Hugo Chavez gives ‘Red Ken’ Livingstone a job
August 28, 2008
Ken Livingstone has got himself a nice little earner - from his old friend and fellow socialist, Hugo Chavez. The Venezuelan president has invited him to work as a consultant on policing, urban planning and transport in the country’s notoriously badly-run capital, Caracas, in the run-up to local elections in November.
“I believe that Caracas will become a first-world city in 20 years,” Livingstone told reporters on a surprise visit to Venezuela. “I have a very extensive network of contacts both domestically and internationally which I will be calling on to assist in this.”
It is two years since Livingstone and Chavez first attempted an arrangement between the two capitals with a deal to supply London with cheap fuel for its bus fleet in return for advice on city management. When Boris Johnson became Mayor in May, he made the cancellation of this agreement one of his first priorities, at the cost of £7m in compensation.
Yesterday, the mayor’s office said of Livingstone’s new arrangement: “Boris Johnson made it clear during his election campaign that he did not want to be on the payroll of Hugo Chavez and did not believe a poor South American country should be subsidising one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
“Ken Livingstone is free, as a private individual, to offer his advice and services to whomever he wants.”
Asked by journalists in Caracas what he was being paid, Livingstone said: “It depends to what extent we will be tapping into our individual resources. The whole cost of this trip has been paid for by the government of Venezuela and as an unemployed citizen I would not be able to pay for my own fare otherwise.”
Is This What It Means to Be a Democrat?
August 28, 2008
Once in a while, not often, you stumble across a statement or quote from some person of prominence that startles, cuts through the fog, and smashes your mind against the wall of reality, a reality that you really did not want to acknowledge.
I had this sensation while reading a recent blog entry on Huffingtonpost.com by the truly creative, often hilarious, screenwriter (Sleepless in Seattle), Nora Ephron.
Ephron was commenting on her favorite part of Hillary Clinton’s speech at the Democratic Convention in which the Senator “admonished her followers not to put their affection for her over the issues…When she reproved them for thinking for even a moment that her historic thrilling campaign was more important that the real campaign to defeat the Republicans.”
“Where any of her followers could have gotten the idea doesn’t seem to have crossed her mind,” said Ephron. “The fish stinks from the head.”
Ephron deftly skewers the Clintons’ “narcissism…which perfumed every bit of Hillary’s campaign.” She thought Hillary’s funniest line was “Were you in it for me[?]“
All of this was great fun to read and classic Nora Ephron. But at the end of this piece, Ephron slams Hillary Clinton for “never once mentioning choice.”
“She never once said the truth, which is that any Hillary supporter who doesn’t understand this issue alone is the reason to vote for Obama has no business pretending to be a Democrat,” blogs Ephron.
So it’s all about abortion. It is this issue “alone” (italics added) that is the moral imperative for voting for Barack Obama. Forget about Iraq, gas prices, the environment, health care. Focus on 1.2 million abortions per year.
Ephron represents a segment of the Democratic Party that seems to view abortion as the alpha and omega of American politics. Is this what it means to be a Democrat in 2008? Forget about those traditional Labor Democrats, urban Catholics, Baptists and other traditional constituencies, many of them strong supporters of Senator Clinton in the primary elections.
Imagine: Hillary Clinton squishy on abortion!
AS I SAID, Nora Ephron’s austere reductionism, in calling abortion the major determinant in voting for Barack Obama, is startling. It is also a measure of the intensity of a focused, dedicated wing of the Democratic Party that has managed to pull this venerable political institution far to the left on an issue as fundamental to human liberty as is the right to life.
Having grown up urban, Catholic, and an Irish-German Republican (my paternal grandfather became a Republican during the New Deal years), most of my social circle, and a fair bit of my family, were all Democrats. Most of them were and are appalled by the nation’s abandonment of unborn children. Many were active in grassroots efforts to protect the unborn, both politically and through the provision of moral and material support. They may not have had much use for skinflint Republicans, at least non-relations, but abortion was beyond the Pale.
But times, as they say, change. Or at least some politicians do. Once pro-life Democrats such as Ted Kennedy, Dick Gephardt and, yes, Al Gore, all succumbed to the Zeitgeist of extreme reaches of the Democratic Party.
There remain a few stalwart congressmen and women in the party who defend the unborn and a hardy remnant called Democrats for Life of America. Nora Ephron believes they have “no business pretending to be a Democrat.”
Here’s hoping they don’t much care what she thinks.
Late Night Laugh: The German Olympic Cheating Scandal
August 27, 2008
In the annals of shameless lawsuits, this one takes the cake.
A Coney Island businessman is suing the city for damaging the Bentley he was driving when he killed a Brooklyn dad in a hit-and-run accident.
Harry Shasho, who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, says the NYPD failed to safeguard the battered black 2005 Bentley GT luxury sedan that was impounded as evidence of the fatal crash. He’s asking for at least $190,000.
The victim’s loved ones are outraged.
“He’s not a human being, he’s an animal with no conscience,” fumed Linda Ruberto, the longtime girlfriend of victim Louis (Pete) Couch, who was killed as he crossed Ocean Parkway.
“Suing the city when you’ve killed somebody is disgusting,” she said. “It’s immoral.”
“Mr. Shasho has shown greater concern for the condition of his vehicle than the condition of the victim it left behind,” added lawyer Stavros Sitinas of Wingate, Russotti & Shapiro, who represented Couch’s son in a suit against Shasho that was settled last year.
Shasho, 38, who owns a fancy Coney Island car detailing shop, struck Couch and left the scene without stopping Oct. 1, 2005. He later surrendered to cops and was sentenced to five years’ probation and community service.
Couch was intoxicated at the time of the accident, which could have played a role in Shasho’s seemingly lenient sentence.
Shasho says the Bentley was in “excellent condition … with no noticeable defects or damage” when he turned himself in, according to the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.
The police report tells a different story.
It describes the car as crumpled and the windshield “depressed and fractured” by the violent impact with Couch that left his body parts strewn across the street.
The suit seeks damages from the city, the NYPD and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
It accuses the NYPD of failing to properly care for vehicles, “particularly those which require special care and treatment due to value, style [and] model.” Noticeably missing from the suit is any mention of why Shasho was arrested. It doesn’t even mention Couch, 54, an assistant manager at a Duane Reade drugstore.
Shasho owns 212 Motoring, a shop that tricks out luxury autos with elaborate sound systems and detailing. Former Knicks forward Jerome Williams is his partner in the business.
Reached by the Daily News, Shasho denied filing a lawsuit and hung up. Shasho’s lawyer refused to comment.
So Much For ‘Change’: Barack Obama And Hunter Biden Doing Business The Old Fashioned Way
August 27, 2008
Excerpted from WAPO investigation:
…An analysis for The Washington Post by Taxpayers for Common Sense of Hunter Biden’s firm’s lobbying business found that its clients collected $2.7 million in earmarks in the last fiscal year.
One of those clients was St. Xavier University, a four-year, 5,600-student institution run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Orland Park, Ill. Steve Murphy, vice president for university advancement, said Hunter Biden approached him in 2005 offering to secure congressional earmarks.
Hunter Biden and his colleague, Eric Schwerin, told Murphy they were “working with a number of clients, institutions like yours, and we would like to help you identify earmarks, federal support and grants.”
Murphy said he found Biden’s parentage a selling point. Murphy then accompanied Biden to the offices of the Illinois delegation, including Obama’s.
Obama requested $1.4 million for St. Xavier, including $900,000 to establish an early-childhood teacher training center “to meet the demand in the southwest Chicago metropolitan area,” according to a news release on the Web site of Obama’s Senate office. Obama requested the early-childhood money in both 2006 and 2007. (Was any of that money headed for the Ayers-Annenberg program?- SC&A)
Obama also in June 2007 sought $500,000 for a skills laboratory for St. Xavier’s nursing school, which has one of the largest nursing programs in the state.
In the end, Obama’s $1.4 million in requests resulted in $192,000 for the nursing facility.
Murphy said that a big selling point was the diversity of the nursing students, who often ended up working in communities where nurses were in shortage.
“Two years ago, we graduated more African American and Hispanic nurses than any private college in the state of Illinois,” Murphy said. “I’m not at all apologetic that we asked for federal support for huge health-care needs of this growing community.”
Since Hunter Biden signed St. Xavier as a client in December 2005, the firm has earned $320,000 from the university.
In 2006, Obama also asked for $2 million for a cancer research treatment center at Chicago’s Thorek Memorial Hospital, according to an Obama letter requesting the money posted on Obama’s campaign Web site. Hunter Biden was the registered lobbyist and his firm was paid $120,000 for representing Thorek, which has not received funding.
Obama’s spokesman also acknowledged lobbying for Mercy Hospital, another client of Hunter Biden.
In addition to his work for universities, Hunter Biden has done consulting work for MBNA, the largest employer in Delaware.
From 2001 to 2005, Hunter was paid an undisclosed amount by the credit card giant, which has since been purchased by Bank of America. It has been widely reported that he received $100,000 a year.
At the time, Sen. Biden led a successful, high-profile battle in the Senate for a bankruptcy bill that ultimately benefited credit card companies. The law makes it more difficult for people to file for personal bankruptcy protection under Chapter 7.
“He was a crucial supporter of the law in that he paved the way for other Democrats to support it,” said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Foundation of America, a consumer group that opposed the bill. “Senator Biden provided a lot of political cover for the credit card industry because they wanted to show that the proposal had bipartisan support. He aggressively undermined the opposition to the bill.”
Over the past two decades, MBNA employees have given more than $200,000 to Biden’s Senate campaigns, more than workers from any other company.
Wade said Hunter Biden was hired by MBNA after working as a Commerce Department lawyer on Internet privacy and online commerce issues. “Hunter consulted for five years as an expert on these very same issues at a time of enormous expansion in online banking,” Wade said. “He was never a lobbyist for MBNA, and his work had absolutely nothing to do with the bankruptcy bill. Zero. Nothing.”
Hunter Biden also lobbied for Napster, the music-sharing Web site that ran afoul of intellectual-property laws. Sen. Biden at the time was a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees laws governing intellectual-property rights.
Wade said Hunter Biden is careful not to approach his father when lobbying. Wade said the younger Biden does not share in revenue of other partners, so he does not directly benefit from their activities.
When he introduced him as his running mate, Obama said of Biden: “He has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn’t changed him.” But Republicans quickly attacked Biden’s connections to lobbyists.
“While Barack Obama decries Washington insiders and says that he detests lobbyists, Joe Biden is the model Washington insider with numerous connections to lobbyists and special interests,” Republican National Committee spokesman Danny Diaz said.
Wade defended Biden, saying he has been “as strong a supporter of ethics reform as the Senate has ever known, and his office follows all ethics laws right down to the letter.”
Obama Linked To $3.4 Million Earmark For Biden’s Son
August 27, 2008
CBS:
Sen. Barack Obama sought more than $3.4 million in congressional earmarks for clients of the lobbyist son of his Democratic running mate, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, records show. Obama succeeded in getting $192,000 for one of the clients, St. Xavier University in suburban Chicago.
Obama’s campaign has taken a hard stance against the world of lobbying in the nation’s capital. Obama said he limits his own efforts to get money for pet projects — a process known as earmarking — to those that benefit the public. He has posted his earmark requests on his presidential campaign Web site to encourage transparency.
Since Obama announced his selection of Biden on Saturday, attention has focused on Biden’s lobbying connections as well as his son’s lobbying activities. R. Hunter Biden is one of many relatives of members of Congress who work as lobbyists.
The younger Biden started his career as a lobbyist in 2001 and has registered to represent about 21 clients that have brought in $3.5 million to his Washington firm, according to lobbying disclosure forms.
Sen. Biden has collected more than $6.9 million in campaign contributions from lobbyists and lawyers since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
A spokesman for the Obama campaign said that Hunter Biden himself has never lobbied his father. Another lobbyist in the firm successfully sought an earmark from the senator for the University of Delaware. But Hunter did not work on the account, the spokesman said.
Campaign spokesman David Wade also said Hunter Biden never appealed directly to Obama.
“Hunter Biden met with the Obama Senate office, not with Senator Obama,” Wade said. “It’s hardly surprising that a Senator from Illinois would fight for investments in Mercy Hospital, Thorek Hospital and St. Xavier University right in Illinois, or that he’d be joined in that effort by a Republican colleague, Representative Judy Biggert.”
Hunter Biden, a 38-year-old Georgetown graduate and Yale-trained lawyer, is a name partner in the firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair, founded by William Oldaker, an election lawyer and lobbyist who worked on Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign and has been a fundraiser and campaign adviser for Sen. Biden.
An analysis for The Washington Post by Taxpayers for Common Sense of Hunter Biden’s firm’s lobbying business found that its clients collected $2.7 million in earmarks in the last fiscal year.
One of those clients was St. Xavier University, a four-year, 5,600-student institution run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy in Orland Park, Ill. Steve Murphy, vice president for university advancement, said Hunter Biden approached him in 2005 offering to secure congressional earmarks.
Hunter Biden and his colleague, Eric Schwerin, told Murphy they were “working with a number of clients, institutions like yours, and we would like to help you identify earmarks, federal support and grants.”
Murphy said he found Biden’s parentage a selling point. Murphy then accompanied Biden to the offices of the Illinois delegation, including Obama’s.
Obama requested $1.4 million for St. Xavier, including $900,000 to establish an early-childhood teacher training center “to meet the demand in the southwest Chicago metropolita area,” according to a news release on the Web site of Obama’s Senate office. Obama requested the early-childhood money in both 2006 and 2007.
Obama also in June 2007 sought $500,000 for a skills laboratory for St. Xavier’s nursing school, which has one of the largest nursing programs in the state.
In the end, Obama’s $1.4 million in requests resulted in $192,000 for the nursing facility.
Murphy said that a big selling point was the diversity of the nursing students, who often ended up working in communities where nurses were in shortage.
“Two years ago, we graduated more African American and Hispanic nurses than any private college in the state of Illinois,” Murphy said. “I’m not at all apologetic that we asked for federal support for huge health-care needs of this growing community.”
Since Hunter Biden signed St. Xavier as a client in December 2005, the firm has earned $320,000 from the university.
In 2006, Obama also asked for $2 million for a cancer research treatment center at Chicago’s Thorek Memorial Hospital, according to an Obama letter requesting the money posted on Obama’s campaign Web site. Hunter Biden was the registered lobbyist and his firm was paid $120,000 for representing Thorek, which has not received funding.
Obama’s spokesman also acknowledged lobbying for Mercy Hospital, another client of Hunter Biden.
In addition to his work for universities, Hunter Biden has done consulting work for MBNA, the largest employer in Delaware.
From 2001 to 2005, Hunter was paid an undisclosed amount by the credit card giant, which has since been purchased by Bank of America. It has been widely reported that he received $100,000 a year.
At the time, Sen. Biden led a successful, high-profile battle in the Senate for a bankruptcy bill that ultimately benefited credit card companies. The law makes it more difficult for people to file for personal bankruptcy protection under Chapter 7.
“He was a crucial supporter of the law in that he paved the way for other Democrats to support it,” said Travis Plunkett, legislative director of the Consumer Foundation of America, a consumer group that opposed the bill. “Senator Biden provided a lot of political cover for the credit card industry because they wanted to show that the proposal had bipartisan support. He aggressively undermined the opposition to the bill.”
Over the past two decades, MBNA employees have given more than $200,000 to Biden’s Senate campaigns, more than workers from any other company.
Wade said Hunter Biden was hired by MBNA after working as a Commerce Department lawyer on Internet privacy and online commerce issues. “Hunter consulted for five years as an expert on these very same issues at a time of enormous expansion in online banking,” Wade said. “He was never a lobbyist for MBNA, and his work had absolutely nothing to do with the bankruptcy bill. Zero. Nothing.”
Hunter Biden also lobbied for Napster, the music-sharing Web site that ran afoul of intellectual-property laws. Sen. Biden at the time was a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees laws governing intellectual-property rights.
Wade said Hunter Biden is careful not to approach his father when lobbying. Wade said the younger Biden does not share in revenue of other partners, so he does not directly benefit from their activities.
When he introduced him as his running mate, Obama said of Biden: “He has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn’t changed him.” But Republicans quickly attacked Biden’s connections to lobbyists.
“While Barack Obama decries Washington insiders and says that he detests lobbyists, Joe Biden is the model Washington insider with numerous connections to lobbyists and special interests,” Republican National Committee spokesman Danny Diaz said.
Wade defended Biden, saying he has been “as strong a supporter of ethics reform as the Senate has ever known, and his office follows all ethics laws right down to the letter.”
Bill Ayers: Unrepentant LYING Terrorist
August 27, 2008
In that Fox interview that Rich linked to, Ayers preposterously claimed that he and his fellow Weather Underground terrorists did not really intend to harm any people — the fact that no one was killed in their 20 or so bombings was, he said, “by design”; they only wanted to cause property damage:
Between October 1969 and September 1973, the Weather Underground claimed credit for some twenty bombings across the country, in which no one was harmed — save the three cell members who perished in a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970, when one of their creations detonated prematurely. Ayers claimed the fact that no other individuals were killed as a result of the Weathermen’s actions was “by design.”
In his autobiography, Fugitive Days: A Memoir, Ayers recalled, he posed the question: “How far are you willing to take that step into what I consider the abyss of violence? And we really never did, except for that moment in the townhouse.… I actually think destroying property in the face of that kind of catastrophe is so — restrained. And I don’t see it as a big deal.Right.
First of all, “that moment in the townhouse” he’s talking about happened in 1970. Three of his confederates, including his then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were accidentally killed when the explosive they were building to Ayers specifications (Ayers was a bomb designer) went off during construction. As noted in Ayers’ Discover the Networks profile, the explosive had been a nail bomb. Back when Ayers was being more honest about his intentions, he admitted that the purpose of that bomb had been to murder United States soldiers:
That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, “tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”
In fact, Ayers was a founder of the Weatherman terror group and he defined its purpose as carrying out murder. Again, from Discover the Networks:
Characterizing Weatherman as “an American Red Army,” Ayers summed up the organization’s ideology as follows: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”
Now he wants you to think they just wanted to break a few dishes. But in his book Fugitive Days, in which he boasts that he “participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972,” he says of the day that he bombed the Pentagon: “Everything was absolutely ideal. … The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.”
And he wasn’t singular. As I noted back in April in this article about Obama’s motley collection of radical friends, at the Weatherman “War Council” meeting in 1969, Ayers’ fellow terrorist and now-wife, Bernadine Dohrn, famously gushed over the barbaric Manson Family murders of the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, and three others: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” And as Jonah recalled yesterday, “In appreciation, her Weather Underground cell made a threefingered ‘fork’ gesture its official salute.” They weren’t talking about scratching up the wall-paper.
A Weatherman affiliate group which called itself “the Family” colluded with the Black Liberation Army in the 1981 Brinks robbery in which two police officers and an armed guard were murdered. (Obama would like people to believe all this terrorist activity ended in 1969 when he was eight years old. In fact, it continued well into the eighties.) Afterwards, like Ayers and Dohrn, their friend and fellow terrorist Susan Rosenberg became a fugitive.
On November 29, 1984, Rosenberg and a co-conspirator, Timothy Blunk, were finally apprehended in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. At the time, they were actively planning an unspeakable bombing campaign that would have put at risk the lives of countless innocent people. They also possessed twelve assorted guns (including an Uzi 9 mm. semi-automatic rifle and an Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun with its barrel sawed off), nearly 200 sticks of dynamite, more than 100 sticks of DuPont Trovex (a high explosive), a wide array of blasting agents and caps, batteries, and switches for explosive devices. Arrayed in disguises and offering multiple false identities to arresting officers, the pair also maintained hundreds of false identification documents, including FBI and DEA badges.
When she was sentenced to 58 years’ imprisonment in 1985, the only remorse Rosenberg expressed was over the fact that she and Blunk had allowed themselves to be captured rather than fighting it out with the police. Bernadine Dohrn was jailed for contempt when she refused to testify against Rosenberg. Not to worry, though. On his last day in office, the last Democrat president, Bill Clinton, pardoned Rosenberg — commuting her 58-year sentence to time-served.
These savages wanted to kill massively. That they killed only a few people owes to our luck and their incompetence, not design. They and the Democrat politicians who now befriend and serve them can rationalize that all they want. But those are the facts.
A Quebec think-tank with a blue-chip business board of directors has waded into one of the most controversial issues in Canadian politics by coming out in favour of bulk water exports.
“Large-scale exports of fresh water would be a wealth-creating idea for Quebec and for Canada as a whole,” the Montreal Economic Institute said Wednesday. “It is urgent to look seriously at developing our blue gold.”
Indeed, Quebec could generate $65-billion a year in gross revenue if it were to export 10 per cent of the one trillion cubic metres of “renewable fresh water” available to it each year, according to an MEI research paper, which was prepared by Marcel Boyer, the organization’s chief economist and vice-president.
That’s based on a price equal to 65 cents a cubic metre that it currently costs to desalinate sea water, which, the paper said, will ultimately determine the commercial value of fresh water and profitability of the spending on infrastructure that would be required.
Even if the province were to charge a royalty of just 10 per cent on such exports, this would bring it $6.5-billion a year in income, the paper said, about five times the dividend currently paid by Hydro-Québec.
The MEI released its research paper at a time when the debate about water is again on the boil.
Just last Wednesday, the Canadian Press revealed that Environment Canada had warned in a draft internal report last December that the country’s supplies of fresh water are not as plentiful as once thought and that shortages threaten to pinch the economy and pit provinces against each other.
As well, the city of London, Ont., recently voted to ban sales of bottled water in city buildings, arenas, community centres and possibly even golf courses.
The wider issue of bulk water exports from Canada has cropped up regularly in the past 40 years, with a number of schemes proposed by various companies over the years. All have met with controversy and all have been shot down.
However, Liberal leader Stéphane Dion alleged a year ago – provoking denials from the federal government – that there have been secret talks between Ottawa and Washington about water sales to the United States, areas of which are growing increasingly parched.
As well, a research paper commissioned by the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto and released last September warned that Canada remains vulnerable to such diversions of its water, despite repeated assurances to the contrary from the federal government.
The Ottawa-based Council of Canadians, headed by Maude Barlow, has campaigned vigorously against what it calls the commoditization and commercialization of fresh water.
The council’s national water campaigner, Meera Karunananthan, took issue with the MEI’s research paper.
“I think it’s absurd to suggest that you can potentially export such large quantities of water … out of Quebec for that not to have an environmental impact,” she said in a telephone interview, stressing that, “It will have an environmental impact.”
She noted that it contradicted the Environment Canada draft report, which Canadian Press obtained under the Access to Information Act.
Ms. Karunananthan also expressed concern that the institute might be able to influence Quebec Premier Jean Charest, who, she said, “expressed an interest in bulk-water exports several years ago.”
Mr. Boyer was not immediately available for comment. He was taking part in a lunch-time debate on water in Montreal organized by the MEI.
The institute bills itself as an independent, non-partisan, non-profit body that takes part in public policy debates in Quebec and Canada “by suggesting wealth-generating reforms, primarily on matters of taxation, regulation, health care and education.”
Its 14-member board of directors is drawn mostly from corporate Quebec and includes Canam Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Marcel Dutil, RBC Capital Markets vice-chairman Jean-Pierre Ouellet, Reitmans (Canada) Ltd. president Jeremy Reitman, and former National Bank of Canada president Léon Courville.
The MEI’s research paper acknowledges that water exports are a contentious issue, but argues that ways around the controversy should be found.
“Water clearly is a resource that is essential to life, and turning it into a business may arouse fears that it could one day be overexploited,” the paper says. “But these fears can be calmed if a legal and regulatory framework is established. Regardless of the fuss, it is not necessary to prohibit trade in water.”
What is more, it says, determining a competitive price for water could be a “major incentive” for its “more efficient and economical” use both in areas where it is abundant and regions where it is scarce.
What Hillary didn’t say: Deja vu, all over again
August 27, 2008
In terms of accomplishing what it needed to accomplish, sure, Hillary Clinton’s speech was a home run, a grand slam, a tape-measure shot across Waveland Avenue (look that up, and without a link!).
But I can’t help but feel the same feeling I’ve felt watching lots of her speeches, and believe me, I have. It could have been a lot more.
I strove to watch this thing from the point of view of one of her supporters – the one in five of her primary-season voters – who not only did not vote for but actively does not like Barack Obama. Who are these people?
They may be immature politically. And they are. I have made my views on that clear. But they aren’t stupid. They know John McCain has pledged to put anti-abortion judges on the bench. They know John McCain has moved to the right on taxes and drilling and loads of things. They are well aware of all the logical and rational reasons that they shouldn’t be flirting with voting for John McCain, but they’re thinking about it anyway.
Did this speech persuade them? I’m honestly not sure. For all her general avowals in Obama’s behalf, there were a few specific things she did not do in the speech.
First, she didn’t vouch at all for Obama’s character. She didn’t say anything like, “I have served in the Senate with this man, and I competed with him on the campaign trail for nearly two years. And as heated as things got sometimes, I can tell you that he is a person of profound judgment and decency and heft who will be a great leader,” or something along those lines. Establishing that she had some degree of personal affinity for the nominee would have hit the Pumas in the breadbasket. She chose not to do it.
Second, she didn’t say anything about Obama’s ability as commander-in-cief. I’d argue she was under a special obligation to do this, at the very moment when McCain is running an ad using her famous quote from February in which she said that she and McCain brought a lifetime of experience to the job of leading America in the world, while Obama had a speech he gave in 2002. I honestly thought that she would reference that ad specifically and say something like, “Well, I’m Hillary Clinton, and I do not approve that message.”
Imagine the applause. But she left all that hanging. And indeed the statement the McCain campaign issued immediately after the speech drove this point home, pointing out that Clinton had said nothing about Obama’s ability to be the commander-in-chief. And I have to think the omission was conscious.
Third, it was interesting to me how she articulated the stakes of people opposing Obama. “I want you to ask yourselves,” she said. “Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for” various unfortunate citizens she’d discussed previously. That was the traditional “invisible people” trope she used often during the primaries.
Well, that was her trope, but it wasn’t Obama’s, and it just struck me as an odd way to make the argument for why any Democrat just has to vote Democratic instead of voting Republican. You have to vote Democratic because you don’t believe in starting hideous wars of choice; because you care what the rest of the world thinks of us; because you don’t want to let one of America’s great cities die from incompetence and neglect; because you honor and cherish the constitution; because you believe that government agencies should do what they are professionally assigned to do, and not conduct ideological witch hunts; because you want a government that answers to the people and doesn’t manipulate them and strike fear into them.
Clinton instead cited: jobs going overseas, oil company profits and the need to build a green economy. Look, these are important things. But they are focused-grouped things, and they are at this point practically throw-away lines. She did not, to my thinking, drill down to the kinds of specifics that would punch liberal women (and some men) – the people who are here in Denver and were raptly watching – in the stomach and make them understand, “Wow, maybe I really am being kinda stupid here.”
She also didn’t really attack McCain very hard. George Bush’s name was mentioned just once. About one-eighth of the speech was devoted to McCain. And she just didn’t say that Obama is ready for the Oval Office, which is a big part of her backers’ opposition to him.
She’s getting great reviews tonight, as I’m writing, and I can understand why. Cable television will probably quiet down on the disunity meme for a while. There were plenty of positive sound bites.
But I will bet anyone my mortgage: in one or two weeks, some polls will come out, and the TV pundits will marvel, “So that barn-burning Hillary Clinton speech didn’t create party unity after all.” She left too much unsaid tonight. And the unity, I still think, will come, but it will come in October. And it will come more because of him than her. But in the short term, she did at least manage to change a negative narrative – at least for 24 hours, until her husband speaks, which is the next drama.
In the end, it was scarcely a declaration of support for Barack Obama at all. Hillary Clinton may have mentioned his name ten times - and uttered the mandatory words (”he is my candidate”) - but her pledge of undying commitment was to her party.
It was necessary, she said, to get a Democrat back in the White House and (by implication) he is the Democrat we’ve got. She said virtually nothing about Obama’s capacity to lead the nation.
In effect, she expressed the hope that he would follow her programme and priorities in office. She followed the script of the Convention which is that John McCain would be “four more years” of the Bush administration but she preceded it with the words, “John McCain is my colleague and my friend” which made the dismissal of him sound hollow.
Hillary’s real objective in this speech seemed to be to secure her place as a figure in the history of the fight for women’s rights. That role, she seemed to suggest, transcended the petty business of running for the presidency.
Perhaps most ominously for the Obama camp, her peroration repeated the refrain, “Keep going, keep going, don’t ever stop. We’re Americans - we’re not big on quitting.”
This lady is not for quitting either. This speech was about her and her future. And it was a showstopper.
