On CNN’s Late Edition today, former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) claimed that the argument that John McCain would, in effect, be a third Bush term “isn’t going to stick”:
BLITZER: [Obama] says he welcomes a debate with John McCain on the issue of the economy, taxes, spending policy because John McCain would simply be more George W. Bush. … Does John McCain want to continue what Obama called the failed policies of the Bush administration?
ROMNEY: Well I think you’re going to hear that time and again, Wolf, throughout the campaign season. And I just don’t think it’s going to stick.
But earlier on the same program, a leading McCain surrogate — Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO) — conceded that McCain is indeed promising a third Bush term on the economy:
BLITZER: So it would be in effect a third Bush term when it came to pro-growth tax policies?
BLUNT: It would be. I think it would be. And I think that’s a good thing.
Watch a compilation:
Romney may not have gotten the memo, but it’s nice to see Blunt conceding the point. McCain is promising more of Bush’s economic agenda — unaffordable massive tax cuts for the rich that offer no help for the average family.
All this coming from a man who once said he “cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us.”
“CBS News RAW”: While campaigning in Fayetteville, W.Va., Bill Clinton argued with an audience member over claims made by Hillary Clinton that she improved health care during his administration.
Frankly, I’m tired of listening to Senator Clinton portray herself as being in the solutions business — as boasting a nice, fat resume of accomplishments — while mocking Barack Obama for being a rhetorical empty suit.
Is she truly a beacon of experience? Because I couldn’t think of a single piece of legislation that has her name stuck proudly on the front of it, no equivalent of McCain-Feingold, for example, I headed straight for her campaign website to see what glorious aspects of her vaunted experience I was missing.
Actually, I was missing nothing. There is not one single example of any legislation with her name appended to it. In fact, the page devoted to her Senate biography is a mush-mash, a laundry list of good intentions. When she talks about “sponsoring” and “introducing” and “fighting for” legislation that obviously hasn’t passed, that’s a smokescreen for failure. By introducing all that legislation that never makes it out of committee, she’s guilty of what she accuses Senator Obama of: confusing “hoping” with doing.
Editor’s Note: George W. Bush, who once saw himself as a modern-day Alexander bestride the Middle East, now presides over two military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan – and has to scrounge around for Americans willing to fight.
The growing unpopularity of Bush’s open-ended wars, especially the one in Iraq, has forced the U.S. military to recruit more and more felons with potentially disastrous consequences, as the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes in this guest essay:
Enmeshed in two military occupations that have turned into well-publicized quagmires, the Army and Marines are understandably having trouble enlisting new recruits. Their answer: vastly increase the number of convicted felons and other societal miscreants accepted into their ranks.
According to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, from 2006 to 2007 the Army more than doubled its felonious recruits and the Marine Corps increased its share by more than two-thirds.
For example, some entrants had convictions for crimes of dishonesty—including burglary, robbery, and grand larceny—crimes of violence—such as aggravated assault, arson, and “terroristic” threats, including bomb threats—and sex crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, and indecent acts with a child.
In addition, the two services dramatically increased their “conduct waivers” for people convicted of misdemeanors. Astonishingly, in fiscal year 2007, nearly one in five Army recruits were brought in under waivers for felonies and misdemeanors.
Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?
By Greg Mitchell | Editor & Publisher, May 8, 2008
Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised. On May 10, 2004, an Iraqi human rights official charged that American overseer Paul Bremer had been repeatedly informed about abuses at Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker revealed that Donald Rumsfeld personally okayed a set of procedures that led to the abuses. Several major newspapers called for Rumsfeld to quit.At that time, in a column, I disclosed how Pulitzer-winning correspondent Charles J. Hanley at The Associated Press had actually “broken” the Abu Ghraib story months before it came out via The New Yorker and other outlets—but the rest of the media had paid it little mind. This led me to ask, Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again?
The media was now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they the previous fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge—when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents? “It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source,” Hanley told me.
Congress is finally moving to shut one of the more egregious forms of Iraq war profiteering: defense contractors using offshore shell companies to avoid paying their fair share of payroll taxes. The practice is widespread and Congressional investigators have been dispatched to one of the prime tax refuges, the Cayman Islands, to seek a firsthand estimate of how much the Treasury is being shorted.
No one will be surprised to hear that one of the suspected prime offenders is KBR, the Texas-based defense contractor, formerly a part of the Halliburton conglomerate allied with Vice President Dick Cheney. According to a report in The Boston Globe, KBR, which has landed billions in Iraq contracts, has used two Cayman shell companies to avoid paying hundreds of millions in payroll, Medicare and unemployment taxes.
Unfortunately right now there is nothing illegal about this. The House has approved legislation to plug the dodge by treating foreign subsidiaries of defense contractors as what they are — American employers required to pay taxes. The Senate must quickly follow suit and not buy the contractors’ line that listing American workers at offshore companies is a cost saving passed on patriotically to the war effort. No less insulting, the Cayman dodge has been blocking Americans from the protection of labor and anti-discrimination laws.
The House has taken on another shamefully common abuse: voting to deny future government contracts to any company that fails to pay its corporate taxes, including an estimated 25,000 defense contractors keeping billions due the Treasury. The Senate should approve that legislation as well.
Companies enriched by taxpayers in the war boom should not be able to compound their profits by not paying their fair share of taxes. Congress must do far more to bring them to a full accounting.
On July 2, 2003, President Bush cavalierly dismissed violence in Iraq when he infamously proclaimed, “There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring ‘em on.
His comments were swiftly criticized. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) called them “irresponsible and inciteful.” The UK Guardian dubbed the remarks a “gesture of presidential bravado.” Even Bush himself seemed to regret his comments, telling reporters in January 2005:
Sometimes, words have consequences you don’t intend them to mean. ‘Bring ‘em on’ is the classic example, when I was really trying to rally the troops and make it clear to them that I fully understood, you know, what a great job they were doing. […]
I don’t know if you’d call it a regret, but it certainly is a lesson that a president must be mindful of, that the words that you sometimes say. … I don’t know if you’d call that a confession, a regret, something.
But as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) reveals in his new book, Bush again used that infamous phrase as recently as 2007. Last night on MSNBC, Reid said that on the anniversary of 9/11 last year, he was “complaining” to Bush about the situation in Iraq. Bush replied, “Bring ‘em on. We’re killing them. We’re killing them.” Watch it:
As in 2003, the last thing that Iraqis and the U.S. military needed was to “bring ‘em on.”
Transcript:
OLBERMANN: We really passed that fifth anniversary on the first of this month, since the “Mission Accomplished” declaration on the aircraft carrier. In this book of yours, the new book, “The Good Fight: The Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington,” you describe a private meeting that you had with the President — on a different anniversary, which was Sept. 11, 2007 — about Iraq, and he made a statement that you wrote, left you somewhat incredulous.
What you wrote, to quote exactly: “To understand what he said is to understand something profound about the problem at the heart of this administration.”
What did the President say to you last 9/11 anniversary, and what does it tell us about his leadership?
REID: Well, I was complaining about what was going on and he basically said, “Bring ‘em on. We’re killing them. We’re killing them.”
Last night, at an Obama town-hall event in Oregon, Rep. Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.) was rather candid in his criticism of John McCain, and broached a subject we generally hear very little about.
DeFazio, an Oregon superdelegate who endorsed Obama today and introduced him at the event, went on an extended critique of McCain, saying voters could not “underestimate the threat that John McCain poses in this election to our future.” DeFazio said McCain’s Straight Talk Express should be called the “trojan horse express.”
And then, DeFazio raised the Keating Five, a 1980s savings and loan scandal in which McCain was implicated. The Senate Ethics Committee later concluded that McCain used “poor judgment” in the matter.
“John McCain has already told us he doesn’t know much about economics,” DeFazio told the crowd of 3,000. “He says we need less regulation. Hello? Wall Street, mortgage meltdown, Bear Stears, taxpayer bailout, Enron. But I guess maybe for a guy who was up to his neck in the Keating Five, and savings and loan scandal, less regulation is better for his friends. No, that is not good for the American people.”
After the event, an Obama spokesperson indicated that that the senator’s campaign had no intention of pushing the Keating Five scandal.
“There is more than enough space between Barack Obama and John McCain on the issues, whether it is tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans or a timeline for bringing our troops home, and that is where we will focus our campaign,” Psaki said.
That sounds fine, but does the Keating Five controversy have to be off the table?
Yes, the scandal was a long time ago, and for those who were following politics closely in the mid-1980s, this probably appears to be well-tread ground.
But given McCain’s media-infused reputation as a reformer and champion of political propriety, his decisions in 1986 and 1987 seem to matter quite a bit today.
As William K. Black watches John McCain move toward the Republican presidential nomination, he thinks of a day 21 years ago that he considers one of the most troubling of his life.
Black, a senior federal savings and loan regulator at the time, attended a meeting at which he felt McCain and four other senators pressured federal regulators to back off from investigating the troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan.
“I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage,” said Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln’s bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.
The story of how the “Keating Five” senators allegedly pressured regulators to lay off a failing Arizona S&L became a major scandal, and marked a turning point in McCain’s life - the near-death of his political career followed by his eventual rebirth as a crusader for campaign finance reform.
The events of 1987, when McCain met with regulators, and 1991, when the Senate Ethics Committee concluded that he used “poor judgment” in the matter, are only dimly remembered by many.
But McCain’s emergence as the likely GOP nominee, combined with the rising volume of anti- lobbying rhetoric in the presidential campaign, has brought renewed attention to the Keating Five case, prompting questions about what McCain learned from it, what he’s accepted was wrong, and whether he now is stepping back from some of his own scrutiny of his past errors.
McCain has assured Americans that while contributors try to buy access, “The question is … do they have excess or unwarranted influence? And certainly no one ever has, in my conduct of my public life and conduct of my legislative agenda.”
This controversy shows otherwise.
Black, however, maintains that the Keating case was a textbook example of politicians, McCain among them, serving a major donor. And Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona and another of the Keating Five who hosted the key meeting in his office, said in an interview that McCain has gotten a relatively “free ride” even though DeConcini insists that McCain was the “most culpable” of the senators because he had the closest relationship with Keating.
If you’ve forgotten the details or need a refresher, this piece is a pretty good primer. Obama wants to take the high ground and steer clear of this humiliating part of McCain’s past, but if the media were anxious to be even-handed in their scrutiny of the candidates’ past, one would like to think the Keating Five scandal could draw at least as much attention as, say, the Rezko story, which appears utterly irrelevant by comparison.
On August 4, 1974, while I was travelling around Italy on an Interrail ticket, a bomb exploded in car 5 of the Italicus Express running from Rome to Brennero on the Florence-Bologna line as it left the tunnel of San Benedetto Val di Sambro. Twelve passengers were killed and 44 were wounded. Mario Tuti, Pietro Malentacchi, and Luciano Franci of the Revolutionary National Front were accused of the attack, though when they came to trial years later they were aquitted for lack of evidence.
Days earlier I had travelled through the same tunnel on my way by train from Venice to Naples. A few days later, I would travel through the same tunnel on my way to Florence. Had my schedule been different, I may well have found myself a victim of the attack.
I became aware of the event through the lurid artist’s reconstructions on the covers of Italian news magazines outside newsagents on Rome’s Corso Vittorio Emanuele.
I was seventeen at the time.
On August 2, 1980, a bomb was planted in the waiting room of the Bologna railway station: 84 died and some 200 were injured. The act was ascribed to neo-Fascists.
A few weeks later, while travelling with a friend around Italy by train we passed through Bologna and noted the gap where the waiting room had been.
In March, 1982, I began to live and work in Italy. In the June of that year, the body of Italian banker, Roberto Calvi was found hanging from a noose under Blackfriars Bridge, London. In the next few years, the name of Banco Ambrosiano, the Propaganda Due (P2) Masonic Lodge, and Licio Gelli would become familiar.
In the winter of 1984/85, I was working in Pistoia, Tuscany, and I lived in a mansard directly under the rafters on the top floor of the medieval Casa del Capitano del Popolo (House of the Captain of the People). (See picture below.)
Shortly before Christmas, 1984, I travelled through the San Benedetto Val di Sambro tunnel where, ten years earlier, there had been a bomb explosion, on my way from Florence to Bologna and from Bologna to Padua to stay with the family of an Italian friend who lived in a house in the Veneto countryside, before flying from Treviso airport to London’s Gatwick airport.
In the January 7, 1985, edition of Time Magazine, the article, “Italy Tunnel of Death”, appeared. It began:
Stretching for 11 1/2 miles beneath central Italy’s rugged Apennine mountains, it is one of Europe’s longest railway tunnels and carries the nickname La Direttissima because it provides the most direct route between Florence and Bologna. Last week the Italian press renamed it the “Tunnel of Death.”
Two days before Christmas, Train 904, an express bound from Naples to Milan with 700 holiday passengers aboard, was roaring through La Direttissima at 90 m.p.h. when a time bomb exploded in a second-class carriage. The force of the blast blew in the double-paned windows in most of the train’s 14 cars. Antonio Algieri, 33, one of those wounded by the flying glass, described the scene as “a hurricane of slivers–and then so much terrible screaming in the dark.” The train came to a stop, and thick smoke billowed through the tunnel, initially frustrating rescue attempts as dazed passengers stumbled around in the blackness.
When rescue teams eventually reached the wreckage, they found that the ninth car of the train had been demolished by the blast; at least 15 people were found dead and 80 were seriously injured. It was Italy’s bloodiest terrorist act since the authorities began to gain the upper hand in the fight against political extremists two years ago.
Within hours, a number of outlawed groups of both the left and the right claimed responsibility for the blast. Official suspicion centered on neo- Fascist terrorists, since the Christmas attack took place in the same tunnel in which right-wing extremists bombed a train in 1974, killing twelve and wounding 48. In 1980 neo-Fascists planted a bomb in the waiting room of the Bologna railway station: 84 died and some 200 were injured.
I had travelled through this very tunnel only days before this second bomb attack.
After flying back to Italy, I returned by the same route to my mansard in Pistoia’s Casa del Capitano del Popolo.
As the couple above whose flat I lived were out and I couldn’t get in, a doctor who lived in a flat below theirs invited me in for a drink and a chat. Naturally, the conversation revolved around the recent bombing, and my own lucky escapes, both in 1974 and a few weeks earlier.
It was then that I became aware of the view, quite commonly held by all classes of people in Italy, including respectable middle class doctors, that the Italian government were somehow behind these attacks.
Over the next few years, the words Operazione Gladio (Operation Gladio), and strategia di tensione (strategy of tension), became increasingly familiar as these were increasingly talked about in the Italian press. These topics are too complicated to deal with in one article. But I leave the reader with a few links and the first of a three-part BBC programme on Operation Gladio.
More recently, Senator Cossiga, who clearly has deep roots in his country’s intelligence service, has stated, in an interview with leading Italian newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera: “It is common knowledge amongst global intelligence agencies that 9/11 was an inside job.”
By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson | Electric politics
We have to recognize that in the Imperial New World Order (INWO), with the Soviet Union gone, and an aggressive and highly militarized United States projecting its great power across the globe, destabilizing and devastating in all its major areas of operation in the alleged interest of liberation and stability, a revised set of principles should be discernible. Most of these are hardly new, but even more audaciously than in the past they translate power relationships into affirmations of rights or the denial of these very same rights, with the ensuing double standards applicable pretty much across the board. The real-world significance of these INWO principles thus depends on three factors: (a) whether Washington affirms them for itself (and directly or by implication for its close allies, clients and hangers-on); (b) whether Washington denies them to its enemies; and (c) whether Washington doesn’t care one way or the other.
As we show below, these power-based affirmations or denials of rights are accepted among the powerful, from the leaders of the Western states, political candidates, and top UN officials, to the establishment media and the intellectuals whose voices can be heard. They represent the institutionalization of a system of power in which justice is inoperative and its perversion hidden in clouds of rhetoric and obfuscation.
With the Bush administration angling for war with Iran, the city of Chicago is considering going on record opposing it
Michael Lynn, The Guardian, May 9, 2008
More than 7,000 miles separate Chicago and Tehran. But on May 14, the city council of the American city will consider whether to take a stand on an event that would have far reaching consequences for residents of both: a US attack on Iran.
A resolution introduced into the council by one of its members, Alderman Joe Moore, would put the city on record as opposing a preemptive strike against Iran by the US. The resolution urges all congressional representatives whose districts include parts of the city to “clearly express the will of the people of Chicago in opposing any attack on Iran, and urging the Bush administration to pursue diplomatic engagement with that nation.”
The resolution is the result of an initiative launched by Chicago’s No War On Iran Coalition, a broad-based grouping of local anti-war, social justice and faith organisations. Ranging widely in viewpoints, the goal that unites us all is preventing the United States from launching another elective war that we believe would prove even more disastrous than the five-year-old one next door in Iraq.
Recent events have added urgency to the goal. In April, General David Petraeus, the commanding officer of American forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to that country, testified to several congressional committees. In their testimony, both struck a common theme: the role of Iran in promoting insurgent attacks in Iraq. Both men accused so-called “special groups” of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of being responsible for the deaths of American troops and rocket strikes on the Green Zone.
The Obamas released tax returns for both Barack and Michelle. The Clintons released returns for both Bill and Hillary. But when John McCain released his tax returns a few weeks ago, Cindy McCain’s tax documents will remain private.
It’s not too hard to understand why. The McCains are extraordinarily wealthy — one might even be tempted to call them “elites” — and Cindy McCain’s assets are estimated to be about $100 million, including a private jet, which her husband has been borrowing at a reduced rate.
Given the other candidates’ disclosures, and McCain’s own alleged commitment to transparency, will we ever see Cindy McCain’s returns? She was asked on the “Today” show this morning, and said, politely, “Never.”
I’ll tell you a little secret: at first blush, I’m not inclined to care. The McCains have more money than some countries, they haven’t been accused of any financial improprieties, and while it’s interesting when a guy like McCain opposes minimum-wage increases while flying around on his wife’s private jet, I’m not exactly itching to go through Cindy McCain’s tax returns. In fact, I’m not surprised that someone of her wealth would want to keep her returns free of scrutiny.
But this is absolutely relevant in this presidential campaign for a few reasons.
First, John McCain, for all of his talk about the importance of transparency and disclosure, has gone out of his way to ensure that all of his assets are in his wife’s name. And as Kevin recently noted, “There’s only one reason for a politician to make sure that all his assets are in his wife’s name: it’s to make sure that no one knows anything about his assets. It’s not as if McCain is the first pol to try this, after all. Is the press really going to let him get away with this?”
Which leads us to the second reason this matters: McCain has always relied on his wife’s wealth, and has always “mixed business and politics.” If the point of releasing tax returns is to offer voters a chance to get a better sense of the candidate, then it’s incumbent on the McCains to stop acting like they have something to hide.
And third, there’s just the shameless hypocrisy of it all. In 2004, the Republican National Committee spent quite a bit of time and energy demanding that the Kerry campaign release Teresa Heinz Kerry’s tax returns. The candidate’s wife resisted, but after pressure from the GOP and the media, she eventually gave in and made the materials publicly available.
The situation is exactly the same. John Kerry made less money than his wife, who inherited most of her fortune. McCain is practically broke, and relies on his wife’s millions, which were also inherited.
In other words, if we hold the McCains to the standards set by the Republican Party, they owe the public some additional information. The press hounded the Kerrys on this; we’ll see if the media chooses to give the McCains equal treatment. I’m not optimistic.
The Senate ethics committee has dismissed a complaint against Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) for soliciting prostitution.
The complaint was filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group had charged that Vitter’s solicitation of prostitutes in Washington, D.C. and Louisiana had broken the law and thus was “improper conduct” that ought to be punished. Vitter reportedly used the D.C. Madam’s escort service, in addition to repeatedly visiting a prostitute in New Orleans back in 1999.
The committee dismissed the complaint, according to the letter, because “the conduct at issue” occurred before Vitter’s run for the Senate, he was not charged criminally, and because it “did not involve use of public office or status for improper purposes.”
The letter, signed by all six members of the committee, adds: “The Committee also wishes to make clear that this decision to dismiss this matter without prejudice should not be taken as personal approbation or acceptance by any of the members of the Committee of the kind of conduct alleged in this matter. In fact, if proven to be true, the Members of the Committee would find the alleged conduct of solicitation for prostitution to be reprehensible.”
Update: The response from CREW’s Naomi Seligman is to the point: “The Senate Ethics Committee has once again done what is does best: nothing…. While Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who committed suicide last week, was found guilty of operating a prostitution ring, Sen. Vitter has not been held accountable for his activities. He walks away without even a slap on the wrist.”
In February 2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki famously predicted that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed for post-war hostilities in Iraq. According to documents recently released by the Pentagon in response to The New York Times’s expose on its propaganda program, however, Donald Rumsfeld claimed in a 2006 briefing that the reason why he did not support a larger invasion force was because commanders did not request it:
RUMSFELD: Now, it turns out he [Shinkseki] was right. The commanders–you guys ended up wanting roughly the same as you had for the major combat operation, and that’s what we have. There is no damned guidebook that says what the number ought to be. We were queued up to go up to what, 400-plus thousand.
Q: Yes, they were already in queue.
RUMSFELD: They were in the queue. We would have gone right on if they’d wanted them, but they didn’t, so life goes on.
In reality, Rumsfeld fought back when generals like Shinseki requested more troops. He said in 2003 that Shinseki was “far from the mark.” As McClatchy reported in 2004, “Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld’s opening bid was about 40,000. … By September 2003, Rumsfeld and his aides thought, there would be very few American troops left in Iraq.”
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