Sydney Schanberg: John McCain Blocked Info on Fellow POW's

Photo from Google Earth from Ocean Park, CA.

"Americans...whose earthly resting place is known only to God."

So says the dedication stone of the MIA/POW gardens in the National Cemetary of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.


The remains of four marines who disappeared in Vietnam when their helicopter was shot down have now been located, according to the POW/Missing Personnel Office of the DOD on November 5. Lance Cpl. Kurt E. La Plant, of Lenexa, KS, and Lance Cpl. Luis F. Palacios, of Los Angeles, CA were individually identified. Two others, were recovered only as "group remains"--Lance Cpl. Ralph L. Harper, of Indianapolis, IN and Pfc. Jose R. Sanchez, of Brooklyn, NY. That means, according to the National Leage of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, that there have been

837 US personnel accounted for since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. 90+% of the 1,746 still missing from the Vietnam War were lost in Vietnam itself or in areas of Laos and Cambodia under Vietnam’s wartime control.

Democracy Now interviewed journalist Sydney Schanberg today about his October 6 article in The Nation, "Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs?" (longer version here at The Nation Institute.

Schanberg wrote,

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero people would logically imagine to be a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

The Nation, in an editor's note, lets us know it has published pieces with a conflicting vision by H. Bruce Franklin, a Rutgers American studies prof (email, web page) and author of MIA or Mythmaking in America. His article, "Who's Behind the M.I.A. Scam - & Why" ($ archive) in the December 7, 1992 issue, argued that the "devastating economic and political warfare" on Vietnam has been justified from 1969 through 1992 by the

The POW/MIA myth...kept alive by politicians such as Richard Nixon, Ross Perot and Jesse Helms since 1969. However, there has never been any credible evidence that US prisoners are being held in Vietnam, and Vietnam has taken unprecedented steps to account for all missing in action.

Then in "M.I.A.sama" ($ archive) in the May 10, 1993 issue, he adds that

Pres George Bush made two attempts to normalize relations with Vietnam, and each time sudden new 'evidence' of American prisoners was released to the media. The same thing has now happened to the Clinton administration, although the media release is filled with obvious flaws.

Whenever normalization of relations with Vietnam seems imminent, a media blitz suddenly features brand-new "evidence" about P.O.W.s in Indochina. Eventually the evidence turns out to be fraudulent, but few Americans ever learn about the expose.

I wish that some donor to The Nation would have made these articles available free of charge for comparison. And Goodman could have done us a solid by having both gentlemen on her program to discuss their alternative views. Readers here know I'm a fan of Goodman, but, as is often the case with advocacy journalism, I'm not sure her point is solely light, but also heat, in the time leading up to the election.

As it is, we're left to read Franklin's October 15 letter to the editor and Schanberg's response . Both are exhibits in name-calling. Franklin describes Schanberg's article as a

recycled and thoroughly discredited right-wing fantasy about Vietnam holding US POWs after the war...

and decries

Schanberg's disgraceful role in promulgating [the POW myth] for decades?

Schanberg, in turn, calls Franklin a "desperate" " ideologue" whose has in the past made "fact-starved claims" and now write a "pompous letter" which is a "foolish way" to deal with their disagreements. He ends,

It's obvious that the best way to get to the bottom of the POW story is to press our government to release all the POW files that have been suppressed for thirty-five years.

That statement appeals to me, even despite another insult he hurls to the effect that his critics have not campaigned for such because they are afraid to find out what's in the records. What's most interesting to me, however, is another piece I discoverd by Schanberg, when I was looking for his emaill address. In a commentary for Neiman Watchdog on October 15, "The silent treatment regarding Vietnam POWs," he writes,

Before The Nation accepted it, I tested the mainstream waters to see if the boycott had possibly been eased. The piece was rejected by everyone from The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times magazine to prominent Web sites like Salon and Talking Points Memo. One magazine editor said that because I had written on the subject before, it was “a retelling”and thus unsuitable. Others said they were too stacked up with McCain stories for the campaign season. None of the brush-offs were any more convincing than that. I appealed to them to tackle the story with their own reporters to set the historical record straight. Silence again.

Once the piece appeared, Schanberg writes that one the piece appeared, he began e-mailing again.

I wrote personal notes to the editors of The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. No response. I did the same with other editors and reporters and columnists and ombudsmen at those papers and many more. Also to television news and commentator shows and to press-beat reporters like Howard Kurtz. The list has grown now to more than 100.

He only got four responses that he can recall, one of which was from a reporter at a major paper who

was seized by the story, immersed himself in the issue and pitched it to his editors, who blew him off saying there wasn’t enough time to research the story and, besides, they said, they had questions about its credibility.

He offers any "any reader – editor, reporter, layman" "links to my earlier writings on this issue" and "guidance on where to go for more information." For, as he notes,

Election Day isn’t the cutoff point. Even if John McCain doesn’t make the White House, he’ll still be in the Senate, suppressing POW files.

The public information is available through the Library of Congress at its Vietnam-Era Prisoner-of-War/Missing-in-Action Database. The information at the National Archives can be found through its Finding Aid to Records Relating to American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action from the Vietnam War Era, 1960-1994. See also the resolution to esetablish a Congressional committee, H. Res. 111 (2007)

Mother Jones reports on McCain staff ties to financial lobbyists

At a Town Hall in Green Bay, WI September 18, according to the WaPo,

McCain accused Sen. Barack Obama of "cheerleading" the gloomy financial news, urged the ouster of the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and said that Obama's running mate believes raising taxes is "patriotic."

But while McCain excoriates the financial industry, it's interesting to remember that he started touting ethics after being involved with the Keating scandal and that that his chief financial guru was for so long former Senator Phil Gramm who helped deregulated the industry.

Now, the Democratic National Committee, using publicly available records, has identified 177 lobbyists working for the McCain campaign as either aides, policy advisers, or fundraisers. And in a post on September 19, Mother Jones named 83 of the 177 lobbyists,

have in recent years lobbied for the financial industry McCain now attacks.

Sarah, Who?

Photo by Jim Wilson accompanied "Palin Disclosures Raise Questions on Vetting," by Elisabeth Bumiller in the September 1, 2008, New York Times.


The Governor of Alaska for less than two years and the mayor of a town of about 5-7K folks before then. This is who McCain picks to take over the presidency?

In "Palin Disclosures Raise Questions on Vetting," Elisabeth Bumiller, in the September 1, 2008, New York Times writes

an F.B.I. official said Monday the bureau did not vet potential candidates and had not known of her selection until it was made public.

In doing so, she refutes the claims made in "Palin Made an Impression From the Start: Fellow Maverick Survived McCain's Thorough Vetting Process, Aides Say," where Dan Balz and Robert Barnes of the Washington Post acted as front page stenographer to the McCain campaign on August 31, writing,

Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager and the person at the point of the vice presidential process, said there was no abrupt change of course in the final hours. Nor, he said, was Palin selected without having gone through the full vetting process that was done for other finalists. That process included reviews of financial and other personal data, an FBI background check and considerable discussion among the handful of McCain advisers involved in the deliberations.

"Nobody was vetted less or more than anyone in the final stages, and John had access to all that information and made the decision," Davis said. "It's really not much more complicated than that."

It's interesting and damning, if true, that McCain wasn't truthful about an FBI vetting. Also that he didn't get his choice of running mate who would have been Lieberman or Ridge, both supposedly disqualified as being pro-choice.

As I mentioned at Newstrust, the story raises some questions in my mind, as there are so many anonymous sources, other than the Alaskans, who are willing to go on record. And what Bumiller fails to tell you or credit, in typical NYT fashion, is that in "Choice stuns state politicians," Anchorage Daily News reporters Sean Cockerham and Wesley Loy published interviews with many of the same folks on August 29 and that, although fellow Republicans, the three quoted by the NYT, all are her political adversaries. From that story,

Lyda Green said she thought it was a joke when someone called her at 6 a.m. to give her the news. "She's not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president?" said Green, a Republican from Palin's hometown of Wasilla. "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?"

Green, who has feuded with Palin repeatedly over the past two years, brought up the big oil tax increase Palin pushed through last year. She also pointed to the award of a $500 million state subsidy to a Canadian firm to pursue a natural gas pipeline that is far from guaranteed.

Former House Speaker Gail Phillips, a Republican political leader who has clashed with Palin in the past, was shocked when she heard the news Friday morning with her husband, Walt.

I said to Walt, "This can't be happening, because his advance team didn't come to Alaska to check her out," Phillips said. Phillips has been active in the Ted Stevens re-election steering committee and remains in close touch with Sen. Lisa Murkowski and other party leaders, and she said nobody had heard anything about McCain's people doing research on his prospective running mate. "We're not a very big state. People I talk to would have heard something."

And while the local article could not get an interview with another NYT interviewee, it noted that Ruedrich, that Palin's complaints against him

before she became governor led to the state fining him on ethics charges.

BTW, Bumiller co-authored another piece August 30 with Michael Cooper on why Lieberman was deleted from the veep list.

WSJ: McCain's Health Plan embraces troubled model

Cartoon of July , 2004 by Tim Dolighan (site, email, bio)


Currently, the National Academy of Sciences is looking at the health repercussions of lacking health insurance coverage, but back in 2004, it noted,

Although America leads the world in spending on health care, it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage.

So on June 2, I was interested to read the Wall Street Journal article "McCain's Free-Market Health Plan Would Boost Role of High-Risk Pools," by Laura Meckler and Anna Wilde Mathews. (The article is only available as a synopsis, if you're a non-subscriber, unless you go grab a copy at the library. I happened to run across the article when I looked at the actual paper, courtesy of our local bakery and coffee shop, Bollos. )

The lede:

McCain derides government-run health care, but the high-risk pools in existence now require a heavy dose of government intervention.

Although the Journal would be expected to be sympathetic to Mr. McCain, it actually pointed out that the plan has more problems than those of his Democratic rivals. While all would continue to rely on insurance companies to shore up the system, McCain proposes a federally funded Guaranteed Access Plan to establish the high-risk health insurance pools for individuals who cannot obtain private coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions or no previous group coverage. (which doesn't, by the way, take into account the higher premiums charged those with previous group coverage who join COBRA plans to replace their group plans.)

Take a look at the observation in the WSJ article by those who operate such plans. Douglas Stratton, chair of the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance Plans, said,

There's no way you can ever charge a premium that's going to pay the cost of this population.

Sara Collins is an assistant vice-president at Commonwealth Fund,
a private foundation "working towards a high-performance health system." She told the Journal, that the risk pool plans

tend not to work particularly well. States have really struggled to finance these adequately.

According to the Journal, fewer than 200,000 U.S. residents currently are enrolled in high-risk health insurance pools, which charge "high premiums and sometimes sharply restrict benefits." In 2006, premiums provided 61% of the funds for high-risk health insurance pools, with most of the remainder of the funds -- about $722 million, or an average of $3,800 per enrollee -- provided by state governments.

McCain senior policy advisor, Douglas Holtz-Eakin said that McCain's proposal would require $7 billion to $10 billion from the federal government to fund the high-risk health insurance pools. Others maintain that the estimate is "nowhere near enough, particularly given the large number of people with pre-existing conditions who would need this help if employers send their workers out to the open market."

It makes a gal wonder what happened to the fiscally conservative maverick?

*

McCain's proposal would also replace a tax break for employees who receive health insurance from employers with a refundable tax credit of as much as $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families for the purchase of private coverage. As health care analyst Robert Laszewski noted back in February,

With the average cost of employer-provided family health insurance at $12,000 a year a $5,000 tax credit will often come up way short.

The candidate had unveiled his current iteration in a speech in Tampa on April 29. New York Times reporters Michael Cooper and Kevin Sack covered the topic April 3o, in "Federal Money in Health Care Plan From McCain:"

His proposal to move away from employer-based coverage was similar to one that President Bush pushed for last year, to little effect. And his call for expanding coverage through market-based competition is in stark contrast to the Democrats’ proposals to move toward universal health care coverage, with government subsidies to help lower-income people afford their premiums.

McCain's health care plan also allows insurers to operate across state lines. As noted by LA Times reporter Rong-Gong Lin II in "McCain’s health plan fails her test," on March 30, 2008, Elizabeth Edwards voiced criticism of McCain's proposal when she spoke at the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists on March 29.

Although mosts attention was devoted to her statement that "Neither one of us would be covered by his health policy," (referring to her breast cancer and his melanoma), she especially criticized McCain’s provision to allow companies to sell health insurance across state lines, which his campaign website justifies as offering consumers more options and thus promoting competition.

Edwards countered that the plan would allow insurers to move their headquarters to states in which consumer protection laws are weak. Giving as an example how many credit card companies are based in Delaware, where the state’s laws are more accommodating to corporate interests, she said,

Hard-fought state-by-state protections would be lost. They mask this proposal as a cost-saving technique. This is giving insurance companies a pass.

According to the LA Times, McCain's cheif policy advisor, Holtz-Eakin, said that

Edwards’ comments were disappointing and that they revealed she did not understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s proposal.

Edwawrds makes her rebuttal in a guest post April 1 at ThinkProgress:

I freely admit that I am confused about the role of overnight funding in repurchase markets in the collapse of Bear Stearns. What I am not confused about is John McCain’s health care proposal. Apparently Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior policy advisor to McCain, thinks I do “not understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s proposal.” The problem, Douglas, is that, despite fuzzy language and feel-good lines in the Senator’s proposal, I do understand exactly how devastating it will be...

Holtz-Eakin had also spoken to the LA Times about the

the power of competition to produce greater coverage for Americans.

Supposedly, this would reduce healthcare costs for consumers "with or without preexisting conditions." Given the way I've see my health insurance company, Anthem, cherry pick, I'd like some hard data on that.

Let me give you an example from Virginia. A secondary policy with with a $1,500 deductible costs four times as much as ten years ago. How can this be?

Anthem would tell you that the plan is grandfathered and no longer exists, except for its original enrollees. There is one just like it, which you can buy for a lot less. In order to participate in the new plan, you would have to re-enroll. If you have suffered cancer and its treatment, or other health problems and enrolled in an individual policy as a "healthy Virginian" before diagnosis, you are grandfathered under the policy with the escalating premiums. If you apply for the "new plan" you will be told you now have a pre-existing condition and thus are ineligible.

Thus, Anthem can attract the young and healthy into this year's version of the plan, and they can move on to next year's version, until they, too, are trapped. If Anthem had not cherry-picked, while the new pool would be paying slightly more, the rest would be paying slightly less. And so it goes. The power of competition? The power of competition only works when you are not locked into your current insurer, which will only be the case when pre-existing conditions cannot be factored in. And if you say, well, the insurer is allowed to make a profit, I would ask, what is insurance for, if not a pooled risk and pooled premiums. Matthew Holt, in his May 15 critique of the McCain plan, "Half A Plan is not half a loaf," has some figures on the "medical loss ratio" of various insurers--the college market, for instance takes in $10 in premiums for every dollar it pays out.

Of course, there is another solution, truly universal coverage. Until now, that has been banished by the specter of "socialized medicine." But that is a topic for another day.

*
Other Resources

• If you'd like to read the arguments on both sides of the "socialized medicine" debate, check out the materials at the Cato InstituteCenter for American Progress.
• While cost containment must be balanced against availability of care, to read a critique of the cost containment provisions offered by McCain, Clinton and Obama plans and alternatives judged to be more effective, see "Putting the Brakes on Health Care Costs: Would the Candidates' Plans Work? Are There Better Solutions?" This forum for journalists held June 3 by the Alliance for Health Reform and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation featured health economists Paul Ginsburg of the Center for Studying Health System Change (which has intersting data on health insurance costs here), Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University and the National Academy of Sciences and Mark McClellan of the Brookings Institution.
• Check out the information at the site for the National Coalition on Health Care, a non-profit founded in 1990 is comprised of more than 70 organizations representing large and small businesses, labor, consumer, religious and primary care providers and health and pension funds.
• You can view a comparison of the candidates plans, as well as that of others at the site for the World Health Care Congress, whose April 2008 conference convened senior officials from the "nation's largest employers, hospitals, health systems, health plans, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and leading government agencies."
• May 1, the Congressional Budget office analyzed Senator Ron Wyden's (D-OR) Healthy Americans Act of 2007 (S 334) with regard to his currently proposed amendments.Employer Health Costs In a Global Economy
• Employer Health Costs in a Global Economy: A Competitive Disadvantage For U.S. Firms, Len Nichols and Sarah Axeen, New America Foundation (may, 2008)

McCain: Webb's GI Educational Benefits Bill will Harm Retention

I wrote about Jim Webb's (D-VA) Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2007 (S. 22) introduced January 4, 2007 in a Veteran's Day entry on November 12, 2007 . Since that time the bill finally had a hearing in the Veterans' Affairs Committee on May 7.

Today's Washington Post campaign blog carried an entry about McCain's speech today in honor of Memorial Day in New Mexico which included his opposition to Webb's bill, saying it would harm retention.

It strikes me as harsh on McCain's part to deny educational benefits in order to bolster retention. Webb counters that his bill will also help with recruitment. Both statements are born out by the CBO cost estimate of May 8:

...because the higher educational benefits would reduce the costs of
attending college after military service, enacting S. 22 (as modified) also
would increase the number of servicemembers who would separate from
military service to take advantage of those benefits. Additional reenlistment
incentives would then be required to keep the number of reenlistments, and the
experience profile of the military force, constant.

Educational benefits have been shown to raise the number of military recruits.
Based on an analysis of the existing literature, CBO estimates that a
10 percent increase in educational benefits would result in an increase of about
1 percent in high-quality recruits. On that basis, CBO calculates that raising
the educational benefits as proposed in S. 22 would result in a 16 percent
increase in recruits. To maintain the same force levels and thus the same
number of recruits, enlistment bonuses and other recruiting costs could be
reduced.

The marginal cost of enlistment bonuses and the other expenditures necessary
to attract an additional enlistment is about $35,000. CBO estimates that
reduced spending for those purposes would result in a savings of almost
$5.6 billion over the 2009-2013 period.

Literature on the effects of educational benefits on retention suggest that every
$10,000 increase in educational benefits yields a reduction in retention of
slightly more than 1 percentage point. CBO estimates that S. 22 (as modified)
would more than double the present value of educational benefits for
servicemembers at the first reenlistment point—from about $40,000 to over
$90,000—implying a 16 percent decline in the reenlistment rate, from about
42 percent to about 36 percent. CBO assumes that to maintain the same force
size, the services would offer selective reenlistment bonuses (SRBs). An
$8,000 bonus to personnel at the first reenlistment point is estimated to
increase reenlistments by about 2 percentage points. Thus, CBO estimates that
SRBs of about $25,000 for each first-term servicemember who reenlists would
offset the expected effects on retention of increased educational benefits,
resulting in a cost of $6.7 billion over the 2009-2013 period for additional
reenlistment bonuses.

A March 6, 2008 article on Military.com (a commercial site for those with military connections) quoted a Department of Defense official who refused to be named as saying that WWII,

was a different era when the government was worried about long-unemployment lines from millions of returning draftees. A robust GI Bill now would make it difficult to keep careerists.

"Why would anybody stay for another deployment when they can go out on a four-year free ride, with guaranteed rent and utilities at the E-5 standard, which by long-standing DoD policy is a two-bedroom townhouse?"

Given current conflicts, this official continued, even volunteers who like service life might decide "to sit out for a year or two, in a large rented townhouse, and come back when things are more hospitable."

Again pretty cynical. Veteran's benefits not for service but to avoid mass unemployment (and ensuing social unrest?) Wonder what veterans would say about that?

Amid the debate and namecalling the Post article engendered, I found this interesting comment signed Vietnam Vet:

It would be illuminating if the posters here would identify themselves as combat veterans, or not. In my neck of the woods (active duty Marine Corps), the very nearly unanimous view is that Senator McCain has turned his back on us, as he assumes we're safely in the Republican column. He's playing to the breast beating know-nothings who fight their wars from their Lay-Z-Boys.

McCain is a sell-out, pure and simple. A shriveled old dogma-spewing party hack. Picture the turkey on the table in the movie "Christmas Vacation" staring Chevy Chase... McCain, like the shriveled remnants of the over-cooked bird, is a grotesque carcass of his former self, reduced to being a mouth-piece of the Bush machine.

I would like to see a poll which judges how reprensentative this attitude is. If a significant number feel this way, it could mark problems for McCain.

Mr. McCain goes to Inez (KY) and tells us what women need

Bruce Dill's photograph of Lilly Ledbetter for Robert Barnes's 2/20/07 WaPo story, "A Hearing Without Being Heard: As Justices Take Case, Plaintiff Finds It Has Little to Do With Her Anymore."
*
As economists and pollsters talked about a recession and as consumers, facing increased gas and food prices, worried about the security of their jobs, April was a good month to remember the wage gap. Women are averaging 77 cents for every dollar men earn for comparable work.

April 22, in addition to being Earth Day, was Equal Pay Day, calling attention to when women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous year. If you doubt the pay gap still exists, just ask Lilly Ledbetter, a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.'s plant in Gadsden, Ala., who found out that after a 19-year career she was making $6,500 less than the lowest-paid male supervisor.

Ledbetter's case gained prominence April 23, when the press covered Senator John McCain's stop in Inez, KY on his "It's Time for Action" tour, as he sought to emphasize his attention to the powerless in our country. In this rural eastern Kentucky town, where poverty is worse among women than men, McCain addressed Ms. Ledbetter's case and George Miller's (D-CA) H.R. 2831, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2007, which had passed the House by a vote of 225-199 July 31, 2007, along almost entirely partisan lines. McCain suggested what women need is not more legal redress for discrimination, that education and training will suffice.

*

I know about Inez, KY from covering the largest environmental disaster in the southeast--Massey Energy's Martin County Coal Sludge Spill--and from covering the work of federal mine inspector, Jack Spadaro, who refused to sign onto a Bush administration whitewash and got locked out of his own office on the orders of Secretary of Labor Elaine Cho.

What I had not remembered about Inez was Lyndon Johnson's visit to launch the War on Poverty which McCain reminded us of on his stop there. McCain had launched the tour April 21 in Selma Alabama, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge site of "Bloody Sunday, March 6, 1965. That 1965 assault on marchers contributed to the federal Voting Rights Act's passage, following upon the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Bill Moyers, who was Johnson's press secretary, reports that on the evening of signing the 1964 measure, Johnson said, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."

Steve Holland of Reuters UK reported,

McCain was driven through the mountains to that wood frame house Johnson visited but now it was padlocked with the front porch fenced off, a "No Trespassing" sign posted and car parked in a driveway with a blanket covering a broken window.

John McCain had come to Inez not to praise Johnson, but to (re)bury him in this the centennial year of his birth. At a news conference at the old Martin County Court House, McCain told reporters, according to AP writer Libby Quaid,

I wouldn't be back here today if government had fulfilled the promise that Lyndon Johnson made 44 years ago.

*

The main thrust of Quaid's story was not Inez at all (her dateline was New Orleans). Instead, she emphasized McCain's failure to return to the Senate to cast his vote on H.R. 2831. The measure would have reverted suits against employers to the prior clock, which allowed court consideration not just within six months of the original discrimination, but at the time of any discriminatory paycheck.

After threatened presidential veto, on the evening of Wednesday, April 23, there were 56 votes in the Senate to move the measure forward, 4 short of the 60 votes are needed to stop a filibuster. (Actually there may have been 57, as Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) spoke in favor of cloture but voted against it--I'm thinking for some kind of procedural reason which would allow him to bring the matter up again.

Republicans voting to stop a possible filibuster were were Coleman (MN), Collins (ME), Smith (OR), Snowe (ME), Specter (R), Sununu (NH) . Coleman had been targeted by People for the American Way in web and radio ads.

For years, Lilly Ledbetter was paid far less than the men in her factory for doing the same work — and she proved it in court. But when the company appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, a new justice nominated by George W. Bush and supported by Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman wrote the opinion that denied her equal pay.

Tell Norm Coleman we need judges who will protect workers — not take our rights away.

Reid had delayed the vote to give McCain's Democratic rivals, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama time to return to Washington to support the measure. As a result, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) argued,

A vote to proceed to the Ledbetter bill is a vote to proceed away from the veterans bill. This is really highly ironic because my side was taking a pounding Monday and Tuesday for allegedly holding up, if you will, the veterans bill. Of course, that was not the case. We have ended up, in order to accommodate the schedules of those who are frequently not here--and understandably not here because they are running for President--we had the Senate, in effect, not in session until 5 o'clock this afternoon. While Americans are waiting for Congress to do something about the economy, jobs, and gas prices, our friends on the other side decided to close shop in order to accommodate the uncertainties of the campaign trail. Finding solutions for the concerns of all our constituents should be our top priority, not just accommodating the travel schedules of two of our Members.

Reid responded,

Their schedules were very difficult recently. They could be here at 6 o'clock. So I made the suggestion, which I thought was reasonable--we haven't been able to legislate on the veterans bill since last Thursday; how about doing it on Wednesday, until 5 o'clock. That would be 6 hours more than we have done since last Thursday. There was a refusal to allow us to do that. To have my friend, the Republican leader, come here and say we haven't done anything today because we had a vote scheduled at their convenience--he didn't use the names, but Senators CLINTON and OBAMA--that is absolutely without any foundation. I have trouble understanding how my friend would have the gall to stand on the floor and make the comment he did, but he did.

*

Opponents said there needs to a restraint on law suits. Proponents said that discrimination laws need to be enforceable and that the Supreme Court had erred in its 5-4 decision May 29, 2007 giving workers only 180 days to file a discrimination suit.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote,

The Court’s insistence on immediate contest overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination. Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time. Comparative pay information, moreover, is often hidden from the employee’s view. Employers may keep under wraps the pay differentials maintained among supervisors, no less the reasons for those differentials. Small initial discrepancies may not be seen as meet for a federal case, particularly when the employee, trying to succeed in a nontraditional environment, is averse to making waves.

Ledbetter told the House in her House testimony in a hearing June 12, 2007 before Miller's Committee on Education and Labor,

according to the Court, if you don’t figure things out right away, the company can treat you like a second-class citizen for the rest of your career. That isn’t right. The truth is, Goodyear continues to treat me like a second-class worker to this day because my pension and social security is based on the amount I earned while working there. Goodyear gets to keep my extra pension as a reward for breaking the law.

When Ledbetter sued she maintained that earlier decisions by supervisors kept her from making more. She told the House,

The plant manager flat out said that women shouldn’t be working in a tire factory because women just made trouble. One of my supervisors asked me to go down to a local hotel with him and promised if I did, I would get good evaluations. He said if I didn’t, I would get put at the bottom of the list. I didn’t say anything at first because I wanted to try to work it out and fit in without making waves. But it got so bad that I finally complained to the company. The manager I complained to refused to do anything to protect me and instead told me I was just being a troublemaker. So I complained to the EEOC. The company worked out a deal with the EEOC so that supervisor would no longer manage me. But after that, the company treated me badly. They tried to isolate me. People refused to talk to me. They left me out of important management meetings so I sometimes didn’t know what was going on, which made it harder to do my job. So I got a taste of what happens when you try to complain about discrimination.

On behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, Neal D. Mollen argued against Ledbetter, in supporting the Supreme Court, saying that the new law, in restoring the paycheck provision would have

frustrated Congress’ design for attempting to resolve such matters, at least in the first instance, without litigation.

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Senate Republicans did not need McCain's vote to kill the bill. But although McCain left no legislative footprints, Quaid quotes him:

I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.....This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system.

So what's a woman to do? I'd have liked to have known Mr. McCain's suggestion for Ledbetter and the rest of us. He told folks in Inez, women

need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else...And it's hard for them to leave their families when they don't have somebody to take care of them....It's a vicious cycle that's affecting women, particularly in a part of the country like this, where mining is the mainstay; traditionally, women have not gone into that line of work, to say the least.

Actually, women do mine coal.

Between 1974 and 1980, almost 2,400 women were hired as underground coal workers in the East. ...In the mid 1980's when the underground coal mining industry started to decline, many women lost their mining jobs because of the rule, “last hired, first fired.”

Actually mining employment continues to decline, as mountaintop removal uses far fewer miners as conventional methods. Jack Spadaro, who I mentioned ast the outset of this article has told me that the ratio is one MTR job for 200 conventional jobs and the coal companies would still make tremendous profits hiring the 200.

Actually the higher education rate for women already exceeds that for men. Jonathan Rauch wrote in the January 15, 2008 libertarian Reason magazine,

According to projections by the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017 half again as many women as men will earn bachelor's degrees. In the early 1990s, six women graduated from college for every five men who did so; today, the ratio is about 4-to-3. A decade from now, it will be 3-to-2—and rising, on current trends.

But those are as they say, "inconvenient truths."

Or, as Gail Collins pointed out in Sunday's New York Times,

Was McCain saying that it’s less important to give working women the right to sue for equal pay than to give them help taking care of their families? There have been many attempts to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to protect more workers who need to stay home to take care of a sick kid or an ailing parent. “We’ve never gotten his support on any of that agenda,” said Debra Ness, the president of the National Partnership for Women and Families.

We also have yet to hear a McCain policy address on how working mothers are supposed to find quality child care. If it comes, I suspect the women trying to support their kids on $20,000 a year are going to learn they’re in line for some whopping big income-tax deductions.

Let them eat dinner mints.

McCain's economic advisors

The lucrative Bear Stearns guarantee in March was not the first time favor bestowed on the J.P. Morgan by the Federal Reserve Bank. Nine years prior to the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which effectively repealed the Glass-Steagall law separating regulation of commercial and investment banks,

In 1990, J.P. Morgan becomes the first bank to receive permission from the Federal Reserve to underwrite securities, so long as its underwriting business does not exceed the 10 percent limit.

One of McCain's economic advisers is none other that the bill's namesake, Phil Gramm, who as chairman of the Senate Finace Committee led the call for deregulation. The former Senator is
is a vice-chair of the UBS investment bank, which on April 1, announced continuing losses of billions of dollars because of sub-prime mortgage investments. Makes one wonder, huh?

But the Republicans were actually doing the Clinton Administration's bidding. Back in 1995, Treasury secretary told the House that the regulations

"conceivably impede safety and soundness by limiting revenue diversification." Rubin also said many legitimate concerns were addressed adequately outside the act, including the numerous steps taken to safeguard against risky and abusive bank transactions and to protect the deposit insurance fund.

As James A. Wilcox, Chief Economist, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, wrote with two co-authors in 2000,

How regulators will in practice coordinate their efforts so that the safety and soundness of the banking system is maintained efficiently remains to be seen.

Evidently, not at all, at least according to Robert Kuttner, who in "The Bubble Economy," argued in September 2007 that deregulation has turned the economy into a "casino" with repeated bail-outs.

Another McCain adviser: Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, forced to step down in 2005, who authorized spying efforts to uncover the source of boardroom leaks.

And, it's not like Barack Obama would bring back such regulations. As he said ,

The argument is not to go back to the regulatory framework of the 1930's because, as I said, the financial markets have changed substantially.

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Today I headed backvia Roanoke to run some errands and then back to Blacksburg.

AEP coming to Tech to "listen"

Cartoon by Dan Wright (email) and Dave Ponce (email)


February 13, American Electric Power issued a news release announcing it would kick off its Listening Tour, "Oil, National Security, and What We Can Do: The Future of Energy" tomorrow at Virginia Tech at 2:00pm in Squires Haymarket Theater (Seats 484 people) with AEP's CEO Michael G. Morris

The format will be 90 minutes to two hours with Morris giving a "brief overview of America’s energy future" followed by Q&A with students. At the conclusion of the tour, AEP plans to compile the highlights of the insights, ideas, and concerns shared by students in a book to be published in the fall 2008, prior to the U.S. Presidential election.

AEP says,

The listening tour's purpose is to engage young people on college campuses across America to share their opinions and ideas, and to hear what it will take to ensure America's energy security while protecting the environment.

According to the Burning Book Collective (BB), the tour will more likely

give the public the impression that AEP is listening, yet really to back the public into a corner with only two options: oil/terrorism or coal/imminent climate chaos and destruction of Appalachia.

To that I'd add nukes, as AEP has invested in that realm and is considering expansion. In "AEP may decide in 2008 on whether to apply for COL,"Pam Radtke Russell wrote in the December 20, 2007 (by paid sub only) Platts Nucleonics Week, that December 11 Nicholas Akins, AEP's executive vice president of generation told attendees at the Power-Gen International conference in New Orleans that in order to lower emissions

We are very focused on nuclear as a possibility...

AEP has been tellling stockholders for months, according to the article, that it is considering new nuclear generation as part of a "portfolio" approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and might also implement energy efficiency measures and add wind power, since according to Atkins,

We don't believe you're going to get a large-capacity coal or nuclear plant built unless you convince regulators that you've done as much as you can to reduce," [greenhouse gas emissions.]

Spokesman Pat Hemlepp later told Russell,

Our CEO, Mike Morris, has said many times that we will likely add new nuclear to our fleet in coming years. We just won't be a first mover in new nuclear in the way we're a first mover for clean coal.

Blacksburg Mountain Justice (MJ) will distribute literature at the presentation tomorrow, raising basic questions regarding AEP's policies and providing the audience with general facts in the categories (links are to the BB wiki):

• Health/Premature Deaths
  
• Coal Combustion Waste & AEP
• Liquid Coal
  
• Sequestration
  
• AEP's Track Record
  
• Alternatives&FutureRegulations
  
• Coal, AEP and MTR
  
• Carbon Trading
  

Within each category, MJ will formulate one overarching question for the handout, coupled with 5-10 facts and 1-3 specific questions for the utility. There are plenty of local issues to bring up, such as Giles/Glen Lyn and Virginia MTR. Organizers say,

Hopefully, by asking informed and well researched questions MJ will stimulate non-affiliated audience members to raise their own concerns.

It will be interesting to see how AEP reacts, if the company includes the MJ "insights" in its planned book and if there will be rebuttal presentations at future stops on AEP's tour, to take place at:

The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville March 10; The Ohio State University in Columbus April 2; Howard University in Washington, D.C., April 7; Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., April 9; and University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Okla., April 30.

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Back in December 2001, Chris Stansberry wrote in Free Republic that he had contacted jouornalist Helen Thomas (email) to tell her,

Your disrespect of President Bush - yes I said President Bush disgusts me! Your tirades during White House Press Briefings are beyond belief - time to take your show elsewhere!

Here is how she replied, according to Stansberry:

Try living your own life. I'm sure you have your hands full.

Usually I wouldn't link to the site, but the vitriol expressed against Thomas in the comments shows such a lack of civility that I'll let you read them for yourself. I got to see Thomas last year at the Virginia Festival of the Book giving her fellow journalists heck for being sheep, and although we've lost Molly Ivins, Helen's still at it, this time on February 15 in "McCain foresees 100-year war," outlining how the Republican's putative candidate is giving Bush hopes for

a third term through a proxy.

Brave New Films: McCain--More War, Less Jobs

Image coming. Blogger having trouble uploading.

My post on posted on So Where Does John McCain Stand on the Issues? has gotten a lot of hits thanks to Newstrust and Google. In that oistm I looked at McCain's statements on military intervention and abortion and linked to his page at On the Issues. That site got a lot of out-clicks on topics ranging from gun control to social security to immigration to children and family services, just to name a few.

So, I found it interesting today, when I got an email from Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, to let me know that he and his crew about two new videos posted at his blog:

• Less Jobs. More Wars (2/5)
  
• What is this "Iraq war" charge on my bill? (2/7)

Greenwald writes,

Jason, Leda, Philip and Lissette put together ...videos. And we have a major BNF strategic campaign to reach hearts and minds...

While we're using a little HUMOR in our opening effort, the war is deadly serious, the deaths to Americans and to Iraqis, a tragedy. We have seen and experienced the terrible pain and suffering. But our job right now is to reach millions of people who have erected emotional walls to any more painful news of death and destruction. So we went to the personal, the cost to each and everyone of us. And we did it by hacking the techniques of Madison Ave, a joke that gets the attention, and then makes the point...

Please post a comment on the blog with your ideas for future videos, a campaign song, a cartoon, and additional ways to get the word out... Let's keep working together to tell America about John McCain's vision for our country: I've got a hunch Joe Scarborough is going to regret ever making that joke.

Greenwald adds a link to Straight talk from Senator McCain: More wars to come:

the original clips where McCain was straight talking with an audience about the reality of his administration, and then goes on to talk about how much he will help veterans. This isn't out of context, and he didn't make a mistake. He really believes there will be more wars.

You can also view a clip on McCain's statement that we will stay 100 years in Iraq and the years in Iraq and the original Scarborough clip . Brave New Films is located at 10510 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232. You can get its latest videos on email, iTunes, RSS, Facebook, and YouTube here, To donate, you can go to this page.