Monday, May 11, 2009

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Karzai's Brother Threatened McClatchy Writer Reporting Afghan Drug Story Top
The ride to Kandahar airport was tense. The Afghan president's brother had just yelled a litany of obscenities and said he was about to beat me. More on Afghanistan
 
Al Zimmerman, DCF, Arrested On CHILD PORN Charges Top
TAMPA, Fla. — A former spokesman for Florida's child welfare agency was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison Friday for taking nude photos of teenage boys, including a 16-year-old under the agency's care. Al Zimmerman's arrest prompted a review of hiring policies and personnel files at the Florida Department of Children and Families to make sure every employee has had a criminal background check. The former TV newsman pleaded guilty in January to a charge of producing child pornography. Other charges were dropped as part of a plea agreement. Zimmerman apologized to the victims and his family. "I keep hoping I'll wake up from this, that it's a bad dream," he said. "I've pretty much destroyed my life." U.S. District Judge Susan C. Bucklew sentenced Zimmerman to 24 years, four months, which was at the lower end of the sentencing guidelines. One of his attorneys, Eric Kuske, said Zimmerman waived an opportunity to argue for a lower sentence because he wanted to save his family and the victims the humiliation of having details of the crimes recounted in court. "Most of my tears have been for the people who have suffered for my mistakes," Zimmerman told the judge. Prosecutor Colleen Murphy-Davis said Zimmerman preying on a child in the foster care system was "the ultimate insult." Zimmerman was the public face and media liaison for the child welfare agency. Prosecutors said in court documents that Zimmerman paid one boy for sending him photos and took his own photos of the boy posing nude and masturbating. The boy told investigators his friends began gathering at Zimmerman's house, where they were given alcohol, the document said. Zimmerman lived in Lakeland in central Florida and part-time in Tallahassee. Another boy told investigators he photographed himself nude with his cell phone camera on five or six occasions and sent the photos to Zimmerman, who then sent him money. The documents also detailed explicit e-mails authorities said Zimmerman sent to one of the boys describing poses and activities he wanted in photographs to get top dollar from overseas pornographers. After learning that he was being investigated, Zimmerman asked a child welfare agency computer technician to throw his home computer in an outdoor trash container so authorities couldn't get access to it, prosecutors said.
 
Alderman Tunney's Aide Suspended For Forged Parking Permit Top
The alderman's aide who parked at an expired parking meter using a fake "official business" placard in his windshield has been suspended.
 
Ellen Galinsky: Peaceful Revolution: What Would You Say to the First Lady? Top
On May 7th I attended the event that is now plastering the news: the First Lady Michelle Obama spoke out on work-life issues . You may have heard some of the lines from her speech at Corporate Voices for Working Families -- that she is a 120-percenter, meaning that if she hasn't done any job at 120 percent, she thinks she is failing; or that she has a blessed life now, with all kinds of support including a personal assistant -- everyone needs a personal assistant! And you may have heard that she called for more work life assistance, from paid time off to quality child care. Mrs. Obama ended the public part of her speech by saying: I am looking forward to learning what works and what doesn't work [in business initiatives in work life], what's economically feasible, what I can do to be of help in furthering some of these agendas. At a private meeting that I attended with her following her speech, Mrs. Obama heard more about "what works" from two companies and asked us why these initiatives aren't more widespread. If family-friendly programs and policies are so good for employers and employees, she asked, then why aren't more companies providing them? According to my organization's 2008 nationally representative study of the U.S. workforce, Mrs. Obama is right on target. For example, only 50% of employees strongly agree that they have the flexibility they need to successfully manage their work and family lives. The people around the table suggested a number of reasons why more companies don't provide flexibility and other work life programs. They said it can be more difficult to manage employees who are working flexibly, flexibility is seen as a perk, not a business strategy, and some programs can cost money. Then a man in finance spoke up. He said, "Show me the dollars saved by these programs." Although it wasn't mentioned, if someone assumes that "presence equals productivity," they dismiss even dollars and cents arguments. The First Lady has asked for our help, and has said she wants to "further this agenda." What would you say to her is and isn't working and how can the work-life agenda be furthered? I will pass on your comments to her office. A Peaceful Revolution is a blog about innovative ideas to strengthen America's families through public policies, business practices, and cultural change. Done in collaboration with MomsRising.org , read a new post here each week. More on Michelle Obama
 
White House On Sykes-Limbaugh: 9/11 Jokes Cross The Line Top
Two days after comedian Wanda Sykes quipped during the White House Correspondent's dinner that Rush Limbaugh was likely the 20th hijacker on 9/11 (only he was so strung out on Oxycoton he missed the plane), the White House publicly distanced itself from the remarks. "There are a lot of topics that are better left for serious reflection rather than comedy," said spokesman Robert Gibbs. "I don't think there is no doubt that 9/11 is one of them." This next-day backtrack is fast becoming a standard of the White House correspondents dinner ritual (helped along, of course, by reporters eager to stir up some controversy ). Before her performance on Saturday, Sykes told "Extra's" AJ Calloway that she had been warned to keep it clean. "They told me not to say the F word or the N word," she said. "I'm offended they even told me that. What do they think? I'm some ignorant a**. Like I'm going to go in there, 'What's up n*****. Like what the f*** they think I'm going to do?" It's worth noting just how tawdry and offensive some of these dinners were in the past. A reader sends over a Washington Post write -up of Nixon's March 14, 1970, Gridiron dinner, in which racial sensitivities were left decidedly at the door. "Things got no better at the Gridiron that night. Absolutely determined that a good time would be had by all, and equally determined to bring down the house, Richard Nixon appeared as the final act. The curtain pulled back to reveal the president and Vice President Spiro Agnew seated at two modest black pianos (Dwight Chapin at the White House had requested grand pianos or at least baby grands but the Statler Hilton could only manage uprights). This was the first time a chief executive had appeared on the Gridiron stage, and Nixon opened by asking: "What about this 'southern strategy' we hear so often?" "Yes suh, Mr. President," Agnew replied, "Ah agree with you completely on yoah southern strategy." The dialect, as Roger Wilkins observed, got the biggest boffo. After more banter with the "darky" Agnew, Nixon opened the piano duet with Franklin Roosevelt's favorite song ("Home on the Range"), then Harry Truman's ("Missouri Waltz"), then Lyndon Johnson's ("The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You"). Agnew, drowned him out a few bars into each with a manic Dixie on his piano, and the Gridiron crew got louder and louder. "The crowd ate" it up," Wilkins observed. "They roared." Nixon ended with his own favorite songs, "God Bless America" and "Auld Lang Syne," and here Agnew played it straight." Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter! More on Wanda Sykes
 
Lesley Stern: How To Live On $0 A Day: Bargain Hunting Tips For Corporate Execs Top
It's really not fair that we're so outraged at the spending habits of corporate executives. After all, aren't we applying our cultural standards on people to whom they're totally alien? Unlike most of us, they've never had to learn how to find a product at a fair and reasonable price. Unscrupulous merchants are taking advantage of their ignorance. Clearly, nobody needs our compassion and guidance more than these poor souls. Let me be the first to extend the olive branch to corporate America with a few ideas on how to save millions of dollars on basic necessities. Let's start with something easy, like plumbing. It's an easy mistake for a cloistered Wall Street executive to think that installing an $80,000 18th century commode in your office suite is a reasonable, cost-efficient way of dealing with pressing lavatory needs. You probably weren't even aware that there's a restroom down the hall. Or maybe you were aware, but don't have a Segueway to transport you. There are quite a few other options if you really feel you can't conduct business without a toilet in your office. And the prices start at $5.49 (for a pooper scooper and roll of plastic bags). My recommendation is the Excret 4200 at $159.00. It also doubles as a chair, so you can auction off your current $20,000 Louis Quatorze desk chair at Christie's. The total possible savings are $99,994.51. While that may seem like small potatoes to you in the scheme of things, remember, every little bit helps. At the very least you'll be able to take yourself out for a decent lunch. More on Financial Crisis
 
Sam Sedaei: Lessons for Americans from Roxana Saberi's Release Top
Roxana Saberi, the Iranian American journalist was freed in Iran after a higher court overturned the 8-year sentence given to her for alleged (and absurd) espionage accusations. There are a number of lessons that President Obama should take form Roxana's release: 1) Talking with Iran works. Time and again, the Iranian regime has shown that it is prone to change on human rights when confronted by the international community. For instance, in the cases of the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars or detainment of fifteen British soldiers in 2007, the Iranian regime promised to persecute the victims. But after the arrests received strong international criticism, the regime released the victims. Another instance relates to the state's execution of juvenile offenders, which activists in Iran have been fighting for decades to stop. But it was no coincidence that Hossein Zabhi, Iran's Deputy State Public Prosecutor, announced on October 15 of 2008 that Iran would no longer execute juvenile offenders for drug crimes; a day earlier, the United Nations member states began a debate on the rights of the child and more than 300 NGOs from eighty-two countries called on the General Assembly to take urgent action to end executions for crimes committed by children. 2) As the president of the United States, President Obama has the responsibility to speak up on human rights. Some Americans believe the United States has no moral authority on the subject and give recent examples of torture and renditions to make that point. However, the fact is that although over the past few years, the United States has engaged in questionable actions, the current scrutiny by the media and lingering possibilities of prosecution of those who were involved attest to the fact that even when America is at its worst, there is accountability. It is wrong to look at respect for human rights as black and white and conclude that the U.S. has not been perfect, it has no moral authority over a country like Iran where atrocities are not nearly comparable to anything that have ever been committed by the American government. As the oldest democracy with the strongest economy and military in the world, the United States has not only the ability, but responsibility to use its weight and leverage to push the cause of human rights. 3) Those who dismiss real violations of human rights in Iran in the name of respecting "cultural differences" need to stop. This writer has lived in Iran for sixteen years and has seen no evidence that there is any support for human rights violations in Iranian culture. 4) There are other non-related to its nuclear program on which to pressure Iran. The United States government--under heavy pressure from lobbyists in Washington--has exclusively obsessed about Iran's nuclear program. But the nuclear issue is the wrong issue to pressure Iran on for a number of reasons. First, as a member of NPT, Iran has the legal right to enrich uranium. Second, for a country with a young population that yeans to join the rest of the free world and build a modernized economy, the nuclear program has become a matter of national pride. Going after such an issue is likely to turn the population against those who are exerting the pressure, which in this case is the United States. That's also why the Iranian regime has been doing everything to keep the conversation on the nuclear issue. But when the United States speaks up on human rights in Iran, it has more leverage because in that area, Iran is violating the international agreements it has signed (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). And more importantly, when the President speaks up on human rights, he is making America more--not less--popular among Iranians. For these reasons, the United States both has the highest moral authority and strategic interest to make human rights the key issue for any upcoming dialogue with Iran. Doing otherwise will make President Obama look like he is sacrificing the cause of human rights in Iran by making deals with Ahmadinejad (or whoever the next poppet of the Supreme Leader is going to be), whom Iranians consider as their oppressor, not legitimately elected. 5) The case of Roxana showed the power that bloggers and citizen journalists now have to affect the actions of the American president. When Roxana Saberi was arrested, President Obama kept silent for at least a few weeks and journalists didn't fare better when it came to covering the story. But when bloggers began talking about Roxana and even demanded that President Obama speaks up , he broke his silence and demanded Saberi's release, they pushed the media to begin to cover the arrest, building momentum among international organizations like Reporters Without Borders --an international organization that fights for freedom of press worldwide--to fight for Saberi's release. This is an empowering experience that should inspire all bloggers to continue to use their platforms to push for progressive change. 6) Lastly, nonviolent action works, even in Iran. When it comes to contentious situations such as Roxana's arrest or any conflict that involves a nondemocratic state like Iran, many people--unfortunately, including many Iranians in Diaspora--believe that violence is the best and only effective way to change the Iranian regime or its behavior. But Roxana took her lessons not from these hawks, but from Akbar Ganji , another journalist who was jailed in Iran years ago. During that time, instead of calling for violence, Ganji went on an 80-day hunger strike that resulted in intensive coverage of his deteriorating health condition in jail and eventual release. Roxana took that lesson and put it to work. On April 21, Roxana went on a hunger strike inside Iran's Guantanamo style Evin Prison and stayed on for nearly two weeks. Her hunger strike led the members of Reporters Without Borders--organized their own hunger strike in solidarity with Roxana. Her hunger strike, as well as that of Reporters Without Borders were critical in continuing the mounting of international pressure on Iran that led to her release. Roxana Saberi's story had a happy ending. But this should be the beginning of another story, and that is the United States government, as well as journalists and bloggers' speaking up about human rights atrocities in all parts of the world, rather than just Darfur. Follow Sam Sedaei on Twitter More on Roxana Saberi
 
Pope Walks Out On Palestinian Sheikh Rant Top
Chief Islamic Judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, launched a poisonous verbal attack at Israel at a Monday night gathering attended by Pope Benedict XVI. More on Israel
 
Stephen Dent, DuPont Heir, Extorted By Prostitutes Over Sex, Online Chats Top
A married, multimillionaire DuPont heir was extorted three times after meeting women for sex and online chats through a "sugar daddy" Web site, court records reveal.
 
Zondra Hughes: The Monsters Invade Print Media Top
The print media have been very thorough in reporting our own dwindling newsrooms, but the story that isn't told as often concerns The Monster that awaits those left behind. Thus, here's the backstory and the scoop. The New Politics of Print The mayhem going on behind the mastheads of some of your favorite magazines and newspapers is unprecedented. Suddenly, the reporter who covers one beat must now cover two, or perhaps four. In addition to the increased workload and concurrent deadlines, you'd better be blogging and Twittering your tired tail off or you may be labeled as a dinosaur. And we all know what happens to dinosaurs of the newsroom -- they become tell-all authors or ornery drunks, and not necessarily in that order. The perks of print journalism, aka the poor man's profession , have faded. The lavish junkets just don't happen the way they used to and if you should ask for meager travel expenses to attend a professional workshop or annual conference you'd better brace yourself for a blank, icy stare. Speaking of ice, if you cough at your desk -- in the age of swine flu -- and you may receive a pink slip before lunch. Speaking of lunch, expect a shouting match to occur in the breakroom between stressed out journos over stolen -- or missing -- cheese curls. As editor of N'Digo, http://www.ndigo.com a weekly, we are profile-driven and historically, we have not known the woes of the bustling daily newsroom. I can tell you quite frankly that in this unprecedented age of print's power struggle, we have become well-acquainted with the ugly side of print. And the ugliness is unsettling. Enter The Monster. The Monster is the fusion of entitlement and desperation that results in some very ugly acts by otherwise professional people. The Monster has totally caught me off guard, and I've asked several colleagues about their experiences, and YES, they have also seen The Monster. Monster #1: The New Age Job Seeker Generally speaking, our office receives up to 20 resumes a week, mostly from college students seeking internships and broadcast professionals electing to delve into writing as a second career. These resumes are often quite good, and we incorporate the most promising contributors whenever we can. And then The Monster appeared: A young, working journalist for another suburban weekly, sent his resume, which was good. I shot him an e-mail to inform him that he's on the radar of potential contributors and I will definitely reach out if an opportunity presented itself. The Monster replied, "your offer to contribute was unsatisfactory" being that he "wanted a full-time job with benefits and dental." Well, I surely didn't meet his requirements, so I responded, "I understand. Good luck with your search." And then The Monster called. Before I could tell him again that we didn't have a position, he told me that he tried to add me as a friend on Facebook and I hadn't responded. Okay. Oh, and that he's following me on Twitter, did I get the e-mail about that? Oh, dear. To put it mildly, I was shocked. As I was slowly returning the phone to the receiver, I could hear The Monster confirming an in-the-flesh interview. "So, I'll be downtown on Monday, so how about I stop by and discuss what you have available." That's when I nipped it in the bud, or so I thought. "We don't have full-time position," I replied, and added firmly, " FOR YOU ." "Oh," he says. "And you're completely satisfied with the assistant you're working with now? I'm surely more qualified. I'm a go-getter." "Well, go-get em, Tiger," I said as I hung up the phone. That was two weeks ago. The Monster has sent three follow-up emails confirming an in-the-flesh interview that was never offered for a full-time position that didn't exist and thus was also never offered. Monster #2: The Publicity Hound On the flip side of the aggressive job seeker is the publicity hound, that happens to be blessed with unmitigated gall . In this case, a contributor wrote a fashion column on accessories and it was slated to run the following week. Lo and behold, an advertiser increased his one-page ad to two full pages on press night, and thus the accessories column had to be held over. We placed the column online and set to revise and update it for the following issue. The contributor was informed of our editorial decision and less than five minutes later, The Publicity Hound Monster appeared. This monster was one of the new local designers featured in the column. Here's the text from her email: "[The reporter] told me that the feature on me and my accessories would not appear in this week's paper. You have caused me great cost to my reputation and my business because I told my growing clientele base that the article would appear and it will not." Ok. I shot the designer an email explaining that the fashion column was published online, and that we were contractually obligated to place the paid advertisement. I also added that we would revise it and publish it immediately. [Not to mention that because news is fluid, print media do not generally guarantee editorial coverage, only paid advertisements.] The Publicity Hound Monster retorted: "I understand that you had to print the ad. But from where I'm standing, you could have cut something else out ." After a closer look, that fashion column is just a little too long.
 
Robert Thurman: Now Is The Time for All Good Women to Come to the Aid of the Planet! Top
(And all good men to stand up with them!) I am excited to begin my HuffPost blogging in the wake of Mother's Day, and a few days after hosting H. H. the Dalai Lama in New York. His Holiness, in radiant health and spirits, powerfully manifested his unwavering message of "world peace through inner peace." To all of us enrapt as ever, he taught us the quintessence of compassion. The next day he attended a packed benefit luncheon for Tibet House, US at the famous "power lunch" restaurant, The Four Seasons. (Alex von Bidder welcomed the guests to what he called "the ultimate power lunch," which I annotated by reminding everyone that the ultimate "power" is that of compassion.) His Holiness spoke from the heart and eloquently appealed to the hearts of all present to save the extremely precious and highly endangered Buddhist culture of beloved Tibet. We all left fully aglow, and inspired to do something for Tibet and for the world. In these times, the doubt often arises as to whether the world is going to make it - at least the stressed out human beings. While there are so many wise and kind and beautiful people everywhere, it seems as if most of the leaders in actual power are charging ahead in flamboyantly self-destructive paths. Exceptional, of course, is the wonderful Barack Obama and perhaps the glorious Angela Merkel. And interestingly, both seem to like the Dalai Lama! Hmmmm. There must be some others at the top of the various heaps of humanity we call nations, but definitely not enough to really turn the Spaceship Earth onto the radically new course it needs to pass the unthinkable crisis we are facing. Spaceship Earth is overheating, its seas are rising. It is overpopulated; its resources are dwindling. Its earth and water and air is poisoned. Its wild animals are perishing at an alarming rate, and its domesticated animals are being tormented and turned into toxic foodstuffs. And the humans, who are causing all this, are mainly in denial about their own responsibility, blaming various enemies instead, and so the majority of their machinery, money, and ingenuity is wasted in warfare and preparation for more, and for local, domestic, and internal violence. So naturally we fear the end is nigh. People ask me all the time, "Can we make it? Do you think it's possible?" I feel the same way emotionally, but intellectually I am certain we will make it and the human drama on this planet will continue for many millennia, getting better and better. Why? Because of Mother's Day, because the real Day of the Mothers is coming. Listen to Julia Ward Howe, a Mother who was a staunch activist against slavery and a pioneer of feminism. She came up with the vision of the international Mother's Day, and wrote the original Mother's Day Proclamation in 1870. Just listen! "Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, For caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs." "From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe our dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace... Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God - In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality, May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace." (Thanks to Jonathan Klate for sending this text of the proclamation.) Now where is this great "general congress of women?" It is to be "without limit of nationality," that is to say: global. Such a congress of women must arise and demand an end to war, an end to men's stubborn "staying the course" in inane campaigns of violence. Julia Ward Howe already outlined their mission, 139 years ago. How bad does it have to get for them to stand up and accomplish it? Twelve years ago, the Dalai Lama was at a Tibet House US "Peacemaking" conference in San Francisco, and was encouraging the 1500 or so "youth at risk" present that we needed them to turn the world around, their energy was crucial. The youth were inspired and the thousands in the audience felt a wave of hope ripple through. At that moment, the notable author and psychotherapist, Jean Shinoda Bolen piped up from the panel on stage, "Your Holiness, there is another crucial source of energy we may also find of great assistance." "What might that be?" was the response. The smiling answer, "Menopausal zest!" brought the house thunderously down, and His Holiness was enormously impressed. Well, then, Mothers of the World, it is high time! When the students and workers at Tiananmen Square held off the communist party bosses for months in 1989, it was because the troops sent in refused to run over the grandmothers out in the square protecting their grandchildren. When Yeltsin had to withdraw in the first Chechen war, it was because the grandmothers en masse went down to the front and took their grandsons out of the line. The grandmother house of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy held veto power over the decisions of the chiefs of the tribes. When the Mother's really recognize that they better leave what's "left of home," their power is undeniable. It is daunting. It is dangerous. But there must come a point where it is more dangerous not to arise and demand peace, demanding it peacefully. May the day soon be upon us! May all men stand together with the Mothers! Now is the time for all women to come to the aid of the planet! Robert Thurman is the author of Inner Revolution, Infinite Life, Jewel Tree of Tibet , and Why the Dalai Lama Matters . More on Mother's Day
 
Crony Capitalsim: How The Financial Industry Gets What It Wants Top
The tilt of American policy in favor of the finance industry -- reflected in the policies of recent Treasury Secretaries Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson and Robert Rubin -- cannot be attributed to any one person or institution. The industry flexes unsurpassed muscle in the political system, backed by billions of dollars invested in candidates and lobbying, a vast grassroots lobbying network of local bankers, the growing centrality of finance in the national economy, and widespread acceptance among public officials of a pro-market, deregulatory philosophy. "Both the end-stage Bush and new Obama administrations have been exceptionally fawning in their support of failed bankers," William K. Black, associate professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, told the Huffington Post. "Crony capitalism is now common in U.S. finance." Since 2000, the finance sector has funneled a total of $2.84 billion directly into the political system, $961 million in donations to candidates and political parties, $1.88 billion in publicly disclosed lobbying expenditures to influence Congress and the executive branch. The leading firm in both lobbying dollars and campaign contributions is Goldman Sachs, which not only produced Treasury Secretaries Rubin and Paulson, but which has also begun to emerge from the current financial crisis as the top dog of Wall Street. In 2008, the largest corporate or trade association source of campaign contributions, including employees, was Goldman Sachs at $6.9 million, followed by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. at $5.8 million. Citigroup, $5.5 million, came in fourth; Morgan Stanley, $4.3 million, 7th; and the American Bankers' Association (ABA), $3.7 million, 10th. Over the past two decades , Goldman Sachs has been the second largest corporate contributor (including employees) at $30.9 million, beaten only by AT&T, at $40.8 million. "When we write history books we will wonder why the government seemed to coincidentally do the things that favor Goldman Sachs and somehow in extremis get them out of trouble," Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- author of "The Black Swan" and distinguished professor at New York University Polytechnic Institute -- told the Huffington Post. The strength of the financial sector and its interlocking allies in insurance and real estate has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past year: Despite near universal agreement that actions of the industry inflicted untold harm on the American and global economies, the Bush and Obama administrations have treated captains of finance with velvet gloves, and Congress, especially the Senate, has consistently deferred to the powerful financial lobby. Looking over the past decade, Simon Johnson, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, provided a coherent, well-conceptualized description in The Atlantic of the political prowess of the banking community, a subsection of the financial industry and a community that Johnson and co-author James Kwak view as an American oligarchy. "From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing: * Insistence on free movement of capital across borders; * The repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking; * A congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps; * Major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks; * A light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement; * An international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness; * And an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation." In Congress, the big test of continued banking muscle in the aftermath of the financial collapse came on April 30. That day, the Senate voted 51-45 to kill administration-backed "cramdown" legislation which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to change the terms of mortgages, many of which were originated by what are now recognized as specialists in predatory or sub-prime lending. The Senate in effect chose to support banking interests over the interests of constituents who are in bankruptcy and facing foreclosure on their homes. "The American Bankers Association appreciates the Senate's decision," declared Floyd E. Stoner, the ABA's executive director, declared. "We are thankful that the Senate recognized [our] concerns." While campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures are reliable measures of the leverage of the financial industry, these figures by no means tell the full story. One of the industry's most powerful tools is the vast network of community bankers who are often key members of local establishments in rural and small town America. Ten of 12 Democratic senators who voted against the cramdown bill -- Max Baucus (Mont.), Michael Bennett (Colo.), Robert Byrd (W.V.), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), and Jon Tester (Mont.) -- represent states that are disproportionately rural, states in which such bankers are especially influential. Johnson and Kwak, in their May Atlantic article provide crucial additional insight. For one thing, the finance industry in recent years has become a lynchpin of the national economy: "From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16% of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19%. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21% and 30%, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41%. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99% and 108% of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181% in 2007." These findings are illustrated in the following two charts: At a more subtle level, Johnson and Kwak describe what amounts to an ideological shift, a shift experienced most intensely in the nation's capital: "[T]he American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital-a belief system.Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America's position in the world." All of which helps to explain Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin's outburst http://progressillinois.com/2009/4/29/durbin-banks-own-the-place on a Chicago radio station last April 27 as he watched the steady erosion of support for the measure allowing bankruptcy judges to alter the terms of home mortgages: "And the banks - [it's] hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. They frankly own the place." Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter! More on Goldman Sachs
 
Jonathan Daniel Harris: Why We Should Attack One Cause at a Time Top
I recently wrote a post on Causecast stating the relative harmlessness of the H1N1 virus in comparison with other illnesses and traumatic events. Not to take away from the pain of those who've been affected by swine flu, but in the grand scope of international tragedies, this one is hardly worth panicking about. In my research for the article, I looked for common, preventable causes of human suffering the world over. I came up with the standard array of horrifying numbers: 40,000 die a year in the U.S. in car crashes, two million women worldwide are forced into sexual slavery, 5,000 children die every year from unclean drinking water. These numbers were a means to an end for me, a way to paint swine flu as a relatively minor blip in the long, torturous list of tragedies to befall our species and life on Earth. To actually think too hard about these numbers and analyze what they mean to human existence is, after all, a bewildering and inescapable drop into hopelessness. I can say this as someone who works at an organization dedicated to helping nonprofits provide aid and comfort to people the world over. Causecast works with only 50 of the more than 900,000 registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits currently operating in the United States. One can very easily suffer from "cause overload" when presented with the unmanageable number of drastic problems we face. It made me wonder if there was a better way we could attack these causes. Certainly a day will never come when we'll say, "Thank God all that's taken care of! Finally, I can crack open my new George Pelecanos book." There will always be problems in the world. However, complete eradication is something we rarely think about in conjunction with our primary causes. The 20th century wonderfully eradicated things like smallpox and voting booth discrimination (mostly). What we need do now is focus all of our energy on actually eliminating these problems, not simply chipping away at them with donations, events and awareness campaigns. That's why, yesterday, I suggested to a co-worker my Swiftian "modest proposal." This plan involves organizing every fully-functioning nonprofit organization in this country. Let's tell all those people to take a month off whatever they're working on, be it cleft palate awareness, director's guild contracts or National Ornithology Day, and put everyone to work on the most horrible, debilitating cause we can think of. I would propose this cause to be one of three things: Giving sustainable sources of clean water to the billion or so people who don't have access to it, eliminating once-and-for-all the genocide in Darfur , or providing food sources for the hundreds of millions that go hungry every day in this country and around the world. It's certainly up for debate, but those would be, in my mind, the three things that are in most need of complete eradication. Let's take care of those things, and then we can work on the next three and then the next three. Don't think me callous. Using this system, in terms of human suffering, it might be a while before we finally overturn Prop 8 or find a way to adequately approach teenage depression, but wouldn't it feel good to really solve something? How good would this country feel, in the face of nearly endless bad news, if we could solve the problem of world hunger or genocide or dehydration? (Note: I don't think cleft palates, the DGA or ornithologists should be mocked. I just needed something to seem slightly less dire than world poverty.) More on Swine Flu
 
Obama lauds industry offer to cut health costs Top
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday portrayed the health care industry's promise to cut $2 trillion in costs over 10 years as "a watershed event" in the long search for a solution to the millions of uninsured. Whether that is true won't be readily known as debate begins in Congress over sweeping health care legislation. What is known now is that the move puts the industry groups involved firmly inside the process of expanding coverage, with the hope they can steer the final product toward something that doesn't restrict their profitability. "I will not rest until the dream of health care reform is achieved in the United States of America," Obama declared in the White House's State Dining Room as he announced the voluntary offer made to the White House Monday by a consortium of hospitals, insurance companies, drug makers and doctors. They told Obama they would slow rate increases by 1.5 percentage points a year by improving coordination, focusing on efficiency and embracing better technology and regulatory reform. Government economists say the shaved costs would create breathing room to help provide health insurance to an estimated 50 million Americans who now do not have it. It's a substantial change from the time in the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton took on health care reform, only to see industry leaders fight back hard, ultimately killing the White House proposal before it could gain any traction. Still, even Obama acknowledged that the step announced Monday would be meaningful into the future only if it is not a singular event, but part of a larger and successful effort toward universal health care coverage for Americans. He said the country "can, will and must" accomplish this goal by the end of the year. "There's so much more to do," he said. "We can't continue down the same dangerous road we've been traveling for so many years," Obama said. "Reform is not a luxury that can be postponed, but a necessity that cannot wait." He indirectly criticized some of the groups at his side for killing the effort last time. "All too often, efforts at reform have fallen victim to special interest lobbying aimed at keeping things the way they are, to political point-scoring that sees health care not as a moral issue or an economic issue, but as a wedge issue, and to a failure on all sides to come together on behalf of the American people," the president said. The industry letter said "these and other reforms will make our health care system stronger and more sustainable." Although the offer from the industry groups doesn't resolve thorny details of a new health care system, it does offer the prospect of freeing a large chunk of money to help pay for coverage. And it puts the private-sector groups in a good position to influence the bill Congress is writing. The industry groups are trying to get on the administration bandwagon for expanded coverage now in the hope they can steer Congress away from legislation that would restrict their profitability in future years. Insurers, for example, want to avoid the creation of a government health plan that would directly compete with them to enroll middle-class workers and their families. Drug makers worry that in the future, new medications might have to pass a cost-benefit test before they can win approval. And hospitals and doctors are concerned the government could dictate what they get paid to care for any patient, not only the elderly and the poor. It's unclear whether the proposed savings will prove decisive in pushing a health care overhaul through Congress. There's no detail on how the savings pledge would be enforced. And, critically, the promised savings in private health care costs would accrue to society as a whole, not just the federal government. That's a crucial distinction because specific federal savings are needed to help pay for the cost of expanding coverage. Costs have emerged as the most serious obstacle to Obama's plan. The estimated federal costs range from $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, and so far Obama has only spelled out how to get about half of that. More on Barack Obama
 
Netanyahu To Restart Palestinian Peace Talks Top
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be looking to build a coalition against Iran and exchange ideas on advancing Middle East peace negotiations when he visits Egypt Monday on his first trip to the Arab world since he took office. Netanyahu is hoping to find some common ground with his Arab neighbors ahead of his pivotal trip to Washington later this month. Efforts are also under way to arrange a trip to Jordan later in the week. Egypt will be looking for the Israeli leader to endorse the internationally backed idea of a Palestinian state, something he has not done so far. Netanyahu's election has been ill-received in the Arab world because of his hard-line positions against yielding land captured in Middle East wars and his refusal to support Palestinian independence. Netanyahu hopes to redefine the regional agenda by focusing on Iran as the key threat to Mideast stability. Egypt, a regional heavyweight, and Jordan are the only Arab countries with peace treaties with Israel. Because they, too, fear Iran's rising influence in the region, Netanyahu hopes to use them as bridgeheads for his ideas among moderate Arab states. Both Israel and Arab moderates, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have expressed concern over President Barack Obama's efforts to start a dialogue with Iran. Netanyahu's decision to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak before sitting down with Obama on May 18 demonstrates his belief that "now is the time to intensify the coordination and the cooperation between Israel and those Arab countries (that) believe in peace," an official in the prime minister's office said Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the meeting in advance. "Our common goals are the desire to strengthen regional stability and to advance the Middle East peace process," the official said. "Our common threats are Iran and its regional proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza." Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said his government hoped Netanyahu would lay out his plans for moving forward on the Palestinian issue. "So far he has not come out openly and directly and said he is supportive of the two-state solution. We have called on him to do that and we will continue to do that," Zaki told The Associated Press. Israel, like the U.S. and many other countries, believes Iran is aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The Jewish state regards the Islamic Republic as its greatest threat, especially in light of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's repeated calls for Israel's annihilation. Iran says its nuclear program is designed solely to produce energy. While the U.S. too is concerned about Iran's role in the region, it also is pressing hard for an Israeli commitment to establish a Palestinian state. "We understand Israel's preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that," Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "And by the same token, there are a lot of things that you can do to diminish that existential threat by working hard towards achieving a two-state solution." Jordan's King Abdullah spoke last week of a "combined approach" to tackling the Mideast conflict that would involve not only Israel and the Palestinians, but Arab states as well. As part of this comprehensive approach, the U.S. has asked the 22-member Arab League to amend a 2002 peace initiative to make it more palatable to Israel, Arab diplomats said. The current Arab plan offers a comprehensive peace between Israel and the Arab world in return for a Palestinian state on all territory captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast War. It also seeks repatriation of Palestinian refugees displaced in the war that followed Israel's creation in 1948. Israel wants to keep some territory captured in 1967, including east Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank, and opposes any large-scale return of Palestinian refugees, saying it would destroy the Jewish character of the country. On Sunday, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Netanyahu told members of his Likud Party that he will never withdraw from the Golan Heights as part of any peace deal with Syria. Israel captured the strategic plateau in the 1967 war, and Syria says there will not be peace until Israel returns the territory. The last round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which had aimed for an agreement on Palestinian independence in 2008, ended without tangible results last year. Complicating matters is the internal Palestinian divide. Moderates led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas control the West Bank while the Islamic militant Hamas rules Gaza. Abbas favors talks with Israel, while Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist. ___ AP correspondent Sarah El Deeb contributed to this report from Cairo. More on Israel
 
Thomas A. Bass: Torture ... Fifty Years of U.S. Practice Top
Torture works. Hanging from the yardarm works. Disembowelment, rape, death by stoning, electroshock -- they all work at terrorizing people and extracting information. But what kind of information? Useful information, as Dick Cheney maintains? Or a babble of disinformation directed at God, America, Allah, or anyone else who can make the pain stop? The United States used torture widely during the Vietnam war. After inheriting "tiger cage" torture cells from the French, the United States went on to build even more brutal tiger cages of its own. South Vietnam was laced with a gulag of prisons; the countryside was defoliated, napalmed, and emptied of peasants who were forced into concentration camps, euphemistically known as "strategic hamlets." The prisons, torture cells, and tiger cages constructed on Con Dao island and elsewhere in Vietnam were built by RMK-BRJ, the Texas-sunbelt consortium of America's four largest construction companies: Raymond International, Morrison-Knudson, Brown & Root, and J.A. Jones. One of the successor companies to RMK-BRJ was Halliburton, whose CEO, before he was elected vice president of the United States, was Dick Cheney. With Cheney acting as White House puppet master, Halliburton thrived on no-bid contracts to build prisons at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, and other CIA "dark sites" around the world. By recycling Vietnam-era blueprints and improving them for "enhanced interrogation," Halliburton for many years made good money out of torture. This work was ennobled, of course, by the company's high-minded dedication to the United States' national defense. As Cheney can be heard saying on Sunday morning talk shows, "Torture works." It produces information, and information is the main weapon in fighting counterinsurgency warfare. The precise nature of this information is not a question that Cheney has entertained. The modern practice of counterinsurgency was developed during the Vietnam War, first by the French, who carried these practices from Southeast Asia to North Africa, and then by the Americans, who reinvented everything already known by the French. French agrovilles became "strategic hamlets," but the idea of engineering what Harvard professor of government Samuel Huntington called "forced urbanization" was the same, and it ended with equally disastrous results. The United States, twenty years later, lost the same war that the French had already lost at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. As British author Graham Greene wrote in Ways of Escape , one of his two autobiographies, "Dien Bien Phu was a defeat for more than the French Army. The battle marked virtually the end of any hope the Western Powers might have entertained that they could dominate the East. The French, with Cartesian clarity, accepted the verdict. ... (That young Americans were still to die in Vietnam only shows that it takes time for the echoes even of a total defeat to circle the globe.)" Counterinsurgency is a tough slog, but the rules of the business are pretty simple. Because insurgencies are often dirty operations involving civilian populations in acts of urban terrorism, one needs a substantial force to counter them. French Colonel Roger Trinquier, who perfected many of the practices of modern counterinsurgency and wrote the classic text on the subject, Modern Warfare (1961), argued that counterinsurgency inevitably involves torture. The French, first in Vietnam and then in Algeria, broke insurgencies one cell at a time through the measured application of torture. Trinquier aided General Jacques Massu in implementing these methods during the Battle of Algiers, and Trinquier himself is depicted in the film The Battle of Algiers by a French officer who busies himself throughout the movie drawing social network graphs. He is assembling, one name at a time, in a great pyramid of names, the intelligence gathered from torturing hundreds of thousands of Algerian insurgents. Near the end of the movie, the very last name at the top of the pyramid is discovered, and the head of the Algerian insurgency is killed. Two years later the French have lost the war and a million French colonialists are forced to flee North Africa. In other words, the French won the Battle of Algiers but lost the Algerian War -- an experience that America would come to know from its own debacle in Southeast Asia. When Gillo Pontecorvo's film was screened at the Pentagon on August 27, 2003, the U.S. Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which was sponsoring the event, sent out a promotional flyer saying: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. . . . Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film." After Vietnam, United States' knowledge about counterinsurgency -- and torture -- was transferred to the South American dictators who organized death squads and started disappearing their citizens in "dirty" wars. The knowledge was repatriated after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon. This is when America's enemies -- and a lot of people mistaken for being our enemies -- began disappearing into Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram, and other "dark sites" around the world. Confirmed by release of the "torture memos," we know that the Bush administration embraced torture as one of its central tools in fighting what it called the Global War on Terror. The administration struggled to hide this policy. It papered it over with legal documents so flimsy that they had to be retracted when brought to light. It worked through a spectrum of propaganda and lies to deny what was immediately obvious to the world when the first photos surfaced from Abu Ghraib in April 2004. The spin masters lost control of the story as soon as "leash girl" Lynndi English was seen parading naked Iraqi prisoners with dog collars around their necks and piling them into pyramidal heaps of battered flesh. The one image that stands as the defining icon of America's embrace of torture is the man known derisively in the Middle East as "the Statue of Liberty." He is the hooded Iraqi shown teetering on a wooden box with outstretched arms. The electrodes and cables attached to his arms and penis are designed to administer an electric shock if he loses his balance and falls off the box. When Time magazine put prisoner 151716 on the cover of its international editions -- I myself first saw this picture while traveling in Vietnam -- everyone around the world knew what they were looking at: Christ on the Cross, an old form of torture, where the victim inflicts pain on himself through what today we call "stress positions." The torture is passive. It is self-inflicted. It includes a large component of psychological torture, and many people in the United States are so confused on the subject that they would say that psychological torture is not really torture at all. The rest of the world does not share this confusion. When they saw prisoner 151716, hooded and dressed in monkish brown sackcloth, with his arms outstretched in a helpless appeal for mercy, they knew that he was being tortured. Mark Scheuer, the ex-CIA analyst from the Bin Laden Unit who wrote Imperial Hubris , said, in a talk delivered a couple of years ago at the U.S. Army War College, that he had no qualms about using torture. He would be glad to employ it, except for one problem. It doesn't work. In Scheuer's experience, insurgents are trained to hand out disinformation, and the intelligence one gets from torturing them is either dubious or wrong. Scheuer gave as an example the famous case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the Al-Qaeda operative whom the United States sent to be tortured in Egypt. George Bush relayed Al-Libi's "confession" to the U.S. public when he announced during a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases." The story was fabricated, and this statement and the rest of al-Libi's "confession" have since disappeared into a hall of mirrors. The argument on torture pits two schools of thought against each other. There are the Trinquierists who believe in the efficacy of torture. They advance their argument most strenuously through the "ticking time bomb hypothesis." You torture your opponent to get out of him the tactical information that allows you to diffuse a time bomb before it blows up in your face. Torture is a dark art that you use because it works. The other side argues that this position is wrong. The strong when tortured confess to nothing, and the weak confess to everything. Torture produces an avalanche of disinformation. The Iraq war proves this handily. The war ranks among the most significant intelligence failures in American history. Everything the United States thought it knew about Iraq before the invasion was wrong. The supposed intelligence from "Curveball" in Germany and al-Libi in Egypt was nothing but red herrings and Al Qaeda disinformation. The United States suffers from a kind of imperial amnesia, which presumes that U.S. power -- no matter how it projects itself in the world -- is always just and right. The strutting Bush in his flight suit and snarling Cheney were also channeling the myth of the American frontier and the redemptive value of violence. In this case, one employs torture not as a necessary evil, but as a social good -- a kind of refining fire, an apocalyptic strategy for separating believers from apostates. Torture also separates Western from non-Western people, who tend to be red-, yellow-, brown-, or black-skinned. Targets of torture are reduced to the status of "other," and racial stereotypes further reduce them to being "inferior." Torture in this case is used to confirm what skin color and race have already implied about somebody's disloyalty to Western values. The treacherous redskin in his feathered headdress has been replaced by the new symbology of keffiyehs and hihabs. As we shake ourselves awake from this terror-filled dream, it is time to remember America's long history of torture. The country may have been founded on witch trials, but torture is illegal. It is morally corrosive and strategically unwise. And not even Dick Cheney, if pressed, could pretend to have got anything more than confessional canards and disinformation from torturing "Curveball" and his colleagues. More on Vietnam
 
Sarah Newman: Soloists Everywhere Making a Difference Top
The poignant film The Soloist offers a genuine, intimate perspective on the life of a homeless man living with schizophrenia in Los Angeles. Following the lives and relationship between two vastly different Angelenos, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers (Jamie Foxx) and Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.), the film gives viewers insight into the daily struggles of homeless people and those with mental illness. And not just the lives of the 88,000 homeless people in Los Angeles, but the millions living in big cities and small towns nationwide. Indeed, Nathaniel's life is tragic but not unusual; there are millions of Nathaniels among us. Homeless people and those with mental illness are frequently marginalized in our society. They are ignored economically (not enough public funding for programs) and socially (how often do you say hello to a homeless person?). And, despite doing nothing wrong, they are often victims of hate crimes. In fact, the state of Maryland is the first state to include homeless people in the state's hate crime legislation. Despite these depressing statistics, The Soloist imparts a sense of hope; viewers experience Nathaniel's gradual transition from the gritty streets of downtown Los Angeles to the Lamp Community. This is fostered in large part through his friendship with Steve Lopez, who grows beyond his role as a journalist to that of a friend. This sense of individual empowerment is what drove us in Participant Media's Social Action department to develop a campaign for the film that offers individuals a host of tools to address homelessness and de-stigmatize mental illness. By participating in our campaign, you can make a genuine difference in the lives of people in your community. Our individual commitment and collaborative engagement will help to make these seemingly intractable issues closer to being solved. We can each be Soloists in our communities to make a difference. Here's how: 1. Volunteer in your community . 2. Watch our video about humanizing homelessness and de-stigmatizing mental illness. 3. Keep tips about mental illness and homeless with you in our wallet-sized "pocket change" guide . 4. Learn about art programs for people with mental illness . 5. Get involved with mental health and homeless organizations serving people throughout the US. 6. See the film . Our cumulative efforts will make a significant difference in the lives of millions of Americans struggling with mental illness and/or homelessness. These are social issues that require significant investment and support from all of us. But, our commitment will make a difference in changing the landscape of our society so that all homeless people and those with mental illness are treated as our equals and nothing less. Sarah's Social Action Snapshot originally appeared on Takepart.com.
 
Gordon Brown Apologizes For Lawmaker Excesses Top
David Stringer | Associated Press LONDON (AP) -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leader of the country's main opposition party apologized Monday for lawmakers' excessive expenses claims, pledging to overhaul the system and win back public trust. The apologies follow days of embarrassing revelations about claims made by British legislators and government ministers, who used public money to pay for porn movies, horse manure and a wreath for fallen soldiers. Brown himself has been embarrassed by reports he paid his brother Andrew 6,500 pounds ($9,800) in public money for cleaning between 2004 and 2006, before he became prime minister. According to documents published by Britain's Daily Telegraph, several lawmakers have also taken advantage of existing rules to claim thousands of pounds (dollars) to renovate homes. "We must show that, where mistakes have been made and errors have been discovered, where wrongs have to be righted, that is done so immediately," Brown said told a conference of nurses in Harrogate, northern England. The expense details have been disclosed following a four-year campaign led by Heather Brooke, an American freedom-of-information advocate who lives in London. Her applications for the details were blocked by Parliamentary authorities in 2005. But in 2008 she won a High Court ruling ordering the information published. Brooke said Monday the disclosure that lawmakers expensed swimming pool repairs, silk cushions and cookies showed her campaign had been valid. Full details of the expense claims will be released in July. The Telegraph has declined to say how it obtained copies in advance, or whether it paid for them. Andrew Brown's wife, Clare Brown, said Monday that the expense money from Gordon Brown was used to pay a cleaner he and his brother shared. Brown had "streams of people trudging through his flat, usually leaving dirty mugs and takeaway cartons in their wake," she wrote in The Guardian newspaper. "He definitely needed a cleaner when in London." The Telegraph published details Monday of claims made by Conservative lawmakers, including allies of party leader David Cameron, who is thought likely to defeat Brown in a national election that must be called by mid-2010. Tory lawmaker David Willetts claimed about 100 pounds ($150) after he had workmen replace 25 light bulbs in his home, the newspaper reported. Conservative election coordinator Oliver Letwin spent 2,000 ($3,000) to repair a pipe under his tennis court. Michael Gove, the party's education chief, spent thousands of pounds (dollars) furnishing two different homes in quick succession, under rules that allow lawmakers to claim the costs of running a second home close to Parliament. "It is the responsibility of those we elect to behave properly. Not just legally, not just within the rules, but to the highest ethical standards," Cameron told the nursing conference, which he attended after Brown. Parliamentary authorities said they plan to allow outside auditors to check expenses claims in the future. Both Brown and Cameron say widespread reforms are needed. The Telegraph has also published expense claims from the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, which has five members from Northern Ireland who refuse to participate in the London Parliament because they do not want to swear fidelity to the British monarch. The newspaper reported that the legislators claim 9,000 pounds ($13,600) a month toward renting a pair of barely used two-bedroom properties in London. The newspaper quoted real estate agents as estimating the two properties' actual rental value at nearer 3,200 pounds ($4,800) a month. Sinn Fein politician Conor Murphy, who said he stayed in the properties just once in the past year, said they represented "fairly modest accommodation in a fairly modest part of London." Associated Press Writer Shawn Pogatchnik, in Dublin, Ireland, contributed to this report Get HuffPost World On Facebook and Twitter! More on England
 
Louise Mirrer: Cleaning Up the American Eden: How Environmentalism Was Born on the Hudson River Top
Although it is one of America's most beautiful and historic waterways, the Hudson River has had some ups and downs over the past 400 years. Visitors to the New-York Historical Society recently had occasion to recall how the fortunes of the river have changed since 1609--the year of Henry Hudson's voyage of exploration in the Half Moon --when former New York Governor George E. Pataki and New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin joined us at our annual Weekend with History event for a talk about the Hudson. As these speakers reminded us, the Hudson River has played a decisive role, not only as the birthplace of New York City and State, but also as the cradle of today's environmental movement. From the establishment of New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hudson to the extension of the river's trade into the West through the Erie Canal, the wealth and vitality of New York were founded on the commerce and industry that flowed along the Hudson. By the early 19th century, this same commerce and industry was filling the riverbank with factories, docks and ferries. Even in those early days, progressive citizens and reformers such as the poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant recognized the threat posed to the river and its landscape by unchecked development and industrial pollution, and they tried to do something about it. One of their most enduring achievements in this regard was to promote the image of the Hudson River Valley as an Eden rediscovered in America--a natural landscape still imbued with a divine glow that was lost to the Old World. Unspoiled nature became a national ideal--even though the greatest creators of this ideal, the painters of the Hudson River School, were fully aware of the economic role of the Hudson. In their canvases, these painters acknowledged but did not foreground economic development and its inevitable impact on the landscape. Instead, as may be seen in the Historical Society's exceptional collection of Hudson River School paintings (soon to be exhibited at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, opening July 11), these artists would slip a commercial or industrial site into a corner of the picture. Historical Society senior art historian Linda Ferber notes that these traces of modern activity were "so deftly naturalized that today we may overlook the evidence of extractive industries, the impact of the railroad, real estate development, and the tourist business." And so the Westchester riverbanks celebrated in paintings by Robert Havell and Asher B. Durand hint at their development for steamboat and later railroad service. Andrew Bunner's winter view of Rockland Lake shades in the seasonal industry of cutting and storing ice for later shipment to New York City. William Miller's picturesque vista of the Bronx River at West Farms is lined with mill and factory buildings; and Joseph Volmering's sweeping panorama of the Tappan Zee includes a view of the state prison built at Sing Sing (today's Ossining) to provide convict labor for the nearby marble quarries. At least in a painting, the presence within nature of industry, and even criminality, could be reconciled with the Edenic vision. No such accommodation could be made for cholera. As the 20th century began, New York State recognized the link between environmental degradation and disease when it created a Department of Health, charged (among other duties) with investigating epidemics caused by "overflow of the canals," and a Water Supply Commission charged with reviewing water quality and methods of sewage disposal. A concerted effort to clean up the State's waters--including those of the majestic Hudson--began here, with this public health campaign. But it was industrial pollution that at last prompted the public to go beyond a concern with the safety of its drinking water, to demand stewardship of the waterways for their own sake. By the 1960s, the American vision of unspoiled nature, now more than a century old, was helping to inspire a popular movement. Looking back, it's possible to identify any number of turning points for this movement. As Andrew Revkin pointed out during Weekend With History, one of these was a landmark court decision in 1965 in favor of the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference, permitting this citizens' group to sue Consolidated Edison to block a building project at Storm King Mountain, and ruling that the Federal Power Commission had to consider the proposed plant's impact on the "unique beauty and historic significance" of the Hudson River Valley. Another such moment was the disaster of July 1, 1976, when a barge struck the Tappan Zee Bridge and spilled 50,000 gallons of oil into the Hudson--an event that galvanized efforts to restore the river. And as Governor Pataki reminded us at the Historical Society, a different kind of disaster also contributed indirectly to the environmental drive. The collapse of the West Side Highway in 1973 led eventually (after many political skirmishes) to the establishment during his administration of the Hudson River Park Trust, which over the past ten years has created the magnificent Hudson River Park on the far West Side of Manhattan. As Governor Pataki noted, this park has drawn many New Yorkers to the water's edge for the first time. The more they see of an increasingly cleaned-up Hudson River, the more they want the clean-up to continue. Four hundred years after Henry Hudson's voyage, people are still discovering the Hudson River for themselves--and what they see still inspires them.
 
Weekend Late Night Round-Up: The Pope, Joe Biden, And The Edwards Family On Oprah (VIDEO) Top
David Letterman kept after Joe Biden this weekend, showing a PSA featuring the VP telling people not to leave their homes because of the sun. This, of course, comes on the heels of Biden telling Americans to avoid public transportation because of swine flu. Bill Maher also used the swine flu to mock politicians saying: "The CDC is having to warn people not to have swine flu parties. I swear to god, people were having swine flu parties where they would infect each other on purpose to build up the immunity. Even sadder, the idea of a swine flu party is now more popular that the Republican Party." To see last weekend's round up, click here. WATCH: Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on Late Night Shows
 
Sherman Yellen: Michael Bloomberg: Republican, Democrat, or Plutocrat? Top
Last October, Michael Bloomberg, New York City's Mayor, announced that he would seek to extend the city's term limits law and run for a third term in 2009, since he needed more than that silly old law limiting the Mayor to two terms, especially during the Wall Street financial crises. "Handling this financial crisis while strengthening essential services...is a challenge I want to take on." Although Bloomberg rejected former Mayor Giuliani's grab for a third term after 9/11, saying that no one is indispensible, he suddenly discovered that someone is -- himself. The public did not unanimously rejoice in his announcement, but according to Wikipedia, "many elite New Yorkers such as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and prominent businessmen including Jamie Dimon and press mogul Mortimer Zuckerman voiced support for such a proposal and published an open letter urging the City Council to extend the term limits." It is a safe bet that anything Henry Kissinger supports warrants very close inspection by a forensic team wearing latex gloves. The City Council voted 29-22 in favor of extending the term limit to three consecutive four-year terms, thus allowing Bloomberg to run for office again. And he may run again in four more years if it suits his fancy, thus turning a great city into a banana republic controlled by the richest man in the city. One critic declared that "Bloomberg's tactics in seeking a third term, along with his failure to foresee the Wall Street crisis at the same time his policies were making the City more dependent on finance, real estate and tourism, are proof that Bloomberg is unfit for the job." I won't argue with that. The wreckage I see all around me is national in scope but here in New York City it has the special Bloomberg logo on it. Sometimes I find hypocrisy entertaining. In literature it can be delightful -- we have Tartuffe and other great literary hypocrites to make us laugh and Iago to make us shudder -- and in life we have the giggles provided by a Rudy Giuliani offering his opinions on marriage, gay or straight, or by Sarah Palin's family on sexual abstinence. But in the case of this Mayor I find it disheartening. There's just no fun in his hypocrisy -- it's bland, joyless, and boringly self-serving. He has shown himself to be no Mayor LaGuardia who nursed New York City through the great depression with warmth, wisdom, and a rough charisma, and supported the arts in the process. My former High School of Music & Art, dedicated to giving city kids from struggling families an opportunity to become painters, writers, and musicians, was a depression-era LaGuardia project. He understood that the arts were a necessary part of a great city and vital to its life. What we have now is New York's richest citizen, flooding our TV stations with ads that drown out the voice of the opposition, and living in a tragic disconnect from the average citizen of the city. Here is a man with the warmth of a snapping turtle and the charm of an impatient bank teller waiting for his lunch break, offering to work for a dollar a year for the pleasure of holding on to power. And power is the ultimate pleasure for the man who has everything. A frightened population, losing jobs, and seeing so many store windows shuttered, while prices rise as incomes fall, may turn to this Messiah to save them. I can see very little about this man of great wealth that understands the lives of ordinary citizens -- actually extraordinary citizens for having managed to live in New York during the past ten years of unrestricted growth. He may ride the subway from time to time, but it's a tourist ride, not a necessary way to get to a necessary job. This Mayor, who let rampant residential building take place without providing the necessary schools for the children of new residents, who took over the failing school system with a hope of improving it, but who places an almost religious faith in standardized tests, which hardly reflect or develop those rare talents of a child, cannot be considered a success by me. How much better it might have been if the millions spent on his campaign were distributed among the poor and middle-class residents of New York to see them through this economical trial. I'm not kidding. I would respect him more if he had the decency to buy the Mayoralty from the voters openly -- send out checks to where it can make a difference in everyday lives rather than enriching the advertising coffers of the TV moguls, the campaign managers, and his fellow plutocrats. Plutocrat, an old word describing the rich who hold power by force of their wealth, is charged with the rhetoric of the defunct and strident 1930s left, but it has an honorable history going back to the Greeks and it is time to rehabilitate it in discussing this mayor. Why am I so adamantly opposed to four more years of Bloomberg, a man whose social views are often close to my own -- pro choice, reasonable immigration policy, gay rights, civil rights -- and whom I admire for his enormous generosity in giving of his wealth to worthy causes? It is because I find that he lacks the moral imagination and the sense of proportion necessary to run a great city and keep its human scale alive. Having a genius for crunching numbers is but one part of leadership. An understanding of what it takes to keep a great city great is the primary asset a Mayor can have. From the point of view of ecology, I have seen the old, low rise neighborhoods demolished under Bloomberg to make way for behemoth buildings that turned Yorkville, for example, into a perpetual construction site like East Berlin. An ineffective and toothless landmark's commission appointed by Bloomberg -- but controlled by realtors -- allowed the destruction of what was old but necessary for a humane environment to be destroyed in the name of progress and a bigger tax base. What could have been recycled housing was bulldozed into history. A lot of lip service has been paid to ecology -- plans for tolling the bridges and restricting auto use -- but most of it ends as a scheme to increase the city coffers. Not an evil in itself, but ineffective in cleaning the air of the city which is its stated purpose. Under Bloomberg NYU swallowed the West Village, and Columbia University made its predatory move on Harlem. Educational institutions, once notable for their sense of a just proportion, have now joined in the great land-money-grab. Bigger is always better -- until it isn't, as we have discovered in the Bank of America, which dominates the city with its branch offices and is now the biggest beggar around. I keep hoping that the Democrats will get behind a human scale candidate and put up a decent fight against this Mayor -- but I don't see one in sight. The Bloomberg landslide that seems likely to come is one that may well bury the greatest city we have. He brings the smarts of an accountant rather than the wisdom of a philosopher-king to his office -- and right now we need the philosopher-kings to get us through the hard times. But money not only talks, it shouts, and it can be shaped into a club to beat the opposition into submission. The silence in the Democratic field is deafening as the Bloomberg avalanche rolls on.
 
Pinaki Bhattacharya: Garbled Messages, Fragmented Mandate Top
Elections to almost three-fourths of India's 544-member lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha have already been completed. The secrets of the ballots are firmly ensconced in the electronic voting machines. Speculation abounds about who would have won the people's confidence this time, making them the rulers of India for the next five years. By all indications, the fortunes of both the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian Peoples' Party)-led National Democratic Alliance and the centrist, Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance seem to be under a cloud. Challenging this bipolarity is another combine of the Leftist parties and their socialist colleagues, yet unnamed and amorphous in nature, loosely termed the Third Front. The emergence of this third force in Indian politics reflects a fragmented polity with the absence of a central message. Unlike in the USA, where the bipolar politics of the country is sought to be held together by fashioning messages that address each sub-section of interest groups in the broader society, in India the ruling class has not yet learnt the lessons of how to divide and rule. They do not yet have the Indian counterparts of Madison Avenue hucksters who could vivisect the polity to minuscule proportions; thus making them eminently more manageable and then target messages catering to their special interests. Instead, Indian elections are historically fought on one central unifying message that is drummed into the consciousness of the people by the political campaigners. So in 2004, Congress Party's message was: Congress's hand (an allusion to its poll symbol) is with the common people. This had played well as a contrast to the elitist, urban centric policies of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government. The Congress Party had done so well with the message that it was able to form a coalition government on the basis of the slogan. This time around, while the Congress Party repeated the same message rather unconvincingly, the main rival BJP talked about a "decisive government." The assumption was that the dual power centers during the Congress Party-led rule -- that of the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh and the party president, Sonia Gandhi -- was a recipe for an 'indecisive government.' Little did they realize that the political discourse had moved away from a 'strong central government addressing people's desires in far flung areas.' The people are clearly not willing to render their fate into the hands of a small elite in New Delhi, but instead prefer parties who are closer home in touch with them on a regular basis. This is where the Leftist party-led Third Front has scored. It is a conglomeration of parties that are ruling the various provinces, thus in touch with the realities of the people on a daily basis. Significantly, the Third Front also did not go to the people with any central message as it suited them to have various voices articulating myriad visions that resonated with the people better. A crucial element in the alternative formation is the rise of the party of India's 'untouchables', the Bahujan Samaj Party (Multifaceted Society Party) and its leader Mayawati. Ever since independence, major political parties like the Congress Party had promised emancipation to the lowest denomination in hierarchical casteist social order in India. But they had invariably failed to deliver. So Mayawati's mentor Kanshi Ram had founded a party to cater solely to the constituency of the 'dalits,' literally, the 'oppressed' or the 'untouchables.' Large in numbers, close to a majority of the population, the dalits had never been able to gain advantage of their numbers as they remained divided by power and pelf, selectively distributed. This time around these inchoate voices have found a rallying point. This may not immediately translate into complete dominance of the political scene by the party, but it is expected to emerge as a force to reckon with, this election. They would thus be a major constituent of the Third Front. Already, the political bean-counters are in great demand to calculate who has got, how much. The political match-making to form coalitions for governance cannot wait till 16 May when the results will be out. It has to begin now in right earnest. After an arduous, month-long, five phase election process, India will not most certainly have a ready government. The process of government formation would reflect the complexities of Indian politics. In that the central message cannot be just a blatant power-grab. The next government would still have to deal with many problems that it would inherit from the national and global realms. Plus, the parties would have to cater to the interests of their individual constituencies. Some of that might conflict with the corporate interests of the country in its entirety. But the golden mean would have to be found. More on India
 
Robert Naiman: AfPak: Congress Clears Its Throat Top
This week Congress continues its formal consideration of the Administration's request for "supplemental" money for the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with a decision expected Wednesday by the Rules Committee on what amendments will be allowed. Regardless of the outcome on the actual money - it's widely expected that the money will eventually go though - this is a key window for Congressional action. There's never a bad time for Members of Congress to try to exert more influence over foreign policy, but a particularly good time is when there is a request for funding pending - the Administration must perform concern about what Members of Congress think, there are opportunities for limiting amendments, and the media and public will be paying more attention to any debate. Likewise, there's never a bad time to call or write your Member of Congress expressing concern about U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but this week is a particularly good time to make contact, whether it's to oppose the money or lobby for conditions. And Tuesday, May 12 would be a particularly good day to call, because many advocacy groups - including the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Peace Action, United for Peace and Justice, and Just Foreign Policy - are calling on Americans to contact Congress on Tuesday in opposition to expansion of the war and in support of alternatives to military escalation. FCNL has provided a toll free number for calling Congress, which you can find here ; if you use the toll-free number, it will add to the official tally of how many people called. Despite the common belief that Members of Congress won't take action now because Afghanistan has been perceived as "the good war," or because Congressional Democrats think we should all hold back and give the new guy a chance, Members of Congress are starting to speak up. Representative Jim McGovern is working to attach an amendment to the supplemental that would require the administration to develop an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan and report that strategy to Congress by the end of the year. At the level of rhetoric, at least, the idea that an exit strategy is needed doesn't want for prominent supporters - President Obama himself told CBS' "60 Minutes" in March that "There's got to be an exit strategy." But the President's request for funds - like any budget, a planning document - does not provide any exit strategy. Representative McGovern's proposed amendment already has at least three dozen supporters. If Members of Congress hear from their constituents this week, the McGovern amendment will gain Congressional support. Thanks in large measure to the advocacy of Representative Barbara Lee, the current version of the supplemental bans the use of funds for "for the purpose of establishing any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Afghanistan." If this provision is becomes law it would be a statement of U.S. policy and could be used to constrain future appropriations. Similar language on Iraq is already U.S. law. Last July Walter Pincus noted in the Washington Post that Congress was rejecting military requests for construction funds in Iraq suspected of being long-term while approving them in Afghanistan. Peace Action is working to get Members of Congress to demand information about and justification for the continuation of U.S. air strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As Peace Action's Paul Kawika Martin notes , only a handful of Members of Congress and their staffs have been briefed on air and drone strikes, and there are no non-classified reports on their efficacy. Yet counterinsurgency expert David Kilkullen has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are destabilizing the Pakistani government and should be stopped, and the Washington Post reports that some senior U.S. officials think the Pakistan drone strikes "have reached the point of diminishing returns." Meanwhile, recent U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan may have killed civilians on a scale unprecedented in Afghanistan since 2001 . It's long past time for Congress to speak up about air and drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want Congress to assert itself on these issues, Tuesday is the time to call . More on Afghanistan
 
Alan Dershowitz: No Linkage Between Iran and Palestinians Top
Rahm Emanuel is a good man and a good friend of Israel, but in a highly publicized recent statement he linked American efforts to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons to Israeli efforts toward establishing a Palestinian state. This is a dangerous linkage. I have long favored the two-state solution, as do most Israelis and American supporters of Israel. I have also long opposed civilian settlements deep into the West Bank. I hope that Israel does make efforts, as it has in the past, to establish a Palestinian state as part of an overall peace between the Jewish state and its Arab and Muslim neighbors. Israel in 2000-2001 offered the Palestinians a state in the entire Gaza Strip and more than 95% of the West Bank, with its capital in Jerusalem and a $35 billion compensation package for the refugees. Yassir Arafat rejected the offer and instead began the second intifada in which nearly 5,000 people were killed. I hope that Israel once again offers the Palestinians a contiguous, economically-viable, politically independent state, in exchange for a real peace, with security, without terrorism and without any claim to "return" 4 million alleged refugees as a way of destroying Israel by demography rather than violence. But the threat from a nuclear Iran is existential and immediate for Israel. It also poses dangers to the entire region, as well as to the United States. The dangers come not only from the possibility that a nation directed by suicidal leaders would order a nuclear attack on Israel or its allies, but from the likelihood that nuclear material could end up in the hands of Hezbollah, Hamas or even Al Qaeda. Recall what Hashemi Rifsanjani said to an American journalist: [Rifsanjani] boast[ed] that an Iranian [nuclear] attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated by dropping its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose only fifteen million people, which he said would be a small 'sacrifice' from among the billion Muslims in the world. Israel has the right, indeed the obligation, to take this threat seriously and to consider it as a first priority. It will be far easier for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians if it did not have to worry about the threat of a nuclear attack or a dirty bomb. It will also be easier for Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank if Iran were not arming and inciting Hamas, Hezbollah and other enemies of Israel to terrorize Israel by rockets and suicide bombers. In this respect, Emanuel has it exactly backwards: if there is any linkage, it goes the other way -- defanging Iran will promote the end of the occupation and the two-state solution. Threatening not to help Israel in relation to Iran unless it moves toward a two-state solution first is likely to backfire. After all, Israel is a democracy and in the end the people decide. A recent poll published in Haaretz concluded that 66% of Israelis favored a preemptive military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, with 75% of those saying they would still favor such a strike even if the United States were opposed. Israel's new government will accept a two-state solution if they are persuaded that it will really be a solution -- that it will assure peace and an end to terrorist and nuclear threats to Israeli citizens. I have known Prime Minister Netanyhu for 35 years and I recently had occasion to spend some time with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. I am convinced that despite their occasional tough talk, both want to see an end to this conflict. Israelis have been scarred by what happened in Gaza. Israel ended the occupation, removed all of the settlers, and left behind millions of dollars worth of agricultural and other facilities designed to make the Gaza into an economically-viable democracy. Land for peace is what they sought. Instead they got land for rocket attacks against their children, their women and their elderly. No one wants to see a repeat of this trade-off. Emanuel's statements were viewed with alarm in Israel because most Israelis, though they want to like President Obama, are nervous about his policies toward Israel. They are prepared to accept pressure regarding the settlements, which are not related to Israel's security, but they worry that the Obama Administration may be ready to compromise, or at least threaten to compromise, Israel's security, if its newly elected government does not submit to pressure on the settlements. Most Israelis strongly believe that these issues must not be linked. Making peace with the Palestinians will be extremely complicated. It will take time. It may or may not succeed in the end, depending on whether the Palestinians will continue to want their own state less than they want to see the end of the Jewish state. Israel should not be held hostage to the Iranian nuclear threat by the difficulty of making peace with the Palestinians. Recall again that Israel offered such a peace in 2000-2001, only to be rebuffed. It may be rebuffed again, especially if Palestinian radicals believe that such a rebuff will soften American action against Iran. In the meantime, Iran will continue in its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. That cannot be allowed to happen, regardless of progress on the ground toward peace with the Palestinians. These two issues must be delinked if either is to succeed. There are other ways of encouraging Israel to make peace with the Palestinians. Nuclear blackmail is not one of them. More on Palestinian Territories
 
Senate Guru: Charlie Crist Is Not Guaranteed Florida's Senate Seat Top
{ First, a cheap plug for my blog Senate Guru . } Both Politico and the Miami Herald are reporting that Republican Gov. Charlie Crist will announce on Tuesday that he will be a candidate for Senate in 2010 for the seat from which unpopular Republican Mel Martinez is retiring. This could very well be a case for Republicans of the old adage "Be careful what you wish for." Crist currently enjoys strong poll numbers: Republican Primary Poll Quinnipiac 4/16/09 Gov. Charlie Crist 54 Rep. Vern Buchanan 8 Fmr. Speaker Marco Rubio 8 Fmr. Speaker Allan Bense 2 Undecided 25 General Election Poll Match-ups: Crist v. Dems Strategic Vision 2/12/09 Crist 57, Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio 29 Crist 58, State Senator Dan Gelber 27 Crist 58, Rep. Ron Klein 24 Crist 60, Rep. Kendrick Meek 26 These numbers, which look insurmountable at first glance, do not accurately reflect the story moving forward. As has been mentioned before, there is growing discontent with Crist among conservatives. Nationally, the conservative Weekly Standard is promoting Crist's primary challenger, former state House Speaker Marco Rubio, as the Republican Obama ; also, the conservative Club for Growth has already started a cheering section for Rubio against Crist : But Rubio could also pick up some powerful supporters in the primary. Following his announcement Tuesday, the anti-tax Club for Growth, which is known for its ability to drive fundraising for candidates it supports, released a statement praising Rubio's entry into the race. Rubio's "fiscally responsible, pro-growth approach in the State Capitol stands in stark contrast with other elements of the state government, led by Charlie Crist," club President Chris Chocola said. Meanwhile, within the state borders of Florida, conservatives are downright displeased with what they see as Crist being not conservative enough : Florida Republican Party circles are hearing increasing talk of conservative dissatisfaction with Gov. Charlie Crist and a possible primary challenge if he runs for the U.S. Senate next year. ... Some conservatives, never happy with Crist's emphasis on racial diversity, environmental regulation and populist willingness to take on big business, are now saying it openly. Rubio is already fomenting this sentiment with direct shots at Crist: "If you agree with Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe on some of these issues, you might as well become a Democrat,'' said former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio, a Republican who is likely to run for the Senate, whether or not Crist does. Rubio also potentially has a big arrow in his FL-GOP quiver: former Gov. Jeb Bush. Rubio is a Bush protege and it has been rumored that Bush might even endorse Rubio over Crist. Jeb Bush's son, George P. Bush, has not been short on criticism of Crist : Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) is only a "light" version of a Democrat, former Gov. Jeb Bush's (R) son claimed Saturday. "There's some in our party that want to assume that government is the answer to all of our problems," Bush said at a meeting of young Republicans, as reported by the Orlando News. "You know who I'm talking about," he added, referencing Crist. After the speech, Bush said Crist is perhaps becoming more of a "D light" politician, not adequately in line with Republican politics. Expect Rubio v. Crist to be a much closer contest than most expect. As a result, even if Crist emerges with the Republican nomination, it will come at the end of a bruising and costly battle. And Democrats are ready with a line of attack against Crist should he become the GOP nominee. Crist is bolting from the Governor's office after only one term (and plenty of days off ), and leaving Florida's budgetary well-being in far worse shape than he found it - the focus of the DSCC's first ad buy of the 2010 cycle: Awaiting candidate Crist is a divisive, damaging, and expensive primary against a more conservative opponent, following by a general election against a Democratic Party ready to pounce that is led by an extremely popular President. Crist's numbers may look good right now, but there is every reason to expect troubles ahead for Crist. More on Charlie Crist
 
Specter, Key "Centrist" Dems Open To Public Health Care Plan Top
Progressive health care reform advocates got a major boost in their efforts to secure a public plan for insurance coverage when newly minted Democrat Arlen Specter said he would be open to such a proposal in a legislative compromise. In a letter to the group Health Care for America Now , the Pennsylvania Democrat backtracked on his position weeks ago opposing the plan. Now, under increasing pressure from progressive groups, Specter says he looks forward to "discussing and considering" the issue. Separately, centrist Democratic senators told the Huffington Post they are keeping the door open to a public health care option after a compromise proposal from Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) last week. Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) publicly announced his opposition to a public option the week before, spurring worry among advocates that more defections could be on the way. Schumer's compromise emphasizes that the public health care plan must finance itself through premiums and must follow the same laws private insurers follow. He argues that it will be a better plan because it won't need to focus on advertising or generating short-term profits for Wall Street. Even Nelson said he's listening. "I know he's making a strong effort here to find something that would work and I've talked to him about it and we're going to continue to talk," Nelson said. So you're open to it? "I'm open to listening to him explain to me how this would work and certainly congratulate him for coming forward with something. It's better than just saying no." Specter, in his letter, said Schumer's proposal could serve as a useful "starting point" for discussions about a public health plan. "With respect to the clause in the third bullet - 'to join a public health insurance plan' - I look forward to discussing and considering the issue. A starting point could be the proposal made by Senator Schumer earlier this week which seeks to maintain a level playing field between the private sector and any public plan. There may well be other proposals on this issue which should be considered in drafting legislation and debating the bill on the Senate floor." "The other issue which I think requires extensive debate and analysis is the clause in the eighth bullet - 'using the public's purchasing power to lower drug and other prices.'.... In order to maintain a level playing field between the private sector and any public plan, consideration would have to be given to the implications of the Government's purchasing power in buying prescription drugs which could provide an unfair competitive advantage. There may be other proposals on this issue which should be considered in drafting legislation and debating the issue on the Senate floor." The Associated Press first reported Specter's openness to a public plan. The Huffington Post obtained his letter to HCAN . Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) says that she's still weighing the public option. "I am actually not sure," she told the Huffington Post. "I don't think I am [for it], but I told the folks that are promoting it that I would talk with them, but I am an original cosponsor of the Wyden-Bennett bipartisan proposal -- the only bipartisan proposal that I know of. And so I'm going to stay focused on that as a core, but I'm not going to shut the door on anything right now." Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is not pushing his proposal aggressively; the biggest fight in the Senate is whether to include a public option. Wyden supports a public option himself, but didn't include it in order to garner Republican cosponsors. But not all Senate Republicans are entirely closed off to a public plan. "I am looking at all the alternatives at this point," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) of the public option. "I have a lot of concerns about the impact of a public plan. The Lewin Group has estimated that it could cause 119 million people to be transferred from private plans to public plans, which would mean the collapse of the private insurance system which I don't think would serve our country well." Asked specifically about Schumer's compromise, she said she had yet to review it. Public plan advocates dispute the Lewin Group findings and insist a public plan can work in conjunction with private insurers. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) sounded disinclined to support a public option, but he hasn't shut the door yet. "I don't have a closed mind on it, but I want to hear folks out through advocates and we'll decide," he said. Sen. Jim Webb is one centrist Democrat who has come out in favor of a public plan. His Virginia colleague, Democrat Mark Warner, hasn't gone that far yet. But he's open. "I haven't weighed in on that yet," Warner said. The White House announced a commitment Sunday night to partner with the insurance industry to cut health care costs by $2 trillion, a collaboration that Paul Krugman declared "some of the best policy news I've heard in a long time." Get HuffPost Politics On Facebook and Twitter!
 
Orangutan Escape Attempt: Short-Circuited Fence, Built Ladder Top
ADELAIDE, Australia — A zoo in Australia was evacuated Sunday after an "ingenious" 137-pound (62-kilogram) orangutan short-circuited an electric fence and hopped a wall surrounding her enclosure. The ape, a 27-year-old female named Karta, jammed a stick into wires connected to the fence and then piled up debris to climb a concrete and glass wall at the Adelaide Zoo. Zoo curator Peter Whitehead told reporters Karta sat on top of the fence for about 30 minutes before apparently changing her mind about the escape and climbing back into the enclosure. "I think when she actually got out and realized where she was ... she's realized she shouldn't be there so then she's actually hung onto the wall and dropped back into the exhibit," Whitehead said. Karta came within a few yards (meters) of visitors, who were the first to notice the animal's escape bid. Whitehead said the animal was not aggressive, but the zoo was cleared as a precaution, and veterinarians stood by with tranquilizer guns in case of trouble. "You're talking about an animal that's highly intelligent," Whitehead said. "We've had issues with her before in normal day-to-day operations where she tries to outsmart the keepers. She's an ingenious animal." Officials at the zoo in the southern city of Adelaide would conduct a "thorough review" of the escape bid and it was likely some vegetation that could be used in a future try for freedom would be removed from Karta's enclosure. More on Australia
 
Hartmarx Protest: Workers At Obama Suit Maker Vote To Stage Sit-In Top
DES PLAINES, Ill. (AP) -- Workers at a suburban Chicago factory where suits for President Barack Obama are made say they'll stage a sit-in if the clothier's creditor go ahead with company liquidation. Workers at Chicago-based Hartmarx Corp. rallied inside a Des Plaines plant Monday and voted unanimously to stage a sit-in if Wells Fargo liquidates. Hartmarx filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January. A Hartmarx spokesman says the company has interested buyers and is weighing offers. Union officials say the factory's 500 jobs could be lost, and they're prepared to fight. In a statement, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo says it sympathizes with workers, but Hartmarx is unable to pay the $114 million it owes the bank. The company wouldn't say when a liquidation could take place. -ASSOCIATED PRESS
 
Greg Mitchell: Why 'Stressed Out' U.S. Soldier Killing Comrades in Iraq Was Inevitable Top
The slaughter of five comrades by a "stressed out" U.S. soldier today in Baghdad is a true tragedy -- but should not come as a shock. Some of us have warned about this kind of thing happening for years, with many in the media ignoring the effects of the war on our soldiers and veterans, or paying attention for just a short while and then moving along. It's revealing that today's incident, according to the latest report, took place at a clinic for soldiers suffering from trauma or mental fatigue. Suicides both in Iraq and among vets back home have been surprisingly high almost from the beginning of the war and have surged in recent months. Also truly shocking is the number of veterans with brain trauma. These numbers get reported when a study emerges, then are forgotten. At least Obama has upped money for treatment. Nearly one in five American soldiers deployed in Iraq suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to the U.S. military's battlemind.army.mil website. Too often the media treats our presence in Iraq as essentially benign now, ignoring the plight of those serving there, and the trevails when they come home. I have written about soldier suicides for almost six years now. I always have plenty to write about, unfortunately. And now, mass murder, if these reports pan out. And remember: We still have as many soldiers in Iraq as we did before the surge --and are sending thousands more to Afghanistan. ** Greg Mitchell's book "So Wrong for So Long" included several chapters on soldier suicides. His latest book is "Why Obama Won." More on Iraq
 
Koresh Mouzuni: 12-Year-Old Boy Enters Iranian Presidential Race Top
Registration for Iranian presidency race completed. Koresh Mouzuni, 12, dreams of leasing Hawaii to Jews 'so that they don't kill the children in Gaza', promises not to make his father a minister More on Iran
 
Susan Braudy: Who Are You? Top
I'm stunned to discover that one dusty philosophy problem I pored over-- from Pre-Socratic fragments all the way to Albert Camus-- is totally happening. Until recently, I believed the most pertinent thing I'd picked up from half a decade of study was the fact that Schopenhauer pushed his mother down a flight of stairs. (Misogyny and old-time male intellectuals can go together like dogs and fleas!!) But, as it turns out, the big issue of our era is selfhood. And it's much bigger than say-- how much stuff can I mortgage or grab for myself. Yes, we're all wrestling with red-hot identity crises --not as in fear of credit cards theft identity, but deeper and scarier. Indeed I secretly worry I lack a strong sense of self. Sometimes in a room of people, I sort of merge into the pack of flesh. Mirrors shock me. (I always look more real somehow.) But , pheww, according to esoteric contemporary thinkers, I'm totally in sync with my times. So who the hell am I? According to Christians, I'm better than the worst thing I've done. But Freudians say I'm permanently scarred by the worst thing that's happened to me. The worst pain? Birth? Burying my parents in dirt? The worst thing I've done--I honestly don't know and, no, I'm not open to suggestions. Plato wrote that a person's selfhood exists at birth. Immanuel Kant's tangled sentences wind around the self watching self. Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre say we're a work in progress--our actions define us. According to new age soothers, I should seize the day and seek joy. Actually lately I feel more myself. Maybe because I tell people what I feel--even when it's ludicrously sentimental and I also push back when people push me. I felt present the other day on the Fifth Avenue bus when I politely told a woman she'd kicked me. And when I told an editor I didn't want to do my article his way. But maybe I'm begging the question: defining myself by other people's beating hearts and chattering voices. So who the hell am I again? Am I primarily a Jew? In 1947, and too young to know the word Jewish, I cried when my mother read a headline aloud about a new home in the Middle East for Jews--her feelings were contagious. While working at Ms Magazine, I believed I was primarily a woman. And you wouldn't be reading this if I hadn't learned new women's rules. When I was ten, I wept when my favorite uncle said I was perverted, because I couldn't place spoons and forks properly at a Chinese restaurant. (Just pass the chopsticks, I'd say today.) During the 1980's I worked with a movie star on Central Park West who loved Wall Street moguls and saying dirty words for female genitalia. I decided he was the New Yorker and I was still the Philadelphian--whose Quaker professors taught honor codes and disinterest in possessions. I comforted myself by writing nights and lunchtimes. After 9/11, I knew I was a New Yorker, a woman, and a Jew--in that order. But, wait, that omits my most active self. I sacrifice money and friends to write what I think. I also live with a man and five animals. A writer, a lover, a New Yorker, a woman, and a Jew--raised according to solid Quaker values. And yes, Quakers can fall short of their ideals, but I wouldn't trade them all the green tea in China. Who are you? This essay first appeared in the West Side Spirit.
 
Marcia G. Yerman: Raising Women's Voices for Health Care Top
Women are getting proactive about their health needs and rights. The financial downturn has made it crystal clear that women's economic status is intertwined with the health care equation. On April 1st and 2nd in New York City, a National Women's Speakout for Action on Health Reform, combined with a Strategy Conference, was held. Sponsored by Raising Women's Voices , the first day dealt with how to amplify women's concerns and integrate their opinions into the health care discussion, building from the grassroots level up. A workshop was devoted to developing the appropriate skills for eliciting personal stories from women, which could be introduced into the larger conversation. The strategies of new media and social networking were referenced as tools that could exponentially expand the efforts to influence public policy. Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC News Medical Editor, moderated a two-hour speak- out for action. The focus was to bring the modalities learned for organizational outreach back to the community. Day two featured a host of top speakers sharing their insights on how to jumpstart reform in a way that puts women's interests squarely in the middle of the health care landscape. Individual presenters parsed varying agendas, with each pointing out inequities in the existing formula. Deborah Reid, a staff attorney in the Washington D.C. office of the National Health Law Program addressed "systems issues" and the disparity in the distribution of services. She emphasized that health care should "not be seen as a commodity, but as a public good." She pointed to data on the low birth rate -- under 5 pounds -- of babies born to women of color (13 per cent for African-Americans; 6.4 per cent for Latinas). Reid identified the wall of silence facing the LGBT community explaining, "People don't want to talk about it." Commenting on the difference in the political atmosphere from a year ago, Martha Livingston, Ph.D., pushed hard for support of pending House Resolution 676 , which she qualified as "health care with principles." Framing the debate as a "moral issue and a question of "justice," she was adamant that women needed to seize "a moment of opportunity we will not see again for awhile." Using visceral language to drive her thought home, Livingston said about the uninsured, "Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away." Jennifer Ng'andu, Associate Director of NCLR , the largest national Hispanic civil rights/advocacy organization in the country, addressed the need for revisions that would help the Hispanic community. The evidence of marginalization is in the numbers. Hispanics have the highest rate of being uninsured. The Senior Advisor for Health and Reproductive Rights at the National Women's Law Center , Lisa Codispoti, underscored how "wedge issues" such as abortion, family planning, and immigration rights could be used to divide health reform advocates. She entreated the audience to ensure that diverse groups work together. Codispoti pointed out that women face affordability issues more than men. In the individually purchased insurance plans, women pay more than men for coverage in forty states ("gender-rating"). Only 12 per cent of these non-employer based insurance plans offer comprehensive maternity coverage. Codispoti also called for an acknowledgment of the challenges facing women with disabilities, and the need for accessibility to programs for mental health and drug/alcohol treatment programs. The United States is paying more for health care and getting less. In a distributed handout on why the country needs to pass H.R. 676, a graph showed how America stacked up against France, Sweden, Italy and Finland. It wasn't encouraging. All four nations have Universal Healthcare and paid parental leave. It was noted that other industrialized nations have either free or subsidized childcare and eldercare. Loretta Ross depicted the current structure as a "skewed system with too many specialists and not enough primary care providers." Elizabeth R. Benjamin pointed to big pharmaceutical companies and large hospitals pronouncing, "It's all about reimbursement." The oft-repeated phrase when the format moved to a question and answer period was, "Women get second class health care." However, participants stressed the belief that change was possible, particularly with "a new President and Congress committed to health reform." But it cannot be left up to the lawmakers and established alliances to do all the work. Each woman must be vocal about her needs, and join with others to move the dialogue forward. Below is a list of resources culled from material at the event: OWL - The Voice of Midlife and Older Women Our Bodies Ourselves - Excerpts from the Our Bodies, Ourselves books. Information on a Range of Women's Health Topics. Health Care for America Now - National Grassroots Campaign to Win Affordable Healthcare for All Amnesty International - Researching human rights violations affecting maternal health in the United States (i.e. Finding or paying for maternity related health care) Contact Anita Kumar: akumar@aiusa.org The Birth Survey - Providing women with insight into maternity health care practices in their community Susan G. Komen for the Cure - National website for global leader in the breast cancer movement This article originally appeared on Empowher Technorati Profile
 
Maggie Speaks! The Littlest Simpson Says Her First Sentence While Acting Out "The Fountainhead" (VIDEO) Top
Most of us remember when Maggie spoke for the first time in season four of the "Simpsons." She said "daddy" as her father put her down to sleep fulfilling his wish to have a child who didn't call him "Homer." Well, now after 16 years of silence she has spoken once again, and this time in full sentence form! Last night, Marge took Lisa to get a manicure and they told the stories of Queen Elizabeth, Snow White (kind of), Lady Macbeth (again, kind of), and the "Fountainhead." The latter was set in a nursery school, in which Maggie excelled at creative architecture but was held back by the dastardly hand of mediocrity. Never has Ayn Rand been cuter. Actually, never has Ayn Rand been cute. Maggie was voiced by Jodie Foster who lent an air of gravitas to the tot. She was originally voiced by Elizabeth Taylor in 1992. See highlights of Maggie's story line below and watch the full episode here. Get HuffPost Comedy On Facebook and Twitter! More on The Simpsons
 
David McKiernan Steps Down From Top Afghanistan Command Post Top
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will replace its top general in Afghanistan as President Barack Obama tries to turn around a stalemated war, defense officials said. The exit of Gen. David McKiernan comes as more than 21,000 additional U.S. forces begin to arrive in Afghanistan, dispatched by President Barack Obama to confront the Taliban more forcefully this spring and summer. McKiernan, on the job about a year, has asked repeatedly for additional forces. Obama's revamped strategy for Afghanistan does markedly increase the number of U.S. forces in the country but focuses on nonmilitary solutions as a better long-term solution. Military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said McKiernan will be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was likely to announce the new leadership in Afghanistan later Monday, an official said. Obama has approved a new strategy for Afghanistan and Gates wants new leadership to carry it out, the defense official said. McKiernan was named to his post by former President George W. Bush. Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen scheduled a Monday afternoon conference at which Gates will discuss his trip last week to Afghanistan and new plans for the seven-year-old Afghan campaign, which during the administration of President George Bush took a back seat to the war in Iraq. McChrystal has had a top administrative job at the Joint Chiefs of Staff for less than a year. He is a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. (This version CORRECTS spelling of McChrystal, not McCrystal.) ) More on Afghanistan
 
Dr. Michael J. Breus: Stormy Weather, Stormy Sleep Top
Have you ever had trouble sleeping when a storm blows through ? (No, I don't mean being awakened by the sound of thunder or the pelts of rain on your window.) If you suffer with obstructive sleep apnea, listen up: there's new evidence that the weather can worsen your sleep-disordered breathing . In other words, when the pressure drops, so does your ability to achieve smooth, restful breathing during the night.  Surprisingly, not much has been studied when it comes to connections between the weather and sleep. Lots of studies have been done to show the effects of high-altitude, which also worsens sleep apnea; but weather-related changes in atmospheric pressure and breathing during sleep has been a neglected area of study. Until now. I've written a lot about obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a common sleep disorder whereby one briefly stops breathing multiple times during the night when the muscles in the back of the throat fail to keep the airway open. This results in: fragmented, poor sleep low blood oxygen levels an increased risk for myriad health problems, including hypertension, heart disease, mood and memory problems the recommendation from your doctor to use a machine called a CPAP at night to keep your airway open for sound sleep This new wrinkle in the mystery of sleep opens the door wide open for much more exploration. We have no idea how the atmospheric pressure could affect apnea . It's still a big question that researchers are now going to investigate. Weather has always carried with it an aura of mystique. People have blamed it on everything from bad moods to joint and muscle pain. I predict that some of those connections are very real. Something to think about this week as we watch wicked weather pass through parts of the US. And blame it on the rain.  Sweet Dreams, Michael J. Breus, PhD, FAASM The Sleep Doctor This sleep article is also available at Dr. Breus's official blog, The Insomnia Blog .
 
Mort Zuckerman: Iran's Aggression Could Join Arabs and Israelis Top
A tectonic shift has occurred in the Middle East, highlighting both a threat and a historic opportunity. The threat, newly revealed in its extent and cunning, is Iranian subversion. The opportunity is the chance to make progress on some of the region's fundamental problems now that, for the first time in a century, Arabs and Jews alike fully appreciate the menace in Iran's hegemonic ambitions to dominate the Muslim world. They share with the West the conviction that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Iran is no longer just an existential threat to Israel. It threatens the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Persian Gulf emirates and has infiltrated other Islamic states. Shiite Tehran has transcended sectarian and ideological differences to create an aggressive coalition. It includes various Sunni movements, such as Hamas and other far-left groups, all operational proxies for Iran's efforts to destabilize the Middle East and promote Iranian interests and terrorist bases. The Iranian operation is multifaceted. Preachers in thousands of mosques have long disseminated the Khomeinist revolutionary propaganda, but the reach is now deeper. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard controls thousands of websites and blogs. Front companies, including banks, employ thousands of locals in each targeted country. Cleverly, the Iranians finance charities, social and medical services, courses in information technology, scholarships, and cultural centers offering language classes and Islamic theology, all with the same underlying purpose. They support publishing houses and more than a hundred newspapers and magazines and control satellite television and radio networks in various languages. Then there are the political satellites: Hezbollah in Lebanon, against which Israel fought a war in 2006, and Hamas, the instigator of the recent Gaza war. They are funded, trained, and armed by Iran to conduct terrorist attacks against Israel and to sabotage any dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Even now, Iran has an outpost in Gaza, creating the potential for Iranian incitements on both Israel's southern border and Egypt's northern border, an area where there is a security vacuum. The Egyptians have now furiously blown the whistle on the subversion against their government. They have exposed a Shiite terrorist group headed by a Hezbollah activist. Dozens of people were arrested, including some from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Tehran's principal vehicle for exporting revolution. The cell planned attacks on Suez Canal installations and Egyptian tourist sites in the hope of destabilizing the regime, which Iran considers vulnerable because of the age of President Hosni Mubarak and the possibility of a shaky political environment when he passes away. Astonishingly, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, publicly attacked the Egyptians and issued an exhortation to the Egyptian Army to overthrow the Mubarak regime. The Egyptian retort, published in the state-controlled newspaper al-Gomhouria, was blistering: "We do not allow, Oh Monkey Sheikh, to mock our judiciary, for you area bandit and veteran criminal who killed your countrymen, but we will not allow you to threaten the security and safety of Egypt . . . and if you threaten its sovereignty, you will burn!" President Mubarak spoke out forcefully, and the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, linked together the Iranian threat to Egypt, Israel, and the West in the same breath. In addition to creating Hezbollah cells--there are probably more--Iran helps Hamas smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip via Sudan and the Sinai. This has awakened the Egyptians to the risk to their security from the iron triangle of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Other Arab countries are similarly aroused. Tehran hopes to see its allies sweep to power in Bahrain. The small but prosperous nation is "part of Iran," in the words of Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, a senior aide to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In Morocco, security uncovered a network of pro-Iranian militants plotting violent operations; Morocco severed diplomatic relations. In Jordan, the State Security Court has sent three people to prison on charges of spying for Hezbollah after they "monitored positions, possessed weapons, and gathered things and information that must be kept secret." Iranian strategists consider Jordan a colonial creation that will disappear when they establish a single state covering the whole of Palestine; two thirds of Jordan's population is Palestinian. The Jordanians fear that one of the consequences of the U.S. military pullout from Iraq will be Iranian penetration into Iraq that will project directly into Jordan. Iranian-controlled groups have been in Kuwait, too. But Iran sees the largest target of opportunity as Lebanon. It aims to destroy Lebanon's historic balance as an Arab country with an affinity for the West. Tehran sees an opportunity to tip that balance between the pro-Western orientation advocated by Christians and the Druze and the pro-Nasserist, anti-Western orientation favored by some of the Muslims, the most rapidly growing part of the population. Iran is infusing massive amounts to back a coalition led by Hezbollah and including former Gen. Michel Aoun, a Christian, in June's general election. Tehran's goal is to transform Lebanon and shift it to the pro-Iran column as a Shiite-dominated country under Islamic law. Should Hezbollah and its supporters win a significant majority, it would constitute a milestone in that quest. Hezbollah, in short, seeks a new election law that would establish an Islamic state run by Hezbollah. In the new Hezbollah platform, there is no reference to its militia and its weapons, nor is there any expression of willingness to dismantle its military capability and integrate it into the Lebanese armed forces. Rather, the group wishes to retain its power in order to change Lebanon's political system and at the same time increase the military threat on Israel's northern border. A Shiite axis of evil controlled by Iran is not a remote prospect. A year ago, when the Lebanese government tried to dismantle Hezbollah's independent communications infrastructure, Hezbollah effected a brutal takeover of Beirut. Clearly, what Hezbollah is doing is not in the interest of Lebanon or the region. The Arab states are understandably opposed to Hezbollah's takeover of Lebanon and, equally, to Hamas's designs to take over the Palestinian Authority in next year's election on the West Bank and Gaza. Should Iran succeed in both elections, Israel would have Hamas on the south, Hezbollah on the north, and Hamas on the West. These are the forces that have provided the seeds for a delicate new alliance based on shared national interests among the United States, the Sunni Arab countries, and Israel--an alliance that can now change the entire political path to secure the stability of the region. The Arab countries, headed by Egypt, realize this battle with Iran requires cooperation-- including, perhaps, with Israel. This hasn't happened since Israel yielded Sinai after the Yom Kippur War. Israel possesses not only a deterrent military component against a nuclear Iran, should that come to pass in the face of Western disunity, but also an intelligence component for effective defense. So, for the first time, Israel, Egypt, and other Arab countries are on the same side of the fence against a common enemy that poses a strategic threat. This shifts priorities from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the fate of the entire region as a hostage to Iran. As it has long been said in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. More on Hezbollah
 
UAE Torture Video Sheikh Detained Top
Abu Dhabi prosecutors launch investigation that could see sheikh publicly tried in criminal court More on Middle East
 
Obama To Visit Russia In July: Kremlin Top
MOSCOW — The Kremlin said Monday that President Barack Obama will travel to Russia July 6-8, where talks are expected to focus on nuclear weapons reductions and broader improvements the US-Russian relationship. The dates for Obama's Russian trip, scheduled just before the July G-8 meeting in Italy, were posted on the Kremlin Web site Monday. Obama had his first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the London G-20 summit in April. Talks there focused on plans for negotiations on a treaty to further reduce nuclear weapons. After that meeting, Medvedev and other Russian officials had warm words for the new U.S. administration's recognition that Moscow was an important player in world affairs. But it is unclear how far and how fast relations between the two countries can advance after years of harsh rhetoric on both sides, which led to talk of a new Cold War. The U.S. has talked about "pushing the reset button" in dealing with Russia, and has focused early efforts on arms control. U.S. and Russian officials have recently begun negotiating to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which expires at year's end. The U.S. has suggested it will address some of Russia's past concerns about the treaty, including Moscow's insistence on a strict verification regime. But Medvedev and other Russian leaders have so far offered no concessions of their own. The U.S. hopes to focus on arms control in isolation, increasing the chances of success. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Sunday the issue is linked to other security concerns, including U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia has also protested continuing U.S. support for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, following the August war between Russia and Georgia. NATO is currently holding military exercises in Georgia. The U.S. meanwhile is pressing Russia to increase its support for the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and to raise pressure on Iran to limit its nuclear program. The Obama Administration is expected to seek international support for more of its initiatives than the Bush administration, and Russia has one of five permanent, veto-wielding seats on the U.N. Security Council. More on Russia
 
Red Ink The Story In Local TV News Top
Plummeting profits are forcing local TV news operations to scramble for new business models. Starting Monday in Chicago, four stations' news departments are combining their camera crews. More on The Recession
 
Robert Redford: Harnessing Nature's Power Top
Anyone who knows Utah knows the power of wind, water and sun. You can see that power in Utah's sculpted arches of stone, in our majestic mountains capped with snow, and in the cracked earth of our deserts. Nature's power is so obvious that you have to wonder why we've mostly ignored it as a source of energy to run our homes and businesses, and to propel our cars and trucks. After all, if we did a little more to harness that power, we could begin to solve some of our most pressing environmental and economic challenges. In fact, creating electricity from the energy nature gives us is critical if we're going to reduce global warming pollution, protect public health with clean air and water, create jobs in Utah and ultimately bring down energy prices. We know that burning fossil fuels is destabilizing the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans. We know that our dependence on oil shackles us to dangerous foreign regimes and to the escalating prices they'll inevitably charge as demand outstrips supply. But we also know how to break our dependence and free ourselves from this destructive cycle. Why keep buying foreign crude when we could be making energy right here in Utah from sunlight, wind and geothermal power? Why rip up more pristine wilderness to extract dirty fuels when we could generate clean power from the energy nature delivers to our doorstep? Dollar for dollar, investing in clean energy creates more jobs than investing in traditional energy sources like oil and gas. That really matters, especially when you consider that more than 30,000 Utah workers lost their jobs last year. We've got tens of thousands of windy acres here in Utah, sites for geothermal energy abound, and the southern part of the state has tremendous potential for solar power. We will have to carefully pick renewable energy sites that don't endanger critical habitat and wilderness quality land, but the opportunity is vast. So how can we jump start a home-grown clean energy economy? Right now Congress is working on a landmark clean energy jobs plan that would boost the amount of wind, solar and other clean energy our country produces. The American Clean Energy and Security Act will also make our vehicles, appliances and buildings more efficient, and update our antiquated electricity grid. Our investments in clean energy and efficiency today will pay dividends for generations. They will create good, family-sustaining jobs that can't be shipped overseas, and they will lower energy prices in the long run. They will reduce energy dependence and global warming pollution, and make our economy more competitive. It's true that the economic and environmental challenges we confront are serious. But Americans have never encountered a challenge of any kind that we couldn't overcome by working together and applying our ingenuity. That is what we need to do right now. The only missing ingredient is a spirit of innovation, cooperation and resolve amongst our political leaders. From the copper-domed Capitol in Salt Lake, to the halls of power in Washington, our leaders need to reconsider their allegiance to the dirty fuels industry, stop their bickering, and act boldly to move America towards a new energy economy. In the coming weeks, Representative Jim Matheson (D-Utah) can lead the way. As a key member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, he'll play a pivotal role before Memorial Day in determining whether Congress even gets to vote on the clean energy jobs bill. Now is the time to let Rep. Matheson and all of our leaders know that we expect them to do what's right for our people, our economy, our land and our future. [This piece first ran in the Salt Lake Tribune.]
 
Lisa Madigan Considering Running For Senate Not Governor: Washington Post Top
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is reconsidering the possibility of running for the Senate in 2010, according to several sources familiar with her thinking. More on Senate Races
 
Space Shuttle Launch: WATCH IT LIVE Top
The space shuttle Atlantis is set to blast off today at 2:01pm for its most dangerous mission ever : repairing the Hubble Telescope. The mission will require five risky spacewalks and NASA is so concerned that something may go awry that they have the space shuttle Endeavour and a second crew ready to go should an emergency rescue operation be necessary. Watch the shuttle launch live below. Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News , World News , and News about the Economy More on Video
 
Jeff Danziger: Bush Record Top
 
Somali Rebel Violence The Work Of Foreign States: Somali President Top
Somalia's president accused Islamist insurgents on Monday of working for foreign governments trying to destabilise his Horn of Africa nation after four days of fighting killed at least 70 people. More on Somalia
 
Paula Gordon: Wanton Predator? Top
Being from Chicago, when I hear, "You can't expect a well-oiled Chicago political machine to understand conservation's importance in salvaging the environment," I take it badly. So here's a test, and a big one. How fast can President Obama say, "Yanking endangered species protection from wolves and polar bears was a huge mistake. It's fixed. Sorry 'bout that." While I'm skeptical, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Interior Secretary Salazar's terrible decision early in the week to deny gray wolves protection as endangered species was a stupid "rookie" mistake. After all, he's from Colorado and cynical pals from the "West" could have schnookered him. But stripping BOTH wolves AND polar bears of their status, precisely the way the Bushites proposed to do? That smells intentional. And it's just as dreadful now as when Bush and his cronies pushed so hard for it. The Obama Administration's abandonment of two vital keystone species to a handful of irresponsible killers makes it hard to choose between appalling and outrageous. So I won't. If anything, this egregious failure of responsibility for two vital species that should be naturals for protection is at least as important for a.) the Obama Administration, and b.) humanity, as it is for the wolves and bears themselves. Contrary to our inflated sense of ourselves in the great scheme of things, humans are NOT in charge in the real world. And we're NOT the top predators, even though we make it our business to be the top killers. Cooling my jets just a tad, let's take this one at a time. First, the wolves. The Sarah Palins of the world have made it clear that they want their way with wolves: Kill 'Em, Kill 'Em All ... preferably just for the fun of it from the safety of an airplane after you've run them to the ground, exhausted. Compassionate conservatism at it's best. This clearly is not about economic interests. Far more domestic dogs kill ranchers' livestock than wolves do. And when it is wolves who are responsible? Ranchers are monetarily compensated by environmental groups. So forget the profit motive. To say that wolves have "recovered" from the near extinction to which we drove them is as wrong-headed as it is to drive them back to that brink. What this IS about is grown-ups who mistake themselves for "Little Red Riding Hood," the "Three Little Pigs" or faux-macho Sarah Palin wannabes. Perhaps we should award these diseased souls the scat-wit merit badge or a one-way ticket to Pakistan's Swat valley. Even Romulus and Remus knew better than to swallow the poisonous swill Aesop dished out about wolves. To date, there are no recorded instances of wolves killing humans in the U.S.A. Maybe it's time to give the guns to the wolves. It appears they would use them more responsibly than we have. Add hard-boiled reason to my own acknowledged biophilia. America has already been down this disastrous road with gray wolves. We wiped them out in Yellowstone National Park and got a stark lesson in return: destroy wolves and the entire ecosystem teeters. While it's a much longer (and VERY interesting) story, suffice it to say: When there were no wolves, elk completely over-ran the place and the entire ecosystem suffered, terribly -- plants, animals, water, soil, the whole place. Even the ditziest tourist knew something was wrong and acted accordingly. And polar bears? They are lightyears beyond being either coca-cola cute, or if you want to slick that up, charismatic megafauna. Polar bears, like us, are at the heart and soul of the terrible consequences of global climate change. Whither goeth the polar bear, there go we -- no habitat, no life. Protecting polar bears in every and all ways has "self-interest" written all over it. Pay attention to them and we also have a chance for the survival of life-as-we-know-it on earth. It's a stretch, but think of polar bears as canaries-in-the-ice; they're a lead indicator. Leave them to chance and we'll go down with them. What was all that talk from Candidate Obama, now President Obama about taking global climate change seriously? Tell that to the polar bears who desperately -- DESPERATELY -- need protection. So here's the deal. Every authentic hunter and outdoors person, every owner of a "Bo" or "Muffy" or "Buster" (every dog in the world, whatever the pedigree or lack thereof, is a direct descendant of wolves) in the land should be howling along with me, in every parlor from the White House to Your House. Every one of us who has a lifetime allegiance to the bear in our own beddy-by; each of us who's ooo'd and ahhh'd when a commercial venture enlisted the iconic polar bear in an attempt to overcome our sales resistance; and anyone who's had to explain to a worried kid looking at a very real photo of a polar bear stranded on a tiny patch of ice needs to be heard. It's not that they're cute. They are meat-eaters; they kill to survive, as humans do. They are essential species in the ecologies of which they are a part. We, the sovereign American people saw to it that the Endangered Species Act was enacted way back in 1973. President Obama, if Ken Salazar isn't up to the job of using that Act on behalf of us all -- and that includes the species with whom we share the land and sea the United States claims -- get someone who is. Before it's too late. U.S. Secretary of the Interior Salazar, why kill a wolf? why drown a polar bear? I'm sure Secretary Salazar would like to hear from you as well, as would the President. Do either want to be characterized as a "wanton predator"? Fortuitously, on Thursday we recorded a program with the President of the indomitable Defenders of Wildlife, Rodger Schlickheisen, focused on wolves and global climate change. We'll have the program up on our "Paula Gordon Show" website and the sunlight/oxygen "YouTube" site shortly.
 
Amie Newman: Breast, Bottle and The Beauty of Motherhood Top
This post originally appeared on RH Reality Check - news, information and analysis for reproductive health. I had my son when I was thirty years old, ten years ago, and as green as one can be when it came to any and all things parenting related. While pregnant, I thirstily drank in every word of the handbook for hip-mothers everywhere - The Hip Mama Survival Guide - with its list of cool songs to which to breastfeed, and 18 ways to "chill out" when your screaming baby is making you crazy. I was also given a copy of What to Expect When You're Expecting and read through it somewhat suspicious of its overly chipper yet authoritarian tone ("don't eat too many of those tasty treats!"). I perused the books of Dr. Sears and Dr. Spock for advice on breastfeeding and parenting with their practical and no-nonsense information. The Internet provided nowhere near the well of resources or communities on motherhood as one finds now so I satisfied my need for as much information as I could possibly consume mostly by way of books like these. And with the information collected stamped into my brain, I set to work on crafting the postpartum world in which I knew my baby, my husband and I would blissfully reside. It was a perfect world to be sure (though I didn't realize this at the time - thinking simply it was what all women experienced, right?). It was a vision that would of course be preceded by an all-natural childbirth with a loving midwife and husband at my side, and blissful days and nights of breastfeeding my newborn baby in the new, wooden rocking chair currently residing in what was to be his bedroom. What could go "wrong"? You know where this is going, don't you? The truth is that nothing turned out the way I thought it would. My "perfect" all natural childbirth morphed into a natural childbirth riddled with medical interventions. The days and nights following were a blur of breastfeeding trauma that included near breakdowns of anxiety and sadness over why my son would simply not feed, preferring to fall asleep upon immediate contact with my breast instead; why it sounded to me like lactation consultants were telling me one thing about how to breastfeed him, my midwife telling me another and the experienced, older women in my life yet another. I was exhausted, confused, frustrated and felt completely out of control. The short of it: after two weeks, I ended up on medication, feeding my son formula and setting out on a path towards motherhood that worked and felt best for myself, my husband, and my child. Feeding my son a bottle, we bonded beautifully and I often experienced the authentic joy and contentment I imagined in my "perfect" vision. But my breastfeeding vs. formula journey was far from over. In my "first weeks" mothers' group, the other mothers - with their discussions of shared breastfeeding difficulties and woes - seemed to look at me with a mixture of pity and contempt when I pulled out the bottle to feed my baby. The leader of the group took me aside one day and let me know it would be okay if "you don't come to those meetings where we talk about breastfeeding challenges since it isn't an issue for you." Some experiences were not so obviously ostracizing. Taking a walk one day in my neighborhood, I passed a neighbor's house. When my son started crying she asked (and then practically begged) me to come in to nurse him so he'd stop crying before we made the rest of the walk home. I was too embarrassed to tell her I wasn't nursing him, mumbled an excuse and power-walked back to my house where I could give him the (horror!) bottle that he so loved. By the time my daughter came along, the clarity I experienced around childbirth and breastfeeding took me down a wholly different path. My daughter came into this world with the strength and relative ease I had always envisioned, and almost immediately nursed voraciously straight through until she was three years old (and she would have nursed longer than that had I not decided the time had come for us to bond in ways that felt less "udderly" invasive by then). Nursing her was often wonderful though, for a long time. It was a bonding experience different, though not "better," than what my son and I had experienced, and we both loved it. Of course, the looks I received in public while nursing her openly as a baby and then as a toddler were equally as ostracizing and judgmental at times, just as when giving my son his bottle. These memories come flooding back with the current public discussion around breastfeeding in both the media and among new mothers. The dialogue centers on the emotional, health and even mental benefits of breastfeeding for mother and child. Breastfeeding your baby promotes "better bonding" . Breastfed babies may have higher IQs. Mothers who breastfeed may have a lower risk for diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. And while some of this information is not necessarily new it is eliciting much more attention as of late. The spotlight has also created a springboard for many mothers, who don't want to breastfeed, can't breastfeed exclusively, had or have difficulties breastfeeding or who have breastfed and simply don't buy all of the "hype" to speak up. With my own history of breastfeeding, one might assume that I'd be strongly rooted on one side of the emerging "breastfeeding wars" or the other. Don't breastfeed; your baby will be perfectly healthy and happy without it! Or, nurse until your child is twelve years old - it's the only certain way to bond, ensure your offspring's brilliance and protect against disease for yourself. But here's the thing. I'm not on either side of that fence. I've made very different choices with each child and I can tell you, as with any and all women's reproductive health experiences, there are as many different ways to experience these situations, as there are women in the world. And while exclusive breastfeeding certainly has a multitude of benefits, not the least of which is that it's free, when it's possible it's possible. When it's doable, it's doable. And when it's not, there are (thankfully and gratefully) other satisfying, excellent options for women in this country. This might sound overly simple. However, the pro-breastfeeding mantra and air of associated judgement has become overbearing and suffocating for many women who don't or can't breastfeed, even for women who both breastfeed and bottlefeed their babies. On the other hand, the fact that more women in this country are not breastfeeding, when they could be (and receiving immense joy and satisfaction from it as well), is a loss as well. In "The Case Against Breastfeeding" Hannah Rosin writes that while she "dutifully breastfed each of my first two children for the full year that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends" when she had her third she thought about escaping the "prison" of breastfeeding after becoming convinced of a couple of things. First, that the so-called conclusions about the benefits of breastfeeding were too inconclusive and second, that in fact breastfeeding was not the nirvana that women were being sold: From the moment a new mother enters the obstetrician's waiting room, she is subjected to the upper-class parents' jingle: "Breast Is Best." Parenting magazines offer "23 Great Nursing Tips," warnings on "Nursing Roadblocks," and advice on how to find your local lactation consultant (note to the childless: yes, this is an actual profession, and it's thriving). Many of the stories are accompanied by suggestions from the ubiquitous parenting guru Dr. William Sears, whose Web site hosts a comprehensive list of the benefits of mother's milk. "Brighter Brains" sits at the top: "I.Q. scores averaging seven to ten points higher!" (Sears knows his audience well.) The list then moves on to the dangers averted, from infancy on up: fewer ear infections, allergies, stomach illnesses; lower rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease. Then it adds, for good measure, stool with a "buttermilk-like odor" and "nicer skin"--benefits, in short, "more far-reaching than researchers have even dared to imagine." Rosin might drawing a caricature, but her frustration is clear. She takes issue with what she sees as an unrealistic or incomplete image of what breastfeeding is really like for mothers - the time commitment, the physical toll, the exhausting juggling necessary for working mothers. Though she decides to continue nursing her third child, her reasoning straddles the two sides of this debate with the beauty of the uncertainty and gray areas in which most mothers' decisions are made: Breast-feeding does not belong in the realm of facts and hard numbers; it is much too intimate and elemental. It contains all of my awe about motherhood, and also my ambivalence. Right now, even part-time, it's a strain. But I also know that this is probably my last chance to feel warm baby skin up against mine, and one day I will miss it. On the other hand, Jennifer Block , author of Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care , and a tireless advocate for maternal health writes in her article, "The Backlash to Breast is Best" , that while she understands some of Rosin's protestations ("There are some relationships that remain unclear, such as whether breastfeeding makes babies smarter or moms shed pregnancy pounds more quickly") Rosin is offering a careless assessment of the overall clear benefits of breastfeeding: Rosin is right that the individual risk of formula-feeding her children may be relatively small, but public health is about the collective, and among a population the risks of not breastfeeding are significant. For example, formula fed babies will have more severe diarrhea and respiratory infections. One could argue that such consequences aren't a huge deal if they are born into families with good access to health care (like Rosin and her friends). But however treatable these ailments, they become more serious among poor families in the U.S., and it's clear that in non-industrialized countries they cause babies to die. The truth is they are both right. And I want more than anything for new mothers to hear this. Sometimes breastfeeding works or works well and sometimes it doesn't. For some women it comes easier than for others and it's okay to live in the beauty of the gray and uncertainty. Embrace the possibilities but "get zen" with what you feel you can realistically do. Yes, breastfeeding is nutritionally wonderful for your baby. It can also be an emotional high; a powerful physical relationship incomparable to anything else. But so can holding your baby in your arms, free from anxiety or exhaustion, gazing into each other's eyes, as you nourish her with a bottle filled with formula. The real focus should be on creating the societal support necessary for mothers to experience new motherhood as optimally as possible. Do we offer adequate paid family leave for new mothers? Do we allow new mothers respectful and comfortable spaces in which to breastfeed in public if they so choose? Do new mothers, regardless of income level, have access to the information and tools, including free formula if necessary, to make the best decisions for themselves and their babies? Right now, the answer to all of those questions is no. When instead we can answer "yes" to all of those questions, I have no doubt the breastfeeding "debate" will resolve itself to a large degree and the guilt or frustration mothers feel, along with the scrutinizing and judging, will dissipate. Whether we breastfed our babies, fed them formula, or whipped up our own special combination of both, we are left with a human being with whom we are blessed to be able to walk through life for many years. As mamas, our relationship with our children is ever evolving and most certainly does not rest with this one decision. We have many miles to walk and many choices to make and the journey will rarely be easy, the "right" decisions rarely clear. More likely, we do the best we can with what we've got. If mothers can support each other in our voyages, knowing this is the real beauty of motherhood - doing our best with each individual decision - then the actual choices made become secondary to the love and intention behind them and the support received and accepted for all.
 
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This past weekend at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and the pre- and post- parties and events, I had several interesting moments... perhaps my most telling exchange came with Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman. More on Michael Steele
 
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Can a television show with a shrinking audience actually increase its revenue? In the case of "American Idol," the answer is yes. More on American Idol
 

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