NATIONAL & WORLD NEWS Thursday May 29, 2008

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New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Go to the links for the following articles:

-In Stock Plan, Employees See Stacked Deck
CLEWISTON, Fla. — Thousands of workers at U.S. Sugar thought they were getting a good deal when the company shelved their pension plan and gave them stock for their retirement instead. They had a heady sense of controlling their own destiny as they became the company’s biggest shareholders, Vic McCorvey, a former farm manager there, said. “It was always stressed to me, as manager of that 20,000-acre farm, that the better you do, the higher your stock will be and the more retirement you could get,” Mr. McCorvey said. “That’s why I worked six and seven days a week, 14 hours a day,” slogging through wet and buggy cane fields, doing whatever it took. Now that many U.S. Sugar workers are reaching retirement age, though, the company has been cashing them out of the retirement plan at a much lower price than they could have received. Unknown to them, an outside investor was offering to buy the company — and their shares — for far more. Longtime employees say they have lost out on tens of thousands of dollars each and millions of dollars as a group, while insiders of the company came out ahead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/business/29sugar.html?hp

-I Knew It All Along
For all of its self serving, Scott McClellan’s book serves one good purpose:
It is a reminder that we still don’t know how far President Bush waded in a “culture of deception.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29thu2.html?ref=opinion

-Lieberman Says He’ll Speak at Dinner
Sen. Joe Lieberman said Wednesday he will address a conference hosted by the Rev. John Hagee, who was spurned by Republican John McCain for his claim that God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land. ''I believe that Pastor Hagee has made comments that are deeply unacceptable and urtful,'' Lieberman, I-Conn., said in a statement. ''I also believe that a person should be judged on the entire span of his or her life's works.
Pastor Hagee has devoted much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews.'' Lieberman is one of the strongest supporters of likely GOP presidential nominee McCain. He also has been mentioned as a possible running mate. Lieberman plans to appear at agee's ''Christians United for Israel'' summit in Washington. He called Hagee's group ''a vital force in supporting the war against terrorism and defending our ally, Israel.'' The liberal advocacy group Democracy for America called on Lieberman to cut his ties to Hagee and his extremist views.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Lieberman-Hagee.html

-Class Dismissed
DOES Barack Obama have a problem with the white working class? Despite the ubiquity of the term during this presidential campaign, it’s hard to say what, exactly, “working class” means. If you define class by education, which is polled more consistently than occupation or income, Mr. Obama certainly seems to have trouble with these crucial swing voters. In almost every Democratic primary, he has lost white voters who didn’t graduate from college to Hillary Clinton. But that doesn’t mean those voters will snub him in the fall. First, there is no relationship between how candidates perform among any particular group of voters in primaries and how they do with that segment in the general election. In 1992, Bill Clinton lost college-educated voters to Paul Tsongas in the early competitive primaries, but he went on to win that group in November by the largest margin any Democrat ever had.
Similarly, John Kerry lost young voters in the competitive primaries in 2004 before going on to win them by a record margin in the general election.
Second, Democrats running for president have been losing white, non-college-educated voters since before Mr. Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29mellman.html


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Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Go to the links for the following articles:

-A Past at Rest in Rwanda
KIGALI, Rwanda -- It happened just 14 years ago -- the slaughter of roughly a million people here in only 100 days. "More people had been killed more quickly than in any other mass killing in recorded history," writes Martin Meredith in his book "The Fate of Africa." And yet today there are few visible traces of the genocide that began in April 1994. It's not that Rwandans have forgotten, but that they seem to have willed themselves to live in the present. That makes this place feel different from other post-conflict states I know, such as Iraq and Lebanon, where the past and present are congealed in a wound that never heals.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/28/AR2008052802914.
html

-Leading On Climate Change By Tony Blair
How Action in Congress Can Move the World
The climate change bill that senators are to begin debating next week is a hugely important signal of intent on behalf of U.S. legislators. Yes, negotiations could still alter the legislation. But the bill's core proposition is correct: Unless the United States radically reduces its greenhouse gas emissions, along with other major emitters, the damage to the climate will be irreversible. Radical reduction is unlikely to happen through voluntary action alone.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/28/AR2008052802915.
html

-Flawed Victory
The Supreme Court stretches the law to help victims of workplace retaliation.
THE SUPREME COURT pleased workers this week when it ruled in two cases that employees who suffer retaliation after complaining about discrimination may sue under existing civil rights law. Yet both decisions are deeply flawed and should make those applauding the results more than a little nervous. In a 7 to 2 vote, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. in the majority, the court concluded that a 19th-century law crafted to protect the legal rights of newly freed slaves also protected Hedrick G. Humphries, an African American associate manager at Cracker Barrel who complained to his boss, a white man, about the discriminatory treatment of an African American waitress. Mr. Humphries was fired soon after and sued Cracker Barrel under the 1866 law, alleging retaliation. The law has been understood to protect African Americans from employment discrimination, but it makes no mention of retaliation
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/28/AR2008052802999.
html

-In Rebuking Minister, McCain May Have Alienated Evangelicals
The Rev. Rod Parsley paces the stage, wiping his forehead and shouting to his congregation in a taped sermon that marriage is under attack by "tortured and angry homosexuals." During another of his nationally broadcast television shows, he compares Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan, saying that its goal is to "eliminate" blacks. And at another service at his 12,000-member World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, he punches the air and calls Islam a "false religion" that God has told America to destroy.
"We were built for battle! We were created for conflict! We get off on warfare!" he adds.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/28/AR2008052803037.
html?hpid=topnews


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Sun-Sentinel
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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-South Florida Hispanics split evenly among Democratcs, Republicans
In the battle for Hispanic votes this fall, South Florida may well be "ground zero." That's according to Sergio Bendixen, a pollster who released new data Wednesday from a survey funded by the Hispanic voter registration group, Democracia USA. Increasingly, non-Cuban Hispanics, young voters and independents dominate a region that was once a Cuban-American Republican tronghold. Cuban moderates and Puerto Ricans, as well as South and Central American immigrants, are behind the change.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-flrndhispanicvote0529sbm
ay29,0,3623197.story


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Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com/
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-About time! Reckless TV anchors put on spot
Bravo! A new study has found widespread fear-mongering and reckless journalism by cable television hosts such as CNN's Lou Dobbs and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who have made a career of bashing Hispanic undocumented immigrants and their home countries. Also good news: Likely Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told me in an interview last week that he shares concerns ''about the anti-immigrant tenor that I have seen in some of the broadcasts,'' which are helping create a climate of hatred against Hispanics. The study by Media Matters Action Network, a watchdog group, says Dobbs, O'Reilly and CNN's Glenn Beck serve up steady anger, resentment and myths ``seemingly geared toward creating anti-immigrant hysteria.''
Among the myths perpetuated in these broadcasts are the notions that undocumented Hispanic immigrants are responsible for a crime wave in the United States, that they consume a disproportionate amount of social services and don't pay taxes, that Mexicans are somehow conspiring to take over the United States and that undocumented immigrants are bringing leprosy to the United States.
http://www.miamiherald.com/418/story/550303.html


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Fort Report
http://www.fortreport.com/
Go to the links for the following articles:

-Obama weighs trip to Iraq, but says he won't go with McCain
Barack Obama is considering a visit to Iraq this summer, his first to the war zone since becoming a presidential candidate. But Obama, who has been under criticism from Republican rival John McCain for not visiting Iraq since 2006, declined McCain's invitation for a joint trip. "I just don't want to be involved in a political stunt," Obama said, according to a report on the New York Times website yesterday. "I think that if I'm going to Iraq, then I'm there to talk to troops and talk to commanders. I'm not there to try to score political points or perform."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/05/29/obama_weighs_trip_to_iraq_
but_says_he_wont_go_with_mccain/

-The illegitimate primaries
POOR HOWARD Dean. The head of the Democratic National Committee has to figure out what to do with Florida and Michigan, which broke party rules by holding their presidential primaries early. Senator Hillary Clinton, who won the two flawed contests, wants them to be treated like any other primaries.
Doing so would be a slight to voters in states that followed the rules - and unfair to Senator Barack Obama, whose name wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan. Strictly speaking, the cleanest option is to stick to the rules laid down in advance and strip the rogue primary states of all their delegates. But excluding two key swing states is turning out to be untenable politically. So when the party's rules committee meets Saturday, the least-bad option would be to follow the Republicans' lead by docking the two states half, not all, of their delegates. Then the party should spot Obama the delegates owed to "uncommitted" voters in Michigan - votes that almost surely would have gone to Obama or to John Edwards, who has now endorsed Obama. This compromise would be fair to Clinton, who wouldn't have fared as well in a contested Michigan primary. And it wouldn't affect the nomination battle, which Obama has all but won. (This page has endorsed his bid for the Democratic nomination.)
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/05/
29/the_illegitimate_primaries/

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