moines, September 27. Q - Would you support a reduction in military spending? Q - Would you work to overcome legislation that sets a 34,000 per day immigrant detention quota and pays corporations that operate private detention facilities, regardless of whether those beds are filled?
The following dialogue was part of a radio interview with Alan Comes, September 28, addressing the role of troops in the Middle East and a US role in addressing refugees.
WEBB: The mistake that I believe we made in Syria and some of these other places in the Arab Spring is to be drawing some of these red lines that were unenforceable in reality. COLMES: So when the President said there was going to be a red line, that was a mistake. Is there anything that we should be doing now? WEBB: I’ll tell you what we shouldn’t be doing is putting troops on the ground over there and I warned about it beforehand and I was saying Syria is going to be Lebanon on steroids. When I was a journalist in Beirut, you could see the divisions, the historic thousands of year old divisions in that part of the world. So we should be calling on, particularly, the Sunni nations in that region to step up and to do more, and also on the refugees situation in Syria, to do more. They’re not doing more, they’re simply trying to drop this on us and I think it’s appropriate for the President today to have said that he will work with the Russians in an attempt to stabilize the situation. ***** COLMES: Do you believe we should take more refugees in? They say 10,000, is what the White House is saying, should we take more? WEBB: I think the Saudis should take more. I think people in the region should step up to try to stabilize Syria. And we should be very careful about bringing a large number of refugees here. I say that as someone, my wife is an immigrant and a refugee from the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. We have a large problem in our country right now in terms of resolving the immigration issue. So for those who are truly political refugees in some way affiliated with what we’ve been doing, we should consider that. ***** Here's our message published 9/17. Click to read: Press Candidates on Issues of War, Peace
|