My friend Eli Lake, on assignment in Iraq, calls in from Baghdad for a special international edition of Bloggingheads.tv with Bob Wright. Worth a watch.

People sometimes like to argue that gender has no impact on how candidates approach women’s issues, and that all the Democrats are equally good and knowledgeable on reproductive rights topics. I present to you Bill Richardson, as described by Mark Kleiman, at the California Democratic Party 2007 Convention over the weekend:

Richardson…just doesn’t seem very smart, or very thoughtful. Having blundered last week by saying Whizzer White would be his model chief justice, a reporter asks him how he can reconcile that with his strong pro-choice position when White wrote the dissent in Roe v. Wade. Richardson says, “White was in the 60s. Wasn’t Roe v. Wade in the 80s?”

Not knowing when one of the most controversial court cases in the past half century was decided and who wrote the opinions in it is the domestic policy equivalent of a presidential candidate not being able to name the president of Pakistan or Iran.

–Crossposted from Tapped.

Scary news about Chinese food scandals hopping the ocean to our shores and others:

The pet food case is also putting China’s agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim.

For its part, Chinese officials dispute any suggestion that melamine from the country could have killed pets. But regulators here on Friday banned the use of melamine in vegetable proteins made for export or for use in domestic food supplies.

Yet what is clear from visiting this region of northeast China is that for years melamine has been quietly mixed into Chinese animal feed and then sold to unsuspecting farmers as protein-rich pig, poultry and fish feed….

Feed producers who use melamine here say the tainted feed is often shipped to feed mills in the Yangtze River Delta, near Shanghai, or down to Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They also said they knew that some melamine-laced feed had been exported to other parts of Asia, including South Korea, North Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.

Melamine is made out of coal. People are feeding the animals they eat processed coal.

Crooks and Liars has video of Sen. Dick Durbin talking about how members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which John Edwards also sat on, received classified pre-war briefings that let them know that the the president was lying about Iraq’s nuclear program — the same nuclear program Edwards cited in 2003, based on his access to those exclusive briefings, as his reason for supporting the war in the face of Democratic opposition.

Looking for something unrelated, I came across this interview with John Edwards at the JFK Library from May 4, 2003. Here’s Edwards on the war, when it really mattered, and when he had the power to stand up and speak out as an elected official:

I supported what we did in Iraq. Some of you probably have questions about it, I’d be happy to tell you why and why I still believe it was the right thing to do. But what we do now is enormously important. Because we have an opportunity now, right now, to show the world that we were not in Iraq for the wrong reasons, that it was not about the expansion of American power.

When push came to shove, when leadership was required, he occupied himself with putting a positive spin on the war. When questioned about this by an audience member, he strongly defended his support for the war and his willingness to stand up to the party’s base — which was even then against the invasion of Iraq — and laid out his thinking:

Q: I mean, I’m the eighth person to stand up and ask you a question. And my question is, do you know how many Americans died in Iraq, how many American servicemen and women have died because of your vote? How many Iraqi civilians have been killed? How many unarmed protesters in the last two weeks in the cities of Iraq demanding that they have their country turned over to them have been shot and killed by American forces? What will you do to ensure that we have a safe society? Your actions have led to the deaths of Americans, and you stand here as a candidate for President supporting George Bush in his actions of war across the world. How can you say that you’re actually providing leadership for us?

JOHN EDWARDS: Are you finished?

Q: Yes.

JOHN EDWARDS: Okay. You and I disagree about this, and we disagree about it strongly. I absolutely respect your right to come here and to come to any place and express your views. And not only do I respect it, I embrace it; it’s what makes America great. But we don’t agree about this issue. I have for a long time believed because of the work that I have done on the Senate Intelligence Committee that it would be irresponsible to let Saddam Hussein continue on the course he was on. [applause] This is not a simple issue; I would never suggest it is. I believe that because of Hussein’s history, because of his brutality for his own people, because of starting two wars, because of what I saw over and over and over as an obsession with ruling and dominating the Arab world and his belief that the ticket to getting there was nuclear capability, that he could never be allowed to have nuclear capability. And in the simplest terms, that’s what drove me about this issue.

And it’s something I felt a personal responsibility for. Because I am one of the people responsible for making sure the American people are safe. So I did what I felt was right. You should know that when I did it, the majority of Democratic primary voters strongly disagreed with it. Most of them agree with you; they don’t agree with me. And I knew that then, and I know it now. But all I can say to you is I did what I believed was right; I’ll do the same thing on every single issue I face. Including issues on which you and I will agree, that may also not be popular. But I am also going to stand for what I think needs to be done.

As Mike Tomasky has written, whether or not you think such statements matter depends on how much weight you think ought to be given to apologies by out-of-office politicians about their records, as compared to their records themselves.

This site has had a registration-only comment policy in an effort to prevent the hundreds of pornographic spam comments it is bombarded with on a daily basis from getting through. As an experiment and due to popular request, I have removed the registration feature. We’ll see how this goes.