Baked Alaskan

Friend of Media Nation Al Giordano has broken the news that Sarah Palin had a tanning bed installed in the Alaska governor's mansion shortly after she was sworn in. Giordano and Bill Conroy, writing for NarcoNews.com, report that Palin paid for the bed with her own money.

I don't care, and Giordano doesn't seem to care all that much either. I mention this only in the context of the mockery directed at John Edwards' $400 haircut (and, for that matter, Bill Clinton's tarmac haircut), John Kerry's disturbing preference for Swiss cheese, Barack Obama's failure to scream for ice cream and similar campaign-trail stupidity.

In other words, Sarah Palin must be ... an elitist!

Checking in with Al Giordano

I just added Al Giordano to the Media Nation links. My former Boston Phoenix colleague is always well worth reading, and I expect that will especially be the case for the rest of the campaign.

Giordano's campaign blog, The Field, is an interesting story in and of itself.

Al Giordano fights for DNC credentials

Narco News founder and former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano is involved in a nasty dispute with a Web site called RuralVotes.com.

Earlier this year, Giordano was blogging the primaries on a RuralVotes page called The Field (see this and this). But recently, claiming censorship, he took it down and moved it to his own site. Now he wants the credentials to the Democratic National Convention that had been awarded to The Field when it was based at RuralVotes, claiming — with quite a bit of statistical evidence — that his readers have followed him to his new location.

There doesn't seem to be anything on the old site giving the RuralVotes side of this dispute. As best as I can tell, The Field has been renamed The Back Forty. If anyone would like to respond to Giordano's charges, I would be glad to post it.

Giordano is an astute political observer and a dedicated rabble-rouser. I wish him well.

The Clintons and Colombia

Hillary Clinton got rid of demoted her chief strategist, Mark Penn, after it was revealed that Penn was working for a free-trade agreement with Colombia that Clinton opposed. But the larger issue, I argue in my latest for the Guardian, is the Clintons' longstanding ties to Colombian president Álvaro Uribe and their indifference toward his miserable human-rights record.

The Colombian primary

My old Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano reports in the Narco News Bulletin that Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, a right-wing despot with a deplorable human-rights record, is deeply worried about the possibility that Barack Obama will become president. Giordano writes:

[T]he Clinton organization has a long history of backing — politically and economically — the Colombian far right, its narco-politicians and paramilitary death squads, of whom Uribe is supreme leader. In 2000, then-US president Bill Clinton went on Colombian national TV to announce "Plan Colombia," the multi-billion dollar US military intervention that keeps Uribe and his repressive regime in power to this day.

According to Giordano's report, Uribe's human-rights record is so bad that it recently attracted the attention of Human Rights Watch and a number of other religious and humanitarian organizations. Last year, Giordano notes, Al Gore decided not to attend an environmental meeting in Miami because he didn't want to share the stage with Uribe, who has been linked to right-wing death squads.

The Clintons, on the other hand, have continued to be ardent supporters of Uribe, with the former president accepting an award from the Colombian government last year.

The Uribe matter has made it into the mainstream media, with the Associated Press running a story on Thursday. But the AP emphasizes Uribe's displeasure over Obama's opposition to a U.S.-Colombia free-trade agreement — never mentioning, as Giordano observes, that Hillary Clinton has said she opposes the agreement as well.

This is an important story that almost certainly won't get the attention it deserves.

More: Ben Smith of the Politico reports that the Colombian government no longer requires the services of Clinton strategist Mark Penn.

An ugly Democratic split

My former Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano, on leave from the Narco News Bulletin, has been blogging the presidential campaign this winter. He's got a particularly detailed and perceptive post on the Nevada Democratic caucuses, in which he offers some thoughts — backed up by first-hand reporting — on the increasingly ugly split between pro-Obama African-Americans and pro-Clinton Latinos. Giordano writes:

Now, I'm a connoisseur of ugliness in all its forms, I find it mostly entertaining, but the part of yesterday's caucus that was so ugly as to be distressing was to see the Hispanic and black communities so polarized: The Clinton caucusers were predominantly Hispanic-American and the Obama caucusers were predominantly African-American — most on both sides were women — and they shouted and taunted each other with boos, cat-calls, hisses, thumbs down, and at one point one man on the Obama side began chanting, "I did not have sex with that woman!"

He concludes: "Frankly, unless events conspire during this 2008 Democratic primary process to reverse those truly ugly developments, any Democrat that thinks that November is already won is a fool that is not to be taken seriously from here on out." (Thanks to Media Nation reader C.M.)