Election 2008 Podcast

Aaron Schachter reports from Beirut on views of the US presidential race. A conversation with the head of a divided congregation, Rabbi Felipe Goodman from Temple Beth Shalom in Las Vegas. An interview with retired Army Col. Patrick Lang on the implications of the recent US attack in Syria. And clean coal. McCain likes it. Obama likes it. But what exactly is it? Jason Margolis reports from West Virginia. Episode 25 is ready.

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He babysat Obama’s kids

I’m not sure what that might reveal about how Obama would govern as president. In any case, Rashid Khalidi reportedly denied that it’s true. The NYTimes has the most thorough look I’ve seen yet on the political mini-storm over the Columbia University scholar that’s been whipped up by McCain and Palin.

Vegan evangelicals for McCain

Anne Hull has a great story in today’s Washington Post about some young Christian conservatives this election season. The main character is a Nigerian American woman at Liberty University (founded by Jerry Falwell) who’s been accused of selling out her race by supporting McCain.

Obama according to the unbalanced media

Blogger Jon Swift has compliled an impressive compilation of answers to the question: who is Barack Obama? The “answers” all come from the right-wing blogosphere. It’s fun.

Congo: Land of plunder

My assignment this morning: do a background story on the fighting in Congo. The conflict there is something we’ve kept our eye on here at The World in recent years. But when I say “we”, I don’t mean me. Somehow, I’ve never done a day-of news piece about Congo. This is why I was relieved to get Adam Hochschild on the phone. I interviewed him from my old haunt at KQED in San Francisco, where Hochschild lives. He talked about how Congo’s colonial past continues to haunt the country, how the US has connections with Congo and what he thinks could be done to help quell the violence long-term.

Here’s the full interview with Hochschild, starting with his explanation of how D.R.Congo was born in the late 1800s as the private fiefdom of Belgian King Leopold the Second.  //13:19

If Obama wins…

Bob Kerrey urges him to think about sitting down and negotiating – without preconditions – with John McCain. Because Obama’s greatest test, Kerrey says, could be dealing with a Democratic majority in Congress.

McCain going big on Israel issue

While Fox News takes the Khalidi/LATimes kerfuffle and runs with it.

Georgian military accused of atrocities

At times, it has seemed like McCain and Obama have fallen over each other to show their support for Georgia and its president Mikhail Saakashvili during their war with Russia this summer. The BBC recently gathered accounts in South Ossetia, where the fighting broke out, that suggest Georgian forces might have committed atrocities, even war crimes. Saakashvili denies the allegations. Here’s the radio story I put together for The World today.

Read more on the conflict in Georgia.

Another Republican for Obama

Francis Fukuyama, neocon thinker and author of the influential 1989 essay, The End of History, is supporting Barack Obama. Here are the first two lines in his brief endorsement.

I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush.

McCain-Palin play the Palestinian card

Both McCain and Palin went after Obama today for being connected to Columbia University Middle East scholar, Rashid Khalidi. They say the LA Times is sitting on a 2003 video that shows Obama attending an event for Khalidi, where participants criticised Israel. McCain and Palin are portraying this as an issue of pro-Obama media bias.

Key quotes from the AP:

…”Among other things, Israel was described there as the perpetrator of terrorism rather than the victim,” Palin said at a rally in Ohio. “What we don’t know is how Barack Obama responded to these slurs on a country that he professes to support.”

…”If there was a tape of John McCain in a neo-Nazi outfit, I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different,” McCain said in an interview with Hispanic radio stations.

The Khalidi-Obama connection is nothing new. It appears to be part of an 11th hour kitchen sink strategy on the part of Team McCain. Khalidi used to teach at the University of Chicago and he and his wife are long-time friends of Obama and his wife, Michelle. Evidently, McCain and Palin describe Khalidi as a former PLO spokesman, which the AP reports that he has denied. I haven’t read everything that Khalidi has written. But I have interviewed him numerous times. For anyone who’s followed the Israeli-Palestinian issue at all, it would come as no surprise to hear that a Palestinian-American scholar is critical of Israel in some ways. What’s not clear to me exactly is what McCain thinks Obama’s association with Khalidi suggests.