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Although Naomi Watts is a subject of continuing fascination, I can hardly believe her claim, in the role of Valerie Plame in the film “Fair Game,” that she was beaten up as a part of her CIA training at “the farm.” Things just don’t happen that way, certainly not to young American CIA aspirants.
There also seems to be a whiff of hyperbole in the acts of derring-do in Iraq by Naomi/Valerie, including contacting an Iraqi nuclear scientist who was later left high and dry with his family at a Baghdad bus stop – their exfiltration having been decommanded by the CIA because of an op-ed by husband Joe Wilson exposing the myth of uranium from Niger ordered by Iraq, and the subsequent attempt by forces in the Bush Administration to smear the ex-Ambassador and “out” his wife.
The clips of Administration officials, from George W. Bush on down, concerning “mobile labs,” “aluminum tubes” and “45 minutes” prep time for Saddam’s weapons, when shown in sequence, demonstrate just how much this was an exercise in marketing, not intelligence.
The verisimilitude to actual players is impressive. There is a weatherbeaten George Tenet, a rotund Karl Rove, and a spot-on Scooter Libby. Even the distinctive-looking Sean Penn, because of a thick mane of dark hair, bears a passing resemblance to Joe Wilson.
The film, like the earlier “The Good Shepherd,” which has more manifold distortions, is good cinematography. This shows that fiction is stranger than truth, and therefore more attractive to viewers.
Editor’s Note: Charles Cogan was the chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was this Division that directed the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He is now a historian and an associate of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

For a year now, Kazakhstan has chaired Eurasia’s regional diplomatic talk shop, called the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Given that the one-year rotating chair is about to change hands, it’s fitting to take stock of Kazakhstan’s performance as the first former Soviet nation to hold the position. Sadly, the consensus that I observed at a senior-level OSCE summit last week in Astana was that Kazakhstan’s stewardship was a success for the mere fact that it appeared to do no harm — there was no apparent backsliding in human rights among the 56 member nations. But that standard of success simply isn’t good enough. In fact, Kazakhstan did a lot less than it could and should have.
Kazakhstan won the chairmanship after much lobbying — member nations were nervous for the simple reason that Kazakhstan and almost no former Soviet nation had ever run a fair election, and arbitrating those elections is a primary OSCE function. Freedom House has long rated Kazakhstan “not free.” But Kazakhstan pledged to fairly fulfill OSCE duties, including serving as a moral authority.
As the summit on the frigid, wind-swept steppe came to a close last Thursday, one was reminded of a remark by the late Russian statesman Viktor Chernomyrdin: “We wanted something better, but got the same as we always do.” Given how far Kazakhstan has come economically in the last two decades, it is reasonable to ask if President Nursultan Nazarbayev, now known by law as the “Leader of the Kazakh Nation,” isn’t capable of meaningful political reform.
“This was,” a coalition of non-governmental organizations from OSCE member states concluded, “a summit without results.” Given the extraordinary effort and substantial resources the Kazakhs committed to hosting this summit, one can’t help wondering at the point of the exercise. Was it truly to re-affirm the noble, albeit dusty, principles around which the OSCE was formed? Or rather was it to provide a stage for Nazarbayev to flaunt himself as a 21st Century statesman? The gaping abyss between the liberal-sounding words parroted throughout the summit and the repressive actions taken by many of the OSCE leaders present at the summit made the group’s hard- fought final declaration ring rather hollow.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a special effort to meet with civil society groups on the margins of the summit. During this meeting, the wife of a jailed Kazakh newspaper editor Ramzan Yeseregepov asked Clinton whether she would raise her husband’s conviction (he was convicted for publishing “state secrets” in a dubious case) with Kazakh authorities. Clinton responded generally about the need for journalists to be free of the constant threat of prosecution. A Kazakh reporter then asked about the WikiLeaks release of classified State Department cables, which Clinton condemned as an illegal breach of security. After the meeting, a senior Kazakh official hissed at the wife of the jailed editor, “Didn’t you hear what Clinton said? Publishing state secrets is dangerous and wrong.”
Mixed and often troubling messages were in abundance during the Astana summit, and the odds for it having been a showcase of rights and freedoms were stacked at the outset. One early advocate of Kazakhstan getting the OSCE chairmanship was Evgeniy Zhovtis, a long-time local human rights defender. But Zhovtis was unable to attend the summit because he is serving a four-year prison sentence for vehicular manslaughter in a case fraught with procedural irregularities, and widely seen to be politically motivated. Zhovtis’ logic in supporting a Kazakhstan chairmanship was that it would compel, if not inspire, the country to perform better in the category of guaranteed citizens’ rights. Yet a Freedom House monitoring project has concluded that this unfortunately did not take place.
Over the last year, Kazakhstan continued to fail to decriminalize libel and cap penalties on civil libel actions. It continued to target independent newspaper editors and human rights defenders, and sidelined opposition political parties either by not registering them or maintaining prohibitively high thresholds for their entry into parliament. All of these are violations of the commitments it made in Madrid in 2007 in order to get the chairmanship. Moreover, in the year of its chairmanship, the Kazakh parliament approved legislation naming Nazarbayev the “Father of the Nation,” forever equating his name with the nation’s dignity, and according him and his family lifetime immunity from prosecution.
I heard some argue that all of this is in the past and no longer matters. But I think it matters very much. Kazakhstan in fact is less repressive than its neighbors, but that alone is not good enough. By striving to lead the OSCE, in which human rights are an integral raison d’etre, the Kazakhs set themselves to a high standard of behavior. Nick Clegg, the new deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom who represented his country at the summit, put it well. “In the 21st century, authority depends on moral leadership,” he said, going on to explain that Britain’s present government has instituted reforms, and suggesting that Kazakhstan might follow the U.K.’s example.
Kazakhstan put itself on the world stage last week. Next year, absent the OSCE chairmanship, Kazakhstan still will not shrink into obscurity. As a past chair, it ought to do much better in charting a course of freedom for its people. By doing so, Nazarbayev would do more to earn the title that his parliament bestowed on him.
Sam Patten is the senior program manager for Eurasia at Freedom House, which conducted a multi-year project in Kazakhstan monitoring the country’s compliance with its OSCE commitments.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

I grew up in Los Angeles, so the notion of living in or around snow was romantic — the thing of movies. Living in Washington, D.C. for the past several winters has proven to be an entirely different experience.
Don’t get me wrong, the calm quiet brought to my neighborhood by several feet of fresh powder blanketing the streets and sidewalks can make for some amazing photos or an impromptu snowball fight or two. But Republicans and conservatives have spoiled the Rockwellian images that I’d always associated with snow in my youth.
Like clockwork, every time even a few inches of snow fall, out come the conservative anti-science crazies. To them, cold weather proves what they already believe: that there is no global climate change.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
There is a very real difference between weather (what we experience outside over a short period of time) and climate (the study of weather over a relatively long period of time). Got that? When right-wingers tell you that a winter cold front or blizzard (short period of time) disproves global climate change (long period of time) they are either lying or shockingly misinformed.
Leading the anti-science idiocy is a host of Republican leaders and media conservatives, all with a history of denying the climate change reality.
Perhaps no one is in deeper denial than Senator Jim “in the recorded history of our family, we’ve never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship” Inhofe.
The Oklahoma Republican attacked former Vice President Al Gore, climate scientists and climate science this spring on the Senate floor saying, “We’ve heard a lot about [Gore]. He was the one who was actually assembling a lot of the science or so-called science, or creating the science, I should say, to support the position of those who believe that anthropogenic [gases] cause global warming.” Inhofe is not one to let the truth get in the way of a good smear. According to a 2008 report from MetOffice — the UK’s national weather service — “the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997.”
Even Senate Republicans who have acknowledged the existence of climate change can’t be trusted to help address the problem. Sure, Arizona’s John McCain and South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham have talked the talk in years past, but they have been AWOL on the issue ever since Obama entered the oval office and the ability to actually address the subject sans-Bush became a reality.
These politicians aren’t alone; Right-wing media outlets like Fox News have their backs.
Fox’s Sean Hannity adds to his extensive history of science denial each holiday season. Last winter the conservative found it absolutely hilarious that Commerce Secretary Gary Locke had “tunneled his way through two feet of snow in D.C.” to announce the proposed creation of a new Climate Service office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The very next day, Hannity was back at it, saying, “Global warming, where are you? We want you back” while discussing snowy weather.
Over on the network’s morning show, Fox & Friends, co-host Gretchen Carlson maintains her long-held passion for dismissing climate science. And co-host Steve Doocy is always there to add to the nonsense, making such idiotic statements as, “the weather is so rotten right now, and people are going, ‘How can there be global warming if it’s snowing and it’s fairly cold?’”
Then there’s the reigning king of right-wing radio, Rush Limbaugh, who never misses an opportunity to use cold weather to dismiss climate science, often attacking former Vice President Al Gore in the process.
When I hear news reports that forecast snowfall, I grimace. Not because I don’t love making a good old-fashioned snowman as much as the next guy. It’s the absurdity from conservatives that follows, which makes me cringe.
Global climate change is real, but with the GOP flat-earthers in charge of one chamber of Congress and right-wing media backing them up, don’t expect anything to be done about this threat any time soon.
Consider it this year’s lump of coal in your Christmas stocking.
Originally posted at Cagle.
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Karl Frisch is a syndicated columnist and progressive political communications consultant. He can be reached at KarlFrisch.com. You can also follow him on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube or sign-up to receive his columns by email.
Distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. syndicate. For information on carrying Karl’s columns, call Cari Dawson-Bartley at 800-696-7561 or e-mail cari@cagle.com.

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I don’t know why but I’m riveted by the fact that John Edwards was by his ex-wife’s bedside.
Before Elizabeth Edwards died, did she say, “Promise not to marry Rielle Hunter?” pointing out that there is historical precedent to this request since Thomas Jefferson’s wife asked her husband never to remarry upon her death. Did Elizabeth say, “I forgive you ?” Could she?
Did he say, which I’m privately hoping, “I’m really sorry and I loved you more than anyone else.” Will he speak at her funeral?
As the author of “Don’t Let Death Ruin Your Life,” I have seen how most people on their deathbed want closure in their relationships. In the past, people have sought it mostly from blood relatives–mothers, fathers even siblings–but more and more these days it is with ex-spouses.
There are no solid numbers addressing this trend, but if you do the math and calculate that at least a million people get divorced each year since the 1970s, it stands to reason that more and more exes will want to attend funerals–and more significantly–will grieve the loss.
Although they were technically separated and never divorced, John Edwards became persona non grata in Elizabeth Edwards’ household (infidelity and a child out of wedlock will do that). Yet both most likely wanted to honor what they did have. When one faces mortality, it is often easier for the couple to airbrush the blemishes of a relationship and focus on the parts that brought joy, laughter and love and not dwell on what caused pain and disappointment–especially when there are children involved.
At least at the funeral, John will not have to face any new spouse, which for many exes can be difficult terrain to navigate. Where do they sit? Should they come to the house after the funeral? Do you send condolence cards to them?
I can never forget how heartbreaking it was for me to observe how marginalized Joan Kennedy was at the funeral of Senator Ted Kennedy. All the accolades and support were channeled to his second wife, Victoria, and hardly anyone mentioned the mother of his three children who quietly attended the funeral.
How difficult it must have been for her to hear how Victoria was the love of Ted Kennedy’s life? Joan had spent 25 years with him, shared wedding china, holiday vacations, school recitals, medical hardships and campaign victories. They fell out of love but that didn’t mean that there hadn’t been love. Ted was also the only husband she ever had.
As her sister Candace McMurrey told ABC News, Joan was trying “not to intrude” at the funeral but to honor the life of her ex-husband and father of her children.
Intrude? That is an interesting word. Are you an intruder as the ex?
Joan was the mother of his children. And his wife for a significant part of his life.
In a refreshingly honest article, Lee Borden from the Alabama Law Center shared how difficult it is for the ex-spouse at the funeral of a loved one. “Even in the stormiest, most destructive divorce, there are still feelings there for the person who used to share your bed and your life,” he wrote. “And in the midst of grieving over the loss of my divorced spouse, I’m also grieving over the relationship as I wish it could have been.”
Borden goes on to suggest that the loss of an ex-spouse hurts more because “I’m forced to go back and relive the cruddy experience of my divorce and the unhappiness that led up to it.” Yes, there is bitter and sweet.
Nor does the ex-spouse usually get calls from friends, bouquets of flowers or a smorgasbord of food as the community arrives to pay respect to your loss. Usually it’s silence and you grieve alone. A part of your history has died.
And even if you are remarried, it is not a subject to bring up with the new spouse since why stir up jealousy or create problems or comparisons?
Of course, you can say that you are grieving for your children.
Even those with horrible divorces are surprised by the emotions that have following the death of a spouse. Sometimes hate can also connect them and that thread has been permanently cut.
People may think they’re breaking free of marriage when they leave but history has a way of putting invisible handcuffs on you and tying you to that relationship forever. Even more so if you have children.
Elizabeth Edwards tried valiantly to keep her marriage together because John Edwards was the love of her life. He was not the husband she may have wanted but he was the one she had.
His presence at the funeral and her bedside is a way of paying respect to that history. And honoring it.
I have no doubt that he will miss her.

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

This fall I was invited to cover the the Keep It Made In America Tour put on by the Alliance for American Manufacturing. I spent a week driving around Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, ejoying the fall colors and visiting small towns all along the way.
I live in Silicon Valley where in spite of the high unemployment — still 10.6% — it’s still pretty nice here, so the extent and especially breadth of the decline of so many cities and towns was a shock. Everywhere you go you see America’s infrastructure crumbling! Of course I know this has been going on, but when you actually come from somewhere that is still pretty nice and see it firsthand – and everywhere – you really see it.
As I drove around these states I saw pretty much the same thing in town after town. As you approach the town on the highway the first thing you encounter is what I will call the vulture circle that surrounds it. This is the circle of Wall Street-owned chains emulating the Wal-Mart model of sucking cash out of the area and sending it away to the wealthy elites who own … almost everything now. These are the national chains that are all the same in every town, all selling the same stuff, all made in China, all putting the local small businesses out of business.
As you drive into town the next thing you encounter is the circle of home equity extraction, with newer houses that have taken on big first and second Wall Street mortgages. These houses mostly look OK — except the foreclosures with the brown lawns and grass growing in the cracks in the driveway. This area has car dealers and strip malls that used to sell expensive cars or nice goods. These dealers and stores feasted on those “take money out of your house” refinancings or second mortgages. Now they have nail and hair salons or are just “for lease.”
As you get closer to the center of town you come to the areas of older houses, more of them boarded up than you want to see, with old, boarded-up stores on a few of the corners of the larger streets. Where there are still-occupied houses they have bars on the windows.
Finally you come to the old, crumbling downtown where there are many empty storefronts, some boarded, the lost dreams of the local small business-owners. Here and there you see, between the vacant lots, a few government buildings.
And then somewhere is what they always call “the old plant.” This is one or more closed-up, fenced-off, rusting old factories or mills. They are fenced off, with lots of broken windows, and maybe part of a building is falling down. This is where the people used to work but the jobs moved to Mexico or China.
Much of the country is like this now. So many of the older small towns, crumbling, the money sucked out by the Wall Street elite. The factories sold off, closed. The people can’t make a living, the towns can’t make a living, the country can’t make a living, the Wall Street elite making a killing.
You can see the process starting here in Silicon Valley, too. As you drive around this area you see that one of every four or five office or light-industrial buildings has an “Available” sign. The region has the same number of manufacturing jobs as it had when the “tech revolution” began. The rest have moved to China. We don’t make cell phones here. We don’t make flat-screen TVs here. We don’t make computers here. We certainly don’t make iPads here — even though Jobs is his name!
Even exclusive Palo Alto has empty storefronts on the main drag. (You know the economy is bad when the rug stores on University Avenue are actually going out of business!) It is even happening here. It will get worse.
In July Intel’s retired CEO and Chairman Andy Grove wrote an important opinion piece,
How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late, in which he warned,
Please take the time to read Grove’s entire piece.
The storm that created the rust belt is heading our way, and we need to pay attention. What will it take for American companies to create American jobs rather than jobs outside America?
This post originally appeared at Speak Out California.

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Originally published on December 16, 2007 at Truthout.org.
In recognition of International Human Rights Day, upcoming on December 10th.
Three years ago, on December 10, 2007, the social justice community in Rochester, New York commemorated the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The themes of the evening’s panel discussion were race and racism, and most of the attention was given to the shockingly high rate of black-on-black violence perpetuated by young men against other young men in this community. Although the discussion was occasionally contentious, most people in the room seemed to agree upon several things: 1) the problem is not unique to the upstate New York region and this issue is equally relevant in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and another half dozen cities across the United States; 2) the epidemic has something to do with the legacy of slavery; 3) structural and institutional racism perpetuate the problem by ensuring that most blacks who find themselves on the lowest rungs of the class ladder stay there, and 4) the responsibility for addressing the issue lies with both the individual and the community. Many people – both black and white – also shared concern that the extraordinary advances made by the Civil Rights Movement are being undermined on one hand by de-facto segregation, and on the other by legalized discrimination, the most visible form of which is racial profiling by law enforcement.
One member of the audience (who happened to be black, although I am a bit troubled that I feel compelled to note that) wondered openly whether the violence was a form of “pathology” unique to the black community, and many others asked for tools that they could apply in their own work with black youth. As I left the event, I found myself reflecting on these questions, and I came to the conclusion that the answers to both may revolve largely around a concept that, strangely, was absent from our collective discussion: power. Slavery – the institutionalized ownership of one human being by another – is arguably the most disempowering system ever created by humans. It is intended to degrade and humiliate to the point that a person no longer feels agency over his own life. Like other systems of injustice, its effects can run so deep that when the institution is removed, the sense of indignity continues for members of the formerly repressed group until there is an open and comprehensive addressing of past injustices and the pain caused by the systematic abuse. In the last 25 years, in countries recovering from severe oppression, “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” have been set up to accomplish these tasks. Peru, South Africa, Morocco and East Timor are just a few of the places where TRCs have helped their societies heal and have facilitated reform by acknowledging past wrongs and ensuring that the horrors of history will not be repeated.
Because there has been no significant attempt to deal with the history of slavery in this country, it is as though our collective mind has been asked to exist in a state of cognitive dissonance. There are no national monuments in the US to former slaves, although they exist for almost every other group who has sacrificed for the “vital interests” of the nation. As a country, we prefer to pretend that slavery never happened, or that it existed too long ago to be relevant to our lives today. This historical amnesia comes easier to some than to others, and it may be that those who have the hardest time reconciling some sense of injustice with the legal rights afforded to every American are young black men. They know that they should feel powerful – after all, they are young and living in the “world’s greatest democracy.” But for many there must also be (what I imagine as) a constant, gnawing sense of indignity whose source may be vague, and which is easily manifested in rage, aggression, and other substitutes for true empowerment. To a young, misguided and righteously indignant person, a gun equals power.
The truth is that violence is the opposite of real power. Where genuine power exists, force is not needed. But where power is perceived as unattainable, violence becomes seen as the only alternative for those with legitimate grievances. John F. Kennedy put it eloquently when he said “Those who make nonviolent revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” He understood that serious societal ills would not resolve themselves, and the question was not whether issues of racism and injustice would be addressed, but how.
In light of this, I offer that as individuals we can empower ourselves and inspire others to do the same by having a stake in the development of our communities and by “dropping our bucket” (to borrow from the work of Dr. Larry Hudson of the University of Rochester). We must become rooted, activated members of both our local communities and the larger society. We have to stop living in isolation; as if what happens “out there” is only worthy of attention when it directly affects our own lives.
Second, collectively, we must reframe the public understanding of power. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act, but to act in concert.” Today, in our consumerist, technologically dependent and self-focused society, that view could not be more important. It should be our first task to publicly promote this understanding of the concept of power-as civic engagement in the truest meaning of the term. This is necessary both to defy the conventional wisdom that armed force equals power and to spur us into a long-overdue dialogue, and perhaps even our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the legacy of our country’s most shameful history.
As citizens of the world’s self-proclaimed model democracy, by refusing to openly acknowledge the truth about our shared past and its present consequences, we are not just complicit in the pathology of an epidemic, we do all of humanity a disservice.
Boaz lived and taught in Rochester, New York from 2004-2008.

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Human Rights Day on December 10 marks the 61st anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration sets a standard for the way we treat one another around the world, challenges discrimination, and, more broadly, ensures respect for human rights.
As we mark Human Rights Day, much of the focus will be on those nations in Africa, Asian and the Middle East with the worst records on human rights. But it’s important to note that human rights violations occur everywhere.
For more than 36 years, the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of Cyprus have been violated as a result of the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the continuous military occupation of more than one-third of the island. Prior to the invasion, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots had co-existed peacefully for centuries. However, with the 1974 invasion, which was in violation of all rules of international legality, including the United Nations (UN) Charter, Turkey proceeded to occupy the northern part of the island and expel nearly all Greek Cypriot inhabitants from that region.
Ankara continues to pursue a policy of moving Turkish settlers to the occupied area in an effort to change the demographic composition of the island. The transfer of people by an occupying power of its own population to the area it occupies is considered a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. Illegal settlers now outnumber Turkish Cypriots by almost two to one.
The people of Cyprus are victims of human rights violations, a fact which has been affirmed by UN resolutions and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). In its judgment of the case Cyprus v. Turkey on May 10, 2001, the European Court of Human Rights found that there were massive and grave violations of 14 Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights concerning the missing persons and their relatives, the home and property rights of displaced persons and the living conditions of Greek Cypriots in the occupied northern part of Cyprus.
Currently, talks are underway between the President of Cyprus, Demetris Christofias, and the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community, Dervis Eroglu, to find a solution to the Cyprus Problem. The agreed framework for a solution is a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation, with a single sovereignty, single international personality and single citizenship and political equality as described in the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions and with its independence and territorial integrity safeguarded.
As we honor Human Rights Day, it is important to remember that the best solution for Cyprus is to restore and safeguard the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all Cypriots, including the right of return, the right to property for the refugees and the full and effective investigation of the fate of all missing persons.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Two years ago, Members of Congress were forced to take a very difficult vote on what the federal government’s response would be to the worst economic collapse in modern history. As apprehensive as we were to bail out the same banks responsible for the crisis, we were advised by leading economists that without immediate and decisive action, the country would be brought to another ‘Depression.’ Ironically, it was the Republican administration of President George W. Bush and Congress that together laid the foundation for a $700 billion program (which the CBO now estimates cost $25 billion) to bail out the financial services industry. While many economists have since concluded that the program did in fact stabilize the economy, many Americans opposed what they considered a bailout of the very same institutions and individuals who caused the collapse of the housing market and economic meltdown.
In fact, this bailout was one of the motivating factors that sparked the Tea Party movement, and many Congressional Republicans who voted for it now passionately condemn the program.
Now, in taking a hard line on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the Republicans are doubling-down on old policies, essentially asking the American people to support a $900 billion compromise that includes unconscionable tax bonuses for the ultra-rich (even though tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is at its lowest in almost 60 years). Although the economic stabilization program served a critical purpose, an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will cost the United States billions of dollars in lost revenue; add to the deficit; further exacerbate existing racial wealth gaps and income disparities; and divert federal resources from other initiatives that could stimulate economic development and help put Americans back to work.
I imagine that in the 112th Congress, the Republican majority in the House will attempt to pay for the tax breaks by cutting a variety of vital programs and services for America’s working class and disadvantaged populations – taking away from the “poor” to give to the “rich.”
The Republicans continue to claim that they want to cut spending and reduce the national debt. However, they are willing to blast a multi-billion dollar hole in the deficit, without paying for it, all to benefit the wealthiest Americans. The Republicans’ positions are utterly irreconcilable. We clearly see the values and priorities of Republicans, who have unduly delayed extending unemployment benefits for workers – who lost their jobs through no fault of their own – but vigorously advocate for a tax break for multimillionaire CEOs and Wall Street moguls.
In exchange for a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits the President’s compromise with Republicans includes a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Adding insult to injury, the deal also includes a renewal of the estate tax at 35 percent – with a $5 million exemption – along with other preferential tax rates for capital gains, dividends, and other investment income. It’s no surprise that Wall Street rallied after the President’s announcement. However, for the majority of Americans, a continuation of tax policies favoring the nation’s wealthiest Americans will have devastating socioeconomic impacts as well as grow the deficit.
As the country’s middle class has grown increasingly dependent on credit cards and loans to keep up with the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education, the wealth gap has grown ever larger. The nation’s richest top 1 percent of households has acquired nearly 50 percent of America’s financial wealth. Their investment income has yielded windfall returns, while for the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households, debt surpasses investments. Wealth, defined as what you own minus what you owe, allows people to start a business, buy a home, send children to college, and ensure an economically secure future. However, preferential tax treatment for the rich and other tax loopholes have allowed the nation’s wealthiest Americans to sustain record incomes as the rest of the country continues to suffer under rapid home foreclosures, crippling debt, unemployment, and financial uncertainty.
Consequently, the Census Bureau recently reported that the U.S. now leads Western industrialized nations in income disparities. The economic outlook for African Americans is exceptionally bleak. Across all economic indicators, African Americans have fared significantly worse. In fact, a recent study from Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) concluded that the racial wealth gap between black and white families has quadrupled, The study also reported that many African Americans now hold more debt than assets, and at least 25 percent of African American families had no assets to turn to in times of economic hardship. The study says the four-fold increase in the wealth gap reflects public policies, such as tax cuts on investment income and inheritances, as well as persistent discrimination in the housing, credit, and labor markets.
Indeed, when Members of Congress are presented with this compromise, we will be asked yet again to take a very difficult vote – a vote to concede on a fundamental principle held by many Democrats. Furthermore, many of the nation’s leading economists have concluded that tax cuts are not the most effective way to stimulate the economy. The past several years have disproved the notion that tax cuts for multimillionaires trickle down to create jobs for all Americans. While U.S. workers across all demographics have contributed to significant productivity gains, the middle class and poor remain on a treadmill of debt and stagnant wages as most of the nation’s wealth flows to the richest top 1 percent. Public policies have and continue to play a critical role in sustaining the wealth gap and income disparities, and they must play a role in closing them. One thing is for certain: extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would ensure that the nation’s poor and working class continue to pay the price.
When progressives make such arguments, we are accused of fomenting class warfare. However, after observing that a secretary in his office paid a far greater percentage of income in taxes than he did, Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest people, famously remarked: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Charles Rangel used to be my congressman.
I was born and raised in the Bronx and attended John F. Kennedy High School, which is located in the borough’s southwestern corner, a neighborhood called Marble Hill. Once upon a time Marble Hill was part of Manhattan, but in 1895 the city fathers had an army of workers move the Harlem River to create a faster shipping lane to the Hudson; they built a canal that severed Marble Hill from Manhattan, turning it into a small island. However, politically it remained part of Manhattan, even after it became physically attached to the Bronx in 1914 when a branch of the river was filled in.
I voted for the first time in 1992 while living in Marble Hill, a few blocks from my old high school. I defiantly refused to vote for any major party candidates in that election (a position I still hold to with some firmness), instead casting ballots for Ross Perot as president and an assortment of fringe candidates in the local elections. Of course no one I threw my support behind won anything. Instead, for better and for worse, the nation got Bill Clinton. And in the House I would continue to be represented by Charles Bernard Rangel.
Even then Rangel was already an institution in New York. He’d accomplished the unthinkable by unseating Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. for the right to represent Harlem in 1970. Powell himself was a living monument, a larger than life character who had outmaneuvered Tammany Hall to become the first African American to represent New York State in Congress, and only the second in America since the end of Reconstruction (1877). When Rangel bested him, it was in the shadow of a corruption scandal. Once an important trailblazer, Powell had devolved into a slacker who spent most of his time in the Caribbean, and an embezzler who, among other things, funneled congressional money to his third wife through a no-show job while she was living in Puerto Rico. In light of such scandals, the House voted not to seat Powell in 1969. He sued and eventually won in the United States Supreme Court; Powell might be a crook, the Court ruled in Powell v. McCormack, but Congress had no right to refuse seating a duly elected official.
By 1970, Rangel was a well-connected, 40-year-old lawyer and politician who had come up the hard way. A Harlem native, son of a black mother and absent Puerto Rican father, young Rangel had been a “juvenile delinquent,” dropping out of school at age 16 and getting into minor scrapes with the law. However, he turned his life around when he joined the army at 18 and soon found himself on the front line during the Korean War. He served in the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion in the 2nd Infantry Division; although President Truman had ordered the military integrated in 1948, the same year Rangel had signed up, desegregation was slow to come about. Rangel saw heavy action against the Chinese Army, watched his friends die, was injured by shrapnel, and though only a private, he led his men to safety during three days of sub-zero temperatures. He earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star with Valor for his service.
As my congressman he eventually rose to rarefied heights, becoming a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, the senior member of New York State’s large delegation, and by 2007 the chairman of the House’s powerful Ways and Means Committee. But, sadly, he eventually followed his predecessor and former nemesis Powell down the path of corruption. A House Ethics Committee recently caught him with his hand in no less than eleven different cookie jars.
On Dec. 2 the House censured Rangel. It is Congress’ most severe punishment short of expulsion. It required him to stand contritely before his peers as he was publicly reprimanded. This is the first time that the House has censured someone since 1983, when the penalty fell upon Dan Crane (R-IL) and Gerry Studds (D-MA) for sexually exploiting congressional pages. Rangel of course did nothing so horrific as that. Rather, he ended up going down a path similar to Powell. 40 years in Washington’s insular culture fed his vanity and left him out of touch with reality. He became too accustomed to power, favors, and privilege, and he fell into the trap of feeling immune and invulnerable. He hid money from the IRS and he skirted rules while raising money for a university library that will bear his name.
It has been a long time since Charles Rangel represented me in Congress, and I never voted for him in any of his 20 elections. And while he was an early critic of the ravages drugs wrought on urban neighborhoods and was instrumental in improving Harlem’s economy, I have not agreed with all of his policies and decisions while in office. Furthermore, I have no doubt about his guilt. Nevertheless, I feel a small stirring of loyalty as I agree with my former representative on one count: the Congress has punished him more harshly than it has some others who have brought far greater shame upon that august body. Indeed, just last week, former House Majority Leader Tom Delay showed barely a fraction of Rangel’s class as a Texas jury convicted him of money laundering, part of a plot to circumvent the rules that govern our democracy. Beyond that, the list of outright criminals, ranging from thieves to sexual predators and everything in between, who have disgraced our Congress with their foul antics in recent years, is too long for this short article to bear.
Charles Rangel has overstayed his welcome. For all the good he has done, the bell yet tolls. However, I will not publicly revel in his downfall. Once upon a time he represented me, first in Korea and then in Congress, though I never asked him to. Now I shall represent him, though he knows me not.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The other morning Emma said tearfully, ” Rope?”
I knew she was asking me to help her find our cat, Merlin’s toy, which has captivated her attention in recent weeks. It resembles a fishing rod, only it’s plastic and at the end of a thinner plastic line is a cat’s version of a fishing fly. The fly has feathers in royal blue and black though ours, or I should say, Emma’s no longer has any feathers. A few defeated bristles are all that remain. I tried to get Emma to call the toy “Merlin’s cat catcher.” Emma repeated the words and then said, “rope,” in a matter-of-fact tone. Fair enough, saying rope is certainly easier than the tongue twister I was suggesting.
Emma’s interest in Merlin’s toy is not to engage Merlin in any sort of play. She likes to hold it and chew on the thinner plastic line. Merlin, under the misguided impression it is still his toy, leaps at the bristled end and tries to grab it in his mouth. Emma ignores him unless prompted by one of us to use it to play with him. At which point she will whip the thing around her head so violently Merlin runs away. Mission accomplished. No one can accuse Emma of not being able to creatively problem solve.
“Leash?” Emma said the other day. “Leash” is short hand for any number of things: tape measure, jump rope, belt or dog’s leash. It began out in Colorado where she loves to hold the leash attached to one of my mothers’ two German Shepherds. She is actually terrified of most dogs, including my mother’s. Giving her the leash to hold is one way to calm her when we are taking the dogs for a walk. But since we do not own a dog in New York City I know when she asks, she is looking for my tape measure or less frequently her jump rope.
The other night Emma was recounting our trip to Costa Rica, something she often does. She tapped her stomach and said, “Now go bang-bang!” Which means she was remembering how her stomach hurt. “Now see thunder,” she added. Meaning she remembered her headache. “Make you cry,” she said and proceeded to pretend cry while looking at her reflection in the mirror.
We have an African Senufo Bird in our loft which is a primitive statue carved from wood. It stands about five and half feet tall and Emma refers to it as “giraffe.” I have corrected her on numerous occasions, but she remains unconvinced.
A rope, a leash, a toy, a giraffe … All things we learn to identify at a very young age and never think about again. But for Emma this was not the case. Why is the letter “H” called “Aich?” Its phonetic sound doesn’t offer any clues. As anyone knows who has attempted to learn English as a second language, for every rule there is an exception.
Emma, like many autistic children is a stickler for rules, she is comforted by them. All the more so when she is the one imposing them.

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I won’t be able to go to Strawberry Fields tonight to commemorate the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death. After my visit last year, it’s probably just as well.
Every December 8th for the last 30 years, I have quietly paid tribute to my fallen hero. Last year, I went to John’s memorial in Central Park to remember the man who changed the world in a way few have. For so many fans of John Lennon, the relationship remains deeply personal, even after all these years.
Throughout high school, I spent much of my free time locked in my room with headphones on studying every beat, every note, every second of every Beatles song. My love of their music inspired me to play the guitar and write songs. And when my band wasn’t playing our songs in the basement, we were in my room marveling over the magic of Abbey Road’s medley or speeding up the end of Strawberry Fields to hear John’s “I buried Paul” or isolating the vocals to hear Paul’s voice crack for a split second on “If I Fell.”
We would then consume books and devour documentaries like “15 Hours With the Beatles.” We would have heated debates over albums and songs. Since I was the unabashed McCartney worshiper, I would take on the unenviable task of arguing how “London Town” matched up to “Abbey Road” or how “Girl’s School” was every bit as driving as “Get Back.”
And while our friends at school were listening to AC/DC, Kiss and Cheap Trick, we were isolated in the corner of the cafeteria talking about “Somewhere in New York City” and laughing over lines from the “Rutles.” This lonely obsession that started in 1977 made us seem more than a little quirky to our friends. It also had to be the cause of more than a few raised eyebrows from our parents.
I can understand now why they didn’t get it back then. That disconnect was laid bare the night we heard the news from Howard Cosell that John Lennon was dead. I sat watching Monday Night Football stunned and silent as my Dad walked through the room muttering that he liked Paul better. A friend on twitter, @Otoolefan, remembers his father telling him the next morning that “they shot Jack Lemmon last night.”
Many parents who suffered through the Great Depression and lost loved ones during World War II surely saw our angst as a little too much to bear. But my mother was a musician who understood the transcendence of music. She also understood that it was probably best to leave me alone with my headphones and Beatles records for the next several weeks.
What I found alone in my room is what I rediscovered last year when a dream of mine came true backstage at Radio City.
As a young congressman, I had been blessed to be able to meet any president, prime minister or politician. I had also met music heroes from B.B. King to U2 to Elvis Costello. All were exciting to meet, but none were Paul McCartney.
That chance came when Carole King was sweet enough to take me backstage to meet Sir Paul. Even the possibility seemed surreal since McCartney had impacted my life more than anyone outside of my family. As the day of the concert neared, a strange ambivalence swept over me. The day before the concert, I even told my wife I was thinking of skipping the chance at shaking my hero’s hand.
“What???” Susan asked incredulously. “I’ve never seen you scared of anyone or anything. Why in the world would you be afraid to meet Paul McCartney?”
It was a good point. People are people. Nothing more, nothing less. I have yet to meet a star who was worthy of worship. They just don’t exist anymore. In fact, I’m pretty sure they never did.
But I still couldn’t answer why I wanted to skip out on my lifelong dream of meeting Macca. Maybe it was Paul Simon’s fear that everything looks worse in black and white. Or maybe it was the fact that I could never tell him in a few seconds how he brought so much joy to so many years of my life. I just knew that the meeting would be short, awkward and leave me feeling a little empty.
Better not to pull back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz.
But I went ahead to Radio City, met Sir Paul McCartney, got my picture taken and managed to get out a few words. I don’t remember what they were but it was so surreal that I wouldn’t be surprised if I blurted out “I like purple” before quickly being escorted from the room.
After Carole and I left the backstage area and made it to our seats at Radio City, I realized that I had been right all along. I should have skipped the meeting and stayed home with my family. That regret lasted only as long as it took McCartney to strap a Hofner around his neck and rip into a supersonic rendition of “Jet.”
I was immediately transfixed–not by the myth, not by the legend, not by Beatle Paul. Instead, it was the music. As Carole and I jumped to our feet that night, I realized in an instant that the secret to their success had always been simple. The Beatles wrote remarkable songs.
For almost half a century, reporters and critics have tried to dissect why the Beatles had such an staggering impact on our times. After arriving in America in 1964, some suggested that Beatlemania was a needed distraction after the horror of JFK’s assassination. A few years later, critics would claim that the band was an outlet for a youth culture in rebellion against authority. And tonight, I am sure we will hear many try to explain again why so many of us still care about the Beatles 30 years after John’s death.
But in the end, all the philosophizing about the Beatles cultural transcendence is unadulterated bullshit. After all that has been written and said about the Liverpool band over the past 50 years, it still comes down their music.
The same music that moved me in 1980 moves my 7 year old daughter 30 years later. And the same magic that made me smile the first time I heard the back side of “Abbey Road” makes my 2 year old laugh when I pull out my guitar and sing him “Yellow Submarine.”
I spent a few hours today watching a BBC special on John’s life. The most revealing part of the documentary for me was a piece of film taken during John’s “Imagine” session. Lennon was told that a young, burned out straggler had made his way to John’s garden where he was spending much of his time.
The former Beatle left his session and walked outside to try to convince this lost soul to go home. As Lennon shot down every suggestion of cosmic connectivity between his songs and the drifter’s life, the Beatle who often had the sharpest edge revealed an inner sweetness that he seldom showed the world.
“Don’t confuse my songs with your life.”
The kid pushed back. Surely the lyrics to “I Dig a Pony” had a deeper meaning.
“I was just having fun with words” replied the retired dreamweaver.
“I’m just a guy.”
Maybe. But he and his bandmates also happened to create music that will bring joy to generations long after we are all gone. So tonight, I don’t have to go to Strawberry Fields to remember John. All I need are his songs.
I’ll put on my headphones, turn on “Number 9 Dream”, close my eyes, relax and float downstream.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

A review of President Barack Obama and his White House’s interaction with congressional Democrats and Republicans reveals a troubling narrative: On too many issues, the President and his staff treat friends like enemies and enemies like friends. This is troubling because, I believe, the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans are enemies of this President. They are dedicated to his failure in office and no amount of bipartisanship or compromise on his part will ever change that reality. It will only embolden Republicans to demand more capitulation. They will oppose him no matter what and he should govern himself accordingly. Dealing with them is a waste of time. Instead, he is quick to anger with those who are with him more frequently (congressional Democrats) than his political enemies (congressional Republicans).
This was made plain by President Obama’s comments following the announcement of a deal with congressional Republicans on Bush-era tax cuts. What began as a single issue matter – whether to extend those tax cuts – morphed into a fiscal relief gumbo that will add $700 billion to the national debt. Particularly galling is the estate tax capitulation. The agreement set an exemption of $5 million per individual and a maximum rate of 35 percent for two years. The estate tax, which was dormant this year, was going to return in 2011 with an exemption of $1 million and maximum rate of 55 percent. Other aspects of the deal include an extension of jobless benefits through 2011 and payroll tax cut by 2 percent for every American worker through the end of next year. Ultimately, all you need to know about the deal can be found in its supporters and critics. Very few Republicans are unhappy with this deal, despite its massive damage to the deficit/debt, while a critical mass of Democrats are trying to clean the residue out of their Christmas stockings from the lump of coal Obama gave them. Meanwhile, Republicans are working to undermine the healthcare reform he just signed into law and other presidential initiatives. And yet, he still deals with them as if they are really want to do the right thing. Give me a break.
George W. Bush, an incompetent President, never treated his base as contemptuously as Obama deals with liberals. Even when Bush angered them – No Child Left Behind and rampant federal spending, for examples – he worked hard to keep them in the fold. Not so Obama. He responded to the criticism launched from within Democratic ranks that he sold out his campaign promise to let the tax cuts lapse by dismissing his critics as sanctimonious and fixated on purist policymaking. This is an unproductive response is part of a trend. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs derided the “professional left.” Former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel lashed out at some liberal groups as “f+@king retarded” for their plans to run ads against conservative Democrats opposed to the President’s health care plan. These and other examples will likely be duly noted when the fundraising requests for the 2012 reelection campaign begin to hit the mailboxes of the sanctimonious professional left retards that elected Obama in the first place.
Worst of all in this may be his statement that he agreed to extend the tax cuts because the Republicans were holding the middle class tax cuts hostage to the high end. In effect, he gave the GOP a roadmap to rolling him – hold hostage something he wants until he agrees to give you what you want. It also appears that you won’t have to hold the hostage very long before he gives in. How can he fight the Republicans tomorrow when he folded up his tent so quickly today?
Michael Fauntroy is associate professor of public policy at George Mason University.

This Blogger’s Books from
Republicans and the Black Vote
by Michael K. Fauntroy
Home Rule or House Rule?: Congress and the Erosion of Local Governance in the District of Columbia
by Michael K. Fauntroy

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Barack Obama’s latest effort to seduce Benjamin Netanyahu to stop expanding illegal settlements in occupied territories as a portal into renewed Palestine-Israel talks has collapsed.
Khruschev, Oops, I mean Netanyahu has yet again thrown eggs in the face of President Obama, humiliated him and his team — including Hillary Clinton and Dennis Ross who helped craft the plan to bribe Israel with military aid.
President Obama should be fuming, behind closed doors. One wonders if Netanyahu is the reason that the overworked President is having an extraordinarily tough time saying no to cigarettes.
The collapse of this malformed initiative in which America belittled itself by offering Israel so much to do so little (a 90 day freeze?) is actually a great thing — and if I were meeting with the President now, I would tell him that I think he was lucky that things fell through and that he should relax.
If the Israelis had taken the deal offered and then not made the 90 day dance work towards something constructive, hopes would again have been raised among Palestinians and among Arabs in the region for progress. The collapse of the process at the end of the 90 days would have yielded more potential damage, even violence, than a collapse before the arrangement even started.
Netanyahu and Abu Mazen can’t blame Hamas on these talks failing. There are no radicals (other than a few in the Israeli Cabinet) who can be pointed to. The Palestine-side of the equation of Salam Fayyad, Mahmoud Abbas, Mohammed Dahlan, and others is about as American-compliant and moderate a team that could be imagined. And yet a deal could not be achieved.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and other very wise foreign policy practitioners from America’s higher stakes Cold War past recommended to President Obama that he lay out his own parameters and vision for what the outlines of a final deal should look like. They strongly encouraged him to “make his own weather” and to provide this outline of his views before the February 2009 Israeli elections.
Barack Obama failed to heed their advice. Big mistake. And ever since, Obama has been responding to the weather that Bibi Netanyahu has created.
It’s time to change up the game — just as in a basketball game when things aren’t going well, or in the early part of Obama’s presidential campaign in late 2007/early 2008 when Lou Susman and others held a serious come to Jesus meeting with Obama about how serious he was (or wasn’t) about running for President.
Barack Obama needs to push reset — needs the foreign policy equivalents of Lou Susman, Penny Pritzker, and others to tell him to stop behaving as if he is JFK the novice and needs to become JFK the great. At Ted Sorensen’s memorial service last night, I couldn’t stop thinking about the tremendous faith that Sorensen had in Kennedy early on, through all of his mistakes, helping him finally to achieve big scores in the Cuban Missile Crisis and securing the the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
My hunch is that people around the President like Tom Donilon, Denis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, Jon Favreau, and Adam Frankel are collectively the Ted Sorensens of today — though not quite the irreplacable him. They have faith in President Obama, and they need to guide him into what will eventually be a collision with Netanyahu that will both be part unstoppable assertion of America’s power combined with sensible restraint. But there is no doubt that the President now must put his imprint on the deal he wants and no longer depend on the illusion that the two primary parties have the maturity or sense of their long term national security interests to do a deal on their own.
Now, the President needs to reach out to those he has not heard before. The ones he had on his team who got drawn into the weeds of the Palestine-Israel mess, or who thought that they could make Palestinian moderates look like winners in a “too much, too late” strategy of offering them lots of resources to shower on their constituents, or who thought that Benjamin Netanyahu would yield to the US President because of his experience not having done so his last time he held the same post — have been wrong.
This is the time for new ideas, for the Palestinians and Israelis to hear Barack Obama’s vision on the outlines of a final status deal, and for “bridging proposals.”
This failure announced yesterday is actually a great opportunity. I happened to chat with President Bill Clinton last night at the International Crisis Group Annual Dinner honoring George Soros — and as grim as things might appear on the surface, Clinton too thought that there was an opportunity to move the parties forward. (President Obama really ought to give President Clinton a call to have a chat on the subject.)
There are ideas kicking out there that I will elucidate in further days — but the key at the moment is for the White House to step back and realize that it missed a bullet by this plan collapsing. This now gives the President significantly more latitude in going back to a broad stakeholder approach to a deal — and to putting his own views out more directly.
That’s the course the administration has been privately flirting with a long time — but has been too shy or too timid to offer. Netanyahu’s failure to perform, his rejection of President Obama’s effort at seduction, now opens the door to better, healthier possibilities.
– Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

CANCN, Mexico — Democracy Now! producers ventured outside U.N. Climate Change Conference at the posh Moon Palace Hotel to talk to farmers, indigenous leaders, climate justice activists, and others who found themselves shut out of the climate talks.
La Via Campesina, the world’s largest federation of peasant and smallholder farmers, held the “1,000 Cancn Global Day of Action for Climate Justice.” Several thousand people took to the streets to protest what they called an “undemocratic” climate summit. Attempting to march to the Moon Palace Hotel, the demonstrators were stopped by a massive presence of heavily armed security officers and fencing. They hoped to be able to talk directly with diplomats and journalists who had official permission to attend the conference.
Indigenous and youth groups demonstrated both inside and outside the summit to call for their inclusion in the negotiations. On Tuesday, activists from Youth for Climate Justice led a walkout inside the heavily guarded conference halls.
“We are here as young people from North America representing impacted communities,” said Kari Fulton, with Youth for Climate Justice. “We are here to reclaim our futures, to make sure the voices of young people who will be most impacted by climate change are heard and are respected.”
Democracy Now! will be reporting from the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Cancn all week. For the complete interviews, transcripts and audio/video podcasts, visit Democracy Now!. Click here for our complete coverage of the climate change talks. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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On December 2, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline quietly halted a clinical trial of SRT501, a concentrated form of resveratrol, which is the much-hyped substance found in red wine grapes.
The reason this matters is that SRT501 had been one of the most closely watched molecules in the Big Pharma pipeline ever since 2008, when GlaxoSmithKline snapped it up in a $720 million acquisition of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals — the company that first suggested resveratrol might be useful for treating age-related diseases.
SRT501 was being tested in a rare form of cancer called multiple myeloma, but Glaxo had grander plans for it and similar molecules. As Sirtris discovered, resveratrol modulates a gene called sir2, which produces the enzyme sirtuin. In mice, turning this gene on extends life by as much as 30 percent. Glaxo has been studying sirtuin-modulating drugs in a range of diseases common in aging people, including diabetes, psoriasis and colon cancer.
Resveratrol will no longer be part of that research, Glaxo says. Signs of trouble first emerged back in the spring, when the company halted the multiple myeloma trial because several patients developed kidney failure. Glaxo investigated, and concluded that the kidney complications may have stemmed from the underlying cancer, but that the SRT501 clearly didn’t help matters. The resveratrol formulation “was not well tolerated, and side effects of nausea/vomiting/diarrhea may have indirectly led to dehydration, which exacerbated the development of the acute renal failure,” said GSK spokeswoman Melinda Stubbee in an e-mail.
What scares me most about this news is that resveratrol is an incredibly popular over-the-counter supplement among healthy people who think it will help them live longer. Sales hit $30 million in 2008 and were forecast to double this year, according to Nutrition Business Journal. Resveratrol is widely available in mega-doses online and from health food stores.
And a lot of that excitement has been generated by Sirtris. The company’s co-founder, Harvard scientist David Sinclair, became something of a media darling after he discovered resveratrol’s effect on sir2 in the early 2000s. Sinclair was featured on “60 Minutes” and on an ABC News television special called “Live to Be 150 … Can You Do It?” On the ABC program, which aired in 2008, Sinclair and Barbara Walters toasted each other with red wine, and Walters asked how many glasses she would have to drink to get the anti-aging benefits. “A thousand bottles a day,” Sinclair answered.
Despite Sinclair’s insistence that resveratrol’s utility in humans had yet to be proven, media attention spawned an entrepreneurial free-for-all. Dozens of companies popped up offering free trials of resveratrol on the Internet. Some of them featured clips of Sinclair, as if to imply he had endorsed specific resveratrol supplements. (He had not.) Thousands of consumers were scammed into signing up for monthly shipments of resveratrol for $90 or more a month.
Many people believe the natural form of the red-wine supplement is perfectly safe and maybe even a lifesaver. Some blame Glaxo for somehow adulterating resveratrol when they turned it into a drug. A patient commenting last week on a Website for multiple myeloma patients called SRT501 “a corruption of the natural resveratrol molecule created by Glaxo to allow them to patent it and control the distribution through pharmaceutical channels.”
But the fact is, “SRT501 is resveratrol,” Stubbee says. It’s purified and concentrated, but other than that, it’s no different from the molecule found in your typical vineyard. Resveratrol seems to activate the longevity gene to some extent, but it’s “not selective, meaning that it does many other things,” she says. In the multiple myeloma trial, those things were not so pleasant.
Glaxo is now focusing on developing far more selective compounds, Stubbee says. They have no chemical relationship to resveratrol. “There are no further plans to develop SRT501.”
To me, the moral of this story is clear: Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. Sure, you can go to your local health food store and self-medicate with huge doses of resveratrol if you’re so inclined. But if your goal is to live longer, I’d think twice.

This Blogger’s Books from
Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old-And Made Billions
by Arlene Weintraub

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Haiti is on edge, after Haiti’s election council announced preliminary results in the November 28 election which even the US Embassy has questioned.
According to the results announced by the CEP, Jude Clestin, Haitian President Preval’s anointed successor, will advance to a runoff along with Mirlande Manigat. But this outcome depends on a razor-thin margin in the CEP’s tally: only .64 percentage points – 6800 votes – separate Jude Clestin from Michel Martelly.
The CNO – financed by the European Union – had predicted that Celestin would be eliminated, based on polling voters at 15% of polling stations.
But even putting the CNO evidence to the side, 6800 votes is way too small a margin to have confidence in the outcome, given the widespread allegations of fraud.
This was a disaster foretold. Back in June, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a report prepared under the direction of Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Member, calling for Haiti’s electoral council to be reformed. But the Obama Administration ignored Lugar’s report, despite the fact that the US government was paying for the elections, as 45 Members of the House pointed out in an October letter.
Why was Sen. Lugar’s report ignored? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the overall framework of US policy has been: the right people are in charge, the people that we support, so we can’t push them too hard, because that might inadvertently result in the wrong people being in charge.
How did the “right people” get to be in charge in Haiti? The US supported a coup against democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004. UN troops have been there ever since, maintaining the “order” brought about by the US-supported coup. One of the electoral council’s most controversial decisions was to exclude the Fanmi Lavalas party of former President Aristide. Sen. Lugar and 45 Members of the House criticized this, but the Administration was silent. That represents continuity with the Bush Administration’s support of the coup against Aristide in 2004.
Opposition in Haiti to the presence of UN troops has crystallized recently with accusations that UN troops were responsible for the outbreak of cholera in Haiti, which has killed at least 2000 people. The UN and others initially dismissed these accusations as unfounded rumor, but now a report by a leading French epidemiologist, selected by the French government to assist Haitian health officials in determining the source of the outbreak, says that UN troops were the likely source of the cholera outbreak.
The flawed election, ignoring warnings about the electoral council; and the lack of honesty about and accountability for the cholera outbreak, suggest it is high time to turn a new page in US relations with Haiti, towards the restoration of full Haitian sovereignty. US officials should support a timetable for the withdrawal of UN troops from Haiti. You can sign a petition to U.S. officials here.
A key obstacle to reforming US policy is that major US media downplay to the point of invisibility the history of US policy. You would have to look hard to find an article in the major establishment media that acknowledges the US role in the 2004 coup, and the continuity of that with present US policy. This is part of a larger pattern of failure by US media to acknowledge the US role in coups in Latin America.
Oliver Stone’s documentary “South of the Border” tried to do something to correct the record. It documented the role of the US in the 2002 coup in Venezuela.
On Friday, December 10 – Human Rights Day – people in 20 cities around the US will be hosting screenings of “South of the Border.” You can check here to see if there is a screening near you.
Here is a clip from South of the Border, in which Scott Wilson, formerly foreign editor of the Washington Post, describes the involvement of the U.S. in the coup in Venezuela:

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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The Mexican government decided to host another main conference to complement the work of COP16. The topic that they chose? Communicating climate science.
The forum was held at the Grand Velas Resort Riviera Maya, a luxury hotel with shiny marble floors, high ceilings, and indoor waterfalls. The fully catered lunch included at least five choices of dessert and was served beneath a tent erected just for the occasion. It made me wish that those of us trying to explain climate science were always treated so well.
And while this treatment may have seemed excessive, I think the Mexican government was right to treat this topic with respect and attention. Climate science communication is in an abysmal state. Despite an unprecedented agreement among scientists, much of the public (and especially the U.S. public) remains unconvinced or unconcerned. We need to do better.
I interviewed six of the speakers, asking them what we could do to improve how we could communicate more clearly the urgency of this topic to the public. I have summarized my findings in the following six articles:
Andy Revkin: You’ve communicated this issue for 20 years. How does collective failure feel?
Jennifer Scott: A Survey of COP16 participants reveals deep pessimism.
Anthony Leiserowitz: The global diversity of opinion on climate change.
Doug Boucher: How have concerned scientists responded to climate change failures?
Eileen Claussen: What is the road forward?
Colin Beavan: How does “No Impact Man” talk about Progress?
Gonzalo Canseco: Why did Mexico choose to host a forum on climate change communication?

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Here’s another pop quiz:
Which president had the highest approval rating at their respective midterm elections?
A)Ronald Reagan (1982)
B)Bill Clinton (1994)
C)Barack Obama (2010)
Which President immediately following the midterm election is behaving as is his approval rating was below Harry Truman in his last year in office?
A)Ronald Reagan (1982)
B)Bill Clinton (1994)
C)Barack Obama (2010)
If you answered C on both questions, not only did you pass this week’s presidential historical quiz, you also uncovered the central problem with the president’s recently proposed deal with Republicans to extend both the middle and upper income tax cuts.
Framing the compromise in win/loss terms oversimplifies the problem. The complexity of governing will invariably produce an end result that is not to everyone’s liking–nor should it be.
For as much as I would like to have seen the president stick to his campaign rhetoric of opposing an extension on the wealthiest Americans receiving a tax cut, I am more concerned that those hit hardest by the country’s economic downturn are not summarily dismissed because of their inability to find work.
For all of my philosophical differences with former president Ronald Reagan, part of his legacy, in my opinion, was his commitment to governing trumped his adherence to his conservative ideology.
I am not as critical of the final result of the deal–that is the nature of politics–my criticism is the path that the president took, or should I say the path he failed to take.
Between the $50 billion in jobless benefits, $300 billion in middle class tax cuts, $130 billion in tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent, $120 billion in reduction of the payroll tax, and $40 billion in earned income tax credit, I understand why the president made the deal.
It represents the difficult choice that confronts the country–short-term stimulus versus an increase in the deficit. Only time will tell how this deal plays out.
But the path that the president pursued gives him the aura of weakness. He didn’t use his bully pulpit to provide the American people with the choices that were at stake and the potential consequences.
Everything he said at his rather defensive press conference should have been stated on the road during the holiday season.
What the president did was akin to one spouse selling the family car because they needed the money without ever bothering to inform the other spouse what was being contemplated.
Millions of people who hired Barack Obama to be their president, who also knew intimately what it would mean to lose their unemployment benefits needed be party to the deal the president was contemplating.
Only the President of the United States has the ability to inform the American people that the only way he could get an extension in unemployment benefits, the middle class tax cuts and a reduction in the payroll tax–all designed to provide stimulus for working families–would be to agree to Republican demands that he also agree to extending the George W. Bush era tax cuts to include the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
Does this mean the deal could have turned out any different? I don’t know.
It does mean that the president would not have been forced to stand isolated at the podium during the press conference, along with a few surrogates making the rounds on cable television claiming the Republicans were holding the middle class hostage.
What was at stake was a bipartisan problem. Were only those who voted Democrat in danger of losing their unemployment benefits? At a critical hour the president didn’t trust the American people enough to inform them of the choices available in advance.
If it took two weeks to make the aforementioned case to the American people, are we to believe that a deal could not have been done?
Ultimately, political leadership is about perception. And it is never a good sign when the president acts in a way that makes him appear unpresidential.
I believe the president and his team had the American people in mind, but his approach sure had the look and feel of capitulation that was fortified in weakness.
He’s got two years to find his mojo or “Yes we can” will be a distant memory compared only to Howard Dean’s rebel yell at the Iowa caucus in terms of its impact on changing the nation.
Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist. He is the author of Strip Mall Patriotism: Moral Reflections of the Iraq War. E-mail him at byron@byronspeaks.com or visit his Web site byronspeaks.com.

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On the thirtieth anniversary of the death of John Lennon, I’d like to review the new film Nowhere Boy, about the early life of the legendary Beatle. This is a very special movie, because it involves a very special person.
Of course, I was Mayor when John Lennon was murdered, an event that caused enormous pain in the city.
For my full review of Nowhere Boy, including my take on how actor Aaron Johnson does in portraying John Lennon, click below. And for more of my reviews, check out Mayor at the Movies. And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and–yes!–Facebook.

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On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether to accept my appeal and help me stop the theft of my family’s property. Although you have undoubtedly never heard of me, my legal challenge has the potential to impact the lives of ordinary Americans more than most cases seeking U.S. Supreme Court consideration. After more than six years of fighting for what is rightfully mine, this is my last chance.
I am asking the court to take specific action and stop the taking through eminent domain of my property by an unelected agency of the state of New York merely to give it to a politically powerful private entity. If I am unsuccessful, the fate of my family business could be the fate of your home, your family business or any other property you and your family own.
In 2004 my American Dream started to turn into an American nightmare. Columbia University, an elite private institution, came to the conclusion that what it wanted — a brand new monolithic campus in West Harlem — could not be accomplished legally and legitimately through the open market. It therefore secretly went to, solicited and convinced that unelected agency, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), to help it expand its facilities onto the very land where my business (and dozens more) stood. The method: the threatened use of eminent domain.
We then were forced to endure the attempted theft of the neighborhood in broad daylight by Columbia — not even the state — using the very public threat of eminent domain to purchase all the property they were unable to through the open market. Businesses that had been solid bedrocks of the area for decades were suddenly shuttered. Jobs were lost; vital services to our community were eliminated and families were thrown apart in bitter struggles over how to stop the Columbia steamroller. By the time the state finally got around to announcing that eminent domain would indeed be utilized in late 2008, its mere threat by Columbia was enough. Only my business and one other were left.
Incredibly, the rationale that the state used to condemn our properties was that the area was blighted. But this designation was fueled by the fact that once Columbia had purchased the vast majority of the land they systematically moved all occupants out and allowed the buildings to decay and deteriorate. Then, to ensure that they got the desired result — an independent neighborhood study declaring the area blighted — the state, in collusion with Columbia, hired Columbia’s hired gun, who was already lobbying the state to invoke its condemnation powers, to perform the study.
At that point, I had no choice but to go to court. At first, we were successful. New York’s Appellate Division invalidated the taking on the grounds that it (and the “blight” designation it was based on) was nothing more than a land-grab designed to advance Columbia’s private interests. The court agreed with our contentions of improper pretext, collusion and bad faith. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) reversed that decision, holding that the state’s courts were not allowed to second-guess the government’s decision to seize private property. The court effectively concluded that if the emperor said he was wearing clothes, then he was wearing clothes!
It is my belief that our highest court should take this case and show that the judiciary needs to protect the rights of all citizens against the tyranny that results from the collusion between executive and legislative branches of our government with favored private entities. It is exactly this responsibility that formed the basis of the checks and balances as laid out in our constitution. Nowadays, courts routinely abdicate their constitutionally mandated responsibilities and merely rubber stamp back-room deals made between our government and favored clients on the grounds that they must defer to decisions made by the other branches of our government.
As envisioned in our constitution, eminent domain is supposed to be for public uses — projects the public will own and use — such as a road or a post office. Eminent domain is not for private institutions like Columbia to expand their profit-making efforts beyond what the free market would allow. I believe that what Columbia has been trying to do is illegal, and I hope our highest court will agree. However, regardless of the outcome of my case, I know that what Columbia and New York have done to the people of West Harlem is unfair and un-American.
Nick Sprayregen is president of Tuck-It-Away Associates in West Harlem.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

Clarence Jones is a living legend. When I was chief speechwriter for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Clarence accepted our invitation to visit with an ad hoc group of Democratic speechwriters on the Hill. For more than two hours, he mesmerized us with stories of his friendship with Martin Luther King and his prominent role in the Civil Rights movement. Clarence not only had a courtside seat to watch history unfold; he was an active participant.
Clarence visited with us in the Capitol less than a week before President Obama’s inauguration. That’s what brought him to town. He waxed poetically about the meaning of the moment and the pride that King would surely feel. But he was also a realist, noting that the election of Barack Obama was not enough. The hard work of governing hadn’t begun yet.
That’s why I was surprised and disappointed to read Clarence’s recent piece breaking with the President and calling for a 2012 primary challenge.
Clarence writes:
I understand and share the frustration that many Democratic faithful feel over the tax cut compromise, the slow progress on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and escalation of troop counts in Afghanistan. All three issues were cornerstones of the President’s 2008 campaign, and Democrats have every right to feel let down.
But let’s not lose the forest for the trees. In less than two years, this President has:
Signed an historic health care reform law that, while admittedly imperfect, expands coverage to more than 30 million Americans and reduces the deficit substantially.
Negotiated an investment in the American auto industry that not only saved thousands of American jobs but may end up making money for the government.
Signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that, has been by all objective measures a major success that saved and created more than one million jobs.
Made significant and improbable progress on education reform, re-writing the traditional playbook that Democrats won’t clash with teachers’ unions.
Ended by executive order the ban on federal investment in stem cell research, which gives scientists new tools to fight fatal diseases.
Signed consumer-friendly credit card reform legislation that protects Americans from financial predators.
Respectfully, the decision by Clarence Jones and some other liberal leaders to abandon President Obama at this moment reminds me of an investor who panics and sells all his shares in a blue-chip company because of one bad quarter. These may be the darkest days of the Obama presidency, but as Rev. King said himself, “we are not makers of history. We are made by history.” History dealt President Obama a tough hand, but his leadership and accomplishments these first two years have earned — at the very least — our patience. The White House is adjusting to the new political reality of divided control in 2011. The sausage making will only get uglier. But President Obama remains the most popular politician in town – and our best hope for progress.
David Meadvin was chief speechwriter for U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and U.S. Attorney General. He is president of Inkwell Strategies, a Washington, DC-based speechwriting and communications firm.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

One of the world’s smallest nations has made a monumental decision for the oceans. As of today, Belize is one of the first countries in the world to institute a complete and permanent ban on trawling in all of its waters.
Bottom trawling is one of the most destructive fishing methods in existence. Bottom trawlers are equipped with massive, weighted nets that effectively clear-cut the ocean floor, destroying sensitive coral communities and anything else in their path.
Meanwhile, shrimp trawls — which were operating in Belize until now — operate in midwater, so they pose a different threat. They catch more untargeted species, or bycatch, than almost any other kind of fishing gear. Thousands of sea turtles, marine mammals and untargeted fish are caught in shrimp trawlers around the world every year.
The ban is only logical when you consider the phenomenal marine resources that Belize has to offer. Namely, the Belize Barrier Reef, which is part of the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the second largest coral reef system in the world after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. With three of the Western Hemisphere’s four offshore atolls, including the famous Blue Hole, Belize is a destination for divers and snorkelers around the world.
The ban, which goes into effect December 31st, was made by Belizean Prime Minister Dean Barrow’s administration after UNESCO threatened to strip the Belize Barrier Reef System of its World Heritage Site status.
The recently released 2010 Report Card of the Mesoamerican Reef revealed that around 70% of the reef is in poor or critical condition, with only 8 percent in good condition. The amount of reef that’s now in critical condition leapt from 6 percent in 2008 to 30 percent as a result of overfishing, coastal development and climate change. Belize’s reef is under great pressure, and it’s a relief to see that the government is taking steps to protect its vital marine resources.
Oceana was a critical part of this decision, collaborating with the government in negotiating a buy-out of the shrimp trawlers. We have been working for years to put a stop to trawling around the world, and we have protected hundreds of thousands of square miles from trawling using our precautionary approach.
Kudos to Belize, and here’s hoping that more countries follow its lead to reduce their destructive fishing footprint.
Ted Danson is a member of Oceana’s board of directors.

Source:www.huffingtonpost.com

The framework tax deal announced this week by President Obama and GOP leaders in the Senate threatens to kill jobs in one of the sectors our nation needs most – clean energy.
In its current form, the deal would allow the only effective federal support mechanism for renewable electricity to expire, killing the 20,000 wind energy jobs and 11,200 jobs in geothermal that would be created in 2011 and the 65,000 jobs in solar over the next two years.
In addition, without an extension of the Renewable Energy Grant Program (1603), the domestic wind industry will lay off upwards of 25 percent of its workforce–20,000 people–on the first of January.
This is not acceptable.
**
In order to create new jobs, we must create brand new industries. Renewable energy – like wind, solar and geothermal – is a natural resource that can be harvested domestically with equipment and technology made in America.
Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress don’t see it that way. They are determined to keep America tethered to the dirty, pollution-heavy energy industries of the past. This Congress, Republicans have fought to keep some $36 billion in subsidies for the biggest industry in the mix – oil and gas.
That would be the same oil industry that has dictated a failed U.S. energy policy for decades. It is one that runs on foreign oil, siphoning half a billion dollars a day out of the U.S. economy and directing it to OPEC and nations in the Middle East that support terrorist activity. Foreign oil alone represents nearly half our trade deficit.
This is not acceptable.
**
We need an oil change. That is why Democrats in Congress are fighting to extend the Renewable Energy Grant Program (1603) for two years. This program was created under the Recovery Act as a patch for the production tax credit (PTC) and the investment tax credit (ITC) programs.
In the wake of the Republican Recession that destroyed 8 million jobs and dismantled financial markets in 2008, new clean energy entrepreneurs and small businesses could not get access to credit – meaning the existing production tax credit and the investment tax programs no longer worked.
Democrats acted in an emergency situation to save these jobs and ensure that the American clean energy sector – which has the potential to become the most important global economic driver for the next century – did not meet an untimely end.
And the results are clear. The Renewable Energy Grant Program created 55,000 jobs and directly led to the deployment of 4,250 megawatts of renewable energy in 2009.
**
Harvesting this clean, safe renewable energy has also created an opportunity to breathe new life into America’s factories. The Recovery Act also included the Clean Energy Manufacturing Program (48C) allocating $2.3 billion in tax credits for building and expanding manufacturing facilities.
That provided a 30 percent tax credit for investments in 183 manufacturing facilities for clean energy products across 43 states to support 41,000 jobs. Demand for this program exceeded expectations — $7.7 billion worth of applications poured in — and it helped get Americans out of unemployment lines and back onto assembly lines building wind turbines and solar panels.
**
Democrats in the House spent the past two years fighting to forge a real, long term plan for American energy independence, a plan that ensures the United States doesn’t take second place to China in the race for clean energy jobs and technology.
Our plan included a Renewable Electricity Standard, electric vehicle incentives, and efficiency measures. Our plan protected consumers from price spikes, like $4 gas, and gave small business and entrepreneurs the chance to compete with Big Oil.
Unfortunately, other than the Recovery Act, Republicans in the Senate killed every attempt to move forward on clean energy. As a result, the private investment community is now looking to move trillions of dollars away from the U.S. That money may now be spent on jobs in China, South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere.
This is not acceptable.
That is why, at a minimum, THIS Congress and the President must immediately move to protect and extend both the Renewable Energy Grant Program and the Clean Energy Manufacturing Program.
While Republican leaders may hope to push clean energy off the agenda in the 112th Congress, the reality is the threat of foreign oil, rising gas prices and jobs competition from China will keep these problems front and center.

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Now that the president has signaled yet another collapse in agreeing to tax cuts for the rich, there is a hidden cost to this capitulation. He is now stuck defending this deal for the rest of his term. I predicted this on the show yesterday and today it’s playing out exactly the way I imagined, with the president sending out advisers to talk about what a great idea it is to give tax cuts to the rich.
Once you sign off on a political position, you own it. This could be a corollary to Colin Powell’s doctrine on foreign policy. Powell said if you break it, you own it. In this case, if you make it, you own it.
The president claims he will fight hard against these same tax cuts two years from now. It’s hard to stop laughing long enough to make a point against that, but I will try. If you are sending out your people to talk up polls about how the right the Republicans were on the tax cuts for the rich now, how are you going to send out the same people to talk about how wrong they were – and how wrong you were – two years from now?
These are the things that make me wonder if President Obama has a firm grasp on basic political fundamentals. Yesterday he said that the political reality is that he just didn’t have the votes in the Senate (by far his favorite excuse). He even said “I can’t win” in the Senate. That’s a damning reversal for a man who ran on “Yes we can.”
But more importantly, he doesn’t seem to understand Politics 101. You don’t just count the votes based on how the other side says they’re going to vote. From time to time, you call their bluff. Which means you go to the home states of swing senators like Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Olympia Snowe in Maine and you campaign on this winning issue there until you make them feel the political pain. Then you put them to a decision — do you want to risk your career voting against me on this issue where I have huge popular support or do you want to vote with me? Then you take the vote and they will bend. If he doesn’t understand that, boy did we elect the wrong guy.
Of course, the alternative is that he does understand that but doesn’t ever have the stomach for a real fight. Or even worse yet, secretly likes this deal and will always find an excuse to get more tax cuts and sweet deals for the rich and powerful. In which case, boy did we elect the wrong guy.
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