State Central Committee

Bernard Schoenburg: Lack of meetings concerns some Democrats

THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER
Posted Dec 06, 2009 @ 12:04 AM

The pay’s not great, but the meeting schedule is light. Still, seats on the Democratic State Central Committee in each of the three congressional districts that include Springfield are being contested in the Feb. 2 Democratic primary.
Democrats voting in the primary elect one man and one woman from each of the state’s 19 congressional districts to be on the committee, which is the official governing body of the Democratic Party. There is no pay.
And for more than a year, there has been no meeting. The party chairman is House Speaker MICHAEL MADIGAN, D-Chicago. As his spokesman STEVE BROWN recalls, the last formal meeting was before the 2008 Democratic National Convention, when the party had to name “superdelegates” to that conclave.
The lack of formal meetings bothers some.

Full Article.........http://www.sj-r.com/schoenburg/x1945280830/Lack-of-meetings-concerns-some-Dems

Obama on troop surge: 'We must keep the pressure on al-Qaida'

by Mark Silva and updated again at 9:05 pm EST
President Barack Obama, swiftly deploying an added 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan, told a national television audience tonight that Americans "have no interest in fighting an endless war'' and promised to begin withdrawing forces from the embattled nation in July 2011.
The surge of forces which Obama has ordered will raise the U.S. commitment to 98,000 troops by next summer, at an estimated added cost of about $30 billion a year. The pace of the subsequent draw-down, however, remains uncertain - depending on "conditions on the ground.''
Both the initial military boost and announced start of a planned withdrawal are intended to weaken and ultimately defeat the Taliban and to train Afghan security forces, administration officials say.
Their goal, the president said, is "to seize the initiative,'' finally, in a war that started on Sept. 11, 2001, and is not going well after eight years, build Afghanistan's capacity to secure itself and then allow for "a responsible transition of our forces out of Afghanistan.''

Full Article........http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2009/12/obama_afghan_plan_transfers_co.html