In: Senator Hillary Clinton. We will admit to being somewhat immoderate during the course of this campaign on the subject of the Junior Senator from New York, who, after all, was competing for the highest office in the land. A friend today reminded us of this, and now we seek to right ourselves as the smouldering over-heatedness of the primaries is over and the Great Work of winning the general election lies before us.
The Senator ran an incredible campaign that was unfortunately cursed with the bad luck of the baggage of her pro-Iraq war vote from which she never recovered. As many pundits have opined, if Senator Clinton had not voted in 2002 to allow the President to invade Iraq on the now-discredited intelligence that Hussein was acquiring weapons of mass distraction, she would be the nominee right now. It was a change election and although she fought nimbly to the very end, the winds of History were against the Senator's candidacy. But we cannot fail to note with some awe the astonishing mid-campaign 180-degree turn in Pennsylvania to embrace the John Edwards white working class vote. Of course it veered, in West Virginia and Kentucky, into something bordering on the racial -- and we called it as such at the time -- it was an almost unprecedented political feat.
Senator Clinton has now endorsed Senator Obama solidly (even on her campaign web page). And we should leave the tensions of immoderate attack from the primaries behind us and move forward. We are all on the same page now. And we are no longer divided thanks to Hillary's endorsement and the work she will be doing in the coming weeks to bring the party -- and her 17 million-plus admirers -- together.
Out: Human Smuggling And Yemen. Even as Yemen is pursuing Biblical tourism with vigilance, it has extraordinarily un-Christ like problems which have conveniently been swept under the rug. Yemen, we just learned today, has problems with the noxious human smuggling trade. From Janes:
"In the last three years, Yemen has become a centre for trafficking Iraqi women.
"In Yemen, this has focused on transhipment; the women are brought to Yemen and then sold to clients in other countries, mainly the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries.
"A number of factors have contributed to Yemen's development as a centre for human trafficking. Yemen is relatively close to the GCC countries and the Yemeni police are either unwilling or unable to stop or impede the traffickers.
"Trafficking not only exacts a terrible cost in human terms but also contributes to the continued instability of Iraq. The amount of money being generated through the sale of these women is substantial. While most of the money generated through the trafficking operation remains in Yemen, some of the money is returned to Iraq where it helps fund additional criminal activity."
More here.
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