11:07 PM ET -- House health care bill gets votes needed for passage. 220 members of Congress -- including one Republican, Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana -- voted in favor of health care reform, advancing the legislation by the slimmist of margins. Forty-nine Democrats voted against the bill, along with 176 Republicans.
Good for Colorado. (My home state) In my opinion Hemp is God Given and serves many purposes! ~MemKRISTEN WYATT | 10/30/09 07:51 PM | AP-Huff
BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — Voters in this Rocky Mountain resort town will decide next week whether to legalize pot for all adults at a time when the movement to allow medical marijuana is gaining steam around the country.
A measure before Breckenridge voters in Tuesday's municipal election would legalize possession of up to 1 ounce of marijuana along with bongs, pipes and other pot paraphernalia. Supporters of the measure say it would inch the whole state closer to full legalization.
Other cities around the country have taken similar action in recent years, including a measure in Denver that decriminalized possession.
Local ordinances to allow some recreational marijuana use have passed in Seattle, San Francisco and other cities, though in all those places the law is considered symbolic because it conflicts with state and federal laws. Alaska allows possession of up to 4 ounces of marijuana in one's home, and advocates in California want to ask voters in next year's election to legalize pot.
Advocates say the Breckenridge proposal goes further than others because it allows paraphernalia as well. "I don't think there's anywhere else in the country that has legalized paraphernalia," said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Washington-based Marijuana Policy Project.
As in most states, drug paraphernalia possession in Colorado is considered a petty offense. Though "head shops" selling bongs and pipes are common in Colorado, the wares are ostensibly for smoking tobacco. Paraphernalia charges are usually only filed along with possession charges. Both are misdemeanors punishable by a $100 fine and court fees.
The penalties aren't serious, but about 100 people a year in Breckenridge are cited for possession of either marijuana or paraphernalia, often both. Supporters of the effort say it's not right to leave small-time pot smokers with a criminal record.
"We don't want to spend our tax dollars prosecuting this, so we're saying, let's just stop it," said Sean McAllister, a Breckenridge attorney who proposed the ordinance. Supporters include a member of the town council and the Summit Daily News, which printed an editorial backing the idea.
Its prospects are strong. In 2006, a statewide ballot measure to make marijuana possession legal failed 59 percent to 41 percent. But among Breckenridge voters it won almost 3-to-1.
McAllister's attempt to put the legalization measure on ballots needed 495 signatures. He collected more than 1,500.
Breckenridge Police Chief Rick Holman has opposed the idea, saying the measure just sets up a conflict between town and state law. Pot possession would still be a state crime, but Breckenridge police officers would have to take users to the Summit County Sheriff's Department to be cited if the measure passes.
Critics also point out that Colorado already allows marijuana for medicinal use – though debate rages because pot shops aren't regulated by the state and are proliferating.
More than 10,000 people in Colorado are cleared to use medical marijuana, and more than 100 dispensaries have opened.
This week, Summit County imposed a 120-day moratorium on new medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated areas so it can figure out how to regulate them. At least six other Colorado counties and towns are considering or have moratoriums for that reason.
Breckenridge had a moratorium, but lifted it this month as the town released zoning guidelines to ban dispensaries from setting up shop near schools or in part of the tourist-friendly downtown.
The debate is playing out around the country as states struggle to figure out how to regulate and enforce medical marijuana laws. The federal government complicated matters earlier this month when the Justice Department told federal prosecutors that targeting medical marijuana users who comply with state laws was not a good use of their time.
Several Breckenridge residents heartily backed the local marijuana effort.
"People think it's a waste of time for the police to be prosecuting these people," said Elisabeth Lawrence, 30. Smoking pot, she said, is "not the worst thing in the world to be doing."
Nancy Skaj, a clerk at a Breckenridge grocery store, said the measure could be a boon for ski tourists who don't have clearance for medical marijuana. "With all the injuries people get skiing up here, instead of popping pills, they should just be doing this. It's a lot more natural," she said.
Backers have one main worry – the measure's timing.
Turnout for off-year municipal elections is often extremely light among Breckenridge's 3,300 or so voters. Election Day falls during the quiet weeks before the ski business picks up.
McAllister, who has two interns waving signs and passing out flyers in support of the measure, says he's confident the effort will send at least a message about what he calls the public's changing attitude toward marijuana.
"Prohibition ended by localities and states saying they didn't want it anymore. And that's exactly how marijuana prohibition is going to end – from the ground up," he said.
On the Net:
http://sensiblecolorado.org
Interesting Facts:
Today in America, Abraham Lincoln would be a criminal for smoking 'sweet hemp'.
"Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." - Abraham Lincoln (from a letter written by Lincoln during his presidency to the head of the Hohner Harmonica Company in Germany)
I'm not quite sure where America would place Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams for suggesting hemp should be an important part of American industry?
"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country."
- Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President
"Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere."
- George Washington, U.S. President
"We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption."
- John Adams, U.S. President
"Michael Moore's Action Plan: 15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now"
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Friends,
It's the #1 question I'm constantly asked after people see my movie: "OK -- so NOW what can I DO?!"
You want something to do? Well, you've come to the right place! 'Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.
Here they are:
FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:
1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.
2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is called H.R. 3200. You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.
3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.
4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)
5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!
FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:
1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!
2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It's time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party -- and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama's agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action -- and he won't feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it's to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I'll post it on my website.
3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year -- or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don't have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don't believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on -- and you should be on it!
4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there's more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place "Capitalism Did This" signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)
5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth -- so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here's an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don't fill that void, who will?
FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:
1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.
2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one -- the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.
3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.
4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here's how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn't be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.
5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she's right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, "Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants"). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I've turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny -- she's fit, she's rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don't put our own "oxygen mask" on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!
I'm sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.
And when you act, send me your stories, your photos and your video -- and be sure to post your ideas in the comments beneath this letter on my site so they can be shared with millions.
C'mon people -- we can do this! I expect nothing less of all of you, my true and trusted fellow travelers!
Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com
The White House has released the text of the letter from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy that President Obama referenced in his address to Congress:
May 12, 2009
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me – and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.
On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.
You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.
When I thought of all the years, all the battles, and all the memories of my long public life, I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the President who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me-and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination.
There will be struggles – there always have been – and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat – that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.
And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family’s health will never again depend on the amount of a family’s wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will – yes, we will – fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.
In closing, let me say again how proud I was to be part of your campaign- and proud as well to play a part in the early months of a new era of high purpose and achievement. I entered public life with a young President who inspired a generation and the world. It gives me great hope that as I leave, another young President inspires another generation and once more on America’s behalf inspires the entire world.
So, I wrote this to thank you one last time as a friend- and to stand with you one last time for change and the America we can become.
At the Denver Convention where you were nominated, I said the dream lives on.
And I finished this letter with unshakable faith that the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.
With deep respect and abiding affection,
[Ted]
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
CNN's Lou Dobbs has been using his show to give life to conspiracy theories claiming President Obama wasn't born in the U.S. The question was put to rest long ago, but Dobbs is pretending that this extremist nonsense is a legitimate national conversation.
Dobbs, intentionally or not, is stoking the fires of racial fear and paranoia in the same way that the McCain/Palin campaign did when they cast Obama as "not one of us." Even after being called on it, he refuses to stop.
CNN claims to be "the most trusted name in news," yet it is allowing one of its hosts to give legitimacy to debunked, racist conspiracy theories. Will you join me in calling on CNN to dump Dobbs -- and ask your friends and family to do the same? It takes just a minute:
http://www.colorofchange.org/dobbs/?id=2027-541082
For more than a year, folks on the far right have been claiming that Obama is not a U.S. citizen, that he was born in Kenya, and that as a result he can't be president. The theory has been repeatedly debunked. Not only has the state of Hawaii produced a birth certificate several times, there were also birth announcements in two separate Hawaii papers when Obama was born, placing his birth in Hawaii--for most reasonable people, that would remove any doubt.
Members of Dobbs' own staff have said they're uncomfortable with his insistence on pursuing this story, but Dobbs insists on claiming there must be something to it because "Obama refuses to produce the long-form of his birth certificate." Other news outlets have refused to give the idea any credence. The head of MSNBC, Phil Griffin, had this to say about the claim: "It's racist. It's racist. Just call it for what it is."
Dobbs and race
Lou Dobbs has a history of attacking immigrants by spouting hateful rhetoric and lies. He once claimed that "the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans" through "deadly imports" of diseases like leprosy and malaria. This kind of rhetoric feeds anti-immigrant hate, which has led to horrors like the beating death of Luis Ramirez in Pennsylvania and the shooting death of 9-year old Brisenia Flores in Arizona earlier this year. Dobb's role in creating this environment has led organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to call on CNN to reign in Dobbs in the past.
Now Dobbs is going after Obama by giving voice to the same kind of xenophobic rhetoric, stoking the deep-seated fears of angry right-wing extremists who, as CNN analyst Roland Martin has said, can't accept the fact that their president is Black.
Dobbs may not like Obama. But it's a real problem for him to use his powerful position as a moderator of discussion about the news to validate a dangerous falsehood that's rooted in racism.
Several watchdog groups have demanded action on the part of CNN. The head of the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote CNN last week asking that they fire Dobbs based on his recent actions9. Media Matters and others have launched efforts to hold CNN accountable as well.
CNN has the opportunity to live up to its description of itself as the most trusted cable news network. Or it can start to look like FOX, where the legitimizing of extremist propaganda is part of doing business.
I've joined ColorOfChange.org in calling on Jon Klein, the president of CNN, to take Dobbs off the air. Will you join us, and ask your friends and family to do the same?
http://www.colorofchange.org/dobbs/?id=2027-541082
Thanks.
Here are some links to more info:
Lou Dobbs Show, CNN, 7-23-09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvYcFgXCJrE
"Mob scene or campaign rally?" ColorOfChange.org, 10-14-08
http://www.colorofchange.org/united/message.html
"(Still) Challenging Obama's birth certificate," Politics Daily, 11-24-08
http://tinyurl.com/m2xhue
"CNN chief addresses Obama birth controversy," LA Times, 7-25-09
http://tinyurl.com/mk4rfd
"On Television and Radio, Talk of Obama's Citizenship," The New York Times, 7-24-09
http://tinyurl.com/mb467j
"CNN's Immigration Problem," Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, 4-24-06
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2867
"Broken Record," Intelligence Report, Winter 2005
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=589
"CNN's Martin: Birthers' "I want my country back" comment means "How is this black guy all of the sudden running the country?" Media Matters, 7-22-09
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907220041
"Major Civil Rights Group Demands CNN Remove Lou Dobbs From The Air," Huffington Post, 7-24-09
http://tinyurl.com/lafpuw
"CNN's Dobbs Problem," Media Matters
http://dobbsconspiracy.com/
Please note that I refer to our delivery system as the HEATHCARE INDUSTRY. In a nutshell, I believe that is the real root of the problems we face. Uniquely,... healthcare in the United States is an INDUSTRY,... a for-profit business which is designed with the primary goal,... not of tending to your physical and mental welfare,... but of making money for its providers and investors. That’s a simple fact and should not come as a surprise! We live in a capitalistic society, and our political leaders long ago decided that healthcare is a commodity,... not a right of citizenship, like our public education, judicial system, fire protection, and other public services.
But that means any attempt to “reform” healthcare delivery and reduce the cost of healthcare will have a negative effect on the income and profits of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, clinics, medical laboratories, and the manufacturers of medical equipment (such as expensive MRI machines, respirators, power wheelchairs, laser devices, pacemakers, etc.)
You should expect them to resist and fight back! Think about it,... for years, the drug companies have been spending millions trying to convince you that you need to take regular pills. They dream up curiously-named syndromes for common discomforts and get to sell you expensive remedies which could be treated by simpler, much less expensive means. These same pharmaceutical companies lobbied your congressional representatives to the absurd extent that recent reform legislation on prescription drugs specifically forbade the Medicare and Medicaid programs from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for better prices on their drugs. Ridiculous,... but true!
Those same drug companies tell you that the reason your prescription drugs cost so much is that they have to spend enormous amounts of money on research to find new and better medications. In fact, most of the investment in developing and testing new drugs is shouldered by the federal government (as a tax-payer, that’s you), through the NSF, NIH and direct grants from HHS. The pharmaceutical companies spend three times as much on promotion,... detailing doctors, advertising on TV and in medical journals,... as they do on research.
The drug companies are not alone in these endeavors. Every part of the healthcare industry,... health insurance companies, hospital associations, nursing homes, health professionals and manufacturers of medical equipment,... provide your congressional representatives with generous contributions for their reelection coffers.
Let’s look at a few of them:
Over the last 6 years,...
Max Baucus, Chairman, Senate Finance Comm. has accepted over $2,350,000 from the healthcare industry as campaign contributions. Do you suppose he feels somewhat obligated to them? This year he’s earning it, as their defender against the massive popular demand to get a single-payer health insurance system. As chairman, he has outright refused to consider any single-payer proposals,... barring from the hearings any single-payer advocates despite vocal protests,... and he’s forging ahead with a plan that promises to discipline the industry,... but keeps them in charge.
His Republican counterpart on the committee, Charles Grassley, helping him write the reform legislation, has gotten nearly 25% of his campaign funding from the industry. He has accepted almost $1,500,000 from them.
John Boehner, Republican minority leader in the House, has received over a million dollars in the past 6 years. Which makes him a “piker” compared to John McCain, who received campaign contributions (including his run for the presidency) to the tune of well over $5 million, just from health professionals alone.
This is a high stakes game that’s being played and there seems to be no shame demonstrated by any of the participants. So far, in the absence of any serious consideration for a single-payer system (which would be the TRUE reform we need), the Obama Administration’s persistent efforts in the healthcare reform debates have managed to assure that we might get a “public option” for healthcare insurance in the final resolution of the bill. This is the very least we should settle for. And if there are no troublesome loopholes in the final bill, a federally supported “public option” should be sufficiently more efficient and less expensive, so that it would either drive the commercial health insurance plans out of business or force them to compete at a greatly reduced cost level.
If you’ve been hospitalized recently, you already know that present healthcare costs are completely unjustifiable. As you are undoubtedly aware, since the beginning of this century, just 10 years ago, the cost of healthcare has doubled.
Let’s consider why that’s the case. In the June 1st issue of the NEW YORKER magazine, there was an article by Atul Gawande, entitled “The Cost Conundrum.” You can pull it up from the internet on your computer. It’s definitely worth a thoughtful reading if you want to understand one of the reasons for skyrocketing healthcare costs. He analyzes, in considerable detail, the reasons why McAllen, Texas has one of the highest health expenditure rates in the nation. In 2006, Medicare spent $15,000 per enrollee here,... almost twice the national average. While in El Paso, with very similar demographics, Medicare spent only $7,504 per enrollee. The huge difference lies in how the local providers practice medicine.
Other than the U.S., here are 9 of the highest spending nations per capita for healthcare in 2007, the latest year for which we have these figures...
France $3,040 Holland $3,092 Australia $3,123
Belgium 3,133 Germany 3,171 Canada 3,173
Iceland 3,294 Austria 3,418 Switzerland 4,011
These figures would be slightly higher now, but notice all but one fall between $3,000 and $3,500. The unchallenged champion spendthrift was the United States, with $6,096 per capita in 2007. That expenditure is currently approaching $8,000 per person, though the state of Hawaii has kept their health expenditures at about $5,000 per capita. Obviously, it can be done! It seems we could have a generous system with excellent care provided to everyone for much less than we are spending now. France has one of the highest rankings for their health care services and outcomes,... and spends half of what we do.
Let me summarize the myths you should discount,... and what it might take to set the system on the right path.
MYTHS:
The United States has the world’s best health care.
(This excerpt is from a recent study by U.S. physicians) - “Compared with five other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes. The U.S. health system is the most expensive in the world, but comparative analyses consistently show the United States underperforms relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance.”
If you have private health insurance, it is an insurance agency employee who gets between you and your physician, creating problems. If you’re on Medicare, a single-payer system, you know that problem does not arise. Maybe that’s why Medicare recipients are so satisfied with their care.
“Socialized” medicine is terrible. Canadians, Brits and the French hate it.
That is what the health industry folks want you to believe and have tried to convince you.
I encourage you to talk to one. Those recipients are really very pleased with their services.
Also they are enjoying better health outcomes and life expectancy than we are.
Health care is a limited resource and, as such, has always been rationed. In our current system, it is rationed by price,... what the individual can pay for, he gets. Under a public system, it would be rationed more equitably and fairly.
• Preferably, adopt a universal single-payer system like France or Canada, (or like TriCare or Medicare) which covers everyone and is paid for through taxes. But our elected representatives are apparently lacking the political will to do that, so a “public option” coverage is absolutely necessary as a minimum.
• Set some clear limitations on reimbursable “end-of-life” health services and support individual hospice services at home, rather than in hospitals, during those final months of life.
More police violence caught on tape in Oscar Grant case
  Why won't the DA prosecute? Join us in demanding answers.
|
It wasn't just one cop attacking Oscar Grant on New Year's Eve. A new video shows that before Grant was killed, officer Tony Pirone punched him in the face without cause, hitting him so hard that he dropped to the ground. Experts have called it criminal. So why has the District Attorney said he's not pursuing charges?
It took two weeks and thousands of people speaking out before the DA charged Oscar Grant's killer with murder. Clearly, it will take continued public pressure to see that justice is served throughout this case. This is a moment to demand accountability, and your voice is critical.
Please take a moment to click the link below. By adding your voice, you'll help us publicly confront District Attorney Tom Orloff, and put pressure on California's Attorney General to keep an eye on how Orloff handles the case. It only takes a second. And please ask your friends and family to do the same.
http://www.colorofchange.org/
Local news reported on the video showing Pirone assaulting Oscar Grant last week,1,2 but it has been on the Internet for weeks.3 As with the shooting, the video doesn't leave a lot of room for explaining away Pirone's actions. It makes it clear that with no physical provocation, he punched Oscar Grant so hard that Grant immediately went down. This is assault, and it is a crime.
Unfortunately, it appears that Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff is once again falling asleep at the wheel. First, he took two long weeks to make the decision to file charges against Oscar Grant's murderer. Then he declared that he was "not actively pursuing"4 charges against other officers, even though he had access to all the video we've seen, BART's internal investigative report, and the evidence collected under his own investigation.
Law professor Peter Keane from UC Hastings College of the Law, couldn't have said it any clearer: "If the district attorney is saying he's not going to charge any officer except Mehserle, in my opinion he's not doing his job."5
Orloff's inaction further calls into question his commitment to justice for Oscar Grant. Given Alameda County's terrible record of prosecuting police abuses, we cannot simply trust that Orloff's office has the will to pursue justice wherever it leads.
That's why we're asking the California Attorney General to once again place an observer in the Alameda County District Attorney's office for the duration of any prosecutions related to Oscar Grant's murder. And we want to hear Orloff tell the public how not seeking charges against Pirone could possibly be in the interest of justice.
Please join our call for justice, and ask your friends and family to do the same. It only takes a minute:
http://www.colorofchange.org/
Thanks and Peace,
-- James, Gabriel, Clarissa, William, Dani, and the rest of the ColorOfChange.org team
January 28th, 2009
References
1. "BART SHOOTING: Rita Williams Reports On Footage Showing Grant Punched Before Being Shot," KTVU, 1-23-09
http://tinyurl.com/c8dxov
2. "Video shows another BART cop hitting passenger," San Francisco Chronicle, 1-25-09
http://tinyurl.com/ar53bc
3. "When Assault Becomes Murder," Injustice in Seattle, 01-11-09
http://tinyurl.com/a5favy
4. "Highlights Of DA Tom Orloff's Wednesday News Conference On Murder Charge," KTVU, 1-14-09
http://tinyurl.com/b7mteh
5. See reference 1.
Obama/Biden-11-10-08-Mem
AP-11-03-08Four employees hired by a temporary staffing agency to encourage absentee voting for Sen. John McCain in Wisconsin say they were instructed to tell people they were Republican volunteers.
The employees told The Associated Press in interviews on Monday they were hired by Allstaff Labor Group to go door-to-door in the Milwaukee suburbs locating McCain supporters and distributing absentee ballot request forms.
Allstaff recruited the workers under a contract with a consulting firm hired by the Republican Party of Wisconsin to run its absentee ballot program.
The workers claim they were told to say they were GOP volunteers even though they were getting paid $10 an hour for the work. They were required to sign agreements stating they would not speak publicly about their work with anyone including reporters, but they decided to speak out because they were angry they had not been paid for their final few days.
"I told the Republican Party and Allstaff, I wanted to know why we were lying to these residents," said Loyalty Dixon, 26, a Milwaukee resident who worked about two weeks in Waukesha. "I said, isn't that fraudulent? They didn't give me a good explanation. They said, you guys know you're getting paid. Don't worry about it."
She recalled getting praised by Waukesha residents at gas stations and at a McDonald's for being a McCain supporter. Some residents at their doors even asked whether they were getting paid, she said.
"We had to lie to these people and say we were volunteers," she said.
Three other employees shared similar stories on Monday.
"They had us say, 'I'm volunteering for the Republican Party of Wisconsin," said Marquis Mayes, 23. "I asked them, why would we say we were volunteers and we're not? They didn't have an answer for that."
The workers claimed they were owed between $200 and $300 for their last few days of work. They said they needed the money to pay upcoming rent and utility bills; they had found out about the job while they were at a Milwaukee YWCA looking for employment.
Two of the workers said they planned to vote for Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday; two others said they were leaning toward McCain but were unsure now because of the dispute with the Republican Party over their pay.
GOP spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski confirmed there was a dispute over how many hours they worked, and the party's vendor was working to resolve it.
She said the program's managers were instructed to "accurately represent the program," and if that didn't happen it was a mistake. The paid workers may have picked up a script that said they were volunteers since they were working at GOP offices alongside volunteers, she said.
She insisted that if anyone brought the issue to the party's attention it would have been promptly fixed.
"We did not instruct them to misrepresent themselves," she wrote in an e-mail.
Allstaff representatives did not return phone messages.
Allstaff was only one of many temporary staffing firms hired by GOP consulting firm Lincoln Strategy Group to run the party's absentee ballot request distribution program.
Kukowski released a copy of the confidentiality agreement signed by the temporary workers, in which they agreed not to discuss the project "with anyone outside of Lincoln Strategy Group and the Republican Party apparatus.
"In addition," the agreement says, "I acknowledge that I am not authorized to speak to any member of the media (i.e. reporter, journalist, camera crew, etc.) should they inquire about the details of this project."
Kukowski said the agreement was required because workers were handling sensitive personal information about voters.
She said the workers spent three weeks distributing the forms to McCain supporters around the state.
The state's top election official, Kevin Kennedy, said the effort ran into problems in the Green Bay area, with at least one employee turning in numerous absentee ballot distribution forms that were falsified. He said the worker was promptly fired and the local clerk tossed out the forms.
He said he also received complaints that the workers were told to mislead voters into believing they were volunteers. Those complaints have been forwarded to local district attorneys, he said, but it's unclear whether it would be a crime.
"I've heard the argument made that somehow this was falsely facilitating absentee voting but I think that's a stretch," Kennedy said. "I think the issue more is, what does that say about the tactics of a political party? ... I don't think it's illegal to do but it creates all sorts of problems."
Kennedy compared the problems to those seen during voter registration drives by the liberal-leaning group ACORN, which Republicans have accused of voter fraud. Anytime workers are paid for campaign work they have an incentive to cut corners, he said.
Huff-Sam Stein-11-03-08Calling it a "bittersweet time" in his life, there were moments when one could detect the sadness in his voice and face. The crowd in Charlotte did its best to pull him along, screaming out words of support as he detailed Madelyn Dunham's life and drew from it threads that weaved into his candidacy and message. It was a poignant moment: the woman who helped raise him passing away just hours before the election.
No matter what happens tomorrow, I'm going to feel good about how it has turned out because all of you have created this remarkable campaign. She is gone home. And she died peacefully in her sleep, with my sister at her side. And so, there is great joy as well as tears. I'm not going to talk about it too long because it is hard, a little, to talk about.I want everybody to know though a little bit about her. Her name was Madelyn Dunham. And she was born in Kansas in a small town in 1922. Which means she lived through the Great Depression, she lived through two world wars, she watched her husband go off to war, while she looked after her baby and worked on a bomber assembly line. When her husband came back they benefited from the GI bill, they moved west and eventually ended up in Hawaii.
She was somebody who was a very humble person, a very plainspoken person. She is one of those quiet heroes we have all across America, who are not famous, their names are not in the newspapers, but each and every day they work hard. They look after their families. They sacrifice for their children, and their grandchildren. They aren't seeking the limelight. All they try to do is do the right thing. And in this crowd, there are a lot of quiet heroes like that, people like that, mothers and fathers and grandparents who have worked hard and sacrificed all their lives and the satisfaction that they get is in seeing their children or maybe their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren live a better life than they did. That is what America is about. That is what we are fighting for.
In her interview with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren last night, Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to claim that the U.S. needs to “win” the non-existent war with Iran: We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there and understand the contrast. And we talk a lot about, OK, we’re confident that we’re going to win on Tuesday, so from there, the first 100 days, how are we going to kick in the plan that will get this economy back on the right track and really shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars?
November 2, 2008If the allegation is true -- and TNR makes a healthy case as to its veracity -- it would mean that McCain violated Senate rules and could have been expelled from that body.
"All five senators -- including McCain -- had testified under oath and under the U.S. penal code that the leaks did not come from their camps," Sahil Mahtani reports. "The leaks were also prohibited by rules of the Senate Ethics Committee; according to the rules of the Senate, anyone caught leaking such information could face expulsion from the body."
But this is not be the only instance in which McCain defied the rules of the Senate when seeking to absolve himself of any wronging in the Keating affair. Public records in Arizona reveal that the Senator was also dishonest in discussing the extent of financial transactions he and his family had with the disgraced Savings and Loans chief.
In a three-and-a-half hour interview with investigators on February 13, 1990, McCain told the Ethics Committee that "other than the Fountain Square project [a property deal in which Keating and McCain's family were jointly invested] there were no other financial dealings between him or his family and ACC [American Continental Corporation]."
This, it seems, was not true.
In 1983, the company owned by the McCain family -- specifically his wife Cindy and father-in-law Jim Hensley -- bought a property in Mesa, Arizona, owned by ACC, only to sell it back two months later.
According to property records (pdf), on May 26 of that year, Keating's ACC "conveyed" Lot 188 of Laguna Shores Unit 8 to the Hensley/McCain's Western Leasing Company for the price of $75,000. On July 21, 1983, Western Leasing Company sold the lot right back to ACC for the same exact price.
By FRANK RICH-New York TimesThough the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too “white” — an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his résumé and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? “He’s so calm and sure of everything,” says his fiancée. “He doesn’t have any tensions in him.” She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to “be president of the United States and they’ll all have colorful administrations.”
What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama’s own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In “Dreams From My Father,” he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what’s most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character — one who appears “so calm” and without “tensions” — white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being “clean” and “articulate,” he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy’s lines of 41 years ago.
Biden’s gaffe, though particularly naked, prefigured a larger pattern in the extraordinary election campaign that has brought an African-American to the brink of the presidency. Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama’s candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s why so many got this election wrong so often.
There were countless ruminations, in print and on television, asking the same two rhetorical questions: “Is He Black Enough?” and “Is He Tough Enough?” The implied answer to both was usually, “No.” The brown-skinned child of biracial parents wasn’t really “black” and wouldn’t appeal to black voters who were overwhelmingly loyal to the wife of America’s first “black” president. And as a former constitutional law professor, Obama was undoubtedly too lofty an intellectual to be a political street fighter, too much of a wuss to land a punch in a debate, too ethereal to connect to “real” Americans. He was Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis or Bill Bradley in dark face — no populist pugilist like John Edwards.
The list of mistaken prognostications that grew from these flawed premises is long. As primary season began, we were repeatedly told that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the most battle-tested and disciplined, with an invincible organization and an unbeatable donors’ network. Poor Obama had to settle for the ineffectual passion of the starry-eyed, Internet-fixated college kids who failed to elect Howard Dean in 2004. When Clinton lost in Iowa, no matter; Obama could never breach the “firewalls” that would wrap up her nomination by Super Tuesday. Neither the Clinton campaign nor the many who bought its spin noticed the take-no-prisoners political insurgency that Obama had built throughout the caucus states and that serves him to this day.
Once Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton by surpassing her in organization, cash and black votes, he was still often seen as too wimpy to take on the Republicans. This prognosis was codified by Karl Rove, whose punditry for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek has been second only to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a reliable source of laughs this year. Rove called Obama “lazy,” and over the summer he predicted that his fund-raising had peaked in February and that he’d have a “serious problem” winning over Hispanics. Well, Obama was lazy like a fox, and is leading John McCain among Hispanics by 2 to 1. Obama has also pulled ahead among white women despite the widespread predictions that he’d never bring furious Hillary supporters into the fold.
But certainly the single most revelatory moment of the campaign — about the political establishment, not Obama — arrived in June when he reversed his position on taking public financing. This was a huge flip-flop (if no bigger than McCain’s on the Bush tax cuts). But the reaction was priceless. Suddenly the political world discovered that far from being some exotic hothouse flower, Obama was a pol from Chicago. Up until then it rarely occurred to anyone that he had to be a ruthless competitor, not merely a sweet-talking orator, to reach the top of a political machine even rougher than the Clinton machine he had brought down. Whether that makes him more black or more white remains unresolved.
Early in the campaign, the black commentator Tavis Smiley took a lot of heat when he questioned all the rhetoric, much of it from white liberals, about Obama being “post-racial.” Smiley pointed out that there is “no such thing in America as race transcendence.” He is right of course. America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it’s built into our DNA. Obama acknowledged as much in his landmark speech on race in Philadelphia in March.
Yet much has changed for the better since the era of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, “Pictures at a Revolution,” it was not until the year of the movie’s release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film’s final cut there’s still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple’s nuptials could be illegal (as Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn’t accept it.)
Obama’s message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that’s where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.
Still, the country isn’t there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can’t quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.
After some 20 months, we’re all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.
Obama doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.
But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.
In Obama's prepared remarks for Pueblo, CO, he congratulated McCain on getting on Dick the VP's endorsement:
President Bush is sitting out the last few days before the election. But earlier today, Dick Cheney came out of his undisclosed location and hit the campaign trail. He said that he is, and I quote, "delighted to support John McCain."
I’d like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it. That endorsement didn’t come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it. He served as Washington’s biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq, and supports economic policies that are no different from the last eight years. So Senator McCain worked hard to get Dick Cheney’s support.
But here’s my question for you, Colorado: do you think Dick Cheney is delighted to support John McCain because he thinks John McCain’s going to bring change? Do you think John McCain and Dick Cheney have been talking about how to shake things up, and get rid of the lobbyists and the old boys club in Washington?
Chuck Hagel's Republican ExileCould Hagel have a role in an Obama Administration?
In early June, Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain met in Hagel’s office on Capitol Hill. McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, considered Hagel—a fellow-Republican and the senior senator from Nebraska—among his closest friends in Congress. Six months earlier, in December, 2007, McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had asked Hagel to endorse McCain and campaign with him in the upcoming primaries. Hagel had demurred. Even after McCain became the presumptive nominee, in March, Hagel, asked repeatedly on the Sunday-morning talk shows whether he was going to endorse him, remained noncommittal.
In Washington, the men’s friendship was well known, and unsurprising. Both were hard-driving, politically conservative, hot-tempered, and humorous. They had served in Vietnam and were known as independent thinkers, averse to Party orthodoxy. And although they could be self-deprecating, they had a penchant for righteousness that did not endear them to many colleagues. McCain had campaigned in Nebraska for Hagel in 1996, during Hagel’s first Senate race, which he won in an upset against Ben Nelson, the former Nebraska governor (and current Democratic senator). A photograph in Hagel’s office shows him newly elected, with the five other senators who were Vietnam veterans: McCain, Bob Kerrey, Chuck Robb, John Kerry, and Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in the war. Cleland, seated in a wheelchair, has made a joke, which they all seem to be enjoying. But Hagel and McCain didn’t become close until, about a year and a half later, McCain read a story about Hagel and the Nebraska gubernatorial race in Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. As the article recounted, Jon Christensen, the onetime front-runner in the 1998 Republican primary, had attacked his opponent with a harsh negative mailer in the final days before the election. Hagel and other Party officials in Nebraska, who had said that they would remain neutral, scolded Christensen and declared that his tactics “embarrassed Nebraska.” Christensen lost by a large margin. The story quoted Hagel as saying, “The most dangerous element of our political future in this country is candidates who debase and degrade the political process by straight-out lies and misleading spots on television. It’s a cancer to our system.” Hagel told me that McCain came to his office to talk to him about the article and said, “You know, I’m really proud of you for doing that. Not many people would have done it.”
In 2000, when McCain first ran for President, Hagel was one of only four senators who endorsed him, and he became co-chair of the McCain campaign. McCain lost in the South Carolina primary after evangelicals led by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed rallied the Christian right to George W. Bush. A smear campaign in the state suggested that McCain had fathered Bridget, the Bangladeshi orphan he and his wife, Cindy, adopted in 1993. Hagel declared that Bush had “sold his soul to the right wing” and called Bush’s campaign “the filthiest” he had ever seen. McCain was invited to speak at the 2000 Republican National Convention, and Hagel was allotted three minutes for the introduction. Moments before he was to walk onstage, a member of Bush’s team told him that he would have only ninety seconds. Hagel excoriated the man with a ferocity that McCain would have appreciated—and he delivered his three-minute speech.
After September 11, 2001, differences in Hagel’s and McCain’s views on foreign policy became sharper, and more consequential. Hagel, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, is an ardent internationalist—“All of us are touched by every event that unfolds in every corner of the world,” he often says. An advocate for a strong military, he also believes that military force should be the last tool of statecraft. McCain has an almost religious belief in American exceptionalism and the merits of using military force to protect the nation’s interests and promote its values. (“Whatever sacrifices you must bear,” he told young men and women at the U.S. Naval Academy, in October, 2001, “you will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure.”) In the months after the September 11th attacks, he became an enthusiastic promoter of war in Iraq. In early January, 2002, as warplanes took off for Afghanistan, McCain stood on the flight bridge of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea, and yelled, “Next up, Baghdad!” Hagel, who was on the trip with the same congressional delegation, told a reporter, “I think it would be wrong, very shortsighted, and very dangerous for the United States to unilaterally move on Iraq.”
Despite misgivings about the Bush Administration’s buildup to war—misgivings that Hagel aired repeatedly in public—he voted for the October, 2002, war resolution. (He has since said that he regrets his vote.) On the Senate floor, he declared, “Actions in Iraq must come in the context of an American-led, multilateral approach to disarmament, not as the first case for a new American doctrine involving the preëmptive use of force.” He also expressed fear about what he calls “the uncontrollables”—the unpredictable consequences of military action—and about America’s limited knowledge of the Middle East. “How many of us really know and understand Iraq, the country, the history, the people, and the role in the Arab world?” he asked. “The American people must be told of this long-term commitment, risk, and cost of this undertaking. We should not be seduced by the expectations of dancing in the streets.” In September, 2004, he called the situation in Iraq “beyond pitiful.” Senator John Kerry, in a debate with President Bush in the 2004 campaign, quoted Hagel’s comment, which rankled Hagel’s Republican colleagues. Hagel has frequently described the Administration’s “war on terror” as ill-conceived sloganeering and has argued that, in addition to fighting terrorism, we must fight the poverty and despair that enable terrorism to flourish. In a committee hearing in early 2007, he denounced the Bush Administration’s proposed “surge” strategy, which McCain strongly supported, as “the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.”
Nevertheless, he and McCain have remained friends, Hagel told me in a series of interviews over the past several months. “That’s the problem with Washington, quite frankly—if you disagree with somebody, you should dislike them, too,” said Hagel, who is sixty-two and has white hair, a worn, ruggedly handsome face, and a forthright manner. “It’s hard, it seems, for some people to comprehend how John and I can be on such different paths on something so important, and still fundamentally have a relationship that’s pretty deep.” (McCain’s campaign declined to comment for this article.)
McCain no doubt understood how difficult it would be for Hagel to endorse him, yet their differences were what would make the endorsement so valuable. From 2004 on, McCain, in his desire to win the nomination, had embraced Bush’s policies ever more zealously, while Hagel had become the Administration’s most severe Republican critic. Although he has frequently voted with his party on domestic policy, his views on foreign policy represent a bold departure from those of the Administration, and his willingness to take Bush to task publicly has alienated many Republicans. In some ways, Hagel is far more of a maverick than McCain has ever been, and his endorsement would likely sway independents whose votes McCain probably needs in order to win.
Hagel said of their meeting in June, “It never was an interview kind of thing—‘John, let me get these things straight.’ ” Rather, he explained, “I wanted to understand, too, as we talked through these things, where he was going. . . . We talked about Iraq, and he and I disagree on this.” They also discussed McCain’s argument that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic Presidential nominee, was wrong to pursue direct engagement with Iranian leaders. “And I said, ‘I don’t think he is. It’s what I’ve been saying, actually longer than Obama.’ I remember telling John—I said, ‘John, if you don’t engage Iran, where do you think this is going to go? We’re going to be in another war!’ ” (Hagel has been calling for direct, unconditional talks with Iran since 2001.)
Hagel says that he told McCain that he believed the election would be close, and he warned against waging a vicious campaign of the kind that had defeated McCain in 2000. “Once you win, then you’re going to have to govern,” Hagel told his friend. “The Democrats are going to add to their numbers, probably significantly, in the House and the Senate. You’re going to be faced with a strong Democratic Congress. You are going to have to bring some consensus here, and the first thing you are going to have to do is reach out to the Congress—Democrat and Republican.”
After the meeting, which Hagel says was amicable, any possibility that he might endorse McCain seemed to disappear. In response to interviewers’ questions, Hagel began to say that he would consider serving as Obama’s Vice-Presidential candidate—though he often added that he did not believe he would be asked—or in an Obama Cabinet; he’s often mentioned in the press as a possible Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense. In mid-July, Hagel and his friend Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, accompanied Obama on a trip to Afghanistan and Iraq. Describing Baghdad to me after he returned, Hagel said, “You can’t walk around—you’ve got flak jackets, helmets on all the time, no matter where you are. It’s always struck me it’s almost like a Fellini movie, kind of unreal. The American people are told things are stable and secure and violence is down. No American would walk outside there without a convoy!”
Hagel’s unwillingness to endorse McCain is generally perceived to be a result of their ongoing disagreements over the Iraq war. But he told me that the gulf between them is much deeper: “In good conscience, I could not enthusiastically—honestly—go out and endorse him and support him when we so fundamentally disagree on the future course of our foreign policy and our role in the world.”
Like Obama, Hagel—who is not running for reëlection this year—seems to have viewed the Senate more as a stepping stone than as a final destination. As a freshman, he secured a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and became a serious student of foreign policy, treating committee hearings as seminars. After the November, 1998, elections, in which the Republicans failed to gain a single Senate seat, he challenged Senator Mitch McConnell for the chairmanship of the Republican Campaign Committee. He attacked the G.O.P. leadership for running “issueless campaigns” with “demonizing” ads, and he spoke about the need to renew the “political culture in America by ‘defining up’ the standards of debate, political discourse, and campaigns.” (Hagel lost.) In 2000, he was on the short list of Vice-Presidential candidates compiled by Dick Cheney for Bush. Four years later, Hagel, with a small group of advisers, was discussing running for President in 2008.
From the start, securing the Republican nomination loomed as his greatest challenge. A traditional pro-business, small-government conservative, Hagel is a graduate of a Catholic high school, who is pro-life and supports school prayer. He occasionally broke with his party—on immigration reform, on the No Child Left Behind Act, on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage—but, according to Congressional Quarterly, in 2006 he voted with the President ninety-six per cent of the time.
Hagel’s heresy on the Iraq war overshadowed the rest of his record, however. In 2002, the Weekly Standard included Hagel (along with Brent Scowcroft and the Times) in its “axis of appeasement.” After Democrats won control of Congress in 2006 and allowed many more votes on the war, Hagel’s support for Bush’s policies declined—in 2007, he voted with the President just seventy-two per cent of the time—and some commentators referred to him as “not a real Republican.”
Hagel says that he attempted to offer advice privately to the White House but was rebuffed. He once called Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and asked to see him; Rumsfeld invited him to lunch. “I wanted to talk to him alone,” Hagel said. “And when I showed up he had a whole table full of generals and admirals.” During the Clinton Administration, he began writing letters to the President on foreign-policy issues of signal importance. “Clinton used to call me and we’d discuss it, or he’d ask me to come talk with him,” Hagel recalled. In the past eight years, he has written to Bush a number of times, including, most recently, letters about Russia and Iran. But he said that he has never received a response from the President. (He has occasionally received an acknowledgment from the assistant secretary for legislative affairs.)
“This Administration has viewed Congress as an appendage, a nuisance,” Hagel told me. “Clinton was just the opposite. Reagan was the opposite. Bush’s father was the opposite. They understood the value of making Congress their ally.” He said that Vice-President Cheney nearly always attended the weekly lunch held by the Senate Republican Caucus, at which major issues—including the war in Iraq—are discussed. Often, someone asked Cheney whether he’d like to say something. “Almost always, he’d say, ‘No, no,’ ” Hagel said. “It always said to me, by his very lack of engagement or even giving us the courtesy of saying something, that they could care less about us. Except when he wanted us to do something: ‘Vote this way.’ ”
In December, 2006, the Iraq Study Group released its report about the war, describing the situation in Iraq as a quagmire. Hagel heartily agreed with the group’s key recommendations—a phased troop withdrawal and diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria—and he was taken aback by the Bush Administration’s negative reaction. “It was a way for the President to almost start over, in building a bipartisan consensus,” he said. “And as I watched this thing go forward—the essential trashing of the report by the President, in his remarks—I was astounded. Not much astounded me about this crowd anymore. But this did.”
Instead of withdrawing troops, the Bush Administration decided to increase their number by thirty thousand, a strategy that became known as the surge. On January 24, 2007, Hagel addressed his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He and his close friend Joe Biden, the Democratic senator who is the committee’s chairman (and now the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee), sponsored a resolution opposing the escalation and calling for a transition to a limited U.S. military mission in Iraq. “This is not a defeatist resolution,” Hagel told members of the committee. “We’re not talking about cutting off funds, not supporting the troops. . . . When I hear, on both sides of this argument, impugning motives and patriotism to our country, not only is it offensive and disgusting but it debases the whole system of our country and who we are.” He went on, “We didn’t involve the Congress in this when we should have. And I’m to blame. Every senator who’s been here the last four years has to take some responsibility for that. But I will not sit here in this Congress of the United States, at this important time for our country and in the world, and not have something to say about this. And maybe I’ll be wrong. . . . But I don’t ever want to look back and have the regret that I didn’t have the courage and I didn’t do what I could.”
Recalling that morning, Hagel said that, as he listened to his colleagues discuss sending more troops to Iraq, he was struck by their “cavalier approach, as if it were an abstraction. Very few people know much about war, very few are touched by it. This is also a time when we had seen over a period of four years so much deception by this Administration—straight outright lies—and I thought to myself, as I looked around the committee, have we learned nothing in the last four years? And we’re now going to send thirty thousand more troops into this meat grinder? For what? . . . We were not a co-equal branch of government. We were just kind of this afterthought to the President, and whatever he tells us to do, we kind of docilely go along.”
The committee approved the resolution in a 12–9 vote; Hagel was the only Republican who voted for it. “I was called a ‘traitor,’ and I was called ‘disgusting,’ ” he told me. “How could I not support the troops? ‘Shut your mouth, you’re a Republican!’ Which I always found astounding—to equate war based on your politics, as a Democrat or a Republican. I often said in hearings, I wonder where my Republican colleagues, who are so enthusiastic about the war in Iraq, would be if Bill Clinton was the President? I think I know exactly where they would be.” Several days after the vote, Cheney, in an interview with Newsweek, said that he believed “in Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. But it’s very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved.”
For the next several months, Hagel tried to persuade enough Republicans to vote for a similar Democratic amendment, so that Republicans and Democrats together would reach sixty votes—the number required to prevent a filibuster. Various Republican colleagues told him privately that they agreed with him, he said, but he was unable to win more than a handful of Republican votes.
On Wednesday, March 7, 2007, Hagel’s staff sent reporters e-mails announcing a press conference at the University of Nebraska, in Omaha, the following Monday. Most reporters assumed that Hagel was planning to declare his intention to run for President; NPR reported that “the Senator’s campaign is portraying tomorrow’s announcement as one of the most important in his career.” But Hagel told the crowd that he had not yet made up his mind, and he was widely ridiculed. That month, in an interview with Esquire, Hagel said of Bush, “He’s not accountable anymore, which isn’t totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment.” John McCollister, a former Nebraska congressman and a longtime friend of Hagel’s, wrote a letter to the editor of the Omaha World Herald, criticizing him, though not by name. “I believe that some people disregard the awful consequences of a premature withdrawal and want to end the war, period,” McCollister wrote. “Others have a consuming, burning hatred of George W. Bush as their dominant legislative priority. Those who carelessly throw out talk of ‘impeachment’ are of the same stripe.” Michael McCarthy, the chairman of a private-equity firm in Omaha where Hagel worked in the early nineties, and who was one of his closest advisers as he considered running for President, told me that Hagel is “very good at political calculus, so there is no doubt that he understood the political ramifications of anything he said, or actions he took.” Even so, McCarthy added, as Hagel has become frustrated by Congress’s failure to confront the Bush Administration over its conduct of the Iraq war, “he has become—he’ll hate me for saying this—somewhat more preachy.”
Some observers were perplexed by Hagel’s behavior; if he was serious about running for President, why was he doing and saying things that virtually guaranteed he could not win the nomination? But Rita E. Hauser, a longtime Republican activist who served on Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board during his first term, and had numerous conversations with Hagel as he thought about entering the race, told me that she encouraged him. “It was a long shot, but I felt he could run as a courageous dissenter, and there was plenty of interest in that among a wide swath of Republicans, who felt the war had gone terribly awry.” Hauser said that Hagel was concerned about the growing political power of the religious right. “He was somewhat shocked at the degree to which the pro-life people—I’ll call it the extreme Christian agenda—had taken over the Party.” In the end, Hauser said, Hagel concluded that if he had to take on both the Christian right and the Bush White House he probably could not win the nomination. In September, 2007, Hagel announced that he would not run for President in 2008 and would retire from the Senate at the end of his term.
According to several people close to Hagel, he had become increasingly discouraged by his inability to influence the Bush Administration and his Republican colleagues, particularly on Iraq-war policy. His younger brother Tom, a law professor at the University of Dayton, says that Hagel, in his various occupations before he became a senator, “had his own agenda and could get things done. I think it was incredibly frustrating for him to be in the Senate, as one of one hundred senators.” When I asked Hagel about his decision to retire, he pointed out that after he was elected he said that he only intended to serve for two terms. On Election Night, he went on, his wife, Lilibet, had asked him, “Do you think you can hold a job for six years?”
“That’s true!” Lilibet told me in late July. We were seated at the kitchen table in the Hagels’ large flagstone house, set high on a hill in McLean, Virginia, where they live with their two teen-age children and a Portuguese water dog. Lilibet, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman from Meridian, Mississippi, who volunteers as a reading tutor in inner-city Washington schools, explained that until Hagel became a senator he had never stayed in a job for more than a few years. “I think he just likes change—it keeps things interesting.” It appears to be a pattern set in his childhood. “His father changed jobs a lot—from bad to worse—and they were always moving,” Lilibet said. “Chuck liked going to new schools—a chance to make new friends and, I think, reinvent himself.”
Hagel, the eldest of four boys, grew up in small towns in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, where acres of arid land stretch to the horizon. (One town where the Hagels lived, Ainsworth, calls itself “The Middle of Nowhere.”) Early on, Hagel developed a curiosity about the world; he loved history, and historical biographies in particular. The family was very poor. The summer he was nine, he held jobs sacking potatoes and ice. When he was eleven, he worked as a carhop at a local drive-in restaurant at night. (He had to stand on a carton to hand trays through car windows.) His father, a veteran of the Second World War, was enormously proud of his oldest boy, but he also drank a great deal and sometimes became abusive. By the time Chuck was eight or nine, he was interposing himself between his father and his mother, or his father and his brothers. When Chuck was sixteen, his father died suddenly, on Christmas morning, and Chuck helped his mother support the family. “So much of who you are starts young,” Hagel told me. “My dad brought a lot of his problems on himself, but I saw how people took advantage of him. And I saw how my mother had to suffer through that. I watched all this. And I guess that’s what has driven me in some ways to be more cause-oriented than a lot of people, to try to go back and see, what’s the cause of this? Let’s don’t just treat the symptoms. When I talk about a man without dignity or without hope, that all comes from down inside me, a long, long time ago.”
In 1967, when Hagel was twenty-one, he and his brother Tom received draft notices and volunteered to go to Vietnam. Eventually, they were assigned to the same unit, and they served together for ten months in the jungles of the Mekong Delta. In “America: Our Next Chapter,” a book he published earlier this year, Hagel describes how Tom saved his life, stanching the blood after shrapnel pierced his chest. A few weeks later, he saved Tom’s life, after their armored personnel carrier hit a land mine. Chuck, his own body aflame, dragged his unconscious brother from the vehicle just before it exploded. Chuck received two Purple Hearts; Tom received three, and a Bronze Star.
For nearly three decades, Chuck and Tom argued about the war, Tom maintaining that it was unjustified from the start and Chuck that it was a righteous effort gone wrong. Then Chuck listened to newly released tapes in which President Lyndon B. Johnson confessed that he knew he couldn’t win in Vietnam but wouldn’t pull out because he didn’t want to be remembered for losing a war. That ended the brothers’ fight. “Chuck is a Type A personality, and he used to be, quite frankly, incredibly rigid,” Tom told me. “But he’s become more willing to listen to contrary opinions.”
Hagel met Lilibet in 1982, when she was completing a master’s degree in literature and working on Capitol Hill as a staffer for G. V. (Sonny) Montgomery, a congressman from Mississippi. By that time, Hagel was thirty-six; he had been briefly married, had worked his way through the University of Nebraska, and had held jobs as a radio newscaster, a lobbyist, and an administrative assistant to Representative McCollister. In 1981, he had joined the Veterans’ Administration as the deputy administrator. The head of the V.A. was Robert Nimmo, a former California legislator and friend of President Ronald Reagan. “Nimmo had next to no interest in veterans’ issues,” Lilibet said. “Chuck went to the White House and said to Ed Meese”—then counsellor to Reagan—“ ‘Either Bob Nimmo goes or I go.’ Our friends said, ‘Who are you?’ But Chuck said, as I’ve heard so many times since then, ‘But it’s just wrong!’ ” Hagel resigned, and the Los Angeles Times published an editorial about Nimmo titled “The Wrong Man Is Leaving.”
Hagel entered the nascent cell-phone business. “People say politics is so hard, but nothing could be as hard as that was—and there was no assurance it would work,” Lilibet recalled. The Federal Communications Commission was awarding two free licenses in each market for the operation of cell-phone systems. Hagel and several partners raised money from hundreds of investors, telling them that they were buying the chance to compete for the licenses through comparative trials, which would be adjudicated by the F.C.C. Then the F.C.C. changed the process to a lottery. Many of the investors were furious and wanted their money back. “We thought we were going to be sued from here to the end of the earth,” Richardson Preyer, Jr., one of Hagel’s partners, told me. But they devised an aggressive strategy, in which their company, Vanguard Cellular, negotiated advance agreements with other applicants for each license, thus increasing Vanguard’s odds of winning. When the company went public, in 1988, Hagel and his partners made millions.
Steve Leeolou, another partner, credited Hagel for the company’s survival. “The more difficult and seemingly senseless circumstances become, the better he does,” Leeolou said. He added that Hagel has little patience with situations he cannot control. “In almost every chapter of Chuck’s life, there is this theme of sticking to principles, almost to a fault. He’s been willing to sacrifice friendships, business partners, women along the way that he dated. If he feels that a relationship threatens his principles, or his sense of what’s right, or something that needs to be done, he will cut that relationship off, fairly cleanly, and move on.”
Hagel had resigned from Vanguard in 1987 and for three years was head of the nonprofit organization World U.S.O. In 1992, he and his family moved to Nebraska, where he went to work as an investment banker in Michael McCarthy’s firm—and prepared to run for office.
Lilibet mentioned that Hagel had just returned from his trip with Obama and Reed to Iraq and Afghanistan. “He came back from that trip in a better mood than he did from most other CODELs [congressional delegation trips],” she said. “It was so great for him to be with two guys who appreciate him, listen to him.” As for Hagel’s Republican colleagues, she added, “his position in that caucus has been a little like a skunk at a garden party.” I asked her about Cheney’s criticism of Hagel in Newsweek, and she replied, “That’s O.K. We don’t breathe the same air as Cheney or Rove. We cancel social engagements if we look at the list and see that they’re on it.”
Lilibet, who contributed to the Obama campaign last February, formally endorsed him on October 7th, at a rally of G.O.P. women for Obama in Alexandria, Virginia. In her speech, she referred to the McCain campaign, deploring the “phantom issues, churned out by a topnotch slander machine,” and said, “I believe the character of the campaign says much about the character of the candidate.” She was Michelle Obama’s guest at the final Presidential debate, on October 15th.
On the morning of September 17th, five weeks after the former Soviet republic of Georgia attacked the separatist Georgian province of South Ossetia, and the Russian Army invaded Georgia, William J. Burns, the State Department’s Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Hagel asked Burns what was being done to repair America’s relationship with Russia, and said, “We’re going to have to find some new common ground and new high ground to deal with Russia,” taking into account the Russians’ “interest, as perceived by them, not just perceived by us, but their optics.” Hagel was invoking, as he often does, the need to see through an antagonist’s eyes. He asked Burns whether President Bush and President Dmitri Medvedev, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, were talking on a regular basis and what new initiatives were being discussed.
Burns responded by citing initiatives that had existed before the Russian advance into Georgia.
“In all due respect, Mr. Secretary, I understand all that, you’ve covered that ground,” Hagel went on. “Let me go back to my question. Are we doing anything new, anything fresh, taking the reality that we have before us? . . . Has the President talked to President Medvedev very often?”
Burns said that Rice had spoken with Lavrov that week and that he was unaware of any recent conversation between Bush and Medvedev.
“The President has not spoken with President Medvedev since the Russianincursion into Georgia?” Hagel asked, incredulous.
Burns said that he would check.
According to the State Department, Bush had spoken with Medvedev the day after the incursion, but not since. “I just don’t think that that’s a smart way to handle this,” Hagel told me. “We’ve got to be very careful that we don’t misplay all this and unwind some of the progress we’ve made and go back, intentionally or unintentionally, to another form of a Cold War.
“We’re going to have differences, of course,” he went on. “But you have to look at where the common interests are.” He listed the global challenges for which Russian coöperation is vital: proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, energy, terrorism, the environment, Iran, North Korea, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Across the board, Russia is woven into this fabric,” he said. “That’s the reality.”
Last January, Hagel travelled to Russia and met with more than a dozen Russian officials. (Vladimir Putin and Medvedev, whom Hagel knows from earlier visits, were travelling abroad.) Nearly all of them raised objections to recent American proposals and objectives, including NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, missile-defense systems in the Czech Republic and Poland, and independence for Kosovo. “They made it very clear that if we continued to unilaterally push on these things without at least giving them some opportunity to respond and work through these issues, then there would be a consequence,” Hagel said. “When I came back, I called Bob Gates”—the Secretary of Defense—“and had a long private conversation with him and passed on to him what I heard.” He went on, “This disproportionate Russian response to the Georgians attacking South Ossetia . . . should not have come as any surprise to us.” Hagel added that he had been to Georgia many times and knows President Mikheil Saakashvili well. “I think Saakashvili made a very, very disastrous miscalculation that somehow we would be there.”
McCain has been a passionate supporter of Saakashvili and has encouraged Georgia’s efforts to join NATO, as part of a strategy to contain Russia. (According to the Times, for at least four years, until last March, McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was a lobbyist for Georgia.) American officials have repeatedly stated that the U.S. missile-defense systems intended for the Czech Republic and Poland are to be used against possible missile attacks from Iran. But, even before the Russian incursion into Georgia, McCain described the missile-defense systems as “a hedge against potential threats from possible strategic competitors, like Russia and China.” The day the ceasefire between Russia and Georgia was declared, the McCain campaign issued a press release stating that McCain had told Saakashvili, “Today we are all Georgians.” Referring to McCain’s statement, Hagel said, “That’s an interesting thing to say, but I’m not sure what John means by that. Is he willing to put F-16s in the air and attack the Russians?”
Hagel, citing McCain’s repeated calls for Russia to be expelled from the Group of Eight, the association of major industrial democracies, said, “You’re not going to isolate Russia—that’s completely crazy!” He told me that McCain’s approach to Russia was one of the reasons that he could not endorse him.
McCain has often spoken about his desire to create a League of Democracies. Discussing Iran during the first Presidential debate, he said, “Let’s be clear and let’s have some straight talk. The Russians are preventing significant action in the United Nations Security Council. I have proposed a League of Democracies, a group . . . of countries that share common interests, common values, common ideals. They also control a lot of the world’s economic power. We could impose significant, meaningful, painful sanctions on the Iranians.” He concluded, “So I am convinced that together we can, with the French, with the British, with the Germans and other countries—democracies around the world—we can affect Iranian behavior.”
Critics have suggested that McCain’s League of Democracies could diminish the role of the United Nations. When I mentioned this to Hagel, he said, “What is the point of the United Nations? The whole point, as anyone who has taken any history knows, was to bring all nations of the world together in some kind of imperfect body, a forum that allows all governments of the world, regardless of what kinds of government, to work through their problems—versus attacking each other and going to war. Now, in John’s League of Democracies, does that mean Saudi Arabia is out? Does that mean our friend King Abdullah in Jordan is out? It would be only democracies. Well, we’ve got a lot of allies and relationships that are pretty important to us, and to our interests, who would be out of that club. And the way John would probably see China and Russia, they wouldn’t be in it, either. So it would be an interesting Book-of-the-Month Club.
“But in order to solve problems you’ve got to have all the players at the table,” Hagel went on, his voice rising. “How are you going to fix the problems in Pakistan, Afghanistan—the problems we’ve got with poverty, proliferation, terrorism, wars—when the largest segments of society in the world today are not at the table?” He paused, then added, more calmly, “The United Nations, as I’ve said many times, is imperfect. We’ve got NATO, multilateral institutions, multilateral-development banks, the World Trade Organization—all have flaws, that’s true. But if you didn’t have them what would you have? A world completely out of control, with no structure, no order, no boundaries.”
Hagel and McCain’s greatest disagreement remains the Iraq war. McCain has made the surge a keystone of his campaign, citing it as proof that the American military is winning. Hagel, like Obama and Jack Reed, says that it is unclear which factors have contributed most to the reduction in violence in Iraq. The addition of thirty thousand troops doubtless helped, he said. But so did the Anbar Awakening, in which Sunni tribal leaders decided to fight Islamic militants affiliated with Al Qaeda instead of the Americans; the decision by the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to order his militias to stand down; and the introduction of improved intelligence systems. “The surge is one of the great misunderstood tactical situations that we’ve had in modern times,” Hagel said. “Most of the press does not get it. What is the point of bringing the violence down? Why are we investing the lives of eleven hundred Americans killed, thousands wounded, tens of billions of dollars of additional money, undermining our interests around the world?” The strategic goal, of course, was to establish enough peace and security to enable a political reconciliation among the Iraqis. On that score, Hagel argued, there has been “very limited progress.” And if the Iraqis don’t reach an agreement on sharing the country’s oil reserves, he continued, “then they will have civil war, and they may have civil war, regardless.” In any case, he pointed out, “We still have more troops there than we had before the surge.”
I was speaking with Hagel in early October, shortly before the second Presidential debate. He mentioned that Obama had just called him, and among the many things they discussed was Afghanistan. “Here we are, in a situation where we all agree that the mountain range between Afghanistan and Pakistan represents the biggest threat to our security and the world’s security, where the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and terrorist groups are reconstituting,” Hagel said. “Pakistan is right on the brink. Yet we do not have enough force structure to put into the location that represents the greatest threat to our security. Why is that? Because of a fatal, fatal error”—the decision to go into Iraq and then to commit an even greater number of troops in the surge. “It has consumed our capacity to deal with anything else in the world. It won’t be until sometime next year that you’re going to be able to give more troops to General McKiernan”—the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan—“whom poor Governor Palin in her debate kept referring to as General McClellan.” Hagel chuckled, and added that that war “was a while back.”
McCain has said that an American victory in Iraq will enable the country to become “our stable, democratic ally” against Iran. But Hagel argues that McCain overlooks the reality of Iraq’s relationship with Iran. “We bluster, we threaten, we say we’re not going to engage [Iran],” Hagel said. “Yet our ally, the elected sovereign government of Iraq, is talking to Iran every day. Maliki”—Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister—“and most of the Shia government were exiled in Iran. So we’ve got Ahmadinejad”—the President of Iran—“in and out of Baghdad, Maliki in and out of Tehran: that’s going on without our even acknowledging it.” Hagel added that this collaboration should be encouraged, for the sake of stability in Iraq.
“Whether we like it or not, there will be no peace or stability in the Middle East without Iran’s participation,” Hagel said. In early October, he prevented action on a bill, which had passed in the House, proposing economic sanctions against Iran. Hagel has long criticized unilateral sanctions as ineffective and counterproductive. (Howard Berman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the legislation’s sponsor, told me that he supports unconditional engagement with the Iranians but favors a twofold approach: “You increase the pressure on them, and you offer to engage with them.” He added that although he shares Hagel’s negative appraisal of the Bush Administration’s unilateralism, he thinks that Hagel opposes this kind of action “too sweepingly.”)
The notion of “winning” in Iraq is a “failed way of thinking,” Hagel said. “If we frame this as win or lose, we’ll be there forever.” He added that this logic is equally flawed with respect to Afghanistan. “I agree with Obama that we’re going to have to put several more brigades in there,” he told me. “But there is no military solution, so we have to be very careful that somehow we don’t just ricochet out of Iraq into Afghanistan, with another hundred-and-fifty-thousand-troop buildup.” According to Hagel, confronting the problems of Afghanistan requires an understanding of its internal politics, its narcotics trade, and its endemic corruption, as well as a regional diplomatic approach, involving Pakistan, India, and Iran.
McCain “thinks we just need more military,” Hagel said. “I’ve talked to John about this many times. I’ve said, ‘John, we’re limited. We’re doing tremendous damage to our Army and Marines, we can’t sustain this.’ ”
Hagel skipped the Republican Convention, choosing instead to go, with two aides, on a fact-finding trip to Latin America. He did hear McCain’s speech, which, in its evocation of the need to bridge a disabling partisan divide, echoed the theme of his discussion with McCain in their meeting in June. But, Hagel said, he’s been “very disappointed” by McCain’s campaign. “He gave one unifying speech and then has spent fifty million dollars to destroy his opponent.” Hagel may be the only senior Republican elected official who has publicly criticized McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. “I don’t believe she’s qualified to be President of the United States,” Hagel told me. “The first judgment a potential President makes is who their running mate is—and I don’t think John made a very good selection.” He scoffed at McCain’s attempts to portray her as an experienced politician. “To try to make the excuse that she looks out her window and sees Russia—and that she’s commander of the Alaska National Guard.” He added, “There is no question that this candidate is arguably the thinnest-résumé candidate for Vice-President in the history of America.” Hagel’s criticisms have prompted protests from Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah, who said in an e-mail statement to me, “Senator Hagel knows that decades of foreign-policy experience in the Senate did not stop countless Democrats and some Republicans from declaring the surge a failure before it started and recommending instead a disastrous policy of withdrawal and retreat in Iraq.”
For Hagel, almost as disturbing as Palin’s lack of experience is her willingness—in disparaging remarks about Joe Biden’s long Senate career, for example—to belittle the notion that experience is important. “There’s no question, she knows her market,” Hagel said. “She knows her audience, and she’s going right after them. And I’ll tell you why that’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because you don’t want to define down the standards in any institution, ever, in life. You want to always strive to define standards up. If you start defining standards down—‘Well, I don’t have a big education, I don’t have experience’—yes, there’s a point to be made that not all the smartest people come out of Yale or Harvard. But to intentionally define down in some kind of wild populism, that those things don’t count in a complicated, dangerous world—that’s dangerous in itself.
“There was a political party in this country called the Know-Nothings,” he continued. “And we’re getting on the fringe of that, with these one-issue voters—pro-choice or pro-life. Important issue, I know that. But, my goodness. The world is blowing up everywhere, and I just don’t think that is a responsible way to see the world, on that one issue. And, interestingly enough, that is one issue that stopped John McCain from picking one of the people he really wanted, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge”—the Independent senator from Connecticut and the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania. (Both men are pro-choice.)
Several of Hagel’s close friends told me they believed that if McCain won the election he would ask Hagel to serve in his Cabinet, as either Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State, and that Hagel would agree, despite their differences. In February, 2006, in an article in the Times Magazine, Joseph Lelyveld asked McCain whether he would consider asking Hagel to be his running mate or a member of his Administration, and he quoted McCain as saying, “I’d be honored to have Chuck with me in any capacity. He’d make a great Secretary of State.”
I asked Hagel whether he would accept a post in a McCain Administration, and he said that he had thought about it. “But I don’t see John changing his position and direction and concept of the American role in the world, to adjust to mine,” he went on. “I’m not going to change mine to adjust to his. And I serve at the pleasure of the President. So it wouldn’t work.” ♦
Venners was a partner in the influence venture on behalf of Saddam Hussein's regime with William Timmons, a Washington lobbyist who was tapped by John McCain to play a leading role in his presidential transition team, according to federal court records and pubic investigative reports by the United Nations.
As first disclosed by Huffington Post, Timmons played a central role over a five year period in the lobbying campaign on behalf of Saddam's regime to ease sanctions against Iraq shortly after the end of the first Gulf War.
Timmons declined to comment for that article as well as for this one. Venners did not respond to messages seeking comment at his office, or that of his wife, a Washington political consultant.
Samir Vincent, an Iraqi born American citizen who Timmons and Venners worked closely with on the influence campaign, pleaded guilty to criminal charges in January 2005 that he acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's regime. Tongsun Park, a second lobbyist who Timmons and Venners also worked closely with, was convicted by a federal jury in July 2006 on charges that he too violated the Foreign Agent Registration
During the same period beginning in 1992, when Timmons and Venners worked closely with Vincent and Park on the lobbying campaign, they were also attempting to negotiate a contract with the Iraqi government to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. The four men stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through. In the end, the arrangement failed because the sanctions were not lifted.
Federal campaign finance records, some of which are available online, show that between 2004 and 2008, Venners made some $40,000 in campaign contributions to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which raise money to finance, respectively, Republican Senate and House candidates. Between 2006 and 2008, Venners made more than $16,000 in additional campaign contributions to individual campaigns of House and Senate Republicans, according to public records. He contributed during the same period to a single Democrat during that period, Sen. Max Baucus, of Montana, whom he gave $1,000.
On its website, the NRSC says of itself: "The National Republican Senatorial Committee is the only political committee solely dedicated to electing Republicans to the U.S. Senate, and re-taking the majority in 2008.
"The NRSC provides invaluable support and assistance to current and prospective Republican U.S. Senate candidates in the areas of budget planning, election law compliance, fundraising, communications tools and messaging, research and strategy."
The National Republican Congressional Committee does much the same thing for Republican House candidates.
Timmons and Venners were cooperating witnesses in the federal investigations of Vincent and Park and were never charged by prosecutors with wrongdoing. And information made public during the case indicated that Vincent and Park often engaged in illegal activity--such as acting as middlemen on behalf of the Iraqi regime to pay millions of dollars in bribes to U.N. officials to ease economic sanctions against Iraq-- without Timmons and Venners knowing what Vincent and Park were up to.
But other evidence made public during the trial demonstrated that Timmons knew that he and Vincent were working closely with top aides to Saddam Hussein in the lobbying campaign to ease or lift economic sanctions against the Iraqi regime.
Testimony and records made public during Park's criminal trial detail that virtually everything Timmons did while working on the lobbying campaign was within days conveyed by Vincent to either one or both of Saddam Hussein's top aides, Tariq Aziz and Nizar Hamdoon. Vincent also testified that he almost always relayed input from the Iraqi aides back to Timmons.
Talking points that Timmons produced for the lobbyists to help ease the sanctions, for example, were reviewed ahead of time by Aziz, Vincent testified in court. Proposals that Timmons himself circulated to U.S. officials as part of the effort were written with the assistance of the Iraqi officials, and were also sent ahead of time with Timmons' approval to Aziz, other records show.
Timmons' activities occurred in the years following the first Gulf War, when Washington considered Iraq to be a rogue enemy state and a sponsor of terrorism. His dealings on behalf of the deceased Iraqi leader stand in stark contrast to the views his current employer held at the time.
Sarah Palin's performance in her CBS News interviews has been so poor that one can't avoid speculating about the depth of her ignorance. As I noted earlier, the Republican vice-presidential nominee can't be faulted for fumbling Charlie Gibson's pompous question about the Bush Doctrine in her ABC News interview, because there's no consensus about what the "Bush Doctrine" even is. (Click here and here to read essays by Charles Krauthammer that provide two contradictory definitions—neither of them Gibson's.) But Palin's befuddled nonanswers to Katie Couric's questions (click here, here, here, here, and here) raise too many questions. Was she really unsure about the meaning or proper pronunciation of the word caricature? Had she truly failed to notice that John McCain jumped down Barack Obama's throat when Obama publicly proposed attacking al-Qaida in Pakistan's ungoverned tribal regions? Why couldn't she name a single newspaper or magazine that she read on a regular basis before being tapped for the national ticket? Why couldn't she name a single Supreme Court decision she disagreed with apart from Roe v. Wade?* In an earlier (2007) interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, why did Palin, after mentioning C.S. Lewis ("very, very deep") as a favorite author, go on to cite George Sheehan, a onetime columnist for Runner's World? You can shrug off any one of these questions as unfair, but together they merge into one rude but necessary query: What does Palin know (besides, that is, how to play basketball and the flute)?
Tangible evidence of whatever data populate Palin's cranium is hard to find. In Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down, Kaylene Johnson reports that Palin started devouring newspapers while still in elementary school. "She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to the bottom right corner to the very last page," Palin's sister Molly tells Johnson. "She didn't just read it—she knew every word she had read and analyzed it." What stories in particular? Johnson doesn't offer any examples. We learn, too, that a junior-high schoolmate who was a year ahead often sought Palin's assistance in writing book reports. "She was such a bookworm," this Palin friend tells Johnson. "Whenever I was assigned to read a book, she'd already read it." Such as? Again, Johnson doesn't say.
As the daughter of a schoolteacher and coach, Palin never doubted she would go to college. But here the evidence of Palin's thirst for knowledge grows even more elusive. Palin's college career is so checkered that her own press spokesperson initially had trouble getting straight whether, during a period of five years, Palin attended four colleges (wrong) or five (correct). Palin made the circuit of three of these colleges with her high-school basketball teammate Kim "Tillie" Ketchum. In describing the two girls' joint pursuit of higher education, Johnson makes it sound like a trip to the ladies' room.
First, Palin and Ketchum (and two other high-school friends) lighted on the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Drawn by the promise of warmth and sunshine, the four girls quickly learned that Hilo was, in fact, quite rainy and immediately either transferred out or declined to register. (The school has no record Palin ever enrolled.)
Next stop: Hawaii Pacific University in Honolulu, where it was sunnier and where an aunt of Palin's lived nearby. Palin enrolled in the business administration program. Two of the four girls got homesick and returned to Alaska, but Palin and Ketchum stayed, renting an apartment one block from the ocean in Waikiki. By the end of freshman year, Palin and Ketchum decided they'd grown tired of this hard-won sunshine and arranged to transfer out.
Next stop: North Idaho College in Coeur d'Alene. (Palin was born in Idaho.) Here, Johnson writes, they "immersed themselves in a more traditional college life" and lived in a coed dorm. According to Ketchum, Palin, who enrolled as a general studies major, remained interested primarily in sports, but Palin spent a semester working in a TV production studio. This past June, North Idaho College's Alumni Association named Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a distinguished alumna and invited her to give the commencement address in 2009. But Palin attended the school for only one year—a spokeswoman for the college told the Associated Press, "We were not able to track down club affiliations or anything"—before departing. This time, Ketchum stayed put.
Next stop: the University of Idaho in Moscow, where today a leadership award is named for Palin. According to Johnson, Palin transferred here "to continue her studies in journalism and political science." (Among Palin's journalism classes, Couric might be surprised to learn, was "Interviewing.") But it seems likelier that Palin transferred to be nearer to her brother Chuck, who played running back for the school's football team. Palin didn't write for the school newspaper—a friend recalls she was more interested in broadcast journalism—and her academic adviser, Roy Atwood, does not appear to remember her. After one year, Palin decided to take some time off.
Next stop: Matanuska-Susitna Community College in Palmer, Alaska, not far from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. This was apparently to be near her high-school boyfriend (and future husband) Todd Palin. Johnson doesn't bother to mention this academic sojourn in her book. Palin took classes here for one semester.
Next stop: Back to the University of Idaho for three more semesters. Palin graduated in spring 1987 with a journalism degree.
There's no evidence that Palin encountered any academic difficulties in any of these places—indeed, Ketchum told Johnson that she and Palin got "straight A's" at Hawaii Pacific University—but one can't help wondering, in the absence of contrary evidence, whether this rolling stone ever found the time to accumulate much moss. That same question has been raised about Palin's lightning-quick rise in politics. In the Oct. 1 Christian Science Monitor, Andrew Halcro, a Republican member of the House of Represenatives, recalls a conversation with Palin when he ran against her for governor in 2006. "Andrew," Palin said, "I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers, and yet when asked questions, you spout off facts, figures, and policies, and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, 'Does any of this really matter?' "
According to Halcro, it didn't. Palin creamed him because "she's a master, not of facts, figures, or insightful policy recommendations, but at the fine art of the nonanswer, the glittering generality. Against such charms there is little Senator Biden, or anyone, can do." The evidence of Palin's CBS News interviews suggests otherwise, but we'll just have to see.
Correction, Oct. 2, 2008: An earlier version of this column written before the clip was made public stated, incorrectly, that Palin could name no Supreme Court decision of any kind apart from Roe v. Wade. This assertion was based on a report in Politico, which in turn attributed the (inaccurate) characterization to an unnamed Palin aide. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
It is important to understand which individuals and organizations Obama has been associated with, the refrain usually goes, as it is reflective of his foreign policy as a whole.
But if that is indeed the standard by which voters are to judge the candidates, than McCain has some questions of his own.
During the late 1990s, the Senator supported and reportedly helped arm an organization that, while eventually tolerated by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, was accused of terrorist activities and allegedly had ties to al Qaeda.
During the late stages of the Balkan War, the Kosovo Liberation Army was known for committing incredible atrocities in its efforts to facilitate Kosovo's independence from Yugoslavia. The guerrilla group often was responding to acts of violence committed against its own people. But its tactics were, nevertheless, viewed as condemnable: abductions and murders, systematic burning and looting of homes, and harassment and intimidation of Yugoslav officials.
President Clinton's special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, described the KLA in 1998 as, "without any questions, a terrorist group."
Eventually, the KLA went from being criticized for threatening a fragile peace process to, gradually, being recognized as a military force that had popular roots within the Albanian community and a shared mission with America. But within the United States, the group was never publicly praised and often considered dangerous.
"As far as I know, no one ever turned around and said, 'these were freedom fighters and I support them,'" said Fred Abrahams, who documented the Balkans War for Human Rights Watch.
Indeed, when the Clinton administration considered forging a stronger relationship with the KLA as a means of bringing all parties to the bargaining table, GOP officials questioned whether such a policy would be a tacit support for a "group with terror, drug ties.""Such an effusive embrace by top Clinton Administration officials of an organization that only a year ago one of its own top officials labeled as 'terrorist' is, to say the least, a startling development," read a paper put together by the Senate Republican Policy Committee.
And yet, John McCain, the current Republican standard-bearer, was one of the KLA's most outspoken supporters. Back in May 1999, when it seemed as if NATO air raids would prove ineffective in stopping the violence, and calls were being made to send in ground troops, McCain suggested that the U.S. simply fund the KLA instead.
"It wouldn't bother me if you arm the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] forces," he said.
Moreover, this past February, former Rep. Joe DioGuardi, a prominent Albanian lobbyist, was quoted as saying that McCain even help get arms for KLA forces.
"Even in 1998 when we had problems with Milosevic, McCain did everything that we asked of him to the benefit of the Albanian people, including arming the KLA," he said. "We are American Albanians and we need a leader who will strengthen this country... We must support John McCain because he did everything we asked of him for Kosovo, from supporting the Kosovo Liberation Army to supporting the independence of Kosovo."
DioGuardi, a bundler for McCain, did not immediately return requests for comment. Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign replied: "You've cracked the code, Sam!"
The Senator's support for the KLA, however, puts him near one of the far ends of his party's mainstream during that conflict. It also represents another potential blemish on a foreign policy record that McCain has held up as virtuous compared to Barack Obama's problematic associations. Earlier it was reported that the Arizona Republican had a served on the board of a far-right conservative organization that had supplied arms to paramilitary organizations in Latin America.
McCain's involvement in the U.S. Council for World Freedom became problematic for his candidacy because of that group's past ties to anti-Semitic figures and its efforts to circumvent U.S. law and fund militant anti-communists.
McCain's support for the KLA was far less clandestine than his service on the U.S. Council for World Freedom board. But it is similarly telling of his world policy views.
While the U.S., as Abrahams noted, generally turned a blind eye on the KLA because the two "shared a common enemy," there is scant evidence of public officials cheer-leading the guerrilla group at the time. Indeed, conservative officials hung the issue over Clinton's head during the late 1990s as of a lack of foreign policy morals.
Part of it had to do with alleged ties to al Qaeda -- the Washington Times reported in May 1999 that several members of the KLA were trained in terrorist camps run by Osama bin Laden himself, charges that Abrahams says have never been proven. But much of the criticism had to do with the KLA's brutal tactics. According to a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch:
The KLA was responsible for serious abuses... including abductions and murders of Serbs and ethnic Albanians considered collaborators with the state. Elements of the KLA are also responsible for post-conflict attacks on Serbs, Roma, and other non-Albanians, as well as ethnic Albanian political rivals... widespread and systematic burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs, Roma, and other minorities and the destruction of Orthodox churches and monasteries.
Words: Adam Peltzman
Race Boating: Swift Boat Backer Funds Racist Mail In Texas
by: Glen W. SmithA group called "Empower Texans," chaired by Tim Dunn of Midland, an associate of Republican Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick, attacked Democratic state House candidate Joel Redmond of Pasadena with a direct mail piece featuring fuzzy images of black and Hispanic lawmakers (plus Barack Obama), several black birds resembling crows, and a picture of the white Redmund. The tag line: "Birds of a feather flock together."
Anyone with any racial sensitivity gets the meaning of the mailer: Redmond has betrayed whites by befriending people of color. He can't be trusted.
This is happening in the Houston area, down the road from Tom DeLay. George Bush's hometown. While an African-American, Barack Obama, is the Democratic nominee for president.
Today's Race Boaters aren't like the Swift Boaters. They ARE the Swift Boaters. Bob Perry. Tom DeLay. Tom Craddick. The same people whose 2002 campaign funding scheme led to Tuesday's guilty plea from the Texas Association of Business, another organization with close ties to the Race Boaters. That plea came from the same investigation that led to the indictment against DeLay.
Under the deal announced in court Thursday, 20-year-old Ashley Todd will be released from jail and required to undergo mental health treatment. Her record eventually will be expunged as long as she goes to treatment, stays out of trouble and keeps authorities apprised of her whereabouts.
Todd, of College Station, Texas, has been jailed since Oct. 24, when police say she admitted making up a story about being robbed near a Pittsburgh bank and then assaulted by a man who scraped a backward letter "B" into her cheek.
Todd, who was charged with making a false police report, did not have to enter a plea.
HALF PAGE AD TAKEN OUT IN LOCAL NEWSPAPER BY AN 81 YEAR OLD MAN
We are a stalwart and stouthearted people, and never more so than in hard times. People weep in the dark and arise in the morning and go to work. The waves crash on your nest egg and a chunk is swept away and you put your salami sandwich in the brown bag and get on the bus.
In Philly, a woman earns $10.30/hour to care for a man brought down by cystic fibrosis. She bathes and dresses him in the morning, brings him meals, puts him to bed at night. It's hard work lifting him and she has suffered a painful hernia that, because she can't afford health insurance, she can't get fixed, but she still goes to work because he'd be helpless without her. There are a lot of people like her. I know because I'm related to some of them.
Low dishonesty and craven cynicism sometimes win the day but not inevitably. The attempt to link Barack Obama to an old radical in his neighborhood has desperation and deceit written all over it.
Meanwhile, stunning acts of heroism stand out, such as the fidelity of military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at Guantanamo Bay -- uniformed officers faithful to their lawyerly duty to offer a vigorous defense even though it means exposing the injustice of military justice that is rigged for conviction and the mendacity of a commander in chief who commits war crimes. If your law school is looking for a name for its new library, instead of selling the honor to a fat cat alumnus, you should consider the names of Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Lt. Col. Mark Bridges, Col. Steven David, Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel and Maj. Michael Mori.
It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone's mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged. When she said, "One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let's commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars," people smelled gas.
Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne'er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself -- one stink bomb after another, and now Governor Palin.
She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain's first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for forty grand a pop, and she'll become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?"
And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics. Your broker kept saying, "Stay with the portfolio, don't jump ship," and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money market where at least you're not going to lose your shirt, but you didn't do it and didn't do it, and now you're holding a big bag of brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe desperate people who are talking trash.
Anybody who got whacked last week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead us out of the swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English language. They'll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.
Sam Stein-Huff-10-29-08The latest salvo came Wednesday afternoon, when the Republican nominee released a web ad placing Obama's visage in front of an outline of Iran, and presenting aspects of the Senator's foreign policy alongside music traditionally associated with a Muslim call to prayer.
"Obama doesn't have preconditions but Iran does. Iran, whose president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel must be wiped off the map. Iran demands that the U.S. must cease its support of Israel and that all U.S. military forces must leave the Middle East, meaning we abandon Iraq, Turkey and Kuwait. What will Obama do? Will he admit he was wrong or will he accept Iran's demands?'
The spot seems designed either to frighten voters away from Obama or confuse them into thinking the Illinois Democrat is more comfortable supporting Iranian interests than domestic concerns. The campaign put it out on the web, where provocative items are placed mainly to grab the media attention.
Indeed, the Republican ticket has been subtly pushing this line for days now. As the Huffington Post reported on Tuesday, the Republican Party of Florida is sending out a new mailer that places the Illinois Democrat's face right over a map of Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It accuses him of being "dangerously unprepared" and "no friend of Israel."
Hours earlier, the McCain campaign had taken the step of reissuing an old campaign ad (for what purpose, it isn't clear) that declared Obama had once called the threat from Iran: "tiny."
The National Jewish Democratic Council is sending out more than 350,000 mailers to Jewish households in key swing states, re-asserting the Democratic nominees stance on a number of issues, some not traditionally considered of Jewish interest.
The most obvious pamphlet touts the Obama-Biden ticket as one dedicated to the security of Israel and strongly opposed to a nuclear Iran.
"Senator Barack Obama believes that Israel must be preserved as a Jewish state. He recently traveled there to reaffirm his commitment to a secure, peaceful Israel."
The other two, however, play up the Illinois Democrats long-term plans to pursue energy independence and his commitment to protecting a woman's right to choose.
When President Johnson asked that question about John McCain's father, Adm. Jack McCain, the answer he got was not flattering. But McCain got a promotion from LBJ anyway.
letters, documents and tapes of phone conversations that have not been reported until now. Johnson did it even though Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said in a 1966 phone conversation with Johnson that he had been told McCain wasn't competent and that "he's not a good strong tough commander." Listen to President Johnson's conversation with Defense Secretary McNamara about Jack McCain Listen to Johnson discuss Jack McCain with Sen. Everett Dirksen
After Adm. Slew McCain lost his command in 1945 when a court of inquiry found fault with his handling of a fleet during a typhoon that resulted in damage and deaths, President Harry Truman gave him a prestigious appointment in Washington.
And after John McCain III, the current presidential candidate, divorced his first wife in 1981 to marry his current wife and enter politics, President Ronald Reagan helped him out by giving his first wife a White House job.
Then there is LBJ's going to bat for McCain's father. The case of Jack McCain is well documented in letters, memos and two recorded telephone calls in the archives of the Dirksen Congressional Center in Pekin, Ill., and the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.
In an era in which both political parties included liberals and conservatives, Johnson relied heavily on Dirksen to help him shepherd through his Great Society program during the 1960s. It was Dirksen who broke the filibuster of Southern conservatives to allow Congress to pass the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, a debt that Johnson never forgot, as he made clear in notes, letters and phone calls to Dirksen.
Dirksen, meanwhile, had become close to John McCain's father and mother, Jack and Roberta McCain, when Jack McCain served as congressional naval liaison in the late 1950s. Letters show the Dirksens and McCains socialized and exchanged small gifts.
John McCain and his biographers write that McCain's father developed powerful friends during his posting in Washington. "The political relationships my parents formed during this period contributed significantly to my father's future success," McCain wrote in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers." But none of McCain's books or other biographies shed further light on those relationships.
Jack McCain, a decorated submarine commander during World War II, apparently made no secret about wanting to match his own father's achievement in becoming a four-star admiral, the top rank in the Navy.
In February 1966, Dirksen wrote a note teasing McCain, then a vice admiral, asking, "How come there are not four stars on your flag? Something must be done about that." And for two or three years, records show that Dirksen lobbied Johnson on McCain's behalf.
On April 7, 1966, Johnson aide Jack Valenti wrote a note to the president about a phone call from Dirksen: "He said he had mentioned some time ago his high recommendation of Adm. Jack McCain."
A few weeks later, on the morning of April 25, 1966, Dirksen talked to Johnson on a telephone call that Johnson recorded.
"Jack wanted that fourth star," Dirksen told Johnson, according to the little-heard tape recording. "Now I get some overtones that changes are in prospect over in Pentagon," Dirksen continued, "and the only way he'll get that fourth star is either to be CNO or vice CNO or commander of the United fleet or commander of the Pacific fleet." The CNO, or chief of naval operations, is the U.S. Navy's highest-ranking officer and reports directly to the secretary of the Navy.
Johnson promised to check into it. An internal White House memo says McCain had some champions in the Navy, but that the top Navy commanders had sidetracked his career, posting him as advisor to the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Arthur Goldberg. It was considered a dead-end posting that would strand McCain as a three-star admiral for the rest of his career.
The next morning, on April 26, 1966, Johnson called McNamara and said, "Dirksen's calling and he's all upset about McCain again. He wants him to be chief of naval operations." McNamara replied, "Oh boy, that's just impossible."
Johnson said he did not know Jack McCain well. "I knew his father well," Johnson said, "and I liked his father." Later in the conversation, Johnson said, "Is McCain a competent fellow?"
McNamara said, "I'm told he isn't, Mr. President." McNamara explained, "He's a nice little fellow. Talks well. Pleasing appearance. But he's not a good strong tough commander and therefore couldn't be commander in chief of the Atlantic or commander in chief of the Pacific."
"I think that's right," Johnson said.
"Then go sit down with Dirksen and try to keep him aboard." McNamara replied, "I sure will."
In May 1967, Johnson promoted McCain to commander of the Atlantic Fleet (just five months before McCain's son John, a Navy pilot, was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese in Hanoi). A year later, after Johnson had taken himself out of the running for reelection, he promoted McCain to commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, which placed him over naval operations in Vietnam. McCain held that post until he retired in 1972.
In June 1967, after his promotion to four-star admiral, McCain wrote to his patron, Dirksen.
"I want to thank you for your trust and confidence in my professional ability," McCain wrote. "It is an assignment of great responsibility and I am most humble to have been chosen for this command."
Copies of the documents and a link to the taped phone calls were sent to the McCain campaign, but it did not respond to requests for comment. McNamara, reached at his home in Washington, said he's 93 now and does not recall the conversation with Johnson, Dirksen's lobbying or "having anything to do with McCain."
Huff-Nicholas Graham-10-28-08I'm sympathetic to Eskew and Wallace, and not just because they're decent people. They've held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me--namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: "Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing." It's a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus. I was told that Palin chafed at being defined by her discomfiting performances in the Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity interviews. She wanted to get back out there and do more. Well, if you're Eskew and Wallace, what do you say to that? Your responsibility isn't the care and feeding of Sarah Palin's ego; it's the furtherance of John McCain's quest for the presidency.
Draper also reports that McCain snubbed Palin during a long ride on the Straight Talk Express.
Palin spent most of the funds, $45,137, in April to build and furnish three offices inside her suite at the Robert B. Atwood Building in Anchorage, records show.
In June 2007, Palin spent $5,380 for labor and materials on a 72-inch wooden display case in her Juneau office. The case houses a football and basketball signed by players from championship high school teams, native artwork, a Klondike Trail mug and other items, said gubernatorial spokesman William D. McAllister.
Another $1,205 was spent in February 2007 on blinds for an arched window and stairwell at the governor’s mansion in Juneau.The McCain-Palin campaign said it would characterize the remodeling expenses as “routine.”
“Gov. Palin has a long record of cutting wasteful spending, using her veto pen to eliminate nearly a half-billion dollars from the budget,” said Jeff Grappone, New England communications director. “She sold the state’s luxury jet, scrapped the governor’s personal chef and got rid of the personal driver.”
On the campaign trail, Palin has touted that record.
“I came to office promising to control spending by request if possible and by veto if necessary,” she said in her convention address.
The money spent for remodeling has not been previously publicized. Alaska government watchdogs said it did not change their opinion of the governor, who is well-regarded in a state infamous for its profligate pols.
“The lady’s literally done a good job up here,” said Donna Gilbert, president of the Interior Taxpayers’ Association in Fairbanks, who noted a mayor in Fairbanks once spent $50,000 on a bathroom.
However, state Sen. President Lyda Green - a Republican who has clashed with Palin over policy - said the cost to remodel the Anchorage offices was “extravagant.”
“As far as I am concerned, that’s excessive to spend that much on four cubby holes,” Green said.
The work on the Anchorage site created new offices for Kelly Goode, Palin’s legislative director, and Roseanne Hughes, director of external communications, McAllister said. The third office is reserved for “traveling staff,” who divide their time between Anchorage and Juneau, which are located 571 miles apart, McAllister said.
A Palin staffer said the Juneau mansion’s new blinds were installed to provide privacy.
“The residence manager determined that the blinds were necessary to prevent observation from the street of the family members,” administrative director Linda J. Perez said in an e-mail.
Mike McBride, past president of the Alaska Voters Organization, did not take issue with the expenses. “It’s not a tremendous amount of money. Things in Alaska cost substantially more than they do in other parts of the country,” McBride said. “It’s not an unreasonable number.”
AMERICANS
October 24, 2008 05:27 PMA newsletter from 1984 provides more embarrassing evidence of John McCain's relationship with the U.S. Council on World Freedom, a group that was involved in funding militant anti-communists and espoused some anti-Semitic views.
McCain's face graces the front page of the group's "World Freedom Report," published on Dec. 15,
