Rachel Maddow reports here on business opposition to laws against slave and child labor (apparently no Repug has ever read Charles Dickens, and no, he wasn’t a Southern Civil War general – not the author, anyway).

I’ll admit that it’s not easy to post about the Middle East, which is why I generally stay away from it, but I felt compelled to say something based on this story, which in part tells us the following…

Thousands of Palestinians turned out Wednesday for a rally here to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the death of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and to show support for his successor, President Mahmoud Abbas, who recently expressed an intention to retire.

…

The rally took place in the grounds of the Mukata, the presidential headquarters in this West Bank city where Arafat took ill in 2004. He died in a Paris hospital, but his body was flown back and buried in the compound amid frenzied scenes of adoration and chaos.

I don’t have an issue with Abbas, who will never escape Arafat’s shadow largely because the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization allowed terrorism to flourish on his watch, to the point where Hamas basically calls the shots in that area of the world. And yes, I’m completely aware of the fact that Israeli intransigence on the Palestinians had a lot to do with Arafat’s ascent.

However, Arafat was, at best, a flawed deliverer of legitimacy (one of the few times I actually agreed with Dubya on anything was when he said Arafat had “failed as a leader” in 2004, though that was hypocritical considering our slavish subservience to Israel under Dubya’s “administration”). And the only reason he won the Nobel Prize along with the late Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres of Israel was because it would have been bad manners to exclude him.

And I think the following is noteworthy about Arafat (from here)…

In August 2002, the Israeli Military Intelligence Chief alleged that Arafat’s personal wealth was in the range of USD $1.3 billion,[92]. In 2003 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) conducted an audit of the PNA and stated that Arafat diverted $900 million in public funds to a special bank account controlled by Arafat and the PNA Chief Economic Financial adviser. However, the IMF did not claim that there were any improprieties, and it specifically stated that most of the funds had been used to invest in Palestinian assets, both internally and abroad.[93][94]

However in 2003, a team of American accountants–hired by Arafat’s own finance ministry–began examining Arafat’s finances; this team reached a different conclusion. The team claimed that part of the Palestinian leader’s wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion, with investments in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone company and venture capital funds in the US and the Cayman Islands. The head of the investigation stated that “although the money for the portfolio came from public funds like Palestinian taxes, virtually none of it was used for the Palestinian people; it was all controlled by Arafat. And none of these dealings were made public.”[95]

Although Arafat lived a modest lifestyle, Dennis Ross, former Middle East negotiator for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, stated that Arafat’s “walking-around money” financed a vast patronage system known as neopatrimonialism. According to Salam Fayyad—a former World Bank official whom Arafat appointed Finance Minister of the PNA in 2002—Arafat’s commodity monopolies could accurately be seen as gouging his own people, “especially in Gaza which is poorer, which is something that is totally unacceptable and immoral.” Fayyad claims that Arafat used $20 million from public funds to pay the leadership of the PNA security forces (the Preventive Security Service) alone.[95]

Fuad Shubaki, former financial aide to Arafat, told the Israeli security service Shin Bet that Arafat used several million dollars of aid money to buy weapons and support militant groups.[96] An investigation by the European Union into claims that their funds were misused by the Palestinian Authority found no evidence that funds were diverted to finance terrorist activities.[97]

Also, as noted here…

Arafat, too, must take his share of the blame for the failure of the peace process. Time and again, he failed to make the bold moves that might have broken the logjam. It was never a viable option for the PLO to confront the rejectionists Hamas and Islamic Jihad militarily — that would have meant a full-scale civil war — but he could have marginalized them if he had been a better leader. Unwilling to either rule out the military option or embrace it, he was a master tactician who seemed never capable of delivering the bold strategic stroke. (In that sense, he resembled his ancient nemesis, Ariel Sharon, a brilliant field general who lacks a larger vision.) Danny Rubinstein, the Haaretz correspondent who has covered the Palestinians for years, noted on Thursday that Arafat could not resist the siren song of the Palestinian street: If it called for violence, he delivered violence. “This was his weak side. This is how it came out,” Rubinstein says. “He always felt it necessary to speak to his people such that they would continue to embrace him, to esteem him, to idolize him, and, most importantly, to obey him.”

And Gary Kamiya of Salon.com also tells us the following…

At the end of his life, although he still held all effective Palestinian power in his hands, Arafat had come to serve a purely symbolic function. That function was sentimentally useful: Arafat represented the last hope for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees around the world, still holding their yellowing deeds and keys to houses in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem to which they will never return. But practically, it was an encumbrance. He was a statue, a myth, and his larger-than-life stature blocked a new, more pragmatic generation of Palestinian leaders from emerging. Those leaders will make the same demands Arafat did — a contiguous state in most of the West Bank, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, shared sovereignty over the holy sites, some fair resolution of the refugee question that does not spell the end of Israel. But perhaps they will actually be able to achieve them.

I must tell you that I can think of better tributes.

Thoughtful stuff…

I thought this was really nice tribute from the Joe Sestak for U.S. Senate campaign.

The following Guest Opinion from Dem PA-08 U.S. House Rep Patrick Murphy appeared in the print edition of the Bucks County Courier Times last Sunday; for some reason I cannot comprehend, the paper didn’t think it was important enough to publish online at that miracle of technology (snark) known as phillyburbs.com…

A Bucks County woman recently lost her job as a copy editor, along with the health insurance that covered her and her husband. She shopped around on her own, but was turned down by insurers because of a pre-existing condition: pregnancy.

Instead of celebrating this wonderful news, they’re terrified about how they’ll afford maternity care without coverage. I support health insurance reform because, in a nation like ours, this should never happen to middle-class families.

Over the past eight months, I’ve listened to thousands of constituents – doctors, patients, folks with insurance and without – about reform, and I’ve heard the same question repeatedly: How will this impact my family? How will it affect Medicare? How are we going to pay for it? I’d like to address those questions and explain to you why I support the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

First, this bill finally prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

What does that mean? If your job offers health insurance, you get coverage regardless of your health. But today, if you aren’t offered coverage through work, or become unemployed and need to buy your own, you’re turned down if you’re pregnant, have cancer, or are diabetic, among other reasons.

Mr. Bogie from Tinicum (Township, Bucks County) told me of his otherwise healthy wife who was denied coverage because she took blood pressure medication. An insurer can also charge higher rates because of those conditions or a host of other reasons, including being female or being a victim of domestic violence. Reform would put a stop to this, too.

Many folks who have insurance report that they’re happy with it, but too often that coverage is taken away when it’s needed most. Today, an insurer can look for any excuse to terminate your plan should you become “too expensive.”

Jay Doroshow from Langhorne never expected to be uninsured, but as soon as he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, his insurance company kicked him off his plan. Reform would end this practice, putting you, not insurance company CEOs, in the driver’s seat. As the American Medical Association said in its endorsement, reform “empowers patient and physician decision making.”
What about folks on Medicare? Reform opponents have targeted their worst scare tactics at seniors, when in fact reform strengthens Medicare and improves benefits. It finally closes the “donut hole” that leaves seniors like David Jones from Warminster paying over $4,000 out-of-pocket for prescription drugs. David worked hard and saved his entire life, but when he developed Crohn’s disease, his medication bills began piling up; he now falls into the donut hole by April every year.

Seniors will also have access to lower-cost prescription drugs, as the government will now be able to negotiate with manufacturers to get better deals on medications. And Medicare beneficiaries will have free preventive care services to help them stay healthy and active. This is why the AARP has wholeheartedly endorsed this bill.

The bill also cracks down on Medicare fraud that drains billions from the system. It includes a bipartisan bill I introduced, the Improve Act, which closes a major loophole in Medicare fraud. My legislation finally gives law enforcement the tools they need to track down scammers and protect taxpayer dollars.

Finally, I support reform because the bill meets two basic requirements I laid out months ago: it does not add a dime to the federal deficit – in fact, it reduces the deficit by $129 billion – and it lowers our national health care spending. Pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other industry groups – who will see millions of new customers – are contributing hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for insurance reform. And a portion of the bill is paid for with a surcharge on only those with annual incomes over one million dollars, which would impact less than 0.3 percent of households.

It has been 16 years since Congress’ last attempt at reform. Since then, over 700,000 people have died because they lacked access to affordable coverage, and premiums continue to rise four times faster than wages. We simply cannot afford to fail again.

For these reasons, I stand with nurses (ANA), doctors (American Medical Association), the AARP, and my constituents to support long-overdue health insurance reform.

To contact Congressman Murphy, click here.

Putting aside the fact that he doesn’t give a damn about issues involving families, the economy, the environment, and just about anything else you care to name (noted here), I just have a question for him as long as he felt it was necessary to grab face time on C-SPAN over this cruel amendment he co-authored with the just-as-useless Bart Stupak (abortions aren’t even allowed when paid for by subscriber premiums?),

What about health savings accounts, Joe?

What about tough new restrictions on funds in health savings accounts used for abortions? What about criminalizing all parties involved if funds for health savings accounts are used for abortions? And that includes companies that contribute to those accounts on behalf of their workers.

Do you care about the unborn or don’t you, Joe?

Update 11/9/09: This is the best description of the utterly awful Stupak-Pitts amendment that I’ve yet seen. Basically, as far as these two and the other signatories are concerned (to say nothing of the Catholic Church of course), women are little better than cattle (and to do something about PA-16’s useless meat sack, click here).

Gee, I wonder how many more Americans without health insurance died while the Repugs played this stupid little game in the House today?

(I may just be posting videos here for a little while; I don’t know more about that at the moment.)

I get really tired of our corporate media treating Tom Coburn as if he’s just some oddball curiosity in the U.S. Senate. He’s a dangerously unhinged individual who frequently acts in an irreparably harmful way towards his own constituents as well as those of the country as a whole. And if anyone chooses not to inform themselves about that and remain utterly ignorant, that’s their fault.

This post from Think Progress tells us that he’s put “holds” on several veterans benefits bills because he wanted to divert money from unspent “stimulus” funds on them (Coburn opposed the “stim,” of course).

(Note: I transcribed this from the TP post, but I have a feeling that the issue is that Coburn isn’t the one who wants to divert the funds, but the issue is that he’s blocking the “stim” funds from being diverted for our veterans, though that’s a bit unclear.)

This unconscionable act hurts individuals such as the person profiled in the video below, as well as many, many others who have made great sacrifices for our country.

The fact that this individual continues to take up space in the U.S. Senate is a damning indictment of those who voted for him, and our country generally for continuing to tolerate his presence (click here for more).

Update 11/9/09: Good for Akaka, Tester and Begich for this.