Holbrooke Hospitalized In Critical Condition

Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the president's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was in critical condition Saturday after surgery to repair a tear in his aorta.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the surgery at George Washington University Hospital was completed Saturday morning on the 69-year-old Holbrooke and that his family was with him. He became ill on Friday while at work at the State Department.

Hospital officials did not respond late Saturday to an e-mail seeking more information.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the hospital on Friday night and again Saturday.

President Barack Obama early in his administration named Holbrooke special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The veteran diplomat is perhaps best known for helping broker the 1995 agreement that ended the war in Bosnia.

He served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the administration of former President Bill Clinton. He also was U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1993 to 1994 and then assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

Holbrooke's career with the foreign service dates back to his posting in South Vietnam in 1962 and included time as a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam.

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High Honors: Living Soldier Awarded Medal of Honor for Afghanistan Service

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george w bush nancy pelosi harry reid john mccain al gore

A Runaway Boy's Temptation: The Train Tracks

Bud Norton was a restless young man in the 1940s, when he was growing up in Kansas. And he often made his life into an adventure. As he tells his nephew, Tim Locher, "I ran away about once a week."

Norton's escapes never lasted long. "They'd always find me on the schoolground playing basketball," he says, "or I'd come home after dark, and my mom always left the back door open."

In one episode, Norton had some company when he ran away — he and some other boys had decided that they should visit the West Coast.

"There was four of us — Dennis Green and Jimmy Brown, Jack Draves and I — we ran away. We was going to go to California. We caught a freight."

After a while, he recalls, "The train stopped, and we thought we was somewhere like Colorado or somewhere, halfway there."

And they were hungry, he says.

"We sent Jimmy Brown, because he was the craftiest of the group, down to the store. We took up a collection, and we told him, 'Buy something, and you know, just stick a couple cans of something in your pocket.' "

When Brown came back, Norton says, "He had three or four cans of dog food, a loaf of bread and a jar of mayonnaise — it must have been about a foot and a half tall. Jack threatened to kill him. And then when we found out we was only in Lawrence, we called Jack's brother to come and get us."

But for Norton, the most disastrous runaway came when he was trying to get out of being punished.

"I had a whipping coming when my dad got home, and I worried about it all day," he says, "so I decided to run away. And I'd seen pictures of hobos, you know, with the stick and the little handkerchief tied on it.

So he put all his belongings in a blanket and rolled it up.

"I had my Sunday suit, brand-new ball glove and my shoes. My dad had just bought me some spikes, because I was playing in the all-star game a week later. And I couldn't find a stick, so I sawed off my mom's broom handle."

After he put all that together, it was a heavy load; Norton recalls barely being able to lift it.

Luckily — or perhaps, unluckily — he only had to carry his load for half a block to get to the train tracks.

"I went down and I threw it on an open box car," he says. "Then it gained speed, and I couldn't catch it!

"I saw all my belongings going down the tracks, and I just stood there and cried and threw rocks at it," he says.

He went back home and told his mother what had happened. They talked to a neighbor who worked for the railroad, but it was too late — the train and his treasures were long gone.

Faced with life without his best belongings, Norton says, "I went to Sunday school with tennis shoes with tape around the toes, and that's what I played the ball game in. Great experience!"

"I'll bet your dad was real happy with you," Locher says.

"He was thrilled," Norton says.

Produced for Morning Edition by Nadia Reiman. The Senior Producer for StoryCorps is Michael Garofalo. Recorded in partnership with KCUR.

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Clinton Gets Comfortable At White House Podium

President Obama enlisted the support of Bill Clinton to sell his tax-cut deal Friday. After meeting for two hours, the two presidents spoke to the press in the White House briefing room. It was supposed to be brief, but after 10 minutes Obama excused himself. His predecessor carried on for another 20 minutes. Guy Raz talks with NPR's Don Gonyea, who watched the briefing.

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House Democrats Hold Out For Their Last Hurrah

The president is way too cool with a deal that cuts House Democrats out of the power equation. That alone is unacceptable, if you are a House Democrat and you have suffered enough before the winds of change and the countermanding winds that follow.

 

Ever go out as the "third wheel" with a couple romantically involved with each other? If so, you know how the House Democrats feel about the recently concluded White House negotiations with Senate Republicans.

Senate Republicans are, of course, not just another team in the power leagues of Washington. The minority party in the Senate is always a special power player, a pivot point for the rest of the government and the national agenda. All it has to do is maintain enough unity to sustain a threat to filibuster. This Republican majority has set records both for unity and for threatening filibusters in the 111th Congress. Few minorities of such few seats have been even nearly as determinative.

Had it been otherwise, the Congress now ending would have passed a public option in the health care bill, tougher regulations on banks, a tougher set of standards on carbon emissions and a totally different tax package to substitute for the expiring tax cuts from the era of George W. Bush. It would have long ago repealed the "don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays in the military and approved the DREAM Act embracing the potential of children brought to the U.S. by illegally immigrating parents.

Filibusters are no longer all-night sieges of floor debate, as in past eras. They are now no more than a series of procedural threats made in the cloaked silence of private chambers.

That's why, confronted with the Jan. 1 expiration of current tax rates, the White House assumed it had to negotiate with Senate Republicans — first, foremost and pretty much exclusively. Whatever Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell could be made to accept would simply have to fly with House Republicans [by and large]. And House and Senate Democrats, for their part, would have little choice but to line up with the president. Their alternative would be to bring on tax increases for everyone on Jan. 1.

And, of course, no one in their right mind would do that. Or would they?

This week, House Democrats announced that they would. You can call that a bluff or a death wish, but it may also be the Democrats' bid to recapture some of their birthright. Faced with just a few weeks until Republicans reclaim control of the chamber in the new Congress in January, it is these Democrats' last shot at a last hurrah.

You have to feel their pain. It's bad enough they lost 63 seats in November and invited ridicule by re-electing the same leadership team. It's bad enough that they paid this price largely for voting with Obama on countless bills and other issues. It's bad enough that they did this again and again, only to watch the self-absorbed Senate invoke its arcane rules and walk away — often without even voting.

Consider the added insult, then, of watching Obama negotiate from weakness and reach an unsatisfying compromise with the GOP this week with nary a backward glance at the House members who gave their political lives for him.

Did it help when the president announced his deal with the GOP just as House Democrats were arriving at the White House for their annual holiday party?  What do you think?

harry reid john mccain al gore bill clinton newt gingrich

Foreign Policy: How To Find The Political Center

While the term "center" is used often in politics, there is no one definition of where that is. David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy argues that there are three different centers, and that the tax deal made by President Obama and Congressional Republicans is not in the kind of center that this country needs.

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