|
|
| No More Mister Nice Blog |
|
|
Saturday, April 30, 2005 I had a post yesterday about various Tom DeLay associates and their involvement in the Marianas Islands, but I didn't give you many details about DeLay's effort to keep the sweat in Marianas sweatshops. For those details, go to this post at Local Tint. A couple of excerpts: ...workers agree to repay recruitment fees from $2,000 to $7,000, trapping them in a state of indentured servitude. They often must sign "shadow contracts" waiving basic human rights, including the freedom to join unions, attend religious services, quit or marry. *** "You represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America," DeLay said at the time to his audience, which included Saipan officials and factory owners. Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 3:21 PM | QUIZ QUESTION Who recently said this about the federal government? it has been an instrument of moral evil for most of its history. Answer: Dr. Paul Schenck, Pastoral Associate at Priests for Life, writing to CWhite of the blog Eclectic Floridian. (See this post.) Here's a fuller version of the quote, from an April 1 e-mail on subjects including Terri Schiavo: Recall that it was our Federal government that sustained slavery for nearly 75 years, segregation and Jim Crow for another 100. It at least tolerated, if not promoted an insitutional anti-semitism for more than 150 years. It condoned anti-catholicism for over 150 years. My point: it has been an instrument of moral evil for most of its history. That it now wrestles over the treatment of the disabled and infirm is no wonder at all. Gosh, it seems to me that a liberal who said something like this would be condemned as a dirty filthy commie America-hater. But Frank Pavone, Dr. Schenck's boss, gave the invocation at a rally for religious conservatives organized by the GOP before the 2004 convention, and did the same at a subsequent "Christian Inaugural Eve Gala" that was also addressed by Karl Rove. So I guess Dr. Schenck gets a free pass. posted by Steve M. | 2:27 PM | Friday, April 29, 2005 Not that any of them really need it, but I've added these blogs to the blogroll: Norwegianity, Will Bunch's Philadelphia Daily News blog Attytood, The Guardian's Newsblog, and Feministing. Use them wisely. (I imagine many of you do already.) posted by Steve M. | 7:20 PM | VALUES CONSERVATIVES Lobbying firms that employed Jack Abramoff, Tom's DeLay pal, were paid $7.2 million over a period of years by the Marianas Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific where clothing companies find cheap labor. The islands were trying to keep the U.S. government from toughening labor laws. But paying for Abramoff's lobbying services apparently wasn't enough -- so in 1996 the Marianas also gave $1.2 million to David Lapin, a rabbi whose brother introduced Abramoff to DeLay. Lapin, The New York Times tells us, "has long promoted conservative causes in Washington." Apparently that kept him so busy that he was never able to hold up his end of the deal: The government of a United States territory in the Pacific said Thursday that it had been unable to determine what work was performed for a $1.2 million contract awarded to a close associate of a Washington lobbyist at the center of a growing corruption scandal here.... Pam Brown, the attorney general for the Marianas, said Thursday that the government had been unable to determine what work David Lapin had done. "We haven't been able to figure out what the deliverables were," Ms. Brown said. "He was tasked with providing some sort of ethical parameters for government work...." Wow. Y'know, I don't want to just snicker at these people, but sometimes they almost make it too easy. ***** More delightful stuff from the same story: In 1999, Mr. DeLay's former chief of staff, Edwin Buckham, and his former spokesman, Michael Scanlon, both of whom later worked with Mr. Abramoff in his lobbying firm, visited the islands to persuade two local lawmakers to change their votes for speaker of the islands' House of Representatives. The DeLay associates wanted the two legislators to support the candidate of the garment industry, Ben Fitial, who was close to Mr. Abramoff, and promised that federal contracts to the islands would follow if they did. DeLay just loves micromanaging the makeup of legislatures, doesn't he? Oh, and more fun: Mr. Buckham later represented Enron in its bid to build an energy plant in the Northern Marianas, and when Enron lost to a Japanese concern, Mr. DeLay worked to get the bidding reopened. I feel sleazy just reading this stuff. posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | Almost missed this in the stories about Ahmed Chalabi becoming interim oil minister in Iraq: With his nephew also installed as finance minister, Chalabi and his family appear to have a firm grip on the country's purse strings. The nephew's name is Ali Abdel-Amir Allawi. And that appointment isn't temporary. More at Needlenose. posted by Steve M. | 12:38 PM | For years, Republicans -- and George W. Bush in particular -- have told middle-class and poor Americans that tax cuts for the rich (on capital gains, on inherited wealth) are in their best interest. Republicans have said that it doesn't matter who benefits and who doesn't -- a tax cut is a tax cut, and all tax cuts are good for ordinary Americans. Last night, Bush told us we should accept Social Security benefit cuts for the middle class and the rich. How is it possible to reconcile that with the standard GOP economic line? If, by definition, every tax cut for Peter is good for Paul, why should Paul be pleased that Peter's benefits are being cut? (I'm ignoring the fact that Bush is really asking the middle class to accept a big benefit cut on itself, because it's obvious that Bush hopes what you took away from the press conference was "The rich lose the most" -- a strange message from the leader of a party that shrieks "Class warfare!" every time a Democrat says of a tax cut, "The rich benefit the most.") posted by Steve M. | 11:07 AM | Hey, where's Tom DeLay? Where's Randall Terry? (4/28/05 - HOUSTON) — At five months old, a local baby girl is already caught in the middle of a life or death debate. The little girl has leukemia and a rare type of flesh-eating disease, and her family is fighting to keep their baby alive. Little Knya Dismuke Howard is only five months old. She is still fighting for her life at Memorial Hermann Hospital.... Knya's father Charles Howard ... says Knya's doctors don't want to continue treatment.... Memorial Hermann Hospital officials released a statement that reads in part, "In certain unfortunate cases where the death of a patient is unavoidable and medical experts believe that continued treatment will only increase pain and suffering, the physician may ask for a meeting of the Committee for Review of Medically Inappropriate/Futile Treatment. That committee is meeting today to examine the case of little Knya." ... And in San Antonio: ...Southeast Baptist Hospital notified the family of Spiro Nikolouzos last week that doctors plan to turn of his ventilator and stop feeding him intravenously May 3. The notification followed the hospital ethics committee's determination that continued care would be futile. "Can you believe a hospital's trying to do this again?" Nikolouzos' wife, Jannette, said. "It's very aggravating -- I never thought this would happen again." Jannette Nikolouzos said she and an adult son will travel to San Antonio to investigate their options... A lof of you will recall the latter case -- Nikolouzos's family wants to keep him alive, but the Texas Futile Care Law -- signed by then-governor George W. Bush and supported by National Right to Life (which helped write it) -- permits hospitals to overrule families in cases like this. Nikolouzos's family was fighting in court successfully to keep him alive during the Schiavo battles, but now it seems that was a temporary victory. It's quite possible I'd agree with the judgment of the hospital if I were the relative entrusted with making medical decisions in either of these cases -- but I'd want to make the decision, and I want thse relatives to do so, too. (Unlike Terri Schiavo's parents, these are the relatives who actually have the legal right to make decisions.) And I thought the people who railed against the decisions in the Schiavo case believed all life should be preserved by any means necessary, so where's their outrage? (Links via Democratic Underground, Rising Hegemon, and Mark A.R. Kleiman.) posted by Steve M. | 7:44 AM | Thursday, April 28, 2005 From Todd Purdum's press conference postmortem in The New York Times: With his presidency at best becalmed - and at worst beset - just 99 days into his second term, President Bush seized the prime-time power of an East Room news conference for only the fourth time in his tenure in an effort to show that he could still do what he has always done in the face of storms around him: make his own weather.... "I'm not surprised that some are balking at doing hard work," Mr. Bush said in answer to the first question about whether he was frustrated at the slow progress of his agenda. "But I have a duty as the president to define problems facing our nation and to call upon people to act." So Mr. Bush did what he likes to do best: He took his case directly to the people.... Er, those two bits in bold -- how can they both be true? posted by Steve M. | 10:54 PM | OUR PALS THE SAUDIS  A Swiss-based businessman accused by the US Treasury of providing financial help to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda carried a Saudi diplomatic passport, according to copies of documents contained in a book published today in Paris. The documents include a letter from the US Treasury to the Swiss authorities, which says that al-Qaeda and its leader received financial assistance from the businessman, Ali bin Mussalim, "as of late September 2001". They also include a copy of Mr bin Mussalim's diplomatic passport. The disclosures, contained in Al-Qaeda Will Conquer (Al-Qa'ida Vaincra), by the author Guillaume Dasquie, will be uncomfortable reading for the Saudi government, which has disputed any suggestions of official complicity in the attacks of September 11 2001. The January 2002 letter from George Wolfe, then the US Treasury's deputy general counsel, says Mr bin Mussalim "has been providing indirect investment services for al-Qaeda, investing funds for bin Laden, and making cash deliveries on request to the al-Qaeda organisation". The letter links him to the now defunct Bank Al-Taqwa and its founder, Youssef Nada.... --Financial Times Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball were following the story of bin Mussalim, Nada, and Bank Al-Taqwa last year, though the bit about the Saudi diplomatic passport is new. Isikoff and Hosenball said that a particular account at Bank Al-Taqwa was originally set up for Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim, a one-time member of Al Qaeda's governing Shura Council who was captured in Germany after the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and has been awaiting trial while in prison in the United States ever since.... After Salim's arrest, other Al Qaeda figures continued to access the account, [a] legal source said.... In addition, the [Treasury Department] letter notes that one of Al-Taqwa's board members, Ahmed Huber, had confirmed that he had met with members of bin Laden's organization in Beirut and had defended the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.... The letter also states that another Al-Taqwa board member, Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, has supported an Islamic center in Milan that the U.S. government believes may be Al Qaeda’s "most important base in Europe" and which was linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, among other terror plots. This Isikoff/Hosenball story appeared on May 12, 2004. The Financial Times notes that Mr bin Mussalim was found dead in his residence in Lausanne last June, a month after reports of the US Treasury letter first emerged. Here's another curious detail in the FT story: Other documents cited in the book include a flight manifest of the so-called bin Laden flight, in which members of the bin Laden family were flown out of the US in the days after the September 11 attacks. The manifest shows 29 people aboard the flight that flew to Le Bourget airport from Boston on September 20, after originating in Los Angeles and then flying to Orlando and Washington Dulles airport. This contradicts the number cited in the report of the 9/11 Commission published last year, which said there were 26 people aboard. The manifest shows the aircraft flew on from Le Bourget to Geneva and Jeddah. Geneva. That's in Switzerland, you know. posted by Steve M. | 2:16 PM | Ahmad Chalabi will be acting oil minister, the parliamentary speaker said. --"Iraq Parliament Approves Cabinet, Government Formed," Reuters, 4/28/05 [Scott] Ritter had one other memorable encounter with Chalabi. Six months after [their January 1998] London meeting, Ritter was feeling dispirited. U.N. investigators had discovered trace evidence of VX nerve gas on warheads in Iraq; he was concerned that Saddam was still hiding something. Chalabi invited him to the town house in Georgetown, and they discussed the VX discovery. Chalabi then talked to Ritter about doing intelligence work for the I.N.C.... According to Ritter, Chalabi went on to describe a clear vision of Iraq's future -- with himself in charge. Ritter said, "He told me that, if I played ball, when he became President he'd control all of the oil concessions, and he'd make sure I was well taken care of. I guess it was supposed to be a sweetener." Chalabi’s office denied Ritter's account, calling him a "liar." Ritter left without agreeing to work for Chalabi. --Jane Mayer, "The Manipulator," The New Yorker, 6/7/04 (Reuters link via Atrios.) posted by Steve M. | 10:23 AM | Wednesday, April 27, 2005 The right-wing blogs are worked up about a bit on Air America that included what Drudge calls "an apparent gunshot warning to the president." The announcer: "A spoiled child is telling us our Social Security isn't safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here's your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little bastard. [audio of gun being cocked]." The audio production at the center of the controversy aired during opening minutes of The Randi Rhodes Show. Kind of a dumb thing to put on the air. But the question is: What should happen to Randi Rhodes as a result? How about what happened to this guy during the Clinton years? Ray Appleton, a host on KMJ in California's San Joaquin Valley, ... promoted a bumper sticker reading, "Lee Harvey Oswald: Where are you now that we really need you?" (L.A. Times, 4/28/95) And what happened to him? Apparently nothing -- he's not in jail and he's still on KMJ. (And I do believe G. Gordon "Go for a Head Shot" Liddy is still walking around free after urging the murder of ATF agents, as is radio commentator turned senator Jesse "Mr. Clinton Better Watch Out If He Comes Down Here" Helms.) posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM | IT'S GOOD TO BE THE (CO-)KING In mid-April, Viacom revealed that it was reimbursing two top executives, co-Presidents Leslie Moonves and Thomas Freston, for sleeping in their own homes while in New York and Los Angeles on business. ...Moonves, who lives in Los Angeles, owns a home in New York. When he stays at that home while traveling on business, he's reimbursed -- to the tune of $105,000 in 2004. Likewise, Freston -- who lives in New York and owns a home in Los Angeles -- was reimbursed $43,100 for staying at his L.A. domicile last year. Both executives earned about $20 million apiece in 2004. --BusinessWeek via Yahoo News Remember, these are the people Republicans want to reward with even more tax cuts. (Link via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 5:41 PM | So who else has held the prince's hand? A member of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz's delegation was denied entry into the United States after authorities found he was on a government "watch" list, a US official said. The US Department of Homeland Security, in a routine check of the delegation passenger manifest, found that one traveller was on a government list meant to screen out possible terrorists, the official said on condition of anonymity. "This information was shared with our interagency partners, including the State Department," the official said. "My understanding is that the State Department denied that person a visa and so they did not enter the country." ... --AFP/Yahoo News posted by Steve M. | 3:40 PM | In case you were worried that you might someday run out of things to despise Tom DeLay for, David Corn points out another: DeLay is now apparently making NASA a personal fiefdom and profit center. Corn's article on the subject is in the current Nation; it's behind the subscription-only wall, but he reproduces it on his blog. Scroll past the item about Ann Coulter (or read it -- it's quite amusing) and learn that in the notorious 2003 Texas redistricting DeLay's district was tweaked so that the Johnson Space Center in Houston would be grafted on; after that -- coincidentally? -- NASA became the only program in Bush's budget to receive an increase, apart from those involving defense and homeland security. Even some Republicans thought that didn't seem right: The GOP-run House appropriations subcommittee on veterans and housing--which oversaw NASA's funding--trimmed NASA's budget by $1.1 billion, partly to make room for funding for veterans' healthcare. But Bush then threatened to veto the $92 billion appropriations bill that included NASA's money. More important, DeLay hit the warpath. ... He kept the subcommittee's bill bottled up. (During this spending battle, aerospace firms like Northrop Grumman and Boeing funded a reception honoring DeLay at the GOP convention.) The appropriations bill covering NASA eventually was incorporated into an omnibus spending measure. And in December DeLay threatened to block that legislation unless NASA received the full funding proposed by Bush. According to Democrats on the appropriations committee, to accommodate DeLay the committee had to apply a nearly 1 percent cut to other programs. This meant slashing $456 million in education, $225 million in veterans' healthcare and $61 million in scientific research. DeLay didn't mind. He held firm and got his way.... Is DeLay just bringing home the bacon? John Pike of globalsecurity.org doesn't think so: "This is not just about DeLay bringing money to his district," Pike says. "It's national. If you want a contract with NASA, who are you going to go to? And we all know how you get DeLay's attention. DeLay must realize this. Over time, the amount of discretionary budget authority available to him could add up to billions." posted by Steve M. | 12:48 PM | Tee-hee: President Bush can forget about getting any mercy from Washington wags at Saturday's White House Correspondents Dinner - not after the setup he gave every comic and Democrat by strolling hand in hand on Monday with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. Jay Leno, who has emceed the dinner in the past, jumped on the tender scene at Bush's Texas ranch by offering "Tonight" viewers a spoof on those Las Vegas tourism commercials showing how Sin City reawakens a couple's romance. The punchline: "What happens in Crawford stays in Crawford."... New Yorker writer Andy Borowitz said, "After the picture came out, President Bush reiterated his opposition to gay marriage - unless one of the partners has several billion barrels of petroleum."... And my favorite from the caption contest at The Hotline: "You had me at 'increased output.'" posted by Steve M. | 10:44 AM | Well, here's your political landscape: Senate majority leader (and possible future GOP presidential candidate) Bill Frist is rejecting a compromise with Democrats on votes for judicial nominees (he must have gotten an earful from religious conservatives for even talking to Harry Reid), and now, in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush (also a possible future GOP presidential candidate) has signed an NRA-endorsed bill that gives residents of his state carte blanche to shoot anyone they feel threatens their lives, in private or in public. Gee, aren't we always being told that it's the Democrats who are too much in thrall to their interest groups? I'd be worked up about this gun bill, but I actually don't think it's going to lead to more shootings. It's clear that most gun-owning Americans already feel they have the right to shoot anyone at any time when they feel threatened, regardless of the law -- think of Rodney Peairs in Baton Rouge: Yoshi Hattori was headed to a Halloween party in Central on Oct. 17, 1992, when he and a friend knocked on the wrong door. After Hattori didn't obey commands to "freeze," Rodney Peairs shot him in the chest. Lewis Unglesby, Peairs' attorney, has said his client was protecting his home and family from what he thought was a threat. A jury later acquitted Peairs of manslaughter, but the Hattoris won a civil lawsuit against him. For that matter, think of Bernhard Goetz, who turned a subway car into a shooting gallery when he felt threatened by four black youths, in the gun-control city and state of New York. (Incidentally, a generation after the Goetz shooting put him on the cover of Time magazine -- "Rising Fear of Violent Crime ... Public Anger at the Justice System," the cover read in part -- we learn that New York City, with its still-strict gun laws, is on track to have its lowest murder rate in forty years. Hey, John Lott, what was that again about "more guns, less crime"?) Meanwhile, Wayne LaPierre wants you to know that he thinks the entire country is now the NRA's bitch: Mr. LaPierre of the N.R.A. said his group would introduce the [Florida] bill in every state, and he predicted it would win broad national support. "We will start with red and move to blue," he said of the states. "In terms of passing it, it is downhill rather than uphill because of all the public support." posted by Steve M. | 7:16 AM | Tuesday, April 26, 2005 If you enjoyed yesterday's intimate get-together between the president and Crown Prince Abdullah, I think you'll like this. (Link via Attytood.) And surely somebody's going to set the video footage to music. ("I Want to Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles? Or at least "Hold My Hand" by the Rutles?) posted by Steve M. | 5:00 PM | In a sane world, this would be the end of any discussion of this woman's appointment to the federal bench: Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech.... Her comments to a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Darien, Conn., came on the same day as "Justice Sunday: Stop the Filibuster Against People of Faith," a program produced by evangelical leaders and simulcast on the Internet and in homes and churches around the country.... "There seems to have been no time since the Civil War that this country was so bitterly divided. It's not a shooting war, but it is a war," she said, according to a report published Monday in the Stamford Advocate. "These are perilous times for people of faith," she said, "not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud."... --L.A. Times (story also available here) War isn't spirited disagreement. War is war. You destroy your enemy in war. You don't work toward justice. And this nominee believes she and her allies are at war with a large percentage of the American public. How can she be fair on the federal bench? How is it possible, when she regards many of the people who would come before her as the Enemy? **** The original Stamford Advocate story is here, by the way. It doesn't have much more on Brown's remarks, but it does have this about the event at which she spoke: [Father William] Lori, bishop of the Diocese of Bridgeport, said by organizing the gathering he hopes those in the legal profession will rededicate themselves to their responsibilities.... He brought up the legality of abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, the death penalty and assisted suicide. "In so many instances, we are trying to solve our problems by death rather than life," Lori said. "I think we have to solve our problems by fostering and promoting life." I'm sure Judge Brown has all the right positions on all the issues Bishop Lori mentions -- except one. The San Francisco Chronicle notes that, as a California Supreme Court justice, she "routinely affirms death sentences," and adds Two years ago, she wrote that 'murderers do not deserve a fate better than that inflicted on their victims." That would seem to make her part of the "culture of death." But she's a Republican, and it's just the death penalty, so it's OK. posted by Steve M. | 2:45 PM | Bush Adds DeLay to Social Security Tour Good grief. They're putting this nasty, partisan pariah on the tour? They really are living in the bunker now. It's as if they've given up on everyone to their left -- meaning every voter in the center and right-center, not just liberals. It's as if they think they can rally the faithful and, brandishing God's mighty sword, just roll over the majority of the country. They're delusional. posted by Steve M. | 10:36 AM | COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVES IN MARYLAND From the Baltimore Sun (if the link doesn't work, try this): ...Conservative and Christian groups are mounting a widespread effort - using e-mails and Web sites with often-fiery rhetoric - against four bills they charge promote the gay agenda. "Pray that God's will be done and that all the churches rise up against these bills," says an e-mail distributed to members of the Christian Coalition of Maryland.... The legislation would add gays to the categories of people protected under the state's hate-crime laws, allow unmarried couples to make property transfers without paying state or local taxes and require schools to report bullying incidents.... [VoteMarriage.org and Take Back Maryland], along with other organizations, such as the Christian Coalition of Maryland, Defend Maryland Marriage and the Family Protection Lobby, also are supporting Del. Donald H. Dwyer Jr.'s petition efforts to repeal a bill to give unmarried couples medical decision-making rights, among other benefits.... Yeah, this is what Jesus would do. I think the opposition to the bullying bill is my personal favorite. It reminds me of this charming anecdote from the recent Rolling Stone article on a conference of "Dominionists" (right-wing Christians who think right-wing Christians need to take over the U.S. government): [Gary] Cass [executive director of Reclaiming America] also presents another small-town activist, Kevin McCoy, with a Salt and Light Award for leading a successful campaign to shut down an anti-bullying program in West Virginia schools. McCoy, a soft-spoken, prematurely gray postal worker, fought to end the program because it taught tolerance for gay people -- and thus, in his view, constituted a "thinly disguised effort to promote the homosexual agenda." "What America needs," Cass tells the faithful, "is more Kevin McCoys." Charming. The pro-bullyists in Maryland say pretty much the same thing, the Sun reports: Kerns and other opponents of the bill say they fear it would be used to discuss homosexuality in the classroom. On the VoteMarriage.org Web site, the gay-rights agenda is described as working to "program future youth to be led as lambs into the dangerous and denigrating homosexual lifestyle." Delegate Richard S. Madaleno Jr., who supports the bill, has a response for that: "I guess the whole idea is a 14-year-old should be beaten senseless in order to be a straight person," said Madaleno. Yup, I think that's about right. posted by Steve M. | 9:42 AM | Rush Limbaugh is Baghdad Bob! ...There is no question the Democrats are imploding. It is the mainstream media that makes it look like they're winning -- and it doesn't help that the Republicans have been recalcitrant so far to stand up for themselves, but regardless what the Republicans do, the Democrats are still imploding. ...Don't sit there and tell me that we are losing. I'm not saying that we're winning per se; the trend is obviously in the right direction because our opponents are in a meltdown.... He's talking about Tom DeLay and John Bolton and the Terri Schiavo case and the nuclear option. He says everything's trending in the direction for right-wingers and the only reason everyone doesn't realize that is relentlessly deception from the stinky old liberal media -- which, he also says, fewer and fewer people pay attention to anymore. Read the whole rather desperate-sounding rant here. (Let me add that I think he may be right when he predicts Tom DeLay's survival. And I do think the Dems could do a much better job of translating anger at Republican policies into anger at Republicans themselves -- and into support for Democrats.) posted by Steve M. | 7:43 AM | Monday, April 25, 2005 Was I offline for a while there? I think I'm back. posted by Steve M. | 7:07 PM | SEE THAT MY GRAVE IS KEPT WINGNUT-FREE Marla Ruzicka was killed by a car bomb while doing humanitarian work in Iraq. In death she was praised for her work and her courage. Don't think for a minute that that's going to prevent right-wingers from trashing her. Today, David Howowitz's Front Page Magazine runs "Meet the Real Marla Ruzicka" by Debbie Schlussel. (That title is toned down; on Schlussel's own Web site it's "Treasonatrix Barbie: Meet the Real Marla Ruzicka.") A sample: With her cascading blonde hair and youthful looks, Ruzicka didn’t look like your average greasy-haired, pot-smoking, hackey-sack-playing, crunchy radical. And the media swooned over her, the newly-anointed Vanity Fair pin-up in Birkenstocks. But looks are deceiving. Marla Ruzicka was no mere peace activist. She formed the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), the goal of which was anything but CIVIC during the War on Terror or ever. Ruzicka’s aim was to force the U.S. government to get an "accurate" count of "innocent civilian' deaths by U.S. troops and blackmail America into paying monetary settlements for each death. But many of those dead included assorted terrorists, jihadists, and other collaborators and uprisers against Americans. Ruzicka had the gall to insist that these Afghani and Iraqi dead, terrorists or not, get recognition and sympathy equal to victims of the 9/11 attacks. More outrageous, Ruzicka got taxpayer money to fund her aiding-and-abetting pursuits. Where was Marla Ruzicka on 9/11? Hint: Not asking al-Qaeda for money to count and compensate U.S. victims of terror. Ah, so that's her real crime: Not locating Osama bin Laden all by herself. The Guardian had a rather different take on Ruzicka's work: In a typical entry from her journal, published on AlterNet on November 6 2003, she reported: "On October 24, former teacher Mohammad Kadhum Mansoor, 59, and his wife, Hamdia Radhi Kadhum, 45, were travelling with their three daughters - Beraa, 21, Fatima, 8, and Ayat, 5 - when they were tragically run over by an American tank. "A grenade was thrown at the tank, causing it to lose control and veer on to the highway, over the family's small Volkswagen. Mohammad and Hamdia were killed instantly, orphaning the three girls in the back seat. The girls survived, but with broken and fractured bodies. We are not sure of Ayat's fate; her backbone is broken. "CIVIC staff member Faiz Al Salaam monitors the girls' condition each day. Nobody in the military or the US army has visited them, nor has anyone offered to help this very poor family." And Ruzicka thought this was a bad thing. The nerve! Schlussel overlooks a rather significant point: We don't want people like this to suffer. Iraqi and Afghan civilians are the good guys. People on the left say this -- and so does everyone in the administration (President Bush says these are the people we fought the wars for). The left may root for Afghan women to cast off their burqas, but so does Laura Bush; everyone can agree that it took courage in January for Iraqis to vote. Unlike Debbie Schlussel, the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress thinks these civilians matter. It gave CIVIC money for civilian victims. As The Washington Post reported in 2004, ... Ruzicka helped focus attention on the problem of collateral victims, and what resulted was a precedent-setting approach that moves beyond the cash payments the military favors. The $10 million is used to rebuild homes and schools, provide medical assistance and make loans. Filthy pinko. posted by Steve M. | 5:15 PM | REVEREND POTTYMOUTH Isebrand.com links to a story on the GOP and the Christian right in Ohio from which we learn about this unholy alliance: ...Pastor Rod Parsley hosted two national celebrities of the Christian right for a Central Ohio rally. Professional liberal baiter Ann Coulter -- who's on the cover of this week's Time magazine -- and perennial candidate Alan Keyes came to Parsley's World Harvest Church to help with a flashy launch of the pastor's new book, Silent No More. Excuse me? Coulter is now a "national celebrity of the Christian right"? I know she's always loved to denounce abortion (in the most graphic, shock-the-bourgeois language possible), but since when is she a woman of God? Morally, it's far from an exact fit. This is from the Web site of Parsley's Center for Moral Clarity: Teaching children that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit from a young age is key to personal responsibility. Waiting for sex until marriage is a commitment to purity – to being holy vessels God can work through. Children should be taught that they should be holy and consecrated – set apart for a divine purpose – at an early age. This is Coulter, as portrayed in Time: "When I first met her," says a fellow conservative, "she was walking around with a black miniskirt and a mink stole, making out with Bob Guccione Jr. in the stairwell." (Coulter dated publisher Guccione, son of the porn mogul, for six months. She says the stairwell story "could be" true, although "I make out in public less often now that I'm publicly recognizable."...) Here's a Parsley tip for troubled souls: Have an alcohol problem? www.overcomersoutreach.org Here's Coulter: As for living on chardonnay and cigarettes, Coulter says that's "definitely true." Parsley: Next, in the chapter entitled "Homosexuality: The Unhappy Gay Agenda," Parsley defines for us "the profile of the new 'political correctness' ... [and] of 'cultural diversity,' 'tolerance,' and 'inclusiveness.'" According to the pastor, those of us in favor of equality will stop at nothing in order to "abolish marriage altogether," instruct all children in homosexual behavior, force "older people' to accept homosexuality, and "expunge a number of passages from [the] Scriptures and rewrite others." The gay agenda is absurd regardless, Parsley reasons, because "gays [are] turning away from the homosexual life and culture in record numbers." Coulter: Coulter ... hardly ever misses the drag queens' Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. I'm joking about this, but until now there's been a bit of a wall of separation between the secular attack dogs of the right and the preachers, and I wonder if it's about to break down. It's interesting that Rev. Parsley doesn't seem to think any of Coulter's sewer attacks on ideological opponents are un-Christian -- he's not even pretending to worship the Jesus of "turn the other cheek" or forgiveness or love, is he? As for Coulter, I wonder if this could be a wickedly brilliant career move: If she throws in her lot with the preachers, she can attack her opponents by saying they "hate people of faith." If she does that -- and, somewhere along the line, starts writing about religion, and about her "spiritual journey" -- how long do you think it'll be before she's back in the newsweeklies, being profiled under the title "Taking Ann Coulter Seriously"? And Parsley's making it clear that she won't even have to stop accusing her enemies of treason or psychosis or disloyalty by dint of being of Middle Eastern descent -- God thinks that's OK. If folks like Coulter and, say, Limbaugh increasingly lend their star power to the Christian conservatives, that could make Bible-thumping seem suburban and mainstream. To me that's a scary thought. posted by Steve M. | 1:57 AM | Sunday, April 24, 2005 VALUES From The Boston Globe: The Archdiocese of Boston has ordered a priest to stop praying outside of Senate President Robert E. Travaglini's home, where he and several followers had been protesting the senator's position on embryonic stem cell research, church officials and the priest said yesterday. The Rev. Thomas DiLorenzo and several parishioners from his parish, Holy Rosary Parish in Winthrop, spent several days over recent weeks singing hymns in front of Travaglini's East Boston home, brandishing rosary beads, and carrying signs with slogans such as, "Stop Playing God," and "This is all about money." DiLorenzo said in an interview yesterday that he was told to stay away from Travaglini's duplex after he sent a letter to the senator that mentioned one of the senator's children as well as his position on embryonic stem cell research. DiLorenzo said that, while he did not consider the letter threatening, church officials told him the senator's wife took it seriously enough that she delivered it to the East Boston police station... [DiLorenzo] said his letter to Travaglini made the reasons for his opposition clear. "I said, 'I have no hate for you,'" DiLorenzo recalled yesterday. "'I pray for you and your family every day. Secondly, you are either ignorant of the issue of embryonic stem cell research, or you are evil.'"... This is what they think of us, folks. ***** UPDATE; Do you suppose Father DiLorenzo did this just to plug his radio show? posted by Steve M. | 11:23 PM | [Ratzinger/Benedict] has been a leading voice in the church for enforcing traditional doctrine on homosexuality, extramarital sex and artificial birth control, writing a letter to American bishops in 1988, for example, criticizing their acceptance of condoms to stop the spread of AIDS, saying the American view supported "the classical principle of tolerance of the lesser evil." -New York Times, 4/20/05 Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night he had 'obstructed justice' after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret. The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001. It asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.... It orders that 'preliminary investigations' into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger's office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the 'functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests'. 'Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,' Ratzinger's letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication.... --Observer today It's weird enough to try to grasp the Catholic Church's logic on the use of condoms (that it's a grave sin), but once you grasp it, it's appalling to hear the church's chief doctrine cop say that this "lesser evil" is intolerable even in the face of an appalling pandemic. And then you see the same doctrine cop saying that pedophilia charges against priests shouldn't go to the secular authorities and shouldn't be made public, and recommending punishment for anyone who violates this omerta. This is "tolerance of the lesser evil" -- better to let these priests get away with brutalizing children than to risk harming the church -- and Ratzinger says it's OK. Ratzinger demanded tolerance of what was, in the church's view, "the lesser evil" in the case of priestly pedophilia, while condemning "tolerance of the lesser evil" in the case of condoms. The appalling response to the child rape is comnpounded by the hypocrisy. posted by Steve M. | 9:10 PM | Saturday, April 23, 2005 This is nice: Wild horses rounded up on federal land in the West and sold to a private owner have been slaughtered for the first time since a new law went into effect, a government official said Thursday. "This is something we regret and are very disappointed this has happened," said Celia Boddington, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Washington. "We make every possible effort when the horses are sold to make sure the animals are placed in good homes for long-term care...." --Yahoo/L.A. Times "We make every possible effort" -- so how could this happen? Maybe there's a hint here: Nancy Perry, the Humane Society's vice president for government affairs ... said a man who identified himself as a minister in Oklahoma told the BLM he intended to use the horses in a program for troubled youth and bought them April 15. The man has not been identified. Actually, that appears not to be true. A news alert from the Society for Animal Protective Legislation gives a name to the buyer, and explains why someone would do this: A recent amendment to the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act has already resulted in the tragic end to the lives of six of America's wild horses in Illinois after they were purchased from the Bureau of Land Management for $50 each by Dustin Herbert a former "rodeo clown" from Oklahoma. ...Over 65,000 American horses were slaughtered last year in the United States to satisfy the demand for horsemeat in France, Italy, Belgium and Japan. So what happened here? An ex-rodeo clown said, "Yessir, I'm a man of God, and I'm going to put these fine animals to good use helping to raise up good Christian youth" -- and the government just took him at his word and let him sell the horses for meat? Seems like as good an explanation as any. posted by Steve M. | 4:42 PM | Friday, April 22, 2005 Via Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged, I learn that South Carolina is now on the verge of making cockfighting a felony ... but domestic violence, even after multiple offenses, is still a misdemeanor. I want to tell you a little bit about the self-righteous idiot at the center of all this, but first here's the story. (Skip down to the asterisks if you already know what's going on.) The State House took up two pieces of legislation this week aimed at protecting two different groups. Up for debate was cracking down on gamecock fighting and protecting victims of domestic violence. A bill protecting cocks passed through the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. John Graham Altman (R-Dist. 119-Charleston) was in favor of the gamecock bill, "I was all for that. Cockfighting reminds me of the Roman circus, coliseum." A bill advocates say would protect victims against batterers was tabled, killing it for the year. Rep. Altman is on the committee that looked at the domestic violence bill, "I think this bill is probably drafted out of an abundance of ignorance." ... Both cockfighting and domestic violence are currently misdemeanor crimes, punishable by 30 days in jail. If the bill passes, cockfighting will become a felony, punishable by five years in jail. Domestic violence crimes will remain a misdemeanor. Now, for Altman, it wasn't enough to stop this bill. He had to insult one its supporters: Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D-Dist. 66-Orangeburg) says of the two bills, "What we have said by the actions of the Judiciary Committee is we aren't going to create a felony if you beat your wife, partner. But now, if you've got some cockfighting going on, whoa! Wait a minute." Rep. Altman responds to the comparison, "People who compare the two are not very smart and if you don't understand the difference, Ms. Gormley, between trying to ban the savage practice of watching chickens trying to kill each other and protecting people rights in CDV statutes, I'll never be able to explain it to you in a 100 years ma'am." as well as a TV reporter who dared to question him: News 10 reporter Kara Gormley asked Altman, "That's fine if you feel you will never be able to explain it to me, but my question to you is: does that show that we are valuing a gamecock's life over a woman's life?" Altman again, "You're really not very bright and I realize you are not accustomed to this, but I'm accustomed to reporters having a better sense of depth of things and you're asking this question to me would indicate you can't understand the answer. To ask the question is to demonstrate an enormous amount of ignorance. I'm not trying to be rude or hostile, I'm telling you." Gormley, "It's rude when you tell someone they are not very bright." Altman, "You're not very bright and you'll just have to live with that."... And sources have confirmed that he's the guy who made this truly vile comment at a Judiciary Committee Meeting: The bill was titled "Protect Our Women in Every Relationship" or the POWER act.... The discussion on the tape is as follows: "Can you tell me why the subcommittee in its great wisdom entitles this 'Protect Our Women in Any Relationship act'?" "You would have to ask Ms. Cobb Hunter, Mr. Leach. They're the ones who drafted the bill and they're the ones who named it that. It was not the subcommittee." "But the subcommittee thought that was a good enough idea to keep it as 'Protect Women' and not 'Protect Both Women and Men'." "We didn't retitle the bill if that's your question." "Any reason?" "None." "Call it 'POPER,' Protect Our People." (Sources confirm Rep. Altman's comment.) "Pop Her Again." Lovely. *************************** "Pop Her Again" isn't John Graham Altman III's first controversial remark. Here are a few others: In January 1997, state lawmakers battled over what to do with the Confederate flag. At a meeting of the House Judiciary committee, Altman took aim at flag opponents, telling them,"Quit looking at the symbols. Get out and get a job. Quit shooting each other. Quit having illegitimate babies. Let's move on from here." It's just one of many times Altman's comments have enraged his critics. Later he wrote to state Education Superintendent Dr. Barbara Nielsen, who supported removing the flag from the State House dome. "The kindest help I can offer you on any level is to try to get you quickly qualified for the Federal Witness Protection program," Altman wrote. (Source.) In 1994, he angered some by proposing that the Charleston County school board designate a "White History Month." (Source.) On hearing that the Citadel Board had voted a resolution to remove the Confederate flag: "I never thought we'd find the Citadel Board of Visitors and the NAACP holding hands and whispering sweet nothings."... The SC Representative, Charleston-R, is working to defeat Hate Crimes legislation in the SC House. He accused its proponents of "spreading drivel," and said, "This bill will make white heterosexuals second-class citizens." (Source.) Altman believes the issue of civil unions is just a smokescreen, saying that gay people just want to get married "because they want to bugger each other. Can two heterosexual men get married? No, because you've got to follow up with conduct, which is having sex." (Source.) And here are a few highlights from Altman's career: * He had a charming response when a court rebuffed abortion opponents: After a federal judge ruled the state's "Choose Life" license plate was unconstitutional because there was no forum to provide the opposing political viewpoint, a Republican lawmaker devised his own compromise - a "Choose Death" tag. "My bill is simply a reaction to the abortionists," said State Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston. "They're pro-choice. Well, they've got a choice - whether to buy [the tag] or not." (Source.) * He tried to cut the budget of South Carolina Educational Television (ETV) when it dared to air a documentary on gay people in the South. Then again, he tried to get the entire board of ETV fired when he learned that it planned to air a film depicted some rural schools as rundown. * Earlier this month, he made a bizarre proposal that his county secede from South Carolina for tax purposes, as a protest against assessment increases. * Needless to say, he vehemently opposes gay marriage and supports "traditional marriage" -- even though he's been married three times. (Scroll down.) This is old-school down-home conservatism, but it's also the modern GOP. (Some links from Crack the Bell, which has more coverage and comments on Altman.) posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM | EEEK! EEEK! From John "Hindrocket" Hinderaker at Power Line ("Blog of the year!" --Time): HOW SICK CAN THE LEFT GET? I don't know, but we haven't hit bottom yet. A reader called me to point out this sickening display on Cafe Press. American political history is often not pretty. But I don't think we have ever experienced anything remotely approaching the current descent of liberals into hate. Not only hate, but weird hate. And it will continue until voters definitively reject the Democratic Party. UPDATE: Another reader points out this one. There is no depth to which the American left will not sink. I read something like that and I think, "Wow, this must really be something. This must be awful. It must be like the head-sawing videos from Iraq. It must be like machete mutilation in Sierra Leone. It might make me physically ill." So I click to see the "sickening display," knowing I may suffer trauma from which I won't soon recover. This is what Hindrocket finds unspeakable:  Arrrrrrrgh!!!! My eyes! My eyes! Steeling myself, I click on the one pointed out by "Another reader." Argh! There it is! The dog again!  (Yes, there are other products at that link, some of which use words stronger than "hump" in reference to Bush ... words like -- I hope you're strong enough to take this -- "Fucktard.") I should point out for the record that the folks at Power Line regularly gush over Ann Coulter. Here's Hinderaker's partner Scott Johnson ("The Big Trunk") gleefully linking a Coulter column rejected by USA Today that reads, in part: Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston, conservatives are deploying a series of covert signals to identify one another, much like gay men do.... My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie-chick pie wagons they call "women" at the Democratic National Convention. Yeah, no hate there. A tip for Hinderaker: You want "weird hate"? I have two words for you. Mia T. Folks, if you don't know what I'm talking about, I can't prepare you. Just click the link. posted by Steve M. | 11:02 AM | Thursday, April 21, 2005 Weird story from Newsday -- grab the tinfoil hat: Neil Bush, Ratzinger co-founders President's younger brother served with then-cardinal on board of relatively unknown ecumenical foundation Neil Bush, the president's controversial younger brother, six years ago joined the cardinal who this week became Pope Benedict XVI as a founding board member of a little known Swiss ecumenical foundation. The charter members of the board were all well-known international religious figures, except for Bush and his close friend and business partner, Jamal Daniel, whose family has extensive holdings in the United States and Switzerland, public records show. The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 to promote ecumenical understanding and publish original religious texts, said a foundation official. Besides then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, founding board members included Rene-Samuel Sirat, the former chief rabbi of France; Jordan's Prince Hassan, a Muslim dedicated to religious dialogue; the late Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, another prominent Muslim; Olivier Fatio, director of the Institute of the History of the Reformation; and foundation president Metropolitan Damaskinos, a Greek Orthodox leader.... Let's see ... his brother's about to run for President (and, God willing, get control of the world's oil supply), so Neil and his pal hook up with ... these guys? Who were doing what exactly? The foundation, based at the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Geneva, is listed by Dun & Bradstreet business credit reports as a management trust for purposes other than education, religion, charity or research. But Vachicouras said the designation must be a mistake of translation to English because the foundation is a private nonprofit established under Swiss law. He said the foundation is being "relaunched" on its mission to publish the original text of the Bible's Old Testament in Hebrew, its New Testament in Greek and the Quran in Arabic. Oh. Of course. Doesn't it seem as if this should be a front for something? But you can't quite figure out how? In recent years, Jamal Daniel has shown up on the advisory board of New Bridge Strategies, which Joe Allbaugh (campaign manager for Bush-Cheney 2000) set up to make money from the rebuilding of Iraq. We know Daniel has an eye for the main chance. But what's with Ratzinger and these other guys? Well, here's Sadruddin Aga Khan's obituary. Sounds like a well-meaning guy -- could have lived a life of dissipation, but worked instead with the UN (and was considered for the post of secretary-general), as well as on environmental issues. Though this is interesting: In the wake of the first Gulf War he negotiated with Saddam Hussein to try to ensure the presence of a UN guard force and the implementation of humanitarian initiatives in Iraq to assist the Kurds and Shia Muslims. He also encouraged Saddam to accept the conditions of the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme. Later, concerned for the welfare of the Iraqi people, he advised that the sanctions should be suspended. Hmmm. Prince Hassan seems like a thoughtful gentleman (find out more at his rather elaborate Web site). For what it's worth, a guy at jesus-is-the-way.com thinks Hassan's nephew, Prince Abdullah of Jordan, might be the Antichrist. Hey, I'm trying here. My guess? There's no big conspiracy. There's -- maybe -- a small one: Neil figured his bro' would be President and so he and his pal Jamal tried to find some way to rub elbows with guys who might be, at most, one or two removes from lots and lots of oil -- but they wanted to find a way to do this that was, y'know, high-minded. Ratzinger? I think he was genuinely interested in whatever this organization was doing. But it would be amusing to learn that the truth was more sinister. (Link via Attytood.) posted by Steve M. | 6:37 PM | The big story in Blogistan right now is that Rick Santorum is backing away from his advocacy of the "nuclear option" and is urging his fellow GOP senators to consider some stall tactics -- all because of the results of an internal Republican poll: Details of the polling numbers remain under wraps, but Santorum and other Senate sources concede that, while a majority of Americans oppose the filibuster, the figures show that most also accept the Democratic message that Republicans are trying to destroy the tradition of debate in the Senate. ...Confirming public disquiet over the "nuclear" or "constitutional" option, Santorum said, "Our polling shows that." Santorum knows a lot about polling and "disquiet" -- he's up for reelection next year, and a Quinnipiac poll shows him trailing Democrat Bob Casey Jr. by 14 points. He's one of the most visible supporters of both the Bush Social Security scheme and the Terri Schiavo intervention, both of which are hugely unpopular. Oh, and Pennsylvania papers have been noting some interesting things about him. His trip to Florida, where he raised funds and did Schiavo photo ops? He got around the state on Wal-Mart's corporate jet -- not long after receiving some serious money from Wal-Mart. And what do you know -- he recently proposed a Wal-Mart-friendly amendment to the minimum wage law, he supports tort reform provisions that would transfer lawsuits like the huge class action suit Wal-Mart is now facing to federal courts, and he's included, in a bill on charities he sponsors, a provision on foundation gifts from corporations that would greatly benefit Sam Walton's heirs. Coincidence? I think not. Also in the Pa. papers is news that the Outback Steakhouse chain is another backer of Santorum's -- and a Santorum amendment to the minimum wage bill would prevent states from creating higher minimum wages for restaurant workers than the nationally mandated restaurant minimum. (What would Jesus do? Yeah, I think he'd mandate the lowest possible minimum wage for waitstaff, don't you?) A few months ago, this guy was mentally measuring the drapes in the White House. Now he could be unemployed in less than two years. Nice. (Last link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 4:26 PM | You know, David Brooks had me going there for a second. He almost had me thinking, "For once the little twerp is right": Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.... Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.... Hmmm, I thought. Maybe that's right -- maybe Roe is the reason our political life is so nasty and partisan. Then I remembered: The civil rights era. Vietnam. The bombing of Cambodia. Attacks on anti-war activists by "hard hats." Bumper stickers about "Hanoi Jane." The dirty tricks of the '72 Nixon campaign. The rhetoric of Spiro Agnew. The rhetoric of Attorney General John Mitchell. The plot to blow up the Brookings Institution, and all the other plots. The Equal Rights Amendment, and Phyllis Schlafly's dark warnings about unisex toilets. Busing in Boston. Proposition 13. The battle over the Panama Canal treaty. The 1980 Reagan campaign. The 1980 campaign that targeted enough Democratic senators to turn the Senate Republican. The mining of harbors in Nicaragua. The rape of nuns in El Salvador. James Watt. Ed Meese. Jeane Kirkpatrick. Ollie North. Ads with the chant "Liberal, liberal, liberal." "Read my lips -- no new taxes." The rumor that Kitty Dukakis once burned an American flag. Bush the Elder touring flag factories during the '88 campaign, while attacking the ACLU. The Willie Horton ad. The rise of Rush Limbaugh. The Morton Downey Jr. Show. The comedy of Andrew "Dice" Clay. The books of William Bennett. The Bell Curve. The Real Anita Hill. "My dog, Millie, knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos." The attack on "Hillarycare." The attack on gays in the military. Travelgate. Filegate. Whitewater. Fellow members of Congress taunting Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky on the floor of the House as she cast the deciding vote in favor of Clinton's budget. Lani Guinier as "quota queen." The targeting of Jim Wright. The Contract with America. The government shutdown. The Arkansas Project. The "Clinton Body Count." Linda Tripp. Lucianne Goldberg. The Mena airport rumors. The mulatto child rumors. Gary Aldrich. Ann Coulter. Barbara Olson. I'm not even up to Clinton's impeachment, much less the present century -- Rush Limbaugh comparing Tom Daschle to Satan, Max Cleland being linked to Osama bin Laden, John McCain being accused of emotional instability and disloyalty to his country and fathering a mulatto bastard who's actually an adopted child from Bangladesh. And on and on and on. No, David, Roe v. Wade isn't why our politics is coarsened and polarized. Our politics is coarsened and polarized because conservatives want vengeance -- for the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, consumerism, and every other liberal change of the twentieth century. And they're not too thrilled about more recent developments, either -- overturning Roe isn't going to make them mellow out about gay marriage or embryonic stem-cell research or self-administered emergency contraception or laws that permit the removal of feeding tubes for patients in permanent vegetative states. Maybe you just focus on abortion because it's the rare issue on which liberals and Democrats fight back. posted by Steve M. | 10:09 AM | I haven't had a chance to read Matt Taibbi's review of the new Thomas Friedman book, but it's the cover story in New York Press, and the cover art (by David "Get Your War On" Rees) is just hilarious. posted by Steve M. | 9:37 AM | Wednesday, April 20, 2005 Am I allowed to utter a heresy here? Will you bear with me if I do that? I've read the cover story on Ann Coulter in Time. I don't think it's that bad. What I mean is that I expected worse. I read a lot of the criticism before I read the article, and I expected puffery on the level of the 2002 George Gurley interview in which Coulter fantasized about Tim McVeigh blowing up the New York Times building. That's not what this is. It's a more flattering portrait than she deserves -- the author, John Cloud, tries to be evenhanded, something she'd never do -- but it doesn't make her look very good. And I'm not talking about the cover photo. I imagine a person reading the story who doesn't know the first thing about her. First impression: She's half drunk and chain-chewing Nicorette. Next: You learn she's compared all liberals to an alleged wife-murderer. Soon she's graphically describing a partial-birth abortion while people around her in a restaurant are trying to eat, after which she insists that her interviewer note for the record that she's getting sloshed. You think this makes her look good? This sounds like an episode of Behind the Music -- the part that comes shortly before the multiple stints in rehab. Then there are the bon mots. See, you and I, we're used to them. If you're a lefty political maven, you've heard all of Coulter's greatest hits -- you can probably recite a few from memory. But to the apolitical reader I'm imagining, this is brand new, and unless the person is far to the right, I think it must seem rather repulsive. Coulter wrote that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is "a little weenie who can't read because he has 'dyslexia.'"... Coulter's speech was part right-wing stand-up routine -- she called Senator Edward Kennedy "the human dirigible" -- and part bloodcurdling agitprop. "Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism," she concluded. "I say, let's give them some. They've had intellectual terror on the campus for years ... It's time for a new McCarthyism." COULTER: God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.' ... " ...Imagine the great slogans the airlines could use: "'Now Frisking All Arabs Twice!' ... "'You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin Not So Fast, Mohammed!'" There's even more in a sidebar. She insults a disabled Vietnam veteran. She insults Pamela Harriman, who's barely cold in her grave. She implies that her Muslim boyfriend is a potential terrorist. She calls a historian who regards her work as sloppy a "chickenshit." She wakes up at one in the afternoon. She sometimes wears a surgical mask when she flies. She's been engaged three times but has never married. She says that she lives on chardonnay and cigarettes, and that she makes out with men in public, but not that often (that's now -- she's in her forties). I think she comes off as Middle America's stereotype of a well-heeled, flaky coast-dweller who's hopelessly screwed up -- Anna Nicole Smith with a higher IQ and a faster metabolism. I think John and Jane Doe are reading this and thinking they're glad they don't watch cable news talk, glad they don't read her column and books, and certainly glad she doesn't live next door. posted by Steve M. | 6:44 PM | Clear Channel's at it again. Yesterday's New York Times had the story: The image planned for the anti-Wal-Mart billboard was unusual - a fire-breathing Godzilla standing next to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge - and the language was strong: "The Wal-Monster will destroy Staten Island businesses and devastate our quality of life." But New Yorkers may never see the billboard, which was supposed to go up on the island, because Clear Channel, the giant radio network that also runs an outdoor advertising company, has rejected it, saying its image and language are too inflammatory.... Paul J. Meyer, the chief executive of Clear Channel Outdoor, said that because billboards are a type of advertising that people cannot avoid, his company felt an obligation to restrict a message that might offend. Really? Gee, that's something that didn't seem to worry Clear Channel last year when it agreed to let the Christian Coalition post a billboard promoting the conversion of homosexuals to heterosexuality -- in New Paltz, New York, where the mayor had performed gay marriages. Clear Channel's rationale for rejecting the Wal-Mart billboard is just preposterous: "Are we perhaps oversensitive on this?" he asked. "Maybe. When it comes to images of violence in New York City after 9/11, we feel we have to be very careful." Excuse me? IT'S GODZILLA! IT'S A HUGE CARTOON REPTILE! WE CAN TAKE IT! (Sorry I'm not posting the ad -- it was in the print paper, but it's not in the online story, and I can't find it anywhere else, either.) posted by Steve M. | 8:00 AM | Tuesday, April 19, 2005 BUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL AND TROUBLE? Yikes: U.S. housing starts posted their steepest drop in more than 14 years in March, suggesting some cooling in the long-hot housing market.... Housing starts plunged 17.6 percent in March, their biggest drop since January 1991, to a 1.837 million unit rate from an upwardly revised 2.229 million unit pace in February, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday. Wall Street economists had looked for housing starts to slip a far smaller 4.8 percent in March.... David Seiders, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders, said the plunge in starts most likely represented just a pause after a couple strong months.... --Reuters Here in New York City, the housing market seems like the dot-com sector in the '90s. (A cartoon caption in last week's New Yorker pretty much sums it up: "We sold our two-bedroom in the Village at a great price and bought the Virgin Islands.") The boom can't last forever, and I don't know what the hell happens when the bubble bursts. posted by Steve M. | 11:33 PM | I learned from today's New York Times that the divorce rate in this country is actually dropping slightly. I also learned the reason why: Researchers say that the small drop in the overall divorce rate is caused by a steep decline in the rate among college graduates. As a result, a "divorce divide" has opened up between those with and without college degrees, said Dr. Steven P. Martin, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. "Families with highly educated mothers and families with less educated mothers are clearly moving in opposite directions," Dr. Martin wrote in a paper that has not yet been published but has been presented and widely discussed at scientific meetings. ... since 1980, ... [w]omen without undergraduate degrees have remained at about the same rate, their risk of divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage hovering at around 35 percent. But for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 from 27 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979.... Can this be? Is it possible? Are those who've been indoctrinated by the tenured radicals of our colleges and universities emerging from those four years of commie-pinko amoral sex-saturated brainwashing with traditional family values? I'm shocked. Shocked! posted by Steve M. | 2:52 PM | John Paul's Dick Cheney was just elected Pope. So the church will remain right-wing. Gee -- imagine my amazement. posted by Steve M. | 1:06 PM | PEOPLE OF FAITH I didn't realize until I read this that one of the speakers who'll be accusing filibuster supporters of being anti-Christian at the upcoming "Justice Sunday" rally will be Charles "Burn That Cross" Pickering. posted by Steve M. | 10:56 AM | I've been meaning to write something about the big article on "Constitution in Exile" judges that ran this past Sunday in The New York Times Magazine. You should certainly read it -- these people want to overturn the New Deal, and maybe not stop there, and the Bush administration might well succeed in putting a number of them on the federal courts, including the Supreme Court. We learn a few tidbits about some of the Bush nominees who are currently being held off by the Democrats -- a century ago the Supreme Court first dealt with minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, finding them unconstitutional, and we're told that Bush nominee Janice Rogers Brown thinks those rulings were just swell (a good point to remember next Sunday, when preachers and Bill Frist are telling us that Democrats hate Bush's appointees because they're so Christian). But what we never get from the article -- we never got this from the recent lengthy New Yorker profile of Antonin Scalia, either -- is a sense of the intellectual debate between right-wing legal radicals and everyone else. Professor Cass Sunstein is trotted out in each article, to criticize Scalia's "originalism" or the C-in-E movement, but the best he can do is enumerate the rulings we wouldn't have had if the modern radicals had been on the courts. A court full of Scalian "originalists" wouldn't have produced the Brown v. Board of Education decision! Constitution in Exile judges would probably find Social Security unconstitutional! That's important, but it's not good enough. The authors of these articles (Jeffrey Rosen in the Times, Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker) seem wary of the radicals, but keep reading and you can see they're a bit overwhelmed by the radicals' seeming intellectual rigor. As a result, they never provide a rebuttal of the radicals' theories -- only of what those theories could lead to. Aren't there competing theories of constitutional law that have equal intellectual heft? Isn't there someone who can rigorously defend the way modern courts interpret the Constitution based on our history? Couldn't Talbot and Rosen find a better rebuttal that Cass Sunstein saying, "If these guys were in charge, things would really suck"? What makes this even odder is that Rosen says Scalia and the C-in-E crowd don't see eye to eye -- though Rosen never really makes clear why. As a layman, I don't understand this -- aren't the C-in-E folks and Scalia saying the same thing about the pure words of the Constitution? If Talbott and Rosen can't tell us how liberal and moderate scholars really think about the Constitution, couldn't one of them at least tell us how Scalia's arguments challenge the arguments of the C-in-E crowd? But there's your somewhat-liberal media: resting on the laurels of the New Deal and the civil-rights era and unable to recognize that we have to prove we have better ideas than these right-wing bastards. Meanwhile, Scalia may be Chief Justice soon (though I'm still betting on Thomas), and Bush has three C-in-E sympathizers ready to join the federal bench if Frist exercises the nuclear option. ***** Adam Cohen knows what needs to be done. He has an "Editorial Observer" column in today's Times that challenges Scalia -- as a hypocrite and a fraud. The piece is titled "Psst ... Justice Scalia ... You Know, You're an Activist Judge, Too." Some excerpts: The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Justice Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth. Justice Scalia has been more than willing to ignore the Constitution's plain language.... The 11th Amendment says federal courts cannot hear lawsuits against a state brought by "Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State." But it's been interpreted to block suits by a state's own citizens - something it clearly does not say. How to get around the Constitution's express words? In a 1991 decision, Justice Scalia wrote that "despite the narrowness of its terms," the 11th Amendment has been understood by the court "to stand not so much for what it says, but for the presupposition of our constitutional structure which it confirms." If another judge used that rationale to find rights in the Constitution - in this case, rights for states - Justice Scalia's reaction would be withering.... Justice Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go. In his view, the 14th Amendment prohibits Michigan from using affirmative action in college admissions, but lets Texas make gay sex a crime. (The Supreme Court has held just the opposite.) He is dismissive when inmates invoke the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison conditions. But he is supportive when wealthy people try to expand the "takings clause" to block the government from regulating their property.... The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court's conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting - it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." That, of course, isn't a constitutional argument - it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.... That's good -- that's very good. Scalia wants you to believe that his logic is always unassailable, and I think he convinced Margaret Talbot. It's good to see that he didn't convince Adam Cohen. More, please. posted by Steve M. | 10:04 AM | Monday, April 18, 2005 You wrote that check because you wanted to save lives. Little did you know that writing it made you part of ... ...THE CULTURE OF DEATH. Cybercast News Service reports: Pro-Life Senators Slammed for Alliance With 'Race for the Cure' The pro-life record of Wyoming's two Republican U.S. senators is being questioned following their strong support for the Susan G. Komen Foundation's "Race for the Cure" in their home state. Senators Craig Thomas and Mike Enzi routinely vote on the side of pro-life causes, but their alliance with the Komen Foundation's Wyoming affiliate exists despite the fact that Komen hands part of the money it raises over to local chapters of the pro-abortion Planned Parenthood Federation of America.... A search of the Komen Foundation site shows that the Wyoming affiliate made 40 grants from 2000 to 2004, including funding for breast cancer screening and education to Planned Parenthood of Wyoming in 2000 and 2002, as well as Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains in 2003. Descriptions of those Planned Parenthood grants: 2000: This project will provide breast health services and self-examination education to women at the center and early detection education to women throughout the state. The center will provide free breast screenings, mammograms, and other follow-up services to 125 women. Education in self-exams will be provided to 500 women. A state-wide broadcast campaign will reach thousands of women with information about the importance of early detection and available services. 2002: This project will provide breast health services and breast self-examination education to women at the Casper Health Care Center and will provide early detection education to women throughout the state of Wyoming. Casper Health Care Center will provide free breast screenings, mammograms, and other follow-up services to 150 women. Education in self-examination will be provided to approximately 300 women. Additionally, a statewide media campaign will reach hundreds of women with information about the importance of early detection and available services. 2003: The Casper Health Care Center, operated by Planned Parenthood of Wyoming (PPW), is committed to high quality and accessible health care for all women. To decrease barriers to early detection of breast cancer, PPW will conduct a marketing campaign to reach underserved women throughout Wyoming. PPW aims to reach those women who live in areas where health professionals are lacking and breast cancer mortality rates are higher. PPW's Breast Cancer Screening and Education Project will provide breast self-examination and breast cancer education to women at the Casper Health Care Center. The Casper Health Care Center will provide free breast screenings, assistance with mammograms and other follow-up services to 150 women. Education in self-examination will be provided to more than 200 women. Appalling! Jesus wept! The CNS story continues: ...Jim Sedlak, executive director of STOPP International, told Cybercast News Service he thought Thomas and Ezri [sic] should convey a simple message to the Komen Foundation: "You ought to stop giving to Planned Parenthood, and we're not going to give you any more money or support your cause until you cut this link."... "Aborting a child before there's a complete pregnancy, one of at least 32 weeks, can cause a woman to develop breast cancer," Sedlak stated. While stating that officials like Enzi and Thomas understand Planned Parenthood's connection with abortion, Sedlak said "they don't really understand its connection with cancer. Either that, or they're denying it."... Yes, perhaps they are denying it -- and, if so, maybe it's because one study after another concludes that there's no connection between abortion and cancer. Another "expert" goes even further: Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, said she also hoped Thomas and Enzi would be guided in their dealings with the Komen Foundation by the relationship between abortion and cancer. "Medical experts recognize that increased childbearing, starting before 24 years of age, and increased breastfeeding offer women the best means of protecting themselves against breast cancer," Malec said. "Komen has an obligation to distance itself from the producers of carcinogens instead of forming business relationships with them," she stated. "Komen is obligated to finger Planned Parenthood for contributing to the nation's out-of-control breast cancer rates by depriving women of their best chance to prevent the disease by having children.... Follow that? It doesn't matter how many mammograms are done under Planned Parenthood's aegis. Planned Parenthood would be worthy of your money only if it stopped supporting abortion rights and urged women to have babies young. (In case you've ever tried to figure out what right-to-lifers would do all day if they ever succeeded in getting all abortions in this country banned, well, there's your answer: Some of them, at least, would be demanding that government and social service agencies pressure women to breed -- early and often.) posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM | CNN reports on a bill recently introduced in Congress that would require pharmacies to fill prescriptions. (The bill "would allow a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription only if the prescription can be passed to and filled by a co-worker at the same pharmacy.") Karen Brauer of Pharmacists for Life is not happy. She thinks "conscience" clauses are helping to save American from descending into moral rot: Yet some want additional legislation to protect pharmacists who believe certain birth control drugs are forms of abortion, Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life, told the Reuters news agency. The group provides legal advice and support to pharmacists. Brauer told Reuters she believes doctors will eventually begin ordering women to abort disabled children, or refuse to treat them after birth. "They'll force women to kill their children ... It will be like China. It's the next logical step," she told Reuters. Got that? If the victim of a sexual assault is actually able to fill a prescription for a morning-after pill so she won't have to give birth to her rapist's baby, that's inevitably going to lead to mass state-ordered child murder. "It's the next logical step." This is the new American political mainstream. posted by Steve M. | 10:36 AM | Sunday, April 17, 2005 JOHN TIERNEY IS MAKING SENSE! No, I don't agree with him about the wacky theory that legalization of abortion was the leading cause of the big drop in crime a generation later, but I do give the house libertarian at The New York Times credit for rejecting more widely accepted varieties of mysticism regarding the crime drop: The Miracle That Wasn't It is an inspirational urban lesson from the 1990's: take back the streets from squeegee men and drug dealers, and violent crime will plummet. But on Thursday evening, the tipping-point theory was looking pretty wobbly itself. The occasion was a debate in Manhattan before an audience thrilled to be present for a historic occasion: the first showdown between two social-science wonks with books that were ranked second and third on Amazon.com (outsold only by "Harry Potter"). It pitted Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point," against Steven D. Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago with the new second-place book, "Freakonomics." Professor Levitt considers the New York crime story to be an urban legend. Yes, he acknowledges, there are tipping points when people suddenly start acting differently, but why did crime drop in so many other cities that weren't using New York's policing techniques? His new book, written with Stephen J. Dubner, concludes that one big reason was simply the longer prison sentences that kept criminals off the streets of New York and other cities. The prison terms don't explain why crime fell sooner and more sharply in New York than elsewhere, but Professor Levitt accounts for that, too. One reason he cites is that the crack epidemic eased earlier in New York than in other cities. Another, more important, reason is that New York added lots of cops in the early 90's.... Then Tierney gets to Levitt's #1 reason -- abortion, which was legalized in New York a few years before Roe v. Wade. But never mind that. The reason this Tierney column matters is that Rudy Giuliani is going to try to work his way back into politics (possibly in a bid for the White House) on the basis of two legends: the post-9/11 "America's Mayor" legend and the legend that he singlehandedly cleaned up Dodge, and did so with an idea, namely arresting the repulsive. This is powerful stuff -- a man of Good versus an evil enemy. It's tremendously appealing to a lot of voters. I wouldn't have predicted that this legend would be rejected by the new conservative op-ed kid in Rudy's hometown, and I'm pleasantly shocked. Tierney does give Giuliani some credit for the drop in crime, however: I still think the police made some difference, and not merely because there were more of them on the streets. The new computerized crime-tracking strategies put new pressure on them. One veteran cop told me that traditionally only a quarter of the officers had done their jobs, and that the heroic achievement of Commissioner William Bratton and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had been to get that figure up to 50 percent. But what he's talking about here is prosaic. According to the legend, Giuliani wielded a moral Excalibur as squeegee men were driven from the streets and broken windows were fixed. The notion that that's why crime fell in New York City is a fairytale worthy of William Bennett's Book of Virtues. It's a crock, and I'm pleased that Tierney's a skeptic. posted by Steve M. | 7:43 PM | Haven't read the Time cover story on Ann Coulter yet, but Christ, look at those legs -- somebody get this woman to an eating-disorder clinic, fast. She's an able attack dog, I guess, but it beats the hell out of me why righties lust after her. (At Free Republic there's an informal rule that in any thread about Coulter someone must post a picture, which is followed by copious hubba-hubbas.) posted by Steve M. | 2:09 PM | When I wrote this in the fall of 2002, I thought perhaps I was being paranoid: I'll be very interested to see the reaction of abstinence advocates and other conservatives to the news that researchers have developed a vaccine that prevents transmission of a form of the human papilloma virus (HPV) known to lead to cervical cancer... ... at the very least there will pockets of outraged resistance to the idea that such vaccines should be given to young children (we will be told that the vaccines "encourage promiscuity").... Guess not: DEATHS from cervical cancer could jump fourfold to a million a year by 2050, mainly in developing countries. This could be prevented by soon-to-be-approved vaccines against the virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer - but there are signs that opposition to the vaccines might lead to many preventable deaths.... In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV. "Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.... I went on to say, More likely, given the near-inevitability of a second term for George Bush, resistance will be fierce and well organized -- and led from within the federal government. I wonder if that prediction will come true as well (perhaps the opposition to this will be led not by the Bush administration but by Republicans in Congress -- paging Dr. Frist). Here's a further prediction: Some doctors are going to refuse to provide this vaccine -- and "conscience clauses" are going to make it easy for them to do so. (Via Cold Fury and Atrios.) posted by Steve M. | 12:34 PM | Saturday, April 16, 2005 You may have seen this brief story in The New York Times -- "Report on Schiavo Finds No Abuse" -- but for the full story you should turn to reports in the Orlando Sentinel and St. Petersburg Times. The Sentinel's lead pulls no punches: In the four years after Michael Schiavo won the right to remove his wife's feeding tube, the state's social-welfare agency methodically investigated 89 complaints of abuse, but never found that he or anybody else harmed Terri Schiavo, records released late Friday show. Instead, the state Department of Children & Families repeatedly concluded that Michael Schiavo ensured his wife's physical and medical needs were met, provided proper therapy for her and had no control over her money. The agency also found no evidence that he beat or strangled her, as his detractors have repeatedly charged. The conclusions reached in the 45 pages of confidential abuse reports made public Friday raised what Michael Schiavo's attorney said is a key question: Why, during her last weeks of life, did DCF twice try to intervene in the seven-year dispute pitting Terri Schiavo's husband against her parents? "The answer is obvious," attorney Hamden Baskin III said. "From the get-go, this was nothing but a political intervention. There was, and continues to be, no reason for them to have been involved."... Some of the complainants were anonymous; the names of others were blacked out in yesterday's report. Apparently they were a varied lot. Here's my favorite complainant story, also from the Sentinel: In at least one case, the caller found the evidence of Terri Schiavo's alleged abuse on the Internet. In January 2004, a female caller reported that Terri Schiavo had an infection on her stomach, at the site of her feeding tube, that was not being treated. But when questioned, she said she had no first-hand knowledge of her complaint. "[She] stated that her information on current infections and lack of treatment was from [a] Yahoo chatline," the report said. And this was investigated. Your tax dollars at work, citizens of Florida. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes, though, to trace one group of complaints back to their source. This is from the St. Petersburg Times: One of the complainants told the DCF that Michael Schiavo was injecting his wife with something, possibly insulin, to hasten her death. Several complainants said Mr. Schiavo asked workers at the hospice several times, "Is the b--ch ever going to die" or words to that effect. Ah, yes -- those would be among the charges leveled by Carla Sauer Iyer, who was one of Schiavo's nurses for about a year in the mid-1990s. Her affidavit in the case is Exhibit A for the Schiavo crazies; here it is, from the Schindler family's Web site. (Insulin is in paragraph 11, "bitch" in paragraph 9.) You may recall that Iyer was one of the nurses who appeared on Hannity & Colmes on March 31 and was coached during a commercial break by Sean Hannity on the most effective way to make the right wing's case. Now the state of Florida has declared her a liar. ***** UPDATE: Pudentilla does the research I considered doing (but was too lazy to do) and reveals that filing a false claim of abuse is a felony in Florida. Shouldn't the authorities seek to determine whether Carla Iyer or others should be charged under this statute? Will anyone (Democrat or otherwise) have the guts to ask? posted by Steve M. | 12:08 PM | Chris Goodwin, who got up the noses of Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin a few days ago with his "Tom DeLay, please commit suicide" shirt (which he'd already withdrawn from circulation), now has a new shirt: "Dear Chris Goodwin, Please commit suicide. Sincerely, Everyone." Satisfied, Michie and Matt? He also has many fine shirts -- some anti-Bush and anti-DeLay, others not political at all -- here. Buy some if you're of a mind to. Meanwhile, Malkin still hasn't acknowledged the existence of these "suicide" shirts, aimed at Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Hollywood, and liberals in general. Well, Michelle? posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM | Friday, April 15, 2005 Worst week for Dow since March 2003 ...Dow Jones industrial average - For the week, the Dow was down 3.57 percent, or 373.83 points, its worst since March 2003. Standard & Poor's 500 - For the week, the S&P fell 3.27 percent, or 38.58 points, its worst since August 2004. Nasdaq Composite - For the week, the Nasdaq was down 4.56 percent, or 91.20 points, its worst since August 2004. --Reuters Not exactly the best time for Bush to insist on private Social Security accounts, is it? posted by Steve M. | 5:06 PM | DeLay. Who else? WOODBURY, Conn., April 12 - A freshly painted, six-foot-high steel tank is this rural town's hope for cleaning up a smelly gasoline additive that is fouling its water system. The additive, methyl tertiary butyl ether, has seeped into two of three wells that supply water for 2,000 residents. ...The question is who will pay for the cleanup. United Water, a subsidiary of Suez S.A., has sued the manufacturers of MTBE to recover its costs. And as hundreds of communities from coast to coast are finding the additive in their water systems, the issue of paying for the cleanup is becoming increasingly contentious. If oil and chemical companies have their way, a majority of lawsuits like United Water's will be thrown out by Congress as part of the energy bill backed by the Bush administration. The bill, which won easy approval from the House Energy and Commerce Committee late Wednesday, includes a waiver that would protect the chemical makers, which are some of the biggest oil giants in the United States, from all MTBE liability lawsuits filed since September 2003. The House majority leader, Tom DeLay, and Representative Joe L. Barton, who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee, are staunch supporters of the waiver. Both are Republicans from Texas, where more than a dozen MTBE manufacturers are based.... The Senate opposes the waiver -- in fact, it blocked the 2003 energy bill largely because of the waiver -- but you just know Tom DeLay is going to get the waiver or go down fighting for it.... posted by Steve M. | 2:55 PM | So do you understand what's going on? Whether by accident or by design, the right-wing crazies' call for multiple judicial impeachments and other radical acts of retaliation against the courts has made the abolition of the judicial filibuster seem like the moderate position. Bill Frist is now able to triangulate, using Tom DeLay as one of the extreme points. And using the Democrats' perfectly reasonable desire to maintain the long-established status quo as the other "extreme" point. I was afraid of this. I was afraid the Terri Schiavo uprising might really work out for the Republicans. For a while it seemed as if cooler heads would prevail, but now it looks as if I may have been right all along. If it works out that way, it would be Elian and impeachment all over again: Republicans stake out a position that's unpopular and outrageous, but they hang tough and they never admit to any embarrassment or shame. (Yes, in this case Tom DeLay admitted that his language was a bit harsh -- but he did so while also demanding a House show trial on the judiciary.) Republicans don't breast-beat, don't criticize one another for being aggressively polemical, don't hold conferences seeking answers to the question "Heavens to Betsy, how can we win back the center?" They just do what they do and dare you to criticize it. And eventually even the muted criticism stops. And, once again, they win. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | Chances are you already know about the little Nuremburg rally Senator Frist is going to address, as The New York Times reports: As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees. Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. ...Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, ... stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said.... Look, I think the fight against Bush's most extreme nominees has been remarkable. I admire the Democrats' success in blocking the worst of Bush's nominees and I support the fight to save the filibuster. But at a certain point, shouldn't the Democrats go public with the actual case against these nominees? I think this would be a good time to make a big public demonstration of what's wrong with these people -- do it at the exact time the broadcast is on the air. And since Frist, Perkins, and so on are arguing that the nominees are being "targeted ... for reasons of their faith or moral positions," maybe the Democrats should talk about some of those "moral positions." William Pryor's view of punishment is a good place to start. Yeah, I think this is just what Jesus would do: Defending the "hitching post" In Hope v. Pelzer, 536 U.S. 730 (2002), [William] Pryor vigorously defended Alabama’s practice of handcuffing prison inmates to hitching posts in the hot sun if they refused to work on chain gangs or otherwise disrupted them. ... The post was a horizontal bar to which inmates were handcuffed "in a standing position and remain[ed] standing the entire time they [were] placed on the post." 536 U.S. at 734. The plaintiff in this case, Larry Hope, charged that he had been handcuffed to a hitching post twice, one time for seven hours, during which he was shirtless "while the sun burned his skin ... During this 7-hour period, he was given water only once or twice and was given no bathroom breaks. At one point, a guard taunted Hope about his thirst. According to Hope’s affidavit: '[The guard] first gave water to some dogs, then brought the water cooler closer to me, removed its lid, and kicked the cooler over, spilling the water onto the ground.'" 536 U.S. at 734-35. Pryor’s brief contended that Mr. Hope had not been subjected to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment... Or how about this, from Janice Rogers Brown: ...in Aguilar v. Avis Rent A Car Systems, Inc. 980 P.2d 846 (Cal.1999), the trial court found that Avis created a hostile work environment in violation of the California Fair Housing and Employment Act by allowing one employee to subject Latino employees to racial slurs. The court issued an injunction to prevent the employee from using racial slurs and to prevent Avis from allowing him to do so. On appeal, Avis argued that the injunction was a violation of First Amendment rights. A majority of the California Supreme Court upheld the injunction. Astonishingly, Justice Brown disagreed. She argued that racially discriminatory speech in the workplace - even when it rises to the level of illegal race discrimination - is protected by the First Amendment. To reach that conclusion, Justice Brown had to ignore several decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and had to embrace a philosophy that, if it were to become the law of the land, would make it almost impossible for judges or legislators to effectively stop racial and sexual harassment involving speech in the workplace. In her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Justice Brown listed the Aguilar dissent as one of her ten most significant opinions. Start with those, and go on from there. Do it in a public press conference. And, maybe, bring along a hitching post. posted by Steve M. | 8:00 AM | Thursday, April 14, 2005 OLD-SCHOOL RELIGIOUS-CONSERVATIVE NUTS Sign spotted earlier this week at a Baptist church in Newport, Tennessee:  Here's the story, from WATE (Channel 6) in Knoxville: A sign in front of a Baptist church in Newport is drawing criticism from other churchgoers because of its reference to the pope and hell. Posted on the sign in front of Hilltop Baptist Church is the message, "No truth. No hope following a hell-bound pope." The other side of the sign reads, "False hope in a fake pope." An assistant pastor at the church, who declined to go on camera, told 6 News the sign's main message is that people shouldn't put their hope in the pope alone. He insisted the church isn't trying to say the pope is in hell, saying that people are misunderstanding the sign. "That's what Catholics would say, too. We don't put our hope in the pope alone," explained Father Vann Johnston, with the Knoxville Catholic Diocese. "The pope has a specific office to...a specific function within the Catholic church. But we only claim Jesus Christ as our lord and savior." ... Er ... OK -- that almost explains the wording of the sign. The church took the sign down, but offered no apologies -- just this instead:  From the follow-up story: ...After watching the Monday night report, a viewer e-mailed the newsroom saying, "It's disgusting to see such bigotry and ignorance." However, the newsroom received an equally passionate e-mail from a Hilltop Baptist member that says, "You people are misunderstanding the sign. The Bible clearly states not to have other gods and many, many people put the pope as their god and that's wrong." ... A little bit closer to explaining the sign -- or, on second thought, not really any closer at all. Look, I'm a lapsed Catholic and pretty damn critical of the church, but I don't think the Pope is going to hell merely because he was the Pope. I know the nouveau evangelicals really dug John Paul -- but I guess not everyone got the memo. posted by Steve M. | 4:24 PM | COURT-PACKING SCHEME Just ran across this from last Friday's Wall Street Journal -- an article by two Federalist Society apparatchiks arguing for Supreme Court term limits: ... The current Court is a gerontocracy--like the leadership cadre of the Chinese Communist Party. ...With justices now staying 10 years longer than they have historically, vacancies are opening up a lot less often. Between 1789 and 1970 there was a vacancy on the Court once every 1.91 years. In the 34 years since the two appointments in 1971, there has been a vacancy on average only once every 3.75 years. The typical one-term president now gets to appoint only one instead of two justices, and with the recent 11-year drought of vacancies a two-term presidency could in theory go by without being able to make even a single Supreme Court appointment. We think this is unacceptable.... For these reasons, over the past few years we have been advocating a constitutional amendment that would limit the justices to an 18-year term with one seat opening up every two years. Tomorrow, a conference of scholars (most of whom are committed to this idea) will meet at Duke Law School to discuss various proposals for such an amendment. Our amendment would not apply to the currently sitting justices or to the current president and would go into effect when a new president takes office in 2009.... Yeah, nice idea: Let's hobble subsequent presidents this way, but allow Bush's appointees (who'll probably all be in early middle age at the time of confirmation) to stay on the court for life, along with Clarence Thomas (56 as I write this). Thomas could literally outlast some of his successors, who might have to resign in the late 2020s (when he'll be around 80), and anyone appointed by Bush almost certainly will outlast appointees of the next president. Sound fair to you? Why do I suspect this op-ed wouldn't have run and the Duke conference wouldn't be taking place if the November election had gone a bit differently? Incidentally, here are the terms of service, in years, of some of the best-known Justices of the Supreme Court (source: World Almanac): John Marshall 34; Roger Taney 28; John M. Harlan 34; Oliver Wendell Holmes 29; Louis Brandeis 22; Hugo Black 34; Felix Frankfurter 23; William O. Douglas 36; Thurgood Marshall 24. Did they all outstay their welcomes? posted by Steve M. | 2:15 PM | Well, this ad is a hoot. Shots of the Port of New York, NYC streets, Grand Central Station, and so on are intercut with scary quotes (from newspapers, Iranian mullahs, and, er, John Kerry) -- all leading up to a big ol' nuclear blast. Then comes a veiled face with mushroom clouds in its eyes. Message: Iranians! Booga-booga! The souce of the ad is World Net Daily's book-publishing division. It's for the new book by Jerome Corsi, the sewermouth ("Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's first act in office was to promote 'gays in the military.' RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together") who coauthored Unfit for Command, the Swift Boat liars' bestseller. He's now referring to himself as Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.; the new book is Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians. It's not selling (#5,884 at Amazon as I write this), but WND Books is spending real money (by book-publishing standards) to put the commercial on the air in twenty TV markets. Oh, and check out the extended version of the ad -- same menacing montage, but then you get Dr. Corsi making this assertion: The clerics ruling Iran today are terrorists. If they get a nuclear weapon, they plan to use it -- not just on Israel, but right here at home in the United States. Got that? This isn't some India-Pakistan balance-of-terror thing -- the Iranians plan to get the bomb and then say, "Yippee! We built it! Let's start World War III! Who cares if the only logical response will be a massive nuclear retaliation by the U.S. that turns our country into a parking lot -- let's do it!!!" Hmmm ... credulity-straining predictions that we'll be subject to nuclear terrorism from a country called "Ira_" and that preemptive war might be the only way to avert catastrophe ... let's see, when have I heard that before? It's interesting: In 2002 and 2003 the Bushies concocted an utterly specious case for war in Iraq. Then in 2004 they outsourced the character assassination of John Kerry during the campaign to Jerome Corsi and his band of merry men. Now it almost looks as if they're combining those two operations. Except this doesn't quite seem to be in sync with administration war plans involving Iran, which are clearly on the back burner. Still, the guy agitating from the "outside" does seem awfully familiar. Corsi also has an agenda of his own -- even though he's from New Jersey, he plans to run against John Kerry in 2008, when Kerry's Senate seat is up for grabs. This is clearly part of that long march -- and it becomes clear why Kerry shows up in the ad. But maybe we're also experiencing a long administration march to war with Iran, and this is part of it. (World Net Daily article on the ad here. Text of a Heritage Foundation speech by Dr. Corsi here. Thanks to DU for the tip and for "Booga-booga!") posted by Steve M. | 10:19 AM | Wednesday, April 13, 2005 OH, MATT? MICHELLE? You know those Tom DeLay "Please commit suicide" shirts you've been so upset about? The ones that are so much worse than anything a conservative would produce? Dear Robert Byrd, Please commit suicide. Dear Teddy Kennedy, Please commit suicide. Dear Hillary Clinton, Please commit suicide. Dear Hollywood, Please Commit suicide. Dear Liberals, Please commit suicide. Just thought you'd like to know. (Incidentally, Michelle Malkin says the DeLay shirt has been removed from circulation but still shows up if you search CafePress for "delay suicide." That was true yesterday, but not anymore. Typical -- the maker of this shirt has been hounded by the right-wing banshees ****** *UPDATE: Christopher Goodwin, designer of the Tom DeLay suicide shirt, says he took the shirt down from the site on his own initiative, as he explains here: APRIL 11, 2005 Earlier today, I came to my own conclusion that the Tom DeLay suicide shirt was in poor taste and could legitimately cause offense to people who have had to deal with suicide in their own families.... Drudge posted his item after that. Hard to imagine our right-wing friend having the decency to come to the same conclusion. (By the way, here's another series of items at that site -- items that declare the traditional Middle Eastern keffiyeh the 21st century swastika. Charming. posted by Steve M. | 6:27 PM | ATTENTION 2008 SOUTH CAROLINA PRIMARY VOTERS Why does future "party of values" presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani do lectures for a company that also sponsors adult video how-to classes featuring live lesbian action? What will we tell the children? (Steve Forbes teaches a class for this company, too. On money, not porn.) posted by Steve M. | 3:53 PM | The Republican Senate? Not supporting the troops. The Marine Corps Times reports: By two 54-46 votes, the Senate blocked efforts Tuesday to add money for veterans' health care to the 2005 supplemental appropriations bill.... The Republican Senate? Happy to support a lot of other people in the same bill. The New York Times reported yesterday: As the Senate began to debate President Bush's request for more than $80 billion in supplemental military spending on Monday, senators seized a chance to pack pet projects into an unstoppable bill, adding provisions dealing with oil drilling, forest services, a new baseball stadium for Washington and economic assistance to Palestinians. Please note the role of GOP senator Thad Cochran. On veterans' care, the Marine Corps Times tells us this: [The] amendment would have provided $1.975 billion to the VA, with $525 million earmarked for mental health programs, $610 million provided specifically for the treatment of veterans wounded in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and $840 million evenly divided between VA regions. The amendment was blocked by a parliamentary motion from Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., Senate Appropriations Committee chairman, who said the funding is not really an emergency need. The Senate voted in support of Cochran’s position... On other issues? Here's The New York Times: His own addition to the spending bill was a measure giving Mississippi control of the mineral rights and the ability to permit certain drilling below the Gulf Islands National Seashore in the Gulf of Mexico.... I'll add this, from the NY Times story: "It is just horrifying," said James Carifano, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group. "It's only a couple of million here and a couple of million there, but it takes a couple of million to buy body armor for our troops, and we didn't do it because we couldn't afford it." Nice to hear that. Fat lot of good it's going to do, though. (Marine Corps Times link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 7:56 AM | JESUS CHRIST ACTION FIGURES This is a joke. (Warning: loud audio.) This isn't. We really are living in a world where parody can't run fast enough to outrun reality. (More info on link #2 here; that link is courtesy of You Forgot Poland!) posted by Steve M. | 7:16 AM | Tuesday, April 12, 2005 Good point made by Ellen Goodman in The Boston Globe a couple of days ago, in a column about "conscience clauses" for pharmacists: How much further do we want to expand the reach of the individual conscience? Does the person at the checkout counter have a right to refuse to sell condoms? Does the bus driver have a right to refuse to let off customers in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic? We could play that game all night. Does a vegetarian have the right to get a job at McDonald's and refuse to sell anything other than salads? Should Hardee's not have the right to fire you if you refuse to sell some people the Monster Thickburger because they're too fat? OK, maybe it's inappropriate to compare secular matters of "conscience" to ones we normally put under the rubric of religion. All right, try this instead: What happens if, in a small town, you go to buy some big-ticket piece of consumer electronics and the dealer says "Sorry, no 42-inch plasma high-definition TV for you" because he attends your church and he knows you haven't tithed? How far could we go with this? If there's a fire and you're living with a partner out of wedlock, or you're gay, can the "values conservative" fire chief let your house burn down? As a "matter of conscience"? (Link via Feministing.) posted by Steve M. | 7:06 PM | Matt Drudge was upset yesterday about a T-shirt being sold online that reads, "Dear Tom DeLay, Please commit suicide. Sincerely, Everyone." Michelle Malkin is upset about that and Kill Bush merchandise, as well as a button that shows George W. Bush holding a gun to his own head. She harrumphs, And before the "everybody does it" apologists pooh-pooh this lunatic anti-Bush merchandise: There's tasteless political paraphernalia on both sides of the aisle, but I've already searched and there are currently no "Kill Kerry" products, blood-spattered or otherwise, being sold at Cafe Press. Er, no ... but over at CafePress's Right Wing Stuff shop, you can pick up a Split Liberals, Not Wood bumper sticker, a Save the Rainforest -- Burn a Liberal bumper sticker, Save the Seals -- Club a Liberal merchandise, Club Liberals, Not Sandwiches merchandise, I (club) Liberals merchandise (a pattern seems to be emerging here), Liberal Hunting License merchandise, and Bushy the Liberal Slayer merchandise (with a sharp-looking dagger). Oh, and at the Metrospy shop you can get a My Jesus Can Beat Up Your Allah T-shirt (larger image here). "Welcome to the sick world of the pro-assassination Left," Malkin writes. Well, welcome to its mirror image, Michelle. posted by Steve M. | 11:35 AM | I just saw this in yesterday's New York Daily News: Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer received a reported $500,000 advance for his memoir, "Taking Heat," which was launched last month by William Morrow with an eye-popping press run of 200,000. That's a lot of dead trees to spin a happy (and, by most accounts, news-free) yarn about the all-around fabulosity of President Bush. Alas, Fleischer's publisher has just placed a tiny little ad in Publishers Weekly Online announcing "a special price promotion for retailers and wholesalers" - often a buzz phrase in the publishing biz for throwing in the towel, admitting a big overestimation of demand and trying desperately to avoid an avalanche of returns by slashing the price. A William Morrow spokeswoman insisted: "It's a Mother's Day and Father's Day promotion." But according to Nielsen Bookscan, Fleischer's volume had sold less than a tenth of the copies in print as of March 3. Tee-hee. That's nice, by the way -- "a Mother's Day and Father's Day promotion." Yeah, nothing says "I love you, Mom!" like Ari Fleischer's memoir. (Via Publishers Lunch.) posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Monday, April 11, 2005 Something I didn't know about Phill Kline, the ayatollah wannabe who's the attorney general of Kansas (as reported by Stephanie Simon in the L.A. Times): In the fall of 2003, he issued an impassioned defense of a Kansas law that subjected sexually active teens to much steeper criminal penalties if they were gay. In a legal brief, Kline argued that the state should punish a boy who had sex with an underage boy more harshly than a boy who had sex with an underage girl because the heterosexual couple might some day marry, and "marriage creates families" -- a desirable outcome for the state. Treating "same-sex or bestial contact" the same as Romeo and Juliet pairings "will begin a toppling of dominoes which is likely to end with the Kansas marriage law on the scrapheap," he wrote. "Same-sex or bestial conduct." Yikes. You remember Phill Kline, of course: Kansas law permits abortions late in pregnancy only if the woman would otherwise face "a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function." To Kline, this means her physical health must be gravely threatened. That interpretation is at odds with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that restrictions on abortion must include exceptions for the woman's mental as well as physical health. Nonetheless, Kline is weighing criminal charges against doctors who may have terminated advanced pregnancies out of concern for the mother's psychological state. Seeking evidence, he is demanding access to dozens of patient medical records; the abortion clinics are appealing. That's typical Kline -- he doesn't much care for the plain text of legal decisions when they interfere with his theology: A federal judge in Georgia recently ordered the removal of stickers in biology textbooks telling students that "evolution is a theory, not a fact." Soon after, Kline told conservative members of the Kansas Board of Education that he would back them if they put similar stickers on textbooks — a move the board had not even considered when the attorney general brought it up. Kline is vague on how he would overcome the legal objections raised by the Georgia judge, but he insists he could. See, this is why, unlike other lefty bloggers, I'm not paying much attention to the struggles of Tom DeLay. It just doesn't matter -- there'll be another DeLay after DeLay's gone, and another DeLay after that; the GOP has an infinite supply of these people, all of them slinging the same theocracy and government-bashing. DeLay might go, just as Gingrich went, but you'll never notice the difference -- not until the public gets sick of the governing philosophy of the GOP. Maybe you'll argue that DeLay's merely a theocrat when it suits him, and that he's a menace mostly because he's a slick operator. Well, I'll grant you that -- but I think Kline is pretty slick, too. It sure looks to me as if he staged a bit of cornpone vaudeville for the big-city reporter from L.A., and she fell for it: Kline also relishes the day-to-day work of an attorney general. One afternoon in late February, aides kept rushing into his office for his signature on various documents: a settlement with an unethical cemetery operator; a letter to a dating service accused of preying on the disabled; a complaint against a telemarketer for violating the do-not-call list. Scanning the pages through smudged glasses, Kline gave each his sober attention -- even a letter from a woman complaining that her city council had forbidden her to keep hens in her yard. "Shucks! So she's going to lose her chickens?" Kline asked. The matter was a bit beyond his purview, he admitted, but all the same, he signed a letter to the woman's state legislator, asking him to intervene to save the poultry. Gosh, ma'am, I'm just a simple country lawyer. Y'all don't have any reason to be scared of me.... (Story also available here.) posted by Steve M. | 2:17 PM | BUSH BOOM! The L.A. Times reports on another accomplishment for the Bush White House: For the first time in 14 years, the American workforce has in effect gotten an across-the-board pay cut. The growth in wages in 2004 and the first two months of this year trailed inflation, compounding the squeeze from higher housing, energy and other costs.... This is the first time that salaries have increased more slowly than prices since the 1990-91 recession.... Hmmm -- and what was the name of the president during 1990 and '91? Let me think.... Of course, not everyone's suffering: The effective 0.2-percentage-point erosion in workers' living standards occurred while the economy expanded at a healthy 4%, better than the 3% historical average. Meanwhile, corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay increases down.... Nice for them. Ah, but it could all change soon, right? Historically, periods when wage growth is outpaced by inflation rarely last more than 18 months. That's partly because businesses don't want their employees' living standards to fall, as that injures morale, said Trewman Bewley, a Yale University economist who has studied wage activity during economic downturns. Many economists figure it's only a matter of time until workers can pry more money out of their employers to catch up to inflation again. If economic growth remains robust, as many forecasters predict, workers may gain greater leverage to negotiate wage hikes. "Chances are that those workers that have problems getting by because of higher fuel prices will probably tell their employers, 'I can't make it,' " said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service. Excuse me? A sane, rational human being, referring to the contemporary United States, uses the words "workers" and "leverage" in the same sentence? I just got back from vacation and I'm a bit discombobulated -- is it April Fool's Day? Oh -- here's the clarification: That hasn't played out for Brian Chartier. Imagine my amazement. The 29-year-old Glendale resident handles inventory for a Los Angeles manufacturing company. No one there, he said, has gotten a raise in two years. "They're able to do this and I haven't quit, because where am I going to go?" he said. "There are no jobs." But there are corporate profits, Bunky, and big tax cuts for the folks who get those profits, and that's all that really matters, right? Boom boom boom! (Story also available at Yahoo News.) posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM | Sunday, April 10, 2005 This really is a slap in the face: ...Officials with the group Surviors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said they were dismayed that Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, the former archbishop of Boston, has been chosen to preside at a mass for the pope on Monday, and that the group's leaders would distribute leaflets outside the event in protest. ...After Law was forced to quit in late 2002 over a series of pedophilia sex scandals involving priests in his diocese, he was tapped by the pope to head one of Rome's great basilicas, St Mary Major, where he will lead the memorial Mass on Monday.... --AFP Remember, Law isn't innocent. Thomas Farragher wrote this in The Boston Globe in 2002, just after Law resigned: ...the roots of the archbishop of Boston's demise lay in a simple admission he made in court papers in June 2001 and then reaffirmed with a damning repetition. He knew. He knew about allegations that John J. Geoghan, the now-convicted child molester, had been attacking little boys and returned him to parish work nevertheless. He knew that the Rev. James D. Foley had fathered two children with a woman who later died from a drug overdose after going to bed with him, and yet he kept Foley in active ministry until this month. Law knew that the Rev. Peter J. Frost was an admitted sex addict and child abuser and still held open the prospect of future ministry for him. With an undeniable certainty, the cardinal's own words, revealed in documents forced from locked chancery filing cabinets by court order, confirmed that knowledge.... Law subsequent position at St. Mary Major was cushy, with a six-figure salary. And now he gets further honors from the church. Disgraceful. posted by Steve M. | 10:07 PM | Yesterday David Brooks said that Republicans are becoming a tad radical these days: First, there's the Terri Schiavo case.... Being conservative, most Americans believe that decisions should be made at the local level, where people understand the texture of the case.... Then there is Social Security reform.... Americans understand that there is a big problem, but right now most oppose personal accounts invested in the markets... Then there is the Tom DeLay situation.... ...the American people ... don't want leaders whose instinct is always to go out wildly on the attack... Brooks thinks that maybe the GOP should rally around that nice man who's Speaker of the House but doesn't have any real power: The public face of the Republican Party these days should be, when he recovers from minor surgery, the House speaker, Denny Hastert. This is a moment for leaders who seem stolid and secure, a moment for tortoises, not hares. Yeah, sweet, even-tempered "Denny" Hastert. The guy who questioned whether George Soros gets money from drug cartels. The guy who implied that John McCain isn't really a Republican and accused him of not understanding sacrifices made by wounded soldiers. The guy who wants to abolish the IRS and impose a flat tax that might deny mortgage-interest deductions of other needed tax breaks to millions of middle-class Americans. Yeah, that's the guy Republicans should unite behind. Not some radical. posted by Steve M. | 1:34 PM | So we got back last night. We were in Puerto Rico, which was lovely and soothing -- but as we were on our way there I was half-expecting that we'd arrive and find the whole place virtually shut down, because the Pope was losing his grip on life and Puerto Rico is una isla catolica. But the Pope's death hardly seemed to be have an effect. Our first stop was in the karst country, and as were driving out and the local papers were reporting that El Papa was con los angeles, it seemed to be just another Sunday for those leaving church -- as well as for the many men heading for the cockfights (which were taking place at a big hall a few doors down from a church). The same day we drove to Rincon, and on the stretch of beach outside our hotel a stunt bicycle demonstration was going on as if nothing earth-shattering was happening elsewhere; a lot of gringo surfers go to Rincon, but the live music and the patter of the MC were in Spanish only, and the crowd was made up of locals. It was like that all week, everywhere we went -- maybe we missed them, but there seemed to be no big public gatherings; there seemed to be nothing unusual going on at the churches or Catholic schools or town plazas. I thought at least we'd see pictures of the Pope in shop windows, or under glass at the cash registers in bakeries -- but no. We were occasionally able to see a little English-language news on TV, and on the flights down and back we were reading The New York Times, and if I'd been judging just from those sources I might have concluded that the Pope's death was almost like 9/11, that it virtually brought life to a halt for the faithful. In Puerto Rico, though, nothing like that seemed to be happening. And really, why should it have been? He was in his eighties. He wasn't well. There'll be another Pope soon. While I was in Puerto Rico I was reading Far from the Madding Crowd. In nineteenth-century English novels, just about everyone attends church and believes in God (you know Hardy's Sergeant Troy is a blackguard because he never attends, and lies about it) -- but Christianity isn't worn on the sleeve. The farms in Far from the Madding Crowd aren't "Christ-centered businesses" -- the men don't gather in a prayer circle every morning and make a great show of reading Scripture before threshing. Was Hardy's Wessex wanting in spirituality? I don't think so, and I don't think Puerto Rico is either. But I wonder if it would seem that way to the people who savor America's ever more florid religiosity, and who cheered the Catholic Deadheads who camped out last week in Rome. posted by Steve M. | 10:53 AM | Friday, April 01, 2005 I wanted to do a bit more blogging today, but I'm going away for a week and I had to wrap a lot of things up. No, this isn't another "retirement" (though a week is longer than my retirement actually lasted). I'll be back and blogging on April 9 or 10. Besides the obvious doings in Rome, I guess I'm going to miss the publication of Jane Fonda's memoir, which hits stores Tuesday. I knew this was coming, and I've assumed it was going to draw a lot of crazies out of the woodwork, but the failing health of the Pope might put the kibosh on their desire to rehash Vietnam for the ten millionth time. Or maybe not -- the Swift Boat liars must be missing the spotlight, no? (By the way, the recently published book by Jerome Corsi, who co-wrote the Swifties' book, is #8,637 at Amazon as I write this. Fonda's book is #324, and it's not even out yet. The Corsi book is about Iran -- yeah, he's a scholar of international relations, didn't you know? -- and he's billed as "Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D." La-di-da!) I never got to blog about New York magazine's cover story on Bernard Kerik -- hell, I never even got to read it. Let me know how it is. I meant to write something about this creepy Boston Globe article about the very religious, very conservative Michael and MarCee Wilkerson and their kids, who live in Ohio. A lot of lefties think that if we ever have a religious war in this country, the Christian soldiers will mostly be Bud-drinkin' blue-collar NASCAR fans; as this article makes clear, they might just as well have grown up in neighborhoods where people drive BMWs and the moms look like Lands' End models (see the photo in the link). This conversation takes place chez Wilkerson: On the test, Brittany says, she answered that the gradual evolution of human beings from other species is a possibility, although she and her family believe that the human race began with God's creation of Adam and Eve. ''I almost wanted to say it's not true," Brittany says of Darwin's theory, later at the house. ''That's so much crap. Who makes it up?" ''It's a myth," answers her father, who did not question or rebuke Brittany for using a vulgar word. ''I think He could do it in seven days," MarCee says of the Genesis timetable for creation. Dad prides himself on never having drunk a beer in his life (apparently he forgot that Jesus turned the water into wine, and good wine at that); Mom says abortion is wrong even in cases of rape or incest. The parents don't want the kids dating outside the faith, and even inside the faith there are caveats: Concerning interracial dating, MarCee pauses before saying, ''I want to be open to that. My point is: Is he a good kid, a good person, and respects her? But number one, does he have Christ as the head of his life. That's the most important in her life." "I want to be open to that." Yikes. Sorry, folks -- it's 2005. That's not good enough. And on a lighter note, I never linked the brilliant Robert Friedman column from the St. Petersburg Times about his living will and "Bobby's Law," though many of you undoubtedly saw it linked elsewhere. Last weekend I linked a very earnest columnist's will and testament; Friedman's is the flip side: Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here's what mine says: * In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me. * I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.... The whole thing is genius, and the guy deserves a Pulitzer. See you in a week.... posted by Steve M. | 8:01 PM | MICHAEL SCHIAVO'S BROTHER: "CULTURE OF DEATH" THIS, YOU BASTARDS On CNN last night: [LARRY] KING: ...Before we check in with Paula Zahn in Bucks County, we have on the phone Brian Schiavo, the brother of Michael Schiavo. Are you there, Brian? BRIAN SCHIAVO, MICHAEL SCHIAVO'S BROTHER: Yes, I am, Larry. Thanks for taking my call. I appreciate it. KING: How's your brother? SCHIAVO: He is extremely tired and very sad, and very emotional. He's lost his wife. But I just wanted to call because I have two points I'd like to straighten out. I watch your show, and first of all, Frank -- what is his name, Frank... KING: Pavone. SCHIAVO: Pavone. Yes. He's a poor excuse of a priest, I'll tell you that. The man made a comment to the workers, or, basically, made a comment that said that the flowers in Terri's room were being treated better than she is. That is a slap in the face to the people that work in that hospice, and he ought to be ashamed of himself. Number two, I will tell you exactly what happened with Bobby Schindler today. I was there. Bobby Schindler was in visiting with Terri with Frank Pavone. They were asked to leave because it was time for Terri to be assessed. She had plenty -- she had several assessments. They were asked to leave. Bobby caused a commotion with the police officer. I talked to the police officer. He caused a commotion. The police officer said he's going to have to leave the building. About two minutes after that, we were approached by the administration of the hospice. They said, Michael, if you want to be with Terri, you need to come now. She basically has very -- quickly -- she's made a turn for the worse. We rushed down to her room, and literally, we had 60 seconds with her before she passed away. That is what happened. David Gibbs better get his act together, because I'm getting sick and tired of everything being twisted and turned, half- truths. You know, they should just tell the truth. KING: Hey, Brian, is there any healing possible here? SCHIAVO: I have no idea. Not from me, I'll tell you that. Maybe with Michael, but not from me. KING: Does Michael... SCHIAVO: I'll tell you, from the very beginning of this, Larry, these people have done nothing but twist and turn and spin this thing. They've made my brother out to be a demon. You know, vilified, he's a murderer. And you know what, we're tired of telling people -- you know, we're not going to prove anything to any body else, anymore. If they don't believe it, that's fine. If they can't believe that this man promised his wife, and committed to her that he would not let her live like that, in that state, then you know what, that's on them. They can go pound sand. KING: OK, Brian, hold it. David Gibbs, do you want to respond? Brian, hold on. SCHIAVO: Yes, I'd like to respond to David Gibbs. KING: All right. Go ahead. [DAVID] GIBBS [ATTORNEY FOR PARENTS OF TERRI SCHIAVO]: Now, Larry -- Larry, as we look at this situation, I don't think it's productive for the parties to continue to take shots back and forth. Bobby Schindler... SCHIAVO: Well, then, tell the right thing. GIBBS: ... (UNINTELLIGIBLE) statement to the... SCHIAVO: Tell the right thing then, Mr. Gibbs. (CROSSTALK) KING: One at a time. Brian, let him speak. GIBBS: ... read his statement. What he said is the same words that Jesus Christ said up on the cross. And the spirit of the Schindler family is, Father, we want to forgive them for they know not what they do. We are heartsick today that Terri has stepped into eternity, we believe unnecessarily. We've watched this lovely lady that was loved by the family, loved by the mother, loved by the father, loved by the brother and sister. She was starved and dehydrated to death. And certainly, the other side believes they've done the right thing. We very much believe that to starve to death an innocent, disabled woman, when you look in the room and you watch Terri literally withering away, Larry, it's heart breaking. KING: David, are you discounting what Brian said, what happened with Bobby today? Are you saying Brian is not telling the truth? GIBBS: I don't know what Brian has... (CROSSTALK) SCHIAVO: Mr. Gibbs, I was there. You were not. Tell the truth. GIBBS: Well, I've talked with the -- I've talked with the police officers. I know what the police officers have said. SCHIAVO: I don't care who you talked to. I was there. You were not. You have -- you're just -- you're just like the rest of them. You spin things; you twist things. You don't tell the truth. KING: David, Terri's gone. Is there any hope that you -- Brian says not on his part. Do you see any reconciliation here? GIBBS: Well, the hope and prayer of the Schindler family, Larry, would be, yes. Obviously, you can see demonstrated the spirit of the other side. It's upset. It's accusatory. It's hurtful. And the Schindler family has offered forgiveness. Bobby Schindler, speaking publicly for the family, has asked that if at any point their spirit was not demonstrating the love and the compassion required of them by their faith. He's asked the world at large; he's asked other side for forgiveness. And certainly, we think it's counterproductive on the day that Terri has stepped into eternity to sit there and snipe back and forth. It just seems like it's disrespectful to Terri. KING: Brian? SCHIAVO: Well, you know what? You know what? I would say the same thing for Frank Pavone. I would say the same thing for him. And if you don't think that my brother has been vilified since day one, when you weren't even around, from the other attorneys, then I'll tell you, you better study the record. Because I'm going to tell you, talk about people accusing people, he's been nothing but accused of doing -- being a murderer. And that's ridiculous. KING: We do not go calmly into this good night. (CROSSTALK) SCHIAVO: ... and a murderer. And that is not right. Amen. posted by Steve M. | 12:15 PM | It could have been worse: And Ashcroft's obsessions: these too were a puzzle.... [When he was governor,] Missouri state troopers were deployed to prevent Pete Busalacchi from ending the life of his comatose daughter, who had no hope for recovery. "It was a matter of one person in a high position inflicting his religious beliefs onto a family," Busalacchi said. "Is John Ashcroft's religion better than mine?" (Source, Vanity Fair, February 2004, via Teresa Nielsen Hayden.) More, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Busalacchi's daughter was pulled from a wrecked and burning car on her father's birthday, May 29, 1987. She was 17. In a desperate attempt to keep her alive, doctors removed a large part of her brain. Her father, a widower, authorized the insertion of a feeding tube. "I wanted her to get better. A year later, I might have had different thoughts," said Busalacchi. He still resents the intrusion of John Ashcroft, then governor of Missouri, who intervened to prevent the removal of his daughter's feeding tube. Busalacchi recalled that he had "20 or 30 doctors look at her" before he decided what to do. "I was with her, I clipped her fingernails, I talked to her," he said. "Once I turned on music real loud and danced around her bedside and believe me, if anything could have, that would have evoked laughter. I tried to tell funny stories. I got no reaction." Busalacchi said he is surrounded in his home by pictures of his daughter, and he remembers her every day. "I'm not as strongly angry as I was," he said. "But I'd love to talk to John Ashcroft some day. He just injected his own religious beliefs in my daughter's case." Remember: The goal of the religious conservatives is a judiciary made up entirely of Ashcrofts, fifty Ashcrofts as governors, Ashcroft clones controlling all fifty state legislatures and an Ashcroft clone as president. They'll never be satisfied with anything less. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | |
|
|
