October 2008 archive

Before they were washed up, I “palled around with some terrorists,” including Weather Underground leader David Gilbert, a close friend and comrade of Bernadine Dorhn and Bill Ayers, whose limited association with Barack Obama has been unsuccessfully used for an election-tipping cudgel for months.

So close a friend was Gilbert, in fact, that Ayers and Dorhn raised his son after he and the boy’s mother, Kathy Boudin, were imprisoned for the robbery of a Brinks armored truck and the killing of a security guard and two policemen in Nanuet and Nyack, New York, on October 20, 1981. Before he chose the general course of action that landed him permanently in the slam, I lived with Gilbert in Denver for more than a year. I’ll get to back that.

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Solidarity,

in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, graciously hosted by the good people at Progressive Blue.

Progressive Solidarity … its a core concept for building a progressive change coalition. It is, indeed, a core concept for Progressive Populism itself. It says, “You got such a great idea for fixing things? Don’t just put it out there and then blame people for not ‘getting it’. Go out an earn their attention by finding out what they say they need and working for it.”

Its not exclusionary. If someone is willing to step forward on an important issue … even someone who is not going to be a partner in the change coalition … even a moderate conservative like Colin Powell who was and continues to be wrong on one of the central foreign policy decisions in our nation in our time … accept it.

When Colin Powell says, in his endorsement of Senator Obama for President:

But right now we’re also facing a very daunting period.  And I think the number one issue the president’s going to have to deal with is the economy.  That’s what the American people are worried about.  And, frankly, it’s not just an American problem, it’s an international problem.  We can see how all of these economies are now linked in this globalized system.  And I think that’ll be number one.  The president will also have to make decisions quickly as to how to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan.  And also I think the president has to reach out to the world and show that there is a new president, a new administration that is looking forward to working with our friends and allies.  And in my judgment, also willing to talk to people who we have not been willing to talk to before. Because this is a time for outreach.

… I have no doubt that the economic solutions he would most prefer and those that I would most prefer will not be the same solutions … I have not doubt that the foreign policy stance he would most prefer and the one that I would most prefer will not be the same stance … I have not doubt that the terms on which he would wish to “work with our allies” would not be the same as the terms that I would favor.

Colin Powell is, after all, a “moderate Republican” in a time when being a “moderate Democrat” would be considered a center-right political position in most of the industrial world. We almost certainly have different views on how things should be done.

However …

So Medicaid is now in trouble, according to this Reuter’s article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Spending on the Medicaid health program for the poor is on a path to grow at a much higher rate than the overall U.S. economy in the next 10 years, officials said on Friday.

Spending on Medicaid benefits will increase 7.3 percent from 2007 to 2008, reaching $339 billion, and will expand at an annual average of 7.9 percent over the next decade, hitting $674 billion by 2017, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a report.

Over that same time span, the projected rate of growth for the overall economy is 4.8 percent, the report stated.

The report’s release comes at a time of growing worry over the fact that health spending has become an increasing burden on individual Americans, businesses and governments.

And what does our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Bush-appointed Michael Leavitt, have to say about this?

“This report should serve as an urgent reminder that the current path of Medicaid spending is unsustainable for both federal and state governments,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said in a statement.

“If nothing is done to rein in these costs, access to health care for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens could be threatened.”

Let’s take a look at Mr. Leavitt, who is so concerned about the health of poor people.

Laura Nyro

Stoned Soul Picnic

McCarthy And Cold War Era Fear And Paranoia

Return Thanks To The Irresponsible McCain/Palin

Campaign

This Is Not How One Shows Leadership    

Arduous Transition Awaits Next President

 Inherited Problems Bring Crushing Pressure

By Michael D. Shear, Michael Abramowitz, Anne E. Kornblut and Shailagh Murray

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, October 19, 2008; Page A01

If Sen. Barack Obama wakes up as the president-elect on Nov. 5, he will immediately assume responsibility for fixing a shredded economy while the Bush administration is still in office. If Sen. John McCain wins the election, he will face an imminent confrontation over spending with a Democratic Congress called back into special session with the goal of passing a new economic stimulus package.

The man who knows too much

 He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib… No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as ‘the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist’.

Rachel Cooke

The Observer, Sunday October 19 2008

Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. ‘Brad Pitt loved this place,’ says Hersh with a wolfish grin. ‘It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter’s den!’ When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated – the idea of moving all his stuff was too much.

USA

Building Flawed American Dreams

THE RECKONING

By DAVID STREITFELD and GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: October 18, 2008  

SAN ANTONIO – A grandson of Mexican immigrants and a former mayor of this town, Henry G. Cisneros has spent years trying to make the dream of homeownership come true for low-income families.

As the Clinton administration’s top housing official in the mid-1990s, Mr. Cisneros loosened mortgage restrictions so first-time buyers could qualify for loans they could never get before.

Then, capitalizing on a housing expansion he helped unleash, he joined the boards of a major builder, KB Home, and the largest mortgage lender in the nation, Countrywide Financial – two companies that rode the housing boom, drawing criticism along the way for abusive business practices.