Obama lost because of NAFTA
March 7
I can't be as sure as that heading implies, but it appears the flap being described as "NAFTA-gate" is what stopped Obama's momentum last Tuesday. I'm not buying the "3:00 call" ad because Obama countered it very effectively, and he ran more ads than Clinton did so I'm sure it was seen. The Resko story can't help him, but it still seems more a punditocracy/blogosphere story. On the other hand NAFTA was a huge theme on the stump in Ohio, and despite assumptions, Texan voters were concerned about trade issues too, and strongly skeptical. So when the story broke that Obama had told the Canadian government that he didn't really mean it when he criticized NAFTA, he looked completely two-faced on an issue that has become a wedge issue among the Democratic base. At least that's my theory. It's also revealing. We learned that the Obama campaign was too slow to realize how big and bad this could be, by contrast with how they handled Samantha Power after her "monster" remark, which may indicate Obama learns fast. We learned that Clinton is willing to keep using a story that works, even after it's been put in doubt, apparently assuming the doubt will go unnoticed or that the repetition will make hearers unsure it was ever doubted after all. Actually this isn't a surprise, since the Clintons were the cause of the coining of the term "Republican-lite". Full Republicans would go with a full-blown lie, like saying Obama personally assured Stephen Harper. And tried to convert him to Islam. Clinton doesn't go that far, thus "lite".
Oh yes, the doubt. It can be confusing, because the story keeps changing, and if my suspicions are right, people keep lying. It's looking like an Obama advisor, Austan Goolsbee, had a meeting with diplomats at the Canadian consulate in Chicago. That part isn't in doubt. Obama denied there was a meeting when asked about it, but later said it did happen and he didn't know earlier that there had been a meeting. What Goolsbee told the Canadians is in dispute. The leaked Canadian memo quoted Goolsbee saying, "He cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans." Goolsbee said that wasn't what he said. Obama denies approaching the Canadians through backchannels. To add a twist, it turns out the initial leaker was Harper's chief of staff, Ian Brodie, who said it was the Clinton campaign was giving the assurances. The Canadian opposition parties seem to suspect the Harper government is up to no good. I suspect so too. My impression of Harper has always been that he's a Bush wannabe, and this leak and the attempts to protect his staff and blame Obama seem very Bush-like. Clinton and Harper deny there were assurances, but she's as implicated as Obama and must know it, yet she's still going after him on it knowing full well the whole thing is based on one consulate staff member's disputed recollection of what an Obama advisor said. Oh yes, a minor point: the Clintons would rather we all forget that it was Bill, with occasional praise for the idea from Hillary until it become too unpopular for a presidential candidate, who foisted NAFTA on us. By "us" I don't mean multinational corporations, for whom NAFTA and free trade in general has been just great. For most workers, not so much.
To get back to the campaign, please Obama, make something out of this report that the Clinton campaign is also accused of giving assurances, and link it with her past statements supporting free trade. If you don't, nothing anyone else tries to say on your behalf will get media attention.
"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.
"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.
"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.
"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.
''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.
"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guantánamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.
"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.
"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.
"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.
"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.
A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.
"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.
"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.
"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.