March 2005 Archives

Wow. Is there any limit to how far the radical Republicans will go to enforce their agenda? Here's a Knight Ridder story, highlighted by Kevin Drum:

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn't to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents were en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted — but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, The Miami Herald has learned.

....For a brief period, local police, who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called a showdown.

...."It was kind of a showdown on the part of the locals and the state police," the official said. "It was not too long after that Jeb Bush was on TV saying that, evidently, he doesn't have as much authority as people think."

In an important test case of Arizona's Clean Elections public campaign finance law, a state commission has voted to remove State Representative David Burnell Smith (R) from office because he broke the law and spent well beyond the campaign limit.

Clean Elections is a vital reform. One that is beginning to spread across the nation. For the system to work, however, there has to be severe penalties for breaking the rules.

Smith broke the rules. So it is necessary that he pay the penalty.

Newsday columnist Johnette Howard writes about the Bush Administration's decision to try to dismantle Title IX, the landmark federal law that outlaws discrimination based on gender. Howard explains the outrage:

Bush administration officials have been under heavy criticism since the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a surprise legal clarification on its Web site Friday advising colleges that, for the first time, they can remain in compliance with Title IX based on an e-mail survey of their undergraduate students designed to gauge "interest and ability" in sports. If the responses do not show enough interest - and what exactly constitutes enough has yet to be determined - then an institution can go ahead and presume it is in compliance.

Imagine that. There'll be no more pesky need to compare an athletic department's spending outlays or scholarships offered for men versus women. The burden will be on the students to enforce the law, not the universities.

Schools also have been told they can count an unreturned survey as a lack of interest. Which means one of the most effective federal laws on the books, a measure that resulted in an eight-fold boom in girls' participation in sports, can be undercut if one too many 19-year-old co-eds merely forgets in a blur of classes and keg parties and homework assignments to open, download, answer and return an e-mail survey that, right now, numbers eight Web pages.

Is this any way to set public policy?

Worse, as Howard explains later, this regulation is contrary to the landmark 1993 federal appeals court decision in the case of Cohen vs. Brown University.

So, once again, we have an example of the present Administration deciding to ignore the courts. Does anyone in the Bush Administration remember that we operate in this Republic under a Constitution?

I guess the ends always justify these radical right-wing means.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay sure knows how to craft quite the conspiracy woe-is-me theory.

Frankly, Mr. Majority Leader, the only reason people like me care politically about you at all is because you are one of the most powerful men in the nation. Alas, you use your power in dastardly ways. I do not like that. Not even a little.

But hey. Your quote indicates that you are suffering more than a little distress over all the attention your misdeeds have brought you. So, I am willing to cut you a break.

If you resign, I promise not to care a bit about you. Okay?

[Hat tip: Julie Saltman, who also notes that liberals have many other things about which they care]

Altercation correspondent Stephen Anderson, who watched her sister die after he and her family decided to remove most life support equipment, offers this perspective on the political grandstanding surrounding the Terri Schiavo tragedy:

The hospital followed our wishes, and called the Doctor, who ordered treatment stopped.

But minutes later, in a virtual coma, she died. My brother, other sister, mother, and my wife were all there to kiss her and tell her we loved her as she began the next journey.

So I feel I have some perspective on the Terri Schiavo situation. And here's my opinion:

No politician who has ever voted for the '99 Texas Advance Directives Act has any right to be involved.

No politician who has violated the ethics of his previous profession has any right to be involved.

And no politician who has:

• mocked a condemned prisoner,
  
• voted for phony Tort Reform legislation which would stop payment of insurance settlements to people like Terri Schiavo,
  
• voted against DNA challenges in capital cases,
  
• refused to examine death warrants in Texas,
  
• talked about Terri Schiavo as being delivered to him for political gain,
  
• voted against States Rights in blatant disregard of the Constitution,
  

has any right to be involved.

If they do, then God damn them.

Eric Alterman explains how the media and political circuses surrounding the tragic Terri Schiavo situation are something we have seen before:

If I had the time go into this, it’d be a good column. This Terri Schiavo thing is a perfect paradigm for our politics. Republicans are fundamentally contravening their own alleged principles by trying to put the federal government in the face of an intimate family decision-making process—“In interviews, some conservatives either dismissed the argument that the vote was a federal intrusion on states' rights or argued that their opposition to euthanasia as part of their support of the right-to-life movement trumped any aversion they might have to a dominant federal government."-- and ignoring the structural problems (more here) they helped create vis-à-vis the nation’s health care coverage that are actually quite germane to the larger issues it raises. The Democrats, meanwhile, are taking a sensible position but are lack the confidence to defend it in public. And the media is covering the story as if it’s the Democrats who are risking the wrath of voters despite that fact that voters tell pollsters that 70 percent of the public supports their position.

The war against science continues:

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - Some U.S. movie theatres are pulling the plug on an Imax film about volcanoes, fearing it might offend people who don't believe in evolution.

Fenton Communications Parker Blackman argues in this excellent commentary that it is time to define the Republican leadership for the "reckless, irresponsible, extreme, and radical" politicians that they are.

The other piece of the puzzle, and the focus of this paper, is the question of how we frame the Republican leadership. We can’t afford to wait. The Republican leadership has been moving swiftly to frame and act on a sweeping, radical agenda that, in the next four years, could demonstrably change the course of history in our country and we cannot allow that to happen. One of the most important roles we as communicators can play is to provide a general, thematic framework to describe the Republican agenda that everyone on the progressive side of the fight – no matter what their specific issue may be – can embrace, repeat and drive home. So here are a couple of ideas for a broad framework describing the Republican agenda, as well as a specific recommendation about what to call our opposition.

That would be certain GOP leaders. But don't take my word for it: David Brooks provides a devasting critique of what he calls the "sleazo-cons".

I'll second what Digby has to say below:

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liebral blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schivos because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

Is California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger going to side with his special-interest corporate buddies again by endorsing an anti-union measure written by a radical anti-tax activist?

In the Bush Administration? I guess not. Thw Washington Post's Glenn Kessler profiles Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's message discipline.

In the story, however, Kessler finds an example that once again shows that we should not take the words of freedom as serious policy. As he opens the analysis:

Since becoming secretary of state two months ago, Condoleezza Rice has transformed the language and image of U.S. diplomacy, offering a relentless and consistent message that has turned the State Department into an adjunct of the White House communications machine.

"We are not going to turn a blind eye to the human desire for freedom anywhere in the world," Rice told students Saturday at Tokyo's Sophia University. Later, after flying to a military command center buried in a mountain south of Seoul, near the North Korean border, she hailed U.S. and South Korean troops as being on the "front lines of freedom."

Oe may evenbegin to take them seriously until reaching the following paragraph in Kessler's story:

With steely discipline, Rice refuses to address questions from reporters that might detract from the well-honed talking points prepared in advance. Any number of carefully phrased questions on a subject will yield almost exactly the same answer. Indeed, she often ignores inquiries that raise uncomfortable issues about the administration's democracy campaign -- such as whether she questioned Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, on when he would abide by his promise to give up his army post.

I guess the hope is that no one will take note of the hypocrisy. Or how, as today's previous post noted, we'll not only overlook the cause of freedom, but also nuclear proliferation for some countries.

Via Atrios, we learn that the Bush Administration continues to lie to foreign governments about intelligence information. The Washington Post's Dafna Linzer reports:

In an effort to increase pressure on North Korea, the Bush administration told its Asian allies in briefings earlier this year that Pyongyang had exported nuclear material to Libya. That was a significant new charge, the first allegation that North Korea was helping to create a new nuclear weapons state.

But that is not what U.S. intelligence reported, according to two officials with detailed knowledge of the transaction. North Korea, according to the intelligence, had supplied uranium hexafluoride -- which can be enriched to weapons-grade uranium -- to Pakistan. It was Pakistan, a key U.S. ally with its own nuclear arsenal, that sold the material to Libya. The U.S. government had no evidence, the officials said, that North Korea knew of the second transaction.

What's most pathetic is that irresponsible Bush Administration officials apparently believe that no one around the world will catch them in these lies.

Memo to the White House: foreign governments are going to care far more about these lies than little photo-ops with the president or Secretary of State Rice.

A busy week kept me away from the blogging life. But, this post by Oliver on The Liquid List does an excellent job of summing up the misplaced priorities exposed during this past week.

Underneath a screen capture of CNN's web site highlighting Jose Canseco and the baseball steroid hearings sideshow, Oliver writes:

ANWR. Social Security. Decreased life expectancy due to childhood obesity. Wolfowitz. Bolton. Italy leaving Coalition of the "Willing." Syrian intelligence agents leaving Beirut. Darfur still genocide. Americans still without healthcare. Wars. Wars. Wars. Poverty.

And this...is CNN?

One might even think that these baseball hearings were held to make sure they would bump the second anniversary of the Iraq War Misadventure off the agenda.

But that would be cynical.

Billmon points us towards this rather troubling picture. As the Guardian describes it:

Africa's tallest mountain, with its white peak, is one of the most instantly recognisable sights in the world. But as this aerial photograph shows, Kilimanjaro's trademark snowy cap, at 5,895 metres (1,934ft), is now all but gone - 15 years before scientists predicted it would melt through global warming, writes Paul Brown.

On second thought, worry is really quite appropriate.

Via Julie Saltman, I see that some bloggers have been recording the states in which they've lived and been in. Why not join the fun. Here's mine:

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Some friends of mine might argue that my moving around may help explain my move from the right to the left over the past decade. That and the wonderful thinking of the late Paul Tsongas have certainly been major factors.

The President of the United States apparently thinks making jokes about the safety of U.S. Treasury bonds is funny.

Me? Not so much. Given that a pretty significant portion of the world's economic system is based on the fact that the United States won't renege on its debts, such jokes seem more than a little irresponsible to this blogger.

And the kicker is: the president admits in his little joke that the massive federal deficits he is overseeing are a problem. Too bad he can't seem to figure out that his massively irresponsible tax cuts caused the problem.

(Hat tip: Atrios)

Update: Ducktape makes an excellent point with a comment following a related Think Progress entry:

I suppose those folks at the central banks in Japan, China, and other countries who are funding our ever-growing deficit may be interested to learn that the President thinks they’re “not so safe” now.

Steve Clemons writes that the White House is putting John Bolton's nomination as United Nations ambassador on the fast track in the hopes of catching opponents off guard.

That seems like a pretty good reason to fight back hard. As Clemons writes:

NOTE TO SENATOR REID -- Don't punt on this one. If you pull together the caucus quickly, demonstrate principled vision and strength on this outrageous Bush choice for the UN, there is a chance that some moderate Republicans may empathize. Let's talk.

For many of the reasons why Bolton is a horrible choice for the UN, see this summary put together by the Center for American Progress' Brooke Lierman.

Spencer Ackerman provides us with another example of the GOP reneging on a deal. One is forced to wonder why any Democrat would be eager to cut a deal with Congressional Republicans, a group that believes that it has no obligation to live up to their end of any bargain.

Max Speaks with the list of Democrats who should never bother running for president after their votes today for cloture on the horrible bankruptcy bill.

I don't care if any of these people turn around and vote no on final passage. Today was the big vote. Once the Republicans got cloture, they won. And these Democrats knew that.

Fourteen Democrats today sided with big business over the needs of the working class. Fourteen Democrats today voted for a bill that allows the affluent to shield more of their assets while sticking it to the working class.

Here's the Hall of Shame:

Biden (D-DE), Yea
Byrd (D-WV), Yea
Carper (D-DE), Yea
Conrad (D-ND), Yea
Johnson (D-SD), Yea
Kohl (D-WI), Yea
Landrieu (D-LA), Yea
Lieberman (D-CT), Yea
Lincoln (D-AR), Yea
Nelson (D-FL), Yea
Nelson (D-NE), Yea
Pryor (D-AR), Yea
Salazar (D-CO), Yea
Stabenow (D-MI), Yea

It would help if the Democrats would not help the Republicans win it.

Nathan Newman catches California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once again divorcing his rhetoric from political reality. Newman quotes from Newsday:

"When the special interests push me around, I'll push back," Schwarzenegger said to cheers and applause from more than 500 people at a $1,000-a-plate dinner.

The event, at a midtown hotel, raised more than $500,000.

Remember, the new Schwarzenegger definition of special interests are those individuals and groups that have yet to write him a check. Orwell would be impressed at the gall of it all.

Truthout's Will Pitt offers this history of the Bush Administration in one sentence.

Once again, Rush and the conservative message machine take their quote twisting beyond the rhelm of reality.

Eric Alterman provides the gory details of their latest outrage: taking an obviously sarcastic joking comment made by Nancy Soderberg on Comedy Central's The Daily Show and playing it as straight-up proof that liberals hate the U.S.

For a group that regularly goes too far, Rush and the crew have really outdone themselves. As Alterman explains:

Anyway, that’s the way it works; not an ounce of truth in it anywhere, but nobody involved could care less.

Just when you think Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) can't sink any lower, he always finds a way to surprise. Now, he is fighting for a law that would expand sweatshops across the United States.

Nathan Newman explains the horrible propsoal at his Labor Blog:

This is as low as it goes, as the GOP fights to expand sub-minimum wage sweatshops across the country. Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum is leading the charge for a GOP bill that would ostensibly raise the minimum wage by $1.10 per hour, but in reality would cut wages for millions of American workers and expand unregulated sweatshops across the country.

As this Economic Policy Institute analysis details, the bill is a trojan horse for assaulting workers rights.

Isn't the GOP's vision of the 21st Century grand?

This presents a wonderful opportunity. As Newman writes:

If progressives miss the opportunity to smash this vote over the head of these rightwing politicians, they are truly brain-dead. While voters are closely divided on a range of social issues, even many normally Republican voters support raising the minimum wage. It's the best wedge issue in the progressive arsenal, and we get to skewer the GOP for hypocrisy on states rights to boot.

This bill also is just the latest example of why defeating Santorum's reelection bid next year should be a national priority.

The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press' blog, Behind the Homefront, highlights an important story from the week, a Dana Priest article in Thursday's Washington Post. The blog writer summarizes:

The case of an Afghan detainee who froze to death in CIA custody - an incident that remained secret for two years - illustrates how little is known about how the agency treats detainees and investigates abuse allegations, The Washington Post reports in its lead story today. The death occurred at a secret CIA prison outside Kabul known as "the Salt Pit." According to anonymous sources, the "uncooperative" young man was stipped bare, chained to a concrete floor and left to die in his cell by Afghan guards under orders of a CIA case officer, who has since been promoted. The man, buried in an unmarked grave, was never identified, and his family was never notified of his death. "He just disappeared from the face of the earth," one U.S. official said.

Hello, Congress? It is your job to investigate. It is your job to provide oversight.

These are the types of stories that will create more terrorists. We really should give a damn about that.

Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler asks a wonderful question of our so-called liberal media: why do they continue to write stories about established facts as if they were just partisan talking points?

He explains yet another example of this error, appearing on the front page of the so-called liberal New York Times:

"KORNBLUT (3/5/05): [T]he personal accounts [that Bush has proposed] would offset a portion of the existing Social Security benefit and, its proponents argue, enhance it. Mr. Bush has proposed letting younger workers divert up to 4 percent of their taxable income into personal accounts—a move that detractors say would cost trillions in transition costs and ruin the underpinnings of the system."

Detractors say that the private accounts “would cost trillions in transition costs?” In fact, Dick Cheney said the same thing four weeks ago, on a major Sunday program. In short, it’s an established fact, disputed by no one—transition costs will run in the trillions. And yet Kornblut, writing for the paper of record, still thinks it’s a point of dispute. Her editors are clueless as well. (emphasis in original)

It is pathetic reporting like this that leads Somerby to point the finger of blame at reporters for why voters are so uninformed about the facts surrounding this important debate.

Rarely has an accusation been aimed at a more deserving target.

Via Atrios, we learn that the Federal Election Commission is discussing regulations that would effectively end political speech on the internet. CNETNews.com's Declan McCullagh reports:

Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

The Washington Post's Nell Henderson reports:

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan yesterday urged Congress to act soon to reduce future Social Security and Medicare benefits, warning that growing federal budget deficits threaten to cause economic "stagnation" in coming decades.

Remember when you basically endorsed President George W. Bush's irresponsible tax cut package? Remember how you have yet to reverse course? Paul Krugman remembers.

Given that, lectures from Greenspan about fiscal responsibility are laughable. He helped create the problem. He should stop using this fiscal crisis, as a political hack would, to justify the destruction of our Social Security system.

Wow. He really has no shame. Rush Limbaugh goes to Afghanistan and lies to our troops -- saying that:

Mentioned this in Kandahar; you could have heard a pin drop. They did not know this story. I repeated the story to them about this Reuters dispatch that we got that found problems with the news that battlefield fatalities were down and lower per capita than ever before in the history of American warfare. Battlefield fatalities are down. And, I said, “Folks, this news was presented as a problem. We couldn’t figure why in the world is the fact that battlefield fatalities are at an all-time low a problem. Why are some people upset? And, we finally figured out that they are actually hoping for more battlefield fatalities because that will help them gin up anti-war support from their mirroring number of supporters in this country.”

I said, “That is going on back home."

Check out this link, where Ben Winkler of The Al Franken Show explains how Rush is completely lying.

Do conservatives support lying to our troops? Is this one of their vaunted moral values?