January 21, 2011 archive

BFFs

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

High-profile Dem lawyer flacking for African strongman

Lanny Davis is now Ivory Coast leader Laurent Gbagbo’s man in Washington, as violence engulfs the African country

By Justin Elliott, Salon.com

Tuesday, Dec 21, 2010 10:54 ET

You’re the leader of a small African country facing an international outcry after reversing the results of a presidential election and dispatching your forces to suppress and kill opposition protesters. What do you do to turn the tide and keep your grip on power?

Call Lanny Davis.

The columnist and former special counsel to Bill Clinton specializes in lobbying for controversial corporate and foreign clients, particularly those seeking Democratic representation in Washington. But even for Davis, taking on Ivory Coast leader and flagrant human rights violator Laurent Gbagbo as a client, as he did this week, seems to cross some kind of line.

D.C. law firm to aid Ivory Coast opposition leader

THE INFLUENCE INDUSTRY

By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, January 20, 2011

One of Washington’s top law firms has signed on to represent Alassane Ouattara, an Ivory Coast opposition leader who has been recognized as the winner of a disputed presidential election in that country.

In papers scheduled to be filed with the Justice Department on Thursday, Covington & Burling said it will “provide advice on international legal and policy matters” to Ouattara as he continues to try to take over from the ousted president, Laurent Gbagbo. The work will be done free of charge as part of the firm’s pro bono services, officials said.

The decision follows controversy late last year over former Clinton administration counsel Lanny Davis, who registered to become Gbagbo’s lobbyist in Washington after the disputed election Nov. 28. Davis, whose firm collected $300,000 in fees, said last month that he was severing the agreement with Gbagbo.

Lanny Davis’ African human rights disaster

When Davis was hired by Equatorial Guinea, the lobbyist said things would change there. They haven’t

By Justin Elliott, Salon.com

Wednesday, Jan 5, 2011 11:01 ET

Last April, when Democratic lobbyist Lanny Davis was hired by the government of Equatorial Guinea, he declared himself the “reform counsel” for the longtime dictator of the small, oil-rich African nation. Davis’ fee was $1 million per year plus expenses, and he and his client, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, promised widespread reforms and a new respect for human rights.

But today, human rights advocates who track Equatorial Guinea tell Salon that nothing has changed there and that Davis appears to be engaged in little more than a whitewashing exercise designed to rehabilitate the image of the Obiang regime on the international stage. And despite a direct promise by Davis to a reporter in June that political prisoners in Equatorial Guinea would be released, that has not happened.

Joe Lieberman – The Model Purple Senator

Lanny Davis, The Huffington Post

Posted: January 19, 2011 04:28 PM

In 1970, I was in the bathroom with a towel over my ears. In the living room, surrounded by my parents and friends, there you were — the sandek at the bris — holding my 8-day-old son Seth for the 3,000-year-old Jewish ceremony while the rabbi made the magic cut. I awarded you the title of godfather for doing me (and Seth) that great favor.

In 2000, you stood at the podium as the vice presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, the first Jew to be so honored, and I sat next to your mother, both of us crying, as you began your acceptance speech, in genuine wonder and awe: “Is this a great country, or what?”

In 2006, you lost a Democratic primary in Connecticut because your liberal base wouldn’t forgive you because you genuinely believed a democratic Iraq without Saddam Hussein was worth going to war over. I disagreed with you on that position. But I also knew that you were and always would be a progressive Democrat — that you had voted over 90 percent of the time with your fellow Democratic senators.

On primary night, when you had lost, I stood heartbroken in your hotel suite in Hartford, Conn. My son and your godson, Seth, now 36 years since the magic cut, arrived.

“So sorry, Godfather,” Seth said.



There is something especially sad that you, an important symbol of decency in politics, should pick this week to announce your retirement — the week after the murderous violence in Tucson, Ariz., left so many people in America frightened of the atmosphere of violence and polarization that has become the hallmark of our politics in too many places.

You will be missed, Sen. Lieberman — just at the time where the role of a “bridge-builder” between Democrats and Republicans, between liberals and conservatives, is needed more than ever.

You showed it is possible to be a genuine liberal Democrat on the major issues — but still able to work with Republicans, with conservatives, and be trusted by them. You were the model “purple” politician.

Budget Reform Requires More Than the Sum of Its Parts

The question of budget deficits and the health of government programs has been the largest can frequently kicked down the road.  Though it’s become repetitive to warn or caution in this fashion, we need to make the appropriate steps and institute the proper reforms now.  This issue is not going to go away.  It is perhaps the least politically popular and most divisive.  As we have seen with Health Care Reform, it may even inspire a backlash that shows the door to many courageous legislators who dared to paddle upstream against a strong headwind.  There are some issues which can be dodged without much harm being done, but then there are others which must be confronted.  Some politicians could write whole books (and teach others) about their genius system of embracing political expediency, but what we need now is not an escape artist or a magician.  We need leaders.  

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?


Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

Jack

He was inaugurated fifty years ago yesterday, on January 20, 1961… and he said something that day I’ve not heard from any politician since:

Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.

Six In The Morning

You Must Destroy It So You Can Destroy it More    



House GOP group proposes deep spending cuts over next decade

Congressional conservatives on Thursday demanded far more dramatic reductions in government spending than House GOP leaders have recently proposed, in the first sign of a fissure between old-guard Republicans and tea-party-backed newcomers.

Members of the conservative Republican Study Committee said the GOP must keep its campaign pledge to immediately slice at least $100 billion from non-defense programs, an effort that would require lawmakers to reduce funding for most federal agencies by a third over the next seven months. And the group called for even deeper cuts over the next decade to return non-defense spending to 2006 levels.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

Children are entitled to their otherness, as anyone is; and when we reach them, as we sometimes do, it is generally on a point of sheer delight, to us so astonishing, but to them so natural.

–Alastair Reid



Pink and Blue 5

Late Night Karaoke

Peter Kornbluh on Wild Wild Left Radio #95

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PhotobucketThis week I have the honor of interviewing Peter Kornbluh, director of the Cuba Documentation Project and the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a public interest research center located at George Washington University (Washington, DC). He is co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New Press), author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New Press) and co-author of a forthcoming book on the untold history of dialogue between the United States and Cuba.

This NSA was Wiki before Wiki was cool, and did it through relentless legal pressure to declassify the documents that hid in our Nation and Other’s “redacted” files so that the Public would know what had been done in our names.

His most recent efforts have been pivotal in Chile addressing its human rights abuses and in the trial of Luis Posada, former CIA asset going to trial for the acts of terrorism he escaped Venezuelan prosecution for, after blowing up a Cuban Airliner.

Author of 6 books, including “Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba,” this man is a veritable wealth of information.

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