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...
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Tell a friend
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
