By: Politicker Staff

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12) today announced that he has hired veteran New Jersey political strategist Jackie Cornell-Bechelli as the political director for his campaign committee.

“Jackie has a proven talent for community action,” Holt said. “Her broad experience in New Jersey politics, her political savvy, and her remarkable ability to cultivate grassroots support make her the perfect fit for my organization. She will help me advance ideas and issues. I’m delighted to have her on board.”

Cornell-Bechelli served as New Jersey State Director for President Obama’s re-election during the early months of 2012 before heading west to run the Obama field operations for the critical Philadelphia suburbs. Her prior work includes serving as the Legislative and Political Director for New Jersey Citizen Action and as the New Jersey State Director for Organizing for America, where she worked closely with Holt’s team during the hotly contested 2010 midterm elections.

Cornell-Bechelli’s roots are in reproductive justice, and she spent more than seven years working for Planned Parenthood throughout New Jersey. She is also the founder of the New Jersey chapter of the New Leaders Council, the nation’s fastest growing training program for young progressive political and social entrepreneurs.

She is a graduate of The College of New Jersey, and she resides in Ewing.

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From: Washington Post
By: Timothy Kudo

Marine Capt. Timothy Kudo, a graduate student at New York University, deployed to Iraq in 2009 and to Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011. Follow him on Twitter: @tkudo.

When I joined the Marine Corps, I knew I would kill people. I was trained to do it in a number of ways, from pulling a trigger to ordering a bomb strike to beating someone to death with a rock. As I got closer to deploying to war in 2009, my lethal abilities were refined, but my ethical understanding of killing was not.

I held two seemingly contradictory beliefs: Killing is always wrong, but in war, it is necessary. How could something be both immoral and necessary?
I didn’t have time to resolve this question before deploying. And in the first few months, I fell right into killing without thinking twice. We were simply too busy to worry about the morality of what we were doing.
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