The whispering campaign against Obama
by Kevin Alexander Gray, Columbia

I hope folk don’t think I am for a particular candidate cause I’m not. This time out I intend to vote in the Democrat primary but beyond that remains an open proposition. Obama is 3rd on my consideration list. Krugman’s article is just another reason to reconsider his position. Clinton is not on my list at all.

Oddly enough, I was speaking to someone from the midwest this past weekend. I believe it was after the Vegas debate. That person matter-of-factly mentioned that the bomb Clinton operatives may have sent to Novak was Obama’s alleged heroin use. I think the person mentioned it to me knowing that at times I can’t hold my water.  I mentioned the call for its oddity to a family member but held passing on the gossip.

But low and behold by Sunday Obama on air was daring the Clinton people to put up or shut up. Then by Monday that sorry-ass Chris Matthews was talking about Obama’s drug use confession to a group of school kids. Matthews said that Obama confessed to drug use as a kid, “pot, cocaine, everything but heroin.”

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Go Fish: Clinton Undaunted by “Gender Card” Allegations
By NOW President Kim Gandy

With a widening six-point lead separating her from Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton remains undaunted amidst media allegations that she has played the “gender card” during debates and public speaking engagements. Are Clinton’s opponents “piling on”? Of course they are — and they’d pile onto any candidate so far in the lead. Taking advantage of that fact isn’t playing the gender card, it’s playing the game.

Most notably slandered for comments made at her alma mater after the last debate, “In so many ways, this all-women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys’ club of presidential politics,” Clinton was attacked by pundits charging that the mere mention of the boys’ club was playing the victim. And when her campaign manager said, quite accurately, that the other candidates had “piled-on” Clinton at the last debate, the pundit-roar was deafening.

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Valerie Plame Still Wants to Know
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
13 Nov.

Former covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson would still like to know the identity of the CIA official who passed her name to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney in the spring of 2003, and “under what circumstances.”

That’s just one of several unanswered questions Plame Wilson has been trying to figure out in the years since several senior officials in the Bush administration leaked her name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak and a handful of other journalists. That leak ended her two-decade CIA career.

“I’d like to know, why did Novak go with my maiden name, Plame, in his original article?” Plame Wilson said during an hour-long, two-part interview with Truthout. “I always thought that was strange. When I married, I took my married name. And then he [Novak] used Valerie Plame [in his column]. It was only the CIA who knew that I worked for them, and my maiden name.”

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A report released today estimates that the cost of the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is double what the Bush Administration has directly requested. The Joint Economic Committee’s majority staff report, War at Any Price? The Total Economic Costs of the War Beyond the Federal Budget, includes “hidden” costs such as the drain on economic growth as a result of war-related borrowing, the disruption of oil markets, the future care of injured soldiers and repair costs for the military. The report projects the total costs of the wars to amount to $3.5 trillion between 2003 and 2017, $1 trillion higher than the Congressional Budget Office forecast.

So far, President Bush has asked for $607 billion for the Iraq War, 10 times higher than what the administration estimated before launching its “shock and awe” campaign.

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The Times Vs. Feminism
By Susan J. Douglas
In These Times

Don’t become a feminist. I mean it. Because then you might end up like Katha Pollitt. Wait, isn’t Pollitt an award-winning poet and columnist? Isn’t her “Subject to Debate” column what most of us turn to first when The Nation arrives? As the sharpest feminist commentator in the country, doesn’t Pollitt make feminism seem cool?

Not if you’re the New York Times Book Review, which has rarely met a feminist it liked. The former ballerina Toni Bentley, author of a book on the delights of crotchless panties and the epiphanies of anal sex (I quote: a “direct path … to God”), was assigned to review Pollitt’s latest collection of essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, and apparently didn’t like it. Fair enough. But Bentley, possibly disappointed by the lack of sodomy, used her review as an opportunity to trash feminists and to trash Pollitt for both being one and not being one who is stereotypical enough.

“Groaning and moaning from clever, sassy women has become a genre unto itself,” writes Bentley of feminist writings, “the righteous revenge of the liberal, pre-, during- or postmenopausal woman,” meaning that even feminists cannot escape from being governed by their hormones and their wombs. Feminists, as we know, are always angry and “shrill”; they are “enraged, educated women” whom Bentley labels “vagina dentate intellectuals.”

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OpenSecrets.org now features updated campaign finance profiles for members of the House and Senate. The site offers a wealth of information about who is greasing whom and for how much.

Find out who’s financing your legislators by clicking here.