Month: June 2007

Now They Notice

by digby

I really don’t want to belabor this bloggy triumphalism because it is, well, unseemly. But I do have to wonder why in the hell I and other bloggers were writing about the “big story” that was all over the TV today —- five months ago.

How can this be? Talking Points Memo, a real live journalistic endeavor, broke the story of Cheney’s bizarre theory that he is a fourth branch of government accountable to no one, not even the president back on February 4th. A bunch of blogs picked it up and pontificated about it. It seemed to me like a pretty big deal:

I had always known that Cheney was running the show, but I assumed he did it purely by using the power of the executive branch and manipulation of the presdient. I had no idea that he might have secretly carved out a previously unenumerated institution that derives its power from both the legislative and executive branches. What in the hell has really been going on in this administration?

Larry Wilkerson called it a “cabal” around Dick Cheney. But it seems to have been more than that. They created a shadow government and developed a constitutional theory to support it.

The undemocratic streak in the Republican Party continues apace. Each time they get power, they seek ways to weaken the nation’s understanding of what is acceptable in our democracy and what our constitution provides. (And keep in mind that it is entirely self-serving — they will turn all of that around without a moment’s thought when it suits them to challenge the opposition.)

[…]

This is important and the congress should not let it pass unexamined. The nation needs to know if some precedent has been set for making a vice-president a power center outside the commonly understood three branches of government.

It’s something out of a political thriller, I know, and it’s hard to wrap your arms around. But there is a part of me that wonders if it wasn’t a plan. It never seemed likely to me that the big money boys of the GOP would trust their fortunes to the blithering fool they set forth as president. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be surprised if some conversations before the fact took place.

Granted, it’s unreasonable for me to think that any reporters read this blog, but many of them read Josh Marshall and certainly they must have read the story in US News that followed the original item several days later. It evoked a huge yawn and the rest of us finally gave up. Apparently nobody cares that the Vice president doesn’t even believe her has to comply with presidential executive orders. Personally, I find that odd, and if I had been a reporter I might have asked the president if he thinks the VP answers to him or not.

Nobody gave a damn until Henry Waxman decided to issue a report that wondered why Dick Cheney was trying to shut down the agency that had crossed him. Then everyone “discovered” that Dick Cheney has created a fourth branch of government that answers to no one — something we were talking about months ago. I don’t get it.

Update: I see that Steve Benen asked the same question today. Why the delay?

Update II: Here’s some ridiculous horseshit for you:

The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, President Bush’s office is exempt from a presidential order requiring government agencies that handle classified national security information to submit to oversight by an independent federal watchdog.

The executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 covers all government agencies that are part of the executive branch and, although it doesn’t specifically say so, was not meant to apply to the vice president’s office or the president’s office, a White House spokesman said.

That’s very nice. But if it’s so, then why in the hell did Cheney make up an elaborate explanation saying he’s not a member of the executive branch because he’s the president of the Senate?

These people think we’re stupid. And maybe they’re partially right because I have to say that it’s just a little bit disturbing that the LA Times, doesn’t even mention Cheney’s ridiculous excuse until the fifteenth paragraph and then doesn’t bother to point out how it tends to undermine Bush’s statement.

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Primitive Elites

by digby

I don’t know how these right wingers manage to avoid nervous breakdowns what with the monumental cognitive dissonance roiling inside their heads. Today’s exercise in 180 comes from Dorothy Rabinowitz (courtesy of Christy Hardin Smith at FDL) who evokes the name of disbarred prosecutor Mike Nifong to tar Patrick Fitzgerald.

Any similarities between Nifong and Fitzgerald are straight out of Bizarroworld. Fitzgerald didn’t accuse anyone of a crime they didn’t actually commit, he didn’t withhold exculpatory evidence and he made no claims to the press he could not prove in court. (Of course, for Republicans, a prosecutor who isn’t spilling grand jury dirt to every friendly reporter he can find to smear Democrats is just not doing his job. Perhaps she got confused on that count.) The best she can do is rather amusingly claim that he unethically manipulated poor frightened little Richard Armitage by asking him not to talk about the case. (Have you seen Richard Armitage? He’s not exactly a shrinking violet.)

But as much as the parallels between Nifong and Fitzgerald make no sense at all, the parallels between Nifong and Rabinowitz herself are absolutely uncanny.

Here, let Eric Alterman explain it:

The story ultimately broke on February 19, when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal joined its erstwhile political and journalistic comrade Drudge. Deploying tear-jerking prose, right-wing ideologue Dorothy Rabinowitz accepted Broaddrick’s claims at face value. She wrote, “To encounter this woman, to hear the details of her story and the statements of the corroborating witnesses, was to understand that this was in fact an event that took place.” The trusting editorial writer–“I am not a hard news reporter,” she has explained–asked Broaddrick no uncomfortable questions and turned up no contemporaneous evidence. Nor did she raise the issue of a voluntary polygraph. Woman-to-woman, Rabinowitz simply decided that Broaddrick’s twenty-one-year-old claims were true, and the massive news-disseminating resources of the Dow Jones Company were marshaled behind a story that its news division wouldn’t touch. Following this act of journalistic recklessness, the paper’s editors chided NBC for its commitment to ethical standards and even compared their own work to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia.

(I’m afraid they compared it to the wrong book.)

Introducing the world to the Broaderick smear is the single most important and memorable thing Dorothy Rabinowitz ever done and I can only marvel at her confidence that she would write about false rape accusations without realizing that people would connect these dots: the woman who tried to bring down a president with a 20 year old rape charge based on no evidence but the highly questionable word of an alleged victim who had denied it for years, now shamelessly uses the reputation of another false rape accuser to assassinate the character of a straight arrow prosecutor. False rape accusation for political gain has become her specialty.

You have to admire her chutzpah, even as you recoil at the bottomless void where her ethical and moral center should be. Shamelessness, hypocrisy and lack of conscience doesn’t even begin to account for such behavior. The woman is simply a primitive political animal, without even the slightest capacity to act out of anything but sheer predatory opportunism. To have wingnuts like her commenting on legal ethics is like asking a wolf pack what they think of sheep herding. Let’s just say their perspective on such things is more than a little bit self-serving.

And by the way, get ready. That sound you hear is the rightwing smear machine cranking up. Scooter is their trial run.

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It’s The Women, Stupid

by digby

Following up on tristero’s post below, and those of others in the blogosphere today, notably Scott Lemieux, about Melinda Henneberger’s egregious piece in today’s NY Times on abortion, I just have one question: If abortion was such a slam dunk political winner for the Republicans, and even more importantly, such a sincere matter of morality and political principle, then why in the world, when they had a majority in both houses of congress and a conservative born-again president in the white house, didn’t they pass a federal law outlawing Roe vs. Wade abortion? Certainly, once they had Alito and Roberts on the court you would have thought they’d be rushing to get that law enacted and on its way for final adjudication to end to the Democrats’ “culture of death” once and for all.

It’s funny, but I don’t even remember them discussing it, do you? Instead, they continue to “send signals” and dance around the issue, even having George W. Bush (like Poppy and St Ronnie before him) only appear by phone at their big forced childbirth marches on the mall.

There’s a reason for that. The majority of this country doesn’t agree with them on this issue and politicians who have to win nationally know this very well. They are more than willing to pander blatantly in every other way to their base. But he has never once said he thought Roe vs Wade should be overturned.

And there’s also a good reason for Democrats to stop listening to the religious industrial complex that works both sides of the aisle on this issue. When it comes to matters of principle, trying to finesse differences makes you look worse than if you say nothing at all. Paul Waldman at TAPPED puts it well:

Ultimately, what Henneberger, like many before her, is asking Democrats to do is to betray some of their most fundamental values in a cynical and doomed attempt to grab a few votes. Doing so would be politically stupid and morally repellent. The fact is that the Democrats are the party that favors reproductive rights, and the Republicans are the party that opposes those rights. On the fundamental question, two-thirds of the public agrees with the Democrats. They only lose on the issue when they listen to people like Henneberger, who tell them that they should act like they’re ashamed of what they believe.

I realize that it’s a tough issue, and that many people find it “icky” and wish it would just go away. But I have news for them. Even if we repeal Roe vs. Wade tomorrow, the issue ain’t going away. Women will always have unwanted pregnancies, as they have since time began. It is a biological certainty. The question is whether they have a right as human beings to determine for themselves when and if they are going to turn their bodies over to the process of gestation and childbirth. If the state determines that they do not, then women are not free. It’s that simple.

I am completely comfortable with the idea of arguing about this with people who are anti-choice until the day I die. They have every right to try to persuade me that I am wrong, and to try to persuade every woman who is pregnant that she should carry that child to term. If religions wish to teach that it is wrong and require that its adherents follow its teaching I would never argue that they couldn’t.

But I will never concede that the state has a right to intrude on something so intimate and personal that it actually requires a person to give up her bodily integrity, submit herself to the judgment of strangers and give birth against her will. It’s hard to imagine the difficulty of making such decisions, but it’s safe to say that judges and legislators and priests from afar are not the ones who should do it. The state is simply the wrong venue for such a complicated issue that requires such a delicate balance of interests. Only the woman, consulting if she wishes with those who know her and have a real interest in her life and the potential life inside of her, can possibly have enough information to make a moral decision like this.

The pro-choice movement has never made a moral judgment against any woman who chose to bear a child. In fact, we worked hard to allow her to be able to make that decision freely by working to eliminate the stigma that was once attached to divorce, out of wedlock births and other social restrictions on motherhood. We support every program out there that will help her raise her children if she decides to have them. We believe that women and men alike should be able to make enough money to support a family with a decent wage.

The other side treats women with unwanted pregnancies as either selfish sluts or childlike innocents who can’t be trusted to make moral decisions at all. They would deny women birth control to help them avoid such circumstances and they believe the traditional nuclear family is the only legitimate way to raise children.

In other words the anti-choice movement makes it simultaneously more difficult for women to have children and more difficult for them to avoid it. So let’s not fool ourselves. It’s not about children. It’s about women. And that means it is simply more conservative resistance to the long march of progress this country has made toward equal rights for all its citizens. The same philosophy that fought tooth and nail against every advance made to ensure that this is truly a free country by denying equal rights to all its citizens also animates those who argue that the rights of the fetus are paramount. It’s just another way of ensuring that the rights of women aren’t.

And once you recognize that you realize that there is no way to fudge this or work around the edges. Every time you forget that you create the rhetorical space for the other side to make their argument more explicit — which is now happening in all its full frontal glory on the Supreme Court of the United States. Women are either free citizens or they’re not.

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Should Democrats Endorse Coathangers As Moral?

Updated

by tristero

Melinda Henneberger says yes. She is wrong, mistaking spin for reality.

She calls a D&E, a procedure used rarely, and often to save a mother’s life, by a deliberately repellent and medically worthless name dreamed up in a christianist think tank. She mentions that Democratic opponents spin abortion as “a human rights issue comparable to slavery.” Apparently, she doesn’t agree with this nonsense. But disgracefully, she fails to note that this is an outrageous comparison that should be dismissed as hyperbole and fear-mongering, not soberly noted or discussed. She merely notes that that is how people talk and urges Democrats to adjust their views accordingly.

No.

The moral high road is our side. We know there is no virtue in forcing the poorest women to endure the dangers of medical procedures performed by coathangers and lye. And that is the major moral issue at stake here, once you clear away the carefully market-tested language of the right. Make no mistake: Regardless of the law, middle-class and richer women will always have plenty of access to a range of contraceptive, prophylactic, and abortive techniques to use or not use, as they see fit. If this country legalizes back-alley abortions – which is what Henneberger is suggesting that Democrats support – the rich will pay more and only the poorest women – will not have access to decent medical procedures and care.

I fail to see how, by any stretch of the imagination, proactively denying adequate medical care to poor women is morally defensible.

This issue is not about, and never has been about, “when does a human life begin?” That simply is not an appropriate question for a government to answer; indeed, to answer it “officially” is tantamount to a religious establishment. And clearly, these are decisions which are quite rightly left to the individuals involved.

No, the advocacy of government-approved coathanger abortions is a rightwing tactic in class warfare. It is also, since there is so much overlap with money, a race issue. But the moral issue is really quite simple. A woman has the right to control her body. No one, and certainly no government, should ever force her to have, or not have, children. How she chooses, what she chooses, when she chooses, are private choices.

—

Now some of you will surely object that my language above is just as overheated as the christianists. Calling opponents of legalized abortions “pro-coathanger” is deliberately antagonizing. And you would be right. The language of this post is extreme, hyperbolic, over the top. Knowing this, why did I write it the way I did, knowing it would antagonize? To make a point about this kind of language.

The language of the far right is, as it is so often, the lingua franca of discussions of this issue which finesses and often buries reality under a pile of malodorous, sophomoric philosophizing. These heartless bastards, whose policies will inevitably lead to the grueseome, painful deaths of poor women, have dared to call themselves “pro-life.” Incredibly, not only the media but Democrats and even liberals have agreed to label these people such. By contrast, those of us trying to prevent the murder of innocents are called “pro-abortion.” And “pro-choice” is even worse. What are we supposed to be choosing? Well if the “other side” is “pro-life,” then we are presumably advocating the woman choose either life or death. So much for the language of neutrality.

So I say, let’s recognize this as a battle by the right to restrict decent healthcare to the upper classes and simultaneously inflict punishment on the poor. And, if the extreme right chooses to deploy inflammatory rhetoric, and that rhetoric gets widely adopted, it is important to confront such rhetoric in kind, but without their propensity for deception.

The worst thing to do is to mistake the rhetoric of the right as reality. We all know what happens when this country adopts the hallucinations of these extremists.

[Edited slightly immediately after initial posting.]

UPDATE: In comments, Susan S. makes an important point, but I don’t think her conclusion follows:

I think you’re missing Melinda’s point. I recently saw her at a Planned Parenthood luncheon in Tampa where she made the same arguments that she makes in her op-ed. She’s merely saying that there are a lot of Democrats who don’t see abortion in the black and white terms most of us do. We ignore that at our peril. We have to find a way of talking to them that shows we recognize their concerns, and not automatically dismiss them…

She doesn’t disagree with us. She’s saying that there are many Democrats who can be brought back into the fold if we stop automatically dismissing them and equating them with the right-wing crazies. For whatever reason (possibly because they’ve been manipulated) their views on abortion are more complicated than ours. We need to educate them, but we can’t do it by talking down to them.

I completely agree. That is exactly the issue. There are a lot of people who don’t see abortion as black and white.

But the issue is not abortion but government regulation of abortion. The fact that so many of us see the abortion issue differently is precisely at the heart of the fight against the right.

They, not Democrats and liberals, want this country to see the issue in black and white. The effect, if they win, will be catastrophic. And the catastrophe will fall predominantly on poor women.

That’s why Henneberger is not only wrong, but completely wrong.

One more thing: While I think Susan S. is quite mistaken in defending Henneberger, I hope my saying so directly is not perceived as a personal attack. It certainly is not meant to be.

Again, to be clear, this is not about personal opinions about terminating or completing pregnancies. This about demanding the government regulate pregnancy and reproduction in accordance with one specific ideology.

Possibly no one feels the same as another about abortion itself. But that is not the issue. It’s the extreme right forcing people to adhere to their, and only their, morality that is the issue.

God Bless The USA

by digby

I don’t find a whole lot to like these days about my hometown paper The LA Times, but today they did a big story on the state of American health care and the film “Sicko” that I think a lot of their readers will find informative. It breaks no new ground for those of us who follow these issues in the blogosphere, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The story features a very handy little chart that you all might find useful in political discussions on the job or at those fun summer bar-b-ques where certain people of the righty persuasion try to pretend that they know what they are talking about:

Healthcare: where the candidates stand

Most 2008 presidential candidates address healthcare on their websites, but the amount of detail varies considerably. Here’s some basic information from the sites of candidates — and potential candidates.

Democrats

Joe Biden
Would “expand health insurance for children and relieve families and businesses of the burden of expensive catastrophic cases.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton
“America is ready for universal health care.”

Chris Dodd
Would “ensure universal affordable quality coverage by creating a Health Care General Fund (HCGF) to serve all Americans. Then, require employers to either cover their employees or contribute to the fund.”

John Edwards
Offers a detailed plan for “universal health care through shared responsibility.”

Mike Gravel
“a universal health-care voucher program in which the federal government would issue annual health care vouchers to Americans based on their projected needs.”

Dennis Kucinich
Supports “a plan for a universal single payer, not for profit healthcare system.

Barack Obama
Gives a plan for “providing affordable, comprehensive and portable health coverage for every American” and “modernizing the U.S. health care system.”

Bill Richardson
Would “open up existing sources of affordable, portable coverage to more Americans.”

Republicans

Sam Brownback
Advocates “increased consumer choice, consumer control and real competition.”

Jim Gilmore
Healthcare isn’t listed on “The Issues” portion of his site.

Rudy Giuliani
Healthcare isn’t listed on the “On the Issues” portion of his site.

Mike Huckabee
The site doesn’t have an “issues” component.

Duncan Hunter
Doesn’t list healthcare under “Issues.”

John McCain
Doesn’t list healthcare under “On the Issues.”

Ron Paul
Doesn’t list healthcare under “Issues.”

Mitt Romney
Recommends “extending health insurance to all Americans, not through a government program or new taxes, but through market reforms.”

Tom Tancredo
Says “tort reform and immigration enforcement would save the system billions.”

Tommy Thompson
Would place “the uninsured in state-by-state insurable pools, allowing private insurers to bid on their coverage.”

Obviously Republicans are catering to their true base — the vastly wealthy — who don’t have to worry about health care any more than the candidates themselves do. That’s nice for them.

I wonder if Democrats are missing the boat on something though. There were a couple of other charts included in this story that might just make even some rich Republicans a little bit uneasy. After all, isn’t it just considered a given that red-blooded real Americans believe this is the very, very best country in the whole wide world?

Well…

Now, the knee-jerk attitude that the U.S. is the best place on earth to be sick, fueled by the reputations of great institutions like the Mayo Clinic and by America’s leadership in drug and technology development, is beginning to be challenged by rigorous international comparisons. There is increasing evidence that, despite justified pride in individual institutions and medical breakthroughs, the world’s biggest medical spender isn’t buying its citizens the longest, healthiest lives in the world.

It’s not just moviemakers and comics saying so. The dire message that the U.S. healthcare system is, by some measures, an also-ran on the worldwide stage is being delivered by doctors, researchers — even insurance industry giants.

[…]

How we measure up

The United States recently ranked last among six industrialized nations on measures of safe and coordinated care, according to the Commonwealth Fund, although it spent the most per person.

COUNTRY	AUSTRALIA	CANADA	GERMANY	NEW ZEALAND	BRITAIN	U.S.
Overall ranking (2007)	3.5	5	2	3.5	1	6
Quality of care	4	6	2.5	2.5	1	5
Access	3	5	1	2	4	6
Efficiency	4	5	3	2	1	6
Equity	2	5	4	3	1	6
Healthy lives	1	3	2	4.5	4.5	6
Health expenditures
per capita (2004)	$2,876*	$3,165	$3,005*	$2,083	$2,546	$6,102

I’m sorry, that’s just embarrassing. Perhaps Democrats should (at least sometimes) speak about health care in the language of good old fashioned national competitiveness. A good stump speech might mention this shameful state of affairs and then say that under Democrats the United States will once again be number one — something about which the Republicans obviously care nothing because they don’t even discuss it.

I know it’s a little bit shallow and maybe even a bit offensive. But winning elections isn’t only about being right on policy. It’s making people realize that certain problems exist and finding ways to help them see that it’s in their interest to solve those problems. If you can use Americans’ knee jerk belief in the innate superiority of the US of A to actually create a superior health care system for Americans, then I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with it.

And anyway, with all the money we spend there actually is no excuse that we’re not number one.

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Attention, Atheists! You Are Wrong. There Is A God.

by tristero

And His name is Dick Cheney, a supernatural being answerable to no earthly power:

The Oversight Committee has learned that over the objections of the National Archives, Vice President Cheney exempted his office from the presidential order that establishes government-wide procedures for safeguarding classified national security information. The Vice President asserts that his office is not an “entity within the executive branch.”

As described in a letter from Chairman Waxman to the Vice President, the National Archives protested the Vice President’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.

Now some of you skeptics out there might continue to deny Him, snottily asking, “Would God be so careless around shotguns, huh? Answer me that!”

Oh, ye of little faith! How can we mere humans judge a Superior Being by our own measly standards? His ways are not our ways.

Ethical Compost

by digby

I hate to retreat so quickly to my vituperative blogger persona, but this is just outrageous. Via Julia, I see that George Bush once again shows his philosophical depth:

Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical — and it is not the only option before us.

Right. That’s a perfectly respectable philosophy that’s been held by many great people for centuries. It’s called pacifism and it’s about as far from the philosophy of this bloodthirsty boor as you can get.

In fairness, he may not realize that because when his briefers discuss the wanton killing of little Iraqi or Afghan children, it’s not called “destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life” it’s called “collateral damage.”

This man led an invasion of a country that posed no immediate threat in the name of “giving birth” to a new democracy and saving the Iraqis from a madman. He is responsible for a whole lot of killing of fully formed human lives which he constantly claims was in the hopes of saving other human lives. In fact, he continues to insist that all this Iraqi carnage will be worth it one day because the US will have brought all the survivors freedom, which is a wonderful value, but since George W. Bush’s idea of freedom could more accurately be defined as chaos, it’s likely that many Iraqis hardly find the trade-off worthwhile.

I’m not sure we need to hear any more lectures on ethics from a man who thinks that blastocysts in a petri dish cannot be destroyed in the interest of saving the lives of others, but hundreds of thousands of people can be violently killed in order to carry out a deluded American Enterprise Institute political science experiment.

Update: Scarecrow at FDL has another take on this.

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About That Speech

by digby

Now that I’m back in my (heavenly coastal cool) secure bunker, I want to get back to regularly scheduled programming. But first I have to thank all of you who have sent me kind emails and written comments here and around the blogosphere. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I feel much better now — not just because it’s over, but because I realize that my tribe is filled with such generous, warm hearted people that I should never have been so terrified in the first place.

Thanks also to Dover Bitch for doing yoeman’s work in filling in for me. I was somewhat obsessed for a few days and couldn’t possibly have written anything decent. She did a great job and I hope she’ll come back frequently and that you’ll all visit her blog as well.

Finally, I have to publicly thank my new hero Joel Silberman, speech coach extraordinaire, who works as a media consultant with a number of high profile bloggers and such groups and People For The American Way and the National Women’s Law Center. Jane Hamsher knew that I was panicked about all this and insisted that I allow him to help me out. The man is a miracle worker. I was a nervous wreck and his advice was simply invaluable. I’m not exaggerating to say that my speech would have failed without him. I hope that every liberal public speaker or group will consider hiring Joel. It could be the difference between success and failure. It certainly was for me.

I’ll be writing a bit about my pseudonymous, genderless experience in the next little while, and sharing some of my observations about identity and the internet. There are some interesting things to say about that. But I don’t plan to change much of anything around here, certainly not what I write about or how I write it.

The speech is currently on the front page of The Nation website if you want to read the prepared text.

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Sun don’t shine above the ground
by Dover Bitch

Tomorrow, the Summer Solstice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will be delivering a speech on Civil Rights in Oxford, Mississippi. Won’t that be special. I wonder if he’ll use the phrase “I don’t recall” much.

Oxford, of course, is home to the University of Mississippi, where, in the middle of a riot, James Meredith became the first African-American student. Meredith survived after being shot, nearly four years later, as he marched for voting rights.

I’ve heard that Meredith does not enjoy being considered an important figure in the Civil Rights movement. From the looks of the Voting Rights Section of the Department of Justice, it would seem Gonzales doesn’t, either.

Via McClatchy on Monday:

WASHINGTON — A former Justice Department political appointee blocked career lawyers from filing at least three lawsuits charging local and county governments with violating the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities, seven former senior department employees charged Monday.

Hans von Spakovsky also derailed at least two investigations into possible voter discrimination, the former employees of the Voting Rights Section said in interviews and in a letter to the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. They urged the panel to reject von Spakovsky’s nomination to the Federal Election Commission.

[…]

In the letter to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the panel’s chairwoman, the former employees said that von Spakovsky acted as the “de facto voting section chief” from early 2003 until late 2005, spending virtually all of his time on voting matters and promoting “partisan political interests.”

“We have never seen a political appointee exercise this level of control over the day-to-day operations of the voting section,” they said.

It was the second letter in the last eight days in which former employees of the Voting Rights Section, including [Joseph] Rich and former deputy chief Robert Kengle, urged the Senate panel to reject the nomination. Feinstein told von Spakovsky during the hearing that the criticism from former department officials would make it difficult for him to win confirmation.

Monday’s letter included the first allegations that von Spakovsky torpedoed suits and investigations over alleged state, county or local laws that diminish the voting strength of African-Americans, Native Americans or other minorities or prevent them from voting altogether.

I’m sure Gonzales’ speech will be riveting.

McClatchy, by the way, has a new website with a new slogan, “Truth to Power.” Josh Marshall sings the praises they deserve.

No excuses
by Dover Bitch

The polymathic and perspicacious Dibgy returns to full blogging capacity soon and I shall, with gratitude, slink back to my small corner of the Internet. But before I go, I want to take advantage of an opportunity to shine a light on an injustice that has persisted far too long.

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a time to reflect on Civil Rights and progress in America. As I was admonished in comments here for not making clearer, the 13Th Amendment abolished slavery in America. But sub-human conditions for workers still exist, to the everlasting shame of the Congress that has allowed it to continue on American soil.

It’s easy sometimes to feel helpless when confronted by crimes against humanity in distant locations, where seemingly little can be done. It is inexcusable for nothing to be done when the outrages occur within the legal jurisdiction of our own representative government.

I’m writing about the exploitation that is hidden away in the Marianas Islands. I’m referring to the women who are tricked into thinking they are buying a chance to work in America, only to learn that they are essentially imprisoned in a filthy den, forced to work for nothing, forced into prostitution, forced to have abortions, and finally shipped back to their homelands, broken and penniless. I’m writing about a man who couldn’t “spotlight” a blog post; he lit himself on fire to call attention to the desperation that has been largely ignored.

I know of nobody on the blog-o-sphere who has devoted more energy to this horrible situation than dengre at Daily Kos. I urge you to read dengre’s diary detailing how Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff made sure Congress would do nothing but turn a blind eye to these atrocities. You can read dengre’s transcripts of the Senate testimony of abused women, some of which fell on deaf ears a decade ago.

You can also see a (somewhat old) video here that shows the working conditions out there.

Again, this is on U.S. soil. Now that the Democrats control Congress, there is no reason this ugliness should remain in the shadows. There is no excuse for allowing this exploitation to continue.

Last week, Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI) introduced “a bill to implement further the Act approving the Covenant to Establish a Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands in Political Union with the United States of America, and for other purposes.” It remains to be seen what the bill hopes to accomplish, or what it will look like in its final form. Hearings may begin next month.

There is no doubt what the bill ought to do. Slavery is wrong. Rape is wrong. That may be hard for Tom DeLay to comprehend while he smiles to allow people to see Jesus through his mugshot. But it should be obvious to just about everybody else. Please put pressure on Congress to do the right thing.