Month: May 2007

Heckuva Job Cheney

by digby

The Bush administration and its neocon muses have long said that the most dangerous thing the US could do would be to give the terrorists a victory by “proving” that we don’t have the ballocks to stand and fight. They firmly believe that a failure to kick ass and take names, going all the way back to Reagan and the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, is what caused the Islamofascists to think they could attack us. They know this because bin Laden has trash talked this line on various tapes and missives over the years so it must be true. (He wouldn’t lie, would he?)

And when they hear him saying “bring it” like big dumb bulls they see red and immediately start snorting and stomping the ground and rush headlong into some half baked scheme designed to prove that we can’t be intimidated. But what if the Islamoboogeymen are actually waving their capes in front of the big, dumb United States in order to get them to do exactly that?

A major CIA effort launched last year to hunt down Osama bin Laden has produced no significant leads on his whereabouts, but has helped track an alarming increase in the movement of Al Qaeda operatives and money into Pakistan’s tribal territories, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation.

In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda’s command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network’s operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.

The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda’s leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network’s leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.

Al Qaeda’s efforts were aided, intelligence officials said, by Pakistan’s withdrawal in September of tens of thousands of troops from the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border where Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are believed to be hiding.

Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda’s core command was thought to be in a financial crunch. But U.S. officials said cash shipped from Iraq has eased those troubles.

“Iraq is a big moneymaker for them,” said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.

Basing your decisions upon your stated enemy’s threats and taunts and holding fast so they can’t yell “psych!” is not a foreign policy — it’s a WWF advertising campaign. It isn’t real and it doesn’t address any real problem. The US is the most powerful country on earth and the Islamoboogeymen are not going to take over our government and make us all wear burkas and pray to mecca. Really. Sophisticated thinkers would find solutions to the real problems of islamic fundamentalism and energy dependence and Israel and all the rest rather than launch invasions as PR exercises, but this is what we are dealing with. Marketing is the only thing the Mayberry Machiavellis know.

This isn’t some scripted TV “throw-down.” It’s a serious and complicated challenge and we desperately need to get some people in power who don’t depend on “Jack Baur” for their policy prescriptions. Every single day these jokers continue with their little playground game, they make things worse.

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Shaving The Odds

by digby

Via TPM, I see that a prominent Republican accidentally told the truth:

Baselice conducted a poll the first week in April for an anonymous client on another subject. He says he threw the voter ID question in on his own, because it was a hot topic at the time. He provided the results to Republicans, who are now using it to support their cause.

The poll found 95 percent of Republicans, 91 percent of independents and 87 percent of Democrats support using photo IDs.

Royal Masset, the former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, who trained Baselice, says it is easy to elicit that kind of response to a poll question.

Among Republicans it is an “article of religious faith that voter fraud is causing us to lose elections,” Masset said. He doesn’t agree with that, but does believe that requiring photo IDs could cause enough of a dropoff in legitimate Democratic voting to add 3 percent to the Republican vote.

After one of my rants about the 2000 “election” I remember an acquaintance telling me to get over it because Americans believe winning is everything and nobody cares how they do it. Judging from the raucous applause we heard at the Republican debate when the candidates tried to top each other with greater and greater declarations that they have no moral or ethical limits, I think that’s basically right. The cult of braindead Hollywood macho has become so warped that a good many people in this country believe playing by rules is for losers.

This is the dazzle-them-with-bullshit Enron philosophy taken to its logical end. The politicization of the justice department and trying to suppress the Democratic vote with onerous requirements was just smart politics. This Texas Republican quoted above committed the only possible error a modern Republican politician can commit. As we can see by the behavior of Bush, Cheney, Libby, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and every last administration war supporter, the only thing dumber than playing by the rules is admitting that you didn’t.

And anyway:

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States” (Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104 [2000]).

So there you go.

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The Best Health Care System In The World

by digby

Tale of last 90 minutes of woman’s life

In the emergency room at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, Edith Isabel Rodriguez was seen as a complainer.

“Thanks a lot, officers,” an emergency room nurse told Los Angeles County police who brought in Rodriguez early May 9 after finding her in front of the Willowbrook hospital yelling for help. “This is her third time here.”

The 43-year-old mother of three had been released from the emergency room hours earlier, her third visit in three days for abdominal pain. She’d been given prescription medication and a doctor’s appointment.

Turning to Rodriguez, the nurse said, “You have already been seen, and there is nothing we can do,” according to a report by the county office of public safety, which provides security at the hospital.

Parked in the emergency room lobby in a wheelchair after police left, she fell to the floor. She lay on the linoleum, writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.

Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone’s apparent indifference.

Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.

Alerted to the “disturbance” in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez’s record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.

[…]

The story of Rodriguez’s demise began at 12:34 a.m. when two county police officers received a radio call of a “female down” and yelling for help near the front entrance of King-Harbor, according to the police report.

When they approached Rodriguez to ask what was wrong, she responded in a “loud and belligerent voice that her stomach was hurting,” the report states. She said she had 10 gallstones and that one of them had burst.

A staff member summoned by the police arrived with a wheelchair and rolled her into the emergency room. Among her belongings, one officer found her latest discharge slip from the hospital, which instructed her to “return to ER if nausea, vomit, more pain or any worse.”

When the officers talked to the emergency room nurse, she “did not show any concern” for Rodriguez, the police report said. The report identifies the nurse as Linda Witland, but county officials confirmed that her name is Linda Ruttlen, who began working for the county in July 1992.

Ruttlen could not be reached for comment.

During that initial discussion with Ruttlen, Rodriguez slipped off her wheelchair onto the floor and curled into a fetal position, screaming in pain, the report said.

Ruttlen told her to “get off the floor and onto a chair,” the police report said. Two officers and a different nurse helped her back to the wheelchair and brought her close to the reception counter, where a staff member asked her to remain seated.

The officers left and Rodriguez again pitched forward onto the floor, apparently unable to get up, according to people who saw the videotape and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Because the tape does not have sound, it is not possible to determine whether Rodriguez was screaming or what she was saying, the viewers said. Because of the camera’s angle, in most scenes, she is but a grainy blob, sometimes obstructed, moving around on the floor.

When Rodriguez’s boyfriend, Jose Prado, returned to the hospital after an errand and saw her on the floor, he alerted nurses and then called 911.

According to Sheriff’s Capt. Ray Peavy, the dispatcher said, “Look, sir, it indicates you’re already in a hospital setting. We cannot send emergency equipment out there to take you to a hospital you’re already at.”

Prado then knocked on the door of the county police, near the emergency room, and said, “My girlfriend needs help and they don’t want to help her,” according to the police report. A sergeant told him to consult the medical staff, the report said. Minutes later, Prado came back to the sergeant and said, “They don’t want to help her.” Again, he was told to see the medical staff.

Within minutes, police began taking Rodriguez into custody. When they told Prado that there was a warrant for Rodriguez’s arrest, he asked if she would get medical care wherever she was taken. They assured him that she would. He then kissed her and left, the police report said.

She was wheeled to the patrol vehicle and the door was opened so that she could get into the back. When officers asked her to get up, she did not respond. An officer tried to revive her with an ammonia inhalant, then checked for a pulse and found none. She died in the emergency room after resuscitation efforts failed.

According to preliminary coroner’s findings, the cause was a perforated large bowel, which caused an infection. Experts say the condition can bring about death fairly suddenly.

You might think that it was just this one hospital or an isolated incident, but you’d be wrong:

A paraplegic man wearing a soiled hospital gown and a broken colostomy bag was found crawling in a gutter in skid row in Los Angeles on Thursday after allegedly being dumped in the street by a Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center van, police said.

The incident, witnessed by more than two dozen people, was described by police as a particularly outrageous case of “homeless dumping” that has plagued the downtown area.

“I can’t think of anything colder than that,” said LAPD Det. Russ Long, who called the case the most egregious of its kind that he has seen in his career. “There was no mission around, no services. It’s the worst area of skid row.”

You know the old saying, “as California goes, so goes the nation?” The health care system in Los Angeles is broken and it’s an exciting preview of what’s coming to your town next if something isn’t done. The population of uninsured is huge here and growing and the hospital system is so strapped that only the richest facilities offer halfway decent care. Get ready America.

If people can live with this, which many can I’m sure, then no problem. Just let paraplegics die in the gutter and women with perforated bowels writhe around in pain on the floor of emergency rooms because people are so hardened that they really don’t give a damn anymore. I guess we can all just cross our fingers and hope we get rich and stay very, very lucky so it doesn’t happen to us. After all, if worse comes to worse we could win the lottery. (Oh never mind, the Governor wants to “lease” the lottery to private interests so that he can cover his ass long enough to get out of office before the entire state budget blows up.)

The good news is that the one thing we can always rely upon is the warm compassionate conservatives who are very, very religious people and hold some things sacred above all others: the rich shalt never, ever have to pay their fair share of taxes and fetuses and blastocysts shall be protected above living human beings. This is what’s known as “the culture ‘o life.” I do believe it was Jesus who said, if you aren’t entrepreneurial enough to go online and comparison shop for the best emergency room you deserve to be dumped in a gutter to die. Or maybe it was Newt Gingrich. It’s so hard to tell the difference.

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I Heart Henry

by digby

Republicans have accused Waxman of partisan pettiness, to which he responded that during the Clinton administration Republicans issued more than 1,000 subpoenas. “They were the ones who politicized oversight,” he said in an interview. “When Clinton was president, there wasn’t an accusation too small for them to rush out and hold hearings. When Bush became president, there wasn’t a scandal too large for them to ignore.”

Waxman is my congressman and makes me proud every time I cast my vote for him. This is the proper way to respond. You don’t get defensive and try to explain yourself when the accusation is coming from people so over-filled with phony sanctimony that it must be difficult for them to even keep from floating straight off the ground. You throw it right back on the hypocritical bastards where it belongs.

As I have written many times, we didn’t create this fetid political swamp, we just live in it. And the only way to drain it is to hold these people accountable so they don’t do it again — and that means all of it, including the partisan witchhunts, impeachments and character assassination they engaged in with such glee.

No Kumbaaya, no “let bygones be bygones” and no “moving forward” until we’ve settled this. Zombie conservatism only looks dead. Let’s make sure we drive a stake through its heart this time.

Update: oh, and by the way, in case you think the flip-flopping charge would work against any of the Republicans, think again. The press have declared the issue dead since all the Republicans are flip-floppers, so it’s not a useful issue anymore. Indeed, it’s now called “evolving.”

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who is supporting Romney in the presidential race, said that he struggled when he arrived in Congress in 1999 with trying to reconcile lessons learned in the private sector with votes he was taking on the floor of the House and, as a result, some of his policy stances evolved over the years.

DeMint said Romney had been far more consistent than he had been portrayed by the media. On abortion, DeMint said that Romney’s “values have always been the same” and that when Romney “saw his political position was out of sync with his personal values, he changed it.”

They are completely beyond embarrassment or shame, aren’t they?

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A Good Thing

by digby

Gonzales, a friend and adviser to Bush since their days in Texas, calls their close relationship “a good thing.”

“Being able to go and having a very candid conversation and telling the president: ‘Mr. President, this cannot be done. You can’t do this,’ — I think you want that,” Gonzales told reporters this week. “And I think having a personal relationship makes that, quite frankly, much easier always to deliver bad news.”

“Do you recall a time when you (were) in there and said, ‘Mr. President, we can’t do this?'” Gonzales was asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the attorney general responded.

“Can you share it with us?” a reporter asked.

“No,” Gonzales said.

I think Gonzales was fibbing. Again. He didn’t get to where he is in the Bush outfit by giving Junior bad news. He doesn’t like bad news:

Bush’s bubble has grown more hermetic in the second term, they say, with fewer people willing or able to bring him bad news–or tell him when he’s wrong. Bush has never been adroit about this. A youngish aide who is a Bush favorite described the perils of correcting the boss. “The first time I told him he was wrong, he started yelling at me,” the aide recalled about a session during the first term. “Then I showed him where he was wrong, and he said, ‘All right. I understand. Good job.’ He patted me on the shoulder. I went and had dry heaves in the bathroom.”

As Steve Benen points out, it’s hard to know which is worse, that the AG is lying again or that Bush actually proposed things that were worse than what Gonzales approved.

Gonzales’ job as White House counsel was not to give the president legal advice and his job as Attorney General is not to tbe the top law enforcement officer and lawyer for the United States government. His job, in both positions, was to provide legal cover for whatever Bush and Cheney wanted to do.

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Making School Useful: A Response To Althouse

by tristero

Ann Althouse has proposed the elimination of fiction reading from public schools:

Give them history texts and teach reading from them. Science books too. Leave the storybooks for pleasure reading outside of school. They will be easier reading, and with well-developed reading skills, kids should feel pleasure curling up with a novel at home. But even if they don’t, why should any kind of a premium be placed on an interest in reading novels? It’s not tied to economic success in life and needn’t be inculcated any more than an interest in watching movies or listening to popular music.

In an update she tries to explain herself further:

I’m drawing on my own background as a law professor. In law school, we spend much of the time teaching students to read cases. So to me, the combination of learning reading skills and learning substantive material is very familiar. I’m working with adult students, obviously, but they are still learning how to read. If I were to try to adapt this to young readers, I would find elementary, well-written books that present scientific and historical information.

Now many of you, I’m sure, are thinking something like, “What the hay? She thinks the purpose of an education is to train everyone to grow up and do exactly what she did.” But that’s totally unfair. In fact, readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that I completely agree with Ann Althouse that reading fiction has no business as being part of a public school education.

Truth be told, I don’t think she goes far enough. I propose the elimination of all reading from public schools and indeed all subjects but one. Instead, everyone should be taught music and nothing but music. I’m serious. It’s the most useful thing you could ever learn. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to state that all human knowledge stems from a solid foundation in music. Pleasure? Forget it! Music epitomizes the value Althouse treasures above everything in education. Music is useful. It’s the most useful thing you could ever learn.

Music provides you with an intuitive grasp of mathematics. For what else is the theory of music but the study of ratio and proportion? Anyone who’s studied music theory understand this. In fact, I myself, when I was in my thirties – this is a true story, people – took two semesters of statistics and scored the highest marks in the class. I attribute it all to my intensive study of harmony and counterpoint at a tender age. If you’ve ever had to wrestle a vagrant 7th chord back to earth, regression analysis holds no terrors for you, I assure you. Therefore, if children seriously studied music theory, they would have all the background they’d ever need if they wanted to pursue a useful career later in life that required some kind of mathematical expertise.

The study of music is the only way to gain a comprehensive understanding of facts historical. Who today remembers Ludwig of Bavaria? I’ll make a bet that most European history texts of the kind Althouse wants us to read give us less than a sentence about him, if they mention him at all. The sheer ignorance on display is breathtaking! You might as well be reading something really worthless, like Heine, or worse, Goethe! But if you studied music, you’d know Ludwig was one of the most important rulers of the 19th Century, for he was a major patron of Wagner.

Ok, around now, I’ll bet Ann Althouse is sneering, “You’re just making fun of me! You know the world doesn’t revolve around music the way it does around something like law. Take me for instance. What can music teach me about something useful to MY life, as a law professor?”

Oh, ho, ho, ho! Dear, dear Ann, now it is you who must be joking. We musicians have a saying, “If you want to get into the creative end of music, get a job in the legal department of a record company.” To understand what American law really is, music will teach you everything there is to know, and inspire you to even greater achievements of subtle legal manipulation and skullduggery. And I’m not even bothering to mention that great 20th Century masterpiece, “The Makropolous Case” by Leos Janacek, which takes place primarily in a law office!

As for science, let me be blunt, although I may offend some sensitive scientists amongst my readership. Without music, there would be no science. If all he was remembered for was that goddamm theorem, the world would think Pythagoras was a piker. But musicians know that Pythagoras’ research on the division of the monochord’s octave is one of the most important projects in the history of science. As a result of this epoch-making research, Boethius, in the Middle Ages, proposed the notion of Music of the Spheres, that all relations amongst heavenly bodies can be described as a kind of music, as ratios. That’s right, Mr. or Ms. Smartypants Einstein Wannabe. Without music coming first, there’d be no physics as we know it, no Newton. As for quantum mechanics, don’t even go there. Erik Satie beat Bohr by twenty years. And he was funnier.

And let’s talk socialization, another very, very useful task for schools to teach. My goodness, what could be more helpful than music? After all, you have to learn how to play together – the comaraderie in an ensemble or band mirrors real life at its finest. And, from a libertarian’s standpoint, the emphasis on musical merit and the competition would quickly weed out the incompetents who could be sent to special education where they could tackle simpler, more entertaining topics, like pre-calculus, torts, and shop.

So, Ms. Althouse, I applaud your intention, which is to streamline an American child’s education so that he or she will study only those useful subjects and topics that make him exactly like you, an exemplar of American-ness, or American-osity, or – well, you know what I mean. But seriously, what you are suggesting isn’t useful enough. You’re wasting time insisting that an 8th grader read Gibbon and Blackstone, even if that is an improvement over Salinger and Flaubert. No. You want the schools to be useful and only useful, there is one subject and only one subject to teach. Music.

Hey, it worked for me.

ht, Chad Orzel.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Gathering Sheep And Whacking The Beard

By Dennis Hartley

If spending an evening with the CIA is your idea of good times, have I got a double bill for you. (Break out the hoods and the water buckets; we’re in for a bumpy night!)

First up, Robert De Niro takes the director’s chair in his 2006 CIA epic, The Good Shepherd, recently released on DVD. Matt Damon stars as Edward Wilson, whose career as an agency spook begins with his enlistment into the OSS during WW 2 and continues through that organization’s metamorphosis into the CIA.

The film opens in 1961, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion. When we are first introduced to Wilson, it is quickly established that he is an officious and inscrutable, yet extremely loyal and dedicated Company man. As the story begins to jump back and forth in time (a la “Godfather II”) we begin to get glimpses of what lies beneath Wilson’s seemingly impenetrable veneer.

We witness a (relatively) looser and more outgoing Wilson during his college days at Yale in 1939, as he is inducted into the infamous Skull and Bones society. As part of the initiation ritual, he is directed to regale his fellow Bonesmen with the deepest, darkest secret from his past. The club members get more than they bargain for as Wilson relates a harrowing childhood memory of bearing witness to his father’s suicide. Moments before taking his own life, his father hands down a credo about “trust”, which becomes the key to unlocking Wilson’s motivations and inner workings for the remainder of the film.

Therein lies the problem with “The Good Shepherd”. There is an awful lot of internalizing going on (for 2 hours and 47 minutes). De Niro’s plus as a director (not surprisingly) is his willingness to give his actors plenty of room to breathe and inhabit their characters. His minus as a director is his willingness to give his actors plenty of room to breathe and inhabit their characters, if you catch my drift. There are some pacing issues with the film. Not that I was expecting car chases and stuff blowing up real good. After all, the reality of espionage does not necessarily lend itself to flash cuts and pop music montage. It’s generally a somewhat somber, mundane and unpleasant business.

Eric Roth’s script has its moments, but gets murky when it comes to the intrigue. It is tough to keep track of who is doing what to whom, and why (and at times, for whose “side”?). Granted, perhaps that is part of the point; torture is torture and murder is murder, no matter how one attempts to rationalize (a point that Steven Spielberg more than sufficiently bludgeoned us over the head with in Munich ) but I GET it, already.

Perhaps the most fatal flaw in the film is Matt Damon’s unconvincing “aging”. There is not much discernable physical transformation between Wilson’s collegiate years and middle age. (Maybe some better prosthetic work could have helped?). At any rate, I just wasn’t buying it, and found it to be a major distraction. Damon is a fine actor, but I think he may have been slightly miscast here. History buffs may still find the film worth a look.
History buffs (and conspiracy-a-go-go enthusiasts) will definitely want a peek at British director Dollan Cannell’s documentary, 638 Ways to Kill Castro just out on DVD.

Mixing archival footage with some knowledgeable talking heads (including a surprising number of would-be assassins-it’s hard to believe this many lived to tell their tale!), Cannell traces the evolution of Cuban politics via a recap of literally hundreds of attempts by the U.S. government to knock off Fidel over the years.

The number in the title (638) is derived from a list compiled by a couple of former members of Castro’s security team (they are among the interviewees). They even go so far as to crunch the numbers by U.S. presidential administration. In case you’re curious, here’s the breakdown (aren’t you glad I take notes?): Eisenhower-38 attempts. Kennedy-42. Johnson-72. Nixon-184. Carter-64. Reagan-197 (Ding Ding! We have a winner!). Bush (the 1st)-16. Clinton-21. (We assume they haven’t had a chance to tally the latest Bush’s numbers, although Cannell slyly bookends his film with footage of Junior’s embarrassingly smug and condescending “Cuba libre!” proclamation.)

The film begins its timeline in 1959, the year that the CIA received the first official go-ahead to take Castro out. The initial schemes sound like they were hatched by Wile E. Coyote and his Acme Intelligence Agency. The plans ranged from relatively benign subversion (making his beard fall out, spraying a TV station with LSD while Castro was on air, a contingency to accuse Cuba of zapping John Glenn’s space capsule with “magnetic rays,” had Glenn not made it back to Earth) to more ominous (a poisoned diving suit, booby trapping shellfish in Castro’s favorite scuba diving spot with dynamite, and most famously, planting poisoned and/or exploding cigars into his humidor).

Although Cannell initially appears to be playing for yucks (especially with the exploding cigar type shtick) the underlying theme of the documentary soon becomes much more sobering. The most chilling revelation concerns the downing of a commercial Cuban airliner off of Barbados in 1976 (73 people were killed, none with any known direct associations with the Castro regime). One of the alleged masterminds was an anti-Castro Cuban exile living in Florida, named Orlando Bosch, who had participated in numerous CIA-backed actions in the past. When Bosch was threatened with deportation in the late 80’s, a number of Republicans rallied to have him pardoned, including Florida congresswoman Ileana Ross, who used her involvement with the “Free Orlando Bosch” campaign as part of her running platform. Her campaign manager was a young up and coming politician named…Jeb Bush. Long story short? Then-president George Bush Sr. ended up granting Bosch a pardon in 1990. BTW, Bosch had once been publicly referred to as an “unrepentant terrorist” by the Attorney General. (Don’t get me started.)

This is a fascinating film; the only criticism I would give it is the director’s “wacky” approach (that kooky CIA and their nutty ideas!)-it doesn’t quite match the subject matter at times. My favorite quote from the doc sums it all up quite nicely-when asked to explain the decades-long obsession about Castro by one administration after another, one pundit cracks “There’s just something about (Castro’s) Cuba that affects these administrations like the full moon affects a werewolf. There’s no real logic at work here.”

Update: And then there’s this fine fellow. Republican administrations always have a hard time telling the “freedom fighters” from the “terrorists.” — digby

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Runnin’ With The Devil

by digby

Bill Sher has an excellent Russert “gotcha” question for Newt Gingrich when he appears on Meet the Press this week-end:

You’re one of the intellectual architects of the current foreign policy strategy in the Gulf, and President Bush is following your advice on Iraq by naming a “war czar.” Yet in May 1999 during the NATO campaign in Kosovo, you said that:

…the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton, and I accuse you in Kosovo, of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for the things that you have done, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created… …I don’t know why none of the Joints Chiefs have resigned because this campaign is a violation of every rule I know of in how you design a campaign… … We are wasting our resources. Our prestige is diminishing. And all over the world we look like a violent, helpless, pathetic country.

I don’t actually expect Russert to ask this question because it would be rude to embarrass a wonderful patriot like Newt with his own idiotic words. That’s something only rude, vitriolic bloggers would do.

But dear God how I wish Newtie would run. The only people in the country who can stand his special brand of creepy arrogance are the equally smarmy James Dobson and this guy, who hilariously is running a “draft Newt” movement.

Doesn’t he know that Newtie has a long history of avoiding the draft?

“Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made.”

It makes the phrase “run, Newt, run” all the more fun, doesn’t it?

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Value$

by digby

I have to take exception to tristero’s post below about that fine Republican Ted Klaudt. He may be a pervert but he’s also a principled pro-choice libertarian who staunchly believes in individual rights:

Representative Ted Klaudt (R-Walker) moved to table the bill, which effectively killed it. After the vote, he told the Rapid City Journal that “Government should never stick their nose into private business.

“It’s just wrong. It’s bad government. Bad government is not justified by a health issue.”

Of course, he wasn’t talking about a woman’s right to choose but rather about a man’s right to smoke, but the principle is surely the same, right?

Well, maybe not. Abortion is a matter of property values as Klaudt’s fellow South Dakota Republican Gordon Howie so eloquently explained when questioned about his belief in limited government and his opposition to abortion:

We place value on life in South Dakota, and even with a mother cow, as soon as you can demonstrate she is pregnant, an even higher value is placed just because she is pregnant,” Howie said.

These South Dakota Republicans are all pro-choice, but they are also believers in property rights. Their little girls belong to their daddies until they get married, and all women are more valuable when they’re breeding. There’s nothing inconsistent about their perversions and political beliefs at all.

Update: More Sexual Perversion And Modern Conservatism.

Mr. Maiello said that “God’s plan” brought them together, they said.

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Sexual Perversion And Modern Conservatism: Joined At The Hip?

by tristero

Via Atrios, I learned about the arrest of S.D. Republican Ted Klaudt on rape charges. The charges are revolting: He duped foster children in his care into letting him perform “exams” on them to see if they qualified as egg donors.

A little googling turns up this list of bills sponsored and you could predict that among them would be things like:

establish certain legislative findings pertaining to the health and rights of women, to revise the physician disclosure requirements to be made to a woman contemplating submitting to an abortion, and to provide for certain causes of action for professional negligence if an abortion is performed without informed consent.

clarify the application of certain provisions pertaining to the sale of pistols.

provide for recognition of certain valid nonresident permits to carry a concealed pistol.

provide for limited confidentiality of certain firearms information.

establish a task force to study abortion and to provide for its composition, scope, and administration.

prohibit the performance of abortions, except to save the life of the mother, and to provide a penalty therefor and to provide for a delayed effective date.

In support of free religious expression in public schools.

Proposing and submitting to the electors at the next general election an amendment to Article XXI of the Constitution of the State of South Dakota, relating to the definition of marriage. [The proposed amendment:: “Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in South Dakota. The uniting of two or more persons in a civil union, domestic partnership, or other quasi-marital relationship shall not be valid or recognized in South Dakota.”]

revise certain provisions regarding the performance of abortions on unemancipated minors and those found to be incompetent. [The bill required a 48 hour delay after notification of a parent befor an abortion could be performed, with certain exceptions noted.]

prohibit the performance of abortions, except to save the life of the mother, and to provide a penalty therefor and to provide for a delayed effective date.

One of the problems with sex scandals is that they are often excuses for prudes to behave like prigs and pricks, as if there’s something uniquely immoral about sexual intimacy and the many different varieties of pleasures experienced.

But I think we can all agree that what is alleged against Klaudt is so disgusting that it clearly is the work of a deeply disordered mind who really shouldn’t be out in the general public. But this scandal brings up loads of questions, (like how he could live with himself as probably the most obvious). But the most puzzling of all is how he could persistently seek legislative office (and he tried for the Senate but failed) and not only that but go out of his way to sponsor this legislation, given his propensities.

And I think it may be fair to raise a more general question, whether an obsessive concern with regulating abortion and defining marriage has more than just a casual association with sexual perversion. By “obsessive concern,” I’m not talking about some decent schnook who’s been fed christianist propaganda,. I’m talking about someone who, like Klaudt, gets all proactive about it, deliberately trying to legislate morality, trying to build a career on it.