Lately CNN has damaged its reputation by keeping Lou Dobbs and his inane birther talk and anti-immigration rhetoric on air; refusing to air Media Matters ads critising Dobbs, as well as CNN and even refusing to air ads critical of the insurance industry. Rick Sanchez's smackdown today of an arrogant insurance industry shill shows what America is up against in trying to reform health care: hubris and greed.
Business Week reports the health insurers have already won.
Meanwhile President Obama's attempts to involve the Party of No in any sort of compromise suggests the "Gang of Six" are seriously watering down the proposed health care reform bill. As usual, middle class and poor Americans are the pawns - and the losers - in these cynical chess games between government and big business.
Smokescreens and attacks
Update: Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post: "...The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems." Hear, hear!
Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh has stooped to a new low in his hate-filled rhetoric, comparing Democrats to Nazis.
And the group calling itself "Freedom Works" has released an "August Recess Action Kit," which features more erroneous information about health care reform - apparently no fact-checkers there - and urges people to continue disrupting public forums and town halls. Mob violence already is in evidence in Florida and other venues.
Voices of reason
At Salon, Joan Walsh questions Republican and insurance company tactics, while Glenn Greenwald wonders about Limbaugh's Nazi references and GOP and media reaction today, compared to 2004, when MoveOn.org was pilloried after a statement about George Bush.
Media takes Clinton story and twists it every which way
An excerpt of Joe Conason's excellent Salon article about reaction to Bill Clinton's trip to North Korea:
"On display in the wake of his successful effort to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee is the purest and most virulent form of a disorder all too familiar to anyone who lived through the Clinton presidency.
"Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America -- a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.
"But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about "Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton." Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton "hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home." Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that "the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton" (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton's mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was "some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy." And not for the editors of the Huffington Post, who posted a very strange headline -- "Bill Upstages Hillary ... Once Again" -- on an Associated Press story that didn’t mention her at all."
"...Finally there are the "serious" commentators, most notably former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the former diplomat best known for disdaining diplomacy and rattling the atomic saber until he was mercifully relieved of public responsibilities. In him the syndrome’s most noticeable effect is a severe case of amnesia. On the pages of the Washington Post, he complained that despite "decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so." Leaving aside the question of whether this situation in any way fits that description, Bolton has clearly forgotten the Iran-Contra affair, when his colleagues in the Reagan administration, all the way up to and including the president, negotiated with Iran’s leaders to release hostages in exchange for deadly missiles -- violating statute and policy. He also seems to have forgotten how he tried to help cover up that outrage as an assistant attorney general."
Sarah Palin: Still lying; more dangerous. And now she's embraced Michelle Bachman! Talk about a dastardly duo!
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Really, such political, media and business shenanigans are enough to make one want to move to a deserted island...
I knew Jaballa Mater personally. When I was a UN correspondent, I was introduced to Jaballa by a mutual friend at the US-Arab Chamber of Commerce in New York. The friend asked me to take Jaballa shopping for presents for his family. I remember him purchasing a wallet and other gifts at the Cartier counter at Macy's. A group of friends accompanied him to dinner at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center and the waiter snapped our picture. Jaballa with his shock of grey hair and mustache was laughing, wearing a suit with his signature white silk fringed scarf draped around his neck. There were other dinners, always an eclectic group, whose livelihood or lives were rooted in the Middle East.
Jaballa was living in Switzerland at the time and didn't like to discuss Middle East politics; certainly not the minefield of Libyan politics, which had caused such grief for him and his family. Years later, I was dismayed to learn Jaballa had been kidnapped, while living in Egypt. Widespread speculation was that Egyptian security forces had turned him over to Libya, another victim of Qaddafi's thugs. Until reading Laila's piece today, I hadn't known Jaballa had been heard from at all during the last 19 years. It's possible he is still alive, although who knows in what condition, along with Qaddafi's numerous other political prisoners. Human rights seem to have been forgotten in the West's renewed quest for lucrative oil and business partnerships in Libya.
Another friend, Mansour Rashid Kikhia, the former Libyan Ambassador to the UN, was kidnapped from his hotel in Cairo in December, 1993. Kikhia had resigned his job at the UN and was head of the International Arab Jurists Association. Despite the intervention of the US government and the United Nations, no information about his fate has been forthcoming.
Many political prisoners died in a massacre June 29, 1996 at Abu Salim prison in Benghazi.
In December 2006, I wrote a poem, "Dead or disappeared" about these two men and other activists - and one special friend - I came to know.
Bright young thing
in New York watching
history unfold amidst chaos
key players crossed my path
some became friends
admired for their selfless courage
The last time I saw him
he took off his shoes
and put his feet on the table
at a UN press conference
so we could see the pattern of scars
calling card of the Shah's SAVAK*
He got our attention.
Two weeks later he was murdered.
The last time I saw him
he seemed a little drunk and flirtatious,
escorted by aides and guards
in an Amman hotel lobby
talking about an upcoming meeting
promising an interview
A sobering phone call followed:
felled on his front porch in a hail of assassin's bullets.
The last time I saw him
he was impassioned about
his human rights work
looking forward to an international conference
to expand the jurists' scope and focus
helping secure rights for all
Newspaper headlines reported his disappearance in Egypt;
UN and governmental inquiries produced no answers.
The last time I saw him
I took him shopping
for family gifts at Cartier
they snapped our picture at the Rainbow Room
and we went to a dinner party with friends
then he went home to Geneva
Vanished without a trace in Cairo;
more UN inquiries; no answers.
The last time I saw him
he told me he loved me
and kissed me goodbye
then boarded a plane to Amman
to do his father's bidding
and work in the family business
Less than five months later he was dead,
shot three times in the head.
For those still here
an obligation to tell their stories
remember what they held dear
the struggles and small victories
undying commitment to causes
greater than themselves
*Secret police during the reign of the Shah of Iran
Note that Qaddafi is spelled in a number of ways. At the UN, we spelled his name Muammar al-Qaddafi.
Photo of bas relief sculptures over a doorway in Amsterdam.