Julia Carson
Member of Congress representing Indianapolis
Updated: Jan. 2007
Democrat Julia Carson was first elected to congress in 1996, succeeding her mentor and patron, Andrew Jacobs Jr., who retired after 30 years in office.
Carson had worked in Jacobs' district office in the 1960s, and it was at his urging that she began her political career with a successful run for an Indiana House seat in 1972.
Childhood:
Julia Carson was born in 1938 in Louisville, Ky. to Velma Porter, an unmarried teen-age mother. They moved to Indianapolis when Julia was a year old. Her mother made a living as a housekeeper.
She graduated from Crispus Attucks High School in 1955, married and had children. The marriage did not last and she raised her own two children (and later two grandchildren) as a single working mother.
Political career:
Carson's first political job was in 1965 when she was hired by Jacobs. She worked as a legislative assistant for Jacobs for eight years. In 1972, she successfully ran for the Indiana House of Representatives and after two terms there was elected to the Indiana Senate where she served until 1990.
More:
http://www2.indystar.com/library/factfiles/people/c/carson_julia/carson.html Rep. Carson- On the War I am a Reagan Democrat
Washington, DC – Rep. Julia Carson (D-IN) released the following editorial today.
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I am today announcing that, when it comes to the Iraq blunder, I am a Reagan Democrat.
Judge Andrew Jacobs, Sr. said, “There are too many people making history who never read history.”
On February 7, 1984, following the slaughter of 241 American service members in an ill-advised deployment to take sides in the Lebanon civil war, President Reagan halted the slaughter of our young Americans by ordering them to come home safe from harm’s way.
His exit strategy was to exit. The Marines were not ordered to cut and run. Discretion being “the better part of valor,” they were ordered to turn and march in an orderly withdraw. There were fewer of our military in Lebanon than there are in Iraq, but we pulled many more out of Vietnam in one operation. War-wimp politicians argue that if we come home, terrorists will follow us. Does anyone with an IQ above 13 believe that masterpiece of superficial logic?
As for our equipment, it can be moved as rapidly as it was taken in, but it’s not worth the life of one of our soldiers or sailors or airmen or Marines, anyway. Besides, the President’s hero, Gen. Petraeus, has lost a lot of the equipment in Iraq already.
President Reagan was severely criticized by a few chicken hawk politicians, but he was generally applauded for his genuine political courage.
The result? The same as it would be if our government removed our soldiers and Marines from Iraq now and stopped feeding them to the futile meat grinder in which they have been gratuitously masticated for four long years.
In the eighties, there was already a decades-old civil war in Lebanon into which American forces were thrust and slaughtered. That civil war continued after our people left and it has flared-up there again now.
In Iraq, a dictator had put a Sunni lid on the culture of hatred, but once that lid was blown off by our weapons of mass destruction in “Shock and Awe,” the free-for-all killing exploded and our military was caught in the middle.
America cannot militarily solve the civil war in Iraq any more than we could in Lebanon. Scrumptious scholars at Brookings warn that our withdrawal would mean civil war and chaos in Iraq. Well, civil war and chaos are what they have there now. And no matter when our government comes to its senses and removes our military from Iraq, the civil war will continue until one side wins, probably with a brand new dictator. In the words of Broadcaster Paul Harvey with regard to Vietnam, “We can quit this war and come home now.” And let our kids live.
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http://juliacarson.house.gov/8.20.07.shtml