WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the era of Jim Crow.
The House on Tuesday evening passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow laws.
The House on Tuesday evening passed a resolution apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow laws.
The nonbinding resolution, which passed on a voice vote, was introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, a white lawmaker who represents a majority black district in Memphis, Tennessee.
While many states have apologized for slavery, it is the first time a branch of the federal government has done so, an aide to Cohen said.
In passing the resolution, the House also acknowledged the "injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow."
"Jim Crow," or Jim Crow laws, were state and local laws enacted mostly in the Southern and border states of the United States between the 1870s and 1965, when African-Americans were denied the right to vote and other civil liberties and were legally segregated from whites.
The name "Jim Crow" came from a character played by T.D. "Daddy" Rice who portrayed a slave while in blackface during the mid-1800s.
The resolution states that "the vestiges of Jim Crow continue to this day."
"African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow -- long after both systems were formally abolished -- through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty, the frustration of careers and professional lives, and the long-term loss of income and opportunity," the resolution states.
The House also committed itself to stopping "the occurrence of human rights violations in the future."
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The resolution does not address the controversial issue of reparations. Some members of the African-American community have called on lawmakers to give cash payments or other financial benefits to descendents of slaves as compensation for the suffering caused by slavery.
It is not the first time lawmakers have apologized to an ethnic group for injustices.
In April, the Senate passed a resolution sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, that apologized to Native Americans for "the many instances of violence, maltreatment and neglect."
In 1993 the Senate also passed a resolution apologizing for the "illegal overthrow" of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893.
In 1988, Congress passed and President Reagan signed an act apologizing to the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were held in detention camps during World War II. The 60,000 detainees who were alive at the time each received $20,000 from the government.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Flooding feared along U.S.-Mexico border from Dolly
By Joe Mitchell
BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Reuters) - Hurricane Dolly, which unleashed a fury of winds and rain on the U.S.-Mexico coastline, weakened to a tropical storm on Thursday but concern remained over flooding along the populous Rio Grande Valley.
The Bush administration declared 15 of the Texas counties hit hardest by the storm as a disaster area, allowing them to draw on federal funds for cleanup and rebuilding.
More than 200,000 customers of American Electric Power Co's Texas unit, which serves the affected area, were without power on Thursday morning.
Dolly, the first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic storm season to cross land, dumped up to 12 inches of rain in the first hours after coming ashore at the barrier island of South Padre Island on Wednesday, where it ripped off roofs and snapped trees.
Residents emerged from their homes and shelters to walk through streets littered with debris, toppled street lights and downed power poles.
"Everything is gone. Everything got wet," said Amber Acevado, who runs a flooring store on South Padre Island. "You stand here inside the store, you can see right through to the outside."
Many residents and tourists trapped on the island by the storm left after a causeway to the mainland reopened.
The storm missed most offshore drilling rigs and production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. crude oil prices rose earlier this week on worries of possible storm damage to offshore drilling rigs. But oil prices fell after the storm barely dented supplies, and hit a 7-week low of $123.62 a barrel on Thursday.
POST-DOLLY FLOODING FEARED
Dolly was downgraded to a tropical storm late on Wednesday and remained at that strength as it moved inland, dumping enormous amounts of rain on south Texas and northeast Mexico and with sustained winds of 50 mph (80 kmh). It was expected to weaken further to a tropical depression later on Thursday.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said it could produce total rainfall of up to 20 inches in some places. "These rains are very likely to cause widespread flooding," the center said.
The storm was centered near Laredo, Texas, the NHC said in a report issued at 11 a.m. EDT.
The full effect of the flooding might not be seen for days as the rainfall flowed into the Rio Grande Valley, home to more than 1 million people.
There were no immediate reports that levees along the Rio Grande had been breached.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has put 1,200 National Guard troops on alert in case they are needed to help cope with the storm's aftermath.
Mexico's navy on Wednesday recovered the body of a fisherman who had gone missing off the Yucatan Peninsula as the storm passed through.
The only other reported casualty from the storm so far was a 17-year-old boy who was seriously injured when he fell seven stories from a condominium balcony in South Padre Island.
(Additional reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio; Writing by Chris Baltimore, editing by David Storey)
(For latest U.S. National Hurricane Center reports, see http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/)
BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Reuters) - Hurricane Dolly, which unleashed a fury of winds and rain on the U.S.-Mexico coastline, weakened to a tropical storm on Thursday but concern remained over flooding along the populous Rio Grande Valley.
The Bush administration declared 15 of the Texas counties hit hardest by the storm as a disaster area, allowing them to draw on federal funds for cleanup and rebuilding.
More than 200,000 customers of American Electric Power Co's Texas unit, which serves the affected area, were without power on Thursday morning.
Dolly, the first hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic storm season to cross land, dumped up to 12 inches of rain in the first hours after coming ashore at the barrier island of South Padre Island on Wednesday, where it ripped off roofs and snapped trees.
Residents emerged from their homes and shelters to walk through streets littered with debris, toppled street lights and downed power poles.
"Everything is gone. Everything got wet," said Amber Acevado, who runs a flooring store on South Padre Island. "You stand here inside the store, you can see right through to the outside."
Many residents and tourists trapped on the island by the storm left after a causeway to the mainland reopened.
The storm missed most offshore drilling rigs and production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
U.S. crude oil prices rose earlier this week on worries of possible storm damage to offshore drilling rigs. But oil prices fell after the storm barely dented supplies, and hit a 7-week low of $123.62 a barrel on Thursday.
POST-DOLLY FLOODING FEARED
Dolly was downgraded to a tropical storm late on Wednesday and remained at that strength as it moved inland, dumping enormous amounts of rain on south Texas and northeast Mexico and with sustained winds of 50 mph (80 kmh). It was expected to weaken further to a tropical depression later on Thursday.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said it could produce total rainfall of up to 20 inches in some places. "These rains are very likely to cause widespread flooding," the center said.
The storm was centered near Laredo, Texas, the NHC said in a report issued at 11 a.m. EDT.
The full effect of the flooding might not be seen for days as the rainfall flowed into the Rio Grande Valley, home to more than 1 million people.
There were no immediate reports that levees along the Rio Grande had been breached.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has put 1,200 National Guard troops on alert in case they are needed to help cope with the storm's aftermath.
Mexico's navy on Wednesday recovered the body of a fisherman who had gone missing off the Yucatan Peninsula as the storm passed through.
The only other reported casualty from the storm so far was a 17-year-old boy who was seriously injured when he fell seven stories from a condominium balcony in South Padre Island.
(Additional reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio; Writing by Chris Baltimore, editing by David Storey)
(For latest U.S. National Hurricane Center reports, see http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/)
In Germany, Obama urges joint fight against terror
By DAVID ESPO and DAVID RISING, Associated Press Writers
BERLIN - Before an enormous crowd, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Thursday summoned Europeans and Americans together to "defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it" as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.
"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.
"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand," he said.
Obama said he was speaking as a citizen, not as a president, but the evening was awash in politics. His remarks inevitably invited comparison to historic speeches in the same city by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and he borrowed rhetoric from his own appeals to campaign audiences in the likes of Berlin, N.H., when he addressed a crowd in one of the great cities of Europe.
"People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time," he said.
Police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said the speech drew more than 200,000 people.
Obama's speech was the centerpiece of a fast-paced tour through Europe designed to reassure skeptical voters back home about his ability to lead the country and take a frayed cross-Atlantic alliance in a new direction after eight years of the Bush administration.
Republicans, chafing at the media attention Obama's campaign-season trip has drawn, sought to stoke doubts abut his claims.
In Die Welt, the German publication, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., said: "No one knows which Obama will show. Will it be the ideological, left-wing Democratic primary candidate who vowed to 'end' the war rather than win it, or the Democratic nominee who dismisses the progressing coalition victory as a 'distraction'? Will it be the American populist who has told supporters in the United States that he will demand more from our allies in Europe and get it, or the liberal internationalist hell-bent on being liked in Europe's salons?"
Obama met earlier in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a discussion that ranged across the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, energy issues and more.
Knots of bystanders waited along Obama's motorcade route for him to pass. One man yelled out in English, "Yes, we can," the senator's campaign refrain, when he emerged from his car to enter his hotel.
Obama drew loud applause as he strode confidently across a large podium erected at the base of the Victory Column in Tiergarten Park in the heart of Berlin.
He drew loud applause when he talked of a world without nuclear weapons and again when he called for steps to counter climate change.
Obama mentioned Iraq, a war he has opposed from the start, only in passing. But in discussing Afghanistan, he said, "no one welcomes war. ... But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success."
He referred repeatedly to the Berlin airlift, launched by the Allies 60 years ago when the Russians sought to isolate the Western part of the city. If they had succeeded, he said, Communism would have marched across Europe.
"Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun," the presidential candidate said.
Now, he said, the enemy is different but the need for an alliance is the same as he cited terrorism and the extremism that supports it. "This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it," he said.
BERLIN - Before an enormous crowd, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama on Thursday summoned Europeans and Americans together to "defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it" as surely as they conquered communism a generation ago.
"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand," Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.
"The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand," he said.
Obama said he was speaking as a citizen, not as a president, but the evening was awash in politics. His remarks inevitably invited comparison to historic speeches in the same city by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and he borrowed rhetoric from his own appeals to campaign audiences in the likes of Berlin, N.H., when he addressed a crowd in one of the great cities of Europe.
"People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time," he said.
Police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said the speech drew more than 200,000 people.
Obama's speech was the centerpiece of a fast-paced tour through Europe designed to reassure skeptical voters back home about his ability to lead the country and take a frayed cross-Atlantic alliance in a new direction after eight years of the Bush administration.
Republicans, chafing at the media attention Obama's campaign-season trip has drawn, sought to stoke doubts abut his claims.
In Die Welt, the German publication, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., said: "No one knows which Obama will show. Will it be the ideological, left-wing Democratic primary candidate who vowed to 'end' the war rather than win it, or the Democratic nominee who dismisses the progressing coalition victory as a 'distraction'? Will it be the American populist who has told supporters in the United States that he will demand more from our allies in Europe and get it, or the liberal internationalist hell-bent on being liked in Europe's salons?"
Obama met earlier in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a discussion that ranged across the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, energy issues and more.
Knots of bystanders waited along Obama's motorcade route for him to pass. One man yelled out in English, "Yes, we can," the senator's campaign refrain, when he emerged from his car to enter his hotel.
Obama drew loud applause as he strode confidently across a large podium erected at the base of the Victory Column in Tiergarten Park in the heart of Berlin.
He drew loud applause when he talked of a world without nuclear weapons and again when he called for steps to counter climate change.
Obama mentioned Iraq, a war he has opposed from the start, only in passing. But in discussing Afghanistan, he said, "no one welcomes war. ... But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO's first mission beyond Europe's borders is a success."
He referred repeatedly to the Berlin airlift, launched by the Allies 60 years ago when the Russians sought to isolate the Western part of the city. If they had succeeded, he said, Communism would have marched across Europe.
"Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun," the presidential candidate said.
Now, he said, the enemy is different but the need for an alliance is the same as he cited terrorism and the extremism that supports it. "This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it," he said.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Some on left target McCain's war record
Ben Smith
Mon Jun 30, 5:54 AM ET
The highest-voltage third rail of this presidential campaign may not be race, sex or age, but John McCain's military service.
McCain's campaign on Sunday issued a pair of outraged statements after retired general and Barack Obama supporter Wesley Clark said he didn't think that McCain’s service as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war was relevant to running the country. Obama has consistently praised McCain's service, and called him "a genuine American hero."
But farther to the left — and among some of McCain's conservative enemies as well — harsher attacks are circulating. Critics have accused McCain of war crimes for bombing targets in Hanoi in the 1960s. A widely read liberal blog on Sunday accused McCain of "disloyalty" during his captivity in Vietnam for his coerced participation in propaganda films and interviews after he’d been tortured.
"A lot of people don't know ... that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity," wrote Americablog.com's John Aravosis. "Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain's military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief?"
"Getting shot down, tortured and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience," Aravosis wrote in the blog post, titled "Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?"
McCain's camp responded sharply to the Americablog posting Sunday night.
"The American people know that John McCain's record of service and sacrifice is not a matter of debate. He has written about and discussed his service as a POW extensively — often in excruciating and painful detail," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers. "The American people will judge harshly anyone who demeans or attacks that service."
McCain has written repeatedly of his service, including a long 1973 magazine article and in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers." A Navy aviator from a military family, he was shot down on his 23rd sortie over Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967. His mission was to bomb a power plant in the North Vietnamese capital. Already suffering from broken limbs, he was beaten by a crowd before being taken to a POW camp. After being tortured there, he participated in some Vietnamese propaganda efforts.
"I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine," he later wrote.
But he later defied his captors by refusing to meet with anti-war delegations from abroad, he wrote, and also refused the most valuable special treatment he was offered: early release.
"I did not want to go out of order," he later wrote. He was finally released on March 14, 1973.
Obama and the Democratic establishment haven't challenged McCain's record. Indeed, even Clark's words came in response to a direct question from CBS's Bob Schieffer on the specific relevance of McCain's service to the presidency.
Democratic West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV in April cut a bit closer, suggesting that McCain's days as a fighter pilot were themselves a critique of his character.
"What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground?" he asked. "He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."
Rockefeller promptly abjectly apologized, praising McCain's "honorable and noble service to our country" and deploring his own "inaccurate and wrong analogy." His apology reflected a conventional political wisdom that McCain's heroism is too well established, and a climate of respect for soldiers too strong, for attacks on his service to do anything but backfire.
But Aravosis, who reiterated his criticism in an interview with Politico on Sunday night, isn't the only one to test this line of attack.
The newsletter CounterPunch published this April an article by Doug Valentine headed "Meet the Real John McCain: North Vietnam's Go-To Collaborator."
Valentine suggested McCain contemplated suicide — something the candidate has written about, and attributed in part to his guilt at not withstanding torture — because he was a "war criminal" whose bombs fell on civilians.
McCain, who sought — along with Sen. John F. Kerry — to debunk claims that Vietnam still held American prisoners into the 1990s, has been attacked in similar terms by leaders of POW/MIA movement, whom he and Kerry cast as charlatans.
That movement has produced the most outlandish attacks on McCain, including widely dismissed and unsubstantiated claims that McCain was not tortured and a smear casting him as a "Manchurian candidate."
But most of the attacks on McCain's war record are now coming from the left. In a HuffingtonPost.com blog, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Jeffrey Klein, called — in tones reminiscent of right-wing attacks on Kerry in 2004 — on McCain to release elements of his Navy record that the candidate has not made available to the public or the press.
"Some of the unreleased pages in McCain's Navy file may not reflect well upon his qualifications for the presidency," he wrote. As to why, Klein speculated that "from Day One in the Navy, McCain screwed up again and again, only to be forgiven because his father and grandfather were four-star admirals."
David Fenton, a prominent progressive public relations executive who works for MoveOn.org and other groups, also inquired to old anti-Vietnam war circles about details of McCain's Navy sorties, a source familiar with the inquiries told Politico. Fenton declined to comment on the inquiries, and a person familiar with them said they were unconnected to his work for MoveOn.
Some anti-war activists link McCain's current position on Iraq to his time in Vietnam.
"I wouldn't characterize anybody who fought in Vietnam as a war hero," said Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the theatrical anti-war group Code Pink. "In 23 bombing sorties, there must have been civilians that were killed and there's no heroism to that."
"Anyone who can't look back and admit how wrong it was to be in Vietnam and be killing civilians deserves to be challenged," she said, though she stressed that her group is more focused on McCain's present support for the war in Iraq than on his past.
Benjamin said she had her doubts about whether criticism of McCain's record could catch on, and she's not the only skeptic. Even Valentine, the CounterPunch author, said McCain's wartime experience could only be questioned "off-Broadway."
Others disagree, however, and the increasing buzz of e-mails and blog posts — the new equivalent on the left of what, in the 1990s, would have been stirrings on conservative talk radio — suggest that this line of attack won't go away, at least not from elements of the energized pro-Obama grass roots and from parts of the anti-war left.
A search of Obama’s community website, my.BarackObama.com, finds two posts calling McCain a “war criminal.”
Noam Chomsky, the linguist and activist, said in an e-mail that he thought Americans should question the relevance of McCain's torture in an unjust war to his campaign.
"The questions could scarcely even be understood within the reigning intellectual and moral culture — though I don't doubt that much of the population would understand," Chomsky said.
And Aravosis was unapologetic about his charge of "disloyalty," citing the similar charges levied at Kerry from the right in 2004.
"McCain is running for president of the United States, not the student council. He should stop feigning shock and outrage and start answering some very legitimate questions about his character and his experience," he said. "Well, the Republicans sported Band-Aids to mock John Kerry's medals from Vietnam. They mocked his injuries in war."
"McCain isn't being mocked, he's being questioned," he said.
For now, that is a minority view on the left. Democrats took from the Vietnam era the lesson that they should not attack soldiers' service, and McCain's Senate colleagues of both parties — including Obama — have expressed deep respect for his service and his suffering. He also worked after the war to heal some of its open wounds, winning the unexpected appreciation of some anti-Vietnam war stalwarts, who are now damping down the attempts to attack his war record.
"I know and like McCain," said Tom Hayden, a former California state senator and prominent anti-war activist. "From my own perspective and that of many anti-war activists of that era, the fact that he bombed North Vietnam some 25 times, probably killing civilians, gets blurred with the facts that he suffered through that long prison ordeal, then also went on to promote diplomatic relations between the two countries."
"It's like asking a guy that served his jail term here — you'd say he's done his time so that's behind him," Hayden said.
Mon Jun 30, 5:54 AM ET
The highest-voltage third rail of this presidential campaign may not be race, sex or age, but John McCain's military service.
McCain's campaign on Sunday issued a pair of outraged statements after retired general and Barack Obama supporter Wesley Clark said he didn't think that McCain’s service as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war was relevant to running the country. Obama has consistently praised McCain's service, and called him "a genuine American hero."
But farther to the left — and among some of McCain's conservative enemies as well — harsher attacks are circulating. Critics have accused McCain of war crimes for bombing targets in Hanoi in the 1960s. A widely read liberal blog on Sunday accused McCain of "disloyalty" during his captivity in Vietnam for his coerced participation in propaganda films and interviews after he’d been tortured.
"A lot of people don't know ... that McCain made a propaganda video for the enemy while he was in captivity," wrote Americablog.com's John Aravosis. "Putting that bit of disloyalty aside, what exactly is McCain's military experience that prepares him for being commander in chief?"
"Getting shot down, tortured and then doing propaganda for the enemy is not command experience," Aravosis wrote in the blog post, titled "Honestly, besides being tortured, what did McCain do to excel in the military?"
McCain's camp responded sharply to the Americablog posting Sunday night.
"The American people know that John McCain's record of service and sacrifice is not a matter of debate. He has written about and discussed his service as a POW extensively — often in excruciating and painful detail," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers. "The American people will judge harshly anyone who demeans or attacks that service."
McCain has written repeatedly of his service, including a long 1973 magazine article and in his memoir, "Faith of My Fathers." A Navy aviator from a military family, he was shot down on his 23rd sortie over Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1967. His mission was to bomb a power plant in the North Vietnamese capital. Already suffering from broken limbs, he was beaten by a crowd before being taken to a POW camp. After being tortured there, he participated in some Vietnamese propaganda efforts.
"I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine," he later wrote.
But he later defied his captors by refusing to meet with anti-war delegations from abroad, he wrote, and also refused the most valuable special treatment he was offered: early release.
"I did not want to go out of order," he later wrote. He was finally released on March 14, 1973.
Obama and the Democratic establishment haven't challenged McCain's record. Indeed, even Clark's words came in response to a direct question from CBS's Bob Schieffer on the specific relevance of McCain's service to the presidency.
Democratic West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV in April cut a bit closer, suggesting that McCain's days as a fighter pilot were themselves a critique of his character.
"What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground?" he asked. "He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."
Rockefeller promptly abjectly apologized, praising McCain's "honorable and noble service to our country" and deploring his own "inaccurate and wrong analogy." His apology reflected a conventional political wisdom that McCain's heroism is too well established, and a climate of respect for soldiers too strong, for attacks on his service to do anything but backfire.
But Aravosis, who reiterated his criticism in an interview with Politico on Sunday night, isn't the only one to test this line of attack.
The newsletter CounterPunch published this April an article by Doug Valentine headed "Meet the Real John McCain: North Vietnam's Go-To Collaborator."
Valentine suggested McCain contemplated suicide — something the candidate has written about, and attributed in part to his guilt at not withstanding torture — because he was a "war criminal" whose bombs fell on civilians.
McCain, who sought — along with Sen. John F. Kerry — to debunk claims that Vietnam still held American prisoners into the 1990s, has been attacked in similar terms by leaders of POW/MIA movement, whom he and Kerry cast as charlatans.
That movement has produced the most outlandish attacks on McCain, including widely dismissed and unsubstantiated claims that McCain was not tortured and a smear casting him as a "Manchurian candidate."
But most of the attacks on McCain's war record are now coming from the left. In a HuffingtonPost.com blog, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Jeffrey Klein, called — in tones reminiscent of right-wing attacks on Kerry in 2004 — on McCain to release elements of his Navy record that the candidate has not made available to the public or the press.
"Some of the unreleased pages in McCain's Navy file may not reflect well upon his qualifications for the presidency," he wrote. As to why, Klein speculated that "from Day One in the Navy, McCain screwed up again and again, only to be forgiven because his father and grandfather were four-star admirals."
David Fenton, a prominent progressive public relations executive who works for MoveOn.org and other groups, also inquired to old anti-Vietnam war circles about details of McCain's Navy sorties, a source familiar with the inquiries told Politico. Fenton declined to comment on the inquiries, and a person familiar with them said they were unconnected to his work for MoveOn.
Some anti-war activists link McCain's current position on Iraq to his time in Vietnam.
"I wouldn't characterize anybody who fought in Vietnam as a war hero," said Medea Benjamin, a co-founder of the theatrical anti-war group Code Pink. "In 23 bombing sorties, there must have been civilians that were killed and there's no heroism to that."
"Anyone who can't look back and admit how wrong it was to be in Vietnam and be killing civilians deserves to be challenged," she said, though she stressed that her group is more focused on McCain's present support for the war in Iraq than on his past.
Benjamin said she had her doubts about whether criticism of McCain's record could catch on, and she's not the only skeptic. Even Valentine, the CounterPunch author, said McCain's wartime experience could only be questioned "off-Broadway."
Others disagree, however, and the increasing buzz of e-mails and blog posts — the new equivalent on the left of what, in the 1990s, would have been stirrings on conservative talk radio — suggest that this line of attack won't go away, at least not from elements of the energized pro-Obama grass roots and from parts of the anti-war left.
A search of Obama’s community website, my.BarackObama.com, finds two posts calling McCain a “war criminal.”
Noam Chomsky, the linguist and activist, said in an e-mail that he thought Americans should question the relevance of McCain's torture in an unjust war to his campaign.
"The questions could scarcely even be understood within the reigning intellectual and moral culture — though I don't doubt that much of the population would understand," Chomsky said.
And Aravosis was unapologetic about his charge of "disloyalty," citing the similar charges levied at Kerry from the right in 2004.
"McCain is running for president of the United States, not the student council. He should stop feigning shock and outrage and start answering some very legitimate questions about his character and his experience," he said. "Well, the Republicans sported Band-Aids to mock John Kerry's medals from Vietnam. They mocked his injuries in war."
"McCain isn't being mocked, he's being questioned," he said.
For now, that is a minority view on the left. Democrats took from the Vietnam era the lesson that they should not attack soldiers' service, and McCain's Senate colleagues of both parties — including Obama — have expressed deep respect for his service and his suffering. He also worked after the war to heal some of its open wounds, winning the unexpected appreciation of some anti-Vietnam war stalwarts, who are now damping down the attempts to attack his war record.
"I know and like McCain," said Tom Hayden, a former California state senator and prominent anti-war activist. "From my own perspective and that of many anti-war activists of that era, the fact that he bombed North Vietnam some 25 times, probably killing civilians, gets blurred with the facts that he suffered through that long prison ordeal, then also went on to promote diplomatic relations between the two countries."
"It's like asking a guy that served his jail term here — you'd say he's done his time so that's behind him," Hayden said.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Now Disembarking: Presidential Enthusiasm
Marine One in Raleigh, North Carolina.
No waves for a president with the lowest approval rating (26%) in US history.
6-20-2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Obama beats McCain in three swing states: poll
WASHINGTON (AFP) - For the first time, White House hopeful Barack Obama leads his Republican rival John McCain in three of the biggest battlegrounds of November's election, according to a new poll Wednesday.
The surveys by Quinnipiac University also found independent voters are opposed to defeated primary contender Hillary Clinton running as Obama's running mate on the Democratic ticket.
Another poll out Wednesday by Zogby had Obama leading McCain by 47 percent to 42 nationally, with a 22-point lead among all-important independents.
The Quinnipiac polls had Obama besting McCain 52-40 percent in Pennsylvania, 48-42 percent in Ohio, and 47-43 in Florida. All three states are crucial building blocks to an election triumph for either candidate in November.
In all three states, Obama leads McCain among female voters by 10 to 23 percentage points, but among men the two contenders are "too close to call," Quinnipiac University Polling Institute assistant director Peter Brown said.
"Finally getting Senator Hillary Clinton out of the race has been a big boost for Senator Barack Obama," he said.
Clinton beat Obama in the three states' Democratic primaries, although neither campaigned in Florida because of a scheduling row. Obama lagged particularly among working-class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"Senator Obama is certainly not out of the woods, but these results are a good indication that he enters the summer slightly ahead in the race to be the next president," Brown said.
The Quinnipiac surveys found that while most Democrats back Clinton to join Obama's ticket, clear pluralities of independent voters in all three states were against seeing the former first lady run as his vice president.
"If Senator Obama seriously is thinking about picking Senator Clinton as his running mate, these numbers might cause him to reconsider," Brown said.
"The people who really matter come November -- independent voters -- turn thumbs down on the idea. And, many say they are less likely to vote for him if he puts her on the ticket," he said.
The Quinnipiac polls also suggested that one in five voters see McCain's age as a reason to vote against him. At 72 in January, the Republican would be the oldest president sworn in to a first term.
"But overwhelmingly they don't see Obama's race as a factor at all -- indicating that Americans are either much less concerned with race, or just don't want to tell callers what they really think on the subject," Brown said.
The surveys by Quinnipiac University also found independent voters are opposed to defeated primary contender Hillary Clinton running as Obama's running mate on the Democratic ticket.
Another poll out Wednesday by Zogby had Obama leading McCain by 47 percent to 42 nationally, with a 22-point lead among all-important independents.
The Quinnipiac polls had Obama besting McCain 52-40 percent in Pennsylvania, 48-42 percent in Ohio, and 47-43 in Florida. All three states are crucial building blocks to an election triumph for either candidate in November.
In all three states, Obama leads McCain among female voters by 10 to 23 percentage points, but among men the two contenders are "too close to call," Quinnipiac University Polling Institute assistant director Peter Brown said.
"Finally getting Senator Hillary Clinton out of the race has been a big boost for Senator Barack Obama," he said.
Clinton beat Obama in the three states' Democratic primaries, although neither campaigned in Florida because of a scheduling row. Obama lagged particularly among working-class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
"Senator Obama is certainly not out of the woods, but these results are a good indication that he enters the summer slightly ahead in the race to be the next president," Brown said.
The Quinnipiac surveys found that while most Democrats back Clinton to join Obama's ticket, clear pluralities of independent voters in all three states were against seeing the former first lady run as his vice president.
"If Senator Obama seriously is thinking about picking Senator Clinton as his running mate, these numbers might cause him to reconsider," Brown said.
"The people who really matter come November -- independent voters -- turn thumbs down on the idea. And, many say they are less likely to vote for him if he puts her on the ticket," he said.
The Quinnipiac polls also suggested that one in five voters see McCain's age as a reason to vote against him. At 72 in January, the Republican would be the oldest president sworn in to a first term.
"But overwhelmingly they don't see Obama's race as a factor at all -- indicating that Americans are either much less concerned with race, or just don't want to tell callers what they really think on the subject," Brown said.
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