Jon Tester: “I’d Be More Surprised If Bush Didn’t Bomb Iran Before the Next Election Than If He Did”

Jon Tester: “I’d Be More Surprised If Bush Didn’t Bomb Iran Before the Next Election Than If He Did”
By: Jane Hamsher


On Saturday night Howie Klein and I went to a dinner at the home of Rick Jacobs (Courage Campaign) for Jon Tester, who was raising money for his PAC to support Democratic Senatorial candidates in 2008.

Blue America raised over $17,000 from 901 contributors for Tester during the last election, so we took the opportunity to bend his ear and ask him about many of the issues that we felt were of concern to members of our community who donated to his campaign.

We asked him how he felt about retroactive telecom immunity, and he said he was inclined to vote against it. I asked him if he would commit to filibuster — he wouldn’t, but he did say that if he decided to oppose it he wouldn’t play games and would vote both against the bill and against cloture. With the room full of Californians, many wanted to know what in God’s name was up with Diane Feinstein. Tester said she seemed to be motivated by information she had received as a member of the Intelligence Committee which he wasn’t privy to, but whatever it was made her believe that the right to snoop on people was imperative to national security. He didn’t comment on her crap decisions to install racist judges and sanction state torture, both of which he opposed. (It should be noted that he seems to be having a good influence on Max Baucus.)

We also asked him how he as an organic farmer felt about the farm bill, and he thought that there were a lot of good things in it, like support for farmers’ markets. He admitted that it needed to go further, and that there was a problem with all of the increasingly privatized universities where the research is now being funded by corporations — Monsanto just isn’t going to give grants to do research into organic agriculture. I had read Kirk Murphy’s and Ian’s posts just before leaving for the dinner, and asked him if he felt that the negative externalities of industrial agribusiness were being adequately addressed by the bill — if in fact they weren’t being exacerbated by all the subsidies. He agreed that this was a problem but said the Senate was a body that moved slowly and hoped they would eventually do more.

Tester was a music major in college, and spoke about his meeting with Margaret Spellings regarding NCLB. He tried to tell her he didn’t think that the program was working and thought that its heavy emphasis on testing math and science was shortchanging kids when it came to, among other things, music and art. She asked if he wanted her to start testing for those, too.

He got up to speak and take questions for a while. He opened by saying he was very thankful to blogs in general and FDL specifically for supporting him last year.

Someone asked about the looming threat of war with Iran, to which Tester responded, “I’d be more surprised if Bush didn’t bomb Iran before the next election than if he did.”

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http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/11/12/john-tester-id-be-more-surprised-if-bush-didnt-bomb-iran-before-the-next-election-than-if-he-did/