… about Iraq and the War Powers Act         by , August 22, 2014

I live in the little town of Sebastopol, in northern California’s Sonoma county: think of Berkeley, only with horses. It’s the kind of town where a sign, posted near an impressive grid of solar energy screens, greets you as you enter the city limits, declaring Sebastopol a "nuclear-free zone" – and where, as you might imagine, the Iraq war wasn’t exactly all that popular. My congressman is one Jared Huffman – a liberal Democrat, naturally: Republicans don’t stand a chance in these parts – and so when I heard President Obama was sending yet more troops to Iraq, as well as ordering air strikes, I called Huffman’s Washington office, convinced my concerns would be getting a sympathetic hearing – a notion of which I was soon disabused.