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Senate candidate Bob Schaffer went to the Mariana Islands in 1999 on what he called a fact finding tour in which he claimed he was going to investigate some of the nations notorious sweatshops, others have called it a Abramoff funded junket.
Another facet to the story is the group that paid for Schaffer and and his wife to tour the islands, is called the Traditional values caolition. I will let the Denver Post take it from here:

Schaffer’s $13,000 trip was paid for by the Orange County, Calif.-based Traditional Values Coalition, which Schaffer described as a religious group “concerned with human rights.”

“Whatever involvement (Abramoff) had with Traditional Values Coalition wasn’t known at the time,” Wadhams said.

Later investigations have shown that in many instances, TVC — which claims to represent 43,000 churches — acted virtually as a political arm of Abramoff’s lobbying operation.

Bob Schaffer thought the Mariana Islands were great and thinks that the US should model our immigration system after theirs even though it leads to things like:

A class-action lawsuit filed the year Schaffer toured the islands alleged that many of those workers lived in slum conditions, housed seven to a room in barracks surrounded by barbed wire designed to keep the workers in. Workers in some factories labored 12 hours a day, seven days a week, the suit alleged — without pay if they fell behind set quotas.

A U.S. Interior Department investigation found that pregnant workers were forced to get illegal abortions or lose their jobs. Some were recruited for factories but forced into the sex trade instead.

At the heart of the Abramoff scandal was the exploitation of the reilgous right to benefit wealthy clients, in fact some might argue that is the heart of modern conservatism is to benefit the rich at the expens of the poor. It is interesting that all those family values seem to lower the taxes of the wealthy. Hopefully the religous right has caught on to people like Bob Schaffer and will stop supporting people like Mr Schaffer who seem to only value money.

The right wing has been making a big deal about an alleged attack by hispanics on a white teen. Turns out the white student made the whole thing up.

An eighth-grader lied when she claimed a mob of angry students assaulted her for making a poster that read, “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration,” school administrators in Texas say.

Surveillance cameras at Athens Middle School show the 13-year-old student purposefully making scratch marks on her face and arms in a hallway after a classmate took her poster in a “snatch-and-grab” style, school superintendent Fred Hayes said Wednesday.

It is not surprising all the immigrant bashing has led to false reports, maybe it is a sign of how far our country has come that at least this did not end in a lynching.

The New York Times has a lengthy article on McCain and his Neo-con friends

The concerns have emerged in the weeks since Mr. McCain became his party’s presumptive nominee and began more formally assembling a list of foreign policy advisers. Among those on the list are several prominent neoconservatives, including Robert Kagan, an author who helped write much of the foreign policy speech that Mr. McCain delivered in Los Angeles on March 26, in which he described himself as “a realistic idealist.” Others include the security analyst Max Boot and a former United Nations ambassador, John R. Bolton.

This paragraph encapislates the problem with McCain and why surrounding himself with a bunch of neo-con idiots could be a problem for the US:

One of the chief concerns of the pragmatists is that Mr. McCain is susceptible to influence from the neoconservatives because he is not as fully formed on foreign policy as his campaign advisers say he is, and that while he speaks authoritatively, he operates too much off the cuff and has not done the deeper homework required of a presidential candidate.

In other words McCain is lazy and lets other people do his thinking for him. The more I learn about McCain the more he seems like George Bush with a comb-over.

John McCain doesn’t need to know the difference between Sunni and Shiite groups because he has been to Iraq? at least that seems to be his latest spin on his recent gaffes regarding the two sects of Islam.

Sen. John McCain, defending his recent troubles differentiating between the two major branches of Islam, suggested today that the terror network al-Qaeda encompasses both Sunni and Shi’a.

When asked today by a Fox News host about recent gaffes in which he confused Sunnis and Shiites, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee smiled, shook his head and replied, “I’ve been to Iraq eight times, I know the leaders, I know the situation on the ground, I know that Sunni and al-Qaeda are closely tied… The question I was asking and the question that needs to be answered is, How widespread is al-Qaeda’s influence in the region as well as in Iraq?

This is the same John McCain that last year said the markets in Iraq were safe, as he strolled through wearing a bullet proof vest, accompanied by hundreds of soldiers and a helicopter escort. I doubt this man knows what he had for breakfast this morning much less what is going on in Iraq. Every time this man talks I wonder why Hillary thinks he should be president.

Looks like Bill Clinton is a big supporter of free trade agreements and has lobbied for the same Columbian orginizations that Mark Penn worked with before he was “fired” from the Clinton campaign.

On Sunday evening, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn, resigned from his post after it was revealed he was working (on the side) for the passage of a Colombia Free Trade Agreement that his candidate opposed.

But within the Clinton campaign, Penn is not the highest-ranking adviser with financial ties to groups and individuals supporting the passage of the measure.

Former President Bill Clinton has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars speaking on behalf of a Colombia-based group pushing the trade pact, and representatives of that organization tell The Huffington Post that the former president shared their sentiment.

In June 2005, Clinton was paid $800,000 by the Colombia-based Gold Service International to give four speeches throughout Latin America. The organization is, ostensibly, a development group tasked with bringing investment to the country and educating world leaders about the Colombia’s business opportunities

I personally don’t see what is wrong with these trade agreements and I doubt Bill or Hillary Clinton have a problem with them either, in fact their actions seem to indicate they support free trade agreements. Maybe they need to share their reasons for supporting these agreements with their supporters rather than trying to mislead many people in the rust-belt states into believing that President Hillary Clinton would bring their old jobs back through protectionist measures, as not only is it not going to happen it may not be desirable anyway.

I am not a nutritionist but this all sounds like really bad advice
McDonalds is the big winner in this “health food” comparison, suggesting that an egg McMuffin is a good way to start the day seems almost criminal.

One of the highlights Crocker/Petreus hearings, via washingtonmonthly.com

Obama was able to hit Petraeus and Crocker very hard….He got Petraeus to agree with him that the total elimination of Al Qaeda is an impossible standard for withdrawal. Next he goes after Crocker’s points about Iranian influence, pointing out that both Iran and Al Qaeda are in Iraq because we invaded and that we can not expect to eliminate Iranian involvement.

Then came the hammer. Obama pointed out that if the definition of success is put so high – no Al Qaeda, no Iranian influence, a prosperous diverse democracy we will be there forever. He then points out that we still, after 8 hours of testimony, have no definition of success….Crocker’s weak response its “hard and complicated.”

Obama seems willing to challenge people like Crocker and Petreus and call them on their BS. This is a nice change from some of the other presidential candidates who either don’t understand the situation well enough to question the judgement of Crocker and Petreus(mostly, I think this applies to McCain who does not seem to know the difference between Shiites and Sunnis) or are too frightened that they will seem weak if they don’t go along with neo-con idiocy. It is time to end the Iraq war and Obama seems to understand this better than anyone else running for president.

John McCain’s nic name in high school was Mcnasty, and he has a few names for his wife, trollop and cunt.  In the next month or so everyone will be able to read about the straight talker in a book called The Real McCain.

Also, Matthew Yglesias has this to say about McCain’s clueless foreign policy:

Meanwhile, he’s saying all kinds of crazy stuff. For some reason he thinks that if we leave that would “almost certainly require us to return to Iraq or draw us into a wider war.” He’s also now claiming he doesn’t want our troops to stay in Iraq for a minute longer than is necessary, when the Bush administration is already moving toward a permanent presence — a goal he’s specifically endorsed in the past. McCain said the Maliki government is moving to disarm all militias, which isn’t true. And he keeps portraying backing Maliki as some kind of anti-Iranian measure when there’s just no reason to see it that way.

John McCain does not seem to have any idea what he is talking about, and you start to wonder if his nasty disposition led to his wifes drug abuse. As the election gets closer people are going to start asking harder questions of John McCain, and other than making threats and spewing venom it is doubtful that he has any answers..

Looks like mad cow disease might be coming to a cranium near you.

This article talks about the hazards of blogging and compares the working conditions of bloggers to sweatshops. I have never worked in a sweatshop, but I do spend a fair amount of time trying to be a blogger and I can tell you it is very enjoyable. I get up in the morning make coffee read articles from various web sites, while my cat is sits on my lap. If I could somehow make a living doing this I would be thrilled.
Maybe thier is something to the idea that once you start getting paid for something. it is less enjoyable. Maybe someone out there could start paying me to blog and we could see if I enjoy it less. I know it would be a huge sacrifice on my part but I am willing to make it for my reader.

Hillary is claiming that she apposed the Iraq war before Obama Of coures that is not exactly true:

In Eugene, Ore., Saturday. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., attempted to change the measure by which anyone might assess who criticized the Iraq war first, her or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., by saying those keeping records should start in January 2005, when Obama joined the Senate. (A measure that conveniently avoids her October 2002 vote to authorize use of force against Iraq at a time that Obama was speaking out against the war.) She claimed that using that measure, she criticized the war in Iraq before Obama did.

But Clinton’s claim was false.

Clinton on Saturday told Oregonians, “when Sen. Obama came to the Senate he and I have voted exactly the same except for one vote. And that happens to be the facts. We both voted against early deadlines. I actually starting criticizing the war in Iraq before he did.”

It’s an odd way to measure opposition to the war — comparing who gave the first criticism of the war in Iraq starting in January 2005, ignoring Obama’s opposition to the war throughout 2003 and 2004. (And Clinton’s vote for it.)

But even if one were to employ this “Start Counting in January 2005″ measurement, Clinton did not criticize the war in Iraq first.

Scrambling to support their boss’s claim, Clinton campaign officials pointed to a paper statement Clinton issued on Jan. 26, 2005, explaining her vote to confirm Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State.

“The Administration and Defense Department’s Iraq policy has been, by any reasonable measure, riddled with errors, misstatements and misjudgments,” the January 2005 Clinton statement said. “From the beginning of the Iraqi war, we were inadequately prepared for the aftermath of the invasion with too few troops and an inadequate plan to stabilize Iraq.”

I think she is trying to say that if Obama had been in the Senate in 2002 he would have also voted for the war, I guess she is trying to argue that being in the Senate makes everyone stupid. For some reason I doubt this argument is going to get much traction.
Also, she  seems mostly to be complaining as to how the war was waged, but she does not seem to have a problem with the war in general. This seems to be the neo-con fallback position, the war in Iraq was a great idea, it was just waged badly.
Also, while she was supposedly critisizing the war she visitied Iraq and seemed to have a positive impression of what was happening there:

Upon returning she argued that setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops would aid the enemy.

“I don’t think it’s useful to set a deadline because I think it sends a signal to the terrorists and the insurgents that they just have to wait us out,” she said.

Describing her trip to Iraq, she said, “It’s regrettable that the security needs have increased so much. On the other hand, I think you can look at the country as a whole and see that there are many parts of Iraq that are functioning quite well.”

She also interpreted a series of suicide bomb attacks as an indication that the insurgency was failing.

All of this seems like someone trying to have two positions on the war, one in case of a loss, and one in case of a victory. She does not seem to understand that invading Iraq was wrong regardless of the outcome, much like John McCain she was and is wrong about Iraq and would probably be happy to get the country into another quagmire with a country like Iran. Niether Clinton or McCain has the judgement to be president.

Unfortunately not by Clinton, but by the Columbian government. Looks like the Columbian government has better judgement than Hillary.

I just heard a little bit of Hillary Clinton talking at the site of Martin Luther King’s shooting.  She said something about wearing a black armband at her school and working to recruit minority students after the shooting.  I am pretty sure that at the time of Martin Luther King’s death Hillary was a Goldwater girl.   As far as I know Barry Goldwater was not known as a champion of minority rights and I doubt a self proclaimed Goldwater girl would care much about a minority preacher. 

I might be wrong on this one but the whole story sounds like one of those things she has repeated so many times that she probably does believe it.   I wonder if 20 years from now we will be hearing Hillary talk about how she was one of the few people who apposed the Iraq war from the start. 

Digby is one of the smartest and best writers on the web. With that said, I think she has  unintentionally figured out what is wrong with the baby-boom generation and perhaps given an example of the problem with the lamest generation.

One of the things I think people may not completely grok about us loathsome and reviled baby boomers is that our politically formative years were a little bit unusual — when we were young our leaders and heroes kept getting assassinated. You can imagine how that might shape a person’s view of politics. Fortunately that hasn’t happened in a long time, which is something we should be grateful for. But for a while, in the 60s, it seemed to kids like me that this was normal.

Sorry boomers you are not that unique. Every generation has unique things that happen, whether it is a rash of school shooting or the dumbest president in history. What about people who were going through their “formative years” at the time of 9/11?
What is unique about baby-boomers is their ability to make everything about them, and their absolute belief that they are owed something by virtue of being baby-boomers. In addition they seem to have an uncanny ability to over-react to almost everything, which is really just another way to make whatever has happened about them.
One of the many reasons that I think Obama would be a good president is that he seems to have gotten beyond the self-involved stupidity of the boomer generation.
BTW the Beetles suck

TPM election central has the details:

In what could become Hillary Clinton’s own version of the NAFTA-Gate controversy that caused Barack Obama so much trouble a month ago, top Clinton strategist Mark Penn reportedly met on Monday with the Colombian ambassador to discuss a bilateral free-trade deal — something his candidate has publicly opposed.

In a case study on the dangers of wearing too many hats, Penn’s attendance was in his capacity as the head of his lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller Worldwide. Expect the Obama camp to hit Clinton for this on at least two angles: Hypocrisy on trade, and having as her top strategist a lobbyist for a foreign government

The real question is how little does Mark Penn care about Hillary Clinton. He could have waited few months to start working for the Columbians, instead he creates another embarrassing and perhaps election ending incident. Part of this is probably that Mark Penn, like almost everyone else, realizes that Hillary Clintons campaign is about over, and he is looking to move on to his next venture. But to do somoething like this seems to show almost complete contempt for the women.
Why Hillary Clinon keeps people like Mark Penn around is one of the mysteries of her campaign. Blind loyalty is not always a good thing, especially when it is not recipricated, in Hillary Clinton’s case this seems to be a pattern throughout her life.

In a lengthy piece by Spencer Ackerman He shows why foreign policy would be very different with Obama as president than either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
These two paragraphs provide a nice summary of the differences between Obama and Clinton/McCain:

Most of the members of Obama’s foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left and the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. “No one [of Obama's critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take,” recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama’s foreign-policy speeches. “And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, ‘No, I’m right about this!’”

Instead of backing down, Obama asked his foreign-policy team to double down. Rhodes wrote a speech that Obama delivered at DePaul University on Oct. 2, which criticized the boundaries of acceptable discourse set by the same establishment that backed the war. “This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it’s about moving beyond it. And we’re not going to be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq,” Obama said. One of his advisers, recalling the fallout from Obama’s comments about pursuing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, says, “He takes policy positions that are a break from both rigid orthodoxy and the Bush administration. And everyone says it’s a gaffe! That just encapsulates everything that’s wrong about the foreign-policy debate in Washington and in Democratic politics.”

This is also why Obama would be a good if not great president he is willing to challenge the dogma that led to the Iraq debacle. Where John McCain probably created the Dogma and Hillary Clinton seems to believe it, Obama has the political courage to challenge the bad neo-con ideas. Obama also seems to have the political skill to explain why he is taking a position and convince a majority of Americans that he is right. Not an easy task when you have guys like Limbaugh and O’Rielly spewing moronic crap on radio as well as TV 24/7.
Obama is definitely the right person to lead the country at this time.

I did not know that Imus was back on the air, more importantantly it appears John McCain was happy to fellate him back to life:

John McCain told Don Imus this morning that he has begun “getting together a list of names” for running-mate consideration. “I’d like to get it done as early as possible. I’m aware of enhanced importance of this issue given my age,” McCain said

Why would you go on the show of a man who was fired for racist remarks unless you were hoping to let all the racists know that you are one of them.
The entire story can be found here