NEWS DAY | World/National – Health care, Afghanistan, Philippines

The big news Saturday night was bringing some kind of health care bill to the Senate floor. That took strong-arming, promises, and wheeling and dealing in the oldest political style, with Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana boasting of getting $300 million in federal funding for her home state as a precondition for her support, according to the Washington Post.

“I am not going to be defensive,” she declared. “And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix.” …
After Landrieu threw in her support (she asserted that the extra Medicaid funds were “not the reason” for her vote), the lone holdout in the 60-member Democratic caucus was Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. Like other Democratic moderates who knew a single vote could kill the bill, she took a streetcar named Opportunism, transferred to one called Wavering and made off with concessions of her own.

Both of them still say they won’t support the bill for passage as long as it has the current public option. At NPR, Guy Raz, interviewing former Senator Tom Daschle, asked the question that many of us think is crucial:

In the end, if you need to compromise so much to get the 60 votes, how do you make sure the result isn’t simply a watered down version of health care legislation that doesn’t do all that much at achieving the goal of insuring millions of uninsured people?

Four more U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan on Sunday, reports the New York Times, bringing the total for November to 15. (October set a record, with 58 U.S. deaths.) Two of the soldiers killed on Sunday died in a bombing in southern Afghanistan, another in a firefight in southern Afghanistan, and a the fourth in a bomb explosion in the eastern part of the country.

As the war grinds on, President Hamid Karzai was inaugurated for a second term and promised to fight corruption. The promise, as the Guardian points out, is a requirement of continued U.S. and allied support:

Karzai’s inauguration followed an election process blighted by fraud, which only ended after his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, pulled out of a runoff, saying it was impossible for the vote to be fair….
Before the ceremony, the US, UK and other frustrated Nato countries had urged Karzai to use his inauguration speech announce a government clean-up.

If Karzai were really going to clean up corruption, he would have to begin close to home. Back in May, McClatchy News reported that Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s brother and the head of Kandahar’s provincial council, threatened a reporter who was writing about drugs and corruption in Afghanistan (“The ride to Kandahar airport was tense. The Afghan president’s brother had just yelled a litany of obscenities and said he was about to beat me.”). In October, the New York Times reportedthat the president’s brother, in addition to his suspected corruption and drug involvement, is probably on the CIA payroll.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

As I’ve pointed out in this column, more than once, General McChrystal’s proposed new U.S. strategy is based not only on more U.S. troops, but more crucially on a credible, responsible Afghan government – which simply does not exist.

Minnesota’s Rep. Keith Ellison is one of many congress members who are coming to the conclusion that we should not send more U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan. According to MinnPost:

Rep. Keith Ellison, back from a trip last week to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said today that a new strategy is needed in the region – one that doesn’t include sending more troops to U.S. troops to Afghanistan until that country’s president, Hamid Karzai, cleans up corruption and “makes himself into a president that the United States can support.”

In the Philippines, the 500-year civil war in Mindanao grinds on. The New York Times reports displacement of hundreds of thousands of people on the island. And this weekend, 21 politicians and journalists were massacred.BBC reports:

Election violence is not unusual in the Philippines but the scale of this attack is shocking. Every election period features assassinations of rivals, particularly in provincial areas where the forces of law and order are often tightly connected to local clans.

… In this case, the Mangudadatu and Ampatuan clans were not always at war – but the Mangudadatu family’s bid to run for governor appears to have provoked a dramatic rise in tension.

News with attitude, mostly from MN but with occasional forays abroad. News Day summarizes, links to, and comments on reports from news media around the world, with particular attention to Minnesota news.

Mary Turck

Mary Tuck is the editor of the TC Daily Planet.