Monday, Senators Kit Bond, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and John McCain will be the featured guests at a "Health Care Reform Forum" at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City.
The 75-100 guests invited to the event have reportedly been "hand-picked" by Bond's office to hear about Republican plans for obstructing real health care reform.
The forum is closed to the public.
Heh. Maybe they're afraid the great unwashed would try to hold them accountable for Medicare Part D.
It's one thing to not do town halls because they've been going badly, it's quite another to hold a fake one and hand pick your crowd.
[September 2007]...Members of Congress and retired Members are entitled to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) under the same rules as other federal employees. Members meeting minimum enrollment period requirements who are also eligible for an immediate annuity may continue to participate in the health benefit program when they retire. For an additional fee, incumbent Members can receive health care services from the Office of the Attending Physician in the U.S. Capitol; in addition, Members may purchase care from the military hospitals using their FEHBP benefit. Members must also pay the same payroll taxes as all other workers for Medicare Part A coverage...
A January 17 New York Times editorial noted that Attorney General designate Eric Holder testified at his nomination hearings that when it came to overhauling the nation's interrogation rules for both the military and the CIA, the Army Field Manual represented "a good start." The editorial noted the vagueness of Holder's statement. Left unsaid was the question, if the AFM is only a "good start," what comes next?
The Times editorial writer never bothered to mention the fact that three years earlier, a different New York Times article (12/14/2005) introduced a new controversy regarding the rewrite of the Army Field Manual. The rewrite was inspired by a proposal by Senator John McCain to limit U.S. military and CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual. (McCain would later allow an exception for the CIA.)
According to the Times article, a new set of classified procedures proposed for the manual was "was pushing the limits on legal interrogation." Anonymous military sources called the procedures "a back-door effort" to undermine McCain's efforts at the time to change U.S. abusive interrogation techniques, and stop the torture.
A Forgotten Controversy
Over the next six months or so, a number of articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times described the course of the controversy. By mid-June 2006, the NYT was reporting that, under pressure from unnamed senior generals and members of Congress (including McCain, and Senators Warner and Graham), the Pentagon was rethinking its plan to have a classified annex to the AFM, which would include a different set of interrogation rules for "unlawful combatants," like the detainees at Guantanamo. Included in the discussion about these classified procedures were, reportedly, members of the State Department and various human rights organizations.
According to an article in the L.A. Times, this latest fight over the classified procedures went back at least to mid-May 2006. The manual itself had been written at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, roughly a year earlier, and then sent to the Pentagon for further evalution. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man, Stephen Cambone, was put in charge of its final draft. According the L.A. Times article, members of Congress were "keen to avoid a public fight with the Pentagon." The announcement that the controversial and still unknown procedures might not be included in the manual was seen as a success by human rights groups.
Yet the proverbial chickens never hatched, and by early September 2006 the new Army Field Manual was finally released. The section on special interrogation procedures for "unlawful combatants" was included as a special appendix (Appendix M), and published in unclassified format. According to a L.A. Times story on September 8, Cambone was crowing that the new Army Field Manual instructions would give interrogators "what they need to do the job." The article noted:
The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be used on so-called unlawful combatants - such as Al Qaeda suspects - not traditional prisoners of war.
That technique, called "separation," involves segregating a detainee from other prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the equivalent of solitary confinement and was consistent with Geneva Convention protections.
As for the proposed secrecy surrounding the new techniques, the Pentagon had decided it couldn't keep them secret forever. Senator Warner was also on record as against any classified annex to the manual.
Not long ago, I wrote about what was included in Appendix M, which purports to introduce the single technique of "separation." In fact, the Appendix M includes instructions regarding solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and, in combination with other procedures included in the Army Field Manual, amounted to a re-introduction of the psychological torture techniques practiced at Guantanamo, and taught by Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE psychologists and other personnel at the Cuban base and elsewhere.
The rewrite of the Army Field Manual included other seemingly minor changes. It introduced dubious procedures, such as the "False Flag" technique, wherein interrogators could pretend they were from another country. It also redefined the meaning of "Fear Up," a procedure meant to exploit a prisoner's existing fears under imprisonment. Now, interrogators could create "new" fears. The AFM rewrite was a masterpiece of subterfuge and double talk, which could only have been issued from the offices of Rumsfeld and Cambone.
One would think this turnaround of the Pentagon's position regarding a removal of these controversial procedures would have been a matter of some note. But there was no protest from Congress, no mention of the past controversy in the press, and only vague comments at first and then acceptance by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Only Physicians for Human Rights protested the inclusion of the techniques listed in Appendix M. For the rest... silence.
Every time John McCain utters his opposition to pork barrel earmark spending, remember that he's talking about his opposition to projects like federal funding for at-risk and homeless youth in Kansas City, community health centers all across Missouri, early childhood education in Springfield and Saint Louis, and so on. If you wondering what else, take a look at Sunlight Foundation's Earmark Watch. Just enter your zip code, city, or state.
It's always funny to see pundits and reporters try to project what other people will think of events based purely on their own gut feeling. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Springfield, IL bureau chief Kevin McDermott tried to do just that when he pulled blogger duty for the Political Fix debate coverage:
(My prediction so far is that McCain might be declared, slightly, the winner on style, but neither will be viewed as having changed the race)
Interestingly, as McDermott admits in a later post, Obama crushed McCain in likability and on who sounds more like a normal politician (McCain sounded the most like an ordinary politician), not to mention on every single issue, from Iraq and the war on terror to health care to the economy. So on style AND on substance, Obama came out ahead.
Leave the projection out of it, pundits. You have snap polls that give us fuller and more accurate information about the reactions of ordinary citizens coming out minutes after a debate. No reason to pretend you know what they might think better than they do.
A couple of more thoughts on the use of the word "maverick." I wonder if it's the right moment for McCain to constantly describe himself using a word that essentially means "unpredictable" when the country is looking for someone with a steady hand, calm in a crisis. It doesn't help when McCain's campaign is erratic, too.
And the word "maverick" comes from Samuel Maverick, a 19th century Texas rancher who refused to brand his cattle. His fellow ranchers thought him independent because of this fact, but his failure to brand his cattle signified a lack of interest in actually ranching. So maybe it is the perfect word to describe John McCain, a senator with a fake ranch, a candidate who takes risks to show how "mavericky" he is but who shows little interest in actually governing.
Nice. Another independent anti-Palin ad will be airing in Missouri this week, this one put together by the California Nurses Association. The ad implicitly refers to McCain's health by repeatedly referring to a heart monitor, while running through a greatest hits list of Sarah Palin's negatives. The list is good (wants to teach creationism, took on a personal vendetta as Governor, charged rape victims for exams, etc.) but it would have been nice to at least include a reference to a source with each claim. And I would have also preferred the ad to link this all back to McCain's judgement, just as the ad implicitly links Palin to McCain's health. Still, good ad.
Watch the ad:
UPDATE: While we're on the subject of anti-McCain-Palin ads, here's one I hope will be aired in Missouri:
I'd mention the Research2000 polling, but internals are currently hard to come by, and i'm reading either 47/46 McCain or 49/45 McCain there. Or both at different times. I'll save some posting for other front-pagers though.
So John McCain sent out a message yesterday afternoon, proclaiming that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to "solve the financial crisis":
Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me.
I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself. It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.
Since McCain's ads are still running, his flacks are on TV attacking Obama, and he gave a major campaign speech today, I wondered what kind of campaign activities McCain was actually planning on suspending. So I sent an e-mail to the local McCain field office, posing as a conservative eager to help out:
Dear Lane,
I found your e-mail address on the Missouri for John McCain website. I'm a staunch conservative who has had my fair share of disagreements with Senator McCain. Still, I can't stand the idea of seeing the liberals take over the entire government, especially this Barrack "Osama Lover" Obama as our Commander in Chief.
I've seen Senator McCain take a little bit of a dip in the polls in the last few days, and it concerns me a great deal. I feel like I have to do something. I have some time from this evening through Monday, and again on future weekends, to help out. What can I do??
Thank you,
Kenny Bennett
Needless to say, in his response (posted below the fold) the local field director gave no hint of a suspension of the campaign, impending or otherwise. Only slightly less surprising is the lack of acknowledgement that McCain's opponent was being called "Osama Lover."
Since McCain hasn't actually suspended any part of his campaign operation, despite his call for America to come together to work toward a common solution, we can definitely call this the gimmick that it is.
Carly Fiorina, who is inexplicably a top McCain economic advisor after being fired as CEO of Hewlett-Packard (the company halved its market share and shed a lot of jobs during her tenure) was on Saint Louis radio today. According to Fiorina, Palin does not have the experience to run a major company.
"Do you think [Sarah Palin] has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?" asked the host.
"No, I don't," responded Fiorina. "But you know what? That's not what she's running for."
I'm not really a huge fan of Claire McCaskill, but she hits the nail on the head regarding Sarah Palin and John McCain's "reformer" claims.
I will say this, Hillary Clinton didn't but I will say this, I have a hard time imagining that Sarah Palin is a reformer if she took taxpayer money to sleep in her own bed. That is not a definition of a reformer, that's a deifnition of somebody who's gonna fit right in in Washington.
McCain gave a speech worse than some of the ordinary folks that both parties gave a chance to speak in their respective conventions. Was this his way of trying to prove he's an outsider?
Many Republican legislators who have worked with John McCain have publicly skewered him for his temper. On July 30th, I quoted some of them. Today seems like an appropriate time to remind you of what they said.
"He is a vicious person. Nearly all the Republican Senators endorsed Bush because they knew McCain from serving with him in the Senate. They so disliked him that they wouldn't support him. They have been on the hard end of his behavior." --Former Representative Charles LeBoutillier, R-NY
"John was very rough in the sandbox. Everybody has a McCain story. If you work in the Senate for a while, you have a McCain story. He hasn't built up a lot of goodwill." --Former Senator Santorum, R-PA
"I don't like McCain. I don't like him at all." --Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-CO
"What has struck me about McCain is that everybody underestimated the ability of his advisers and him to hypnotize the national media, because most of us in the media in Arizona thought of him as a guy who had a terrible temper, occasionally had a foul mouth, a guy who whined and pouted unless he got his way. McCain has a temper that is bombastic, volatile, and purple-faced. Sometimes he gets out of control. Do you want somebody sitting in the White House with that kind of temper?" --Pat Murphy, former editor of the Arizona Republic, and a former friend of McCain
And by Quayle, I mean an inexperienced, weak vice-presidential candidate. And that's what Sarah Palin brings to the table - almost no experience in governance even in her own state. I might add that Alaskan Republicans could be the most corrupt in the country, and Sarah Palin is close with them, even Republican Senator Ted Stevens after he was indicted. She's actually under an ethics investigation right now.
What a weak, desperate move.
UPDATE: Obama's response:
"Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. Governor Palin shares John McCain's commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush's failed economic policies -- that's not the change we need, it's just more of the same," said Bill Burton, Obama Campaign Spokesman.
UPDATE II: In a CNBC interview earlier this month, Palin admitted that she didn't even know what the VP does:
"But as for that VP talk all the time, I'll tell ya, I still can't answer that question until somebody answers for me, what is it exactly that the VP does every day?" - Sarah Palin, 8/1/08, CNBC, "Kudlow and Company"
Today is John McCain's birthday. That's easy to remember, because on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans as a Category 3 hurricane, bringing ruin and devastation to an impoverished population unable to evacuate partially because of decades of neglect and partially because of an unresponsive government.
And part of the unresponsivity is directly tied in with John McCain. On August 29, 2005, John McCain was celebrating his 69th birthday with George Bush in Arizona, and apparently the festivities couldn't be called off so that the president of the United States could coordinate some sort of effective response. Now we have indelible images like this:
juxtaposed with this:
This is yet another shameful legacy Bush, along with his enablers like John McCain, has given us. When you don't believe government can be useful or effective, you don't spend time trying to figure out how it can actually be useful or effective.
Speaking of responses, our very own Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor Sam Page volunteered his time and effort providing free medical services for Katrina in Jennings, LA. That's especially touching to me, because not only was I born in Louisiana, I still have lots of extended family in Jennings. Thank, Sam, for showing that you cared when those higher up in government did not.
Many Republican legislators who have worked with John McCain have publicly skewered him for his temper. On 
