I love John Kerry - I just wanted to say that.

[jillan]

Anybody who heard him on the Senate floor today will know what I am talking about.
He gave the best dam speech of anyone.
Talk about being on FIRE!
(hopefully there will be a link on youtube or cspan soon)


And - as the new Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - he is trying a round table approach to hearings, rather than the typical style of Senators on one side, people testifying on another.
How cool is that?


Plus, I love it when he says "idea-ers".

[bdamomma]

1. I missed him

:-(

[jillan]

2. We'll have to find you a link.

He was amazing.

[TayTay]

3. It will be at C-Span soon

On this link:
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/congress/?q=node/77539&hors=s

Scroll down and click on THE NAME of the Senator you want to see and the video will come up. They are about an hour behind realtime.

[jillan]

5. Thanks TayTay!

It's just too bad he had to be followed by Vitter!
Talk about throwing ice on a fire.

[Muttocracy]

4. ditto. nt

[ComtesseDeSpair]

6. I was not a fan of his presidential candidacy, but...

I have to admit, I've fallen in love with him as a senator. He really fights the good fight for us!

[karynnj]

7. For people interested, here are comments on the SFRC that jillian mentioned - with a link

Here is a link to archived video at http://foreign.senate.gov/hearings/2009/hrg090205a.html The topic was Afghanistan.

Kerry explained how he wants to do the hearings - he is trying a really different approach to the hearing. More an attempt to get a conversation and answers to questions. They will not go around with everyone having a turn, but everyone can ask questions as part of a conversation. Kerry will act as moderator. (YvonneCa said this sounds like a 'Socratic Seminar' style discussion.)

The content on Afghanistan is really interesting and far more lively than earlier hearings. There also seems to be far more interaction between the experts. This seems to lead to questions and information that none of the Senators or experts on their own would get to. The experts he invited were very interesting - including a woman, from MA, who has lived in Khandahar for several years.

The consensus really seems to be that it did a very good job getting issues out - and more importantly getting beyond prepared statements and formal questioning of the regular format of committee hearings- where there is no continuity because many Senators took their turn using their prepared questions. (I'm not knocking Biden or Lugar, but this really seems a different good approach. If I understood right, some hearings, when they want to dig deeply into issues will follow this format, while others will have the regular format.)

Kerry said that, votes permitting, he was going to the NATO meeting that Biden is going to. It came up because there was discussion on things NATO should do. Also, at the beginning when explaining what he wanted to do, he spoke of wanting transcripts of all the hearings - though he didn't say on the web (unless I missed it), but that would be consistent with his stated goal that they be available for scholarly and journalistic use.

[karynnj]

8. kick