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Thursday, March 31, 2005 QUESTION During the years that Reagan had Alzheimer's, did any conservative ever question his diagnosis? Did anyone on the right say that the diagnosis might be wrong, even though it presumably had been affirmed by a number of experts, or that it might not have been made in good faith? And why don't I recall any right-winger questioning the irreversibility of the disease? Why didn't the people who think Terri Schiavo could have made a miraculous recovery, a recovery impossible to explain by the laws of medicine, believe the same thing about Reagan? I recall that a little while back it was noted that fights over brain-damaged patients only seem to take place in the case of young women. And I'm also thinking about Peggy Noonan's notorious Elian column. Noonan said Reagan would have believed that Elian was the beneficiary of a God-given miracle in the form of a rescue by dolphins -- and Reagan would have believed it because "he was a man." Is that it? Did the right-wingers not look to the skies for a miracle to save Reagan's brain because "he was a man," and miracles happen only to nubile women and little children? **** UPDATE: Some good points are made in the comments. (Scroll past Mark the Troll and my futile attempt to reason with him.) posted by Steve M. | 10:44 PM | CNN says the Pope has been given last rites. Sorry if this is tasteless, but if you want to make money right now and you have no shame, you might want to get to work designing commemorative items that pair the Pope and Terri Schiavo. I would feel awful saying that, but I am 100% certain that such items will be widely available in this country if the Pope doesn't pull through, and that they'll be snapped up very, very quickly. They'll probably look something like this:  though probably with a bit more religio-patriotic schmaltz, like this:  Mark my words. posted by Steve M. | 6:25 PM | Was her last thought "I thirst"? --Ken Masugi at the Claremont Institue blog The Remedy What, in 1990? Sorry to be harsh, but presumably well-educated conservatives' "principled" refusal to accept the facts about the way Terri Schiavo was existing for fifteen years is regressive and dangerous. posted by Steve M. | 2:49 PM | By the way, do you think it's just a coincidence that -- just as the Schindler family's last court challenges were rejected and it became clear that soon Terri Schiavo would die and demons du jour Michael Schiavo and Judge Greer would soon leave the stage -- The New York Sun ran an editorial entitled "Hillary's Hyperbole" and Peggy Noonan published a column entitled "Riding the Waves: Why Hillary will be hard to beat"? Gotta keep those GOP voters' checkbooks open, right? You don't want to let a moment go by without a Goldstein. posted by Steve M. | 1:11 PM | So now that Terri Schiavo has passed away, do you suppose all those believers in a "culture of life" who are gathered in Florida -- especially the Catholics, and also the ones who may have been passing around this column by Nat Hentoff -- will turn their attention to urging commutation for the 368 people on Florida's death row? Nope, me either. posted by Steve M. | 12:34 PM | Rest in peace, Terri Schiavo. posted by Steve M. | 10:38 AM | I've been talking about Priests for Life lately, and I see from the L.A. Times that the head of the organization, Father Frank Pavone, has a new gig: New Order of Catholic Priests Is Forming to Fight Abortions AMARILLO, Texas -- The Roman Catholic Church plans to establish its first religious society devoted exclusively to fighting euthanasia and abortion, church leaders said this week. The male-only Missionaries of the Gospel of Life -- founded by the Rev. Frank Pavone, an outspoken opponent of abortion rights -- will be housed in a vacant Catholic high school and dormitory on the grounds of the Diocese of Amarillo. The order will have a decidedly political bent, and will be active rather than contemplative, Pavone said. Priests will be trained to conduct voter-registration drives, use the media to get out their anti-abortion message and lobby lawmakers to restrict abortion rights. They also will learn to lead demonstrations outside offices where abortions and family-planning services are provided.... So this is a nakedly political organization; just about the only thing these folks are going to do besides push for changes to the law is stand outside abortion clinics and try to shame or intimidate people. Yet the Times can't quite figure out whether the new group should still be deemed a charity for tax purposes: According to the Internal Revenue Service, churches risk losing their tax-exempt status if they endorse or oppose political candidates. But they can adopt political positions and, to a limited degree, lobby to influence legislation.... Got that? "To a limited degree." Here's what the IRS says: To be tax-exempt as an organization described in IRC Section 501(c)(3) of the Code, an organization ... may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate at all in campaign activity for or against political candidates. Priests for Life blithely states on its Web site that "all donations are tax-deductible." Yet elsewhere on the site there's this: On this page you will find periodic updates on pieces of legislation which we are making a special effort to promote, as well as guidance on how to take action.... Current Legislation: Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act (S. 51, H.R. 4420) Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (H.R. 748) also know as the Child Custody Protection Act (S. 8) Human Cloning Research Prohibition Act (H.R. 222) Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act (H.R. 235) The RU-486 Suspension and Review Act (Holly's Law) ( S. 511, H.R. 1079) The Incapacitated Person's Legal Protection Act (S. 539, H.R. 1151) Take Action!... Gee, that doesn't like an organization that "attempt[s] to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities," does it now? Oh, and Frank Pavone gave invocations at both a rally for religious conservatives organized by the GOP before the 2004 convention and a subsequent "Christian Inaugural Eve Gala" that was also addressed by Karl Rove. And past online poll questions at the Priests for Life site include: It is the view of many that the Democratic Party, because of its stated support for abortion as a fundamental human right and for gay and lesbian families, can no longer be morally supported by Christians. Do you agree with that view? and Should a priest, who has not received specific instructions one way or the other from his bishop on this matter, refuse to give Communion to pro-abortion Senator John Kerry? Nope, nothing political going on here, right? And I'm sure the same will be true for this new organization. posted by Steve M. | 7:36 AM | Wednesday, March 30, 2005 OUR SYSTEM OF CHECKS AND BALANCES MAKES THE BABY JESUS CRY Online poll at the Web site of Priests for Life (scroll down): Should the United States Congress exercise veto power over Supreme Court decisions? Yikes. No results posted yet. posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM | GIULIANI JOINS THE TEXAS MOB I'm not quite sure how to interpret today's Giuliani news. The story in today's New York Times suggests that he's kissing the rings of Texas Republicans because that's how you get to the White House in the twenty-first century: Rudolph W. Giuliani's empire is expanding with a high-profile new venture: Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is becoming a partner in a politically connected Texas law firm and will open its Manhattan office in May. The Houston law firm, Bracewell & Patterson, employs several prominent Republicans and former members of the Bush administration and has a roster of oil, gas and banking clients that once included Enron. ... Mr. Giuliani, the former federal prosecutor, noted on Tuesday that he was not restarting his legal career at the expense of a future return to politics. "At some point I'll probably want to run again but I don't know," Mr. Giuliani said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he was taping an appearance on the "Tonight Show" for NBC. ...In recent years the firm has expanded its Washington presence, increasing its lobbying portfolio and also moving into homeland security issues.... The firm has added several other prominent Republicans and former Bush administration officials, including Marc Racicot, who was chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign in 2004 and a Republican National Committee chairman, and Lisa Jaeger, a former top adviser and acting general counsel of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. [Pat] Oxford [Bracewell's managing partner] said he began talks with Mr. Giuliani last fall after being introduced by Roy W. Bailey, a founding partner of Mr. Giuliani's consulting firm and a Texan who once served as finance chairman of the Texas Republican Party.... But this Houston Chronicle story makes it seem like a corporate merger -- or a partnership enabling a crime family to muscle in on new territory: "He will give us just the profile we need," said Pat Oxford, Bracewell's managing partner. He said Giuliani will show the firm's lawyers "how it is to play in the bigs." A bit more from the Chronicle: Giuliani conceded ... that he felt a bond with Oxford because of the managing partner's close ties with Bush. Oxford raised more than $100,000 for Bush's 2000 presidential campaign and was chairman of his Houston-area campaign for governor in 1998. When he was governor, Bush appointed Oxford a regent of the University of Texas System, where he also served as a member of its investment management company, known as UTIMCO.... The decision to hire Giuliani was greeted enthusiastically by one of the firm's clients, Rich Kinder, the chairman of Kinder Morgan Inc. "I think he would be an excellent rainmaker," said Kinder, whose wife Nancy was a major Bush fund-raiser. The first chairman of UTIMCO was Tom Hicks. Hicks is the guy who made George W. Bush a rich man by buying out his stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team. Paul Krugman wrote about all this in 2002: The University of Texas, though a state institution, has a large endowment. As governor, Mr. Bush changed the rules governing that endowment ... government officials no longer had to tell the public what they were doing with public money, or allow an independent performance assessment. Then Mr. Bush "privatized" (his term) $9 billion in university assets, transferring them to a nonprofit corporation known as Utimco that could make investment decisions behind closed doors. In effect, the money was put under the control of Utimco's chairman: Tom Hicks. Under his direction, at least $450 million was invested in private funds managed by Mr. Hicks's business associates and major Republican Party donors. The managers of such funds earn big fees. Due to Mr. Bush's change in the rules, these investments were hidden from public view; an employee of Utimco who alerted university auditors was summarily fired. Even now, it's hard to find out how these investments turned out, though they seem to have done quite badly. Eventually Mr. Hicks's investment style created a public furor, and he did not seek to retain his position at Utimco when his term expired in 1999. A site called UT Watch thinks the management of UTIMCO is still a bit questionable. It notes, for instance, that Pat Oxford owns 5,000-10,000 shares of Kinder Morgan Inc. stock while UTIMCO, of which he is a regent, has approximately 1,000,000 shares of Kinder Morgan Energy. And, as the Chronicle story notes, Oxford's law firm has Kinder Morgan as a client. One hand washes the other. And now this crowd's man in New York is Saint Rudy. **** UPDATE: In comments, Skimble points me to this 2004 post from his blog, which describes a birthday party thrown for Bush the Elder by Rich Kinder (of Kinder Morgan) and his wife, Nancy; Rich Kinder gave more money to Shrub than anyone else in 2000. Oh, and he used to be an Enron exec (though he seems to have left before things got really ugly). And note, in Skimble's post, who else was a guest at the party. posted by Steve M. | 1:59 PM | BODY ARMOR Hey, we've only been in Iraq for 48 months -- surely you didn't think that was enough time for Rummy's military to figure out how to protect our troops properly, did you? The Rev. Gary Blaine says he respected his son's decision to join the Army National Guard, but he never expected to pay for his son's military equipment. Mr. Blaine is pastor of Toledo's First Unitarian Universalist Church, which is trying to raise money to provide his son with better body armor than that provided by the military before he is deployed to Afghanistan in June.... Mr. Blaine said though transportation units like the one to which his son will be attached are frequently attacked, the Army won't provide Christopher with the body armor he needs to protect him from a bullet. "The Army will only give my son Level 3 body armor, which will only stop shrapnel but not a bullet," the pastor said. He said his son's military supervisor advised members of the unit to go out and buy their own Level 4 body armor, which is what other military families and personnel have recommended.... "It makes me feel very angry that we cannot afford to buy the necessary equipment for our troops," said Maureen Casile, a member of the church's board of trustees.... --Toledo Blade (Link via Democrtatic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 12:19 PM | Congratulations, Schiavo crazies -- you are now to the right of the New York Post: The time has come to let Terri Schiavo die with dignity - and in peace. The battle over her fate was mostly a noble one, and always a heart-rending one, but it has turned into a circus. Nothing anyone can do will alter the outcome now. The arrests will make no difference; yesterday's high-profile arrival of the Rev. Jesse Jackson's stretch limousine will change nothing; Randall Terry's publicity-mongering is pointless.... ...Congress, to its discredit, added endgame drama to the debate. So did President Bush; it was not his finest hour. It was always the courts -- state and federal -- that should have had the final word in this dramatic tragedy. And the courts have spoken -- in Florida and at the federal level -- on the merits of the case, and on the law.... There are 71 patients at Woodside Hospice, including Terri Schiavo. And there are countless thousands around the country making painfully difficult life-and-death decisions. They all deserve peace in their final hours — they all deserve respect.... posted by Steve M. | 9:53 AM | Tuesday, March 29, 2005 Overheard in New York: "If Terri Schiavo's head was filled with oil Dubya would drill into her skull himself." posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | Sharia, U.S.A.: WILMINGTON, N.C. -- A former sheriff's dispatcher who quit her job after her boss found out she lived with her boyfriend is challenging North Carolina's law against cohabitation.... The lawsuit seeks to abolish the nearly 200-year-old -- and rarely enforced -- law that prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of the opposite sex from living together. North Carolina is one of seven states with such a law.... Hobbs had been living with her boyfriend for about three years when she was hired as a Pender County 911 dispatcher in February 2004. The couple decided they didn't want to marry; Hobbs quit last May rather than be fired. Sheriff Carson Smith said last year that Hobbs' employment was a moral issue as well as a legal question. He said he tries to avoid hiring people who openly live together, but that he doesn't send out deputies to enforce the law.... --AP Under the law, it's a misdemeanor for a couple to "lewdly and lasciviously associate, bed and cohabitate together." The law dates to 1805, but the state actually went to the trouble to rewrite it in 1995. Incidentally, it was reported in 2001 that a U.S. magistrate in Charlotte, Carl Horn, habitually asks defendants, regardless of why they are before him, if their living arrangements violate the state's no-cohabitation law. If so, he refuses to release them unless they agree to marry, move or get their partner to relocate. (Horn is on the board of directors of the Charlotte Pregnancy Care Center, which is clearly a "crisis pregnancy" operation designed to dissuade women from having abortions. Surprised?) (AP story via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM | EVERY LIFE IS SACRED Jennifer Johnson, barefoot and in her pajamas, ran to her grandfather's bedside once a hospice worker said his death was moments away. She got there -- one minute too late. Johnson said the chaos outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo is dying kept her from saying goodbye. When Johnson arrived, a police officer demanded identification; she had none. And after a hospice employee cleared her, another officer halted her for a search with a metal detector. The delays lasted three to four minutes -- the last of her grandfather's life. ... Johnson, 24, said her 73-year-old grandfather, Thomas Bone, was restricted from moving freely around the hospice grounds during his final days. He died just hours after Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed and protests intensified. "They've taken away hospice's greatest quality, that it is peaceful and serene and quiet and calming -- and it's not fair," Johnson said. --AP (I assume Johnson is the woman mentioned in the last paragraph of this Washington Post article.) posted by Steve M. | 5:26 PM | IRAQ THE MODEL Remember Iraq? That country we invaded a couple of years ago? It seems as if everyone in America has more or less forgotten about it (except for, y'know, the hundreds of thousands of people who are either risking death there or waiting back home for a loved one to return home safe), but in the meantime the Iraqis are trying to put together a government. And, apparently, not doing a bang-up job of it: BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 29 - The second meeting of the new Iraqi constitutional assembly descended into a series of contentious exchanges today, as some members accused others of hijacking the political process and betraying the Iraqi people by failing to form a government. Prominent politicians also said in interviews that the delay in forming a government could force the assembly to take an extra half-year to write the permanent constitution, pushing the deadline for a first draft well beyond the original target date of Aug. 15. That means the delay could significantly throw off the timetable for the establishment of a full-term democratically elected government.... That's from a story that went up on the New York Times site today. But meanwhile, there's just so much love in Iraq. This is from an article in Sunday's Washington Post about Jalaledin Saghir, a highly influential Shiite preacher/politician whose get-out-the-vote campaign in January is said to have really boosted Shiite turnout: In contrast to the public statements of the Supreme Council, with their emphasis on reconciliation with and inclusion of disenchanted Sunnis, Saghir is brusque with his followers.... Insurgents? They are dismissed as Hussein loyalists disguised as holy warriors -- "Baathists wearing beards and turbans," he calls them in one sermon. ... He ridicules the doctrine of the Association of Muslim Scholars, the most influential Sunni Muslim group, as "Saddam Hussein's Islam." And purges lie ahead, he warns, for Iraq's outgoing interim government, which he calls tainted by "the dirty faces of the Baathists.". "The killers of today," he says in another sermon, "are the same killers as yesterday." National reconciliation? "With whom?" he has asked in more than one talk. "With those criminals who have shed the blood of our people in Hilla, Karbala, Najaf and every other place in Iraq?" And this is from Sunday's Boston Globe: For the first time, Sunni Muslim sheiks are publicly exhorting followers to strike with force against ethnic Kurds and Shi'ites, an escalation in rhetoric that could exacerbate the communal violence that already is shaking Iraq's ethnic communities. ''The Americans aren't the problem; we're living under an occupation of Kurds and Shi'ites," Sattar Abdulhalik Adburahman, a Sunni leader from the northern city of Kirkuk, told a gathering of tribal leaders last week, to deafening applause. ''It's time to fight back." Such calls for violence are being voiced against the backdrop of an alarming rise in tit-for-tat ethnic and sectarian killings. According to several Iraqi leaders, Shi'ite death squads routinely kill Sunnis suspected of ties to the Ba'ath Party or insurgency. Bands of Sunnis target Shi'ites in retaliation, Sunni political leaders like Adnan Pachachi said, suggesting that significant organizations, rather than small splintered cells of vigilantes, are driving the killing. ...''In hot areas, our dignity is humiliated every day," Sheik Amash Awad al-Obeidi, leader of 17,000 tribesmen in Ramadi, told the Sunni gathering, exhorting his fellow chiefs to concentrate on action, not endless political meetings. ''We are sinking in blood. Enough words." And in Basra, as I've noted a couple of times already, followers of Moqtada al-Sadr recently beat students who were engaging in such moral outrages as picnicking with members of the opposite sex and listening to music, while the local authorities said they were helpless to intervene without the backing of a central government. (More on this story here, from today's Washington Post.) Kidnappings? Did I mention the rash of kidnappings? I keep thinking that -- to use the terms Woody Allen used in Annie Hall -- Iraq has gone from the horrible to the miserable. And could turn horrible again at any moment. Was it worth it? posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM | Gary McCullough's name makes The New York Times -- the paper notes that the spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents has brokered a deal to sell a list of the families' financial backers to a conservative direct-mail firm, not even waiting for Schiavo to die -- but there's no mention of McCullough's background as an anti-abortion activist who engaged in criminal trespass and who also was a friend and spokesman for the murder of a doctor who performed abortions, and the defender of another. As I mentioned on Friday, the details are at this link-rich post at World O'Crap. Here's a sample: DEFENSIVE ACTION P.O. Box 2243, Pensacola, FL 32513-2243 Paul J. Hill, Director Telephone Number Prior to Jury Selection - (904) 478-0800 Press Number during Jury Selection and Trial - (904) 474-5285 Media Consultant - Gary McCullough; Publicist - Jerry McGlothlin We, the undersigned, declare the justice of taking all godly action necessary to defend innocent human life including the use of force. We proclaim that whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child. We assert that if Michael Griffin did in fact kill David Gunn, his use of lethal force was justifiable provided it was carried out for the purpose of defending the lives of unborn children. Therefore he ought to be acquitted of the charges against him. (Source.) Pity the Times can't be bothered to look into this. UPDATE: More at this World O'Crap update, which notes, among other things, that Alan Keyes is a McCullough client. posted by Steve M. | 10:05 AM | Monday, March 28, 2005 HOW THE SCHIAVO FETISHISTS FIGHT Here's a story the "save Terri" crowd wants to tell you: CLEARWATER, FL., March 14, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On Saturday a rally of over three-hundred of Terri Schiavo's most die-hard supporters heard the first-hand account of the sufferings and remarkable recovery of Kate Adamson. Struck down in 1995 at the age of thirty-three by a rare double brainstem stroke, Kate, then a mother of two young girls, was completely paralyzed; she was unable even to blink her eyes. Like Terri Schiavo, the medical staff treating her questioned the merit of continuing granting Kate the most basic human right of food and water. Terri Schiavo, although not nearly as severely disabled as Adamson once appeared to be, is slotted to have her feeding tube removed at 1:00 pm this Friday. Similarly, Kate Adamson's feeding tube was at one point removed for a full eight days before being reinserted due to the intervention of her husband (also a competent lawyer).... Here's Adamson's Web site, where she directly compares herself to Terri Schiavo. Here's a list of media outlets that have given Adamson a platform to make this comparison. Last week it was Larry King Live and Hannity & Colmes. There's just one tiny problem. Here's what actually happened to Adamson in the immediate aftermath of her stroke, as described in Caregiver magazine (emphasis mine): Her seven weeks in the ICU were terrifying and devastating. Kate experienced severe headaches and double vision, but couldn't tell anyone. She couldn't swallow, had a feeding tube surgically placed in her stomach, a tracheotomy to breathe and several IVs. Because she couldn't cough, Kate needed painful suction treatments every 20 minutes to extract fluids from her lungs. "I could hear what people were saying to me but, in the beginning, no one knew if I understood because they didn't know how much brain damage I had," she says. She was trapped in her own body, unable to move or communicate. When her family realized she could blink voluntarily, she was able to communicate with an alphabet board. "At the end of six weeks in ICU, I blinked to my doctor, was I going to die, because I just couldn't do it anymore," she says.... Transferring to Daniel Freeman Rehabilitation Hospital was a turning point for Kate. Her neurologist, Dr. David Alexander, remarked after his assessment that he thought rehabilitation would work. "I needed to hear that and I hung on to those words," Kate says.... Here's the comparable narrative for Terri Schiavo, as it appears in the 2003 report by Dr. Jay Wolfson, whom Jeb Bush appointed to review the case (again, emphasis mine): Theresa spent two and a half months as an inpatient at Humana Northside Hospital, eventually emerging from her coma state, but not recovering consciousness. On 12 May 1990, following extensive testing, therapy and observation, she was discharged to the College Park skilled care and rehabilitation facility. Forty-nine days later, she was transferred again to Bayfront Hospital for additional, aggressive rehabilitation efforts. In September of 1990, she was brought home, but following only three weeks, she was returned to the College Park facility because the "family was overwhelmed by Terry's care needs." ...The clinical records within the massive case file indicate that Theresa was not responsive to neurological and swallowing tests. She received regular and intense physical, occupational and speech therapies. ...In late Autumn of 1990, following months of therapy and testing, formal diagnoses of persistent vegetative state with no evidence of improvement, Michael took Theresa to California, where she received an experimental thalamic stimulator implant in her brain. Michael remained in California caring for Theresa during a period of several months and returned to Florida with her in January of 1991. Theresa was transferred to the Mediplex Rehabilitation Center in Brandon, where she received 24 hour skilled care, physical, occupational, speech and recreational therapies. Despite aggressive therapies, physician and other clinical assessments consistently revealed no functional abilities, only reflexive, rather than cognitive movements, random eye opening, no communication system and little change cognitively or functionally. On 19 July 1991 Theresa was transferred to the Sable Palms skilled care facility. Periodic neurological exams, regular and aggressive physical, occupational and speech therapy continued through 1994. Got it? Adamson was communicating via eyeblink within less than two months, then responded to rehabilitation. Schiavo never manifested any signs of cognition and didn't respond to approximately three years of very aggressive therapy (nor has she shown cognition in the decade since). Do people who hear Adamson speak know this? Does Adamson know this? Does the LifeSiteNews "journalist" who says Schiavo is "not nearly as severely disabled as Adamson once appeared to be" know this? Did Jeb Bush know this a couple of weeks ago when he asked Adamson to "join in the fight to save Terri Schiavo"? Does Larry King know this? posted by Steve M. | 3:42 PM | Personal Savings Plans Likely to Offer Workers More Risk than Reward, Says S&P Report Even with mandated personal accounts a part of any social security reform package, average workers are likely to have difficulty saving enough capital to enjoy comfortable retirements, according to research recently published by Standard & Poor's. The article, entitled "Can People Save Enough?," is part of a special report on social security, corporate pension plans, and retirement savings that will appear in CreditWeek, Standard & Poor's weekly magazine on credit issues on March 30, 2005. On average, personal accounts may be attractive, the report notes, if investments are profitable and risks become rewards. But because risks are borne by individuals and will not be shared, the results for many investors will be disappointing and will likely produce negative consequences. ...David Blitzer, author of the report and Managing Director and Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor's, ... drew these conclusions by looking at two simulation models using key investment data from 1945-2004.... According to one simulation model, an individual making $40,000 a year following a typical investment strategy could end up with more than a million dollars or nothing at all. A more aggressive investor could end up with more than $6 million or nothing. Given the risks in the market, not all aggressive savers will retire with ease. --YubaNet.com; also see this short item from MarketWatch Standard & Poor's? What a bunch of stinkin' commies. posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | "VALUES" CONSERVATIVES On the street where Terri Schiavo's hospice is located: Near one end of 102nd Avenue is Triple O Auto, where Scotty Jackson, a single father raising two sons, has grown used to being cussed at and ridiculed by people clutching Bibles and waving signs. ... Triple O stands for On Our Own, and there are times when Jackson struggles to pay his bills and is forced to work on a Sunday — upsetting one protester, who heckled him about working on the day of rest. This is why I'm sick of hearing about the Bush base and its "values." This guy is doing what he has to do to take care of his family; some Christians do object to working on the sabbath, but an awful lot of Christians would say he's doing a morally good thing. Yet our idiot press and the Democratic Party think (or thought until the polls came in) that everything any conservative says about "values" is (a) a belief shared by all "values" voters and (b) a belief we'd all share if some of us weren't horrible disgusting secular hedonist coastal Brie-eaters. Oh, and the article also describes how the protests are affecting other hospice patients and their families: None of the men and women venture out anymore to sit in the manicured garden, taking in the fresh air and listening to music as they live out their last days. And their loved ones can’t visit without going through checkpoints, security clearances and a macabre death vigil: the women with black lips and faux blood dripping down their faces, the guy with the bullhorn warning about damnation, the signs that demonize Terri Schiavo’s husband as a murderer and an adulterer, the man cradling the skeleton. Charming. And, of course, as that article and this one note, kids at the school next door to the hospice have been forced to relocate. posted by Steve M. | 11:20 AM | Sunday, March 27, 2005 I'm still catching up after a mostly news-free weekend, but I did want to share this with you. I saw it in the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York; it's by Jeremiah Horrigan. It wasn't written as a response to Peggy Noonan's vile column on Terri Schiavo this week, but it serves as the best rebuke to that column I can find, because it's written in her language, the language of believers. I'll give you the whole thing, because it's hard to get through the paper's registration screen. Apologies for the lack of cynicism and snark: My last prayer and testament Recent tragic events have made it seem necessary to publicly declare my last wishes, should I be rendered incapable of discussing them when it is my turn to die. Let my last wish be cast in the form of a prayer. Call it my last prayer and testament, and let it be directed in gratitude to He who gave me life and to those who have shared the gift of life with me – be they family, friend or presumptive foe. On the occasion of my near-death, should I be rendered incapable of speech, of song, of story-telling and story-hearing, should I no longer be able to enjoy good friends, good wine, foods that are not good for me as well as foods that are, should I be robbed of sight, unable to move or to stumble my way through a bad joke or laugh at another's, should I, in other words, be suddenly and irrevocably removed from the world I share with every other living thing, please, Lord, grant me peace. Let my enforced and inescapable silence, my stillness, whatever its cause, not be confused, however lovingly, with living. Deliver me, Lord, from the machinery that can prolong existence without promise or hope. Deliver me from the deadly purity of the hospital room, the lifeless bleep of the heart monitor, the loss of sunshine, wind and snow. Protect me, Lord, from every other form of mechanistic invasion, from court order to news conference. Please comfort my wife and children, who may wrongly imagine that their lives must – or should – stop in deference to my artificial continuance in the world we could no longer share. Grant them peace and courage, Lord. Please grant my wife the strength to remember my wishes and act accordingly. And grant that my mother, brothers and sisters remember that I placed my life and fate in her hands the day I married her, and let them not put those vows asunder, even in the name of their unquestioned and unending love. Please don't allow my delayed passing to become a public spectacle, the occasion for political posturing, displays of misplaced emotion, televised news updates. Protect my loved ones, I pray, from impressionable strangers who, with every good intention, would presume to speak for me. Or for You. Keep them from the street outside my family's home. Let them realize that one day they will die, and that they, like me, deserve to be remembered not as a symbol but as a person. Protect my family and friends from my professional colleagues. As you know so well, Lord, we messengers are too frequently blind to the shades of life's colors. Protect my loved ones most especially from those of your elect, whether secular or religious, men and women who would make a crusade of my suffering. Give them pause, O Lord, when they declare their love of life. Before they make a spectacle of me, let them ask themselves if their love of life extends to all men and women whose lives they judge expendable in the name of abstract principle or political expediency. Let them invoke the unqualified Mosaic law against killing of any sort, yes, Lord, as well as the Christian obligation to love one's neighbor. Give them the strength we expect of leaders to apply those sacred laws to all before they declare themselves righteous in Your sight or the sight of their constituencies. This I humbly ask of You, the only One who knows the hearts of men. Amen. I'm an atheist, but I'll add "Amen" to that. posted by Steve M. | 11:04 PM | Friday, March 25, 2005 So, Priests for Life? The group that says the Terri Schiavo case "must mark the beginning of a new era of civil disobedience and conscientious objection, with simultaneous, determined efforts to curb the authority of the courts and restore government to the people through their elected representatives"? For what it's worth, one of the members is Father Paul Scalia -- son of Antonin. More on the organization here. **** Alas, I'm going to have houseguests this weekend -- I'll probably miss the commando raid, or whatever it is that's going to happen in Florida. But I'll try to check in on Sunday night. posted by Steve M. | 4:20 PM | RIGHT-WING YEAR ZERO CONTINUES Might as well try to destroy everything, right? A new television ad designed to propel a grass-roots anti-U.N. movement slams the international body and charges Secretary-General Kofi Annan coddles terrorists and tyrants. The new ad, "U.N. Photo Album," was produced by the group leading the effort to "Get the U.N. out of the U.S.," Move America Forward, and is expected to begin running on national cable news networks during the first week of April. It can be seen online at the group's website.... --World Net Daily (Move America Forward was founded by Californians who'd worked in the Gray Davis recall campaign; its purpose at its founding was to try to persuade theater owners not to show Fahrenheit 9/11. Walt Disney Pictures later teamed up with Move America Forward to sponsor the showing of America's Heart & Soul, a documentary meant to counter F9/11. The ad is here.) posted by Steve M. | 3:46 PM | NOT ABOUT TERRI SCHIAVO Last Saturday I posted an excerpt from a New York Times story about students in Iraq who were beaten at a picnic by Islamist militiamen -- apparently for the "crime" of wearing Western-style clothes and jeans. Well, according to The Times of London, it appears that two of the students were beaten to death: "There were dozens of them, armed with guns, and they poured into the park," Ali al-Azawi, 21, the engineering student who had organised the gathering in Basra, said. "They started shouting at us that we were immoral, that we were meeting boys and girls together and playing music and that this was against Islam. "They began shooting in the air and people screamed. Then, with one order, they began beating us with their sticks and rifle butts." Two students were said to have been killed. But everyone knows Iraq is determined not to become a theocracy. Surely the authorities will see to it that justice is done. Right? Police were guarding the picnic in the park, as is customary at any large public gathering, but allowed the armed men in without any resistance.... After escaping with two students, Ali reached a police station and asked for help. "What do you expect me to do about it?" a uniformed officer asked.... When the students tried to organise demonstrations, they were broken up by the Mehdi Army. Later the university was surrounded by militiamen, who distributed leaflets threatening to mortar the campus if they did not call off the protests.... Colonel Kareem al-Zeidy, Basra’s police chief, pleaded helplessness. "What can I do? There is no government, no one to give us authority,” he said. “The political parties are the most powerful force in Basra right now." And here's an aspect of the story that seems straight out of The Handmaid's Tale: One [armed man] brought a video camera to record the sinful spectacle of the picnic, footage of which was later released to the public as a warning to others. It showed images of one girl struggling as a gunman ripped her blouse off, leaving her half-naked. "We will send these pictures to your parents so they can see how you were dancing naked with men," a gunman told her.... Fellow students say that the girl later committed suicide. Good Lord. Will Iraq become an Islamist state? It seems that, right now, part of it already is one. (Via This Is Rumor Control and the American Street.) posted by Steve M. | 1:58 PM | So, er, I wonder when someone in the mainstream press is going to do a story on the fact that Gary McCullough, the media coordinator for Terri Schiavo's parents, has deep ties to the ultraviolent wing of the anti-abortion movement. Go to that second link and just keep reading. McCullough has called one abortion provider's murderer a "hero" and was a friend and media spokesman for another such murderer. He has a few arrests to his record, too, for anti-abortion intimidation. And now he's at the forefront of the fight to force Terri Schiavo's feeding tube back in. posted by Steve M. | 10:26 AM | You know who else is standing with the Bushes and Tom DeLay and Randall Terry in the Terri Schiavo case? Ralph Nader. Isn't it nice to see he's standing up for junk science and against the legal rights of her husband/legal guardian: ...The medical and rehabilitation experts are split on whether Terri is in a persistent vegetative state or whether Terri can be improved with therapy. There is only one way to know for sure- permit the therapy. That is the only way to resolve all doubts. ...The federal and state governments are spending billions on what we are told will become miracle medical cures for people with all sorts of degenerative conditions, including brain damage. If this is so, why not permit Terri's parents and siblings who want to care for her do so in the hope that such cures are discovered?... That's from a press release issued by Nader and Wesley J. Smith. Smith, who once wrote a book with Nader, is a bioethicist affiliated with the Discovery Institute, a group that's prominent in the drive to muscle evolution aside in American schools to make way for "intelligent design." Smith also writes for The Weekly Standard and National Review; his articles include "A 'Dr. Death' Runs for President: Howard Dean Advocates Kevorkian-Syle Medicine." Thanks again, Ralph. Way to stick up for progressive causes. (Press release link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 7:41 AM | Thursday, March 24, 2005 LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM Glenn has posted a statement from the American Council of Science and Health denoncing as "junk science" any assertion that challenges the diagnosis that Terri Schiavo is PVS and attacking Dr. William Chesire. The statement mischaracterizes Chesire's affidavit, which did not provide a "new diagnosis" at all, but rather concluded that "there was reasonable doubt on the prior diagnosis of PVS." --Hugh Hewitt at HughHewitt.com Based on the evidence, I believe that, within a reasonable degree of medical certainty, there is a greater likelihood that Terri is in a minimally conscious state than in a persistent vegetative state. --page 6 of the affidavit by Dr. William Cheshire, which Hewitt says does "not provide a 'new diagnosis' at all" posted by Steve M. | 11:39 PM | Right-wing pundit Debra J. Saunders, writing about the Terri Schiavo case in the San Francisco Chronicle: ...spare me the rhetoric about Republicans being hypocrites on states' rights -- fresh from the mouths of Democrats who don't want to let Alaskans drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, who don't want states to determine their own gun-control laws and couldn't wait for the feds to storm the home of the Miami family of Elian Gonzalez. Wow, I learned a lot from that. * I learned that it's Alaskans who want to drill in ANWR. All by themselves! With no involvement by multinational oil companies! Gosh, I had no idea it was so grassroots. And I learned that it's none of my business what's done with a national wildlife refuge established by the Eisenhower administration, expanded a generation later by an act of Congress, and administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. * On Elian, I learned that issues of immigration devolved to the states while I wasn't looking, sometime during the last five years. The Immigration and Nationalization Service? Utterly irrelevant! And the members of Congress who wanted to give Elian permanent U.S. residency? They were, er, um ... well, they were doing Good, so it was OK for them to try to use the national government to resolve this 100% states'-rights issue! * And on gun control, I learned that I want the federal government to overturn all local ordinances, so New York gun policy can be entirely determined by Texans. I had no idea I wanted that. Typical liberal! posted by Steve M. | 5:27 PM | I do not understand the emotionalism of the pull-the-tube people. What is driving their engagement? ... Why are they so committed to this woman's death? They seem to have fallen half in love with death. ...Terri Schiavo may well die. No good will come of it. Those who are half in love with death will only become more red-fanged and ravenous. And those who are still learning--our children--oh, what terrible lessons they're learning. What terrible stories are shaping them. They're witnessing the Schiavo drama on television and hearing it on radio. They are seeing a society--their society, their people--on the verge of famously accepting, even embracing, the idea that a damaged life is a throwaway life. ...When a society comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber. You wind up on a low road that twists past Columbine and leads toward Auschwitz. Today that road runs through Pinellas Park, Fla. --Peggy Noonan today As to those in the World Trade Center . . . Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break.... To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in -- and in many cases excelling at -- it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it. --Ward Churchill on the 9/11 attacks I see no essential difference between these two statements. With her column today, Peggy Noonan has entered the ranks who should be shunned when they walk down the street. She declares today that the vast majority of Americans are Nazis-in-development. That's beyond the pale. posted by Steve M. | 11:40 AM | CULTURE OF BUSH State records show Bush re-election concerns played part in FEMA aid As the second hurricane in less than a month bore down on Florida last fall, a federal consultant predicted a "huge mess" that could reflect poorly on President Bush and suggested that his re-election staff be brought in to minimize any political liability, records show. Two weeks later, a Florida official summarizing the hurricane response wrote that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was handing out housing assistance "to everyone who needs it without asking for much information of any kind." ... politics was foremost on the mind of FEMA consultant Glenn Garcelon, who wrote a three-page memo titled "Hurricane Frances -- Thoughts and Suggestions," on Sept. 2. ...Garcelon, a former FEMA employee, recommended that "top-level people from FEMA and the White House need to develop a communication strategy and an agreed-upon set of themes and communications objectives." "Communication consultants from the President's re-election campaign should be brought in," he wrote.... Weeks after it was written, the memo made its way to Gov. [Jeb] Bush's chief of staff, Denver Stutler, who forwarded it to the governor Sept. 30.... FEMA has been under scrutiny since the Sun-Sentinel first reported in October that the agency was awarding millions of dollars in disaster funds to residents of Miami-Dade County, even though the county did not experience hurricane conditions. In a Sept. 13 memo to Gov. Bush and other top state officials, Orlando J. Cabrera, executive director of the Florida Housing Finance Corp. and a member of the governor's Hurricane Housing Work Group, wrote after a meeting with FEMA that the agency was allocating short-term rental assistance to "everyone who needs it, without asking for much information of any kind."... Even state officials were surprised at how quickly money flowed to Florida. The day after Hurricane Charley hit the west coast, the state's labor chief, Susan Pareigis, asked for a federal grant for unemployment assistance for storm victims. Four days later, U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao "was down personally" to award the money, Pareigis wrote in an Aug. 24 e-mail to the governor. "Please express our sincere thank you for such an instantaneous response." The governor forwarded her e-mail to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in less than 10 minutes. "Please tell the President and your team how grateful we are," Gov. Bush wrote. "The response has been awesome from FEMA and other departments." --South Florida Sun-Sentinel yesterday posted by Steve M. | 9:45 AM | Wednesday, March 23, 2005 GOP adviser died of overdose Republican media adviser R. Gregory Stevens, who was found dead in the Beverly Hills, Calif., home of actress Carrie Fisher on Feb. 26, died of an overdose of cocaine and the painkiller OxyContin, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office. ...Mr. Stevens, 42, was an associate with the powerhouse Washington lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers.... Mr. Stevens ... served as the head of the Bush-Cheney Entertainment Task Force for President Bush's recent inaugural. Barbour Griffith & Rogers, one of the co-founders of which was chairman of the Republican National Committee, held a memorial service for Mr. Stevens earlier this month.... --Washington Times Barbour Griffith & Rogers is a lobbying firm that has as one of its clients the trade group PhRMA -- the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For whatever that's worth. And, of course, the Barbour in Barbour Griffith & Rogers is Haley Barbour, who resigned as president of the firm to become governor of Mississippi. posted by Steve M. | 10:31 PM | Update 4:52 p.m.: The Florida Senate rejected a bill today to keep Terri Schiavo alive as the brain-damaged woman's parents were running out of options to have her feeding tube reinserted. --Associated Press/Orlando Sentinel But it's far from over. From another Orlando Sentinel story: TALLAHASSEE -- Even as the state Senate debated a measure aimed at keeping Terri Schiavo alive, Gov. Jeb Bush said today his social services agency may step in to have her feeding tube reinstated. In an extraordinary move, Bush said the Department of Children and Families has filed a legal motion alleging "30 detailed allegations of abuse, neglect or exploitation" that have occurred during Schiavo's stay at a Pinellas Park hospice.... Along with the petition alleging abuse, the Bush administration has filed with the Pinellas Circuit Judge George W. Greer an affidavit from Jacksonville neurologist William Polk Cheshire, Jr., who concluded from examining videotape of Schiavo that the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman may not be in a persistent vegetative state. Instead, "It is likely she is in a state of minimal consciousness," Bush said. "This new information raises serious concerns and warrants immediate action." An affidavit based on the frigging videotape! Hasn't Judge Greer watched the whole videotape -- not just the few seconds cherry-picked by the family to show to fellow right-to-lifers? DCF Secretary Lucy Hadi said that under state law the agency is authorized to intervene and have Schiavo's sustenance restored even without a court order. She said the agency would make that decision before the end of today. And here's my favorite part -- Jeb actually had the unmitigated gall to say this: "I'm doing everything within my power to make sure that Terri is afforded at least the same rights that criminals convicted of heinous crimes take for granted," Bush said. "If a prisoner comes forward with new DNA evidence 20 years after his conviction that suggests his innocence, there is no doubt the courts in our state and all across the country, for that matter, will immediately review their case. We should do no less for Terri Schiavo," Bush said. Here's the reality in Bush's own state: Under the law, passed in 2001 and sponsored by Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, anyone convicted of a crime has two years after a sentence becomes final to ask a judge to review DNA testing of physical evidence. And in 2003, when the first criminals faced a deadline under the law, this was the response: Villalobos says he's open to weighing the request for a time extension, but Gov. Jeb Bush is not considering such a move, said Jill Bratina, a spokeswoman for the governor. There isn't a circle of hell low enough for Jeb. (UPDATE: Link fixed.) posted by Steve M. | 4:57 PM | World O'Crap has been looking at right-wing opinion and finds that Christian conservatives will blame Jeb Bush (and, to a lesser extent, his brother) if Terri Schiavo dies: Gov. Bush, put a stop to this travesty right now, for the sake of all that our nation stands for, in the interest of meriting God's merciful protection of our country in the years ahead. If you "allow" Terri to die, you will indeed be her chief executioner. That's one of a number of quotes from several sources S.Z. assembles. Go read -- it's amazing. Jeb is the man a lot of them plan to blame. This means (as if it wasn't obvious) that even if the Supreme Court refuses to intervene, this won't be over -- Jeb has to save her or his base will turn on him and his career really could be at risk. He'll start by playing hardball with the Florida Senate -- which voted 21-16 on Friday not to intervene. But if that fails, I don't think we can rule out the possibility that he'll use force to keep her alive. And that would be a watershed -- that might do what a million op-eds and a billion blog posts couldn't: persuade Americans that the far right is out of control. If force is used to "save" Terri Schiavo, the public reaction won't be like what we saw regarding Waco or Elian. In each of those situations, the use of force was on behalf of policies Americans supported (for Waco, see footnote 2 here; for Elian, see this). We know what the polls are in this case. This will be seen as force directed not at religious crazies or the likes of the feckless, meddlesome "Miami relatives," but at the kind of sickbed virtually all of us worry about being in or standing beside. Americans can easily imagine being Terri or Michael Schiavo. Americans agree with Michael Schiavo's judgment. Thuggery against him will make a lot of Americans think: They could do that to me. And they would, wouldn't they? posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM | I never posted the text of that memo that described the Terri Schiavo case as "a great political issue." ABC has had it up for a couple of days here. And now the Raw Story has reproduced the document itself, here. Not much in it beyond what's been reported, really. However, right-wingers are just desperate to turn this into another "Rathergate"; see this post and this one at Power Line. They really want to prove the document is a hoax -- but they're defining "hoax" rather narrowly: ...the content of the memo is highly suspicious. Why would anyone mix political strategy points--the ones the Democrats want to talk about--with talking points for Senatorial argument? A competent staffer preparing a talking points memo wouldn't do that, but a Democratic dirty trickster would. Does this prove the memo is a fraud? Not at all. It is possible that somewhere in the House or Senate there is a Republican staffer dumb enough to have produced and circulated it.... But it doesn't have to have originated in a congressional office to be an authentic strategy document and a telling glimpse into the vile thinking behind this crusade. Look, here's the reality: Zealots within the national Republican Party control the party, and zealots outside the official party structure have a disproportionate influence over those in the party who run it. Maybe the boys at Power Line see a wall of separation, but I don't. Recall the lead from this New York Times story that ran yesterday: When a judge set last Friday as the deadline for removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, Ken Connor, a Florida trial lawyer and prominent Christian conservative who represented Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida on this issue, decided to appeal to a higher power, Congress. He turned to an old acquaintance, Representative Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican and doctor, in a long-shot effort to persuade Congress to intervene. Convicted murderers have more chances to appeal to the federal courts than patients who are incapacitated, Mr. Connor argued. "Don't we want to accord the same protections to the handicapped and disabled that we do to death row inmates?" he asked. That was three weeks ago. The plans hatched by Mr. Connor and Dr. Weldon eventually snowballed into Congress's marathon weekend session... Their success was the culmination of a two-year campaign by social conservatives who had been building support for the cause, along with the diligent efforts of Ms. Schiavo's parents and brother. Senator Mel Martinez, a newly elected Republican of Florida who is Mr. Connor's former college roommate, also played an influential role.... Ken Connor is now a D.C. lawyer and used to head the Family Research Council and Florida Right to Life. The right-wing attempt to pick the document apart has borne some fruit. Commenter #35 at that Raw Story link notes that some of the text of the memo matches the text of this page at the Web site of the Traditional Values Coalition. To the commenter, this strongly suggests that the thing is a work of Democratic fraud. Er, hold on a second. The Traditional Values Coalition page is a list of talking points for the Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act of 2005. And, gosh, what's this? Why, it's a March 8 press release, also at the TVC Web site, announcing the introduction of the Incapacitated Person’s Legal Protection Act of 2005 ... by Senator Mel Martinez and Congressman Dave Weldon! Does a vague wisp of smoke emanate from a gun in one of these men's offices? Or from the office of the well-connected D.C. lawyer Ken Connor? Or from the TVC itself? And if so, do you think the Power Liners can smell it? posted by Steve M. | 10:39 AM | Tuesday, March 22, 2005 YEAH, YEAH, YEAH -- YOU HAVE A NUMBER TATTOOED ON YOUR WRIST. WE DON'T CARE. WE'RE REPUBLICANS. WE'RE MORALLY INFALLIBLE. OLYMPIA - A Holocaust survivor who endured Nazi medical experiments is demanding an apology from state lawmakers who compared embryonic stem cell research to Nazi atrocities. "I was just very much hurt," Fred Taucher, 72, said Tuesday. "You don't know how it hit me. It's beyond my comprehension. Usually I do not get this emotional." ... Taucher was captured by Nazis when he was 12.... in front of the Capitol on Tuesday, he told how Nazi scientists plunged him into baths of ice water and then baths of boiling water, burning his skin.... [Rep. Joyce] McDonald [R-Puyallup] said she believes embryonic stem cell research kills human lives, and she will not apologize for her comments. In her floor speech, McDonald referred to "experiments that were done by the Third Reich" as a warning about embryonic stem cell research. "I think they're making more of it than they need to," she said about the complaints raised Tuesday.... Rep. Glenn Anderson, R-Fall City, said in his floor speech that Nazi Germany's policy was "in order to perfect humanity it was necessary to selectively destroy humanity. And the medical experiments at Auschwitz were carried out for that explicit purpose." Anderson did not return calls seeking comment on Tuesday, but last Friday he told reporters he saw no reason to apologize.... --KOMO TV, Seattle Unbelievable. posted by Steve M. | 11:45 PM | FREEDOM ON THE MARCH Ben Johnson in David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, 2/28/05: ...a sea-change is taking place in the Arab world: democracy is becoming reality for the first time in history – and all this progress came about because of the determination of President George W. Bush and over the most vicious objections of the American Left. The most recent dividends of the Bush Doctrine became evident on Saturday, when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak demanded the 1971 (socialist) constitution be amended to allow multiparty elections for the first time.... AP today: Egyptian Opposition Leader Charged With Forgery, Ordered to Stand Trial The only man who has dared to challenge Hosni Mubarak for the presidency was charged Tuesday with forging signatures to win approval for his party - an escalation in the government's confrontation with the most prominent figure in Egypt's fledgling reform movement. ...Prosecutors accused Nour of forging signatures required for the registration application of his Al-Ghad - or "Tomorrow" - party. The 40-year-old politician denies the charges, saying they are an attempt to wreck him politically. ...If he is convicted, Nour would lose his right to run for office and could face a prison term of up to 15 years - though the right would be restored if he successfully appealed any guilty verdict. No date for a trial has been set, and the process of trials and appeals could take years.... posted by Steve M. | 5:57 PM | On cue, as Atrios notes, here's Rick Santorum calling Judge Whittemore's ruling "judicial tyranny." Hate to say I told you so. Yesterday I mentioned the Elian case as a precedent for Republicans suffering no consequences despite being very much on the wrong side of public opinion (while Democrats, or at least Al Gore, did suffer even though the public disagreed with the Republicans). I could have also mentioned the Clinton impeachment (losing a few GOP seats in '98 was more than made up for by Gore's inability to coast into the White House on peace and prosperity) or no-brainer gun issues like the assault-weapons ban and closing the gun-show loophole. In each case the public has been on the side of the Democrats, but no harm has come to the GOP. That's why, alas, I don't think the Republicans are overreaching. We've seen this movie before: Republicans rant, Democrats divide (with a few Dems timidly objecting), and the status quo doesn't change. posted by Steve M. | 1:58 PM | DELAY: GOD DESTROYED TERRI SCHIAVO'S BRAIN IN ORDER TO SAVE MY POLITICAL CAREER On Friday, as the leaders of both chambers scrambled to try to stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube, Mr. DeLay, a Texas Republican, turned his attention to social conservatives gathered at a Washington hotel and described what he viewed as the intertwined struggle to save Ms. Schiavo, expand the conservative movement and defend himself against accusations of ethical lapses. "One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said. --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 10:40 AM | Monday, March 21, 2005 Wow: Church cuts ties to food pantry because of Catholics CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A church has withdrawn its support for a food pantry serving the needy because the pantry works with Roman Catholics. Central Church of God explained its decision in a letter March 1 from minister of evangelism Shannon Burton to Loaves & Fishes in Charlotte. "As a Christian church, we feel it is our responsibility to follow closely the (principles) and commands of Scripture," the letter said. "To do this best, we feel we should abstain from any ministry that partners with or promotes Catholicism, or for that matter, any other denomination promoting a works-based salvation." Loaves & Fishes isn't the only ministry with which the large church has cut ties, and Catholics have not been the only reason they've given. The Rev. Tony Marciano, executive director of Charlotte Rescue Mission, said Burton told him the church could no longer support the agency after it allowed three Muslim students from UNC Charlotte to help serve a meal.... Full story here, from last Saturday's Durham Herald-Sun. And there's a longer story here. Ah, but since then the the pastor's had a change of heart! The pastor of Central Church of God says the huge Charlotte church will continue supporting two ministries it had decided to quit helping because of the presence of Catholics. "I'm apologizing," the Rev. Loran Livingston said at the second of two Palm Sunday services. "I'm telling all the people for the hurt, 'I'm sorry.' As long as we can, we're going to help until the Lord tells us to redirect our wealth."... Though not completely: But Livingston said the church would no longer support Charlotte Rescue Mission, citing in part the involvement of three Muslim students who helped serve a meal there. Hey, you gotta have some standards, right? WWJD? (First link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 11:34 PM | So the federal judge hearing the Schiavo case is a Clinton appointee. That's good. It may mean he'll make a sensible decision. But this is a win either way for DeLay and his thugs. If the judge forces the feeding tube back in, that's a big win -- but if he doesn't, that gives the thugs a chance (as I've said) to point to this case forever as an example of "judicial tyranny." This will be another Waco for the far right -- and now the thugs can also blame it on an "out-of-control" federal judiciary (which segues nicely into the crusade to lard the federal courts with right-wing extremists). **** UPDATE: Yeah, I've seen the ABC poll showing massive opposition to congressional intervention. I worry that it may not matter. This reminds me of Elian -- the Republicans were on the wrong side of public opinion, but come Election Day the only voters who remembered were voters in Florida wanting to punish the Clinton administration. The next election cycle is off-year. Who'll vote? Motivated voters. If the past is any indication, there'll be a lot more people voting in '06 to get back at "activist" Judge Greer than to get back at Tom DeLay. And the same goes for the mobilization of public opinion in any future battle over judicial nominees. posted by Steve M. | 2:17 PM | THIS IS NOT ABOUT TERRI SCHIAVO We saw this weekend how fast the one-party government in Washington can move to try to keep a woman with no higher-order brain functions alive for several more decades. Alas, the government's concern for the lives of healthy, fully functional soldiers in Iraq has been a bit less robust -- it's still going to take several more months (actually, it's taken two and a half years) to get each of the troops a sophisticated, high-tech piece of lifesaving equipment, the lack of which has led a number of them to bleed to death. A tourniquet. Here's the original story from the Baltimore Sun (link; if that doesn't work, try this): Since at least a month before the war in Iraq began, medical experts in the Army and other services have called on the Pentagon to equip every American soldier in the war zone with a modern tourniquet. The simple first-aid tool - a more sophisticated version of the cloth-and-stick device used by armies for centuries - could all but eliminate deaths caused by blood loss from extremity wounds, the most common cause of preventable death in combat, they argue. The cost would not likely exceed $2 million, or about two-thousandths of a percent of the $82 billion proposed for the war this year. Yet many of the nation's soldiers - tens of thousands, some doctors and Army medical officials estimate - continue to enter battle without tourniquets. And some bleed to death from battlefield injuries that would not be life-threatening if a proper tourniquet were available, according to more than a dozen military doctors and medics who spoke to The Sun on the condition they not be identified.... Even though the Army has approved a new soldier first-aid kit that would include a tourniquet and manufacturers say they are ready to produce as many as 100,000 tourniquets a month, the Pentagon has not placed an order.... Many of the Army's Reserve and National Guard units, maintenance and supply soldiers, and infantry soldiers ... don't have modern tourniquets. The Army has never added any type of tourniquet to its standard equipment list for soldiers, and the Pentagon has never dedicated money to buy them. Squads of 10 or more soldiers sometimes go into battle without a single tourniquet among them, The Sun has found. Many soldiers don't even carry the $2.05 cravat bandage, which the military has used as an improvised tourniquet for hundreds of years.... And this isn't a trivial issue: One photograph circulating among Army doctors shows an unidentified soldier with a tourniquet on his leg fashioned from a bungee cord. According to a doctor who showed the picture to The Sun, the improvised tourniquet failed, and the soldier bled to death.... A Sun update late last week (try this to get it) informs us that the situation is being remedied. That means instantly, right? "We anticipate theaterwide distribution beginning in mid-April, with completion in three or four months, by July or August," said Cynthia Vaughan, a spokeswoman for the Army surgeon general. So what went wrong? One obstacle was that the military wanted first to develop new training manuals and a pouch for carrying the tourniquet, a process expected to take months. Let's see: Military doctors have been talking about this since 2003, there've been 1500+ deaths and a lot more injuries, and the the training manuals and pouch are still in the planning stages? I guess they weren't planning to finish this process until the third or fourth Bush invasion of a Middle Eastern country. posted by Steve M. | 2:02 PM | On NPR this morning, I heard Congressman John Lewis of Georgia denouncing the Schiavo bill. John Lewis! This John Lewis. You have a hero of the civil rights era on one side and, as a party, you don't have the guts to put him up against Tom DeLay? What the hell is wrong with the Democrats? **** Even a few Republicans get it, at least outside of Washington -- these Florida state legislators, for instance: Terri Schiavo's parents couldn't get their own legislators to vote this time around for a bill that would keep their daughter hooked to a feeding tube. Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Treasure Island, and Rep. Everett Rice, R-Treasure Island, count Bob and Mary Schindler among their constituents. And yet both lawmakers voted Thursday to defeat proposals [in the Florida legislature] that would block the withholding of food and water from patients in a persistent vegetative state.... Jones and Rice were among a surprisingly large number of Tampa Bay-area Republicans who broke party ranks and voted against the bill. The group included the woman who is second-in-command in the House, Rep. Leslie Waters, R-Seminole, the speaker pro tempore. Most said they were philosophically opposed to involving government in issues they felt should be handled privately by families.... Rep. Charlie Dean, R-Inverness, said he also felt remorse after voting for Terri's Law in 2003. "I think this was a family matter," Dean said. "I voted for it last year but after reflection, I had to vote against it." That's from the St. Petersburg Times. The story goes on to tell us something about the letters and e-mails the legislators are getting: While nearly every lawmaker was deluged with e-mails from national organizations begging them to save Schiavo's life, local correspondents were more likely to ask them to stay out of the matter. For example, of the 300 e-mails Rice received Wednesday, about 215 were from out of state and all asked him to vote for the bill. Of the 29 definitely from Rice's district, all but six asked him to vote against the bill. The origin of the remainder could not be determined. Rep. David Russell, R-Spring Hill, who also voted against the bill, said the local letters were dramatically different from two years ago. "It is almost a 180-degree turnaround," Russell said. "I received a number of communications from my constituents, many of them conservative Republicans, asking that we not intervene. And I listen to my constituents." The message is getting through to these Republicans. Why can't the whipped-dog Democrats in Washington hear it? posted by Steve M. | 11:25 AM | Sunday, March 20, 2005 OK -- why did this happen? It happened, in part, because Democrats -- as is so often the case -- were caught flat-flooted. And why was that? Why did no one in the Democratic Party grasp the fact that right-wingers have rallied around Terri Schiavo, and thus the case was ripe for self-righteous GOP moralizing? I knew. You know when I did my first post about Terri Schiavo? 2003. Why did I know about her case? Because I pay attention to the hardcore Republican base. I'm a regular lurker at Free Republic and Lucianne.com. I know that's where you can pick up the danger signals. For that matter, I knew the Swift Boat liars were coming a couple of months before their first ad went on the air. It's not rocket science. I knew from FR and Lucianne. Why the hell does it seem that no one in the Democratic Party does what I do? Why didn't anyone see this coming? Why were no Democrats prepared for this possibility? Did any Democrat even know the facts of the case before this week? How many Democrats know, even now, that this is hardly an unprecedented case, that Terri Schiavo can't possibly recover, that she won't suffer agony as she dies? Republicans know all the Christian conservative Schiavo talking points. Has any Democrat in D.C. ever even looked at the exhaustive Terri Schiavo information page at Matt Conigliaro's Abstract Appeal to learn the truth about the case? When Terri Schiavo became Congress's priority #1, Democrats -- as usual -- buckled under pressure. They've just thrown up their hands. From yesterday's New York Times we learned that For Democrats still struggling in the wake of their defeat in the November elections, the case offered a way to portray their newfound willingness to move to the center on such issues. From an AP story today we learn that, with regard to the GOP bill to transfer control of the case to federal courts, The Democratic whip, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said his office was informing members of the vote and not discouraging them from returning to the capital. But he said the party was not counting votes and was telling members to vote their conscience on the issue. Translation: The Republicans are probably right on this one. As is so often the case, they'll say we're evil if we don't vote with them, and, well, they're right, I guess. After all, they have values. We don't. Democrats remind me of a woman I used to see doing standup comedy back in the '80s. She talked about an ex-boyfriend and said they had one thing in common: "We both loved him and hated me." That's the Democratic Party in relation to the GOP: They both love the GOP and hate the Democrats. I don't want Democratic resistance to be limited to this: But Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., spoke of "the manifestation of a constitutional crisis" where Congress, for ideological reasons, was ignoring the separations of power written into the Constitution. I want someone to say flat out that what Republicans are doing is morally wrong. It stomps on spousal rights and the due process of law. It's hypocrisy given that other parents and guardians are seeing their relatives pulled off life support against their wishes. The grandstanding turns Terri Schiavo into a political football. An awful lot of ordinary Americans get this. A lot of them would rally to a Democrat who wasn't full of self-hatred, who would say that the Republican position is not the moral position. But that will never happen. Shortly after the '04 election, an essay made the rounds that described all Democrats as battered wives. I don't agree -- the Democrats I know don't act like victims who tie themselves in knots to please (Republican) abusers. But that's because I don't know any Democrats who are officeholders or staffers in the Beltway. When I look at those Democrats, I have to say: Yeah, you're living in an abusive marriage. You've got to stop letting yourself get hit, and you've got to save yourself, for crissakes. posted by Steve M. | 7:55 PM | And anyone who hasn't yet caught up with the cases of Sun Hudson and Spiro Nikolouzos should go here. Hudson and Nikolouzos are patients in Texas (a six-month-old boy and a 67-year-old man, respectively) whose families have sought to keep them on life support, but the families' wishes have been thwarted because hospitals in that state have the legal right to overrule families. (Sun Hudson, the six-month-old, has since died.) Let me be cold-blooded: If Democrats played the game like Republicans, a delegation of Dem politicians would fly down to Texas and literally try to make a federal case of these denials of care. (Link via Sisyphus Shrugged.) posted by Steve M. | 6:45 PM | In case you haven't seen this, here's more on the Schiavo memo, from The Washington Post: An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters. The memo singled out Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who is up for reelection next year and is potentially vulnerable in a state President Bush won last year. "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," said the memo, which was reported by ABC News and later given to The Washington Post. "This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats." Yeah, that's just how Jesus would have put it. posted by Steve M. | 6:04 PM | Captain Flightsuit -- to the rescue! Congressional leaders reached a compromise Saturday on legislation to force the case of Terri Schiavo into federal court.... The White House announced late Saturday that President Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., would make an unscheduled return on Sunday to Washington, where he would remain until early Monday in anticipation of signing the measure.... [White House press secretary Scott] McClellan said that a bill could be flown to Crawford for the president's signature, but that a woman's life was at stake and Mr. Bush did not want to waste a moment.... --New York Times Got that? He has to fly from Crawford to Washington because flying the bill from Washington to Crawford would take too long. Yeah, that makes sense, right? Christ, the mainstream press will swallow any swill this administration dishes out, won't it? ***** UPDATE: Or quite possibly the point of this stunt is obvious, and I'm just missing it -- see comment #1. posted by Steve M. | 10:53 AM | Why have congressional Republicans been working the Terri Schiavo case so hard when polls show that most of America would support the removal her feeding tube? Yesterday's New York Times tried to answer that -- but missed an obvious reason. The Times story mentioned pressure from religious conservatives, sincere concern about Schiavo's fate on the part of "Mr DeLay and other lawmakers" (yeah, right), and an eagerness on DeLay's part to change the subject from his fund-raising scandals. But here's what the Times missed: the fact that this is part of a larger right-wing argument, namely that we are suffering from "judicial tyranny." Note that it was just this week that the Senate Judiciary Committee dealt with the first of Bush's resubmitted judicial nominees, setting the stage for a possible exercise of the filibuster-quashing "nuclear option" in the full Senate. Note also that the top-selling right-wing book at this moment (#6 on the New York Times bestseller list as I write this) is Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. Note that the The Empire Journal, a right-wing site that's taken up the Schiavo case, is selling STOP JUDICIAL TYRANNY magnets, suitable for the back of your SUV. And there's a larger implicit message beyond that: "unelected judges" who impose "judicial tyranny" are doing just what leftists/liberals/Democrats always do -- they're unilaterally imposing their perverse will on America, in defiance of common decency and common sense. That's the overarching message that wins elections for the GOP. Whether it's tenured-radical professors forcing our babies to espouse America-hatred in college classrooms or John Kerry calling for a "global test" on fighting terrorism or the ACLU requiring department-store clerks not to say "Merry Christmas," the evidence is overwhelming: People on the left have freakish notions and we force everyone to yield to them. (Yes, of course, every example I've given is a distortion of the truth. But large swaths of the public believe all of them are literally true.) No, I don't know why our side can't paint DeLay and Florida Republicans and the religious right as the ones wearing the jackboots in this case. But that's the way it usually goes, isn't it? ***** I wrote that yesterday -- and after I wrote it, as if on cue, I discovered that a gentleman named Horace Cooper had written an op-ed for UPI making the precise "judicial tyranny" argument I was talking about. So far the op-ed isn't widely circulated, but I think it's representative of right-wing thinking. Cooper says that George Greer, the Florida judge overseeing the case, has acted as judge, jury, and executioner and more like the grim reaper than a neutral arbitrator upholding the law.... Cooper thinks Greer should be impeached, but Unfortunately judges and their "amen choir" in the media and academia have successfully limited the use and frequency of this power. As a result, brazen acts of judicial usurpation go unabated as judge after judge plays the legal version of "Que es mas macho?" pursuing ever more extremist counter-culture agendas that would never pass in an open democratic public process. There it is, in two sentences -- the whole argument, with nearly all the usual suspects rounded up. (Cooper, by the way, has written for GOPUSA, former stomping grounds of Jeff Gannon, as well as for the "respectable" National Review Online.) posted by Steve M. | 8:52 AM | Saturday, March 19, 2005 FREEDOM ON THE MARCH In the southern city of Basra, hundreds of students have protested in front of the governor's office for the past three days, sometimes scuffling with the police, in the latest show of anger against the Shiite parties and militias that largely run the city. The demonstrations began after an incident on Wednesday in which militiamen loyal to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr beat a group of students dressed Western style, with uncovered hair and jeans, as they ate a picnic lunch in a Basra park. Police officers were standing by but did not stop the attack, the students said.... Basra's governor, Muhammad Mesbeh al Waili, said Mr. Sadr's local office had issued a formal apology. But the spokesman for Mr. Sadr's office in Basra, Sheik Asad al-Basra, was unrepentant in an interview on Saturday, saying that the incident had been caused by "licentious behavior" among the students. --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 11:58 PM | Friday, March 18, 2005 From Linda Douglass on ABC News tonight (no transcript available online): ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited..." and "This is a great political issue... this is a tough issue for Democrats." Really pure of heart, aren't they? ***** UPDATE: A commenter informs me that ABC has now posted this, which quotes the talking points and DeLay's response to them: "I don't know where those talking points come from, and I think they're disgusting." I believe that's what you'd call a "non-denial denial" of their authenticity. ***** (Welcome visitors from TBogg, Atrios, Oliver Willis, etc. While you're here, let me also direct your attention to the fact that right-wingers are lying to you about Terri Schiavo's "agonizing" death.) posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM | Propaganda: Terri Schiavo Sentenced to Slow, Painful Death --American Life League press release The moment her feeding tube is removed, Terri Schiavo will begin a long, slow, painful death by starvation and dehydration. --Operation Rescue Web site Death by dehydration is a painful, agonizing and arduous process that takes 10 to 14 days. Compared to starvation and dehydration, death by hanging, firing squad or even electric chair seem humane. --Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.) on the House floor Thursday Fact: ... the brain-damaged woman's physical response to having her feeding tube removed is likely to be very serene. "The process of starving to death seems very barbaric but in actuality is very peaceful," said Dr. Fred Mirarchi, assistant clinical professor of emergency medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia. "The patient's experience is really pretty benign," said Dr. Joanne Lynn, a hospice physician associated with Americans for Better Care of the Dying, a group working for improved end-of-life care. "Overwhelmingly, what will happen is nothing." ... the fact that Schiavo is in a vegetative state will likely make her death faster and less painful, Lynn said. ...Most patients who cannot eat or drink will enter a physical state known as ketosis. During ketosis the body begins to use fat and muscle as a fuel source. In advanced cases of ketosis, the nervous system response is dulled, and patients rarely feel pain, hunger or thirst. There is also some evidence that ketosis can produce a state of well-being or mild euphoria. ...Over time, the patient will become more and more dehydrated and will eventually develop kidney failure, Mirarchi explained. "Patients at this point are uremic -- filled with bodily toxins -- and are unaware of their surroundings," Mirarchi said. ...In the final moments of life, the abnormalities in the patient's heart rate known as arrhythmia are common. "The heart will then stop and the patient will die," said Mirarchi. --ABC News posted by Steve M. | 10:49 PM | Shorter Peggy Noonan: Bill Frist has more of a right to decide Terri Schiavo's fate than her lawful husband whose opinion has been affirmed numerous times by the courts because her husband is a "strange-o" and lots of people who agree with him have beards. **** Update: Doctors removed Terri Schiavo's feeding tube Friday despite an extraordinary, last-minute push by Republicans on Capitol Hill to use the subpoena powers of Congress to save the severely brain-damaged woman. Schiavo's family issued a statement on their Web site confirming that the tube had been disconnected. It is expected that it will take one to two weeks for Schiavo to die, provided no one intercedes and gets the tube reinserted.... Which is a big if. ***** Oh, and apologies for failing to mention that one of the most prominent supporters of Terri Schiavo's parents in their fight against her husband and the courts is Randall (Operation Rescue) Terry. posted by Steve M. | 4:20 PM | The latest in the Terri Schiavo case is that a Florida judge has delayed removal of her feeding tube -- shortly after this cheap little stunt took place in D.C.: ...U.S. lawmakers on Friday called on Terri Schiavo to appear before congressional committees in an attempt to keep her alive. House of Representatives leaders issued subpoenas for Schiavo while the Senate called her as a witness to congressional hearings to stave off the removal of her feeding tube, scheduled for 1 p.m.... Federal law protects a witness "from anyone who ... influences, obstructs, or impedes an inquiry or investigation by Congress," [Senator Bill] Frist said. For some reason, this reminds me of Russell Weston. Remember him? He killed two police officers at the U.S. Capitol in 1998, and it's the most open-and-shut case of not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity imaginable: Russell Eugene Weston Jr. told a court-appointed psychiatrist that he stormed the U.S. Capitol last summer, killing two police officers, to prevent the United States from being annihilated by disease and legions of cannibals. "He described his belief that time was running out and that if he did not come to Washington, D.C., he would become infected with Black Heva," wrote Sally C. Johnson, the psychiatrist who examined Weston last fall. Weston called this imaginary ailment the "most deadliest disease known to mankind" and said it was spread by the rotting corpses of cannibals' victims, Johnson wrote. Weston told Johnson he went to the Capitol to gain access to what he called "the ruby satellite," a device he said was kept in a Senate safe. That satellite, he insisted, was the key to putting a stop to cannibalism. The former mental patient told another doctor that he fatally shot officers Jacob J. Chestnut and John M. Gibson on July 24 because they were cannibals who were keeping him from the satellite.... Weston was found incompetent to stand trial, but he was then forcibly medicated in order to determine whether he could be made competent -- and face the death penalty. In each case, the outcome of standard procedures -- Michael Schiavo's trip through the Florida court system and Russell Weston's competency hearing -- led to a conclusion that's at odds with the simple verities a lot of Americans would like to believe rule the universe: that helpless innocents will triumph and that those who do evil will be punished. Terri Schiavo can't recover, but, for some Americans, that reality is intolerable. No rational person can be held accountable for the Capitol shootings, but some Americans find that equally intolerable. So people with the power to do so toy with the system -- and use Terri Schiavo and Russell Weston -- in order to make life jibe with their belief in a just world. posted by Steve M. | 2:23 PM | LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA "If you're going to put somebody to death, or have them starved to death, I would think that you would want a complete neurological exam in reaching that conclusion," Frist said on the Senate floor. "In fact -- this is what I'm told -- that she hasn't had an MRI or CAT scan which suggests she has not had a full neurological exam." --Senator Bill Frist quoted on the Terri Schiavo case at World Net Daily In the initial adversary proceeding, a board-certified neurologist who had reviewed a CAT scan of Mrs. Schiavo's brain and an EEG testified that most, if not all, of Mrs. Schiavo's cerebral cortex--the portion of her brain that allows for human cognition and memory--is either totally destroyed or damaged beyond repair. --July 2001 opinion of a three-judge panel of Florida's Second District Court Ah, but if you try to search the Internet for "schiavo" and "mri," you get pages and pages and pages of right-wing/Christian conservative sites, all recycling the same lies, rumors, and half-truths, including the assertion that she's had no test that would show what's really going on in her head. For the millionth time, the right-wingers, using sheer volume, have won an information war -- even NPR this morning was presenting the possibility of Schiavo's recovery as a he-said/they-said story (something to the effect of "but Schiavo's parents believe she could recover").* Of course, heaven forbid that Frist, a doctor, should make a bit of extra effort to find out the truth before shooting his mouth off. --- *And see the last sentence of this AP story. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | Ah, we all cheered, didn't we, when Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, under intense pressure from Future Fifth Face On Mount Rushmore George W. Bush, announced that Egypt would soon have elections involving more than one party. And we cheered again when Ayman Nour, newly released from an Egyptian prison, declared that he would challenge Mubarak for Egypt's presidency. It's the inexorable march of freedom in the Middle East! Hail Bush! Or, er, maybe not so inexorable: ... with the odds heavily against any rival to President Hosni Mubarak, Ayman Nour is so far alone in stepping forward. Other opposition leaders are waiting for now, dismayed by what they call "the impossible conditions" they say guarantee that Mubarak -- 76 years old and the unquestioned ruler of Egypt for nearly a quarter century -- will be the winner in elections this September as usual, even after he decided to open the vote to competition. Impossible conditions such as these: Under the new rules, candidates must obtain a certain percentage of "recommendations" from the upper and lower house of the parliament, in addition to votes from the local city councils, as the first step toward eligibility. The 47,000 members of the city councils are government bureaucrats, and the great majority are members of the ruling National Democratic Party who won their seats through unmonitored elections that were widely thought to be skewed in favor of the ruling party. The council members' loyalty to Mubarak made them one of the regime's important tools against any popular uprisings. They also organize pro-government rallies, such as a huge state-orchestrated celebration for Mubarak when he arrived in Egypt after escaping an assassination attempt in Ethiopia in 1995. So other candidates aren't stepping forward -- and, in fact, Mubarak's party is looking for candidates who'll step forward, apparently to make the fig leaf bigger: ...Diaa Eddin Dawoud, secretary-general of the Nasserite party, said the ruling party is actually searching for opponents to guarantee the elections look like a success. "The National Democratic Party is nagging, pushing and implicating many party heads to enter into elections ... to give legitimacy to the election of a president," he said in a telephone interview.... So what is this election really supposed to accomplish? Many opposition leaders fear that if the elections take place in such conditions, Mubarak will not only be a winner but will be mentioned in the history books as Egypt's modern reformist, and pressures from the United States and the West for real reform will ease. Another worry is that the president will use the elections to ensure that his 41-year-old son, Gamal Mubarak, succeeds him. Oh, and there was this last night from Dan Harris on ABC's World News Tonight: And today, hours after his raucous campaign kickoff, Ayman Nour was taken back into state custody for further interrogation. posted by Steve M. | 10:07 AM | Thursday, March 17, 2005 These people never rest: Pierre, S.D. -- Gov. Mike Rounds signed a series of anti-abortion bills, including one that requires doctors to tell women the procedure ends the lives of humans, his office announced Thursday.... One of the four new laws requires doctors to inform pregnant women, in writing and in person, no later than two hours before an abortion that the procedure ends the lives of humans and terminates the constitutional relationship women have with their fetuses. Whatever the hell that means. And as for that equation of fetuses and "humans," there's no indication so far that South Dakota plans to lower the drinking age to 20 years and 3 months. Women also must be told that some women die during abortions and the procedure can lead to later depression and other problems.... Rounds, a Republican elected in 2002, also signed a bill that will automatically ban most abortions in South Dakota if the U.S. Supreme Court reverses its 1973 Roe decision and gives states authority to prohibit abortion. The only exceptions would be cases where a woman's life is in danger. Doctors who perform illegal abortions could receive up to two years in prison. Got that? No exception for rape or incest. That goes into effect the day Roe is overturned. ...Another bill signed by Rounds tightens the state's parental notification law to require parents to be told within 24 hours if their minor daughter receives an emergency abortion to protect her life or health. The minor could seek an exception through a court order. A fourth new law establishes a state task force to study the history of abortion since 1973 and to see if other laws need changing. Abortion opponents said science, medicine and technology have changed considerably since the Roe v. Wade decision. About 800 abortions are done each year in South Dakota. And clearly, before these guys are done, there'll be at least twice as many hoops to jump through if you decide to get one. (Link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 3:46 PM | Oh, this is perfect: Former Green Beret Commander Bo Gritz is trying to conduct a citizen's arrest of Terri Schiavo's husband and the judge who ordered the brain-damaged Florida woman's feeding tube removed so she can be legally starved. The 66-year-old retired Army Lt. Colonel with his wife, Judy, arrived in Florida from their home in Nevada yesterday with the intent of arresting anyone involved in removing the life-sustaining tube. Gritz came bearing a notarized "citizen's arrest warrant" addressed to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Attorney General Charlie Crist. His intent is to "paper" state and federal law enforcement offices with his warrant today – one day before Pinellas Circuit Court Judge George Greer's deadline to begin denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo. Gritz says the "arrest" is designed to allow officials additional options as the Florida governor and legislature maneuver to save the woman from starvation.... --World Net Daily I don't really believe he'd have the guts, the ability, or the opportunity, but I half-wish this old showboater would do it -- really take the law into his own hands and grab Michael Schiavo or some hospital worker, or maybe a judge. Maybe that would get across to America how the God-speaks-through-me crowd is operating in this case. There really isn't a whole lot of difference between Gritz the vigilante and legislators (in Tallahassee and D.C.) who've decided they have the right to overturn a court decision they don't like because they think judges who've studied the facts of the case are less to be trusted than self-appointed "experts" who don't know what they're talking about. More on Gritz -- allegedly the model for Rambo -- here and here. posted by Steve M. | 10:49 AM | Afghan president says parliamentary elections delayed until September Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Thursday that parliamentary elections originally scheduled for May will instead be held in September, a much-anticipated delay as Afghan and international organizers struggle with logistics for the vote. Karzai cited "technical problems" including the lack of an accurate census as reasons why the vote would be delayed.... Some of Karzai's critics have said that delaying the parliamentary vote beyond the May 20 deadline would leave him in the position of an elected dictator, though most opposition groups have taken the likely delay in stride. Observers in Kabul and elsewhere have long said the vote would be delayed because of the daunting task of organizing the election, which is supposed to include ballots for district and provincial assemblies. --AP So, er, if it's impossible to hold credible parliamentary elections in May, what are we supposed to think about the election last fall in which Hamid Karzai was elected president? And if we're going to hail every baby step toward democracy in the Middle East as the equivalent of the fall of a chunk of the Berlin Wall, what should we say about a noteworthy step backwards? posted by Steve M. | 8:20 AM | Wednesday, March 16, 2005 You just can't make this stuff up... Experience The 'Scent Of Christ' - In A Candle You can find candles with just about every fragrance imaginable, from blueberry to ocean mist, to hot apple pie. Now, there's a candle that lets you experience the "scent of Jesus." And surprisingly, it's straight from South Dakota, not Bethlehem. They've been selling by the case. "We see it as a ministry," says candle maker Bob Tosterud. Light up the candle called "His Essence" and, according to the makers, you'll experience the fragrance of Christ. "It's a very meaningful experience." The obvious question is, 'how do you capture the scent of Jesus?' True -- that is the obvious question. It's all spelled-out in Psalm 45. Candle maker Karen Tosterud explains, "It's a Messianic Psalm, referring to when Christ returns, and his garments will have the scent of myrrh, aloe and cassia." Wondering what this would smell like, Karen ordered a combination of oils that produce a sort of flowery-cinnamon aroma. Then she called on a friend, who just happened to be a candle maker. "And in October, we got our first batch of 768 candles. We had no idea how it would go." But once word got out, "It was the hottest item in South Dakota for Christmas." They went through 10,000 candles.... --WFIE, Evansville, Indiana This is real. Here's the Web site. The candles are 18 bucks a pop. The toll-free number is 1-877-PSALM-45. Er, didn't Martin Luther nail some theses to a door because of commerce that was not entirely dissimilar to this? ***** (Somewhat related, but considerably scarier: this.) posted by Steve M. | 5:03 PM | YO, DOLLFACE! MAKE ME A SANDWICH! Mrs. Clinton is also hard to dismiss as a screechy obstructionist because she's gone out of her way to be collegial in the Senate and to work with Republicans from Trent Lott to Sam Brownback.... other senators seem to like Mrs. Clinton. Perhaps it's that, according to New York magazine, she surprises other senators by popping up during meetings and asking: Anybody want a coffee? --Nicholas Kristof in today's New York Times You uppity women I don't understand Why you gotta go and try to act like a man, But before you make your weekly visit to the shrink You'd better occupy the kitchen, liberate the sink. Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed That's what I to my baby said, Women's liberation is a-going to your head, Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed.... So damn emancipated in your mind and your body, Gonna have to cancel all your lessons in karate. If you can't love a male chauvinist You'd better cross me off your shopping list. Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed That's what I to my baby said, Women's liberation is a-going to your head, Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed. --Kinky Friedman, 1973 posted by Steve M. | 9:49 AM | CALL THE SEX POLICE In Missouri: A bill that seeks to overhaul Missouri's child abuse reporting laws could require teachers, doctors, nurses and others to report sexually active teenagers and children to the state's abuse hot line. ...Perhaps the most controversial provision of the bill is one that many say would require educators, medical personnel and other professionals to report "substantial evidence of sexual intercourse by an unmarried minor under the age of consent." Critics say the language would, in essence, require child abuse reports even of cases of consensual sex between two teens. Byrd claims the bill seeks only to target sex by children under the age of 15.... Ed Postawko, a sex crimes prosecutor in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's office ... said it's statutory rape or statutory sodomy for anyone to have sex with a child under the age of 14... --St. Louis Post-Dispatch Fourteen is rather young to be having sex, but it's also rather young to have a criminal record just for having sex with your same-age girlfriend or boyfriend. (Link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 7:40 AM | Tuesday, March 15, 2005 Today's Christian Science Monitor has an article about a gathering of evangelicals that took place last month at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale. Most of what's in the article is what you'd expect -- but this jumped out at me: In material given to conference attendees, the Rev. D. James Kennedy, Coral Ridge pastor wrote: "As the vice-regents of God, we are to bring His truth and His will to bear on every sphere of our world and our society. We are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government ... our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors - in short, over every aspect and institution of human society." Yikes. That isn't Christian conservatism -- it's Christian fascism. Here's more information about the conference; this mini-manifesto, "The Cultural Mandate," is, I assume, what the Monitor is quoting. According to "The Cultural Mandate," that quote from Reverend Kennedy is a gloss on Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth." I know that passage. I've always assumed it meant God was putting human beings in charge of plants and animals -- I never thought it meant God was pitting Christians in charge of other human beings. But that's what Reverend Kennedy thinks. Scary. posted by Steve M. | 11:33 PM | Chinese-made goods sold by Wal-Mart and other discount retailers are gloriously, soul-satisfyingly cheap. Too bad they're killing coal miners. More than 5,000 Chinese miners are killed each year, 75% of the global total, even though the country produces only a third of the world's coal. Working under appalling safety conditions, they are sacrificed to fuel the factories that make the cheap goods snapped up by consumers in Britain and other wealthy nations. ... Last month, 216 miners were killed at Sunjiawan mine in north-east China in the most deadly accident in 50 years. Last October, another gas explosion killed 148. Last Thursday, a cave-in at a mine in Sha'anxi province killed 16 miners and left another 11 trapped underground. And if there's a fire in a mine? Stay in the pit or lose pay: The five-mile deep pit at Chenjiashan had a particularly bad reputation. Four years ago, 38 men died in a gas explosion. Five days before the latest accident a fire broke out underground. "We came up, but the bosses told us to go back. We didn't want to, but we had to," says one miner, Li, who lost his brother in the explosion. "We all needed the money and there is a penalty of 100 yuan (around £6) for refusing to go down." ...There have been no reports of punishments for any of the mine operators who forced their men into the burning pit. In the Chinese coal mines, life is literally cheap: In calculating compensation for the victims of the Chenjiashan blast, the state estimated the value of a miner's life at 51,000 yuan (£3,200). An extra 20,000 yuan was paid as a widow's allowance and another 20,000 yuan for an unrecovered body. By contrast, mine operators were reportedly promised a 400,000 yuan bonus if they could raise output by 400,000 tonnes in the last two months of the year. They could afford at least three deaths and still come out with a profit. 
posted by Steve M. |
12:17 PM
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Remember those evangelicals who were trying to start a discussion of global warming? Did you read about them last week and think, Hey, maybe these guys aren't so bad -- maybe evangelicals won't always be in lockstep with the GOP? Well, pay no attention to them. They're tools of Satan. At least, that's what God-bothering syndicated columnist and Fox News commentator Cal Thomas says: Rev. Ted Haggard, president of NAE, says he has become passionate about the issue because he is a scuba diver (but not a scientist) and has seen how "global warming" affects coral reefs. What about passion for Jesus Christ? ... this is a far cry from "Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty." (Zechariah 4:6) The first description of Satan is that he is "subtle." (Genesis 3:1) Another translation says "crafty." Satan tempts to do what seems good.... This is going to be another failed effort that will lead many astray, divert resources from more effective pursuits and leave little of eternal value.... Whew! Glad we cleared that up! **** Or perhaps I'm being unfair. It turns out that Cal Thomas might not be representative of all Christian conservatives in this -- after all, in the same column he also criticizes the Moral Majority (of which he was a vice president) for being too involved in worldly things. In fact, Thomas is known on the Christian right for questioning some of the political work of Christians: ... Lobbying for cultural change, moreover, "doesn't work" and is "a waste of money," Thomas said. Government lacks the power to solve the real problems of society, which can be addressed only through moral and spiritual renewal from the ground up. And yet when anti-abortion protesters gather in D.C., Thomas praises them. When the Republican governor of Massachusetts tries to curtail a Harvard stem-cell research program because he finds it "ethically wrong," Thomas approves. When President Bush tells Thomas, I have said that I don't see how anybody can be President without prayer and a belief in the Almighty, although I'm sure others were able to do so. I think that's an important qualifier, because I'm sure people sat here in the office and felt like they could be President. I recognize that, in my feebleness, I need support from the Almighty, because I believe in an Almighty. And I love the support of the people through prayer... Thomas, far from being appalled, presses him for his favorite Bible verse. So, er, what does Cal Thomas really think the proper relationship between religion and politics is? I think it's this: If conservatives win, it's godly. If liberals win, it's Satanic. posted by Steve M. | 10:06 AM | Monday, March 14, 2005 KRISTINN'S HELICOPTERS Asked what lessons liberal and progressive bloggers could learn from the experience of FreeRepublic, [Kristinn] Taylor replied that while "I'm loath to give them advice," they might have to outgrow the conspiracy-theory stage of blogging to produce reports that are credible and relevant to a wider audience. "In the old days of FreeRepublic," he said, "we had all kinds of black helicopters" and speculation about the effect of the Y2K problem. After the world did not end on Jan. 1, 2000, he said, "We tried to be more realistic." --New York Times today Er, that wouldn't be the same Kristinn who said this at Free Republic on February 22, would it? What happened to [Jeff] Gannon was a Clintonista hit. It had nothing to do with his alleged past, but everything to do with insulting Her Heinous in a nationally televised press conference. posted by Steve M. | 3:36 PM | Beltway smarties love to slag the Democrats for supposedly mismananging the abortion issue. Wouldn't it be nice if this happened to the Republican Party once or twice? Well, it's theoretically possible in Maine. You see, there's a Republican in the Maine House of Representatives named Brian Duprey. He's a far-right zealot and a clown: He opposes abortion and gay rights (a bill supported by Maine's governor that would merely extend Maine's nondiscrimination laws to gay people is too extreme for him), but he's proposed a bill that would legalize same-sex marriage in Maine and -- most notoriously -- he's also proposed a bill that would make it illegal to abort a fetus that has the (yet-to-be-discovered) "homosexual gene." No, I'm not making this up. The guy's just a childish right-wing prankster -- he pulls this crap strictly for effect. He sounds as if he'd be Ann Coulter's dream man, except that he's married, and he and his wife have five children ("whom they home school," as he is careful to point out on the Maine House Republicans' Web site). The "gay gene" stunt is making him semi-famous: He recently appeared on the Rush Limbaugh radio show and on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor." On Thursday, a crew from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" visited the Capitol for a story on Duprey. House Republican staffers say the Stewart segment will air Thursday. And the thing is, he's thinking of running against Olympia Snowe, one of Maine's two pro-choice GOP senators: Q. Are you going to seek higher office in the next few years? A. I am considering running for the Senate against Olympia Snowe. If I can raise enough seed money to kick off a credible campaign, I will take the initiative and run. I will be watching her voting record very carefully. If she votes against President Bush’s judicial nominees, or tries to block the President’s agenda, it will speed up my decision to run. That's from an interview at the Web site of the Christian Civic League of Maine, which seems to be closely allied with Duprey, and whose head sounds like a real sweetheart: The issue of a so-called "gay gene" came up at the State House last fall when the head of the Christian Civic League of Maine issued a statement questioning whether Gov. John Baldacci had one. Wouldn't it be nice if, in a blue, tolerant state, the voters of the Republican Party rejected a moderate and put an unelectable gonzo extremist on the ballot? Maybe it could never happen -- Snowe's surely going to have quite a bit of financial support from the banking industry, given the fact that she voted for the bankruptcy bill and her husband has worked as a consultant for MBNA -- but is it possible? Could a national groundswell among right-wingers result in a serious challenge to Snowe? I say: Run, Brian, run! (Some links via Progressive Reason, Maine Politics, and scoopernicus.) posted by Steve M. | 2:14 PM | HUNTING PELTS AGAIN Just wanted to warn you that the Right-Wing Media Correctness Police are out to punish another thoughtcrime. This time the deviant from appropriate thinking is Philip Bennett, the managing editor of The Washington Post, who may have to enter the reeducation camp for telling China's People's Daily, I don't think US should be the leader of the world. Matt Drudge is leading the hunt, along with Lucianne.com and Power Line. I hope Bennett's resume is up to date, because he may not have a job by Easter. I suppose the "MSM" ought to just end the suffering and agree to subject all news stories, and all public utterances by media executives, to pre-clearance by a team of right-wing bloggers, who'd have the power to terminate employment on the spot (or, presumably, hold an across-the-blogs show trial first). posted by Steve M. | 11:25 AM | Sunday, March 13, 2005 Francis Fukuyama in The New York Times Book Review: The past century was marked by what the German theorist Carl Schmitt labeled "political-theological" movements, like Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, that were based on passionate commitments to ultimately irrational beliefs. Marxism claimed to be scientific, but its real-world adherents followed leaders like Lenin, Stalin or Mao with the kind of blind commitment to authority that is psychologically indistinguishable from religious passion.  (Go here for an explanation of the above image.) posted by Steve M. | 10:46 PM | Did you catch this a couple of days ago? On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Professor Juan Cole and Osama Siblani, publisher of Arab-American News. Siblani -- a Republican whose Arab-American Political Action Committee endorsed Bush in 2000, according to a 2004 article in Lebanon's Daily Star (available here and here) -- told Goodman that he met Bush in early 2000: OSAMA SIBLANI: ...I met with the President, and he wanted to go to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and he considered the regime an imminent and gathering threat against the United States. AMY GOODMAN: You met with the President of the United States? OSAMA SIBLANI: Yes, when he was running for election in May of 2000 when he was a governor. He told me just straight to my face, among 12 or maybe 13 [R]epublicans at that time here in Michigan at the hotel. I think it was on May 17, 2000, even before he became the nominee for the Republicans. He told me that he was going to take him out, when we talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And I said, 'Well, you know, I totally disagree with you. You just can't go around taking leaders out of their countries, you know. Let the Iraqi people do it. They can't do it on empty stomachs. Lift sanctions. Keep the pressure on Saddam Hussein, but lift the sanctions on the Iraqi people. People can't make moves on an empty stomach. Once they start establishing, you know, a connection with the United States and helping democracy inside, they will overthrow him.' And then he said, 'We have to talk about it later.' But at that time he was not privy to any intelligence, and the [D]emocrats had occupied the White House for the previous eight years. So, he was not privy to any intelligence whatsoever. He was not the official nominee of the Republican Party, so he didn't know what kind of situation the weapons of mass destruction was at that time. May 2000? Interesting. ***** (And do read the interview to be reminded that, as both Cole and Siblani note, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories have had elections recently -- elections aren't some sort of gift to the Palestinians and Lebanese from the Democracy Fairy in the Bush White House.) posted by Steve M. | 10:44 PM | So what do you think happens if you're a corporate CEO in America and you get a big bonus based on the fact that your company hit an earnings target in a given year, but then it's discovered that that earnings target was never reached at all -- the bookkeepers cooked the books? Well, these are American CEOs we're talking about, so the answer is: Nothing happens to you. You get to keep the money. At least that's what this New York Times article says: WILLIAM A. WISE hit the jackpot when his company hit its number. After the El Paso Corporation, the energy company in Houston, reported a profit of $93 million in 2001, Mr. Wise, its chief executive, was rewarded with a $3.4 million bonus, 768,250 stock options, $1.7 million of restricted stock and $3.7 million in "other compensation." And that was on top of his regular salary of $1.3 million. Just two years later, however, El Paso had this to say about its performance leading up to Mr. Wise's big payday back then: Oops! El Paso's board ousted Mr. Wise in 2003, and last year the company reported that it actually had a loss of $447 million in 2001. As it turns out, the company said, "certain personnel used aggressive, and at times, unsupportable methods to book proved" oil and gas reserves. The numbers for other years were wrong, too, it added. Now that the record has been set straight, will Mr. Wise be giving back all that extra money he received for meeting his performance goal - hitting his number, in industry parlance - when, in fact, he didn't even come close? Not a chance. And therein lies the rub. Hundreds of companies have restated earnings in recent years - 414 in 2004 alone, according to a recent study by the Huron Consulting Group. And in many cases, the revisions came in the wake of discoveries of questionable accounting or other possible wrongdoing that meant the numbers leading to bonuses were inaccurate. But a review of restatements by large corporations shows that companies very, very rarely - as in almost never - get that money back. The list of restatements was compiled for Sunday Business by Glass Lewis & Company, a research firm based in San Francisco.... Nice, hunh? The article does go on to say that the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which was passed in the wake of the scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and other companies, is supposed to prevent this. But so far regulators have not enforced the provision, in part because the law took effect only in July 2002. Oh, and: SARBANES-OXLEY also set specific triggers that force a payback: there must be an accounting restatement, the law applies only to chief executives and chief financial officers, and there must be evidence of misconduct as opposed to honest error. Any more loopholes? Hey, let's not kid ourselves -- I'm sure there are plenty more where that came from. It's good to be the king, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 10:01 PM | Gosh, it seems like only about a week and a half ago that Jonah Goldberg was snarking off (at National Review Online and elsewhere) about looting in Iraq: Remember al-Qaqaa? This was the massive cache of explosives that American forces failed to secure after the fall of Saddam. In the final week of the presidential campaign it was The Most Important Story on Earth. The New York Times splashed the news on its front page and didn't stop splashing it for a week. In all, the Times ran 16 stories and columns about al-Qaqaa, plus seven anti-Bush letters to the editor on the subject over an eight-day period. Editorial boards across the country hammered the "outrage" for days. It led all the news broadcasts. It became the central talking point of the Kerry campaign... Goldberg assured us in that March 4 column that this was just an attempt by the Liberal Media Forces of Darkness to hornswoggle the nation so John Kerry would be elected president. First of all, the looted material was just a drop in the bucket: ... The frightening multi-author article, which dropped like manna from heaven for the Kerry campaign, couldn't find room to mention that the 380 tons of missing explosives constituted a fairly small fraction of the 400,000 tons of explosives and weapons that had been either destroyed or secured from more than 10,000 sites.... Plus, the timing of the looting was uncertain: Oh, and they left something else out: The weapons might have been removed before the invasion. Over the course of the week, the Times was forced to concede, often grudgingly and obliquely, that the weapons may not have been there for U.S. forces to secure in the first place.... Plus, it was all the fault of Satan's branch office on Earth, the United Nations: ...As Times columnist William Safire and Cliff May, a former Times reporter and NRO regular, have suggested, the whole al-Qaqaa story might have been orchestrated by Mohammed el-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in order to influence the American presidential election.... According to the Wall Street Journal, Baradei triggered the process which resulted in the al-Qaqaa story getting leaked to the Times and CBS News. And the smoking gun that proves this was a work of dastardly propaganda is the fact that the Times dropped the story like a hot potato as soon as Kerry lost: ... Byron York, my NR colleague ... wondered, whatever happened to The Biggest Story on Earth? The answer, it turns out, is nothing. The Times has not run a single story about the al-Qaqaa story since November 1. Nada, bupkis, zilch.... Yup. Until now: In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away. Dr. Araji said his account was based largely on observations by government employees and officials who either worked at the sites or lived near them.... Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons.... The peak of the organized looting, Dr. Araji estimates, occurred in four weeks from mid-April to mid-May of 2003... As examples of the most important sites that were looted, Dr. Araji cited the Nida Factory, the Badr General Establishment, Al Ameer, Al Radwan, Al Hatteen, Al Qadisiya and Al Qaqaa.... So we have a new Times story. It's sourced to an Iraqi official. It pinpoints the time of the looting as after the U.S. invaded. It notes that the looting was even worse than we thought when the Al Qaqaa story broke. Ah, but why did the story drop off the radar for months? Because the evildoers at the UN failed in their dastardly plot to elect Kerry? Er, perhaps not: Last fall, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, put public pressure on the interim Iraqi government to start the process of accounting for nuclear-related materials still ostensibly under the agency's supervision. Iraq is obliged, he wrote to the president of the Security Council on Oct. 1, to declare semiannually changes that have occurred or are foreseen. In interviews, officials of the monitoring commission [UNMOVIC, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] and the atomic energy agency said the two agencies had heard nothing from Baghdad - with one notable exception. On Oct. 10, the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote to the atomic agency to say a stockpile of high explosives at Al Qaqaa had been lost because of "theft and looting." During the American presidential election last fall, news of that letter ignited a political firestorm. Privately, officials of the monitoring commission and the atomic energy agency have speculated on whether the political uproar made Baghdad reluctant to disclose more details of looting. Well, that will be dismissed as more words from Satan's lips, but it sounds plausible to me. posted by Steve M. | 1:11 PM | Saturday, March 12, 2005 2008 GOP PRESIDENTIAL CONTEST: CONDI RICE DROPS OUT That's not what this story says, but that's what it really says: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday pointedly declined to rule out running for president in 2008, and gave her most detailed explanation of a "mildly pro-choice" stance on abortion. In an interview with editors and reporters in the office of the editor in chief at The Washington Times, she said she would not want the government "forcing its views" on abortion.... Miss Rice said abortion should be "as rare a circumstance as possible," although without excessive government intervention. "We should not have the federal government in a position where it is forcing its views on one side or the other...."... Describing pro-lifers as "the other side" is one of the ways Miss Rice articulates her position as a "mildly pro-choice" Republican. She explained that she is "in effect kind of libertarian on this issue," adding: "I have been concerned about a government role.... Not an anti-abortion zealot? That's it. She won't be on the GOP ticket -- not the presidential candidate, not the vice presidential candidate. Not unless she has a road-to-Damascus conversion on abortion in the next two and a half years. And that means Dick Morris is dead wrong, as usual. Why does anyone pay attention to him? *** (For some reason, that last sentence got garbled when I tried to link the original Dick Morris article from NewsMax. Don't know why.) posted by Steve M. | 7:26 PM | Friday, March 11, 2005 THE BEST-TRAINED FIGHTING FORCE IN THE WORLD From The Times of London: AMERICAN soldiers in Iraq are being given “anti-fratricide” training to reduce the number of friendly fire attacks against British and other coalition troops, The Times has learnt. Thirty-two “blue-on-blue” attacks on British and other coalition vehicles have been logged in the past twelve months in southern Iraq, Britain’s area of responsibility.... The officials declined to spell out the injuries received or whether they were all British soldiers, but they confirmed that most of the “firing nationalities” were American.... The best part? The reason this is happening: US commanders were so worried that their men were shooting at the British because they failed to recognise the Union Jack or other distinguishing military markings that, in an unprecedented move, they asked the British Army to supply vehicles, men and flags to teach their soldiers what their allies looked like.... And, in addition to not bothering to make sure our troops know what the flag or uniforms of our most loyal allies look like, we've clearly trained them to be just as thoughtful and mature as their commander-in-chief was when he was their age: A British officer in Basra said: “The Americans can be pretty pumped-up. Sometimes they fire in broad daylight when we are travelling at two miles per hour, shouting that we are British out of the window and waving the Union Jack. If they shoot, our drill is to slam on the brakes and race in the opposite direction.” (Link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 4:36 PM | Good news! The New York Times says Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon is really, really bad for Hezbollah: ...The Israeli view is that Hezbollah, which is financed and supplied by Iran and Syria, would be more weakened by a Syrian withdrawal than restrained by a continuing Syrian presence. ...[An] official acknowledged there was "some apprehension about Syria leaving Lebanon, but it's a calculated risk one has to take to weaken Hezbollah." Hezbollah has been forced to take a pro-Syrian - and thus anti-Lebanese - stand, the official said, adding: "By distancing Syria from Lebanon, by loosening its grip to some extent, this will definitely hurt Hezbollah. It won't wither away, but it will lose potent support." ...Hezbollah's open support for Syria is likely to hurt it as a political party, the Israelis say.... Er, bad news! Knight-Ridder says Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon could be really, really good for Hezbollah: BAALBEK, Lebanon - ...Uncertainty may rule the streets of Beirut after dueling protests for and against Syrian involvement in Lebanon's affairs, but loyalties are crystal-clear in this town built around Roman ruins 6 miles east of the Syrian border. Hezbollah's green and yellow flags flutter along its streets. Taped to nearly every shop window and plastered across intervening concrete walls, the face of Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah broods at passers-by, as it does throughout Lebanon's predominantly Shiite Muslim east and south. ..."The Syrians are trying to leave behind a system they can control. A pillar of that will be Hezbollah," said Michael Young, the opinion editor of Lebanon's English-language newspaper Daily Star. ...Young and others said that Syria, through its many agents and supporters in Lebanon, would move to lift the political restrictions that distribute power to religiously based factions according to an unwritten 1943 agreement that today leaves Lebanon's Shiite plurality underrepresented. That would net Hezbollah more parliamentary seats in May elections.... I don't know who's right, but while we're concentrating on terrorism and "draining the swamp" and all that, are we, yet again, possibly downplaying or overlooking regional/ethnic issues? ...In Baalbek, Mohammed Yezbek, 47, shrugged when he was asked why he had pictures of Nasrallah in his fabric shop and not slain former Prime Minister Hariri, whose posters have adorned buildings across Beirut since his assassination. "He never came to Baalbek in 12 years," during his terms as prime minister, Yezbek said. Hezbollah, on the other hand, is active every day in Baalbek. Residents say the Islamic group holds a 70 percent share of power in town, including the mayor's seat.... Hezbollah also provides security by patrolling the country's southern border with Israel. Lebanon's army mans a few checkpoints and little else.... (Knight-Ridder link via Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 2:59 PM | I'm noticing a bit of bewilderment over on the Internet right. These folks made life miserable for Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, Ward Churchill, and others, and after that they thought a revolution was taking place -- they thought the old media/political order was crumbling, and in its place would emerge a brave new world in which real power was in the hands of blogs (meaning their blogs). Now -- perhaps surprisingly -- a lot of these right-wingers don't like the bankruptcy bill, and they know lefties don't like it either. They are the mighty giant-killers, and we have (bafflingly to them) a fair number of readers; surely this should have added up to a formidable force. And yet the bankruptcy bill's going to pass. What happened? A post at righty blog Just One Minute notes the extent of the opposition and offers some theories about what's gone wrong. Theory #1: Opponents reacted too late. (But isn't that the power of the mighty blogosphere -- that it goes from zero to blogswarm in an eyeblink?) Theory #2: Those stinky old liberals screwed everything up by opposing the bill with incorrect thinking. (Too silly a theory to addresss -- and besides, if our side's ideas are so off base, isn't the awe-inspiring power of the blogosphere to correct its own errors, and everybody else's as well, supposed to contain that kind of problem?) Theory #3: "money talks." Well, duh. We don't do blog triumphalism over on the left. We know that the media -- yup, the "liberal media" -- pays very little attention to us. The two stories that reached the mainstream through the work of lefty blogs -- Trent Lott's favorable comments on Strom Thurmond's presidential bid and the strange career of propagandist/rent boy Jeff Gannon -- were exceptions to the media's neglect of us because they involved (a) race and (b) sex. When it comes to policy, we're shut out -- we challenge the consensus, and the mainstream press isn't interested in that. Righties have been thinking lately that they're genuinely powerful, but they only seem to wield power when they do what established interests want them to do -- namely, hunt left/liberal pelts. The established interests -- the conservative press and the Republican establishment -- are delighted when right-wing bloggers take down a major "liberal" media figure or a provocateur lefty college professor, because telling the hoi polloi yet again that leftists/liberals/Democrats are treasonous and sinister makes it all the more likely that Republicans will continue to triumph at the polls and be free to do what vested corporate interests want them to do. That's the limit of right-wing bloggers' power. And the clueless bastards really don't get it. **** Or maybe I'm wrong: Some on the right are linking to Politology's campaign to fight the bankruptcy bill in the House. I'd be delighted if this bears fruit -- hell, I think it would be terrific to beat this bill even if right-wingers got the credit. Maybe we should all link arms and see what happens. By the way, I really think the righties are sincere in their opposition, and a bit appalled at what their elected heroes are doing. Check out this from RedState ("Collaborative Republicanism for the Masses"). Money quote: The bankruptcy bill before the Congress is bad law, bad practice, and an example of bad faith with the common people whom elected officials presumably serve. When it passes -- and it will -- it will be thanks purely to the Republican Party. You got that right. **** (I was led down this trail by Alicublog.) posted by Steve M. | 10:24 AM | Thursday, March 10, 2005 Let's see ... on one side we have the world's largest company, a behemoth that has exerted relentless pressure on workers around the world and has succeeded in keeping itself globally union-free. On the other side are union organizers whose lone victory was rendered null and void when the megacompany shut down the store where the win took place. Gee, no wonder this New York Times article presents the two as more or less evenly matched. JONQUIERE, Quebec - Shoppers in this Quebec mill town are about to pay more for ice-fishing gear, snowmobile covers and cheese curds for poutine: the local Wal-Mart is closing this spring.... Workers at various Wal-Marts around Quebec say they are being pressured by both management and labor. They describe a workplace atmosphere poisoned by rumor-mongering, insults and damage to personal property. Anti-union workers at the Ste. Foy store, which other workers are trying to organize, reported unwanted visits to their homes in the middle of the night by organizers during the unionization drive. Two pro-union cashiers at the Ste. Hyacinthe store outside Montreal reported that they recently had shortages in their registers, which they believe were the work of management trickery to get them into trouble. "This store is basically hell right now," said Noella Langlois, 53, a saleswoman in the Jonquiere store who opposes unionization. "You have two deeply divided clans."... Sure, Wal-Mart can shut down a unionized store and put hundreds of people out of work at the drop of a hat, and sure, by doing so it can scare the crap out of Wal-Mart workers elsewhere in Canada who want to unionize, but that doesn't mean all the power's on one side -- hey, the evil Canadian government is after the poor, struggling retailer! ... Quebec's labor relations board recently ordered Wal-Mart Canada to stop "intimidating and harassing" cashiers at a store in Ste. Foy, a suburb of Quebec City, amid an organizing drive.... That's what the Times says today, and it's the truth. Left unmentioned, however, is the vicious punishment dealt out by the merciless Canadian bureaucrats: The board ordered Wal-Mart to immediately stop "intimidating and harassing" the cashiers in St. Foy. But it imposed a relatively light penalty: Wal-Mart must post the decision in the store's lunchroom for 30 days. Oh, the humanity! And meanwhile, back in Wal-Mart's home country, in a not entirely unrelated development, the flood of cheap textiles from China becomes a tsunami: In the first month after the end of all quotas on textiles and apparel around the world, imports to the United States from China jumped about 75 percent, according to trade figures released by the Chinese government.... In January, the United States imported more than $1.2 billion in textiles and apparel from China, up from about $701 million a year ago. Imports of major apparel products from China jumped 546 percent. Last January, for example, China shipped 941,000 cotton knit shirts, which were limited by quotas; this January, it shipped 18.2 million, a 1,836 percent increase. Imports of cotton knit trousers were up 1,332 percent from a year ago. These figures may be understated because China ships a large part of its goods through Hong Kong, and those shipments are not included. Fears that China is going to flood the world market with cheap textile exports have already inflamed tensions between Washington and Beijing because of worries about American manufacturing plants being closed and thousands of jobs being lost.... Recall this China Daily story from a couple of months ago: The world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, says its inventory of stock produced in China is expected to hit US$18 billion this year, keeping the annual growth rate of over 20 per cent consistent over two years. The trend is expected to continue, company officials revealed. "We expect our procurement stock from China to continue to grow at a similar rate in line with Wal-Mart's growth worldwide, if not faster," said Lee Scott, the president and CEO (chief executive officer) of Wal-Mart. ...So far, more than 70 per cent of the commodities sold in Wal-Mart are made in China.... This is how Wal-Mart keeps prices low. Keeping prices low is how Wal-Mart drives competitors out of business. Driving competitors out of business tightens the job market, which means Wal-Mart doesn't have to worry all that much about losing workers to better-paying employers. And the downward spiral continues to spiral. Now, why would Canadian workers want to screw up such a good thing? posted by Steve M. | 10:51 PM | For the past several days, the servers at Blogger/Blogspot have been operating with all the efficiency of Dick Cheney's arteries after half a dozen Monster Thickburgers. Obviously, I've gotten a few posts through, including this one, but it's really hit or miss, and there's no sign that the server gods even recognize that there's a problem. So keep checking back, but I don't know when the next post is going to make it through. posted by Steve M. | 4:09 PM | IDIOT Why are the same people who are saying there's no crisis in fixing the Social Security crackup in mid-century the same people who say we have to act now to prevent the earth from warming up a Fahrenheit degree or two by 2100? --Tim Graham at The Corner, National Review Online Recordings show that Alaska has been warming at 0.7 - 0.8° C every 10 years, according to Alaska's Center for Global Change. If the trend [continue]s, the temperature could be 7 - 8° C warmer in 100 years. This is a big difference. In the last ice age it was only about 5 - 8° C cooler. --"Athena, Earth and Space Science for K-12" at nasa.gov posted by Steve M. | 11:23 AM | GET RID OF THE BABY. OH, AND KEEP THE BATHWATER -- IT HAS CHAMPAGNE IN IT The headline: G.O.P. Senators Balk at Tax Cuts in Bush's Budget At last! Pangs of remorse! Finally they understand -- we're at war, there are ballooning deficits, and the baby boomers are about to retire, so we simply have to stop cutting taxes! Well, not exactly: ...the Senate Republicans called for $70.2 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, as opposed to the estimated $100 billion the White House is seeking. OK -- well, surely they're going to limit cuts that are going to benefit people who already have all that they need ... right? ...Senator Judd Gregg, the New Hampshire Republican who is chairman of the Budget Committee, said his intent was to extend reductions on capital gains and dividend taxes, which are set to expire in 2008. So, er, what does Congress hope to cut? Both the House and Senate would reduce spending on so-called entitlement programs, including Medicaid, the insurance plan for the poor, marking the first time since 1997 that Congress has sought to curb the growth of entitlements. Could you be more specific? The House budget ... instructs other House committees to pare $68.6 billion from entitlement programs, in which spending is determined by eligibility, over the next five years. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, Mr. Bush's budget proposed only $51 billion, or about $18 billion less, in cuts to those programs. So the headline says that GOP senators want there to be less tax-cutting (although they want to save the precious deductions used by the investor class). What the headline doesn't say, then, is that House Republicans want to lower the deficit by cutting more from social programs than even Bush wants to cut. And what about tax cuts on the House side? The House budget calls for $106 billion in tax cuts over the next five years. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Mr. Bush's proposed tax cuts would total $100 billion. Oh, so the headline is "G.O.P. Senators Balk at Tax Cuts in Bush's Budget," but their House colleagues not only aren't balking, they're saying, "Cut taxes more! And then cut social spending more!" Got it. posted by Steve M. | 10:25 AM | Deadbeats: U.S. Misses Soldier Reimbursement Deadline The Defense Department hasn't developed a plan to reimburse soldiers for equipment they've bought to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan despite requirements in a law passed last year, a senator says. In a letter sent Wednesday to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., asked details on the Pentagon's progress setting up the reimbursement program and questioned why it was not in place yet. "Very simply, this is either negligence on their part, because they were not happy with this when it passed, or it's incompetence," Dodd said. "It's pretty outrageous when you have all their rhetoric about how much we care about our people in uniform." ...Under the law, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations on the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item.... --AP Hopes for D.C. Inaugural Reimbursement Dim Seven weeks after President Bush's second inauguration, District of Columbia officials are still hoping for reimbursement of the $12 million they spent on security. A Homeland Security official told them Wednesday it may be too late. District officials were told to spend money from regional homeland security grants, which were supposed to be used for other projects, to pay for security for the president and other dignitaries during the swearing-in ceremony and the inaugural parade.... D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz said she is not discouraged. She pointed to a history of presidents paying for their own inauguration. "I don't think it's ever too late to get reimbursed for what was a national event," Schwartz said.... --AP I bet the young Shrub used to skip out on drink tabs, too. posted by Steve M. | 9:43 AM | Wednesday, March 09, 2005 WE ARE WITNESSING THE IRREVERSIBLE MARCH OF ... HEY! WHERE ARE YOU GUYS GOING? BEIRUT, Lebanon - Lebanon's pro-Syrian prime minister, who was forced to resign last week by opposition protests, was virtually assured of being asked to form the next government after a majority of lawmakers backed him Wednesday. An unofficial count gave Omar Karami more than half the votes in the 128-member legislature. A formal announcement by President Emile Lahoud, who consulted with legislators, may be made as early as Wednesday night or Thursday.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 5:02 PM | Over at Seeing the Forest, Dave Johnson actually looks at the facts and discovers that a lot of abortion opponents have spoken at recent Democratic conventions, and made their stance on the issue known from the stage. Presumably, this is news to the editor of The New Republic, Peter "Illiberal" Beinart. posted by Steve M. | 1:48 PM | I don't know which reaction to the now-inevitable passage of the bankruptcy bill makes me wince more: Elizabeth Warren's look-on-the-bright-side message at Talking Points Memo ("...you pushed up the cost.... Because of this fight, there will be no quiet, smooth passage for this bill") or the fist-shaking in Max Sawicky's list of "Democratic senators who will never be president" (because of their vote to let the bill come to the floor). Warren, Sawicky, and so many others are on the side of the angels, but please, people -- can we be realistic? Look, we're just not organized enough, not powerful enough, not scary enough to give our Senate and House delegations pause. If Social Security is the third rail of American politics, we weren't even capable of raising this to the level of a balloon rubbed on a sweater. The activists and mavens who care about matters like this are too small a sliver of the electorate to worry wily pols. They fear big blocs of voters, not us, and we were never able to make average voters care. Is that a surprise? We simply don't have the Right's message machine. A bit of what happens on the Right is purely grassroots -- I'm thinking of the work of Christian conservatives -- but right-wing activism packs a punch only because of big money, from self-interested corporations and scheming think-tank-funding billionaires. Big money shapes the message and gets it out there. That, in turn, keeps a much larger percentage of ordinary conservative Americans pumped up and versed on talking points than we can muster on the other side. This is a huge problem, and as long as we can't find a solution to it, we're not going to win on issues like this. Only a small percentage of us (the activists and mavens) will remember this moment in '08; the rank and file simply won't. That means we don't really have a whole lot of leverage over Democrats who sell us out. Ultimately, there need to be millions of Americans -- at least a double-digit percentage of the electorate -- who are fired up by the idea of progressivism. I'm talking about a mirror image of what the Right has: millions of people who listen to Rush and watch Fox and who may not know much, but they know that the correct answer in every case is whatever right-wing opinion leaders say it is. We aren't there -- we aren't even close. So for the Democrats on Max Sawicky's list, this was, unfortunately, pretty much risk free. posted by Steve M. | 12:06 PM | Gunmen have killed three Iraqi women in the Shia district of Sadr City in Baghdad, police say. The trio were said to have been shot as they stood on a street corner. Police said they believed the women had been accused by a religious movement of being prostitutes, and were not killed for political reasons.... --BBC yesterday Er, what happened to "Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!"? ***** Tuesday, March 08, 2005 So I wonder if that "scummy little book" Nicholson Baker published last year was ever translated into Italian. I think it might seem sort of timely in Italy right now. The book was a novel in the form of a two-character conversation. The title was Checkpoint. ...JAY: It was that thing I read on the Net, the news story. I was so awful. BEN: About what? JAY: It was in the Sydney Morning Herald. BEN: Sydney, Australia? JAY: Yes. BEN: What was the story? JAY: Oh, it was about this checkpoint, and, um. I don't want to -- oh, it was a thing that happened, that nobody would have ever wanted to happen. But it happened, and it made me so mad. So mad at him. BEN: Why don't you tell me. JAY: It was just an event. Well. Okay. There were a bunch of Army guys there and this Land Rover drove toward them. It was filled with a family, they were fleeing. Many children. Everybody was jammed into this car, and they were trying to get out of the war zone. BEN: Okay. JAY: And they waved, and somebody at the checkpoint misinterpreted the wave, and so there was a huge blast of fire, and one of the women in the car, the mother, she said, "I saw the --" Sorry. BEN: It's okay. JAY: She said, "I saw the heads --" Pull myself together. BEN: It's all right. JAY: She said, "I saw the heads of my two little girls come off." That's what she fucking said. I'm not kidding you, man. "My two little girls." That's what she fucking said. Can you imagine it? You're just trying to get your family out of a war zone? Your farm's already been blasted by helicopters, and then a bunch of guys in Kevlar open fire on your kids, and you see that happen? Ho, God. BEN: That's bad. JAY: Liberators. Such bullshit. It's just one event. The grandfather was killed, too. You know what he had on? He was wearing a pin-striped suit so that he would look more American. Ho, man. Ho, man. And that creep, that fucking Texas punk, who can't even talk, with his drugged-out eyes, he brought us to this point, to this war, and for nothing, for not one red fucking thing.... Here's the Sydney Morning Herald story Jay talks about. (If you can't get it to load, you can probably get it via this Google search; it's the first result.) The story's from April 2003. Now, Rowan Scarborough insists in today's Washington Times that Mistaken shootings of civilians resulted in "few deadly incidents" since the U.S. started checkpoints in March 2003, according to [an internal Pentagon] memo. However, William Langewiesche, writing in the November 2004 Atlantic, begs to differ: If there was one remaining road rule in Iraq, it was to stay well behind [U.S. military] patrols, because of the understandable tendency of American soldiers to fire back indiscriminately when attacked. There are many stories, glossed over in official reports, of innocent Iraqis who were shredded in their cars because they happened to drive too close to a patrol that had been bombed or fired upon. Sometimes entire families died that way. posted by Steve M. | 10:30 PM | The problem with no-'count rich men's sons is that they think nothing of letting others clean up their messes: State Taxpayers Providing Relief to Military Families Taxpayers can donate their refunds in many states to the homeless, to victims of child abuse, to protecting endangered species or to a group of needy people whose taxpayer-financed salaries do not always make ends meet - military families. Illinois led the way last year when it added a Military Family Relief Fund to the list of charities on its state tax forms, collecting $204,000. Five more states have followed suit, and at least 21 more, including New York, have introduced legislation to do so next year.... The money is intended to help cover property taxes, car repairs, rent, equipment not supplied by the armed forces, or anything that might be a reach for the families of National Guard members and reservists struggling with the domestic hazards of wartime, including loss of income, long separations, disability or sudden death. The measures are part of a movement by states to fill what they perceive as a void in federal support for military families.... --New York Times Heaven knows the military families need help, but the diversion of this money to them means, of course, that there's that much less for schools, roads, bridges, cops, and so on. But hey -- isn't that a small price to pay to spare George W. Bush the anguish of having to take responsibility for the consequences of his own actions? posted by Steve M. | 2:15 PM | Excuse me -- why am I reading this in The Washington Post? Why the hell is this out there for public consumption? Social Security Stance Risky, Democrats Told Bush Could Outflank Their Rigid Opposition ...at a time when many Democrats are congratulating one another, others are beginning to worry that their strategy of rigid opposition has not begun to pay any political dividends and that Bush could yet outflank them before this fight is over. The party's situation was posed most provocatively by two veteran Democratic strategists, Stan Greenberg and James Carville. In a memo issued last week, the two wrote: "We ask progressives to consider, why have the Republicans not crashed and burned?" "Why has the public not taken out their anger on the congressional Republicans and the president?" they added. "We think the answer lies with voters' deeper feelings about the Democrats who appear to lack direction, conviction, values, advocacy or a larger public purpose." ... We all know what the Democratic Party is: a collection of spineless, gutless, self-doubting, self-hating, mewling, pathetic losers. But then there's tart-tongued, tough-talking, till-the-last-dog-dies James Carville, Mr. "We're Right, They're Wrong." Or at least that's his reputation. But if you really believe "We're right, they're wrong," you don't say, "Gosh, it's possible that we really might be wrong" in a memo that's distributed in such a way that it ends up in The Washington Post, fer crissakes. Yes, in recent weeks there have been some public expressions of doubt on Social Security by Republicans. That's because they're losing. It's a sign that they're losing. Except for the occasional moderate playing the "maverick" card, Republicans don't hang their dirty laundry in public -- their doubts make the papers only on the rare occasions when they feel that putting daylight between themselves and the leadership is necessary for their political survival. Democrats, alas, hang their dirty laundry in public all the time -- in fact, as in this case, Democrats often seem to deliberately dirty their laundry, then cast about for a public place to hang it. Self-sabotaging idiots. posted by Steve M. | 10:34 AM | Monday, March 07, 2005 Peter Beinart says in The New York Times Book Review, It's remarkable to me how many people still mention the fact that [the anti-abortion Pennsylvania governor] Bob Casey was denied the right to speak at the 1992 Democratic convention. That was an illiberal thing the party did. Atrios, among others, denounces this as an urban legend. Casey wasn't denied the opportunity to speak because he was anti-choice, he was denied the opportunity to speak because he refused to endorse the Clinton/Gore ticket. Over at The Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum does a Nexis search of articles on the subject and concludes, So it seems to me that the real reason Casey was prevented from speaking was because....he wanted to give a pro-life speech. But a commenter named Jane says he's missing the point: ... The right-wing meme isn't that Casey was prevented from speaking because he wanted to give a pro-life speech, it's that Casey was prevented from speaking *because he was pro-life.* Veerrry different.... Repeat-- the GOPers keep saying Casey was denied a speaking slot because of his beliefs, not because of what he intended to say. She's absolutely right. And it's a vital distinction. Now and for the foreseeable future, no one's going to get up at a Republican convention and make a speech the central thrust of which is opposition to the Iraq war, or support for higher taxes, or advocacy of gay marriage or abortion rights. Everyone knows that. Thus, in order for the Casey story to retain potency, it must appear that the party kept him off the stage because of his beliefs, not because the point of his speech was to rebuke to the presidential nominee on a key issue. But that's precisely what a lot of people believe happened. And this is more than a right-wing meme now -- it's conventional wisdom. Here's Zell Miller last summer on Meet the Press: … the Republican Party has become the party where diversity is accepted. You know, they talked about diversity at the Democratic convention. There was no diversity in ideology whatsoever. Can you remember when they wouldn't even let Bob Casey, a pro-life Democrat, Governor of Pennsylvania -- wouldn't even let him speak at the convention in '92? They have completely pushed out any moderate to conservative Democrat. It's no longer the party of the big tent that it once was. Here's Nat Hentoff (an anti-abortion zealot, as you know if you've read him regularly) eulogizing Casey in 2000 in The Village Voice: Casey was not asked to speak. In fact, he and his Pennsylvania delegation were exiled to the farthest reaches of Madison Square Garden--because Casey was pro-life. Here's the Catholic magazine Crisis: Ultimately, Casey's opposition to abortion made him a pariah among the most radical Democrats. He was banned from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York. Here's Jonathan E. Kaplan writing last summer in The Hill: In 1992, Democrats did not allow Pennsylvania Gov. Bob Casey to speak because he was pro-life, even though he was a longtime liberal Democrat. Here's a 2004 editorial in the St. Petersburg Times: No one expected to find an antiabortion Democrat on the list of speakers [at the 2004 convention]. It simply isn't allowed. Feminists would object, just as they did at the party's 1992 convention, when Robert Casey, then governor of Pennsylvania and a genuine New Deal liberal, was denied a speaking role because of his opposition to abortion. That's why I thank Digby for digging up this 1996 New Republic article by Michael Crowley on the Casey brouhaha. In addition to the other evidence Crowley marshals, he notes this: ...a slew of pro-life Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley Jr., Senators John Breaux and Howell Heflin, and five governors, did address the delegates in 1992. That's it. That's the smoking gun. How many anti-abortion Democrats got to speak at that convention? At least eight. Not primarily on abortion -- but they did get to speak. posted by Steve M. | 3:35 PM | WHAT REALLY MATTERS Army generals say a more effective answer to the threat of explosives [to U.S. troops in Iraq] may lie in electronic instruments that have proven successful in blocking the detonation of homemade bombs.... Such an electronic countermeasure was used at the start of the war to shield Iraqi oil fields from possible sabotage. But some members of Congress and security experts say shortsighted planning and piecemeal buying on the part of the Army has resulted in too few of the devices being used to protect the troops. --New York Times today ***** (That's just a small detail in a very good story about how the Pentagon botched the armoring of vehicles and the manufacture and distribution of bulletproof vests for U.S. troops.) posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | I see that Instapundit is telling his large audience that American photo editing = reality: the opposition in Lebanon is full of "attractive Lebanese women," while the pro-Syrian faction, well ... Caption: "Syrian workers hold pictures of Syrian President Bashar Assad as one cuts himself with a knife during a pro-Syrian demonstration in Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, March 6, 2005. Man cuts himself to show his support and commitment to his president." ...that's what I'm seeing. And I haven't seen anything to suggest that it's an inaccurate reflection. But, er, Glenn? Some of the people who were getting blown up by insurgents in Iraq a couple of weeks ago were cutting themselves really, really badly -- in fact, that's why they were being blown up. They're all bloody from self-inflicted sword wounds. And there are no pretty girls in sight. Does that mean the insurgents were right to kill them? posted by Steve M. | 8:07 AM | Sunday, March 06, 2005 Peter Beinart of The New Republic can prattle on all he wants, either alone or in groups, about what he thinks it'll take to revive the Democratic Party, but nothing is going to work as long as Republican image-massagers continue to sell the message that voting against a Republican candidate is voting against God -- a message some people clearly take quite literally. The mind reels. A large chunk of Bush's base doesn't think he's godly. They think he's God. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM | CAFETERIA CHRISTIAN Grassley now: A national group of Christian lawyers is appealing to church leaders to join them in lobbying against the bankruptcy reform bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia. The lawyers say the legislation runs contrary to the forgiveness of debt and charity required by the Bible.... In response, Grassley said Congress could not be bound by biblical mandates because "the Constitution does not provide for a theocracy." "I can't listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population," Grassley said. --Des Moines Register, 3/4/05 ***** Grassley then: SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY: ... It's odd that one of those -- there has been some condemnation of him because of his religious beliefs. It's a sad commentary that John Ashcroft's Christian religious beliefs can't be considered an asset in the same vein that Joseph Lieberman's religious faith was considered an asset during the last election. --discussing the pending confirmation of John Ashcroft, PBS NewsHour, 1/18/01 On Friday, June 19, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act, S.1244. The new law will protect tithing and charitable giving under the federal bankruptcy code. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced the legislation last year.... In addition to protecting from federal bankruptcy courts the donations made to a church through tithing or to a tax-exempt charity through an established pattern of giving, the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act also restores the right of debtors to tithe and give charitably after declaring bankruptcy under Chapter 13.... --Grassley press release On June 12, 1995, the Senate initiated debate on the CDA [Communications Decency Act]... The entire Senate debate, spearheaded by Senator Exon and Republicans Dan Coats and Charles Grassley, was informed by the sensibilities of the religious right. The Senators read letters from the Christian Coalition and from Bruce Taylor [of the National Law Center for Children and Families] into the record.... --"The Religious Right and Internet Censorship" by Jonathan Wallace That there can be no doubt as to the source of parental rights proposals, the last paragraph of New Jersey's proposal states: "The 'Parental Rights Amendment' has been introduced by legislators in at least 29 states to date. Major pro-family organizations are working for he adoption of the amendment across the nation, including the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, Concerned Women for America, Of the People, and the Home School Legal Defense Association. This amendment complements federal parental rights legislation which has been introduced by Representative Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa." (Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 114, State of New Jersey, Introduced March 10, 1997 by Senator Cardinale.) --report from the Washington Natural Learning Association posted by Steve M. | 10:58 AM | Friday, March 04, 2005 The brutal murder of a family of Coptic Christians in Jersey City, New Jersey may have been carried out by Muslim fanatics in retaliation for the expression of "anti-Muslim" views on the internet.... As we've said many times before, these fanatics cannot be reasoned with or deterred. They can only be hunted down and killed, and the more of them that are killed in countries other than this one (Iraq, for example), the better. --"Hindrocket" on January 16, 2005, at Power Line (Time magazine's Blog of the Year) Robbery, not religion, was the motive behind the savage slaying of a family of four in January, prosecutors said Friday. Two paroled drug dealers who were deeply in debt were charged with four counts of murder and held on $10 million bail in the Jan. 11 killing of the Armanious family, Coptic Christians from Egypt who emigrated to the United States in 1997.... "I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear: The motive for these murders was robbery. This was a crime based on greed, the desperate need of money," Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said. Edward McDonald, 25, who rented a second-floor apartment above the Armanious family, and an acquaintance, Hamilton Sanchez, 30, pleaded not guilty.... --New York Daily News/AP today ***** UPDATE: The New York Post says this turned from a robbery to a multiple murder when the youngest child in the Armanious family struggled out of a duct-tape blindfold and recognized one of the robbers as her upstairs neighbor. On this one the Post is wearing its tabloid hat, not its ideological one; the result is detailed, grisly, and believable. This sure looks like noir, not jihad. posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | You know that there are serious shortfalls in U.S. military recruiting these days. Now Stars and Stripes notes a downturn that's been going on for some time: The Army’s wartime recruiting challenge is aggravated by a sharp drop in black enlistments over the last four years, which internal Army and Defense Department polls trace to an unpopular war in Iraq and concerns among blacks with Bush administration policies. The Army is straining to meet recruiting goals in part because the number of black volunteers has fallen 41 percent — from 23.5 percent of recruits in fiscal 2000 down steadily to 13.9 percent in the first four months of fiscal 2005.... Officer recruiting is hit, too. Black enrollment in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program is down 36 percent since 2001.... Harlem congressman Charles Rangel is interviewed, and he makes the obvious point: “I have not found a black person in support of this war in my district,” he said. “The fact that every member of the Congressional Black Caucus emotionally, politically and vigorously opposes this war is an indication of what black folks think throughout this country.” Rangel also said there was “overwhelming disappointment” among blacks after Bush, in a disputed election, became president in 2001, and the disappointment “plummeted after he declared war in Iraq.” Of course, even after a drop of this magnitude, blacks are 13.9% of recruits and 14% of all recruiting-age youth. So they're doing their part. They're just not doing more than their part anymore. ***** (Masochists can read the Free Republic discussion of this article, where commenter mariabush, whose tagline is "We voted like we prayed," declares, "Charlie Rangle [sic] needs to be tried and shot for treason. He is aiding and abetting the enemy.") ***** UPDATE: And gosh, what on earth could those African-Americans be so squeamish about? A growing number of U.S. troops whose body armor helped them survive bomb and rocket attacks are suffering brain damage as a result of the blasts. It's a type of injury some military doctors say has become the signature wound of the Iraq war. ...From January 2003 to this January, 437 cases of TBI [traumatic brain injury] were diagnosed among wounded soldiers at the Army hospital, Lux says. Slightly more than half had permanent brain damage.... Symptoms of TBI vary. They include headaches, sensitivity to light or noise, behavioral changes, impaired memory and a loss in problem-solving abilities. In severe cases, victims must relearn how to walk and talk. "It's like being born again, literally," says Sgt. Edward "Ted" Wade, 27, a soldier with the 82nd Airborne Division who lost his right arm and suffered TBI in an explosion last year near Fallujah. Today, he sometimes struggles to formulate a thought, and his eyes blink repeatedly as he concentrates. posted by Steve M. | 6:54 PM | GRANDSTANDING ANTI-ABORTION ATTORNEY GENERAL: VICTIMS OF REAL MOLESTORS ALWAYS ABORT Remember J. Leon Holmes, the Bush judicial nominee who said that "concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami"? Well, now we have a new, equally absurd theory about abortion from the anti-choice crowd. This one comes from Kansas attorney general Phill Kline. You know he's on a fishing expedition, subpoenaing records of two Kansas abortion clinics. One of the things he says he's hunting for is evidence of child rape -- but this, of course, leads to an obvious question: Why not also subpoena records of births? At a press conference yesterday, Kline had an answer for that, as reported in the Lawrence Journal-World: Kline said he doubted many child rapists would allow their victims to carry out their pregnancies. And he said his office would not prosecute consensual sexual activity between children of similar age. "I have stated that repeatedly; we are looking for the child predators," Kline said. "You do not find child predators standing in a hospital as their prey gives birth to the child that they father. That's common sense." That's it. Full stop. If you're underage and you got pregnant, we know you were brutalized just by noting that you had an abortion. If you'd just been canoodling with your same-age boyfriend, you would have simply had the baby. It always works that way -- it's just "common sense." By the way, here are some numbers: Records maintained by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment show that in 2003 -- the latest data available -- 171 girls under age 16 gave birth in the state; two gave birth outside the state. Forty of these births involved girls between ages 10 and 14, including two in Douglas County, two in Johnson County, 10 in Sedgwick County and 11 in Wyandotte County. Records from 2003 also show that 366 16-year-old girls gave birth in the state; 13 outside the state. It's unclear how many of these girls became pregnant when they were 15. According to Kline, "common sense" tells you that not one of these girls was likely to have been impregnated by a "predator." Not even the one or more 10-year-olds. posted by Steve M. | 11:22 AM | Wow, is this for real? From Naharnet News in Lebanon: The Pentagon is now convinced that air strikes on Syria have become necessary to overthrow the Assad regime, liberate Lebanon and stop support of insurgents waging a guerrilla war against American forces in Iraq as well as Palestinian militants against Israel, the U.S.-sponsored Al Hurra TV network says.... "Diplomacy as a means to deal with countries supporting terrorism is over and out. The situation is now open to all eventualities as far as Syria is concerned," the sources were quoted as saying by the Arabic-language Al Hurra. "Resolving problems with Syria now requires changing the Syrian regime or mounting air attacks similar to those staged against Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998 to wipe out terrorist centers once and for all," the U.S. intelligence sources were quoted as saying.... Al-Bawaba confirms this. Al-Hurra, the TV network that broadcast this report, is the U.S.-based, U.S. government-funded network set up about a year ago by the Bush administration to counteract Al-Jazeera and its competitors. Just a threat? Or the next war? posted by Steve M. | 7:38 AM | Thursday, March 03, 2005 Like me, Skimble can't seem to stay retired from blogging. Recently he's been reading Jeff Gannon's brand-new blog. Gannon, the rent boy turned phony reporter, actually posted this on March 2: Tom Bevan has an [sic] great piece at Real Clear Politics, PLAYING HARDBALL WITH MAUREEN DOWD, in which he makes some good points about this gal who probably needs a bit of the old Jeff Gannon to relieve some of that pent up whatever. Yikes. Dowd "needs a bit of the old Jeff Gannon"? I assumed Gannon was a Kinsey six, but I guess the door swings both ways. Or maybe he just wants to do to Maureen Dowd what he was trying so hard in the briefing room to do to the Democratic Party, and the country. ***** Meanwhile, What happened to Gannon was a Clintonista hit. It had nothing to do with his alleged past, but everything to do with insulting Her Heinous in a nationally televised press conference. Don't laugh -- this woman (who calls Washington "the political gulag") has back-up on this. No, really -- just ask her: During the course of our hour-long freep outside Monica's Gate in front of where the TV networks do their standups, a hard pass holding member of the White House press corps stopped and spoke with us at length about the situation. The member of the press corps was familiar with Gannon and what was being done to him for simply asking a question. The member wholeheartedly agreed with our sign that said, "After Gannon, Who's Next?" In response to our comment that this was the Ellen Romesch strategy played out as a warning for any reporter to be careful what they say about Hillary Clinton as she prepares for her probable 2008 presidential run, the member of the press corps said that this went back further: To Filegate.... For those in search of a footnote for "Ellen Rometsch strategy," here's a Salon article from the Lewinsky era that points out the moment when certain right-wingers glommed onto the phrase (Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch subsequently picked up on it): ...George Stephanopoulos, analyzing the then-2-week-old Lewinsky scandal for ABC's "This Week," said White House allies were "starting to whisper about what I'll call the 'Ellen Rometsch' strategy." Stephanopoulos then went on to explain that Rometsch was an East German spy who had slept with President John Kennedy as well as many other congressmen and senators. "Robert Kennedy was charged with getting her out of the country and also getting [FBI Director] John Edgar Hoover to go to the Congress and say, 'Don't you investigate this, because if you do, we're going to open up everybody's closets," Stephanopoulos said.... So there you have it: In his question to the president, Gannon makes a brief negative reference to Hillary, and she decides he Must Be Destroyed. Through blogs, of course. Left-wing blogs. Because, of course, she's only been a First Lady and a U.S. senator for the past twelve years -- it's not as if she knows any print or TV journalists, right? And you can't blame her for being overly sensitive, because she's gotten such good press over the years -- in fact, this is the first time anyone's ever said anything negative about her in public, isn't it? ***** BELATED UPDATE: In comments, I'm told that Kristinn, whom I identified as a woman, is actually the guy on the left here. posted by Steve M. | 6:46 PM | So ... those sob stories we hear all the time about little towns where you just can't find a doctor anymore? That's all the fault of greedy trial lawyers with their junk medical lawsuits -- right? Maybe not, as USA Today reports: The country needs to train 3,000 to 10,000 more physicians a year -- up from the current 25,000 -- to meet the growing medical needs of an aging, wealthy nation, ... studies say. Because it takes 10 years to train a doctor, the nation will have a shortage of 85,000 to 200,000 doctors in 2020 unless action is taken soon. ... For the past quarter-century, the American Medical Association and other industry groups have predicted a glut of doctors and worked to limit the number of new physicians. In 1994, the Journal of the American Medical Association predicted a surplus of 165,000 doctors by 2000. "It didn't happen," says Harvard University medical professor David Blumenthal, author of a New England Journal of Medicine article on the doctor supply. "Physicians aren't driving taxis. In fact, we're all gainfully employed, earning good incomes, and new physicians are getting two, three or four job offers." The nation now has about 800,000 active physicians, up from 500,000 20 years ago. They've been kept busy by a growing population and new procedures ranging from heart stents to liposuction. We have a doctor shortage, in other words, because a conscious choice was made to keep the number of doctors in America at this level, based on an assessment of need that we now know is wrong. The AMA was a bit slow on the uptake -- the article notes that Even the American Medical Association (AMA), the influential lobbying group for physicians, has abandoned its long-standing position that an "oversupply exists or is immediately expected." In fact, that position was held by the AMA as recently as two years ago. And note that the government sets the pace of medical training: Congress controls the supply of physicians by how much federal funding it provides for medical residencies — the graduate training required of all doctors.... The government spends about $11 billion annually on 100,000 medical residents, or roughly $110,000 per resident. The number of residents has hovered at this level for the past decade, according to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. In 1997, to save money and prevent a doctor glut, Congress capped the number of residents that Medicare will pay for at about 80,000 a year. Another 20,000 residents are financed by the Veterans Administration and Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for the poor. Teaching hospitals pay for a small number of residents without government assistance. Medicare, which faces enormous financial pressure in coming decades, already spends 3% of its budget training physicians and may not have the resources to spend more.... Oh, and doctors, perhaps understandably, tend to set up practices where they'd like to be rather than where the need is, and in high-paying specialties, again regardless of what's really needed. And modern doctors practice fewer hours than doctors did a few years ago. I'm not saying that the cost of malpractice insurance is 100% irrelevant to the doctor shortage. But these seem to be the major reasons that the sleepy little towns Republicans love to cite really don't have enough doctors. posted by Steve M. | 1:30 PM | Good Lord -- it's as if we're watching It's a Wonderful Life II: This Time Potter Wins: ...Mostly along party lines, the GOP-controlled Senate voted 59-40 [yesterday] to reject an amendment that would have granted to older people special homestead exemptions to keep their homes when they file for bankruptcy. Such exemptions now are determined by the states. Also rebuffed, 58-39, were two proposals focused on people whose significant medical expenses for illness force them to file for bankruptcy. The first would have allowed them to keep at least $150,000 of the equity in their primary residence. If, in addition, the medical bills exceed 25 percent of the person's income, the second proposal would have exempted the person from a new test in the legislation measuring income and assets of bankruptcy applicants to determine if his or her debts can be discharged. By another 59-40 tally, the Senate defeated a Democratic proposal to require that credit card statements show how long it would take a consumer to pay off a debt by making only minimum monthly payments. It was the second day of defeat for Democratic amendments to the sweeping bill to overhaul the bankruptcy code. On Tuesday, the Senate accepted a more limited GOP provision that would give a break to active-duty military personnel and some veterans who file.... --AP Oh, but as Gretchen Morgenson reported yesterday in The New York Times, not everyone is being cast out into the cold -- everything's copacetic if you're rich: ...legal specialists say the proposed law leaves open an increasingly popular loophole that lets wealthy people protect substantial assets from creditors even after filing for bankruptcy. ...since 1997, lawmakers in five states - Alaska, Delaware, Nevada, Rhode Island and Utah - have passed legislation exempting assets held domestically in [asset protection] trusts from the federal bankruptcy code. People who want to establish trusts do not have to reside the five states; they need only set their trust up through an institution in one of them. "If the bankruptcy legislation currently being rushed through the Senate gets enacted, debtors won't need to buy houses in Florida or Texas to keep their millions," said Elena Marty-Nelson, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., referring to generous homestead exemptions in those states. "The millionaire's loophole that is the result of these trusts needs to be closed."... This loophole actually protects people who run huge companies in a sleazy way: Asset protection trusts have become increasingly popular in recent years among ... corporate executives, whose assets are at greater peril now because of new laws. The Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, for example, requires chief executives and chief financial officers to certify that their companies' financial statements are accurate; anyone who knowingly certifies false numbers can be fined up to $5 million. In addition, under Sarbanes-Oxley, executives may have to reimburse their companies for bonuses or other incentive compensation they received if their company's financial reports have to be restated in later years. "Given all the notoriety of what we're seeing today, from HealthSouth to WorldCom, there is probably more of an impetus for executives to consider going this route," said Scott E. Blakeley, a lawyer at Blakeley & Blakeley in Irvine, Calif. "And yet in the bankruptcy bill, this topic is not touched."... The vote totals make it clear that some Democrats are signing on to this -- but remember, a bill like this one simply wouldn't be a top agenda item if Democrats ran Congress. This is why we have to be very, very careful about rooting for Joe Lieberman to have a primary challenge -- in the long run, sure, but not now, not until Democrats are the majority. In fact, instead of eating our own (even just the ones who deserve it), we really need to concentrate on going after vulnerable Republicans (even the ones who seemingly don't deserve it, like the ladies from Maine). posted by Steve M. | 9:56 AM | It should be obvious to anyone who's checked in since I posted my farewell notice on Sunday that I haven't exactly cleaned out my desk and turned in my company ID. There are a couple of reasons for that: (1) I miss doing this, and (2) a lot of you wrote posts and e-mails that made me think I was doing something good here. Those messages meant a lot to me. So, yeah, I'm back. I probably won't be posting quite as often as before (I think I was trying too hard to keep up with the Big Boys), and it's possible I'll succumb again to burnout, or maybe just want to give up the solo space and join a group blog, but for now I'll be here again. I should add that posting could be really sporadic in the immediate future -- not because I'm reading so much, but because work is piling up. But I want to do this again. Thanks for helping me out. And just to clarify my last post: When John Emerson talked about his readership, I took it to mean, "I wish my voice could reach further and also be heard by some powerful ears," not "I don't like my current readers." If I'm interpreting that correctly, I share his frustration. In any case, I like my readers a lot. posted by Steve M. | 12:01 AM | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 I know what you're thinking: "How can I miss Steve when he won't go away?" But I see that I'm not the only lefty who's announced a withdrawal from the fray this week -- John Emerson of Seeing the Forest is going on hiatus. Besides delayed shock at the results of the '04 election, he's feeling some of what I've been feeling: At the beginning of my blogging career I was happy just to vent, but over the last year or so I've tried to figure out a way to make something of my political writing. That really hasn't happened -- I still seem to be speaking to the same small audience of people who basically already agree with me, without really getting my message out the generic Democrats or the big-time bloggers -- much less the party leadership. He goes on to say this: The media is hopeless, and we need something completely new -- a new national newspaper, new national TV and cable networks, and a new national radio network. Radio is only halfway there, and the others don't exist at all. It would all cost about half a billion, and while people tell me that the money is out there, I don't see much happening. Right now there is no career track for openly liberal, openly Democratic media people. You can sit back and watch all of them fudging, refusing to burn bridges, and primping their moderation cred -- hoping for that invitation to go on TV, or maybe even to write for the Times eventually, like the liberal Kristoff. I might also mention that there's a considerable pool of talented bloggers out here who've been self-financing all along while the dud consultants have been pulling down six-figure incomes for losing over and over again. After awhile, that kind of thing gets old, and I know of at least two well-respected bloggers who are just plain flat broke. Republican bloggers seem to get support, although they don't necessarily tell anyone about it. I don't know about financial support, but Republicans on the Internet sure get political support. On the right, it sometimes seems that anyone can break big-time: You can be a ham-fisted clown like ScrappleFace, pop the phrase "axis of weasels" into your silly blog, and see it rocket around the world, straight up into the mainstream, within days; you can be a non-blogging chat-room dabbler like Buckhead and the Internet Right will take your brief comment about document fonts and use it to turn CBS upside down (and neutralize an otherwise important and accurate story). The Right will take anything it thinks it can use from anywhere on the Internet and stovepipe it this way; "axis of weasels" went mainstream via James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" in The Wall Street Journal; the route for the CBS story was from Buckhead to two right-wing blogs to ABC via the Drudge Report. Taranto, Drudge -- we have nothing similar, no truly effective inside-yet-outside conduit to the news mainstream. I'm not sure if the problem is that our advocates aren't as good (or as well funded) or that they don't "work the refs" enough or that ABC and CNN and The New York Times have highly developed cases of Stockholm Syndrome and will eagerly seize on an "underground" story that's embarrassing to liberals while turning up their noses at something similar from our side. I don't have answers, but I think John's on to something. posted by Steve M. | 2:24 PM | Tuesday, March 01, 2005 Shorter Weekly Standard movie critique by Wesley Smith: Million Dollar Baby: Goebbels would have approved. I wish I were exaggerating. (Note: The link contains spoilers -- assuming you could possibly not know the ending of MDB after weeks of the Michael Medved-led right-wing fatwa. By the way, the movie Smith wanted Eastwood to make has already been made -- it's The Waterdance by Neal Jimenez. Good movie -- and, to the best of my knowledge, it didn't make two cents.) ***** (Yup, another post. So I'm semi-retired.) posted by Steve M. | 9:51 PM | I'm not saying that people with separate accounts have marriages that are less healthy than anybody else's. I'm saying we should pause before this becomes the social norm. Private property is the basis for our market democracy. But private property in the home is an altogether trickier proposition. --David Brooks today STELLA [crossing to bureau]: Stanley doesn't give me a regular allowance, he likes to pay the bills himself.... --Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire **** (Yeah, I know -- I'm being a typical "retired" blogger who can't completely quit.) posted by Steve M. | 11:18 AM | |
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