I can't tell whether I have a bad cold or the swine flu, but I sure would have gotten the vaccine if it had been available. Now I know why I never got that notice:

When the swine flu vaccine was most scarce, health officials gave thousands of doses to corporate clinics at Walt Disney World, Toyota, defense contractors, oil companies and cruise lines, according to a USA TODAY review of vaccine distribution data from three states.

USA TODAY examined how state health departments distributed H1N1 vaccine after public outcry last month over Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs receiving doses while doctors and hospitals encountered shortages. The data show other companies got the vaccine in October and early November. In some cases, early doses went to people not deemed most at risk by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Now we have evidence of what my suspicions were," said U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., chair of a House health subcommittee. "I'm afraid when you have these corporate initiatives, it's not primarily needs-based."

Pallone said he would send the CDC a letter Tuesday asking it to revise guidelines to states on the use of corporate health clinics.

Each state health department must decide how to provide the vaccine to people most at risk, and employers are a legitimate venue, said Anne Schuchat, the CDC's immunization director. CDC's priority groups include pregnant women, people with chronic health conditions, health care workers and people ages 6 months to 24 years. "This is much less about what you do for a living and much more about how do you get the vaccine in the path of those target populations," she said.

It sure would be interesting to know who made those decisions - and at whose request.

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You'd think rape would be one issue Republicans would be smart enough not make into a partisan issue, but no. They couldn't help themselves.

Franken passed an amendment that was attached to a defense bill that would withhold government contracts from companies that refused to let employees bring rape cases before the courts. It should be tough voting against rape, but thirty Republicans did just that and now they are whining the night away because bloggers and some MSMers have highlighted their atrocity. And in their usual silly reality, they are blaming Sen. Al Franken because they are getting hammered over their malfeasance.

Al Franken fallout has GOP fuming

The Republicans are steamed at Franken because partisans on the left are using a measure he sponsored to paint them as rapist sympathizers — and because Franken isn’t doing much to stop them.

“Trying to tap into the natural sympathy that we have for this victim of this rape —and use that as a justification to frankly misrepresent and embarrass his colleagues, I don’t think it’s a very constructive thing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview.

“I think it’s going to make a lot of senators leery and start looking at things he’s doing earlier on, because I don’t think it got appropriate attention ahead of time.”

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Franken, who declined to be interviewed, has said previously that the measure was inspired by the story of former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who alleges that she was drugged, beaten and gang-raped at age 19 when stationed in Baghdad. She fought the arbitration clause in her contract, and in September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Jones’s sexual assault allegations were not “related to” her employment, allowing her to proceed in court. KBR is fighting the ruling.
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“I don’t know what his motivation was for taking us on, but I would hope that we won’t see a lot of Daily Kos-inspired amendments in the future coming from him,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, No. 4 in the Senate Republican leadership. “I think hopefully he’ll settle down and do kind of the serious work of legislating that’s important to Minnesota.”
Aides point out that despite attacks on Republicans by liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann and on blogs such as Daily Kos, Franken never appeared on any of the shows or on the blogs to make a partisan argument about the matter, saying that the senator turned down entreaties to do so.

Also, they point to the 10 Republicans who voted for the amendment as proof that it wasn’t a partisan measure.
“Sen. Franken has been proud to partner with both Republicans and Democrats to find common-sense solutions to the problems we face,” said Jess McIntosh, his spokeswoman. “He’s been working hard for Minnesota since he got here five months ago and has already introduced 10 bills — four of which were introduced with Republican co-sponsors, and two already passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support.”

Cornyn should be embarrassed by the Republicans, but instead tries to say they were misrepresented. Really? Did he vote yes or no? That's the only question that should be debated. All the Republicans who voted against Franken's measure have a lot more to answer for. Bad PR is just the beginning.

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I had noted that Rachel ought to have Jeremy Scahill on if she wanted to get to the bottom of what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and lo and behold she did, not that I think I had anything to do with it. I was just glad to see her have Jeremy Scahill on to talk about just what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the President's decision to escalate our presence in Afghanistan and the recent revelation that Erik Prince was acting not only as a military contractor, but a CIA asset as well. You can read Scahill's recent article at The Nation The Secret US War in Pakistan.

Transcript via Nexis Lexis.

MADDOW: By the time President Obama`s new plan for Afghanistan is implemented, there will be 100,000 U.S. troops there -- which means that President Obama will have roughly triple the number of U.S. troops that were in Afghanistan when he took office. That`s the most talked about, but the second most sobering set of numbers of the whole new Afghanistan policy.

The most sobering and perhaps overlooked is that as we look to get up to 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, turns out we`ve already got more than 100,000 contractors there. Yes. U.S. Central Command is telling "Talking Points Memo" that the number of contractors in Afghanistan is 104,000 now. And that number has grown by 30,000 just in the past six months. And the number of contractors is only expected to grow further along with the new troop increase.

The last time we paid a lot of attention to contractors in Afghanistan, some of them were doing vodka shots in places -- yes. Embarrassing the country and themselves and making us wonder all over again why it is that we pay people like this to go to our embassy instead of our own troops.

Here`s a new reason to wonder. Some pretty stunning revelations about the most notorious defense contractor of them all, Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince.

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This is infuriating. If there was any doubt in your mind as to whose side the political establishment is on, this should settle it:

An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.

Inouye's office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up. The Senate is considering taking out a provision known as the Title VII claim, which (if removed) would allow victims of assault or rape to bring suit against the individual perpetrator but not the contractor who employed him or her.

"The defense contractors have been storming his office," said a source with knowledge of the situation. "Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR's (or other contractors') own terms -- with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The House seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the Senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get Republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely."

A Democratic aide on the Hill, also with knowledge of the situation, confirmed the account, as did a source who works on defense contracting matters outside of Congress. "The contractors are putting on a full-court press on this amendment... they are all doing it," said the latter source.

This is why I love Al Franken. I had no doubt he'd be a fantastic Senator and he's yet to disappoint.

h/t Brainwrap at Daily KOS: Al Franken DESTROYS KBR attorney. Go over and read the entire diary.

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September 01, 2009 PBS Newshour

MARGARET WARNER: Just two weeks ago, outside NATO headquarters in Kabul, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives-filled car at a checkpoint. The blast killed seven people and wounded 91.

But the real target, said a Taliban spokesman, was not the NATO mission, but the U.S. Embassy, part of the same huge installation just down a closed road from the NATO site. As more American troops and treasure pour into Afghanistan, there are new questions about whether one of the most tempting U.S. targets for terrorists, the American Embassy, is being adequately protected.

Today, the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog group, laid out allegations of serious misconduct and security lapses by ArmorGroup. That's the private security company that guards the Embassy, under a $189 million contract with the State Department.

ArmorGroup, which is owned by a Florida-based firm called Wackenhut deploys a force of 450 men in Kabul. One hundred and fifty are so-called expats, former military and policemen from English-speaking countries. Three hundred are so-called Gurkhas from Nepal or Northern India.

The watchdog group's letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today detailed allegations from more than a dozen current and former expat ArmorGroup guards.

It said: "The evidence collected calls into question ArmorGroup and Wackenhut's ability to provide effective security of the embassy" -- among the allegations, routine 14-hour days, causing severe sleep deprivation for guards, chronic understaffing, causing frequently revoked leave time, inability to communicate between English-speaking expats and Nepalese Gurkhas, ritual hazing, lewd activity, prostitute use, and alcohol abuse by some expat guards and their supervisors, and low morale, causing 90 to 100 percent annual turnover in the guard force.

Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project, said the security implications are enormous.

DANIELLE BRIAN, executive director, Project on Government Oversight: We are tremendously concerned because we have a guard force that is sleep-deprived. They are working 14-hour days for weeks on end, with no leave.

They are tremendously demoralized, seeing their supervisors engaged in really bizarre and deviant misconduct. So, it's ruining the -- the chain of command and the level of trust. You have guards that can't actually speak the same language to each other. So, if there were an incident, the capacity to respond quickly is -- is -- is practically zero.

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It's got to be done, and using someone like Gates to do it is a smart plan. But we can expect defense contractors to throw a lot of political muscle and money into the fight:

WASHINGTON - As the Bush administration was drawing to a close, Robert M. Gates, whose two years as defense secretary had been devoted to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, felt compelled to warn his successor of a crisis closer to home.

The United States "cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything," Gates said. The next defense secretary, he warned, would have to eliminate some costly hardware and invest in new tools for fighting insurgents.

What Gates didn't know was that he would be that successor.

Now, as the only Bush Cabinet member to remain under President Obama, Gates is preparing the most far-reaching changes in the Pentagon's weapons portfolio since the end of the Cold War, according to aides.

Two defense officials who were not authorized to speak publicly said Gates will announce up to a half-dozen major weapons cancellations later this month. Candidates include a new Navy destroyer, the Air Force's F-22 fighter jet, and Army ground-combat vehicles, the officials said.

More cuts are planned for later this year after a review that could lead to reductions in programs such as aircraft carriers and nuclear arms, the officials said.