From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Nedra Pickler

Democratic party officials said a party committee agreed Saturday on a compromise to seat Michigan and Florida delegates with half-votes after Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to get enough support to force their positions through.

The deal was reached after committee members met privately for more than three hours, trying to hammer out a deal. The sticking point was Michigan, where Obama’s name was not on the ballot.

Clinton’s camp insisted Obama shouldn’t get any pledged delegates in Michigan since he chose not to put his name on the ballot, and she should get 73 pledged delegates with 55 uncommitted. Obama’s team insisted the only fair solution was to split the pledged delegates in half between the two campaigns, with 64 each.

The committee agreed on a compromise offered by the Michigan Democratic Party that would split the difference, allowing Clinton to take 69 delegates and Obama 59. Each delegate would get half a vote at the convention in Denver later this summer, according to the deal.

They also agreed to seat the Florida delegation based on the outcome of the January primary, with 105 pledged delegates for Clinton and 67 for Obama, but with each delegate getting half a vote as a penalty.

The deal would increase the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination to 2,118. Overall, Obama would pick up 69 delegates, including superdelegates already committed to him. Clinton would pick up a total of 94.5.

The deal still leaves Obama within striking distance of the nomination, needing 65 delegates to clinch it.

From The Guardian UK
By John Pilger

When I phoned Aung San Suu Kyi’s home in Rangoon yesterday, I imagined the path to her door that looks down on Inya Lake. Through ragged palms, a trip-wire is visible, a reminder that this is the prison of a woman whose party was elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by men in ludicrous uniforms. Her phone rang and rang; I doubt if it is connected now. Once, in response to my “How are you?” she laughed about her piano’s need of tuning. She also spoke about lying awake, breathless, listening to the thumping of her heart.

Now her silence is complete. This week, the Burmese junta renewed her house arrest, beginning the 13th year. As far as I know, a doctor has not been allowed to visit her since January, and her house was badly damaged in the cyclone. And yet the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, could not bring himself to utter her name on his recent, grovelling tour of Burma. It is as if her fate and that of her courageous supporters, who on Tuesday beckoned torture and worse merely by unfurling the banners of her National League for Democracy, have become an embarrassment for those who claim to represent the “international community”. Why?

Where are the voices of those in governments and their related institutions who know how to help Burma? Where are the honest brokers who once eased the oppressed away from their shadows, the true and talented peacemakers who see societies not in terms of their usefulness to “interests” but as victims of it? Where are the Dennis Hallidays and Hans von Sponecks who rose to assistant secretary-general of the UN by the sheer moral force of their international public service?

Read more Silence

From Salon
By Louis Bayard

Is it possible to feel sorry for Scott McClellan?

Not if you’re one of the pundits who’ve been piling on his carcass since the release of his memoir, “What Happened.” From the left, he’s been scorned for suppressing his qualms about the Bush administration until a publisher was willing to pay for them. From the right, he’s been flayed for betraying the people he formerly served as mouthpiece.

Yes, there is rude justice in seeing McClellan ground up by the same White House attack machinery that he himself stoked all those years. And yes, there are ample reasons to doubt the purity of his motives. (His suggestion that he’s only trying to depolarize our political climate is particularly disingenuous.) All the same, as one who once plied McClellan’s trade, albeit at a much lower level, I prefer to take a more charitable view of his belated truth-telling. I see a man trying to disentwine his soul from his job.

Which is a particularly hard thing to do when you have, or, I should say, had, a job like McClellan’s. A job that has only a notional link to reality, that requires you to say night is day and to stifle every uprising of self-doubt. A job that forces you, in effect, to have two selves — public and private — while making it virtually impossible to reconcile them.

Indeed, if you talk to Washington flacks, no matter their political stripe, you’re more likely to hear a measure of empathy for McClellan. If you ask them why McClellan didn’t speak up earlier, the answer will be: He was a press secretary, not an ombudsman. If you ask them why he didn’t resign, they’ll tell you that a good flack, like a good soldier, follows orders. The cause is what matters, not the individual’s pangs of conscience. And if you ask them how McClellan could turn around years later and betray his employer’s confidences … well, the more thoughtful ones might concede that betrayal, one way or another, is written into the job description.

Read more Coming Clean

From The NY Times
By Bob Herbert

I guess it’s official now since we have a Bush administration insider, Scott McClellan, telling us that the war in Iraq was a monumental strategic blunder, and that it was sold cynically and deceitfully to a craven Congress and to a public still traumatized by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Some of us already knew that, Scott. Some of us knew it at the time.

In his new book, “What Happened,” Mr. McClellan even tells us that wars “should only be waged when necessary.”

Gee, Scott, some of us have known that deep in our hearts all of our lives.

Even the most cursory reading of wartime history — take your pick: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, any war — would convey the message that to engage in warfare unnecessarily is insane.

Reading Mr. McClellan’s book, I kept thinking of the many ordinary people — the service members, their relatives, and so many others — who have suffered so grievously from this misbegotten and thoroughly unnecessary war.

I remember talking with Tyler Hall, a baby-faced sergeant from Wasilla, Alaska, in 2004. “I was blown up in an I.E.D. attack,” he told me.

Sergeant Hall had three bones in his back broken. His arm was broken. He lost his left leg below the knee. He was badly burned. Part of his palate was destroyed. The lower part of his face had to be reconstructed. He suffered a brain injury. And so forth.

Read more Coming Late

From The LA Times
By Tim Rutten

Alittle more than 50 years ago, George C. Marshall, the greatest American general and statesman since George Washington, turned down an offer to write his memoirs for a national magazine because, he said, it was unseemly to profit from a life of public service.

The Saturday Evening Post offered Marshall $1 million for his story at a time when $1 million was real money. Military historians since have learned that at the moment Marshall declined the Post’s offer, he and his wife had precisely $1,300 in the bank.

Four years ago, Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, took a different approach. Franks agreed to publish his memoirs — earning, by most estimates, well into seven figures — at a time when the wars he’d overseen still were being fought and the troops he’d commanded still were in harm’s way.

Then, a month ago, retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal, published his account of that service, accusing President Bush and his advisors of “gross incompetence and dereliction of duty” for their handling of the Iraq war. In the meantime, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III has published his own self-justifying account of his disastrous term as American proconsul in Baghdad.

From Marshall’s refusal to this sorry trio’s eager rush to settle scores and profit handsomely is a gap that demands to be measured in more than decades. Their three examples are useful because they demonstrate just how far the tell-all impulse has taken us. The well-lived 21st century American life, it seems, is the one most lucratively monetized.

Read more Money Makers

From The Washington Post
By Eugene Robinson

For nearly five decades, the United States has pursued a policy toward Cuba that could be described as incredibly stupid.

It could also be called childish and counterproductive — and, since the demise of the Soviet Union, even insane. Absent the threat of communist expansionism, the refusal by successive American presidents to engage with Cuba has not even a fig leaf’s worth of rationale to cover its naked illogic. Other than providing Fidel Castro with a convenient antagonist to help whip up nationalist fervor on the island — and prolong his rule — the U.S. trade embargo and other sanctions have accomplished nothing.

Now, with Fidel ailing and retired, and his brother Raúl acting large and in charge, the United States has its best opportunity in years to influence the course of events on the island. George W. Bush, as one might have expected, won’t do the right thing. It will be up to the next president.

Raúl Castro is 76, and since assuming the presidency he has acted as if he knows he doesn’t have much time to waste. In short order, he has repealed the prohibition against Cubans buying computers, cellphones and other consumer goods — items that Fidel feared might facilitate sedition or promote counterrevolutionary comfort and lassitude.

It’s true that these measures are largely symbolic — on an average salary of about $17 a month, most Cubans can’t dream of buying computers, and, in any event, the Cuban government still strictly controls access to the Internet. Likewise, any Cuban who owns a cellphone can’t use it without paying the astronomical rates demanded by the government cellphone monopoly.

Read more Cuban Policy

From The Seattle Times
By Froma Harrop

Put disadvantaged teens into summer jobs. Hook them into the world of work. They’ll come home with new skills, discipline, contacts and, yes, money.

Seems pretty obvious — but apparently not in Washington, which in 2000 gutted the Summer Youth Employment Program. The program had been helping 600,000 mostly low-income young people find jobs.

The labor market is now caving teens from all backgrounds. But for low-income, black and Hispanic kids, it’s the “Great Depression,” according to a new report by Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies.

Andrew Sum, an economist who heads the center, recently testified before Congress that a jobs program for teens makes superb economic stimulus.

“You can create jobs more cost-effectively for young people than for any other group,” he told me, “and you’re getting an output as opposed to paying something for doing nothing.”

This may sound all backward, but kids from rich families are more likely to have summer jobs than their poor cohorts. Last summer, only 29 percent of teens in families with incomes under $20,000 found work, while 50 percent of young people in families making $75,000 to $100,000 did.

Read more Teen Jobs

From The Boston Globe
Editorial

Regulators and elected officials are starting to circle the credit card companies, and not a moment too soon. The Federal Reserve reports that credit card debt rose more than 7 percent last month, on top of the already burdensome average of $8,000 per family. Credit and debit card delinquencies are at their highest levels in 18 years. And all the while credit card companies are employing practices that only dig consumers deeper into the hole.

The Federal Reserve, stung by charges that it didn’t move quickly enough to head off the subprime mortgage crisis, this month proposed new regulations to protect consumers from usurious and inexplicable fees and interest rates. Among other things, the new rules would forbid companies from raising rates on existing credit card balances; allow consumers a reasonable amount of time to pay their bills before slapping on late fees; and force banks to apply payments to higher-rate balances first.

The Fed’s moves complement several congressional efforts, though some bills go further to protect consumers. Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York proposes modest reforms to bar credit card companies from raising interest rates on outstanding balances because of bad credit reports or unpaid bills to other creditors. She would give cardholders 45 days’ notice of any rate increases. Senators Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Robert Menendez of New Jersey have separate bills that cap the interest rate hikes companies can assess for an unpaid bill at 7 percent above the previous rate, and allow consumers under age 21 to opt out of the relentless credit come-ons in the mail.

Read more Credit Cards

From Information Clearing House
By Mike Whitney

The Commodity Futures and Trading Commission (CFTC) is investigating trading in oil futures to determine whether the surge in prices to record levels is the result of manipulation or fraud. They might want to take a look at wheat, rice and corn futures while they’re at it. The whole thing is a hoax cooked up by the investment banks and hedge funds who are trying to dig their way out of the trillion dollar mortgage-backed securities (MBS) mess that they created by turning garbage loans into securities. That scam blew up in their face last August and left them scrounging for handouts from the Federal Reserve. Now the billions of dollars they’re getting from the Fed is being diverted into commodities which is destabilizing the world economy; driving gas prices to the moon and triggering food riots across the planet.

For months we’ve been told that the soaring price of oil has been the result of Peak Oil, fighting in Iraq, attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria, labor problems in Norway, and (the all-time favorite)growth in China. It’s all baloney. Just like Goldman Sachs prediction of $200 per barrel oil is baloney. If oil is about to skyrocket then why has G-Sax kept a neutral rating on some of its oil holdings like Exxon Mobile? Could it be that they know that oil is just another mega-inflated equity bubble—like housing, corporate bonds and dot.com stocks—that is about to crash to earth as soon as the big players grab a parachute?

There are three things that are driving up the price of oil: the falling dollar, speculation and buying on margin.

The dollar is tanking because of the Federal Reserve’s low interest monetary policies have kept interest rates below the rate of inflation for most of the last decade. Add that to the $700 billion current account deficit and a National Debt that has increased from $5.8 trillion when Bush first took office to over $9 trillion today and it’s a wonder the dollar hasn’t gone “Poof” already.

According to a January 4 editorial in the Wall Street Journal: “If the dollar had remained ‘as good as gold’ since 2001, oil today would be selling at about $30 per barrel, not $99. (today $126 per barrel) The decline of the dollar against gold and oil suggests a US monetary that is supplying too many dollars.” Wall Street Journal 1-4-08

Read more Oil Swindle

From The Independent UK
By Andy McSmith, Jerome Taylor and Nigel Morris

British pensioners who cannot afford to heat their homes. European hauliers and fishermen whose livelihoods are under threat. Palestinians forced to fill up their cars with olive oil. Americans asked to go down to a four-day week.

All around the world, in a multitude of ways, the soaring price of oil is hurting rich and poor alike. For the lucky ones, it is simply a matter of changing their lifestyle. But those most vulnerable to the price of oil have been driven on to the streets in angry protests, which raise a fundamental question: what can we do to survive in a world where a barrel of oil costs $127 (£64)?

Great Britain

The rise in the oil price could not come at a worse time for Gordon Brown. After a week that has seen hauliers blocking roads and air passengers facing higher surcharges, yesterday it was the impact on fuel bills that came to the fore. The Prime Minister’s attempt to ease the pain felt by pensioners and low-income families from rising fuel bills was dismissed as a “sticking plaster to hold back a catastrophe”. It consists mainly of advice on coping with the cost of heating rather than extra money.

The number of Britons in “fuel poverty” – 10 per cent of their income goes on energy – is thought to have reached four million. The average annual household bill for heat and light is now more than £1,000. The Government plans to reform data protection laws so that low-income families can be contacted directly by the companies and offered help. The aim is to ensure that the “social tariffs” get to the people that need them most.

Read more Shocked!