President Bill Clinton came to the White House briefing room yesterday in a rare, intriguing, shocking, and somewhat bizarre (for Washington) display of common sense.
The former President was at the White House to meet with the current President, and their meeting turned into a 30-minute discourse on economics, bipartisanship, politics and realism.
His lecture wasn't aimed at the White House, or necessarily Republicans, but at members of his own party who have been upset over parts of the Bush era tax cut extension compromise worked out between the White House and Republican Congressional leaders.
Clinton's basic lesson: The American people want Washington to work. Period.
In praising the compromise deal he made it seem that Washington has been stuck in a deep freeze — and finally there is a thaw.
"In general a lot of people are heaving a sigh of relief that there's finally been some agreement on something," said Clinton.
Bill Clinton and Obama Team up to Push Tax Deal
The past and current presidents have read this year's mid-term election results the same way Mr. Clinton did after his party's loss in 1994: The American people didn't reject the Democrats because they weren't liberal enough (as some in Congress would like to think) or that they didn't fight hard enough for their priorities (a notion Mr. Obama lashed out against in his press conference earlier this week).
What the American people want (including many crucial-to-re-election independent voters) is a President who works across politics to accomplish things for the country.
This is what Clinton believes, and this is what the White House is now believing.
Returning to the notion that having the two parties work together is a relief, Clinton hit on the notion that compromise requires give-and-take.
"I think it is [an] enormous relief for America to think that both parties might vote for something, anything, that they could both agree on," he said. "And there is no way you can have a compromise without having something in the bill that you don't like."
While some Democrats in Congress may not agree — and while even the President has offered there are provisions in the tax package he doesn't like — both presidents believe putting the country's priorities (like fixing the economy) first is the key to success.
Clinton proved it in 1996, and President Obama hopes to do so in 2012.
Six NATO service members were killed Sunday in an insurgent attack in southern Afghanistan, the international alliance said in a statement.
NATO did not give further details, in keeping with a policy of waiting for individual countries from the alliance to identify their casualties.
Most NATO troops in southern Afghanistan come from the United States, but there are contingents from several nations in the area.
Fighting has increased in southern Afghanistan as a surge of U.S. troops have poured into Helmand and Kandahar provinces this year in an attempt to push the Taliban out of their traditional strongholds.
More than 670 international troops have been killed so far this year, well above the 502 killed in the whole of 2009.
Sunday's attack was the second incident in two weeks to kill so many service members. On Nov. 29, an Afghan policeman turned his gun on his American trainers in the east, killing six of them before he was gunned down. The Taliban claimed that they had sent him to join the police as a sleeper agent. Before that, five U.S. soldiers were killed in a Nov. 14 insurgent attack on their unit in eastern Afghanistan
Also Sunday, NATO said a joint NATO-Afghan force killed a Taliban leader and captured a key member of another militant group in the east.
The Taliban leader was involved in weapons smuggling and attacks in eastern Wardak province, according to a statement. NATO identified him only by his first name, Fedahi.
Two men threatened the troops as they entered a compound Saturday night where they had heard Fedahi was staying. They shot and killed both men and one was later identified as Fedahi, the statement said. The coalition statement said no civilians were harmed in the operation.
In a separate raid in eastern Khost province Saturday night, NATO and Afghan troops captured a leader for the Haqqani network, a Pakistan-based Taliban faction closely tied to al-Qaida.
The troops captured the targeted militant in a compound in Terayzai district, according to a statement. The detainee, it said, has conducted bomb attacks and ambushes against Afghan and coalition troops.
American lawmakers are pressing China for action on currency and high-tech trade in talks this week, and a planned Washington visit by President Hu Jintao next month has raised hopes Beijing might offer concessions.
The meeting of the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade on Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington comes as Beijing faces rising congressional pressure over its swollen trade surplus. The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a measure to allow Washington to punish currency manipulation and the Senate is considering it.
Both sides are likely hoping for a "successful meeting with some deliverables" ahead of Hu's arrival in Washington in January, said Christian Murck, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.
"Because of the timing, expectations are higher," Murck said.
A group of 32 U.S. senators, both Democrats and Republicans, wrote to the chief Chinese envoy, Vice Premier Wang Qishan, ahead of the meeting to press for action on a list of chronic irritants.
They cited Beijing's failure to stamp out rampant product piracy and complaints that its currency controls keep its yuan artificially weak, giving China's exporters an unfair price advantage and wiping out U.S. jobs.
They also appealed for an end to Beijing's "indigenous innovation" policy, under which the communist government is trying to nurture domestic technology companies by favoring them in official procurement. Business groups complain that could shut foreign suppliers out of fast-growing markets for computers and other goods.
Beijing promised more exchange rate flexibility in June but the yuan has strengthened by only about 3 percent against the dollar since then. Chinese officials have rejected a faster rise, saying that would lead to huge job losses.
Chinese envoys might be looking for ways to placate American critics but concessions are likely to be limited, said Ren Xianfang, senior analyst in Beijing for IHS Global Insight, a consulting firm.
"It has been almost a Chinese tradition for the government to make certain concessions regarding bilateral issues ahead of state visits," Ren said.
Beijing might promise more currency flexibility, but "actual implementation will certainly be aligned with China's own economic priorities at this moment, which means it will be gradual and it will remain unpredictable," she said.
The U.S. trade deficit with China is especially sensitive at a time when Washington faces pressure to cut high unemployment. The gap widened to a monthly record of $28 billion in August and is running 21 percent higher than in 2009.
"We urge China to demonstrate its commitment to adopting a market-determined exchange rate by allowing its currency to appreciate meaningfully in advance of President Hu's visit," said the Senate letter. Signers included Max Baucus, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, and Chuck Grassley, its senior Republican member.
The U.S. delegation to the 21st meeting of the JCCT is led by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack also is due to take part.
The JCCT is lower-profile than the U.S.-Chinese Strategic & Economic Dialogue, which covers cooperation on topics from geopolitics to energy and health. But companies closely watch the JCCT because it focuses on business issues and has produced agreements in the past on some disputes.
This year's meeting comes amid wrangling over access to each other's markets for steel pipes, beef, movies and other goods.
Beijing has tried to mollify criticism of "indigenous innovation" by promising to treat Chinese units of foreign companies as domestic suppliers. But that leaves out suppliers that have no operations in China, and business groups worry local governments still exclude foreign companies.
The senators warned Wang that Beijing's innovation policy has a "corrosive effect" on business confidence and support for U.S.-Chinese economic relations.
"It is in our mutual interest for China to suspend these discriminatory policies," their letter said.
Mark Madoff, the son of convicted Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff, apparently killed himself while his wife was out of town and his 2-year-old son was asleep in a nearby bedroom, New York police said Saturday.
Deputy New York Police Commissioner Paul Browne said Madoff's father-in-law discovered the body around 7:30 a.m. Saturday, while his grandson was sleeping in a back bedroom. Madoff was fully clothed and hanging from a ceiling pipe with a dog leash around his neck. The boy was unharmed.
Prior to his death, Madoff e-mailed his wife in Florida with "words to the effect that someone should check on his son," Browne said.
Neither Browne nor Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly would say if Madoff had left a suicide note. But Kelly said that Madoff sent multiple e-mails to various family members "during the morning hours" on Saturday.
The e-mails went out after after 4 a.m. Saturday, Browne said.
Police investigators were at Madoff's apartment to examine the circumstances surrounding his suspected suicide. Police allowed the medical examiner to remove Madoff's remains around 12:20 p.m., about 5 hrs after he was discovered. Crime scene investigators remained on the scene Saturday afternoon.
An autopsy will be conducted to determine the exact cause of death.
Madoff's death occurred on the second anniversary of his father's arrest.
"Mark Madoff took his own life today," Madoff's attorney Martin Flumenbaum said in a statement. "This is a terrible and unnecessary tragedy. Mark was an innocent victim of his father's monstrous crime who succumbed to two years of unrelenting pressure from false accusations and innuendo. We are all deeply saddened by this shocking turn of events."
Bernard Madoff is currently serving a 150-year prison sentence for masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. Madoff bilked investors out of $50 billion by masquerading his investment firm as legitimate when it was nothing more than a front. He used funds from new investors to send payments to his more mature investors, falsely portraying them as proceeds from investments, when they were actually stolen money.
The 71-year-old Madoff pleaded guilty to the charges in 2009 and is now incarcerated at the Butner Federal Correction Complex, a medium-security prison in North Carolina. Madoff is scheduled to be released on Nov. 14, 2139.
Bernard Madoff's criminal activities have spawned a tidal wave of civil actions against Mark Madoff, his mother, siblings and hundreds of other defendants, accused of profiting off the Ponzi scheme by withdrawing more money from Madoff's fund than they invested, money they presumably thought was investment income.
A person familiar with the Madoffs says Mark Madoff has not been in touch with his extended family for the past two years.
Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee in charge of recovering and distributing Madoff's assets, has filed a slew of lawsuits in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan over the past week on behalf of some of Madoff's victims.
One filed on December 8 named Mark Madoff -- as well as his brother Andrew and uncle Peter -- as one of several defendants in a civil lawsuit.
On Saturday, Picard issued a brief statement expressing his condolences.
"This is a tragic development, and my sympathy goes out to Mark Madoff's family," he said.
The defendants include JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, UBS, an Austrian banker, and two CPAs (and their families) who are accused of knowing about the fraud but covering it up and profiting from it.
The majority of Madoff's victims did not invest directly in his firm. They invested in third-party feeder funds, and therefore don't qualify for the financial protections extended to direct investors.
So far, 16,394 claims have been filed by investors who claim to have lost money.
The majority of the claims -- 13,054, or nearly 80% of the total -- have been denied, because the investors were invested through feeder funds.
Newly released U.S. diplomatic cables indicate that the Vatican felt "offended" that Ireland failed to respect Holy See "sovereignty" by asking high-ranking churchmen to answer questions from an Irish commission probing decades of sex abuse of minors by clergy.
That the Holy See used its diplomatic-immunity status as a tiny city-state to try to thwart the Irish fact-finding probe has long been known. But the WikiLeaks cables, published by Britain's The Guardian newspaper on Saturday, contain delicate, behind-the-scenes diplomatic assessments of the highly charged situation.
The Vatican press office declined to comment on the content of the cables Saturday, but decried the leaks as a matter of "extreme seriousness."
The U.S. ambassador to the Holy See also condemned the leaks and said the Vatican and America cooperate in promoting universal values.
One leaked document published Saturday, authored in February 2010 by Rome-based diplomat Julieta Valls Noyes, cited her conversations with Irish Ambassador Noel Fahey and his deputy, Helena Keleher, about the diplomatic bind Ireland found itself in.
Ireland wanted to be seen as fully supportive of the independent probe into child-abuse cover-ups in the Dublin Archdiocese, but its Rome officials also didn't want to intervene in the probe's efforts to get information from the Vatican, Noyes' report said.
Noyes reported that Irish diplomats in Rome decided not to press Vatican officials to respond to questions from the panel, which was led by an Irish judge and operated independently of Ireland's government. It sent letters to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Vatican's ambassador to Ireland seeking information on Vatican officials' knowledge of cover-ups, but got no replies.
Noyes, citing a conversation with a Holy See official, wrote that the investigators' letters "offended many in the Vatican" because they were viewed as "an affront to Vatican sovereignty."
The diplomat wrote that "adding insult to injury, Vatican officials also believed some Irish opposition politicians were making political hay with the situation by publicly calling on the government to demand that the Vatican reply."
"In the end the Irish government decided not to press the Vatican to reply," the U.S. diplomat wrote, citing Keleher.
Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs, the Dublin Archdiocese and the Vatican's ambassador in Rome, Giuseppe Leanza, also declined to comment.
But one of Ireland's most prominent campaigners against the Catholic Church's cover-up of child abuse, Andrew Madden, said the leaked document offered more evidence that the Vatican was concerned only about protecting itself, not about admitting the truth.
"The only issue for the Vatican has been the supposed 'failure' of the Irish government to protect the Vatican from intrusive questions. Self-interest ruled the day when their priests were raping children," said Madden, a former altar boy who was molested by a Dublin priest. In 1995 Madden became the first person in Ireland to go public with a lawsuit against the church, opening the floodgates for hundreds of lawsuits.
The Dublin Archdiocese report, published in November 2009, found that senior church officials had kept detailed files on child-abuse reports involving 170 suspected pedophile priests since 1940 - but all the abuse was covered up until 1995, and many files were kept secret until 2004 when Dublin received a new reform-minded archbishop, Diarmuid Martin.
Saturday's official Vatican press statement said the WikiLeaks cables "reflect the perceptions and opinions of the people who wrote them and cannot be considered as expressions of the Holy See itself." It added that the report's "reliability must, then, be evaluated carefully and with great prudence."
The cables also contain information regarding the Vatican's relations with the Anglican Communion, which includes the Church of England and its affiliates in more than 160 countries.
One cable reports that Britain's ambassador to the Vatican warned that the pope's invitation to disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic church had chilled relations between the two churches and risked inciting a violent backlash against British Catholics.
A November 2009 file from U.S. Embassy at the Vatican quotes British envoy Francis Campbell as saying that "Anglican-Vatican relations were facing their worst crisis in 150 years as a result of the pope's decision."
The Vatican moved last year to make it easier for traditional Anglicans upset over the appointment of female priests and gay bishops to join the Catholic Church, whose teaching holds that homosexual activity is sinful.
The pope invited Anglicans to join new "personal ordinariates," which allow them to continue to use some of their traditional liturgy and be served by married priests.
A cable quotes Campbell as saying the move put the Anglican spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, "in an impossible situation." And he worried that the crisis could aggravate "latent anti-Catholicism" in majority-Protestant England.
"The outcome could be discrimination or in isolated cases, even violence, against this minority," the cable said.
