From NBC’s Courtney Kube A State Department official warns against making too much of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s widely-reported sentiment to stop the war in Afghanistan that he uttered just before going in to surgery last week.
“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan,” he said, per the Washington Post.
The official said that Holbrooke’s doctors were urging him to calm down as they were preparing him for surgery last week. As they told him to settle down, he replied that he had too much to do. They told him they would take care of everything while he was in surgery and he joked back that if they could do his job, then they should see what they can do about stopping the war in Afghanistan, too.
The official said that Holbrooke had multiple doctors in the room at the time, including a Pakistani doctor, but there is “no indication” he was speaking to the Pakistani doctor when he said this. In fact, the official said the doctor he was speaking to at the time was Egyptian.
State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley also addressed this story during today’s briefing, saying there was “a lengthy exchange with Holbrooke and the medical team.”
Crowley said that when the medical team told Holbrooke to relax, he responded, “I can’t relax. I’m worried about Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Crowley said that after more back-and-forth, the medical team finally said, “We’ll tell you what, we’ll try to fix this challenge while you’re undergoing surgery.” Crowley said that Holbrooke joked, “Yeah, see if you can take care of that, including ending the war.”
Crowley warned that there was no transcript of this exchange, and that it is based on Crowley’s conversations with several people who were in the room at the time.
Crowley joked that this said two things about Holbrooke: “No. 1, he always wanted to make sure he got the last word.” Two: “It showed how he was singularly focused on pursuing and advancing the the process and the policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan to bring them to a successful conclusion.”
Yesterday, in the Westminster Magistrates Court in London, the lawyers for WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange presented to the judge a document from me stating that I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail.
Furthermore, I am publicly offering the assistance of my website, my servers, my domain names and anything else I can do to keep WikiLeaks alive and thriving as it continues its work to expose the crimes that were concocted in secret and carried out in our name and with our tax dollars.
We were taken to war in Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands are now dead. Just imagine if the men who planned this war crime back in 2002 had had a WikiLeaks to deal with. They might not have been able to pull it off. The only reason they thought they could get away with it was because they had a guaranteed cloak of secrecy. That guarantee has now been ripped from them, and I hope they are never able to operate in secret again.
Dec. 11, 2010 – Seven days a week, anyone who is hungry can sit down at a soup kitchen somewhere in Beaver County. No questions asked.
A community schedule of meals, available online at http://www.bccan.org., lists the times when the 15 meals are available in churches from Beaver Falls to Aliquippa.
Such soup kitchens became a staple in the region 25 years ago when the steel industry stopped nourishing the area’s economy. Since then, soup kitchens and food pantries have filled food gaps for the chronically poor who are without jobs, benefits and money, and for those whose Social Security, disability and welfare benefits don’t stretch through the end of each month.
That was until recent months, when soup kitchen and food pantry staff said they began to see new faces at their tables and new names on food pantry applications, which are governed by income guidelines.
The nation’s rocky economy has delivered a direct blow to some middle-class Joes and Janes here in the Beaver Valley. An increase in local food pantry recipients brings home that point.
Inmates in Georgia Prisons Use Contraband Phones to Coordinate Protest
By SARAH WHEATON
Published: December 12, 2010
The prison protest has entered the wireless age.
Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.
Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department’s industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.
The protest began Thursday, but inmates said that organizers had spent months building a web of disparate factions and gangs — groups not known to cooperate — into a unified coalition using text messaging and word of mouth.
With our economy struggling, our working families hurting, and our deficit crisis worsening every year, we need to take action to create jobs, bolster the middle class, and bring our budget into balance.
But the agreement you’ve struck with Senate Republicans is a bad deal. It doubles down on a failed strategy of tax cuts for the super-wealthy that would explode our deficit without strengthening our economy. It’s too high a price to pay for the support of those who have continually refused to put the middle class first.
Instead of giving in to obstruction, we should fight it. I am willing to stay in session as long as it takes to overcome a filibuster and extend both unemployment benefits for jobless Americans and tax cuts for the middle class. If our colleagues on the other side of the aisle want to spend their holidays refusing to help working families struggling to enjoy a Christmas of their own unless their wealthy friends get another bailout, let them.
Mr. President, I know that you share my desire to pass good economic policies that help working families. But a deal that also includes bad policies that will worsen our deficit and fail to help our economy falls short. By standing our ground and standing strong for the middle class, we can do better. And I urge you to do just that.
THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE TO PRESERVE SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE ~ Trusted ~ Independent ~ Effective ~
December 10, 2010 NEWS RELEASE
Social Security Experts Detail Why Payroll Tax “Holiday” is No Gift to Americans
Briefing reporters today, National Committee President Barbara Kennelly, Social Security Works Co-Director Nancy Altman and CEPR Co-Director Dean Baker warned that passage of a payroll tax holiday could have devastating effects on Social Security’s long-term financing.
“As we’ve seen in Washington these days, it’s easy to enact tax cuts but virtually impossible to allow them to expire. This payroll tax holiday proposal will be no different. Election year politics in 2012 will doom the repeal of this $120 billion dollar cut and Social Security beneficiaries will then pay the price. The American people understand we’re in an economic crisis yet they don’t want to trade their future security for a short-term benefit. They didn’t ask Congress to cut their Social Security contributions, in fact, poll after poll shows they’d pay more to preserve Social Security. I salute the House for saying we need to give this deal another look because this payroll tax provision is no deal at all.”…Barbara B. Kennelly, President/CEO National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare
WASHINGTON Dec. 9, 2010 – California Rep. Barbara Lee, Chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, has released the following statement after the Democratic Caucus meeting with Vice President Joe Biden:
“During the meeting, I informed Vice President Biden that the overwhelming majority of Congressional Black Caucus members are opposed to the current tax plan. We will have a specific proposal we would like to discuss with the administration. Congressman Bobby Scott and our taskforce are putting this together.
“We are opposed to the estate tax provision and extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus support extending unemployment benefits and provisions to create jobs, and we want to support something responsible.
“We understand there are tough choices that will need to be made next year and are extremely concerned that the cuts that could be made should this package pass will disproportionately hurt the poor and low-income communities, and may further erode the safety net.”
I Have to Say Something about Obama,
the Tax Cuts,
and the Federal Pay Freeze
The African World
By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
I am sorry, folks. I just have to get my two cents in on President Obama’s proposal to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and freeze the pay of federal workers. I will make this brief.
During the campaign, one of the things that I and a number of other commentators warned about was the sense that we had from then Senator Obama that struggle was not a watch-word. In fact, the then Senator seemed to avoid that as best he could. He wanted us to embrace Martin Luther King’s vision of the need for a non-racial and just United States without acknowledging the extent to which the struggle continued.
Since his election we have seen a combination of some bold ideas and rhetoric matched with a consistent pattern of premature compromising. There have been psychological explanations offered for this but I think that they mainly miss the point. There is, however, a psychological aspect that we must acknowledge.
First, President Obama, as we warned, saw himself primarily reforming the image of the USA rather than the substance. The masses that supported him, however, were looking for substantive change. They were far from united on the character of that change, but they were looking for a champion to advance that. Whether Obama intended on making substantive change is beside the point. What he clearly decided, evident immediately after the election and during the transition period, was to seek to stabilize neo-liberal capitalism and focus on assuring the markets and investors that he was reliable. His appointments have almost all been in that direction.
Here’s one big reason congressional Republicans and the deficit hawks are dead wrong about cutting Social Security[1] benefits: According to a new study, nearly half (47.4 percent) of all Americans between the ages of 60 and 90 will experience at least one year of poverty or near poverty and seniors of color are twice as likely to be affected.
The study by Mark Rank, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis, shows that 58 percent of seniors between 60 and 84 will, at some point, not have enough liquid assets to allow them to weather an unanticipated expense or downturn in income.
But if you are a senior who is black or unmarried or have less than a high school education, the likelihood that you will be poor at some point increases dramatically. Rank found that although 32.7 percent of white older Americans will experience at least one year below the official poverty line, the percentage for black older Americans was nearly double at 64.6 percent.
Congressman Jason Altmire is supporting Republican efforts to undermine social security by reducing the social security payroll tax, which goes to savings, instead of the income tax which goes to spending. This will undermine the trust fund’s stability, and justify the Republican’s demand to cut benefits.
Please call Altmire’s office and demand “Hands off Social Security.”
Join us for a noon vigil on Wednesday December 15th.
See the two articles below by Sen. Bernie Sanders and by the National Committee to Preserve Social Security.
by Senator Bernie Sanders
President Obama is right about one thing — Republicans in Congress are holding the middle class hostage.
We have a $13.8 trillion national debt, a collapsing middle class and the most unequal distribution of wealth of any major country. With all this in mind, Republicans in Congress say they will block tax cuts to the middle class and block unemployment benefits to more than two million families unless the President gives huge tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires.
Their behavior is morally bankrupt. It is reprehensible.
But instead of challenging the Republicans for their absurd demands and their outrageous tactics, the President gave them virtually everything they wanted.
I cannot and will not support this deal. I will do everything I can to uphold the promise made to the American people to end the Bush tax cuts for the rich.
One of the most under-reported parts of this deal is a cut to the Social Security payroll tax. In just one year, over $120 billion of revenue will be cut from Social Security under the President’s compromise plan, weakening the program and virtually guaranteeing benefit cuts in the future.
(A statement from Michael Moore) 
Beaver County Blue: Voice of the 17th CD of Progressive Democrats of America 