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Buzz, perspectives, insight and news from AlterNet

Are We Ready for a New Policy on Cuba?
Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report on May 20, 2008 at 11:19 AM.

For a couple of generations, every major presidential candidate, from both parties, has taken the same position on U.S. policy towards Cuba: keep the status quo. The embargo needs to stay in place in order to “keep the pressure” on Castro. Any thawing in relations would be a victory for a brutal thug, and would enrage a powerful voting bloc (Cuban Americans) in a key electoral state (Florida).

With that in mind, no candidate has been willing to talk openly about a change. I distinctly remember in 2004 when Wesley Clark said in a debate he wanted a dramatic shake-up in the existing policy. “When you isolate a country, you strengthen the dictators in it,” Clark said. The next day, Clark’s campaign backpedaled, after aides heard from supporters in Miami.

This year, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama went out on a limb and said the status quo isn’t good enough, and had the audacity to point that the current policy doesn’t actually work. They no doubt expected Republicans to try to exploit this, but made the case anyway.

Dodd stepped aside in January, but Obama is poised to be the first Democratic candidate in a half-century to offer a real change when it comes to Cuba. Today, John McCain intends to smack him on it pretty hard in a speech in Miami.

In an indication that John McCain sees foreign policy as the best route to take on Barack Obama — and that he will take it frequently — McCain is set to roll out another tough attack, with a speech today to the Cuban community in Miami. At the rate things are going, the McCain camp will be hitting Obama on some new foreign policy point every day.

“Just a few years ago, Senator Obama had a very clear view on Cuba,” McCain will say, according to prepared excerpts, then quoting Obama saying that normalization of relations would improve conditions for the Cuban people.

“Now Senator Obama has shifted positions and says he only favors easing the embargo, not lifting it. He also wants to sit down unconditionally for a presidential meeting with Raul Castro. These steps would send the worst possible signal to Cuba’s dictators — there is no need to undertake fundamental reforms, they can simply wait for a unilateral change in US policy.”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Pakistani Rice Exports Alleviate Food Crisis
Posted by The Littlest Gator, Group News Blog on May 20, 2008 at 10:03 AM.

Rice prices eased after a record high in April because Pakistan, confident of meeting local demand, will export 1 million tons and it looks like other countries will follow suit.

Pakistan, the fifth-biggest exporter, will permit shipments of 1 million metric tons because local needs have been met, Mohammad Azhar Akhtar, chairman of the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan, said yesterday. Rice has fallen 13 percent in Chicago this week.

Prices reached an all time high in April and helped trigger riots over food cost from Haiti to Egypt. This peak and food cost fear was partly due to real concerns over increased demand and diminished supply but was also made dramatically worse by speculative hedge funds and corporate greed.

In spite of good news from Pakistan rice exporters, the outlook is not all that rosy.

The surge in rice prices, coupled with record energy and wheat costs, stoked concern that basic goods would cost more than the poor could afford, creating a global food crisis. The UN's FAO estimated May 12 the global rice trade will drop 7.1 percent this year to 28.8 million tons.

and

Rice prices had also gained earlier this month after a cyclone slammed into Myanmar's main rice-growing region on May 3, inundating farmland and fueling speculation that the nation will be forced to halt exports. The impact of Cyclone Nargis had been factored into global rice prices, Sunny Verghese, chief executive officer of commodity supplier Olam International Ltd., said today. Myanmar used to contribute about 5 to 6 percent of the world rice trade, Verghese said in an interview. ``The new crop, I don't think they will export.

- Bloomberg

Now that food concerns are going to finally be center stage, maybe food politics will gain a stronger consideration in global political circles and progressive discourse. Our food strategy in the future is going to have to be an important part of foreign policy in future years. The politics of the world food supply is not going to be something anyone can ignore.

For some basic background reading about food politics I reccomend anything by Marion Nestle

Will Bob Barr and Ron Paul Out-Flank McCain on the Right?
Posted by Howie Klein, Down With Tyranny! on May 20, 2008 at 8:32 AM.

With GOP toe-sucker Dick Morris publicly urging McCain to shed his far right extremism and move to the center if he's going to have any chance at all to win a few states outside of the Old Confederacy plus Utah, Wyoming and Idaho, a very different kind of reality is closing in on McCain who, says toe-sucker, "has been dealt a terrible hand: a tanking economy, an unpopular war, a Republican incumbent whose approval ratings are at their all-time low and a gloomy national mood, with 82 percent of Americans saying in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last week that the country is on the wrong track." He offers the hapless Republican nominee a roadmap, a roadmap dependent of Jeremiah Wright-- "the honorary chairman of McCain's get-out-the-vote efforts"-- even though every voter in red, red, red Mississippi first congressional district was inundated with Jeremiah Wright and still voted against Bush and the GOP.

The growing fear of Obama, who remains something of an unknown, will drag every last white Republican male off the golf course to vote for McCain, and he will need no further laying-on of hands from either evangelical Christians or fiscal conservatives.

So McCain doesn't have to spend a lot of time wooing his base. What he does need to do is reduce the size of the synapse over which independents and fearful Democrats need to pass in order to back his candidacy. If the synapse is wide, they will stay with Obama. But if they perceive McCain as an acceptable alternative, there is every chance that they will cross over to back him in November.

But even as toe sucker/Fox News shill admits that McBush's endless war in Iraq agenda could kill the deal, another dynamic has arisen that negates whatever toe sucking meditations popped into Morris' demented little right-wing brain: Bob Barr.

Micah Sifry, a lot smarter and far more with it than Morris was even when he was relevant, thinks if McCain doesn't watch his right flank, he's a dead duck. He warns that if McCain follows the toe-sucker's strategy Barr will siphon off enough votes to insure a McCain loss, "not because Barr is such a compelling candidate, but because he could become the vehicle for the many disaffected Republicans gathered under Paul's flag."

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Immigrants Are Assimilating Faster Than Ever
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on May 20, 2008 at 6:58 AM.

One of the enduring right wing shibboleths about immigration is that immigrants just don't assimilate like they used to.

It's not true:

Immigrants of the past quarter-century have been assimilating in the United States at a notably faster rate than did previous generations, according to a study released today.

Modern-day immigrants arrive with substantially lower levels of English ability and earning power than those who entered during the last great immigration wave at the turn of the 20th century. The gap between today's foreign-born and native populations remains far wider than it was in the early 1900s and is particularly large in the case of Mexican immigrants, the report said.

The study, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank, used census and other data to devise an assimilation index to measure the degree of similarity between the United States' foreign-born and native-born populations. These included civic factors, such as rates of U.S. citizenship and service in the military; economic factors, such as earnings and rates of homeownership; and cultural factors, such as English ability and degree of intermarriage with U.S. citizens. The higher the number on a 100-point index, the more an immigrant resembled a U.S. citizen.

In general, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the more characteristics of native citizens he or she tends to take on, said Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor at Duke University and author of the study. During periods of intense immigration, such as from 1870 to 1920, or during the immigration wave that began in the 1970s, new arrivals tend to drag down the average assimilation index of the foreign-born population as a whole.

The report found, however, that the speed with which new arrivals take on native-born traits has increased since the 1990s. As a result, even though the foreign population doubled during that period, the newcomers did not drive down the overall assimilation index of the foreign-born population. Instead, it held relatively steady from 1990 to 2006.

"This is something unprecedented in U.S. history," Vigdor said. "It shows that the nation's capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong."

Well, what do you know?

The report does note that some immigrants do better than others, with Mexicans coming closest to the bottom. however, this is likely due to the fact that they tend to be illegal immigrants and are forced to live in the shadows. Legal Mexican immigrants assimilate at the same levels as everyone else:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Obama Ratchets-Up His Attacks on Big Media
Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left on May 20, 2008 at 6:01 AM.

On Friday, I wrote about how Obama is subtly sending out signals that he is going to reform media by emphasizing a more diverse ownership structure. Currently, radio station ownership is mostly held by white men. Latinos own 2.9% of all radio stations and African-Americans own 3.4% of them. TV is even worse. According to Free Press, "people of color own just 3.15 percent of commercial television stations in the United States... while women own just 5.87 percent of television stations."

Pledging a more diverse ownership structure is a serious challenge to the current media environment. Today, Obama pledged to use antitrust tools to work on media consolidation.

"I will assure that we will have an antitrust division that is serious about pursuing cases," the Illinois senator told an audience of mostly senior citizens in Oregon.

"There are going to be areas, in the media for example where we're seeing more and more consolidation, that I think (it) is legitimate to ask...is the consumer being served?"

I wrote about this in November, 2007, when Obama came out with his media and tech proposals. He's got a strong open source, almost libertarian attitude, as evidenced by his technocratic advisors and slightly more conservative stances on economic stimulus and health care. While cautious instincts are part of his DNA, when it comes to media, they serve the public extremely well. Unlike health care and the green economy, elites in technology are extremely powerful and progressive, so they counterbalance the more corrupt and conservative telecom and cable interests. The Obama camp is close with Silicon Valley, which is both libertarian in general matters and progressive when it comes to technology; venture capitalists were some of Obama's first Presidential backers, and you can get a really good sense of who he is by reading this blog post endorsing Obama by Marc Andreesen, the founder of Netscape (and a Mitt Romney donor). Google itself is willing to get into the fray, pushing back against Joe Lieberman's demands to censor Youtube.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Anti-Choice McCain is Not a Moderate
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on May 20, 2008 at 5:04 AM.

One of the ongoing issues in this election is going to be waking people up to the fact that John McCain is a grade A, totally not moderate social conservative. This is critical for that swing vote, especially those swing voters that say, “Well, I don’t think abortion should be illegal, but it’s bad to use it as birth control.” Translation of that sentiment: “I want to be able to have an abortion if I so desire, but I reserve the right to gossip about others in tones that indicate that I’m so scandalized.” These people would shy away from a ban, of course, but they probably can be convinced to vote for someone they erroneously believe talks the anti-choice talk but won’t do the anti-choice walk.

Or, long story short: McCain is running the same campaign that worked so well for Bush. The “compassionate conservative”, i.e. panders to the haters but wants you to think deep down inside that he’s not really a hater. This goes for the gay thing, too. Bush pushed for the marriage ban, but to maintain the illusion of compassion, the Bush administration actually tried to rein in some of their crazier homophobes. Not sure what the line in the sand is on reproductive rights, though, since the Bush administration appointed a bunch of misogynists to the Supreme Court and passed a really terrible piece of anti-abortion legislation and tried to block emergency contraception from being sold over the counter.

Educating people about McCain’s hard right views on women’s rights will be an uphill battle this election, but I was pleased to see that he was helping us out with his mailers.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Next Troop Rotation to Consist Solely of National Guard
Posted by Spencer Ackerman, Attackerman on May 20, 2008 at 3:54 AM.

Fresh out from the Pentagon: the next Iraq rotation. Notice how it’s all National Guard troops.

The Department of Defense announced today the alert of additional major units scheduled to deploy in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The announcement involves four brigades from the Army National Guard.

All four brigades will have a security force mission and be assigned tasks to assure freedom of movement and continuity of operations in the country. Those tasks will include base defense and route security in Iraq and Kuwait.

These deployments will involve approximately 14,000 personnel who will begin deploying in the spring of 2009. They are receiving alert orders now in order to provide them the maximum time to complete their preparations. It also provides a greater measure of predictability for family members and flexibility for employers to plan for military service of their employees.

Specific decisions made by the secretary of defense include:

72nd Brigade Combat Team, Texas National Guard

2nd Brigade Combat Team, 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania National Guard

256th Brigade Combat Team, Louisiana National Guard

278th Brigade Combat Team, Tennessee National Guard

So we’re so thin on active-duty Army brigades that we’re sending reservists to Iraq as our entire spring-2009 force complement. Perhaps by then we’ll have a president who decides that such an Iraq deployment is the last one U.S. forces will make.

Crossposted to The Streak.

Hospital Attempts Deportation of Woman With Inadequate Insurance
Posted by Cara , Feministe on May 19, 2008 at 3:23 PM.

An immigrant woman from Honduras who has very recently awakened from a coma is being threatened with what can effectively be called deportation, because she does not have the insurance needed to cover her medical bills. (Don’t read the comments in these articles unless you want to lose your lunch.) But here is the real kicker: while it would be repulsive and incredibly inhumane to deport an uninsured/under-insured person with a serious medical condition because of their undocumented status, despite the lack of adequate facilities for their care in their nations of citizenship, it isn’t even the case here. Sonia del Cid Iscoa has a current visa and in the U.S. legally. (All emphasis in quoted text is mine.)

A gravely ill woman at risk of being removed from the country for lack of adequate insurance coverage awoke from a coma Tuesday.

The hospital has been seeking to return her to her native Honduras; her family took the hospital to court.

[. . .]

Iscoa, 34, has a valid visa and has lived in the United States for more than 17 years. She has no family in Honduras.

But St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center sought to have her sent to Honduras when she went into a coma April 20 after giving birth to a daughter about 8 weeks premature. Iscoa has an amended version of Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System coverage that does not cover long-term care, Curtin said. But her family worried that the move would seriously harm her, or, at the very least, prevent her from ever returning to the United States.

Iscoa’s mother, Joaquina del Cid Plasecea, obtained a temporary restraining order to keep her from being moved. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Carey Hyatt also ordered that the family post a $20,000 bond by Tuesday to cover St. Joseph’s costs of postponing the transfer.

However, Curtin said that the hospital gave the family three more days to come up with the money before a hearing Friday.

If the family can prove that Iscoa would suffer irreparable injury by a move, the bond will be refunded and Iscoa will not be transferred. But if Hyatt determines that Iscoa is not in imminent danger by a move, the family will forfeit the bond.

A stipulation to a court order issued by Hyatt Tuesday evening said that the parties were “actively exploring alternative sources of securing payment for the medical bills of Sonia Iscoa.”

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Superdelegates Turned Down $1 Million Offer from Clinton Donor
Posted by Mike Connery, AlterNet on May 19, 2008 at 1:31 PM.

So how much is the youth vote worth this year? Apparently $500,000 a pop if you are a superdelegate.

The Huffington Post is running a shocker of a piece claiming that Clinton donor Haim Saban offered the Young Democrats of America access to $1 million in funds if their two remaining superdelegates - David Hardt and Crystal Strait - endorsed Sen. Clinton:

One of Sen. Hillary Clinton's top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization's two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.

Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization's other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton.

YDA isn't answering anymore questions about this incident on the record, but if this is true, all I can say is "good for the Young Democrats!" for turning the offer down. At a time when Sen. Obama's campaign is threatening to defund 527 organizations (YDA is a 527), and many progressive youth organizations still struggle to raise their yearly budgets, YDA's leadership, this could not have been an easy choice for YDA leaders. $1 million is a substantial portion of YDA's yearly budget. This was the ultimate Faustian bargain dangled in front of them and they turned it down. They made the ethical choice to forgo what might be best for themselves politically and faithfully represent the will of their constituents in the nominating process.

It was even braver considering the potential fallout from other donors close to Saban:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

More Democrats versus Better Democrats
Posted by Digby, Hullabaloo on May 19, 2008 at 1:01 PM.

I'm curious as to what you might think about this:

While much of the Congressional political focus has been on the declining fortunes and numbers of House Republicans, House Democrats have their own problem – they are winning too many elections.

By prevailing in conservative locales where they ordinarily would not have a chance, Democrats are widening the ideological divide in their own ranks and complicating their ability to find internal consensus.

This will be an interesting challenge. In the blogosphere we've been in the business of trying to elect more and better Democrats, by which we mean progressive. This raises the question: is more, without the better, a good idea?

The article asserts that the Democrats need to win much more in order to have a real working majority and there may be a chance this year to do it. But it still presents an interesting conundrum. What if you end up with a bigger majority of people with (D) after their names, but most of the new ones are conservative? It's not an unexpected outcome in a country that has, until recently, been very evenly divided.

The Republicans kept their "moderates" on a very short chain and consciously governed with as few cross over votes as possible in order to keep the other side frustrated and the caucus "pure." They got things done for a while, and protected their president with the loyalty of feral pit bulls, but ended up destroying themselves.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

DOJ Report: FBI Needs Supervision in Use of Security Letters
Posted by Looseheadprop , Firedoglake on May 19, 2008 at 11:24 AM.

The Center for Democracy and Technology has issued a scathing report on the FBI's attempts to self police with regard to compliance with regulations associated with the issuance of National Security Letters (NSLs). This comes as a result of two successive DOJ-IG reports showing systematic failures and abuses by the FBI in the management of these disclosure devices.

In October 2001, the PATRIOT Act dramatically weakened the standard for issuing NSLs by removing the requirement that the records sought with the NSL pertain to an "agent of a foreign power" such as a terrorist or a spy. The PATRIOT Act also eliminated the requirement that the government be able to articulate the factual basis for its suspicion.

Current law merely requires an FBI official to state "purely for internal purposes -- that the records are "relevant to" or "sought for" foreign counter-intelligence or terrorism purposes. Furthermore, an amendment adopted in 2003 dramatically expanded the institutions subject to NSLs to include travel agencies, real estate agents, jewelers, the Postal Service, insurance companies, casinos, car dealers and others.

Among other things, the IG found that the FBI issued NSLs when it had not even opened the investigation that is the only predicate for issuing an NSL. It found that the FBI retains almost indefinitely the information it obtains with an NSL, even if the record subject turns out to be innocent of any crime and of no intelligence interest.

It also found that the Attorney General had refused to adopt adequate "minimization" procedures designed to protect the privacy of information about innocent Americans obtained with an NSL, even though an interagency working group had recommended such procedures.

So, the CDT is calling for an overhaul of the legislation related to NSLs. After the 2007 IG report, CDT reports that the FBI did institute internal rules and training which improved things somewhat with regard to agents actually opening a case before issuing an NSL, or returning or destroying information received but not relevant to the investigation. However, the 2008 IG report still found that the internal review process prior to issuing an NSL was stil insufficient.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Compulsory Heterosexuality: School Bars Dateless Girls from Prom
Posted by Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon on May 19, 2008 at 10:02 AM.

This is extremely bizarre. A Staten Island high school has banned girls from the prom if they don’t have a male date. It’s a girls-only school, which probably means that proms generally have a huge number of girls and not that many guys. Maybe the principle is pitying the boys at the prom, feeling they shouldn’t be outnumbered. There’s other speculations.

“That makes sense only because it probably controls the chaos,” Valente said. “You know you’re there with somebody, you’re less likely to go crazy.”

So, there’s a grave danger of high levels of squealing and circle dancing. I say, good practice for the weddings the principle presumably wants them to have in the future.

By the way, explanation for the academicese in the title: compulsory heterosexuality isn’t just about compelling people not to be gay. It’s about the social pressures to perform heterosexuality that are put on everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. Even if you’re straight, you can be subject to this pressure if your straightness doesn’t conform to the get married/have kids/participate in the rituals of American heterosexuality. And so a straight girl who is banned from the prom because she wanted to go with girl friends instead of a date is