Month: July 2008

McCain: Lobbyist’s Bitch

Seth Anderson1 Comment

John McCain never met a lobbyist he didn’t like, especially ones who are affiliated with the International Republican Institute.

Beer Money at the MCA

Over the years, Mr. McCain has nurtured a reputation1 for bucking the Republican establishment and criticizing the influence of special interests in politics. But an examination of his leadership of the Republican institute — one of the least-chronicled aspects of his political life — reveals an organization in many ways at odds with the political outsider image that has become a touchstone of the McCain campaign for president.

Certainly the institute’s mission is in keeping with Mr. McCain’s full-throated support for exporting American democratic values. Yet the institute is also something of a revolving door for lobbyists and out-of-power Republicans that offers big donors a way of helping both the party and the institute’s chairman, who is the only sitting member of Congress — and now candidate for president — ever to head one of the democracy groups.

Operating without the sort of limits placed on campaign fund-raising, the institute under Mr. McCain has solicited millions of dollars for its operations from some 560 defense contractors, lobbying firms, oil companies and other corporations, many with issues before Senate committees Mr. McCain was on.

[From McCain’s Lobbyst-Laden Group – International Republican Institute Gives Donors Access – NYTimes.com]

A few of the more prominent friends of Saint McCain:

First up that night in September 2006 was the institute’s vice chairman, Peter T. Madigan, a McCain campaign fund-raiser and lobbyist whose clients span the globe, from Dubai to Colombia. He thanked Timothy P. McKone, an AT&T lobbyist and McCain fund-raiser, for helping with the dinner arrangements and then introduced the chairman of AT&T, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., whose company had donated $200,000 for the event.

AT&T at the time was seeking political support for an $80 billion merger with BellSouth — another Madigan client — and Mr. Whitacre lavished praise on Mr. McCain, a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee. When Mr. McCain finally took the podium, he expressed “profound thanks” to AT&T before presenting the institute’s Freedom Award to the president of Liberia, a lobbying client ofCharlie Black, an institute donor and McCain campaign adviser.

The parade of lobbyists and fund-raisers at the dinner is emblematic of Mr. McCain’s tenure at the institute, one of a pair of nonprofit groups — taxpayer-financed and each allied with one of the two major political parties

…

If anything, the overlaps seem more pronounced in his latest quest for the presidency, and they involve institute board members associated with his campaign and donors with interests before the Senate. Mr. Madigan, the institute’s vice chairman and a McCain fund-raiser, represented the government of El Salvador in 2004, when the institute was monitoring presidential elections there. Mr. Madigan’s firm has represented six foreign governments and sometimes lobbied Mr. McCain’s Senate office.

Among those clients is the government of Colombia, which has paid the firm at least $590,000 over the last 18 months. One issue Mr. Madigan has been pushing on behalf of the Colombians is a pending free trade agreement with the United States. Several weeks ago, Mr. McCain traveled to Colombia and, in keeping with his views on trade, spoke about the need for the accord.

Another board member is the McCain campaign’s chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann. Until March, he was registered as a lobbyist for several foreign governments, and he represented the government of Georgia last January when the institute sent election monitors there. Since joining the institute in 2004, Mr. Scheunemann has spoken with Mr. McCain or his Senate aides at least 42 times on behalf of his foreign lobbying clients

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Update – a brief history of the International Republican Institute

Presidential hopeful John McCain is hiding a skeleton in his closet. Not your typical political scandal, Senator McCain’s dirty little secret is his longtime involvement with the International Republican Institute (IRI), an organization that operates in 60 countries and is budgeted by millions of US taxpayer dollars each year. The IRI is “officially” a politically independent entity, though in reality it is aligned in most respects with the Republican Party and its ideals. Senator McCain has been chairman of the IRI since 1993 and Lorne Craner, president of the organization, is one of the presumptive Republican candidate’s informal foreign policy advisors. If McCain’s involvement with the IRI does not worry Latin America yet, it certainly will if the policies that have had such a destructive influence in the past are backed by the power of the presidency. His connection to the IRI could endanger already stressed US-Latin American relations in the event of a McCain victory.

[From A Hidden Agenda: John McCain and the IRI by Sarah Hamburger]

More on that topic later

Footnotes:
  1. for some reason, even though McCain’s love for lobbyist cash has never been hidden, nor his love for Republican talking points [↩]

Creating Space to Think

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Sunday NYT reprinted a brief off-the-mike conversation between Barack Obama and David Cameron, another one of those “didn’t realize the mike was live” moments. Though this snippet was actually interesting.

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

Mr. Obama: And, well, and you start making mistakes or you lose the big picture.

There is a tendency to fill up our days with as many activities, as many appointments, as many tasks as we can fit, and then even a few more beyond, to the detriment of our minds. I’ve always felt it was extremely important to have time to think, to daydream, to doodle, or to stare vacantly at walls. Bill Clinton (and Barack Obama) seem to agree.

Books on the BBC list of 100

Seth Anderson0 comment

The Facebook meme goes like this:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? I’ve read X

I don’t actually think the BBC list claimed people only had read six – as far as I can tell, the BBC just collected stats on what books were the most read.. The list is nearly identical to this list, but not quite exactly the same.

Still fun to compare/contrast. I’ve read 64 of these books, plus most of the Bible, plus most of “Complete Works of Shakespeare”, plus a couple Classics Illustrated Comics versions.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. Tag other book nerds—and that would include me. I want to know who’s read what.

And:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – X

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – X

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – X

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling -nope

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – X

6 The Bible -a hard one to answer. I’ve probably read it all, but I can say for certain that I didn’t skip over 2 Thessalonians or something?

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell -X

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman -nope

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – X

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – X

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy –X

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller –x

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not all, but most)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – X

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien -X

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – nope

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – X

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger-no

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot -X

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – X

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald -X

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens -nope

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -X

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams -X

27
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -X (one of my favorites of all time)

28
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck -X (likewise)

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll-X

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame- X

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy -X

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – X

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis -X

34 Emma-Jane Austen- X

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen –

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – X

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – nope

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres -nope

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden -I don’t think so

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – X

41
Animal Farm – George Orwell -X

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown -nope

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving- X

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins -nope

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery- X

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy -X

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – X

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – X

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan- nope

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – nope, though its on my shelf

52 Dune – Frank Herbert -X

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons-nope

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – X

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth -nope

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon -nope

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – X

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon- nope

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – X

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – X

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov-X

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt -nope

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold –

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas- no (but I did used to own the Classics Illustrated Comic version!)

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac -X

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy -X

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding- nope

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie –X

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville -X

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens- X

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker -X

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett -X

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson -nope

75
Ulysses – James Joyce -X (probably my favorite book, at least at one time in my life. Haven’t re-read in a few years)

76 The Inferno – Dante- partial credit. Need a good translation, any suggestions?

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome -nope

78 Germinal – Emile Zola -nope

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray-X

80 Possession – AS Byatt –nope

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens -X

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell -nope

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker- X

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro -no

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert -X

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry -nope

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom- nope

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle- X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton-nope

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – X

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery -X

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks -nope

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams- X

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – X

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute -nope

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas -nope (but I did used to own the Classics Illustrated Comic version!)

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare-X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl -X

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo-X

Paul Westerberg Album 49

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“Besterberg: Best of Paul Westerberg” (Paul Westerberg)

Actually, Paul Westerberg has come up with a pretty clever way to sell an entire album: release it (cheaply!) as one long track, forcing listeners to hear it in the way it was originally sequenced.

I bought the album for $.49, all 49 minutes of it, and if I like the album, will buy the actual CD. If there is one, this might just be a oddity and curio. Still am happy to squander two quarters for an interesting idea.

 

—

update, apparently not available anymore. If you want a copy of the mp3, contact me directly, and we’ll see if we can work it out.

Steve Jobs Health off the record

swanksalot0 comment

Joe Nocera steers close to the edge of propriety while discussing Steve Jobs health, ostensibly wrapping his tattle tale with discussion of Apple’s keen interest in secrecy.

Under its chief executive and founder Steven P. Jobs, Apple has created a culture of secrecy that has served it well in many ways — from new products to the health of Mr. Jobs.

…Mr. Jobs first discovered he had an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor — which is both rarer and less deadly than other forms of pancreatic cancer — in October 2003. This was a full nine months before he had the surgery to remove it. Why did he wait so long? Because, according to a Fortune magazine article published in May, Mr. Jobs was hoping to beat the cancer with a special diet.

The Apple directors who knew the gravity of the situation urged him to undergo surgery, according to the Fortune article. But it was only when Mr. Jobs realized that the tumor was growing that he finally agreed. And only after the surgery was successful did he inform employees that he had been sick, in an e-mail message in which he declared himself “cured.” That’s how Apple’s shareholders found out, too. The company has never spoken about his illness, citing his “privacy” concerns.

I bring this up because of what transpired on Monday afternoon, during Apple’s third-quarter conference call. In June, rumors began swirling that Steve Jobs was sick again. They had started during the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where Mr. Jobs looked unusually thin and haggard.

[From Talking Business: Apple’s Culture of Secrecy]

And nothing you ever say to anyone is ever really “off the record”, even if you are Steve Jobs

On Thursday afternoon, several hours after I’d gotten my final “Steve’s health is a private matter” — and much to my amazement — Mr. Jobs called me. “This is Steve Jobs,” he began. “You think I’m an arrogant [expletive1 ] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.” After that rather arresting opening, he went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record. I tried to argue him out of it, but he said he wouldn’t talk if I insisted on an on-the-record conversation. So I agreed.

Because the conversation was off the record, I cannot disclose what Mr. Jobs told me. Suffice it to say that I didn’t hear anything that contradicted the reporting that John Markoff and I did this week. While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than “a common bug,” they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer. After he hung up the phone, it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr. Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money.

You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.

Footnotes:
  1. asshole, probably, or motherfucker, possibly [↩]

Aroma is Disgusting

Seth Anderson0 comment

We haven’t eaten at Aroma on Randolph for many years1 because I thought the place was kind of gross. The food wasn’t fresh, and the entire restaurant looked unclean, unkept, unswept, you name it. Apparently, my instinct was correct, the City of Chicago agrees that Aroma is gross.

Aroma on Randolph, 941 W. Randolph, was shut down after inspectors found dozens of cockroaches in the kitchen, particularly in the drip pan of a stove.

The restaurant also was cited for raw sewage backing up from a floor drain in the basement kitchen, no hand washing sink in the basement kitchen, a non-functioning hand washing sink in the kitchen on the main floor, no soap or hand towels at any sink on the premises, employees laying their shoes and clothing on top of plates and utensils, houseflies and fruit flies in the kitchen, and a poorly maintained outside garbage area (grease on top of and on the ground around the grease box).

CDPH inspectors also cited Aroma on Randolph for two violations of the Chicago Clean Indoor Air Ordinance. Inspectors found two dozen dirty ashtrays hidden behind the bar. The second citation was issued because management had failed to post “No Smoking” signs as required by law.

The Aroma on Randolph web site states, “Our restaurant has a smoking area…”.

Smoking is prohibited in all restaurants in the city, as well as in the rest of the state.

Today’s inspection was triggered by a customer who contacted CDPH via the City of Chicago web site to allege that she had found a cockroach in her food.

[From City of Chicago – Near West Side Restaurant Shut Down by City Health Department]

I’d be surprised if they manage to emerge from this violation: that’s pretty harsh. Also the first violation of “No-Smoking” I’ve ever heard since the ordinance was passed.

see this screenshot from their website:
Aroma Randolph Smoking

Footnotes:
  1. though there used to be a Thai restaurant in the same location called Hi Ricky which was quite good [↩]

Granite Countertop Radiation Risk

Seth Anderson4 Comments

Why Go to Night School?
[The Pope checks out our Volga Blue granite table]

A mildly scary story you are bound to hear of sooner or later1

SHORTLY before Lynn Sugarman of Teaneck, N.J., bought her summer home in Lake George, N.Y., two years ago, a routine inspection revealed it had elevated levels of radon, a radioactive gas that can cause lung cancer. So she called a radon measurement and mitigation technician to find the source.

“He went from room to room,” said Dr. Sugarman, a pediatrician. But he stopped in his tracks in the kitchen, which had richly grained cream, brown and burgundy granite countertops. His Geiger counter indicated that the granite was emitting radiation at levels 10 times higher than those he had measured elsewhere in the house.

[Click to read more details of What’s Lurking in Your Countertop? – NYTimes.com]

For me the real crime is hinted at in a paragraph towards the end of the article:

Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and is considered especially dangerous to smokers, whose lungs are already compromised. Children and developing fetuses are vulnerable to radiation, which can cause other forms of cancer. Mr. Witt said the E.P.A. is not studying health risks associated with granite countertops because of a “lack of resources.”

What the hell is the EPA doing instead? Going to lunch with the chemical industry executives who are offering future employment? What? The Environmental Protection Agency should have the funding and desire to conduct careful study of such topics so that there is real data available for consumers to make informed decisions whether granite countertops are a risk or whether they are harmless. How about instead of buying yet another Trident Missile or B2 Spirit, the government throws a few pennies at the EPA?

—
update:
Dean Armstrong also notices this story, and writes, in part:

But is this a hazard? Granites I’ve encountered have rates ranging from nothing to about 10x background. This isn’t that much. Time spent at cruising altitude is about 40x background at 500ft. It certainly wouldn’t be worth the fuss of ripping up a kitchen, unless it was proven to be the source of elevated radon levels. After reading the literature about naturally occurring radon sources, I have difficulty assigning the radon to just a small granite piece. Any soil or rock within 4 gas-diffusion-days of the basement or slab can be a source of radon for a home, and the total amount of uranium in that quantity is going to exceed the amount in the countertop (especially the part of the countertop that is within radon’s half-life time of the surface). If you covered your walls in granite it might be different.

Footnotes:
  1. such news stories are custom made for our sensationalistic media [↩]

Bush Wants to Kill Workers

Seth Anderson0 comment

Follow up on yesterday’s surprising1 admission that there is a secret plan to reduce the possibilities that workers will have safe workplaces. Reduce it to zero, in fact. The Bush-ites want workers just to be happy they have jobs, and not worry about having safe jobs.

Congressional leaders demanded yesterday that the Labor Department withdraw an eleventh-hour rule proposal that would make it more difficult to set industry limits on the amount of dangerous chemicals that U.S. workers are exposed to on the job.

In a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao, the Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House labor committees accused her department of crafting a secret rule in the final months of the Bush administration, with the goal of weakening worker safety and helping businesses avoid regulations.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (Calif.) said Chao’s department violated the rule requiring federal agencies to alert the public twice a year to any directives it was considering. They asked her to turn over internal documents of any meetings or communications Labor officials had with business or outside groups relating to the proposal.

Their demand came the day The Washington Post reported that the agency began actively researching the proposal as early as last September, when it commissioned a $347,000 outside study of the idea. It did not disclose its interest until it formally submitted a draft rule to the White House Office of Management and Budget on July 7.

“For nearly eight years, this administration has consistently failed to respond in a meaningful way to the real health and safety threats workers face while on the job,” Miller said. “But now they will stop at nothing to rush through a secret rule that will tie the hands of health and safety experts.”

The proposed rule, which would have the force of law, would call for reexamining long-standing agency assumptions used to weigh risks from toxins, including the notion that some workers spend 45 years in the same kind of job. The proposal has not been made public, but according to sources and internal documents, it aims to address business complaints that previous agency risk assessments exaggerate risk and cost industry too much.

[From Democrats Ask Labor to Forgo ‘Secret Rule’ – washingtonpost.com]

Oh, poor, poor industry, having to maintain safe workplaces when there are profit margins to increase, second homes to pay for in Aspen, yadda yadda. I’ve never understood how working class folks could ever vote for a Republican – screwing people and slurping on corporations is what the Republicans do best.

Footnotes:
  1. and yet, not so surprising, given the track record of the anti-consumer activists currently running the executive branch of the US [↩]

Get Paid

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Harlan Ellison tells us, “Get Paid”! Applies to photography (no more freebies if there’s an option), music, writing, everything. Especially when a corporation as wealthy as Warner Bros is asking for free content, why should they get it?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE

(Note, Harlan Ellison uses many, many NSFW words, so adjust your viewing accordingly)

links for 2008-07-25

swanksalot0 comment

Is Obama punishing The New Yorker?

Seth Anderson0 comment

I doubted the allegation that Ryan Lizza was barred from the Obama plane as soon as I heard it breathlessly reported as fact. Steve Chapman did one better, and asked the Obama campaign directly.

As a longtime member of the press, I’m always sensitive to any sign a politician is punishing journalists for doing their jobs. So my ears pricked up at the story that Barack Obama’s campaign had retaliated against The New Yorker magazine for its Obama-as-terrorist cover by excluding reporter Ryan Lizza from the press plane on the senator’s Middle East trip.

So I emailed Obama’s media people to ask for a list of journalists who are accompanying him. It turns out almost all the reporters are from TV networks or newspapers–those who cover him week in and week out. Only three magazines were represented: Time, Newsweek and Ebony.

Of the 200 journalists who applied, the campaign says it could take only 40. Among those denied were The Economist, the Boston Globe and the Financial Times. Some of the publications that were included, the campaign says, didn’t get as many seats as they requested.

I would be surprised if Lizza were barred as payback. In my numerous dealings with the Obama press people, they have always been cordial and helpful–even after their previous efforts were rewarded with a piece criticizing their boss on some issue or another. My Sunday column slammed him for his opposition to school vouchers. Yet on Monday morning, they responded quickly and helpfully to my inquiry.

[From Is Obama punishing The New Yorker?]

As Mr. Chapman points out, the Obama team let Maureen Dowd fly, and she has been one of the worst Obama snipers.

Squatters: Obama’s In-box

Seth Anderson0 comment

This cracks me up.

July 27, 2004, a friend invited Guru Raj to create a Google e-mail account. A recent graduate of the University of Virginia, Raj, then twenty-one, was watching the Democratic National Convention on a television in his parents’ basement, in Norcross, Georgia. The beta version of Gmail—available by invitation only—was less than four months old at the time, and largely unproved, but Raj’s U.V.A. e-mail account was set to expire in a few weeks, so he decided to give Gmail a try.

At first, Raj tried to create an address using his own name, but, remarkably, both gururaj@gmail.com and rajguru@gmail.com were already taken. So he tried the name of the young senator from Illinois who was giving the Democratic keynote address on TV. To his surprise, it worked, and, moments later, barackobama@gmail.com was quietly born. “I’m not some cute little Indian boy who grew up in America with political aspirations,” Raj, the first in his family to be born an American citizen, said recently. “I just thought it would be kind of funny to create an e-mail address based on a random senator whose name no one could spell.”

Over the next four years, as Gmail became the third most popular Webmail provider in the U.S. and Obama became a serious contender for the next President of the United States, Raj used the account for his personal e-mail. In the fall of 2006, he received, for the first time, a message intended for the Senator. By February, 2007, when Obama formally announced his candidacy, Raj was daily receiving dozens of misdirected notes from all over the world.

[Click to read more of Squatters: Obama’s In-box: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker]

I’ll bet a lot of crazy stuff gets sent to that email address.