The Obama camp has put out a statement describing as “inaccurate” that CTV report about back-channel communications between the campaign and the Canadian ambassador to reassure him about Obama’s NAFTA rhetoric.
They don’t say what exactly is inaccurate about the report.
We have the full statement here.
The Canadian embassy is refuting the CTV report, saying no such conversations about NAFTA ever took place with either campaign.
Late Update: ABC News has more reaction from the Canadian embassy.
Later Update: Meanwhile, a key labor surrogate for Hillary is hitting Obama over the CTV report.
Latest Update: Greg Sargent is reporting similar denials from the Canadian embassy, but with the caveat that discussions about NAFTA with both campaigns has occurred, although none like the one described in the Canadian TV report.
Ruth Rosen remembers Barbara Seaman, the crusading pioneer of the women’s health movement.
From TPM Reader ND:
I have been an avid reader of your blog for many years and was moved to email you because it seems to me that this whole discussion about NAFTA seems to be missing a key component.
A little background–I am a professor of political science and my focus is almost exclusively on Latin America and development issues. In this context it is almost hallucinatory to watch the debate about NAFTA, and the comments about it from newspapers to blogs (including a headline here in TPM about Mexican and Canadian reactions), that are completely uninformed about how the rest of the countries in this hemisphere view, frame and consider these trade agreements.
There is much discussion in academic circles about the effects of free trade agreements on developed economies–Dani Rodrik at Harvard is an excellent example of this– and I could write at least twenty pages on the different angles there are on this and which have played quite a lot in the media and to some extent in this election cycle. But there is also a very passionate debate about the effects of these agreements on developing countries, and this pops up here and there in the media but only in the context of anti WTO demonstrations.
In reality, passing trade agreements in Latin America is probably the hardest and most contentious policy decision a government can make. It is not just about anti Americanism, or a sovereignty issue, it has to do with concerns regarding social safety net programs that have to be cut, massive privatization programs, and all the regulations that guarantee safe working conditions, environmental compliance and good wages. So when Obama or Clinton talk about renegotiation it seems to be assumed that the other countries would NOT want to renegotiate and do NOT have the same concern about having enforcement of these issues. They do, even if renegotiation might be a hard pill to swallow politically because of the changed policy environment in the region.
To my mind what has been missing is an awareness of how contentious these agreements are and how they have been part of elections in these countries as well. If the press did a little of leg work they would have discovered that in 2006 the Mexican presidential election was very much about renegotiating NAFTA (the candidate most in favor of this, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, lost very narrowly).
Perhaps the best example is playing out in DC today–all the signatories of CAFTA-DR are giving Costa Rica (the most staunch ally of the united States in Latin America) an extra 7 months to be able to join the pact because even after 5 years of negotiation, of having signed it, of having approved it in a referendum last October, opposition parties in congress in CR are fighting tooth and nail to assure the guarantees that the candidates mentioned in the debate on Tuesday and that so far have not been included to these parties’ satisfaction.
With all the back and forth about Canada the big hemispheric picture seems to be missing. Just something I thought your readers should know.
What’s likely next Tuesday? And what’s John McCain’s real plan for running against Barack Obama? We give you our read in today’s episode of our weekly campaign 2008 roundup …
We’re seeing some new jousting now between the Hillary and Obama camps over February fundraising hauls. Camp Hillary says they’re going to hit $35 mill. Meanwhile, Obama’s folks are saying they’re on track to raise “considerably more” than that.
But this is a case where it’s important to step back from the intramural squabble and look at the bigger picture. It would seem that the Dems as a whole, or at least the two remaining presidential candidates, are on track to raise some number in excess of $70 million in the short month of February. Maybe Obama will raise $45 million, who knows. But even if he does, $35 million would have been a shockingly large sum as recently as, well, last month. The impact of the small-donor fundraising engine the Dems are sitting on is difficult to overstate going into the summer and fall.
Ickes: Seen any missteps in the Clinton primary race? Talk to Penn.
Late Update: So, so sad. Now even Shrum’s piling on about Penn’s incompetence. Now that’s gotta hurt …
Late Udpate: Now Arianna decides to slap Penn around a bit.
As you know, for seven or eight months now, we’ve been slowly redesigning and retooling our entire network of sites — first with TPM and the news section we rolled out mid-2007 and now with all of our sites. So I wanted to take a moment to note the work of the outfit we’ve been working with on this on-going project: Apperceptive.com.
TPM has always been a tiny operation run by the skin of our collective teeth. So this has been the first time we’ve had the resources to go to industry standard experts on the publishing platform we operate on (Movable Type) — something that the size of our audience and operation has now made essential. The change in the graphics and layout are obvious, if you’re a longtime reader. What’s less clear is that the way the site functions on the back-end is vastly more complex (with the news section, comments, the way the sites are now integrated together) than was the case in any of the earlier iterations of the site. One other point I should note: because of our size and resources, we’ve never been able to field close to the hardware resources behind the site as would be called for with the scale of traffic we get (to give you a sense, we now regularly get traffic equal to what we got on election night 2006, and almost four times what we got on election night 2004). That’s required some custom tinkering to keep our blog train from going off the server rails.
Now, we’ve gotten some nice praise recently for the stuff our team has published at TPM. But literally none of it would be possible without the engine the folks at Apperceptive have built for us that keeps the words streaming off our keyboards on to your computer screens. So they come with our strong recommendation. And if you’re looking for people who do this kind of work I’d be happy to answer your questions about our experience.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refers the criminal contempt resolution against Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers to the U.S. attorney for D.C.
From The Australian …
THE Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The former World Bank vice-president yesterday said the war had, so far, cost the US something like $US3trillion ($3.3 trillion) compared with the $US50-$US60-billion predicted in 2003.
…
Professor Stiglitz told the Chatham House think tank in London that the Bush White House was currently estimating the cost of the war at about $US500 billion, but that figure massively understated things such as the medical and welfare costs of US military servicemen.
The war was now the second-most expensive in US history after World War II and the second-longest after Vietnam, he said.
The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.
“The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system,” he said.
That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.