US to be place on “heightened terror alert” in response to Republican efforts to maintain hold on presidency.
Bob Novak caught a lot of grief for that incident last week in which he struck a pedestrian in downtown DC and then kept driving until flagged by a bicyclist. Novak said he didn’t realize he’d hit anyone. And he may have been telling the truth. According to the Associated Press this is sometimes a symptom of a brain tumor …
Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a homeless man with his black Corvette in downtown Washington. Novak kept going until he was stopped by a bicyclist, who said the man was splayed on Novak’s windshield.
Dr. Lynne Taylor, a neuro-oncologist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, said residents at the hospital are taught to check for brain tumors in patients who report having a recent car accident in which they didn’t realize they struck something.
“People get spatial and visual neglect of a certain part of their bodies and they don’t realize they’ve done what they’ve done,” said Taylor, a fellow with the American Academy of Neurology.
This is a story I’ve been wanting to dig into for a while.
We’re regularly told that we should be looking into the background of a presidential candidates key advisors. And in the on-going contretemps over who’s got the best judgment and experience on Iraq, John McCain voice and brain is Randy Scheunemann. Look at the key statements from the campaign, the enunciations of policy and so forth and you’ll see they’re almost all statements from him. So who is it that’s speaking for John McCain on Iraq and shaping his views of what our policy there should be?
It comes as no surprise that Scheunemann was a staunch supporter of the war. But he was much more that. He was not only a key behind-the-scenes promoter and architect of the war. He also had a troublingly close relationship with Ahmad Chalabi — the Iraqi exile we now know fed the US reams of bogus intelligence about phantom WMD and ties to al Qaeda and allegedly also shared highly classified US intelligence with the Iranians. Indeed, something I didn’t realize, back when he and other neoconservatives were cooking up the Iraq War in 2002, Scheunemann’s lobbying firm, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which he set up with the White House’s blessing to gin up support for the Iraq War and Chalabi’s handler/spokesman Francis Brooke all shared an address. Almost as if they were different arms of the same operation.
And it’s not just what happened before the war. He was also a big time advocate of most of the biggest policy screw ups of the post-war period — like the aggressive ‘debaathification’ program that everyone now realizes was a disaster as well as the decision to freeze the UN out of any role in the reconstruction of the country.
All of this information is contained in Zachary Roth’s first installment of his reporting on Scheunemann. John McCain is basing his campaign now on his judgment and experience on Iraq. So why is he still taking the advice of the guy who was the conduit between him and Ahmad Chalabi an who has been wrong about Iraq so many times?
McCain’s whole campaign now is based on his judgment on Iraq. So why aren’t the campaign reporters telling you more about his top foreign policy advisor’s iffy past?
McCain still throwing around random Iraq withdrawal timetables: How about one month? That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
John McCain campaign manager Rick Davis: “Barack Obama has more fans across the world than Paris Hilton does.”
The AFL-CIO is targeting blue collar voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania with a big mailing designed to counter the “Obama is Muslim” rumors.
A year ago, John McCain pledged to capture Osama bin Laden even if it meant going to gates of hell. Last night, McCain told Larry King that he wouldn’t even chase bin Laden into Pakistan:
Sen. Ted Stevens indicted on seven counts.
Just to give you a little background on this story. We keep our ears pretty close to the ground on Ted Stevens. And while an eventual indictment was not at all unexpected, I feel pretty confident saying that this indictment coming down now was. There was a pretty broad expectation that Stevens’ son, former Alaska state senate president Ben Stevens, would be indicted first.
As you know we’ve been on the Stevens story for some time. And here’s our archive of Stevens coverage going back now almost two years. Here’s our TPMtv episodes on the Stevens’ case.
At the Netroots Nation conference in Austin, TPMtv talked to former NATO Commander and retired General Wesley Clark and former Bush administration counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke about what course America needs to take to save a darkening situation in Afghanistan …
High-res version at Veracifier.com.