Democrats against the DLC

Changes to Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

2012-01-27T06:04:00.001-05:00

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Dear Google user, We're getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that's a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. We believe this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/policies. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.
One policy, one Google experience

Easy to work across Google Our new policy reflects a single product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. Whether you're reading an email that reminds you to schedule a family get-together or finding a favorite video that you want to share, we want to ensure you can move across Gmail, Calendar, Search, YouTube, or whatever your life calls for with ease.	Tailored for you If you're signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you've expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We'll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you're searching for and get you those results faster.	Easy to share and collaborate When you post or create a document online, you often want others to see and contribute. By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.

Protecting your privacy hasn't changed Our goal is to provide you with as much transparency and choice as possible, through products like Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager, alongside other tools. Our privacy principles remain unchanged. And we'll never sell your personal information or share it without your permission (other than rare circumstances like valid legal requests).	Got questions? We've got answers. Visit our FAQ at http://www.google.com/policies/faq to read more about the changes. (We figured our users might have a question or twenty-two.)

Notice of Change March 1, 2012 is when the new Privacy Policy and Terms will come into effect. If you choose to keep using Google once the change occurs, you will be doing so under the new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Please do not reply to this email. Mail sent to this address cannot be answered. Also, never enter your Google Account password after following a link in an email or chat to an untrusted site. Instead, go directly to the site, such as mail.google.com or www.google.com/accounts. Google will never email you to ask for your password or other sensitive information.

Free Mayor Bobby Higginbotham

2011-03-20T18:25:00.001-04:00

It's like a scene from the 1960s — a Black mayor stepped out of line with powerful White politicians in a small Louisiana town, and it cost him his freedom. Now it's up to us to help win it back.

Bobby Higginbotham, mayor of Waterproof, LA, started making policies intended to bring the town more revenue and give it more control over police matters. In doing so, Higginbotham misstepped, but he corrected the errors. District Attorney James Paxton took advantage of the situation to arrest Higginbotham on 44 trumped-up charges and install a political ally in his place.

After essentially being forced to represent himself in trial, Higginbotham was convicted before a nearly all-White jury in a parish where the majority of residents are Black.

This isn't the first time a Louisiana prosecutor has abused his power against Black folks who don't "know their place" — a similar scene played out in the case of the Jena Six. But if enough of us speak out, we can expose his behavior and help free the former mayor. Please join us in calling on Paxton to end his bogus prosecution of Bobby Higginbotham, and then ask your friends and family to do the same:

http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/mayor

Waterproof is a town of only 800 people in Louisiana’s Tensas Parish, the last parish in the state to allow Black folks to vote. The parish is more than 55% Black, but it’s the wealthy Whites who hold the power there. Journalist Jordan Flaherty writes that “Waterproof is 'reminiscent of the bygone days of southern politics,' with a White power structure maintaining political power over a black majority...”1 Even with a minority of citizens, Whites controlled the wealth, the jobs, and the politics.

Soon after Bobby Higginbotham took office in tiny Waterproof, LA the new Black mayor began challenging the area’s most powerful White officials — namely Sheriff Rickey Jones and District Attorney James Paxton — by establishing a local police force that would provide better local service, in effect competing with the parish Sheriff. Before Higginbotham took office, the Waterproof police force was anemic. According to former Waterproof Police Chief Miles Jenkins, "[If] You called the Waterproof police for help before, [they] would say, 'wait 'til tomorrow, it's too hot to come out today.'" Under Higginbotham and Jenkins, Waterproof's new police force grew in size and collected its own traffic tickets — siphoning revenue and influence from the Sheriff.

A Black deputy sheriff warned not to push against the system too hard: “You’ve got to adapt to your environment. You can’t come to a small town and do things the same way you might in a big city. Like the song says, you got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em.”

Mr. Higginbotham didn't fold. Instead, he brought a direct, some say in-your-face, attitude that rubbed figures like the Sheriff and DA the wrong way. According to Waterproof resident Annie Watson,“The Mayor and the Chief said you can’t treat people this way, and the Sheriff and DA said you got to know your place. If you’re educated and intelligent and know your rights in this parish, you are in trouble. They are determined to let you know you have a place and if you don’t jump when they say jump you are in trouble.”2

As a result, Higginbotham and Jenkins endured major harassment by Paxton and Jones — Jenkins alleges being beaten by Sheriff's deputies, while both Waterproof officials claim that Paxton and Jones had them arrested under false pretenses on several occasions. The harrassment culminated with Higginbotham's arrest on bogus, trumped-up corruption charges. With Higginbotham out of the way, Paxton pulled levers to replace Higginbotham with a political ally.

It’s clear to us that Higginbotham made mistakes as mayor, mistakes pointed out in a 2008 Louisiana legislative auditor’s report. But what also seems clear is that Higginbotham's errors as mayor did not rise to the level of the criminal. In the wake of the report, the mayor sought to correct all issues highlighted by the audit, including hiring an independent auditor to review the town's financial records. That didn't stop the District Attorney from charging Mr. Higginbotham with 44 counts of corruption, all but two of which were later dropped.

Higginbotham was charged with felony theft for giving himself what the DA claims is an unauthorized raise. But this raise was in the budget passed by the Board of Aldermen, along with raises for themselves which they received, just as he did. Higginbotham was also charged with malfeasance in office for allegedly using a town credit card for personal charges — an honest mistake that Higginbotham immediately corrected. Both of these charges are the result of an intentional distortion of facts based on a personal vendetta against Higginbotham.

At trial, Higginbotham was essentially forced to represent himself. It also appears that the record of the meeting where the mayor's raise was approved, which could clear him, is now "missing." He was convicted by a jury containing five White members to only one Black member — in a parish where Blacks make up nearly 60% of the residents. The judge gave the jury polling slips that had "guilty" pre-selected. Higginbotham was not told of the error until a week after he had been convicted and sent to jail without bond. Higginbotham wants to appeal, but the court reporter failed to keep a trial record during several of the prosecution’s key witnesses.

Mayor Higginbotham has been denied bail at every turn since his conviction — a consequence usually reserved for violent offenders and flight risks — and he's been sitting in jail for nearly a year awaiting final sentencing.

This isn't right. Please join us in calling on District Attorney Paxton to drop all charges against Bobby Higginbotham and to allow his release on bond pending an appeal — and when you do, please ask your friends and family to join the effort. It takes just a moment:

http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/mayor

Thanks and Peace,

-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Matt, Natasha and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
February 24, 2011

Make Wall Street Pay

2011-03-11T20:31:00.001-05:00

by Peter Colavito

This week, 600 homeowners and community leaders from around the country shut down a Washington, DC branch of Bank of America. There they delivered a bill demanding that the company who helped bankrupt our country pay its fair share to rebuild it.

It was an amazing day. But it was only the beginning. And now you can get in on the action too.

Go to www.makewallstreetpay.org to find out how much the big banks cost you and your state, and then tell Congress it's time banks pay their fair share!

Wall Street crashed the economy, causing millions of families to lose their jobs and homes.

A recent report uncovered that the six big banks--Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley--avoided paying their full income taxes in 2009 and 2010. Had they paid the full amount, the federal government would have received an additional $13 billion in tax revenue. This would cover more than two years of salaries for the 132,000 teacher jobs lost since the economic crisis began in 2008

So when politicians talk about the budget crisis and tell you they need to make cuts, remember that the money needed to restore our economy is not in Grandma's pension, it's not in the homes of families fighting off foreclosure and it's not in the pockets of American schoolchildren.

It's on Wall Street.

Go to www.makewallstreetpay.org and let our Congressional leaders know that we're done picking up the tab. It's time for Wall Street to pay.

Support PFAW's Campaign To Recall Wisconsin Republicans

2011-03-05T06:09:00.002-05:00

by Claude Chaney

There should be no doubt that Wisconsin is ground zero in the US class war. The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is becoming jobless. While many of us among the middle class have become too complacent and trusting of those who have robbed us blind, others are ready to do battle in Wisconsin, in Indiana, in Ohio, in New Jersey and in the rest of the United States. The major task at hand is to get the word out. We cannot and will not trust the mainstream media to tell us the truth about ANYTHING remotely political when it comes to the middle class. When I say "mainstream media" I mean ALL of them, not just FOX. When over 100,000 union workers and their families were in and around the Wisconsin State Capitol, NBC, ABC and CBS all had conservative guests comment on the situation on their Sunday talk shows. FOX continues to be outlandish. When one of their huge strapping commentators entered the Wisconsin State Capitol, he was immediately greet with the chant "FOX LIES, FOX LIES". This commentator and Geraldo Rivera tell the audience that this is an example of the hatred and intolerence of another point of view present among the demonstrators. Have you ever heard a guest of Sean Hannity or Bill O'reilly attempt to present another point of view on their shows? Usually they are not permitted to get a word in edgewise and in many cases there are at least two or three consevative guests to the one progressive guest. I am not aware of anything FOX said about the female Move.on representative who entered a conservative function who was attacked and even kicked by males. This is just another example of how FOX is so "UNfair and UNbalanced". When the Tea Party manages to get 5,000 people at any event there is immediate coverage, but when the unions mass tens of thousands in Wisconsin or Ohio you get late or little or no coverage at all. There was no attention given to the Wisconsin demonstrations until the sixth day of it existence and even then it was by the Associated Press.
The Republican/Tea Party coalition may have some minor disagreements among themselves but they are both very determined to DESTROY the middle class. They have diverted the blame from the financial crisis from Wall Street (where is rightfully belongs to public sector workers). Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker gave millions of dollars of tax breaks to corporations: that is why there is a problem with revenue. Chris Christie ended the millionaire's tax in New Jersey as well as rejecting a federal project that would have provided 6,000 needed construction jobs to the residents of New Jersey;: that is why there is a problem with revenue.
People For The American Way is starting a petition to expediate the removal of the Wisconsin Republicans who support Governor Scott Walker's war on the middle class of that state. I wholeheartedly suggest that YOU follow my example and support this campaign with your dollars. You may not live in Wisconsin, but the same elements determined to destroy the middle class in Wisconsin are trying to do the same thing in your state if YOU let them. An attack on a union member anywhere is an attack on a union member everywhere. Please read about the PFAW petition......

In a move that many are contending is in direct violation of the state constitution and a departure from normal Senate rules, Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate yesterday approved an order for the state's police to detain the Senate Democrats, who have left the state to block Gov. Scott Walker's attack on the middle class and workers' rights, and bring them to the Senate chambers. Gov. Walker also threatened that he would start sending layoff notices today to state workers.

Now they're running roughshod over state law and the rules of their own chamber ... and Gov. Walker has gone from simply acting like a dictator to acting like a hostage taker, with state jobs as his hostages. Unwilling to even consider compromise on his proposal to gut workers' fundamental rights, he is now threatening to start eliminating those state jobs if he doesn't get his way.

Perhaps the most outrageous part is that the layoffs are completely unnecessary to address the state's budget problems ... the same way his plan to destroy collective bargaining for public employees and make the middle class bear the entire economic sacrifice in fixing the state's budget is completely unnecessary.

If you're like me, you are wishing more than anything right now that Gov. Walker was eligible for recall this year -- especially since polling shows he would lose in an election between him and his 2010 gubernatorial opponent. Unfortunately, he can't be recalled until 2012, but eight of the Republican Senators backing his extreme power grab are eligible to be recalled now, including:

Randy Hopper, who won his last election by just 184 votes ...

Alberta Darling, who won her race by just over 1,000 ...

And Glenn Grothman, who on MSNBC's The Last Word, called protesters at the Wisconsin state capitol "slobs," and insisted that they were just a bunch of "college students having a fun party."

Here's what you can do today:

1. If you have not already done so, sign our petition indicating your support for the recall effort now underway in Wisconsin. If you have signed, make sure to spread the word! Share on Facebook and ask others to visit www.pfaw.org/Recall.

2. If you live in or near Wisconsin, you can start volunteering to help gather recall petition signatures. We have 60 days to get enough signatures to hold recall elections and our friends at the SEIU will be sending out a sizable wave of canvassers this weekend to get us off to a good start. Sign up here: http://action.seiu.org/page/s/wisconsinrecall

3. If you know ANYONE in Wisconsin, please call or email them as soon as you can and urge them to support the recall effort.

4. Make a contribution to PFAW's work on the recall campaign.

Main Street Movement Erupts as Thousands Across The Country Protest War on the Middle Class

2011-02-25T09:53:00.004-05:00

by Jiad Zilani - Think Progress
Last week, 14 Wisconsin Senate Democrats inspired the nation when they decided to flee the state rather than allow quorum for a vote on a bill that would have decimated the state’s public employee unions and dealt a crippling blow to the state’s hard-working teachers, sanitation employees, and other middle class union members. Since then, tens of thousands of Wisconsinites have taken to the streets in even greater number than before the walkout in support of the fleeing legislators and in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) anti-middle class agenda.
Inspired by the events in Wisconsin, thousands of Americans all over the country are taking action to battle legislation that would attack their labor rights, defund their schools, threaten their health and safety, and decimate the American middle class. Here are just some of the places across the nation that are taking part in this new “Main Street Movement” to defend and rebuild the American middle class:
- GEORGIA: Hundreds of workers demonstrated outside the Georgia capitol yesterday, declaring their solidarity with striking Wisconsin workers. Some demonstrators wore “cheesehead” hats, a clear reference to a cultural tradition in Wisconsin.
– IDAHO: Hundreds of teachers marched against legislation that would layoff 770 teachers and leave schools severely understaffed.
– INDIANA: In Indiana, House Democrats fled the state, preventing a vote on legislation that would enact “right-to-work” laws that would’ve crippled the right to organize. After the House Democrats took off, hundreds of workers and students marched into the capitol building and staged a massive sit-in, pledging not to leave until the radical legislation was withdrawn. Yesterday, Indiana’s Main Street Movement scored its first victory as Republican lawmakers withdrew the anti-union bill. Indiana Democrats are refusing to come back until right-wing legislators withdraw legislation to undermine the state’s public education system.
– MONTANA: More than a thousand “conservationists, sportsmen, firefighters, teachers, correctional officers and others” descended on the Montana capitol to protest against “unprecedented GOP attacks on public services and education and laws that protect land, air, water and wildlife.” Students carried signs that read “Keep Us In School,” protesting crippling cuts to the state’s education system.
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– OHIO: In Ohio, thousands of ordinary Americans who rely on the right to organize to earn good, middle class incomes are facing off with Wisconsin-style legislation backed by Gov. John Kasich (R). Nearly 10,000 protesters demonstrated in Columbus, Ohio, gaining the support of former Gov. Ted Strickland (D-OH) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). So many demonstrators showed up that the Ohio Highway Patrol was ordered to lock the doors of the state capitol to stop more demonstrators from getting into the building.
– TENNESSEE: Hundreds of Tennesseans gathered to protest a bill that would completely strip Tennesee teachers of collective bargaining rights. “What you have right now is 300 or so of us, standing and asking the state legislature to focus on what the priorities are right now, instead of attacking working people,” said Mary Mancini, executive director of Tennessee Citizen Action. “If they listen to us, well then that’s great. … If not, I can see this thing growing.”
– WASHINGTON: 2,000 demonstrators in Olympia, Washington, marched against the state’s proposed budget cuts that would harm students and middle class Washingtonians and in solidarity with workers in Wisconsin. “If Scott Walker succeeds in ending worker rights in Wisconsin, the birthplace of public servants’ liberty, it could happen here,” said Federation of State Employees President Carol Dotlich.
ThinkProgress has put together a video compilation highlighting protests by ordinary Americans all over the nation to defend the middle class from this unprecedented assault.
Even larger demonstrations are planned this Saturday, as thousands more Main Street Americans plan to take to the streets to protest the ongoing assault against the middle class. Moveon.org is organizing protests at every single state capitol in the country, aiming to “Save the American Dream.” Meanwhile, US Uncut, an activist group inspired by United Kingdom’s UK Uncut, plans to protest against American tax dodgers, asking why the rich in the country have been able to get off easy on their taxes while low- and middle-income Americans continue to be asked to sacrifice.

Protests Against Union-Busting State Bills Sweep Midwest by Dana Chivvis

2011-02-23T07:15:00.002-05:00

Protests against union-busting state bills are sweeping the Midwest today, with thousands packing the Capitol in Ohio, Indiana's House Democrats staging a walkout and Wisconsin Democrats remaining in hiding outside the state.

In Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that he was ready to drop the so-called "right to work" bill after only three of the state's 40 House Democrats showed up this morning, according to The Indianapolis Star.

Jay LaPrete, AP
Demonstrators display signs during a protest against Senate Bill 5 outside the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday in Columbus.The rest were reportedly on their way to Illinois and Kentucky, stopping the legislative process in its tracks by denying their chamber the 67 members required for a quorum.

Daniels told reporters he thought the Democrats would return to work if the bill dies, the Star reported.

As in Wisconsin and Ohio, the Democrats in Indiana are protesting legislation that critics call a bid to rein in the power of unions by eroding collective bargaining. The "right to work" bill would keep companies and unions from negotiating contracts that required nonunion members to pay representation fees.

In Wisconsin, Senate Democrats walked out last week rather than vote on Gov. Scott Walker's bill that would force public workers to pay more for their benefits. He also wants to cut collective bargaining for nearly all workers.

In Ohio, thousands of protesters rallied inside and outside the Capitol building in Columbus to oppose a bill that would effectively end collective bargaining for state workers and significantly reduce bargaining for local workers.

While the protests in Ohio have largely mirrored those in Wisconsin and Indiana, Democrats in Ohio's Statehouse don't have the same ability to stymie legislation by walking out on the process. Republicans in the Ohio Senate have a 23-10 majority and an 8-4 majority on the Senate Insurance, Commerce and Labor Committee.

Related Stories
Indiana Democrats Follow Wisconsin Strategy, Run Away
Beyond Wisconsin, This Could Be the End of Labor Unions
Union leaders and Democratic opponents interpret the bills as political power plays, while Republican supporters of the various bills say they are a way to give government leaders control over their budgets in a time of fiscal crisis.

Ohio's Senate Bill 5 was introduced Feb. 8 by Republican Sen. Shannon Jones and is supported by Gov. John Kasich. Ohio is facing an $8 billion budget deficit, which amounts to 11 percent of its budget. (In contrast, Wisconsin faces a $3.6 billion deficit and Indiana a $300 million deficit.)

"Let me be clear: I am not doing this to punish employees who serve this state day after day," Jones said during testimony Feb. 8, according to The New York Times. "I am doing this because I want to give the government flexibility and control over its work force."

The leaders of Ohio's police and firefighters unions this morning called for the government to slow down the progress of the bill to allow time for discussion, according to The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Meanwhile, in Indiana, Democratic Party Chairman Dan Parker told the Star that Democrats would return when Republicans drop the legislation they see as an "assault on the middle class."

This article orignally appeared in AOL News, February 24, 2011

Radical Right Wing Agenda by Alex Seitz-Wald

2011-02-22T09:03:00.000-05:00

National tea party groups like Americans for Prosperity have been bussing conservative activists to Madison, WI to confront protesters there standing up to Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) union busting. But Tea Party Nation and Mark Williams, the disgraced former chairman of Tea Party Express, who was forced to resign after making offensive racial comments, are calling for a more radical approach. In an email alert to supporters sent last night, Tea Party Nation promotes Williams’ “great idea” to impersonate SEIU organizers at upcoming labor rallies in an attempt to embarrass and discredit the union.

Williams lays out a highly dishonest and fairly involved scheme to have “plants” sign up on the SEIU website to be organizers for an upcoming rally, dress up in SEIU shirts, and to then make outrageous comments to reporters covering the events in order to “make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is”:

That link will take you to an SEIU page where you can sign up as an “organizer” for one of their upcoming major rallies to support the union goons in Wisconsin. Here is what I am doing in Sacramento, where they are holding a 5:30 PM event this coming Tuesday: (1) I signed up as an organizer (2) with any luck they will contact me and I will have an “in” (3) in or not I will be there and am asking as many other people as can get there to come with, all of us in SEIU shirts (those who don’t have them we can possibly buy some from vendors likely to be there) (4) we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us. [...]

Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.

Williams is even hoping to make a few bucks off the idea, asking readers to “Please contribute!!!” as “I need to travel beyond Sacramento to the other SEIU rally cities and then Madison, and in short order!”

And Williams has no qualms about employing this treachery, telling his “plants”: “Chances are that because I am publishing this they’ll catch wind, but it is worth the chance if you take it upon yourself to act.” In an update, Williams say activists in Iowa, Colorado, Massachusetts, “and several other states” were already on board, and he said “Tea Party Patriot groups and individuals are flooding me with emails vowing to participate and come up with their own creative ruses!”

Williams’ plan appears to have been taken down from both Tea Party Nation and Williams’ own site, suggesting they perhaps realize this plan is entirely in the wrong, but view a cached version here, and screen grabs here and here.

Update In a statement to ThinkProgress, SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette condemned Williams' plot, saying: "At a time when Americans are standing up and courageously speaking out, these guys are playing the same old dirty tricks. Last week we learned about the Chamber trying to create phony research to debunk and hack into our computers, this week the Tea Party dons purple. It's like the emperor has no clothes: they have to rely on subterfuge because they do not really represent the majority of people."

Thousands Converge on Koch Brothers Billionaire's Caucus by David Dayen, Sunday, January 30, 2011, FPL

2011-01-30T21:46:00.001-05:00

Thousands Converge on Koch Brothers Billionaire’s Caucus; 25 Arrested
By: David Dayen Sunday January 30, 2011 4:34 pm
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Twenty-five protesters were arrested in Rancho Mirage, California today, at a protest in front of the Rancho Las Palmas resort, site of the “Billionaire’s Caucus,” an annual meeting put on by the Koch Brothers and other corporate entities and conservative movement operators.

Riverside Sheriff’s deputy Melissa Nieburger said that the sheriff’s department did have contacts with protest organizers, which included the California Courage Campaign, CREDO, MoveOn.org, 350.org, the California Nurses Association, United Domestic Workers of America and the main sponsor, the good-government group Common Cause, prior to the event, and that they were aware that some protesters would seek to be arrested for trespassing. She would not guarantee that all 25 who were arrested were part of that coordinated operation. The police, who wore riot gear, batons and helmets, did put the arrested into plastic handcuffs. Nieburger described them as “passive restraints.” They were being processed at press time, and Nieburger would not say whether they would be released or would spend the night at the jail in Indio.

Nieburger estimated between 800 and 1,000 activists at the “Uncloak the Kochs” event. Event organizers chartered buses from several locations around Southern California and claimed 1,500 people signed up for those buses, on top of any local activists who attended. It appeared from the ground that well over 1,000 protesters were there.

While the sheriff’s deputy claimed no knowledge of who called out the Riverside County sheriffs and the Palm Springs police department to the proceedings, Common Cause was contacted by the sheriff to see what they were planning and coordinate appropriate resources. The city of Rancho Mirage contracts with the Riverside County sheriff’s department for their law enforcement needs.

Van Jones, the former green jobs deputy in the Obama Administration and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, described the anti-Koch rally as “the beginning of our fight back.” The leadership of Common Cause, generally a far more congenial organization, was a bit unusual, part of a new aggressiveness and penchant for direct action from the group. “I think you’re going to see a new Common Cause.”

The Koch Brothers, billionaires who have generously funded conservative and libertarian causes for over a generation – including the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and tea party groups like Americans for Prosperity – put together an annual meeting, typically held in the California desert, with fellow corporate CEOs and conservative operatives, to plan the year ahead. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Herman Cain were reputed to attend the gathering at the sprawling Rancho Las Palmas resort. The Kochs bought out the entire resort for Saturday and Sunday. Some activists who stayed at the resort Friday night and booked dinners at their restaurants on Saturday had their reservations canceled by the resort, and were given $150 each for their trouble.

Common Cause organized the protest weeks ago, and set up a stage in the parking lot across the street from the Rancho Las Palmas resort. But from the beginning, activists were far more interested in the resort site, and they massed themselves across the street and then eventually in the driveway of the resort. The police, in their riot gear, came out very early to guard the resort, only letting in authorized personnel. Hotel guests, presumably attendees to the Koch Brothers meeting, looked on, holding smart phone cameras and taking pictures of the display. In addition, conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart, resplendent in shorts and roller skates, mulled around the crowd with a couple lackeys and a small video camera, talking to (and arguing with) attendees. I asked Breitbart exactly who necessitated the riot police, the lady with the papier-maché puppet or the Code Pink lady’s umbrella, and he claimed to have seen unspecified “internal emails” proving the potential for violence and the need for security. Surely that will come out in the next few days. I didn’t want to keep him from his workout, so I wrapped up the interview.

After a litany of speakers – including Jim Hightower, Rick Jacobs of the Courage Campaign, and Common Cause President and former Illinois Congressman Bob Edgar, the entire group of protesters moved to the setup across the street from the resort. Police helicopters buzzed overhead. After a while, the police agreed to shut down Bob Hope Drive, and the protesters streamed across the street and directly in front of the resort, just a few inches away from the phalanx of riot cops. The usual protest chanting and raising of banners ensued. More cops were brought in, traipsing over the flower beds. And 25 protesters were taken away in a paddy wagon. The protests were generally peaceful, and the police professional.

The protesters generally decried the Koch Brothers’ influence over American democracy, in particular their use of the Citizens United ruling to spend corporate money in elections. Koch Industries’ funding of climate denialism and other conservative causes was on the minds of the protesters as well.

After about 45 minutes, the cops opened the road again (the police originally said they would only shut the street for 7 minutes) and asked the crowd to disperse. Eventually, the crowd did so, chanting “This is just the beginning.”

Sheriff’s deputy Neiburger would not say whether this was the first time protesters had disrupted the Koch Brothers meetings, but up until last year and a series of articles by Lee Fang of Think Progress, they had not been well-publicized.

Bob Edgar, the President of Common Cause, said in a brief interview that he was happy with the turnout and the outcome. I asked him if this was evidence of a more aggressive organization. “Keep watching,” he said.

http://www.gigleader.com/band/Claude-Chaney---Friends

2010-09-07T19:35:00.000-04:00

http://www.gigleader.com/band/Claude-Chaney---Friends

GOP's Golden Boy Boehner's Dark Economic Prognosis is About as Fake as His Freakishly Dark Skin Tone

2010-08-25T14:58:00.002-04:00

by Roy Ostroy/The Ostroy Report, August 25, 2010

House Minority Leader John Boehner (OH) is a hopeful man. He hopes that voters are both stupid and forgetful. He hopes they have no recollection whatsoever of the eight years of largely Republican rule during the Bush years; years that saw a loss of eight million jobs and the failed policies that led to the worst financial meltdown in America's history since the Great Depression over eighty years ago. And he's banking on this memory loss to propel his elitist, do-nothing party back into power in the November midterms. Boehner's GOP needs to have a net pick up of 39 seats to oust his political nemesis, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA), and re-take control of the House.

Boehner, the future-Speaker wannabe, challenged President Obama Tuesday to fire his economic team over what he called a failure to turn the economy around. "We do not have the luxury of waiting months for the president to pick scapegoats for his failing stimulus policies."

Boehner's disingenuous assertions ignore reality, and the huge economic improvements Obama's made since taking office. A new Congressional Budget Office report cited the president's stimulus package as having lowered the unemployment rate in the second quarter of the year; creating 1.4 million to 3.3 million jobs; and increasing productivity by approximately 4.5%. Boehner needs to remember where the economy was in January of 2009 as George W. Bush was preparing to exit the White House. The nation's output was contracting at an annual 6% rate, jobs were being lost at a 700,000 monthly clip, and American industry--from automobiles to banking to Wall Street to retail and housing--was on the precipice of disaster. While we still have a long way to go towards full employment and financial prosperity, America's economy has made monumental progress and is clearly headed in the right direction.

In response to Boehner's revisionist history, vice president Joe Biden came out swinging: "For eight years before we arrived, Mr. Boehner and his party ran this economy and the middle class into the ground. They took the $237 billion surplus they inherited from the Clinton administration and left us with a $1.3 trillion deficit, and, in the process, quadrupled the national debt — all before we had turned on the lights in the West Wing.

While acknowledging the GOP's Bush-era complicity in Congress's profligate spending, Boehner boasted of Republicans' near-unified opposition to Obama's stimulus bill, health care reform and environmental legislation. "We began to show people we are different." No, the only thing you're showing people is that your #1 goal as a party is to screw the poor and middle class while obsessively pursuing massive tax cuts for the rich. Sorry, Johnny, but you're singin' the same old Republican tune. The billion-dollar question is, will voters realize that come November....and remember why they kicked you and your useless party out of power in the first place.

ColorOfChange initiates "Turn Off Fox" campaign

2010-08-25T13:19:00.001-04:00

"COLOR OF CHANGE" INITIATES "TURN OFF FOX" CAMPAIGN

A year ago, Glenn Beck called the President a racist who had a deep-seeded hatred for White people.1 In just over a week, he says he will "reclaim"2 the legacy of the civil rights movement by holding his "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC — on the same day and place as Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.3

You can get mad at Beck. You can protest and try to prevent him from stepping on Dr. King's honor for one day. The reality is that the next day — and five days-a-week from there on out — Beck will be back on Fox News, speaking to millions and spreading hate, lies, and fear, as he does every week.

The real problem is Fox News. Fox News gives Beck his platform, and Fox promotes his events — all despite Beck losing virtually all of his major advertisers in the last year.

Fox's rhetoric is not just divisive; it's dangerous. Last month, a heavily armed man got into a gun fight with police after he was pulled over on his way to kill people at the Tides Foundation4 — a non-profit that was little known until Glenn Beck repeatedly demonized it, claiming it to be the center of a great conspiracy.5 Last year, Kansas doctor George Tiller was gunned down while at church6 after Bill O'Reilly called him a Nazi, a "baby killer," and warned of "Judgment Day."7

It's why today we’re launching TurnOffFox, and we hope you'll join us. TurnOffFox is the first step in our overall effort to beat back the poison, hate, and division of Fox. We'll get Fox turned off in stores, restaurants, and other public places — places where Fox pulls in new viewers and gains legitimacy. But we need your help.

Click below to declare your household "Fox free" and at the same time call on establishments in your community (and across the country) to follow your lead and turn off Fox. Then invite your friends and family to do the same. Armed with thousands of signatures, including yours, ColorOfChange members will then visit businesses in their community that play Fox, explain how divisive and dangerous it is, and call on them to stop. And we'll give you a FREE Turn Off Fox sticker when you sign on — it takes just a moment:

http://colorofchange.org/turnofffox?id=1790-114613

Some people watch Fox at home because it reflects their view of the world; but there are others who see it on TV in public places and assume that it's legitimate news. Fox News is often on in bars, restaurants, airport lounges, stores — appearing to be real news, while spreading lies and fomenting hate and division.

The goal of Turn Off Fox is to reduce the number of public TVs showing Fox News, while spreading the word about Fox's poison (and how it works) to those who don't know.

Signing up for the campaign is just the first step. We make it easy for you to tell us about businesses playing Fox. If you're willing to talk with them, we'll provide you with straightforward materials that explain why they shouldn't be a party to what Fox is doing. And if there are businesses you know that want to tell the world they would never play Fox, you can help them declare themselves a "Fox-free zone."

As businesses Turn off Fox and stand up as Fox Free, and as we encourage our friends and family to do the same, we'll help make clear, to people across the country, what Fox is about. And we'll reduce their ability to do harm.

Click the link below to join us in standing up to Fox, and we'll give you a free TurnOffFox sticker. And then please ask your friends and family to do the same:

http://colorofchange.org/turnofffox?id=1790-114613

Thanks and Peace,

-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani, Milton, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
August 25th, 2010

Lift Every Voice and Sing

2010-07-02T07:39:00.000-04:00

A Message From Free Press: AT&T, Comcast & Verizon buy Congress to kill net neutrality

2010-07-01T19:24:00.001-04:00

Spread the Word. Expose the Corporate Takeover of the Internet

Dear Claude,

Did you read the New York Times yesterday?

In a prominent editorial, the paper exposes AT&T, Verizon and Comcast for flooding Congress with cash to kill Net Neutrality.

These companies have funneled millions of dollars in campaign contributions to elected officials. ... and now they expect a return on their investment.

But campaign contributions are only the tip of the iceberg. The phone and cable industry is quietly spending hundreds of millions more — all part of a massive effort to take control of the Internet away from the people who use it.

To shed light on this dirty game, Free Press is launching "Corruption Road: How Corporate Money and Astroturf Pollute Media Policy." Check it out:

http://corruptionroad.freepress.net

Corruption Road looks beyond the money mentioned in the Times to illustrate how phone and cable companies are major players in Washington's economy of influence:

AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have spent tens of millions on an army of lobbyists, lawyers and PR specialists to attack efforts to protect consumers;
They've secretly funded dozens of astroturf groups to parrot industry talking points and fabricate grassroots opposition to an open Internet;
They've strong-armed members of Congress to paint Net Neutrality as a "government takeover of the Internet" and sign letters opposing oversight of the industry.
This gigantic corporate spending spree serves one goal: Prevent the FCC from preserving the open Internet, protecting consumers' rights and fostering universal access to broadband. If these companies succeed, Net Neutrality will be in serious danger.

We're giving you a first look at Corruption Road because we need you to do two things to help stop this takeover:

1. Take a drive down Corruption Road to learn more about the shady influence-peddling.
2. Help spread the word about Corruption Road via e-mail, Twitter and Facebook.

What's going on is outrageous. But we can stop it by bringing this corruption to light, shaming corporate sellouts in Congress, and convincing more people to stand in support of Net Neutrality.

Thank you for taking action,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net
www.SavetheInternet.com

P.S. Read yesterday's New York Times editorial: "The Price of Broadband Politics

Two Big Victories for Velvet Revolution Campaigns

2010-06-30T16:16:00.000-04:00

House Passes DISCLOSE Act
Last week, as part of our Protect Our Elections campaign, we asked you to contact Congress with calls and letters demanding passage of the DISCLOSE Act to mitigate the corrosive influence of unlimited corporate money on our elections. Partisans, including the Chamber of Commerce and the Tea Party Express, had spent millions to defeat the bill yet we persisted in our quest to get it passed. And on the day of the House vote, you answered our call surpassing over 8000 calls and letters to win the vote! Congress members say that we really helped to make the difference. Thank you.

The Chamber of Commerce, issued a statement blasting the vote: "The Democratic majority in the House jammed through a piece of legislation that clearly violates the Constitution, as well as basic principles of fairness and equity. The Supreme Court calls it 'viewpoint discrimination,' and every first-year law student knows that it's illegal."

Please make sure to let your friends know that we have succeeded so far but the fight is not over. We have to get this through the Senate too. And if you have not yet signed on the petition, please do so here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don Siegelman’s Criminal Conviction Vacated By Supreme Court
Several years ago, we launched our Restore Justice At Justice campaign to urge the Department of Justice to reverse the political prosecutions of the Bush Administration. The poster child for these prosecutions is Don Siegelman who was personally targeted by Karl Rove because he was a popular Democrat in the South. The Court of Appeals last year threw out some of Siegelman’s convictions but let several stand under the “honest services” statute.

But yesterday, in a one sentence order, the Supreme Court vacated the convictions of Siegelman and his co-defendant Richard Scrushy, remanding the case to the Court of Appeals for reconsideration in light of a decision from last week that undermined convictions for “honest services.”

In short, the Supreme Court held that federal prosecutions for “honest services” should only take place in clear cases of bribery, something that is not present in Siegelman’s case, where he was accused of appointing a political donor to a job after he donated to a state education fund. So now the Court of Appeals will get to apply to new honest services standards to Siegelman’s case and, if it does so fairly, will have to reverse the convictions.

Again, we want to thank all of you for helping us with our campaign to correct the injustice against Siegelman and all those targeted by the Bush DOJ. Thousands of ordinary citizens signed on to the campaign. If you have not yet done so, go to www.RestoreJusticeAtJustice.com and do so.

People For The American Way Poll Shows Americans Want Action to Correct Citizens United Results Show Broad Support for Candidates Who Favor Amendment

2010-06-30T14:22:00.002-04:00

PFAW Poll Shows Americans Want Action to Correct Citizens United
Results Show Broad Support for Candidates Who Support A Constitutional Amendment to Overturn the Decision
Results of a poll conducted by Hart Research Associates for People For the American Way revealed that Americans across the political spectrum are intensely concerned about corporate influence in our democracy and disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

In addition, more than three-quarters of voters said that they support a Constitutional Amendment if one is necessary to limit the amount that corporations can spend in elections. A similar majority are inclined to support a candidate who has spoken out in favor of an amendment. The support cuts across party and ideology, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans and Independents in support of the measure.

The poll reveals:

85% of voters say that corporations have too much influence over the political system today while 93% say that average citizens have too little influence.
95% agree that “Corporations spend money on politics mainly to buy influence in government and elect people who are favorable to their financial interests.” (74% strongly agree)
85% disagree that “Corporations should be able to spend as much as they want to influence the outcome of elections because the Constitution protects freedom of speech.” (63% strongly disagree)
93% agree that “There should be clear limits on how much money corporations can spend to influence the outcome of an election.” (74% strongly agree)
77% think Congress should support an amendment to limit the amount U.S. corporations can spend to influence elections.
74% say that they would be more likely to vote for a candidate for Congress who pledged to support a Constitutional Amendment limiting corporate spending in elections.
“These results make perfectly clear that Americans want bold action to overturn Citizens United,” said Michael B. Keegan, President of People For the American Way. “Voters are strongly supportive of initiatives, including a Constitutional Amendment, to reign in corporate spending in elections. Democratic and Republican politicians alike would do well to catch up with their constituents and lend their support to an Amendment that does just that.”

Leading up to Election Day, People For the American Way, along with Public Citizen, will be asking congressional candidates to pledge to support a Constitutional Amendment, and sharing the information with voters.

You can read more about the poll here (PDF).

To arrange an interview with a People For spokesperson, or with Geoff Garin of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the poll, contact Miranda Blue at 202-467-4999 or media@pfaw.org.

Stop Feeding The Vultures - by Greg Palast

2010-04-01T10:01:00.000-04:00

I get the idea that Eric Hermann doesn’t want to talk to me. When I came to his office suite, his hedge fund’s name plaque had been unbolted from the building’s wall, the suite number removed and all the employees locked in.

I’m not surprised. Hermann is a vulture, not the carrion-eating type, but the kind that prey on the financially wounded. “Vulture” is a hedge fund industry term for the financiers who buy up the right to collect old loans of the world’s poorest nations, and then use every trick in the book — from lawsuits to bribery to hiring Henry Kissinger’s lobby firm — to muscle destitute countries into turning over their meager foreign aid funds.

Vultures, whether of the feathered or speculator species, don’t like to talk to reporters.

On February 25, the day after BBC Television’s Newsnight ran my report from in front of Hermann’s locked office door, Britain’s Parliament voted to bar vulture funds from using Britain’s courts to grab the assets of poor nations.

And what about the United States? Why are our own politicians cowering behind legislative locked doors?

What we can do and why we should do it requires, first, a little more info on how vultures operate.

In Hermann’s case, his hedge fund bought, for next to nothing, the right to collect several million dollars owed by Liberia. (They grabbed the debt from a unit of what is now J.P. Morgan Chase; banks like Morgan Stanley like to hand off their dirty work.) In February 2002, Hermann’s fund then sued Liberia for the long-forgotten loan, for compounded interest and fees. Hermann filed suit the very week Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, was surrounded by warlords, with neither electricity nor water, and the government was controlled by an escaped convict from the United States, Charles Taylor, who is now imprisoned at The Hague.

To no one’s surprise, neither Taylor nor representatives of Liberia showed up in the New York court. Liberia thereby lost by default, and was ordered to pay Hermann and his partners all the millions they sought.

Fast forward to 2007 and peace in Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is elected Africa’s first female president and donor nations, including the United States and Britain, agree to pay off Liberia’s old debts. By now, almost all that debt is held by vulture funds, but they all, including Hermann, agree to accept three cents on the dollar of their claims which, while seeming low, produced a very nice profit for these “investors.”

But when it came time to actually turn over the loan papers, Hermann and his partner, Michael Straus, admitted that they had passed off a hunk of their holdings to mysterious British Virgin Island funds called “Hamsah” and “Wall.”

With all the other creditors out of the way, Hamsah and Wall could, in effect, hold Liberia ransom for all its remaining and future assets. For example, Norway is helping Liberia drill oil—but that aid would now go to the two remaining vulture firms. They are demanding $28 million, more than 5 percent of the nation’s entire budget.

Hermann is not the only debt vulture, nor Liberia the only prey.¬† In 2007, BBC aired my investigation of a vulture who goes by the moniker “Goldfinger.” Goldfinger is U.S.-based speculator Michael Francis Sheehan. Our evidence suggests Sheehan bribed the president of Zambia to win his pound of flesh. Hearing the report, a furious Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) drove immediately to the White House and confronted George Bush.

Bush promised Conyers he’d act, but he didn’t. One can only wonder if Bush’s failure to put vultures out of business may have been influenced by the fact that the biggest vulture of them all, Paul Singer, who threatens Congo and Argentina, has also become the biggest contributor to the Republican Party in New York. Singer, notably, funded the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry.

But it’s not just Republicans who feed the vultures. Former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) held a fundraiser sponsored by Singer and other vultures. Massa, in turn, sponsored a bill to punish nations that resist payment to vulture funds. Lucky for indebted nations, Massa’s own predatory behavior has rendered useless his service to the hedge fund chiefs.

Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) has sponsored the “Stop VULTURE Funds Act” (H.R. 2932), which mirrors what Britain and other nations have done: put the financial corpse-chewers out of business. Congress should pass it now.

***

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

2010-03-29T08:42:00.000-04:00

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Limbaugh backpedals on Pledge by Dr. Boyce Watkins

2010-03-27T08:48:00.001-04:00

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh gave America reason for hope recently, when he made a public pledge to move to Costa Rica if health care reform were to pass through Congress. In a move that pleased many of those who would like for Limbaugh to return to the rock from which he came, Limbaugh promised that if Obamacare were implemented, he would make the big move to the country whose health care system he respects:"If this passes, and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica."

What's most ironic about Limbaugh's pledge is not just the fact that millions of Americans would love to see Limbaugh leave the country, but that Costa Rica has a far more socialized health care system than we have here in the United States. Not only does the country provide universal health care coverage for its citizens, but the country has a strong public option. The system also works quite well, as Costa Rica has a life expectancy second to only Canada in the Western Hemisphere. The country's health program was rated "excellent" by a study in the American Journal of Public Health.

So, Limbaugh inadvertently did his liberal enemies a huge favor by drawing attention to the country whose socialist health care system he admires. Limbaugh, one of the right wing talking heads who constantly rants about Obama's alleged socialist plot to take over the world, has (surprise) put his foot in his mouth.

Of course, once health care reform passed through the House of Representatives, Limbaugh started back pedaling. If it seems as though he's being a hypocrite for running away from his previous pledge, the answer is "yes." Limbaugh, the man who once argued that drug addicts should go to prison, is himself a recovering drug addict. But Limbaugh fully understands that he is a clown-like public figure only meant for entertainment. It is our fault for actually taking him seriously.

This incident also points out one other important truth about Limbaugh that the world has yet to fully realize: The man is not very smart. He is uneducated (well, he did get his high school diploma), and a terrible person to be in a position of influence within American politics. His public smack down of black Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele reiterates the fundamental disrespect that he has for black people as well. I jokingly refer to Limbaugh as part of my "Axis of Ignorance," including himself, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. When these three men are off the air, that will be a huge step toward living in a truly post-racial America. Their very existence as prominent media figures is a manifestation of the fact that we've got a long way to go.

Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the author of the new book, "Black American Money." To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.
Tagged as: black politics, black scholars, BlackPolitics, BlackScholars, dr boyce watkins, DrBoyceWatkins, michael steele, MichaelSteele, rush limbaugh, rush limbaugh costa rica, RushLimbaugh, RushLimbaughCostaRica
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Tea Baggers Show True Colors at Capitol by Jon Ponder

2010-03-21T16:45:00.001-04:00

Tea Baggers Show True Colors at Capitol – Called Civil Rights Heroes ‘Niggers,’ Rep. Frank a ‘Faggot,’ Spat on Rep. Cleaver, an African-American Minister
Jon Ponder | March 21, 2010
Growing increasingly desperate as the House vote on a reconciliation measure in the health-care reform bill approaches, Republican House members addressed a group of tea baggers on Capitol Hill yesterday, stoking their fears about reform with lies and distortions and then unleashing the mob which had become so enraged that they stopped bothering to conceal the true intentions of their “movement”:

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protester. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a ‘nigger.’ And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a “faggot,” as protesters shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president’s speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

“It was absolutely shocking to me,” Clyburn said, in response to a question from the Huffington Post. “Last Monday, this past Monday, I stayed home to meet on the campus of Claflin University where fifty years ago as of last Monday… I led the first demonstrations in South Carolina, the sit ins… And quite frankly I heard some things today I have not heard since that day. I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus.”

“It doesn’t make me nervous as all,” the congressman said, when asked how the mob-like atmosphere made him feel. “In fact, as I said to one heckler, I am the hardest person in the world to intimidate, so they better go somewhere else.”

Asked if he wanted an apology from the group of Republican lawmakers who had addressed the crowd and, in many ways, played on their worst fears of health care legislation, the Democratic Party, and the president, Clyburn replied:

“A lot of us have been saying for a long time that much of this, much of this is not about health care a all. And I think a lot of those people today demonstrated that this is not about health care… it is about trying to extend a basic fundamental right to people who are less powerful.”

Here’s another take, via Talking Points Memo:

Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”

Standing next to Lewis, emerging from a Democratic caucus meeting with President Obama, Carson said people in the crowd yelled, “kill the bill and then the N-word” several times, while he and Lewis were exiting the Cannon House office building.

“People have been just downright mean,” Lewis added.

And that wasn’t an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed “Barney, you faggot”–a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter…

Shortly thereafter, the same group of people surrounded Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) as he entered a first-floor elevator. Above the cacophony, I heard one man call Waxman a “crook” and a “liar.”

The spitting incident involved Rep. Cleaver, who is also a Methodist minister and who was active in the civil rights movement. The congressman was escorted to safety by the U.S. Capitol Police, who, according to early reports, also arrested the tea bagger. Later, the New York Times reported that no arrest had been made.

Last night, someone threw a brick through the window of the district office of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), chair of the House Rules Committee.

(This article originally appeared in Pensito Review)

A Message From Michael Moore

2010-03-20T10:02:00.002-04:00

Michael Moore once again has presented a logical informative perspective on the issue of health care. It was posted on this site because it is a message I would like all who just happen to stumble upon this site (and anyone else capable of reading). -Claude Chaney 3/20/10

My Congressman, Bart Stupak, Has Neither a Uterus Nor a Brain ...a letter from Michael Moore

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Friends,

I live in Michigan, in one of the 31 counties represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by none other than Mr. Bart Stupak, a Democrat. You've probably never heard of him. He's a pretty quiet guy, a former Michigan State Police trooper who boldly decided to run some 18 years ago as a Democrat in a rural part of Michigan that votes almost exclusively for Republicans (yes, I know -- what am I doing here? I'll save that story for a future letter).

His voting record is pretty conservative for a Democrat, but he's had a few shining moments. In the wake of the Columbine shootings, he voted for some gun control, a not-too-popular position to take here in northern Michigan. The NRA came after him with all they had in 2000.

But the good people of this area knew Bart's story and understood: He's been touched personally by gun violence. In a terrible tragedy, his teenage son, depressed and confused from the medication he'd been prescribed, killed himself with the family's .38 revolver. Despite the NRA's best efforts, Bart was returned to Congress by an overwhelming margin.

Yet, here we are, just days before a weak, simple-minded, but now ultimately necessary health care bill has a chance of making it through Congress -- and Bart Stupak is threatening to derail it because he wants to make sure that no woman WHO BUYS HER OWN INSURANCE with HER OWN MONEY is able to have a medically-insured abortion. We're not talkin' about federally-funded abortions -- those were stupidly outlawed long ago. Bart Stupak doesn't like that the Democrats' bill doesn't prohibit private insurance programs, set up for those whose employers don't provide it, from providing abortion coverage if they get any federal funding -- even to an individual woman paying without any government help. That's it.

A group representing most of America's 59,000 Catholic nuns has written to Congress and said that Obama's health care plan should be passed. Stupak, instead, has chosen to diss the nuns. Last night he went on TV and dug his heels in -- he said he intended to stop this health care bill and he didn't care what anyone had to say.

Now, it would be easy for some to just pass this attitude off on his Catholicism -- he believes what he believes and you have to respect him for that, even if you don't agree with him. But it's not that simple. It turns out that Stupak has been living in a subsidized room in the "C Street House," run by the infamous right-wing Christian cult "The Family." It was in this former convent that GOP Rep. Chip Pickering (according to his former wife) carried on the affair that ended his marriage. It's where South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford sought refuge as his marriage fell apart thanks to HIS affair. And then there's C Street roommate Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who cheated on his wife with the wife of one of his top staffers. (The Justice Department is currently investigating whether Ensign committed a felony while paying off his aide to keep him quiet.)

C Street is where power, money, sex and religion meet. So am I led to believe that Bart Stupak lives in a brothel and belongs to a cult? He says he was just renting a room there. But that just doesn't ring true. Something stinks to the high heavens here, and Stupak sees no irony in taking his holier-than-thou position while living in a house that should be dubbed "Hypocrites' Hideaway."

If Stupak were truly pro-life then he'd vote for this bill. Right now, a mother in the U.S. has a TEN times greater chance of dying in childbirth than a mother does in Ireland. If you really wanted to reduce abortions, you'd have to ask yourself this question: Why does godless France, where abortion is nearly free (it's covered by their universal health insurance), have 20% fewer abortions per capita than we do? What's even more amazing about that statistic is that you can't even get an abortion in America in 87% of our counties because there isn't one single doctor in those counties who will perform one! 87%!! The Right has scared them all to death -- literally -- out of performing an otherwise legal, safe procedure. So, you can say women have "choice" in this country, but the reality is the "choice" doesn't exist in the majority of the nation. "Right to Life" has essentially won this battle. (My personal position: I don't get to have a position -- I don't have a uterus. If a Senate that was 90% female told me I couldn't have a vasectomy or made it a crime to leave the toilet seat up, I guess I might object.)

What is "life"? An egg is life, a sperm is life. Those sperm aren't running on a battery pack. They are living creatures, as is a fertilized egg. But they're not "human beings." A human being is something that can exist outside the womb of a mother. If you think a fertilized egg is a human being, then I respectfully ask you to go down to the DMV today and have them change your birthday on your driver's license to 9 months older than what you've been telling everybody.

So back to my question. Why do we have an abortion rate 20% higher than France's (and more than twice as high as Germany's), especially considering most doctors here won't perform them? The answer is ANY country that has universal health care, where contraception is free, where child care is free or inexpensive, where there is less poverty because people don't become bankrupt over medical bills -- those societies are simply going to have fewer unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

And there the mask gets pulled off the Bart Stupaks and the "Christians." If the statistics show that countries with government-provided universal health care and nearly-free abortions are, in fact, the countries with the fewest abortions, then why on earth wouldn't the Right be the first in line to support universal health care?!!

Because it isn't about "universal health care." It's about controlling women, period. It's about sticking your nose in other people's business. It's about pushing your religious beliefs on everyone else because voices in your head tell you your Jesus is The One -- even though YOUR Jesus never said one single solitary word in any of the four gospels of the Bible about abortion or fertilized eggs being human. You've just gone and made it up about "life beginning at conception." Jesus NEVER said that. The little voice in your head said that, the same little voice that wants your grubby paws on women's uteruses. You need help. Please get some help and leave the rest of us alone, Mr. Stupak and friends.

After all, isn't it enough that women can't get an abortion in any of the 31 Michigan counties you represent in Congress? There is not one single abortion provider here in the north of the state, according to Planned Parenthood Mid and South Michigan. Hey, Bart -- you've already won! Women's rights have been stamped out in your entire Congressional district! Woo hoo!

So why don't you leave the rest of the country alone, step out of the way, and let them have the minimal health coverage this bill will give them? You wouldn't really crush the sick and infirm because of your own personal agenda, would you? What would Jesus do?

In the meantime, Bart, my neighbors and I are going to make sure a real Democrat runs against you in August's primary here. One of our religious beliefs in these parts is to never impose our religious beliefs on others.

Yours,
Michael Moore

Judge Reverses Some Damage Done to ACORN by Madison J. Gray

2010-03-14T14:08:00.000-04:00

Ha! Take that, Glenn Beck!

Just when you thought ACORN suffered its death blow by populist nonsensical cable network bufoonery, a Brooklyn, N.Y., judge lets everyone know that Congress had no business punishing the group before any guilt had been determined.

Thank goodness we have something in this country called "rule of law/" and America's actually getting better at it. That means you really can only be punished if you've done something wrong, and that's what U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon ruled on Wednesday, regarding a government request that funding to ACORN be blocked.
Last week, we reported that ACORN was found by a U.S. District Court to have not done anything wrong, when two hyperconservatives, who call themselves "activists," tried to entrap them on video, going between several organization offices posed as a pimp and a hooker.

Gershon's new ruling backs that up even further, because last year the Senate voted to block housing grant funding coming from agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. But the joke is on the Senators -- even so-called "liberals" like Al Franken, who voted for this because you can't actually take away that federal funding unless you've determined that an organization has mishandled it, which they have not.

The only thing ACORN is guilty of is having a few incompetent employees, and not even in every office. If having a few people who couldn't do their jobs correctly were a crime, then President Bush and his entire cabinet should have been canned right after Hurricane Katrina.

According to the judge's finding in December, ACORN was "singled out by Congress for punishment that directly and immediately affects their ability to continue to obtain federal funding in the absence of any judicial, or even administrative process, adjudicating guilt.

But the government asked her to change her mind and keep the cutoff of funds current and tie ACORN's hands. But Gershon, known as a no-nonsense justice, turned around and told the feds not only was the cut off of funds unconstitutional, but that they should spread the word that agencies cannot punish the group on this basis.

All this means that Congress has been made a fool of, getting caught up in a bunch of right-wing soundbyte garbage - all designed to pick on an organization that directly helps poor minorities find housing for them to actually own, thus giving them the same advantage as white, middle class Americans: a neo-con's biggest fear.

So bottom line, the chickens are coming home to roost. Blathering idiots, like Beck, Rush Limbaugh (who I hope really does leave the country when health care is passed) and others don't run this country. And if the people in Congress had any balls, they'd know that and not be intimidated.

U.S Airways Sued For Discrimination

2010-01-09T05:21:00.004-05:00

by Liz Behler

January 7, 2010

The NAACP is suing US Airways, accusing the airline of discriminating against African American Philadelphia airport employees by assigning them to less desirable gates, which employees refer to with racially loaded nicknames, like "Compton" and "The Ghetto."

The suit was filed on Tuesday, and claims that both managers and lower level employees openly use derogatory terms to refer to the terminals where a majority of African American employees work, according to an article by The Philadelphia Inquirer on January 7th.

The lawsuit was brought forward by the NAACP, along with three former airline employees.

According to the complaint, Terminal C was nicknamed both "Compton", a Californian city known for violence, and "Camden", another crime-ridden city located near Philadelphia. Terminal F, a remote terminal that has fewer amenities, is perceived to have more minority passengers, and which also houses US Airways, is referred to as "The Ghetto."

Additionally, parts of the airport with mostly white employees are named after typically-white Philadelphia neighborhoods, like "Frankford" and "South Philly". Sections of main terminals A and B were nicknamed "King of Prussia," after a nearby suburb known for its wealth.

The NAACP also claims that African American workers were given less popular shifts than white workers, and that the shifts were referred to with the derogatory nicknames.

"We take discrimination very seriously," Suzanne Boda, the senior vice president of airport customer service, international and cargo for US Airways, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "We have a very strong commitment to diversity and to nondiscrimination."

Boda, who had not previously heard the nicknames, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that terminal and shift assignments were based purely on seniority.

"You bid for whatever shift you want to work and where you want to work."

The suit seeks damages for all African American employees and the reinstatement of the three employees named in the suit. An immediate ban on "racial code words" is also called for, as well as the placement of a civil-rights monitor to supervise all US Airways operations in Philadelphia.

How the White House Misjudged the Political Landscape

2009-12-20T07:30:00.001-05:00

by Robert Cruickshank

As progressives on and offline continue to debate the future of the health care reform bill, attention is finally shifting to the underlying factors that have gotten us into this mess in the first place: namely, the mistakes of the White House. Meteor Blades at Daily Kos asks the right question - why is it that progressives are getting blamed for this? Others reply that Obama does the best he can, and that to avoid a collapse in the 2010 elections, Democrats and progressives need to "point out all the good" that Obama has done so far.

But that isn't enough. The fact is that Democratic electeds, the president first and foremost, have completely misunderstood American politics in 2009. I'm not talking just about the failed and senseless efforts at bipartisanship, though Obama's underestimation of the level of control Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the teabaggers have over the Republican Party hasn't helped.

Instead I'm talking about the inability of the White House to understand the changing nature of the American left. The late 20th century experience of a marginalized and weak left has been replaced during the 2000s by a much more powerful and popular movement. The White House's unwillingness to treat that movement as an equal partner is damaging not only the health care bill, but the political fate of Democrats in 2010 and, potentially, 2012.

The collapse of support for the bill reveals a deeper and growing divide, an unwillingness of most Americans to embrace a flawed process. In particular, progressives - activists and voters - need a clear, signal victory in order to avoid complete 1994-style demoralization. Something big and bold, something clearly progressive that forced moderates and conservatives to concede something important, something that will give more people a reason to rally to Obama's defense when he is in a difficult place.

Comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of the Grijalva proposal would achieve this. Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell would achieve this (and repeal of DOMA would be a grand slam). Firing Geithner and Summers would achieve this. Breaking up some of the big banks would achieve this. And yes, a public option of some kind would have achieved this.

Instead we have a White House and a Senate Democratic leadership that still believes we live in the 1990s, where the "left" is weak and has little popular support. They've not understood the transformative effect of the 2000s and Bush in particular, who helped create a genuine American left with real and widespread popular support for the first time in 40 years.

The White House does not view progressives as equal partners, as people who have legitimate concerns and priorities that need to be included in any deal. They still take the Clintonian view that the "left" can be appeased either through a few nice words in a speech, and if that fails, can be crammed down by being told they're wreckers, being told this is the best progressives can get, being told that progressives are irrelevant (even while the WH's defensive actions show they're anything but irrelevant).

The White House hasn't yet grasped that some basic and timeless rules of politics still apply: that you have to deliver something to your supporters to keep them on board. Something that excites them, something that gets them motivated. Ever since 1993 Democratic presidential Administrations have assumed those rules are in abeyance, where supporters will stay on board out of fear of Republicans, unwilling to act on their beliefs or frustrations out of an internalized belief that America is a conservative place hostile to progressive values.

The Bush years destroyed those internalized frustrations. Congressional Democratic support for the Iraq War destroyed what existed of progressive acceptance of that Clintonite strategy, and freed the left to actually feel confident in asserting its own values regardless of what the Democratic leadership says, because any trust in that leadership was destroyed in 2002. Obama understood this out of necessity during the primary, when he had to embrace this to defeat Hillary Clinton. But once that was achieved, he went right back to the old Bill Clinton strategy of appeasing the center-right and assuming progressives would simply go along with it - and once elected, Obama surrounded himself with old Clinton hands who espoused the same basic view of politics.

There were a number of instances in 2009 that showed Obama doesn't quite grasp political realities, and the snowballing collapse of health care reform is just one element of that misunderstanding.

Until he sees progressives as genuine partners, Obama will face declining political fortunes. That's his problem, something he and his team should and eventually will address. For our part, progressives should concern ourselves with how to further build up our own institutions and power, instead of wasting time trying to prop up a weak president who views us and our views and our work with contempt.

Some Observations from Media Matters For America

2009-12-12T08:28:00.001-05:00

Conservative media figures demanding ACORN investigation opposed, downplayed investigations of Bush scandals
Conservative media figures including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Newt Gingrich have called for an investigation of ACORN's activities and its supposed link to President Obama and Democrats, often while spreading misinformation about ACORN. However, these same media figures opposed or downplayed investigations into scandals involving the Bush administration, including the controversial firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, the outing of the identity of Valerie Plame, and alleged torture and prisoner abuse by U.S. officials. Read more at the MediaMatters website.

Fox hosts let GOP Rep. Issa attack ACORN over embezzlement, but ignored NRCC embezzlement
In separate interviews, Fox News hosts Bill Hemmer and Greta Van Susteren allowed Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to attack the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on the grounds that in 1999 and 2000, one of its leaders embezzled from the group. However, at no point did either Hemmer or Van Susteren note that in 2008, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) stated that its treasurer had embezzled more than $600,000 from the organization over the course of several years. Read more at the MediaMatters website.

The Republican War against ACORN by Jason Leopold

2009-09-27T15:06:00.000-04:00

In recent days, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major news outlets have recounted the "troubled" history of the poor people's advocacy group ACORN, but left out the five-year anti-ACORN campaign led by White House adviser Karl Rove and other Republican operatives.

Dropped down the memory hole is the fact that ACORN was at the center of the so-called "prosecutor-gate" scandal, when the Bush administration pressured US attorneys to bring indictments over the grassroots group's voter-registration drives, then fired some prosecutors who resisted what they viewed as a partisan strategy not supported by solid evidence.

The latest furor over ACORN was touched off by conservative filmmaker James E. O'Keefe III and a right-wing columnist who posed as a couple planning to buy a house for use as a brothel and getting advice from a few ACORN employees, rather than being turned away.

The pair filmed their meetings at ACORN offices with a hidden camera, producing a video that brought to a fever pitch the long-simmering Republican war against ACORN. The video was trumpeted by Fox News and other right-wing news outlets, starting a stampede in the mainstream press and in Congress, where a majority of panicked Democrats joined the herd in approving legislation to strip ACORN of federal funds.

The stampede, which trampled ACORN and its mostly black and Hispanic organizing staff, soon pulled in President Barack Obama, who often has touted his work as a community organizer in his youth. In an interview last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," Obama told host George Stephanopoulos that ACORN "deserves to be investigated."

Yet, while bending to Republican demands to speak out against a poor people's group, Obama continued to resist the notion that powerful Republicans from the Bush administration deserved to be investigated for authorizing the use of torture against prisoners in the "war on terror."

In an interview with CBS's "Face The Nation," Obama downplayed the seriousness of an investigation authorized last month by Attorney General Eric Holder into several cases where CIA officers allegedly exceeded Justice Department guidelines during interrogations.

"I have said consistently that I want to look forward and not backward when it comes to some of the problems that occurred under the previous administration, or when it came to interrogations," Obama said. "My understanding is it's not even a criminal investigation at this point."

That juxtaposition is a stark example of how Republicans - aided by the giant megaphone of the right-wing media - continue to keep Democrats on the defensive, while evidence of Republican guilt gets little sustained attention except at a handful of Internet sites.

That pattern holds true even for issues connected to ACORN.

For instance, much less media interest followed the House Judiciary Committee's August release of Bush administration emails related to the role that Rove and other Bush administration officials played in the firings of nine US attorneys amid a Republican effort to target ACORN's voter-registration work during the 2004 presidential election.

Two of the nine US attorneys who were fired in 2006 were targeted because they refused to bring criminal charges against individuals affiliated with ACORN. The firing of another US attorney was due, in large part, to his refusal to convene a grand jury and secure a voter-fraud indictment against individuals, some of who were affiliated with ACORN.

A May 2, 2005 email from Rove deputy Scott Jennings to Tim Griffin, another Rove protégé, said that in the fall of 2004, Bernalillo County's Republican Sheriff Darren White and New Mexico Republican Party operatives Pat Rogers and Mickey Barnett turned over hundreds of "suspected fraudulent voter registration forms" handled by ACORN workers. The email was also forwarded to Leslie Fahrenkopf, Bush's associate counsel.

In 2004, New Mexico was considered a swing state in the Bush-Kerry race and Bernalillo County had been targeted by ACORN for a major grassroots effort to register voters, which resulted in about 65,000 newly registered voters, many of who were low-income people and minorities - groups that tend to vote for Democrats.

Sheriff White challenged the integrity of some of the names on the voter registration rolls, according to then-New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias in his book, "In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration." White held a press conference along with other Republican officials in the county to call attention to the matter.

"The purported examples that were then produced included a woman who had correctly filled out two different registrations with slightly different signatures and another in which a husband, with his wife's permission, had signed her name to the form," Iglesias wrote. "It was demanded that I take action against what was perceived as rampant abuse of the system."

Iglesias said he established an election fraud task force in September 2004 and spent more than two months probing claims of widespread voter fraud in his state. In testimony before a Senate committee in 2007, Iglesias said the task force received about 108 complaints of alleged voter fraud through a hotline over the course of about eight weeks.

"Most of the complaints made to the hotline were clearly not prosecutable - citizens would complain of their yard signs being removed from their property and de minimis matters like that," Iglesias testified.

"Only one case of the over 100 referrals had potential. ACORN had employed a woman to register voters. The evidence showed she registered voters who did not have the legal right to vote. The law, 42 USC 1973 had the maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $5,000 fine.

"After personally reviewing the FBI investigative report and speaking to the agent, the prosecutor I had assigned, Mr. [Rumaldo] Armijo, and conferring with [a Justice Department official] I was of the opinion that the case was not provable. I, therefore, did not authorize a prosecution.

"I have subsequently learned that the State of New Mexico did not file any criminal cases as a result of the" election fraud task force.

Iglesias said Republican officials in his state were far less interested in election reforms and more intent on suppressing votes. He wrote in his book that the Justice Department issued a directive to every US attorney in the country to find and prosecute cases of voter fraud in their states during the height of hotly contested elections in 2002, 2004 and 2006, even though evidence was thin or nonexistent.

During this period, ACORN had stepped up its voter registration efforts and boasted in press releases about registering tens of thousands of first-time voters.

Iglesias said that in late summer 2002 he received an email from the Justice Department suggesting "in no uncertain terms" that US attorneys should immediately begin working with local and state election officials "to offer whatever assistance we could in investigating and prosecuting voter fraud cases."

Pressure also came from congressional and state Republicans. In New Mexico, Barnett, Rogers and White were among Republican operatives who complained directly to Rove at the White House and to officials in Bush's Justice Department that Iglesias would not prosecute ACORN employees. These unhappy Republicans demanded that Iglesias be replaced.

According to a report by the Justice Department's inspector general released last year, "In a March 2006 email forwarded to [Craig] Donsanto in the [Justice Department's] Public Integrity Section, Rogers complained about voter fraud in New Mexico and added, 'I have calls in, to the USA [U.S. Attorney] and his main assistant, but they were not much help during the ACORN fraudulent registration debacle last election.'"

In June 2006, Rogers sent Iglesias's Executive Assistant US Attorney Rumaldo Armijo an email which said, "The voter fraud wars continue. Any indictment of the Acorn woman would be appreciated.... The ACLU/Wortheim [sic] democrats will turn to the camera and suggest fraud is not an issue, because the USA would have done something by now. Carpe Diem!" [Carpe Diem is translated, "seize the day."]

Despite positive job reports, Iglesias was fired in December 2006 as part of a purge of nine federal prosecutors who were deemed not to be "loyal Bushies," or had other supposed shortcomings.

Last August, Rove went on Fox News to downplay his role in Iglesias's firing, but acknowledged that he did pass on complaints to the Bush Justice Department about "the performance of the US attorney in New Mexico, that he failed to go after ACORN in clear cases of vote fraud."

The Republican war against ACORN didn't stop with Iglesias.

In Missouri, former US Attorney Todd Graves was another federal prosecutor who fell into disfavor with the Bush administration because of alleged inaction on ACORN and voter fraud issues.

Graves would not file criminal charges of voter fraud against four employees of ACORN, according to documents later released by the Justice Department in connection with the fired-prosecutors probe.

Graves also resisted pressure from Bradley Schlozman, head of the Bush Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, to file a lawsuit against Robin Carnahan, Missouri's Democratic Secretary of State, on charges that Carnahan failed to take action on cases of voter fraud, Graves testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2007.

Graves was forced to resign in March 2006 and was replaced by Schlozman as Missouri's acting US attorney. Schlozman then filed the civil suit against Carnahan.

The case was later dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled,
"The United States has not shown that any Missouri resident was denied his or her right to vote as a result of deficiencies alleged by the United States. Nor has the United States shown that any voter fraud has occurred."

Schlozman also filed federal criminal charges of voter fraud against members of ACORN only days before the November 2006 midterm elections. The case was later dismissed and Schlozman came under criticism for breaking with longstanding Justice Department policy against bringing voter fraud charges close to an election.

Schlozman testified before a Senate committee in 2007 that he received approval to file the voter fraud charges from a Justice Department ethics official. The Justice Department recently declined to prosecute Schlozman on allegations that he perjured himself during his Senate testimony related to politicized hiring decisions.

Though the Republican war against ACORN contributed to the "prosecutor-gate" scandal, GOP operatives carried the fight into the 2008 presidential campaign, seizing on some ACORN employees who apparently were padding their registration numbers by submitting bogus forms with fake names like "Mickey Mouse."

For its part, ACORN has insisted that its own quality control flagged many of the suspicious registration forms before they were submitted to state officials and that state laws often require outside registration groups to submit all forms regardless of obvious problems.

Independent studies also have shown that phony registrations rarely result in illegally cast ballots because there are so many other safeguards built into the system.

For instance, from October 2002 to September 2005, a total of 70 people were convicted for federal election-related crimes, according to figures compiled by The New York Times last year. Only 18 of those were for ineligible voting.

That figure - 70 people - appears in a misleading report released July 23 , a little more than a month before the ACORN videos were broadcast on Fox News. The report was prepared by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform.

The report - entitled "Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?" - cites, among other material, several dozen published reports from right-wing commentators and news organizations, including Fox News's Glenn Beck, and Breitbart.com, whose proprietor, Andrew Breitbart, worked closely with Beck and the filmmakers of the ACORN video to demonstrate the organization's involvement in widespread criminal acts related to voter fraud, tax evasion and racketeering.

In the report, Issa asserts that all 70 people he cites worked specifically for ACORN and were convicted of crimes. However, an in-depth search on Google and Lexis to support this claim does not turn up evidence; it produces only incarnations of the claim itself, which went viral and was picked up by the right-wing echo chamber of news organizations, talk radio and bloggers.

The actual conviction numbers Issa cites in his report don't add up to 70, and those cases weren't all convictions. Additionally, Issa cites employees who were charged or arrested on suspicion of registering bogus names on voter registration cards but it's unclear whether they were ever convicted.

According to an Oct. 18, 2008 report in FactCheck.org, "Neither ACORN nor its employees have been found guilty of, or even charged with, casting fraudulent votes," although "several ACORN canvassers have been found guilty of faking registration forms and others are being investigated. But the evidence that has surfaced so far shows they faked forms to get paid for work they didn't do, not to stuff ballot boxes."

Indeed, the cases suggest that ACORN was the intended victim of the attempted fraud, in that the phony registration forms were part of an effort by employees to exaggerate their work product.

"No evidence has yet surfaced to show that the ACORN employees who submitted fraudulent registration forms intended to pave the way for illegal voting. Rather, they were trying to get paid by ACORN for doing no work. Dan Satterberg, the Republican prosecuting attorney in King County, Wash., where the largest ACORN case to date was prosecuted, said that the indicted ACORN employees were shirking responsibility, not plotting election fraud."

The FactCheck.org report was prepared after Republican presidential candidate John McCain jumped on the anti-ACORN bandwagon, citing it at the third presidential debate. He declared ACORN "is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."

The McCain-Palin campaign put out a web ad titled "ACORN," which carried the verbal endorsement of McCain.

The ad asked, "Who is Barack Obama? A man with 'a political baptism performed at warp speed.' Vast ambition. After college, he moved to Chicago. Became a community organizer. There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN. He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

"What did ACORN in Chicago engage in? Bullying banks. Intimidation tactics. Disruption of business. ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans. The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.

"No wonder Obama's campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, 'Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.' But Obama's ties to ACORN run long and deep. He taught classes for ACORN. They even endorsed him for President.

"But now ACORN is in trouble."

The motive of Republicans in escalating the war on ACORN was suggested by a line in Rep. Issa's report - to delegitimize Obama. On page five, the report states: "Documents provided by former ACORN employees and contained in this report demonstrate the degree to which ACORN and ACORN affiliates organized to elect President Barack Obama in 2008."

In both today's ACORN attacks and those of the 2008 campaign, the major US news media has mostly ignored the connections to the "prosecutor-gate" case. Last year, the press focused on anecdotes like Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo's name showing up on one registration form.

The McCain campaign's attempt to politicize ACORN - and hype the danger of voter fraud - also paralleled the allegations made by Republicans during the final days of Campaign 2004.

In October 2004, Marc Racicot, chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential campaign, called on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry to demand that ACORN and other voter registration groups stop engaging in voter registration fraud. Racicot said these registration efforts would "ultimately paralyze the effective ability of Americans to be able to vote in the next election."

Two weeks before the 2004 presidential election, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett announced the formation of a media campaign to counter what they claimed was voter registration fraud in nine Ohio counties.

"The reports of voter fraud in Ohio are some of the most alarming in the nation," Gillespie said on October 20, 2004.

The attacks on ACORN for allegedly signing up phony voters served as a cover for Republican efforts to purge real voters from the voting roles, a tactic that became infamous in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio.

In Florida, another battleground state in 2004, President Bush's brother Jeb was governor, and the state's Department of Law launched a statewide probe into voter registration fraud just two weeks before the presidential election. A press release from the Department of Law cited ACORN, which registered more than 212,000 new voters in the state.

In the two weeks before Election 2004, GOP officials raised similar concerns in Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Now, having finally succeeded in dealing a severe blow to ACORN with the undercover videos, Republicans are trying to expand the stain to Obama. In a speech on the House floor on Thursday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, called Obama "the star of ACORN, the lead, chief organizer.... He walks with them all the way through."

King then demanded that every House committee launch an investigation into ACORN and criticized "a lame little announcement" that the Justice Department would look into the group's activities.

At least two Democratic lawmakers, however, want to find out how the congressional backlash against ACORN will impact the low-income families and individuals the organization assists.

In a two-page letter sent Wednesday to Daniel Mullhollan, director of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the investigative arm of Congress, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, requested that the CRS "research and issue a comprehensive report concerning proposed and pending Congressional and other activity related" to ACORN.

"Because of the recent charges and countercharges that have been leveled at ACORN and various proposals for action, we believe it is important that CRS conduct a careful and objective analysis of a number of issues concerning ACORN," the letter says.

Specifically, Conyers and Frank want CRS to provide details about the "pending and proposed [civil, criminal, congressional and internal] investigations" into ACORN, as well as requests for probes by lawmakers; details about the federal funds ACORN has received from various government agencies over the past five years; a description "of all instances, if any where ACORN violated the terms of its federal funding"; and the extent to which ACORN has helped place homeless and low-income families into homes.

Additionally, Conyers and Frank want the report to include details about the impact on elections from phony voter registration forms ACORN employees have filled out, and whether the undercover videos taken earlier this year at a few ACORN offices violated federal and state wiretapping laws.

Lastly, CRS was asked to determine whether the "Defund ACORN Act," an amendment sponsored by Issa that passed the House last week and other pieces of legislation aimed at specifically stripping ACORN of federal funds are unconstitutional or "represent an unlawful bill of attainder."

The claim that the "Defund ACORN Act" represented a bill-of-attainder violation was mentioned by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York, last week after the passage of the amendment.

"The Constitution says that Congress shall never pass a bill of attainder," Nadler said during a floor speech after last week's vote. "Bills of attainder, no matter what their form, apply either to a named individual or to easily ascertainable members of a group, to inflict punishment. That's exactly what this amendment does.

"It may be that ACORN is guilty of various infractions, and, if so, it ought to be vetted, or maybe sanctioned, by the appropriate administrative agency or by the judiciary. Congress must not be in the business of punishing individual organizations or people without trial."

House Liberals Write Directly to Obama; No Public Option, No Support

2009-09-03T20:46:00.004-04:00

by Greg Sargent (The Plum Line)

In a letter delivered to the White House moments ago, the two leaders of the bloc of House progressives bluntly told President Obama that they will not support any health care plan without a public option in it — and demanded a meeting to inform him face to face.

The not-yet-released letter — the first joint statement from progressives since news emerged that Obama might not address the public option in next week’s speech — is their sharpest challenge yet to the president, given the extraordinary sensitivity of this political moment. The letter urges him to mention the public option in his speech.

“Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Mediare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable,” reads the letter, which was sent over by a source. It was signed by Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Raul Grijalva, the two leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“A health reform bill without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs,” the letter continues. “We cannot vote for anything less.”

“We look forward to meeting with you regarding a robust public option in any final health reform bill and request that that meeting take place as soon as possible,” the letter says.

Last month, five dozen House liberals wrote a letter to Nancy Pelosi ruling out support for any bill without the public option. While today’s letter doesn’t bear all those signatures, it signals that House progressive leaders intend to try to maintain a united, potentially confrontational front even as the president prepares to make his case in a major, make-or-break address to Congress.

Should Obama jettison the public option, progressives will come under tremendous pressure to back the plan anyway. White House advisers will likely insist that liberals mustn’t deny the president a historic victory and enable a defeat that could cripple the first African-American presidency.

The Progress Report

2009-08-29T16:27:00.001-04:00

August 28, 2009 by Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Nate Carlile, and Zaid Jilani
ECONOMY Stimulating Hypocrisy

Earlier this year, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 without a single Republican vote in the House of Representatives and with the support of only three Republicans in the Senate. This stimulus bill, which included $552 billion in spending and $275 billion in tax cuts, has provided much-needed support to state and local economies across the country. Cognizant to this fact, conservatives have jumped on the chance to personally deliver stimulus money to their cash-strapped states and districts, while conveniently brushing past their original opposition. A two-faced approach to the stimulus debate has become routine for many Republicans, with many GOP lawmakers who are standing against the stimulus in Washington, D.C., but touting it when they travel home to their constituents.

CONGRESSIONAL HYPOCRITES: Several House Republicans who opposed the Recovery Act quickly returned to their districts to tout projects that it funded. Stimulus opponent Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) met with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin (D) and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently to solicit stimulus money for streetcar expansions and road repairs. Cao proudly boasted that he is looking "at federal monies that the state has and channeling more of that money to the district." Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) earlier this month asked for stimulus funds to be diverted into paying down the deficit rather than paying it out to states. But the same day he took credit for the construction site at Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County, Kentucky -- a project that was funded in large part by the Recovery Act. One of the most brazen acts of hypocrisy came from House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who has repeatedly claimed that the stimulus is "failing" to create jobs. Earlier this month, Cantor appeared at a job fair in Midlothian, VA, to demonstrate how he is working on "long-term solutions that will put...Virginia workers back on the path to financial stability." But scores of jobs advertised at the jobs fair were created by the stimulus, and Chesterfield County, where the fair was being held, will receive more than $38 million in stimulus funding over the next two years.

HYPOCRITICAL GOVERNORS: Republican governors lined up to attack the Recovery Act and oppose its passage as well. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA), said if he was still a member of Congress he would've voted against the stimulus and wrote an op-ed in Politico lambasting the Recovery Act's effect, calling it the "stimulus that has not stimulated." Yet the very next day, he appeared with constituents in Louisiana to present a jumbo-sized check of federal grant money authorized under the Recovery Act to residents of Vernon Parish. He later toured the state in a "Louisiana Working" tour, handing out millions of dollars of stimulus money while simultaneously attacking "Washington Spending." Similarly, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last year titled "Don't Bail Out My State," proudly boasting about being the only governor to travel to Washington to lobby against the stimulus package. Yet after the legislation was passed, Sanford changed his mind and told reporters that being against the Recovery Act "doesn't preclude taking the money." In April, Sanford became the last governor to seek economic recovery funds.

THE STIMULUS IS WORKING: The Council of Economic Advisers, in a report released earlier this month, called the Recovery Act the "boldest countercyclical fiscal stimulus in American history" and concluded that the stimulus added nearly 500,000 jobs to the economy in the second quarter of 2009 that would not have been there without it. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), one of the few Republicans who voted in favor of the stimulus, noted last March that even "those who were opposed to the stimulus spending will see some of the projects that are underway in their communities as they've initiated." Snowe said she believes that the effect of the spending has been to create an "amazing" number of projects in her home state. Many conservatives who opposed the stimulus or the idea of Keynesian spending in general have started to line up to defend the Recovery Act. On Aug. 7, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who served as Sen. John McCain's (R-AZ) chief economic adviser during his 2008 campaign, told reporters that "no one would argue that the stimulus has done nothing." Three days later, Niall Ferguson of the conservative Hoover Institution said the Recovery Act "has clearly made a significant contribution to stabilizing the US economy."

Concerted Effort Needed to Remove Glenn Beck

2009-08-06T07:29:00.001-04:00

As you may know, right-wing talk show hosts have been bringing race-based fear mongering into the mainstream, but FOX's Glenn Beck just took it to another level. On Tuesday, Beck said:

This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people... this guy is, I believe, a racist.
It's part of a larger argument Beck has been making: that President Obama wants to serve the needs of Black communities at White people's expense. This kind of talk stirs up fear, hate, and it can lead to violence.

I've joined ColorOfChange.org's effort to stop Glenn Beck. ColorOfChange is already putting calls into Beck's advertisers, asking them if they want to be associated with this kind of racist hate and fear-mongering. When the advertisers see that tens of thousands of us are behind that question, I believe they'll move their advertising dollars elsewhere, and his show and platform will be history.

Will you take a stand and be counted, and invite your friends and family to do the same? It takes just a moment:

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/?id=1790-114613

Glenn Beck is appealing to the worst in America. Of course, some Americans refuse to accept the fact that our president is Black or the idea that he could truly serve all Americans. But the only way these views fade away is if they're not reinforced by mainstream society. Instead, folks like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh are exploiting racism and race-based fear to bump their ratings, stirring up racial discord in the process.

The dangers of these tactics are real. We saw the same dynamic during the presidential race: By the end, the McCain/Palin campaign was unable to control the violent energy whipped up by their race-baiting. It resulted in an unprecedented number of threats on Obama's life, a rise in the number of hate groups, and an increase in the number of threats and crimes against immigrants and Black people.

FOX has a horrible track record on pushing racist propaganda, but Glenn Beck appears to be taking the network to an even lower standard. He's trying to divide and distract America when we should be coming together and talking about issues that really matter--like health care and the economy.

The good news is that we have the power to stop this. All major media is funded by advertising. And advertisers care more than anything what consumers think. If we want to change what's happening and put an end to folks like Glenn Beck having a platform, we can do it.

It's up to us, and it can start now. Please join me:

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/?id=1790-114613

Thanks.

Here are some links to more info:

"Beck: Obama has 'exposed himself as a guy' with 'a deep seated hatred for white people'"
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907280008

"Glenn Beck: Obama agenda driven by 'reparations' and desire to 'settle old racial scores'"
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907230040

"MSNBC's Deutsch encourages viewers to demand advertisers on Beck's show spend money elsewhere"
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907290037

"On Television and Radio, Talk of Obama's Citizenship"
http://tinyurl.com/mb467j

Republicans, Can You Answer These Questions Truthfully About the "Obama Economy" ?

2009-08-05T09:18:00.003-04:00

by Andy Ostroy

The Republican party's love affair with former President Ronald Reagan took on Mark Sanford-like Argentinian proportions after eight miserable years of George Bush. To conservatives today, Reagan is God. To Democrats, he's an overrated myth who tripled the deficit and doesn't deserve the hype. But, he was a masterful politician who brilliantly asked Americans during a 1980 televised debate with then-incumbent Jimmy Carter, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The rest is campaign history.

With the country still reeling from the impact of the worst financial crisis not seen in 80 years, perhaps it's time that that other masterful politician, President Barack Obama, defend his nascent administration's fiscal policies by revisiting and re-phrasing that legendary question: Is the economy stronger now than when Bush left office? It's a really simple question, and one that cuts right through the rampant partisan rhetoric polluting the airwaves today.

So here's a little test for our Republican friends to help them decide the status of the nation's economy. I dare them to answer these questions truthfully, as Americans first, and not as transparent partisan stooges:

1. Is the stock market stronger today than when Bush left office?
2. Is the banking industry stronger than when Bush left office?
3. Are Wall Street companies (JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, etc) doing better today than when Bush left office?
4. Are the credit markets doing better than when Bush left office?
5. Is the auto industry doing better than when Bush left office?
6. Are the housing markets doing better than when Bush left office?
7. Are retailers doing better than when Bush left office?
8. Is the technology industry doing better than when Bush left office?
0. Are monthly jobless claims lower than when Bush left office?
10. Is consumer confidence higher than when Bush left office?

Of course, the answer to every single one of these black and white questions is yes. Conclusion? It's abundantly clear that President Obama's stewardship of the economy has resulted in tremendous improvement from the near-abyss the nation fell into last Fall at the end of Bush's presidency. While Republicans can vehemently criticize Obama's stimulus plan and disingenuously declare its failure all they want, the facts speak for themselves.

Nice work, President Obama. Keep it up. While Republicans may never thank you, their businesses, jobs, homes and savings will.

On another note, we could use your help at The The Adrienne Shelly Foundation. We're a 501 c 3 tax-exempt, non-profit organization dedicated in my late wife's honor, and with a simple mission: supporting women filmmakers. Adrienne, who wrote, directed and starred in the hit film WAITRESS, was killed November 1, 2006. Through the Foundation, her commitment to filmmaking lives on. We've established scholarships, grants, finishing funds, screenwriting fellowships and living stipends at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts/Kanbar Institute of Film; Columbia University; American Film Institute; Women in Film; IFP; the Nantucket Film Festival; the Tribeca Film Institute; and the Sundance Institute. Your generous contribution will go a long way towards helping us achieve this very important mission. Please click here to make a donation. Thank you.

Erik Prince of Blackwater accused of murder

2009-08-05T08:09:00.001-04:00

by Jeremy Scahill

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct. Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area. They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater's motion to dismiss the case. Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.

The former employee, identified in the court documents as "John Doe #2," is a former member of Blackwater's management team, according to a source close to the case. Doe #2 alleges in a sworn declaration that, based on information provided to him by former colleagues, "it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct." John Doe #2 says he worked at Blackwater for four years; his identity is concealed in the sworn declaration because he "fear[s] violence against me in retaliation for submitting this Declaration." He also alleges, "On several occasions after my departure from Mr. Prince's employ, Mr. Prince's management has personally threatened me with death and violence."

In a separate sworn statement, the former US marine who worked for Blackwater in Iraq alleges that he has "learned from my Blackwater colleagues and former colleagues that one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information about Erik Prince and Blackwater have been killed in suspicious circumstances." Identified as "John Doe #1," he says he "joined Blackwater and deployed to Iraq to guard State Department and other American government personnel." It is not clear if Doe #1 is still working with the company as he states he is "scheduled to deploy in the immediate future to Iraq." Like Doe #2, he states that he fears "violence" against him for "submitting this Declaration." No further details on the alleged murder(s) are provided.

"Mr. Prince feared, and continues to fear, that the federal authorities will detect and prosecute his various criminal deeds," states Doe #2. "On more than one occasion, Mr. Prince and his top managers gave orders to destroy emails and other documents. Many incriminating videotapes, documents and emails have been shredded and destroyed."

The Nation cannot independently verify the identities of the two individuals, their roles at Blackwater or what motivated them to provide sworn testimony in these civil cases. Both individuals state that they have previously cooperated with federal prosecutors conducting a criminal inquiry into Blackwater.

"It's a pending investigation, so we cannot comment on any matters in front of a Grand Jury or if a Grand Jury even exists on these matters," John Roth, the spokesperson for the US Attorney's office in the District of Columbia, told The Nation. "It would be a crime if we did that." Asked specifically about whether there is a criminal investigation into Prince regarding the murder allegations and other charges, Roth said: "We would not be able to comment on what we are or are not doing in regards to any possible investigation involving an uncharged individual."

The Nation repeatedly attempted to contact spokespeople for Prince or his companies at numerous email addresses and telephone numbers. When a company representative was reached by phone and asked to comment, she said, "Unfortunately no one can help you in that area." The representative then said that she would pass along The Nation's request. As this article goes to press, no company representative has responded further to The Nation.

Doe #2 states in the declaration that he has also provided the information contained in his statement "in grand jury proceedings convened by the United States Department of Justice." Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury in the aftermath of the September 16, 2007, Nisour Square shootings in Baghdad, which left seventeen Iraqis dead. Five Blackwater employees are awaiting trial on several manslaughter charges and a sixth, Jeremy Ridgeway, has already pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempting to commit manslaughter and is cooperating with prosecutors. It is not clear whether Doe #2 testified in front of the Nisour Square grand jury or in front of a separate grand jury.

The two declarations are each five pages long and contain a series of devastating allegations concerning Erik Prince and his network of companies, which now operate under the banner of Xe Services LLC. Among those leveled by Doe #2 is that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe":

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."

Among the additional allegations made by Doe #1 is that "Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq." He states that he personally witnessed weapons being "pulled out" from dog food bags. Doe #2 alleges that "Prince and his employees arranged for the weapons to be polywrapped and smuggled into Iraq on Mr. Prince's private planes, which operated under the name Presidential Airlines," adding that Prince "generated substantial revenues from participating in the illegal arms trade."

Doe #2 states: "Using his various companies, [Prince] procured and distributed various weapons, including unlawful weapons such as sawed off semi-automatic machine guns with silencers, through unlawful channels of distribution." Blackwater "was not abiding by the terms of the contract with the State Department and was deceiving the State Department," according to Doe #1.

This is not the first time an allegation has surfaced that Blackwater used dog food bags to smuggle weapons into Iraq. ABC News's Brian Ross reported in November 2008 that a "federal grand jury in North Carolina is investigating allegations the controversial private security firm Blackwater illegally shipped assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in large sacks of dog food." Another former Blackwater employee has also confirmed this information to The Nation.

Both individuals allege that Prince and Blackwater deployed individuals to Iraq who, in the words of Doe #1, "were not properly vetted and cleared by the State Department." Doe #2 adds that "Prince ignored the advice and pleas from certain employees, who sought to stop the unnecessary killing of innocent Iraqis." Doe #2 further states that some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy "unfit men" and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were "the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to 'kill ragheads' or achieve 'kills' or 'body counts,'" as well as "excessive drinking" and "steroid use." However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, "Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to 'stop costing the company money.'"

Doe #2 also says Prince "repeatedly ignored the assessments done by mental health professionals, and instead terminated those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men." He says Prince and then-company president Gary Jackson "hid from Department of State the fact that they were deploying men to Iraq over the objections of mental health professionals and security professionals in the field," saying they "knew the men being deployed were not suitable candidates for carrying lethal weaponry, but did not care because deployments meant more money."

Doe #1 states that "Blackwater knew that certain of its personnel intentionally used excessive and unjustified deadly force, and in some instances used unauthorized weapons, to kill or seriously injure innocent Iraqi civilians." He concludes, "Blackwater did nothing to stop this misconduct." Doe #1 states that he "personally observed multiple incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using unnecessary, excessive and unjustified deadly force." He then cites several specific examples of Blackwater personnel firing at civilians, killing or "seriously" wounding them, and then failing to report the incidents to the State Department.

Doe #1 also alleges that "all of these incidents of excessive force were initially videotaped and voice recorded," but that "Immediately after the day concluded, we would watch the video in a session called a 'hot wash.' Immediately after the hotwashing, the video was erased to prevent anyone other than Blackwater personnel seeing what had actually occurred." Blackwater, he says, "did not provide the video to the State Department."

Doe #2 expands on the issue of unconventional weapons, alleging Prince "made available to his employees in Iraq various weapons not authorized by the United States contracting authorities, such as hand grenades and hand grenade launchers. Mr. Prince's employees repeatedly used this illegal weaponry in Iraq, unnecessarily killing scores of innocent Iraqis." Specifically, he alleges that Prince "obtained illegal ammunition from an American company called LeMas. This company sold ammunition designed to explode after penetrating within the human body. Mr. Prince's employees repeatedly used this illegal ammunition in Iraq to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis."

Blackwater has gone through an intricate rebranding process in the twelve years it has been in business, changing its name and logo several times. Prince also has created more than a dozen affiliate companies, some of which are registered offshore and whose operations are shrouded in secrecy. According to Doe #2, "Prince created and operated this web of companies in order to obscure wrongdoing, fraud and other crimes."

"For example, Mr. Prince transferred funds from one company (Blackwater) to another (Greystone) whenever necessary to avoid detection of his money laundering and tax evasion schemes." He added: "Mr. Prince contributed his personal wealth to fund the operations of the Prince companies whenever he deemed such funding necessary. Likewise, Mr. Prince took funds out of the Prince companies and placed the funds in his personal accounts at will."

Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, "If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians." Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.

"Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn't exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated," Kucinich said.

A hearing before Judge Ellis in the civil cases against Blackwater is scheduled for August 7.

The Democratic Leadership Council

2009-08-04T12:14:00.000-04:00

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In late July 2006, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) held a three-day conference in Colorado during which it unveiled a policy manifesto, presented by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), aimed at recapturing the White House and Congress. According to the Los Angeles Times: "Clinton wielded a red-white-and-blue bound copy of the group's initiative and used a measured tone to paint a grim portrait of the last five years under President [George W.] Bush. 'Americans are earning less while the costs of a middle-class life have soared,' she said. 'College costs, up 50% in the five years. Healthcare, 73%. Gasoline, more than 100%.'" Although the conference, which was attended by four likely Democratic presidential contenders-Clinton, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson-as well as some 400 elected leaders from the local and state levels, covered everything from college tuition to healthcare, the Iraq War "was scarcely mentioned" (Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2006).

But it is the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's heavy-handed war on terror, both largely supported by DLC leaders, that are at the center of a growing debate among Democrats about the future direction of the party. Instead of addressing the debate head on, Clinton argued that the party "will not let the president and the Republicans off the hook for the mistakes they've made and the disastrous policies they have followed abroad. We'll hold them accountable every bit as much for national security and homeland security as for their failure to provide Americans with economic security." About Iraq, Clinton managed to say that a Democratic-led Congress "would investigate no-bid contracts, the role oil companies are playing in Iraq, and supply problems that have plagued U.S. combat troops" (Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2006).

The DLC is a nonprofit corporation organized under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Service code. According to the DLC, the council "is not a political committee and is not organized to influence elections." Rather, the DLC "seeks to define and galvanize popular support for a new public philosophy built on progressive ideals, mainstream values, and innovative, non-bureaucratic, market-based solutions." The DLC publishes the magazine Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century and an online newsletter called New Dem Dispatch. Closely associated and sharing offices with the DLC is the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a think tank sponsored by the Third Way Foundation that proposes policy agendas for the so-called third way movement of what the DLC designates the "New Democrats."

The DLC's "New Democrat Credo" declares: "In keeping with our party's grand tradition, we reaffirm Jefferson's belief in individual liberty and capacity for self-government. We endorse Jackson's credo of equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none. We embrace Roosevelt's thirst for innovation and Kennedy's summons to civic duty. And we intend to carry on Clinton's insistence upon new means to achieve progressive ideals."

The DLC's "leadership team" includes Vilsack, chairman; Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, vice-chairman; Senator Clinton, chair of the DLC's American Dream Initiative; Al From, chief executive officer; and Bruce Reed, president. From and Reed, together with Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, are the main architects of the DLC's center-right political agendas, which are laid out in more detail in the reports of the PPI and in articles in Blueprint and New Dem Dispatch.

The DLC comprises three main clusters of New Democrats. The largest is a group of nearly 400 national, state, and local legislators and officials. This contingent includes a wide range of centrist and conservative Democrats, including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. (Perhaps the DLC's political thrust is more precisely defined by a list of prominent Democrats who have not lent their names to the DLC, including such figures as Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich.)

Aside from the DLC's leadership team, the major forces of the New Democrat movement are 45 House members and 20 senators who compose the New Democrat coalitions in Congress. According to the DLC, "Together, they are among the most influential forces in the United States Congress." In the House, the coalition's leaders are California Rep. Ellen Tauscher, Wisconsin Rep. Ron Kind, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, and Alabama Rep. Artur Davis.

The Senate New Democrat Coalition (SNDC) was formed in 2000 by Bayh, Graham, Lieberman, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, and Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln in order "to provide a unified voice in the U.S. Senate for progressive ideas, mainstream values, and innovative, market-based policy solutions," according to the DLC. Other members of the SNDC-which the DLC calls "the strongest and most unified Democratic group in the Senate"-include Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson, and Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

The DLC was established in the wake of President Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory, in which he won 49 states, over Democrat Walter Mondale. During the Democratic convention in San Francisco, Mondale had successfully beat back a challenge from Gary Hart, who predicted that unless the Democratic Party adopted a new image it would be decisively defeated. Mondale proved unable to respond effectively to charges from the Republican right and neoconservative Democrats that the Democratic Party was the party of progressives-which Jeane Kirkpatrick variously labeled as the "San Francisco Democrats" and the "blame America first" Democrats-who were out of touch with mainstream America. As Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein concluded in their book Storming the Gates, "Mondale's landslide defeat exposed as a dead end the vision of regaining the White House by mobilizing an army of the disaffected with a message of unreconstructed liberalism."

Pondering the Mondale defeat, a gathering coalition of Southern Democrats and northern neoliberals expressed concerns that the Democratic Party faced extinction, particularly in the South and West, if the party continued to rely on its New Deal message of government intervention and kept catering to traditional constituencies of labor, minorities, and anti-war progressives. In 1985, Al From, an aide to Rep. Gillis Long (D-LA), took the lead in formulating a new messaging strategy for the party's centrists, neoliberals, and conservatives. Will Marshall, at that time Long's policy analyst and speechwriter, worked closely with From to establish the DLC and then became its first policy director.

In his "Saving the Democratic Party" memo of January 1985, From advocated the formation of a "governing council" that would draft a "blueprint" for reforming the party. According to From, the new leadership should aim to create distance from "the new bosses"-organized labor, feminists, and other progressive constituency groups-that were keeping the party from modernizing. From's memo sparked the formation of the Democratic Leadership Council in early 1985. According to Balz and Brownstein, "Within a few weeks, it counted 75 members, primarily governors and members of Congress, most of them from the Sunbelt, and almost all of them white; liberal critics instantly dubbed the group 'the white male caucus.'"

Although DLC members shared, for the most part, the neoliberal perspective of centrist Democrats such as Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis, they took a much harsher, conservative stance on social justice and foreign policy issues. Regarding foreign policy, the DLC attempted to resurrect the hardline anticommunism of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson but rejected the New Deal politics that Jackson and other traditional "New Deal liberals" embraced. In the late 1980s, DLC Democrats supported aid to the Contras, applauded Reagan's "Evil Empire" rhetoric, and offered their support to those militarists calling for missile defense and rejecting arms control negotiations. While the neoliberals foresaw an end to the Cold War, the DLC still viewed the Soviet Union as an unmitigated threat.

In a 1986 conference on the legacy of "Great Society" of the Johnson administration, DLC chairman Gov. Charles Robb of Virginia took up the neoconservative critique of liberalism first articulated in the early 1970s by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, and other neoconservatives. According to Robb, "While racial discrimination has by no means vanished from our society, it's time to shift the primary focus from racism-the traditional enemy without-to self-defeating patterns of behavior-the enemy within." This speech signaled the end of the "New Politics" of the 1960s and 1970s in the Democratic Party and the rise of a new social conservatism in the party. Robb's speech opened room for Democratic Party stalwarts to back away from political agendas that proposed government initiatives to address poverty, discrimination, and crime, and to join the traditional conservatives and neoconservatives in opposing affirmative action, social safety-net programs, and job-creation initiatives. Thus, the New Democrats of the DLC added their voices to the chorus of those calling for stiffer sentences, an end to affirmative action, reduced welfare benefits, and less progressive tax policies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the defeat of neoliberal technocrat Dukakis opened up new political room for the DLC and validated its claim that a conservative agenda was the only hope for reviving the Democratic Party. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who accepted From's request to become DLC chairman in 1990, helped synthesize the various currents driving the Democratic Party to leave both "New Deal" nostalgia and "New Politics" of the 1960s progressives behind. Clinton successfully redefined the Democratic Party, molding it into an organization led by New Democrats, who seized hold of the political center by targeting swing votes of the middle class and advocating the politics of growth rather than redistribution and safety nets. Clinton leaned heavily on the polling of Yale University political scientist Stanley Greenberg and on the policy framework outlined by two analysts from the PPI in their 1989 paper "The Politics of Evasion."

In many ways, it was Bill Clinton-not the DLC-who succeeded in giving a human face and viable political program to the New Democrats. Although Clinton adopted most of the DLC platform as his own, he softened its hard ideological edge through compromise and inclusion, drawing in the party's left-center and center-right. Ralph Nader and other critics of Clinton and the DLC contend that Clinton was a creature of the DLC. But Clinton proved larger than the DLC ideologues, and it was Clinton who made the DLC a major force in the Democratic Party rather than the other way around, as the DLC leadership implies when it takes credit for the Democratic presidential victories of the 1990s.

Writing shortly before the November 2000 presidential election, John Nichols observed that the DLC had been founded "with essentially the same purpose as the Christian Coalition," namely, "to pull a broad political party dramatically to the right." According to Nichols, "The DLC has been far more successful than its headline-grabbing Republican counterpart" (Progressive, October 2000). Although the DLC can rightly claim to have yanked the Democratic Party to the right, it has repeatedly failed to sideline what PPI president Marshall has disparaging labeled "the party traditionalists." Since its founding, the DLC has aimed to subsume all Democrats under its ideological umbrella. But persistent (and resurgent) resistance to neoliberal prescriptions, neoconservative foreign policy, and social conservative domestic policies has curtailed DLC ambitions and obliged it to operate more as a powerful agenda-setting and lobbying group within the party. In effect, the DLC has focused on controlling the party's platform and leadership rather than on selling "big tent" politics to all Democratic Party constituencies.

As Kenneth Baer observed in his book Reinventing Democrats, the DLC, after several clashes with the leadership of the party's progressives and traditional liberals, refined its mission to function as "an elite organization funded by elite-corporate and private-donors." However, leading DLC voices such as Al From have continued to harbor hopes that the DLC and its think tank will one day constitute the core of the Democratic Party, not just a fifth column working within the party's elite.

When Al Gore, a DLC member since its first years, chose Lieberman, the DLC chairman, to be his presidential running mate, the DLC staff felt triumphant. Although Gore was not a neoliberal "true believer" or national security militarist like Lieberman, in the lead-up to the 2000 party convention, From predicted that soon "We'll finally be able to proclaim that all Democrats are, indeed, New Democrats" (Progressive, October 2000).

More recently, former candidate Howard Dean's criticism that the DLC and its "New Democratic agenda" constituted "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party" highlighted long-running tensions between the party's center-left and center-right. Dean was roundly criticized for dividing the Democratic Party when unity was needed to defeat George W. Bush. The party's leading conservative and then-chair Lieberman lambasted Dean, claiming that his rival for the nomination "essentially pushes Bill Clinton out of the Democratic Party" along with "hundreds of governors and local officials" who consider themselves part of the New Democrat movement. Throughout his campaign, Dean characterized his candidacy as representing "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" (Los Angeles Times, December 25, 2003).

Such language alarmed the center-right of the party, especially the DLC leadership. Seven months before Dean took the DLC to task for pushing the party to the right, the DLC had mounted an initiative to discredit Dean. In May 2003, From and Bruce Reed sent a memo to party leaders arguing that Dean's efforts to energize traditional party constituencies around a populist, anti-war, and liberal message would doom the party to the fates suffered by George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984. Then, at the July 2003 DLC annual conference, the DLC leadership blasted Dean and other presidential hopefuls for flirting with a "far-left" critique of the Bush administration and pointed out the political folly of attacking Bush's tax cuts and his national security leadership. Commenting on the "Democratic Weaselship Council" in Salon.com, Joan Walsh observed that the DLC was "in danger of adopting a political terror strategy [that] involves doing the enemy's work for them: damaging your own party's candidates by declaring them ideologically flawed and unelectable" (Salon.com, July 29, 200 3).

Both the DLC and the closely associated PPI have elicited sharp criticism from several centrist and progressive factions of the Democratic Party. One of the most outspoken DLC critics is Jesse Jackson, who once said that DLC stands for "Democrats for the Leadership Class" (Progressive, October 2000). Nader has also challenged the DLC's attempt to define itself as centrist: "So right-wing is the DLC, mounted imperiously on their sagging party, that even opposing Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, that cause huge federal deficits and program cuts in necessities such as health, education, environmental protection, and children's well-being, is considered ultra-liberal and contrary to winning campaigns" (In the Public Interest, August 1, 2003). Nader continued: "If there were a superlative to the word 'hubris,' it would come close to describing Al From and his DLC cohorts. With unseemly regularity, they take credit for all Democratic victories as having been rooted in their philosophy of turn-your-back-on-organized labor and open-your-pockets-to-corporations (who fund the DLC, incidentally). All Democratic defeats are explained as owing to losing candidates being too 'left' or too 'populist.'"

Although Clinton's personal charisma and political smarts were the main factors in the success and corresponding re-imaging of the Democratic Party, From, Marshall, and the DLC leadership can claim at least partial credit in moving the core Democratic Party platform closer to the DLC's modernizing agenda, which stresses market-based solutions, an alignment with the military-industrial complex, and a distancing from the identity politics and bothersome demands of the "New Politics" constituencies that emerged in the late 1960s. To its credit, the DLC and PPI have helped the Democratic Party redefine itself as a party that not only represents minorities and the disenfranchised but also the mainstream. But blinded by their own triumphalism, New Democrat ideologues fail to acknowledge that they have fallen in line behind the ills of neoliberals, neoconservatives, militarists, and social conservatives who have transformed the Republican Party over the past three decades. What's more, the DLC (with PPI) has also proved itself an effective shill for transnational Wall Street capitalists, although it faces competition in this role from the Republican Party and its array of affiliated policy institutes and think tanks. Such rightward leanings prompted the America Prospect's Robert Kuttner to call the DLC the "Republicans' Favorite Democrats" (American Prospect, July 1, 2002).

Regarding foreign policy, the DLC proposes a "third way-between the neo-imperial right and the non-interventionist left." The DLC labels its stance on foreign policy "progressive internationalism," which it defines as "the belief that America can best defend itself by building a world safe for individual liberty and democracy." Following this logic, the group proclaims: "We therefore support the bold exercise of American power, not to dominate but to shape alliances and international institutions that share a common commitment to liberal values. The way to keep America safe and strong is not to impose our will on others or pursue a narrow, selfish nationalism that betrays our best values, but to lead the world toward political and economic freedom." When the DLC gets to the specifics of foreign policy, such as supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there seems to be little separating its progressive internationalism from the "neo-imperial" foreign policy of the Bush administration and its neoconservative advisers. According to the PPI, "We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of U.S. global leadership by harnessing America's awesome power to universal values of liberal democracy" (see Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Policy, DLC, October 30, 2003).

The DLC and its close associate, the PPI, receive grants from many Fortune 500 companies and various right-wing foundations such as the Bradley Foundation. According to the a 2002 study by the Capital Research Center, corporate contributors to the PPI have included the AT&T Foundation, Eastman Kodak Charitable Trust, Prudential Foundation, Georgia-Pacific Foundation, Chevron, and Amoco Foundation. The Third Way Foundation, an umbrella group of the New Democrats in the DLC, receives funding from the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Ameritech Foundation, and General Mills Foundation. According to John Nichols in the Progressive, the DLC has had funding from Bank One, Citigroup, Dow Chemical, DuPont, General Electric, Health Insurance Corporation, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Occidental Petroleum, and Raytheon (Progressive, October 2000).

"Sicko" Factual Backup by Michael Moore

2009-08-04T09:27:00.002-04:00

'SiCKO' Factual Backup

SiCKO: There are nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually reported that 54.5 million people were uninsured for at least part of the year. Health Insurance Coverage: Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, 2006. Centers for Disease Control. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur200706.pdf
The amount of uninsured is rising every year, as premiums continue to skyrocket and wages stagnate. From 2004 to 2005 the number of uninsured rose 1.3 million, and rose up nearly 6 million from 2001-2005. Leighton Ku, "Census Revises Estimates Of The Number Of Uninsured People," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 5, 2007 http://www.cbpp.org/4-5-07health.htm. With 44.8 uninsured in 2005, in 2007 the number will be much higher. Professors Todd Gilmer and Richard Kronick, in "It's The Premiums, Stupid: Projections Of The Uninsured Through 2013," Health Affairs, 10.1377/hlthaff.w5.143, "project that the number of non-elderly uninsured Americans will grow from forty-five million in 2003 to fifty-six million by 2013." According to these authors, by now the number of non-elderly uninsured by this date clearly would be nearly 50 million.
SiCKO: 18,000 Americans will die this year simply because they're uninsured.

According to the Institute of Medicine, "lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Although America leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage." Insuring America's Health: Principles and Recommendations, Institute of Medicine, January 2004.
http://www.iom.edu/?id=19175
SiCKO: Richard Nixon and John Ehrlichman are heard discussing the concept of a health maintenance organization in Oval Office Recordings.

On February 17, 1971, Richard Nixon met with John Ehrlichman to discuss the Vice President's position on health maintenance organizations, as heard in the film. The Miller Center of Public Affairs has this audio recording (conversation number 450-23. "Richard Nixon - Oval Office Recordings,"
http://millercenter.virginia.edu/scripps/digitalarchive/presidentialrecordings
/nixon/oval?PHPSESSID=b813e56b3017d097cd176720bc10fc74
The next day, Nixon called for a "new national health strategy" that had four points for expanding the proliferation of health maintenance organizations, or HMOs. "Special Message to the Congress Proposing a National Health Strategy," February 18th, 1971, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=3311
The term "health maintenance organization" was coined by Nixon advisor Paul Ellwood. Patricia Bauman, "The Formulation and Evolution of the Health Maintenance Organization Policy, 1970-1973, Social Science & Medicine, vol. 10. 1976. After Congress passed Nixon's HMO Act in 1973, HMOs in America increased nine-fold in just ten years. N. R. Kleinfield, "The King of the HMO Mountain," New York Times, July 31, 1983.
SiCKO: The American Medical Association distributed a record featuring Ronald Reagan discussing the evils of socialized medicine.

Ronald Reagan's recording was widely available in the 1960s, and was a part of the American Medical Association's "Operation Coffee Cup," a coordinated rebuttal to Democrats' push for Medicare. Max Skidmore, "Ronald Reagan and Operation Coffee Cup: A Hidden Episode in American Political History," Journal of American Culture, vol. 12. 1989.
SiCKO: $100 million spent to defeat Hillary's health care plan.

"Even before debate began in Congress, a powerful coalition had been cobbled together to fight Clintoncare, as opponents labeled it - congressional Republicans, the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the Business Roundtable, the Christian Coalition, the conservative radio talk show network. Those groups spent between $100 million and $ 300 million to defeat it. And the battle was fought like a presidential campaign - with a TV advertising campaign, a network of field operatives and public relations experts to lobby members of Congress back in their districts." Rob Christensen, "Who killed health care reform? Answer: Everyone," News & Observer, June 19, 1996.
"In 1993-94, the Health Insurance Association of America, a trade group, spent about $15 million on advertising to defeat Clinton's proposed overhaul of the nation's health care system." John MacDonald, "Proponents, Opponents Join Battle Over Drug Price Limits," Hartford Courant, June 21, 2000.
"'We spent $1.4 million to fight President Clinton's plan,' [Mike Russell of the Christian Coalition] says." Harold Cox, "Business will spearhead Health Reform II ; Old enemies of Clinton's plan in lead," Washington Times, December 27, 1994.
"A study by Citizen Action, a consumer group, reports that doctors, hospitals, insurance companies and other providers of medical services made campaign contributions of $ 79 million during the 1993-1994 election cycle. The insurance industry passed out $16 million. The American Medical Association, which objects to cost-control measures, contributed $ 3 million." Froma Harrop, "The big lie about health reform," Rocky Mountain News, August 20, 1995.
"According to [Citizens for a Sound Economy] spokesman Brent Bahler, the group has not bought any airtime for commercials but has 'tentative plans' for a grassroots advocacy effort that would include an advertising component. Last year, Bahler said, the CSE spent more than $2 million on print, radio and television advertising to defeat Clinton's health care reform plan." James A. Barnes, "RNC Turns To TV Ads On Budget," National Journal, 5.16.95.
SiCKO: The United States is ranked #37 as a health system by the World Health Organization.

"The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds." "World Health Organization Assesses The World's Health Systems," Press Release, WHO/44, June 21, 2000. http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2000/en/pr2000-44.html
SiCKO: Health industry companies accused of wrongdoing in Sicko.

Aetna: "Aetna Inc. … settled with the plaintiffs, which include the medical associations of California and Texas. Aetna agreed to pay the plaintiffs $120 million." Milt Freudenheim, "Class-Action Status Is Upheld for Doctors Suing Insurers," New York Times, September 2, 2004. See also, Susan Beck, "HMO Postmortem," American Lawyer, October 10, 2003. Settlement Agreement, http://www.aetna.com/provider/agreement_with_physicians.html
Blue Cross/Blue Shield: "Sixty-seven Blue Cross/Blue Shield companies across the nation have paid the United States a total of $117 million to settle government claims that Medicare made primary payments for health care services that should have been paid by the Blue Cross/Blue Shield private insurance companies, the Department of Justice announced today." "Blue Cross/Blue Shield Companies Settle Medicare Claims, Pay United States $117 Million, Agree To Share Information," Department of Justice News Release, October 25, 1995.
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/Pre_96/October95/551.txt.html
Cigna: "Cigna Corporation, [has] settled with the plaintiffs, which include the medical associations of California and Texas. … Cigna agreed to pay $85 million." Milt Freudenheim, "Class-Action Status Is Upheld for Doctors Suing Insurers," New York Times, September 2, 2004.
"HCA Inc. (formerly known as Columbia/HCA and HCA - The Healthcare Company) has agreed to pay the United States $631 million in civil penalties and damages arising from false claims the government alleged it submitted to Medicare and other federal health programs, the Justice Department announced today. … Previously, on December 14, 2000, HCA subsidiaries pled guilty to substantial criminal conduct and paid more than $840 million in criminal fines, civil restitution and penalties. Combined with today's separate administrative settlement with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), under which HCA will pay an additional $250 million to resolve overpayment claims arising from certain of its cost reporting practices, the government will have recovered $1.7 billion from HCA, by far the largest recovery ever reached by the government in a health care fraud investigation." "Largest Health Care Fraud Case In U.S. History Settled; HCA Investigation Nets Record Total Of $1.7 Billion," Department of Justice News Release, June 26, 2003.
http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm
SiCKO: Executive Compensation

Michael B McAllister earned $3.33 million in compensation as CEO of Humana. "Forbes 2006 Executive Pay list," April 20, 2006.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/12/AG0Q.html.
John W Rowe earned $22.2 million in compensation as CEO of Aetna. Rowe has since left Aetna. "Forbes 2004 Executive Pay list," April 21, 2005.
http://www.forbes.com/static/execpay2005/LIRS5NI.html?passListId=12
&passYear=2005&passListType=Person&uniqueId=S5NI&datatype=Person
Bill McGuire has stock options worth $1.6 billion at the end of 2005, as CEO of UnitedHealth Group. Robert Simison, "SEC Investigates UnitedHealth Over Stock-Options Practices," Bloomberg News, December 27, 2006; Michael Regan, "Business 2006: Who Won, Who Lost," Associated Press,December 26, 2006.
SiCKO: There are four times as many health care lobbyists as there are members of Congress.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), in 2005 there were 2,084 health care lobbyists registered with the federal government. With 535 members of Congress, that's 3.895 lobbyists per member.
SiCKO: Hillary Clinton became the second largest recipient in the Senate of health care industry contributions.

"As she runs for re-election to the Senate from New York this year and lays the groundwork for a possible presidential bid in 2008, Mrs. Clinton is receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers and insurers. Nationwide, she is the No. 2 recipient of donations from the industry, trailing only Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership." Raymond Hernandez and Robert Pear, "Once an Enemy, Health Industry Warms to Clinton," New York Times, July 12, 2006.
SiCKO: Drug industry money to members of Congress, and the president, who led the effort to pass the Medicare Part D prescription drug plan.

"The health industry gave $14 million total to the eleven elected officials largely credited with negotiating the bill. Pharmaceutical company PACs, employees, and their families gave more than $3 million in campaign contributions to (those) eleven elected officials." Buying A Law: Big Pharma's Big Money and the Bush Medicare Plan, Campaign Money Watch, January 2004.
http://www.ourfuture.org/docUploads/donnelly$_1-15-04.pdf
SiCKO: The Medicare Part D plan will hand over $800 billion of our tax dollars to the drug and health insurance industry.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, for the ten-year period, 2006 through 2016, the projected spending is $848 billion. "The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2017," Congressional Budget Office, January 2007. http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/77xx/doc7731/01-24-BudgetOutlook.pdf
SiCKO: The elderly could end up paying more for their prescription drugs than they did before under Part D - and a majority of senior citizens could still pay over $2000 a year.

"For all patients, Medicare covers 75 percent of the first $2,250 worth of drugs. But after that, coverage drops to zero - and doesn't resume until the patient hits $5,100 in expenses. Then Medicare kicks in again, paying 95 percent of costs. But it's this gap - of almost $3,000 - that many sick and disabled seniors call unaffordable." Medicare's 'Donut Hole,' CBS News, July 26, 2006.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/26/eveningnews/main1839288.shtml
"Nearly 7 million seniors and individuals with disabilities who purchased stand-alone prescription drug coverage are now at risk of falling into the 'doughnut hole.' According to a report released today by Senior Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee… nearly 88 percent of new drug plan enrollees, roughly 7 million individuals, are at risk of losing coverage for their medications while they continue to pay monthly premiums to their insurers. The report further details how few individuals have enrolled in plans without doughnut holes, presumably because of the prohibitive cost of such plans." "88% Of New Medicare Drug Program Enrollees At Risk Of Falling Into The 'Doughnut Hole,'" Joint News Release From Representative Charles B. Rangel, Ranking Democrat, Committee On Ways And Means, Representative Pete Stark, Ranking Democrat, Subcommittee On Health, Committee On Ways And Means, Representative Sander M. Levin, Ranking Democrat, Subcommittee On Social Security, Committee On Ways And Means, September 21, 2006.
http://www.house.gov/list/press/wm31_democrats/060921_88
_of_new_medicare_drug_program_enrollees_at_risk_of_falling
_into_the_doughnut_hole.html
"Over the past year, Part D drug prices have increased several times faster than the rate of inflation. Families USA analyzed the prices for 15 of the drugs most frequently prescribed to seniors. We examined prices for each of the plans offered by the largest Part D insurers, which together cover about two-thirds of all Part D beneficiaries. We then compared the lowest available Part D price for each drug in April 2006 with the lowest available price for the same drug in April 2007. The lowest price for every one of the top 15 drugs prescribed to seniors increased, and the median increase was 9.2 percent." Medicare Part D Prices Are Climbing Quickly, FamiliesUSA, April 2007.
http://www.familiesusa.org/assets/pdfs/medicare-part-d-drug-prices.PDF
SiCKO: Fourteen Congressional aides went to work for the industry; Billy Tauzin left Congress to become CEO of PhRMA for a $2 million annual salary.

See, e.g., The Medicare Drug War: An Army of Nearly 1,000 Lobbyists Pushes a Medicare Law that Puts Drug Company and HMO Profits Ahead of Patients and Taxpayers, Public Citizen Congress Watch, June 2004,
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Medicare_Drug_War%20_Report_2004.pdf
"Retiring Rep. Billy Tauzin, R-La., who stepped down earlier this year as chairman of the House committee that regulates the pharmaceutical industry, will become the new president and CEO of the drug industry's top lobbying group…Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer advocacy group, called Tauzin's hiring 'yet another example of how public service is leading to private riches.' Tauzin gets a pay package reportedly worth at least $2 million a year, making him one of the highest-paid lobbyists in Washington." "Tauzin switches sides from drug industry overseer to lobbyist," USA Today, December 15, 2004.. http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/drugs/2004-12-
15-drugs-usat_x.htm
SiCKO: Canadians live three years longer than we do.

The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5, and the life expectancy in Canada is 80.2. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283.
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf.
SiCKO: Tommy Douglas, who pioneered Canada's health care system, was heralded as the nation's singular most important person.

"In November 2004, Canadians voted Tommy Douglas the Greatest Canadian of all time following a nationwide contest. Over 1.2 million votes were cast in a frenzy of voting that took place over six weeks as each of 10 advocates made their case for the Top 10 nominees in special feature programs on CBC Television… . From his first foray into public office politics in 1934 to his post-retirement years in the 1970s, Canada's 'father of Medicare' stayed true to his socialist beliefs -- often at the cost of his own political fortune -- and earned himself the respect of millions of Canadians in the process." "The Greatest Canadian," CBC, 2004. http://www.cbc.ca/greatest
SiCKO: Canadian "wait times" not nearly as long as some try to allege.

According to Statistics Canada, the official government statistical agency, "In 2005, the median waiting time was about 4 weeks for specialist visits, 4 weeks for non-emergency surgery, and 3 weeks for diagnostic tests. Nationally, median waiting times remained stable between 2003 and 2005 - but there were some differences at the provincial level for selected specialized services.… 70 to 80 percent of Canadians find their waiting times acceptable" "Access to health care services in Canada, Waiting times for specialized services (January to December 2005)," Statistics Canada, http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-575-XIE/82-575-
XIE2006002.htm
A recent study of emergency care in Ontario found that overall, "50% of patients triaged as CTAS I [most acute] were seen by a physician within 6 minutes and 86% were seen within 30 minutes of arriving at the [Emergency Department]. In contrast, the 50% of patients triaged as CTAS IV or V who were seen most quickly waited an hour or less, while 1 in 10 waited three hours or more. Understanding Emergency Department Wait Times: How Long Do People Spend in Emergency Departments in Ontario? Canadian Institute for Health Information, January 2007.
http://www.cihi.ca/cihiweb/dispPage.jsp?cw_page=reports_
wait_times_bulletins_e
"Gerard Anderson, a Johns Hopkins health policy professor who has spent his career examining the world's healthcare, said there are delays, but not as many as conservatives state. In Canada, the United Kingdom and France, 'three percent of hospital discharges had delays in treatment,' Anderson told The Miami Herald. 'That's a relatively small number, and they're all elective surgeries, such as hip and knee replacement.' John Dorschner, "'Sicko' film is set to spark debate; Reformers are gearing up for 'Sicko,' the first major movie to examine America's often maligned healthcare system," Miami Herald, June 29, 2007.
SiCKO: Drugs in England only cost $10.

For much of 2006, the standard charge for a prescription was £6.65. "The cost of an NHS prescription in England is to rise by 15p to £6.65 from the start of April." "Prescription charge to rise 15p," BBC News, March 13 2006.
From April 1 2007 to present, the charge is £6.85. "There are many unacceptable inequities and anomalies in the present system. Although around four out of five prescriptions are exempt (see below for list of exempt categories), the price of a prescription (£6.85 from 1 April 2007) often hits those who cannot afford such charges. There are many people with chronic conditions who are not exempt and those on low incomes find it very difficult to pay. This causes a disproportionate levy on a limited section of the population." British Medical Association, "Funding - Prescription Changes," March 2007. http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/FundingPrescriptionCharges
SiCKO: After losing 42,000 civilians in eight months during a vicious bombing campaign during World War II, Britain pulled together and instituted a National Health Insurance program in 1948.

"The Blitz was September 7, 1940 through May 11 1941. "42,000 civilians are estimated to have died during the campaign, with over 50,000 injured, and around 130,000 houses destroyed." See, "Remembering the Blitz,"
http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/exhibits/blitz/intro.html; "Living With War; Air Raids," The Discovery Channel,
http://www.discoverychannel.co.uk/ww2_home/ww2_living_with
_war/index.shtml

"The NHS was set up in 1948 and is now the largest organisation in Europe. It is recognised as one of the best health services in the world by the World Health Organisation but there need to be improvements to cope with the demands of the 21st century." "About the NHS," NHA website,
http://www.nhs.uk/Aboutnhs/howthenhsworks/Pages/
HowtheNHSworks.aspx
SiCKO: In a study of older Americans and Brits, the Brits had less of almost every major disease. Even the poorest Brit can expect to live longer than the richest American.

"The US population in late middle age is less healthy than the equivalent British population for diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, lung disease, and cancer. Within each country, there exists a pronounced negative socioeconomic status (SES) gradient with self-reported disease so that health disparities are largest at the bottom of the education or income variants of the SES hierarchy. This conclusion is generally robust to control for a standard set of behavioral risk factors, including smoking, overweight, obesity, and alcohol drinking, which explain very little of these health differences… Level differences between countries are sufficiently large that individuals in the top of the education and income strata in the United States have comparable rates of diabetes and heart disease as those in the bottom of the income and education strata in England." (See also Table 1 - for example, prevalence of diabetes among high-income Americans is 8.2 per thousand, while it's 7.3 among low-income Brits.) Banks, Marmot et al., "Disease and Disadvantage in the United States and in England," Journal of the American Medical Association, 2006;295:2037-2045.
SiCKO: A baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of surviving than a baby born in Detroit.

According to the United Nations Statistics Division, Population and Vital Statistics Report, the rate of infant deaths per thousand in El Salvador is 10.5. "Table 3, Live births, deaths, and infant deaths, latest available year, June 15, 2007." http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/vitstats/serATab3.pdf
According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, the rate of infant deaths for Detroit is 15.9 per thousand. "Number of Infant Deaths, Live Births and Infant Death Rates for Selected Cities of Residence, 2005 and 2001 - 2005 Average," Michigan Department of Community Health Web Site, http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/InDxMain/Tab4.asp.
SiCKO: Around 65 percent of young Americans can't find Britain on a map.

"About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn't even locate the U.S. on a map. The Pacific Ocean's location was a mystery to 29 percent; Japan, to 58 percent; France, to 65 percent; and the United Kingdom, to 69 percent." "Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy," National Geographic Today, November 20, 2002. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/11/1126_021120_
TVGeoRoperSurvey.html.
SiCKO: Companies that no longer offer pensions to new employees.

These can be found on a list prepared by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Pension Change Fact Sheets, http://www.bc.edu/centers/crr/PFFS.shtml In addition, the Pension Rights Center has also compiled a near-comprehensive list. Companies That Have Changed Their Defined Benefit Pension Plans, http://www.pensionrights.org/pubs/facts/company_list.html
SiCKO: Like Canadians and Brits, the French live longer than we do.

The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5, the United Kingdom is 78.5, France is 79.6, and Canada is 80.2. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283.
http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf.
SiCKO: The productivity rate per hour in France is higher than in America.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, France has a higher labor productivity (GDP per hour worked) than the United States. "OECD in Figures 2005, 2005/Supplement 1 at 84.
http://213.253.134.29/oecd/pdfs/browseit/0105061E.PDF
"Britain has yet to catch up with its rivals on productivity. Gordon Brown, the chancellor, has long wished to close Britain's productivity gap with other countries. It is proving a long haul. In 2004, output per hour worked was 19% higher in France, 15% higher in America and 5% higher in Germany than it was in Britain." "Poor show; International comparisons," The Economist, January 21, 2006.
SiCKO: French policy on childcare and household assistance for new parents.

According to the French-American Foundation comprehensive review of child care, "For non-working parents or parents who work part-time, haltes garderies (drop-in centers) provide part-time, occasional, and drop-in care. Haltes garderies are also subsidized (by municipality and the National Family Allowance Fund), with parents paying a portion of the costs based on a sliding scale (parents pay an average of $1 per hour). … For working parents [there are] licensed family day care providers (assistants maternelles), licensed babysitters at home (social security costs and salaries subsidized by the National Family Allowance Fund)." Peer, Shanny., "The French Early Education System," French-American Foundation, November 13, 2003.,
www.eoionline.org/ELC/Presentations/Peer4.pdf
SiCKO: There is a company in France, SOS Medecins, which will perform doctor house calls at any time.

SOS Medecins has an English website, viewable here: http://www.sosmedecins-france.fr/en/smf_en_present.htm.
SiCKO: The government initially refused to pay for the health care of 9/11 volunteers, because they were not on the government payroll. It remains difficult for the volunteers to access the $50 million fund that has been appropriated for their care.

The Department of Defense and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for Recovery From and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States Act provided a total of $175 million for workers compensation programs - $125 million to NYS Workers Compensation Review Board, and an additional $50 million to reimburse the NYS Uninsured Employers Fund, including for benefits paid to volunteers. However, there have been major delays in getting money to volunteers. See. e.g. "Statement of Robert E. Robertson, Director, Education, Workforce, and Income Security Issues," "September 11, Federal Assistance for New York Workers' Compensation Costs," United States Government Accountability Office, (GAO-04-1068T) September 8, 2004.
"With strong advocacy from New York's Congressional Delegation and labor leaders, a portion - about $52 million - of the $125 million in federal funding that had been allocated for administering workers compensation claims was re-allocated to provide some funding for medical treatment programs, but it will only meet a fraction of the need. Congress approved the legislation authorizing this funding in late December 2005." Devlin Barrett, "Congress Gives New Life to 9/11 Programs," Newsday, December 22, 2005.

A $52 million fund for volunteers was eventually established, but experts agree it's inadequate. The New York Times reported on September 6, 2006 that "Dr. John Howard, who was named the federal 9/11 health coordinator in February, has already said that the $52 million the federal government has appropriated for treatment late last year is inadequate. He said in an interview yesterday that the new study will very likely mean that the gap between funds and the need for them is going to grow." Anthony DePalma, "Illness Persisting in 9/11 Workers, Big Study Finds," New York Times, September 6, 2006.
SiCKO: American officials claim that detainees at Guantanamo Bay receive excellent health care.

"There is still acute care 24 hours a day, in which surgical procedures, everything, can be performed right there in the detainee camps, but as those wounds healed and as the detainees got further and further away from acute injuries, there has been increasing emphasis on preventative care. Indeed, the immunization rate there is higher than in the United States of America…. Things such as screening for cancer have taken place there. Colonoscopies--a procedure which, as we all know, is used commonly in this country to screen for colon cancer--are performed there on a routine basis. The health personnel-to-detainee ratio is 1 to 4--remarkably high. That is all health personnel who are there. And I guess, as I left this briefing and the opportunity to talk to the doctors and the nurses and the psychologists and the psychiatrists, I left with an impression that health care there is clearly better than they received at home and as good as many people receive in the United States of America." Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), remarks on Guantanamo Bay, U.S. Senate, September 12, 2006.
"They go out, they do sick call on the blocks three times per week, care for them there, if they can… We have diabetes. We have high blood pressure, high cholesterol. Those detainees -- we've created a population health database so that we can track those detainees to make sure we're seeing them frequently, monitoring their labs and their overall health." Statement of Navy Commander Cary Ostergaard. "Hearing Of The House Armed Services Committee Subject: Detainee Operations At Guantanamo Bay," June 29, 2005.
"Detainees receive medical, dental, psychiatric, and optometric care at U.S. taxpayers' expense. In 2005, there were 35 teeth cleanings, 91 cavities filled, and 174 pairs of glasses issued." "Ten Facts About Guantanamo," Department of Defense, September 14, 2006. http://www.defenselink.mil/home/dodupdate/For-the-record/documents/
GuantanamoBay_Top10_ATTACHMENT2.doc.
SiCKO: Cuba is one of the most generous countries in providing doctors to the third world.

"WHO statistics show that the incidence of AIDS in Cuba is the lowest in this hemisphere, and there are now more than 800 Cuban doctors in Haiti alone working to control the AIDS epidemic. President Castro has offered an almost unlimited number to be sent to Africa, to be paid by the Cuban government with only a small stipend from the host countries." "President Carter's Cuba Trip Report By Jimmy Carter," May 21, 2002.
http://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc528.html
"The close friendship between Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has netted Venezuela a loan of 20,000 Cuban health workers -- including 14,000 doctors, according to the Venezuelan government -- who work in poor barrios and rural outposts for stipends seven times higher on average than their salaries at home. Castro has vowed to send Chavez as many as 10,000 additional medical workers by year's end." "As Cuba Loans Doctors Abroad, Some Patients Object at Home," Boston Globe, August 25, 2005.
"President Evo Morales on Friday heeded the wishes of six visiting U.S. senators by acknowledging the positive effects of American aid in his country - but added that Cuban doctors had had a greater impact on Bolivia than their U.S. counterparts… [I]n a Friday interview with Bolivian radio network Fides, Morales said the assistance of Cuban leader Fidel Castro - who has sent Bolivia some 1,700 doctors and paramedics this year alone, setting up free hospitals and eye clinics throughout Bolivia -- outshines the United States' own medical aid." "Morales Says Cuban Doctors top U.S. Medical Aid," Boston Globe, December 29, 2006.
SiCKO: In the U.S., health care costs run nearly $7,000 per person. But in Cuba, they spend around $251 per person.

United States health spending per capita is $6,697 per person according to Catlin, A, C. Cowan, S. Heffler, et al, "National Health Spending in 2005." Health Affairs 26:1 (2006). As with the number of uninsured, the number continues to increase and is projected to be $7,092 per capita in 2006, $7,498 per capita in 2007 and reaching $12,782 by 2016, according the Department of Health and Human Services Center for Medicare and Medicaid Expenditures, National Health Expenditures Projections 2006-2016,
http://www.cms.hhs.gov/NationalHealthExpendData/downloads/proj2006.pdf
The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report says Cuba spends $251 per capita on health care. (Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006. http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/52.html)
SiCKO: In Cuba, access to health care is universal.

"Cuban dissatisfaction with their personal lives does not mean they are negative about the revolutionary government's achievements in health care and education. A near unanimous 96 percent of respondents say that health care in Cuba is accessible to everyone. Gallup polls in other Latin American cities have found that on average only 42 percent believe health care is accessible." Gallup/ Consultoría Interdisciplinaria en Desarrollo, "Cubans Show Little Satisfaction with Opportunities and Individual Freedom Rare Independent Survey Finds Large Majorities Are Still Proud of Island's Health Care and Education," January 10, 2007.
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brlatinamericara/
300.php?nid=&id=&pnt=300&lb=brla
SiCKO: Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate and a longer average lifespan than the United States.

The 2006 United Nations Human Development Report's human development index states the life expectancy in the United States is 77.5, and is 77.6 in Cuba. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2006 at 283. http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf.
According to the United Nations Statistics Division, Population and Vital Statistics Report, the rate of infant deaths per thousand in Cuba is 6.2 per thousand, and in the United States is 6.8. "Table 3, Live births, deaths, and infant deaths, latest available year, June 15, 2007."
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic

Is Glenn Beck a bigot?: A message from Color of Change

2009-08-02T01:02:00.001-04:00

More and more, right-wing talk show hosts are bringing race-based fear mongering into the mainstream, but FOX's Glenn Beck just took it to another level. On Tuesday, Beck said:

This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep-seated hatred for white people... this guy is, I believe, a racist.1

It's part of a larger argument Beck has been making:2 that President Obama is using the White House to serve the needs of Black communities at White people's expense. This kind of talk stirs up fear, hate, and it can lead to violence.3,4

Together we can stop Glenn Beck.5 Starting today we're calling Beck's advertisers, asking them if they want to be associated with this kind of racist hate and fear-mongering. When they see tens of thousands of people signing on behind that question, we believe they'll move their advertising dollars elsewhere, damaging the viability of his show and possibly putting him out of business.

All it requires is you, standing up and being counted. Please take a moment to join the effort, and invite your friends and family to do the same:

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/?id=1790-114613

Glenn Beck is appealing to the worst in America. Of course, some people refuse to accept the fact that our president is Black or the idea that he could truly serve all Americans. We know that. The only way these views will fade away is if they're not reinforced by mainstream society. Instead, folks like Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs,6 and Rush Limbaugh7 are exploiting racism and race-based fear to bump their ratings, stirring up racial discord in the process.

The dangers of these tactics are real. We saw the same dynamic during the presidential race: by the end, the McCain/Palin campaign was unable to control the violent energy whipped up by their race-baiting. The result was an unprecedented number of threats on Obama's life, a rise in the number of hate groups, and an increase in the number of threats and crimes against immigrants and Black people.8,9,10

FOX has had a long history of race-baiting and racism on its shows, and we've run campaigns calling them out.11,12 But Glenn Beck appears to be taking the network to an even lower standard. He's trying to divide and distract America when we should be coming together and talking about issues that really matter--like health care and the economy.

The good news is that we have the power to stop this. All major media is funded by advertising. And advertisers, more than anything, care what consumers think. If we want to change what's happening and put an end to folks like Glenn Beck having a platform, we can do it.

It's up to us, and it can start now. Please join us:

http://www.colorofchange.org/beck/?id=1790-114613

Thanks and Peace,

-- James, Gabriel, William, Dani and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
July 30th, 2009

Help support our work. ColorOfChange.org is powered by YOU -- your energy and dollars. We take no money from lobbyists or large corporations that don't share our values, and our tiny staff ensures your contributions go a long way. You can contribute here:

https://secure.colorofchange.org/contribute/?id=1790-114613

References

1. "Beck: Obama has 'exposed himself as a guy' with 'a deep seated hatred for white people'" Media Matters, 7-28-09
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907280008

2. "Glenn Beck: Obama agenda driven by 'reparations' and desire to 'settle old racial scores'," Media Matters, 7-23-09
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907230040

3. "Palin linked to death threats against Obama," Economic Times, 11-9-2008
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3691429.cms

4. "Obama win prompts wave of hate crimes," Times Online, 11-17-2008
http://tinyurl.com/5rhf29

5. "MSNBC's Deutsch encourages viewers to demand advertisers on Beck's show spend money elsewhere," Media Matters, 7-29-09
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907290037

6. "On Television and Radio, Talk of Obama's Citizenship," The New York Times, 7-24-09
http://tinyurl.com/mb467j

7. "Rush and reparations," The Nation, 5-12-2009
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/435392/rush_and_reparations

8. See reference 2.

9. See reference 3.

10. "Homeland Security report warns of rising right-wing extremism, Huffington Post, 4-14-2009
http://tinyurl.com/cpgx6q

11. ColorOfChange.org email on Fox's attacks on the Obamas
http://www.colorofchange.org/foxobama/message.html

12. "An overview: Fox News and its problem with African-Americans," ColorOfChange.org
http://colorofchange.org/fox/summary.html

The Vicious Right Wing Attacks Don't Surprise Me by DIONNE WARWICK

2009-07-31T19:41:00.002-04:00

I was surprised when Radio One's Cathy Hughes added my name to the list of African American artists and civil rights activists she's attacked in her vicious campaign against fairly compensating musicians for their work. Then again, since smearing African American leaders to protect her profits has become Ms. Hughes siren song, maybe I shouldn't be surprised at all.

Every time we buy a CD or download a song, the artist is paid for their work. You might not know that this isn't the case when a musician's work is played on the radio. That's because corporate radio CEOs like Cathy Hughes are exploiting a legal loophole that allows them to play these artists songs without paying them for their work.

Ms. Hughes is now very angry with me, other black recording artists, and civil rights leaders because we support the Performance Rights Act, which many now call the Civil Rights for Musicians Act. This bill, which was written by the Dean of the Congressional Black Caucus, Congressman John Conyers, closes the legal loophole the radio corporations and CEOs are using to ensure that African American artists receive fair pay for airplay.

In defending her refusal to fairly compensate the artists on whose back she earns her living, Ms. Hughes now claims poverty, which is pretty amazing considering Radio One owns 54 radio stations and reaped $316 million last year alone. She even paid her own son, Radio One CEO Alfred Liggins, a $10 million bonus. Far from a struggling company, Radio One sounds more like one of those Wall Street rip off firms where executives pay themselves big bonuses while they rip us off and throw their workers in the street.

If their profits and the bonuses Ms. Hughes has paid her son are any indicator, Radio One is hardly struggling. But there are small stations, especially gospel stations, in our communities that we love and that deserve our help. That's why the Civil Rights for Musicians Act protects these truly small radio stations while insisting even a big corporate radio firm like Radio One would only pay roughly what they earn off of about five commercials each day.

You can begin to understand Ms. Hughes' willingness to rip off black artists when you take a look at who she attacks and the kind of company she keeps. During the last presidential campaign she repeatedly attacked Barack Obama, calling him "a dazzling deception" and implied that we supported him because black people are easily fooled. She has even supported the current chairman of the Republican Party, Michael Steele, who said he would attract more African Americans to his party by offering "fried chicken and potato salad." This is hardly a woman who is looking out for what's best for the African American community.

The struggling musicians who need the Civil Rights for Musicians Act don't want a handout from Cathy Hughes or Clear Channel or the National Association of Broadcasters, which is the mouthpiece of big -- largely white -- corporate radio. They just want to be paid for their work. This legislation would make sure that these artists are directly compensated, not the recording executives who may have stolen from them much as Ms. Hughes and Radio One steals from them now.

I am proud of my support for the Civil Rights for Musicians Act, even if it means suffering though the tirades of Ms. Hughes. I hope she understands that the struggle to pass the Civil Rights for Musicians Act isn't about us any more than Rosa Parks bravery was about getting a better seat on the bus.

Better women than Ms. Hughes have spent a lifetime toiling to ensure equal rights and economic opportunity for black Americans. There is nothing "stupid" about insisting that African American workers are paid for their labor. The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It's about what's right. And it's about time.

Even if Henry Louis Gates' Arresting Officer Is Right, He Was Wrong

2009-07-31T05:41:00.001-04:00

By Robert Schlesinger
Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Assume for a moment that Cambridge Police Officer James Crowley is telling the absolute truth in his incident report and subsequent press appearances and that Henry Louis Gates is lying about the events that led to the Harvard professor's arrest. Assume for a moment that when Crowley showed up at Gates' home, Gates was belligerent, angry, immediately started in on race and racism and made a "your mama" comment. Assume that he spouted inanities to the effect that Crowley didn't know who he was "messing" with. Assume that when Crowley, satisfied that Gates did in fact live in the home and so was in fact not burglarizing it, started to leave Gates kept yelling at him.

Even if all of that is true ... Crowley was still wrong arresting Gates. "The professor at any time could have resolved the issue by quieting down and/or going back inside the house," Crowley said in a radio interview. Maybe so. But Crowley could also have resolved by rolling his eyes at the cranky--but not criminal--professor, getting back in his car and driving away.

There are undoubtedly times when a police officer needs to restrain someone who is genuinely being disorderly in a way that could pose a threat to himself, the officer or the community. But no one can plausibly argue that this was such an instance. And neither disliking someone's attitude nor their tone of voice is good reason to cuff them and take them downtown.

And that's all assuming that this Cambridge Community Theatre version of Rashomon is one-sided (Crowley is completely right, Gates is completely wrong), which strains credulity.

Police officers do a tough and important job. But part of that job includes knowing when to be the grownup and walk away.

=

Siegelman Responds to Federal Prosecutors by Glynn Wilson

2009-07-30T14:46:00.000-04:00

Siegelman Responds to Federal Prosecutors
July 28th, 2009

Glynn Wilson
Former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery, with Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, wife of Birmingham Civil Rights icon Fred Shuttlesworth, in the background.
Federal prosecutors in Montgomery filed their response this week to Alabama Governor Don Siegelman’s and HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy’s motion for a new trial, and their demands for recusal of Chief U.S. District Justice Mark E. Fuller.

It is boilerplate legalese that basically says they do not deserve a new trial and the judge should not recuse himself.

Siegelman reacted immediately to the news.

“I am shocked by the contentions of the United States Government’s response to the motion for the judge to recuse himself from all other proceedings in this case,” Siegelman said in an e-mail message.

“The government farcically argues that the trial judge and 11th Circuit decided in my case that the system operated fairly for me because the trial judge assumed that the emails from Juror No. 7 and Juror No. 40 were ‘authentic’.” he said. “So when he denied our motion for a new trial, based on those emails, both courts said that it’s OK for jurors to be emailing each other before the close of the government’s case, OK to be in a a conspiracy to subvert the defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial.”

Keep in mind what these jurors were saying and what they were trying to do, he said.

For background, check this story from our archives:
Explosive New Story Lends Credence to Siegelman Appeal

“The emails revealed a deep hidden prejudice against both me and Richard Scrushy and just as important, the emails showed that the jurors were violating the order of the Court and plotting to get other jurors to vote for a conviction,” Siegelman said. “How in the world can anyone have respect for a system of justice if this kind of conduct is given a stamp of approval by a trial judge and a court of appeals?

“According to the United States government these courts have just said that jurors are now free to conspire by email or text messaging during the course of a trial and are free to conspire with one another to try to get votes for a conviction even before the evidence and witnesses have been heard,” he said. “How can the U.S. government think that such a judgment promotes public trust and confidence in the fairness of our judicial and court systems?”

Former President Carter :Children Tortured Under Bush

2009-07-21T07:45:00.001-04:00

by Richard Lopez

While congress says it is gearing up to investigate what is old news, that CIA and Special Ops forces are killing Al Qaeda leaders, a decision of far different gravity is being contemplated by Attorney General Eric Holder. The new insistence of Congress on its oversight role, conspicuously absent throughout 8 years of Bush, is suddenly rearing its head in the form of questioning a policy which has been in place with no controversy for years. The U.S. has been hunting and killing Al Qaeda leaders outside of official war zones since 2004, when the New York Times reported that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had signed an order authorizing Special Forces to kill Al Qaeda where they found them.

As recently as September 2008 CBS reported that Special Forces struck Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

The decision faced by Holder, whether or not to appoint a Special Prosecutor on torture, is of a different gravity altogether. A weight of evidence keeps building which indicates torture was employed on innocent men, that it didn't work, and that it didn't prevent any attacks. And it gets worse. Bush's own FBI Director Robert Mueller recently confirmed to the New York Times what he told Vanity Fair a year ago, that "to [his] knowledge" torture didn't prevent a single attack. Former Legendary CIA Director William Colby has said that torture is "ineffective."

Harper's Magazine's Scott Horton nows suggests there are two Eric Holders at war with each other: Holder the good soldier who knows well the preference of his boss for prosecutions to not take place, and Holder the servant of the law who is aware that what he does now may determine what is likely to happen again.

It is becoming clear that such an investigation, if it happens, will not stop with a few low-ranking scapegoats. Horton notes:

"President Obama’s assurance to CIA officials who relied on the opinions of government lawyers in implementing these programs, an assurance that Holder himself repeated, would have to be worked in. That suggests that the focus would likely be on the lawyers and policymakers who authorized use of the new techniques."

And CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern writes this week:

the buck stops - actually, in this case, it began - with President Bush. Senate Armed Services Committee leaders Carl Levin and John McCain on Dec. 11, 2008, released the executive summary of a report, approved by the full committee without dissent, concluding that Bush's Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum "opened the door to considering aggressive techniques."

What changed with Holder? Horton writes in "The Torture Prosecution Turnaround?":

Holder began his review mindful of the clear preference of President Obama’s two key political advisers—David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel—that there be no investigation. Axelrod and Emanuel are described as uninterested in either the legal or policy merits of the issue of a criminal investigation. Their concerns turn entirely on their political analysis...Holder initially appeared prepared to satisfy their wishes.

This attitude seemed to change after Obama's speech at the CIA, when Emanual and Axelrod moved out front to say there would be no prosecutions. According to Horton:

"In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated."

To make things worse for the Bush administration, evidence is emerging that they can no longer even rely on exhibit A and B of the Torture Works theory, Al Zabudaya and Kalid Shiek Mohammed, the latter of whom is still confessing to everything short of being the real Boston Strangler. I guess if I'd been waterboarded 82 times I'd be babbling too. The FBI Special Agent who interrogated Abu Zubayda, recently breaking a 7-year silence after reading the "torture memos," wrote in the New York Times:

"One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence...This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives."

Then there is the political risk to the Obama administration that Axelrod and Emanual have miscalculated, and that, in fact, the rest of the president's agenda is hamstrung while a growing number of Americans call for existing laws to be enforced. What is haunting Americans could be, in Washington jargon, "sucking oxygen" out of the debate, and "moving forward" is a pipe dream until pending business is dealt with. Spontaneous and planned rallies calling for a Special Prosecutor are growing, not diminishing. In addition, the worse revelations may be yet to come in the horrifying saga of what happened when, as Major General Anthony Taguba says:

[a] permissive environment [was] created by implicit and explicit authorizations by senior US officials to "take the gloves off"...

President Jimmy Carter wrote that the Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon "have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, confirmed by soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse." In "Our Endangered Values" Carter said that the Red Cross found after visiting six U.S. prisons "107 detainees under eighteen, some as young as eight years old." And reporter Hersh, (who broke the Abu Ghraib torture scandal,) reported 800-900 Pakistani boys aged 13 to 15 in custody.

Journalist Seymour Hersh's (who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal) bombshell before the ACLU some years ago has been in a temporary slumber, as there is question as to whether the videotapes in possession of the Pentagon were among those claimed to be destroyed. Destroyed or not, there is still the conscience of soldiers and agents who bore witness to contend with, as the reign of political terror against whistleblowers which characterized the Bush administration subsides. Hersh said:

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said at the time:

"The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."

History is just beginning to sort out the Bush era, with stubborn facts showing a resilience that Fox News talking points cannot, and more emerging. Today, even among Republicans, it is difficult to find those who will embrace Richard Nixon, though for a while he was every bit the perceived victim of "left-wing hate" that Bush and Cheney are now. Incredibly, to compare Nixon to Bush-Cheney is to do a deeply flawed man a disservice. Nixon inherited Vietnam. He did not orchestrate from whole cloth a campaign to link Saddam with 9/11, and strenuously push to war despite the objections of his countrymen and the world. Nixon spied on political enemies. He did not use a tragedy to illegally spy on millions, the true numbers of which we still do not know because congress has never investigated.

It's almost possible to feel sorry for the shifty, friendless Nixon. It is less possible to feel so for the smirking Bush, who thought nothing of telling soldier's families that war critics were saying that their loved ones "had died in vain."

A compilation in November 2008 of other evidence of alleged incidents involving children at the time recounts:

-- Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, "suffer from torture, rape, (and) starvation" and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of "random" arrests "not based on any legal text."

-- Former prisoner Thaar Salman Dawod in a witness statement said, "[I saw] two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and [a U.S. soldier] was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners."

-- Iraqi TV reporter, Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, arrested while making a documentary and thrown into Abu Ghraib for 74 days, told Mackay he saw "hundreds" of children there. Al-Baz said he heard one 12-year-old girl crying, "They have undressed me. They have poured water over me." He said he heard her whimpering daily.

-- Al-Baz also told of a 15-year-old boy "who was soaked repeatedly with hoses until he collapsed." Amnesty International said ex-detainees reported boys as young as 10 are held at Abu Ghraib.

-- German TV reporter Thomas Reutter of "Report Mainz" quoted U.S. Army Sgt. Samuel Provance that interrogation specialists "poured water" over one 16-year-old Iraqi boy, drove him throughout a cold night, "smeared him with mud" and then showed him to his father, who was also in custody. Apparently, one tactic employed by the Bush regime is to elicit confessions from adults by dragging their abused children in front of them.

-- Jonathan Steele, wrote in the British "The Guardian" that "Hundreds of children, some as young as nine, are being held in appalling conditions in Baghdad’s prisons...Sixteen-year-old Omar Ali told the "Guardian" he spent more than three years at Karkh juvenile prison sleeping with 75 boys to a cell that is just five by 10 meters, some of them on the floor. Omar told the paper guards often take boys to a separate room in the prison and rape them.

-- Raad Jamal, age 17, was taken from his Doura home by U.S. troops and turned over to the Iraqi Army’s Second regiment where Jamal said he was hung from the ceiling by ropes and beaten with electric cables.

-- Human Rights Watch (HRW) last June put the number of juveniles detained at 513. In all, HRW estimates, since 2003, the U.S. has detained 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten.

-- IRIN, the humanitarian news service, last year quoted Khalid Rabia of the Iraqi NGO Prisoners’ Association for Justice(PAJ), stating that five boys between 13 and 17 accused of supporting insurgents and detained by the Iraqi army "showed signs of torture all over their bodies," such as "cigarette burns over their legs," she said.

-- One boy of 13 arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 was held in solitary for more than a year at Bagram and Guantanamo and made to stand in stress position and deprived of sleep, according to the "Catholic Worker."

Attorney General Holder is a man of conscience who now serves both President Obama and the law. A Newsweek piece last week says he has no illusions that:

Such a decision [to appoint a Special Prosecutor] would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

There can be redemption for a nation which faces its past. One that does not can only become more monstrous.

Honduras; The Right -Wing Coup d'etat is Faltering, but Its Supporters Have Powerful Friends in Washington. by Hugh O'Shaughnessy

2009-07-20T06:04:00.003-04:00

The international group of right-wingers who staged the coup d'état against the democratic government of Honduras on 28 June are watching their plot fast unravel.
There is stiffening international opposition to their protégé, Roberto Micheletti, who, in his capacity as President of Congress, ordered President Manuel Zelaya to be expelled from the country by plane in his pyjamas.

Supporters of Honduras' ousted President Manuel Zelaya protest in Catacamas, Honduras, Saturday, July 18, 2009. Hopes for a quick resolution to Honduras' political crisis dimmed when its interim government balked at a plan presented in talks Saturday to reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya and form a national unity government.
(AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)Mr Zelaya gave negotiators meeting in Costa Rica until midnight yesterday to restore him to office, threatening to secretly return to Honduras and attempt to retake power on his own if no agreement is reached. At a news conference at the Honduran embassy in Nicaragua, he said: "I am going back to Honduras, but I am not going to give you the date, hour or place, or say if I'm going to enter through land, air or sea." But indications last night suggested the interim government would call his bluff.

As the Acting President's support shrinks at home, the plotters are lobbying to have Mr Micheletti shored up from abroad by means of a declaration of legitimacy from the US Congress. That scheme is not prospering. Enrique Ortez Colindres, the supremely undiplomatic octogenarian appointed foreign minister by Mr Micheletti, has had to resign, but not before he called Barack Obama "a negrito who knows nothing about anything", on Honduran television.

For some of the plotters it is their second attempt to overthrow an elected reformist government in Latin America: the group includes prominent figures involved in the 2002 ousting of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who was kidnapped for 48 hours and sent to a Caribbean island before being restored to office after widespread popular protest.

The temporary toppling of Mr Chavez was welcomed by the Bush administration, the Blair government and the International Monetary Fund. This weekend, the US seems destined for a replay of 2002's Operation Chaotic Coup. Amid a stream of contradictory messages it is clear that last month's putsch against Mr Zelaya was brewed up in Washington by a group of extreme conservatives from Venezuela, Honduras and the US. They appear to have hidden their plans from the White House, but hoped eventually to bounce President Obama into backing them and supporting the "interim president". They are making much of Mr Zelaya's alliance with Mr Chavez, whose sense of nationalism challenges US hegemony.

Financial backing for the coup is identified by some as coming from the pharmaceutical industry, which fears Mr Zelaya's plans to produce generic drugs and distribute them cheaply to the impoverished majority in Honduras, who lack all but the most primitive health facilities. Others point to big companies in the telecommunications industry opposed to Hondutel, Honduras's state-owned provider. Parallels are being made with ITT, the US telecommunications company that offered the Nixon government funds for the successful overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973.

A key figure is Robert Carmona-Borjas, a Venezuelan active against Mr Chavez in 2002, who later fled to the US. He runs the Washington-based Arcadia, which calls itself "an innovative 'next generation' anti-corruption organisation". Its website carries three video clips alleging, without evidence, that Mr Zelaya, his associates and Hondutel are deeply corrupt. Behind Arcadia are the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), the well-funded overseas arm of the Republican Party. Currently active among the Uighurs of western China, the NED has this year funnelled $1.2m (£740,000) for "political activity" in Honduras.

The focus of attention in the campaign against Mr Zelaya is now on the office of Senator John McCain, the defeated US presidential candidate, who is chairman of the IRI, takes an interest in telecoms affairs in the US Congress and has benefited handsomely from campaign contributions from US telecoms companies - which are said to have funded the abortive 2002 coup against Mr Chavez.

Mr McCain's former legislative counsel, John Timmons, arranged the visit of Micheletti supporters to Washington on 7 July where they met journalists at the National Press Club "to clarify any misunderstandings about Honduras's constitutional process and ... the preservation of the country's democratic institutions".

Meanwhile, within the US administration, difficulties in co-ordination have emerged between the State Department and the White House, with the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, issuing a low-key condemnation of the coup which was quickly superseded by stronger words from Mr Obama. The President called for Mr Zelaya's reinstatement, which Mrs Clinton had failed to demand.

The conservative-minded Mrs Clinton retains John Negroponte, an ambassador to Honduras under Ronald Reagan, as an adviser. He also represented George W Bush at the UN and in Baghdad. Democratic Senator Chris Dodd attacked Mr Negroponte in 2001 for drawing a veil over atrocities committed in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, by military forces trained by the US. Mr Dodd claimed that the forces had been "linked to death squad activities such as killings, disappearances and other human rights abuses".

During his time in Tegucigalpa, Mr Negroponte directed funds to the US-supported Contra terrorists seeking to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. He assured them of arms and supplies from the Palmerola airstrip, the main US base in Central America. As President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is in the final stages of closing the US base in his country, Mr Negroponte is conscious of what the US could lose if a Zelaya government banned its presence at Palmerola. For their part, Hondurans have noted that when Mr Zelaya tried to return on 6 July, and his plane was refused permission to land at Tegucigalpa airport, no room was found at Palmerola.

Since last July, the US ambassador in Tegucigalpa has been the Cuban-born Hugo Llorens. He was the principal National Security adviser to Mr Bush on Venezuela at the time of the failed 2002 coup, when he was working with two other well-known State Department hardliners, Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams.

Mr Reich, a former US ambassador to Venezuela, advised Mr McCain in his presidential bid and previously worked for AT&T, the US telecoms giant. As he goes into battle against Mr Zelaya, the website of his business consultancy, Otto Reich Associates, quotes Mr Reagan: "You understand the importance of fostering democracy and economic development among our closest neighbours."

Mr Abrams was also deep in the business of supplying the Contra terrorists. He tried to sabotage the Central American peace plans proposed by Oscar Arias, then the Costa Rican President, who later received a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. In 1991 Mr Abrams, a neoconservative passionately supportive of Ehud Olmert and other leading Israeli hawks, was convicted of hiding information from the US Congress investigation of the Iran-Contra affair. The New York Times reported in 2006 that he had strong ties to then vice-president Dick Cheney.

In a divided Washington, Mrs Clinton seems in recent days to have regained some advantage. Now Washington's strategy is to minimise the role of the pan-continent Organisation of American States which, under the leadership of the independent-minded Chilean José Miguel Insulza, took a strong line against the "interim president".

Washington is now relying on Mr Arias, a firm friend in Central America, to soften the line against Mr Micheletti. He is trying to "mediate" between Mr Zelaya and the coup's appointee by putting them on the same footing. On Friday he called for a "government of national reconciliation" with ministers from both camps, a proposal which it appeared Mr Zelaya would countenance but that the interim government would not.

Yet the outcome of the crisis is not likely to be worked out in huddles of foreign politicians outside Honduras, but on the streets of Tegucigalpa and in the country's forests - perhaps even this weekend.

Honduran voters have traditionally - and ineffectually - been organised into two parties, the Nationals and the Liberals, whose politics are almost indistinguishable. But repudiation of Mr Micheletti is widespread. The principal roads have been blocked by Mr Zelaya's supporters brandishing banners calling for his return.

Mr Micheletti has been forced to re-establish the curfew he imposed just after the putsch. He has even offered to resign in order to prevent civil war - provided Mr Zelaya does not return. Another worrying development for Mr Micheletti came on Friday, when the armed forces delivered a solemn and urgent message that they were totally united in favour of democracy. In the world of Latin American politics, this is a sign that they are deeply divided.

At the festivities on Friday commemorating the 200th anniversary of Bolivia breaking free from Spanish rule, Mr Chavez joined Bolivia's President, Evo Morales, President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay and President Correa in a declaration of support for the re-establishment of democracy in Honduras. All four leaders are strong supporters of demands for better treatment of Latin America's indigenous peoples.

Perhaps that's what is really worrying the plotters of Tegucigalpa.

House Committee Allows States to Create Single-Payer Healthcare

2009-07-17T15:29:00.002-04:00

by Tim Carpenter

Kucinich amendment receives bi-partisan support

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a victory for single-payer advocates. Our job in the ensuing weeks will be to ensure that this amendment does not get stripped from the final legislation.]

On Friday morning at 9:45 a.m. ET in the House Committee on Education and Labor, the committee members voted 25 to 19 to pass Congressman Dennis Kucinich's amendment to the healthcare reform bill. This amendment, if it survives the full House, the Senate, the conference, and the President, will not alter the federal legislation except to allow states to create single-payer healthcare systems if they choose to. If this change to the bill makes news, it will pass the Senate, because there is no legitimate argument against it, and the support for it is bipartisan.

The Man Who Knew Cheney's Secret

2009-07-15T22:37:00.003-04:00

WEDNESDAY 15 JULY 2009
by Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh was mocked in March when he referred to Dick Cheney's secret squad of CIA assassins. Now, he talks to The Daily Beast about the next shoe to drop.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh raised eyebrows back in March when he told an audience at the University of Minnesota that Dick Cheney ran a secret hit squad that he kept hidden from Congressional oversight.

"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on," Hersh said at the time. He added: "Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us."

"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told The Daily Beast. "The last time they said the government doesn't torture, this time it's the government doesn't assassinate."

Some observers accused him of rumor-mongering and a top former military official threw cold water on the story, but with the recent news that the CIA allegedly kept Congress in the dark on a covert program, Hersh's words suddenly look more and more prescient. Yesterday, the New York Times reported the hidden program in question was a death squad authorized by Dick Cheney without Congressional approval.

Now, there are key differences between Hersh's reporting and the Times' latest piece. Hersh suggested that the assassination ring was conducted out of the Joint Special Operations Command rather than the CIA. Moreover, according to Hersh's sources the program was operational, leaving a trail of bodies, while The Times cited officials saying that the CIA hit squad never actually carried out a mission. The Times and Hersh could conceivably be reporting two distinct squads.

The Daily Beast tracked down Hersh in South Asia, where he says he has not been able to read the New York Times piece but has received calls buzzing about the report. Asked about the officials quoted in the Times' report who claimed that Cheney's assassination ring never became operational, Hersh offered a skeptical response.

"I said what I said, they can always say what they say," Hersh told The Daily Beast. "The last time they said the government doesn't torture; this time it's the government doesn't assassinate."

Hersh said that his words in Minnesota were exaggerated in the press, since he had already previously reported on covert operations that he alleged were out of Congress' view. In February 2005, he published a report the President had authorized Donald Rumsfeld to organize special operations in South Asia and the Middle East without going through the CIA, and thus having to report them to Congress. In July 2005, he wrote that the White House circumvented Nancy Pelosi to organize covert operations led by retired CIA officers and non-government personnel to influence the Iraqi elections.

"In my reporting for this story, one theme that emerged was the Bush administration's increasing tendency to turn to off-the-books covert actions to accomplish its goals," he wrote in the July 2005 piece. "This allowed the Administration to avoid the kind of stumbling blocks it encountered in the debate about how to handle the elections: bureaucratic infighting, congressional second-guessing, complaints from outsiders."

As recently as July 2008, Hersh published a report that the White House was exploiting technical differences between defense and intelligence operations in order to get around briefing Congress on pursuing "high value targets" in Iran through covert action.

"There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing," he wrote then.

Beyond his own reporting, Hersh said President Bush's own speeches provided evidence of secret assassinations.

"Go read George Bush's January 2003 State of the Union speech," he said. "He's talking and he says we've captured and detained 3,000 Al Qaeda members and other terrorists—crazy numbers—and said some of them will never bother us any more. And Congress cheers."

Bush's full quote then was:

"All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

This article originally appeared in "The Daily Beast"

Who's Behind Honduras Destabilization? All Roads Lead to McCain

2009-07-15T06:11:00.001-04:00

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 07/14/2009 - 8:43am. Guest Contribution
BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Nikolas Kozloff

Behind the recent pressure campaign against the Zelaya regime in Honduras lurks a shadowy world of right wing foundations, lobbying groups, and anti-Chávez figures. This tangled web of Washington, D.C. interests includes the Arcadia Foundation, a mysterious figure named Robert Carmona Borjas, and former State Department official Otto Reich. What do all these organizations and characters have in common? In one way or another, they are all tied back to Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

According to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Venezuelan lawyer Robert-Carmona Borjas helped to draft some of the infamous anti-constitutional "Carmona decrees" after Hugo Chávez was overthrown in the April 2002 military coup. After Chávez was returned to power, Carmona Borjas fled to the United States where he found his calling as a leading anti-Chávez figure and, more recently, as a fierce critic of the Zelaya regime in Honduras.

In 2004, Carmona-Borjas was listed as part time faculty at the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at George Washington University; as recently as November 2008, set up a class entitled "Political Management in Latin America" offered through the Graduate School of Political Management. According to the GW Hatchet, the local student paper, the class had a roster of right-wing, free-trade boosting speakers including Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich, Leopoldo López, a Venezuelan politician, Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutiérrez, and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).

According to the Hatchet, the class sought to "analyze Latin American governments that have failed social policies, which have led to anti-system political movements." "Many Latin American countries have forged ties with re-emerging powers and countries in pursuit of nuclear capability," Carmona-Borjas said, "ties that can endanger the interests of the United States in the region."

But it was not part time teaching in D.C. that distinguished Carmona Borjas as a political player. No, it was the Venezuelan's work as Vice President of the mysterious anti-corruption and watchdog outfit known as Arcadia Foundation that really set him apart. From his perch at Arcadia, Carmona-Borjas launched anti-corruption attacks against Honduras and the Zelaya regime. In particular, he conducted a massive public relations campaign against Hondutel, the state telecommunications company in Honduras. In article after article published in the Central American media, Borjas-Carmona accused Hondutel of corruption.

The Right-Wing Telecom Connection

The Venezuelan right winger was joined in his criticisms by Otto Reich, former U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela, State Department official under Bush, and foreign policy adviser for McCain's 2008 campaign. Reich was linked to figures in the 2002 coup against Chávez and has worked as a corporate lobbyist for firms such as telecom giant AT&T. His firm, Otto Reich Associates, advises U.S. corporations in Latin America and promotes the American free trade agenda by fighting privatization.

I speculated before that Reich and Carmona-Borjas might have known of each other, and the George Washington University connection is now proof of that. What seems to have united both Reich and Carmona-Borjas was their interest in the telecommunications issue. That's not too surprising in light of the history. Indeed, for McCain and his right-wing ilk the telecom industry has been a central political focus. McCain has had important historic ties to big corporations such as AT&T, MCI, and Qualcomm. In return for their financial contributions, McCain, who partly oversees the telecommunication industry in the Senate, has acted to protect and look out for the political and economic interests of the telecoms on Capitol Hill.

To get a sense of the sheer scope of McCain's incestuous relationship with the telecoms, one need only log on to the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics. In the 1998 electoral cycle, AT&T gave $34,000 to McCain. In the 2000 cycle, the telecom giant provided $69,000; in 2002 $61,000; in 2004 $39,000; in 2006 $29,000; and in 2008 $187,000. Over the course of his career, AT&T has been McCain's second largest corporate backer.

What's more, AT&T has donated handsomely to McCain's International Republican Institute (IRI). McCain chairs this group and though he seldom talks about it, he has gotten much of his foreign policy experience working with the operation that is funded by the U.S. government and private money. The IRI, which receives tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year, claims to promote democracy worldwide. In 2006, AT&T gave the IRI $200,000. AT&T spokesman Michael Balmoris declined to elaborate on why the international telecommunications provider wrote a big check. "AT&T contributes to a variety of charitable organizations," he said flippantly.

IRI and Telecom Agenda in Latin America

The IRI has fought against regimes in Latin America that resist privatization of the telecom industry. In Venezuela, where the government nationalized the telecom firm CANTV, IRI generously funded anti-Chávez civil society groups that were opposed to the regime. Starting in 1998, the year Chávez was elected, IRI worked with Venezuelan organizations to produce anti-Chávez media campaigns, including newspaper, television, and radio ads.

Additionally, when politicians, union and civil society leaders went to Washington to meet with U.S. officials just one month before the April 2002 coup, IRI picked up the bill. The IRI also helped to fund the corrupt Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (which played a major role in the anti-Chávez destabilization campaign leading up to the coup) and Súmate, an organization involved in a signature-gathering campaign to present a petition calling for Chávez's recall.

Like Hugo Chávez, Honduran President Zelaya was known to be as a fierce critic of telecommunications privatization. In this sense, he was at odds with the current coup president Roberto Micheletti as well as right-wing interests in the U.S. such as McCain's IRI, Arcadia, and Otto Reich Associates that push for the free trade agenda and privatization.

The Curious Case of Cormac

For evidence of further U.S. corporate and right-wing ties to the Honduran imbroglio, one need look no farther than PR Newswire for last Monday, July 6. In an article headlined "Honduran Congressional, Business Leaders to Hold Washington, D.C., Press Conference," we learn that a delegation sought "several days of meetings with United States policymakers to clarify any misunderstandings about Honduras' constitutional process and to discuss next steps to ensure the preservation of the country's democratic institutions."

Founded in March 2001, the Cormac Group is a "strategic consulting and lobbying firm" advocating "open and fair markets." Cormac works in the telecommunications sector and seeks to construct "a barrier-free regulatory structure that enhances competition." Cormac's Founding Partner John Timmons was a fundraiser for McCain and former Senate aide and has represented AT&T. Another partner at Cormac, Jonathan Slade, "has developed a well-known reputation from helping American and foreign companies impact the U.S. foreign policy process, particularly related to Latin America."

Hard Right and Not Obama

What seems to have united all these right-wing groups and figures -- from Arcadia to Otto Reich -- was their allegiance to free markets and privatization of the telecom industry. It was these entities allied to the hard right and McCain that played the most prominent role in the pressure campaign against Zelaya -- not the Obama Administration.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Hugo Chávez: Oil, Politics and the Challenge to the U.S. (Palgrave, 2006) and Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave, 2008). Check out his Web site at http://senorchichero.blogspot.com.

"Single Payer" Supporters Challenge Democrats

2009-06-07T17:11:00.003-04:00

In Los Angeles, nurses and healthcare activists push for universal single-payer healthcare legislation.

When President Obama convened a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, N.M., last month, he wanted to talk about credit card reform. But many in the crowd had a different agenda.

"So many people go bankrupt using their credit cards to pay for health care," the first questioner said to applause. "Why have they taken single-payer off the plate?"

The "single-payer" activists had struck again. As Obama and congressional Democrats work to hammer out landmark health-care legislation, they face increasingly noisy protests from those on the left who complain that a national program like those in Europe has been excluded from the debate.

Also see below:
Robert Parry | 119 Million Americans Must Be Wrong •

The White House and Democratic leaders have made clear there is no chance that Congress will adopt a single-payer approach - named for the idea that a single government-backed insurance plan would pay for all Americans' medical costs - because it is too radical a change.

That has not dissuaded single-payer activists, who have spent months hounding Democratic lawmakers and organizing demonstrations, including one that resulted in 13 arrests at a Senate hearing last month. The offensive continues this weekend with plans to swamp a series of "house parties" on health care hosted by Organizing for America, an Obama-backed project at the Democratic National Committee.

Opportunity and Challenge

The movement poses both an opportunity and a challenge for Obama, who is able to position himself as a centrist by opposing a single-payer plan but who risks angering a vocal part of the Democratic base.

"Obama is really the one who is puzzling to us," said Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, a union that has been leading many of the single-payer protests. "We were all supporters of him... . It's hard to understand how he can expect to rally support around a plan that will leave the big insurance companies in charge and keep hurting patients."

Many Republicans see the movement as evidence that Democrats are setting the country on the path to "government-run health care," as they describe it. Conservatives for Patients' Rights, an advocacy group bankrolled by ousted Columbia/HCA chief Rick Scott, unveiled a $1.2 million ad campaign Thursday that portrays Democratic plans as a "bulldozer" aimed at eliminating private insurance companies.

"It's just one step removed from a single-payer system," Scott said in an interview, referring to current Democratic proposals. "The goal is to get rid of the insurance companies, and then the government makes all the decisions."

Obama and other Democrats dispute such characterizations, saying they favor a plan that would marry private and public resources to control costs and expand coverage for 46 million uninsured Americans. Obama wrote in a letter to Democrats this week that he "strongly" backs creating a public insurance option to compete with private carriers, and also signaled that he is open to the idea of requiring coverage for all Americans.

Obama has rejected the idea of establishing a single government insurance program, however, saying the U.S. tradition of providing health care through employers would make such a shift politically and practically impossible.

"If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense," Obama said in response to the questioner in New Mexico, echoing comments he made during his presidential campaign. "The only problem is that we're not starting from scratch... . We don't want a huge disruption as we go into health-care reform where suddenly we're trying to completely reinvent one-sixth of the economy."

Advocates of a single national program argue that its benefits would far outweigh the drawbacks, noting that most other industrialized nations guarantee coverage for all at far lower costs with generally better health outcomes. They also dispute allegations by Scott and other conservatives that such a system would lead to rationing and waiting lists, saying that Americans face the same problems and worse now.

"Single-payer on its merits can win," said Tim Carpenter, national director of Progressive Democrats of America. "But we've been cut out by the doctors, the insurance companies and other special interests."

A Small Victory

The single-payer activists won a small victory this week when Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is leading health-care negotiations as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, agreed to meet with them after months of tension. Those in attendance said Baucus apologized for not including single-payer advocates more prominently in earlier hearings, but he also said it is too late to change direction.

Polling on single-payer insurance varies widely, based largely on how the issue is framed. In an April Kaiser Family Foundation poll about ways to increase the number of Americans covered by health insurance, the option finished last on an eight-item list, with 49 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed. Moreover, about a third of those who support a public insurance option would turn against the idea if it were an initial step toward single-payer care, the poll found.

Most mainstream progressive groups, including some that have previously advocated a single-payer approach, think Obama's strategy has the best hope for success. Many groups draw lessons from the Clinton administration, which buckled under attacks from Republicans and the medical lobby when it proposed a more centralized approach.

This time around, unions and groups such as Health Care for America Now plan to spend more than $80 million on ad buys, outreach and other efforts to support Obama and the Democrats. The DNC, using Obama's campaign e-mail list of 13 million names, kicks off its effort today with thousands of "house parties" focused on "the urgency of passing health care reform this year," according to a news release.

In an e-mail this week, Progressive Democrats of America urged its supporters to "take the single-payer message" to the meetings.

DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said the gatherings are open to all. "Their voices, energy and passion are welcome, and no one is looking at them as the enemy," he said. "It's just that with the system we have, single-payer is not something that's likely to happen."

Another Message from MoveOn.org

2009-05-30T07:23:00.001-04:00

Remember when Dick Cheney let oil and coal lobbyists craft our nation's energy policy behind closed doors?

Barack Obama may have thrown them out of the White House—but they've relocated to Capitol Hill, with the help of some powerful conservative Democrats in Congress.

In weeks of often secret negotiations over this year's energy bill, these Democrats managed to not just weaken the legislation, but even to slip in language that would prevent the Obama administration from cleaning up coal plants and oil refineries.

We can't let a few conservative Democrats get away with undermining Obama's clean energy jobs plan. So we're fighting back with a massive campaign to fix the bill and expose members of Congress who are undermining Obama—but we need to know if we have the resources to pull it off.

To meet our goal, it's going to take 3,000 of us donating today, which means we need 3 donations from people in Somerset—can you chip in $25 to help out?

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/epa1.html?id=16264-1453416-c4dViox&t=3

Last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by progressive Democrats Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, passed a huge energy bill aimed at creating clean energy jobs.

But unfortunately, a few conservatives on the committee were determined to weaken the bill—and working behind closed doors, they did some real damage.

And what's worse—they didn't just work with Republicans to weaken the bill, they're also trying to tie Obama's hands so he can't take action on his own. The latest version of the legislation would take away the Environmental Protection Agency's existing authority to curb global warming pollution from power plants, oil refineries, and other industrial sources.

Why does that matter? Because the Obama administration is already taking its own steps towards building a clean energy economy. The White House recently announced a bold plan to make cars use less gas—and the EPA is considering whether to propose new rules that would clean up coal plants and oil refineries.1

These steps could help move us toward cleaner, cheaper sources of energy and create millions of clean energy jobs—but not if Congress pulls the rug out from under President Obama before he can act.

We're ramping up a major effort to strengthen the clean energy jobs bill and make sure it doesn't block Obama's efforts. Can you chip in with a contribution of $25? Click here:

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/epa1.html?id=16264-1453416-c4dViox&t=4

Thanks for all you do.

–Adam, Anna, Stephen, Peter and the rest of the team

MoveOn.org targets Democrats on Health Care by Alexander Bolton

2009-05-30T07:15:00.001-04:00

MoveOn.org is pressuring centrist Democratic senators on health care with a new ad campaign urging them to support a government-run option as part of broad legislation lawmakers will mark up next month.

The liberal advocacy group announced Friday that it would run radio ads targeting five Democratic senators and centrist Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine). The Democrats under pressure are Sens. Kent Conrad (N.D.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Tom Carper (Del.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.) and Bill Nelson (Fla.).

All six sit on the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over a major portion of health care reform, including finding ways to pay for it. Of the group, Wyden faces reelection in 2010.

MoveOn.org has also organized "thousands" of members, including doctors, nurses and small-business owners, to visit senators' district offices to call on them to support the so-called public plan option.

"President Obama and 70 percent of voters support health care reform that includes a public health insurance option to contain costs, increase competition and guarantee coverage," the narrator in the ad states.

"The insurance industry says with new rules they can do it alone, but they'll find a way to put profits first. We need a health insurance choice not run by the insurance companies to keep costs down and ensure access to quality, affordable care."

The question over whether to make the public plan option available in all parts of the country has emerged as one of the thorniest of the health care debate. Republicans say a nationwide public plan option would be a "non-starter" and would represent a march toward a single-payer, socialized health care insurance system. They argue that government competition would drive private health care companies out of business.

The campaign calls to mind an effort liberal advocacy groups waged earlier this year to pressure centrist Democrats to support President Obama's budget proposal.

Health care reform has become an increasingly contentious topic between centrist Democrats and groups on the party's left wing. Last week, three major labor unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, launched ads in Oregon criticizing Wyden for a proposal he drafted that has attracted the support of Republican leaders.

Wyden's plan does not call for a government-run health care option to be made available across the country, as liberals want. He would limit the public option to underserved areas of the country where Americans can choose only between two or fewer private plans.

The contest between liberal advocates and centrist Democrats seeking to attract broad GOP support for a reform plan will heat up next month. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is scheduled to hold its first walk-through of draft legislation June 2-3. The committee is scheduled to begin marking up the bill June 16.

The Senate Finance Committee is expected to follow and mark up its own bill, which would pay for the massive overhaul.

Indictment of Bush Officials May Come in Days

2009-04-10T12:04:00.002-04:00

Publicizing the indictment movement requires placing newspaper ads, organizing national call-in days to pressure Congressional representatives, intensive media work, teach-ins and educational forums. Please consider taking a moment right now to make a donation to this new movement for the indictment of Bush.

* The imminent indictment in Spanish courts of former officials of the Bush Administration is being applauded by civil and human rights organizations and legal scholars. The popular wave of support for indictment of Bush officials will inevitably lead to Bush himself.

* Newsweek Magazine blew open more shocking news about Bush' system of kidnapping, secret prisons and torture. A secret Red Cross report indicates that many kidnapped and tortured people were turned into "disappeared persons" by the CIA under instructions from Bush and Cheney. A former Bush administration official told Newsweek's Michael Isikoff that the information had been hidden from the Red Cross. "The majority of the people in the CIA program are unaccounted for. We don't know what happened to them," a human rights investigator told Isikoff.

* Like Bush, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, thought his power would shield him from criminal prosecution when his regime kidnapped and tortured and assassinated individuals who became known as the "disappeared." It was when Spanish courts brought indictments against Pinochet that everything changed. As Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "the importance of this investigation [in Spain] can not be understated. Contrary to statements by some, the Spanish investigations are not 'symbolic.' Just ask Augusto Pinochet, who was stranded under house arrest in England and who ultimately faced criminal charges in Chile because of the pressure of the Spanish courts. If and when arrest warrants are issued, 24 countries in Europe are obligated to enforce them. The world is getting smaller for the torture conspirators.”

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General has called for the prosecution of Bush and other high officials in the United States, stating, "The greatest danger arising from impunity for President Bush and his cohorts would be that all subsequent officials will feel secure in committing the same crimes and the people, having failed to compel impeachment for such open, notorious and egregious crimes, will feel even more helpless to prevent them. Ultimately the power and the responsibility to prevent criminal acts by government is with the people."

Now is the time for massive outreach and publicity. This requires newspaper ads, organizing national call-in days to pressure Congressional representatives, intensive media work, teach-ins and educational forums, and providing literature for people of conscience to distribute in cities and towns across the country. Please consider taking a moment right now to make a donation to this new movement for the indictment of Bush. There is no time to spare. The time to act is now and we will.

--All of us at IndictBushNow.org

Rochester mother arrested for trying to get a good education for her children

2009-04-09T07:56:00.002-04:00

Well, words fail me. A Rochester mother has been arrested and charged with two felonies -felonies! - for trying to get a good education for her children.

The Democrat and Chronicle's outrageous headline: "Woman arrested in a school scam."

According to the charges, the mother, Yolanda Hill, lives in Rochester but has been sending her children to Greece schools, and she didn't pay tuition. And, according to the charges, she lied and said her children lived in Greece. In the eyes of the law, she has stolen money from Greece taxpayers.

Yes, if Hill broke the law and lied about it, that was wrong. But much worse is a system that traps the region's poorest children in poor neighborhoods and sends them to concentrated-poverty schools. Also much worse: knowing - as all of us do - that those children almost certainly won't get a good education, and not doing anything about it.

What to do about it? Break up the concentration of poverty in urban school districts, through regional schools, campus schools, more charter schools - take your pick. But it is immoral to doom those children. And it should be no surprise when parents try to get a good education for their children in any way they can.

Yolanda Hill's story has produced a media frenzy, along with the usual surge of comments on local media websites. Some have been sympathetic to Hill and her family; many, predictably, have been obnoxious.

Something good could come out of this. Community leaders might realize the depth of our urban education crisis and actually try to do something about it. I know what'll happen, though; they'll point fingers at the Rochester school district again. And that'll get them off the hook. And nothing will change.

-Mary Anna Towler

Colombia Government complicit in crimes against humanity: Delegation

2009-04-09T07:48:00.002-04:00

A delegation of twenty U.S. and British Congressmen and representatives of U.S. and Canadian unions that visited Colombia says "the Government of Álvaro Uribe and the security forces are complicit" in crimes against humanity.

In a statement, the delegation says to be in a "state of shock" and "given the evidence" has "no doubt" that "the Government of Álvaro Uribe and the security forces are complicit in these crimes against humanity."

The unionists and Congressmen heard testimonies of "fathers, mothers, brothers and sons being killed, of families displaced, of innocent peasants being murdered and dressed up as guerrillas, of threatened, intimidated and murdered labor rights workers".

The delegation is "convinced that the murderous activities of the paramilitary forces are endorsed and actively supported by the government and state forces."

Upon returning to the United Kingdom and North America, the members of the delegation will "call for an immediate end of military and political support for Colombia," the statement reads.

The delegation also warns that "there will be no free trade pact with Colombia whatsoever until human rights and union rights are respected in an internationally verifiable way."

Among the parliamentarians were former U.K. Minister of Defense Peter Kilfoyle (Labour) and U.S. congressman James McGovern (D-MA), an outspoken critic of the Uribe administration.

The visit ended on the same day a group of ten U.S. Congressmen met with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe in Cartagena and applauded "the progress that he [Uribe] has made in human rights."

- Mario Murillo

Revive The Fairness Doctrine - by Dave Johnson

2009-02-16T08:28:00.000-05:00

Let's start a discussion about reviving the Fairness Doctrine to re-introduce the commons and the idea that we tell the corporations what to do!

A few years ago, in a popular post about the Fairness Doctrine, I wrote,

This "Fairness Doctrine" requirement was intended to protect the public from the possibility of moneyed interests buying up all of the information sources, leaving the public hearing only their viewpoint.
I think that this may be an opportunity - if done right - to reintroduce the public to the idea of the commons: that the public owns the resources of the country, and the laws, and has the power to tell corporations what to do instead of the other way around. If we can project that into the discussion, it leads straight to a discussion of the tight concentration of ownership of the media by a few corporations. What better issues than something called "Fairness" and that so clearly can be demonstrated. There just are no voices of labor and other non- corporate opinions on the airwaves. The public is ready to hear that.

The demise of the Fairness Doctrine paved the way for this media consolidation, because issues around media consolidation were no longer discussed in the media. And that's the problem now, as well, because it will be very difficult to get a good, honest, all-sides discussion of the commons and the Fairness Doctrine and media consolidation started -- because of media consolidation and lack of a Fairness Doctrine.

So do we let the corporations just win this? Reagan unilaterally scrapped public control of the airwaves, vetoed it when Congress voted to bring it back, and then the Republicans filibustered the majority in following years every time the Congress tried again. Does that mean the Congress should stop trying and we should all just let the matter drop, and leave the public thinking that corporations have the right to control the airwaves?

Or does renewing the fight revive public discussion and understanding of these issues, leading to increased understanding of the need for Net Neutrality so big corporations can't just block the public from even seeing union and progressive websites?

So I think reviving this fight is strategic, preparing the public for upcoming fights on all issues of public vs corporate control of public resources and decision-making.

In 96 I wrote,

Restoring the Fairness Doctrine would open up America's "marketplace of ideas." It would help to restore civility to our public discourse. It would help restore our democracy.
I say it is time to restore the Fairness doctrine.

PNAC: What informed American hasn't heard of the treacherous Project for a New American Century by now?

2009-01-24T06:54:00.001-05:00

PNAC: What informed American hasn't heard of the reacherous Project for a New American Century by now?
PNAC is a small off-shoot, occupying the 5th floor, of the American Enterprise Institute which has been around since 1943. The AEI has 12 very busy floors where its operative have had plenty of time to send their operatives over to infiltrate the Democratic Party, or leave them in to be more accurate since the PNACers & AEIers are ORIGINALLY DEMOCRATS. To this day Richard Perle, Fieth and Wolfowitz are still Democrats. The day the Republican party, which they hijacked also, no longer suits their needs, they'll follow other PNAC neo-cons like Marshall Wittman back to the Democratic Party where the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council is laying out the welcome mat for them.

The AEI, the PNAC & the DLC were founded by Scoop Jackson democrats who follow the philosophy of Leo Strauss. To this day the DLC is stacked with neo-conservative ideologues, who maintain deep personal ties to the war-mongers in the Bush Administration.

The DLC is following the footsteps of its neo-conservative, war-mongering predecessor organizations of the 1970s: the Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM)((also see www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Coalition_for_a_D... )), founded in 1972 by the likes of Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, among others; the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) ((also see www.rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/cpd.php )), founded in 1976 by Richard Perle, Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, et al; and the Committee for the Free World (CFW) (( also see www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Committee_for_the... )), founded in 1981 by exactly the same crew. Rounding out the picture, CFW's chairman was none other than Donald Rumsfeld.

The "missing link" between the "Democratic" DLC and the now "Republican" CDM/CPD/CFW neo-cons, is the Social Democrats-USA, (SDUSA), whose chairman, Penn Kemble, was the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in 1972, until he brought in Richard Perle's underling Stephen Bryen to take his place. Bryen, who created the hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) in the early 1980s, when he served as Perle's aide at the Department of Defense, is another leading member of the neo-conservative gang that wants to go to war against the entire Arab world in the name of anti-terrorism. Providing daily coordination between Perle and Bryen would be Joshua Muravchik, a fixture at nearly every American Enterprise Institute event--but also a leader of SDUSA since its creation.

The DLC and SDUSA both maintain extremely close links to Tony Blair's British "New Labour" party faction, and in parallel, are out to recreate a new version of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in time for the 2004 elections. The battle cry for this effort is to follow the "strong defense" lead of the original CDM's heroes: the late Dem Senators Henry "Scoop" Jackson, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The CDM's two leading lights in Congress were the Democratic Senators Jackson and Moynihan. The Cold Warrior and fanatically pro-Israel
Jackson remains the model for the DLC crowd today. Former DLC president Joe Lieberman declares he is proud to be identified as a
"'Scoop' Jackson Democrat." It was these two Senators' offices that housed the Straussians behind the no-exit Iraq War.
http://forums.alternet.org/guest/motet?show+-ui13dz+-il... -

From Jackson's office:
Paul Wolfowitz
Richard Perle
Frank Gaffney

From Moynihan's office:
Elliott Abrams
Abram Shulsky
Gary Schmitt

In 1999, Norman Podhoretz, known as the "father" of neo-conservatism, wrote that the CDM was created to destroy the policies of 1972 Dem nominee George McGovern in the Democratic Party, especially because of McGovern's opposition the CDM was a flop that "never got off the ground." But in the mid-80s, the DLC certainly did get off the ground, and controls the Democratic Party today. http://forums.alternet.org/guest/motet?show+-ui13dz+-il... -

"...In the 1970s, under the leadership of Carl Gershman, SD/USA ((Social Democrats-USA)) became a supporter of Sen. Henry Jackson and his contingent of conservative, hawkish "defenders of democracy." As such, they gained a great deal of political experience and savvy, but little political power. It was not until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, that the SD/USA achieved positions of power and influence in both the labor movement and the government. (2)..."

"http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/sd-usa.php "

Some SD-USA members:

"Carl Gershman, chair of SD/USA from 1974 to 1980, was an aide to Jeane Kirkpatrick when she was the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations. In 1984, he served as an adviser to the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (the Kissinger Commission) established
by President Reagan. (2) Penn Kemble was on the advisory committee of the U.S. Information Agency's (USIA) Voice of America. (34) Arch
Puddington worked for USIA's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. (35) Elliott Abrams was Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican
Affairs in the Reagan administration. Prior to that he served as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and as a staffer for
Sen. Henry Jackson. (40) Abrams was a major figure in the Iran-Contra Affair. (41) Bruce McColm served as a consultant to the U.S. Senate's
Central American Monitoring Group and has taken congressional representatives on fact-finding tours in Central America. (11) Jeane
Kirkpatrick was the U.S. delegate to the United Nations during the Reagan administration. (53) Max Kampleman was a legislative counsel
for Sen. Hubert Humphrey and a chief U.S. negotiator to the Geneva arms talks with the Soviet Union. (40)

The anti-communist, anti-left fervor of SD-USA is no second to PNAC (or the DLC, for that matter). Members were leaders in the AFL-CIO's efforts in overthrowing Allende in Chile, and later in anti-left action in Central America; they have been in the leadership of the
CIA's subversion wing -- the NED -- since its inception; they have been on the board of the terrorist Mas Canosa's Cuban-American
National Foundation; they supported the 2002 coup against Chavez in Venezuela and continue to support opposition terrorists, purging
unions in Venezuela (just as everywhere else) of any "left" leadership or influence by whatever means necessary.

http://forums.alternet.org/guest/motet?show+-ui13dz+-il... -

Michael Lind for instance traced their roots back to the right wing Shactmanite faction of the American Trotskyite movement who entered the Democratic Party in the 1960s and then split with the Left over the Vietnam War. Many members of this group continued their rightward itinerary by rallying to Senator Scoop Jackson’s campaign against the New Democrats. Some finished with the Democratic Leadership Council, while others found a home in the Reagan and now the Bush fils administrations. Other critics who promote an “Iran-Contra bis” scenario for the current flap over intelligence trace the group back to the policy cabal that had promoted the Contra war against the Sandinistas and who had lost their power and influence in the second Reagan Administration as a result of the Iran-Contra hearings of the late 1980s.
http://www.logosjournal.com/mason.htm
Let me point out, that another committee spawned from the same hellish cancer was the Balkan Action Committee which brought us step one of the PNAC wars, the one against Yugoslavia, and was staffed by the same neo-Cons. Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Abramowitz, Carlucci were all on its executive Committee.

They're pretty much the same. Both the same cancer, coming from the same place & destroying both parties.

If I were a Republican, I'd be pissed as hell at the Democrats from whom this stuff spawned. But as such I'm just a Progressive Democrat determined to keep that vermin out and toss out the ones they left behind warming their butts in my party. Lieberman, Feinstein, Kerry- ever wonder why they really went along with the war? It had nothing to do with being fooled! These wars were planned long ago with full complicity of the Democratic Leadership Council which firmly endorsed this war and has endorsed every scheme against the people that the Bush Administration has wanted.

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The Conservative Outrage at Gitmo Closing by Kelly

2009-01-24T06:40:00.001-05:00

« Hey George, Don’t let the Door Hit You on Your Way Out | Home

The desperation of the conservatives is evident; we aren’t going to torture people anymore and they don’t like it. Witness this blog entry which starts, "Over the objections of a large majority of 9/11 family members, President Barack Obama is expected to sign an Executive Order today directing that the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base be closed…" Curious to see what a "majority" constituted I clicked on the reference, a link to the Washington Times and found that "a majority" by their definition constituted five family members. So out of 2000 victims, each I’m certain with a number of relative, five of them constitute a "large majority." To them this is more important than the fact that it was a clear position of Obama in running for office, and a part of what he was elected to do. And such is the fury of the Republican punditry in trying to repeal the results of the last election. Five is the majority of 10,000 and supersedes the majority of American people. Five in fact, is greater than 70 million. Aren’t you glad we’re spreading democracy? The rhetoric is being spewed out at a record pace as the Conservative spin machine looks to find some kind of traction in defending its position. The reason that they can’t get traction though is their position is untenable.

The article goes on to discuss the merits of keeping Gitmo open, "the safest place to have these trials is Guantanamo Bay. If they were to move to the homeland it would endanger all of us ," said Lorraine Arias Believeau of Barnegat, New Jersey, whose brother, Adam, was killed in the attacks. This particular blog has no special place in the argument, it just happens to be one I read, but the fallacies utilized are common to the Repub…erp…conservative media. Firstly, it assigns a false authority to the members of the 9/11 families in addressing these issues. Precisely what expertise doe Lorraine have on these matters? Does the death of her brother, as tragic as it is, imbue her with some ability to know what the rest of the world does not? Does it validate her claim that it would endanger us all? No, of course not, but the representation of her brother’s death is meant to illicit sympathy over logic, legality and morality, and cause us to agree with the idea of torture. Secondly, it allows Lorraine to make baseless statements that go unchecked. What evidence is there that if we had the trials anywhere but Guantanamo Bay it would "endanger all of us." Furthermore embedded in the rhetoric is the notion that torture works. So let’s cut through the rhetoric and examine this issue from three perspectives, the morality of it, the legality of it and the effectiveness of it.

Joe Scarborough, bloviating freshly this AM on the subject, challenged anyone, "with ears to hear" him to Google, "Geneva convention rules" and read them. The argument he addresses of course is the whole notion of an enemy combatant needing to be in "uniform." Since these are not technically "enemy combatants" the Geneva conventions don’t apply to them. The essence of this swill is ridiculous. We incarcerate them, without due process, because they are "enemy combatants" but we can do so in Cuba and torture them because they aren’t "enemy combatants." This is why the Supreme Court, the conservative Supreme Court mind you, has already struck down this entire argument . Still, a far more telling point, and one somewhat ignored by a large portion of the media, and even the blogosphere is a very basic point, and it’s one that Joe blows past without a second thought.

Henry Dumant founder of the Red Cross and the inspiration of the Geneva Conventions was motivated when he came across a battlefield, and saw 80,000 wounded soldiers not being cared for. He assimilated a group of civilians from town, mostly women and children, and they used the phrase "all are brothers." Brothers. It would be very different if the phrase were "all are soldiers." Our bestowal of basic rights to enemy combatants, whether uniformed are not, is not based upon a treaty. That treaty is an agreement on a premise that we are brothers. i.e. people. As people they deserve to be treated in a certain manner, regardless of whether they would treat others in the same way. All the rhetoric about what "they would do" and about "uniforms" and so on is designed to do one thing, dehumanize them. By dehumanizing them we justify torture. However in dehumanizing them we dehumanize ourselves. History is full of this sort of dehumanization and it’s fraught with abuse. From ancient Egypt, to ancient Rome, to early America, to World War II Germany there’s been arguments to make people less than people and it’s always followed with abuses of people, enslavement and torture and murder. The least discussed but most important issue here is not of legality, not of effectiveness but of morality. Our humanity as a nation can only be defined by how we treat our enemies. If we treat them as they would treat us we become them. What voice then do we have in the world when we talk about "spreading democracy?" How can China listen to us if we denounce them on human rights? To preach morality to the world we must be a moral society, and we cannot do that if we are advocating torture. It never fails to amaze me how in some instances the Christian Right can be all about the Bible, but in others completely ignore it. Is torture in concert with the Lord’s admonition, "love your enemy?" Sorry, for all the high minded rhetoric about morality the right fails in this regard. The primary reason we shouldn’t be in the torture business is because it is just plain wrong.

The legality, as I’ve said before is a settled issue at this point. The conservative Supreme Court has settled it, but it’s still not settled in the minds of the Conservative pundits. They cling to the same tired, defeated and wrong arguments as though they haven’t been addressed yet. Let’s not be confused, there’s a reason we are torturing people in Cuba and not in the US—it’s legal there! It has nothing to do with the safety that Ms. Believeau of Barnegat, New Jersey wants to babble about. It has everything to do with bending the rule of law. The position of some, literally is advocating for a governments right to take a person from their home in the US, and without due process, without any opportunity to consult with an attorney, without even telling them why , and ship them to Cuba where they are imprisoned, tortured and perhaps even killed. They actually w ant this to be legal!!! Not only that, they are flabbergasted over the notion that someone wouldn’t. These, the people of "small government" are pushing to legalize such a system.

It would seem to some that the problem with legalizing things like getting around little things like due process one is going to bump into some constitutional issues. However, the Republicans, true to form, have turned things on their head, and insisted that making laws against expatriation for the purpose of torture is what is "unconstitutional" in the infamous, "torture memo. " This memo, as infamous for its scholarly value as for its use, is an example of the best legal arguments the Republican machine could come up with. So why go through so much trouble to try and represent sophistry as authentic research? For one simple reason—it’s all they have. The truth is there is no legal argument to be made. Torture is wrong, and torture is illegal and there’s really nothing to even discuss Mr. Scarborough. I have a challenge for you Joe. How about you Google, "legal arguments torture " and read up on your topic before you start blathering ignorance all over my TV set next time.

Yet, in spite of the fact that it’s unchristian, immoral, and illegal, the Republicans think they have their trump card in "but what if it stops a terrorist attack" argument. Who can argue against water boarding some America-hating terrorist who would saw your head off without a second thought in order to prevent another 9/11. Here it gets interesting as they talk out of both sides of their mouth trying to defend their position. I want to hone in on that position for just a couple of minutes before heading on over to discussing whether torture actually works. They make two arguments lately. One is that this is the only way to get whatever information we want out of them and it’s the only way to stop terrorist attacks. They then prove that it stops terrorist attacks by pointing out there aren’t any. At the same time they have an entirely separate line of argument against closing Guantanamo, talking about the 61 terrorists we’ve already sent back to the battlefield to prove their point. So let’s pause a moment and consider the symmetry of these two arguments. In the first torture appears to be working to stop terrorist attacks. My question is, if it works so well why are we releasing the terrorists? After all, President Obama only signed the order yesterday, so it’s my reasonable assertion that these alleged 61 were no a result of the closing of Gitmo, but must be a result of the tactics that were used prior to his inauguration. Furthermore, if they’ve been released "to the battlefield" then that implies there is a "battlefield" and if there’s a battlefield then the torture isn’t working.

Let’s also look at the arguments separately. The "proof" that our present strategy is working is that there haven’t been any 9/11 attacks since. It reminds me of a series of jokes we used to tell when I was young. Q. "How can you tell if an elephants been in your fridge?" A. "By the footprints in your pizza." Q. Why should you keep garlic in your fridge A. To keep the elephants out. Q. Do you have elephant footprints in your fridge?. (No.) Then that proves it’s working!!! And then we all yuck it up because it’s ridiculous. The inherent logic of something preposterous not happening because we did something to prevent it form happening is shallow enough that even children can see through it. The preposterous, the outrageous, the unlikely doesn’t really happen that often. There has only been one attack on American soil after the likes of 9/11. There were some prevented before 9/11 without the use of such tactics and there’s every reason to believe that the only reason 9/11 ever happened is that conventional tactics weren’t being followed. If anything it is probably the case that our current strategy is making the Al Queda stronger, not weaker, at least if the last National Intelligence Estimate is meant to be believed . In saying that, let’s not forget that the CIA is responsible for both the report and the torturing, so I wouldn’t get to caught up in trying to present it as a case of liberal bias.

Torture simply is not an effective way to get results. I refer you to an interesting piece in the Washington Post which recounts 5 myths about torture . It’s not my intent to rewrite this article but to some up in a few easy statements, torture really doesn’t work. It is probably successful less than 10 percent of the time, and whatever time is saved by that is more than lost when people lie, especially if people don’t know anything and they are merely saying what they need to say in order to stop the torture. Torture is more than bad humanity and bad law; it’s bad interrogation.

Lastly though I want to a allude to an argument I made at the outset. President Obama ran on this platform. This is not some Jan 21 surprise that has the whole world reeling, it is part of what he was elected to do. For all their grandiose statements about backing the President and respecting the vote, the extremists on the right need to now heed their own words. If they love democracy they have to love it when it fails. We are not a center right country. America does not agree with you. The election showed it and the polls show it. I now quote about ten million internet users from eight short years ago, from when our country was enjoying peace and prosperity and Bush stole the election, "You lost, get over it."

This is no sop. It is a vote to end the occupation of Iraq, the total defeat of the US plan to install a supine ally in the Middle East.

2008-11-30T06:52:00.003-05:00

by Jonathan Steele, guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 28, 2008

This is no sop. It is a vote to end the occupation of Iraq The total defeat of the US plan to install a supine ally in the Middle East is likely to be confirmed today in BaghdadComments (…)
Two victories in a single month. Amid the encircling economic gloom, it's hard to believe we deserve such good news. First, of course, Barack Obama's election win. And now Iraq's unexpected deal with the American government for the occupation to end at last.

Debated by the Iraqi parliament today, the agreement has been virtually ignored in many left-liberal circles as well as by most of the mainstream American media. We are so inured to thinking that the US will always get its way in Iraq, thanks to its enormous investment of troops and treasure, that any potentially contrary development is dismissed. The US has agreed to leave Iraq. "You must be joking," comes the response. "Why would they build 14 mega-bases if they didn't intend to stay for decades?" The US is allowing Iraqi courts jurisdiction over crimes committed by American troops. "Give me a break. You can't believe that," I hear the sneer.

Well, look at the agreement's text. It is remarkable for the number and scope of the concessions that the Iraqi government has managed to get from the Bush administration. They amount to a series of U-turns that spell the complete defeat of the neoconservative plan to turn Iraq into a pro-western ally and a platform from which to project US power across the Middle East.

The title gives the game away - Agreement on the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organisation of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq. Remember how Bush (and his ally, Gordon Brown) constantly rejected any "artificial timetables" for pulling out the troops. Everything had to be "conditions-based", meaning that no dates could be given in advance since all depended on whether Iraq's own forces were ready to fill the gap. It was an elastic formula that allowed Washington to delay a withdrawal for ever.

That has gone by the board. The agreement stipulates that "all US forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31 2011". More remarkably, all combat troops will leave Iraqi towns and villages and go back to base by the end of June next year. Pause for a moment and take that in. Six years and three months after the invasion, Iraqi streets will be a US-free zone again.

Iraq will have a veto over all US military operations. A clause added at the last minute after pressure from Iran says that Iraqi land, sea and air may not be used as a launch pad or transit point for attacks on other countries. The Iraqi government eagerly took up the point after US helicopters flew into Syria and attacked a compound there last month, claiming it was a base from which foreign fighters entered Iraq. Iraq joined Syria in protesting against the raid.

Under the withdrawal agreement, no Iraqi can be arrested by US forces except with permission from Iraqi authorities, and every Iraqi who is arrested in these circumstances must be handed to Iraqi forces within 24 hours. The tens of thousands of detainees in US custody must either be released or turned over to the Iraqis immediately. US troops may not enter or search any Iraqi house without an Iraqi judge's warrant, except if they are conducting a joint combat operation with the Iraqi military.

US contractors - the armed mercenaries in their SUVs whom Iraqis hate even more than the American military - will lose their immunity and be subject to Iraqi law, a development that is already prompting many security firms to start pulling out. US troops who rape Iraqi women or commit any other crime while off duty and off base will have to stand trial in Iraqi courts.

The deal gives Iraq's national resistance almost everything it fought for. How did Nouri al-Maliki's government achieve it? The main reason is that Iraqi nationalism and the occupation's unpopularity have become overwhelming. Opinion polls have long shown that a majority of Iraqis wanted the occupation to end. They found it humiliating and oppressive. Al-Qaida's infiltration, and the sectarian conflict which its supporters and recruits successfully provoked in 2006 and 2007, distracted many Iraqis for a time. Some saw the US as the lesser enemy. But al-Qaida's power has waned thanks to the Awakening movement of Sunni tribal leaders; and the primary issue, the US intervention, has returned to centre stage. Nationalist sentiment, articulated from the first weeks of the occupation by Sunni insurgents (many of whom later joined the Awakening movement) as well as Moqtada al-Sadr's Shia militia, has spread through the country's ruling elite. This summer Prime Minister Maliki began to realise that he had more to gain by posing as the man who achieved a US withdrawal than by trying to block it. It is a triumph for Iraq.

There are caveats. US forces need not leave for three years, a point which troubles many in the Iraqi parliament which is scheduled to vote on it today. The Sadrists oppose the agreement largely for that reason. Under pressure from their leading imam, the main Sunni block called for a referendum. Maliki has conceded the point, though the pact will come into force and only lapse if voters turn it down next year. Now the Sunnis are adding new demands.

Obama's position is compatible with the pact, and his staff approved it before the Bush team signed. The president-elect wants US combat troops out of Iraq by May 2010, well before the pact's deadline. The joker in Obama's policy is his call for a "residual force" to stay to fight al-Qaida and carry on training Iraqis. The pact allows some US forces to remain, but only after joint "strategic deliberations" in the event of an external or internal threat. As for training, there has to be a separate US-Iraqi agreement.

From the American point of view, the main thing the pact does is to allow the US to withdraw with dignity. No hasty Vietnam-style humiliation, but an orderly retreat from an adventure which was illegal, unnecessary, and a disaster from the moment of conception. Like most Iraqis, I am content with that. American neoconservatives will declare victory, as Frederick Kagan, one of the architects of the "surge", did this week. But the fact is that Bush and his ideologues wanted to make Iraq a protectorate and stay indefinitely so as to intimidate Iran and Syria. Now they have been forced to give up, and a newly confident Tehran has been helping its neighbouring Shia-led government in Baghdad to show them the door.

j

Did Republicans just admit that Katherine Harris stole 2000 election for Bush? by John Amato

2008-11-16T07:26:00.002-05:00

Did Republicans just admit that Katherine Harris stole 2000 election for Bush?
By John Amato Thursday Nov 13, 2008 4:00pm This is too much. The Republicans are basically admitting that Katherine Harris stole the election for George Bush.

Republicans are also questioning the credibility of Minnesota’s Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the man tasked with overseeing the recount. A background document distributed by national Republicans portrays Ritchie as a far-left, Democratic version of Katherine Harris, the former Republican secretary of state whose actions helped decide the 2000 presidential election. The document accuses Ritchie, who was elected in 2006 with the assistance of a progressive-led group designed to elected Democratic election administrators, of having connections to the controversial voter registration group ACORN and the Communist Party of America.

As Al Franken gets closer to victory, the Republicans are unraveling. A recount is definitely on its way. Oh, what fun...

THE SIEGELMAN NAIL IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION COFFIN ... OR AS THEY SAY, TIME TO PAY THE PIPER by Larisa Alexandrovna

2008-11-16T07:14:00.005-05:00

The Siegelman nail in the Bush administration coffin...
Or as they say, time to pay the piper:

Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years of controversy at the Bush Justice Department. Now new documents highlight alleged misconduct by the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney and other prosecutors in the case, including what appears to be extensive and unusual contact between the prosecution and the jury.

Remember, we knew about this, but Time has gotten the documents. Remember too, that the Bush appointed-Karl Rove-friend-judge on the case, Mark Fuller, knew about the jury tampering and discounted it. Onwards:

The documents, obtained by TIME, include internal prosecution e-mails given to the Justice Department and Congress by a whistle-blower during the last 18 months. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which investigated the Siegelman case as part of a broader inquiry into alleged political interference in the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Department, last week sent an eight-page letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey citing the new material.

Conyers says the evidence raises "serious questions" about the U.S. Attorney in the Siegelman case, who, documents show, continued to involve herself in the politically charged prosecution long after she had publicly withdrawn to avoid an alleged conflict of interest relating to her husband, a top GOP operative and close associate of Bush adviser Karl Rove. Conyers' letter also cites evidence of numerous contacts between jurors and members of the Siegelman prosecution team that were never disclosed to the trial judge or defense counsel.

Remember too, that the DOJ lied to me when I demanded to know if Leura Canary had recused herself from the case. I was told that she had. When I demanded documentation, they told me that the documents were not public (really? a federal prosecutor's rescusal documentation are private?). And the cover-up continued:

When the House Judiciary Committee looked into the Siegelman affair earlier this year, DoJ issued statements, placed in the Congressional record, maintaining that the case had been handled only by career prosecutors, not political appointees, and that Canary had recused herself in 2002, "before any significant decisions ... were made."

Prove it!

Both former AG Alberto Gonzales and current AG Michael Mukasey have obstructed justice in this case and all in order to protect something or someone. Now I doubt that either of them care very much about what happens to the Canary clan. But, the Canary clan is key to something else. I will let you guess to who or what. Onwards:

But new documents furnished by DoJ staffer Tamarah T. Grimes tell a different story. A legal aide who worked in the Montgomery office that prosecuted Siegelman, Grimes first submitted her documents to DoJ watchdogs in 2007, and now finds herself in an employment dispute that could result in her dismissal. Grimes' lawyer had no comment.

The documents — whose authenticity is not in dispute — include e-mails written by Canary, long after her recusal, offering legal advice to subordinates handling the case. At the time Canary wrote the e-mails, her husband — Alabama GOP operative William J. Canary — was a vocal booster of the state's Republican governor, Bob Riley, who had defeated Siegelman for the office and against whom Siegelman was preparing to run again. Canary also received tens of thousands of dollars in fees from other political opponents of Siegelman.

So this is clear and you understand. Not only was Bill Canary an adviser to the Riley campaign. So was Rove. Let's go back to Part III of my investigative series into this:

Karl Rove is known to have worked with Bill Canary on numerous political races in Alabama, beginning in 1994 and including William Pryor's campaign in 1998. Canary and Pryor both enjoyed a close political and social relationship with Rove — who went on to become a senior adviser to the president, before Bush's "brain" resigned earlier this year.

Two Republican lawyers who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation allege that Canary and Rove also worked together on the 2002 Alabama governor's race. One of the lawyers is close to the Republican National Committee in Alabama.

According to the lawyers, Rove and Canary initially supported Republican Lieutenant Governor Steve Windom in his bid for the nomination to challenge Governor Siegelman but then switched their allegiance to Rep. Bob Riley after his victory in the primary. The Windom campaign was well known to be sluggish, however, prompting many observers to wonder just how serious an undertaking it really was.

In other words, you have two campaign advisers for the Republican candidate for Alabama governor in 2002 - Bob Riley - one is married to the US Attorney (Leura Canary) and the other got her appointed to that position. One adviser is a top level official in the White House, the other works for the Chamber of Commerce, which illegally funneled out-of-state funds into Alabama and Mississippi both.

By all appearances, the federal government - including law enforcement - has become and arm of both GOP corporate donors and their purchased government officials. That is the real K Street project scandal. If you have any doubt, then explain to me while the below crimes have yet to be investigated:

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA – In two states where US attorneys are already under fire for serious allegations of political prosecutions, seven people associated with three federal cases have experienced 10 suspicious incidents including break-ins and arson.

These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases.

Watergate was one break-in. This is 10 and 2 cases of arson. And the FBI does nothing? The DOJ does nothing? As I have said before, both Gonzales and Mukasey have become accessories after the fact by obstructing justice. When this administration leaves office, both Gonzales and Mukasey need to be investigated for their continued obstruction not only in the Siegelman's case, but also the cases of Paul Minor, Wes Teel, John Whitfield, Oliver Diaz Jr., at al. Siegelman is but one victim of this ongoing bigger-than-Watergate series of politically motivated crimes. What are you going to do about this?

Well, if Bush leaves office and pardons the players in this un-American criminal saga on his way out, then justice will never be served. If Bush is impeached, however, he cannot pardon the witnesses. Do you see why impeachment is necessary? Again, what are you going to do about this? Or are you too busy celebrating the Obama victory with no thought of these victims?

Media Matters: Loose ends by Jamison Foser

2008-10-18T11:48:00.002-04:00

Finally, for the first time this year, a prominent media figure asked John McCain about his relationship with G. Gordon Liddy last night.

The lack of media attention to the Liddy-McCain relationship is one of the clearest double standards in recent political history. McCain and the news media have devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to Barack Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, yet until last night, McCain hadn't been asked a single question* about his ties to Liddy, a convicted felon who has instructed his listeners on how best to shoot law-enforcement agents. Liddy has held a fundraiser for McCain at his home and describes the Arizona senator as an "old friend"; McCain has said he is "proud" of Liddy.

Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had said he was "proud" of an "old friend" who urged people to shoot law-enforcement agents in the head. Do you think maybe he would have been asked a question or three about it? Do you think maybe there would have been more than the occasional passing mention in the news of the relationship? Of course there would have been.

Yet McCain hasn't been questioned about Liddy. The media have largely ignored the relationship, even while working themselves into a frenzy about Obama and Ayers. McCain's relationship with Liddy is obviously newsworthy in its own right, but coupled with his attacks on Obama over Ayers, it's a textbook case of hypocrisy -- exactly the sort of thing that political reporters supposedly drool over. But not when it's John McCain. When it's John McCain, the nation's leading news organizations band together in what is, in effect, a blackout of information that could be damaging to their longtime favorite.

Until last night, when McCain was finally asked, point-blank, about his relationship to Liddy and the similarities between that relationship and the Obama-Ayers relationship he has attacked so harshly.

Who finally asked the question? The New York Times? The Washington Post? CNN's "best political team on television"?

Nope.

David Letterman asked McCain about Liddy, putting the nation's journalists to shame in the process.

For years, political professionals, academics, and media watchdogs have lamented the fact that some Americans get their news from late-night comedians and other entertainment. As it turns out, that might be a good thing.

Unfortunately, after Letterman broke the media's embargo on questioning McCain's relationship with Liddy, reporters quickly pretended it never happened -- or, if they did mention it, downplayed the significance of the relationship. Time's Mark Halperin described Letterman "hound[ing]" McCain over his Ayers attacks, adding, "The late-night host doesn't let up on where the former Weather Underground leader fits into the campaign." But, inexplicably, Halperin didn't so much as mention that Letterman confronted McCain about his relationship with Liddy. Several news reports that did mention the Liddy exchange described him as a Watergate felon -- omitting Liddy's much more recent statements about shooting law enforcement personnel.

But the worst was MSNBC. This morning, the cable channel played a clip of McCain on Letterman -- but not the Liddy exchange. Then, immediately after the clip, MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall referenced the McCain attacks on Ayers. At no point did Hall mention Liddy.

* Or, if he has been asked, it hasn't been reported. Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman did ask McCain's campaign about Liddy back in the spring, but despite what reporters always claim about how open McCain is, Chapman didn't get a response.

Tax clarity

Two weeks ago, I wrote that too many news reports "simply repeat charges and counter-charges or obsess over minor details while failing to provide the big picture" and, in doing so, "obscure rather than clarify the candidates' proposals and positions." News reports about the candidates' tax plans, for example, often fail to make clear the most important facts: how much the plans cost, and how the cuts are distributed -- how much the typical middle-income taxpayer would save, how much a millionaire would save, etc.

Today's New York Times offers a perfect example. Reporting on the "plumber" John McCain referred to incessantly during Wednesday's debate, the Times purported to assess how he would fare under Barack Obama's tax plan.

Well, that's not quite right: The article didn't say a word about how the actual Joe Wurzelbacher would actually fare under Obama's tax plan. Instead, it focused on the effect Obama's tax plan would have on some hypothetical version of Joe Wurzelbacher who makes considerably more money than the actual Joe Wurzelbacher does.

The accompanying chart was even worse. It was titled "A Plumber's Tax Bill," but it didn't indicate how much the typical plumber would pay in taxes under Obama and McCain. Nor did it show how much an actual plumber would pay in taxes under Obama and McCain. Instead, it showed how much an imaginary plumber who is a partner in a two-person plumbing company that makes $280,000 a year after expenses would pay in taxes under the two candidates.

While The New York Times obscures the effects of the candidates' tax plans, last weekend's Parade magazine showed just how easy it is to get it right: "If your annual salary is less than $112,000, you'd pay less in taxes under Obama's plan; if your salary is higher, McCain would cut your taxes more." That took just 27 words -- 27 words that should be in every news report about the candidates' tax plans from now until Election Day. And Parade included an easy-to-read chart that showed how much people at various income levels would save under the two candidates' plans (or how much more they would pay, in the case of people making more than $227,000 a year).

Rehabbing McCain

Even while reporting critically on John McCain's campaign tactics over the past month or so, many Beltway journalists and pundits have been quick to assert that those tactics don't reflect the "real" McCain, or to bend over backward to suggest that he is not responsible for what his campaign is doing in his name. Last week, for example, David Gergen praised McCain for sending his staff and surrogates out to deliver the nastiest anti-Obama messages rather than doing it himself.

This week, two Time reporters enthusiastically threw themselves into the McCain reputation rehabilitation project. As Glenn Greenwald documented, Ana Marie Cox offered this defense of McCain:

COX: I think McCain in his heart of heart wants to win this fair and square. He wants to win this because he's the better candidate. He doesn't want to win this because people think Obama is a Muslim or is a terrorist or he's not really American. He wants to win this on his own merits. It upsets his sense of fair play -- to win -- to think that the support he's getting is because of what he thinks are bad reasons. . .

ANN ALTHOUSE: But in the last month or so, he's been losing ground, and resorting to this terrorist meme --

COX: I think that hasn't worked for them. I think they recognize that to the extent that that does work, that's not how McCain wants to win. I adore the guy. I think he's fantastic in many ways. I respect him, I admire his service to the country. I think ultimately he's very principled and, to coin a phrase, honorable. . . .

Never mind what John McCain has actually been saying and doing and what his campaign has been saying and doing: Ana Marie Cox is here to assure you that, in his heart of hearts, John McCain is an honorable and principled man with a sense of "fair play." Judge him not by his words, or his deeds -- judge him by what Ana Marie Cox thinks is in his heart!

Ana Marie Cox, by the way, is the "liberal" half of washingtonpost.com's "Both Sides" feature, in which she is paired with Tucker Carlson to provide Post readers a balanced "debate" of "the issues and latest developments." So "Both Sides" consists of a conservative ... and a liberal who "adores" John McCain. That isn't actual balance; that's Fox News "balance."

At least Cox makes clear that her defense of McCain is based not on what he has done, but on her reading of his heart. Her Time colleague Karen Tumulty announced yesterday that both campaigns are equally negative and pretended that her conclusion was based on actual data. It wasn't. The data Tumulty pointed to showed that just 26 percent of McCain's ads have been positive, compared to 39 percent (fully 50 percent more!) of Obama's.

You might be tempted to cut Tumulty some slack; the data she pointed to came from a statement by Ken Goldstein of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which concluded that "the tone of the McCain and Obama campaigns has been absolutely identical." So maybe Tumulty didn't read closely enough to see that the data demonstrated the falsity of Goldstein's conclusion. But when the actual data was pointed out (in reader comments on Time's website, and by me on Media Matters' blog), Tumulty said she would "go with Wisconsin on this" -- that is, she still agreed with Goldstein's claim that the "tone" of the campaigns has been "absolutely identical."

But this really isn't a matter of interpretation. Ken Goldstein's data shows that Barack Obama has run many more positive ads and that a much higher proportion of Obama's ads have been positive. That isn't interpretation: That's what the data says, right there in Ken Goldstein's press release. Therefore, it is simply false to say the "tone" of the two advertising campaigns has been "absolutely identical." There's no way around this: It's false. No matter how you look at it, 26 and 39 are not "identical." Choosing to "go with" Goldstein's claim is deliberately choosing to be wrong.

The only question is: Why would Karen Tumulty choose to be wrong? Is it because it makes McCain look better? Is it because she blindly accepts Ken Goldstein's claims, even when Ken Goldstein's data prove them to be false? Is it because she rejects out of hand accurate statements made by Media Matters and several of her readers? None of those explanations would reflect well on her as a journalist, but other explanations do not readily present themselves.

(As for Goldstein himself: I attempted to contact him for an explanation yesterday afternoon. At 9:30 this morning, I attempted to contact the PR firm listed on his press release. As of 4 p.m. today, I have not heard back from either Goldstein or his representatives. If you, too, would like an explanation of how 26 is "absolutely identical" to 39, you can find contact information here and here.)

Fraudulent reporting

If you believe what you see in the news, you'd think that voter fraud is rampant. In fact, it is so rare as to be virtually non-existent. There is ample evidence that far more people are improperly prevented from voting each Election Day than illegally vote. And there's a long history of Republican voter-suppression efforts and of bogus GOP allegations of voter fraud.

You might think, then, that news organizations who have fallen for these phony Republican allegations in the past would react to current Republican allegations of voter fraud by thinking to themselves, "Not this time." That, instead, they'd focus on voter suppression and document the GOP's history of crying "wolf."

But that isn't really the way things work. When John McCain and the GOP say, "Jump," the media ask, "How high?" So the media are flooded with overheated news reports about alleged voter fraud.

Media Matters has extensively documented flawed reporting about voter fraud over the past week:

Ignoring its own reporting, NY Times omitted key facts on ACORN voter registration allegations
CNN reports leave out relevant facts on ACORN voter registration allegations
Media revive pattern of reporting on alleged "voter fraud" concerns, despite lack of evidence
ABC World News reported on ACORN but ignored voter suppression, including indictment of GOP official in NH case
Dick Morris baselessly accused ACORN of "committing voter fraud"
AP, CNN report that Obama represented ACORN, but not that DOJ was also a plaintiff in the lawsuit
WSJ editorial leaves out relevant information in smear of ACORN
Fox News' Kelly mocked ACORN for accurate statement about Florida registration law
The debates: what was missing?

Time's Massimo Calabresi found great significance in the fact that McCain and Obama didn't talk about God during their debates:

In the nearly sixteen thousand words uttered last night in the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, one was noticeably absent: God.

[...]

Still, the fact that both Obama and McCain chose so assiduously not to invoke "God" in any form in any of their debates is noteworthy, not least to people who care about the presence of religion in politics. "Whether intentional or not the discussion of God and the role of faith appears to have been relegated to the Saddleback forum in this general election," says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, who calls the development "troubling."

Here's the presidential oath of office, in its entirety:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Nothing about "God" in there. Turns out the president's job is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." Given the way the current president has approached that job, you might think the Constitution would have been a big topic in the debates.

Well, in the three presidential debates, the only time the word "Constitution" was used was during a discussion of abortion during the final debate. That's a continuation of what happened during the primaries, when the journalists moderating the Democratic and Republican debates all but ignored the Constitution, executive power, and civil liberties.

And yet Time thinks what was missing from the debates was discussion of God.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.

Voters say they were duped into registering as Republicans

2008-10-18T11:33:00.002-04:00

SACRAMENTO -- Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

Obama, McCain solidify campaign themes...Contact the reporters with your experiences
FBI investigating ACORN voter fraud claims
Supreme Court throws out Ohio GOP lawsuit on new voters
"I am not a Republican," insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet-clinic manager and former Democrat from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. "I certainly . . . won't sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again."

It is a bait-and-switch scheme familiar to election experts. The firm hired by the California Republican Party -- a small company called Young Political Majors, or YPM, which operates in several states -- has been accused of using the tactic across the country.

Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Ventura counties say they are investigating complaints about the company.

The firm, which a Republican Party spokesman said is paid $7 to $12 for each registration it secures, has denied any wrongdoing and says it has never been charged with a crime.

The 70,000 voters YPM has registered for the Republican Party this year will help combat the public perception that it is struggling amid Democratic gains nationally, give a boost to fundraising efforts and bolster member support for party leaders, political strategists from both parties say.

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

The Times randomly interviewed 46 of the hundreds of voters whose election records show they were recently re-registered as Republicans by YPM, and 37 of them -- more than 80% -- said that they were misled into making the change or that it was done without their knowledge.

Lydia Laws, a Palm Springs retiree, said she was angry to find recently that her registration had been switched from Democrat to Republican.

Laws said the YPM staffer who instructed her to identify herself on a petition as a Republican assured her that it was a formality, and that her registration would not be changed. Later, a card showed up in the mail saying she had joined the GOP.

"I said, 'No, no, no. That's not right,' " Laws said.

It all sounds familiar to Beverly Hill, a Democrat and the former election supervisor in Florida's Alachua County. About 200 voters -- mostly college students -- were unwittingly registered as Republicans there in 2004 by YPM staffers using the same tactic, Hill said.

"It is just incredible that this can keep happening election after election," she said.

YPM and Republican Party officials said they were surprised by the complaints. The officials said the signature gatherers wear shirts bearing the Republican symbol, an elephant -- a contention disputed by some of the voters interviewed.

Every person registered signs an affidavit confirming they voluntarily joined the GOP, party leaders said.

"It does the state party no good to register people in a party they don't want to be in," said Hector Barajas, communications director for the California Republican Party.

The document that voters thought was an initiative petition has no legal implications at all. YPM founder Mark Jacoby said the petition was clearly labeled as a "plebiscite," which does nothing more than show public support.

He also said that plainclothes investigators for Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, have conducted multiple spot checks and told his firm it is doing nothing improper.
By Evan Halper and Michael Rothfeld, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
October 18, 2008

Another View of Sarah Palin by HockeyMom14

2008-10-04T07:59:00.001-04:00

Palin was rude to the moderator, rude to Biden, she answered off topic many of the questions from the moderator(which woould cause her to lose points if she were on a debate team), she had poor knowledge of foreign affairs and the economy, she had no clue to the meaning of the term "Achilles heel" and she answered that question wrong, when she doesn't know the answer to a question, she states that it is because she is a Washington outsider, she states that she values education yet even with Alaska's huge surplus they have one of the worse literacy rates in the country and her older kids aren't college bound, her phoney down home behavior and language is a mask for her lack of knowledge and an insult to intelligent rural oriented people, she talked of warm and wonderful Wasilla but failed to mention that it is the meth capital of Alaska and that she fired a police chief who wanted the bars closed at 2AM instead of 5 and she also fired him because he wanted to change the law that allowed people to carry concealed weapons in a bar, she uses tha baby as a prop, and "you betcha" that she secretly supports the goals of the Alaska Independence Party as does her husband. She was so intent in not having a baby in the lower 48 that at 8 months pregnant and after her water broke in Texas while at a conference with her husband, she boarded a plane for a 10 hour flight back to Alaska to have the baby there. I don't know of any other soccer, hockey, PTA , or NRA mother who would have risked the life of their unborn child with that unnecessary trip especially AFTER her water broke. Sara Palin, thank you but no thank you.

When Madmen Reign by Bob Herbert

2008-10-01T06:24:00.001-04:00

I’m not holding my breath, but I would like to see the self-proclaimed conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealots step up and take responsibility for wrecking the American economy and bringing about the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

Even now, with the house on fire, the most extreme among them won’t pick up the fire hoses and try to put it out.

With the fate of the Bush administration’s desperate $700 billion bailout of the financial industry hanging in the balance, Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, stuck to his political playbook like a man covered in Krazy Glue. He pronounced himself “resolute” in his opposition to the bailout because to be otherwise would amount to a betrayal of party principles.

To deviate from those principles, in Mr. Issa’s view, would be like placing “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.”

We are in very strange territory here.

George H.W. Bush warned us about “voodoo economics” in 1980, but the ideologues clamped a gag on him and put him on the Gipper’s ticket. For much of the time since then, the madmen of the right have carried the day. They were freed of their remaining few restraints with the ascendance of George W. Bush in 2000.

These were the reckless clowns who led us into the foolish multitrillion-dollar debacle in Iraq and who crafted tax policies that enormously benefited millionaires and billionaires while at the same time ran up staggering amounts of government debt. This is the crowd that contributed mightily to the greatest disparities in wealth in the U.S. since the gilded age.

This was the crowd that cut the cords of corporate and financial regulations and in myriad other ways gleefully hacked away at the best interests of the United States.

Now we’re looking into the abyss.

When President Bush went on television last week to drum up support for the bailout package, he looked almost dazed, like someone who’d just climbed out of an auto wreck.

“Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

He should have said that he, along with his irresponsible Republican colleagues and their running buddies in the corporate and financial sectors, put the entire economy in danger. John McCain and his economic main man, Phil (“this is a mental recession”) Gramm, were right there running with them.

Credit markets have frozen almost solid, banks are toppling like dominoes and brokerage houses are vanishing like props in a magic act. And who was one of the paramount leaders of the manic anti-regulatory charge that led to this sorry state of affairs? None other than Mr. Gramm himself, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Where is Mr. Gramm now? Would you believe that he’s the vice chairman of UBS Securities, the investment banking arm of the Swiss bank UBS? Of course you would. A New York Times article last spring noted that the “elite private bankers” of UBS “built a lucrative business in recent years by discreetly tending the fortunes of American millionaires and billionaires.”

Toadying to the rich while sabotaging the interests of working people was always Mr. Gramm’s specialty. He was considered a likely choice to be treasury secretary in a McCain administration until he made his impolitic “mental recession” comment. He also said the U.S. was a “nation of whiners.”

The tone-deaf remarks in the midst of severe economic hard times undermined Senator McCain’s convoluted efforts to reinvent himself as some kind of populist. But they were wholly in keeping with the economic worldview of conservative Republicans.

The inescapable disconnect between rhetoric and reality is often stark. Senator McCain has been ranting recently about the excessive pay and “bloated golden parachutes” of failed corporate executives. And yet one of his closest advisers on economic matters is Carly Fiorina, who was forced out as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard. Her golden parachute was an estimated $42 million.

Voters have to shoulder a great deal of the blame for the economic mess the country is in. Too many were willing, for whatever reasons, to support politicians who spat in the eye of economic common sense. Now the voodoo that permeated conservative economic policies for so many years has come back to haunt us big-time.

The question voters should be asking John McCain is whether he has stopped serving his party’s economic Kool-Aid, which has taken such a toll on working families, and is ready to change his ways. Is his sudden populist transformation the real thing or just a mirage?

In the gale force winds of a full-fledged economic hurricane, it’s fair to ask Senator McCain whether he still considers himself a conservative, small government, anti-regulation, free-market zealot. Or whether he’s seen the light.

More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on September 30, 2008, on page A27 of the New York edition.

A Mad Day by John Cory

2008-09-30T09:25:00.001-04:00

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust ... and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do..." Howard Beale, from the film "Network" (1976).
I'm mad as hell because today was bad and was all about politics and not country first.

Democrats were once again Charlie Brown to the Republican's Lucy with the football and we saw the predictable result. Republicans are whining about "the big mean lady who talked bad about us so we showed her - we didn't vote for America, we voted against the big mean lady who didn't talk nice!" And the media talking heads will regurgitate this bilge for hours and days to come.

There is only one political ad that should be aired immediately by the Democratic Party and that is: All of the McCain's surrogates' quotes about McCain suspending his campaign to save the country with this headline: "Republicans Vote For The Great Depression!"

The Democrats need to hang this necktie around John McCain and the Republicans from now to Election Day. John McCain and the Republican Party refused to reach across the aisle. McCain is powerless. McCain is Bush in lame-duck clothing. McCain was pivotal in defeating the bipartisan effort to save America.

Wake up Democrats! These people couldn't care less about America, the middle class working folk, poverty, health insurance and education. The Republicans care more about politics and the wealthy than anything else in this world. Don't you get it? We turn to you for change - not compromise. We turn to you for leadership - not more of the same.

As I read Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini and others, they all say this was not the best solution - but it was something to fill the void of nothing. Doing nothing would only speed the crisis with disastrous results. And so, Democrats believed in the delusion of "Country First" and went to the wall. Republicans, of course, support disaster because that is their forte. The Republicans bring about disaster like the war in Iraq, Katrina, Enron, deregulation, and, when caught, blame it on Democrats from FDR to Bill Clinton. Blame it on the poor and minority populations. Blame it on Gay Marriage. Blame it on teaching evolution in public schools. Anything to avoid taking responsibility for their failures. That's the GOP way.

It's time to play politics, Democrats! Hope is not a method. Change comes through action, and now is the time to nail this to the Republican hide of this country. No nice words - no soft peddling - power to truth - with a political edge. If Democrats want victory in November - it may have just been handed to them.

I'm not a smart guy or strategic political planner, but here is my view of the next few days that could bring Democrats victory - if they really want it:

1) Every Democratic spokesperson on television points out that McCain is so weak he cannot lead his own political party, so how can we expect him to lead this country?

2) Run ads of John McCain hugging George Bush with photos of New Orleans drowning, of the carnage in Iraq, the DOW plummeting, CEO's retreating to beautiful mansions with millions of dollars while their former companies go bankrupt and employees carry their jobs out in cardboard boxes on their way to the unemployment office.

3) Show the DOW where it was on the day Bill Clinton left office and where it is today after eight years of Bush and the GOP. If it is a flat line - we all know the medical condition of an EKG flat line. No matter how many spikes are induced by CPR.

4) Message: McCain and GOP put politics first - not country. Willing to sacrifice America to avoid losing power.

As I said in the beginning, I'm mad as hell and I'm looking for the Howard Beale Democrats. Anything less is disaster for America.

"... We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy ... I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad." - From the film "Network" (1976) by Paddy Chayefsky.

Democrats - it is time to get mad.
»

The Rich Are Staging a Coup This Morning ...a message from Michael Moore

2008-09-29T07:46:00.001-04:00

Friends,

Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.

No matter what they say, no matter how many scare words they use, they are up to their old tricks of creating fear and confusion in order to make and keep themselves and the upper one percent filthy rich. Just read the first four paragraphs of the lead story in last Monday's New York Times and you can see what the real deal is:

"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

"Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

"At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.

"Nobody wants to be left out of Treasury's proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions."

Unbelievable. Wall Street and its backers created this mess and now they are going to clean up like bandits. Even Rudy Giuliani is lobbying for his firm to be hired (and paid) to "consult" in the bailout.

The problem is, nobody truly knows what this "collapse" is all about. Even Treasury Secretary Paulson admitted he doesn't know the exact amount that is needed (he just picked the $700 billion number out of his head!). The head of the congressional budget office said he can't figure it out nor can he explain it to anyone.

And yet, they are screeching about how the end is near! Panic! Recession! The Great Depression! Y2K! Bird flu! Killer bees! We must pass the bailout bill today!! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Falling for whom? NOTHING in this "bailout" package will lower the price of the gas you have to put in your car to get to work. NOTHING in this bill will protect you from losing your home. NOTHING in this bill will give you health insurance.

Health insurance? Mike, why are you bringing this up? What's this got to do with the Wall Street collapse?

It has everything to do with it. This so-called "collapse" was triggered by the massive defaulting and foreclosures going on with people's home mortgages. Do you know why so many Americans are losing their homes? To hear the Republicans describe it, it's because too many working class idiots were given mortgages that they really couldn't afford. Here's the truth: The number one cause of people declaring bankruptcy is because of medical bills. Let me state this simply: If we had had universal health coverage, this mortgage "crisis" may never have happened.

This bailout's mission is to protect the obscene amount of wealth that has been accumulated in the last eight years. It's to protect the top shareholders who own and control corporate America. It's to make sure their yachts and mansions and "way of life" go uninterrupted while the rest of America suffers and struggles to pay the bills. Let the rich suffer for once. Let them pay for the bailout. We are spending 400 million dollars a day on the war in Iraq. Let them end the war immediately and save us all another half-trillion dollars!

I have to stop writing this and you have to stop reading it. They are staging a financial coup this morning in our country. They are hoping Congress will act fast before they stop to think, before we have a chance to stop them ourselves. So stop reading this and do something -- NOW! Here's what you can do immediately:

1. Call or e-mail Senator Obama. Tell him he does not need to be sitting there trying to help prop up Bush and Cheney and the mess they've made. Tell him we know he has the smarts to slow this thing down and figure out what's the best route to take. Tell him the rich have to pay for whatever help is offered. Use the leverage we have now to insist on a moratorium on home foreclosures, to insist on a move to universal health coverage, and tell him that we the people need to be in charge of the economic decisions that affect our lives, not the barons of Wall Street.

2. Take to the streets. Participate in one of the hundreds of quickly-called demonstrations that are taking place all over the country (especially those near Wall Street and DC).

3. Call your Representative in Congress and your Senators. (click here to find their phone numbers). Tell them what you told Senator Obama.

When you screw up in life, there is hell to pay. Each and every one of you reading this knows that basic lesson and has paid the consequences of your actions at some point. In this great democracy, we cannot let there be one set of rules for the vast majority of hard-working citizens, and another set of rules for the elite, who, when they screw up, are handed one more gift on a silver platter. No more! Not again!

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

P.S. Having read further the details of this bailout bill, you need to know you are being lied to. They talk about how they will prevent golden parachutes. It says NOTHING about what these executives and fat cats will make in SALARY. According to Rep. Brad Sherman of California, these top managers will continue to receive million-dollar-a-month paychecks under this new bill. There is no direct ownership given to the American people for the money being handed over. Foreign banks and investors will be allowed to receive billion-dollar handouts. A large chunk of this $700 billion is going to be given directly to Chinese and Middle Eastern banks. There is NO guarantee of ever seeing that money again.

P.P.S. From talking to people I know in DC, they say the reason so many Dems are behind this is because Wall Street this weekend put a gun to their heads and said either turn over the $700 billion or the first thing we'll start blowing up are the pension funds and 401(k)s of your middle class constituents. The Dems are scared they may make good on their threat. But this is not the time to back down or act like the typical Democrat we have witnessed for the last eight years. The Dems handed a stolen election over to Bush. The Dems gave Bush the votes he needed to invade a sovereign country. Once they took over Congress in 2007, they refused to pull the plug on the war. And now they have been cowered into being accomplices in the crime of the century. You have to call them now and say "NO!" If we let them do this, just imagine how hard it will be to get anything good done when President Obama is in the White House. THESE DEMOCRATS ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS THE BACKBONE WE GIVE THEM. CALL CONGRESS NOW.

McCain Voted against All Katrina Aid in 2005 by Steve O

2008-09-02T22:18:00.001-04:00

As the Democratic minority tried throughout the fall of 2005 to get help for people in Louisiana and Mississippi, the Republicans wanted no part of it and despite his post-Katrina pledge to “do all that is necessary to fund essential relief and recovery efforts and help those in need,” John McCain was right there to shoot down every initiative that would have helped, including the following Democratic-sponsored bills:

So when John McCain makes his grand exploitation trip to Louisiana later this week — and especially if he follows that stunt by making his convention speech from there — keep in mind that no matter what words of resolve or sympathy he throws at the latest hurricane victims, he voted down every chance he had to actually provide help and oversight the last time this happened.

The best McCain can hope voters assume is that he simply didn’t care. The worst — and probably closer to the truth — is

McCain's Dangerous VP Pick

2008-09-01T13:30:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was John McCain's 72nd birthday. If elected, he'd be the oldest president ever inaugurated. And after months of slamming Barack Obama for "inexperience," here's who John McCain has chosen to be one heartbeat away from the presidency: a right-wing religious conservative with no foreign policy experience, who until recently was mayor of a town of 9,000 people.

Huh?

Who is Sarah Palin? Here's some basic background:

She was elected Alaska's governor a little over a year and a half ago. Her previous office was mayor of Wasilla, a small town outside Anchorage. She has no foreign policy experience.1

Palin is strongly anti-choice, opposing abortion even in the case of rape or incest.2

She supported right-wing extremist Pat Buchanan for president in 2000. 3

Palin thinks creationism should be taught in public schools.4

She's doesn't think humans are the cause of climate change.5

She's solidly in line with John McCain's "Big Oil first" energy policy. She's pushed hard for more oil drilling and says renewables won't be ready for years. She also sued the Bush administration for listing polar bears as an endangered species—she was worried it would interfere with more oil drilling in Alaska.6
How closely did John McCain vet this choice? He met Sarah Palin once at a meeting. They spoke a second time, last Sunday, when he called her about being vice-president. Then he offered her the position.7
This is information the American people need to see. Please take a moment to forward this email to your friends and family.

We also asked Alaska MoveOn members what the rest of us should know about their governor. The response was striking. Here's a sample:

She is really just a mayor from a small town outside Anchorage who has been a governor for only 1.5 years, and has ZERO national and international experience. I shudder to think that she could be the person taking that 3AM call on the White House hotline, and the one who could potentially be charged with leading the US in the volatile international scene that exists today. —Rose M., Fairbanks, AK

She is VERY, VERY conservative, and far from perfect. She's a hunter and fisherwoman, but votes against the environment again and again. She ran on ethics reform, but is currently under investigation for several charges involving hiring and firing of state officials. She has NO experience beyond Alaska. —Christine B., Denali Park, AK

As an Alaskan and a feminist, I am beyond words at this announcement. Palin is not a feminist, and she is not the reformer she claims to be. —Karen L., Anchorage, AK

Alaskans, collectively, are just as stunned as the rest of the nation. She is doing well running our State, but is totally inexperienced on the national level, and very much unequipped to run the nation, if it came to that. She is as far right as one can get, which has already been communicated on the news. In our office of thirty employees (dems, republicans, and nonpartisans), not one person feels she is ready for the V.P. position.—Sherry C., Anchorage, AK

She's vehemently anti-choice and doesn't care about protecting our natural resources, even though she has worked as a fisherman. McCain chose her to pick up the Hillary voters, but Palin is no Hillary. —Marina L., Juneau, AK

I think she's far too inexperienced to be in this position. I'm all for a woman in the White House, but not one who hasn't done anything to deserve it. There are far many other women who have worked their way up and have much more experience that would have been better choices. This is a patronizing decision on John McCain's part- and insulting to females everywhere that he would assume he'll get our vote by putting "A Woman" in that position.—Jennifer M., Anchorage, AK

So Governor Palin is a staunch anti-choice religious conservative. She's a global warming denier who shares John McCain's commitment to Big Oil. And she's dramatically inexperienced.

In picking Sarah Palin, John McCain has made the religious right very happy. And he's made a very dangerous decision for our country.

In the next few days, many Americans will be wondering what McCain's vice-presidential choice means. Please pass this information along to your friends and family.

Thanks for all you do.

–Ilyse, Noah, Justin, Karin and the rest of the team

Sources:

1. "Sarah Palin," Wikipedia, Accessed August 29, 2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin

2. "McCain Selects Anti-Choice Sarah Palin as Running Mate," NARAL Pro-Choice America, August 29, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17515&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=1

3. "Sarah Palin, Buchananite," The Nation, August 29, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17736&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=2

4. "'Creation science' enters the race," Anchorage Daily News, October 27, 2006
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17737&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=3

5. "Palin buys climate denial PR spin—ignores science," Huffington Post, August 29, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17517&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=4

6. "McCain VP Pick Completes Shift to Bush Energy Policy," Sierra Club, August 29, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17518&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=5

"Choice of Palin Promises Failed Energy Policies of the Past," League of Conservation Voters, August 29, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17519&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=6

"Protecting polar bears gets in way of drilling for oil, says governor," The Times of London, May 23, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=17520&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=7

7 "McCain met Palin once before yesterday," MSNBC, August 29, 2008
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=21119&id=13661-5646812-7y8CjPx&t=8

Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 3.2 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

This article comes from MoveOn

Did a Mississippi Raid Protect Rightwing Politicians by David Bacon

2008-09-01T13:14:00.001-04:00

Immigration Agents arrest workers at Howard Industries in Jena, Mississippi. Workers were taken to a privately run detention center. (Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Laurel, Mississippi - On August 25, immigration agents swooped down on Howard Industries, a Mississippi electrical equipment factory, taking 481 workers to a privately-run detention center in Jena, Louisiana. A hundred and six women were also arrested at the plant, and released wearing electronic monitoring devices on their ankles if they had children, or without them if they were pregnant. Eight workers were taken to Federal court in Hattiesburg, where they were charged with aggravated identity theft.

Afterwards Barbara Gonzalez, spokesperson for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), stated the raid took place because of a tip by a "union member" two years before. Other media accounts focused on an incident in which plant workers allegedly cheered as their coworkers were led away by ICE agents. The articles claim the plant was torn by tension between immigrant and non-immigrant workers, and that unions in Mississippi are hostile to immigrants.

Many Mississippi activists and workers, however, charge the raid had a political agenda - undermining a growing political coalition that threatens the state's conservative Republican establishment. They also say the raid, which took place during union contract negotiations, will help the company resist demands for better wages and conditions.

Jim Evans, a national AFL-CIO staff member in Mississippi and a leading member of the state legislature's Black Caucus, said he believed "this raid is an effort to drive immigrants out of Mississippi. It is also an attempt to drive a wedge between immigrants, African Americans, white people and unions - all those who want political change here." Patricia Ice, attorney for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), agreed that "this is political. They want a mass exodus of immigrants out of the state, the kind we've seen in Arizona and Oklahoma. The political establishment here is threatened by Mississippi's changing demographics, and what the electorate might look like in 20 years."

In the last two decades, the percentage of African Americans in the state's population has increased to over 35%, and immigrants, who were statistically insignificant until recently, are expected to reach 10% in the next decade. Mississippi union membership has been among the nation's lowest, but since the early 1980s, workers have joined unions in catfish and poultry plants, casinos and shipyards, along with those at Howard Industries.

Evans, other members of the Black Caucus, many of the state's labor organizations, and immigrant communities all see shifting demographics as the basis for changing the state's politics. Over the last seven years their growing coalition has proposed legislation to set up a Department of Labor (Mississippi is the only state without one), guarantee access to education for children of all races and nationalities, and provide drivers' licenses to immigrants. MIRA organized support in the state capitol for those proposals, and Evans, who sponsored many of them, chairs MIRA's board.

Earlier this year, however, the legislature passed, and Governor Haley Barbour signed, a law making it a state felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, punishable by 1-5 years in prison and $1,000-10,000 in fines. Employers are given immunity for employing workers without papers, so long as they vet new hires through an ICE database called E-Verify. It is still not known whether the people arrested at Howard Industries will be charged under the new state law. Evans says the law and the raid serve the same objectives. "They both just make it easier to exploit workers. The people who profit from Mississippi's low wage system want to keep it the way it is," he alleged.

In the week before the raid, MIRA organizers received reports of a growing number of ICE agents in southern Mississippi. They began leafleting immigrant communities, warning them about a possible raid and explaining their rights should people be questioned about their immigration status. When agents finally showed up at the Howard Industries plant, many workers say they tried to invoke those rights, and warn others that a raid was in progress. One woman, later detained and then released to care for her child, began to call workers who had not yet come to the factory on her cell phone, warning them to stay away. "She first called her brother, and then began calling anyone else she could think of," explained her mother, who works in a local chicken plant. Both feared being identified publicly. "An agent grabbed her arm, and asked her what she was doing, so she went into the bathroom, and kept calling people until they took her phone away."

Howard Industries, like most Mississippi employers, has a long record of opposing unions. Workers there chose representation by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers on June 8, 2000, by a vote of 162-108. Employment at the plant, which manufactures electrical ballasts and transformers, grew considerably after the election, and the company now employs over 4000 workers at several locations in Mississippi. In 2002 it received a $31.5 million subsidy for expansion from the state government, and at one point state legislators were all given HI laptop computers. "The company is very well-connected politically," says Evans, who noted that its owners donated to the campaigns of former Democratic governor Ronnie Musgrove, and then to Mississippi's current Republican governor Haley Barbour.

As it grew, the company hired many immigrant Mexican and Central American workers, diversifying a workforce that was originally primarily African American and white. The company has declined to comment, and released a press statement that said, "Howard Industries runs every check allowed to ascertain the immigration status of all applicants for jobs. It is company policy that it hires only U.S. citizens and legal immigrants."

During the organizing drive, the union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging intimidation and violations of workers' rights. After the union and company agreed on a contract, more charges followed. NLRB Region 15 issued a complaint against the company for violating the union's bargaining rights. Roger Doolittle, attorney for IBEW Local 1317, says other charges allege that the company threatened a union steward for trying to represent workers in the plant. In June, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced it intended to fine the company $123,000 for 36 violations of health and safety regulations at the Pendorf plant, where the raid took place, and another $41,000 in fines for a second Laurel location.

Tension between the company and union increased after the collective bargaining agreement expired at the beginning of August. According to one immigrant worker, who was not detained because he worked on swing shift and did not want to be identified, the union was asking for a wage increase of $1.50/hour and better vacation benefits. Company medical benefits are also an issue among workers, he said, because family coverage costs over $100/week, putting it out of reach for most employees.

Mississippi is a right-to-work state, and labor contracts cannot require that workers belong to the union. Instead, unions must continually try to sign workers up as members. In past years, according to other union sources, IBEW Local 1317 had a reputation as a union that did not offer much support to its immigrant members.

According to the swing shift worker, who did not belong to the union, there were just a few hundred members at the Pendorf plant, and in negotiations the company used that low membership as a reason not to sign a new agreement.

To increase its ability to negotiate a contract, Local 1317 began making greater efforts to sign up immigrant members. Spanish-speaking organizers were brought in, and they handed out leaflets in Spanish explaining the benefits of membership. They visited workers at home so they could talk about the union without being overheard or seen by company supervisors. According to the swing shift worker, many began to join, especially the immigrants who'd been hired most recently. IBEW's national newspaper, Electrical Worker, reported that over 200 had signed up last April, according to Local 1317's African-American business manager Clarence Larkin. "It's a constant process to keep the union alive and growing," he told the paper.

That's when the plant was raided. Local 1317 will now have to try to negotiate a contract after the loss of many of its members, who were among those detained. Those members, who joined the union in hopes of better wages and treatment, instead have been imprisoned for days in Jena, Louisiana, a two-hour drive from Laurel. ICE spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez would not provide an estimate of how long they might be jailed, but said "the investigation of their cases is ongoing."

The day after ICE agents stormed the factory, MIRA began organizing meetings to provide legal advice, food and economic help. According to MIRA director Bill Chandler, Howard Industry representatives told detainees' families, and women released to care for children, that the company wouldn't give them their paychecks. On August 28 MIRA organizer Vicky Cintra led a group of workers to the Pendorf plant to demand their pay. Managers called Laurel police and sheriffs, who threatened to arrest her. After workers began chanting, "Let her go!" and news reporters appeared on the scene, the company finally agreed to distribute checks to about 70 people.

The swing shift worker was so frightened by the raid that he hadn't gone back to work after almost a week, and wasn't sure he'd have a job waiting if he did. "Everyone is still really scared," he said. Doolittle agreed, and said that fear would affect more than just the workers taken away. "Workers get apprehensive anytime something like this happens," he said. "That's just human nature."

Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, explained that "raids drive down wages because they intimidate workers, even citizens and legal residents. The employer brings in another batch of employees and continues business as usual, while people who protest get targeted and workers get deported. Raids really demonstrate the employer's power." The Hattiesburg American reported Friday that Howard Industries sent a letter to customers two days after the raid, assuring them that production would be back to normal by the end of the week, and noting that the company has not been charged.

Spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez claimed ICE waited two years after receiving a call from a "union member" before conducting the raid, because "we took the time needed for our investigation." She declined to say how that investigation was conducted, or what led ICE to believe their tip had come from a union member. The picture of a plant in which union members were hostile to immigrants was reinforced after the raid by media accounts of an incident in which workers "applauded" as their coworkers were taken away. But on August 29, when Cintra and the braceleted women sat in front of the plant for a second day, demanding more paychecks, African American workers came up to them as they left work, embraced the women, and told them they supported them.

"It's hard to believe that a two-year old phone call to ICE led to this raid, but whether or not the call ever took place, that possibility is a product of the poisonous atmosphere fostered by politicians of both parties in Mississippi," says MIRA director Chandler. "In the last election Barbour and Republicans campaigned against immigrants to get elected, but so did all the Democratic statewide candidates except Attorney General Jim Hood. The raid will make the climate even worse"

During the 2007 election campaign the Ku Klux Klan organized a 500-person rally in Tupelo, and when MIRA organizer Erik Fleming urged Barbour to veto the bill making work a felony for the undocumented, he was attacked by state anti-immigrant organizations.

Some state labor leaders have contributed to anti-immigrant hostility. After the Howard Industries workers, many of them union members, were arrested, state AFL-CIO President Robert Shaffer told the Associated Press that he doubted that immigrants could join unions if they were not in the country legally. U.S. labor law, however, holds that all workers have union rights, regardless of immigration status. It also says unions have a duty to represent all members fairly and equally

"This raid will just make us more determined," Evans declared. "We won't go back to the kind of racism Mississippi has known throughout its past.

This article originally appeared in TRUTHOUT, September 1, 2008

DIEBOLD COVERUP: Stephen Spoonamore Confronts MD Board of Elections with Unredacted SAIC Report

2008-08-30T07:27:00.002-04:00

VR NEWSLETTER ALERT
08/29/2008

DIEBOLD COVERUP

STEPHEN SPOONAMORE CONFRONTS MD BOARD OF ELECTIONS
WITH UNREDACTED SAIC REPORT

We have been asserting for years that Diebold (now Premier Elections Systems) makes voting machines that don’t work, are unreliable and that have flipped elections. Just last week, Diebold was forced to admit that software in its machines has been dropping votes for a decade. These machines are being used in 34 states in the upcoming election.

Two years ago, The Brad Blog broke the Pentagon Papers of E-Voting stories about the SAIC report on the vast problems with Diebold voting machines. In short, Diebold had issued a 40 page redacted version of the SAIC report which whitewashed the problems. Computer cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore got a copy of the 197-page unre dacted report which listed hundreds of serious problems, and he released that report to us.

Well, Spoonamore did more than that – he took the report to the Maryland Board of Elections and confronted them with it at a public meeting. He told them that if he were handed such a report in the private sector, he would "shut down the system and open a fraud investigation." The elections officials expressed shock that they had not ever seen the same unredacted report. And when the meeting was over, Spoonamore, with a concealed microphone, personally confronted the officials. And what did one of them say to him? That him having the report was "a security risk." Following the confrontation, Spoonamore was contacted by law enforcement officials who demanded to know how he got the report. We can say now that the report came from a high official in the Executive Branch who wanted to expose Diebold.

You can watch the video on our website:

Liberal Positions Gaining In Popularity by Steven Thomma

2008-08-23T15:13:00.003-04:00

As Democrats gather, liberal positions gaining in popularity.
Denver - As they meet for their national convention Monday through Thursday, Democrats are poised to shift their party's course - and the country's.
They're turning to the left - deeply against the war in Iraq, ready to use tax policy to take from the rich and give to the poor and middle class, and growing hungry, after years of centrist politics, for big-government solutions, such as a health-care overhaul, to steer the nation through a time of sweeping economic change.
They are, in short, more liberal than at any time in a generation and eager to end the Reagan era, which dominated not just the other party, but also their own, for nearly three decades.
"Every generation ... there are changes in people's relationship with government," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. This, he said, is such a time.
The shift of the party also reflects a change in much of the population - evidenced in the policy positions advocated by rank-and-file voters as well as the party's presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.
"Government SHOULD do more, especially when you're spending tens of billions of dollars in Iraq protecting the interests of millionaires," said Rebecca Washington, a Democrat and an accountant from Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
"We've got to revoke the tax cuts for the wealthy," said Vicki Balzer, a Democrat and retired teacher from the Cleveland suburb of Berea. "We definitely need to do something more for the economically disadvantaged.... We've allowed big corporations to take millions for corporate leaders while workers get nothing."
Nationally, 40 percent of Democrats in the 2006 midterm elections called themselves liberal, the highest since the American National Election Studies program started asking in 1972.
At the same time, the number of Democrats who support a government safety net for the poor - such as guaranteeing food and shelter for the needy and spending to help them even if it means more debt - jumped by 14 percentage points from 1994 to 2007, according to the Pew Research Center.
Support for that safety net also rose by 15 points among independents and 9 points among Republicans.
That's a remarkable change since the mid-'90s, the decade when centrist Bill Clinton dominated the Democratic Party, signed a welfare overhaul into law that forced recipients to work, expanded free trade against the wishes of organized labor and famously declared the era of big government to be over.
"During the era when Bill Clinton was president, there was a clear re-centering of the party," said Democratic Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.
Today, she added, "there is a growing understanding that government can play a positive role in investing in our country."
What changed? Several things:
The Iraq war lasted longer, cost more lives and money, and proved deeply unpopular. A few years ago, Obama was a rare voice in the party opposing the war; today he's one of a chorus.
Anxiety about a slowing economy resurrected fears about American jobs and paychecks in the global economy. Promises to change trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement punctuated the Democratic primaries.Also, Obama promises a dramatically different tax policy, one that would raise taxes on the wealthy, cut taxes for the middle class and offer new "refundable" tax credits to the working poor that would wipe out tax liabilities and deliver anything left over in the form of checks.He also wants to tax oil companies and use the money to give checks to the poor to pay for high fuel costs, or anything else.
Many Americans recoiled at the weak federal government response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Republican George W. Bush turned into one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history. Just as American revulsion at Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980 helped usher in the Reagan era, rejection of the Bush era could help swing the pendulum the other way.
At the same time, the party has new power centers in liberal groups such as Moveon.org and blogs such as dailykos.com, where antiwar fever and anti-Bush anger are magnified.
They helped propel Howard Dean to an early lead for the 2004 Democratic nomination, lost, then regrouped to help defeat pro-war Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut in a 2006 primary, though he went on to win re-election as an independent.
"Enormous dissatisfaction with the Republican Party has brought out the base more," said Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico.
Ever more vocal and influential heading into this year's election, that base fed the sense that the party should "return to its core values," Richardson said. "The rise of the Internet and bloggers have made the party more progressive."
Schumer also thinks that it's all part of a historic cycle in American politics - or at least he hopes it is.
He said Americans encouraged and grew accustomed to an activist federal government during the Great Depression of the 1930s, one that Democrat Franklin Roosevelt delivered and Democrat Lyndon Johnson accelerated in the 1960s.
They grew disenchanted with that big government by the 1970s, a government seen as corrupt in the Nixon days, unable to stop oil crises or runaway inflation, and unable to rescue Americans whom Iran had taken hostage.
"By 1980, the average person said, 'I don't need government anymore. I'm fine on my own,'" Schumer said.
That sentiment drove U.S. politics for years, helping Republicans win five out of seven presidential elections and giving the Democrats two victories only when they nominated a Southern centrist in Clinton.
This year, however, Democrats rejected Hillary Clinton, who, while arguably more liberal than her husband, was to the right of Obama on big issues such as tax policy and had a history of being more hawkish on national security.
Perhaps it's because Obama was simply a more appealing candidate. But it also might be because times are changing.
Now, Schumer said, Americans feel shaken by big forces such as globalization, terrorism and a sputtering economy. "The whole world changes, and people feel a little bit at sea, and they need help," Schumer said.
Whether the country will turn to a resurgent-liberal Democratic Party to navigate that less-certain world won't be known until November. But for Democrats watching their national convention, it's clear they want something very different.
»This article is from August 22, 2008 McClatchy Newspapers

American Prayer

2008-08-23T10:54:00.001-04:00

more about "American Prayer", posted with vodpod

The Problem With John McCain's 10 Houses

2008-08-22T14:00:00.001-04:00

Turns out John McCain isn't only married to a wife, who struggles with the truth — falsely claiming that Mother Teresa had asked her to choose their adopted daughters, pretending she is an only child even though she has two sisters — but, too, McCain, supposed man of the people, owns ten different houses. Ten different houses! Ten different houses with a total value of nearly $14 million! Indeed, John McCain, champion of the common people!
The problem isn't that McCain owns these ten houses — valued at an eye-popping $14 million. No, one can hardly fault a man for being lowly enough to cheat on his first wife with a wealthy heiress, to marry that heiress while still legally married to the first wife, and to take advantage of the second wife's wealth by way of purchasing 10 houses. No, can't fault a man for that, right? After all, since when has character played a vital role in selecting a president?
The problem with McCain owning ten different houses is that he owns so many different houses that, another Geritol moment perhaps, he can't exactly remember how many houses he actually owns. When asked by a reporter, McCain couldn't answer the question and said that he would have to ask his handlers and that they, for some reason, would have to provide the information. Honestly, how does a self-proclaimed man of the people not know the number of houses that he and his family live in?
Still, not knowing that he owns nearly $14 million worth of houses isn't the only problem with McCain's ten house holdings. How to put this without seeming indelicate? Hhmmm … well, it would seem that a man in possession of ten different houses, valued at nearly $14 million, and a man owning those ten houses, valued at nearly $14 million, not knowing that he owns ten houses, because he owns so many houses; well, it would seem that that particular man would be, by definition, an elitist. And, since McCain has been accusing Obama of being an elitist, ignoring the fact that the latter owns but one home, that would make McCain a rather sad and pathetic figure … to be precise, it would make McCain, man of the people, one giant hypocrite!
And, that, you see, is the problem with John McCain, self-proclaimed man of the people, owning ten houses that are valued at nearly $14 million.
This is the August 22, 2008 Editorial of THE PROGRESSIVE DAILY BEACON

The Heritage Foundation Is Nuts

2008-08-22T08:57:00.001-04:00

Want to see what passes for scholarly research with the great brainz inside Washington think-tankery these days? Watch and amaze as the crazy people at the Heritage Foundation discuss these "Casas de Alba" that have been popping up in Peru in recent months:
Alba means "dawn" in Spanish, but the people of rural Peru are learning that, for them, it might mean a return to the dark nights of tyranny they experienced in the 1980s when guerilla groups such as the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and the Communist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) terrorized the Peruvian countryside.
Holy Mac! Terrorisms?! So just what exactly are these Casas de Alba, anyway, indigeo-jihadist training camps? Haha, not exactly. As the LA Times notes, they are "social service centers" for low income folk that help "thousands of poor Peruvians to receive free medical care from Cuban doctors working in Bolivia under Operation Miracle, a Chavez health initiative. Cuban educators in Bolivia are also training Peruvian volunteers for a related literacy campaign."
Wait, health clinics? What does that have to do with the Shining Path again? Back to you, Heritage:
The unimaginative and retrograde collectivist socialist models aggressively peddled by Chavez, Morales, and others are proven failures, but getting the positive message of prosperity through market-based democracy to the poor in rural Peru is increasingly difficult when that message is drowned out by the well-funded ALBA houses.Ok, so the, uh...point?... is that if the Peruvian poor are getting their health and education needs met, then we'll never be able to win them over to market-based democracy, which is too imaginative to waste schools and hospitals on dirt eaters. And so it's all just like terrorism, somehow, or something. Honestly I've waded through the whole 12 pages of footnoted crazy talk six times now and I still don't get it.
This article came from Bo.Rev.net

The Natives Are Getting Really Uppity

2008-08-22T08:50:00.001-04:00

>> First the Indians propelled Evo Morales to an unprecedented 68% electoral victory. Now they've dared to resist the so-called "strike" that the opposition's neo-Nazi thugs were enforcing. The indigenous insolence was cured with spiked clubs and baseball bats. Seriously, where do these assholes buy baseball bats in Bolivia?
>> In Peru, Indian communities had the audacity to protest new laws that would allow the state to more easily confiscate and exploit their traditional lands. Naturally, the right-wing government declared a state of emergency and suspended constitutional rights. President Alan Garcia may even send in the army to beat the civilization into the savages.
>> The new President of Paraguay spoke Guarani, dressed in traditional attire and promised to govern for the benefit of the poor Indian majority during his inauguration. He's even naming former slaves to his cabinet.
Of course the US media ignored, or couldn't understand, the symbolic and historic nature of the events in Paraguay.
This article came from BoRev.net

Fox News and Jerome Corsi, living in the past by Eric Boehlert

2008-08-20T09:40:00.002-04:00

Tue, Aug 19, 2008 10:00am ET

Fox News and Jerome Corsi, living in the past
by Eric Boehlert
It sure felt like déjà vu all over again, didn't it?
No election watcher could forget the summer of 2004, when Fox News repeatedly invited Swift Boat author John O'Neill onto cable prime time and allowed him to air his scurrilous allegations about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Even before the partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group unveiled its infamous television ads, it was on Fox News where the controversy was birthed. It was Fox News that allowed O'Neill a mostly unobstructed platform on August 10, 17, 19, and 24, 2004, to libel Kerry and to gin up a controversy that eventually swamped the Democratic candidate for most of that crucial summer month.
Then, almost exactly four years later to the dates (on July 31, August 3, 12, and 14), Fox News presented its White House campaign sequel. It welcomed O'Neill's Swift Boat writing partner, Jerome Corsi, to publicize his new attack book, The Obama Nation. Laying out his fever-swamp allegations about Obama's drug use and his supposed connections to Islam, Corsi enjoyed the type of national exposure, courtesy of Fox News, that every author craves.
It was an audience that helped propel The Obama Nation to No. 1 on the bestsellers list, which then ignited wide-scale mainstream coverage for Corsi and his book.
In other words, everything was going according to plan. The sequel had been set up -- had been marketed -- just like the Swift Boat predecessor, and now all conservatives had to do was sit back and watch the fun, as the Obama campaign became engulfed in Corsi-led controversy.
Right?
It hasn't worked that way. The Obama Nation's allegations, as slight and flimsy as they are, have taken a back seat to questions about Corsi's own credibility. In fact, journalists have likely spent more time dissecting the errors in Obama Nation and highlighting Corsi's controversial path, including the hateful, bigoted items he used to post in online forums, than they have focusing on the allegations Corsi wanted to broadcast.
As the conservative National Review Online noted with frustration, "The media narrative thus becomes 'Corsi refuted' rather than 'Obama embattled.' "
Add in the fact that some conservatives have stepped forward to publically denounce Corsi and his brand of slime, beseeching the movement to divorce itself from Corsi's unsubstantiated attacks, and suddenly the sequel is in real distress.
Oh sure, it's selling. (Thanks in part to bulk sales, a right-wing marketing staple.) But in terms of affecting the race, in terms of gumming up the works for the Obama campaign, the book has so far been a bust.
What happened? How did a sure-fire follow-up hit turn into such a trouble-plagued production? And why isn't Fox News' Swift Boat formula working?
Simple. Both Corsi and the Fox News team are living in the past and failed to realize how dramatically the media landscape has shifted since the shady Swift Boat accusers were able to deftly use the media to spread their lies.
First and foremost, the progressive movement has spent the last four years bulking up its infrastructure, and specifically readying itself to respond to media-driven attacks from the right; the way Media Matters for America immediately blanketed The Obama Nation and documented its egregious errors (often floated on Fox News) and also raised doubts about the author's veracity and integrity. And thanks to the larger Netroots community, Corsi hasn't had any breathing room to spread his misinformation.
But there were also key marketplace changes within the cable news industry that affected the Corsi coverage, I think. Because remember that in 2004, Fox News drove the Swift Boat saga; it was practically a co-sponsor of the anti-Kerry crusade, devoting endless hours to promoting the Vietnam-era allegations. By sheer force of repetition, Fox News, then the dominant player in cable news, forced its competitors to not only acknowledge the Swift Boat story, but to go all in as well. And soon all the cable news outlets were treating the Swift Boat saga with Fox News-like breathlessness. (CNN aired nearly 300 segments referencing the topic.)
And just like Fox, they weren't asking the tough questions. Instead, they gave the Swift Boat accusers the same free ride that Fox News did. They became media enablers, too.
Not this time around. With Fox News no longer the dominant cable news king -- and with Fox News no longer driving the campaign narratives -- its competitors opted for a much different approach to covering Corsi. And I think the coverage from the competitors sent a subtle, yet simple, message: We no longer take our cues from Fox News' lead, because they no longer dictate campaign coverage. Instead, we're going to exult in our role as a counterbalance, as a fact-checker, to the Fox News-produced Corsi attack campaign. In fact, we're gonna help pull the curtain back on Corsi.
Just look at how MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer greeted Corsi, as he ventured for the first time beyond the friendly TV confines of Rupert World:
BREWER: You say it's a comprehensive look, and yet there are already online bloggers that are going through this book page by page and picking apart what they see as factual errors. ... If they're going through, and they're finding all of these factual errors in your book, why should we give you the credibility?
CNN's Campbell Brown introduced a prime-time report by announcing, "Obama Nation is riddled with pretty much every unsubstantiated rumor you ever heard about Obama."
And on Larry King Live, Corsi was forced to face off against Media Matters Senior Fellow Paul Waldman, who refused to let the author spread his misinformation uncontested.
All the above represented precisely what the press, and most especially the cable outfits, should have done -- but mostly refused to do -- in 2004.
They refused to allow articulate, independent critics onto the national stage to debunk the patently false Swift Boat charges. Instead, the press most often treated the Swift Boat story as a political one, which meant amplifying the partisan charges and then going to the Kerry campaign for a quote, or inviting a Kerry campaign surrogate on the air to debate a Swift Boat liar.
Rather than forcefully labeling the Swift Boat attacks a charade and IDing the attackers as pranksters, and instead of holding the Swift Boat accusers accountable, the press played dumb and abandoned its traditional campaign role.
As Greg Mitchell at Editor & Publisher noted, "The mainstream press gave the charges -- carried in ads, in books and articles, and in major TV appearances -- a free ride for a spell, then a respectful airing mixed with critique, before in many cases finally attempting to shoot them down as overwhelmingly exaggerated or false."
In the infamous words of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie, upon being pressed about the paper's Swift Boat coverage in August 2004: "We are not judging the credibility of Kerry or the [Swift Boat] Veterans, we just print the facts."
Talk about abdicating your role as journalists. During the Swift Boat hoax, Downie and his team at the Post essentially walked off the field, refusing to officiate the smear campaign. Wasn't judging the credibility of the previously unknown Swift Boat accusers precisely what the Post and the rest of the press should have been doing in August 2004?
Thankfully, that kind of cowardice has been replaced by actual journalism when dealing with the Corsi sequel. And on TV, I'd suggest that about-face has been fueled by Fox News' fall from ratings grace, as its competitors, flush with confidence, realize they no longer have to follow.
Instead, they can lead.
Of course, the fact that Corsi won't admit or correct obvious errors in his book has only emboldened the press to pose tough questions. His often loopy logic has also not helped him, like suggesting we cannot believe Obama when he said he stopped taking drugs in college because, according to the author, "self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable."
When Corsi stumbled down that twisted path on CNN's Larry King Live last week, Media Matters' Waldman was waiting to pounce:
WALDMAN: You put up on right-wing websites a whole series of bigoted and hateful posts in 2002 and 2003 that you later had to admit to when you got found out -- all kinds of really vile, malicious stuff.
CORSI: OK. If you --
WALDMAN: Now, you say that you've stopped that. You say that you've stopped that and you don't put up those kinds of vile, bigoted, malicious, hateful posts on right-wing websites. But all we have is your word. I mean, do -- can we really trust you? People who do that kind of thing, well, you know, they're not really very trustworthy.
CORSI: We have --
WALDMAN: So can we trust you? Are you still doing that?
CORSI: You have more than my word. You've got the record of everything I've written since then.
WALDMAN: Can you prove that you're not doing it anonymously? Can you prove it?
I'm hard-pressed to recall the last time I saw an author get so thoroughly discredited on national television the way Corsi was at the hands of Waldman. (The encounter simply confirmed why conservatives often refuse to go head-to-head with reps from Media Matters in public settings.)
That undressing proved infectious within the mainstream media, as it began to spell out, fairly and accurately, what Corsi and his book were about. The Associated Press' Nedra Pickler reported, "Corsi suggests, without a shred of proof, that Obama may be using drugs today. Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine as a teenager but says he quit when he went to college and hasn't used drugs since."
The New York Times' political blog, The Caucus, set aside space to detail Corsi's touting of radical 9-11 theories that suggest explosives detonated inside the Twin Towers were also responsible for the destruction, not just the terrorist-piloted jumbo jets. And Politico noted how Corsi had "left a trail of wild theories, vitriol and dogma that have called into question his credibility."
Is it some sort of collective penance journalists are serving for the media's Swift Boat failures of 2004? Who knows? But it's exactly what journalists ought to be doing when mischief-makers like Corsi climb onto the national stage (ladder, courtesy of Simon & Schuster), and start making unsubstantiated charges about presidential contenders.
Conservatives now whine about the press taking sides, that it's teaming up on Corsi. In fact, the press is simply doing exactly what it should have done in 2004, and that's vet the accuser. Period.
The game has changed. But somebody forgot to tell Corsi and his friends at Fox News.
—E.B.

Blacks Banned from Bars in Beijing During Olympics, what?!!

2008-08-17T08:24:00.000-04:00

Blacks Banned from Bars in Beijing During Olympics, what?!!
Beijing ex-pat site with Beijing mag that discusses the "secret" banhttp://www.shanghaiexpat.com/MDForum-viewtopic-p-902799.phtmlLink to another article describing posthttp://www.racewire.org/archives/2008/07/blacks_banned_from_bars_in_bei.htmlChinese Paper Says Blacks Banned From Bars During Olympics Published on: Monday, July 21, 2008 Nsenga Burton What do Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard and Jason Kidd have in common? They are the starting five of the 2008 Olympic Men's Basketball team and none of them will be admitted to any bars in Beijing because they are black. No, this is not fiction -- it is fact as reported by the South China Morning Post (7/18/08). Beijing authorities have forbidden bar owners to serve blacks during the 2008 Olympics.How hypocritical is it that the host of the largest international sports competition in the free world would ban an entire group of people based on race? This blanket discrimination is couched in the idea of "controlling" Beijing's problem with prostitution and drugs, which is primarily driven by Mongolians. Somehow, this policy smacks of impropriety, pun20intended, and underscores China's continuous policies of discrimination. You would think with the global embarrassment over the mistreatment of Tibetan Monks, faulty consumer products, and the suppression of information about deadly diseases, that China would have figured out by now that the systematic exclusion of an entire group of people, many of whom have histories of horrendous discrimination in their home countries, would not reflect well on the mainland. Further, I was not aware that blacks owned drug trafficking and prostitution worldwide. Amsterdam anyone? Let's get this straight. Black people can participate in the games, add money to the economy in "permitted" spaces like hotels, lodges and restaurants, but they cannot go to a bar, which may be located in a hotel, lodge or restaurant. This is outrageous. Would the world stand still if in 2008 the United States was banning entire populations of people based on perceived ideas about race? Pretending to control drug trafficking while controlling the movement of black folks is out of control. To define an entire race of people as drug dealers and prostitutes is unacceptable. I guess this is what you get when an international committee overlooks a country that has transgressed human rights without recourse. The world community needs to unite against this injustice and demand that China allow all Olympic participants, athletes and visitors alike, equal access to all venues. As China prepares to take the world's stage in celebration of athletes all over the world, and by e xtension their people, it is tragic that they have decided to add blanket discrimination to the many offerings during this year's Olympic games. Perhaps our expectations of China are too high? It is kind of ridiculous to have the expectation of moving freely in a country that does not allow its citizens to move freely. Complicated countries have complicated practices. The fact that Beijing is being allowed to ban all Blacks from any place or event, without rebuke or scorn, is maddening. Will the world stand by while China further institutionalizes another human rights debacle?
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2008-08-16T17:38:00.000-04:00