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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, 1984, a copy of which was obtained from the research library at the University of Kansas. The front page also features a reprint of an article McCain penned that same month for Reader's Digest.
In the early 1980s, McCain served on the advisory board of the Council on World Freedom, which funded and provided arms to what the Associated Press described as "ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America." The group also "aided rebels trying to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua," which landed it "in the middle of the Iran-Contra affair and in legal trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, which revoked the charitable organization's tax exemption."
When McCain's connection to the council received its first blast of press attention earlier this month, his campaign told Politico that McCain "disassociated himself" from the group in 1984 "when questions were raised about its activities."
But the group's tax filing in 1985, covering the previous year, lists McCain as a member of the advisory board. And in October 1985, a States News Service report placed McCain "at a Washington awards ceremony staged by the council."
Moreover, in 1986, McCain himself told the Phoenix New Times that his reason for leaving the group merely had to do with a lack of time.
Asked by the AP this year about McCain's alleged efforts to distance himself from the council in both 1984 and 1986 (when McCain had to ask to have his name removed from the group's stationary), founder John Singlaub said: "That's a surprise to me. ... I don't ever remember hearing about his resigning."
Though the group's founder also said it was possible that McCain had asked to resign and he hadn't heard about the "housekeeping" details, the Council's unearthed newsletter from late 1984 would seem to support Singlaub's -- and not McCain's -- memory of the events.
In Defense of White Americans 
Published: October 25, 2008
NYT
IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.
That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCainand Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.
It wasn’t just Allen’s lame racial joke or his cluelessness about 21st-century media like YouTube that made him a harbinger of the current G.O.P. fiasco. It was most of all the national vision he set forth: There are Real Americans, and there are the Others. The Real are the small-town white folks Allen was addressing in southwestern Virginia. The Others — and their subversive fellow travelers, the Elites — are Americans like the young man whom Allen maligned: a high-achieving son of immigrant parents who was born and raised in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs during its technology boom. (Allen, the self-appointed keeper of real Virginia, grew up in California.)
Cut to 2008. You’d think that this incident would be a cautionary tale, but the McCain campaign instead embraced Allen as a role model, with Palin’s odes to “real” and “pro-America” America leading the charge. The farcical apotheosis of this strategy arrived last weekend, again on camera and again in Virginia, when a McCain adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, revived Allen’s original script, literally, during an interview on MSNBC. After dismissing the Northern Virginia suburbs, she asserted that the “real Virginia” — the part of the state “more Southern in nature” — will prove “very responsive” to the McCain message. All Pfotenhauer left out was “macaca,” but with McCain calling Barack Obama’s tax plan “welfare” and campaign surrogates (including the robo-calling Rudy Giuliani) linking the Democrat to violent, Willie Horton-like criminality, that would have been redundant.
We don’t know yet if McCain will go the way of Allen in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964, when L.B.J. vanquished another Arizona Republican in a landslide. But we do know that Obama swept like a conquering hero through Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, last week and that he leads in every recent Virginia poll. There are at least two larger national lessons to be learned from what is likely to be the last gasp of Allen-McCain-Palin politics in 2008. The first, and easy one, is that Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is. In the eight years since the first Bush-Cheney convention pledged inclusiveness and showcased Colin Powell as its opening-night speaker, the G.O.P. has terminally alienated black Americans (Powell himself now included), immigrant Americans (including the Hispanics who once gave Bush-Cheney as much as 44 percent of their votes) and the extended families of gay Americans (Palin has now revived a constitutional crusade against same-sex marriage). Subtract all those players from the actual America, and you don’t have enough of a bench to field a junior varsity volleyball team, let alone a serious campaign for the Electoral College.
But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.
So do all those deer hunters in western Pennsylvania. Once Hillary Clinton whipped Obama in the Rust Belt, it’s been a bloviation staple (echoing the Clinton camp’s line) that a black guy is doomed among Reagan Democrats, Joe Sixpacks, rednecks, Joe the Plumbers or whichever condescending term you want to choose. (Clinton at one low point settled on “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”) Michigan in particular was repeatedly said to be slipping out of the Democrats’ reach because of incorrigible racism — until McCain abandoned it as hopeless this month in the face of a double-digit Obama lead.
Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.
The original “racist for Obama,” after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaii on Friday. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of “throwing his grandmother under the bus.” But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.
Such human nuances are lost on conservative warriors of the Allen-McCain-Palin ilk. They see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.
NYT
IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.
That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCainand Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.
It wasn’t just Allen’s lame racial joke or his cluelessness about 21st-century media like YouTube that made him a harbinger of the current G.O.P. fiasco. It was most of all the national vision he set forth: There are Real Americans, and there are the Others. The Real are the small-town white folks Allen was addressing in southwestern Virginia. The Others — and their subversive fellow travelers, the Elites — are Americans like the young man whom Allen maligned: a high-achieving son of immigrant parents who was born and raised in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs during its technology boom. (Allen, the self-appointed keeper of real Virginia, grew up in California.)
Cut to 2008. You’d think that this incident would be a cautionary tale, but the McCain campaign instead embraced Allen as a role model, with Palin’s odes to “real” and “pro-America” America leading the charge. The farcical apotheosis of this strategy arrived last weekend, again on camera and again in Virginia, when a McCain adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, revived Allen’s original script, literally, during an interview on MSNBC. After dismissing the Northern Virginia suburbs, she asserted that the “real Virginia” — the part of the state “more Southern in nature” — will prove “very responsive” to the McCain message. All Pfotenhauer left out was “macaca,” but with McCain calling Barack Obama’s tax plan “welfare” and campaign surrogates (including the robo-calling Rudy Giuliani) linking the Democrat to violent, Willie Horton-like criminality, that would have been redundant.
We don’t know yet if McCain will go the way of Allen in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964, when L.B.J. vanquished another Arizona Republican in a landslide. But we do know that Obama swept like a conquering hero through Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, last week and that he leads in every recent Virginia poll. There are at least two larger national lessons to be learned from what is likely to be the last gasp of Allen-McCain-Palin politics in 2008. The first, and easy one, is that Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is. In the eight years since the first Bush-Cheney convention pledged inclusiveness and showcased Colin Powell as its opening-night speaker, the G.O.P. has terminally alienated black Americans (Powell himself now included), immigrant Americans (including the Hispanics who once gave Bush-Cheney as much as 44 percent of their votes) and the extended families of gay Americans (Palin has now revived a constitutional crusade against same-sex marriage). Subtract all those players from the actual America, and you don’t have enough of a bench to field a junior varsity volleyball team, let alone a serious campaign for the Electoral College.
But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.
That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle’s prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press’s default setting has been to ominously intone that “in the privacy of the voting booth” ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man.
A leading vehicle for this journalistic mind-set has been the unending obsession with “the Bradley effect” — as if nothing has changed in America since 1982, when some polls (possibly for reasons having nothing to do with race) predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the California governorship. In 2008, there is, if anything, more evidence of a reverse Bradley effect — Obama’s primary vote totals more often exceeded those in the final polls than not — but poor old Bradley keeps being flogged anyway.So do all those deer hunters in western Pennsylvania. Once Hillary Clinton whipped Obama in the Rust Belt, it’s been a bloviation staple (echoing the Clinton camp’s line) that a black guy is doomed among Reagan Democrats, Joe Sixpacks, rednecks, Joe the Plumbers or whichever condescending term you want to choose. (Clinton at one low point settled on “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”) Michigan in particular was repeatedly said to be slipping out of the Democrats’ reach because of incorrigible racism — until McCain abandoned it as hopeless this month in the face of a double-digit Obama lead.
The constant tide of anthropological articles and television reports set in blue-collar diners, bars and bowling alleys have hyped this racial theory of the race. So did the rampant misreading of primary-season exit polls. On cable TV and the Sunday network shows, there was endless chewing over the internal numbers in the Clinton victories. It was doomsday news for Obama, for instance, that some 12 percent of white Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania said race was a factor in their choice and three-quarters of them voted for Clinton. Ipso facto — and despite the absence of any credible empirical evidence — these Clinton voters would either stay home or flock to McCain in November.
The McCain campaign is so dumb that it bought into the press’s confirmation of its own prejudices. Even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million in Pennsylvania (more than double the 2004 gap), even though Obama leads by double digits in almost every recent Pennsylvania poll and even though no national Republican ticket has won there since 1988, McCain started pouring his dwindling resources into the state this month. When the Democratic Representative John Murtha described his own western Pennsylvania district as a “racist area,” McCain feigned outrage and put down even more chips on the race card, calling the region the “most patriotic, most God-loving” part of America.Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.
The original “racist for Obama,” after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaii on Friday. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of “throwing his grandmother under the bus.” But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.
Such human nuances are lost on conservative warriors of the Allen-McCain-Palin ilk. They see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.
McCain Transition Chief Aided Saddam In Lobbying Effort.-Murray Wass-Huff-Oct. 14, 2008
William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.
The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein's government.
During the same period beginning in 1992, Timmons worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.
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.
John McCain strongly supported the 1991 military action against Iraq, and as recently as Sunday described Saddam Hussein as a one-time menace to the region who had "stated categorically that he would acquire weapons of mass destruction, and he would use them wherever he could."
Timmons declined to comment for this story. An office manager who works for him said that he has made it his practice during his public career to never speak to the press. Timmons previously told investigators that he did not know that either Vincent or Park were acting as unregistered agents of Iraq. He also insisted that he did not fully understand just how closely the two men were tied to Saddam's regime while they collaborated.
But testimony and records made public during Park's criminal trial, as well as other information uncovered during a United Nations investigation, suggest just the opposite. 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.
Moreover, there was a major financial incentive at play for Timmons. The multi-million dollar oil deal that he was pursuing with the two other lobbyists would only be possible if their efforts to ease sanctions against Iraq were successful.
Now This Is The John McCain The World Has Come To Know!
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E&P Pub-Oct. 11, 2008
'Hockey Mom' Palin Booed -- At Hockey Game
From the Sports Desk: You never know where you are gonna find a political scoop, but Lynn Zinser at her NYT hockey "Slapshot" blog just posted that Sarah Palin, in her much-ballyhooed appearance dropping the puck at the Philly Flyers' opener, was greeted by "resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd." Of course, Fox Sports was more "balanced," observing on its site, "The crowd reacted with a mixture of cheers and boos at her appearance." See video below, though it is hard to judge because of the music.
But Zinser's post had a lot more in mind: "I would object to this sideshow whichever political party it involved. Having vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin drop the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers’ opener Saturday night was problematic not because it was Palin — Flyers owner Ed Snider’s decision under the flimsy excuse of 'honoring' hockey moms — but because it is injecting politics in a place it should not be." More:
The biggest problem: when Palin came out to onto the Wachovia Center ice Saturday night — greeted by resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd — the the two hockey players who had no choice but to appear with her in that photo op were turned into props in a political campaign. If Rangers center Scott Gomez or Flyers center Mike Richards wanted to make some sort of political statement, that would be fine, but in this case, they were thrust into a situation not of their choosing. Snider put them there with his ill-advised mixing of politics and sports.
The level of discomfort has been palpable for the Rangers’ two Alaska natives, Gomez and Brandon Dubinsky, as they have been asked questions about Palin and the election in recent weeks. Dubinsky, a 22-year-old who has shied away from nothing since he broke in with the Rangers last year, looks petrified when the topic gets brought up. I think both would rather play goalie in a shootout than weigh in on the presidential election.
The New Republic
Ladies' Man by Fred Strebeigh
Joe Biden is the backslapping, hero of womens rights.
In January 2000, when the Supreme Court assembled to hear oral arguments attacking a pivotal section of the Violence Against Women Act, Joseph Biden was front and center. VAWA legally protects women from domestic abuse and gender-based violence, and Biden has proclaimed it the "most important legislative accomplishment" of his Senate career. But, long before the law had reached a congressional vote, Chief Justice William Rehnquist had attacked the "Civil Rights for Women" section, with which Biden sought to define gender-motivated crimes as bias or hate crimes.
As Rehnquist prepared to open the morning's first argument, Biden did not sit somberly. Rather, the senator swiveled in his seat (conspicuous to most of us in the court's press section), smiling cheerily and talking with nearby allies, including numerous female attorneys who had helped him shape the bill. Although Biden had no official role, he sought to signal that--in what he described that day as a "titanic struggle"--neither he nor the women around him would go quietly in defeat.
These days, many women voters are more likely to perceive Biden as a spoiler than as a supporter. Since his selection last month as Barack Obama's running mate, Biden has been pitted against women, first taking the job that many Hillary Clinton supporters felt was her due, then facing off against another historic woman, Sarah Palin, who could become the first female vice president of the United States. With his 30-plus years in the Senate, Biden can sound like the member of a male-only club, an impression reinforced by old-boy gaffes--from joking that his wife's doctorate "is a problem" to referring to Palin as "good-looking."
But the irony of this assessment is that Biden has some of the best feminist bona fides around. The mostly untold story of Biden's fight to support the "Civil Rights For Women" section of VAWA provides a window into his work for women, its origins, and how the defense of women's rights fits into his political worldview. Women voters may yet find something to cheer: In fighting for the legislation, Biden showed he was willing to trust the guidance of women activists and women judges, and then to contend against fierce and mostly male resistance in Washington, particularly from the Supreme Court.
In the spring of 1990, a new staffer in the offices of the Senate Judiciary Committee received a surprise project from her boss. Joe Biden wanted her to figure out what Congress should do to reduce violent crimes against women. Victoria Nourse, the staffer, was then just six years out of law school and unaware of Biden's past efforts along similar lines. In 1981, as he recalls in his 2007 memoir, Promises to Keep, Biden had pushed for a provision opposing laws that treat rape within marriage as a lesser crime than other rapes. Biden's effort led to a rebuff by Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, who replied, "Damn it, when you get married, you kind of expect you're going to get a little sex."
The late '80s, Biden noticed, showed a rise in violent crimes against young women. Then, in December 1989, a man walked into a university classroom in Montreal with a hunting rifle, divided the students by sex, yelled that the women were all "a bunch of feminists," and killed 14 of them. Biden's aide Ron Klain handed the Senator an article in the Los Angeles Times by a friend who had clerked with Klain the year before at the Supreme Court, Lisa Heinzerling (now professor of law at Georgetown). Heinzerling connected that murder of "feminists" to a gap in U.S. law. Federal law tracking hate crimes targeted only, she wrote, a "victim's race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation." Thus, she argued, "if a woman is beaten, raped or killed because she is a woman, this is not considered a crime of hate"--a legal loophole "welcome to no one but the misogynist."
Biden posed a challenge to Nourse: figure out what Congress should do, and start by looking at the marital-rape issue he had tried to tackle a decade earlier. In the legal reading room of the Library of Congress, Nourse found a twist that shocked them both. Some states had extended the marital-rape exemption to become a date-rape exemption that downgraded a rape charge if a woman was a man's "voluntary social companion." One state that had done so was Delaware, where Joe and Jill Biden were raising a young daughter.
In 1972, Biden's first wife, Neilia, and infant daughter, Naomi, had died in a car crash, and, afterward, he had made a decision, despite his political career, to raise his children in their home state. From this point on, for Biden, a big part of politics became personal. Now he was learning that his daughter was legally more vulnerable to date rape in Wilmington than in, say, Washington or Arlington. When Nourse reported this to Biden, she saw a "look of horror on his face."
Looking for a solution, Nourse drafted a proposal for the "Civil Rights for Women" section of what would become VAWA. (The bill's other two parts, "Safe Streets for Women" and "Safe Homes for Women," proposed funding and legal support to assist law enforcement and protect women from domestic abuse.) The goals of the civil rights section were grand: make women "free from crimes of violence motivated by the victim's gender." But its method was more modest: give victims of such violence the right to sue their attackers in federal court. Nourse grounded the section constitutionally both in the equal-protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment and in the Commerce clause (partly via language echoing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, itself upheld by the Court under the Commerce clause).
Even before Biden introduced VAWA at Senate hearings on June 20, 1990, Nourse began seeking allies among women's groups in New York and Washington, D. C. Both she and Biden recall that"inside the-beltway women's groups" did not leap to assist. In Promises to Keep, Biden quotes one group member replying, "Oh, Victoria, you're a nice little girl, but you work for Joseph Biden. Why should we believe you?" Such distrust, he thought, came because he was not "pure" in his support for abortion--opposing federal funding of abortion though supporting a woman's right to choose.
Fortunately for VAWA, Nourse found a significant ally in the association of attorneys called the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund and particularly with a staff attorney named Sally Goldfarb (now a professor at Rutgers School of Law-Camden). Goldfarb set out to form a coalition to gather broad support for the bill.
Biden, in the meantime, held a second Senate hearing on violence against women in August 1990. As he listened to a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (where his son Beau was still a senior) talk about efforts to help victims of acquaintance rape, Biden became energized. After hearing the woman say that some male students had harassed her with "nightly phone threats," Biden launched into what Goldfarb believed was an unplanned but revealing narrative. He told of trying to convince his wife Jill, who drove to night school for her graduate degree classes, to park in a place that was safer but illegal. In response, he said he got "almost a punch in the nose." Trying to work out why, he spoke of his wife's "frustration and anger" that she should need to take precautions no man would take. He linked her anger to her sense of "lost control."
Goldfarb felt she was hearing a man grasp a fundamental understanding about "the lack of control that is experienced not only by women who are themselves victims, but by all the women who have to constrain their daily activities to avoid becoming a victim." Biden was expressing, she thought, the "basic insight of the civil rights provision--that violence against women deprives women of equality."
Biden, too, portrayed himself as a man surprised by new knowledge. In Delaware, he found that victims of rape were beginning to "literally stop me in the street" to tell their stories and give thanks for VAWA. More than half, he said, spoke of a "need to regain control," which Biden evidently understood. The loss of safety, home, and control that he had felt himself when he lost his first wife and daughter was something that these women had also been forced to grapple with in the wake of their rapes.
For Biden and his staff, the great surprise came when VAWA--and particularly its civil rights section--came under fire, long before any congressional vote on the bill. In the summer of 1991, Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed a four-judge ad hoc committee to report on VAWA to an administrative body that he chaired, the Judicial Conference of the United States. The conference soon challenged the civil rights section on a variety of grounds, including the dubious projection that the federal caseload might double if even a tenth of domestic complaints became VAWA cases, causing "major state-federal jurisdictional problems and disruptions." Trying to stave off condemnation, Biden replied fiercely in a letter to the committee's chair: "I will not mince words: As author of the legislation, I have stated that ... the bill does not federalize divorce law or domestic relations cases any more than any other civil rights law does."
Undeterred, Rehnquist attacked VAWA in his 1991 "year-end report" opposing congressional additions of work to his courts unless "critical to meeting important national interests." In early 1992, he made clear to the American Bar Association (ABA) that he was pressuring Congress against vawa and added, "I urge your attention to this issue also." If Rehnquist could sway the ABA, Biden feared, congressional support for VAWA might evaporate.
At this point, the coalition of women Biden was working with realized that they needed to get judges on their side. Goldfarb and a colleague reached out to the one group, only about a dozen years old and far from radical, that might offer a counterbalance, the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ). After spirited debate--one judge reportedly warned her colleagues that if they supported VAWA they would be seen as an adjunct for the National Organization for Women--the association's board voted to present a resolution supporting vawa's civil rights section to its full membership. A few months later, the ABA voted down an anti-VAWA resolution.
Soon, female judges working to save Biden's civil rights initiative began working to reshape it. They pushed Nourse and Goldfarb into accepting language that would assure detractors that VAWA's civil rights section would not overburden federal courts and would pass constitutional muster. The judges urged that the civil rights section apply only to crimes that were also "due, at least in part, to an animus based on the victim's gender." The key term "animus," or purpose, served to ground vawa more strongly in early civil rights law and the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of equality.
With that language in place, VAWA easily passed Congress in 1994. Contrary to fears mongered by the chief justice, the law did not cause cases to flood federal courts, perhaps partly because a woman's case had to meet the limiting language of "animus." The animus requirement helped defend VAWA against legal challenges also, and, by the end of 1999, the civil rights section had been upheld as constitutional in 17 of the 18 district courts that ruled on the question.
But, in 2000, one of these cases, Brzon-kala v. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, finally reached the Supreme Court. Two male college students had allegedly raped a freshman named Christy Brzonkala within 30 minutes of her meeting them. When the first man finished raping her, he allegedly warned her that she "better not have any fucking diseases." A while later, in a university dining hall, he allegedly said that he "liked to get girls drunk and fuck the shit out of them." Strong "animus based on the victim's gender" seemed present, and Brzonkala brought suit under VAWA. Her assailants then challenged the law as unconstitutional.
During the years VAWA had begun its route to victories in lower courts, Rehnquist had extended what commentators have described as his "federalism revolution"--an effort to diminish the reach of the national government. The Court first undercut congressional authority to make law under the Commerce clause in a controversial 1995 case called Lopez that overturned a law passed by Congress to keep guns out of schools. Then the Court undercut congressional authority to make law under the Fourteenth Amendment in a 1997 decision about religion called City of Boerne v. Flores. By the time Biden faced off with Rehnquist at the Court, the civil rights section was in trouble.
On January 11, 2000, Biden stood without cheer in cold rain on the steps of the Supreme Court. He had just heard Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose vote he viewed as key to the survival of the civil rights section, suggest that the Court might have been "helped" if VAWA had contained a better "hook" to interstate commerce--an ominous and even ironic request, since the VAWA of 1994 was hooked solidly to the Commerce clause before 1995 when Lopez made the clause harder to hook to.
Standing beneath an umbrella that carried the seal of the Senate, Biden made an argument for women's equality that VAWA's defenders could not make inside the Court because the Court did not wish to hear arguments based on the Fourteenth Amendment. "Men don't choose not to take jobs" for fear of gender- motivated violence, Biden said, but "women do alter their life patterns." Then he returned to his own stake in the law--adopting a "personal is political" stance close to the heart of Biden's political values as well as much feminism. The effort to protect women against gender-based violence, he argued, "empowers my daughter and granddaughters."
The civil rights section's effort lost, however, by a vote of 5-4 in the Court after Rehnquist reportedly lobbied O'Connor for her vote. Although the rest of VAWA remained law, it had lost the part that Biden most valued--the part that strove explicitly for equality.
Joe Biden may have lost in a titanic struggle to expand the civil rights of women. But, along the way, he showed himself ready to follow the lead of female attorneys and judges. As Victoria Nourse told me in a recent e-mail from her desk at Emory Law School, where she is now a professor: "[I]n a day and age when Senators were still fondling interns in the Senate elevator, he not only protected me, he listened to me, my legal advice, and by extension, all the women who talked to me."
No one can pretend that getting Biden as vice president lifts women's spirits as high as they may go with the election of the first woman president. But no one will doubt that, on that wet day on the slippery Supreme Court steps, beneath his senatorial umbrella, Joe Biden was there--trying to stand tall for the rights of women.
Fred Strebeigh teaches nonfiction writing at Yale University. This article is adapted from Equal: Women Reshape American Law, forthcoming in February 2009.
Time: New McCain Attack Ad Plays Race Card-9-19-08
Karen Tumulty writes: When politicians interject race into a campaign, they seldom do it directly. Consider McCain's new ad, which the campaign says it will be airing nationally ...
This is hardly subtle: Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman.
Let me stipulate: Obama's Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn't even mention a far more significant tie--that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama's vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama's principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.
The AP digs into the thin claim that Raines is an Obama adviser:
Obama's campaign says Raines is not an Obama adviser and that McCain's campaign knows it because Raines said so in an e-mail earlier this week to Carly Fiorina, a top McCain adviser. Obama's campaign provided The Associated Press with a copy of the e-mail."Carly: Is this true?" Raines asks above a forwarded note informing him that Fiorina was on television saying he was an Obama housing adviser. "I am not an adviser to the Obama campaign. Frank."
Obama's campaign says Fiorina did not respond.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said he was not aware of the e-mail to Fiorina, but noted that the Post reported on three occasions, between July 16 and Aug. 28, that Raines was advising Obama.
"If he was not advising, obviously someone somewhere along the way should have corrected the record," Rogers said.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said he has since asked the Post for a correction. Burton said Obama only met Raines once briefly at an event, and that Raines sought an introductory meeting with Obama Senate aide Mike Strautmanis. At that meeting, Burton said no advice was sought from or given by Raines, who also had served as President Clinton's budget director.
Jason Linkins-Huffpost-Sept. 17, 2008
Top Clinton Fundraiser Endorses McCain. Elitist Abandons Dems Over Elitism To Endorse A Guy With Seven Homes
Those who are concerned about which member of the landed gentry would take up the cause of flacking John McCain now that Carly Fiorina's been taken off duty for her momentary lapse of honesty yesterday needn't worry their pretty little heads. Coming to the Maverick's aid is the Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who, despite having been a Clinton backer and a contributor to the Democratic Party Platform Committee, has had it up to here with all of the Democrats' elitism.
The Lady's political shift was something one could have seen coming, if one had suffered through the simpering take on contemporary politics she offered on that fora for middle-class thought, the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page. "If Barack Obama loses the presidential election," she opined, "it may well be the result of a public perception that he is detached and elitist -- a politician whose expressions of empathy for hard-working Americans stem more from abstract solidarity than a real connection to the lives of millions of citizens."
I'd say that for de Rothschild, who "splits her time living in London and New York," to criticize anyone's "abstract solidarity" with the working class is precisely what it means for the pot to call the kettle black. But, after the whole "lipstick on a pig" episode, I know that doing so would probably get me accused of racism. Nevertheless, it's true! For more on de Rothschild, let's go to the lede of Lloyd Grove's interview with her, in Portfolio:
When 67-year-old British banking scion Sir Evelyn Rothschild first set eyes on 44-year-old Lynn Forester at the 1998 Bilderberg conference- - the matchmaker was none other than Henry Kissinger -- she was already a woman of major means.
Honestly? We're to take seriously a critique of elitism from a woman whose marriage was yentaed by Henry Kissinger at the Bilderberg conference?
Mickey Kaus, who normally can be counted on to talk himself out of coherence, managed to stay on point when handed de Rothschild's WSJ piece: "You lost me at 'de.'" But if you struggled your way past the byline, you got this:
I'm a longtime Democrat. I worked for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and supported Sen. Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign. But I must face the uncomfortable truth that liberal elitism has been a weakness of the Democratic Party for more than half a century. In 1952 and 1956, for example, Adlai Stevenson emerged as the presidential candidate of the party's "new politics" wing. But while Stevenson's stylish, articulate, high-brow manner thrilled the nation's intellectuals, he could never connect with large numbers of working-class Democrats who found him aloof and aristocratic.
So, wait. Her personal snit with the Democratic Party's "elitism" dates back over a half-century, during which she gladly participated in the party, and only now does she decide to abandon it? What can I say? NOTHING ABOUT THIS WOMAN MAKES A LICK OF SENSE. One thing's for sure, with de Rothschild's melodramatic departure, the Democratic Party has become substantially less elite this morning.
MSNBC Countdown (video)
The New York Times-Sept. 17, 2008-by Michael Cooper
McCain Laboring to Hit Right Note on the Economy
VIENNA, Ohio — On Monday morning, as the financial system absorbed one of its biggest shocks in generations, Senator John McCain said, as he had many times before, that he believed the fundamentals of the economy were “strong.”
Hours later he backpedaled, explaining that he had meant that American workers, whom he described as the backbone of the economy, were productive and resilient. By Tuesday he was calling the economic situation “a total crisis” and denouncing “greed” on Wall Street and in Washington.
The sharp turnabout in tone and substance reflected a recognition not only that Mr. McCain had struck a discordant note at a sensitive moment but also that he had done so with regard to the very issue on which he can least afford to stumble.
With economic conditions worsening over the course of this year and voter anxiety on the rise, Mr. McCain has had to labor to get past the impression — fostered by his own admissions as recently as last year that the subject is not his strongest suit — that he lacks the experience and understanding to address the nation’s economic woes.
In the most recent case, he first sought to explain away his remarks about the economy’s fundamental soundness by saying he had been referring to the American people, almost daring his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, to contradict him on that score. But within hours his aides were scheduling appearances for him Tuesday on all the morning television news shows so that he could try to erase the notion, being promoted aggressively by Democrats, that he was out of touch.
His campaign also sent to reporters the text of a speech he was delivering later Monday that included much starker language about the nation’s financial troubles, and by Tuesday had produced a new advertisement asserting that his experience and leadership were necessary in a “time of crisis.” Aides and advisers repeated to anyone who would listen the words that Mr. McCain has frequently spoken following his comments about the economy’s fundamental strengths: that “these are very, very difficult times.”
Beyond striking a more populist tone and more explicitly acknowledging the nation’s economic problems, his campaign also began an effort Tuesday to cast him as a strong leader with profound experience on economic issues, given his service on the Senate Commerce Committee, where he was chairman for six years. That effort quickly hit a pothole when one of his economic advisers suggested that he had helped to create the BlackBerry, by virtue of his role in brokering telecommunications legislation; the McCain campaign later disavowed that, calling the suggestion “boneheaded.”
For much of this year, Mr. McCain has seemed to struggle to strike a balance between conveying the optimism that many voters want in their leaders, and the I-feel-your-pain empathy that they crave during hard times. His task is complicated by the tension between his plans to continue many of the economic policies of the unpopular incumbent Republican president he hopes to succeed, and his pledges to improve the American economy and shake up Washington.
As recently as January, Mr. McCain argued at a Republican debate that Americans were better off than they were eight years ago; by this summer he had released an advertisement that said “we’re worse off than we were four years ago.”
His first big speech on the mortgage crisis warned against excessive government intervention; a month later he released his plan for government action to help people keep their homes.
And a tour on which he embarked in July to emphasize his understanding of Americans’ economic pain was overshadowed when one of his top economic advisers, former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, was quoted as saying that the United States was only in a “mental recession” and had become “a nation of whiners.”
The most recent episode began Monday morning at a rally in Jacksonville, Fla., where Mr. McCain spoke of the troubles in the financial sector.
“There’s tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and on Wall Street,” he said. “People are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think still, the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times. And I promise you we will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. We will reform government. And this is a failure.”
His statement about the strength of the economy’s fundamentals was one he has made for nearly a year now, usually adding that times are tough or people are hurting. And in some ways, given that the recession that many have feared all that time has yet to be officially proclaimed, he has been borne out.
But his repeating the remark on Monday, even as the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers was helping send the stock market plunging to its steepest loss since the terrorist attacks of 2001, quickly became a political problem.
His campaign swung into action then, to try to put the remark “in context,” as one top aide said, and to push back against what the McCain organization deemed unfair attacks coming from the Obama camp. In short order Mr. McCain’s campaign sent reporters the advance text — a step usually reserved for major speeches or pronouncements — of remarks he planned to deliver in Orlando, Fla., on Monday afternoon proclaiming that “the American economy is in crisis” and redefining what he had meant when he spoke about the “fundamentals.”
On Tuesday morning, Mr. McCain was interviewed for CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and CNBC. Again and again, he explained that he understood the “crisis” and called for a new commission to study it, modeled on the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.
On the NBC News television program “Today,” Matt Lauer asked Mr. McCain how he could say that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” while his campaign was releasing an advertisement that said the economy was in crisis.
“Well, it’s obviously true that the workers of America are the fundamentals of our economy, and our strength and our future,” Mr. McCain replied. “And I believe in the American worker, and someone who disagrees with that — it’s fine. We are in crisis. We all know that. The excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street have caused us to have a situation which is going to affect every American. We are in a total crisis.”
Mr. McCain’s economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, told reporters Tuesday that the senator, who has often favored deregulation, would push for new regulations as president.
“This story line that people want to write that somehow McCain himself or the McCain campaign doesn’t understand what’s going on with the economy is wrong,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said. “You shouldn’t run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people. Let’s be accurate. This is an economy that has serious problems.”
By the end of the day, the campaign had gone back on offense. Here in Vienna, outside Youngstown, Mr. McCain noted at a joint rally with his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, that Mr. Obama had originally chosen a former head of the recently bailed-out Fannie Mae to lead his vice-presidential search (though the head of Mr. McCain’s search committee was himself a past lobbyist for Fannie Mae).
And Ms. Palin said that Mr. Obama’s “tax plans really would kill jobs and hurt small businesses and make even today’s bad economy look like the good old days.”
“Pompous, Self-Serving Son of a Bitch” Endorses McCain
By Kyle | September 16, 2008 - 11:43am
Earlier this year, right-wing luminary Paul Weyrich announced that, if John McCain secured the Republican presidential nomination, he’d be voting for a third party candidate:
Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Sixty Votes Coalition PAC, says if the November choice is between Hillary Clinton and McCain, he would then look for a third party candidate whom he could back. This is no small matter. Weyrich has only one vote like the rest of us, but many conservatives would at least take his views into consideration when making up their own minds before casting their ballots.
"I will not vote for him [McCain]," Weyrich told this column in an interview. "I can't" ... Weyrich could live with other prospective GOP nominees — in a couple of cases, hopefully gaining some concessions to the conservative position. But McCain — never.
It was no surprise that Weyrich refused to support McCain, considering that the two have a long history of mutual animosity:
Weyrich told National Journal earlier this year that he questioned whether McCain had the temperament to be commander in chief because he was too hot-headed.
McCain has been equally scathing. "Weyrich possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain," he wrote in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. "Corpulent and dyspeptic, his mouth set in a perpetual sneer as if life in general were an unpleasant experience, he is the embodiment of the caricature often used to unfairly malign all religious conservatives." McCain added: "I like to think I know a pompous, self-serving son of a bitch when I see one."
But, of course, like just about every other right-wing leader who once declared McCain utterly unacceptable, Weyrich has changed his tune:
They only started speaking again after nineteen years. Both have been quite open in saying why they held one another in “minimum high regard.” Their animosity toward each other is well known in national political circles.
But Paul Weyrich, one of the godfathers of the modern conservative movement, put all of that aside last week when he strongly endorsed John McCain for President.
And how did this come about? Because McCain once again realized it suited his political interest to grovel:
After he nailed down the Republican nomination, Weyrich [said], the Arizonan “came to my office to see me. We talked things over and he asked for my support.”
Apparently McCain decided that what his campaign desperately needed was the support of at least one more “corpulent and dyspeptic … pompous, self-serving son of a bitch.”
Steve Quinn-Setpember 16, 2008
Lawmakers-sue-to-stop Palin Trooper Investigation.
Palin Contradicts Herself On Troopergate.
JUNEAU, Alaska — Five Republican state lawmakers filed suit Tuesday to end the bipartisan investigation into Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's firing of the public safety commissioner even though the vice presidential candidate once said she welcomed the probe into allegations of abuse of power.
The lawsuit called the investigation "unlawful, biased, partial and partisan." None of the lawmakers who filed the suit in Anchorage Superior Court serves on the bipartisan Legislative Council that unanimously approved the investigation.
The scandal known as "Troopergate" gained national attention after Republican presidential candidate John McCain chose Palin as his running mate. Since then, Palin and the McCain campaign have sought to distance Palin from the controversy and have taken actions that could slow its resolution until after the November election.
Palin fired public safety commissioner Walt Monegan in July. Weeks later, it emerged that Palin, her husband, Todd, and several high-level staffers had contacted Monegan about state trooper Mike Wooten, who had gone through a nasty divorce from Palin's sister before Palin became governor. While Monegan says no one from the administration ever told him directly to fire Wooten, he says their repeated contacts made it clear they wanted Wooten gone.
Palin maintains that she fired Monegan over budget disagreements, not because he wouldn't dismiss her ex-brother-in-law. Still, she said in July that she'd welcome and cooperate with the investigation ordered by the Legislative Council. McCain campaign spokesman Ed O'Callaghan now calls the investigation "tainted."
On Tuesday, three state representatives and two state senators sued Democratic Sen. Hollis French, who is overseeing the investigation; Juneau Democratic Sen. Kim Elton, who heads the Legislative Council; independent investigator Steve Branchflower; and the Legislative Council itself.
The lawsuit seeks to either delay the investigation until after the Nov. 4 general election or remove French and Elton.
"There is no nonpartisan reason to complete this investigation until after the election," said Anchorage attorney Kevin G. Clarkson. "We just want to take the politics out of it and bring fairness back into it."
Clarkson said he and a nonprofit legal firm in Texas, Liberty Legal Institute, were donating their work on the suit. A phone message for French was not immediately returned.
The Legislative Council, made up of four Democrats and eight Republican, voted unanimously to investigate the circumstances of Monegan's dismissal. Although Monegan was an at-will employee who could be fired for almost any reason, lawmakers wanted to see whether Palin tried to use her office to settle a personal score with Wooten.
Last week the state Senate Judiciary Committee voted to issue subpoenas for Todd Palin as well as nearly a dozen others and to gain phone records of a top aide to the governor. The subpoenas seek to compel their cooperation in the investigation.
O'Callaghan said Monday that Sarah Palin, who was not subpoenaed, was unlikely to speak to Branchflower and that he didn't know if Todd Palin would challenge his subpoena. At the same time, the campaign released e-mails it claimed supported Sarah Palin's assertion that disagreements over budget were behind Monegan's firing.
Among the e-mails released was a farewell note by Monegan. In it, he suggested the governor had reason to believe she had lost his support, and he urged his former colleagues to communicate better with her.
"For anyone to lead effectively they must have the support of their team, and I had waited too long outside her door for her to believe that I supported her," he wrote. "Please, choose a different path."
Palin's lawyer has sought to have the three-member state Personnel Board take over to investigation, alleging that public statements made by French indicated the probe was politically motivated. French had said the results of the investigation could constitute an "October surprise" for the McCain campaign, and he later apologized.
The campaign insists that French, Branchflower and Monegan are friends, even though the men say they only know each other professionally and have never socialized. Democrats charged that the McCain campaign was trying to stall the investigation.
"Rather than cooperating with the investigation, the Republican presidential campaign is doing everything it can to stall and smear," said Patti Higgins, chairwoman of the Alaska Democratic Party.
McCain campaign spokeswoman Meg Stapleton denigrated Monegan at a news conference Monday, accusing the veteran law enforcement officer of "insubordination," "obstructionist conduct" and a "brazen refusal" to follow proper channels for requesting money.
When Monegan was fired, the governor offered to let him head the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Asked why someone with a history of insubordination would be given such a position, Stapleton said that without having to deal with a budget, Monegan would be able to focus on alcohol abuse issues.
The governor "respects the fact that he was respected in the community," she said.
Thomas Van Flein, a lawyer for the governor's office, cited the newly released e-mails Monday in asking the Personnel Board to find no probable cause for an ethics investigation.
In an interview Monday night, Monegan said Palin never raised concerns about his management. In fact, at an event in May, she singled him out and praised his efforts to reduce violence against native women.
"In my time as a commissioner, the governor has never talked to me about complaints about my efforts," Monegan said.
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About Barack Obama
United States Senator for Illinois
Barack Obama has dedicated his life to public service as a community organizer, civil rights attorney, and leader in the Illinois state Senate. Obama now continues his fight for working families following his election to the United States Senate.
Sworn into office January 4, 2005, Senator Obama serves on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which oversees our nation’s health care, schools, employment, and retirement programs. He is a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which plays a vital role in shaping American policy around the world, including our policy in Iraq. And Senator Obama serves on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, which is focused on providing our brave veterans with the care and services they deserve. In 2005 and 2006, he served on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which safeguards our environment and provides funding for our highways.
During his eight years in the Illinois state Senate, Obama worked with both Democrats and Republicans to help working families get ahead by creating programs like the state Earned Income Tax Credit, which in three years provided over $100 million in tax cuts to families across the state. Obama also pushed through an expansion of early childhood education, and after a number of inmates on death row were found innocent, Senator Obama enlisted the support of law enforcement officials to draft legislation requiring the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all capital cases.
Obama is especially proud of being a husband and father of two daughters, Malia, 9 and Sasha, 6. Obama and his wife, Michelle, married in 1992 and live on Chicago’s South Side.
Barack Obama was born on August 4th, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
Senator Barack Obama
McCain's Health Care Plan for Americans: Don’t Get Sick
Center for American Progress Action Fund Health and Wellness: McCain, a cancer survivor, would be unlikely to get coverage under his own plan if he did not have government-provided insurance.
Key Women Clinton Supporters: McCain Won't Get Our Vote
Ari Berman, TheNation.com Election 2008: McCain is out of touch with women's lives. Women know that he would be a dangerous choice for them.
The War in Iraq Is Pure Murder
Chris Hedges, Tomdispatch.com War on Iraq: We have embarked on an occupation that is as damaging to our souls as to our prestige and power and security.
Obama Shows His Punch
Robert L. Borosage, Huffington Post Election 2008: Obama takes a clean, connecting swing at Bush and McCain's disastrous economic policies.
Obama and McCain Offer Two Very Different Americas
Frank Rich, The New York Times Election 2008: The general election is an epic showdown between two wildly different visions of the country.
Obama Signals He Won't Back Down to GOP Smears
Drew Westen, Huffington Post: Obama made clear that he will not resort to the low road, but he also will not take punches on the chin or below the belt.
John Cusack Sees Double Video: Cusack stars in a MoveOn.org ad highlighting the similarities between Bush and McCain. More »
 | John McCain Makes Stuff up |
OBAMA FOR PRESIDENT IN 2008
War Casualties Under Reported?
Tom Philpott June 12, 2008
Mental Wounds Said To Raise War Casualties Tenfold
Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, charged Bush administration officials Wednesday with continuing to downplay the mental trauma and brain injuries suffered by veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Filner said an April RAND Corp. study, "Invisible Wounds of War -- Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery," justifies a tenfold jump in the U.S. casualty count versus the figure of 33,000 American dead and wounded used by the Pentagon.
RAND researchers extrapolated from a survey they conducted of 1,965 veterans to conclude that nearly 300,000 service members and veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan wars are suffering from post-traumatic stress or major depression. Filner told the pair of researchers, who had summarized their findings for his committee, that their work probably understates the problem.
"I personally think these are low estimates, just from my own studies," Filner said. "But if you take even the 300,000, [it's] 10 times the official casualty statistics from the Pentagon. Shouldn't this 300,000 be included?"
Lisa H. Jaycox, a senior behavioral scientist and clinical psychologist who co-directed the RAND study, embraced Filner's argument.
"Well, they are [suffering] an injury condition resulting from combat deployment, and so it's a different kind of casualty," Jaycox said. "But, yes, they are very important numbers."
At the same hearing, Michael L. Dominguez, principal deputy under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said RAND had gathered solid data from its survey but then drew the wrong conclusions. The study, Dominguez said, "did not, and cannot, definitively say that there are 300,000 cases of clinically diagnosed cases" of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression among veterans who served in the two theaters of war.
Filner angrily interrupted him, telling Dominguez that RAND didn't claim to show 300,000 clinically diagnosed cases of PTSD or depression. "It was an extrapolation to the possibility" of 300,000 cases, Filner said.
With over 1.6 million U.S. service members having served in Iraq or Afghanistan, Dominguez said, a finding that 300,000 veterans "have experienced some kind of mental health stress is very consistent with our data. And those people do need to be discovered [and] to get help."
But, he continued, "many of them will, with very little counseling or assistance, resolve those combat stress issues themselves. A few -- a few – will in fact manifest a clinical diagnosis of PTSD and they'll need much more sustained intervention by medical health care professionals."
"How many is a few?" Filner snapped.
The results so far, Dominguez said, show "less than one percent will actually have clinical PTSD that will need treatment over…"
"You believe that?" said Filner, cutting him off with sarcasm. "You believe that there are less than one percent of these deployed soldiers will have PTSD as a clinical diagnosis?"
Dominguez was stunned into silence momentarily but finally managed, "So far this is the number that we are seeing."
"That shows why you don't do anything," Filner said, "because you think there's only a few."
Another purpose of the three-hour hearing, which included testimony from retired Navy Rear Adm. Patrick W. Dunne, assistant secretary for policy and planning for the Veterans Benefits Administration, was to assess progress by DoD and VA in implementing Wounded Warrior legislation passed in January in response to the Walter Reed scandal last year.
Dominguez and Dunne conceded that some congressional deadlines haven't been met, including a late April target for establishing a Wounded Warrior Resource Center to give recovering service members, their families and primary caregivers a single point of contact for assistance.
But Dr. Terri L. Tanielian, co-director of the RAND study, acknowledged to Rep. Steve Buyer (R-Ind.) that the Wounded Warrior initiatives have set the Departments of Defense and VA "on the right track" for addressing most war-related mental health challenges.
The big hurdle now to proper care for many mentally wounded veterans is clinical capacity nationwide, Tanielian said. The pipeline for training mental healthcare providers in the most effective therapies for PTSD used by VA needs widening, she said, and that requires "transformation and system-level changes across the entire U.S. health care system."
Filner, meanwhile, wants every servicemember and veteran who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan to receive a mandatory examination, which should include at least an hour with a clinician trained to detect the symptoms of PTSD, depression and even mild cases of traumatic brain injury.
In his tirade at Dominguez and Dunne, Filner said that, between the two of them, "I think there's been a contest to see who can suck the humanity out of this issue better…I mean, we're talking about our children! We're talking about life and death! We're talking about suicides...homelessness…a lifetime of dealing with brain injuries! And you guys sit there without anything to say. This is absolutely unacceptable."
He asked Dominguez if he also disagreed with RAND that 320,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have a probable traumatic brain injury.
"Again," said Dominguez, "you don't have 320,000 brain injuries. You have 320,000 people who have been in or around a concussive event. Again, it's a spectrum of experience [versus] a spectrum of need that manifests itself. So, no, there is not 320,000 people out there with brain injuries."
That attitude, Filner charged, encourages clinicians to misdiagnose conditions so veterans are denied the care they need and the compensation they deserve. Dominguez took strong exception to those remarks.
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Financial Disclosure
View John McCain's official financial disclosure statements, which describe the sources, types and amounts of income earned in a given year. (See more disclosure reports.)
Biographical InformationMcCAIN, John Sidney, III, a Representative and a Senator from Arizona; born in Panama Canal Zone, August 29, 1936; attended schools in Alexandria, Va.; graduated, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, Md. 1958, and the National War College, Washington, D.C. 1973; pilot, United States Navy 1958-1981, prisoner of war in Vietnam 1967-1973; received numerous awards, including the Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, and Distinguished Flying Cross; elected as a Republican in 1982 to the Ninety-eighth Congress; reelected to the Ninety-ninth Congress in 1984 and served from January 3, 1983, to January 3, 1987; elected to the United States Senate in 1986; reelected in 1992, 1998 and in 2004 for the term ending January 3, 2011; chair, Committee on Indian Affairs (One Hundred Fourth Congress; One Hundred Ninth Congress), Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (One Hundred Fourth through One Hundred Sixth Congresses, One Hundred Seventh Congress [January 20, 2001-June 6, 2001], One Hundred Eighth Congress); unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. (Source.) More coverage of John McCain on washingtonpost.com Roles in Congress· 110th Congress: Senator, Arizona, Republican. Jan. 4, 2007, to Jan. 3, 2011. Key VotesSee how John McCain voted on key votes -- the most important bills, nominations and resolutions that have come before Congress, as determined by washingtonpost.com. Missed VotesJohn McCain has missed 359 votes (60.8%) during the current Congress. See a list of his missed votes since 1991 or see a full list of vote missers. Voting with PartyJohn McCain has voted with a majority of his Republican colleagues 88.3% of the time during the current Congress. This percentage does not include votes in which McCain did not vote. See a list of his votes against his party since 1991, a list of all Senators in the 110th Congress with a similar score, or a full list of party voters. | State Information Arizona demographic profile (2000 Census) Financial DisclosureView John McCain's official financial disclosure statements, which describe the sources, types and amounts of income earned in a given year. (See more disclosure reports.) |
Latest Votes
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| Date | Vote | Position | GOP opinion | DEM opinion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vote 148: On the Nomination: Confirmation Mark S. Davis of Virginia, to be US District Judge | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 147: On the Cloture Motion: Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to Consider H.R. 6049; Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008 | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 146: On the Cloture Motion: Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to Consider S. 3044; Consumer-First Energy Act of 2008 | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 145: On the Cloture Motion: Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Boxer Amdt. No. 4825; In the nature of a substitute. | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 144: H R 6124: H.R. 6124; Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 143: On the Motion: Motion to Instruct Sgt-At-Arms; Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 142: S CON RES 70: S. Con. Res. 70 Conference Report; An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2009 and including the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2008 and 2010 through 2013. | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 141: On the Cloture Motion: Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed to Consider S.3036; Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008 | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 140: H R 2419: Upon Reconsideration Shall the Bill H.R. 2419 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Not Withstanding?; Food and Energy Security Act of 2007 | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 139: On the Motion: Motion to Concur to the House Amendment No. 1 to the Senate Amdt. with Amdt. No. 4818; In the nature of a substitute. | Not Voting | Yes | No | |
| Vote 138: On the Motion: Motion to Concur in the House Amdt. No. 1 to the Senate Amdt. to HR 2642, with an Amdt. No. 4817; In the nature of a substitute. | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 137: On the Motion: Motion to Concur in the House Amendment No. 2 with Amdt. No. 4803; In the nature of substitute. | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 136: On the Nomination: Confirmation G. Steven Agee, of Virginia to be US Circuit Judge | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 135: On the Motion: Gregg Motion to Instruct Conferees (Discretionary Spending) re: S. Con. Res. 70; An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2009 and including the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2008 and 2010 through 2013. | Not Voting | Yes | No | |
| Vote 134: On the Motion: Vitter Motion to Instruct Conferees (OCS) re: S. Con. Res. 70; An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2009 and including the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2008 and 2010 through 2013. | Not Voting | Yes | No | |
| Vote 133: On the Motion: DeMint Motion to Instruct Conferees (China - India) re: S. Con. Res. 70; An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2009 and including the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2008 and 2010 through 2013. | Not Voting | Yes | No | |
| Vote 132: On the Motion: Boxer Motion to Instruct Conferees (China - India) re: S. Con. Res. 70; An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2009 and including the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2008 and 2010 through 2013. | Not Voting | No | Yes | |
| Vote 131: On the Motion: Gregg Motion to Instruct Conferees (Tax Increase) re: S. Con. Res. 70; An original concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget for the United States Government for fiscal year 2009 and including the appropriate budgetary levels for fiscal years 2008 and 2010 through 2013. | Not Voting | Yes | No | |
| Vote 130: H R 2419: Conference Report to Accompany H.R. 2419; Food and Energy Security Act of 2007 | Not Voting | Yes | Yes | |
| Vote 129: On the Motion: Motion to Waive Rule XLIV, 8(a) re: H.R. 2419 Conference Report; Food and Energy Security Act of 2007 | Not Voting | No | Yes |
Full list of votes by John McCain
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