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State Dinner Guest List FULL UPDATE: Who's In, Who's Out

2009-11-24T17:46:09Z

5:45 UPDATE:

The White House has released the list of expected attendees:

Check out our State Dinner Big News page and follow the state dinner LIVE on Twitter!

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

_______________________________________________________________________________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 24, 2009

Below is a list of expected attendees at tonight's State Dinner:

The President & First Lady Michelle Obama

Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister, India & Ms. Gursharan Kaur

The Honorable (Rep) Gary Ackerman, United States Representative

Mr. Sant Singh Chatwal (Guest)

His Excellency Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Mr. Mukesh D Ambani

Mr. Tim Dutta (Spouse of Ms. Pia Awal)

The Honorable (Mr.) David Axelrod, White House Communications

Mrs. Susan Axelrod

Ms. Preeta Bansal, OMB - General Counsel

The Honorable (Ms.) Melody Barnes, Domestic Policy Council

Mr. Marland E. Buckner

The Honorable (Rep.) Howard Berman, United States Representative (D/California)

Mrs. Jane Berman, Spouse of United States Representative (D/California)

Mr. Om Prakash Bhatt

Mr. Hunter Biden

Mrs. Kathleen Biden

The Honorable (Vice President) Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Vice President of the United States

Dr. Jill Biden

Mr. Robert O Blake, Jr., Assistant Sec for South and Central Asian Affairs, State Department

Mrs. Sofia Blake

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York, NY

Ms. Diana Taylor

The Honorable (Mr.) John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Deputy National Security Advisor for Counterterrorism, Homeland Security Council

Mrs. Katherine Brennan

The Honorable (Ms.) Lisa Brown, Office of Staff Secretary

Mr. Kevin Cullen

Mr. Donald Browne

Ms. Maria Junqera

The Honorable (Ms.) Carol Browner, Energy and Climate Change

The Honorable (Mr.) Tom Downey

Mr. William Burns, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Department of State

Ms. Lisa Carty

General James E Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Mrs. Sandee Cartwright

The Honorable (Senator) Bob Casey, United States Senator (D/Pennsylvania)

Mrs. Terese Casey, United States Senate Spouse (D/Pennsylvania)

Mr. Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Mrs. Julie Chandrasekaran

Mr. I.S. Chaturvedi, Personal Secretary to the Prime Minister of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Senator Satveer Chaudhry, State Senator

Colonel Ravi Chaudhry (Guest)

Ms. Rohini Chopra

Mr. Deepak Chopra

Mrs. Rita Chopra

The Honorable (Secretary) Steven Chu, Secretary of the Department of Energy

Mrs. Jean Chu

The Honorable (Secretary) Hillary R. Clinton, Secretary of State

The Honorable (Rep.) James E. Clyburn, United States Representative (D/South Carolina)

Mrs. Emily Clyburn

The Honorable (Senator) Kent Conrad, United States Senator (D/North Dakota)

Ms. Lucy Calutti, United States Senate Spouse (D/North Dakota)

Mr. David Cote

Ms. Katie Couric

Mr. Brooks L Perlin

Mr. Greg Craig, Assistant to the President and Counsel to the President

Mrs. Margaret D Craig

Mrs. Paula Crown

Mr. Jim Crown

The Honorable (Rep.) Elijah Cummings, United States Representative (D/Maryland)

Mrs. Maya Rockeymoore

Senator Swati Dandekar, State Senator

Mr. Arvind Dandekar

Mr. Rajesh De, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice

Nancy Ann DeParle, Office of Health Reform

Mr. Jason P DeParle

Ms. Bhairavi Desai

Javaid Tariq

Dr. Vishakha N. Desai

Robert Oxman

The Honorable (Senator) Chris Dodd, United States Senator (D/Connecticut)

Mrs. Jackie Clegg Dodd

Mr. John Doerr

The Honorable (Mr.) Thomas Donilon, Assistant to the President, Deputy National Security Advisor, NSC

Ms. Cathy Russell

The Honorable Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director

Mr. Bob Bauer

Mr. Ari Emanuel

Mrs. Sarah Emanuel

The Honorable (Mr.) Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to the President

Ms. Amy Rule

The Honorable (Mr.) Jon Favreau, Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting

Ms. Sarah Feinberg, Office of the Chief of Staff

The Honorable (Mayor) Adrian Fenty, Mayor of the District of Columbia

Mrs. Michelle Fenty

Ms. Michelle Flournoy

Mr. Thomas Friedman

Mrs. Ann Friedman

The Honorable (Mr.) Mike Froman, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, NSC

Dr. Ashok S Ganguly

The Honorable (Mr.) Patrick Gaspard, Office of Political Affairs

Mrs. Raina Washington

The Honorable Robert Gates

Ms. Charlene Gaynor

Mr. Richard Heiss

Mr. David Geffen

Mr. Jeremy Lingvall

The Honorable (Secretary) Timothy F. Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury

Ms. Carole Sonnenfeld

The Honorable (Mr.) Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary

Mr. Anish Goel, Acting Senior Director, South Asia Affairs, NSC

Mr. Senapathy Gopalakrishnan

Mr. Mark Gorenberg

Ms. Wendy Wanderman

Mr. John Gorman

Mrs. Tamra Gorman

Representative Jay Goyal, State Representative

Kiran Goyal

Representative Raj Goyle, State Representative

Mrs. Monica Arora

The Honorable (Governor) Jennifer Granholm, Governor of Michigan (D)

Mr. Daniel Mulhern, First Gentleman of Michigan

Mr. Earl G. Graves

Mrs. Barbara Graves

Ms. Geeta Rao Gupta

Mr. Arvind Gupta

Mr. Raj Gupta

Mr. Rajat Gupta

Mrs. Anita M Gupta

Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Mrs. Rebecca Olson Gupta

Mr. Lee Hamilton

Mrs. Nancy Hamilton

The Honorable (Ms.) Kamala Harris

Ms. Maya Harris

Mr. Kamil Hassan

Mrs. Talat Hassan

Mr. George Haywood

Mrs. Cheryl J Haywood

The Honorable Fred Hochberg, Export-Import Bank

Thomas P Healy

The Honorable (Rep.) Paul Hodes, United States Representative (D/New Hampshire)

Mrs. Margaret Hodes

The Honorable (Attorney General) Eric Holder, United States Attorney General, Department of Justice

Dr. Sharon Malone, MD

Dr. John P. Holdren

Dr. Cheryl E Holdren

The Honorable (Rep.) Eleanor Holmes-Norton, United States of Representative (D/DC)

Mr. John Norton

Mr. Robert D Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy, and Agricultural Affairs, State Department

Ms. Camille Massey

The Honorable (Rep) Steny Hoyer, United States Representative (D/Maryland)

Ms. Kathleen May

Mr. Chris Hughes

Mr. Sean S Eldridge

Mr. Jeff Immelt

The Honorable (Senator) Daniel Inouye, United States Senator (D/Hawaii)

Ms. Irene Hirano, United States Senate Spouse (D/Hawaii)

Mrs. Deepa Iyer

Mr. Parag Khandhar

Mr. Vasudeva Iyer

The Honorable (Administrator) Lisa Jackson, Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency

Mr. Kenneth Jackson

The Honorable (Ms.) Valerie Jarrett, Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor

The Honorable (Governor) Bobby Jindal, Governor of Louisiana

Mrs. Supriya Jindal, First Lady of Louisiana

The Honorable (General) James Jones, Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor

Mrs. Diane Jones

Mrs. Ann Jordan

Mr. Vernon Jordan

Mr. Anil Kakani

Mr. Farooq Kathwari

Mrs. Farida Kathwari

Mr. Neal Katyal, Principal Deputy Solicitor General, Office of the Solicitor General

Mr. Jeffrey Katzenberg

Mrs. Marilyn Katzenberg

Ms. Maneesha Kelkar, Manavi

Vinay Vaishampayan

The Honorable (Senator) John Kerry, United States Senator (D/Massachusetts)

Dr. Harish Khare, Media Advisor to the Prime Minister of India, Indian Delegation

The Honorable (Mr.) Bradley Kiley, Office of Management and Administration

Mr. James Coley, Jr.

Ms. Gayle King

The Honorable (Ambassador) Ron Kirk, USTR

Mrs. Matrice Ellis-Kirk

The Honorable (Mr.) Ronald Klain, Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Office of the Vice President

Mrs. Chanda D Kochhar

His Excellency S.M. Krishna, Minister of External Affairs of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Ms. Gaitri Kumar, Joint Secretary (Americas), Ministry of External Affairs of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Mr. Vivek Kundra

Mrs. Jhumpa Lahiri

Mr. Alberto Vourvoulias

Mr. Marc Lasry

Cathy Lasry

Mr. Jacob Lew, Deputy Secretary, Department of State

The Honorable Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce

Mrs. Mona Locke

The Honorable (Mr.) Christopher Lu, Cabinet Affairs

Ms. Kathryn Thomson

The Honorable (Senator) Richard Lugar, United States Senator (R/Indiana)

Mrs. Char Lugar, United States Senate Spouse (R/Indiana)

Mr. Michael Lynton

Ms. Elizabeth Jamie Alter

Mr. Surinder Malhotra

The Honorable (Chief of Protocol) Capricia Marshall

The Honorable (Ms.) Alyssa Mastromonaco, White House Office of Scheduling

Mr. Brian Mathis

Mrs. Tracey Kemble

Ms. Kiran Mazumda-Shaw

The Honorable (Senator) Claire McCaskill, United States Senator (D/Missouri)

Mr. Joseph Shepard, United States Senate Spouse

The Honorable (Rep) Jim McDermott, United States Representative (D/Washington)

Mrs. Therese Marie Hansen

Mr. Zarin Mehta

Ms. Carmen Lasky

The Honorable (Mr.) Jim Messina, Office of Chief of Staff

Mr. Judd Miner

Mrs. Linda Miner

Mr. Newt Minow

Mrs. Josephine Minow

Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal

Kalpen Modi, Associate Director, Office of Public Engagement

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Mrs. Deborah Mullen

The Honorable (Secretary) Janet Napolitano, Secretary, Department of Homeland Security

His Excellency M.K. Narayanan, National Security Adviser of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Mr. Shantanu Narayen

Mrs. Reni Narayen

Mr. Raju Narisetti

Durga Raghunath

Mr. Martin Nesbitt

Ms. Anita Blanchard

Mr. Konrad Ng

Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng

Ms. Indra Nooyi

The Honorable (Rep) David Obey, United States Representative (D/Wisconsin)

Mrs. Joan Obey

The Honorable (Mr.) Peter Orszag, Director, Office of Management & Budget

Mr. Jim Owens

Ms. Katie Owens

Mr. Deepak Parekh

Mr. Eboo Patel

Ms. Shehnez Mansuri

The Honorable (Governor) Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts (D)

Mrs. Diane Patrick, First Lady of Massachusetts

The Honorable (Speaker) Nancy Pelosi, United States Representative (D/California) and Speaker of the House

Mr. Paul Pelosi

Mr. Dan Pfeiffer, White House Office of Communications

Mr. Sam Pitroda

Mrs. Anjana Pitroda

General Colin Powell

Ms. Alma Powell

Dr. Rachakonda D Prabhu

Dr. Lata Shete Prabhu

Mrs. Penny Pritzker

Dr. Brian Traubert

Ms. Kavita Ramdas

Her Excellency Nirupama Rao, Foreign Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Ms. Preetha Reddy

The Honorable (Governor) Edward Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania (D)

The Honorable (Judge) Marjorie Rendell, First Lady of Pennsylvania

Mr. Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting

The Honorable (Ambassador) Susan Rice, United States Ambassador to the United Nations

Mr. Ian Cameron

The Honorable (Governor) Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico (D)

Mrs. Barbara Richardson, First Lady of New Mexico

Ms. Robin Roberts

Mrs. Marian Robinson

Ambassador Timothy Roemer, US Ambassador to India

Mrs. Mary Johnston

Ms. Desiree Rogers, Special Assistant to the President and White House Social Secretary

Mr. John Rogers

The Honorable (Dr.) Christina Romer, Chair, Council of Economic Advisers

Mr. Dennis Ross, NSC

The Honorable (Rep) Edward Randall Royce, United States Representative

Marie Therese Royce

Mr. Michael Sacks

Mrs. Cari Sacks

The Honorable (Rep.) Linda Sanchez, United States Representative (D/California)

Mr. James Sullivan, Guest of Then Honorable Linda Sanchez

Mr. Pankaj Saran, Joint Secretary to the Prime Minister of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

His Excellency Shyam Saran, Special Envoy to the Prime Minister on Climate Change, Indian Delegation

Mr. Jaideep Sarkar, Personal Secretary to the Prime Minister of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Mr. Parag Saxena

The Honorable (Rep.) Jan Schakowsky, United States Representative (D/Illinois)

Mr. Robert Creamer

The Honorable (Mr.) Phil Schiliro, Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs

Mrs. Jody Schiliro

Ms. Annetta Seecharran

Seema Agnani

Mr. Stuart Seldowitz, Acting Director for South Asia, NSC

Dr. Amartya Sen

Ms. Emma Georgina Rothschild

Under Secretary Rajiv J Shah, Under Secretary for Research, Education & Economics, Department of Agriculture

The Honorable Sonal Shah, Deputy Assist to the President, Director Office of SICP, Domestic Policy Council

Mr. Vinod Shah

Her Excellency Meera SHANKAR, Ambassador, India

The Honorable Susan Sher, Assistant to the President/Chief of Staff to the First Lady

The Honorable (Mr.) Neil Cohen

Mr. M. Night Shyamalan

Mrs. Bhavna Shyamalan

Ms. Amrit Singh

Mr. Analjit Singh

Mr. Arun K. Singh, Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of the Republic of India, Indian Delegation

Mr. Balvinder Singh

Mr. Mohinder Singh

Mr. Lakhwinder Singh

Mrs. Sukhbir Kaur

Ms. Upinder Singh

Mr. Steven Spielberg

Mr. Sri Srinivasan

Ms. Carla Garrett

Ms. Srinija Srinivasan

The Honorable (Mr.) Jim Steinberg, Deputy Secretary of State

Ms. Sherburne Bradstreet

Mrs. Semonti Stephens, Deputy Press Secretary, Office of the First Lady

Mr. Andy Stern

Ms. Anna Burger

Mrs. Jane Stetson

Mr. Bill Stetson

Honorable (Dr.) Larry Summers, Director, National Economic Council

Dr. Elisa New

The Honorable (Ms.) Mona Sutphen, Office of Chief of Staff

Mr. Clyde Williams

Mr. Ratan Tata

The Honorable (Ms.) Tina Tchen, Office of Public Liaison

Ambassador Vinai Thummalapally, Ambassador, Embassy of Belize

Mrs. Barbara Thummalapally

Mr. Jim Torrey

Ms. Rose P Lynch

Mr. Richard Trumka

Mr. Paul H Lemmon

Ms. Urvashi Vaid

Ms. Kate Clinton

Mr. Kirk Wagar

Ms. Crystal Connor

Dr. Eric E. Whitaker

Dr. Cheryl Whitaker

Mr. Brian Williams

Mrs. Jane Williams

Mr. Wellington Wilson

Mrs. Wilson

Mr. Neal Wolin, Deputy Secretary, Department of Treasury

Ms. Alfre Woodard

Mr. Blair E Underwood

Mr. Fareed Zakaria

Ms. Paula Throckmorton Zakaria

##

*****
11/24:
Politico reports that other expected attendees include Nancy Pelosi, United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, Senator John Kerry, Senator Dick Lugar, Vishakha N. Desai, president of the Asia Society, M. Night Shyamalan, Ari Emanuel of WME Entertainment, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Washington Post, Kal Penn, Associate Director of White House Office of Public Engagement, CNN's Sanjay Gupta, David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

Check out our State Dinner Big News page!

From AP, 11/20:

WASHINGTON — It's the hottest ticket in town. Just don't ask the White House who got them.

The White House is saying very little about next week's state dinner with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the first for President Barack Obama. Folks aren't talking about the menu, the guest list or even where it's being held. (Hint: That tent going up on the White House South Lawn is a clue.)

But the silence from the White House is only fueling the speculation about who's in – and who's out.

Will talk show maven Oprah Winfrey mingle with as many as 400 guests who huddle under the big top? What members of Congress got the tickets – and which did not? Will the dinner be filled with guests from Hollywood and Bollywood? And how much spice will be added to the curry?

For sure, the dinner is shaping up to be Washington's equivalent of the Oscars. Lobbyists, celebrities and movers-and-shakers all have been calling the East Wing to make sure their high-stlye invites weren't lost. A polite reply lets them know the postal service didn't err.

Obama's big event has been scripted for weeks but first lady Michelle Obama's office isn't dishing details yet. Protocol dictates a strict list of those who must be invited – ambassadors, ministers, dignitaries. Etiquette dictates others, such as prominent Indian-Americans. And – lest we forget this is Washington – politics will play a big part in who gets the rest.

Some of the confirmed guests are predictable. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton – but not former President Bill Clinton – will be there, as will Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu.

Although the White House is tightlipped, aides to lawmakers and officials confirm they were among the lucky few who will arrive at the star-studded night.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also snagged an invite. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican of Indian descent, will be there. He was invited when President George W. Bush hosted India for a state dinner in 2005 as well. The House Republican leader, Rep. John Boehner, won't be there just two days before Thanksgiving; he'll be home in Ohio. His deputy, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, didn't rate an invite, although he was invited to the elaborate welcoming ceremony that afternoon.

To say the dinner is just another meal would be a dramatic understatement. Tuesday night's fete is shaping up to be the latest imprint Mrs. Obama will leave on Washington's social scene. There was a conga line when the Obamas hosted the nation's governors in February. Stevie Wonder played a concert in the East Room. Marc Anthony took to the South Lawn for an evening of Latin music and Foo Fighters played the Fourth of July party there.

White House aides know they have a chance to make a splash, bringing in a guest chef and reaching out to the entertainment circles for the night's diversion. Even the invite list telegraphs something.

Does it include Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Obama's first nominee to the court and a celebrity in her own right? What about cookbook author and "Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi? Will local students get seats, as has been the case in other stylish events hosted by Mrs. Obama?

And what about political thank yous? How many Obama fundraisers will make the cut? That's not clear.

But Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who's also chairman of the Democratic National Committee, didn't snag an invite, so he won't be sampling the naan or curry.

William Bradley: Tony Blair's Cautionary Tale For Obama

2009-11-24T11:58:47Z

Tony Blair's recent travails, last week over his bid to become the first president of the European Union and today with the start of Britain's Iraq War inquiry, stand as something of a cautionary tale for President Barack Obama. Blair was long the favorite to become the first president of the European Union. But in the end, pilloried on the left for his leading role in the Iraq War and still not supported by the right, he was supplanted by a little-known Belgian bureaucrat.

Just as America had Obamamania in 2008, Britain had Blairmania in 1997. "Things Can Only Get Better" blared, as it were, the ubiquitous Blair campaign song.

Tony Blair's farewell speech.

"Everybody voted for him. He wasn't a politician; he was a craze." That's how the title character puts it in the deliciously vicious roman a clef novel by former Blair friend Robert Harris, The Ghost (as in ghostwriter of the ex-prime minister's memoirs), which was was being made into a movie by Roman Polanski when he was arrested in Switzerland.

Blair ushered in an era of "Cool Britannia," which many critics say morphed into Cruel Britannia as he swapped his famous friendship with Bill Clinton for an infamous friendship with George W. Bush.

As Britain's Opposition Leader in 1994, Blair, along with Clinton, swiftly emerged as a chief advocate of the the global "Third Way," between the sclerotic sort of socialism which made Labour a consistent loser in Britain and a hyper-capitalism which hollowed out communities. With Blair, Labour became New Labour, a remade force able to take on the reigning Conservatives. Well, more than able to take on the Tories. Able to shatter them, actually, which Blair proceeded to do.

"Things Can Only Get Better," the ubiquitous campaign song of Tony Blair and New Labour.

Blair reinvented a moribund political party, won three national elections (the only Labour politician to do so) beginning with his landslide win in 1997 -- the largest in 165 years -- and quickly became a very major world figure.

Under Blair, Britain "modernised" as "Cool Britannia," and indicators on the economy, the environment, and crime improved for his decade-plus as British prime minister. He made Britain a more inclusive society. And he settled the bloody, decades long conflict in Northern Ireland. Blair and Clinton formed a strong working partnership as Blair became a global player.

Fatefully, Blair became quite the interventionist abroad. He took Britain to war, in one form or another, five times. First when he and Clinton decided to conduct an air war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq when the Iraqi dictator proved intransigent on weapons inspections and other matters. Next when, at Blair's determined instigation, NATO launched an air war to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and bring down the Serbian dictatorship of Slobodan Milosevic. Then Blair intervened in the African nation of Sierra Leone, with British forces landing to end a brutal civil war.

Then came 9/11, and Blair, who had formed an unlikely friendship with George W. Bush, was quick to spring to America's side. British resources, notably intelligence, and forces, including its crack special ops forces, were instrumental in helping America overthrow the Taliban's theocratic dictatorship in Afghanistan and rout Al Qaeda from its redoubt.

Bush and Blair address the people of Iraq as the invasion begins.

Then came Iraq. The war far too far, to borrow a phrase and change it a bit. By 2002, it was apparent that Tony Blair had developed a taste for intervention and for turning out dictators, as well as a commitment to his alliance with the US in the 9/11-derived war on terror. Iraq was next on the agenda of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the coterie of neoconservative theorists around them, as it had been all along. Initially skeptical about an Iraq invasion, Blair was caught up in the move. Blair and his people believed that he had major influence over Bush, having banked a great deal of credit with the Afghanistan operation, intel/special ops moves around the world, and world diplomacy in the UN and elsewhere. It turned out that, despite all that and their personal friendship, he did not.

Saddam Hussein was unpopular in much of the Arab world and was a largely secular dictator who was actually oppressing much of his population, especially the Shia. But the Bush/Cheney team, as we've seen, closely associated with various charlatans in the Iraqi exile community and elsewhere, had a totally unrealistic view of how Iraq might be secured and governed in the aftermath of victory in a conventional war. Blair wanted a strong UN role in the governance of Iraq, but Cheney and his allies worked assiduously to undermine Blair's influence with Bush on that and other matters. Such as engagement with Iran and Syria, which Blair has always advocated. To the hardline neoconservatives, Blair, actually a man of the center-left, was a socialist who did not share their view of a civilizational war, and that was that.

A BBC retrospective on Blair.

The other big problem was how to sell an Iraq war. Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator, but that hardly made him unique in the world. His links with Al Qaeda were slight, and there was no serious evidence linking him to the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, despite what Dick Cheney and the neocons said. You couldn't actually say that we were invading Iraq for its oil. Which, of course, never did pay for the occupation, a later claim of Donald Rumsfeld's. That left WMD (weapons of mass destruction).

Which Saddam Hussein, for all his understandable bluster, didn't really have. He maintained the facade of having them -- consistently blocking weapons inspections -- to maintain fear and order within and to seem more powerful to other countries. Incidentally, merely because an irritating country says it can do things doesn't mean it should be taken seriously. Otherwise, we would believe that North Korea was about to take over the world. It's the job of intelligence services and their decision-making masters in government to determine what is bullshit and act accordingly.

But Bush and Cheney pushed the myth of Iraqi WMD, and its supposedly imminent threat. Because it served their nitwit purpose to do so. Blair lent his credibility to this nonsense and took Britain to war. A war which, as we saw at the Azores Summit prior to the invasion, Blair was far better at explaining and selling than was the falteringly inarticulate Bsh.

A war which played right into Al Qaeda's hands, which wanted the West tied down in military operations in the middle of the Islamic world, both to drain America's resources and to inflame a new generation of jihadists. A war which provided Iran with the opening to become the great power of the region, an ambition which has not yet come to fruition.

A war which hamstrung Tony Blair, festooning his once glittering reputation with streamers of screaming charges of "B.Liar," that he not only used his very considerable powers of persuasion to help sell an unsellable war but also facilitated the torture of British citizens at the hands of CIA and Pakistani interrogators.

The Ghost teaser trailer.

Could something like this happen to Barack Obama? Could he pin America down in another faraway quagmire, going far beyond what is needed to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become the base for "The Base," Al Qaeda? Could he see his shining stand against torture slide into a de facto policy of torture?

Blair, who never officially announced his candidacy for the European presidency, made several late moves to try to find his way through the complex thicket of European politics, with calls to various leaders and a speech in Switzerland where he appealed to the continent's dominant center-right faction by warning against too much governmental intervention to overcome the global recession.

But it didn't work. Blair was too big a figure for some of the smaller countries and for some leaders of the larger countries with global aspirations of their own; too controversial for the left and too left for the right. And so the old political dictum that you can't beat somebody with nobody was proved wrong, at least in this instance.

He continues as special Mideast envoy of the Quartet (America, Britain, Russia, and the European Union). But the qestion of Israel and Palestine continues to be largely intractable. His supposed ally, Secretary of State Condi Rice imagined she would negotiate a peace -- at which she clearly failed -- and pushed Blair off to the building up of the Palestinian Authority. Which is only a fraction of the equation. A friend who visited the region last week said that the Israeli and Palestinian leaders she saw barely mentioned Tony Blair.

You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.

Lesley M. M. Blume: State Dinner Menus of Eras Past: Aspic, Hot Dogs, and Boiled Mutton

2009-11-24T08:45:35Z

Tonight President Obama and Mrs. Obama will host their first state dinner at the White House, honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Few events are more glamorous than these; they make Vanity Fair's famous annual Oscar party seems like kindergarten in comparison. A thousand egos must perish on the vine when state dinner invitations go out and don't land on certain doorsteps.

After all, as author Peter Schifando says in his book Entertaining at the White House with Nancy Reagan, "a published list of guests is taken as a barometer of who is in favor and who is out."

Social politics (not to mention political politics) aside, state dinners also offer a barometer of another sort: they showcase the state of American culture - and this time around, the world is eager to see Obama-lot revive the glamour of Camelot's grand fetes. After all, state dinners and other similar events allowed the Kennedys to show the world a new side of our country: one premised on youth, chicness, and a uniquely American cultural sophistication.

"State dinners [are] not just an opportunity to show off American hospitality," says one-time First Chef Walter Scheib in his book White House Chef: Eleven Years, Two Presidents, One Kitchen. "They are a chance to parade American food and wine before the world."

For more than 200 years, American presidents and their wives have used state dinners to display the best that America has to offer. In this special edition of my Let's Bring Back column (which celebrates forgotten events, objects, personas, and pastimes from bygone eras), I've looked into how some First Couples have touted American cuisine - and by extension, American identity - in the past.

It's fascinating to see how presentation and palates have evolved over the years, and how historical context and presidential personality all influence this facet of American showmanship. Yet one thing has always been consistent: the desire to make a distinct impression.

Below, the Kennedys tout the virtues of aspic, the Franklin Roosevelts scandalize the polite world with an all-American entrée, and George Washington gives new meaning to the phrase "no frills."

* * *

The humbleness of the Washington White House

On May 29, 1789, President George Washington hosted America's first state dinner, at which ministers from France and Spain were present. A description of this modest event from one of the guests:

"It was the least showy dinner that I ever sa[w] at the President's. As there was no clergyman present, Washington himself said grace on taking his seat. He dined on a boiled leg of mutton, as it was his custom to eat of only one dish. After the dessert a single glass of wine was offered to each of the guests, when the President rose, the guests following his example, and rapired to the drawing-room, each departing at his option, without ceremony."

This was perhaps an appropriately solemn affair, considering that the leaders of this newly-founded, war-ravaged country were probably still terrified about shaping its future. Another source states that "the Washingtons served good wine, but ordinarily a silver mug of beer stood beside the President's plate, except at state dinners."

(Excerpt from Washington After the Revolution, William Spohn Baker [J.B. Lippincott Company: Philadelphia], 1898)

* * *

"Mess Hall" state dinners under President Ulysses Grant

His early state dinners were hardly the stuff of culinary dreams. One source states that President Grant brought with him into the White House a "quartermaster from his army days" to serve as the resident chef. The White House tables of all levels of formality were treated with military democracy: as mess halls. Roasted turkey was apparently served for most informal dinners, and the chef "varied the menu for a state dinner by having a bigger turkey."

Things improved significantly once Mrs. Grant took control of things and brought in a chef named Valentino Melah. This maestro turned many later state dinners into 20+ course affairs, featuring:

• French vegetable "oul" (a soup)
• French croquet of meat
• Fillets of beef with potatoes and mushrooms
• "Luscious" legs of partidge
• Rice puddings and quinces
• Some concoction called "Roman punch"

* * *

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt wow the Queen of England

They did so by feeding her a hot dog during an historic official visit in 1939. Many were scandalized, of course, but hey - it was during the Depression, after all.

* * *

Camelot makes aspic officially glamorous

Practically everything that the Kennedys did when they first swept into the White House symbolized "out with the old, in with the new." This meant not only banishing some dreary Eisenhower-era rattan furniture that had been cluttering up the executive mansion; it also meant showing the country - and the world - that there was a new sheriff in town when it came to entertaining and style.

President and Mrs. Kennedy held their first state dinner May 3, 1961, in honor of Tunisian President Bourguiba. Mrs. Kennedy meticulously researched for the event with the State Department Protocol Office and scoured reports of previous state dinners to ensure that this was an impeccable, tone-setting event; President Kennedy also partook in the wine tastings. While the glamorous new First Lady was likely the star attraction of the evening, an elaborate American military panoramic was staged for the guests on the South Lawn, with nearly 500 performers. Determined to show that Americans could be erudite, Mrs. Kennedy infused White House culture with French references, as you can see from certain flourishes in the important evening's (very 1960s) menu:

• Medallions of Cold Salmon
• Roast Lamb with Vegetables
• Salad and Brie Cheese
• Molded Strawberry and Vanilla Ice Cream
• Petits Fours

* * *

The Reagan years: Shoulder pads and "Nouvelle Cuisine"

There was nothing reticent about the 80s, and the Reagans reflected that in their entertaining. If their predecessors, the Carters, stood for homeyness, the Reagans were all about fanciness.

Sequins and hairsprayed bouffants were hastily ushered back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on February 26, 1981, when President and Mrs. Reagan honored British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("the other woman in my life," joked the president) with their first lavish White House state dinner. Vanity Fair later said that this event revived "the connection between the political and the social [in Washington] -- elements many felt had been lacking since the days of Jacqueline Kennedy." There was a dress rehearsal for the event; Mrs. Reagan planned every detail of the seating (the guest list was narrowed to around 90 people to give the event an exclusive feeling) and the 1980s "nouvelle cuisine" menu, which included:

• Pompano with champagne sauce
• Rack of lamb
• Grand Marnier soufflé (an especially 80s touch)
• Mixed vegetables, tiny potatoes, and mushrooms

* * *

The Clintons serve "light and contemporary" fare
(and Bill goes out for a Big Mac afterward)

On June 13, 1994, President and Mrs. Clinton held an unusually large state dinner - for 180 guests - in honor of Emperor Akihito of Japan, occupant of what some call the "most formal throne on earth." In the first white-tie dinner since the Reagan administration, the First Couple put up a huge white tent dripping with chandeliers in the Rose Garden. At one point in the evening, President Clinton walked in the garden with Japanese Empress Michiko and sang her the words from "Autumn Leaves."

Since the 1990s oversaw the national "fat-free" revolution, the state dinner menu showcased "light and contemporary, regional American" fare, according to then-White House chef Walter Scheib (this was, of course, rather ironic given President Clinton's oft-spoofed predilection for fast food). The courses were largely devoid of butter and cream:

• Seared breast of quail with white corn custard, grilled vegetables, and tomato-cumin sauce
• Arctic char and lobster sausage with wild mushroom risotto
• Field greens with goat cheese and basil baked in phyllo, topped with port wine dressing
• Cherry sherbet with almond ice cream in a spun sugar cherry topped with a spun sugar cherry blossom

* * *

The Bush years: The White House goes Tex-Mex

Hee haw: the Texans were back. On September 5, 2001, President and Mrs. George W. Bush held their first state dinner, honoring Mexican President Vicente Fox - and the menu practically shouted: "No Eastern seaboard pretension here." President Bush heartily welcomed President Fox to the "Casa Blanca" and the evening ended with a whopping fireworks display. The dinner menu nodded both to Mexico's cuisine and President Bush's tex-mex sensibilities:

• Maryland crab & pozole chorizo with summer vegetables
• Pepita-crusted bison
• Poblano whipped potatos
• Salad of gold and red tomatoes
• Mango and coconut ice cream dome

* * *

In Fall 2010, Chronicle Books will release a book by Lesley M. M. Blume based on this popular column. 'Let's Bring Back' will be a sophisticated, stylish cultural encyclopedia, celebrating forgotten objects, pastimes, and personae from bygone eras. From sealing wax and quill pens to the Orient Express, fainting couches, and limericks, there is a great deal of ground to cover. Please make sure to visit previous installments of Let's Bring Back.

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Read more: Style News, Kennedy, Ulysses Grant, Let's Bring Back, Ronald Reagan, President Obama, Jacqueline Kennedy, Obama, State Dinner, George Washington, White House, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, White House History, Style, Eleanor Roosevelt, Michelle Obama, Lesley M. M. Blume, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Etiquette, Jackie Kennedy, Laura Bush, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton, American Cuisine, Presidential State Dinner, Style News

William Bradley: Mad Men : Three Seasons On and Looking Forward

2009-11-21T09:54:04Z
Mad Men's brilliant third season finale earlier this month is still echoing in the mind. And in the culture. January Jones was a game host of Saturday Night Live the following weekend. (Though she didn't make anyone forget Jon Hamm's great hosting gig last year. He is seriously funny.) Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed that she's a fan of the show. And of course her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is a Mad Men fan as well.

Which is simply too perfect for words. I could easily write a column comparing Bill Clinton and Don Draper. Avoiding the obvious cheap shots. Another time, perhaps.

Don Draper and Roger Sterling move forward with new plans for the future.

I've been thinking about the arc of the series from its excellent pilot, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," set in March 1960, to the fabulous third season finale, which takes place in December 1963. Where has the series been, where is it now, and where might it be going with creator Matthew Weiner?

The reality is that our beloved old Sterling Cooper was a rather stodgy advertising agency. That's clear in the series premiere. We meet Don Draper, our protagonist anti-hero. He's trying hard to come up with a campaign for a tobacco company. And to help it deal with these awful rumors that cigarettes are very bad for you.

We learn that Don, while very creative, is wedded to an old paradigm. He doesn't like research. He doesn't like quirky advertising. He doesn't think, so far as we can tell through all the smoke around him, that there's anything wrong with cigarettes. We see that his agency is on the wrong side of change. That's really spelled out when Roger Sterling says he doesn't see any reason why America won't fall in love with a good-looking Navy hero like Dick Nixon.

As the season goes on, we see the Sterling Coo crew blindsided by the advent of John F. Kennedy. (Except for Pete Campbell.)

The only art we see highlighted, and this is in season two, is Bert Cooper's Rothko. Which the characters view as a great mystery. It's a key prop in season two. In fact, you could say that the Rothko set in motion most of the principal events for the rest of season two and all of season three.

After all, it was Jane Siegel's impish decision to goad a group into venturing into the forbidden territory of Bert's office to view the painting that led to her being fired by Joan. And reinstated by Roger, who had happened upon the perfect context in which to casually hit on Don's gorgeous, smart young secretary without looking like an aging lech. That in turn led to the collapse of Roger's marriage, his decision to marry Jane, and the need to sell Sterling Cooper to the Brits to settle his divorce.

The essential milieu of Mad Men is not all that admirable.

In that sense, the Rothko is the show's McGuffin, a mysterious object of wonderment which triggers action.

Yet the fact that it is a Rothko which serves as the trigger for monumental change in the show points up the time warp nature of Sterling Cooper. A dangerously time warp nature, what with the cascading changes about to unfold in the 1960s.

Rothko is Abstract Expressionism. Avant garde in the '50s. And it placed New York City at the center of the art world, supplanting Paris. But by the '60s, it was establishment art. What was popping across, as it happens, New York at the very time of Mad Men's seasons two and three, was Pop Art. Heavily influenced by advertising, mass media, and pop culture -- in many respects an ironic commentary on them -- and executed by ex-commercial artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist, Pop was centered in New York City.

Yet we see not a hint of Pop in the world of Sterling Cooper, even as it's beginning to explode across the same city, with Lichtenstein's classic Drowning Girl produced in 1963. The gang finally gets Kennedy, as we see right along from Jackie Kennedy's TV special on the White House, which takes place during season two. And Peggy and a few others discover Bob Dylan, while Don dabbles with a beatnik girlfriend. But on the whole, this is a crew that is largely behind the curve of change, as is so shockingly clear in the Derby Day episode early in season three, with Roger singing in blackface and Pete and Trudy dancing the Charleston. We barely even see anyone dance the Twist.

And while it's a shock to see that great Sterling Cooper set slip into the rear view mirror, it's okay with me. I thought it was brilliant, but I didn't really like it. I like the fashions of the early '60s more than the design aesthetic.

In any event, Sterling Coo felt more late '50s than even early '60s, and the real "Sixties" are definitely getting underway.

The characters react to the shocking news of the assassination of President Kennedy.

It's like comparing and contrasting North By Northwest with Dr. No. The films are only three years apart -- with North By Northwest in 1959 and Dr. No in 1962 -- but they have a very different feel. North By Northwest, which clearly influenced the show, is definitely of the '50s, refined and rather mannered. Dr. No is definitely of the '60s, rawer and more sexual and violent. (North By Northwest, unlike Dr. No, is a great movie, which I'll write about as its 50th anniversary edition is now out this month.)

And the change we see reflected in those films will be even more pronounced the next time we see the ex-Sterling Coo crew, which I expect to be 1964. It's the year of the Beatles and Goldfinger, the last Bond film in which Bond wears a hat (and then only while golfing with the villain). And it's the year of LBJ's election (as well as that of a new senator for New York named Robert F. Kennedy), the year of civil rights and the real beginnings of the Vietnam War. Advertising is the perfect prism by which to view these characters moving through a hyper-capitalist society that is accelerating and fragmenting as it does.

It's interesting that President Kennedy basically killed off most of the hat industry after he was elected president and went hatless on the day of his inauguration. The fact that one of the last things Don does in the old Sterling Cooper offices is pick up his hat signifies how he has clung to the past while clinging to Sterling Coo. If he wears a hat from now on, it will be through sheer force of habit. And I doubt he will, as it's important to his self-image as an image professional for Don to be cool.

Betty confronts Don with his little box of big secrets in this past season's Episode 11.

So where are Don and the other characters now in this fabulous novel for television?

** Don Draper is the one constant in the series. Though there was a moment when I thought he just might swim out to sea, like Bruce Dern in Coming Home. Now, prodded by his eccentric but clear-sighted amigo Connie Hilton, he's flown the coop (even though he forced Coop to come along for the big ride), setting up a new advertising agency that can be fast and nimble enough to drive change rather than be washed away by it.

His marriage to Betty is over. I suspect he'll be happier without the pressure and energy drain of having to pretend to keep up the facade of a life which itself was a facade. Don never really got Betty, as we saw in the aftermath of their big trip to Rome. He wanted the image of Betty, kept safely behind the gilded white picket fence cage of the "perfect" suburban life. Ironically, had he engaged her in his professional life, which she wanted, she could have been a great partner in his new venture.

In any event, Don Draper is on the loose. That frees up the show in many ways. I thought this season was quite brilliant, in much the same way that a great long novel can be brilliant, in exploring the permutations of family and married life that led to the big break-up. But like such a novel, portions of it dragged for me, necessary though they probably were. Now that is largely done, pared away, presenting exciting possibilities for Don.

Did Don actually blow his best chance to revive his marriage to Betty after they returned from Rome?

** Betty Draper has been another central constant, because she is married to the protagonist. In some ways, this season was as much about Betty as it was about Don. Now their marriage has ended, and so has Betty's centrality to the story. She'll still be a significant player, certainly because of the children. But she's likely to disappear for stretches of the story now. In that sense, she may become a more likable character.

She is marrying someone she barely knows, which is never an especially brilliant idea. But Henry Francis is a more real concept to her now than Don, since she's learned that there really is no Don. Like Don, she fell in love with an image. When she learned that the picture she had held in her head of "Don Draper" was false, what faith she had left was cracked. The Kennedy assassination, and especially its immediate aftermath, shattered their already fractured bond.

** Sally Draper was always an intriguing child. This season, she became one of the principal characters in the series. She's the quintessential baby boomer in the series. She's already being raised largely by television. That will only accelerate with her parents split apart. Her brother Bobby is a less interesting character, perhaps because boys that age are not all that fascinating. Though he did have some telling moments late in the season.

** Roger Sterling is the character I enjoy the most. His funny, frequently sarcastic, nearly always spot-on observations are a real treat. His character really sold me on the series in its early days when it was still unfamiliar and sometimes slow-going. He and Don have a great rapport, and a fascinating dynamic. Kind of like sweet and sour chicken. It was hard when he was sidelined from the main action through much of the season. But he is certainly right in the thick of it now. And with a real existential challenge. He inherited his business. Now he gets to find out what he can do on his own, reliant though he will be on Don. And vice versa.

** Peggy Olsen is the forerunner female professional, with the clearest arc. As pollster Paul Maslin puts it: "She is going to be the litmus test on a lot of the change -- gender roles, first and foremost, but I could see her getting radicalized by the times as well."

January Jones played Grace Kelly in this Saturday Night Live version of a scene from Hitchcock's classic Rear Window.

** Joan Holloway has been the betwixt and between female character. She's used her sexuality to get ahead. But ironically, her looks have gotten in her way professionally. Now, with her central role in this very high-powered little start-up agency, she has the opportunity to shine in ways she never could have before.

Then there's Joan's husband. It's tempting to talk sardonically about Vietnam and land mines, but suffice it to say that their lives are going in very different directions. He's in the Army, he has training and postings overseas, and I really don't see Joan chucking her new role as, essentially, the chief operating officer of Sterling Cooper Draper Price to sit around base housing somewhere.

** Pete Campbell has always been ahead of the curve in his thinking. He's also been a big pain in the ass and worse, pouting, snobby, backstabbing (remember Freddy Rumsen, one of my favorites?), forcing himself on the neighbor's nanny.

Yet he is growing up, in tune with the times. He turned out to be the Kennedy person at Sterling Coo, even though in season one he had dutifully come up with a very clever gambit to help Nixon. He's helped tremendously by having the best marriage, to the estimable and delightful Trudy, who I think will be more of a player in the series as the new agency moves forward.

** Bert Cooper is not ready for the ice floe. The eccentric sage of Sterling Coo, who can play real hardball when he wants to (recall how he finally got Don to sign his contract) is now way outside his comfort zone, working in a hotel room with people young enough to be his grandchildren. There's no place for him to nap or watch TV during the day there. The slumbering old lion in the winter of his days may have a rebirth.

** Lane Pryce quickly became one of my favorite characters. The ultimate company loyalist proved to be quite the skilled plotter when he cast aside his old company tie. I think he will end up working well with Joan. Capable people admire capability. After all, without both of these characters, there is no Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Mad Men's third season opener set a strong stage for things to come.

** Sal Romano has had a terrific character arc which dropped him in the middle of his identity's central contradiction. He won't easily return to the crew. After all, there is no agency without the big tobacco account, and unless the odious Lee Garner Jr. steps in front of a bus, or tries to be a movie mogul in Hollywood, this scrambling start-up is in no position to play hardball in order to rehire Sal as art director. He could be a consultant, however. He's a terrific character, and I hope and expect we will see a lot more of him.

** Ken Cosgrove was one of the "left behind." We don't really know why yet. As talented as Pete is, especially in terms of ideas and foresight, Ken is the better accounts man, for the reason that Lane laid out. He makes it look effortless. And he's certainly talented, a fine writer as we know from season one, with a better touch with talent than Peggy, as we saw in season two.

** Paul Kinsey lost his copywriting duel with Peggy. He went to Princeton (as he mentions on occasion), she went to secretarial school. But she has the knack for advertising, and he doesn't. The new crew could certainly hire him as they staff up, but they could hire somebody else, too.

** Harry Crane, the luckiest character in the series -- his key career moment came when he saw that Sterling Coo should have a television department, which was not exactly a stroke of genius -- keeps on keeping on. He has the connections now and is the amiable facilitator they need.

** Duck Phillips looked as though he might be the deus ex machina setting big changes in motion this season. But he turned out to be more of a red herring; unless he marries Peggy, which is hard to see, I don't know how he plays into things.

** Henry Francis, of course, is now a serious character. Will he marry his Grace Kelly whom he's rescued from the suburbs -- as he sees it -- and make Betty the princess she was raised to be? Well, he has a presidential campaign to work on, that of his governor, Nelson Rockefeller. This 1964 campaign, incidentally, marks the fundamental defeat of the liberal East Coast wing of the Republican Party and the rise of the Sun Belt right.

This might portend a more nomadic existence for Henry, if he were principally a campaign operative. But he works in the governor's office. And Nelson Rockefeller is going to be governor of New York for another decade. Then he becomes vice president of the United States. As Henry Kissinger knows, there is sustaining power and prestige in being a senior advisor to Rockefeller, a famed art collector and one of the richest men in America. And a rather glittering world of power for Betty to explore.

** Suzanne Farrell is not crazy. Sorry, folks. she's not. A lot of fans think she is (fill in the blank) psychiatric designator. What she is is a forerunner in her own right, a smart, free-spirited, proto-hippie. She's also very good-looking, a brunette (like Don likes when he is not in Grace Kelly dream mode). Oh, and little Sally absolutely adores her ex-teacher. Hmm ...

** Jane Siegel is someone we might see more of next season, especially if the ABC scifi drama Flash Forward doesn't start doing better. That's because the actress who plays the new Mrs. Roger Sterling is a regular on this new show. A lot of fans want Roger and Joan to get together. There are two problems with this. One, they are both married to other people, only one of whom is going to be sent overseas. The other is that they work together. In very confined spaces. And Roger, as Bert pointed out, is too old for Joan. He's not too old for Jane, however paradoxical it may seem. When Roger passes on, Jane is still pretty young, and very well off, and can more easily restart her life with someone else. Jane is also one of the most contemporary characters on the show, something of a neo-Mod, actually, before she married Roger.

** Conrad Hilton proved to be a most interesting character. After all, he set the events of the finale in motion, with Don finally doing what Connie wanted to hear him say he would do: Go out on his own and make his own mark. Connie can only be approving of what his sometime surrogate son has done. And since Don didn't burn his bridges, and then acted very rapidly on his own -- and there is no redundancy of Hilton advertising now -- there's no reason these two can't work together down the line.

You know, Don Draper does look a little bit like George Kaplan. Or Roger O. Thornhill. What does the "O" stand for? Nothing at all.

Well, I think that's enough for now. This is a novel playing out on television, and can be discussed endlessly.

I'm really a political writer, not an entertainment writer, so this has been a very interesting experience. I do write about movies from time to time. In fact, I'm going to write over Thanksgiving about the 50th anniversary edition of North By Northwest, a movie which has an obvious connection to this great series.

And having been writing about the best show on television for the past three months, I'm going to write about the biggest show on television. That's NCIS, a very different sort of show, very well done, which has surprisingly become more popular as it has aged, being in its seventh season now. And, oddly, no one has written about it.

But I won't be analyzing NCIS every week. Not that it would not be much easier, though the Ziva character (the agent who is the daughter of the head of Israel's Mossad secret service, which, contrary to your expectation, doesn't come off at all well) is certainly complicated enough to be on Mad Men.

I could write about Lost. After all, I've watched it from the beginning. And this is the last season. Sadly, I still don't really know what's going on. With the characters time shifting so often I sometimes feel like I have a concussion while watching it.

I don't think many Americans watch MI-5 (Spooks in the less PC UK).

24? It got better again last season, though it's not as good as it was in its first few seasons. And the constant torture motif certainly is significant, if too predictable. But that might be too much like writing about politics. Though it might be good to examine how Jack Bauer manages to drive across Los Angeles in less than half an hour. Sadly, the show no longer takes place in LA, so that humor angle no longer exists.

Let's see. It's less than nine months till Mad Men's season four begins ...

You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
Read more: Mad Men, Bill Clinton, 1960s, Jon Hamm, Advertising, January Jones, Matthew Weiner, Hillary Clinton, Don Draper, John F. Kennedy, Pop Art, Rothko, Entertainment News

Bill Clinton Blasts Olbermann For Politicizing Health Care Event, Refuses To Go

2009-11-20T22:01:13Z
On Friday, Bill Clinton decided not to attend a health care event organized by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann because Olbermann had "politicized" the event.

He explained his decision to FireDogLake's Eve Gittelso, who ran into Clinton in a gift shop of the Clinton Library in Arkansas:

"Clinton responded that Olbermann was politicizing the clinic, and that it wasn't helpful for Olbermann to do that. He said he did not feel he could show up now, because the event had turned political....Olbermann, who has invited his viewers to contribute to the National Association of Free Clinics in advance of the event, has said on his show that 'I want Sens. (Blanche) Lincoln and (Mark) Pryor to see what health care poverty is really like in Little Rock.' Lincoln has met recently with Joe Biden and President Obama, but has yet to agree to vote for debate on health care to proceed in the Senate."

Mediaite notes that Olbermann began his endorsement of these free clinics on October 8 and that the Arkansas event is just one of six Olbermann had done.

Watch Olbermann's original health care pitch below.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Read more: Bill Clinton, Olbermann Politicizes Health Care Event, Clinton Olbermann, Olbermann Health Care Event, Clinton, Health Care Reform, Clinton Blasts Olbermann, Keith Olbermann, Olbermann, Health Care, Olbermann Health Care Reform, Politics News

Brent Green: To End War in Afghanistan, Reinstate Military Draft?

2009-11-19T13:42:37Z

On December 1, 1969, a single number hung over my head like the Sword of Damocles. That innocuous written number had been tucked inside a blue plastic capsule, mixed with 365 other identical capsules, and then pulled randomly from a large glass jar. The number represented my birthday; it was the 71^st capsule drawn.

I will never forget the nation’s first military lottery since 1942 because I would henceforth be more vulnerable to being drafted if I lost tenuous grasp on a student deferment, classified as 2-S. Rampant rumors warned: the first 150 birthdays drawn that year would be needed to fill quotas.

The number 71 wasn’t as dreadful as the first birthday selected that day: September 14. American men born between 1944 and 1950 on September 14 went to the front of the line to await a possible letter from the U.S. Selective Service System and, for many, involuntary military duty.

Young men throughout the nation joined me by watching this lottery spectacle on national television, most feeling some trepidation and anxiety. One random moment in this “reality TV show” could portend an ominous outcome: military induction and a complimentary airline ticket to the steamy jungles of Vietnam.

And in those days of explosive military escalation in Southeast Asia, even a student deferment might become worthless by summer vacation. For young men of that time, experiencing Vietnam stateside meant never knowing for sure if your next birthday would be celebrated in a foxhole.

Parallels between Vietnam War and Afghanistan War

U.S. invasions of Vietnam and Afghanistan have eerie similarities. Vietnam was ruled by Diem; Afghanistan is ruled by Karzai. Both leaders came from corrupt families, failing to achieve widespread public support, especially in vast rural regions.

In both countries at war, guerrilla extremists stubbornly frustrate efforts at nation building: communists in Vietnam and Taliban in Afghanistan. Ill-defined military goals, especially exit strategies, make both wars seemingly endless.

Both nations share histories of bungled attempts at dominion or regime change by empires with superior armies and technologies. Failed military domination by the Japanese and French preceded America’s presence in Vietnam. Botched dominance by the British and Russians precede America’s Afghanistan.

In November 1969, about 66% of the nation’s citizens believed it had been a mistake to send troops to fight in Vietnam. In November 2009, about 57% of Americans oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Even hawkish political arguments have conspicuous parallelism. Fall of Vietnam to communist takeover would be the first domino, with nations tumbling all the way to Mexico. Relinquishing Afghanistan to the Taliban guarantees expansion of fundamentalist extremism throughout the region, threatening friendly oil producing neighbors.

And both nations have idiosyncratic histories, cultural imperatives, language subtleties, nationalistic traditions and human motivations that U.S. policymakers did not fully comprehend before leading this nation to war, making these invasions appear naïve in retrospect.

As Theodore Sorensen, President John Kennedy’s speech writer and special counsel wrote recently, “I advised the president, ‘If ever there was a country that needed to save itself, that country is Vietnam.’” Sorensen now flatly concludes: “Today that country is Afghanistan.” Further, Sorensen observes: “America’s national security, much less its way of life, was never at stake in Vietnam, thousands of miles from our shores, nor is it in Afghanistan.”

Public support for the Vietnam War fell to the lowest level in opinion polls by October 1969. Coincidentally, that month also included an unprecedented outpouring of antiwar protests through The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on October 15. By some accounts, this strike and demonstration involved more Americans in a coordinated war protest than at any time in the nation’s history. It became the first major refutation of Richard Nixon’s handling of the war. Over 100,000 attended a Boston rally to hear anti-war Senator George McGovern. Future president Bill Clinton, then a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, organized and participated in a demonstration in England.

One month later on November 15, over 300,000 protestors congregated in Washington D.C. in another massive Moratorium march. Who were these protestors? The New York Times reported: “Except for clusters of middle-aged marchers and a few in their latter years, the crowd in appearance could have been a merging of the college campuses across the nation.” A similar demonstration estimated at 250,000 filled the streets of San Francisco.

Given such unfavorable public opinion polls, why does the war in Afghanistan rumble and tumble onward, a war that has lasted nearly as long as America’s active military engagement in Vietnam? What single significant variable is different today?

Clearly, forces other than compulsory military draft compelled many to protest Vietnam so stridently, but one undeniable factor then, nonexistent today, was a military draft. On the contrary, millions of American men today between 18 and 25 do not face involuntary military duty, and this may help explain a lack of resounding and unavoidable public demonstrations against today’s wars.

What might happen if in addition to lobbying to end the war in Afghanistan, peace-seeking legislators proceed to reinstall the military draft?

Perhaps President Obama might then gaze from his Oval Office, as did Nixon 40 years ago, and see hundreds of thousands of young protestors vociferously denouncing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unambiguously demonstrating sentiments of a majority of the nation’s citizens.

Read more: Bill Clinton, Military Lottery, Vietnam War, Draft, Theodore Sorensen, Taliban, George Mcgovern, Afghanistan, Karzai, Barack Obama, Diem, Politics News

Les Leopold: Clinton's Cash for Caulkers? Not enough Economic Insulation

2009-11-19T10:18:45Z
Bill Clinton and John Doerr, the venture capitalist, are urging the Obama administration to use unspent TARP funds to stimulate jobs and reduce energy wastage by providing cash to homeowners and businesses for weatherization. It's being sold as a way to counteract our jobless recovery (make that our job-loss recovery). They claim that the two-year $23 billion program will pay for itself in the not-so-long haul because of the obvious energy savings.

To be sure, using TARP money for something other than increasing Wall Street profits and bonuses would be a welcomed change. But it is questionable whether the Cash for Caulkers scheme can stimulate sufficient employment soon enough to help the 30 million who are jobless and the 49 million who are skipping meals.

A more direct approach would be the creation of a national Caulkers Corps, modeled after the New Deal's Works Progress Administration and its Civilian Conservation Corps. Like those programs, the Caulkers Corps would directly hire the unemployed to weatherize homes and businesses coast to coast.

In addition, it needs more funding. The $23 billion estimated for two years won't produce nearly enough jobs to break our jobs depression. We need to put at least $50 billion a year directly into the Caulkers Corps. (That's a million jobs at $50,000 each. The multiplier might add another 500,000 jobs.) Homeowners and businesses could be asked to pay for the cost of supplies so that most of the taxpayers' money could go into wages and benefits.

Weatherization should be the Democrats' (and everyone's!) dream program. In one fell swoop you create jobs, reduce living expenses for homeowners and renters, improve national energy security, enhance business profitability and the competitiveness of exporters, and pluck the lowest-hanging fruit in the effort to confront global warming. And while it requires the up-front investment, it pays for itself through savings in only a few years' time.

Given our employment collapse, this program needs a massive investment to really do the job. When it comes to bailing out Wall Street we empty Fort Knox. But when we talk saving energy and creating jobs, the Clinton plan offers an investment that will be smaller than Goldman Sachs' bonus pool. (In fact, a 90 percent windfall profit tax on the bailout-created profits of the 19 largest banks would be the ideal way to promote a robust caulker jobs program.)

If we really want to get the job done, we should graft this program with the bolder one suggested by finance expert Marshall Auerbach. He makes an excellent case that government should become the employer of last resort (ELR) in order to automatically create sufficient jobs when our system fails to produce enough work for those willing and able to work. If we combine Auerbach's proposed ELR with the Caulkers Corps we get a powerful program that both weatherizes all homes and business over the next decade, and ensures that Americans are back at work.

Opponents instead will say that we must get the government out of the way to make room for entrepreneurial initiative. They insist that the natural forces of the economic cycle will soon right our ship. But even those tossing tea into the harbor must notice that the only ships setting sail are those tax-payer supported yachts on Wall Street. If we don't put our people back to work, we'll all be headed to more troubled waters. A robustly-funded Caulkers Corps could truly make a difference.

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.

Bob McKinnon: Giving Thanks for Action

2009-11-17T12:00:46Z

Today you will blink almost 17,000 times, but what will you see? Your heart will beat 30,000 times today, but how much will you feel? You will take over 4,000 steps, but where are you really going?

Every day our lives are filled with hundreds of thousands of acts, so many of which go unnoticed, even to our selves. We go about our daily routines filled with responsibilities, habits and hobbies and in an instant the day is gone. And what do we have to show for it? How many moments were we fully present? How many of our acts were deliberate? How much of our day really lived?

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote upon going to live at Walden Pond, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

It has been suggested that this decade be labeled the "Decade of Distraction" and it is easy to see how distraction has become the enemy of the deliberate. We all have our share of distractions from the seemingly benign like sports and celebrity culture, to the bizarre like our fixation on events like the boy not in the balloon or the unveiling of a woman mauled by a chimp.

The forms by which they are delivered exacerbate the diversity of our distractions. The average American spends 40 hours a week in front of a screen. The average office worker spends 2/3rds of their time on email. And of course, social media like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter fuels our simultaneous needs for distraction and instant validation.

Distraction has its place. It can serve as a welcome respite from the stresses of everyday life. But we must be prepared with the repercussions of what our distractions are distracting us from both as individuals and as a society.

Martha Graham once wrote, "Every action of ours is passed on to others according to its value, of good or evil, it passes from father to son, from one generation to the next, in a perpetual movement".

So what are we passing on with our actions and our distractions?

When habitual distractions trump deliberate actions we focus on politics instead of policy, the selfish vs. the selfless, and the "urgent" vs. the important.

Margaret Mead said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." And while I would not dispute the premise that a small group can ignite change, what ultimately changes the world is when most of us change.

I once heard Mike Huckabee speak at an event at the Clinton Presidential Library. In talking about the need to change the social norms that contribute to childhood obesity, he told the audience "If we were at the same conference twenty years ago. This room would be filled with cigarette smoke, as most of us would be smokers. After we were done here, many would have a couple of drinks, get behind the wheel of a car and drive home probably inebriated. Very few of us would fasten our seat belt and as we drove away our highways would be littered with trash."

But because our social norms have changed, it would now be unacceptable to smoke in public, drive drunk, to not fasten our seat belt or litter. People in mass were able to set aside their distractions long enough to take deliberate action.

Today everything from health care to climate change are not addressed with decisive and deliberate action, because we are distracted by the sideshows at the circus. We do not confront the essentials of the issues because we take issue with the unessential.

Fortunately, there are more and more organizations helping us to act deliberately such as All for Good, Change.org, Carbon Rally, Do Something, Do Good, Volunteer Match, and hopefully even my own project, Actions Speak Loudest. Their names say it all. They serve as a much needed reminder and support system to act collectively and with deliberation.

I am hardly immune to distractions. And at times they have been consuming. Which should come as no surprise to any fellow Red Sox fan.

Recent events, however, have forced me to think and act more deliberately.

When you have a sick child, as I have now, actions become more deliberate.There is little chance for distraction.

So yesterday, when my 9-day old daughter awoke in the hospital, the tubes and wires that sustained her were arranged so I could hold her. The monitor with her vitals told me she was taking 32 breaths per minute - all with deliberation.

And later in the day, when my two year-old daughter wanted to go for a walk with Daddy, we counted our steps. Down the hill, and through the park, we counted one, two, three, four, five steps - on and on for almost an hour. Each step was taken with deliberation towards our final destination of the slides and swings. Only stumbling when distracted. Only falling when losing focus.

As Thanksgiving draws near. Let us give thanks for the deliberate actions others have taken for us. The doctors and nurses that care for our children and our friends and families that sustains us in times of need. And at the same time, after the distractions of football and turkey, may we also act deliberately for others so future generations will be thankful for us.

Don McNay: President Obama's Entrepreneurial Mindset

2009-11-16T14:07:48Z

I can give you
anything but time

-Elvis
Costello

I'm sometimes critical of President Obama because it often seems to me that he doesn't understand people like me – an owner of a small
business in a small town.

I have not seen much evidence of Obama being in touch with
small-town
Kentucky, but
after reading David Plouffe's new book, The
Audacity to Win, I have become
convinced that he knows what it takes to run a business.

I'm a devoted student of Dan Sullivan, the “Strategic Coach" for
entrepreneurs. I went through Sullivan’s program in Toronto. Dan has devoted
his life to helping entrepreneurs become better at their craft. I am convinced that President
Obama operated his 2008 Presidential
campaign with a classic entrepreneurial mindset.

Common
traits of successful entrepreneurs include setting
seemingly impossible goals and challenging conventional wisdom.

Planning to be President of the United
States is a pretty high goal.
Especially for a guy who had been an Illinois state legislator just five years
ago.

When history goes back to studying the Obama
campaign, it will compare it to the William Jennings Bryan campaign of 1896 or
Ross Perot's in 1992. Those unconventional
styles of
campaigning set the standard for every
campaign after them.

No one focused on Larry King before Ross Perot did.
Now,
all candidates find their way to Larry, Leno, Dave, Ellen, Tyra and Oprah.

Now, every campaign is going to organize and raise
money using the
Obama model.

Like a Steven Jobs or Bill Gates, Obama changed the dynamic.

But unlike
Bryan and Perot,
Obama won.

And he
did in classic entrepreneurial fashion. He developed a campaign plan that
exploited
opportunities that seemed crazy to "Washington insiders.”

It was the same way Steven Jobs and Bill Gates seemed crazy to IBM and Xerox. Or the way that Google seemed crazy to Microsoft.

A good entrepreneur takes what "the
professionals" see as disadvantages and turns them into advantages.

Jimmy Carter had one of the most innovative
campaigns of
the modern era. People laughed when an unemployed, former governor of a Southern
state decided to be president. Carter understood that being unemployed
allowed him to campaign full time, and that being Southern allowed him to connect to a large segment of
the population who didn't want George Wallace as the primary symbol of southern
politics.

Obama took the unconventional candidate theory to a new
extreme. We have not had many senators become president, and especially not many one-term senators. I can't think of another president who was raised by an unmarried,
single mother. I’m sure
Obama is the first president born in Hawaii. He’s younger than all but a
handful of presidents and has an unusual name.

Also, did I mention that
he is African-American?

As Plouffe's book points out, Obama's
"negatives," like Jimmy Carter's negatives, turned out to be
positives.

Plouffe noted that among people who voted in the 2004 George W. Bush- John
Kerry election, Obama beat McCain by only a 50% to 49% margin. Depending on how
the electoral votes would have played out, Obama could have narrowly won, narrowly lost or faced the
same fate as Al Gore.

Instead, a huge turnout by African-Americans and younger voters propelled Obama to a landslide victory.

Obama did not run the
campaign by conventional rules. He
developed his own rules and made them work for him.

It’s tough to challenge conventional wisdom. Everyone wants to tell
you what you are doing wrong.

Programs like the Strategic Coach teach
entrepreneurs to develop written goals and to have ways to measure how people are progressing
towards those goals.

Plouffe noted the discipline exhibited
by the Obama campaign in sticking to their game plan.
The early campaign was roundly criticized by "experts" who didn't see the same
vision that the Obama people saw.

I was impressed by how they were able to use matrices to measure
every aspect of the campaign, like fundraising, organizing and coordinating, to track how successfully the campaign was meeting its plan.

It has been said that anything that
can be measured, can be obtained. In Obama's case, that
included the Presidency of the United States.

Dan Sullivan built most of his
coaching philosophy around something called the "entrepreneurial time
system." An entrepreneur's time is the
most precious resource of any business, and it needs to be treated as such.

I've seen way too many political candidates and business people
try to be everywhere, doing everything, and who wind up being nowhere and
getting nothing much done.

Until I read The Audacity to Win, I had no idea how
much campaign focus was directed
to proper use of Omaba's time. Time was also scheduled for the
candidate to relax and spend time with his family. There was a lot of pressure
to have Obama go to outside debates and rallies, but the plan called for him to stay focused on the Iowa primary and never to waver from
his central message.

His highly favored primary opponent, Hillary
Clinton, did not manage her time as
well and had a litany of campaign messages. Obama against Clinton was like
watching an energetic start-up go against a bureaucratic
mega-corporation.

We all rooted for David over Goliath. Entrepreneurs are those who
can look at Goliath and recognize
that a giant can be taken down.

Just like Barack Obama took the Presidency.

Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC is
one of the world's leading authorities in helping people deal with “Big
Money” issues.

McNay
is an award winning, syndicated financial columnist and
Huffington Post Contributor.

You can read more about Don at www.donmcnay.com

McNay
founded McNay Settlement Group, a structured settlement and financial
consulting firm, in 1983 and Kentucky Guardianship Administrators LLC
in 2000. You can read more about both at www.mcnay.com

McNay
has Master's Degrees from Vanderbilt and the American College and is in the
Eastern Kentucky University Hall of Distinguished Alumni.

McNay
has written two books. Most recent is Son of a Son of a Gambler: Winners, Losers
and What to Do When You Win The Lottery

McNay
is a lifetime member of the Million Dollar Round Table and has four
professional designations in the financial services field.

Clinton Presidential Library Celebrates Fifth Anniversary, Gives Back To Community

2009-11-15T10:54:48Z

In honor of the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library, the institution has initiated Five Days of Giving. The library's program features a five-day coat drive, which store manager Connie Fails hopes can provide some comfort to community residents affected by the tough economy.

Attendees who bring a coat will receive free admission to the library.

Former president Bill Clinton will appear at the library in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Wednesday to deliver the keynote address of the anniversary celebration.

Can't make it to Little Rock? The William J. Clinton Foundation also accepts donations.

Obama Bows In Japan To Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko (VIDEO, PHOTOS)

2009-11-15T02:36:21Z

In a scene that will likely be replayed on Sunday's political talk shows, President Obama bowed deeply to the Emperor and Empress of Japan on Saturday. The president's kowtow to the royal couple came on the second day of his Asian tour and before a private lunch with the pair in Tokyo.

An unnamed, senior Obama administration official told Politico Saturday that the president was observing protocol, saying, "I think that those who try to politicize those things are just way, way, way off base." During his speech in Tokyo, President Obama reaffirmed the United State's alliance with Japan and called himself America's first Pacific President.

In April, the president was criticized by the National Republican Senatorial Committee for bowing to Saudi King Abdullah at a G-20 meeting. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to call Obama's gesture to Abdullah a bow, instead saying Obama "bent over" to shake hands with the king.

Anticipating drama, the Los Angeles Times wrote a blog entry Saturday about the bow. The LA Times detailed former Vice President Dick Cheney's (non-bow) handshake with the Japanese emperor and pointed to the "comedic" drama surrounding former Presdient Clinton's bow to Akihito.

WATCH:

PHOTOS:

Jim Luce: NBC's Brian Williams: Changing the World for the Better

2009-11-13T16:39:22Z

Several weeks ago Brian
Williams profiled the children of the Afghan Child Education and Care
Organization (AFCECO) and its founder Andeisha Farid in Kabul, Afghanistan for NBC Nightly News’ segment Making a Difference (video).

Brian is anchor and
managing editor of the NBC Nightly News
based in New York. Last week, his show, including
the segment Making a Difference, had
9.5 million viewers. The show spikes up
to 11 million viewers frequently.

I had interviewed the
orphanage’s founder Andeisha of Kabul in New York in September and have followed
her progress carefully. I knew immediately
that Brian’s focus would have an enormous impact on her good work.

As founder of Orphans International Worldwide, I am familiar
with running homes for children around the world – and the difficult task of
raising the fund necessary to do so.

What I did not grasp
about the piece on Making a Difference was
what an enormous difference it would
make – with so many contributions that flooded over the Internet to fund the
kids there from Brian’s generous viewers.
He thanked them the following week (video).

I wanted to speak with
Brian about how good that must make him feel – and how this sense of
responsibility must now shape his life – so I asked him to call me, and he did. Brian told me:

I was
really revved to do a piece on this orphanage in Afghanistan. I wanted it to be seen by as many people as
possible – and luckily it was. I was so
grateful – we raised much more for those children than we had thought possible.

I do
pieces on different topics. We were in
Kabul when there was a huge loss of life at the U.N. and I wanted to do a story
after that which was ‘nice and hopeful.’
We had one day to do this feature piece, and it all just came together.

Sitting
there in our rental house in Kabul, I realized I had a personal enough relationship
with our viewers – who I felt could be very generous – to ask them to help
these kids. And they did!

The
cultural differences and similarities in the orphanage were enormous. Little girls are little girls anywhere in the
world. Thank God I have parented two
children, so it was the most natural of moments.

Switching
glasses with them, seeing them draw stars and hearts… The children were so tactile, kind, loving,
affectionate, and gracious.

I saw a
picture of Paul Stevers there on the wall, the founder of CharityHelp International
in the U.S. that provides a bridge between child sponsors and the children
there.

The kids
had a politeness, and order, a discipline – not like in Annie, but an attitude of accepting real responsibility – the way I
was raised. It was so real.

On his blog, Brian had
posted the following after his viewers had been so generous:

I want to
say thank you -- and to express my ongoing appreciation at the amazing
generosity of our viewers. We did a
follow-up on the orphanage in Afghanistan.

I was only
home from work for a few hours when we learned they had already received 500
e-mails from Nightly News viewers -- many of them offering donations and
pledges to sponsor a child.

It is
immensely gratifying, and I’m beyond words in expressing my thanks and appreciation
on behalf of the lovely children we met over there.

Brian Williams received individualized cards
from each of the children in Kabul.

“Although some are
one-time gifts, our experience tells us that many of the child sponsors will
continue to give for the next few years so the benefits of Brian’s efforts are
very substantial and will enable AFCECO to care for many more children,” Paul
Stevers, founder of CharityHelp
International, told me.

CharityHelp
International is the Internet bridge that connects the children to child
sponsors around the world. Orphans
International Worldwide, the charity I founded, relies on CharityHelp to fund
our kids in Haiti, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

“Security is an enormous
issue in Kabul,” Brian told me. “In
Kabul, importance is measured by the size of your gate and the number of guns
you have. I hope the orphanage there will
be able to spend more on security,” Brian added.

Clearly, the segment Making a Difference is making a
difference. From one night a week, the
segment now airs up to five times a week.

“It was my wife’s idea,
honestly,” Brian shared. “With the
economy sinking, she said, ‘Someone, somewhere is doing spectacular acts of
kindness – go capture them!’ And we
did,” Brian told me.

Making a Difference features mostly ordinary people, although it
has begun to also focus on celebrities using their visibility to also help
humanity.

Quintessential thought leaders
and global citizen Brian Williams on the streets of Kabul.

Brian replaced Tom
Brokaw, one of his mentors, in 2004. Previously,
Brian was the network’s chief White House correspondent and host of The News with Brian Williams on CNBC and
MSNBC.

After studying at
college, Brian took an internship with the administration of President Jimmy
Carter. He holds an honorary doctor of
humane letters degree from one of my favorite schools, Bates College, and an
honorary Doctor of Journalism degree from Ohio State University.

NBC Night News anchor Brian Williams
frequently reports from Afghanistan.

Brian is the most
honored network evening news anchor. He
has received four Edward R. Murrow awards, his fifth Emmy award, the
DuPont-Columbia University award and the industry's highest honor, the George
Foster Peabody award.

Most were given for his
work in New Orleans while covering Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and all
were awarded to Brian in only his second year on the job.

Brian Williams of NBC Nightly
News with Afghani children in Kabul.

Brian was the first and
only network evening news anchor to report from New Orleans before Hurricane
Katrina hit and was the only network news anchor to report from the Superdome
during the storm. He remained in New Orleans to report on the aftermath and
destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

In 2006, Brian joined
Bono, traveling to three countries in Africa — Nigeria, Mali, and Ghana — to
report on the major issues facing the continent, including HIV/AIDS, poverty,
disease, and crushing debt.

In 1994, Brian was named
NBC News Chief White House correspondent. Accompanying President Clinton aboard
Air Force One, Brian circled the world several times, covering virtually every
foreign and domestic trip by the President until 1996.

On perhaps one of the
most historic trips of the Clinton presidency, Brian was the only television
news correspondent to accompany three U.S. presidents — Clinton, Bush, and
Carter — to Yitzhak Rabin's funeral in Israel.

Brian is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and is also a member of the Board of
Directors of the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation. He has lectured at Columbia University School
of Journalism and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin,
Texas.

In 2007, Brian was
listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most
Influential People in The World. He
lives in New Canaan, Connecticut, with his wife, Jane Stoddard Williams.

There is a reason “When
breaking news happens, America turns to NBC
Nightly News with Brian Williams."
America trusts Brian the way we once trusted Walter Cronkite.

“Walter Cronkite was the
architect for what this show has become,” Brian told me. “Walter’s level of professionalism is what I
strive for every day.”

“I have been luckier
than most two have had two North Stars to follow – Walter Cronkite and Tom
Brokaw,” Brian admitted.

Like Walter and Tom, Brian
is the quintessential thought leaders and global citizen – and has thousands of
fans on Facebook
from around the world to prove it.

Today Brian Williams has
an enormous power – and a parallel responsibility – to help humanity.

Luckily for all of us, he
knows this well – and is highly focused on doing all that he can in his
position to change our world for the better.

Clinton To Dems: GOP Will Define Debate If Health Care Fails

2009-11-10T15:49:32Z

Former President Bill Clinton urged Democratic senators to score a victory on health care reform in the weeks ahead, warning that a failure to pass legislation would leave them particularly vulnerable to Republican attack.

Addressing the caucus just one day before they head to recess, Senate sources tell the Huffington Post that Clinton made a fairly emotional and political plea for action.

"If you don't win this, the opposition will define the issue," a Senate aide who was briefed on the meeting, paraphrased the former president as saying. "[Clinton] noted that Hilary Care was defined in a way that didn't resemble what it truly was. His point was that you better win, or you risk being tagged by whatever they want to tag you with. The 'they' being Republicans, Republican strategists, candidates, etc..."

The former president, who is perhaps the best living symbol of the political harm incurred by failing to pass health care reform, told reporters that his message was: "The worst thing to do is nothing."

Inside closed doors, he bucked up Senate Democrats during the Caucus lunch and, according to one person in attendance, spent 20 minutes afterward "discussing health care with different groups of members that came up to talk to him." The list included not just fence-sitters but die-hard reform proponents as well.

In addition to warning of a pending Republican victory, Clinton also laid out the reasons that reform could be a success. According to the Senate aide, the former president listed several ways in which the current landscape is more favorable than that which he confronted.

Clinton, the aide relayed, noted that "among the differences from last time is that this time around we have a Finance [Committee] chairman [Max Baucus] who has been working very hard to get health care done and wants to get health care done. The contrast was to [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan [who scuttled Clinton's efforts] last time."

After the meeting, Clinton summarized his pep talk as follows (per the The New York Times):

So I think it is good politics to pass this and to pass it as soon as they can. But I think the most important thing is, it's the right thing for America. We just simply -- the worst thing to do is nothing. The worst thing to do is to keep dragging around a 16.5 percent of G.D.P. health-care system that doesn't sent cover everybody, doesn't get the right results and do so much better.

Look at the A.M.A. -- endorsed it. They joined the nurses and AARP. I mean, every doctor I know is screaming inside every day because of the way that the whole financing and bureaucracy requirements of the health-care system have taken away a lot of the joy of practicing medicine and claimed more time.

The worst thing to do is nothing. That was my message to them and those are my reasons.

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Bill Clinton To Speak To Democratic Senators About Health Bill

2009-11-10T03:17:13Z

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton urged Senate Democrats on Tuesday to pass health care legislation by year's end, pointedly telling skittish lawmakers that an imperfect bill is preferable to another failure like the one he and the party endured in 1994.

"It's not important to be perfect here. It's important to act, to move, to start the ball rolling," the former president told reporters after the closed-door meeting, held on the cusp of Senate debate on intensely controversial legislation. The House cleared its version of the bill late Saturday night on a narrow, party-line vote of 220-215.

Daoud Kuttab: The End of the Oslo Phased

2009-11-09T08:32:19Z

In the midst of discussions regarding possible scenarios following Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' decision not to run for president, few have paid attention to the larger picture.

Abbas' refusal to run for a second term as president of the Palestinian Authority signals a clear end of the Oslo phase in which he, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres were key players.

The Oslo process called for a step-by-step process as the best way to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The idea was that easier issues will be dealt with first, with the hope that confidence will be built between the two sides, making the resolution of the more difficult issues at a later stage possible. A five-year interim plan was suggested in the agreement signed on September 13, 1993, at the White House.

Some ambiguity was agreed upon in the written text of the agreement, but both sides were clear that the ultimate goal was the end of the 1967 Israeli occupation and the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The Palestinians reluctantly agreed then not to insist on a settlement freeze, because Rabin said he needed time to convince the Israelis of the eventuality of a Palestinian state. Rabin didn't live long enough to carry out his promise; his political heirs took the easy way out and failed to carry out this unwritten promise.

As the 20th century came to an end, it became clear that the five-year interim agreement was becoming permanent, negotiations were not reaching any conclusion and Jewish settlement building was continuing unabated. With no end in sight and the Israelis refusing to deal fairly with the requirements of peace, it was a question of time before the occupied territories exploded in a second, much more violent, uprising.

During the dark early years of the 21st century, Abbas was one of the few Palestinian leaders that clung to the hope that a negotiated process would eventually produce results that would address the minimum Palestinian national aspirations.

Sixteen years after that historic White House handshake, it has become clear that no effort is being made to convince the Israelis to come to term with Palestinian national aspirations. The number of illegal Jewish settlers in Palestinian areas has doubled and more and more Palestinians are convinced that negotiations are a waste of time.

Many still remember the threats of former Israeli prime minister Shamir to drag negotiations. Speaking to the Israeli daily Maariv, Shamir was quoted as saying: "I would have conducted negotiations on autonomy for 10 years and in the meantime we would have reached half a million people in the West Bank."

The failure of the step-by-step negotiations has focused on the need to follow a different paradigm.

Abbas outlined the Palestinian red lines. His disappointment with the US administration has led him to believe that the way out of the present impasse is to work backwards. The Palestinian leader believes that instead of wasting time in wasteful negotiations, there must be a firm decision about the end result of the negotiations and then talks can deal with a schedule for implementation of such a results, rather than what negotiations should contain.

The two-state solution has become accepted bipartisan policy in Washington. The Palestinian and Israeli public have repeatedly been polled about a compromise solution roughly on the 1967 borders, with slight adjustments and a fair solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. Such a solution is best codified in what is referred to as the Clinton parameters. It is also detailed in the Israeli-Palestinian blueprint titled the Geneva Agreement.

Another approach is that of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who is convinced that Palestinians must prepare for statehood in spite of the occupation. In two years, Fayyad believes that a de facto Palestine will exist and it will then seek international recognition.

The flurry of US officials' visits to Ramallah is likely to stop unless a major and important change takes place in Washington. In the meantime, Abbas will pay more attention to the home front, trying to stitch together some type of agreement with Hamas.

The PLO will most likely gain much from Abbas' decision, as the Palestinian leader will likely de-emphasise the status of the president of the Palestinian Authority, while raising the profile of his position as the chairman of the PLO's executive committee.

Abbas cannot resign from his post, so as not to allow the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council to take over, and he has not given up his position as the head of the PLO and the leader of its biggest faction, Fateh. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that any Palestinian official from the PLO will be running for the position of president without Abbas' approval until a new mechanism for an end to the occupation is found.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Good Reason for Muslims to Fear Ft. Hood Backlash

2009-11-07T11:17:51Z

The instant the news broke that a soldier with a Muslim name shot up the base at Ft. Hood the Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass murders. The Council didn't know whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was a Muslim by birth, a converted Muslim, or even a Muslim at all. The name and the horrific murder spree was enough to drive the group to quickly distance itself from the rampage. Other Muslim organizations instantly followed suit and issued their own equally strong disavowal of Hasan.

They were wise to do so. Though anti-Muslim hate crimes and anti-Muslim hysteria have leveled off somewhat since the September 11 terror attacks, Muslims still routinely get the blame for anything that even remotely smacks of a terrorism act.

Hasan's alleged Ft. Hood bloodbath is no different. The pack of shrill rightist bloggers and talk radio chatterers jumped all over the shooting and gleefully fanned anti-Muslim passions. It didn't take much to get the anti-Muslim hate juices flowing. A legion of writers on websites spewed the ritual anti-Muslim slurs, profanities, and insults at Hasan and Muslims.

President Obama saw the danger of anti-Muslim fear mongering, and tried to head it off at the pass. He quickly admonished the public not to rush to judgment about the shooting and the shooter. Obama took a page from Clinton and Bush's playbook when mob hysteria was building after the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1996 and the 9/11 attacks. Clinton and Bush cautioned the public not to finger point at Muslims for the attacks.

The Oklahoma City bombing was the handiwork of Timothy McVeigh, a loose screw, red-blooded American fanatic. The 9/11 attackers were mostly Saudi nationals. Yet, that still didn't stop the murmurs, and finger pointing at, and bashing of all Muslims.

That's no surprise. American Muslims have been the repeated targets of verbal digs, physical assaults, and profiling. They are just too inviting a scapegoat for the fears and frustrations many American have over two failed and flawed wars, a moribund Middle East peace process, and even more frightening to many is the increasing presence of Muslims in their neighborhood, in schools, and work places, especially when wearing Muslim attire.

Obama's admonition and the absence of self-serving, anti-Muslim inflammatory antics or statements by elected officials, as well as the army brass's bending over backward to tamp down any talk that Hasan's act was anything more than the crazed act of an over-the-edge military guy took the edge off the mob stirrings.

But that may not be enough to totally still the murmurs about alleged Muslim conspiracies and anti-American terrorist plots in the coming days. The repeated media loop of a witness' claim that Hasan allegedly shouted Allah Akbar, the Muslim impassioned cry, is prima facie proof for some people of a darker Muslim conspiracy afoot.

In an interview a Palestinian cousin of Hasan's hinted that anti-Muslim taunts may have driven him to commit carnage. While there's not a scintilla of proof to back this charge up, it's still more than enough to set the mindless and the gullible off to the races about the Muslim peril to America.

The Council of American-Islamic Relations then had good reason to rush out their statement denouncing Hasan's alleged murder spree. However, even that won't be enough to convince the hate Muslim crowd that Hasan's bloody assault had nothing to do with Muslim fanaticism but simply one man's going off the murderous deep end. Those types, we've learned to our sorrow, come in all shapes, sizes and religions.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Chris Weigant: One Year After Obama's Election: Still Smarter...Than The Alternative

2009-11-04T18:57:07Z

The day before I cast my vote for Barack Obama, I wrote a column titled "Barack Obama Is Smarter Than Us." By "us," I meant the legions of us lefty bloggers out here, who second-guessed his campaign on a daily basis for nigh on two years. I included myself in that "us" as well -- because, I fully admit, I got incredibly frustrated during Obama's campaign when he didn't do what I really, really wanted him to. Or didn't do it fast enough to suit me.

But you know what? He won anyway.

Here's part of what I wrote back then:

...I have to say, once again, that Barack Obama was right not to always listen to me, and others of my ilk. He knew through it all that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and that a purist lefty candidate would not win the White House. So I have to stand up and admit it.

Obama was right. We were wrong. And he has shown he knew what he was doing all along, which makes me even more comfortable casting my vote for him tomorrow.

I also wrote, at the time:

Should Obama be elected, and should he run his White House the way he has run his campaign; then we are about to see some professionalism and basic competence in Washington once again, instead of the pure partisan rancor and dysfunction we've (sadly) become accustomed to.

So, after reflecting on how I felt a year ago during the election itself and how I feel now, I do have to say that the old adage is true: governing is harder than campaigning.

The eternal question within the District of Columbia for an "outsider" running a successful campaign on "changing the system" (Note to our younger readers: Barack Obama is not the first to have come up with this theme) is, of course: "Will you change Washington... or will Washington change you?"

Barack Obama was always a bit of a blank canvas for everyone. The Righties were incensed by this, and tried to portray him as some sort of empty suit, building castles in the air upon his lofty campaign rhetoric. But the Lefties were almost as bad, attempting to paint their own picture upon this blank canvas with the funny name... and, by doing so, declare Obama one of them. You might say the Lefties took up residence in Obama's air castles, smug in their belief that he would (after he was elected) do what they wanted (and indeed expected) him to, rather than what he actually said he was going to do. Or not do.

Obama, though, was not the picture either side painted of him on this blank canvas. He was, and always has been, his own man.

The disillusionment and disappointment a lot of Lefties are feeling right now is a direct result of their own refusal to hear what Obama was actually saying during the campaign, versus what they really wanted him to say, or "heard" him say, somehow. That may be a fairly harsh assessment for some people to hear, but I believe it is true to some extent. The feeling of crashing back down to Earth is usually the end result of attempting to live in a castle in the air. Some of the Left's disappointment, to be sure, is over actual broken campaign promises; but most of it is over their perceptions of Obama that didn't quite prove to be true in the end.

I have to say that I pride myself (as someone who does a halfway-decent imitation of a "pundit" on the interwebs) for never having totally "drunk the Obama Kool-Aid." I apologize if it causes offense, but I've always seen him as a politician. A brilliant politician, to be sure, and one whose like we may not see for another generation in American politics (in other words, not "just a politician" as some sort of pejorative), but a politician nonetheless. For better or worse.

Take the issue of foreign policy, for example. Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq. He spoke of moving thousands of American troops out on a monthly basis, beginning almost immediately after he took office, until all combat forces had come home. Both the Left and the Right (using different language to describe it, of course) decided that Obama wanted to get out of Iraq as soon as could be safely arranged. But then, at the last minute, George W. Bush signed a Status Of Forces Agreement which pretty much laid down the "timetable for withdrawal" to follow. Obama, once sworn into office, has largely kept Bush's plan intact. The first stage was withdrawing from Iraqi cities this summer. The second stage will be the real troop drawdown, which should begin shortly after Iraq has a national election (currently slated for January). Neither the Left nor the Right's caricature of Obama as Commander-In-Chief turned out to be true. He took into account the "situation on the ground," and changed his strategy accordingly -- something neither side really expected him to do, it should be noted.

Or take the Afghanistan situation. Throughout the campaign, Obama spoke of Afghanistan as being the war we really should be fighting, rather than Iraq. The "good" war, if you will. He spoke of sending around 10,000 more American troops over there right away. Now, as Obama decides what the strategy will be for the coming year, the Right is trying to portray him as some sort of wimp who is going to lose the war by "dithering" (as Dick Cheney put it); and the Left is portraying him as somehow betraying their idealistic anti-war image of Obama. The telling thing to me is that neither side either: (a) admits that Obama was always hawkish on the Afghanistan war; or (b) even noticed or has seen fit to mention that Obama has already fulfilled his campaign promise -- threefold -- when he sent 30,000 more troops over there, earlier this year.

Perception -- as in "people's perception of Obama" -- seems to be more important to a lot of folks than the reality of Obama the politician, or Obama the president. On both sides.

The Right, after the election, wasted no time in trying to paint Obama as all sorts of things that he wasn't, and was never going to be. They haven't let up for a minute -- and they won't, for the next three years. The Left has been shocked by all of this unseemliness, since they conjured images up of everyone singing "Kumbaya" after Obama's inauguration -- conveniently forgetting that whole "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" thing that Bill Clinton had to put up with (also from Day One, in his presidency). Or the way Dubya started his term, for that matter. Just because an election's over does not mean that the losing side in the election is going to suddenly "see the light" of the winning side -- it never has in American politics, and it never will.

Expectations after Obama took office, from both the Left and Right (again, in different ways), were high. The Right -- some of them, at least -- think America is truly on the brink of becoming (take your pick) Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or even (conservatives shudder at the suggestion), France. The Left -- some of them, at least -- actually believed in their own dreams of a Progressive Utopia, even though what Obama actually said during the campaign bore little resemblance to it.

Now, all of this isn't to say that I don't have my own annoyances with Barack Obama, which I point out frequently here in public. He has either broken or severely backtracked on a number of his campaign promises, I fully admit. But he has also kept and delivered upon a downright astonishing number (for any politician) of campaign promises, as well. Governing is always harder than campaigning, and every politician is forced at times to realize that what sounded so glib while knocking his opponent during a rally of the faithful is really a lot tougher than it seemed at the time. This is natural, although some of Obama's supporters may be too young to have ever seen it before in a politician of their own party whom they admired greatly on the hustings, giving his stump speech. There's always a bit of letdown, and because Obama was being held to such a high standard (the absolute ramparts of the air castles, as it were), the letdown is even more keenly felt by some.

Millions of Americans did have sky-high expectations for Obama. But he has been more closely examined and criticized and covered by the media than just about anyone I can remember. The media, hilariously, calls Obama (in disparaging tones) a "media rock star" -- without realizing the irony that the only thing they're condemning by using such a term is themselves. You can't be a media star without a willing media. If proof is needed -- look at us. Here we are, critically examining Obama's "first year," when, in actual fact, he has served less than three hundred days in office. Because, you see, Barack Obama doesn't get a first year. He gets a first nine-and-a-half months. That's the way it goes if your name is Obama, I guess.

I was at a party recently, and a close friend and I were discussing the subject of Obama, his "first year," and this article (which I was then considering how to write). A quick rundown on this friend: she's a Union officer and organizer, she would rather be dipped in molten lava than vote Republican, and she keeps up on the political scene and the news about as much as any Huffington Post reader. She also, from Union negotiations with local government, understands both the slowness and obstacles to getting good things done, and also the fact that sometimes you have to compromise and you don't get everything you want.

But, after circling around for a while in describing her disappointment in some of what Obama has done (mostly "not done," if truth be told), she finally, in exasperation, said what she really felt, in response to something I said along the lines of: "If Obama had overturned 'Don't Ask/Don't Tell' on his first day in office, but failed on healthcare reform -- would you be happier with the result than if it was the other way around?".

She summed up her frustration with Barack Obama not going further faster in a very visceral way: "I want it all," she said, perhaps unconsciously quoting the late Freddie Mercury. "I want it all, and I want it now!" Specifically, what she wants is: Democrats in Congress to act like Democrats, and act like they have a majority; Obama to forcefully get out there and fight for what he campaigned for -- "Change we can believe in!"; Obama to be the "fierce advocate" for gay rights he promised he'd be; Obama to stop bailing out Wall Street and pay a lot more attention to Main Street; Obama to send George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to Guantanamo Bay where they would be subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" until they came clean about the past eight years; the Democrats to pick up about 50 or 60 seats in the House in 2010 and about 20 more seats in the Senate; Harry Reid to be replaced as Senate Majority Leader, tout suite; Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers to be replaced, also immédiatement; Union strength to return to about where it was in... oh... 1958, say; Alan Grayson to appear on every political talk show for the next four years, on a daily basis; John Boehner and Mitch McConnell never to appear on her television screen, ever again, on any program; Sarah Palin to be a miserable failure at anything she attempts in the future; and President Obama to have a magic wand which he can wave and get Congress to do exactly what he wants them to do. Oh, and the memory of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of her state to be permanently excised from her memory, I should mention that one, too.

She's not alone in any of that, either. That particular ethereal castle's booked solid, and has a waiting list as long as your arm to get into. I sympathize with most of what she felt, myself. It sounds like a pretty good place to live in, or even to visit; the way we all used to tune in each week to The West Wing, to see how life was like in the alternate universe where Martin Sheen was president. Or, perhaps, another universe in which Obama conducts himself much as President (or "King" as it were) George W. Bush conducted himself, in regards to Congress.

But it's not reality. It's not the reality we live in. This reality is a lot more ugly, and a lot more concrete. Obama is not King. Obama really believes reaching out to the other side is a good and important thing to do, and not just a campaign promise. Congress still has a role under our Constitution, as inconvenient as it is to admit this fact. Lobbyists still exist. Washington is still situated on a former swamp, having only exchanged alligators for alligator wingtips on K Street. Congresscritters (far too many of them) are still absolute whores for big corporate campaign contributions. 'Twas ever thus in the District. There's only so much one man (no matter how powerful, or what his name is) can do to drain this particular swamp.

And while I would have loved to see some cage-fighting Democrats beating down Republican opponents on the Hill in the past nine months, I have to admit that what I wrote a year ago is a double-edged knife -- it cuts both ways. While we who consider ourselves "down in the trenches" in these day-to-day battles would absolutely love it if we got stronger backing and stronger leadership from the White House at times, what we are really hoping for is merely a reversal of fortunes in Washington, not a true change. Again, what I wrote back then:

Should Obama be elected, and should he run his White House the way he has run his campaign; then we are about to see some professionalism and basic competence in Washington once again, instead of the pure partisan rancor and dysfunction we've (sadly) become accustomed to.

"Pure partisan rancor" can come from both sides -- we'd all do well to remember that.

Which returns us to our primary question: "Has Washington changed Obama, or has Obama changed Washington?"

I would answer this in two ways. The first is to state that Obama has changed Washington in a very critical way -- because Democrats are now on the offensive. Democrats are now driving the bus. This is not always entirely apparent (they are, after all, Democrats), but think about it dispassionately for a moment -- Democrats are the ones proposing legislation, and Democrats are the ones squabbling about what it will contain. Even after the 2006 sweep of Congress, the agenda in D.C. largely remained Republican, since no matter what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid managed to pass, if it wasn't sufficiently acceptable to Bush and his Republican sycophants, it would not have become law. This has changed, in a big way. It can be argued that this is not due to Obama himself, but rather to the partisan power dynamic which exists now, as opposed to back then -- but that would be to ignore the reason for this change: Barack Obama being elected president.

And it's a bigger change than most people give him credit for, or indeed, even think about.

The second thing that Obama is trying to change is the 24-hour-news-cycle, short-sighted nature of Washington thinking (or what passes for "thinking" in the punditocracy). The jury is still largely out on this one, I have to admit. The most impressive thing about Obama, which I have noticed over and over again in the past nine months or so, is that he absolutely refuses to be drawn in to trivial subjects -- which, it must be pointed out, cause vapors, fainting, shrieking, and even (at times) heads exploding among the cable news channels. Put succinctly: Obama takes the long view. Always. Even when all around him are taking a very, very short view -- for the sake of puffing some stupid playground battle among politicians into some improved cable chat show ratings. Obama, to a very large extent, just doesn't play that game. He simply refuses to, over and over again. The only time he's really slipped up on this front was the whole "beer summit" nonsense, for which he can be forgiven (seeing as how a friend of his was involved).

To me, this -- if he manages to succeed in the end -- would be "change" I could indeed believe in. The shortening of the American attention span, and the concomitant idiocy-pretending-to-be-depth stoked by the 24-hour news cycle is one of the chief culprits in the crime of American politicians being seemingly incapable of having serious debates about serious subjects with long-range implications in the modern age. If Obama can manage to overcome this prattling nonsense, and hence rise above the rank stupidity of filling up the airwaves with non-stories on a daily basis -- then he will have achieved more than I ever thought any politician could, in today's media world.

Of course, he'll probably fail at that. P.T. Barnum's "there's one born every minute" maxim does come to mind. But I have to give Obama credit for at least trying.

That's what it all comes down to, really. Do you still give Obama the benefit of the doubt? I have to admit here, his supporters have used the line "it's only been X months..." as an excuse to deflect Obama criticism so many times now that it is indeed beginning to wear a bit thin. We're not talking about a true "first year" for Obama today, but that actual milestone isn't all that far away. And one year is precisely one-fourth of a president's term.

The other question it really all boils down to is one of trust. Do you still trust President Obama to do the right thing in most situations? I did back when I voted for him, and I have to admit that I still do. I have reservations, I'm a bit wary at times over specific actions Obama takes, and strategies he employs (or doesn't employ); but that core of trust in Obama -- as a politician, and with eyes wide open on my part -- still exists, I have to say. And while Obama's approval polls are down a bit from the stratospheric highs he entered office with, he still enjoys support from just about exactly the same percentage of Americans who voted for him on election day last year. And that is a measure, in a very real way, about how the public still trusts Obama to the same degree they did last year. Which, I have to admit, is a comforting thought.

Especially when you consider the alternative. Imagine where we'd be now with President John "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" McCain, and Vice President Sarah (shudder) Palin. Each and every time you get disappointed in President Obama, or disagree with something he says or does, ask yourself: "How would this discussion be different if McCain had won?"

That kind of puts Obama's "first year" in perspective for me, at least. Obama may not be smarter than all of us, but he sure is smarter by a long shot than McCain would have been. And that, for now, is enough for me.

[Technical Note: Earlier, I used what can only be described as metaphorical excess, since I don't believe alligators ever infested Georgetown or anything. I could be wrong about that, though, as I could have sworn I once saw Pogo Possum, Albert, and a few of their friends on the Metro....]

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com

Russ Baker: What Obama Is Up Against

2009-11-04T13:45:57Z

The first anniversary of Barack Obama's historic election finds many of his supporters already grousing. Fair enough: Obama has been more vigorous in some areas than others. But one essential question goes unasked: How much can any president accomplish against the wishes of recalcitrant power centers within his own government?

We Americans harbor a quaint belief that a new president takes charge of a government that eagerly awaits his next command. Like an orchestra conductor or perhaps a football coach, he can inspire or bludgeon and get what he wants. But that's not how things work at the top, especially where "national security" is concerned. The Pentagon and CIA are powerful and independent fiefdoms characterized by entrenched agendas and constant intrigue. They are full of lifers, who see an elected president largely as an annoyance, and have ways of dealing with those who won't come to heel.

Compound that with the Bush-Cheney administration's aggressive seeding of its staunch loyalists throughout the bureaucracy, and you have a pretty tough situation. Obama, then, has to contend not only with the big donors and corporate lobbies. His biggest problem resides right inside his "team."

The internal battles between American presidents and their national security establishments are not much reported. But if it is an invisible game, it is also a devious and even deadly one. Our civilian leaders end up mirroring the chronically nervous chiefs of state of the fragile democracies to our south.

Those who do not kowtow to the spies and generals have had a bumpy ride. FDR and Truman both faced insubordination. Dwight Eisenhower, who had served as chief of staff of the US Army, left the White House warning darkly about the "military industrial complex." (He of all presidents had reasons to know.) John Kennedy was repeatedly countermanded and double-crossed by his own supposed subordinates. The Joint Chiefs baited him; Allen Dulles despised him (more so after JFK fired him over the Bay of Pigs fiasco), and Henry Cabot Lodge, his ambassador to South Vietnam, deliberately undermined Kennedy's agenda. Kennedy called the trigger-happy generals "mad" and spoke angrily to aides of "scattering the CIA to the wind." The evidence is growing that he suffered the consequences.

In the 1950s, the late Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a high-ranking Pentagon official, was assigned by CIA Director Allen Dulles to help place Dulles's officers under military cover throughout the federal government. As a result, Dulles not only knew what was happening before the president did, but had essentially infiltrated every corner of the president's domain. One Nixon-era Republican Party official told me that in the early 1970s, there were intelligence officers everywhere, including the White House. Nixon was unaware of the true background of many of his trusted aides, particularly those who helped drive him from office. Remember Alexander Butterfield, the so-called "military liaison," who told Congress about the White House taping system? Years later, Butterfield admitted to CIA connections.

In December 1971, Nixon learned of a military spy ring, the so-called Moorer-Radford operation, that was piping White House documents back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Chiefs were wary of secret negotiations the president and Henry Kissinger were conducting with America's enemies, including North Vietnam, China and the USSR, and decided to keep tabs on this intrusion upon their domain. Jimmy Carter came into office as revelations of CIA abuses made headlines. He tried to dismantle the agency's dirty tricks office, but wound up instead a victim of it -- and a one-term president.

Those who avoided problems -- Johnson, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr. -- were chief executives that made no problems for the Pentagon and intelligence chiefs. All embraced military and covert operations, expanded wars or launched their own. The agile Bill Clinton was a special case -- no babe in the woods, he focused on domestic gains and pretty much steered clear of the hornets' nest.

As for the Bushes, their ascension represented a seizure of power by the national security state itself. Their family had profited from arms manufacturing for decades. The patriarch, Prescott Bush, monitored US assassination plots against foreign leaders as a senator; and records indicate that the elder George Bush had been a secret agency operative for decades before he became CIA director -- and then, 12 years later, president.

Obama seems to understand his narrow range of movement, and to be carefully picking his fights. He retained many of Bush's top military brass, and even Bush's Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who himself had served as a CIA director for Bush's father. He has trod very carefully with the spy agency and has declined to aggressively investigate Bush administration wrongdoing on torture and wiretapping. Obama's campaign rhetoric about disengaging from Iraq seems a long time ago, and the war in Afghanistan is taking on the hues of permanency.

The old boys' network is very much in place, and it is hard at work to force Obama's hand, a la Vietnam. Witness the leaking of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's supposedly "confidential report" calling for escalation in Afghanistan. The leak was, not surprisingly, to the reliable Bob Woodward. The reporter was himself in Naval Intelligence shortly before he went to work at the Washington Post, where he soon built a career around leaks from the military and spy establishment. The White House was furious at the McChrystal release. But what could it do? Presidents come and go, and the security folks have ways to hasten the latter.

Covert alliances and payments to corrupt foreign allies continue, making creative diplomacy more difficult. In late October came a front-page story that the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, suspected of being a major figure in that country's opium trade, has been on the CIA's payroll for eight years. Anyone who finds this shocking should go back and read about the CIA and the drug trade in Southeast Asia.

Throughout its six-decade history, the CIA has resisted accountability, with even some of its own nonspook directors kept in the dark about the agency's most troubling activities. As for the public's elected representatives, Nancy Pelosi is the most recent in a long line of legislators to accuse the CIA of deliberately misleading Congressional overseers.

None of this is likely to change soon, and not without a huge fight. Half a century after Ike's famous admonition, conflict and intrigue remain the engine of our economy, and everyone from private equity firms to missile makers to car and truck manufacturers count on that to continue. The homeland security industry, the most recent head to grow on this hydra, is now seeking permanency.

So Barack Obama is boxed in. But so are the American people, and so, really, is democracy itself. Bringing this inconvenient truth out in the open is the essential first step toward taking back control of our government -- and our future. For all the reasons laid out here, Obama will need help. He may, in the rote formulation, hold "the most powerful office in the world." However, the extent to which he controls the government he heads, is another matter.

This originally appeared on Truthout

Russ Baker is an investigative journalist and founder of the nonprofit reporting web site whowhatwhy.com. His book, Family of Secrets: the Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, now available in hardcover, will be published in paperback November 10. Gore Vidal calls it "one of the most important books of the past ten years."

Clinton, Bush To Debate At Radio City Music Hall

2009-11-04T09:12:57Z

An entirely different kind of presidential debate is coming to Radio City Music Hall.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will take the stage on February 25th for the third annual "Minds That Move The World" speakers series to debate topics ranging from the economy, to foreign policy, to the current administration.

Presidents 42 and 43 took part in a similar event in Toronto in May. That "debate" lead to some disappointment among those seeking a bloody battle between the political foes as the two "rarely disagreed" with each other. At one point Bush even referred to Clinton as his "brother."

Ticket prices range from $60 to a wallet-busting $1,250, although the latter also gets you pre-show cocktails and photos with the ex-presidents.

James Pinkerton: One Year Later: Gerald Ford Will Always Be President

2009-11-03T16:01:34Z

"Gerald Ford will always be president." That's a cynical piece of Washington wisdom that you can find a) discomfiting, or b) reassuring. But c), it is an enduring truth. The centrist center of gravity in this town is that strong.

Such centrist reality is distressing to the left today, just as it was distressing to the right in the era of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove.

I am writing before the results of Election Day 2009 are known, but it's a cinch that the electoral results will be a check on progressive ambitions. As has been obvious all year, conservative/libertarian/tea-partying energy has been surging since Barack Obama's inauguration. The latest Gallup Poll, for example, finds the percentage of self-identified conservatives on the rise, while the percentage of self-identified liberals is declining.

A year ago, according to Gallup, conservatives outnumbered liberals by 15 points, 37 to 22. Today, conservatives have ticked up three points, and liberals have ticked down two points; 40 percent of Americans now call themselves conservative, just 20 percent liberal -- a 2:1 advantage for conservatives. Politicians are doing the math; center-right beats center-left.

Which brings up another Beltway lesson: Ideology and power generally go in opposite directions. Ideological movements arise in reaction to the perceived abuses and excesses of the incumbents, and then those movements recede when "their" side takes power. Of course, the most ardent wings, left and right, will never be happy with much that anyone in power does, no matter what his or her label. That's the price that those respective wings pay for being in the fringe ideological deciles of the population; by definition, they are always on the outside looking in.

The point here is that the political equivalent of the statistical concept of regression always kicks in after an election: Things are never as good as you hope, nor as bad as you fear. The middling middle triumphs: Hello, President Ford.

There have been exceptions, of course, to this muddle-through rule. Such instances are sufficiently rare in American history that they get their own special term: "realignment." And there have been only four of five realignments in American history. Franklin Roosevelt and his New Dealers led one one the 1930s and 40s, and Ronald Reagan and his Reagan Revolutionaries led another in the the 1980s -- although once again, the level of change the Reaganites achieved was deeply disappointing to "movement" conservatives.

A year ago, Obama might have thought that he was going to be another FDR -- an admiring media told him he could do it -- but it hasn't happened. Perhaps the situation might have been different if Obama had put more emphasis, sooner, on the primary issues of jobs and mortgages, thus cementing the loyalties of worse-off swing voters. But instead, Obama chose healthcare and global warming, and he pursued those secondary issues with no great competence.

So no Rooseveltian realignment for Obama, just Clintonian regression.

So, one year after the election, what do you think Candidate Obama would think of President Obama? Tweet your response (our Twitter hashtag is #OneYearLater), or post it in the comments section.

Bill Clinton: I Wish I Had Left White House "In A Coffin"

2009-11-03T14:07:57Z

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said on Monday he would have preferred to leave the White House in a coffin because he loved being commander in chief, but signaled his political life was over.

Daoud Kuttab: Will the Real Hillary Please Stand Up?

2009-11-03T13:09:10Z

As first lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton was the darling of Palestinians and Arabs when late in Bill Clinton's term she uttered the hot button word, Palestine.

Since then Ms. Clinton has flip flopped depending on the political winds. As a senator for the state of New York she became a staunch Israeli supporter standing by the Jewish state whether it was justifiable or not. To win the US presidency she continued in this pro-Israel stance but as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, she flipped back.

Shortly after being sworn in and speaking on Al Jazeera TV (that in itself is a change of Washington's bias, according to Al Arrabiya TV), Clinton stressed clearly and unambiguously the Obama administration's rejection of any settlement activities including "natural growth," as she said. The unity of Obama, Clinton and envoy Mitchell on this prerequisite of the road map was welcomed by Palestinians living under occupation.

It is not hard to understand why everyone who supports a two-state solution sees Jewish settlement activities in what will become the Palestinian state as a knife in the heart of such a deal. The previous as well as current US administrations consider the creation of a viable Palestinian state with contiguity in the "national interest" of the United States. It follows that any actions that directly block the chances of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state are actions that are against US national interests and not just Palestinian interests.

So it was another shock when Secretary Clinton met with Palestinian President Abbas and pressed him to enter negotiations with Israel even if it doesn't adhere to the international community's demand of a 'freeze.' Instead of placing the pressure on the guilty party, Clinton considered Abbas's position a precondition while lavishing praise on right wing Israeli Prime Prime Minister Netanyahu for agreeing to build "only" 3,000 more new settlement units in the West Bank and continue to irritate Palestinians in Jerusalem.

Sixteen years earlier Palestinians in the occupied territories were surprised to hear that the PLO had reached a secret deal with Israel in the Norwegian capital Oslo. When Haidar Abdel Shafi, who headed the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace conference, learned that it didn't include a settlement freeze, he and many other Palestinians publicly opposed it. Since then, the demand that Israel completely freeze all settlement construction (including those attributed to natural growth) has become a litmus test of whether the Israelis are serious about peace.

Jewish settlements built on land occupied by Israel in 1967 are considered by the international community to be illegal and in clear violation of the Geneva Convention, which is aimed at regulating military occupations. More recently, in 2004, the International Court of Justice at the Hague unanimously ruled that the settlements were illegal when considering an appeal against Israel for building a wall inside Palestinian territories.

Successive US administrations have also repeatedly rejected settlement activity.

For the US, the settlements have proven to be an equal-opportunity obstacle, obstructing both Republican and Democratic diplomacy. Former President Carter believed he had a commitment to freeze settlements at Camp David. The Clinton administration attempted to put brakes on then-Prime Minister Netanyahu's efforts to construct a new settlement near Bethlehem. After a short hiatus, construction resumed. Today, Har Homa, built on Jabal Abu Ghnaim with the aim of cutting off Bethlehem from Jerusalem, is home to 19,000 settlers. Some of the new settlements that Netanyahu wants to continue building are in the same settlement that President Clinton opposed.

Jeff Aronson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, concludes that Israeli leaders will continue to be able to fool their American counterparts on this issue. Some Israeli right-wing leaders like Menachem Begin, Shamir, and Netanyahu trumpet their settlement achievements. Others, including Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert "talked left and built right". The UN security council has also ruled against settlements in numerous occasions, directly or in the prelude, to various resolutions.

Ironically, and as a result of the uproar by Arab leaders about Clinton's pro-Israel statements, she went to Morocco and told Arab foreign ministers that while what Netanyahu has done is "unprecedented," it is still doesn't meet the US expectations.

"This offer falls far short of what we would characterize as our position or what our preference would be," she added. "But if it is acted upon, it will be an unprecedented restriction on settlements and would have a significant and meaningful effect on restraining their growth." Note the term "if acted upon."

So after all this flip flopping, many Palestinians ask the simple question of what is the real position of the US secretary of state, and will the real Hillary Clinton please stand up?

Daoud Kuttab is an award winning Palestinian journalist and former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. His email is info@daoudkuttab.com

Phil Bronstein: The Original Power Couple Emerges Again With Hillary on Top...

2009-11-02T16:38:07Z

Barack and Michele Obama, the couple, continue to captivate the public and the press, most recently in the cover story of the NY Times Sunday magazine: "The first marriage. It's modern, it's a formidable international brand and it's an ongoing negotiation." Sounds like a reality show promo to me. Behind the scenes with those sleek and powerful Obamas.

The First Lady's Halloween leopard outfit was definitely the most overtly tangy executive spouse action since Jackie purred seductively on the phone to Lyndon Johnson in her breathless, Marilyn Monroe style only weeks after her husband's assassination.

But let's not lose sight of the most rubber-necked and mysteriously complex White House relationship of the modern era. What's up with the Big Dog and Big Cat Clintons?

A number of national political writers who covered the Clintons have told me that competition was one of the key things that kept the two together.

The Clinton marriage is probably less of a negotiation than a long-term range war (not without genuine affection.) But surveying the battlefield, it's clear that Hillary has advanced her public personality position way ahead of his.

It might have seemed things were going Bill's way after his wife spiraled out of the presidential race and took a job that only Henry Kissinger before her had been able to turn into a genuinely starring role.

There was the North Korean hostage release where Bill bitch-slapped former bus tour partner Al Gore out of the spotlight and upstaged his own wife with Pyongyang photo ops. And a few weeks ago, Mr. Clinton jetted to California to be the major big foot fundraiser for Gavin Newsom's gubernatorial campaign (RIP).

Then yesterday Bill was in Kosovo for the unveiling of a full-length statue dedicated to him on Pristina's main drag. It appears that he's finally out of that doghouse.

But the Kosovo thing is a little tin-horny Kim Jong Bill. He could barely raise pennies for his pup, Gavin. And he was forced to muzzle himself at the emotional homecoming of the Current TV journalists.

Hillary, meantime, has become a fire-breathing, in-their-face lioness. She's sharp, tireless and blunt. While local pols in DC were trembling even at the idea of rowdy Town Hall meetings, she dove directly into them...in Pakistan, where they eat tea baggers and US officials for lunch. She seems to relish the clash of ideas and told already angry Pakistanis that their government wasn't doing its part in the war.

Snap! No wonder one press report called her the "White Goddess."

Not enough action for the Secretary of State? She then goes to the Mideast and high fives the Israelis for slowing down West Bank Settlements, infuriating the Palestinian leadership. So much for the Obama tilt toward the Muslim world.

This all seems less like the arrogance and repressed anger of the old Hillary and more like a tough, independent-minded superstar.

Agree with her specific positions or not, but in the Clinton wars, my money's on Hillary.

Robert Reich: Health Care Reform is Critically Important, But Getting Americans Back to Work is More So

2009-11-02T12:41:55Z

Presidents tend to overcompensate for the errors of their predecessors in the same party and in so doing sow seeds of their own mistakes. Bill Clinton wanted above all to avoid Jimmy Carter's fate -- losing re-election because the economy was heading south on Election Day. So Clinton made a deal with Alan Greenspan to slash the budget deficit and thereby jettison much of his ambitious campaign agenda (that was Greenspan's precondition for lowering interest rates and causing an economic boom in time for the re-election) and then Clinton took direction from Dick Morris, who told him to move to the right. The result: Clinton avoided Carter's failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn't have enough left to enact health care in 1994.

Barack Obama came to the White House intent on not repeating Clinton's failure to enact universal health care. Did he over-learn the Clinton lesson? Obama seems to have made all the right moves to enact something he can credibly label health-care reform: Rather than spend his political capital elsewhere, he reserved most of it for health care.

I sincerely hope America gets genuine health reform and I hope it's stronger than what's emerging in the Senate. (Whoever voted for Joe Lieberman last time around ought to pray for continued good health.) I worry, though, that Obama's strategy may turn out to be a mistake comparable to Clinton's overemphasis on deficit reduction. Obama's focus on health care rather than jobs, when the economy is still so fragile and unemployment moving toward double digits, could make it appear that the administration has its priorities confused. While affordable health care is critically important to Americans, making a living is more urgent. Yet the administration's efforts to date on this more basic concern have been neither particularly visible nor coherent.

The current rate of unemployment would have been even higher were it not for the federal stimulus package, but the stimulus should have been much larger. Especially with the states still cutting back on spending and raising taxes, the federal stimulus will be barely enough to keep unemployment from hitting 11 percent by the middle of 2010. Yet as the rate of unemployment continued to rise faster and higher than the White House anticipated, Obama could not return to Congress to seek a larger stimulus. He was spending political capital on health care.

The Wall Street bailout, meanwhile, has saved Wall Street but left most regional banks in deep distress. Almost nothing has trickled down. Small businesses still can't get loans. Foreclosures continue to mount largely because jobs continue to vanish and homeowners can't pay their mortgages. Yet at this point, on the eve of a health care bill, it would be difficult for Obama to return to Congress seeking billions more to aid distressed homeowners and small businesses.

While health care reform, if done right, can help American families stay afloat in the economy, the current bills won't offer most Americans any appreciable decline in the cost of their health insurance nor clear improvement in the efficiency or quality of the health care they receive, and those who will benefit won't see the benefits until 2014 at the earliest. All this is partly a result of Obama's sharpest break from Clinton -- whose ambitious health care plan drew immediate fire from Big Pharma, the American Medical Association, and health insurers: The Obama White House bought off the medical-industrial complex by promising it fatter profits, bolstered by tens of millions of new paying customers.

That and other deals cut with industry -- including promises to Big Pharma that Medicare wouldn't use its bargaining clout to reduce drug prices, to the AMA that doctors wouldn't have to face larger cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates, and to private insurers that the White House wouldn't fight hard for a public insurance option -- are likely to make the resulting reform far more costly than it would be otherwise. These extra costs will be borne by those Americans who will be required to buy insurance but won't qualify for federal assistance, along with Medicare beneficiaries who will be paying more and receiving less. These people may not know they're indirectly paying the costs of buying off these industries, but they'll know they're getting shafted (Republicans will be sure to make them aware, even though the GOP has a much longer record of shafting the middle class for the benefit of big business).

The optimist in me says Obama can pivot off a health-care victory and launch some new initiatives that palpably and quickly spur job growth. The realist says there aren't any such initiatives -- at least none that can work fast enough to reverse the tide of unemployment before the midterm elections. Fiddles such as a new jobs tax credit can help but they won't make much of a dent. Even with a larger stimulus, a jobs recovery would still be far off. The tangible benefits of health-care reform are likely to be so elusive in the meantime that the public may become easy prey for demagogues on the right who blame Democrats for the economic insecurities that bedevil the nation next November.

If Obama and the Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, it will be because the president learned only the most superficial lesson of the Clinton years. Health-care reform is critically important. But when one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, getting the nation back to work is more so.

Cross-posted from Robert Reich's Blog.

Kim Jong-Il Double Fooled Bill Clinton, Japanese Analyst Says

2009-11-01T12:05:07Z

A number of analysts here are convinced that not all the photos being released of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, are really photos of Kim Jong-il.

Instead, they say, a look-alike has been standing in for him on some of the 122 trips he's reportedly made this year to the countryside, factories, cultural events, military units, and all sorts of other venues.

Some observers say the North Korean leader is too ill to make all these appearances. One Japanese analyst claims President Clinton didn't meet with Kim Jong-il in August -- he met with a Mr. Kim double.