Perhaps this is old news but I just caught this report from The Hill where Obama is quoted as having told the Black Congressional Caucus in a closed session meeting that he bit his tongue refraining from criticism of Senator Clinton.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said he bit his tongue “many times” during the fierce primary battle with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Two sources said that Obama’s comments came after Rep. Diane Watson (D-Calif.), a Clinton backer, told the Illinois senator that the Democratic Party needs time to heal.

“I bit my tongue many times. Many times. I bit my tongue many times during this campaign,” Obama told his colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) last week during a private meeting. He repeated the “I bit my tongue” phrase three times during the meeting, the sources said.

The comments suggest that Obama believes that he did not unfairly attack Clinton but held back after feeling the sting of political barbs.

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From the clever folks at Jib-Jab. Still, my favorite is the Yes We Can Can Can below.

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Gay news that is heterosexual friendly.

Senate Passes the Lantos/Hyde Act
In an 80-16 vote, the Senate today approved the Lantos/Hyde U.S. Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act (S 2731) which reauthorizes the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and along with it, an amendment secured by Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) that lifts a ban on travel and immigration to the U.S. by those who are HIV-positive. Under the current plan, HIV-positive people can be considered “inadmissible.” Permanent entry and short term visits can be denied by border agents under this policy. The bill now goes to conference committee before heading on to the President.

California Supreme Court Keeps Anti-Gay Marriage Initiative on Ballot
A voter initiative to reinstate a ban on same-sex marriage will remain on the November ballot, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Wednesday. The court issued a brief order rejecting arguments that the initiative, Proposition 8, was an illegal constitutional revision and that voters had been misled when they signed petitions to put it on the ballot. The decision, reached in closed session during the court’s weekly conference, cleared the way for what some observers expect to be a close vote on the marriage measure. More from the Los Angeles Times.

Genetic Trait in Blacks Makes Them More Susceptible to HIV
New research suggests that people of African descent are much more likely to have a genetic trait that makes them more susceptible to infection with the HIV virus. Scientists estimate that the trait — which also provides protection against a form of malaria — might account for 11 percent of the HIV cases in Africa, the continent hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. Details in the Washington Post.

South Carolina Is So Gay

No wonder Obama took Donnie McClurkin campaigning in South Carolina. The Palmetto state is a gay heaven. Not exactly.

Some residents of South Carolina are up in arms over an international advertising campaign that touts the state as a gay-friendly destination.

Tourism posters proclaiming “South Carolina is so gay” were plastered all over London last week to coincide with London’s Gay Pride Week, but state tourism officials have now disavowed the campaign and insisted that they knew nothing about it.

An unidentified ‘low-level’ state employee reportedly responsible for greenlighting the posters has since resigned his position.

According to state officials, the employee was unauthorized to approve the campaign.

Despite protests to the contrary by South Carolina state representatives, however, there is evidence that there were some well placed individuals in the state’s tourism department who were aware of the campaign before last week.

Gay Commercials
Gay-themed commercials from Dolce Gabanna, Virgin Atlantic, Levi’s, MTV, Israel Board of Tourism, TEN Male Pheromone Frangrance, ML Telecommunications, Guinness Stout, Gay Adoption, Fernet Cinzano and Israeli Gay Youth TV. We’re so marketable. The Vigrin Atlantic is a classic but the Fernet Cinzano ad from Argentina is clever. The MTV ad is painfully sweet while the Guinness ad will drive me to me have a Guinness this week, any ad that portrays gay men in long-term loving relationships is memorable. Kudos to Guinness. The TEN Male Pheromone, while sexy hot, is more typical.

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Note: This is a post by French Doc on the US Progressive Blogosphere in the wake of its shattering this past primary season.

Lambert Strether, of Corrente has kindly invited me to write this week’s installment in the Progressive Blogosphere 2.0 series and I am happy to do so, although I live in a Central Time area so, my post will probably be up around 6pm, Eastern.

My contribution will focus on what I think should be central to PB2.0: social justice (Lambert and I have a slight difference of view on this, so, I’m sure / I hope he’ll explain in the discussion).

Social justice is important to me as a progressive (and as an old-fashioned European social democrat) because it encompasses issues of inequalities in terms of distribution on rights, opportunities and resources (all terms I’ll define tomorrow) and I really think that PB1.0 threw social justice concerns out the window during the primary in terms of race, gender and class: by throwing around accusations of racism, trivializing gender and deriding social classes (especially the bottom of the social ladder).

To put it pretentiously, I would want us to start thinking about having / adopting / developing a theory of social justice as the foundation of PB2.0. This would take us away from strict electoral politics but would get us to better define what PB2.0 should stand for.

Once we have that theoretical / conceptual basis in place, then we can start thinking about how we promote social justice, on and offline, beyond the usual - and often vain - admonitions to call our representatives and Senators on this or that issue (I am not trivializing this, but how often have we gotten our way with this in the past, oh, 4 to 8 years?).

The point, for me, to have a strong theoretical / conceptual basis is to avoid falling into the ever-tempting trap of repeating (and therefore thinking in terms of) right-wing, media-shaped narratives that are detrimental to progressive causes. In a sense, I’m asking us to learn a new language (and not just a superficial Lakoffian framing). For instance, I always prohibit my students from saying / writing “cheap labor”… labor is neither magically nor naturally cheap. I require them (and then, they do it on their own once they “get it”): it’s “labor made cheap” or “labor kept cheap” to underline the social-structural foundations of labor/wage structure.

Anyway, I hope you’ll all join me and that we’ll have stimulating discussions as we have had in the past two weeks.

Disclaimer: the views expressed in the post will be mine only, not those of Lambert or the Corrente Fellows.

T Rex - Children of the Revolution

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So much for the man with the midas touch, Obama’s campaign seems to reaching its financial limits. Via Time magazine on The Half Billion Dollar Man:

Is Barack Obama worth $500 million? The Democratic Party is betting he’ll help bring in about that much — if not more. As the public face of the party, Obama is responsible for both his own campaign’s fund-raising and for that of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) — a combined estimated goal of $450 million. He has also pledged to help Hillary Clinton with her reported $20-million debt to various vendors, and congressional Democrats are hoping that Obama’s financial coattails will be tens of millions of dollars long for their own electoral purposes.

These are staggering sums for someone who was still paying off his student loans three years ago. But the freshman Illinois Senator shattered so many records in the primaries — raising nearly $300 million in 16 months — that he has become a victim of his own success in the general-election expectations game. The public has become numb to his staggering sums, as have his donors, a danger for a campaign seeking to make folks feel involved. After all, how much of a difference can an extra $25 make in a pool of half a billion?

Donors, especially on the Democratic side, may be getting a little burned out. More than $1.04 billion was raised during the primaries for the 24 presidential aspirants from both parties. Of that, $651.2 million went to Democratic candidates and $390.4 million went to Republicans. Sensing donor fatigue, Obama’s e-mail appeals have slowed to about one a week, versus several a week at the height of the primaries. But Obama needs to keep up the pace: essentially, he must repeat his primary feat, add more than 50% and do it in a quarter of the time. “It’s a huge task that we’ve got,” said one top Obama donor. “I wouldn’t define it as concern, but there’s a realization of the enormity of what we are trying to accomplish, and everybody is intensely focused on the task at hand.”

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I’m taking the plunge. I’ve reached my breaking point. What’s yours?

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Can someone please tell Senator Obama that people do pay attention to the comings and goings on his website?

A funny thing happened over on the Barack Obama campaign website in the last few days.

The parts that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared. John McCain and Obama have been going at it heavily in recent days over the benefits of the surge.

The Arizona senator, who advocated the surge for years before the Bush administration employed it, says the resulting reduction in violence is proof it worked with progress on 15 of 18 political benchmarks and Obama’s plan to withdraw troops by now would have resulted in surrender.

When President Bush ordered the surge in January, 2007, Obama said, “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse,” a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year he acknowledged progress, but maintained his position that political progress was lacking.

Tuesday, while Obama gave a speech on foreign policy, the New York Daily News was first to notice the removal of parts of Obama’s campaign site listing the Iraq troop surge as part of “The Problem.” An Obama spokeswoman said it was just part of an “update” to “reflect changes in current events,” as our colleague Frank James notes in the Swamp. The update includes a new section on the rise of al-Qaeda violence in Afghanistan.

But some might see the updating as part of Obama’s skip to the political center now that he’s secured the Democratic nomination. “Today,” McCain said Tuesday, “we know Sen. Obama was wrong” to oppose the troop surge.

An old quote of Obama’s criticizing the “rash war,” which helped him with the left wing of his party and helped differentiate his stand from that of Sen. Hillary Clinton, a primary opponent who voted for the use of force in Iraq, has been replaced on his site by one saying that ending the Iraq war will make America safer. That’s more of a general election message.

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Mexico is slipping into chaos, perhaps unnoticed but certainly not quietly. The number of dead are astonishing. Twenty-one people were killed this past weekend in Sinaloa. Two weeks ago, five people were found decapitated in Mexico City. Two weeks before that another seven headless. On June 23, 2008, 21 people were found dead execution style in Chihuahua, 38 deaths nationwide on that day. Five hundred have died in drug-related violence in Ciudad Juarez alone this year. Sixty-five percent of the deaths have been in two states — in Chihuahua and Sinaloa. But the dead are not just members of rival gangs, it includes innocents caught in the crossfire, policemen and the head of the Mexico City Federal Police. In May, a gun battle left seven Mexican Federal Policemen dead, another four wounded. Mexico slips into chaos.

Some 300 tons of cocaine are estimated to pass through Mexico to the United States each year, and Mexico is considered the largest foreign supplier of crystal methamphetamine to the United States. President Calderon has attributed the wave of violence to drug cartels fighting for supremacy and has said the carnage was unavoidable in the government’s quest to turn back the tide. Unavoidable? An odd choice of words. Perhaps accurate but at the same time what is the Calderon government doing? This is will make or break the Calderon government and that has reprecussions for Mexico, the United States and Latin America.

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for covering the story diligently. Some of the sensationalism is carried in the US media and both the New York Times and the Washington Post may write a serious article now and then but the Los Angeles Times is covering this story day-in and day-out. The paper is to be commended. As a Colombian who lived through the drug wars if not for the honour, I would have rather not lived through them. In Colombia, they began quietly enough. Drug lords fighting over turf in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the late 1970s. Whatever, we said. Son pandillas. No tiene importancia. They are gangs. They are not important.

On April 30, 1984, we began to learn of our mistake in paying these gang wars no heed. That day, Colombia’s Justice Minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was assassinated. That day we fell into an abyss that would take over a decade to climb out of and one from which we have not yet fully escaped. The dead in Colombia run in the thousands at this point. Never mind the sicarios as we call the drug gang members, let’s talk policemen. In the first half of 1990, two hundred alone died in Medellín. From 1989-1992 at the height of the cartel wars, at least 3,500 policemen died in Colombia. It is a debt that we as Colombians have yet to fully repay their families.

Then there are the judges. In the 1980s, 43 were killed in addition to another 222 court workers. Over 200 judges went into exile. Three presidential candidates were murdered in span of eight months — Luis Carlos Galán on August 18, 1989, Bernardo Jaramillo on March 22, 1990 and Carlos Pizarro on April 26, 1990. I had voted for Bernardo Jaramillo in the 1986 elections and I was working for Galán. So was Ingrid Betancourt. Few deaths have been more painful for me than that of Luis Carlos Galán. There was also the assassination of Carlos Mauro Hoyos, the Colombian Attorney General, on February 25, 1988. This is Colombia’s past, the question is, is it Mexico’s future?

The story from the Los Angeles Times is below the fold: (more…)

Belgium may be atop the brewing world with InBev’s acquisition of Anheuser-Busch but governing Belgium is proving difficult. Today, the Belgian government fell after only four months in office. It had taken nearly eight months to piece together a coalition in a fractured Belgium. “Total Chaos” is how the Flemish press is reporting the collapse of Prime Minister Leterme’s government. The French-language press was slightly more circumspect with headlines of “Belgium on the Precipice.” Via Deutsche Welle:

Belgium woke up to a new political crisis Tuesday when it became clear that its five-party coalition government led by Prime Minister Yves Leterme had broken down after only four months in office.

Flemish Christian Democrat Leterme handed in his resignation to Belgian King Albert II late Monday night after it became clear he would not be unable to broker an agreement on the basis of constitutional reform or a power-sharing deal that has split the country in two.

But after a four-hour meeting with his prime minister, Albert rejected the resignation of the government, instead favoring a deliberation period where he would consider whether to accept the move. The royal palace said the king would begin consulting political leaders from both sides of the linguistic divide this week.

Leterme’s government apparently crumbled after failing to find common ground on a reform plan before the prime minister’s self-imposed July 15 deadline. A contributing factor was the ongoing cultural differences between the Dutch-speaking Flemish people and the French-speaking Walloons.

Both sides are struggling to increase their influence in the country, with the Flemish — representing some 60 percent of Belgium’s 10.5 million people — demanding increased responsibilities for their territories. In particular the reorganization of the multilingual constituency of the Brussels region was under dispute.

Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking northern half, craves more regional powers to reflect its prosperity. It also resents subsidizing the less affluent, French-speaking Wallonia region to its south.

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Here is the Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 edition of interesting reads from around the world.

ICC Warrant for Omar al-Bashir
Egypt, China and Algeria voiced concerns over the warrant for the arrest for the Sudanese President on charges of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. “China expresses grave concern and misgivings about the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s indictment of the Sudanese leader,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing. The Washington Post covers the Chinese response while Xinhua Net covers Algeria’s. Lastly, an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal.

Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim Arrested
Police arrested Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim on Wednesday, less than an hour before a deadline for him to appear at police headquarters to answer allegations that he sodomized a male aide. Details from Al Jazeera.

Chávez-Correa-Ortega Summit in Manta, Ecuador
The Presidents of Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua are meeting in Manta, Ecuador (home to a US military base slated to close in 2010) this week. Their gathering is to celebrate the beginning of construction of the Refinería del Pacífico, the largest oil refinery on the west coast of South America. Chávez has made clear that he wants to increase Venezuela oil sales to Asia and diminish sales to the United States. More (in Spanish) from Noticias 24.

Egypt After Mubarak
The Los Angeles Times has a feature on Omar Suleiman, the head of Egypt’s foreign intelligence service. The article ponders whether Suleiman may be the next in line for Egypt’s Presidency. Not that Mubarak is going anywhere. Elections, such as they are in Egypt, are not due until 2011 on the one hand and on the other, we may yet see a Mubarak dynasty rise in the land of the Pharoahs. Gamal Mubarak is also being groomed for the Presidency.

Japan-Korea Squabble over Islets
Korea’s Ambassador to Japan Kwon Chul-hyun temporarily returned to Seoul yesterday in protest over Tokyo’s claim that the Dokdo islets in the East Sea belong to Japan. The Korea Herald covers the story from Seoul while the Japan Times takes up the story from Tokyo. The story has great importance in Korea than in Japan. However, there are plans for demonstrations later this week in Seoul and South Koreas has cancelled a cultural exchanged slated for August.

Fishermen Strike in Tokyo
The National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations and 16 other fishing industry bodies launched a strike involving some 200,000 fishing boats Tuesday to protest against the fuel price increases. Japanese fishermen’s one-day strike cut Wednesday’s fish supplies on the Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market in Tokyo’s Tsukiji by 20 percent from the previous day to 401 tons, prompting wholesalers to warn further strikes would induce a serious supply disruption, market officials said. “Prices of some fish underwent increases of some 10 percent” due to supply decreases, a market source said after morning auctions. Such fish included flatfish and sea bream from Japan’s home waters. They are often used by up-scale sushi shops.

Indian No Confidence Vote Scheduled for July 21
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s UPA government will introduce a measure of confidence on July 21, 2008 over the US-India Nuclear deal according to The Hindu. This article from The Hindu lays out the government’s case why the pact should be approved. Opposition to the deal is coming largely from leftist parties, including the Indian Communist Party, that feel that the deal impinges on India’s sovereignty.

Drug Gangs Blamed in Guatemalan Lawyer’s Killing
President Elias Antonio Saca of El Salvador blamed drug gangs for the killing of a Guatemalan state prosecutor who was investigating the murder of three Salvadoran deputies to the Central American Parliament. Juan Carlos Martinez was shot Monday while driving near his home southeast of Guatemala City. The three Salvadoran deputies were killed in February 2007. Eduardo D’Aubuisson, William Pichinte and Jose Ramon Gonzalez were deputies in the Guatemala-based regional Central American parliament from El Salvador’s conservative ruling ARENA party. The remains of a fourth man were found with them. Villagers discovered their bodies in a blazing car up a dirt track an hour’s drive east of Guatemala City. The suspected murderers are members of Guatemala’s police force but they are being protected by Guatemala’s military establishment. None have been charged.

Russia’s Medvedev Criticizes the West
President Dmitri A. Medvedev chided the West for paternalism in a foreign policy speech in which he criticized the United States and Western Europe for creating a missile defense shield and for recognizing Kosovo’s independence. More from the New York Times.

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