Vietnam, which figured prominently in the 2004 presidential campaign, has surfaced again as a volatile issue as the McCain and Obama camps square off. Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark's recent remarks about Sen. John McCain's service not necessarily qualifying him to become president have enraged the McCain camp, inside sources report. Apparently, a McCain "Truth Squad" is now contemplating countering by alleging that Obama's true vulnerability isn't that he didn't see action in Vietnam, but that he did--on the side of America's enemies.
The gist of the accusation seems to be that as a lad in Indonesia, Obama did not, in fact, attend a madrassa, as some have alleged, but instead was a lousy student who refused to hit the books and played hooky. The contention is that, eager for adventure and excitement, he hot-footed it to the war zone sometime in 1971 as a ten-year-old and wound up in North Vietnam, where he became enamored of anti-war singers such as Joan Baez and Hollywood stars like Jane Fonda. He is also said to have been influenced by the writer Mary McCarthy, who traveled to Vietnam several times. Obama's critics now trace his elitism and later association with radicals such as William Ayers to these formative experiences, which are said to have imbued him with a deep and abiding mistrust of American values and patriotism.
Indeed, grainy photographs from the early 1970s showing a small child supposedly resembling a young Obama handing Viet Cong soldiers soft drinks and other snack foods have begun to circulate on the internet. One caption says that Obama's childhood name "Barry" really referred to his readiness to supply soldiers with berries from the countryside. McCain aides refused to comment, but groups close to the campaign are said to be scouring the archives for possible pictures of Obama working on farms in Cuba as well, figuring that they might help put Florida in play again. One GOP consultant who insisted on anonymity declared, "look, he may sound appealing enough, but he's always just been a bad apple." Though Obama himself dismissed the photos today as the kind of politics his campaign seeks to transcend and as "rotten to the core," the controversy has indubitably enlivened what is turning out to be a bruising campaign by further pitting the two camps against each other.
The evidence collected from rape victims after they’ve been assaulted goes into something called a rape kit. It’s the product of a lengthy and uncomfortable examination process that, according to a recent report in the Los Angeles Times, far too often leads to nothing. Some 400,000 rape kits are sitting in storage, untested, right now.
Los Angeles Times:
The National Institute of Justice estimates that at least 400,000 rape kits are sitting untested in police stations and crime labs across the country. In the city of Los Angeles alone, more than 7,000 sit in refrigerated storage in a city warehouse facility and a trailer behind police headquarters. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department likely has its own backlog, but the sheriff has never disclosed its size.
Law enforcement officials blame a lack of resources—for starters, they need more crime lab staff. But it’s hard not to surmise that the problem is, in reality, a matter of priorities. Among L.A. City Council members, only Jack Weiss has insisted on budget increases to address the rape kit backlog. This year, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa rejected the LAPD’s funding request to hire more crime lab staff.
YOU HAVE TO BE KIDDING. THE RAPE KITS AREN'T EVEN OPENED? THEY'RE NOT PROCESSED? THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW IF THERE'S IDENTIFIABLE DNA? WHAT THE HELL'S THE POINT?! YOU THINK SOMEONE MIGHT JUST KICK START THIS THING AND GET THE PROCESSING DONE? YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT JUSTICE DELAYED .....
If I were a rape victim, I might never know whether my rape kit was opened. I might assume that silence from the police meant that the crime lab just didn’t find any DNA, or none that identified my assailant. Although not every tested rape kit yields a database match, when New York City processed all its backlogged rape kits in 2003, the effort led to about 2,000 hits.
Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) visited Worth & Co., a contracting company in Bucks County, PA, where he held a town hall. The visit is a slap in the face to the state’s unions, since Worth & Co. has been investigated by the state Department of Labor and Industry for “intentionally failing to pay the predetermined minimum wage” to its employees. The Intelligencer reports:
McCain, who has already drawn the ire of union leaders throughout this country, will be visiting a company that earlier this year was under investigation by the state’s Labor and Industry Department over employee wages. At the time of the investigation, company founder Stephen Worth said he was being targeted by union interests who were going after his non-union shop. Union members plan to protest McCain’s visit.
McCain’s visit fits squarely within his anti-labor record. The AFL-CIO emphasizes that “there is nothing moderate about McCain,” who they call “a loyal ally of Bush who has consistently and perniciously voted against the interests of working families in his decades-long career in Washington.” Highlights of that long career:
– Helped block minimum wage hike in 2005 with John Kyl [LINK]
– Voted to filibuster minimum wage hike in 2007 [LINK]
– Compared unions to monopolies, during a presidential debate [LINK]
– Voted to block the Employee Free Choice Act in 2007, allowing workers to form unions [LINK]
– Skipped the vote on the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2008, which would have made it easier for women workers to sue for equal pay [LINK]
The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from
the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military
bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial"
dangers to public health and the environment.
Today's New York Times leads with a report that Al Qaeda is strengthening their organization in Pakistan. With US resources heavily invested in Iraq, focus on the hunt for Al Qaeda in outlying regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan suffered.
Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.
Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the creation of a Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways inevitable -- that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a dispirited terrorism network to find refuge. The American and Pakistani officials also blame a disastrous cease-fire brokered between the Pakistani government and militants in 2006.
But more than four dozen interviews in Washington and Pakistan tell another story. American intelligence officials say that the Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the C.I.A. in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A., including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.
Inside the C.I.A., the fights included clashes between the agency's outposts in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad. There were also battles between field officers and the Counterterrorist Center at C.I.A. headquarters, whose preference for carrying out raids remotely, via Predator missile strikes, was derided by officers in the Islamabad station as the work of "boys with toys."
Yesterday morning on Fox News, former UN Ambassador John Bolton claimed Israel has to make a decision to bomb Iran soon, partly because they need to do it with a U.S. President in office who would support the unilateral strike:
I think their calculation has to be they want the support — at least after-the-fact — from the United States, and therefore, I think doing it during President Bush’s term makes a lot of sense. I don’t think they’ll do it before our election because you can’t calculate what the impact would be, and of course after the election, they’ll know who will be President — and that would factor into their decision as well.
In the interview, Bolton also made the case for preventive war against Iran. “I don’t personally believe in just-in-time non-proliferation,” he said. “Our intelligence on Iran is far from perfect,” Bolton conceded. Yet Iran’s “strategic objective” and “rhetoric from their leadership” is enough to justify war. Watch it:
Bolton was even more explicit in an interview with Israel Insider. “Bolton said that if Senator Obama is elected in November, Israel could not afford to wait until he takes office on January 20, before taking action. ‘An Obama victory would rule out military action by the Israelis because they would fear the consequences given the approach Obama has taken to foreign policy.’”
The right-wing neoconservative establishment is quickly unifying behind this argument that bombing must occur before a possible President Obama takes office. Last week, both Bolton and Bill Kristol made the argument.
[base ']ÄúI do wonder with Senator Obama, if President Bush thinks Senator Obama[base ']Äôs going to win, does he somehow think [base ']Äî does he worry that Obama won[base ']Äôt follow through on that policy,[base ']Äù Kristol said.
“If [Republican candidate John] McCain gets elected, he could really easily make a decision to go for it,” Shavit told the paper. “If it’s Obama: no. My prediction is that he won’t go for it, at least not in his first term in the White House.”
UPDATE II: Dana Perino was asked in the White House press briefing today whether Bush agreed with Bill Kristol that a strike would need to occur on his watch if Obama is elected. Perino answered: [base ']ÄúThere[base ']Äôs a lot of political analysts out there, and I respect that they have their opinions. What I can tell you as the President[base ']Äôs spokesperson, he is singularly focused on trying to solve this issue diplomatically.[base ']Äù Watch it:
Sen. John Kerry harshly criticized John McCain on Monday for using a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in his efforts to counteract criticism from an Obama campaign surrogate.
The 2004 Democratic nominee, whose candidacy was undercut by the Swift Boat veterans, lambasted McCain for turning to SBVT veteran Bud Day as a campaign representative, suggesting that the Arizona Republican had abandoned "a new kind of politics."
"Colonel Day's comments today only further highlight the McCain campaign's disregard for a new kind of politics," Kerry said in a statement. "John McCain condemned these kinds of attacks in 2004 when he called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth 'dishonest and dishonorable.' Senator McCain should condemn these remarks and cut ties with the Colonel and anyone else connected to SBVT. Day's comments only serve to disparage all those who served on swift boats in Vietnam."
Earlier on Monday, McCain's campaign hosted a conference call in which Day, a contemporary from Vietnam, lambasted remarks made by Gen. Wesley Clark suggesting that McCain's military experience was not, in and of itself, a qualification for the White House.
During the call, Day was asked to reconcile how he could work to smear John Kerry's war record in 2004, yet claim war records were out-of-bounds for McCain in 2008
"The Swift Boat attacks were simply a revelation of the truth, the similarity does not exist here," he explained. "What the Swift Boat campaign was about was to lay out John Kerry's record. John Kerry has never produced any evidence to deny that. We are producing the evidence of these attacks right now to show that those remarks were completely inaccurate."
As Kerry pointed out in his statement, McCain publicly criticized the Swift Boat ads back in 2004, saying they were reminiscent of the smear campaigns launched against him during his initial White House run in 2000.
"It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," said the Senator.
Indeed, during the last campaign, Day called Kerry "the Benedict Arnold of 1971," appeared in advertisements questioning Kerry's war record, and, latter, formed the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation, an extension of the Swift Boat effort.
Sizeable Minority In US Condone Torture. UNITED NATIONS - The number of Americans who would condone torture, at least when used on terrorists in order to save lives, has risen over the past two years and now stands at over 40 percent, according to a new opinion poll.
The poll released by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a project managed by the University of Maryland, found [...] [CommonDreams.org » Headlines07]
9:37:22 AM comment []
Today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) visited Worth & Co., a contracting company in Bucks County, PA, where he held a town hall. The visit is a slap in the face to the state’s unions, since Worth & Co. has been investigated by the state Department of Labor and Industry for “
