Posts with the tag Dorothiea Roberts

Obama Spells New Hope for Human Rights

Dorothiea — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:13:52 EST

Obama Spells New Hope for Human Rights

Monday 10 November 2008

by: Marjorie Cohn, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

(Photo: Bahrain Center for Human Rights)

Celebrations of Barack Obama's election as president of the United States erupted in countries around the world. From Europe to Africa to the Middle East, people were jubilant. After suffering though eight years of an administration that violated more human rights than any other in US history, Obama spells hope for a new day.

While George W. Bush was president, I wrote "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law," which chronicled his war of aggression, policy of torture, illegal killings, unlawful Guantanamo detentions and secret spying on Americans. When the book was published, it seemed unimaginable that we could elect a president who would turn those policies around. But the election of Obama holds that potential.

This is the first in a series of articles in which I will suggest how the Obama administration can start undoing some of the damage Bush wrought, by ratifying three of the major human rights treaties and the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court.

Although the US government frequently criticizes other countries for their human rights transgressions, the United States has been one of the most flagrant violators. We have refused to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). And while the United States worked with other countries for 50 years to create the International Criminal Court, it has failed to ratify that treaty as well. When we ratify a treaty, it becomes part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.

In this article, I will explain why the United States should ratify the ICESCR, which is particularly relevant now that we are in the midst of the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal helped lift us out of the Depression, gave his famous Four Freedoms speech, focused on freedom of speech and expression, freedom to worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Roosevelt fleshed out the freedom from want and fear principles in his Economic Bill of Rights. It contained equality of opportunity, the right to a job and a decent wage, the end of special privileges for the few, universal civil liberties, guaranteed old-age pensions, unemployment insurance and medical care.

FDR's Bill of Rights formed the basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Eleanor Roosevelt helped draft, and which the UN General Assembly adopted in 1949. The Declaration embraced two types of human rights: civil and political rights on the one hand; and economic, social and cultural rights on the other.

These rights were codified in two binding treaties: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

The United States ratified the ICCPR in 1992. But it has refused to commit itself to the protection of economic, social and cultural rights. Since the Reagan administration, there has been a policy to define human rights in terms of civil and political rights, but to dismiss economic, social and cultural rights as akin to social welfare or socialism.

Indeed, the United States's inhumane policy toward Cuba exemplifies this dichotomy. The US government has criticized civil and political rights in Cuba while disregarding Cubans' superior access to universal housing, health care, education and public accommodations and its guarantee of paid maternity leave and equal pay rates.

The refusal to enshrine rights such as employment, education, food, housing and health care in US law is the reason the United States has not ratified the ICESCR. This treaty contains the right to work in just and favorable conditions, to an adequate standard of living, to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental health, to education, to housing, and to enjoyment of the benefits of cultural freedom and scientific progress. It also guarantees equal rights for men and women, the right to work, the right to form and join trade unions, the right to social security and social insurance and protection and assistance to the family.

In the United States, more than ten million people are unemployed, two to three million families are homeless each year, and 46 million have no health care benefits. Untold numbers lost their retirement savings when the stock market crashed. Obama has pledged to give the rebuilding of our economy top priority after he is sworn in as president. He promised to create jobs and to ensure that all Americans are covered by health insurance. When Obama said he would cut taxes for 95 percent of the people, but end the tax cuts for the rich, he was criticized for wanting to "spread the wealth." But Obama's plan is fully consistent with our progressive income tax system. After the election, 15,000 physicians called for a single-payer health care plan, which Obama and Congress should seriously consider.

The United States's flouting of the United Nations in its unilateral war on Iraq, and torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Iraq has engendered widespread condemnation in the international community. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, citing Professor Louis Henkin, summarized the hypocrisy of the United States in the area of human rights as follows: "In the cathedral of human rights, the US is more like a flying buttress than a pillar - choosing to stand outside the international structure supporting the international human rights system, but without being willing to subject its own conduct to the scrutiny of the system."

We should encourage President-elect Obama to send the ICESCR to the Senate for advice and consent to ratification. Becoming a party to that treaty will help not only the people in this country; it will also engender respect for the United States around the world.

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Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her new book, "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent" (with Kathleen Gilberd), will be published this winter by PoliPointPress. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com. The next article in this series will explain why the United States should ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Obama Will Be One of The Greatest (and Most Loved) American Presidents

Dorothiea — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 10:28:22 EDT

**Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back

Frank Schaeffer

Obama Will Be One of The Greatest (and Most Loved) American Presidents

Great presidents are made great by horrible circumstances combined with character, temperament and intelligence. Like firemen, cops, doctors or soldiers, presidents need a crisis to shine.

Obama is one of the most intelligent presidential aspirants to ever step forward in American history. The likes of his intellectual capabilities have not been surpassed in public life since the Founding Fathers put pen to paper. His personal character is also solid gold. Take heart, America : we have the leader for our times.

I say this as a white, former life-long Republican. I say this as the proud father of a Marine. I say this as just another American watching his pension evaporate along with the stock market! I speak as someone who knows it's time to forget party loyalty, ideology and pride and put the country first. I say this as someone happy to be called a fool for going out on a limb and declaring that, 1) Obama will win, and 2) he is going to be amongst the greatest of American presidents.

Obama is our last best chance. He's worth laying it all on the line for.

This is a man who in the age of greed took the high road of community service. This is the good father and husband. This is the humble servant. This is the patient teacher. This is the scholar statesman. This is the man of deep Christian faith.

Good stories about Obama abound; from his personal relationship with his Secret Service agents (he invites them into his home to watch sports, and shoots hoops with them) to the story about how, more than twenty years ago, while standing in the check-in line at an airport, Obama paid a $100 baggage surcharge for a stranger who was broke and stuck. (Obama was virtually penniless himself in those days.) Years later after he became a senator, that stranger recognized Obama's picture and wrote to him to thank him. She received a kindly note back from the senator. (The story only surfaced because the person, who lives in Norway , told a local newspaper after Obama ran for the presidency. The paper published a photograph of this lady proudly displaying Senator Obama's letter.)

Where many leaders are two-faced; publicly kindly but privately feared and/or hated by people closest to them, Obama is consistent in the way he treats people, consistently kind and personally humble. He lives by the code that those who lead must serve. He believes that. He lives it. He lived it long before he was in the public eye.

Obama puts service ahead of ideology. He also knows that to win politically you need to be tough. He can be. He has been. This is a man who does what works, rather than scoring ideological points. In other words he is the quintessential non-ideological pragmatic American. He will (thank God!) disappoint ideologues and purists of the left and the right.

Obama has a reservoir of personal physical courage that is unmatched in presidential history. Why unmatched? Because as the first black contender for the presidency who will win, Obama, and all the rest of us, know that he is in great physical danger from the seemingly unlimited reserve of unhinged racial hatred, and just plain unhinged ignorant hatred, that swirls in the bowels of our wounded and sinful country. By stepping forward to lead, Obama has literally put his life on the line for all of us in a way no white candidate ever has had to do. (And we all know how dangerous the presidency has been even for white presidents.)

Nice stories or even unparalleled courage isn't the only point. The greater point about Obama is that the midst of our worldwide financial meltdown, an expanding (and losing) war in Afghanistan, trying to extricate our country from a wrong and stupidly mistaken ruinously expensive war in Iraq, our mounting and crushing national debt, awaiting the next (and inevitable) al Qaeda attack on our homeland, watching our schools decline to Third World levels of incompetence, facing a general loss of confidence in the government that has been exacerbated by the Republicans doing all they can to undermine our government's capabilities and programs... President Obama will take on the leadership of our country at a make or break time of historic proportions. He faces not one but dozens of crisis, each big enough to define any presidency in better times.

As luck, fate or divine grace would have it (depending on one's personal theology) Obama is blessedly, dare I say uniquely, well-suited to our dire circumstances. Obama is a person with hands-on community service experience, deep connections to top economic advisers from the renowned University of Chicago where he taught law, and a middle-class background that gives him an abiding knowledgeable empathy with the rest of us. As the son of a single mother, who has worked his way up with merit and brains, recipient of top-notch academic scholarships, the peer-selected editor of the Harvard Law Review and, in three giant political steps to state office, national office and now the presidency, Obama clearly has the wit and drive to lead.

Obama is the sober voice of reason at a time of unreason. He is the fellow keeping his head while all around him are panicking. He is the healing presence at a time of national division and strife. He is also new enough to the political process so that he doesn't suffer from the terminally jaded cynicism, the seen-it-all-before syndrome afflicting most politicians in Washington . In that regard we Americans lucked out. It's as if having despaired of our political process we picked a name from the phone book to lead us and that person turned out to be a very man we needed.

Obama brings a healing and uplifting spiritual quality to our politics at the very time when our worst enemy is fear. For eight years we've been ruled by a stunted fear-filled mediocrity of a little liar who has expanded his power on the basis of creating fear in others. Fearless Obama is the cure. He speaks a litany of hope rather than a litany of terror.

As we have watched Obama respond in a quiet reasoned manner to crisis after crisis, in both the way he has responded after being attacked and lied about in the 2008 campaign season, to his reasoned response to our multiplying national crises, what we see is the spirit of a trusted family doctor with a great bedside manner. Obama is perfectly suited to hold our hand and lead us through some very tough times. The word panic is not in the Obama dictionary.

America is fighting its 'Armageddon' in one fearful heart at a time. A brilliant leader with the mild manner of an old-time matter-of-fact country doctor soothing a frightened child is just what we need. The fact that our 'doctor' is a black man leading a hitherto white-ruled nation out of the mess of its own making is all the sweeter and raises the Obama story to that of moral allegory.

Obama brings a moral clarity to his leadership reserved for those who have had to work for everything they've gotten and had to do twice as well as the person standing next to them because of the color of their skin. His experience of succeeding in spite of his color, social background and prejudice could have been embittering or one that fostered a spiritual rebirth of forgiveness and enlightenment. Obama radiates the calm inner peace of the spirit of forgiveness.

Speaking as a believing Christian I see the hand of a merciful God in Obama's candidacy. The biblical metaphors abound. The stone the builder rejected is become the cornerstone... the last shall be first... he that would gain his life must first lose it... the meek shall inherit the earth...

For my secular friends I'll allow that we may have just been extraordinarily lucky! Either way America wins.

Only a brilliant man, with the spirit of a preacher and the humble heart of a kindly family doctor can lead us now. We are afraid, out of ideas, and worst of all out of hope. Obama is the cure. And we Americans have it in us to rise to the occasion. We will. We're about to enter one of the most frightening periods of American history. Our country has rarely faced more uncertainty. This is the time for greatness. We have a great leader. We must be a great people backing him, fighting for him, sacrificing for a cause greater than ourselves.

A hundred years from now Obama's portrait will be placed next to that of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Long before that we'll be telling our children and grandchildren that we stepped out in faith and voted for a young black man who stood up and led our country back from the brink of an abyss. We'll tell them about the power of love, faith and hope. We'll tell them about the power of creativity combined with humility and intellectual brilliance. We'll tell them that President Obama gave us the gift of regaining our faith in our country. We'll tell them that we all stood up and pitched in and won the day. We'll tell them that President Obama restored our standing in the world. We'll tell them that by the time he left office our schools were on the mend, our economy booming, that we'd become a nation filled with green energy alternatives and were leading the world away from dependence on carbon-based destruction. We'll tell them that because of President Obama's example and leadership the integrity of the family was restored, divorce rates went down, more fathers took responsibility for their children, and abortion rates fell dramatically as women, families and children were cared for through compassionate social programs that worked. We'll tell them about how the gap closed between the middle class and the super rich, how we won health care for all, how crime rates fell, how bad wars were brought to an honorable conclusion. We'll tell them that when we were attacked again by al Qaeda, how reason prevailed and the response was smart, tough, measured and effective, and our civil rights were protected even in times of crisis...

We'll tell them that we were part of the inexplicably blessed miracle that happened to our country those many years ago in 2008 when a young black man was sent by God, fate or luck to save our country. We'll tell them that it's good to live in America where anything is possible. Yes we will.

Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri

Dorothiea — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 17:54:16 EDT

Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri

Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event.

The crowd assembled under the Gateway Arch on a sunny Saturday afternoon to hear Obama speak about taxes and slam the Republicans on economic issues.

Lt. Samuel Dotson of the St. Louis Police Department confirmed the number of attendees piled into the grassy lawn by the Mississippi River.

To be sure, big crowds don’t always signal a big turnout on Election Day. But Obama’s ability to draw his largest audience yet in a typically red state that just weeks ago looked out of reach, could signal a changing electoral map.

For months Missouri polls put Obama as much as ten percentage points behind Republican John McCain. It was widely believed that McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate would have won over the state’s conservatives and boosted his chances there. So far, that hasn’t happened.

A Rasmussen poll released on Friday shows Obama leading in Missouri 52% to 46% for McCain.

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill had harsh words for Palin when she introduced Obama on Saturday. Referring to comments Palin made earlier this week in North Carolina about “pro-America” states, McCaskill said “We have reached a new low in America politics when a candidate dares to say that one part of America is pro-America and another part is anti-America.”

She also took a dig at McCain for selecting a vice presidential nominee with limited experience. “One [candidate] picked one of the strongest candidates for vice president he could’ve picked in the United States and well, the other didn’t.”

Recognizing that big rallies don’t always result in cast ballots, the Obama campaign has dispatched thousands of field organizers and volunteers to Missouri to knock on doors in a statewide get out the vote effort.

So Lets Get Out There And Get The People To The Polls...

Troopergate report: Palin abused power

Dorothiea — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:50:04 EDT

Troopergate report: Palin abused power

By DON HUNTER, SEAN COCKERHAM and WESLEY LOY
Anchorage Daily News
A legislative investigation has concluded that Gov. Sarah Palin abused her power in pushing for the firing of an Alaska state trooper who was once married to her sister, or by failing to prevent her husband Todd from doing so.
The report by investigator Steve Branchflower was made public late this afternoon by a bipartisan 12-0 vote of the Legislative Council, which authorized the investigation.
Branchflower's report contains four findings. The first concludes that Palin violated the state's executive branch ethics act, which says that "each public officer holds office as a public trust, and any effort to benefit a personal or financial interest through official action is a violation of that trust."
Branchflower was investigating Palin's involvement in an effort to get state trooper Mike Wooten fired. Wooten was involved in a nasty divorce from Palin's sister. Palin and her husband, Todd, have accused Wooten of threatening Palin's father.
The investigation also looked into whether Palin dismissed public safety commissioner Walt Monegan because he resisted pressure to fire Wooten.
The report says Palin failed to reign in her husband's inappropriate efforts to use the governor's office to contact trooper employees in his attempts to have Wooten fired.
"Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda ... to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired," Branchflower's report says.
"Compliance with the code of ethics is not optional. It is an individual responsibility imposed by law, and any effort to benefit a personal interest through official action is a violation of that trust. ... The term ‘benefit' is very broadly defined, and includes anything that is to the person's advantage or personal self-interest."
In the second finding, Branchflower says Monegan's refusal to fire Wooten was not the sole reason for his dismissal but that it was a "contributing factor." Still, he said, Palin's firing of Monegan was "a proper and lawful exercise" of the governor's authority.
The third finding says a workers compensation claim filed by Wooten was handled appropriately. Number four concludes that the attorney general's office failed to comply with Branchflower's Aug. 6 request for information about the case in the form of e-mails.
Branchflower writes that his investigation did not take into account late-arriving statements from several administration officials who, on the advice of Attorney General Talis Colberg, resisted subpoenas. They agreed to provide written statements this week, however, after a state judge upheld the subpoenas. Information from those statements was provided to the Legislative Council separately.
In a five-page response issued Friday night, Palin's attorney, Thomas Van Flein, accuses Branchflower and Democratic Sen. Hollis French, who oversaw the investigation, of using the probe in a partisan attempt to "smear the governor by innuendo."
Van Flein says Branchflower's finding that Palin violated the ethics act is flawed because she received no monetary benefit from whatever actions she and her husband are accused of. He cited several prior ethics investigations.
"The common thread of all of these Ethics Act cases is money and the use of a government position to personally gain," Van Flein's statement says.
"Here, there is no accusation, no finding and no facts that money or financial gain to the Governor was involved in the decision to remove Monegan," the governor's attorney says. "There can be no ethics violations under these circumstances."
The McCain-Palin campaign also responded.
Because Branchflower's report does not recommend any particular penalty for Palin, it shows the investigation was outside the Legislature's authority, campaign Meghan Stapleton said.
"The Palins make no apologies for wanting to protect their family and the public interest by reporting to appropriate authorities the conduct of a threatening and abusive trooper," Stapleton said.
Stapleton and spokesman Ed O'Callaghan, a former New York prosecutor now working for the campaign in Alaska, have been meeting regularly with reporters in an effort to discredit the investigation.
The campaign also said Branchflower's finding that Palin broke state ethics laws is beyond the scope of the original investigation, which Stapleton and O'Callaghan said was to determine if she had a legitimate reason for firing Monegan.
In authorizing the investigation on July 28, the members of the legislative council voted "to investigate the circumstances and events surrounding the termination of former public safety commissioner Monegan, and potential abuses of power and/or improper actions by members of the executive branch."
The chairman of the Legislative Council, Sen. Kim Elton, D-Juneau, said he agreed with Branchflower's findings but wasn't ready to suggest there should be any consequences for the governor.
"We don't charge people, we don't try people as legislators," Elton said. Any further action or disciplinary measures, he said, would be up to Palin's executive branch, the attorney general or the state Personnel Board.

Sen. Gene Therriault, R-North Pole, said the report is flawed because Branchflower didn't take into account statements and other materials submitted earlier this week by Todd Palin and administration employees who earlier had resisted subpoenas.
Therriault said Todd Palin's written response indicates that Gov. Palin, at some point, urged her husband to drop his efforts against Wooten. That information goes to the heart of Branchflower's conclusion that the governor violated the ethics law, Therriault said.
Therriault said Branchflower was unable to consider those late-arriving materials "because we had this artificial deadline today."
"Why?" he continued. "Because we're in a political season."
Senate President Lyda Green said the report doesn't speak well for the governor.
"The problem with power is that people pay attention to it," the Wasilla Republican said. "And it's very easy to get beside yourself and use it in the wrong way.
"And we do have to leave personal business at home," she said.
Two other lawmakers said the governor and her husband's actions were understandable.
"Who is going to blame Todd Palin for protecting his family?" said Rep. John Coghill, R-North Pole. " Not me."
Another member of the Legislative Council, Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage, said he thinks Branchflower's findings are wrong, and that Palin didn't violate the ethics act. "She and Todd Palin were trying to defend their family," Lynn said. "I think any normal person would do the same."
The release of Branchflower's 263-page report came after a unanimous vote of the 12-member Legislative Council, which authorized the inquiry last summer. The vote followed an all-day, closed-door meeting with Branchflower. Three members participated by telephone.
Branchflower also recommends the Legislature change the way complaints against peace officers such as troopers are handled. He says lawmakers should consider making it possible for people who file such complaints to get feedback about the status of their complaint and whatever action was taken about it.
The initial complaint against Wooten was filed by Gov. Palin's father, Chuck Heath, before she was elected governor in 2006. Branchflower says the inability of the family to get information about what was happening with the complaint was frustrating to them.
"I believe their frustration was real as was their skepticism about whether their complaints were being zealously investigated," Branchflower's report says. "The irony is that the complaints were taken very seriously, and a thorough investigation was underway. However, the law prevented the Troopers from giving them any feedback whatsoever."
The law should try to balance the need for confidentiality with a recognition that feedback to the filer of a complaint is also important, the report says.
Daily News reporter Kyle Hopkins also contributed to this report.

Before the Next Debate: Reach People Who Don't Know the Real McCain

Dorothiea — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:24:12 EDT

Before the Next Debate: Reach People Who Don't Know the Real McCain

Posted October 10th, 2008 at 12:26 AM

Dear Friends,

I was in a deep conversation with some Brave New Films supporters recently. They were enthusiastic about the value of our videos in spreading the truth and motivating support, but they kept asking, "How do you reach people who don't agree with you?" Seems like a good time to explain why we ask you to forward the videos, Digg them, and encourage people to get their own free Brave New Films video subscription. Before the next debate, it is critical to get this information to as many people as possible.

Every day, our 20 videos on John McCain are seen by several hundred thousand people searching and browsing the Internet for information on McCain. They are literally typing in "john mccain" into Google, where our video is the #4 result. The same search on YouTube yields several more videos from The Real McCain series, which will only increase in the coming weeks. So far, these videos have received over 11 million views.

Think about it, if you didn't know much about John McCain, what would you do? Probably two things. Type "john mccain" into Google, and ask your friends what they think.

That's where YOU come in. When you get an e-mail from us with our latest video, what happens in the next 24 hours determines how far the video will reach outside the audience who would typically watch it. The more views on the video, the higher it goes on YouTube's most viewed pages, seen by 60 million people a month. The more people who Digg it--a critical tool to reach those outside the choir--the better chance we have of getting on the Digg homepage, which is seen by 20 million people a month.

Every time we get on these top pages, we get tens of thousands of additional views from people who might otherwise have watched a cat playing the piano, a magic ping pong ball, or a pretty woman falling in the shower. We estimate that getting on the Digg homepage generates an additional 30,000-50,000 viewers. The YouTube most viewed page alone can add another 100,000 views!

Anything you do that increases the number of views helps. Posting on your blog, on Facebook, on MySpace, sending emails, leaving comments on other sites, and Digging it. The important thing to understand is it's not just the people who view it that we reach, it's the ripple effect those views have, pushing our videos higher up Google, YouTube, Digg, and all over the Internet. And that ripple effect extends months and even years down the road.

That #4 result on Google is a video we put out in February of 2007! 70,000 people watched it last week. Yes, it would be easier to spend millions of dollars on TV ads, but that is not what we do. Think about the difference in watching a video that has been sent to you by someone you know, versus skipping through a TV ad. What a difference in impact!

And when you get your friends to subscribe to the free Brave New Films video subscription, they become true force multipliers by sending to people who agree, who watch, who motivate, who send to others, and help us reach many people who don't agree with us.

So, help us get the word out about McCain now before the next debate. Below are four videos that explain McCain's stances on four crucial issues: the environment, the economy, tax cuts, and abortion. Let's get that ripple effect going now by spreading these to everyone you know and getting them on blogs and sites like Digg.

1. McCain's Green Economy: Drill, Baby, Drill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3ecA2L-VuQ

2. John McCain: Economic Disaster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4egXbhSOhk

3. Why the Rich Love McCain's Tax Plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwtayJCK5LY

4. The REAL McCain is anti-choice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAAYxCCT-Bg

Help increase the number who know the facts, and reach those who don't. Now is the time!

Yours,
Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New team

Sensitive Palin ethics report kept secret, for now!

Dorothiea — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:04:08 EDT

Edit Sensitive Palin ethics report kept secret, for now!

Posted October 10th, 2008 at 11:11am

Sensitive Palin ethics report kept secret, for nowBy MATT APUZZO –

<o:p>

Alaska Supreme Court justice Walter Carpeneti, right, questions attorneys during oral arguments before the Alaska Supreme Court in Anchorage, Alaska, Wednesday Oct. 8, 2008 on whether to shut down an abuse-of-power investigation into Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Justices Robert Eastaugh, center and Warren Matthews, listen. The state Supreme Court refused Thursday, Oct. 9, 2008 to halt the ethics investigation into Gov. Sarah Palin. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)<o:p>

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Sworn to secrecy, Alaska lawmakers have begun reviewing a lengthy and politically sensitive investigative report focusing on whether Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin abused her authority as governor.<o:p>

The first-term Alaska governor has been accused of firing a state commissioner to settle a family dispute. But the report is also expected to touch on whether Palin's husband meddled in state affairs and whether her administration inappropriately accessed employee medical records.<o:p>

The inquiry, approved by a legislative committee's bipartisan vote, began before Republican presidential nominee John McCain named Palin his running mate. Since then, the case has been dogged by accusations of political influence.<o:p>

The investigation focuses on her firing of Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan. Monegan says Palin and her husband pressured him to fire Mike Wooten, a state trooper involved in a nasty divorce and custody dispute with the governor's sister. When Monegan resisted, he says, he was fired.<o:p>

Palin's critics say that shows she used her office to settle family affairs.<o:p>

"When you're the governor, you leave your household hat at home and you become governor," said state Senate President Lyda Green, a Republican who has frequently clashed with Palin.<o:p>

At their meeting Friday, lawmakers planned to vote to release the estimated 300-page report and some of the 1,000 or more pages of supporting documents. The 14-member legislative panel could recommend that the case be closed, that another committee continue to investigate, or that the matter be referred to criminal investigators.<o:p>

In an effort to head off the report, McCain campaign spokesman Taylor Griffin released the campaign's own version of events. That report, which Griffin said was written by campaign staffers, says the Legislature has taken a legitimate policy dispute between a governor and one of her commissioners, and portrayed it as something inappropriate.<o:p>

"The following document will prove Walt Monegan's dismissal was a result of his insubordination and budgetary clashes with Governor Palin and her administration," campaign officials wrote. "Trooper Wooten is a separate issue."<o:p>

Monegan had not seen the closely held report Thursday night and said he did not know what to expect.<o:p>

"I just hope that the truth is figured out," Monegan said in a telephone interview Thursday. "That the governor did want me to fire him, and I chose to not. You just can't walk up to someone and say, 'I fire you.' He didn't do anything under my watch to result in termination."<o:p>

The report is also expected to focus on Palin's husband, Todd, who had extraordinary access to the governor's office and her top aides. Todd acknowledges calling and meeting over the course of many months with numerous senior government officials about Wooten, whom he described as a dangerous and unstable man who had threatened his family.<o:p>

One of those meetings, Monegan said, occurred in the governor's office. Green said that raised questions of impropriety and that, ultimately, the governor is responsible.<o:p>

"He shouldn't be sitting in the governor's office and making phone calls if he's going to be pushing his agenda," she said. "Everything's on her."<o:p>

Steve Branchflower, a retired prosecutor hired by the Legislature, is also investigating whether anyone in the Palin administration pressured auditors to deny Wooten's disability claim. He had claimed he hurt his back moving a body bag, but Todd Palin later said he documented and took photos of Wooten riding a snowmobile that cast suspicion on his injury.<o:p>

Republican state Rep. John Coghill, a member of the committee, said he would try to keep the discussion focused on the what legislators set out to investigate: Monegan's firing.<o:p>

"It wasn't supposed to look into the whole administration team. It was supposed to look at the governor," he said before reading the report. "This is about the integrity of the legislative process."<o:p>

Palin's attorney, Thomas Van Flein, said he had not received a copy of the report. Over the past few days, Van Flein has released affidavits and other documents that Palin's husband and aides provided to investigators. That rankled some lawmakers but Van Flein said he wanted to make sure Branchflower's report didn't take anything out of context.<o:p>

"Whenever anyone writes their own report, they're filtering their data. And if you've already drawn your conclusion, you tend to filter it in a way to support that conclusion," he said.<o:p>

Palin's allies have accused the committee of having already drawn their conclusion. They cited comments by Democratic state Sen. Hollis French, who said the investigation could provide an "October surprise" for McCain. <o:p>

McCain and the POW Cover-Up

Dorothiea — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:33:51 EDT

McCain and the POW Cover-Up

by: Sydney H. Schanberg, The Nation

Upon return from Vietnam, John McCain greets then-President Richard Nixon. (Photo: File)

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington - and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number - the documents indicate probably hundreds - of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

Mass of Evidence

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon's performance was an insider, Air Force Lieut. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon's position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid "without any political conditions." But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party "in accordance with its own constitutional provisions." That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored - and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners - just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men - those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture - were eventually executed.

My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few - if any - are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my own reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain's role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.

The Arizona Senator, now the Republican candidate for President, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and national security advisor, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H. W. Bush's defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington.

McCain's Role

An early and critical McCain secrecy move involved 1990 legislation that started in the House of Representatives. A brief and simple document, it was called "the Truth Bill" and would have compelled complete transparency about prisoners and missing men. Its core sentence reads: "[The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict, shall make available to the public all such records held or received by that department or agency."

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as "the McCain Bill," suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge - only records that revealed no POW secrets - it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, at left, when the Pentagon cited McCain's bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all - even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence.

McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which had been strengthened in 1995 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties, saying: "Any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to the disappearance or whereabouts and status of a missing person shall be fined as provided in Title 18 or imprisoned not more than one year or both." A year later, in a closed House-Senate conference on an unrelated military bill, McCain, at the behest of the Pentagon, attached a crippling amendment to the act, stripping out its only enforcement teeth, the criminal penalties, and reducing the obligations of commanders in the field to speedily search for missing men and to report the incidents to the Pentagon.

About the relaxation of POW/MIA obligations on commanders in the field, a public McCain memo said: "This transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the [battle] field to Washington." He wrote that the original legislation, if left intact, "would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks."

McCain argued that keeping the criminal penalties would have made it impossible for the Pentagon to find staffers willing to work on POW/MIA matters. That's an odd argument to make. Were staffers only "willing to work" if they were allowed to conceal POW records? By eviscerating the law, McCain gave his stamp of approval to the government policy of debunking the existence of live POWs.

McCain has insisted again and again that all the evidence - documents, witnesses, satellite photos, two Pentagon chiefs' sworn testimony, aborted rescue missions, ransom offers apparently scorned - has been woven together by unscrupulous deceivers to create an insidious and unpatriotic myth. He calls it the "bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists." He has regularly vilified those who keep trying to pry out classified documents as "hoaxers," charlatans," "conspiracy theorists" and "dime-store Rambos."

Some of McCain's fellow captives at Hoa Lo prison in Hanoi didn't share his views about prisoners left behind. Before he died of leukemia in 1999, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter - a response to McCain's stream of insults hurled at MIA activists. Guy wrote: "John, does this [the insults] include Senator Bob Smith [a New Hampshire Republican and activist on POW issues] and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were 'last known alive'? Does this include some of your fellow POWs?"

It's not clear whether the taped confession McCain gave to his captors to avoid further torture has played a role in his post-war behavior in the Senate. That confession was played endlessly over the prison loudspeaker system at Hoa Lo - to try to break down other prisoners - and was broadcast over Hanoi's state radio. Reportedly, he confessed to being a war criminal who had bombed civilian targets. The Pentagon has a copy of the confession but will not release it. Also, no outsider I know of has ever seen a non-redacted copy of the debriefing of McCain when he returned from captivity, which is classified but could be made public by McCain. (See the Pentagon's rejection of my attempt to obtain records of this debriefing, at left.)

All humans have breaking points. Many men undergoing torture give confessions, often telling huge lies so their fakery will be understood by their comrades and their country. Few will fault them. But it was McCain who apparently felt he had disgraced himself and his military family. His father, John S. McCain II, was a highly regarded rear admiral then serving as commander of all US forces in the Pacific. His grandfather was also a rear admiral.

In his bestselling 1999 autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs, owing to his high-ranking father and thus his propaganda value. Other prisoners at Hoa Lo say his captors considered him a prize catch and called him the "Crown Prince," something McCain acknowledges in the book.

Also in this memoir, McCain expresses guilt at having broken under torture and given the confession. "I felt faithless and couldn't control my despair," he writes, revealing that he made two "feeble" attempts at suicide. (In later years, he said he tried to hang himself with his shirt and guards intervened.) Tellingly, he says he lived in "dread" that his father would find out about the confession. "I still wince," he writes, "when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace."

He says that when he returned home, he told his father about the confession, but "never discussed it at length" - and the Admiral, who died in 1981, didn't indicate he had heard anything about it before. But he had. In the 1999 memoir, the senator writes: "I only recently learned that the tape...had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father."

Is McCain haunted by these memories? Does he suppress POW information because its surfacing would rekindle his feelings of shame? On this subject, all I have are questions.

Many stories have been written about McCain's explosive temper, so volcanic that colleagues are loathe to speak openly about it. One veteran congressman who has observed him over the years asked for confidentiality and made this brief comment: "This is a man not at peace with himself."

He was certainly far from calm on the Senate POW committee. He browbeat expert witnesses who came with information about unreturned POWs. Family members who have personally faced McCain and pressed him to end the secrecy also have been treated to his legendary temper. He has screamed at them, insulted them, brought women to tears. Mostly his responses to them have been versions of: How dare you question my patriotism? In 1996, he roughly pushed aside a group of POW family members who had waited outside a hearing room to appeal to him, including a mother in a wheelchair.

But even without answers to what may be hidden in the recesses of McCain's mind, one thing about the POW story is clear: If American prisoners were dishonored by being written off and left to die, that's something the American public ought to know about.

10 Key Pieces of Evidence That Men Were Left Behind

1. In Paris, where the Vietnam peace treaty was negotiated, the United States asked Hanoi for the list of American prisoners to be returned, fearing that Hanoi would hold some prisoners back. The North Vietnamese refused, saying they would produce the list only after the treaty was signed. Nixon agreed with Kissinger that they had no leverage left, and Kissinger signed the accord on January 27, 1973, without the prisoner list. When Hanoi produced its list of 591 prisoners the next day, US intelligence agencies expressed shock at the low number. Their number was hundreds higher. The New York Times published a long, page-one story on February 2, 1973, about the discrepancy, especially raising questions about the number of prisoners held in Laos, only nine of whom were being returned. The headline read, in part: "Laos POW List Shows 9 from US - Document Disappointing to Washington as 311 Were Believed Missing." And the story, by John Finney, said that other Washington officials "believe the number of prisoners [in Laos] is probably substantially higher." The paper never followed up with any serious investigative reporting - nor did any other mainstream news organization.

2. Two defense secretaries who served during the Vietnam War testified to the Senate POW committee in September 1992 that prisoners were not returned. James Schlesinger and Melvin Laird, both speaking at a public session and under oath, said they based their conclusions on strong intelligence data - letters, eyewitness reports, even direct radio contacts. Under questioning, Schlesinger chose his words carefully, understanding clearly the volatility of the issue: "I think that as of now that I can come to no other conclusion...some were left behind." This ran counter to what President Nixon told the public in a nationally televised speech on March 29, 1973, when the repatriation of the 591 was in motion: "Tonight," Nixon said, "the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come. For the first time in twelve years, no American military forces are in Vietnam. All our American POWs are on their way home." Documents unearthed since then show that aides had already briefed Nixon about the contrary evidence.

Schlesinger was asked by the Senate committee for his explanation of why President Nixon would have made such a statement when he knew Hanoi was still holding prisoners. He replied: "One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States...was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roil the waters..." This testimony struck me as a bombshell. The New York Times appropriately reported it on page one but again there was no sustained follow-up by the Times or any other major paper or national news outlet.

3. Over the years, the DIA received more than 1,600 first-hand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 second-hand reports. Many witnesses interrogated by CIA or Pentagon intelligence agents were deemed "credible" in the agents' reports. Some of the witnesses were given lie-detector tests and passed. Sources provided me with copies of these witness reports, which are impressive in their detail. A lot of the sightings described a secondary tier of prison camps many miles from Hanoi. Yet the DIA, after reviewing all these reports, concluded that they "do not constitute evidence" that men were alive.

4. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, listening stations picked up messages in which Laotian military personnel spoke about moving American prisoners from one labor camp to another. These listening posts were manned by Thai communications officers trained by the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors signals worldwide. The NSA teams had moved out after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and passed the job to the Thai allies. But when the Thais turned these messages over to Washington, the intelligence community ruled that since the intercepts were made by a "third party" - namely Thailand - they could not be regarded as authentic. That's some Catch-22: The US trained a third party to take over its role in monitoring signals about POWs, but because that third party did the monitoring, the messages weren't valid.

Here, from CIA files, is an example that clearly exposes the farce. On December 27, 1980, a Thai military signal team picked up a message saying that prisoners were being moved out of Attopeu (in southern Laos) by aircraft "at 1230 hours." Three days later a message was sent from the CIA station in Bangkok to the CIA director's office in Langley. It read, in part: "The prisoners...are now in the valley in permanent location (a prison camp at Nhommarath in Central Laos). They were transferred from Attopeu to work in various places...POWs were formerly kept in caves and are very thin, dark and starving." Apparently the prisoners were real. But the transmission was declared "invalid" by Washington because the information came from a "third party" and thus could not be deemed credible.

5. A series of what appeared to be distress signals from Vietnam and Laos were captured by the government's satellite system in the late 1980s and early '90s. (Before that period, no search for such signals had been put in place.) Not a single one of these markings was ever deemed credible. To the layman's eye, the satellite photos, some of which I've seen, show markings on the ground that are identical to the signals that American pilots had been specifically trained to use in their survival courses - such as certain letters, like X or K, drawn in a special way. Other markings were the secret four-digit authenticator numbers given to individual pilots. But time and again, the Pentagon, backed by the CIA, insisted that humans had not made these markings. What were they, then? "Shadows and vegetation," the government said, insisting that the markings were merely normal topographical contours like saw-grass or rice-paddy divider walls. It was the automatic response - shadows and vegetation. On one occasion, a Pentagon photo expert refused to go along. It was a missing man's name gouged into a field, he said, not trampled grass or paddy berms. His bosses responded by bringing in an outside contractor who found instead, yes, shadows and vegetation. This refrain led Bob Taylor, a highly regarded investigator on the Senate committee staff who had examined the photographic evidence, to comment to me: "If grass can spell out people's names and a secret digit codes, then I have a newfound respect for grass."

6. On November 11, 1992, Dolores Alfond, the sister of missing airman Capt. Victor Apodaca and chair of the National Alliance of Families, an organization of relatives of POW/MIAs, testified at one of the Senate committee's public hearings. She asked for information about data the government had gathered from electronic devices used in a classified program known as PAVE SPIKE.

The devices were motion sensors, dropped by air, designed to pick up enemy troop movements. Shaped on one end like a spike with an electronic pod and antenna on top, they were designed to stick in the ground as they fell. Air Force planes would drop them along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other supply routes. The devices, though primarily sensors, also had rescue capabilities. Someone on the ground - a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor gang - could manually enter data into the sensor. All data were regularly collected electronically by US planes flying overhead. Alfond stated, without any challenge or contradiction by the committee, that in 1974, a year after the supposedly complete return of prisoners, the gathered data showed that a person or people had manually entered into the sensors - as US pilots had been trained to do - "no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 US POWs who were lost in Laos." Alfond added, according to the transcript: "This PAVE SPIKE intelligence is seamless, but the committee has not discussed it or released what it knows about PAVE SPIKE."

McCain attended that committee hearing specifically to confront Alfond because of her criticism of the panel's work. He bellowed and berated her for quite a while. His face turning anger-pink, he accused her of "denigrating" his "patriotism." The bullying had its effect - she began to cry.

After a pause Alfond recovered and tried to respond to his scorching tirade, but McCain simply turned away and stormed out of the room. The PAVE SPIKE file has never been declassified. We still don't know anything about those twenty POWs.

7. As previously mentioned, in April 1993, in a Moscow archive, a researcher from Harvard, Stephen Morris, unearthed and made public the transcript of a briefing that General Tran Van Quang gave to the Hanoi politburo four months before the signing of the Paris peace accords in 1973.

In the transcript, General Quang told the Hanoi politburo that 1,205 US prisoners were being held. Quang said that many of the prisoners would be held back from Washington after the accords as bargaining chips for war reparations. General Quang's report added: "This is a big number. Officially, until now, we published a list of only 368 prisoners of war. The rest we have not revealed. The government of the USA knows this well, but it does not know the exact number...and can only make guesses based on its losses. That is why we are keeping the number of prisoners of war secret, in accordance with the politburo's instructions." The report then went on to explain in clear and specific language that a large number would be kept back to ensure reparations.

The reaction to the document was immediate. After two decades of denying it had kept any prisoners, Hanoi responded to the revelation by calling the transcript a fabrication.

Similarly, Washington - which had over the same two decades refused to recant Nixon's declaration that all the prisoners had been returned - also shifted into denial mode. The Pentagon issued a statement saying the document "is replete with errors, omissions and propaganda that seriously damage its credibility," and that the numbers were "inconsistent with our own accounting."

Neither American nor Vietnamese officials offered any rationale for who would plant a forged document in the Soviet archives and why they would do so. Certainly neither Washington nor Moscow - closely allied with Hanoi - would have any motive, since the contents were embarrassing to all parties, and since both the United States and Vietnam had consistently denied the existence of unreturned prisoners. The Russian archivists simply said the document was "authentic."

8. In his 2002 book, Inside Delta Force, Retired Command Sgt. Major Eric Haney described how in 1981 his special forces unit, after rigorous training for a POW rescue mission, had the mission suddenly aborted, revived a year later and again abruptly aborted. Haney writes that this abandonment of captured soldiers ate at him for years and left him disillusioned about his government's vows to leave no men behind.

"Years later, I spoke at length with a former highly placed member of the North Vietnamese diplomatic corps, and this person asked me point-blank: 'Why did the Americans never attempt to recover their remaining POWs after the conclusion of the war?'" Haney writes. He continued, saying that he came to believe senior government officials had called off those missions in 1981 and 1982. (His account is on pages 314 to 321 of my paperback copy of the book.)

9. There is also evidence that in the first months of Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1981, the White House received a ransom proposal for a number of POWs being held by Hanoi in Indochina. The offer, which was passed to Washington from an official of a third country, was apparently discussed at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room attended by Reagan, Vice-President Bush, CIA director William Casey and National Security Advisor Richard Allen. Allen confirmed the offer in sworn testimony to the Senate POW committee on June 23, 1992.

Allen was allowed to testify behind closed doors and no information was released. But a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter, Robert Caldwell, obtained the portion relating to the ransom offer and reported on it. The ransom request was for $4 billion, Allen testified. He said he told Reagan that "it would be worth the president's going along and let's have the negotiation." When his testimony appeared in the Union Tribune, Allen quickly wrote a letter to the panel, this time not under oath, recanting the ransom story and claiming his memory had played tricks on him. His new version was that some POW activists had asked him about such an offer in a meeting that took place in 1986, when he was no longer in government. "It appears," he said in the letter, "that there never was a 1981 meeting about the return of POW/MIAs for $4 billion."

But the episode didn't end there. A Treasury agent on Secret Service duty in the White House, John Syphrit, came forward to say he had overheard part of the ransom conversation in the Roosevelt Room in 1981, when the offer was discussed by Reagan, Bush, Casey, Allen and other cabinet officials.

Syphrit, a veteran of the Vietnam War, told the committee he was willing to testify but they would have to subpoena him. Treasury opposed his appearance, arguing that voluntary testimony would violate the trust between the Secret Service and those it protects. It was clear that coming in on his own could cost Syphrit his career. The committee voted 7 to 4 not to subpoena him.

In the committee's final report, dated January 13, 1993 (on page 284), the panel not only chastised Syphrit for his failure to testify without a subpoena ("The committee regrets that the Secret Service agent was unwilling..."), but noted that since Allen had recanted his testimony about the Roosevelt Room briefing, Syphrit's testimony would have been "at best, uncorroborated by the testimony of any other witness." The committee omitted any mention that it had made a decision not to ask the other two surviving witnesses, Bush and Reagan, to give testimony under oath. (Casey had died.)

10. In 1990, Colonel Millard Peck, a decorated infantry veteran of Vietnam then working at the DIA as chief of the Asia Division for Current Intelligence, asked for the job of chief of the DIA's Special Office for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. His reason for seeking the transfer, which was not a promotion, was that he had heard from officials throughout the Pentagon that the POW/MIA office had been turned into a waste-disposal unit for getting rid of unwanted evidence about live prisoners - a "black hole," these officials called it.

Peck explained all this in his telling resignation letter of February 12, 1991, eight months after he had taken the job. He said he viewed it as "sort of a holy crusade" to restore the integrity of the office but was defeated by the Pentagon machine. The four-page, single-spaced letter was scathing, describing the putative search for missing men as "a cover-up."

Peck charged that, at its top echelons, the Pentagon had embraced a "mind-set to debunk" all evidence of prisoners left behind. "That national leaders continue to address the prisoner of war and missing in action issue as the 'highest national priority,' is a travesty," he wrote. "The entire charade does not appear to be an honest effort, and may never have been....Practically all analysis is directed to finding fault with the source. Rarely has there been any effective, active follow through on any of the sightings, nor is there a responsive 'action arm' to routinely and aggressively pursue leads."

"I became painfully aware," his letter continued, "that I was not really in charge of my own office, but was merely a figurehead or whipping boy for a larger and totally Machiavellian group of players outside of DIA...I feel strongly that this issue is being manipulated and controlled at a higher level, not with the goal of resolving it, but more to obfuscate the question of live prisoners and give the illusion of progress through hyperactivity." He named no names but said these players are "unscrupulous people in the Government or associated with the Government" who "have maintained their distance and remained hidden in the shadows, while using the [POW] Office as a 'toxic waste dump' to bury the whole 'mess' out of sight." Peck added that "military officers...who in some manner have 'rocked the boat' [have] quickly come to grief."

Peck concluded: "From what I have witnessed, it appears that any soldier left in Vietnam, even inadvertently, was, in fact, abandoned years ago, and that the farce that is being played is no more than political legerdemain done with 'smoke and mirrors' to stall the issue until it dies a natural death."

The disillusioned Colonel not only resigned but asked to be retired immediately from active military service. The press never followed up.

My Pursuit of the Story

I covered the war in Cambodia and Vietnam, but came to the POW information only slowly afterward, when military officers I knew from that conflict began coming to me with maps and POW sightings and depositions by Vietnamese witnesses.

I was then city editor of the New York Times, no longer involved in foreign or national stories, so I took the data to the appropriate desks and suggested it was material worth pursuing. There were no takers. Some years later, in 1991, when I was an op-ed columnist at Newsday, the aforementioned special Senate committee was formed to probe the POW issue. I saw this as an opening and immersed myself in the reporting.

At Newsday, I wrote thirty-five columns over a two-year period, as well as a four-part series on a trip I took to North Vietnam to report on what happened to one missing pilot who was shot down over the Ho Chi Minh trail and captured when he parachuted down. After Newsday, I wrote thousands more words on the subject for other outlets. Some of the pieces were about McCain's key role.

Though I wrote on many subjects for Life, Vanity Fair and Washington Monthly, my POW articles appeared in Penthouse, the Village Voice and APBnews.com. Mainstream publications just weren't interested. Their disinterest was part of what motivated me, and I became one of a very short list of journalists who considered the story important.

Serving in the army in Germany during the Cold War and witnessing combat first-hand as a reporter in India and Indochina led me to have great respect for those who fight for their country. To my mind, we dishonored US troops when our government failed to bring them home from Vietnam after the 591 others were released - and then claimed they didn't exist. And politicians dishonor themselves when they pay lip service to the bravery and sacrifice of soldiers only to leave untold numbers behind, rationalizing to themselves that it's merely one of the unfortunate costs of war.

John McCain - now campaigning for the White House as a war hero, maverick and straight shooter - owes the voters some explanations. The press were long ago wooed and won by McCain's seeming openness, Lone Ranger pose and self-deprecating humor, which may partly explain their ignoring his record on POWs. In the numerous, lengthy McCain profiles that have appeared of late in papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, I may have missed a clause or a sentence along the way, but I have not found a single mention of his role in burying information about POWs. Television and radio news programs have been similarly silent.

Reporters simply never ask him about it. They didn't when he ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in 2000. They haven't now, despite the fact that we're in the midst of another war - a war he supports and one that has echoes of Vietnam.

The only explanation McCain has ever offered for his leadership on legislation that seals POW files is that he believes the release of such information would only stir up fresh grief for the families of those who were never accounted for in Vietnam. Of the scores of POW families I've met over the years, only a few have said they want the books closed without knowing what happened to their men. All the rest say that not knowing is exactly what grieves them.

Isn't it possible that what really worries those intent on keeping the POW documents buried is the public disgust that the contents of those files would generate?

How the Senate Committee Perpetuated the Debunking

In its early months, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs gave the appearance of being committed to finding out the truth about the MIAs. As time went on, however, it became clear that they were cooperating in every way with the Pentagon and CIA, who often seemed to be calling the shots, even setting the agendas for certain key hearings. Both agencies held back the most important POW files. Dick Cheney was the Pentagon chief then; Robert Gates, now the Pentagon chief, was the CIA director.

Further, the committee failed to question any living president. Reagan declined to answer questions; the committee didn't contest his refusal. Nixon was given a pass. George H.W. Bush, the sitting president, whose prints were all over this issue from his days as CIA chief in the 1970s, was never even approached.

Troubled by these signs, several committee staffers began asking why the agencies they should be probing had been turned into committee partners and decision makers. Memos to that effect were circulated. The staff made the following finding, using intelligence reports marked "credible" that covered POW sightings through 1989: "There can be no doubt that POWs were alive...as late as 1989." That finding was never released. Eventually, much of the staff was in rebellion.

This internecine struggle (see coverage, at left) continued right up to the committee's last official act - the issuance of its final report. The "Executive Summary," which comprised the first forty-three pages - was essentially a whitewash, saying that only "a small number" of POWs could have been left behind in 1973 and that there was little likelihood that any prisoners could still be alive. The Washington press corps, judging from its coverage, seems to have read only this air-brushed summary, which had been closely controlled.

But the rest of the 1,221-page Report on POW/MIAs was quite different. Sprinkled throughout are pieces of hard evidence that directly contradict the summary's conclusions. This documentation established that a significant number of prisoners were left behind - and that top government officials knew this from the start. These candid findings were inserted by committee staffers who had unearthed the evidence and were determined not to allow the truth to be sugar-coated.

If the Washington press corps did actually read the body of the report and then failed to report its contents, that would be a scandal of its own. The press would then have knowingly ignored the steady stream of findings in the body of the report that refuted the summary and indicated that the number of abandoned men was not small but considerable. The report gave no figures but estimates from various branches of the intelligence community ranged up to 600. The lowest estimate was 150.

Highlights of the report that undermine the benign conclusions of the Executive Summary:

* Pages 207-209: These three pages contain revelations of what appear to be either massive intelligence failures, or bad intentions - or both. The report says that until the committee brought up the subject in 1992, no branch of the intelligence community that dealt with analysis of satellite and lower-altitude photos had ever been informed of the specific distress signals US personnel were trained to use in the Vietnam war, nor had they ever been tasked to look for any such signals at all from possible prisoners on the ground.

The committee decided, however, not to seek a review of old photography, saying it "would cause the expenditure of large amounts of manpower and money with no expectation of success." It might also have turned up lots of distress-signal numbers that nobody in the government was looking for from 1973 to 1991, when the committee opened shop. That would have made it impossible for the committee to write the Executive Summary it seemed determined to write.

The failure gets worse. The committee also discovered that the DIA, which kept the lists of authenticator numbers for pilots and other personnel, could not "locate" the lists of these codes for Army, Navy or Marine pilots. They had lost or destroyed the records. The Air Force list was the only one intact, as it had been preserved by a different intelligence branch.

The report concluded: "In theory, therefore, if a POW still living in captivity [today], were to attempt to communicate by ground signal, smuggling out a note or by whatever means possible, and he used his personal authenticator number to confirm his identity, the US Government would be unable to provide such confirmation, if his number happened to be among those numbers DIA cannot locate."

It's worth remembering that throughout the period when this intelligence disaster occurred - from the moment the treaty was signed in 1973 until 1991 - the White House told the public that it had given the search for POWs and POW information the "highest national priority."

* Page 13: Even in the Executive Summary, the report acknowledges the existence of clear intelligence, made known to government officials early on, that important numbers of captured US POWs were not on Hanoi's repatriation list. After Hanoi released its list (showing only ten names from Laos - nine military men and one civilian), President Nixon sent a message on February 2, 1973, to Hanoi's Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. saying: "US records show there are 317 American military men unaccounted for in Laos and it is inconceivable that only ten of these men would be held prisoner in Laos."

Nixon was right. It was inconceivable. Then why did the president, less than two months later, on March 29, 1973, announce on national television that "all of our American POWs are on their way home"?

On April 13, 1973, just after all 591 men on Hanoi's official list had returned to American soil, the Pentagon got into step with the president and announced that there was no evidence of any further live prisoners in Indochina (this is on page 248).

*Page 91: A lengthy footnote provides more confirmation of the White House's knowledge of abandoned POWs. The footnote reads:

"In a telephone conversation with Select Committee Vice-Chairman Bob Smith on December 29, 1992, Dr. Kissinger said that he had informed President Nixon during the 60-day period after the peace agreement was signed that US intelligence officials believed that the list of prisoners captured in Laos was incomplete. According to Dr. Kissinger, the President responded by directing that the exchange of prisoners on the lists go forward, but added that a failure to account for the additional prisoners after Operation Homecoming would lead to a resumption of bombing. Dr. Kissinger said that the President was later unwilling to carry through on this threat."

When Kissinger learned of the footnote while the final editing of the committee report was in progress, he and his lawyers lobbied fiercely through two Republican allies on the panel - one of them was John McCain - to get the footnote expunged. The effort failed. The footnote stayed intact.

* Pages 85-86: The committee report quotes Kissinger from his memoirs, writing solely in reference to prisoners in Laos: "We knew of at least 80 instances in which an American serviceman had been captured alive and subsequently disappeared. The evidence consisted either of voice communications from the ground in advance of capture or photographs and names published by the Communists. Yet none of these men was on the list of POWs handed over after the Agreement."

Then why did he swear under oath to the committee in 1992 that he never had any information that specific, named soldiers were captured alive and hadn't been returned by Vietnam?

* Page 89: In the middle of the prisoner repatriation and US troop-withdrawal process agreed to in the treaty, when it became clear that Hanoi was not releasing everyone it held, a furious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, issued an order halting the troop withdrawal until Hanoi complied with the agreement. He cited in particular the known prisoners in Laos. The order was retracted by President Nixon the next day. In 1992, Moorer, by then retired, testified under oath to the committee that his order had received the approval of the President, the national security advisor and the secretary of defense. Nixon, however, in a letter to the committee, wrote: "I do not recall directing Admiral Moorer to send this cable."

The report did not include the following information: Behind closed doors, a senior intelligence officer had testified to the POW committee that when Moorer's order was rescinded, the angry admiral sent a "back-channel" message to other key military commanders telling them that Washington was abandoning known live prisoners. "Nixon and Kissinger are at it again," he wrote. "SecDef and SecState have been cut out of the loop." In 1973, the witness was working in the office that processed this message. His name and his testimony are still classified. A source present for the testimony provided me with this information and also reported that in that same time period, Moorer had stormed into Defense Secretary Schlesinger's office and, pounding on his desk, yelled: "The bastards have still got our men." Schlesinger, in his own testimony to the committee a few months later, was asked about - and corroborated - this account.

*Pages 95-96: In early April 1973, Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements "summoned" Dr. Roger Shields, then head of the Pentagon's POW/MIA Task Force, to his office to work out "a new public formulation" of the POW issue; now that the White House had declared all prisoners to have been returned, a new spin was needed. Shields, under oath, described the meeting to the committee. He said Clements told him: "All the American POWs are dead." Shields said he replied: "You can't say that." Clements shot back: "You didn't hear me. They are all dead." Shields testified that at that moment he thought he was going to be fired, but he escaped from his boss's office still holding his job.

*Pages 97-98: A couple of days later, on April 11, 1973, a day before Shields was to hold a Pentagon press conference on POWs, he and Gen. Brent Scowcroft, then the deputy national security advisor, went to the Oval Office to discuss the "new public formulation" and its presentation with President Nixon.

The next day, reporters right off asked Shields about missing POWs. Shields fudged his answers. He said: "We have no indications at this time that there are any Americans alive in Indochina." But he went on to say that there had not been "a complete accounting" of those lost in Laos and that the Pentagon would press on to account for the missing - a seeming acknowledgement that some Americans were still alive and unaccounted for.

The press, however, seized on Shields' denials. One headline read: "POW Unit Boss: No Living GIs Left in Indochina."

*Page 97: The POW committee, knowing that Nixon taped all his meetings in the Oval Office, sought the tape of that April 11, 1973, Nixon-Shields-Scowcroft meeting to find out what Nixon had been told and what he had said about the evidence of POWs still in Indochina. The committee also knew there had been other White House meetings that centered on intelligence about live POWs. A footnote on page 97 states that Nixon's lawyers said they would provide access to the April 11 tape "only if the Committee agreed not to seek any other White House recordings from this time period." The footnote says that the committee rejected these terms and got nothing. The committee never made public this request for Nixon tapes until the brief footnote in its 1993 report.

McCain's Catch-22

None of this compelling evidence in the committee's full report dislodged McCain from his contention that the whole POW issue was a concoction by deluded purveyors of a "conspiracy theory. But an honest review of the full report, combined with the other documentary evidence, tells the story of a frustrated and angry president, and his national security advisor, furious at being thwarted at the peace table by a small, much less powerful country that refused to bow to Washington's terms. That President seems to have swallowed hard and accepted a treaty that left probably hundreds of American prisoners in Hanoi's hands, to be used as bargaining chips for reparations.

Maybe Nixon and Kissinger told themselves that they could get the prisoners home after some time had passed. But perhaps it proved too hard to undo a lie as big as this one. Washington said no prisoners were left behind, and Hanoi swore it had returned all of them. How could either side later admit it had lied? Time went by and as neither side budged, telling the truth became even more difficult and remote. The public would realize that Washington knew of the abandoned men all along. The truth, after men had been languishing in foul prison cells, could get people impeached or thrown in jail.

Which brings us to today, when the Republican candidate for President is the contemporaneous politician most responsible for keeping the truth about his matter hidden. Yet he says he's the right man to be the Commander-in-Chief, and his credibility in making this claim is largely based on his image as a POW hero.

On page 468 of the 1,221-page report, McCain parsed his POW position oddly: "We found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence - though no proof - to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of America's military involvement in Vietnam."

"Evidence though no proof." Clearly, no one could meet McCain's standard of proof as long as he is leading a government crusade to keep the truth buried.

To this reporter, this sounds like a significant story and a long overdue opportunity for the press to finally dig into the archives to set the historical record straight - and even pose some direct questions to the candidate.

--------

Sydney H. Schanberg, a journalist for nearly 50 years, has written extensively on foreign affairs - particularly Asia - and on domestic issues such as ethics, racial problems, government secrecy, corporate excesses and the weaknesses of the national media. Most of his journalism career has been spent on newspapers but his award-winning work has also appeared widely in other publications and media. The 1984 movie, The Killing Fields, which won several Academy Awards, was based on his book The Death and Life of Dith Pran - a memoir of his experiences covering the war in Cambodia for the New York Times and of his relationship with his Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran.
For his accounts of the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting "at great risk." He is also the recipient of many other awards - including two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism.

Alaska Women Reject Palin, Rally is HUGE: Hot News From The Frozen North.

Dorothiea — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:01:20 EDT

Hot News From The Frozen North.

Click Link Below For Pictures Of Reject Palin Rally!
http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/

I attended the Welcome Home rally for Sarah Palin this morning. Hooo. It was an experience. About a thousand (maybe) hard-core Palin supporters showed up to hear her speak at the new Dena’ina Convention Center in downtown Anchorage. After shaking it off with a good double shot of espresso, and a brisk walk back to my car, it was time to head to the Alaska Women Reject Palin rally. It was to be held outside on the lawn in front of the Loussac Library in midtown Anchorage. Home made signs were encouraged, and the idea was to make a statement that Sarah Palin does not speak for all Alaska women, or men. I had no idea what to expect.The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.So, as I jettisoned myself from the jaws of the ‘Drill Baby Drill’ crowd and toward the mystery rally at the library, I felt a bit apprehensive. I’d been disappointed before by the turnout at other rallies. Basically, in Anchorage, if you can get 25 people to show up at an event, it’s a success. So, I thought to myself, if we can actually get 100 people there that aren’t sent by Eddie Burke, we’ll be doing good. A real statement will have been made. I confess, I still had a mental image of 15 demonstrators surrounded by hundreds of menacing “socialist baby-killing maggot” haters.It’s a good thing I wasn’t tailgating when I saw the crowd in front of the library or I would have ended up in somebody’s trunk. When I got there, about 20 minutes early, the line of sign wavers stretched the full length of the library grounds, along the edge of the road, 6 or 7 people deep! I could hardly find a place to park. I nabbed one of the last spots in the library lot, and as I got out of the car and started walking, people seemed to join in from every direction, carrying signs.Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.Then, the infamous Eddie Burke showed up. He tried to talk to the media, and was instantly surrounded by a group of 20 people who started shouting O-BA-MA so loud he couldn’t be heard. Then passing cars started honking in a rhythmic pattern of 3, like the Obama chant, while the crowd cheered, hooted and waved their signs high. So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart, sit back, and enjoy the photo gallery. Feel free to spread the pictures around (links are appreciated) to anyone who needs to know that Sarah Palin most definitely does not speak for all Alaskans. The citizens of Alaska, who know her best, have things to say.

Please Click Below For Pictures Of The Citizens Of Alaska, At the Reject Palin Rally!http://mudflats.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/alaska-women-reject-palin-rally-is-huge/

Maybe I'm preaching to the choir: What to do when you get "hit piece" emails about Sen.Obama

Dorothiea — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:43:12 EDT

Maybe I'm preaching to the choir here, but surely somebody can use these links and information to rebut the ugly stuff that people forward without bothering to check. Maybe they just don't care if it's true, but I'm happy to be working on a campaign that doesn't have to lie to get elected. We have the issues on our side; we just need to be ready to hit back and hit back HARD when people send us this crap.But here's an excerpt..... Yes, it's long, but there's so much material!!!One good resource is Obama himself. Wondering if some of the crazy claims are true about his proposals? Go to the issues secton of his Web site and find out for yourself: http://www.barackobama.com/issues/He also has a site specifically devoted to fighing smears, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be able to keep up with the new ones. Still, there's good info here: http://www.fightthesmears.comAnother good resource is Snopes.com - the urban legends Web site. You can often find a total debunking of one of these hit piece emails here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/You can do the same thing with John McCain at Snopes, and I urge you to do so. There are so many valid reasons to vote Democratic this year. We don't have to lie. You'd have me believe that the military thinks the Iraq war is just dandy. So it's pretty amazing that the majority of campaign contributions from deployed military people are going to Obama. Could it be that those troops who give 6 to 1 to Obama hate America? Or maybe they see the folly of pouring good money after bad and losing even more of our soldiers. (http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/08/troops-deployed-abroad-give-61.html) I think that the mistake that was made is taking the country to war based on the lie that Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11. Sarah Palin and McCain are still peddling it. (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/inteldump/2008/09/palin_iraq_and_911.html) What's up with that? The mistake was not sending enough troops to adequately handle an occupied country. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Shinseki) The mistake was signing our country up on the list of regimes who TORTURE PEOPLE. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-countries-knew-about-cia-torture-flights-524366.html) It's a LIE that Sarah Palin "opposed the bridge to nowhere" (http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed7/idUSN3125537020080901") and just like it's a LIE that Obama is, as you claimed previously, a Muslim. (http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp) And if he is, so what? Remember that pesky Article 6 of the Constitution that outlaws a religious test for public office?'course it's not a LIE that Palin's minister is a bigwig in Jews for Jesus and that her church hosted a speaker who claimed that terrorism in Israel is because Jews haven't embraced Christianity. (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13098.html)It's not a LIE that McCain's tax plan will give $269,364 in tax breaks to those making more than $2.87 MILLION, but only to $319 to middle class families making between $37,596 and $66,354. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/09/ST2008060900950.html) And it's not a LIE that McCain plans to tax the health care benefits of people with employer-sponsored health plans (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/11/politics/animal/main4440453.shtml) or that the Republican platform calls for abortion to be outlawed in ALL CASES - even rape and incest. Even if the woman/girl is the same age as our daughters. That really doesn't work for me.The GOP platform also calls for abstinenance-only sex education. We see how well that's worked in other prominent families, right? (http://www.rcrc.org/issues/election08r.cfm) That's not change I can believe it. That's change that simply unbelievable.Support any candidate you want. Vote for whomever you want. Fine. But do it on the facts, not poorly-sourced viral emails and videos. And remember that we're electing the President of the UNITED STATES.I think if someone sends out something that's inaccurate and doesn't bother to check the facts - which a quick trip to Snopes.com can do - then I'm not confident that the sender will correct him or herself later. So I reply to everyone. Or even add a few if the spirit moves me.McCain is running on a platform that supports a criminal regime that makes unnecessary war, tortures people, spies on its citizens, holds people without charge in violation of the Constitution of the United States, and has a president who agrees, along with his advisors, with Richard Nixon that "If the President does it, it's not illegal." (http://afjjusticewatch.blogspot.com/2008/04/when-president-does-it-that-means-that.html)That's just wrong.You may be happy living in a police state, but I'm not. I demand more from my government. Keep in mind that one of the Big Ten is to not bear false witness. I think everyone should check these forwarded emails for accuracy at the snopes.com urban legends Web site before sending them on. A campaign that uses its candidate's record of service and HONOR can do no less.
Happy rebutting!

The Other Woman from Wasilla: Green and Palin also have something else in common: They can't stand one another.

Dorothiea — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:34:02 EDT

The Other Woman from Wasilla<o:p>

Who would have thought that a woman from Wasilla would play a key role in the presidential election? No, I'm not (just) talking about Sarah Palin. I'm talking about Lyda Green.<o:p>

Green is Alaska's Senate president. Like Palin, she's a Republican from the now-famous town in Alaska's Mat-Su region.<o:p>

Green and Palin also have something else in common: They can't stand one another. Take a look at what Green told the Anchorage Daily News when Palin was announced as John McCain's running mate:<o:p>

"She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"<o:p>

Green became senate president in an interesting way. She persuaded the Senate's nine Democrats (out of 20 members) to support her bid for leadership, in exchange for committee chairs and other perks of being part of the majority. Eventually, 15 members of the Senate became part of this bipartisan working group.<o:p>

In her role as Senate president, Green has clashed with Palin on policy. In fact, by most accounts, Green is more conservative than Palin. Green opposed tax increases on oil companies that were pushed by Palin.<o:p>

It's pretty clear that the feud is personal too. Usually, if your disagreements are only about fiscal policy, you don't tell US Weekly about them.<o:p>

This year, Palin ended Green's political career -- indirectly. Green was running for reelection until a Palin ally challenged the senate president in the Republican primary. Green, realizing she didn't have a chance against Palin's proxy, dropped out.<o:p>

So, in her few remaining months in the legislature, how might Green influence the presidential election?<o:p>

Most obviously, at a time when the McCain campaign is charging that the legislature's Troopergate investigation is the work of Democratic loyalists, Green seems happy to validate the investigation as bipartisan and to criticize Palin in the process. Here's what she said in this morning's New York Times, as a group of Alaska Republicans sued to stop the investigation:<o:p>

“The McCain campaign is the one that has made this partisan,” Ms. Green said. “This was 100 percent bipartisan effort on the part of the Legislature to ask questions that deserve to be answered.”<o:p>

A few quotes in newspaper articles, of course, will have minimal impact on the election's result. But, given what she's saying on the record, I have to wonder what she's telling reporters off the record. Journalists, I'm sure, appreciate any hints as to where they can find dirt on Palin.<o:p>

And, whether the Troopergate investigation appears bipartisan is not a trivial matter. If the legal maneuvering fails and a report is issued before the election, the McCain campaign's strategy will be to depict the findings as part of a partisan smear campaign against Palin.<o:p>

It seems clear that Green will vouch for any report's findings. The bigger question, though, may be whether she can persuade Republican allies to do the same. The more Alaska Republicans who support the report, the harder the McCain campaign's task will be. So, if she can do that, she just might get the last laugh in her feud with Palin.<o:p>

The Ugly New McCain

Dorothiea — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:54:09 EDT

The Ugly New McCain

By Richard Cohen
Wednesday, September 17, 2008;

Following his loss to George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

The precise moment of McCain's abasement came, would you believe, not at some news conference or on one of the Sunday shows but on "The View," the daytime TV show created by Barbara Walters. Last week, one of the co-hosts, Joy Behar, took McCain to task for some of the ads his campaign has been running. One deliberately mischaracterized what Barack Obama had said about putting lipstick on a pig -- an Americanism that McCain himself has used. The other asserted that Obama supported teaching sex education to kindergarteners.

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician's lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

At a forum last week at Columbia University, McCain said, "But right now we have to restore trust and confidence in government." This was always the promise of John McCain, the single best reason to vote for him. America has been cheated on too many times -- the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies. Who believes that in Afghanistan last month, only five civilians were killed by the American military in an airstrike, instead of the approximately 90 claimed by the Afghan government? Not me. I first gave up on the military during Vietnam and then again when it covered up the death of Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger and former NFL player who was killed in 2004 by friendly fire.

McCain was going to fix all that. He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can -- as he did in South Carolina -- renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won't work. Karl Marx got one thing right -- what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

cohenr@washpost.com

Gloria Steinem says Gov. Palin is the wrong woman for the job

Dorothiea — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:09:22 EDT

Sarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008 Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the "white-male-only" sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie. · Join the reader discussion on Gloria Steinem's Op-Ed articleSelecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, "I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?" When asked about Iraq, she said, "I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq."She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Did you watch Sarah Palin's speech last night? The speech told us a lot about her.

Dorothiea — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:31:10 EDT

Did you watch Sarah Palin's speech last night? The speech told us a lot about her.

It told us that she can distort the facts and deliver mean-spirited zingers with the best of them. It told us that if Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter ever need a stand-in, she'd be a great pick.

It told us that she can be condescending and dismissive of the real work Barack Obama did helping real people on the South Side of Chicago. It told us that she can uphold the long Republican tradition of lying about Democratic tax cuts—even though Obama's plan would give Americans a bigger break than McCain's.

But the speech—written by one of President Bush's speechwriters—didn't tell us the truth about Sarah Palin's extremist positions. And the more that people know her far-right views, the less they support her. (There's a partial list below.)

One of the best ways to get the word out about Palin is to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Today's a great day to write because this is very relevant—it just happened last night. Plus, our online tool makes it easy and has great tips. Please take a few minutes to write a quick letter to the editor now:

http://pol.moveon.org/lte?campaign_id=95&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=3

Palin's speech and the reaction to it also made clear why McCain picked her. It wasn't a decision about who's most qualified to serve a heart-beat away from the presidency—it was a political decision about pleasing the far-right base of the Republican party.

Writing a letter to your local paper is a great way to make sure voters understand that. The opinion pages are the most widely-read pages of the newspaper. Write today, and your letter's a lot more likely to get published because it's so topical. It'll help sway the editorial board too.

Here are a bunch of points you might want to include in your letter:

Palin recently said that the war in Iraq is "God's task." She's even admitted she hasn't thought about the war much—just last year she was quoted saying, "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq." 1, 2
Palin has actively sought the support of the fringe Alaska Independence Party. Six months ago, Palin told members of the group—who advocate for a vote on secession from the union—to "keep up the good work" and "wished the party luck on what she called its 'inspiring convention.'" 3
Palin wants to teach creationism in public schools. She hasn't made clear whether she thinks evolution is a fact.4
Palin doesn't believe that humans contribute to global warming. Speaking about climate change, she said, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being manmade." 5
Palin has close ties to Big Oil. Her inauguration was even sponsored by BP. 6
Palin is extremely anti-choice. She doesn't even support abortion in the case of rape or incest. 7
Palin opposes comprehensive sex-ed in public schools. She's said she will only support abstinence-only approaches. 8
As mayor, Palin tried to ban books from the library. Palin asked the library how she might go about banning books because some had inappropriate language in them—shocking the librarian, Mary Ellen Baker. According to Time, "news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor." 9
She DID support the Bridge to Nowhere (before she opposed it). Palin claimed that she said "thanks, but no thanks" to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. But in 2006, Palin supported the project repeatedly, saying that Alaska should take advantage of earmarks "while our congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist." 10

The plain fact of the matter is that Sarah Palin did a bang-up job delivering a Karl Rove-style political attack speech last night. That makes her a skilled politician but it doesn't make her views any more palatable for voters. Americans don't really want another far-right, anti-science ideologue in the White House.

Please help get the word out about where Sarah Palin really stands on the issues.

http://pol.moveon.org/lte?campaign_id=95&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=4

Thanks for all you do.

–Nita, Ilyse, Wes, Karin and the rest of the team

P.S. If you haven't seen it, check out the Daily Show clip on Palin. It's worth a watch
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=24753&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=5

Sources
1. "Palin: Iraq war 'a task that is from God'," Associated Press, September 3, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=24701&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=6

2. "Palin wasn't 'really focused much' on the Iraq war," ThinkProgress, August 30, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=24702&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=7

3. "The Sarah Palin Digest," ThinkProgress, September 4, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/palin-digest/

4. "McCain and Palin differ on issues," Associated Press, September 3, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=24703&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=8

5. Ibid

6. The Sarah Palin Digest," ThinkProgress, September 4, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/palin-digest/

7. Ibid

8. Ibid.

9. "Mayor Palin: A Rough Record," Time, September 2, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=24704&id=13701-4770726-aLCzDix&t=9

10. The Sarah Palin Digest," ThinkProgress, September 4, 2008
http://thinkprogress.org/palin-digest/

SARAH PALIN'S PREGNANT DAUGHTER CARTOON

Dorothiea — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:56:37 EDT

CaglePost

SARAH PALIN'S PREGNANT DAUGHTER CARTOON

Attacks, Praise Stretch Truth at GOP Convention

Dorothiea — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:27:07 EDT

Attacks, Praise Stretch Truth at GOP Convention

By: Jim Kuhnhenn, The Associated Press

Many claims at the Republican convention were false. (Photo: Getty Images)

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her Republican supporters held back little Wednesday as they issued dismissive attacks on Barack Obama and flattering praise on her credentials to be vice president. In some cases, the reproach and the praise stretched the truth.

Some examples:

PALIN: "I have protected the taxpayers by vetoing wasteful spending ... and championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere."

THE FACTS: As mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million. In her two years as governor, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. While Palin notes she rejected plans to build a $398 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport, that opposition came only after the plan was ridiculed nationally as a "bridge to nowhere."

PALIN: "There is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate."

THE FACTS: Compared to McCain and his two decades in the Senate, Obama does have a more meager record. But he has worked with Republicans to pass legislation that expanded efforts to intercept illegal shipments of weapons of mass destruction and to help destroy conventional weapons stockpiles. The legislation became law last year. To demean that accomplishment would be to also demean the work of Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, a respected foreign policy voice in the Senate. In Illinois, he was the leader on two big, contentious measures in Illinois: studying racial profiling by police and requiring recordings of interrogations in potential death penalty cases. He also successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform legislation.

PALIN: "The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars."

THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain's plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.

Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks, mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families.

He also would raise income taxes, capital gains and dividend taxes on the wealthiest. He would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise.

MCCAIN: "She's been governor of our largest state, in charge of 20 percent of America's energy supply ... She's responsible for 20 percent of the nation's energy supply. I'm entertained by the comparison and I hope we can keep making that comparison that running a political campaign is somehow comparable to being the executive of the largest state in America," he said in an interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson.

THE FACTS: McCain's phrasing exaggerates both claims. Palin is governor of a state that ranks second nationally in crude oil production, but she's no more "responsible" for that resource than President Bush was when he was governor of Texas, another oil-producing state. In fact, her primary power is the ability to tax oil, which she did in concert with the Alaska Legislature. And where Alaska is the largest state in America, McCain could as easily have called it the 47th largest state - by population.

MCCAIN: "She's the commander of the Alaska National Guard. ... She has been in charge, and she has had national security as one of her primary responsibilities," he said on ABC.

THE FACTS: While governors are in charge of their state guard units, that authority ends whenever those units are called to actual military service. When guard units are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, they assume those duties under "federal status," which means they report to the Defense Department, not their governors. Alaska's national guard units have a total of about 4,200 personnel, among the smallest of state guard organizations.

FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin "got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States."

THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor's election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.

FORMER MASSACHUSETTS GOV. MITT ROMNEY: "We need change, all right - change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington! We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington - throw out the big-government liberals, and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin."

THE FACTS: A Back-to-the-Future moment. George W. Bush, a conservative Republican, has been president for nearly eight years. And until last year, Republicans controlled Congress. Only since January 2007 have Democrats have been in charge of the House and Senate.

---------

Associated Press Writer Jim Drinkard in Washington contributed to this report.

Palin lied about visiting Ireland as part of her foreign policy experience

Dorothiea — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:38:48 EDT

Palin lied about visiting Ireland as part of her foreign policy experience
John Aravosis (DC)

She didn't visit Ireland, which is what the McCain-Palin campaign claimed to Politico's Ben Smith on Saturday. She had a short refueling stopover, which means at best her extensive Irish diplomacy amounted to buying a sweater and a beer mug in the Shannon airport.

Why does Sarah Palin's duty-free-diplomacy matter? Because John McCain, who is 72 and has had 4 bouts of cancer, just picked Sarah Palin to replace him as commander in chief should he die or be incapacitated in office. Sarah Palin, in an effort to bolster her non-existent national security expertise, claimed she had visited 3 countries: Germany; Kuwait; and Ireland. Now we find out that one of those three, 33% of her experience, was pretty much a lie. Did the McCain campaign know that Palin basically lied to the media and the American people? Or did this Irish blogger do the vetting that the McCain campaign couldn't be bothered to do?

Oh, the McCain-Palin campaign now alleges that Palin visited Canada too. Sure, if you count buying a Celine Dion CD.

http://www.americablog.com/2008/09/palin-lied-about-visiting-ireland-as.html
********
"It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues."
- Abraham Lincoln"

what the Repubs are really saying

Dorothiea — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:01:01 EDT

Take a listen to what the Repubs are really saying when they are not on camera!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrG8w4bb3kgThat is absolutely PRECIOUS!!!!

An Extreme Choice

Dorothiea — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:27:11 EDT

An Extreme Choice

Last Friday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) as his vice presidential running mate, "catching almost everyone but his inner circle by surprise." Of the very little that is known about Palin is her extreme right-wing policies on a wide range of issues. For example, she supports teaching creationism in school, favors privatization of health insurance, boasts of being a "lifetime member of the NRA," opposes stem-cell research, and declared that "she would support a ballot question that would deny benefits to homosexual couples." On some of the most important issues of this election -- Iraq, energy, abortion -- Palin represents the extreme right wing.

EXTREME ON ABORTION: One of the only policy stances widely known about Palin when her name was first announced is her extreme opposition to abortion. She once said that she would not support an abortion for her then-14 year old daughter, even if she had been raped. Palin has also declared that "explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support," favoring abstinence-only programs instead. The right wing has lauded both Palin for choosing to carry her most recent child, who has Down Syndrome, to term, and her 17-year-old daughter for deciding to complete her pregnancy. Yet as the American Prospect's Ann Friedman points out, "John McCain and Sarah Palin don't believe women have a right to choose. It's absolutely absurd for the campaign to emphasize the fact that [Palin's daughter] Bristol 'made this decision,' and then push for policies that take away that choice."

EXTREME CLUELESSNESS ON IRAQ: Like George Bush before he became president, Palin has barely traveled outside the United States. She has never been to Iraq or Afghanistan and admitted last year, "I haven't really focused much on the Iraq war." In an interview with Time magazine last month, she seemed completely unaware of McCain's Iraq plan. She said she did not know "what the plan is to ever end the war." She later said it's "tough" to "talk about the plan for the war" because her son will be deployed to Iraq. "Let's make sure we have a plan here," she said. Palin then added, "respecting McCain's position on that too though." Eschewing any substantitve analysis of the war, she asserted simply that U.S. soldiers are "out on a task that is from God." She also seems to believe the Iraq war was about oil, saying that "in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources." In another interview, she argued, "we better have a real clear plan for the war," adding, "And it better not have to do with oil."

EXTREME DENIAL OF GLOBAL WARMING: Though McCain points to his position on global warming as a chief difference between himself and President Bush, Palin shares more of the current president's perspective than McCain's. Though she admits that climate change "will affect Alaska more than any other state," she said, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made." "During last fall's political campaign, Gov. Sarah Palin said she remained unconvinced about how much human emissions contribute to current global warming trends." She has also opposed listing polar bears as endangered due to climate change. In the New York Times today, Tom Friedman writes, "With his choice of Sarah Palin -- the Alaska governor who has advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and does not believe mankind is playing any role in climate change -- for vice president, John McCain has completed his makeover from the greenest Republican to run for president to just another representative of big oil."

EXTREME PAWN OF BIG OIL: "No one is closer to the the oil industry than Governor Palin," the Sierra Club's Carl Pope said. Palin told Roll Call last week, "When I look every day, the big oil company's building is right out there next to me, and it's quite a reminder that we should have mutually beneficial relationships with the oil industry." As a champion for Big Oil, Palin is a vociferous proponent of domestic drilling. "I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can't drill our way out of our problem," she said. She also dismisses alternative energy solutions as "are far from imminent" focusing instead on opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. During her race for lieutenant governor, she received a full 10 percent of her campaign donations from executives and their families at the disgraced oil services company Veco. In her 2006 race for governor, another 10 percent of her donations came from the oil and natural gas industry. Though she supported a windfall tax on oil profits -- an idea McCain has blasted -- she also signed a bill just last week "suspending Alaska's gasoline, marine fuel and aviation fuel taxes until Aug. 31, 2009," which will only add to Big Oil's coffers.

MEDIA -- INFURIATED ABOUT TOUGH CNN INTERVIEW, MCCAIN CANCELS LARRY KING APPEARANCE: On Monday, Tucker Bounds, a campaign spokesman for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), appeared on CNN for a tough interview with Campbell Brown. Brown repeatedly asked Bounds to name a foreign policy decision made by McCain's running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK). Citing the Bounds interview as "over the line," McCain canceled an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live yesterday. According to the Washington Post, the McCain campaign believes that the media is "on a mission to destroy" Palin and feels "under siege." The Post writes, "The McCain camp has been unusually aggressive in pushing back against the media, and it seems to hope to persuade journalists to back off in their scrutiny of Palin." McCain even considered pulling out of a presidential debate set to be moderated by NBC anchor Tom Brokaw because of what campaign manager Steve Schmidt called NBC's "irresponsible journalism." CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer reported that CNN is standing by Brown. "CNN does not believe that Campbell's interview was over the line," he said. "We are committed to fair coverage of both sides of this historic election."

JUSTICE -- DOJ INSPECTOR GENERAL REPORT SHOWS EVIDENCE OF GONZALES PERJURY: There is also "strong evidence" in a new Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) report released yesterday that former attorney general Alberto Gonzales "lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents." According to the IG's report, "Gonzales said that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature" of the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program he referenced in notes on the document. Yet the report also says "the envelope containing documents related to the NSA surveillance program bore the handwritten markings, 'TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY - ARG' [the attorney general's initials] followed by an abbreviation for the SCI codeword for the program." CQ's Jeff Stein notes, "Poor Scooter Libby...who suffered million-dollar legal bills and lifetime disbarment for a perjury...only to be snatched from the jaws of prison by a pardon from President Bush. Today, the Justice Department revealed that it had saved everybody the bother in the case of Alberto Gonzales."

ENERGY -- BUSH EXPLOITS HURRICANE GUSTAV TO DEMAND MORE OFFSHORE DRILLING: Early yesterday, President Bush exploited his press briefing on the "follow-up efforts" to Hurricane Gustav to attack Congress about lifting the offshore drilling moratorium. Stating that "what happens after the storm passes is as important as what happens prior to the storm arriving," he declared that "our discussion here today is about energy." Bush was not referring to the 1.4 million Louisianans who have lost power due to the storm's destructive force. Rather, he was referring to his misguided campaign to end the ban on offshore drilling in the outer continental shelf. "This storm...ought to cause the Congress to step up their need to address our dependence on foreign oil. And one place to do so is to give us a chance to explore in environmentally friendly ways on the outer continental shelf," he said. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were both floored by Bush's decision "to use another hurricane in Louisiana to promote offshore drilling at this point," after his administration "performed so poorly during Hurricane Katrina." Scarborough exclaimed, "Just stop!"

California lawmakers passed a bill aimed at cutting CO2 emissions by "rewarding cities and counties that prevent urban sprawl and improve public transportation." Supporters and transportation experts say it is "the first measure in the nation to link government transportation funding with urban planning and CO2-reduction goals."

Vice President Cheney "traveled to Azerbaijan Wednesday, part of a tour of three ex-Soviet republics wary of Russia's intentions following last month's war between Russia and neighboring Georgia." Azerbaijan is "home to some of the largest oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet Union."

"The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that construction spending declined 0.6 percent in July, double the 0.3 percent decrease analysts had been expecting." Construction activity is down 4.7 percent from last year, "representing one of the major drags on the current economy."

And finally: The Huffington Post claims to have caught former president George H.W. Bush checking his watch last night during First Lady Laura Bush's speech at the Republican National Convention. The site has posted the "nostalgia-inducing video" here.

Is McCain (Physically/Mentally) Fit To Lead?

Dorothiea — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:48:25 EDT

Is McCain (Physically/Mentally) Fit To Lead?

I've been reticent to make much of McCain's advanced age because, as I've mentioned to those who have poked fun at his age, there is no lack of issues of substance to which McCain is vulnerable, not to mention childish and superficial attacks on his age just make us look small (much like McCain looks with his juvenile "celebrity" attack ads). That said, I'm really starting to think his age might be an important issue. Let me explain.

First, McCain has only held one public campaign event on a weekend since winning the Republican nomination back in February. All the while Obama, with the exception of this past week, has been hard at work on the campaign trail, weekends included, for over a year and a half. Hillary did the same thing while she was campaigning, there was no time to take weekends off, let alone almost every single weekend for 6 months. When I first became aware of this I was shocked. I couldn't believe he took every weekend off. Apparently campaigning without two days off every five days is too rigorous for McCain at 72. McCain also typically only holds a single campaign event per day.

Not only that, despite having months of free general election campaigning time while Hillary and Obama went 53 rounds in the primaries, many Republicans have criticized McCain for basically squandering that extra time, and having nothing to show for it. He didn't hit the campaign trail hard, he just loafed around for months, campaigning at full snail pace, while of course taking weekends off, so at the end of the Democratic primary, McCain had basically nothing to show for his time advantage. Obviously this had Republicans quite frustrated. Again, this is unheard of in presidential campaigns.

So what was McCain doing during this time? He certainly wasn't doing his job as a senator for Arizona. Yes, all presidential candidates who are sitting members of Congress inevitably miss a lot of votes, because let's face it, campaigning is a full-time job, and I certainly don't fault the candidates for that. Obama and Hillary both missed a lot of votes while engaged in their year and a half long struggle for the Democratic nomination. But even though McCain had four months of free time with basically no opponent, he still showed up for work in Congress far less than Obama and Hillary. Here is a rundown from the end of July, which will give an idea how how MIA McCain has really been. Please note that the picture is even worse than what these numbers show, because he hasn't shown up for any votes or hearing since these numbers were up-to-date.

Any way you measure it, McCain's performance in the Senate during the last year has been abysmal. He has missed 400 votes, far more than any other Senator (including Tim Johnson, who's recuperating from a brain hemorrhage). In May Ronald Hansen of the Arizona Republic referred to "his chronic absence in the Senate" as if the problem is well known in McCain's home state. Earlier this month he was the only Senator to skip the vote on the Medicare bill. At the time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid publicly criticized McCain for his regular absences.

Here are some numbers:
LI>63% - How many votes in the Senate McCain has skipped during the 110th Congress (since January 2007).
96 - The number of Senate votes McCain has missed since his last recorded vote on April 8.
111 (Update: 132) - The number of days since McCain last attended a committee hearing (of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on April 9).
25% - How many full SASC hearings McCain has attended during the 110th Congress.
89% - How many full SASC hearings McCain has skipped since April 2007 (32 out of the last 36 hearings).
2007 - The last year in which McCain attended any Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee hearings or subcommittee hearings.
The League of Conservation Voters noted in February that McCain has skipped every one of the 15 Senate votes on environmental issues that it deemed critical during this Congress.

Read the whole thing here.

But leave it to McCain to heap some serious hypocrisy onto his pathetic record:

[Commenting on Congress not lifting the ban on offshore drilling before its recess]

"The Congress, doing nothing, decided to go on a five-week recess," said McCain. "Congress should come back into session... and I'm willing to come off the campaign trail."

Woah, big words from the big dog! He even said he'd show up to work for a change to vote on such an important issue as getting the oil companies more profit. The same article in which McCain was quoted saying this puts this in context of the other votes that McCain doesn't find nearly as important as oil company profits:

Medicare Reimbursement Cuts, 7/9/08
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 7/9/08
The New GI Bill, 6/28/08
A $44 Billion Stimulus Package (McCain was in D.C. at the time) 2/7/08
Equal Pay Legislation, 2/23/08
All 15 Key Environmental Votes, according to the League of Conservation Voters

Alright, so let's review. McCain takes more time off from the campaign than any other presidential candidate has. Despite having four extra months on the campaign trail, McCain has barely anything to show for it, yet he also managed to show up for work less than any other senator, including all of the other presidential candidates, and a senator who had a major stroke. These are the things that have been building up in the back of my head over the last few months, and taken together they paint a picture that is somewhat alarming.

But it does get worse. This was in an article a little over a week ago:

McCain said he would concentrate on getting more sleep when he can.

"If I put in three or four 18-hour, 20-hour days in a row, I'm not sharp. It's just a fact," the Republican senator from Arizona said. "I'm more sharp if I get a little rest."

McCain said he feels best sleeping until 7:30 or 8 a.m., as opposed to his usual morning drill of rising at 5:30 or 6 a.m.

"It seems to help me to get up a little later in the morning," he said, joking, "Sorry to bother with that intimate detail."

Yeah, I'm sure it is rough, but needing to sleep til 8am? Seriously? People with regular 8-5 jobs don't even have that luxury, and their job isn't to run the country. This is not a job for the feint of heart. It is a 24/7 job. Remember all of those ridiculous ads Hillary ran saying she's the one ready for that 3am phone call? Well despite her giving absolutely no reason for us to believe Obama wasn't ready to answer that same phone call, she was right when she said that crises can occur in the middle of the night, or at any time. You always have to be ready to go. 24/7. Have you noticed how when presidents go into the White House they have color in their hair, and when they leave they have a LOT more white hair? Obviously this doesn't apply to McCain who has had white hair seemingly forever, but the point is, THIS IS A HARD AND EXHAUSTING JOB! Oh, but it does get worse still.

Back in May there was an overlooked* revelation that McCain has been using the sleeping pill Ambien on the trail to help him sleep. This is a pill to be taken only if you can get 7 to 8 hours of sleep, meaning if you take it, and there is a 3am phone call, your ass is going to be sleeping through it. Its side effects include amnesia, fugue states**, drowsiness, cognitive impairment, reaction impairment, and sleep walking. It also has potential effects on how you feel while awake, in addition to drowsiness, it is suggested that users be careful driving or operating machinery, or doing anything that requires them to be awake and alert until they know how Ambien affects their abilities. Ambien also comes with a warning that "The sedative effects of Ambien may be stronger in older adults. Accidental falls are common in elderly patients who take sedatives. Use caution to avoid falling or accidental injury while you are taking Ambien." Ambien may also be habit-forming. It is also not recommended for people who have a history of depression, mental illness or suicidal thoughts (I have no idea what goes on in McCain's mind, but he was a POW, as he loves to point out, and has a very aggressive temper). Ambien has also notably caused some people to do things like driving, eating, or making phone calls in their sleep, and later having no memory of the activity.

Alright, so my point is, this 72 year old man wants to have probably the most stressful and intense job in the world, yet he has to take much more time off than other candidates despite his much easier schedule. He has admitted to not being sharp without plenty of sleep, and he is taking powerful sedatives that have stronger reactions with elderly people, and cause people to be unable to think clearly, and which have the potential to cause amnesia, and producing zombie-like states in users where they don't remember doing complex activities because they are so sedated. Dr. Donald W. Greenblatt, director of the Strong Sleep Disorders Center at the University of Rochester Medical Center had this to say about McCain's Ambien use:

But while the overall risks of behavioral and judgment effects due to Ambien may be low, sleep experts agree that in a high-importance role such as the presidency, proper planning is needed when considering its use.

"Ambien should only be taken when you have a window of seven to eight hours for sleep," Greenblatt said. "Your staff should know that you've taken the medication, and that you should not be involved in any decision-making during that time."

[Dr. Peter A. Fotinakes, medical director of the St. Joseph Sleep Disorders Center] added that sleeping pills and other sedatives have been proven to be more potent in the elderly. In light of this, he said, "It may not be the best idea for the commander-in-chief to be under the influence when he or she may have to make a snap decision regarding national security in the middle of the night; Hillary's so-called telephone call at 3:00 a.m."

I'm not, I repeat NOT, saying this to make fun of McCain's age, but we need to be honest here. There are important 3am phone calls. The president cannot be sedated when those critical calls come. We can't have the president taking prescription sedatives that greatly impair cognitive and motor functions and just hope that nothing goes wrong in the world for the next 8 hours (not counting the wake-up fog period). And the president cannot take weekends off. The president can't sleep in til 8. The president can't simply decide to work less than his counterparts. Those are just the facts. McCain is old, it is a fact, and he certainly won't get any younger. This is about readiness. I've seen him during the middle of the day struggling with basic facts and his memory. We can't have a part-time president who may or may not make it through 4 years, let alone 8. Many have speculated that Reagan showed signs of Alzheimer's in his second term, these are real issues. And all joking aside, McCain's difficulties with basic facts, memory, and understanding complex issues (although his last one may just be because he is purposely being deceptive, like offshore drilling) may point to this already being a very real problem. In fact, I'm far less concerned with his cancer reoccurring than I am with the issues I've just raised, although I'd include stroke in the list of worries. One stroke and we are out a Commander-in-Chief. And on top of that McCain has been less than forthcoming with his medical records.

I honestly think we are to the point at which McCain's advanced age could be a major problem, not just for his campaign, but the country if he is ever elected president.

* H/T to JedReport and BlatantLiberal for catching this.

** A Fugue state is a state of mind characterized by abandonment of personal identity, along with the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The Fugue state is a condition of Dissociative Fugue (formerly Psychogenic Fugue).

Posted by TPIP

Commentary: Is McCain another George W. Bush?

Dorothiea — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 12:00:19 EDT

Commentary: Is McCain another George W. Bush?By Jack Cafferty
CNN

Editor's Note: Jack Cafferty is the author of the best-seller "It's Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars, and Losers Who Are Hurting America." He provides commentary on CNN's "The Situation Room" daily from 4 p.m.-7 p.m. You can also visit Jack's Cafferty File blog.

Jack Cafferty says John McCain shows virtually no intellectual curiosity, emulating President Bush

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Russia invades Georgia and President Bush goes on vacation. Our president has spent one-third of his entire two terms in office either at Camp David, Maryland, or at Crawford, Texas, on vacation.

His time away from the Oval Office included the month leading up to 9/11, when there were signs Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, and the time Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans.

Sen. John McCain takes weekends off and limits his campaign events to one a day. He made an exception for the religious forum on Saturday at Saddleback Church in Southern California.

I think he made a big mistake. When he was invited last spring to attend a discussion of the role of faith in his life with Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, McCain didn't bother to show up. Now I know why.

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. "It means I'm saved and forgiven." Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we've all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand.

Asked about his greatest moral failure, he cited his first marriage, which ended in divorce. While saying it was his greatest moral failing, he offered nothing in the way of explanation. Why not?

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Throughout the evening, McCain chose to recite portions of his stump speech as answers to the questions he was being asked. Why? He has lived 71 years. Surely he has some thoughts on what it all means that go beyond canned answers culled from the same speech he delivers every day.

He was asked "if evil exists." His response was to repeat for the umpteenth time that Osama bin Laden is a bad man and he will pursue him to "the gates of hell." That was it.

He was asked to define rich. After trying to dodge the question -- his wife is worth a reported $100 million -- he finally said he thought an income of $5 million was rich.

One after another, McCain's answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has -- virtually none.

Where are John McCain's writings exploring the vexing moral issues of our time? Where are his position papers setting forth his careful consideration of foreign policy, the welfare state, education, America's moral responsibility in the world, etc., etc., etc.?

John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.

He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the "Straight Talk Express" for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner -- short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.

George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

Obama Still Does Not Know His Place

Dorothiea — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:41:51 EDT

Obama Still Does Not Know His Place

By: Paul Jenkins

When Barack Obama started running for president, he was widely described as arrogant for daring to take on the Clintons after just two years in the Senate, despite the fact that polling at the time showed him to be the only threat to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

Eighteen-months later, we are told by the McCain campaign and its traditional media parrots that Obama is at risk of looking "presumptuous" for his recent trip abroad, even as he has registered a small but significant bounce in the polls upon his return, presumably for doing what most of us expect of a presidential candidate.

The man who slayed Democratic royalty, who has raised more money than any political campaign in US history, drawn record-breaking crowds in the US and abroad, who has been ahead of John McCain since widespread general election polling began four months ago, this man is presumptuous for thinking he has a good shot at becoming president and should therefore get to know his potential counterparts and visit the sites of US military activity?

Most candidates Obama's age will be charged sooner or later with youthful conceit for taking on their elders, no matter how guilty those elders are of mismanaging the country. It happened to some extent to Bill Clinton, and surely to others before him. However, it is hard not to see in the ongoing attitude towards this presidential frontrunner, just three months before the election, something more uncomfortable that is not simply a matter of age, but one of race.

Throughout the primary there was a growing sense of disbelief in the Clinton camp that this young'un (older than Bill was in 1991 when he started running, mind you) really thought he had a shot at this. Bill, in particular, showed little patience for Obama's "fairy tale" campaign, eventually going ballistic because, in his own version of "some of my best friends are," he did not understand that even he, whose office is in Harlem, may be condescending towards African-Americans, and towards this African-American in particular. Perhaps more perniciously, some long-time African-American political and business leaders joined in with some of the worst stereotyping of the campaign, seemingly upset at the upstart who dared to go where most of them had not.

Now McCain is recycling some version of this superciliousness, heavily aided by a traditional media still so easily scared into thinking it is not tough enough on Obama. McCain can hardly hide his rage at this uppity kid who thinks he can hobnob with world leaders just as he does -- who thinks he has more judgment than a septuagenerian war-mongering former prisoner of war. And who sees no reason to wait his turn when barely 1 in 10 Americans think the country is on the right track, thanks to his elders' enlightened leadership. In a weird echo of the Clinton attacks, McCain smirks his way through one sarcastic comment after another, his face twisted in hatred and disbelief. Not only is Obama "presumptuous," he also "doesn't understand." It is never clear what Obama doesn't understand since he actually has not gotten his facts or, so far, his analysis wrong, as opposed to McCain whose errors in fact and in judgment are so numerous as to make one wonder where he has been for the past 20 years (poring over Cold War era reports on Czechoslovakia? Hanging out at the Iraq-Pakistan border? Plotting to bomb-bomb-bomb bomb-bomb Iran?). McCain is the most arrogant of Senators (not a light charge), yet even by his standards the tone he adopts towards Obama is so densely patronizing that here too it is hard to dismiss it as purely a matter of age gap. McCain's joke of an economic advisor, Carly Fiorina, is now also laying it on thick: she is glad that Obama is consulting with experts. This from the woman who nearly ran a Fortune 100 company into the ground and whose candidate knows so little about economic issues after three decades in Congress that Fiorina is reduced to repeating that McCain "has been understanding [economic issues] for months."

That Obama is actually able to listen to facts, absorb them and analyze them should be a good thing. We assume that those skills came in handy throughout his life, not least at Harvard, where he graduated near top of his law school class. This, of course, now makes him an elitist, as he would not be expected by the old DC guard to possess any such competence (charisma perhaps, analytical ability no.) Both McCain (894th out of 899 at Annapolis) and George W. Bush revel in their under-achieving school days, as if this made these scions of hyper-privilege any closer to real people. This tactic clearly succeeded well enough for Bush to be elected president twice, and McCain to be nominated once. But there is a sense that American voters may not be taken in again and that they may actually enjoy as president someone who isn't an inbred moron or a senile fratboy.

Obama's partner in elitism, his wife Michelle, is in extreme tongue-biting mode. This is a shame, but it is inevitable, as she too is under the kind of scrutiny that would make Cindy McCain's face melt back into some approximation of reality. It is widely understood that Obama is more deserving of close examination than McCain because she is more actively involved in her husband's campaign than Cindy is. This of course is a lie: McCain has campaigned extensively for her husband and, were it not for her family fortune and her private jet, he wouldn't even have come close to being nominated. The truth is that Obama is expected to play a certain role: strong, angry, overbearing, and every one of her statements is demeaningly parsed in that light. If every word uttered by McCain were analyzed and reported to fit the stereotype of the rich, spoilt, husband-stealing white woman that she is, all would be fair. But instead, we get adoring glances, little examination of her actual role and an occasional hiccup about Michelle Obama's lack of patriotism.

What angers John McCain and bemuses many traditional observers is how unflappable Barack Obama remains in public, no matter how condescending the attacks. There is little doubt that the thick skin he grew over decades came in handy as he started to run for president. The past 18 months surely were not the first time Obama was baited for being black, for being white, for being Muslim, or for not being from "here," and it must be fascinating, although not unexpected, for him to see these patronizing attitudes resurface at this stage of his life. For the rest of us, what is fascinating is to witness how these old-school mindsets are backfiring on those who hold them, making them look less wise, more prejudiced, less fit to lead and altogether completely unappealing. And to witness that in America in 2008, it is perhaps not a bad thing not to know your place.

Sen. Obama Delivers Soaring Call for Unity in Berlin

Dorothiea — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 00:26:37 EDT

Obama Delivers Soaring Call for Unity in Berlin

Thursday 24 July 2008

by: Agence France-Presse

Barack Obama spoke in Berlin addressing a crowd estimated at over 200,000. (Photo: AP / Jae C. Hong)

Berlin - Barack Obama Thursday challenged a new generation of Americans and Europeans to tear down walls between estranged allies, races, and faiths in a soaring call for global unity at an unprecedented mass campaign rally in Berlin.

The Democratic White House candidate told tens of thousands of people near the footprint of the old Berlin Wall that humanity faced a perilous turning point, and it was time to build "a world that stands as one."

"The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," said Obama, who has scorched through US politics at lightning speed to challenge Republican John McCain for the White House in November's election.

Also see transcript of his speech below:
"A World That Stands as One" •

Part 1Part 2Part 3

The strikingly audacious speech, in a fevered atmosphere in Berlin's famed Tiergarten, took the White House race out of US borders in a way never seen before, and was designed to portray Obama as a leader with unique global appeal.

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," he said, referring to festering divisions between Europe and the United States opened up by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand," said Obama, in an address beamed live on US and German television channels and to viewers around the world.

"The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down," Obama said, drawing cheers and applause.

Obama's speech was a clear echo of former US president Ronald Reagan's call to then Soviet leader Mikhael Gorbachev in Berlin in 1987 to "tear down this wall," before the fall of Communism.

Despite its soaring cadences however, the speech was short on specifics. Obama's aides said he would not talk policy as that is the job of a president but his critics will likely slam him for empty rhetoric.

The Illinois senator rebuked both his country and Europe for blaming one another for strains in their relations, but took pains to insulate himself from critics back home who doubt his patriotism.

"I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived, at great cost and great sacrifice, to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world."

"In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common," the 46-year-old first term senator said.

"In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe's role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth."

Obama, who has a narrow lead in most polls of the US race, but trails McCain when voters are asked who would be the most credible commander in chief, used Berlin's triumph over division and totalitarianism as a metaphor for the world he hoped to forge.

"People of the world - look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one," Obama said.

In a speech that risked being seen as presumptuous, considering Obama will not even face US voters for another three months, he warned of a world where partnership was not a choice but the only means of survival.

"We cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone," he said.

He promised America under his watch would be serious about tackling global warning, a huge concern in Europe and a cause of rifts between the continent and the United States during the Bush administration.

But he also signalled he would demand Europe live up to its side of the bargain, asking for more help in the struggle against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"America cannot do this alone," Obama said.

"The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation.

"We have too much at stake to turn back now."

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

    Remarks of Senator Barack Obama (as prepared for delivery)
    "A World That Stands as One"
    July 24th, 2008
    Berlin, Germany

Thank you to the citizens of Berlin and to the people of Germany. Let me thank Chancellor Merkel and Foreign Minister Steinmeier for welcoming me earlier today. Thank you Mayor Wowereit, the Berlin Senate, the police, and most of all thank you for this welcome.

I come to Berlin as so many of my countrymen have come before. Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen - a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.

At the height of the Cold War, my father decided, like so many others in the forgotten corners of the world, that his yearning - his dream - required the freedom and opportunity promised by the West. And so he wrote letter after letter to universities all across America until somebody, somewhere answered his prayer for a better life.

That is why I'm here. And you are here because you too know that yearning. This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom. And you know that the only reason we stand here tonight is because men and women from both of our nations came together to work, and struggle, and sacrifice for that better life.

Ours is a partnership that truly began sixty years ago this summer, on the day when the first American plane touched down at Templehof.

On that day, much of this continent still lay in ruin. The rubble of this city had yet to be built into a wall. The Soviet shadow had swept across Eastern Europe, while in the West, America, Britain, and France took stock of their losses, and pondered how the world might be remade.

This is where the two sides met. And on the twenty-fourth of June, 1948, the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city. They cut off food and supplies to more than two million Germans in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.

The size of our forces was no match for the much larger Soviet Army. And yet retreat would have allowed Communism to march across Europe. Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun. All that stood in the way was Berlin.

And that's when the airlift began - when the largest and most unlikely rescue in history brought food and hope to the people of this city.

The odds were stacked against success. In the winter, a heavy fog filled the sky above, and many planes were forced to turn back without dropping off the needed supplies. The streets where we stand were filled with hungry families who had no comfort from the cold.

But in the darkest hours, the people of Berlin kept the flame of hope burning. The people of Berlin refused to give up. And on one fall day, hundreds of thousands of Berliners came here, to the Tiergarten, and heard the city's mayor implore the world not to give up on freedom. "There is only one possibility," he said. "For us to stand together united until this battle is won...The people of Berlin have spoken. We have done our duty, and we will keep on doing our duty. People of the world: now do your duty...People of the world, look at Berlin!"

People of the world - look at Berlin!

Look at Berlin, where Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle.

Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security.

Look at Berlin, where the bullet holes in the buildings and the somber stones and pillars near the Brandenburg Gate insist that we never forget our common humanity.

People of the world - look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.

Sixty years after the airlift, we are called upon again. History has led us to a new crossroad, with new promise and new peril. When you, the German people, tore down that wall - a wall that divided East and West; freedom and tyranny; fear and hope - walls came tumbling down around the world. From Kiev to Cape Town, prison camps were closed, and the doors of democracy were opened. Markets opened too, and the spread of information and technology reduced barriers to opportunity and prosperity. While the 20th century taught us that we share a common destiny, the 21st has revealed a world more intertwined than at any time in human history.

The fall of the Berlin Wall brought new hope. But that very closeness has given rise to new dangers - dangers that cannot be contained within the borders of a country or by the distance of an ocean.

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. The genocide in Darfur shames the conscience of us all.

In this new world, such dangerous currents have swept along faster than our efforts to contain them. That is why we cannot afford to be divided. No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone. None of us can deny these threats, or escape responsibility in meeting them. Yet, in the absence of Soviet tanks and a terrible wall, it has become easy to forget this truth. And if we're honest with each other, we know that sometimes, on both sides of the Atlantic, we have drifted apart, and forgotten our shared destiny.

In Europe, the view that America is part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right, has become all too common. In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe's role in our security and our future. Both views miss the truth - that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe.

Yes, there have been differences between America and Europe. No doubt, there will be differences in the future. But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more - not less. Partnership and cooperation among nations is not a choice; it is the one way, the only way, to protect our common security and advance our common humanity.

That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

We know they have fallen before. After centuries of strife, the people of Europe have formed a Union of promise and prosperity. Here, at the base of a column built to mark victory in war, we meet in the center of a Europe at peace. Not only have walls come down in Berlin, but they have come down in Belfast, where Protestant and Catholic found a way to live together; in the Balkans, where our Atlantic alliance ended wars and brought savage war criminals to justice; and in South Africa, where the struggle of a courageous people defeated apartheid.

So history reminds us that walls can be torn down. But the task is never easy. True partnership and true progress requires constant work and sustained sacrifice. They require sharing the burdens of development and diplomacy; of progress and peace. They require allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.

That is why America cannot turn inward. That is why Europe cannot turn inward. America has no better partner than Europe. Now is the time to build new bridges across the globe as strong as the one that bound us across the Atlantic. Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads, and people to assemble where we stand today. And this is the moment when our nations - and all nations - must summon that spirit anew.

This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it. This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it. If we could create NATO to face down the Soviet Union, we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks that have struck in Madrid and Amman; in London and Bali; in Washington and New York. If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope.

This is the moment when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. No one welcomes war. I recognize the enormous difficulties in Afghanistan. But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success. For the people of Afghanistan, and for our shared security, the work must be done. America cannot do this alone. The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now.

This is the moment when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love. With that wall gone, we need not stand idly by and watch the further spread of the deadly atom. It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

This is the moment when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. In this century, we need a strong European Union that deepens the security and prosperity of this continent, while extending a hand abroad. In this century - in this city of all cities - we must reject the Cold War mind-set of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many. Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet. This is the moment for trade that is free and fair for all.

This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East. My country must stand with yours and with Europe in sending a direct message to Iran that it must abandon its nuclear ambitions. We must support the Lebanese who have marched and bled for democracy, and the Israelis and Palestinians who seek a secure and lasting peace. And despite past differences, this is the moment when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.

And this is the moment when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world. We must remember that the Cold War born in this city was not a battle for land or treasure. Sixty years ago, the planes that flew over Berlin did not drop bombs; instead they delivered food, and coal, and candy to grateful children. And in that show of solidarity, those pilots won more than a military victory. They won hearts and minds; love and loyalty and trust - not just from the people in this city, but from all those who heard the story of what they did here.

Now the world will watch and remember what we do here - what we do with this moment. Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words "never again" in Darfur?

Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don't look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?

People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time.

I know my country has not perfected itself. At times, we've struggled to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people. We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

But I also know how much I love America. I know that for more than two centuries, we have strived - at great cost and great sacrifice - to form a more perfect union; to seek, with other nations, a more hopeful world. Our allegiance has never been to any particular tribe or kingdom - indeed, every language is spoken in our country; every culture has left its imprint on ours; every point of view is expressed in our public squares. What has always united us - what has always driven our people; what drew my father to America's shores - is a set of ideals that speak to aspirations shared by all people: that we can live free from fear and free from want; that we can speak our minds and assemble with whomever we choose and worship as we please.

These are the aspirations that joined the fates of all nations in this city. These aspirations are bigger than anything that drives us apart. It is because of these aspirations that the airlift began. It is because of these aspirations that all free people - everywhere - became citizens of Berlin. It is in pursuit of these aspirations that a new generation - our generation - must make our mark on the world.

People of Berlin - and people of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again.

McCain Gets History Of The Surge Wrong, CBS Doesn't Air Footage

Dorothiea — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:36:21 EDT

McCain Gets History Of The Surge Wrong, CBS Doesn't Air Footage During a CBS interview on Tuesday, John McCain made a stone cold error on a subject about which he claims expert knowledge: the "surge" strategy in Iraq. In an interview with anchor Katie Couric, the Arizona Republican said, inaccurately, that the surge strategy was responsible for the much-touted "Anbar Awakening," in which Sunni sheiks turned against Al Qaeda, helping in turn to reduce violence in the country.

Yet McCain's error was not seen by any CBS Evening News viewers. As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted, "CBS curiously, to say the least, left it on the edit room floor. It aired Katie Couric's question, but in response, it aired part of McCain's answer to the other question instead." (Ironically, this edit came on the same day that McCain's campaign released a video mocking the media's "love affair" with Obama.)

Click below for video of Olbermann exposing McCain and CBS.

McCain Knows Best: Rejects Maliki’s Timetable But Says ‘I Know What Iraqis Want’»

Dorothiea — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:57:55 EDT

McCain Knows Best: Rejects Maliki’s Timetable But Says ‘I Know What Iraqis Want’»

This weekend, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops out of Iraq as soon as possible, supporting the plan set forth by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). “Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” he said.

But Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) couldn’t care less what the Iraqis want. When Maliki signaled support for a timetable earlier this month, McCain rejected it. This weekend, a senior McCain aide told Marc Ambinder, “voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders.” On NBC’s Today Show today, McCain was again dismissive of Maliki, suggesting that only he knows what the Iraqis really “want”:

Q: If the Iraqi government were to say, if you were president, ‘we want a timetable for troops being removed,’ would you agree to that?
McCAIN: I’ve been there too many times. I’ve met too many times with him. And I know what they want. They want it based on conditions. And of course they’d like to have us out. That’s what happens when you win wars.

Watch it:

McCain has a history of thinking he knows better than Iraqis. After Maliki initially requested a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal this month, McCain stated, “Actually, the Iraqis are not” asking for withdrawal. On a conference call this morning, top McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann also brushed off Maliki’s withdrawal call:

One inartful statement from Prime Minister Maliki certainly does not change Iraqi government policies.

McCain is picking up a tactic from President Bush: claiming that he can now speak for Iraqis and know what’s best for them. In October 2006, Bush claimed that Iraqis are willing to “tolerate” high levels of violence because they “so [want] to be free” (despite polls showing that 71 percent wanted U.S. troops to leave). Last November, Bush implied that Iraqis should be thankful for the U.S. invasion, stating, “If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you’d be saying: God, I love freedom, because that’s what’s happened.”

As McCain said in 2004 when asked if the U.S. should withdraw if asked by the Iraqi government, “I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave.”

McCain receives almost $2,000 of "absolute disgrace" each month

Dorothiea — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:19:15 EDT

McCain receives almost $2,000 of "absolute disgrace" each month Submitted by AmyW on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 2:28pm. Alerts

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
By Amy Weiss

Sen. John McCain doesn't seem to be hesitant to accept Social Security checks, paid for by the taxes of current workers, the very thing he calls an "absolute disgrace." He received approximately $1,930 per month last year in social security benefits.

McCain apparently told campaign reporters: "I'm receiving benefits," but added, "the system is broken and, unfortunately, my children and grandchildren, according to the trustees of the Social Security system, will not have the same benefits the present retirees have."

McCain receives a yearly Senate salary of over $165,000 and his wife, Cindy, made $6 million in 2006, bringing her net worth to approximately $100 million. (So it's unlikely his children and grandchildren will have to worry.)

Clearly the McCains do not financially rely on the $23,000 in Social Security he receives each year, so why doesn't he make a statement by not participating in a system he considers so disgraceful?

"An individual does have the right to refuse his/her Social Security retirement benefit," Social Security Administration official B.J. Jarrett explained. Then, he effectively answered the question why McCain wouldn't or shouldn't opt out: "However, Social Security is an entitlement program and an individual would essentially be forfeiting a benefit based upon contributions during his/her working lifetime."

Those contributions made over a lifetime and paid back are the foundation of the system that has worked for 70+ years. McCain paid for the benefits of the generation before him and now he's receiving it back.

Obviously, the system needs reform and how to do it is debatable. But if McCain has a solution to fix social security, he must be keeping it a secret. McCain has no "Social Security" option on his "Issues" menu on his campaign Web site. On his "Economy" page, he has one paragraph:

He will fight to save the future of Social Security while meeting our obligations to the retirees of today and the future without raising taxes. John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts -- but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept. He will reach across the aisle, but if the Democrats do not act, he will. John McCain will not leave office without fixing the problems that threatens our future prosperity.

Sharon O'Brien said in the Senior Living report on About.com:

Figuring out McCain's position on privatizing Social Security isn't as easy as you might expect. McCain's public statements on privatization are often contradictory, appearing to place him firmly on both sides of the issue.

While campaign Web site summaries of issues can often be vague and uninformative, at least Obama dedicates a whole page to "Seniors and Social Security" and actually mentions concrete possible solutions and goals:

Obama believes that the first place to look for ways to strengthen Social Security is the payroll tax system. Currently, the Social Security payroll tax applies to only the first $102,000 a worker makes. Obama supports increasing the maximum amount of earnings covered by Social Security and he will work with Congress and the American people to choose a payroll tax reform package that will keep Social Security solvent for at least the next half century.

Maybe it's unreasonable to expect McCain to reject social security, but then it's also unreasonable for him to call it a disgrace and offer only "personal savings accounts" as the most constructive solution to fix that disgrace.

Sen. Obama in Iraq

Dorothiea — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:51:07 EDT

Obama in Iraq
Monday 21 July 2008

Barack Obama. (Illustration: Paul Giambarba / t r u t h o u t)
Der Spiegel proves al-Maliki story correct; series of bombings hit Baghdad.

Senator Barack Obama is in Iraq for consultations with American military commanders and Iraqi leaders. Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF [Iraqi Security Force] Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554, according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.

That is, the Iraqi death toll is actually still worse now than the last time Obama was in Iraq! (See the bombings and shootings listed below for Sunday). The hype around last year's troop escalation obscures a simple fact: that Obama formed his views about the need for the US to leave Iraq at a time when its security situation was very similar to what it is now! Why a return to the bad situation in late 2005 and early 2006 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren't for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn't be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.

The troop escalation, which actually allowed the ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis of Baghdad and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from the country, has largely been pushed as propaganda by the White House and the AEI. Here's an example of how their propaganda works. As is usual with news it does not like, the Bush administration attempted to muddy the waters this weekend regarding the interview of PM Nuri al-Maliki with Der Spiegel in which he expressed approval of Barack Obama's plan to get US troops out of Iraq within 16 months of next January. Al-Maliki told Der Spiegel in response to a question about how long US troops would be in his country:

"Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.
Der Spiegel: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want."

Ali al-Dabbagh, who is usually described as al-Maliki's spokesman but actually seems to work for the CENTCOM or Pentagon Middle East Command, was trotted out to make vague statements about Der Spiegel's having mistranslated or misinterpreted what al-Maliki said. This denial was issued through CENTCOM! When the original demand came from al-Maliki for a timetable for US withdrawal, it was al-Dabbagh who reinterpreted it as a "time horizon." Al-Dabbagh was contradicted by National Security Counsellor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, who seems actually closer in this thinking to al-Maliki. My guess is that al-Dabbagh has been recruited by some agency in Washington, DC, to explain away al-Maliki's statements whenever they contradict Bush's.

Der Spiegel stood by its story. The text of Der Spiegel's statement is here. It turns out that the translator involved works for al-Maliki, not for Der Spiegel, and so presumably knew what the prime minister's words meant in Arabic. And for the piece de resistance, it turns out that Der Spiegel has an audiotape of the Arabic of the interview, which they leaked to The New York Times. Sabrina Tavernise and Jeff Zeleny write:

'"But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki's office, not the magazine ... The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki's comments by The Times: "Obama's remarks that - if he takes office - in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq." He continued: "Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq."'

But you see, it does not matter that al-Maliki actually said what he said. It does not matter that Der Spiegel can prove it. All that matters is that the Goebbelses around Bush and Cheney have managed to muddy the waters and produce doubt, taking the hard edge off the interview. Even AFP, the usually skeptical French wire service, asserted that al-Maliki had "denied" the accuracy of the Der Spiegel interview! Of course, al-Maliki has done no such thing. CENTCOM ventriloquising al-Dabbagh engaged in the denial, and a very vague one at that.

That is the way propaganda works, to obscure the truth and ensure it can be denied. Some wingnut even tried to pressure me to retract the little sentence I had written on the affair yesterday, on the grounds of "al-Dabbagh's" mendacious and ridiculous assertions. Our information system is so corrupt and easily manipulated that even a clumsy ploy can obscure the truth and bully the journalists.

Aljazeera International reports on the conflict between Obama and McCain on a timetable for US troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Over the weekend, the Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front rejoined the al-Maliki government. It had left last summer over accusations that al-Maliki ignored Sunni sensitivities, refused to speak to his vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, coddled Shiite militias that ethnically cleansed Sunnis, and kept tens of thousands of Sunnis in prison without charges or due process. As Xinhua notes, al-Hashimi's Iraqi Islamic Party, one of three components of the Iraqi Accord Front coalition of Sunni parties, will face great competition in the provincial elections from the US-created Awakening Councils, which are paid and armed by the US military.

Speaking of this fall's provincial elections, the country's elections commission announced Sunday that they might have to be postponed, given that Parliament has still not passed the enabling legislation. The election law is mired in debates over the mixed province of Kirkuk in the north, and whether it should hold provincial elections along with the other provinces. The province is claimed by the Kurdistan Regional Government, which wants to annex it, even though the Turkmen and Arab populations do not want to join semi-autonomous Kurdistan (where the state schools are no longer Arabophone).

Al-Zaman, writing in Arabic, says that the new date has been set as December 22. It is official: The provincial elections in Iraq will not occur in time to affect the US presidential race. E.g., if the Sadrists sweep to power in many Shiite provinces, that could have been a factor in the US polls. Not going to happen.

A new airport, funded in important part by Iran has opened at the Shiite holy city of Najaf. It will likely bring millions of pilgrims from Iran, Pakistan, India and elsewhere to the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. American authorities worried about Iranians in Iraq may as well just lay back; with millions going in and out, tracking them is going to be rather difficult.

McCain to boost and cut Pentagon spending at the same time

Dorothiea — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:10:40 EDT

McCain to boost and cut Pentagon spending at the same time

It may seem hard to believe, but John McCain is actually intent on making Still-President Bush look fiscally responsible. Given that Bush has added trillions to the debt, run the largest deficits in U.S. history, and is the first president to ever put the costs of a war on the national charge card, that’s no small feat.

But McCain is giving it a shot anyway, most notably when it comes to tax cuts. He wants to take the Bush tax cuts (which McCain originally voted against) and make them permanent, on top of slashing the corporate income-tax rate from 35% to 25%. In all, according to the McCain campaign and the Congressional Budget Office, McCain’s plan would cost an additional $400 billion a year (at a time of already huge budget deficits), and at the same time, the senator has also vowed to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term.

The trick, of course, is figuring out how to pay for all of these new tax cuts. Originally, McCain said he could achieve this by eliminating earmarks. Ultimately, though, the campaign could only identify about $18 billion in cuts — which may sound like a lot, but pales in comparison to tax cuts with a $2 trillion price tag.

So, the McCain gang has rolled out rationalization #2.

McCain’s top economic adviser, Doug Holtz-Eakin, blithely supposes that cuts in defense spending could make up for reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% and the subsequent shrinkage in federal revenues. Get that? The national security candidate wants to cut spending on our national security. Wait until the generals and the admirals hear that.

Wait, McCain wants to cut the Pentagon budget? Since when?

Chris Bowers noted:

If true, this would be a much bigger bombshell that McCain’s remarks on Iraq withdrawal. Unlike Forbes, it isn’t the hypocrisy of being “tough” on national security while suggesting cuts in defense spending that would be a big deal. Instead, it would be a big deal because it has the potential to create a bi-partisan consensus in this election on the need to cut the defense budget in 2009.
Obama should jump all over this, and argue that if we are going to cut defense spending, it should not be to pay for a corporate tax break, but instead to invest in American infrastructure, health care, and a new energy economy. He should also argue that McCain won’t actually cut defense spending, because his refusal to withdraw from Iraq would make a reduction in defense spending impossible.

Quite right. McCain’s stated position is that he intends to increase the size of the military, while fighting indefinitely in Iraq. And he’s going to do this while slashing spending for the Defense Department? How’s that, exactly?

What’s more, while the McCain campaign is talking about the savings associated with cuts to the Pentagon budget, the same McCain campaign is talking about increasing the size of the Pentagon budget.

Along with more personnel, our military needs additional equipment in order to make up for its recent losses and modernize. We can partially offset some of this additional investment by cutting wasteful spending. But we can also afford to spend more on national defense, which currently consumes less than four cents of every dollar that our economy generates — far less than what we spent during the Cold War. We must also accelerate the transformation of our military, which is still configured to fight enemies that no longer exist.

As Matt Yglesias noted, “So on the one hand, defense cuts will pay for tax cuts. But on the other hand, we need to substantial increase defense spending as a share of GDP to something more like Cold War levels.”

I know there are some who consider McCain a credible, knowledgeable guy. I just can’t figure out why.

US women voters head to Obama after Clinton departure: poll

Dorothiea — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 10:31:46 EDT

US women voters head to Obama after Clinton departure: poll
Published: Wednesday June 11, 2008 De facto Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has rapidly picked up support from women voters in the wake of Hillary Clinton's withdrawal from the campaign, according to a Gallup poll out on Wednesday.Between the eve of the final primaries on June 3 and Monday, Obama's support among all women in polling matchups with Republican rival John McCain has jumped to give him a 13-point margin in this voter group.According to Gallup, in its surveys covering June 5-9, Obama was supported by 51 percent of women voters compared to 38 percent for McCain.A week earlier, Obama topped McCain with just a 48-43 percent spread.Gallup pointed out that Obama's support among women voters is now close to the steady 52 percent level Clinton had in earlier theoretical matchups with McCain, whom she led in this group by 12 points.It said that the shift of older and married women to Obama appeared to explain his surge.Married women backed McCain 52-40 percent in the previous poll, and are now evenly split 45-45 percent over the two.Meanwhile unmarried women liked Obama by 57-32 percent and 57-31 percent in the earlier May 27-June 2 poll and the most recent poll, respectively."Now that Clinton is no longer campaigning and the focus of voters' decision-making is a choice between Obama and McCain, female voters may be taking a second look at Obama," Gallup said."Indeed, his current 13-point advantage over McCain is essentially the same advantage that Clinton held over McCain throughout her active candidacy."Among male voters Obama also picked up ground on McCain. McCain led his Democratic rival in the earlier poll by six points, 49-43 percent. In the newest poll, McCain maintained only a two-point spread, 47-45 percent.The Gallup poll was conducted between May 27 and June 2 among 5,270 voters and has a two-point margin of error.A Rasmussen Institute poll carried out June 7-9 shows that Obama is ahead of McCain by seven points, 50 percent against 43 percent.An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll to appear Thursday in the newspaper confirms the tendency in Obama's favor.Forty-seven percent of those polled plan to vote for Obama against 41 percent that support McCain, a broader margin for Obama when compared to the same poll in April (46-43 percent).According to the poll, 54 percent of those surveyed believed "it is important to look for a person who will bring greater changes to the current policies even if he is less experienced and tested," against 42 percent that supported a "more experienced and tested person even if he brings fewer changes to the current policies."And 59 percent said they believed it was "time to have a president who will focus on progress and help move America forward," against 37 percent who said it was "time to have a president who will focus on protecting what has made America great."The WSJ/NBC poll was conducted June 6-9 among 1,000 voters, and has a 3.1 point margin of error.

Olbermann: McCain should know better!

Dorothiea — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:51:02 EDT

Olbermann: McCain should know betterContext and decency elude the GOP presidential nomineeVideo Olbermann: McCain should know better
June 12: In a Special Comment, Keith Olbermann takes a look at the context of John McCain’s “not too important” comment regarding the urgency of bringing American troops home from the Iraq war.

Countdown To view video click here- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/

SPECIAL COMMENTBy Keith OlbermannAnchor, 'Countdown'MSNBCupdated 1 hour, 56 minutes ago

Keith OlbermannAnchor, 'Countdown'• Profile

Tonight, a Special Comment on Sen. John McCain’s conclusion that it’s "not too important" when American forces come home from Iraq.

Thoughts, offered more in sorrow, than in anger. For two full days now, the Senator and his supporters have been outraged at what they see as the subtraction of context from this extraordinary remark.

Story continues below ↓ advertisement This is, sadly, the excuse of our time, for everything. Still. If the Senator claims truncation, we will correct that, first.

"A lot of people," Matt Lauer began, "now say the surge is working."

"Anybody who knows the facts on the ground say that," the Senator interjected.

"If it’s now working, Senator," Lauer continued, "do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?"

"No," answered McCain. "But that’s not too important. What’s important is the casualties in Iraq. Americans are in South Korea. Americans are in Japan. American troops are in Germany.

That’s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw. We will be able to withdraw. General Petraeus is going to tell us in July when he thinks we are. But the key to it is we don’t want any more Americans in harm’s way. And that way they will be safe, and serve our country, and come home with honor and victory — not in defeat, which is what Sen. [Barack] Obama’s proposal would have done. And I’m proud of them, and they’re doing a great job. And we are succeeding. And it’s fascinating that Sen. Obama still doesn’t realize it."

And there is the context of what Sen. McCain said. Well, not quite, Senator.

The full context is that the Iraq you see, is a figment of your imagination. This is not a war about "honor and victory," Sir. This is a war you, and the President you support and seek to succeed, conned this nation into.

Yes, sir. You.

Of the prospect of war in Iraq, you said, "I believe that success will be fairly easy –" John McCain., September 24, 2002.

"I believe that we can win an overwhelming victory in a very short period of time –" John McCain, September 29, 2002.

Of the ouster of Saddam and the Baathists: "There’s no doubt in my mind that once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators – " John McCain, March 24, 2003.

Asked, about a long-term commitment in Iraq, "are you talking about something in terms of South Korea, for instance, where you would expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq for decades?"

"No," you answered. "I don’t think decades, but I think years. A little straight talk, I think years. And I hope that we can gradually reduce that presence – " John McCain, March 18, 2004.

You were asked about the troops, and the future.

"I would hope that we could bring them all home. I would hope that we would probably leave some military advisers, as we have in other countries, to help them with their training and equipment and that kind of stuff."

"…I think one of our big problems has been the fact that many Iraqis resent American military presence. And I don’t pretend to know exactly Iraqi public opinion. But as soon as we can reduce our visibility as much as possible, the better I think it is going to be – " John McCain, January 31, 2005.

When a speaker at your town hall, five months ago, referenced the President’s forecast that we might stay in Iraq for 50 years, you cut him off.

"Make it a hundred! We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine by me … – " John McCain, January 3, 2008.

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Mrs. Michelle Obama to Sit In on 'The View'

Dorothiea — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:23:18 EDT

Michelle Obama to Sit In on 'The View'BARACK OBAMA's wife, MICHELLE, will be a guest co-host on daytime chat-fest "The View" on June 18th, the Associated Press reports. Like earlier show guest, CINDY McCAIN, Michelle will sit at the table with WHOOPI, BARBARA, JOY, SHERRI and ELISABETH and help interview guests and participate in the opening "hot topics" segment of the show. Copyright 2008 Scott Olson / Getty Images

Sen. Obama appoints team to help find running mate

Dorothiea — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:01:36 EDT

Sen. Obama appoints team to help find running mate 12 minutes ago Barack Obama has asked a three-person team, including Caroline Kennedy, to help lead the vetting of a prospective vice presidential candidate. Kennedy has begun managing the process with high-profile Democratic insiders Jim Johnson and Eric Holder.Johnson is the former CEO of Fannie Mae who also oversaw the vice presidential vetting for John Kerry in 2004 and Walter Mondale in 1984. Holder was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and has been a senior legal adviser to Obama's campaign.Said Obama spokesman Bill Burton: "Senator Obama is pleased to have three talented and dedicated individuals managing this rigorous process." Also today, Obama spoke directly with his vanquished rival Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday and expressed optimism they could achieve party unity after their bruising battle for the Democratic presidential nomination. He also accused Republican rival John McCain of supporting a "plan for staying, not a plan for victory" in Iraq.As he traded jabs with McCain over national security policy, Obama visited the Senate where Democrats and Republicans shook his hand and congratulated him. The Illinois senator disclosed he had spoken with Clinton, who was not in the Senate, earlier in the day after he claimed the nomination and she stopped short of conceding."I just spoke to her today, and we're going to be having a conversation in coming weeks. And I'm very confident how unified the Democratic party's going to be to win in November," Obama told reporters as he left the Senate.Asked if Clinton indicated she planned to concede, Obama replied: "It wasn't a detailed conversation. As I said, I'm very confident of how we're going to be able to bring the party together." He dismissed a question about her refusal to concede after the final two primaries Tuesday night by saying she was "understandably focused on her supporters."Obama and Clinton ran into each other backstage at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting, which they addressed separately Wednesday morning.Clinton later visited her campaign headquarters in suburban Virginia where she thanked staff for their work. Aides said she was also phoning superdelegates and supporters, and planned to host an 89th birthday celebration at her Washington home for her mother, Dorothy Rodham.A day after welcoming Obama to the general election campaign, McCain said in a morning television interview, "I think he has exercised very bad judgment on national security issues and others."Obama used his speech at the AIPAC meeting to reassure Jewish voters of his support for Israel and criticize McCain's promise to keep U.S. troops fighting in Iraq."Keeping all of our troops tied down indefinitely in Iraq is not the way to weaken Iran, it is precisely what strengthened it," Obama said in a speech in which he said the security of the Jewish state was sacrosanct.Elsewhere, Obama's accomplishment in becoming the first black ever to win a major party presidential nomination drew Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's attention."The United States of America is an extraordinary country. It is a country that has overcome many, many, now years, decades, actually a couple of centuries of trying to make good on its principles," said Rice, the first female black secretary of state in history, serving in a Republican administration."And I think what we are seeing is an extraordinary expression of the fact that 'We the people' is beginning to mean to all of us."On Wednesday, two more fellow senators swung behind Obama after remaining neutral throughout his long nominating battle with Clinton."We have a nominee of our party," said Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. "The nominee of our party is obviously Barack Obama." Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado also announced his endorsement.Former Vice President Walter Mondale, who had been a Clinton supporter, announced he was backing Obama.It hardly mattered in terms of delegate math — after months of struggle, Obama had more than enough to prevail at the party convention in Denver in August. But Mondale, Harkin, Salazar and others poised to endorse Obama later in the day were also sending a message to Clinton that her race is over, whether she will admit it or not. The former first lady has yet to concede defeat in the primary campaign, although she is courting an invitation from Obama to become his vice presidential running mate. McCain made several appearances on morning television programs, and he said he would be seeking support outside his party's traditional base. "The key to winning the election is independent voters and Democrats as well," McCain said in an interview shown Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America." Even so, asked on CBS whether he'd pick a Democrat as his running mate, he replied, "I don't think so." He also announced he has sent Obama a letter inviting him to a series of 10 joint town-hall meetings over the summer. "I even suggested we travel them together on the same plane. Probably help on energy savings," McCain said in Baton Rouge, La. Clinton followed Obama to the podium at AIPAC, delivering a strong defense of Israel — and also of her rival in the nominating race. "Let me be very clear. I know that Senator Obama will be a good friend to Israel," she said to applause. Clinton herself made no mention of the question on the minds of Democrats everywhere — her future plans. But others were not as reticent. "I think a lot of her supporters would like to see her on the ticket," said her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe said. "There is no deal in the works," said Obama's spokesman, Robert Gibbs. "When the dust settles and it makes sense for her, he'll meet whenever she wants to," Gibbs said. "She's accumulated a lot of votes throughout this country. We want to make sure that we're appealing to her voters." In his speech at AIPAC, Obama urged his audience to reject what he said were false e-mails circulating about him, stressed his support for Israel and depicted the war in Iraq as a threat to Israel's security. "Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is nonnegotiable," he said. He backed a Palestinian state that is "contiguous and cohesive," but also said any agreement must "preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," he said. Obama said Bush's decision to invade Iraq had enabled the hard-liners in Iran to tighten their grip on power. "And the United States and Israel are less secure," he added. He said McCain "offers a false choice: stay the course in Iraq or cede the region to Iran. ... It is a policy for staying, not a policy for victory," adding he favors a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq. On the final night of the primary season, Clinton won South Dakota on Tuesday while Obama took Montana — and a slew of party superdelegates who declared their support to help him clinch the nomination. He did it, according to The Associated Press tally, based on primary elections, state Democratic caucuses and support from superdelegates. It took 2,118 delegates to clinch the nomination at the convention, and Obama had 2,154 by the AP count. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a dogged Clinton supporter, recognized the brutality of the arithmetic. "I am the last of the Mohicans, but it is over," he said.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/primary_rdp;_ylt=AlrzQwNg6qkWYp0K4EX5ikys0NUE

McCain: I'd Spy on Americans Secretly, Too

Dorothiea — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:38:32 EDT

McCain: I'd Spy on Americans Secretly, Too

by: Ryan Singel, Wired

Republican presidential contender Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) holds a cell phone. McCain said he believes in the right of a president to use wartime powers to spy on Americans.
(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP)

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president's wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday. READ MORE » http://www.truthout.org/article/mccain-id-spy-americans-secretly-too

Friends of Clinton who advocate a convention fight shouldn't work in the party ever again

Dorothiea — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:26:05 EDT

Friends of Clinton who advocate a convention fight shouldn't work in the party ever again
John Aravosis (DC) · 6/01/2008 01:16:00 PM ET · Link It's time to stop playing games. As someone who was a Republican until I came out in 1991, and then never went back, I know a thing or two about party loyalties. You don't get to switch back and forth, lest neither side trust you. You pretty much get to switch one time, and even then you'd better be able to prove you're for real.

Well, now it's time for Hillary's staff and supporters to pick a side. It's their one chance, and there's no coming back.

It would seem that a number of Hillary's top supporters, and a lot of her fans, are more comfortable helping a Republican become president if Hillary can't win the nomination. Some of that is, understandably, just talk - it sucks to lose, people are are angry. But at this late date, cheap talk is no longer acceptable. We have to reunite our party in time to successfully take on John McCain. And people like Mandy Grunwald, Harold Ickes, Terry McAuliffe, Howard Wolfson, and so many of Clinton's other staff, surrogates and rich donors have already caused major damage to those efforts. Hillary and her team have successfuly changed the national mood, of Hillary's supporters, at least, from one of disappointment that their candidate lost, to one of outright anger that her nomination was supposedly stolen away because she's a woman. That's ludicrous. Yeah, there's been some sexism by irrelevant third parties, but I just don't believe that Hillary lost because a guy is selling nutcrackers in the airport. Hillary lost this race because Obama ran a better campaign.

(Not to mention, I still get a chuckle out of the fact that Hillary's supporters think a white woman faces more obstacles in America than a black man. Not to go all Hillary-morbid on this, but for all the anti-Hillary hatred in America, Obama is the one dealing with far more speculation about his safety, and it's not because no one cares about Hillary's safety. It's because a lot of Americans, at least bigots in America, have a far greater problem accepting blacks than they do women. It doesn't mean women have it easy. It does mean, however, that Hillary's supporters should stop pretending that it's easier to be black in America than a woman.)

Up until now, you guys claimed you were still fighting because the brave people of Florida and Michigan needed you. Well, they don't you any more. Yesterday, the brave representatives of the brave people of Florida and Michigan reached a deal acceptable to them. You no longer have standing, or the right, to continue a battle on behalf of the people of Florida and Michigan when those very same people have decided that the battle is over and settled to their satisfaction. If you continue fighting now, it's for your own personal ego; it's because you want to see Obama lose in the fall.

Hillary and her supporters have this week to get on the bus, or the bus is leaving, and they're not going to like where it's left them. If Hillary's top supporters and staff think it's better to take this lost battle to the convention, in an effort to hurt our party's nominee and help John McCain become president (where he can launch a few more wars, reinstate the draft and put every American's kids at risk, appoint at least two more justices to the Supreme Court and overturn Roe v. Wade (which he says he wants to do)), then please do help put another George Bush in power for another four to eight years.

But if you do that, know that you're no better than Joe Lieberman. You're no better than Dick Morris. You're no better than any Republican who got us to where we are today - bankrupt, at war, hated worldwide, and with an economy in tatters. And just remember, Republicans don't get hired as consultants in the Democratic party. "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Clintons Lost Control of the DNC: Hillary's Campaign is Over

Dorothiea — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:10:53 EDT

The Clintons Lost Control of the DNC: Hillary's Campaign is OverSubmitted by mark karlin on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 7:34am. EditorBlog
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher
June 2, 2008
Last year Harold Ickes (a chief Clinton strategist), a member of the DNC Rules and By-Laws Committee that met on Saturday, voted to take away the delegates and superdelegates from Florida and Michigan if they moved up their primaries, which they did.
A few years back, Terry McAuliffe -- Hillary Clinton's campaign manager this year -- was head of the DNC, appointed by Bill Clinton. At that time he read the riot act to Senator Carl Levin about his desire to move the Michigan Dem presidential primary up to challenge Iowa and New Hampshire. McAuliffe told Levin that if Michigan moved up its primary that they would lose their votes.
Fast forward and now Ickes and McAuliffe have taken positions 180 degrees opposite their former DNC positions. Now, they are saying that a great injustice was done to Senator Clinton on Saturday because the DNC adopted the compromise Florida and Michigan Democratic Party seating and voting plans for the two states. In short, the Democratic Party agreed with the states -- not with Hillary Clinton the candidate -- and resolved the contentious problem.
Although the resolutions on Florida and Michigan that occurred in a Washington Hotel room on Saturday -- unless Clinton decides to challenge the Democratic state parties of Florida and Michigan at the Credentials Committee in order to further ruin the presumptive nominee -- was somewhat eclipsed by the relatively meaningless Puerto Rico vote (residents of the island of Puerto Rico cannot vote in the general election; only Puerto Ricans living on the mainland can), the DNC Saturday meeting (there were two votes; with the Clinton campaign garnering only 8 of 30 committee members to support their electoral heist to strip Obama of the votes the state party deemed he was due in Michigan) was the final coup de grace for Clinton Inc. this year.
Yes, perhaps Senator Clinton's last stand with the likes of one demonstrator at the meeting who was escorted out, who claimed that if Obama got any votes in Michigan she would vote for McCain thus ensuring an overturn of Roe v. Wade, more pre-emptive war, and more tax cuts for the wealthy, wasn't fully understood by the mainstream press.
But this is what it meant in a nutshell: Clinton Inc. no longer can call the shots at the DNC, even in a committee that was headed by two former Bill Clinton administration officials, and a committee on which 13 of the 30 members were pledged Clinton delegates (Obama had 8 and the rest were undeclared at this time.)
It was the final blow to Clinton's presidential aspirations. The institutional vehicle for the legitimacy of Clinton Inc., the DNC, is now more interested in fairness and winning the November elections than the personal, mercurial professional aspirations of Senator Clinton and Bill Clinton.
What it comes down to is this. Delegates are the way an individual wins the Democratic nomination -- and there is virtually no way except for an act of God that Hillary Clinton can attain the requisite number to win (now there is a slightly higher threshold due to Saturday's decisions on Florida and Michigan).
So any continuation of the Clinton campaign after Obama obtains the new threshold delegate figure, which will happen probably by Thursday, if not earlier, will only serve to help McCain and hurt the prospects of the Democratic Party in November, from the presidential ticket down the line to senators, congressmen and congresswomen, governors, and state legislators.
There can only be one winner in a presidential nomination process.
No matter how much one candidate believes that the nomination belongs to him or her, there is a time to give up one's personal ambition for the good of the nation, for the good of the party, for the good of keeping Roe v. Wade the law of the land, for the good of economic justice, for the good of gender and minority equality, for the good of advancing a foreign policy based on international cooperation.
On Saturday, the race was over.
Clinton Inc. couldn't get away with changing the rules at the end of the game. Serious deliberation and fairness won out over entitlement at the DNC.
It was a courageous and just moment for the Democratic Party.
After the last two primaries are over on Tuesday, and after Obama meets the new threshold of delegates and becomes the presumptive nominee, if Clinton stays in the race it won't be about what's better for America or "choice" or economic justice; it will just be about the ego of Hillary Clinton and a desire to ruin the chances of the Democratic Party to win in November.
A lot of progressive principles are riding on her choice.
Perhaps she can finally find her true voice: ensuring the return of a just government to America by asserting her loyalty to the Democratic party, the progressive issues at stake for women, minorities, the poor, and the working class Americans in need.
To do this, she would have to douse the flame of her feelings of entitlement, her personal ambition, her battle cry of victimhood, and her feelings of hurt that her campaign was outsmarted by a junior senator from Illinois.
The choice is hers: what's best for the nation or what feels best for Hillary Clinton.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Obama Hits Back at McCain and Bush

Dorothiea — Sun, 18 May 2008 17:09:34 EDT

Obama Hits Back at McCain and Bush
The Associated Press

Friday 16 May 2008

Watertown, South Dakota - Senator Barack Obama on Friday criticized Senator John McCain, his potential rival for the presidency, and President George W. Bush for what he called "dishonest and divisive" attacks in hinting that he would appease terrorists.

Obama responded strongly Friday to the comments Bush made in Israel on Thursday and to McCain's subsequent words. At a town hall meeting here, Obama said: "That's the kind of hypocrisy that we've been seeing in our foreign policy, the kind of fear-peddling, fear-mongering that has prevented us from actually making us safer."

Obama said McCain had a "naïve and irresponsible belief that tough talk from Washington will somehow cause Iran to give up its nuclear program and support for terrorism."

Other Democrats also accused McCain of hypocrisy, saying the presumptive Republican nominee had previously been willing to negotiate with the militant Palestinian group Hamas.

In an op-ed published Friday in The Washington Post, James Rubin, a former State Department official from the Clinton administration, said McCain, responding to a question in a television interview two years ago about whether U.S. diplomats should be working with the Hamas government in Gaza, said:

"They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy toward Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice." He added: "But it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

Rubin, who interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News, said McCain was "guilty of hypocrisy" and accused him of "smearing" Obama. On Thursday, McCain suggested that Obama was naïve and inexperienced for expressing a willingness to meet with leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

In Charleston, West Virginia, speaking before Obama's speech, McCain said Friday, "I made it very clear, at that time, before and after, that we will not negotiate with terrorist organizations, that Hamas would have to abandon their terrorism, their advocacy to the extermination of the state of Israel, and be willing to negotiate in a way that recognizes the right of the state of Israel and abandons their terrorist position and advocacy."

He then contended that Obama wanted to "sit down and negotiate with a government exporting most lethal devices used against soldiers."

McCain continued: "He wants to sit down face to face with a government that is very clear about developing nuclear weapons. They are sponsors of terrorist organizations. That's a huge difference in my opinion. And I'll let the American people decide whether that's a significant difference or not. I believe it is."

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, said in an interview with CNN on Friday that the Bush administration had negotiated with North Korea and Libya.

"This is pure hypocrisy," Biden said. "But the worst part about it is, think how it falls on the ears in capitals of Europe and the rest of the world and Toyko when the president of the United States says under no condition will we talk to anybody like that, and John McCain, the nominee for the Republican Party, who may very well be president of the United States, is saying the same thing."

Obama Says Bush Policies Strengthened Iran, Hamas

Dorothiea — Sun, 18 May 2008 16:58:00 EDT

Obama Says Bush Policies Strengthened Iran, Hamas
Reuters

Watertown, South Dakota - Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama said on Friday President George W. Bush's "failed policies" had strengthened U.S. enemies like Iran and Hamas.

Responding to Bush's comment on Thursday that those who want to talk to Iran were like Nazi appeasers before the Second World War, Obama accused Bush of "exactly the kind of appalling attack that's divided the country and that alienates us from the world."

Obama also challenged Bush and Republican presidential rival John McCain to a debate on foreign policy issues, a day after Bush caused outrage among Democrats with his remarks on appeasement before the Israeli parliament.

McCain, who has clinched his party's presidential nomination, did not repeat the word "appeasement" on Thursday. But he did criticize Obama's pledge to speak directly to U.S. foes, particularly Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He said Obama needs to explain why he would talk to him.

"If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I'm happy to have any time, any place, and that is a debate that I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for," Obama said in a campaign speech in South Dakota.

"They've got to answer for the fact that Iran is the greatest strategic beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq. It made Iran stronger, George Bush's policies," he said.

"They're going to have to explain why Hamas now controls Gaza, Hamas that was strengthened because the United States insisted that we should have democratic elections in the Palestinian Authority."

"That's the Bush-McCain record on protecting this country," he added. "Those are the failed policies that John McCain wants to double down on."

(Reporting by David Morgan, editing by David Alexander).

Despite Pennsylvania, Obama’s the Winner

Dorothiea — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:24:52 EDT

Dear Friend,

I wanted to share with you my blog about the Pennsylvania primary
that was posted last night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360. As I
state in the entry, the presidential primary is "a race for
delegates, and Barack Obama has acquired a nearly insurmountable
lead." So, while watching and hearing all the commentary and
analysis about the results from one state -- don't get lost in
the moment, remember the math!

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/04/23/despite-pennsylvania-obamas-the-winner

Jesse Jackson, Jr. - Congressman Second District of Illinois
http://www.jessejacksonjr.org

FREE OFFER! — Get these cards FREE, Hillary Clinton

Dorothiea — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 10:47:20 EDT

FREE OFFER! — Get these cards FREE, Click Here NowMore Images

Sick of the media’s puffery of Hillary Clinton and her new book in an obvious effort to help her presidential chances?

Now Newsmax.com has the perfect antidote to the liberal media’s Hillary love fest: the Deck of Hillary.

That’s right – the Deck of Hillary is a set of playing cards that will not only make you laugh out loud – it also blows the lid off her lies and her new book.

In the Deck of Hillary, Newsmax.com reveals the real Hillary – by using her own quotes. These quotations are even sourced to some of the most respected writers and media sources.

Newsmax was among the first to offer the Iraqi Most Wanted cards. Then we came out with the Deck of Weasels, which exposed the 54 worst celebrities and politicians who blame America first. Our Deck of Weasels became a national best seller.

Now the Deck of Hillary is set to rock America.

In fact, Newsmax has a goal – we want to sell more Decks of Hillary than Hillary sells of her own book. It’s a big goal – but with your help we can do it and tell the big media about our success.

Hillary thinks she can get away from her record by rewriting her history and that of her husband’s sordid administration.

We’re calling her bluff with the Deck of Hillary, which raises the ante by spilling everything that her highness doesn’t want you to know.

You’ll find out all about her:

Outrageous rantings about Jews and Minorities.
Hilariously half-hearted defenses of hubby Bill.
Comical explanations for why men hate her so much.
Bizarre claim that Christians can’t be Republicans.
Hillary promises she wouldn’t run for the Senate and she won’t run for president.
The unbelievable comments made to Secret Service agents, state troopers, presidential mistresses and other working stiffs.
Deep-seated paranoid theories on why the Republicans are opposed to her.
Knee-slapping comment about Bill’s relative in the KKK.
Her angry orders about the White House American flag.
Hillary's explanation as to why so many women are becoming lesbians

Don’t worry, the cards are suitable for all audiences, because we’ve bleeped out Hillary’s frequent use of profanity.

In four suits of the deck, we tell Hillary’s unvarnished story:

The Spades reveal “The REAL Hillary” – including her phony claims she was a duck hunter and a Marine recruit.
The Hearts tenderly and not so tenderly describe “Bill & Me” – her decades-long business and political partnership with her husband, the impeached former president.
The Diamonds recount her diamond-hard reign as "The First Lady.” Learn what she really thought of the Secret Service – and about the special Secret Service Free Zone she created around herself!
The Clubs, appropriately, offer Hillary “The Feminist.” And yes, girls like baseball, too. Hillary was a Yankees fan. How do we know? Because she said so.
And as for the Jokers, they expose Hillary’s two biggest concoctions in recent memory – you’ll just have to see them for yourself.

The Deck of Weasels was the biggest seller in Newsmax’s history and the Deck of Hillary has become a runaway best seller.

You’ll die laughing at Hillary, from our “Statue of Hillary” design on the back of every card, modeled after the Statue of Liberty, to the great photos that capture the real Hillary – to her own shocking statements over several decades in public life.

Millions of Americans will use, play and read the Deck of Hillary – millions more than read her book!

And millions will agree, Hillary Clinton should never be president of the United States.

All quotes in the Deck of Hillary were excerpted from the book "I've Always Been a Yankees Fan: The Greatest Quotes of Hillary Rodham Clinton," edited by Thomas Kuiper, with an Introduction by Dick Morris.

No Knockout for Hillary; Obama Will Prevail

Dorothiea — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:24:09 EDT

No Knockout for Hillary; Obama Will Prevail
Friday, April 25, 2008 9:42 AM

By: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann Article Font Size

Sports metaphors are trite and too male-oriented, but sometimes they are so apt they are unavoidable.

The Clinton-Obama contest is like a 15-round heavyweight title bout in boxing.

Hillary went for an early knockout. All previous Democratic races since 1960 have been decided that way, with one candidate winning decisive primaries, forcing his opponents to withdraw. But Obama beat her to the punch in Iowa, survived a loss in New Hampshire, and countered her sweep of New York, New Jersey and California on Super Tuesday by winning a large number of smaller states, largely by out-organizing Hillary in caucus states.

While most traditional candidates are forced out if they lose key states because their money dries up, Obama’s ingenious use of Internet funding provided him with an ample financial base even as he fell behind Hillary in the delegate count.

But Hillary, in spending all her resources on an early Super Tuesday knockout, was too depleted to do well in the middle rounds — the February caucus and primary states.

Her focus on an early knockout led her to neglect organizing in these states, and her insistence on spending every dime she had in pursuit of an early win left her financially incapable of competing in these February contests.

Obama won round after round on points, sweeping 11 states in a row and establishing a solid lead in elected delegates.

Obama piled up such a lead in points in the middle rounds that Hillary has been forced to go for a knockout in the final rounds. Knowing that Obama has more delegates, she has to win decisively in the late primaries to have a chance at persuading the superdelegates to flip and abandon the voters’ choice. But, so far, the proportional representation rules and Obama’s daunting financial advantage have denied her the elusive knockout. Obama can’t knock her out, but he doesn’t need to. Remember, he’s ahead on points.

Hillary won in Pennsylvania for two key reasons:

1. Pennsylvania only permits Democrats to vote in its primary. Hillary has always won among Democrats. It is among independents, the swing voters in November, that Obama has manifested his greatest strength.

2. Pennsylvania is the second oldest state in the nation after Florida. But while the elderly moved to Florida, Pennsylvania acquired its status by having its young people move out. The result is a demographically atypical electorate.

Both Indiana and North Carolina, the next two states, allow independents to vote in Democratic primaries, and North Carolina has a decidedly young population. (It is here that the Pennsylvanian youths moved!) Obama should win both of these states, North Carolina by a lot, Indiana by a little, and their combined effect should wipe out most of the gains Hillary got from her Pennsylvania win.

By the time the voting ends on June 3, Obama will still lead Hillary among elected delegates by 100 to 150 delegates.

At that point the gang of four — Gore, Edwards, Pelosi, and Dean — will probably call on the superdelegates to make commitments in the next 10 days so that the race can draw to a close and the party can have its nominee.

Shortly thereafter, Obama will be able to claim that he is above 2,025, the threshold for victory. And the ref will be raising his arm in triumph.

It's the Politics of Negatives -- Not Negativity -- that Matters

Dorothiea — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:06:24 EDT

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee is one of the few superdelegates who refuses to join the "Isn't-this-great?" chorus of smiley-face politics. Rather than extolling Hillary Clinton's Pennsylvania win as a splendid example of good, clean and continuing Democratic fun, Bredesen painted a bleaker and far more realistic picture of what it portends:

"This is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen. They are going to just keep standing there and pounding each other and bloodying each other."

That pugilistic quote appeared in a NY Times' article whose headline -- "The Bruising Will Go On for the Party, Too" -- was inspired by the metaphor-invoking governor. This primary race is no longer reflective of any internal, Democratic values; it's merely a slugfest for the benefit of one.

Amid all the lopsided cheering and hallelujah hallucinations, the article's author, Adam Nagourney, pointed to the clearer light of day: "Mrs. Clinton’s margin was probably not sufficient to fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race, which continued to favor an eventual victory for Mr. Obama." There are, after all, and as Nagourney understated it, "significant hurdles" obstructing her nomination -- such as Obama's delegate count, lead in the popular vote, number of states won and, by now, the little time that's left.

None of this, of course, has fazed Hillary in the least. With each passing hour, it seems, and always out of whole cloth she conjures a new argument for the urgency of her democracy-toppling nomination. Her latest is that she actually leads in the popular vote, assuming one counts a couple of major states that don't, and in no way can, count.

Yes, yes, I know, it's laughable. On the other hand, Hillary knows her target audience -- those kings of vacillation and spinelessness, the uncommitted superdelegates. They could have secured the nomination for the party's still-presumptive nominee by now, so that he could get on with the more urgent contest of boxing McCain rather than shadows, but that would be too institutionally businesslike and politically sane for these grand poobahs of Democracy. Better to wait a while longer and test the political winds once again, and again ... and again. One never knows, is their motto.

But let's try to think like a superdelegate for a moment and join with Hillary in putting aside all those "significant hurdles." Just forget about them, as Hillary and her supporters are somehow able to do. Let us assume that Obama has no real lead in any of the above and customarily decisive categories. From this artificial balancing we start from scratch; the candidates are even-steven -- right?

Wrong. Because still trailing Hillary like toilet paper stuck to her shoe is that little matter of her negatives, something you and the superdelegates won't ever hear Mrs. Clinton advertising. They are grim, devastatingly grim, over-before-it-starts grim, and which the Washington Post deconstructed last week.

To quoth the black raven sitting atop her electoral burial marker: "While Clinton retains a big edge over Obama on experience, public impressions of her have taken a sharply negative turn. Today, more Americans have an unfavorable view of her than at any time since The Post and ABC began asking the question, in 1992." Pucker up, Mrs. Clinton -- as well as all you uncommitted superdelegates -- because "54 percent said they have an unfavorable view" of you.

That, right there, is the game ender, as virtually any objective political adviser would agree. No presidential candidate with negatives in the high 40s, let alone in the mid 50s, is going anywhere after an election but home. That's just a fact of political life that's also going ignored amidst all the Clintonite hoopla.

And it gets even worse. An accompanying WaPo piece noted that "Clinton is viewed as 'honest and trustworthy' by just 39 percent of Americans ... compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest."

The real killer, of course, was her Bosnia fantasy, against which Obama's "bitter" comments or guilt by pastoral association pale. There's a huge and game-ending difference between recidivist lying to successive public audiences and dropping indiscreet remarks to a few privately huddled San Franciscans, and don't think Americans -- not to mention the salivating GOP machine -- don't know it.

Hillary's verbal contortions regarding her Iraq-war vote have been bad enough; her Bosnia-war whoppers are but 60-second visuals of the final touches, encased as they are within indiffusibly negative atmospherics.

So back to reality as we reassemble things: Obama leads in the delegate count, the popular vote and states won and nothing will change these dynamics, while Hillary leads only in historic negatives. And what conclusion do the uncommitted superdelegates derive from all this? Let us, they say, wait and see.

Please respond to the commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact P.M. at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

The Pennsylvania Primary was Hillary Clinton's last chance to deliver!

Dorothiea — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:14:57 EDT

Truth Detector

The Pennsylvania Primary was Hillary Clinton's last chance to deliver a game changing blow to Obama's campaign for the nomination. She failed to deliver.

Pennsylvania provided her with her final real opportunity to knock the wheels off the Obama campaign. She needed a crushing victory of 18% to 25% to have any real chance of altering the math or the psychology. Demographically, Pennsylvania was made for Hillary: the second oldest state in the nation, heavily blue collar, Catholic and rural -- Hillary's voter profile. She started with a lead of almost 20 points. But her final margin -- which the Pennsylvania Secretary of State says was only 9.2% -- fell far short of what was needed to stop Obama's nomination. Here's why:

1). Pledged Delegates. By CNN's count, Clinton netted about 14 pledged delegates in Pennsylvania. That still leaves Obama up by 151 pledged delegates. It is likely that after Guam, Indiana and North Carolina, there will be no net change in pledged delegates, even if Clinton wins Indiana, since Obama will certainly pick up delegates in North Carolina. But at that point only 251 pledged delegates will remain to be chosen.

Even if she got 80% of all of the pledged delegates that remain after Indiana, she would still trail Obama at the end of the day.

The battle for the pledged delegate advantage is over.

2). Popular Vote. Pennsylvania was her best opportunity to really close in on Obama's popular vote lead. She picked up about 216,000 net votes. But that still leaves her over 600,000 votes behind, and Obama will likely increase his popular vote margin further after the contests on May 6th. Her failure to blow Obama out in Pennsylvania makes it almost impossible for her to close the popular vote gap.

3). Electability. Clinton's entire strategy rests on the premise that she can convince Super Delegates that Obama is unelectable. Only a massive win in Pennsylvania would have credibly made that case. Clinton's victory did little to enhance her argument.

Regardless of the passions of the moment, history shows us that just because voters prefer one candidate in the primary, it doesn't mean they won't vote for her Democratic opponent in a general election when the choice is a Republican. When all is said and done, primary voters almost always vote for the candidate of their party in a general election - regardless of what they might say (on either side) in the middle of a primary fight.

In fact, the people who decide general elections rarely set foot in primary voting booths. They are the independent voters who vote only in general elections and unengaged voters who are would vote Democratic, but have to be mobilized to go to the polls.

The fact is that to whatever degree Hillary might have more appeal among independent rural and blue collar voters, Obama more than makes up in additional appeal to independent suburban voters. Obama's ability to mobilize new young and African American voters in the general election is indisputably greater than Clinton's.

And of course, Obama will not go into the General Election burdened by the towering Clinton negatives that her own negative campaign strategy increases daily.

The polls, and even Pennsylvania Governor and Clinton supporter Ed Rendell, make it clear that Obama can win Pennsylvania in the general election. But Obama can also broaden the playing field with a shot at winning states like Colorado and Virginia.

4). Super Delegates. Finally is a fact that is generally overlooked by pundits. At the close of the primaries, Obama will not need a stampede of Super Delegates to clinch the nomination. In fact he will only need about 40% of those that remain today.

Let's make the most conservative assumptions about the outcome of the remaining races: Guam, even; North Carolina, 58%-42% Obama; Indiana, 54%-46% Clinton; Kentucky, 60%-40% Clinton; West Virginia, 60%-40% Clinton; Oregon, 56%-44% Obama, Montana 56%-44% Obama; Puerto Rico, 60%-40% Clinton. That would leave Obama at 1,846 delegates at the close of the Primaries.

He would need only 41% of the Super Delegates remaining today to clinch the nomination with 2,025. And let's remember, he has picked up almost one Super Delegate a day for the last month. There is no reason to believe he won't keep picking up Super Delegates as the contest continues. So by the end of the primaries he will need an even lower percentage of the Super Delegates that remain.

All that remains for Clinton are more opportunities have her own campaign to be shut down. If she loses Indiana and North Carolina it will be extremely hard for her to continue. But there is no longer any opportunity for her to defeat Obama.

Clinton's may have won last night, but she failed to do what she needed to do to derail Obama's march to the nomination. In retrospect, Pennsylvania will appear as Clinton's Waterloo.

Please Check Out This Very Powerful Video!

Dorothiea — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:32:31 EDT

Please Check Out This Very Powerful Video, By Zoe Kravitz And Many Others.http://www.dipdive.com/dip-politics/wato/

Senator Clinton Doesn't Really Oppose the Colombian Trade Agreement:

Dorothiea — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 06:39:58 EDT

Senator Clinton Doesn't Really Oppose the Colombian Trade Agreement: Just look at Her Senior Staff, Including Bill ClintonSubmitted by mark karlin on Wed, 04/09/2008 - 9:10am. EditorBlog

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher, April 9, 2008

Mark Penn, Not Gone and Not Forgotten

I recently detailed how Mark Penn’s visit with the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. about the proposed free trade agreement with that nation, where union leaders are regularly assassinated, was in all likelihood carried out as part of his dual roles as then top Clinton campaign strategist and on behalf of Burson-Marsteller, which he also represented since he never stepped down as CEO -- and that was fine with Senator Clinton.

The key evidence in this theory is that the President of Colombia, as I detailed, denounced Barack Obama for his opposition to the Colombia trade agreement -- opposition due primarily to union rights concerns (particularly the right not to be murdered) -- two days after the meeting with Penn, and then again two days later. So twice in one week the Colombian President lacerated Obama but didn’t utter a word about Hillary Clinton’s claimed opposition to the trade agreement.

It’s extremely unusual for a foreign country to become officially and vocally involved, at the presidential level, in taking sides in a presidential primary race in the United States, to say the least. But it is even more remarkable that the leader of Colombia would only launch an attack on one of the candidates, even though the other candidate is holding out to Pennsylvania union voters that she also opposes the pact.

Mark Penn, as we said, wasn’t "officially" demoted because he met with the Colombian ambassador. As we observed, his title was "officially" taken away because he got caught, allegedly by Republican dirty trickster, Roger Stone, about whom BuzzFlash also has written. (If true, then Stone leaked the story to The Wall Street Journal.)

In what is likely an election ruse by the Clinton campaign to pretend to be against the Colombia agreement, they even misled the press into posting headlines and stories that Penn was fired. But that was a lie. He is still, according to published reports, daily on press phone calls and also directly advising Hillary Clinton -- and he speaks regularly with Bill, who, in turn, advises Hillary. In short, nothing much has changed except that the Clinton campaign was panicking because union leaders were calling and asking for Penn’s head.

So Senator Clinton, who along with Bill, allegedly loves Penn’s loyalty since 1996 (Penn was brought into the Clinton inner circle by Dick Morris, by the way, in ’96, and Morris was brought into the White House by -- well -- Hillary Clinton, and she brags about it in her memoir) decided to simply change Penn’s nameplate, but keep him as a key adviser on her campaign. Penn was, and this is undisputed, not fired, not by a long shot.

The New Republic recently published an analysis about why the Clintons are so fond of Penn, and here is one of the reasons that The New Republic notes:

Others in the party object to, if not Penn's disdain for liberals, then his chronic inability to hide that disdain. "One of his favorite things is the 'double-push off,'" chuckles the colleague from a past race. "On the one hand, he's attacking Bush and pushing off of him. On the other hand, he's attacking and pushing off the excesses of the left." And while this tendency risks alienating many within the party's base, Penn's rough handling of liberals rarely upset the Clintons too severely, considering Bill's historical success with triangulation.

But back to why Hillary Clinton is probably lying about her opposition to the Colombian free trade pact. The answer is simple, very key people on her staff -- and her political partner, Bill -- support it. In fact, Bill has financially benefited from the relationship to at least the tune of $600,000.

It’s not just Mark Penn. Howard Wolfson, who is now the new "co-key-strategist" of Clinton’s campaign has a large (perhaps million dollar) equity interest in a firm doing work on behalf of passing the pact.

The New York Times reported on just some of the Clinton team connections to passing the Colombia Free Trade Agreement:

To help make its case, Colombia had already hired at least three firms on Capitol Hill, in addition to the work by Mr. Penn’s firm, Burson-Marsteller, paying out from $15,000 to $40,000 a month. Collectively the Colombian government has paid more than $1 million to firms that have negotiated or lobbied on behalf of the deal.
They include the Glover Park Group, the fast-growing firm set up by former Clinton White House aides including Joe Lockhart, who was chief spokesman for the president. (Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign communications director, was a partner at the firm but has taken a leave of absence.)
The ties between the lobbying firms and the Clinton campaign illustrate the complexity of Washington’s political world, where players are often switching positions or playing multiple roles. While Mr. Wolfson has taken a leave from Glover Park, for example, he still has equity in the firm valued at $500,000 to $1 million, according to a disclosure form.
A long list of former Clinton administration aides, including Mack McLarty, the former counsel to the president; Donna E. Shalala, the health and human services secretary; and Leon E. Panetta, the onetime chief of staff, also have come out in support of the deal. It puts them in alliance with Mr. Bush and Republican leaders.

Either Senator Clinton has very poor judgment about how who you employ is perceived by foreign governments, or she is basically lying about her opposition to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement in order to placate the union vote in PA, which she desperately needs.

Either way, she is not a good match for a presidency that has to deal with both perception and action when dealing with sensitive issues like the proposed Colombian Free Trade Agreement and the challenge of the Colombian political mess in general. Senator Clinton hired all these people already knowing about their multiple conflicts of interest, not just on the Colombian trade proposal, but also on unions, big tobacco, big oil, and so on. In short, she was sending out a signal in her choice of key campaign staff that business would be conducted as usual in D.C. with the K Street lobbyists -- and against the public interest. Otherwise, she would have picked a different staff.

As for Bill, no one, especially Hillary, denies that they have a political partnership. She also benefits from his earnings, as in the case with Colombia. This is an inherent conflict of interest, given that Bill Clinton is her chief surrogate and is a former President of the United States. Lobbying is all about influence, and no one has more influence on Hillary Clinton than Bill Clinton, and vice versa, by their own accounts.

When Penn went to the Colombian embassy, a spokesperson claimed not to know whether Penn was representing the Clinton campaign or Burson-Marsteller:

A spokesman for Colombia's President Álvaro Uribe said the ambassador met with Mr. Penn to discuss the bilateral agenda. "There have also been meetings with the advisers to the campaigns of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain," he said. "It's the embassy's job to explain Colombia's reality."
"The spokesman said he didn't know if Mr. Penn was representing Sen. Clinton or Burson-Marsteller, which signed a $300,000, one-year contract with the Colombian Embassy in March 2007 to work on behalf of the trade deal and anti-drug-trafficking initiatives, according to the Justice Department filings."

That is an astonishing statement, but it reveals that either Senator Clinton is utterly naïve in terms of the game of perception and foreign policy, or knew all along what Penn was up to, her reported feigned outrage aside.

How can you hire as your key strategist a liberal hating guy who insists on not taking a leave of absence from a firm that represents the lead line-up of bad boy corporations, and then claim ignorance about what he is up to?

The very act of letting Penn remain CEO of Burson-Marsteller, while paying his own firm (another one, yes) more than $10 million (and currently owing him an estimated $2.5 to $3 million), sends a signal to the dark side of the corporate world. (Blackwater was one of Burson-Marsteller’s clients.)

It is quite worthy of note that when Senator Clinton finished questioning Crocker and Petraeus on April 8th, "… reporters spilled out to follow her down the hallway and stairwell … Shortly afterward, she was asked, twice, why she was keeping Mr. Penn on the campaign and whether his influence had waned. She had nothing to say, and walked out the door."

Nothing to say, indeed.

Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior

Dorothiea — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:15:25 EDT

Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior

By Dan Calabrese

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.

“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.

The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files. So what did Hillary do?

“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.

The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.

Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.

Of course, Nixon’s resignation rendered the entire issue moot, ending Hillary’s career on the Judiciary Committee staff in a most undistinguished manner. Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodman would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.

But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.

Source: NorthStar Writers Group

Encouragement To Sen. Obama,"Yes We Can" By Rev. John P. Kee

Dorothiea — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:34:38 EDT

Please Click Here To View New Music Video Of Encouragement To Sen. Obama,"Yes We Can" By Rev. John P. Kee http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMJEXZazjHk

PA Democratic Party enrollment surges past 4 million

Dorothiea — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:22:05 EDT

PA Democratic Party enrollment surges past 4 million

With the television and news headlines noting how Hillary will have a walk through the park in the PA primary, I feel that the revelation of 4 million voters newly enrolled as Democrats in PA may just show that we the people of Pennsylvania are sick of PA Governor Ed Rendell and his cronies telling the nation that PA is Hillary country.

This in fact may be a showing of support for Obama, of which I hope it is.

The surge in enrollment in PA apparently came about after that fat sweaty pig of a Governor in PA, that never knows when to shut his big mouth, went on to say that this primary would be a Hillary win.

I am not sure why the Rendell thinks so highly of the Clintons and has made this into a side show attraction.

With Carvel calling Richardson Judas for supporting Obama, what does this make Rendell? Personal toilet paper for Hillary? Rendell has been kissing Hillary’s ass more than any other elected politician I know of during this race.

With PA Congressmen/women Joe Sestak, Allyson Schwartz & John Murtha, plus Philadelphia Mayor Michael (do nothing so far as a mayor) Nutter, speaking out in favor of Hillary in such a manner in PA as to sway people from voting for anyone but Hillary, I only hope the peoples of PA shove it down the throats of these elected idiots that seem to forget how they even got into office in the 1st place.

Perhaps these elected idiots should have just kept their mouths shut and allow the voters to decide before they came out of the closet?

Introducing the new Three Stooges: Hillary, Ed Rendell & Michael Nutter

Dorothiea — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 02:57:32 EDT

Introducing the new Three Stooges: Hillary, Ed Rendell & Michael Nutter

Hillary was in Philadelphia the other evening for a rally & of course her two idiot endorsers PA Gov. Ed Rendell and Newly elected Mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter had been her obedient lap dogs pushing her agenda. Mayor Nutter obviously has no pressing issues to deal with it would seem with his 24/7 canvassing for Hillary, be it recorded calls sent to residents at all hours of the day and night to support Hillary or listening to Rendell talk out of both sides of his mouth, of which has been a common manner for Rendell to carry his obese body’s state. The man is a heart attack/heart disease poster child.

The rally for Hillary had taken place at Temple University in one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia none the less. I would gesture that the majority of those present at this rally are not even from the North Philadelphia neighborhood and are affluent suburbanites that had taken a drive to the badlands of this Philly neighborhood. This is a false means of selling herself as a candidate, as she should have held the rally at a luxurious country club in the suburbs in noting the general audience that attended that night. It was not an example of a town meeting with the area residents attending…just the opposite.

What strikes me as odd about her support by these two Philadelphia/PA elected idiots is the manner of which they are being displayed as well as contradicting themselves. They must, as I have noted in previous writings, been promised something on a grand and most likely personal gain scale to be bending over for Clinton.

In an excerpt from this rally it was noted:

Also helping to cast Clinton in a familiar, favorable light: the 1990s. After Philadelphia former mayor (and current Pennsylvania governor) Ed Rendell heaped praise on the Clinton Administration for policies that he said helped the city–including federal empowerment zones, housing-authority assistance, poverty programs and extra police–Clinton eagerly picked up the theme. “When people say, ‘We don’t want to go back to 1990s,’ I think to myself, which part don’t they like?” she said. “The peace? Or the prosperity?” The reporters in the press file rolled their eyes–they’d heard it all before. But Philadelphians, of course, haven’t–and after years of watching murder rates skyrocket under a corrupt mayor, it’s probably smart politics to promise them a return to security and competence.

Oddly enough the corrupt Mayor that they point out was running Philadelphia, was a two term serving Mayor of which Rendell praised at every chance as the best man for the job. He campaigned for two terms for Mayor Street (the previous Philly corrupt mayor as pointed out by Clinton), so how is it now that this cities problems had no oversight by Rendell? What side of Rendell’s mouth do you trust? Fast Eddie will do anything for some back handed private deal that would benefit him.

Michael Nutter of who is the newly elected Mayor in Philadelphia ran his campaign on “Change” from what Philadelphia’s previous mayor had neglected to address while in office. Strange that Nutter ran on the “change” ticket and yet is working with Rendell of who praised the previous Philly mayor, now is contradicting himself. Nutter has done nothing more since January, other than tap a keg on TV for Beer week in Philly and attend the St. Patrick’s day Parade. Seems like Nutter forgot he was elected Mayor of Philadelphia!

Just look at Rendell for the moment, he really has done nothing for the State of PA during his 2 terms as Governor, except tax and spend whenever he can…not to leave out firing qualified people in state run job positions for his personal friends with no qualifications at a pay raise higher than the previous worker. That is State monies, being abused by this tax and spends poor excuse for a human being. This is the same Governor that closed down the government in PA and withheld owed monies to employees due to a state bill that did not pass in the manner that fast Eddie wanted. So he had taken his anger out on innocent low ranking PA Gov. Employee’s and furloughed them w/o pay. Nice!

If my fellow Pennsylvanians can be so blind as to have the wool pulled over their heads by these two idiots vying for Hillary support, then the people of PA are just ignorant or are looking for a handout. The problems that may arise will be when in the future they have their hands bitten by the ones they voted for.

Clinton’s final lines last night perfectly captured the character of her candidacy going forward. Obama can keep his uplift, she seems to say. I’m betting that Pennsylvanians are in the market for something nittier, grittier and more “down-to-earth.”

Personally, I think most people in PA are just sick of the name Bush & Clinton. We are tired of the excuses these two families mention when asked why something they worked on failed. I have seen absolutely NO ownership on the behalf of Hillary for anything that has failed in her Senate elected position.

With the campaigning in PA, the last thing I would want to hear is the additional empty promises by Rendell and Nutter reminding us of needed “change” from our current political spectrum. It’s as if the Three Stooges had been in Philadelphia the other night! Hillary as Moe, Rendell as Curly and Nutter as Larry Fine.

Come on PA people…wake the hell up!

Judge Him by His Laws

Dorothiea — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:21:31 EDT

Judge Him by His Laws Barack Obama (Charlie Neibergall - AP) Enlarge Photo » Links to this article By Charles PetersFriday, January 4, 2008; Page A21

People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.

Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously. (Another factor is reporters' fascination with the horse race at the expense of substance that they assume is boring, a fascination that despite being ridiculed for years continues to dominate political journalism.)

I am a rarity among Washington journalists in that I have served in a state legislature. I know from my time in the West Virginia legislature that the challenges faced by reform-minded state representatives are no less, if indeed not more, formidable than those encountered in Congress. For me, at least, trying to deal with those challenges involved as much drama as any election. And the "heart and soul" bill, the one for which a legislator gives everything he or she has to get passed, has long told me more than anything else about a person's character and ability.

Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused.

Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama's bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to "solve" crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

Obama had his work cut out for him.

He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that "Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics."

The police proved to be Obama's toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, "This means we won't be able to protect your children." The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought -- successfully -- to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.

By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.

Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

Obama didn't stop there. He played a major role in passing many other bills, including the state's first earned-income tax credit to help the working poor and the first ethics and campaign finance law in 25 years (a law a Post story said made Illinois "one of the best in the nation on campaign finance disclosure"). Obama's commitment to ethics continued in the U.S. Senate, where he co-authored the new lobbying reform law that, among its hard-to-sell provisions, requires lawmakers to disclose the names of lobbyists who "bundle" contributions for them.

Taken together, these accomplishments demonstrate that Obama has what Dillard, the Republican state senator, calls a "unique" ability "to deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to deal with diverse people." In other words, Obama's campaign claim that he can persuade us to rise above what divides us is not just rhetoric.

I do not think that a candidate's legislative record is the only measure of presidential potential, simply that Obama's is revealing enough to merit far more attention than it has received. Indeed, the media have been equally delinquent in reporting the legislative achievements of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, both of whom spent years in the U.S. Senate. The media should compare their legislative records to Obama's, devoting special attention to their heart-and-soul bills and how effective each was in actually making law.

Charles Peters, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, is president of Understanding Government, a foundation devoted to better government through better reporting.

There's the Beef

Dorothiea — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:05:00 EDT

article By Steven PearlsteinFriday, February 22, 2008; Page D01

During the course of our endless presidential campaigns, lots of silly things are said by the candidates and the press. But few are more ridiculous than the idea that Barack Obama is just an empty suit.

We're talking here about a former president of the Harvard Law Review. Have you ever met the people who get into Harvard Law School? You might not choose them as friends or lovers or godparents to your children, but -- trust me on this -- there aren't many lightweights there. And Obama was chosen by all the other overachievers as top dog. Compared with the current leader of the free world, this guy is Albert Einstein.

Given his youth and relatively short time in government, it's fair to ask if Obama has the wisdom and experience to be president. But it's quite another to suggest that he has no vision, no program, no specifics.

Let's begin with the fact that he has written two books (all by himself, unlike a certain other candidate). The first offers a compelling personal narrative that, for some reason, is dismissed as puffery by a presumptive Republican nominee who first ran for office on the strength of his compelling personal narrative. The second book is a thoroughly readable, intelligent and well-reasoned discourse on politics and policy that offers a fresh perspective on a wide range of issues.

Obama has participated in 18 televised presidential debates in which he has managed to hold his own not only with Hillary the Wonkette, but also with the Senate's leading light on foreign affairs, a former United Nations ambassador and a former vice presidential candidate who was a skilled trial lawyer. I watched most of the debates, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I don't recall thinking that Obama was in over his head.

Now that Obama is sprinting toward the finish line in the Democratic marathon, his opponents are suddenly asking, "Where's the beef?"

If it's beef you like, all you have to do is go to http://barackobama.com, where you will find a refrigerator case packed with prime policy meat. That may come as something of a surprise to you, considering how utterly lacking in substance the reporting and analysis has been over the last year. But it's all there -- as much as or more than is offered by other candidates and certainly as much as any voter would require.

There is, for example, the 11-page, single-spaced energy plan that features a cap-and-trade system that would require businesses to purchase credits for 100 percent of their carbon emissions, along with a requirement that all electric companies produce a quarter of their juice from renewable resources. Obama would also invest $15 billion annually -- a big chunk of change, even by federal standards -- in biofuels and other forms of clean energy. He wants to change the way electricity rates are set to give utilities more incentives to save power rather than produce it.

Those aren't uniquely Obama's ideas -- in one form or another, they've been part of the Democratic congressional agenda for years. And considering how fiercely they are opposed by industry and free-market Republicans, they aren't going to produce the kind of across-the-aisle compromise that Obama promises to deliver. But it's hardly like there's nothing there.

Or perhaps you'd like to curl up with a copy of Obama's 15-page, single-spaced health-care plan, including 65 footnotes. You'll find a cogent analysis of what ails the health-care system, along with the best thinking of Democratic health-care reformers on how to fix it: disease management, computerized medical records, radical reforms of the insurance market, tax subsidies for low-income families and federal reinsurance for catastrophic illness. There's even a requirement that businesses either offer health insurance to their workers or pay into a universal health-care fund.

The plan would be expensive and involve a major federal intrusion into the marketplace, and there is a legitimate question as to whether the plan would work better if everyone were required by law to buy health insurance. But by any measure it is a serious plan that would win the support not only of labor but also of major parts of the business community, including hospitals and health insurers.

Finally, there's the 40-plus-page economic agenda that outlines Obama's proposals for avoiding a recession, helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, restoring the rights of workers to form unions, improving public education, combating poverty and shifting the tax burden from the middle class to the upper class.

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Hillary's Adventures Abroad

Dorothiea — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 02:23:46 EDT

                                                                                              Hillary's Adventures Abroad                                              We find some exaggerations in Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience.Summary. On March 6 Hillary Clinton claimed that, unlike Barack Obama, she and likely Republican nominee John McCain have "cross[ed] the commander-in-chief threshold." In a CNN interview the day before, Clinton had listed five foreign policy accomplishments. We can't determine how much behind-the-scenes work Clinton did while first lady, and she certainly took an active interest in foreign policy when her husband was president. Moreover, her time as first lady plus her longer Senate career do give Clinton more foreign policy experience than Obama. But the public record of her actions shows that many of Clinton's foreign policy claims are exaggerated.
Clinton claims to have "negotiated open borders" in Macedonia to fleeing Kosovar refugees. But the Macedonian border opened a full day before she arrived, and her meetings with Macedonian officials were too brief to allow for much serious negotiating.
Clinton's activities "helped bring peace to Northern Ireland." Irish officials are divided as to how helpful Clinton's actions were, and key players agree that she was not directly involved in any actual negotiations.
Clinton has repeatedly referenced her "dangerous" trip to Bosnia. She fails to mention, however, that the Bosnian war had officially ended three months before her visit – or that she made the trip with her 16-year-old daughter and two entertainers.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton claim that Hillary privately championed the use of U.S. troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda. That conversation left no public record, however, as U.S. policy was explicitly to stay out of Rwanda, and officials say that the use of U.S. troops was never considered.
Clinton's tough speech on human rights delivered to a Beijing audience is as advertised, though Clinton herself has been dismissive of speeches that aren't backed by solutions.
AnalysisOver the past two weeks – beginning with that well-known 3 a.m. ad where she calls herself "tested" – Hillary Clinton has been arguing that she has significantly more foreign policy experience than Barack Obama, her rival for the Democratic nomination. On her Web site, Clinton cites five specific examples of her foreign policy experience: her assistance in bringing peace to Northern Ireland; her work to help open Macedonia’s borders to Albanian refugees; her trip to the Bosnian war zone to promote U.S. policy; her speech on women’s rights delivered in Beijing; and her public statements on Rwanda. Obama's camp has fired right back with charges that Clinton is exaggerating her foreign policy experience. And when initially pressed to name a "moment" when Clinton was "tested in crisis" her two chief spokespeople responded with an awkward silence.

Officials from Bill Clinton’s administration are largely divided as to the extent and effectiveness of Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy role as first lady. For example, Richard Holbrooke, a former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to the U.N., claims that Clinton’s "intense efforts" in Macedonia "contributed to saving many lives." On the other hand, Susan Rice, also an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, argues that Clinton was never asked to do any "heavy lifting" and says that Clinton’s role was more about "gentle prodding or constructive reinforcement." That Holbrooke and Rice would remember Clinton’s role differently is unsurprising: Holbrooke is a foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign, while Rice has the same role with Obama’s campaign.

Indeed, the New York Times recently reported that, as first lady, Clinton did not hold a security clearance nor did she sit in on meetings with the National Security Council. We examined some of the specific examples of Sen. Clinton’s experience and found that most of them are weaker than advertised.

Border Patrol

    In a March 5 interview on CNN, Clinton said that she "negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo." Clinton is referring to her May 14, 1999, trip to Macedonia, which shares a border with Kosovo. According to her Web site, Clinton "traveled to the international border on the edge of the war zone" before meeting with Macedonia’s president and prime minister.

We note, first, that Clinton’s claim that the refugee camp was "on the edge of a war zone" gives an exaggerated picture of the risk involved. Traveling to the Kosovo border was more dangerous than remaining in Washington, and the trip did involve some risk. But Clinton did not land in the middle of an active combat zone, and the risks that she did take were not exceptional: Prior visitors to the refugee camp included Richard Gere and Bianca Jagger. For that matter, much of the "war" in Kosovo consisted of NATO airstrikes against the Yugoslav troops who had forced thousands of ethnic Albanians to flee Kosovo, and the nearest NATO ground troops were deployed in Albania, more than 100 miles away from Clinton.

More significantly, Clinton did not in fact "negotiate on matters such as opening borders for refugees during the war in Kosovo." Macedonia had reopened its border to Kosovar refugees the day before Clinton’s arrival, as has been widely reported. Clinton now says that she pressed for opening the borders "much wider." In a written statement that the Clinton campaign has circulated widely, Holbrooke, the Clinton administration’s chief negotiator on peace in the Balkans, says that there is "no doubt" that Hillary Clinton's actions saved lives.

So how much "pressing" did Clinton actually do? According to her official travel schedule, Clinton was in Macedonia for less than nine hours, nearly half of which she spent touring refugee camps. Clinton was scheduled for photo ops with the prime minister at the residence of the U.S. ambassador at 2:20 p.m. At 2:50 p.m., she had a photo session with Macedonia’s president at his residence, followed by a 3:20 photo op with the first lady. That would leave a total of 30 minutes for negotiations, minus time for photos. Indeed, at the time, the New York Times reported that Clinton’s trip was so scripted that "Administration officials chose which refugees Mrs. Clinton would speak with." News reports on Clinton's own Web site characterize the first lady's visit as "sweeping through Macedonia" offering "publicity" and "aid."

Update, March 25: Six days after our article appeared, Hillary Clinton’s White House schedule was released to the public. We have since been able to determine that Clinton met with Prime Minister Ljubcho Georgievsky from 2:20 to 2:35. Also attending: Macedonian chief of cabinet Valentin Mitrovski; U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill; Clinton’s aide, Melanne Verveere; and Susan Braden, a member of the national security council. Mrs. Georgievsky, Mrs. Mitrovski and Mrs. Hill also are listed as attending.

Clinton’s meeting with Macedonian president Kiro Gligorov lasted from 2:50 to 3:20. Hill, Braden and Verveere attended the meeting, along with a representative from the State Department and one from USAID.

A Proponent of Peace

  Clinton has taken an interest in the Northern Ireland peace process, visiting the area seven times between 1995 and 2004 – making five of those trips as first lady. Clinton has said that she "helped bring peace to Northern Ireland." Of course, "helped" is a fairly weak claim, one that could be made by nearly anyone who contributed in a way that didn't actively hinder the process. Clinton was not directly involved in the peace negotiations that eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. Her work focused on encouraging Irish women to take a more active role in the male-dominated peace talks. There is universal agreement that Clinton "helped." The dispute is about how much she helped.

Figures close to the negotiations are split in their assessments. Clinton's campaign has been busy sharing some responses with the press. For example, former Sen. George Mitchell – the lead U.S. negotiator – told the Chicago Tribune that Clinton’s visits were "very helpful" and that her work with women was a "significant factor" in contributing to the success of the process. And in a written statement, John Hume, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with David Trimble for their work on the Good Friday Agreement, said that Clinton provided "decisive support" for the process. Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams agreed, telling the Irish Times that "Senator Clinton played an important role in the peace process" and praising her as "extremely well informed on the issues."

But not everyone agrees. Trimble, for instance, remembers things differently, saying that Clinton’s role was mainly that of "cheerleader" and not one of "principal player." One of Hume’s aides – perhaps inadvertently showing why the peace process really did need to have more women involved – opined that Clinton was active "in a classic woman politicky sort of way," although he said that Clinton was "certainly investing some time." And an Irish historian who has written extensively about the peace process told the Tribune that Clinton’s work was "nice" but also "ancillary to the main thing."

Key players agree that Clinton was an active behind-the-scenes supporter of the peace process and that she was an important player in getting women involved in the negotiations. Getting parties to the table is a crucial part of any peace process. But we note that many could claim foreign policy credentials for bringing principal figures together, including U2's Bono – who convinced Hume and Trimble to appear together for the first time during the referendum campaign and whose photo with the two Irish politicians has been called "one of the enduring images of the peace process."

Dodging Bullets with Sinbad

Clinton has also touted her March 1996 visit to war-torn Bosnia as evidence of her foreign policy experience, and her campaign has made references to a Washington Post article that described the visit as "the first time since Roosevelt that a first lady has voyaged to a potential combat zone." In a December campaign stop, Clinton recounted a harrowing trip, with her aircraft engaging in a tight corkscrew landing to avoid potential sniper fire. As Clinton explained, the unofficial White House policy was, “If it's too dangerous, too small and too poor, send the first lady.”

We can’t speak to what may or may not have happened on the military transport that delivered Clinton to Bosnia. She is right, though, that she visited a potential combat zone. But what she fails to mention is that the Dayton Peace Accords – which officially ended a year-and-a-half of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – had been signed in December 1995. So by the time of Clinton’s March 1996 visit, the war itself had been over for three months. Indeed, the accords were so successful that by June 1996 Anthony Lake, a member of President Clinton's national security team, could say with confidence that predictions of "renewed fighting" in Bosnia had turned out to be unfounded. Clinton also correctly quotes the Post. But she leaves out the part of the article that discusses Pat Nixon's visit to a Saigon field hospital in 1969 and Barbara Bush's Thanksgiving celebration with American troops in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm.

Moreover, Clinton’s visit was part of what the New York Times described as a "good-will tour." Other stops included a meeting at Baumholder Army Base in Germany with the families of military personnel who were deployed to Bosnia and meetings in Turkey and Greece to promote women’s rights. Chelsea Clinton, then 16, accompanied her mother on all the stops; on the Bosnian leg of the tour, they were joined by singer Sheryl Crow and the comedian Sinbad, who came with a host of donated items, including a big screen TV and candy bars, designed to boost the troops’ morale.

Rwandan Pillow Talk

At a campaign stop in Iowa in December 2007, Bill Clinton told a gathering of potential caucus-goers that Hillary advocated the use of U.S. troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda. When asked whether it was true, Hillary Clinton replied with an unequivocal, "It is."

We're hardly in a position to dispute a private conversation between Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is worth noting, however, that the conversation doesn't seem to have had any sort of verifiable effect. The conversation is not recorded in the memoirs of either Clinton. And there is no record of the former president raising the possibility of deploying troops with any of his advisers. Prudence Bushnell, the State Department official who held the Rwanda portfolio during the Clinton administration, told the Tribune that the U.S. did not ever consider a military intervention in Rwanda. Bushnell is not affiliated with any campaign. For that matter, the U.S. took an active role in removing the few international peacekeeping forces that had been in place. According to an article in The Atlantic by Samantha Power of Harvard (and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on America's role in combating genocide), "staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective." Power, of course, was an Obama adviser until her celebrated reference to Clinton as a "monster," but Power's article was written in September 2001 – well before Obama ran for the U.S. Senate.

Chinese Rights

   On March 5, Clinton told CNN that "I've been standing up against ... the Chinese government over women's rights and standing up for human rights." Clinton is referring to a speech (you can watch it here) that she delivered in 1995 as part of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Clinton was critical of China's record on human rights generally and on women's rights in particular, and her forceful remarks drew praise at home from Republicans and Democrats alike. The Chinese were less pleased; her remarks were blacked out, and only 5,000 party members were permitted to hear the speech. Moreover, Clinton's speech achieved a diplomatic end: As incentive for the first lady to come to China, the Chinese government released Harry Wu, a human rights activist whom the government had jailed following his conviction on spurious espionage charges.

Clinton is exactly right as to the details of her China speech. Does a tough speech count as foreign policy experience? Clinton frequently says that Obama "offers speeches" while she "offers solutions," so by her own standards, the China speech doesn't deserve much consideration. We'll leave it up to you to determine how much China's human rights situation improved between 1995 and 2007.

– by Joe Miller

Fact checking Rev. Jeremiah Wright: 9/11 sermon

Dorothiea — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:36:08 EDT

Fact checking Rev. Jeremiah Wright: 9/11 sermon

03.19.2008 In This Issue
Roland S. Martin
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As this whole sordid episode has played out over the last week regarding the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, I wanted to understand what he ACTUALLY said in this speech. I've been saying all week on CNN that context is important, and I just wanted to know what the heck is going on.

I actually listened to the sermon Rev. Wright gave after September 11 titled, "The Day of Jerusalem's Fall." It was delivered on Sept. 16, 2001. Click HERE to listen to the sermon.

One of the most controversial statements in this sermon was when he mentioned "chickens coming home to roost." He was actually quoting Edward Peck, former US Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force, who was speaking on FOX NEWS. That's what he told the congregation. He was quoting Peck as saying that America's foreign policy has put the nation in peril.

"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, araw, The Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

"We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

"We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-miliatry personnel.

"We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathrs.

"We bombed Qadafi's home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children's head against the rock.

"We bombed Iraq. we killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they'd never get back home.

"We bombed Hiroshima. we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than teh thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

"Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

"Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have. but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that."

He went on to describe seeing the photos of the aftermath of 9/11 because he was in Newark, N.J. when the planes struck. After turning on the TV and seeing the second plane slam into one of the twin towers, he spoke passionately about what if you never got a chance to say hello to your family again.

"What is the state of your family?" he asked.

And then he told his congregation that he loved them and asked the church to tell each other they loved themselves.

His sermon thesis:

1. This is a time for self-examination of ourselves and our families.

2. This is a time for social transformation (then he went on to say they won't put me on PBS or national cable for what I'm
about to say. Talk about prophetic!)

"We have got to change the way we have been doing things as a society," he said.

Wright then said we can't stop messing over people and thinking they can't touch us. He then said we may need to declare war on racism, injustice and greed, instead of war on other countries.

"Maybe we need to declare war on AIDS. In five minutes the Congress found $40 billion to rebuild New York and the families that died in sudden death, do you think we can find the money to make medicine available for people who are dying a slow death? Maybe we need to declare war on the nation's healthcare system that leaves the nation's poor with no health coverage? Maybe we need to declare war on the mishandled educational system and provide quality education for everybody, every citizen, based on their ability to learn, not their ability to pay. This is a time for social transformation."

3. This is time to tell God thank you for all that he has provided and that he gave him and others another chance to do His will.

By the way, no where in this sermon did he said "God damn America." I'm not sure which sermon that came from.

This doesn't explain anything away, nor does it absolve Wright of using the N-word, but what it does do is add an accurate perspective to this conversation.

The point that I have always made as a journalist is that our job is to seek the truth, and not the partial truth.

I am also listening to the other sermons delivered by Rev. Wright that have been the subject of controversy.

And let me be clear: Where I believe he was wrong and not justified in what he said based upon the facts, I will say so. But where the facts support his argument, that will also be said.

So stay tuned.
To reach Roland S. Martin:roland@rolandsmartin.comTo read Roland S. Martin's blog:http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001f0eP3dszUpR80QeucdllCaWcBhk1X-JAxdapuSbkXzyo2JDpAg2CGxV3UoJwiE-2mf2G2bnYHEpQCa470Y6_e3MUuv5IQLA0KNnxfY0L47TICxe_7T30GE9IYSPOK96l

Three Of The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Presidents Had Shorter experience In Politcs, Then Sen. Obama

Dorothiea — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:01:39 EST

[“Along The Color Line”, written by Manning Marable, PhD and distributed by.BlackCommentator.com, is a public educational and information service dedicated to fostering political dialogue and discussion, inspired by the great tradition for political event columns written by W. E. B. Du Bois nearly a century ago. Re-prints are permitted by any Black-owned or Black-oriented publications (print or electronic) without charge as long as they are printed in their entirety including this paragraph and, for electronic media, a link to http://www.BlackCommentator.com.]
Several years ago, I was walking home to my Manhattan apartment from Columbia University, just having delivered a lecture on New York State’s notorious “Rockefeller Drug Laws.” The state’s mandatory-minimum sentencing laws had thrown tens of thousands of nonviolent drug offenders into state prisons with violent convicts. In my lecture I had called for more generous prisoner reentry programs, the restoration of felons’ voting rights, increased educational programs inside prisons, and a restoration of judges’ sentencing authority.
A white administrator from another local university, a woman, who I had always judged to be fairly conservative and probably a Republican, had attended my lecture and was walking along with me to go to the subway. She told me that my lecture about the “prison industrial complex” had been a real “eye opener.” The fact that two million Americans were imprisoned, she expressed, was a “real scandal.”
Then this college administrator blurted out, in a hurried manner, “You know, my son is also in prison … a victim of the drug laws.”
In a split second, I had to make a hard decision: whether to engage this white conservative administrator in a serious conversation about America’s gulags and political economy of mass incarceration that had collaterally ensnared her son, or to pretend that I had not heard her last sentence, and to continue our conversation as if she had said nothing at all. Perhaps this is a sign of generational weakness on my part, but the overwhelming feeling I had at that precise moment was that, one day, the white administrator would deeply regret revealing such an intimate secret with a black person. I might tell the entire world about it. Instead of proceeding on the basis of mutual trust and common ground, transcending the boundaries of color, it would be better to ignore what was said in haste.
All of this occurred to me in the span of one heartbeat. I decided to say nothing. Two seconds later, I could visually detect the signs of relief on the woman’s face. African Americans have survived in the United States for over four hundred years because, at least up to the most recent generation of black people, we have made it our business to study white Americans generally, and especially those who exercise power. This explains why so many African Americans, at the very core of their being, express fears that millions of white Americans will be unable to cast ballots for Obama for president solely due to his racial identity. Of course, the majority of them would deny this, even to themselves.
Among the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, former Senator John Edwards (albeit with a “suspended” campaign) has been consistently the most progressive on most policy issues, in my view. On issues such as health care and poverty, Edwards has been clearly to the left of both Obama and Hillary Clinton. But since Edwards probably cannot win the Democratic nomination the real choice is between Clinton and Obama.
We’ve all heard the arguments explaining why Obama’s “not qualified” to be president. Chief among them is that he “doesn’t have enough experience in government.” As a historian, I think it may be instructive to observe that three of the twentieth century’s most influential presidents had shorter careers in electoral politics than Obama. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, served as New York’s governor for only two years, and was William McKinley’s Vice President for barely six months. Woodrow Wilson served as New Jersey’s governor for only two years before being elected president. And Franklin D. Roosevelt, our only four-term president, had served in Albany as New York’s governor for four years. None of these leaders was ever elected to Congress.
Obama’s seven years in the Illinois State Senate, according to the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, show that “he scored significant achievements there: a law to videotape police interrogations in capital cases; an earned income tax credit to fight poverty; an expansion of early childhood education.” To be perfectly honest, there are some public policy issues where I sharply disagree with Obama, such as health care. Obama’s approach is not to use “mandates” to force millions of healthy twenty-somethings into the national health insurance pool. He claims that you won’t need mandates, just lower the price of private health insurance and young adults will buy it on their own. Obama’s children are still small, so maybe he can be excused for such an irrational argument. Obama’s reluctance to embrace health mandates is about his desire to appeal to “centrists” and moderate Republicans.
That brings us back to Barack’s unspoken problem: white denial and voter flight. It’s instructive to remember what happened to David Dinkins, the first (and still only) African American elected mayor of New York City. According to Andrew Kohul, the current president of the Pew Research Center, the Gallup organization’s polling research on New York City’s voters in 1989 indicated that Dinkins would defeat his Republican opponent, Rudolph Giuliani, by 15 percent. Instead, Dinkins only narrowly won by 2 percent. Kohul, who worked as a Gallup pollster in that election, concluded that “poorer, less well-educated [white] voters were less likely to answer our questions;” so the poll didn’t have the opportunity to factor in their views. As Kohul admits, “Here’s the problem – these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.”
So I return to the white college administrator whose son is in prison on drug charges. I made a mistake. People of color must break through the mental racial barricades that divide America into parallel racial universes. We need to mobilize and support the election of Barack Obama not only because he is progressive and fully qualified to be president, but also because only his campaign can force all Americans to overcome the centuries-old silences about race that still create a deep chasm across this nation’s democratic life. In the end, we must force our fellow citizens who happen to be white, to come to terms with their own whiteness, their guilt and fears about America’s terrible racial past.
If there is any hope for meaningful change inside U.S. electoral system in the future, it lies with progressive leaders like Barack Obama. If we can dare to dream politically, let us dream of the world as it should be.