Roasted Squash and Einkorn Wheat Salad
6 hours ago
Before Robin Roberts could ask a question, McCain said this:Read More......
“May I just say, I’m here for one day, I’m in Mexico the next day, then I’m back home -- also drugs is a big, big problem in America, the continued flow of drugs from Colombia through Mexico into the United States is still one of our major challenges to all America.”
“I’ve been here many times, I’ve been here several times in the past, as well as with Mexico, and I think that it deserves our attention,” McCain added.
When Roberts asked why he was in Colombia when the economy is foremost in voters' minds, this was McCain’s response:
“Well, I’d be glad to repeat myself,” he said. “There is clearly a continued threat of drugs pouring into the United States of America, which can harm us and our young people very badly. I’m happy to say that there has been some success. The cost of cocaine on the street is up.”
Not to belittle the nation’s drug plague -- but in between the bird chirps, I think 1984 just called, asking for its candidate back.
Maybe this is huge with conservative voters and I’m missing something, but I had Nancy Reagan flashbacks. With the economy teetering, $80 SUV fill-ups, and two real wars, this is what McCain has chosen to spotlight in a foreign trip, four months before Election Day?
Just judging from the polls -- shouldn’t he be a little more concerned with the price of gas than the price of cocaine?
Wall Street resumed its sell-off Wednesday after oil hit a new record and a bearish analyst report renewed concerns that General Motors Corp. could run out of cash.Read More......
The stock market's pullback, which accelerated in the final hours of the week's last full trading day, left the Dow Jones industrial average officially in bear market territory, with the blue chips having fallen more than 20 percent from their October highs.
Oil surged to new records above $144 a barrel as the government reported a bigger-than-expected drop in U.S. supplies and as investors worried about tensions in the Middle East....
The S&P; is just shy of the 20 percent pullback that signals a bear market. While the Nasdaq is also in bear market territory, it hit that mark in March, moved higher and has now returned to a bear level
Brian Beutler, a well-known progressive blogger, was shot and seriously injured during a mugging last night in Washington, D.C.The neighborhood he was shot in, like a 5 minute walk from me, has an ongoing gang war on the very corner he was shot. It's been going on for years. And years. And years. But DC is such an inept city, that all we hear about is how fighting crime is hard work. Sound familiar? I've looked at condos right next to where he was shot. $400,000 for a one bedroom. I laugh when I see places like that, because I know there's a gang war going on about 100 feet away. And now this would be our second mugging-shooting we've had in the last month or so. Though I guess this is a step up from when I was mugged and strangled by two kids in front of my apartment building at 8 o'clock at night on a busy street. At least they only used their hands to try to kill me. Now they're using guns. And this is our nation's capital. It's really pathetic. Read More......
One bullet damaged Beutler's spleen, and he had it removed during surgery this morning at the Washington Hospital Center. He's expected to make a "pre-trauma" recovery, which is to say, a completely full recovery.
"McCain was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Cochran said in an interview with The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss. "But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever ...Read More......
"I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, 'Good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission.' I don't know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy ... and he just reached over there and snatched ... him."
Cochran, who has complained about McCain's temper before, said only a handful of senators took part in the trip, including former Sen. Steve Symms of Idaho. He said he didn't know who the man McCain grabbed was except that he was an associate of Ortega.
"Longer term we’re looking at a market that is a bear market," Carter told "Squawk Box Europe."Read More......
While we can expect a rally over the next three to five weeks, this is a downward spiral that is not going away any time soon, he said.
"A trend is a trend until it ends, and we’re actually looking for the Dow to take out 10,000 by the end of the year," he added.
There are too few sectors holding the markets up, and too many dragging it down, to consider getting back into non-recession-proof sectors, according to Carter.
"A large percentage [of sectors], like financials, are getting hammered. A lot of the darlings of the past are going to get taken out back and get shot," he said.
If you or I knowingly funneled $1.7 million to one of the worst, and best known, terrorist organizations in the world, we'd be sent to Guantanamo permanently. But when it's the senior management of Chiquita Banana, the Bush administration gives them a fine.It probably also helps that one of those senior managers is a major fundraiser for the GOP -- and John McCain.
The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.Read More......
Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company's board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University's National Security Archive as an "illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country's most notorious civilian massacres."
Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita's payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.
According to the Justice Department, the payments "were reviewed and approved by senior executives" of Chiquita, who knew by no later than September 2000 "that the AUC was a violent, paramilitary organization."
Late last week, Lindner co-hosted a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for McCain and the Republican Party in the wealthy Indian Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The event raised about $2 million; Lindner also serves on McCain's Ohio Victory Team.
"I don’t really believe that at this point people are having to choose between food and medicine and housing, and if they are it’s because they made poor choices with their mortgages. You can’t blame that on the president," she said.Bush is faultless. And, then there's this tidbit to show Bloom doesn't let facts get in the way of her defense of Bush and the GOP:
According to the Web site of the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, in January 2001, when Bush took office, Maine’s unemployment rate was 3 percent. Seven years later, in January 2008, Maine’s unemployment rate had risen to 4.9 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate dropped from 4.7 percent in 2001 to 4.6 percent in 2007.Anyways, that Ms. Bloom, GOP spokesperson extraordinaire. Read More......
"I don’t see what’s wrong with the unemployment rate," Bloomer said. "It’s not that bad. I think the unemployment rate is mostly for people who don’t want to [or can’t] work anyways."
President Bush's record unpopularity is playing an unprecedented role in the 2008 campaign, complicating John McCain's task among key constituencies.That's a lot packed into one sentence. But, it does explain why Grandpa McCain gets extra cranky about running for the third Bush term. Read More......
Botswana's vice-president, Lieutenant General Mompati Merafhe, declared that the outcome of last Friday's elections, in which Mugabe was the sole candidate, "does not confer legitimacy on the government of President Mugabe.Read More......
"In our considered view, it therefore follows that the representatives of the current "government" in Zimbabwe should be excluded from attending SADC and African Union meetings.
Taking the floor in a closed session, Mugabe spoke at length and delivered a blistering counter-attack on his accusers, according to diplomats at the summit. The tone was summed up by his spokesman, who said his critics could "go and hang. They can go to hang a million times. They have no claim on Zimbabwean politics".
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
© 2011 - John Aravosis | Design maintenance by Jason Rosenbaum
Send me your tips: americablog AT starpower DOT net