Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Lieberman's Unaccounted Cash

Apparently, the Lieberman campaign needed a little ‘walking around’ money during the Democratic primary against Ned Lamont. They got plenty. In fact, while Lieberman himself has often supported transparency in election spending, his campaign spent over $387,000 in unspecified petty cash expenses. Over the last week, these mystery funds have become a story.

The Public Campaign Action Fund, which was active in monitoring the financial shenanigans of Rep. Tom Delay, has asked for an accounting of these unknown expenditures, which are comparatively huge in a Senate primary. Below is an excerpt from their Board Chairman’s letter to the Lieberman campaign:

“No other Senate campaign that we know of has
ever left undisclosed to the public a sum as
large as this. The Federal Elections Commission
does not require that you provide a line-by-line
accounting of this for public scrutiny. But in the
interests of fairness and protecting the public
trust, we urge you to make an accurate
accounting of these expenses available for the
public to view on its own. That way this matter
can be put to rest.”

So far, there seems to be little urgency on the part of the Lieberman campaign to shed any light on these expenditures, which are supposed to be limited to $100 or less at a crack. T Tagaris at TPM Café asked why the names of those signing for cash disbursements aren’t being provided, as the law requires. So have reporters from the NY Times and the Hartford Courant.

Tomorrow's Newspaper Headline: Saddam Convicted, Bush Satisfied, GOP Vindicated, Go Vote...

Oh, come on.

The verdict announcement in Saddam Hussein’s eight-thousand-year-long trial has been re-scheduled to be announced two days before the US midterm elections.

No, of course there’s no connection to the elections. How could you even ask that?

(Thanks to Jonathan at Past Peak)

Riverbend and Understanding Iraq

As many of you who read here frequently already know, I’m fond of an Iraqi blogger, Riverbend. She has been perhaps the clearest and most poignant voice of the Iraqi public available to foreign readers in English throughout the occupation. Take a short trip into her world with me, via Tom Engelhardt, a Nation writer who keeps his own blog, TomDispatch. Tom has written a short history of Riverbend’s blog as a part of his important two-part piece on the lost war in Iraq. Passages of “Fiasco then, Fiasco Now,” regarding her blog appear below:

She arrived online on Sunday, August 17,
2003, just over four months after Baghdad was
occupied by American troops. "So this is the
beginning for me, I guess," was her first
sentence. "I never thought I'd start my own
weblog… I'm female, Iraqi, and 24. I survived
the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that
matters these days anyway." Reading that
passage over now still gives me a little chill.

She took the pseudonym Riverbend, called her
blog Baghdad Burning, and we did learn a
bit more about her over the years: that, like
many Iraqi women, she had worked -- as a
computer programmer, a self-styled "geek";
that she had lost her job soon after the war
ended as hostility toward women in the
workplace grew; that she was a Sunni (though
for a long time she clung to the hope that Iraqis
would not make religious affiliations their
identity) and believed in God; that she did not
wear a hijab or headscarf; that she lived in a
middle-class neighborhood in Baghdad with
her beloved younger brother "E" (who would
soon be sporting a pistol for protection) and
her parents in a world that was slowly, slowly
slipping away. We learned that she had spent
some years of her youth abroad, though not
where…

(She) wrote it in English -- stunning,
American-style English – because she
didn't want to "preach to the choir" in Arabic.
We learned a little about her life as a young
reader (Jane Austen to John LeCarré)
and about the limitations her parents
put on her TV watching as a child. Bits and
pieces slipped out. But, in the end, she was
generally as good as her word. Signing off on
each post as "river," she offered remarkably
little more in the way of biographical
information -- but so unimaginably much more
about everything else.

Without Pity...

OK, whatever I said, Michael J. Fox said it far better. Take it from him…

Card Game Gets Serious in CT

It seems that Ned Lamont has finally got something going right in his ad campaign.

His new card game ad plays to a demographic that could have been wondering about their longstanding support for Joe Lieberman ever since he waffled on privatization of Social Security in 2005.

The ad’s the kind of “Where’s the Beef” zinger that could turn the race into a tossup.

Iraq May Have Already Partitioned, While the US Dickers...

Later in the day, NPR will post the morning’s ATC stories for download. Check their site then for a fascinating interview with Adeed Dawisha, an Iraqi professor of political science at Miami University of Ohio. His experience and insights into the de facto division of Iraq are worth hearing. In particular, for people wondering how far along the ethnic divide is in this occupied country, Dawisha states that half a million people have either migrated or been forcibly removed to discrete Shia, Sunni, or Kurdish regions already.

I guess James Baker’s Iraq Study Group missed that when they spent four days sitting in the Green Zone over Labor Day weekend, figuring out how to change US policy.

Sick...and Tired

My co-worker’s dad has Parkinson’s Disease. It’s not pretty, from what I hear. He’s in an advanced state of the disease and suffering greatly, along with his wife, who takes care of him at home in a little town in Germany. It’s apparently difficult for him to express himself at all or to control his body in the slightest.

My colleague’s not much of a fan of American politics, coming from another country, where these days, our entire body politic is suspect. But even she was shocked enough by a bit of our news this week to bring it up at the office. She was appalled at Rush Limbaugh’s comment that he suspects Michael J. Fox, a victim of the same disease, of exaggerating his Parkinson’s symptoms in a political commercial backing a politician who supports embryonic stem cell research.

I took it in stride, saying something offhand, like, “Yeah, well they’re really on the ropes now— and guys like Limbaugh are getting desperate to find a way to activate their base.”

Tonight, several hours later, I realize that my expectations have fallen pretty low that I’d even try to explain this kind of crap. Every now and then we need to stop and think about just how nuts our political discussion has become. I mean, it’s sad when this kind of thing is alright for even a marginal percentage of the electorate. The know-nothing personal attacks on political speech by the American political Right have sunk to such a level that we barely even notice it anymore.

I can only hope that we get enough of a grip of ourselves to pull a few inches out of the mire over the next political cycle. Even just becoming a bit more civil would be something to hope for. Meanwhile, I will no longer excuse the bilge being pumped out of the airwaves that emanate around characters like Rush. I think Ezra Klein got it right yesterday, when he said, “I like to say that if a neocon is a liberal who got mugged, a progressive is a conservative who got sick.”

UPDATE— Speaking of bilge, this whole exchange on the Today Show makes me wonder what being “taken to account” really involves. If Matt Lauer and Susan Estrich think that having your disease dissected for its true essence and realism is good television, they are definitely in need of a little reality check.

Maybe a visit to someone with Parkinson’s might help.

"Back Off"

"You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it's complicated, it's difficult," Rumsfeld said at his press conference about deadlines for the Iraqi government to take steps to control the escalating violence there.

Yea, back off, everyone. The man whose handiwork has gotten us in such a fine situation wants a stop to all the carping, alright? He’ll take care of it.

I feel better already.

What Staying the Course Means for Iraqis

I’ve been listening to the BBC this morning, where an Iraqi doctor was talking about why he stays in the country, despite the dreadful situation he faces on a daily basis. Basically, he stays because he has roots there and because he hears about the identity problems his fellow Iraqis face as expats. In fact, the BBC reports that some 18,000 Iraqi doctors have left Iraqi since 2003, leaving the nation’s health system totally decimated.

Riverbend writes that in her home, it’s become hard to contemplate writing about the situation.

“I'd be filled with a certain hopelessness that can't
be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis
feel also.”

“…There are Iraqi women who have not shed their
black mourning robes since 2003 because each
time the end of the proper mourning period comes
around, some other relative dies and the
countdown begins once again.”

From the People Who Brought You....

There are some entertaining political ads out there right now and I thought we’d slip into the Youtube age with links to a couple of them.

The first is an ad that I enjoyed, but probably isn’t a big vote-getter for the candidate. It’s a Ned Lamont ad, running in Connecticut that spoofs the all terror, all scare campaign that his opponent, Joe Lieberman is running against him. Lieberman has called Lamont’s nomination a boost to Al Qaeda.

link

The Lamont ad is one that film aficionados will enjoy, but that might puzzle much of the public. Maybe not, who knows. I laughed.

******

The second ad is on the air in Pennsylvania, where former Vice Admiral Joe Sestak is running in a House campaign against data-mining enthusiast and influence peddling suspect Rep. Curt Weldon.

Weldon, in a reprise of the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry in 2004, has been attacking Sestak for supposed violations of uniform dress codes, his leadership style in the Navy, and his use of Washington-area hospitals instead of local hospitals for his daughter, who suffers with a brain tumor.

link

This ad strikes me as especially effective, down to the carriage and number of the veterans included in it. And it’s also got a little humor going for it, too.