J's Cafe Nette

Archive for July 25th, 2007

With dwindling finances and many of his staff resigning I’m beginning to wonder how much longer John McCain will stay in the presidential race.

This Wall Street Journal report [Subscription may be required.] says McCain’s media team has quit.

Sen. John McCain’s well-known media team has resigned, an indication that his campaign shake-up is continuing to backfire and imperiling the Arizona Republican’s presidential candidacy.

Political ad-makers Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, veterans of President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns, on Monday emailed the new campaign manager — lobbyist and longtime McCain adviser Rick Davis — to say that they were quitting. The two men told friends they had considered leaving for days, as they hadn’t been paid and the campaign’s financial straits raised questions of when and how much they would be.

Since Mr. McCain accepted the resignations of former campaign manager Terry Nelson and chief strategist John Weaver two weeks ago, and put Mr. Davis in charge, more than a dozen senior staffers have left from the headquarters in northern Virginia as well as state offices in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — all states with early nominating contests. Several fundraisers have cut their ties to the campaign, which reported a debt at the end of the second quarter.

Now the loss of the Schriefer-Stuart media team is considered a new blow, Republicans strategists say. The McCain campaign had long planned to begin running ads this fall in early-contest states; those plans are at risk given Mr. McCain’s debt, compounded now by the difficulty of getting donors to invest in a troubled campaign.

A blind man can see this campaign is in deep trouble and is going nowhere. Instead of incurring more debt the Senator should call off his quest for president as no one seems to be supporting him.

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When Bernie Sanders is against you, you know you have a problem.

Virtually all of Sen. Russ Feingold’s Democratic colleagues share his displeasure with President Bush.

But so far, only a handful seem prepared to even consider supporting his push for a nonbinding measure to censure Bush — an action that is forcing Democrats to choose between expressing their dissatisfaction with an unpopular president and getting hammered for supporting yet another symbolic resolution while key national issues go unaddressed.

“I do think it would behoove us to put some pressure on the president to start listening to what is going on in the country,” said freshman Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “But I came here to get stuff done — not to vote on procedural motions.”

“I really don’t know if there is any appetite for [censure] in the Senate,” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), one of three co-sponsors of a Feingold censure last year rebuking the Bush administration for its warrantless domestic surveillance program.

“There is a lot of anger and frustration [here],” Kerry said, “but I am not sure it’s gravitated towards that.”

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has called Bush the “worst president in the modern history of America,” would not definitively say he’ll support Feingold’s measure.

Story

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Every one identified helps bring comfort and possibly closure to their families.

DNA experts have identified the remains of a 42-year-old brokerage executive who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and the medical examiner’s office announced the discovery of 35 new human bone fragments in an area near ground zero.

The latest Sept. 11 victim to be identified, Edward Ryan, of Scarsdale, N.Y., was a vice president of Carr Futures with an office on the 92nd floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

His remains were found while sifting materials from a ramp once used to get to ground zero, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner. The ramp was dismantled several months ago as construction at the site progresses.

Ryan died along with 68 co-workers after apparently being trapped by debris that clogged stairwells in the burning tower that was hit by American Airlines Flight 11.

The families of 13 other Carr employees are still hoping the remains of their loved ones might be identified.

Story here.

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Since the infamous YouTube gaff by Obama on Monday night things have been heating up between the Clinton campaign and Obama’s.

In separate interviews with the Quad-City Times today, Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tangled over Obama’s statement at the YouTube debate Monday that he would be willing to meet in the first year of his presidency with the leaders of countries antagonistic to the United States.

Clinton called Obama’s comments “irresponsible” and “naive.”

Obama countered by accusing the Clinton campaign of hatching a “fabricated controversy” and suggested that her position put her on the same track as the Bush administration.

This campaign that has dragged on for so long now is beginning to show the rough edges around the leaders of the pack.

I wonder what it will be like by the end of the primary season sometime next year?

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Isn’t this exciting?

Mayor Bloomberg insists he’s not running for President, but he has put a provocatively named mike2008.com Web site on the Internet.

It links directly to Bloomberg’s recently relaunched personal Web site, mikebloomberg.com, where Hizzoner keeps the public posted on the causes he’s supported in business, philanthropy and government.

Bloomberg spokesman Robert Lawson said the mayor’s use of mike2008.com has no connection to speculation he may run for President next year.

“The Web administrators control a number of Bloomberg-specific [addresses] to prevent cyber-squatters and redirect users to mikebloomberg.com,” Lawson said.

Other Web addresses – such as mbloomberg.com, michaelbloomberg.com and mike2007.com – also link to the mayor’s site.

Lawson said the mayor decided to link all those addresses because he wanted to make sure anyone looking for information about him got to his site.

Bloomberg’s decision in May to relaunch mikebloomberg.com, which was used for his 2001 and 2005 mayoral campaigns, fed chatter about his possible presidential ambitions. Then last month, Bloomberg switched his party registration from Republican to independent.

Here

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I guess someone thinks a man’s word is everything. I know you’re going to say that they’re not the first to change after being confirmed and you’re right but that means they’re all alike. I don’t believe that.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) plans to review the Senate testimony of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito to determine if their reversal of several long-standing opinions conflicts with promises they made to senators to win confirmation.

Specter, who championed their confirmation, said Tuesday he will personally re-examine the testimony to see if their actions in court match what they told the Senate.

“There are things he has said, and I want to see how well he has complied with it,” Specter said, singling out Roberts.

The Specter inquiry poses a potential political problem for the GOP and future nominees because Democrats are increasingly complaining that the Supreme Court moved quicker and more dramatically than advertised to overturn or chip away at prior decisions.

Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who served as chairman during the hearings, said he wants to examine whether Roberts and Alito have “lived up” to their assurances that they would respect legal precedents.

Judicial independence is “so important,” Specter said, but an examination could help with future nominations. “I have done a lot of analyzing and have come to the conclusion that these nominees answer just as many questions as they have to.”

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a Judiciary Committee member who voted against both nominees, said a review “could lead us to have a different approach.” He said senators need to be “more probing” with their questioning of nominees.

“Certainly Justice Roberts left a distinct impression of his service as chief justice. And his performance on the court since, I think, has been in conflict with many of the statements he has made privately, as well as to the committee,” said Durbin, who was unaware of Specter’s idea.

“They are off to a very disturbing start, these two new justices. I am afraid before long they will call into question some of the most established laws and precedents in our nation.”

Story

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Seems to be working just fine.

Standing on the south bank of the Fraser River a stone’s throw from the Vancouver International Airport, Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi motions toward the frenetic activity at the Olympic speed skating oval construction site. “This exercise is about as valuable an experiment as I could have done in my academic career,” he says, pulling his Lee Valley Tools baseball cap tight to his black wire rim glasses to ward off the late June sunshine.

The project he’s describing, built as part of the oval site, is the Richmond Thermal Energy Network. Using the waste heat from the creation of ice at the Olympic venue, it’s one of the region’s biggest alternative energy projects.

“Ordinarily you build an ice rink, and to make the ice you have to reject a lot of heat,” explains the affable, Iranian-born UBC professor who’s also associate director of the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “Just like the back of your refrigerator. Cool inside the icebox, warm outside the icebox.”

The reflected heat that would otherwise be lost will be pumped to new apartments to be built around the oval. The Offsetters Carbon Neutral Society, a two-year-old Vancouver-based non-profit that Dr. Dowlatabadi co-founded, is instrumental in the project’s development. And the society’s involvement with the oval project is being paid for partly by people who want to cancel out the considerable carbon pollution they put into the atmosphere every time they step on an airplane. It’s a model scheme that typifies the new, but exploding, industry built on the concept of carbon offsets.

A carbon offset is a monetary investment in a project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to the measured amount of a polluting activity. Individuals wanting to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle pay a fee to an offsetting company, which in turn invests that money in projects that either remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or result in less greenhouse gas expelled at source. For industry it often makes economic sense to purchase offsets rather than reduce emissions because it is immediately possible and often the cheapest alternative. Proponents of carbon offsetting argue it signals the beginning of assigning a monetary value to the environment. Any sort of acknowledgement of the impact of individual and corporate greenhouse gas emissions is invaluable, they say, as we move toward an uncertain future of global warming

Story

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Presidential candidate John Edwards’ wife Elizabeth is giving up tangerines to do her part to help global warming.

The politics of global warming got very concrete, and oddly difficult, in a meeting with local environmentalists in the coastal town of McClellanville today, where Elizabeth Edwards raised in passing the importance of relying on locally-grown fruit.

“We’ve been moving back to ‘buy local,’” Mrs. Edwards said, outlining a trade policy that “acknowledges the carbon footprint” of transporting fruit.

“I live in North Carolina. I’ll probably never eat a tangerine again,” she said, speaking of a time when the fruit is reaches the price that it “needs” to be.

What about other citrus fruits, a good source of vitamin C which is the only vitamin our bodies can’t store?

I live in S.C. and I know I can’t buy citrus here, so I’ll take the trucked-in variety of fruit or I’ll drive to Florida to buy it.

Then I’ll plant a tree to erase my carbon footprint. 8-|

Seriously, this global warming trend is becoming a religion to some people.

I’ll still be buying orange juice and citrus fruits from the market and I won’t worry about it at all.

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Are you kidding me? This has got to be wrong.
Well people, if you want something outrageous to comment on, this story is it.

Twenty soldiers deployed to Iraq from this Army base were killed in May, a monthly high. That same month, the base announced a change in how it would honor its dead: instead of units holding services after each death, they would be held collectively once a month.
The anger and hurt were immediate. Soldiers’ families and veterans protested the change as cold and logistics-driven. Critics online said the military was trying to repress bad news about deaths. By mid-June, the base had delayed the plan.

[Its commander, Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby, was expected to decide Wednesday whether to go through with it.]

“If I lost my husband at the beginning of the month, what do you do, wait until the end of the month?” asked Toni Shanyfelt, who said her husband was serving one of multiple tours in Iraq. “I don’t know if it’s more convenient for them, or what, but that’s insane.”

Military historians and scholars say the proposal and its fallout highlight the tender questions facing the armed forces as casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan mount, and some soldiers and their families come to expect more from military bases than in past conflicts.

During Vietnam and Korea, the historians say, many bases were places for training soldiers and shipping them out, rarely to see them return, with memorial services uncommon. Now, in the age of the all-volunteer force, the base has become the center of community. The Army and other branches have fostered the idea that military service is as much about education, job training and belonging to a community as national defense.

“It wasn’t considered the Army’s business in any of the other wars to conduct these services,” said Alan H. Archambault, director of the Fort Lewis Military Museum, which is supported by the Army. “It was the hometowns of the soldiers that died that had these. Now I think the Army bases are trying to be the hometowns.”

Army officials said the idea to hold monthly services reflected a need to find balance between honoring the dead and the practical reality that the services take time to plan, including things like coordinating rifle salutes and arranging receptions for family members who attend.

“As much as we would like to think otherwise, I am afraid that with the number of soldiers we now have in harm’s way, our losses will preclude us from continuing to do individual memorial ceremonies,” Brig. Gen. William Troy, who was the interim commander at Fort Lewis at the time, wrote in an e-mail message announcing the policy in May.

SAD

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Almost a week ago I read this article in the Washington Times but, except for other blogs, I didn’t see it anywhere else. None of the major newspapers except the Washington Times picked up the story.

The thrust of the story is that while the Homeland Security bill was in conference for House-Senate reconciliation an important provision approved in the House by a 304-121 vote, called the “John Doe” provision, was taken out of the bill by the Democrats.

Congressional Democrats today failed to include a provision in homeland security legislation that would protect the public from being sued for reporting suspicious behavior that may lead to a terrorist attack, according to House Republican leaders.

“This is a slap in the face of good citizens who do their patriotic duty and come forward, and it caves in to radical Islamists,” said Rep. Peter T. King, New York Republican and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Republicans wanted the provision included in final legislation, crafted yesterday during a House and Senate conference committee, that will implement final recommendations from the September 11 commission.

Mr. King and Rep. Steve Pearce, New Mexico Republican, sponsored the provision after a group of Muslim imams filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against US Airways and unknown “John Doe” passengers. The imams were removed from US Airways Flight 300 on Nov. 20 after fellow passengers on the Minneapolis-to-Phoenix flight complained about the imams’ suspicious behavior.

Republicans persisted in what seemed like a long-shot, but a report in the Washington Post shows that the conference committee has reached a tentative agreement to keep the language in the bill, but you have to go to the twelfth paragraph to find it.

The last obstacle was cleared when negotiators crafted language to satisfy a Republican demand giving immunity from lawsuits to people who report suspicious behavior. The issue grew out of an incident last fall where six Muslim scholars were removed from a flight in Minneapolis after other passengers said they were acting suspiciously. The imams have since filed a lawsuit, saying their civil rights were violated.

I have no problem with the provisions of this bill and the news should be reported without proclaiming it to be a victory for one side or the other when an important provision would have been left out had it not been for Rep. Peter King, Rep. Steve Pearce, and Rep. John Boehner, all Republicans, who insisted this language remain. Kudos also go to Sen. Joe Lieberman who chaired the Senate part of the conference committee.

It should go without saying our citizens should be protected from mad mullahs and any other suspicious people from civil lawsuits just because they report their suspicious behavior.

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You have got to see this. Video It surely will make you laugh.

During an exchange this morning between Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Durbin misspoke when referring to the increased strength of Osama Bin Laden: “Obama, er, Osama Bin Laden – excuse me – is still at large.”

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Omar Fadhil of Iraq the model has written a post at Pajamas Media detailing his experiences while travelling to Amman, Jordan.

While I understand that Jordan might be skeptical of those arriving in their country from Iraq given the terrorist activity there, treating people like animals when you claim to be a civilized country is another thing.

In my opinion, that is exactly the treatment Omar and evidently many other citizens of Iraq have suffered when doing no more than attempting to have a Visa cleared for travel, or just trying to get home.

I was used to the mild discrimination the Jordanians have been practicing against Iraqis at the airport in Amman in recent years. Passengers on a flight coming from any airport in Iraq do not exit from an ordinary gate like other passengers. Instead we are taken by bus from the plane parked hundreds of meters from the terminal under the watch of guards armed with automatic guns. Then we pass through extra security X-ray, metal detection, and a body search – before they get to the passports counters, even though all of us had passed through the strictest airport security system on earth before getting on board.

But that’s OK and we got used to it.

But recently our Jordanian brothers came up with a truly outrageous practice of discrimination against Iraqis. All disembarking Iraqi passengers now are taken to special passport counters in a hall separated from the rest of airport facilities regardless of the origin of their flights or the airlines they came aboard. Attached to this hall is what Iraqis call “the prison”.

As Omar goes writes further he details the conditions experienced in “the prison.”

I would immediately say shame on Jordan with all of its technology and sophistication that they would resort to this type of treatment for anyone, let alone fellow Middle Easterners, but to one Iraqi travelling home with Omar, the thoughts were a bit different.

No, the guy sitting to my right objected. “They were mean to us and they hurt us, but if we do the same we’ll have sunk to their level. Let’s instead hope that one day our country will become a better place.”

Omar was right when he replied “Amen.”

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Ward Churchill has been relieved of his teaching duties at the University of Colorado.

The University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to terminate controversial professor Ward Churchill on Tuesday evening.

“This case was an example not of mistakes, but an effort to falsify history and fabricate history and in the final analysis, this individual did not express regret or apologize,” said Brown. “This is a faculty that has an outstanding reputation and this move today protects that reputation.”

I have personally found this man to be a black mark on an Institute of Higher Learning and I believe his (through his attorney) behavior following today’s hearing just continued his pattern of arrogance.

“It sends absolutely an atrocious message to the academic community all over the country, which is: if you stick your neck out and make politically inflammatory comments, your reputation will be destroyed by the university bent on destroying you and ultimately your tenured position will be forfeited,” said Lane. “To the public at large the message is: there will be a payback for free speech.”

Mr. Churchill needs to accept personal responsibility for the real reasons he was terminated.
Details of the allegations which aided the Board of Regents in their decision to release the Professor can be found here with a synopsis of this report at this site.

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