Rush Limbaugh signs an eight year, $400 million deal to continue his top-rated radio show. Premiere Radio Networks: Palm Beach County's property tax rolls (and the underground pill trade), thank you.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the pay scale: U.S. employers cut another 62,000 jobs in June, making it six months in a row of job cuts for the Bush economy. And, says the New York Times:
... as job losses mount, even those still on payrolls have felt the pain: employers are cutting hours for their full-time employees and shrinking salaries, just as workers face record-high prices for gasoline and food.
The unemployment rate stayed steady in June at 5.5 percent, the highest level in four years. The elevated figure dispelled speculation among some economists that last month’s half-percentage point jump, the biggest monthly spike in 22 years, was a statistical anomaly.
...In the last 12 months, the economy had seen a net gain of only 15,000 jobs, the lowest net increase since November 2003.
The Hill reports that both the Obama and McCain campaigns are touting plans to turn the bleak employment picture around.
The Democratic presidential candidate promised that he would “restore broad-based, bottom-up growth that benefits all Americans.”
“I will provide working families with a middle-class tax cut; fight for affordable health care and college tuition; work to help raise workers' wages, and invest in infrastructure, education and a clean energy future to create millions of new jobs,” he said.
Sen. John McCain also noted that Americans are feeling the pain of a struggling economy and said that “Washington can no longer abdicate its responsibility to act.”
“To get our economy back on track, we must enact a jobs-first economic plan that supports job creation, provide immediate tax relief for families, enact a plan to help those facing foreclosure, lower healthcare costs, invest in innovation, move toward strategic energy independence and open more foreign markets to our goods,” the Arizona Republican said.
Both sought to paint the other party as responsible for the woes.
Meanwhile, the Hill also reports that McCain says he did indeed get a heads-up on the Colombian Army's FARC raid.
“Last night, President Uribe and the defense minister did brief us that the operation was going to take place today,” said McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, who was visiting Colombia Wednesday to promote a free trade agreement and to discuss drug trafficking.
“Today, I spoke by phone to President Uribe. He told me some of the details of the dramatic rescue of the people who were held hostage. Three Americans are now free and Ingrid Betancourt is now in good condition,” said McCain. “I’m pleased with the success of this very high-risk operation.”
No word on whether he got wind of the raid from the Bush administration before he planned his trip...
The WaPo, meanwhile, has a story on the Bush administration's shocking and entirely unexpected foreknowledge of a U.S. oil company's plans to do an end-run around the new Iraqi government, by cutting an oil deal with the Kurds:
Bush administration officials told Hunt Oil last summer that they did not object to its efforts to reach an oil deal with the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, even while the State Department was publicly expressing concern that such contracts could undermine a national Iraqi petroleum law, according to documents obtained by a House committee.
Last fall, after the deal was announced, the State Department said that it had tried to dissuade Hunt Oil from signing the contract with Kurdish regional authorities but that the company had proceeded "regardless of our advice." Although Hunt Oil's chief executive has been a major fundraiser for President Bush, the president said he knew nothing about the deal.
Yesterday, however, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released documents and e-mails showing that for nearly four months, State and Commerce department officials knew about Hunt Oil's negotiations and had told company officials that there were no objections. In one note, a Commerce Department official even wished them "a fruitful visit to Kurdistan" and invited them to contact him "in case you need any support."
That guidance contradicted the administration's public posture. The Bush administration made an Iraqi national petroleum law, which has still not been adopted, a top priority last year in the hope it would more tightly bind the country's regions together and open the way for international oil companies to invest in much larger oil fields south of Iraq's Kurdish region. The State Department said, and continues to assert, that it opposes any contract with a regional Iraqi authority in the absence of a national petroleum law.
The Bush administration dabbling in secret oil deals? Say it isn't so!
The Post also has news of hundreds of Zimbabwean opposition members seeking refuge in the U.S. embassy to escape the wrath of monstrous dictator Robert Mugabe's goons.
Meanwhile the Independent UK has a story about how Zimbabwe's political crisis could affect, of all things, cricket.
And the paper reports that Google is being forced by a federal court to disclose viewing data on Youtube, to satisfy a copyright infringement claim by Old Media company Viacom.
A coming Jerusalem "Berlin Wall"? ... The Guardian reports on a possible move to partition Jerusalem's Arab and Jewish neighborhoods, after this week's deadly bulldozer attack.
And the Guardian profile's freed Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt, "Colombia's Joan of Arc." |
The Miami Herald has the update on former FARC hostage Ingrid Betancourt's reunion with her family, after the Colombian government puts one over on the FARC guerrillas and frees several people who were held by them for more than five years, including the former presidential candidate, Betancourt, and three Florida contractors. The New York Times also offers its take on Betancourt's ordeal. [Betancourt is pictured at left after her rescue- AP]
BOGOTA -- The rescuers came wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and logos declaring them delegates of some obscure organization. They didn't look much like an international humanitarian brigade. And they weren't.
They were the Colombian intelligence agents who pulled off ''Operation Checkmate,'' one of the greatest military capers in Colombia's history -- a mission that would finally liberate the world's most famous hostage from the hands of leftist rebels in the jungle.
Without firing a single shot.
''Who are these people? What kind of international commission is this?'' former hostage and once-presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt remembered thinking. ``Are we clowns in another circus? I didn't want any part of it.''
In a military operation described as ''unprecedented'' and ''perfect,'' the Colombian armed forces Wednesday infiltrated the top command of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- Latin America's oldest insurgency -- and tricked rebels into handing over Betancourt, held hostage for six years, and three American defense contractors, held for five years.
It was an effort the White House says it knew about and helped support.
The hostages, the rebel group's most-prized possessions, were held in chains in jungle camps in the hopes the government would swap them for guerrilla prisoners. The three Americans -- Keith Stansell, Thomas Howes and Marc Gonsalves -- were scuttled out of the Andean nation and were set to arrive Wednesday night in San Antonio. ... Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said the ruse that also freed 11 Colombian soldiers and police officers was straight out of an action flick, and added that the mission garnered even more spoils: ''César,'' Betancourt's guerrilla warden all these years, was captured and placed under arrest. More details of the raid:
More details from the defense minister
He said the military infiltrated the FARC's top hierarchy and arranged for a transfer of hostages on the ruse that they were going to be handed over to Alfonso Cano, the rebel group's maximum leader.
... The government mole arranged for the hostages to be brought together from three different locations to one camp, and then taken in a helicopter the FARC believed belonged to a friendly aid group that would transport the hostages to Cano.
... The chopper was piloted by intelligence officers dressed as leftist sympathizers. Betancourt said the hostages thought they were being picked up by some kind of international humanitarian organization to be taken to the FARC high command.
''Our hearts broke. More captivity. Another transfer,'' Betancourt said in a dramatic press conference minutes after embracing her mother. ``Every time we heard helicopters my pulse would race. Run, hide, gather your things. But this helicopter was white. It was exciting.
''It was surreal,'' Betancourt said, describing the bizarre white helicopter and the strangely dressed men who came for her. ``They had logos that certified they were a delegation of who-knows-what.''
She and the others were handcuffed as they boarded the chopper, which she described as ''humiliating.'' Once aboard, something happened so fast Betancourt missed it.
But then she saw ''César'' -- the ''cruel despot'' who guarded her -- subdued on the floor of the helicopter. The pilots turned and said the words she and the others had waited so long for:
``We are from the army. You are free.''
''The helicopter almost crashed; we jumped, we screamed and we cried,'' she said, lavishing praise on the military, the defense minister and President Alvaro Uribe.
Betancourt was kidnapped in 2002, the contractors in 2003. OK, now for the conspiracy theories...
The raid was more than a year in the making, as the Colombian "mole" ingratiated himself with the rebels. And the Bush administration says it knew about the planning. And there was John McCain, just happening to be in town to dress up in his Navy cap and meet the victorious president of Colombia, Alvaro Urive, who has had his troubles lately, but who along with the Colombian Army was hailed by his countrymen yesterday. Too convenient? Maybe.
In Colombia, John McCain shows off his "Top Gun" look
The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company's board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University's National Security Archive as an "illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country's most notorious civilian massacres."
Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita's payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.
And McCain is under fire from labor leaders over his support for a free trade pact with Colombia (the stated reason for his trip south.)
But so far, there's not much more to the suspicion that McCain's trip was more than luckily timed, besides suspicion.
The New York Times is calling McCain's FARC convergence a "happy coincidence," but not everyone is so sure. The skeptics are lining up online, with many awaiting the gauzy photo-ops of McCain with Colombian president Uribe, and with the rescued hostages. Even many media types were scratching their heads this week over the McCain trip, just before the Fourth of July, to do what, push unpopular free trade? It's definitely a head scratcher, and given what we've witnessed over the last four years, one could easily see the Bush administration briefing their candidate on this being a great week to go to Colombia...
They're just your average American family. No country clubs, good looking dates and cigarettes here, folks! In fact, John and Cindy McCain are just ... like ... us.
Item one: There's never a recession at Cindy's house!
No, my friends, there's only shoes, shoes, SHOES! Cindy shops til she drops, and in that devil-may-care that only a beer heiress can muster, she kicks up her heels while the little people scrounge for gas money (and bake nasty, "homemade" cookies):
Cindy McCain and the McCain children are the beneficiaries of a beer distributing fortune amassed by her parents and estimated to be worth $100 million or more. Though the McCains maintain separate finances, Cindy McCain’s family fortune has boosted her husband’s political career at critical junctures, helping to fund his inaugural 1982 run for Congress and helping to subsidize his current presidential campaign when it all but went broke last year. ...
... While Cindy McCain, her dependent children and the trusts and companies they control made as much as $29 million — and likely substantially more — from her family’s business interests from 2004 through last year, data from the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Office of Government Ethics and the Center for Responsive Politics also reveals that they spent $11 million purchasing five condominiums for the family, hired additional household help and racked up progressively larger credit card bills almost every year.
Their credit card bills peaked between January 2007 and May 2008, during which time Cindy McCain charged as much as $500,000 in a single month on one American Express card and $250,000 on another, while one of their two dependent children had an AmEx card with a monthly balance as large as $50,000.
A campaign aide who did not want to be identified discussing the McCains’ personal finances stressed that the credit card balances are “not ongoing debt.”
And how! (John, what's the price of a gallon of gasoline again? Oh, that's right. Only the little people pay to pump! To Barneys, Jeevsey, and put some English on it!)
But Cochran said he observed McCain engage in a physical confrontation with a Sandinista while participating in a diplomatic mission led by Sen. Bob Dole and others in the fall of 1987. Cochran, McCain — who had won election to the Senate the year before after serving in the House — and other members of a bipartisan committee of lawmakers called the Central American Negotiations Observer Group met with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, head of the left wing political party known as "Sandinistas," about tensions in the region.
The atmosphere was tense, as the U.S. was pressing the countries involved "pretty hard." Cochran noticed a disturbance at the meeting table in a room lined with armed personnel.
"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever. I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, 'Good grief, everybody around here has got guns,' and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."
There were no punches thrown and the two sat back down. The man, who appeared to be ruffled after the confrontation with McCain, was an associate of Ortega's, possibly a lieutenant, but Cochran said he was unsure of his identity.
Right to bear arms, Thad ... right to bear frikkin' arms...
By the way, the next time a scrawny little runt reporter dares to ask about John's service in Vietnam, and why it by itself qualifies him to be president? Someone's going to get hurt. You got that, ABC's David Wright?
McCain became visibly angry when I asked him to explain how his Vietnam experience prepared him for the Presidency.
"Please," he said, recoiling back in his seat in distaste at the very question.
McCain allies Sen. Lindsey Graham stepped in to rescue him. Graham expressed admiration for McCain’s stance on the treatment of detainees in US custody.
"That to me is a classic example of how his military experience helped him shape public policy in a way no other senator could have done,’’ Graham said.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman, also traveling on the trip, expressed admiration for McCain’s wartime service as well.
McCain then collected himself and apologized for his initial reaction.
"I kind of reacted the way I did because I have a reluctance to talk about my experiences," he said, noting that he has huge admiration for the "heroes" who served with him in the POW camp and said the experience taught him to love the U.S. because he missed it so much.
"I am always reluctant to talk about these things," McCain said.
Good thing John's appointment secretary, Lindsey, was there to help. Boy, that gal sure helps a fella keep a level head!
Well folks, that's all for now! The McCain's sure do appreciate your dropping by! Oh, and wipe your feet on the way out. Poor people are sooooo, grimey!
Joint Chiefs Chair: the forgotten war needs more troops
The latest in the "Iraq stole our war" saga, courtesy of the Washington Post:
The nation's top military officer said today that more U.S. troops are needed in Afghanistan to help tamp down an increasingly violent insurgency but does not have sufficient forces to send because of the war in Iraq.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said insurgent Taliban and extremist forces in Afghanistan have become "a very complex problem" that is tied to the extensive drug trade, a faltering economy and the porous border region with Pakistan. Violence in Afghanistan has increased markedly over recent weeks, and June was the deadliest month for U.S. troops since the war began in 2001, with 28 combat fatalities.
"I am and have been deeply troubled by the increasing violence there," Mullen said, adding that he has made no secret of wanting to send more forces into the country. "The Taliban and their supporters have become more effective in recent weeks. ... We all need to be patient. As we have seen in Iraq, counterinsurgency warfare takes time and commitment."
Mullen said military commanders are looking at the prospects for sending additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009, but conditions in Iraq would have to continue to improve for that to happen. The war in Iraq has occupied as many as 20 military brigades during the troop buildup over the past year. The military is reducing that force to 15 brigades this year.
"I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq," Mullen said. "Afghanistan remains an economy of force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there. We have the ability in almost every single case to win from the combat standpoint, but we don't have enough troops there to hold. That is key to the future of being able to succeed in Afghanistan." ...
And as for the neocons' plans for the next war?
Mullen said plainly that he opposes the U.S. or Israel engaging Iran with a military strike.
"My strong preference is to handle all of this diplomatically with the other powers of government, as opposed to any kind of strike occurring," Mullen said. "This is a very unstable part of the world and I don't need it to be more unstable."
McCain sources say Schmidt, who ran Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's reelection campaign and was a top communications aide in Bush-Cheney '04, will coordinate the campaign's daily pro-McCain and anti-Obama message but also will have an increased role in shaping most every facet of the organization including scheduling, policy, coalitions and surrogates.
Davis will focus more on big-picture issues such as general strategy, helping to plan the convention, picking a vice president and tending to the needs of major donors.
Schmidt has been serving as a senior McCain adviser for months and had recently returned to headquarters to help bolster the Republican nominee's message operation.
The move comes a year to the day after McCain laid off dozens of staffers as part of a cost-cutting measure that what would ultimately spur a major overhaul of his campaign.
Now, accounts diverge on the exact nature of the new chain of command. One top McCain source said that Schmidt "assumed full operational control of the campaign today" and described Davis as "a general manager."
But Charlie Black, another top adviser, said Davis was still in charge.
"Steve is going to function under Rick as a [chief operating officer]," Black said. "Rick still has authority over all things. Steve works for Rick."
But Black made sure to not diminish Schmidt's elevated role in the campaign.
"He'll be the maestro who conducts the symphony," Black said of Schmidt's position in driving McCain's message.
WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign has gone through its second shake-up in a year as Mr. McCain, responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering, put Steve Schmidt in charge of day-to-day operations and abandoned an effort to have the campaign run by 11 regional managers, the senator’s aides said Wednesday.
Mr. Schmidt is a veteran of President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and he worked closely with Karl Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s political adviser. His installation at Mr. McCain’s headquarters sharply diminished the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been Mr. McCain’s campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.
Mr. McCain’s advisers said that Mr. Davis would continue to hold the position of campaign manager, but that Mr. Schmidt had taken over every major operation where Mr. McCain has shown signs of struggling: communications, scheduling and basic political strategy.
The shift was approved by Mr. McCain after several aides, including Mr. Schmidt, warned him about 10 days ago that he was in danger of losing the presidential election unless he revamped his campaign operation, according to two officials close to the campaign. ...
In the first public reflection of Mr. Schmidt’s new role, the campaign is what will amount to a relaunch of Mr. McCain’s candidacy after July 4, with the senator touring the country to promote a jobs program and visiting battleground states like Colorado, Wisconsin and Michigan to illustrate the economic problems he will be talking about.
By contrast, in moves that drew widespread derision by Republicans and delighted Democrats, Mr. McCain recently delivered a speech on energy policy before an audience of oil executives in Houston and came out in favor of offshore drilling in a speech in Santa Barbara, Calif. In both cases, Mr. McCain’s aides said, he ended up delivering those speeches in those locations because he was there fund-raising.
Cooking out with McCain would be like a retirement party, says one voter. Jeez, imagine what a wake it would be if he brought Lieberman... More on the AP/Yahoo cookout with the candidate poll here.
More AP/Yahoo poll stuff: Michelle Obama has a ways to go to win over voters, while Cindy McCain is mostly a mystery. And take the nifty quiz at the bottom of the page. This one's for that wacky woman who called in to C-SPAN this morning insisting Obama was born in Indonesia: which presidential candidate was born outside the U.S.?
To the New York Times, where we learn one of the places the Pentagon got their ideas for how to torture prisoners:
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.
Look for the right wing crazysphere to begin calling for the heads of the reporter and New York Times editor shortly...
The Times also reports on a factual error in the recent Supreme Court ruling on executions for child rape. And who uncovered the mistake? Why, your friendly neighborhood milblogger:
When the Supreme Court ruled last week that the death penalty for raping a child was unconstitutional, the majority noted that a child rapist could face the ultimate penalty in only six states — not in any of the 30 other states that have the death penalty, and not under the jurisdiction of the federal government either.
This inventory of jurisdictions was a central part of the court’s analysis, the foundation for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s conclusion in his majority opinion that capital punishment for child rape was contrary to the “evolving standards of decency” by which the court judges how the death penalty is applied.
It turns out that Justice Kennedy’s confident assertion about the absence of federal law was wrong.
A military law blog pointed out over the weekend that Congress, in fact, revised the sex crimes section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to add child rape to the military death penalty. The revisions were in the National Defense Authorization Act that year. President Bush signed that bill into law and then, last September, carried the changes forward by issuing Executive Order 13447, which put the provisions into the 2008 edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial.
Anyone in the federal government — or anywhere else, for that matter — who knew about these developments did not tell the court. Not one of the 10 briefs filed in the case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, mentioned it. The Office of the Solicitor General, which represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, did not even file a brief, evidently having concluded that the federal government had no stake in whether Louisiana’s death penalty for child rape was constitutional.
The provision was the subject of a post over the weekend on the blog run by Dwight Sullivan, a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve who now works for the Air Force as a civilian defense lawyer handling death penalty appeals.
Mr. Sullivan was reading the Supreme Court’s decision on a plane and was surprised to see no mention of the military statute. “We’re not talking about ancient history,” he said in an interview. “This happened in 2006.”
Over to the Washington Post, where the top story is the deadly upsurge in U.S. combat deaths, with June being the deadliest month for American troops since the war began in late 2001.
Meanwhile, the Post attempts to do a "gotcha" on Barack Obama, reporting that ... shock of all shocks ...!!! a well-to-do elected official got a great mortgage loan deal! No... NOOOOOOO!!!!!! Memo to the reporterati, most Americans get that borrowers with more money in the bank, better credit, larger down payments, and who are seeking higher loans, get better mortgage deals. The Post reports the Obama discount saved him and his wife a whopping $300 a month. What's that, 1/1000th of the cost of just one out of eight Cindy McCain homes?
One more: the Post also reports on the double-dilemma faced by some SUV owners:
With $4-a-gallon gas coming between drivers and their very large vehicles, consumers are dropping their once-beloved rides, fast. But not fast enough, it seems. As the price of gas has gone up, the value of sport-utility vehicles has gone down.
In the past six months, the price of a used Chevrolet Suburban has dropped as much as $8,000, said Mike Parker, manager of used-car sales at Lustine Toyota/Dodge in Woodbridge.
For those determined to swap their fuel-thirsty behemoths for gas-sipping subcompacts, the glut increasingly means taking a financial hit. In the worst cases, declining SUV values leave owners owing more money to the bank than their vehicle is worth.
The question they face is: Which is worse for the wallet -- the cost of gas or the money lost selling the vehicle?
Over to the left coast, where the L.A. Times' Greg Miller reports that the U.S. is so confident in the Iraqi Army we're training, we spy on them.
WASHINGTON -- Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.
The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army's violent push into Basra three months ago.
The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.
The satellites are "imaging military installations that the Iraqi army occupies," said a former U.S. military official, who said slides from the images had been used in recent closed briefings at U.S. facilities in the Middle East. "They're imaging training areas that the Iraqi army utilizes. They're imaging roads that Iraqi armored vehicles and large convoys transit."
Military officials and experts said the move showed concern by U.S. commanders about whether their Iraqi counterparts would follow U.S. guidance or keep their coalition partners fully informed.
"It suggests that we don't have complete confidence in their chain of command, or in their willingness to tell us what they're going to do because they may fear that we may try to get them not to do it," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a website about intelligence and military issues.
And in a story that's sure to get a lot of play on cable news today, the LAT has scored video of staffers at ironically named Martin Luther King Hospital literally ignoring a patient to death.:
Edith Isabel Rodriguez writhed for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital as staffers walked past and a janitor mopped around her. Her boyfriend called 911 from a pay phone outside the hospital, pleading futilely for help. The infamous incident in May 2007 was captured by a security camera, but the tape was actually seen by very few people. Los Angeles County has insisted for more than a year that the tape is "confidential, official information," refusing to release it to Rodriguez's family or to The Times.
This week, however, excerpts of the grainy video were sent anonymously to the newspaper and are available on The Times' website.
The public airing of the tape comes the same week as an eerily similar -- but much clearer -- surveillance tape was released showing a woman collapsing and writhing on the floor of a Brooklyn, N.Y., hospital's waiting room last month. She lay there more than an hour, as patients and security guards looked on.
According to published reports, Esmin Green had been waiting in the psychiatric emergency room of Kings County Hospital for nearly 24 hours when she fell from her seat June 19. An hour and three minutes later, a staffer who had been alerted by someone in the waiting room went up to Green, tapped her with her foot and tried to awaken her.
Finally, the Guardian reports that the opposition in Zimbabwe is in no mood for talks with Mugabe.
And the Guardian reports on a BBC radio execs take on the media's pornographic coverae of Amy Winehouse, which the exec said has contributed to her troubles. Hear hear.
One frequent criticism surrounds the widely held perception that the campaign has failed to define or convey a consistent narrative against Obama — something that many Republicans insist should have begun right after Obama captured the nomination.
“What’s the political strategy when you allow your opponent, who has just had a grueling four months, time to catch their breath, regroup, fundraise and start to define himself?” asked a Republican strategist who helped lead a past presidential campaign. “It’s politics 101.”
Several consultants from past GOP campaigns were even more frustrated by what they viewed as a reluctance to attack — textbook strategy for an underdog.
One GOP consultant said that if McCain wanted to define Obama as “too inexperienced, too liberal and too risky” then “why wouldn’t your message every day have something to do with these three problems?”
Other insiders expressed frustration that there is a lack of consistency in defining McCain as well, pointing to the recent launch of an ad touting his challenge to the president’s position on global warming — at the same time that McCain traveled to Texas to advocate lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling.
“It’s hard to see a thematic message,” said another GOP strategist who has worked on past presidential races. Several Republicans said it remains unclear whether McCain will run on experience or attempt to redefine Obama’s message of change.
Despite all the detractors, I continue to believe that John McCain was the best gambit Republicans had this year. Romney was too phony, Giuliani's a wife-swapping psycho, Huckabee was the most likeable, but the unhinged right hates him for raising taxes in Arkansas and caring about the poor; and Tancredo and the other also-rans were nuts. The most compelling Republican in the race, Ron Paul, had no shot at the nomination, because he just makes too much sense when it comes to Iraq, and the Arab/Muslim-hating hoardes of right wing lunatics don't tend to abide apostasy on the issue of anti-Muslim jihad. In the end, Republican voters made the most pragmatic choice they could -- picking a candidate they assumed would be the same pretty solid guy from 2000.
I mean, who would have thought McCain would throw away his entire persona to become an incoherent Bushbot? I sure didn't.
On to the veepstakes!
At this point, I think McCain has no choice but to pick Mitt Romney as his running-mate. He can't afford -- literally -- to spend $10 million explaining to Americans outside of Minnesota who Tim Pawlenty is. And he's gonna need Romney's Mormon money, and his strengths in Michigan and out west. Romney is minimally acceptable to evangelicals, and can at least talk about faith better than Mac himself. And the nutroots love him, having bought into his phoney-baloney "conservative" act. Besides, with all that dark hair and those 83 look-alike sons, Romney can inject an air of robotic youthfulness to the moribund McCain campaign. He'll be like the human version of the new Straight Talk Air Express. |
The hysterical over-reaction by Camp McCain and their hacks in the blogosphere to Wes Clark's statement about military service not being a qualification to be president (duh...) continues. This time, Orson Swindle, a Vietnam vet who was a McCain cell-mate in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, and a former FTC chair, launches a REAL attack on the military service of a fellow veteran: Wes Clark. During the second McCain conference call on this non-story in two days, Swindle said the following (courtesy of TPM Muckraker.)
"General Clark probably wouldn't get that much praise from this group. I can't speak for them, but we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar."
Huh? While no thinking person believes that Wes Clark, who has repeatedly praised McCain's Vietnam service, was demeaning that service, or McCain himself, Swindle's comments were a direct shot at Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. What about "his record in his last command" is Swindle referring to? And isn't THIS, the textbook definition of "Swiftboating"??? Perhaps we should ask McCain surrogate and official SwiftBoat Veterans smear merchant Bud Day.
TPM has audio of the call, as well as the following response to the attack on Clark from the McCain campaign:
It certainly was not an attack on his service - no one would ever disparage that. Everyone honors Gen. Clark's service and sacrifice -- he's literally bled for our country. It was about policy disputes.
Except that it WAS an attack on Clark's service, again, completely unlike the comments Clark made about McCain. And by the way, the same McCain aide that sent TPMM the statement, sent this link to a 2004 National Review story disparaging Clark's service as the head of NATO. Go figure. ... But don't look to the righties to notice the irony. They are completely incapable of irony, or shame. (By the way, according to the Hot Air Blog, on that same conference call, Miss Lindsey Graham said that “Nobody expects John to be elected because he was a POW." Is Graham now going to be attacked on the right for essentially saying what Clark said?)
Clark has continued to defend himself, and well he should. Wes Clark gave 34 years of heroic service to the United States Army and to this country. He came back wounded from Vietnam and stayed in the service, making it his career, at great sacrifice to himself financially, and to his wife and son. Simply stating the obvious: that being shot down during wartime is not an automatic qualification to be president, is nothing like taking the shot at a man's actual service that Swindle did.
BTW, let's see if the media goes as ape-crap over the Swindle remarks as they have over Clark.
I really think we're witnessing the fiery, sputtering end of the conservative movement. They've gone from Bush-worshiping idolaters to utterly insane. These people are so off the rails, they've even accused Jim Webb of "coordinating" a conspiratorial attack on McCain. Absolutely, breathtakingly, unbelievably insane.
"If John McCain believed that serving your country in uniform in wartime made you a better president, he would have endorsed John Kerry against George W. Bush."
Ad ad promoting free trade with Colombia in the middle of a recession ... huh???
Meanwhile, McCain is headed south ... of the border ... to which the Wall Street Journal's Laura Meckler says:
It is an effort to pad his foreign-policy credentials, appear statesmanlike and drive home a message about trade and international relations. In Colombia on Tuesday and Wednesday, in the coastal city of Cartagena, he plans to highlight a pending free-trade agreement that he supports and rival Sen. Barack Obama opposes. Thursday in Mexico, the Republican candidate will talk about the war on drugs. The Arizona senator will meet with both nations' presidents.
It isn't clear how much the trip will benefit Sen. McCain's No. 1 mission: being elected president. This will be Sen. McCain's third foreign trip since effectively wrapping up the Republican nominating contest, making him among the best-traveled presidential candidates. This spring, Sen. McCain visited the Middle East, including Iraq, Israel and Jordan, and Europe, including London and Paris. Last year, in the midst of the primaries, he went to Switzerland, Germany, Pakistan and Iraq. And June 20, he was in the Canadian capital of Ottawa.
More head scratching here:
Some Republican political strategists expressed surprise that Sen. McCain would take time out for this trip. "It just continues to burnish his foreign-policy experience and continues to focus on Obama being inexperienced," said strategist Tony Fabrizio. "At this juncture I'm not sure there are a lot of voters on the fence wondering about that."
A McCain adviser said the campaign considered that the candidate's time might have been better used elsewhere but decided that the senator should go anyway, partly because the days before the July 4 holiday are slow.
Some have speculated, as well, that the trip could play well with Hispanic voters, whom the Arizona senator is trying to win over.
MSNBC's Chuck Todd pointed out today that McCain will garner plenty of free media on Telemundo, Univision and other Spanish-language news and talk outlets in the U.S., which may be his way of bringing up his numbers with Hispanic voters out West, who are about 70 percent Mexican-American.
Wes Clark got a fresh defender against the silly, overblown attacks on his rather inarguable point that serving in the military, even being a military hero, is, in and of itself, not a qualification to be president of the United States. If it were, Clark could be president. Yesterday, Charlie Rangel, who served in the infantry during the Korean war, stepped up:
Rangel, on Fox News, said that McCain's service in Vietnam was "admirable"
"And we should spend the rest of our lives thanking people for doing that," Rangel said. "It doesn't have any connection at all in being a good senator, as being a good president."
... Rangel went onto say that his own four years of military service didn't make him a better congressman.
"I could have done so many things in life that probably could have been more productive in terms of being able to resolve legislative and other type of things," he said. "I think my training in law school better prepared me to be a lawmaker than getting shot in Korea, as I did in 1950. But I think that people who serve should be treated differently. I think people put their lives in harm's way."
Duh...
Meanwhile, the same nutball right wingers who made an industry out of attacking John Kerry's service and promoting the sleazy "Swiftboat Veterans for Truth" are now pretending to be just outraged ... OUTRAGED! at fictitious attacks on John McCain's service ... did I mention they used to hate John McCain, too? Of course, the winger mind will tell you that the big difference is, that Kerry deserved the attacks, because he's a Democrat and opposed the Vietnam War, while McCain doesn't deserve to be questioned, because, even though they hate his guts, he's a Republican, and favors not just the wars we're in, but even more wars ... bigger wars ... against even more "Islamists..." and therefore they support him ... or at least they oppose those who oppose his election ... you get the idea...
And then, like a bright light in the wilderness, along comes a lone, sane conservative, who cuts through the winger hysterics to make, at long last, a salient point that states the obvious, but needs to be said:
On a news show on Sunday, General Wesley Clark was asked a direct question about the war record of John McCain. Clark replied that he didn’t think being shot down and living in a prison camp qualified someone for Presidency.
Guess what? He’s right! It doesn’t! In no way did he demean the service record of McCain. In no way did he question his patriotism. He said something that was a bit insensitive and it sounded a bit mean. But it wasn’t wrong.
On come the rhetorical battles of the news shows. Either Clark must drop out his political activity and crawl into the same whole as Jeremiah Wright, Clark is a dastardly, evil man for impugning a man that paid such a heavy toll for his country and Obama must step up and once again apologize for someone else .... Or ... Clark, of course, is the "true patriot" for his dissent, blah, blah, blah.
How about this, Wright, I mean, Clark was factually correct. John McCain’s war record, although admirable on so many levels, in no way qualifies him to be President, just like Bob Dole. However, what he said was a bit insensitive and in actuality PART of what makes McCain the type of individual that would make a great leader is his war record.
For all the condemnation of Zimbabwe, Foreign Policy in Focus reminds us that the world, and the U.S., are much more tolerant when it comes to thuggish leaders of countries that have vast natural resources, including "Swaziland, Congo, Cameroun, Togo, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Gabon, Egypt, and Tunisia. None of these countries holds free elections, and all have severely suppressed their political opposition."
And the worst of all? Our good friends, Equatorial Guinea. My take here, FPIF's take as follows:
Among the worst of these African tyrannies has been the regime of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. Obiang has been in power even longer than the 28-year reign of Mugabe and, according to a recent article in the British newspaper The Independent, makes the Zimbabwean dictator “seem stable and benign” by comparison. Obiang originally seized power in a 1979 coup by murdering his uncle, who had ruled the country since its independence from Spain in 1968. Under his rule, Equatorial Guinea nominally allowed the existence of opposition parties as a condition of receiving foreign aid in the early 1990s. But the four leading candidates withdrew from the last presidential election in December 2002 in protest of irregularities in the voting process and violence against their supporters. In that election, Obiang officially received more than 97% of the vote (down from 99.5% in the previous election.)
Though the U.S. State Department acknowledged that the election was “marred by extensive fraud and intimidation,” the Congress and the administration devoted none of the vehement condemnation that was so evident after the recent, similarly marred election process in Zimbabwe.
One major reason for the difference in response is oil. The development of vast oil reserves over the past decade has made Equatorial Guinea one of the wealthiest countries in Africa in terms of per capita gross domestic product. Virtually all of the oil revenues, however, goes to Obiang and his cronies. The dictator himself is worth an estimated $1 billion, making him the wealthiest leader in Africa; his real estate holdings include two mansions in Maryland just outside of Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country’s population lives on only a few dollars a day, and nearly half of all children under five are malnourished. The country’s major towns and cities lack basic sanitation and potable water while conditions in the countryside are even worse.
During his most recent visit to Washington in 2006, Obiang was warmly received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who praised the dictator as “a good friend” of the United States. Not once during their joint appearance did she mention the words “human rights” or “democracy.” At the same press conference, Obiang praised his regime’s “extremely good relations with the United States” and his expectation that “this relationship will continue to grow in friendship and cooperation.” None of the assembled reporters raised any questions about the regime’s notorious human rights record or its lack of democracy, instead using the opportunity to ask Secretary Rice questions about the alleged threat from Iran.
In 2002, the dictator met with President George W. Bush in New York to discuss military and energy security issues. He followed up in 2004 with meetings with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.
Cozy Relations
Equatorial Guinea receives U.S. government funding and training through the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). In addition, the private U.S. firm Military Professional Resources Incorporated – founded by former senior Pentagon officials who cite the regime’s friendliness to U.S. strategic and economic interests – plays a key role in the country’s internal security apparatus. Furthermore, as a result of Obiang’s understandable lack of trust in his own people, soldiers from Morocco – one of America’s closest African allies – have served for decades in a number of important security functions, including the role of presidential guards.
Maintaining close ties with such a notorious ruler has led even conservative Republicans like Frank Ruddy, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, to denounce the Bush administration for being “big cheerleaders for the government – and it’s an awful government.”
Though the Chinese have also recently begun investing in the country’s oil sector, U.S. companies ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess, Chevron/Texaco, and Marathon Oil have played the most significant role. A report by the International Monetary Fund notes that U.S. oil companies receive “by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region.” Congressional hearings recently revealed how U.S. oil companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars destined to state treasuries directly into the dictator’s private bank accounts. A Senate report faulted U.S. oil companies for making “substantial payments to, or entering into business ventures with,” government officials and their family members.
The Bush administration can, in essence, rant and rave about Zimbabwe all it wants, with no consequences. The Bush administration gets to pretend it means business with all this talk of "democracy," even as they know that South Africa, Russia and China will likely block any serious sanctions against Zimbabwe in the U.N. Security Council. And they get to keep on ignoring and playing ball with the vicious governments of places like E. Guinea and Nigeria, where so long as the oil keeps flowing, the U.S. could give a damn.
Robert Mugabe was received as a hero this week by fellow African leaders following his blunt-force victory in a no-contest poll in Zimbabwe, where he remains dictator. The venue was the African summit, where the heads of the continent's 53 nations gathered just after Zimbabwe's phony elections. Many of the African "presidents" share Mugabe's methods, so I guess they do really understand him:
President Omar Bongo of Gabon, who has held power for 41 years and won a series of widely criticised elections, gave his public backing for Mr Mugabe as leaders met in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
"He was elected, he took an oath, and he is here with us, so he is President and we cannot ask him more," said Mr Bongo. "He conducted elections and I think he won."
Mr Bongo added that African leaders would not allow Western governments to dictate their view of Zimbabwe. "We have even received Mugabe as a hero," he said. "We understand the attacks but this is not the way they should react. What they've done is, in our opinion, a little clumsy, and we think they could have consulted us first."
But the real shame is that the few real democrats (small d) in Africa, like South Africa's Thabo Mbeke, couldn't find the strength to do much more than complain:
Mr Mugabe has faced fierce criticism from his fellow Africans. The AU's election observers ruled that Zimbabwe's presidential contest did not meet democratic "standards", the first time they have ever denounced an African poll.
Raila Odinga, Kenya's prime minister, urged the AU to respond by taking punitive steps against Mr Mugabe. "They should suspend him and send peace forces to Zimbabwe to ensure free and fair elections," he said.
While many are deeply unhappy about Zimbabwe's crisis, African leaders are unlikely to snub Mr Mugabe or pass judgement on his country's crisis at this summit. Instead, they will probably confine themselves to urging Mr Mugabe and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change to negotiate.
South Africa's foreign ministry said that talks on the creation of a "transitional government" to cope with Zimbabwe's "challenges" were needed.
The private frustrations that President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa has felt towards Zimbabwe's regime have now emerged. In 2001, he wrote a 37-page "discussion document" for Mr Mugabe's Zanu-PF party setting out a series of stark warnings and recommendations.
"Of critical importance is the obvious necessity to ensure that Zimbabwe does not end up in a situation of isolation, confronted by an array of international forces she cannot defeat, condemned to sink into an ever-deepening social and economic crisis," wrote Mr Mbeki.
... a lame-duck President, required to step down next year, and he has lost control of the A.N.C. party apparatus to his chief rival, Jacob Zuma. But his coddling of Mugabe has made him complicit in Zimbabwe’s devastation. So perhaps there is some justice in the fact that the Zimbabwean crisis he denies threatens to become the defining crisis of his Presidency. After all, the recent mayhem in South Africa only serves Mugabe, creating a distraction as he bleeds Zimbabwe in the final stretch of the election, with forebodings of greater slaughter hanging over the outcome. ...
... though to be fair, the Brits don't do much themselves beyond complain, for fear of looking like the colonial power trying to butt back in. Nor has the United Nations been much help (surprise, surprise...) And the Bush administration? Put it this way: like the late Saddam Hussein, Mugabe is a thug, who holds pretend elections and terrifies his own people into knuckling under (his militias burned a political opponent's wife alive this election cycle.) Unlike Saddam, he has no oil that Bush and Cheney's friends in the Industry want to exploit for their own gain...
Earlier, Odinga broke ranks with other Africa leaders following Mugabe's widely discredited re-election as the Zimbabwean president.
Speaking from Nairobi, he said: "The African Union should not accept or entertain Mugabe.
"He should be suspended until he allows the African Union to facilitate free and fair elections between him and his opponent."
Yesterday, Odinga called for AU peacekeepers to be sent to Zimbabwe and the UN urged the union to negotiate a political settlement.
But Odinga is largely alone, and few other African nations have the strength or stability to challenge the status quo. And with South Africa being the strongest country, economically and politically, in sub-Saharan Africa, it will continue to bear the brunt of criticism for Africa's collective inaction. That same New Yorker article, written by Philip Gourevich, concluded:
To watch the intertwined agonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe today is to see what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in “The Wretched of the Earth,” that “the last battle of the colonized against the colonizer will often be the fight of the colonized against each other.” Mbeki and Mugabe belong to a generation of liberation fighters who seem incapable of seeing the world through any lens beyond that of anti-colonial struggle, and who invoke their revolutionary bona fides as immunity against all political criticism and all challengers. Their time has passed.
Pity no one has told the dictators.
Meanwhile, back at the AU summit, Mugabe tells his critics to "go hang."
What body parts would MSNBC producers sell for the audio?
Forget the Bush administration's bungling in Pakistan or their pending war against Iran ... Barack Obama called Bill Clinton today (by phone)! And having told the Democratic nominee to "kiss his ass," according to "sources," you've got to figure that convo had a lot of pauses ...
