''Shout It Out, Howard, We're Listening''

"Howard Dean's election as Democratic National Committee chairman was a shot across the bow of Washington's power clique, so it does not surprise us at the state-party level in Oregon that he is making our kin inside the Beltway nervous. In fact, it delights us.
Dean speaks loudly about things our folks in Washington tip-toe to avoid. He condemns the Iraq war as misguided. He wonders why we don't worry more about nuclear weapons in North Korea. Republicans preach morality, he says, but ignore poverty in the United States. Where is the respect for privacy when Republicans want to legislate end-of-life decisions for a brain-dead woman? And Dean, the white Christian, acerbically grumbles that our nation is not stronger if we are viewed only as Caucasian mono-religious.
Are those comments misguided, or are they timely? The way we see it from this end of the country, the former presidential candidate is catching the wave."-from the op-ed in Sunday's LA Times by the chair of the Oregon Democratic party, Jim Edmunson.