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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: puborectalis who wrote (37262)	7/31/2008 11:45:16 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224750

Hospital Doctor Slams Obama, Canceled Visit Thursday, July 31, 2008 3:07 PM Today, Dr. Danny Jazarevic, who served as the Chief of Trauma, Critical Care and Vascular Surgery at Landstuhl, issued the following statement on Barack Obama's canceled visit to Ramstein and Landstuhl: "Last week, Senator Obama skipped a visit with wounded U.S. troops at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany because the Pentagon would not allow campaign staff or media to accompany him into the hospital. I served as director of trauma surgery at that hospital for nearly four years and saw the effect that a visit from a celebrity like Senator Obama could have on morale. During that time, I do not recall a single member of Congress canceling a visit with the troops despite being just a few hours away, but Senator Obama seems to have been more concerned with how the visit would affect him than how it would affect the soldiers recovering from wounds received in the service of their country." Dr. Danny Jazarevic served as the Chief of Trauma, Critical Care and Vascular Surgery at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. In 1984, Dr. Jazarevic joined the United States Army and later the Florida National Guard. He has since served in Honduras, Africa, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, and Iraq. From December 2002 through January 2006, Dr. Jazarevic was assigned to the U.S. Army Hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where he served as Chief of Trauma, Critical Care and Vascular Surgery. During this period, he deployed to Iraq numerous times, including with the 101st Airborne Division Forward Surgical Team and as Director of Operations for the 44th U.S. Army Medical Command. He is currently the Chief Trauma Surgeon at a civilian medical center in Florida, and also serves as a full Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. Dr. Jazarevic has been awarded the Bronze Star Medal.

To: puborectalis who wrote (37262)	8/1/2008 3:27:54 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224750

Here's a Democrat who finds Rubin to be a scoundrel: Banking expertise we don't need By Robert Scheer, The National Magazine, Aug 1 2008 ..the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which only became law when Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin prevailed upon President Clinton to sign the bill. The bill's immediate major effect was to legitimatize the long-sought merger between Citibank and insurance giant Travelers. Rubin's critical support for the bill was rewarded with an appointment, within days of its passage, to a top job at Citibank (later Citigroup) paying more than $15 million a year. That is the same Rubin with whom Democratic candidate Barack Obama met, along with other influential advisers, on Tuesday to figure out what to do about the sorry state of our economy. But what in the world did he expect to learn from Rubin? And why did he appoint Rubin's protege, Jason Furman, who ran the Rubin-funded Hamilton Project, to be the Obama campaign's economic director? Hopefully, during their encounter Tuesday, Rubin offered himself as a contrite model of everything that the candidate of change needs to change. After all, Goldman Sachs, where Rubin spent 25 years of his business career before entering the Clinton administration, has been one of the prime corporate villains in the financial shenanigans that led to the sub-prime mortgage scandal. As co-chairman of the firm, surely he had knowledge of the financial hanky-panky that would prove so disastrous down the road. Indeed, as Treasury secretary, he favored an extension of the deregulation that enabled this explosion of banking avarice. Not surprisingly, the current Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, also previously headed Goldman. When Rubin assumed a top position at Citibank after his stint at the Treasury, he was not above influencing his former employees in the government. In one notorious instance during the fall of 2001, when Enron was going down the tubes, Rubin telephoned a Treasury undersecretary and asked him to consider intervening with credit-rating agencies to hold off downgrading Enron's ratings. Some media accounts noted the possibility of a conflict of interest when the story was leaked, because Enron owed Citibank $750 million, which it could not pay if bankrupt. Despite his skills and his vaunted position as Citibank's chairman, Rubin was not spared the disastrous consequences of Citibank's own wild financial manipulations that, if anything, even exceeded those of Enron. Tens of billions in bad mortgage and credit card debt placed the bank at the forefront of the current economic crisis, and so it is weird that Obama would now turn to Rubin for advice. It's even weirder that the presumptive Democratic nominee would pick Rubin's man Furman as his campaign economic director at a time when cleaning up the mess left by the bankers is the highest priority. Furman hardly distinguished himself in that role in John Kerry's failed presidential campaign four years ago, with its muffled economic message that could not be blamed on the candidate's stiff style alone. The bigger problem is that folks such as Rubin and Furman, perhaps best known as an economist for his bold but woefully misguided defense of the Wal-Mart business model, clearly do not feel the pain of the voters who are losing their homes. But then again, why should Rubin, or Gramm on the Republican side, be expected to care when they have made so many millions off of the suffering of those voters? Not good at a time when we need a presidential candidate who sticks it to the bankers instead of sucking up to them. Robert Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation magazine appeal-democrat.com