A photo my publisher passed along from the recent Book Expo in Los Angeles …

The new compilation will be out in October. (It’s part of the reason I haven’t had much time for blogging lately…)

There’s more than enough reasons to oppose John McCain, so I hope as the general election goes on, we can avoid joining conservatives in delving into this muck :

Perot’s real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. “There’s evidence, evidence, evidence,” Perot claims. “McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs.”

Oddly, this was the second time I’ve seen the POW issue pop up in the past week. Earlier, I saw it mentioned in the last two minutes of this video created by a Ron Paul supporter (via JedReport) :



I’m not being disingenuous when I say that attacks on John McCain’s time as a P.O.W. are unseemly and should be avoided. Any mentions of John McCain and Vietnam are a rabbit hole Democrats would be ill-advised to jump down. I don’t mention this because I’m trying to be high-minded, but because these assertions are largely unprovable and only highlight the military record that John McCain hides behind to help distract people from the fact that he’s a hot-headed, ethically-challenged, war-mongering phony who doesn’t know his ass from a hole the the ground. The “he said, she said” accusations about McCain’s time as a P.O.W. won’t really settle anything and are overshadowed by his three decade record of being a shameless panderer and faux moderate who, despite his self-righteous rhetoric about working across party lines, has an overwhelming record of voting with Republicans and helping dig the hole we’re stuck in now.

Dennis Kucinich is on C-Span 1 right this second (7:30 pm ET) on the floor of the House, introducing 35 separate articles of impeachment for President Bush. And he’s reading them all into the record, so if you want to tune in, he’ll be there for a while.

Be sure to visit Google News in an alternate, happier dimension.

Exactly the speech she needed to give. A few days late, but that’s not going to matter too much six months from now.

William Blum:

[Carla] Del Ponte remained in her position [as Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] until the end of 2007, leaving to become the Swiss ambassador to Argentina; at the same time writing a book about her time with the Tribunal — “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals”, published two months ago but available at the moment only in Italian. It hasn’t been much reported yet what del Ponte has said about NATO, but the book has already created a scandal in Europe, for in it she reveals how the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted hundreds of Serbs in 1999, and took them to Kosovo’s fellow Muslims in Albania where they were killed, their kidneys and other body parts then removed and sold for transplant in other countries…

On February 17 of this year, in a move of highly questionable international legality, the KLA declared the independence of Kosovo from Serbia. The next day the United States recognized this new “nation”, thus affirming the unilateral declaration of independence of a part of another country’s territory. The new country has as its prime minister a gentleman named Hashim Thaci, described in Del Ponte’s book as the brain behind the abductions of Serbs and the sale of their organs.

Some of the relevant parts of del Ponte’s book are here. This is so lurid, and so similar to standard war atrocity rumors, that the evidence del Ponte provides doesn’t seem anywhere near conclusive. (Recall the blockbuster Turkish movie Valley of the Wolves was about US troops doing this with Iraqis.) In any case, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know for sure; given the position of the US, it will never be seriously investigated.

Here’s Hillary Clinton on Kosovo in June, 1999, right when this was purportedly happening:

This has been possible because our nations—our leaders and our citizens—stood up against evil. Now there are some who I know who would quibble with my use of that word, but I think it fully describes the conflict we have been waging these last few months…we will not turn away when human beings are cruelly expelled, or when they are denied basic rights and dignities because of how they look or how they worship. When crimes against humanity rear their ugly heads, we have to send such a message as an international community.

Rick Perlstein has posted some amazing outtakes from his research for his book Nixonland (which is well worth buying). It’s a bunch of constituent letters to Illinois liberal Democratic Senator Paul Douglas before he lost the 1966 election. For instance:

At least fifty square of Chicago is occupied by negroes which means that no part of that area is safe for white people to travel…
It is safe to say that not a single white person has ever moved into a negro neighorhood yet there has been over a million white people dumped, shoved, or pushed out of their homes by expansion of negroes…
NEGROES HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

Read the rest. That is an order from the NEGROES WHO HAVE BEEN MADE THE BOSS OF THE UNITED STATES.

This is a New York Times story from February 18, 2007:

One of the most important decisions that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton made about her bid for the presidency came late last year when she ended a debate in her camp over whether she should repudiate her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq…antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather than make an apology she did not believe in.

“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., in a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.

Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).

If progressives had power, we’d be able to turn this into unquestioned conventional wisdom about how voting for aggressive war dooms Democrats who want to be president. That wouldn’t be true, but one measure of power is the ability to create non-true but convenient conventional wisdom.

I didn’t expect Hillary Clinton to concede and/or endorse tonight, but I certainly didn’t expect her to use her speech as a big “fuck you” to Barack Obama. It’s customary to use the final big speech of a campaign to thank supporters and reflect on the campaign’s themes and accomplishments, but tonight’s speech went beyond that. The ways Clinton used her speech tonight to further divide the Democratic party makes it seem as if my last post was written with the help of a time machine. I wrote about Clinton using rhetoric to give voters the impression that “Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate”, now take a look at her speech :

Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows? People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.

You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard working men and women who don’t always make the headlines but have always written America’s story. You have voted because you wanted to take back the White House, and because of you, we won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.

In all of the states you voted because you wanted a leader who will stand up for the deepest values of our party. A party that believes everyone should have a fair shot at the American Dream. A party that cherishes every child, values every family, and counts every single vote.

On the very night when Barack Obama sealed the nomination, she couldn’t even be humble enough to acknowledge the fact. Instead, she used her speech to once again insist that she won the popular vote, insist that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain, and make a thinly-veiled jab about Florida and Michigan.

Even worse is that her insistence that she wouldn’t concede was just another plug for her website :

Now the question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight. But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my website at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.

As Kos notes, rather than be magnanimous tonight, she chose to stir up her supporters even more and end the night with a fundraising appeal. Even as she’s laying off staff and becoming more obvious about her desire for the VP slot, she’s trying to squeeze every last dollar she can out of her supporters to pay off her campaign debts (to herself). And she has the gall to follow up the plug for her website with this :

In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.

Yeah, and I’m sure the reminders about her “18 million” supporters aren’t implicit threats to take her voters and go home. If she truly cared about her party, rather than just HER campaign and HER supporters, she wouldn’t have picked tonight to pour salt the Democratic party’s open wounds and exploit her supporters passions (and disdain for Obama) to try to weasel her way into the VP slot and re-fill her bank account.

Embarrassing. Pathetic. Classless. Disgraceful.

John McCain: Bob Dole without the charisma, and with a scary death-rictus grin and weird Batman-villain giggle.

Hillary Clinton: this really could have, should have been her moment. Before she came on, my wife and I were talking about the possibility of an Obama/Clinton ticket, moving beyond the unpleasantness of the primary to bring the Democratic party together, acknowledging that she has earned many votes, and deserves respect for that. And if Hillary had come out and graciously conceded, we might have been able to sustain that fantasy. Instead, she gave an utterly tone-deaf speech which was All About Her, and at the end of it, I was ready personally to throw her under a bus, should one be passing by.

Barack Obama: Pitch perfect speech in front of a rock star crowd, the clear winner of the evening in every respect.