Republican Lobbying Firm Can Help You Steal Election in Azerbaijan
July 15, 2008 6:02 pm

Alternet

The Sunday Times caught politically-connected lobbyist Stephen Payne on tape suggesting that a $250,000 donation George W. Bush presidential library could help secure access to senior administration officials.

Perhaps even more incredible is the Worldwide Strategic Partners(WSP) brochure that ran with the expose. [Download payne.pdf]
Here's what WSP claims to have done for Azerbaijan, verbatim, from the last page of the brochure, emphases added:

I. Arranged for the President of Azerbaijan to visit the U.S . and meet with President Bush -- a task the Azeri government had been trying for over 3 years

II. Arranged a private phone call between the Vice-President of the United States and the President of Azerbaijan, prior to the Azeri Elections in November of 2005

III. Arranged a series of meetings for the Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan during his September visit to the U.S.

IV. Worked with members of the Helsinki Commission to reduce the negative language in the U.S. press release following the November Elections

V. Implemented an aggressive media campaign to discredit the Azeri opposition candidates, allowing the government for freedom in enforcing election curfews and laws.

VI. Arranged several articles and speeches to be placed into the U.S . Congressional record

VII. Helped create/write the Silk Road II legislation

VIII . Developed a series of Op-Ed's written by influential U.S. officials to boost positive U.S. public perception about Azerbaijan including:

I. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)
II . A. Elizabeth Jones -- Former Assistant Secretary of State -- Europe and Eurasia
III. Gary Buaer (sic) -- 2000 Presidential Candidate and Leader of the Christian Right

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The Wedding Crashers
July 15, 2008 6:04 pm

U.S. Jets Have Bombed Five Ceremonies in Afghanistan

A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars

By Tom Engelhardt

We have become a nation of wedding crashers, the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offering nary an apology.

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Unfit to serve
July 15, 2008 6:05 pm

Jed Report

It's hard to imagine that John McCain intended to compromise the safety of Barack Obama when he said he thought Barack would land in Iraq either today or tomorrow, but that's besides the point. The issue is that this is something McCain should have known not to say.

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Who's the Real Foreign Policy Expert?
July 18, 2008 6:06 pm

Richard Clarke discusses the series of recent foreign policy shifts from McCain and Bush -- all toward the Obama position:

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Obama Leading on Foreign Policy, McCain Following
July 19, 2008 6:07 pm

Just this week, Senator McCain has been forced by events to switch to Barack Obama?s position on two fundamental issues: more troops in Afghanistan, and more diplomacy with Iran. On both issues, Obama took stands that weren't politically popular at the time - opposing the war in Iraq as a diversion from the critical mission in Afghanistan, and standing up for direct diplomacy with Iran - while John McCain lined up with George Bush. Time has proven Obama's judgment right and McCain wrong.

The next shift appears to be Iraq. For months, Senator McCain has called any plan to redeploy our troops from Iraq "surrender" - even though we'd be leaving Iraq to a sovereign Iraqi government. Now, the Bush Administration is embracing the negotiation of troop withdrawals with the Iraqi government - a position that Senator Obama called for last September, and reiterated on Monday in the New York Times. And now, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Barack Obama's timeline, telling Der Speigel that, "Barack Obama is right when he talks about 16 months."

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The Iraq War Was About Oil, All Along
July 19, 2008 6:08 pm

Bill Moyers

.....Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq -- and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq -- the press mogul Rupert Murdoch -- once said that a successful war there would bring us $20-a-barrel oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?.....

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President Bush lobbyist Stephen Payne in 'bribes' row quits
July 20, 2008 6:09 pm

Times UK

An American government adviser and lobbyist, caught offering access to top White House figures in exchange for a $250,000 (?126,000) donation towards President George W Bush?s private library, has resigned following the launch of a congressional inquiry into the scandal.

Stephen Payne, who has close links to the White House, had to relinquish his seat on the advisory council to the Department of Homeland Security following an expos? in The Sunday Times last weekend.

It has also since emerged that Payne had made misleading statements about his business dealings relating to another aspect of the "cash for access" scandal in which a $2m payment was allegedly made by a foreign government to secure a visit from Dick Cheney, the US vice-president.

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Taser Death Ignites Racial Tensions
July 20, 2008 6:10 pm

by Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune

WINNFIELD, LA. - At 1:28 p.m. on Jan. 17, Baron "Scooter" Pikes was a healthy 21-year-old. By 2:07 p.m., he was dead.

What happened in the 39 minutes in between - during which Pikes was handcuffed by police and shocked nine times with a Taser while reportedly pleading for mercy - is spawning suspicions of a political cover-up in this lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.

Racial tensions also are mounting; Pikes was black and the officer involved is white.

No novelist could have invented Winnfield, the birthplace of two of Louisiana?s most colorful and notorious governors - Huey and Earl Long.

The police chief committed suicide three years ago after losing a close election marred by allegations of fraud and vote-buying. Just four months later, the district attorney killed himself after allegedly skimming $200,000 from his office budget and extorting payments from criminal defendants to make their cases go away.

The current police chief is a convicted drug offender pardoned by then-Gov. Edwin Edwards, who is in federal prison for corruption convictions.

All that history is wrapped up in the Pikes case because the officer in question, Scott Nugent, is the son of the former chief who killed himself and the protege of the current chief, who hired him.

"A lot happens in this town and it just gets swept under the rug," said Kayshon Collins, Pikes? stepmother, who has participated in several protests over the case.

"What the police did to Scooter just isn?t right. They would never have Tasered a white kid like that."

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Chuck Todd: GOP panicked, Maliki sticks with "timetable"
July 20, 2008 6:11 pm

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Obama Meets Troops in Afghanistan
July 20, 2008 6:11 pm

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Benny Morris Justifies Israel's Coming Attack on Iran
July 20, 2008 6:12 pm

David Bromwich

On Friday July 18 the New York Times published an op-ed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris. It is entitled "Using Bombs to Stave Off War." Morris chose this American venue to announce that Israel would "almost surely" attack Iran some time in the next few months. And he indicated that America would be well advised to support the attack.

The reputation of Benny Morris is founded on unquestioned scholarly achievement and a far more dubious political stance. As one of Israel's "new historians," he recovered the record of harassment, murder, and expulsion of the Palestinians in the war of independence -- a finding that largely discredits the Israeli myth that the inhabitants fled from their own timidity, or because they were told to flee by Arab governments.

But speaking as an Israeli citizen, more recently, Morris has declared his view that the mistake of Ben-Gurion and the leadership of 1948 was that they did not carry the expulsion of the Palestinians all the way. Morris sees Israel in 2008 as a state under perpetual siege and the focus of a clash of civilizations; he sees Palestinians -- and to a degree, all Arabs; and Iranians, too -- as a species of animals not yet inducted into full humanity. ....

....One may notice that the Israeli attack goes on a much faster schedule than the Iranian pace of research and discovery. Why the haste for destruction? Could it have something to do with the American presidential election of 2008 (which comes at Morris's four-month lower limit), or something to do with the inauguration of a new president in 2009 (thirty days before his upper limit of seven months)? Morris does not say. He writes, he says, because people need to realize that the success of Israel's coming "conventional assault" on Iran will be good for Israel, for the United States, and even for Iran. If, on the other hand, this conventional assault fails, Israel will some day launch a nuclear attack; and that will be less good.....

.....But let us return for a last look at Benny Morris.

No person into whose mind had entered the idea that an Iranian may be a human being--and that there are millions of innocent Iranians -- could have generated with such casual facility the image of Iran as a "nuclear wasteland." Yet this was the image of Iran that the Israeli Benny Morris decided to conjure up for American readers in the New York Times.......

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