Clinton tells Bush to skip start of Olympics, trade deal
Hillary Clinton offered plenty of advice yesterday to President Bush: Skip the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics to protest China's actions in Tibet and Sudan, and back off the trade deal with Colombia.
The latter led to the resignation over the weekend of her senior presidential campaign strategist, Mark Penn, who, in his other job as a private lobbyist, had met with Colombian officials on the pact. The Colombians later severed the lobbying tie after Penn apologized for promoting a policy Clinton opposed.
After Bush announced yesterday he is submitting paperwork to force Congress to vote on the deal within 90 days, Clinton urged the Senate to say no.
"I oppose signing any trade deal with Colombia while violence against trade unionists continues and the perpetrators are not brought to justice," Clinton said in a statement. "The United States should be pursuing trade agreements that promote human rights and worker rights, not overlook egregious abuses."
The New York senator also added her voice to those urging Bush to stay away at the opening ceremonies unless the Chinese government makes major changes in policy. "The violent clashes in Tibet and the failure of the Chinese government to use its full leverage with Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur are opportunities for presidential leadership," she said in a statement.
Her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, said recently that he was conflicted about whether the United States should fully participate in the Olympics.
Bush has said he will attend the Olympics because it is a sporting event, not a political one. White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters yesterday that the president's position had not changed, nor had the administration's concerns about China's human rights record.
"We have never been afraid to express those views, either directly by the president or the president's senior advisers when they travel to China, and publicly," Fratto said.
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Yesterday, a group calling itself Democrats United for Clinton/Obama 08 launched voteboth.com, a website where like-minded partisans can sign an electronic petition to the Democratic National Committee urging a unity ticket. The group was founded by a former Clinton staffer.
When Clinton and her husband publicly suggested the possibility last month as a way for Democrats to support both her and Obama, the Illinois senator quickly quashed the entire premise, pointing out that he leads in delegates and popular vote and that it was rather presumptuous of the candidate in second place to promote such an idea.
FOON RHEE
Clinton's proposal would pump $300 million more a year into research for new treatments and uncovering possible genetic and environmental links, plus expanding access to treatment and screenings for low-income women. The money would go to the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Department of Defense's Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.
"We all know people who survived and people who haven't. And I just think we should set a goal of curing breast cancer within the next decade," Clinton said. "We should make it absolutely totally curable, and . . . try to figure out what causes it, because we just don't know why some people are susceptible."
Last year, about 40,000 women died of breast cancer in the United States.
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