Transcript of Deans speech in Las Vegas

[Egnever]

For what it is worth. This is a full transcript of the fundraiser I went to and reported on here at DU. My question on BBV is not included as I wasnt called on directly during the question and answer session. The question on NCLB is from my wife though.

Pick it apart or soak it in I leave it to you. It was a great speach to hear in person and I post it here mostly so you can get a full quote without the parsing done by the press.

Transcript from Howard Dean¹s speech
Las Vegas, NV
Oct. 28, 2003

I wanted to first thank Mel, Rand and all of you who have made this an incredible evening. I want to know if the architect of this building is here. If he would raise his hand and we could thank him too. It¹s pretty terrific. You don¹t often get to go to events and thank the architect for a spectacular house, I thought I¹d take that opportunity.

We¹re going to have a little fun at the president¹s expense here tonight, but we are also going to say what we would do instead because you can¹t beat anybody, not even this president, without saying what you would do that¹s different and that¹s better. We¹re going to talk about some things like jobs, health insurance, things like foreign policy. And we¹ll talk about some Nevada specific things. I¹ll try not to talk too long so I could take some questions. I have about 10 things I usually say in my speech, and we usually get to about six of them because otherwise I¹d talk too long. But we¹re going to start where we usually end up, and that¹s how we¹re going to beat George Bush.

Mel said it exactly right. What we are doing in this campaign is this: George Bush gave $3 trillion of our tax payers money away ‹ $600 billion in interest costs to borrow the money, and $2.4 trillion in tax cuts. One percent of the country got $26,000 and the other 60 percent got $304. So the president is getting all of his money in $2,000 checks from that 1 percent who got $26,000 tax cuts. We¹re going to get our money in $75 increments from the 60 percent who got the $304 and we¹re going to win because of that.

BALANCING THE BUDGET
If we¹re going to have jobs in this country again, we have to balance the budget. Now I know there are some Republicans and Independents here, and I thank you for coming out. I just discovered you can go to caucus. You got to change that registration on that day, but you can do it, and we want you to do it. So anything mean I say about Republicans only applies to those right-wing wackos in the White House. It doesn¹t apply to God fearing Republicans like me and almost every other American who thinks we ought to balance the budget. I think we should. No American president has balanced the budget in 34 years. You cannot trust your hard earned taxpayer dollars to the Republicans because they cannot handle money.

Here¹s why we have to balance the budget. First of all, people don¹t invest in countries that run half-trillion-dollar deficits year after year. Secondly, if you want social justice, you have to balance the budget. Let me tell you why. I served as governor long enough, almost 12 years, so that I served through both Bush recessions, not just one of them, and it was really tough. We had to save, and do some tough things. But when the good times came, we never allowed the legislature to increase spending by more than five and a half percent per year. We never gave big tax cuts. We did give some. We put a lot of money aside and paid off a quarter of the state¹s debt. So when the bad times came again, we did not cut higher education; we did not cut K-12; we didn¹t cut health care for kids; we did not cut help for the cities and the towns and the counties; and we still balanced the budget. The very time in which the revenues for the state government and the federal government are turning down is exactly the time when people who depend on government the most, need the most help, and we¹re not just talking about poor people. Tell me what your kids¹ college tuition has done in the last two and a half years. Tell me what¹s happened to your property taxes in the last two and a half years. Tell me what¹s happened to sales taxes or other revenues the last two and a half years. The middle class in this country did not get a tax cut. They got $304, which was eaten out by increased money because the president didn¹t fund special education, increased property taxes because the president didn¹t give the local folks enough money for police and fire and first response through homeland security. There was no middle class tax cut, and if we¹re going to get jobs back in this country again, we¹re going to have to get back every dime of the president¹s tax cuts because they have put us in a $500-billion hole and no country can survive that year and after year after year. If you want to have people invest in this country with confidence, you have to balance the budget, and $3 trillion given away to Ken Lay and the boys who ran Enron is not the way to do that.

CREATING JOBS
Here¹s what I want to do to create jobs. I do want to balance the budget because that¹s important. Secondly, instead of giving tax breaks to the biggest corporations in America that then move their headquarters to Bermuda and their jobs to China, how about we do something for small businesses? Small businesses create seven out of 10 jobs in this country. They don¹t pay quite as well as big businesses do, but they do not move their jobs out of their community. Secondly, how about instead of taking $3 trillion of our tax dollars and giving it to Ken Lay and the boys who ran Enron, suppose that we invest it in our infrastructure, in roads, in mass transit, in schools, and renewable energy, and broadband telecommunications so we can have information-based jobs everywhere in America. We have not had a major infrastructure invested in this country since the interstates were built, and we need one now because we can create jobs now, and building that and building a platform upon which to build a new American economy.

HEALTH CARE
Next, this is the fastest growing state in America. We got a lot of job growth here, some, maybe not so much lately. But you also have a lot of service jobs that don¹t have benefits. Now let me tell you about my state, my little rural state up in northeastern America. Every child under 18 years old has health insurance in my state ‹ 99 percent. Everybody under 150 percent of the poverty, all are working poor people have health insurance. One-third of all our seniors have prescription benefits, which we paid for because we got tired of waiting for Congress year after year after year not to deliver. If we can do that in a small rural state, 26th in income then balance the budget, surely the most powerful and wealthy society on the face of the earth can join the British, and the French, and the Germans, and the Japanese, and the Irish, and the Italians, and the Israelis, and the Canadians, and the Dutch, and the Norwegian. Everybody in the industrialized world has health insurance for all their people except for us and we oughta have it too. Unless anybody thinks this is a liberal plot concocted in crazy Vermont, Harry Truman put this in the 1948 Democratic Party platform. Fifty-eight years later it is time to deliver. The price tag is less than a third of the president¹s tax cut, the number unfortunately will sound familiar to all of you: $87 billion a year for health insurance for every single American.

FOREIGN POLICY
Speaking of $87 billion, let¹s talk about foreign policy for a moment. Most of you know that I did not agree with General Clark, and Senator Kerry, and Representative Gephardt, and Senator Lieberman, and Senator Edwards. I did not think it was a good idea to go to war in Iraq. And let me tell you why. I supported the first Gulf War because one of our allies had been overrun and I thought we had a responsibility to defend them. I supported the Afghanistan war because 3,000 Americans were murdered on our soil, and I thought we had an obligation and a duty to defend the United States of America. But this time the president told us that Iraq was buying uranium from Africa. Two months ago, he admitted that wasn¹t so. Then the president let us believe Al Qaeda and Saddam were just like that, and Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Two weeks ago, the president admitted there was no evidence of that. The vice president told us, still insists to this day, that Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons. There was a report this week in the paper that showed there was no evidence for that. The secretary of defense said he knew just where the weapons of mass destruction were, right around Tikrit and Baghdad, and there was no evidence for that. I think the job of the commander-in-chief of the United States military is to send American troops anywhere in the world to defend the United States of America. But as commander-in-chief of the United States military, I don¹t think it¹s my job ever to send American sons, and daughters, and brothers, and sisters, and grandchildren to a foreign country to fight without first telling the truth to the American people about why they are going.

DEFENSE
I do no think this president knows very much about defense, and we are in a more dangerous position today than we were when he took office, and let me tell you why. He had $3 trillion of our money to give to Ken Lay and the boys over at Enron, but he didn¹t have enough money to inspect the cargo containers coming into this country every single day. Two months ago, ABC News smuggled uranium from Jakarta, Indonesia to Los Angeles, California to see if it could be done. And they did it, and we didn¹t find it. He had $3 trillion of our dollars to give away to Ken Lay and the boys at Enron, but he didn¹t have enough money to buy the enriched uranium stocks left over from the former Soviet Union weapons stockpile, which we were entitled to buy under Cooperative Reduction Agreements. And if that gets in terrorist hands, we have a major national security emergency on our hands. The president is about to let North Korea become a nuclear power because he doesn¹t like the president of North Korea, so we can¹t have bilateral negotiations to get them to give up their nuclear weapons. Well, I don¹t think the president of North Korea is such a fine fellow either, but I do not believe the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth oughta be based on the petulance of the chief executive of that country.

Here¹s what the president really doesn¹t understand about defense. He sent our folks over to Iraq. When they got over there, he told them he was going to double their tour of duty and they were going to be there for a year. And one Friday night about a month ago when he thought the press wasn¹t watching, he tried to cut their combat pay. Last January, he went to a veterans administration hospital and said veterans deserve the best kind of care that money could buy, a day before he cut 164,000 veterans off their health care benefits. Mr. President, one thing you¹re going to learn about defense is it is only as good as the people who we have in Iraq or here, and if you want a good defense, you will treat our veterans and servicemen with respect and dignity. Let me tell you what the president really doesn¹t understand about defense. Over a decade ago, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed without America firing a shot. There were some reasons internally in the Soviet Union that that happened, but there were two reasons we had a lot to do with it. One, we had a strong military, and I think that¹s important. But the other is the majority of people behind the Iron Curtain wanted to be like America and wanted to be like Americans. Well after two and a half years under the presidency of George W. Bush, you would be hard pressed to find the majority in too many countries around the world who wanted to be like us anymore. What this president doesn¹t understand about defense is that defense is not just about having a strong military, it is also about having high moral purpose and a set of ideals which the rest of the country admires and respects. And that¹s important to defend America too, and I promise you that if you make me the chief executive of this country, I will restore the honor and the dignity and the respect this country deserves around the rest of this world by having a foreign policy based on cooperation, not confrontation.

PRISONS
I want to talk about prisons. We have the highest prison population in the free world in this country. Every state has it. Fact is that prisons are a necessary part of American life. You can¹t have violent people running around in the streets. The prisons are also the most expensive and the least effective social services in this country. And any competent qualified kindergarten teacher could tell you who the five kids are in his or her class who are most likely to end up in prison 15 to 20 years from now. So my question is if we have some idea who is going to use the most expensive and the least effective social service intervention that we have 15 to 20 years ahead of time, why is it that we are not investing in small children and their families right now? So we do. My state, we visit every mother in the hospital, whether she is the wealthiest or the poorest woman in our state. We ask them if they¹d like a home visit. Ninety-one percent say yes. Most of those family don¹t need help. They¹re happy to see a friendly face in the community. But the ones who do need help get child care, health care, job training skills, parenting skills and parenting classes, and programs to keep the dads interested in the kids in the case of the single mom. Our child abuse rate is down 43 percent in 10 years and child sexual abuse is down 70 percent, and those kids have a better chance of going to college than they do of going to prison. And there is not one state in this country ‹ I know, oh that little white state up in the northeastern part of America, you can do all that stuff there. There¹s a program just like this called MarVista in Central Los Angeles in the 96 percent Latino neighborhood. This works any place where parents care about kids, and you got leadership in the community. It has nothing to do with ethnicity or poverty. It has to do with parents, and supporting parents who want to be good parents.

YUCCA MOUNTAIN
Now, you¹re going to ask me about Yucca Mountain so I¹m going to answer it. In 1996, I wrote a letter to my senators saying they oughta vote for Yucca Mountain because we got a nuclear power plant and I wanted to get the stuff out of my state. Having run for president, I have seen the light. I¹m not going to promise you I¹m going to be against Yucca Mountain, but if I become president, here¹s what I¹m going to do. We¹re going to have a complete safety review. We¹re going to stop construction and have a complete safety review. I am not persuaded by the transportation argument, although I am persuaded by the safety argument. I worry deeply about corrosive nuclear waste rotting through casks and having the stuff buried all that far underground. So we are going to revisit this stuff, and have some scientists who are not paid in the nuclear power industry and try and figure out what exactly we are going to do.

BUSH
Let me close by saying this. The biggest thing we have lost in the last two and a half years is not 3 million jobs that have gone someplace else. And the biggest thing we¹ve lost is not our respect around the world. It¹s our sense of community. Our sense that we are all in this together. The president used the word ³quota² five or six times during the evening news talking about the University of Michigan¹s affirmative action program. First of all, he was wrong, and the most conservative Supreme Court since the Dread Scott decision didn¹t even agree with him on that. Secondly, every pollster and politician in America knows that the word ³quota² is a race loaded word, which is deliberately designed to appeal to people¹s fears that they are going to lose their jobs or a position at a university to a member of the minority community. In other words, the president played the race card, and that alone entitles him to a one-way bus ticket back to Crawford, Texas. I am tired of being divided by race in this country. I am tired of being divided by gender when the president thinks he knows better than an American woman what kind of reproductive health care she wants to have. I am tired of being divided by sexual orientation when the president says what a fine, inclusive senator Rick Santorum is or Anthony Scalia oughta be the next chief justice for the United States. I want a president who¹s going to appeal to the very best in us, and stop appealing to the very worst in us. When I was 21 years old, it was the end of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King had been killed, and Bobby Kennedy had been killed, and this country had suffered greatly. But it was also a time of great hope. A time when we felt we were all in it together, everyone of us. If one person was left behind, the country couldn¹t be as great as it could be or as it should be. We had Medicare, we had the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the first African-American justice in the Untied States Supreme Court. We felt that we were making progress, that we were moving forward. That¹s what I want back. I want back the notion that John Ashcroft and Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Falwell do not own the American flag. That flag belongs every single one of us. And we are going to reach out, and the way we are going to beat George Bush is not beat Bush light. It is to give the 50 percent of Americans who quit voting because they can¹t tell the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party anymore a reason to vote again. And when they come and vote, when they come and vote, we are going to have 3 or 4 million new people at the polls and we are going to have more votes than George W. Bush. And not only that, the Democratic senator and the Democratic congressman and the Democratic county commissioner, they are going to have more votes than the Republicans because they aren¹t going to vote on any Republicans right on down the line, especially in the state of Nevada. This time when we have more votes than George Bush does, the president is going back to Crawford, and the person with the most votes is going to the White House.

Let me close by saying this. We are going to have a country where we have equal rights under the law for every single American. I don¹t mean your friends, I don¹t mean your neighbors, I don¹t mean the people you play golf with. I mean every single American is going to have equals rights under the law. We talked about the Civil Union Bill when I was at Stonewall. I signed that bill because I knew if I didn¹t that I had wasted my entire career in public service because once in a generation a bill comes along where there is no compromise. Ninety-nine percent of what we do in politics is resource allocation. We argue about how much to spend on schools, or can we spend some more on roads, or should we cut taxes, or spend more money. We could always find a compromise when there¹s a dollar amount. How do you tell somebody, ³I¹m sorry, you can¹t have your rights for another year because I¹ve got an election, and I¹m really worried that if I gave you rights and people got upset?² One of my idols is Harry Truman. Harry Truman didn¹t give a damn about the polls. He did what he thought was right. The two things he did that I admire is one, he recalled Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he wouldn¹t obey orders even though MacArthur was one of the most popular military people in history. And, in 1948 he figured that African Americans who served their country abroad oughta have exactly the same rights they had when they got home and he integrated the armed forces. And he had the courage to do that and it wasn¹t popular to do that in the north or in the south. He didn¹t look at any polls. He did what he felt was right, and he beat the hell out of Tom Dewey and sent him back to New York, and that¹s what we are going to do to George Bush. He¹s going back to Texas.

Let me close by saying that I always say about this campaign we raised three times as much money as every other Democrat in the race last time, although we didn¹t raise as much as George Bush, and we need your help for that. The way we did it is what¹s important ‹ 200,000 people giving us an average of $75. So that¹s the way you beat George Bush. He can get all those checks from that 1 percent, and I¹ll work with that 60 percent because we¹re going to take this country back. The biggest lie people like me tell people like you at election time is if you vote for me, I¹m going to fix all your problems. The truth is this. Abraham Lincoln said that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth. This president has forgotten ordinary Americans and you have the power to take this party back and make it stand for something again. You have the power to take this country back and include all of us again, and we have the power to take the White House back in 2004 and that is exactly what we are all going to do. Thank you.

AUDIENCE QUESTIONS
(I¹m a teacher in the Clark County School District and my biggest concern is education. Are you for repealing No Child Left Behind, or are you just for fixing it?)
No, I don¹t want to fix it just by funding it because it¹s a disaster. There¹s one piece of No Child Left Behind that I like and that¹s something called Disaggregation of Scores, which means that you can¹t improve the scores in your district without improving every kid¹s scores, not just the white kids. You got to do the minority kids too. That¹s good, the rest of it is awful. It makes teachers¹ lives miserable. Basically it has the federal government telling you how you are going to run your school system and there¹s no money. What we need to do in school is let you all decide what kind of testing you want to have. We want to have accountability, and fully fund special education because if we did that, you¹d have adequate money to run the school systems, and it wouldn¹t be run by Washington.

(Who¹s your first, second and third choice as a running mate?)
I think there are a lot of good people who we could run. It certainly is going to be someone with military or defense foreign policy background. There¹s no question about that.
(That¹s all I needed to hear.)
Though, I¹m not sure who it¹s going to be.

(Do you support funding companies for renewable energy?)
Well, we¹re going to get rid of the funding for nuclear energy industry. We need to start funding renewables. Global warming is a critical issue. We are going to do what we used to do in renewables. The Dutch get 18 percent of all their electricity from wind. We get less than half a percent. We need to do that. Here, solar obviously makes sense. We need to do two things. We need to get tax credits for solar and wind, and allow people to hook them up in their own houses. I don¹t know if you have this in Nevada, but we have it in Vermont, and it works really well ‹ net metering. Net metering means that if you buy a solar panel and you are not using the electricity it is making, you¹re selling it back to the power company at exactly what you paid for it. These things are essential to do a lot of things. One of the things that we have to do here, and I don¹t think people understand this, is that renewable energy is not just a matter of reducing global warming. It¹s a matter of creating jobs. It¹s also a matter of defense. Our oil money goes to the Middle East, where it is used to teach small children to hate Americans. I don¹t think that¹s standing up for America, and this president seems to be afraid to do that. This president¹s idea of renewable energy is drilling in ANWAR, and I don¹t think that¹s a very good policy. We oughta use renewables. And it¹s not just wind and solar, it¹s things like ethanol. If you put 10 percent ethanol is everybody¹s gas tank in this country, you would reduce the total world oil consumption by 2 percent. That¹s a pretty big number, and we need to do these things.

(Gun control)
My position is this. I come from a small rural state. We have no gun control of any kind other than the federal law. I¹ve been endorsed eight times by the National Rifle Association. That¹s the good news if you are a gun guy, and bad news if you are not a gun guy. Let me tell you my position. I support the assault weapons ban. I think it ought to be renewed. I support the Brady Bill because I don¹t know any responsible hunters who think we oughta have guns in the hands of children. And I support closing the gun show loophole so we can have background checks on people who buy guns. However, above and beyond that, I think you oughta have whatever gun control you want in Nevada. Above that, if you want some, don¹t give it to me in Vermont. We had five homicides one year for the whole year in Vermont. I mean there are some states that needs more gun control, and you can have it. They love gun control in California. Let them have as much as they want, but don¹t have a big national law because what makes sense in big urban states doesn¹t make sense in tiny little rural states like mine. So that¹s my attitude towards gun control. Do the stuff that makes sense. Enforce the federal laws vigorously, and let states make as much additional laws as they want to, but don¹t force small states to do it.

(Do you intend to bring us back into compliance with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty?)
Yes. And I do not intend to have tactical nuclear battlefield weapons. For us to be running around talking about nuclear nonproliferation in North Korea and Iran, and then develop tactical nuclear battlefield weapons is just completely consistent with everything the Bush Administration does.

(What about Don¹t Ask, Don¹t Tell?)
Don¹t Ask, Don¹t Tell we¹re going to get rid of. Let me tell you a story about this. This is really serious. Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 of our people. One of the problems is we didn¹t have enough Arabic translators in our armed services to be able to decode the messages we were getting in Arabic. The president¹s people fired six translators because they were gay. I think Don¹t Ask, Don¹t Tell endangers national security. Let me tell you one more thing about this. When you run for president, you meet extraordinary and exceptional people, and I want to tell you a story about one I met. There¹s no such thing as a boring American. I got off the stage in Washington after I gave some speech about a year ago, and I don¹t remember what the speech was about, but I got off the stage and this guy came up to me and said, ³Governor, I want to thank you for this civil unions bill.² This guy is about 80. So I sort of shrug my shoulders. I was sort of surprised. He said, ³Well thank you very much I appreciate that.² I asked, ³Do you have a son who¹s gay or a daughter who¹s a lesbian?² He said, ³No, governor. I¹m 80 years old. I¹m a veteran, and I fought on the beach at Normandy and a lot of my friends died on D-Day and I¹m gay.² Now there¹s a guy that by virtue of his age, and his service to the military almost certainly lived a majority of his life in the closet. There¹s a guy who what all those guys in the White House who never served one day in their life overseas always talk about, he was willing to give his life for the United States of America. His friends did give their lives for the freedom of not only that war in the United States of America, but the entire Western world. That¹s a guy who deserves exactly the same rights as I have when he comes back to the United States of America just like Harry Truman did in 1948.

(How do you feel about illegal immigration?)
How do I feel about illegal immigration? Illegal immigration is illegal. There are three problems: the short-term problem, the medium problem, the long-term problem. The long-term problem is a perfectly obvious fix. When we had globalization at WTO and NAFTA, we globalized the rules for multi-national corporations so that they could make a lot of money. But we didn¹t globalize worker safety rules, and organizing rules, and environmental rules. We¹re not going to get rid of globalization, but if you had the same environmental and labor standards and human rights standards in the countries we trade with, including Mexico, then you would elevate the status of workers in Mexico so they wouldn¹t be making $2 a day, or $5 a day, or $10 a day. What they would be able to do is organize, just like in this country and build a middle class. If you do that, that¹s the long run solution to not only illegal immigration, but to the drain of jobs south of the border. Decent working conditions for workers all over the world are now the new challenge of globalization, and we have to do that in order to fix our problem. In the short term, we¹ve got to stop people from dying in this desert. There¹s nothing humanitarian that we do that encourages illegal immigration to avoid us having water stations. I believe that if you¹ve been in this country for a significant period time, and you¹ve worked hard, and paid your taxes, and you don¹t have a jail record, and we don¹t have a program that allows you to have a fast track to citizenship. And I think if you served in the armed forces of the United States, that way to become a citizen is not to get killed in Iraq, it ought to be a fast track there as well.

(We know pre-emptive strikes are not the way to protect our borders. What would you do to make the American people feel safe from a threat like 9/11?)
The way the president governs is essentially by fear. Yellow, orange, orange, yellow: without any reason for it. So of course we don¹t feel safe. What I discovered is that if people come to you with a pretty tough problem, you tell them what it is then you put a plan in place and tell them exactly what it is you are going to do, and that the outcome will probably be pretty decent if you put the plan in place and everybody does what they are supposed to do. I think a government based on the idea of hope will always be a government better than a government based on the idea of fear. And I think a campaign based on the idea of hope will beat a campaign based on fear, and that¹s why I think the president is going back to Texas after this term. Now, specifically what would we do? We need the money that¹s in the tax cuts to fund homeland security, inspection of containers, purchase the rich uranium stocks. I believe the proper way to deal with Iraq is we can¹t leave Iraq and just pull out because if you do, Al Qaeda will be there. There was no Al Qaeda to speak of in Iraq before we went there, but they¹re there now. And you can¹t just pull out and leave a fundamentalist regime or Al Qeada, so the thing to do is remember that George Bush¹s father, who is a great deal more statesmanlike than his son, had over a 100,000 foreign troops in Iraq, many of them who were Arabic speaking or Muslim troops. We need those folks in Iraq now so we can bring home our national guard and our reserves and our one of our divisions. We need to internationalize the reconstruction of Iraq, and not have it be an American occupation. If we do that, then we¹ll then have sufficient personnel at home to take care of the homeland security needs. We also need to beef up our intelligence capacities. If you ask me if I want to cut the budget of the pentagon and I say no, and they are always surprised. Because I¹m not going to build tactical battlefield nuclear weapons, and I¹m not going to build most of the star wars, or whatever they call ‹ the intercept session stuff. It doesn¹t work, and I don¹t believe putting money into something that is tested, and fails the tests 60 percent of the time. But we need that money for human intelligence for intelligence technology, to raise the pay of service people, 20 percent of whom are eligible for food stamps in this country. And we can do that and be safe at home if you have a reasonable plan and you tell the truth to the American people about exactly what it is we are doing, and stop this silly red, orange, orange, red without telling people what it is they need to do about it.

(Do you have a timeframe, like Kennedy had with putting a man on the moon, on ending our reliance upon foreign oil?)
The answer is yes, and that¹s what we are going to do. I believe that by 2020 we can have 20 percent of all our energy pure renewables. That doesn¹t include things like ethanol, it does include bio-desiel, it does include wind, it does include solar. I think we can do that, and we oughta do that, and if we are able to do that, that will almost eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. It¹s not just foreign oil, though. We got to do conservation as well. In our state, we saved 2 percent of our entire electric load simply by having hired a group of people called the Energy Efficiency Utility and their job was just to go into farms and factories and businesses and show them how to save electricity. We¹ll have 10 percent of our load saved by the end of this decade. We can do these things, and this is not rocket science. Ford Motor Company is coming out with this SUV that gets 37 miles to the gallon next year with a hybrid engine. We have this stuff now, we should use it now, and we will do that.

(Question on gay rights in school setting)
We will enforce the civil rights in schools like that. That kind of behavior is mostly ignorance and fear. Some of it is bigotry, but a lot of it¹s ignorance. One of the things that this next generation is pretty good about is there¹s a lot less bigotry in general in the new generation. I¹m not saying there isn¹t any, but there¹s a lot less than there was when we were growing up. A lot of it is the president of the United States. I went to a Stonewall Democrats meeting nationally in Washington not too long ago and there were four or five Democratic presidential candidates there. One of them was sort of a good soldier and some went through gagging out towards gays and lesbians. One of them gave an entire speech to the Stonewall Democrats ‹ I won¹t say who he is, but he¹s tall and he¹s got a lot of hair ‹ without once using the word gay or lesbian in his speech, which I suspected he was only afraid somebody was going to make an ad in the Republican National Committee and use it. Now it seems to me that the president of the United States needs to talk about things because if the president doesn¹t talk about these problems, whether it¹s sexual orientation, whether it¹s race, or whether it¹s the word condoms. One of my big supporters is Joycelyn Elders. She knows what she is talking about. I think, you know this president says he¹s going to do all these things for AIDS, and you¹re not allowed to use the word ³condoms² on the CDC web site? What he really needs is a surgeon general who can explain the birds and the bees. We¹re not going to stop HIV and AIDS from spreading unless you talk about condoms. So I used to say that I was going to be the first president comfortable talking about sex, but in recent history I think that may not be quite true. The truth is that the law has a remedy for fixing the problem you just talked about, but the bigger remedy is the talk. The willingness of the president of the United States needs to step in a case like that and say this is wrong. When General Boykin said last week that Islam is a horrible religion, or whatever he said, I don¹t think that should have been left to the defense department¹s spokesman to say something about that. I think the president should have said ³General Boykin misspoke. He doesn¹t represent my policies and he¹s going to have another job somewhere else in the pentagon.² I also think the same is true about anti-Semitism. When it was said that Jews owned everything and everybody else was sent to fight, the president of the United States should have said, ³I¹m terribly sorry you feel that way. I don¹t think we¹ll have a meeting this week as we were supposed to.² Wherever racism or bigotry or homophobia or whatever it is rears its head, if you care about justice, you have to speak out. You have to speak out. It doesn¹t do you any good to keep quiet and hope it¹s going to go away. You have to speak out.

(Question from a serviceman)
When I was probably your age or a little bit younger, we had a Vietnam War. When people came home from Vietnam, they weren¹t treated very well. One of the things we have to be constantly reminding ourselves of, we think the president¹s policy is wrong. We don¹t think it is unpatriotic to criticize the president of the United State for engaging in this policy. But we support people like you because you represent the United States of America, and we are very proud of you, and I thank you very much. If I get to be president, you¹re going to be home in one piece properly protected.

Let me thank all of you tonight. I really appreciate it. Thank you all very, very much. Remember this is not about Howard Dean going to the White House. This is about us going to the White House because you have the power. Please use it. Please use it on February 14th at the caucuses all over this state. We need to win in Nevada, which means people dragging their sorry you-know-whats out of bed, and go into the caucus that night and sitting there until we can get those votes in. This is all about organization. Nevada is a state that¹s all alone, I think. I don¹t think there¹s another state that has a caucus on the 14th. This is going to be a big deal for whoever wins, but we really want to win here. Thank you very much!

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1. Thanks for posting this Egnever!

I know you had a Grreat time! I'm so excited about Dean and so was a customer of mine today at our Co-op! He is a political science major at the University of Buffalo and Dean is his candidate, too! :kick: