Month: August 2008

Saturday Night At The Movies

Swing voters and Nixon calling

By Dennis Hartley

“If daddy punches a chad, an angel gets his wings.”

With less than 100 shopping days left until The Most Important Election Day Ever, I thought I would alert you to a couple of politically-themed films that have reached out from behind the curtain to give a timid tug on Batman’s cape, and tide us over until Oliver Stone’s W opens this fall (BTW here’s the trailer, in case you haven’t seen it yet.)

First up on the ballot is Swing Vote, a lightweight but agreeable political fantasy/civics lesson from writer-director Joshua Michael Stern (Neverwas). Signaling a return to form for star Kevin Costner, the film speculates on what would happen if a presidential election literally hinged on one person’s vote (remember, I already said it’s a fantasy).

Costner plays the underachieving Bud Johnson, a trailer-dwelling, beer-quaffing, NASCAR worshipping single parent who supports himself and daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll) with a job at an egg-packaging plant in Texico, New Mexico. Young Molly may be the “dependent” as far as Family Services is concerned, but in reality takes on the role of the responsible parent in the household. She constantly admonishes her Dad for his drinking, poor grooming habits and slack attitude toward his job. The civic-minded Molly also takes it upon herself to register her father for voting in an upcoming national election, much to his chagrin (he’d rather not be on the radar for that pesky jury duty). Needless to say, he doesn’t follow politics, or keep up on the “issues”.

You know where this is headed, don’t you? After a chain of serendipitous events that only occurs in movies, this gomer ends up with the fate of the free world hinging on the flick of his chad finger. Before he knows it, he is at the center of a crazed media circus, and is being personally feted by the incumbent Republican (a convincingly presidential Kelsey Grammer) and his Democratic challenger (the always interesting Dennis Hopper).

Some of the film’s most clever moments arrive in the form of the faux-TV ads brainstormed by the campaign strategists for both sides (ably played by Stanley Tucci for the Republicans and Nathan Lane for the Democrats). It’s quite amusing to see a rainbow-hued, pro-gay marriage ad endorsed by the Republican president and a radical anti-abortion polemic featuring the Democratic challenger, tripping over partisan party platforms and each other in their rush to pander to one undecided swing voter.

There is a temptation to read these plot machinations as a setup for a modern-day “Capraesque” tale, which is where the film appears to be heading at first glance. But in actuality, it’s sort of Capra in reverse; “Washington goes to Mr. Smith”, if you will (Capra’s Jeff Smith is a political idealist by nature; Bud Johnson, on the other hand, has his idealism thrust upon him). There has been some critical outcry that the film is more than a little derivative of a relatively obscure 1939 John Barrymore vehicle called The Great Man Votes. Frankly I’ve never seen that film, so I can’t address that specific issue. In a more contemporary context, you could say that this film could be viewed as Mike Judd’s Idiocracy-with a heart (and much better acting). Also, I found some of the satirical aspects of Swing Vote reminiscent of Hal Ashby’s Being There and Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. The film’s depiction of a flock of ravenous media vultures descending on a small New Mexico town has some strong echoes of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole , as well.
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I don’t think the film is in danger of showing up on anybody’s top 10 list for the year, but as long as you buy into the premise, I think you’ll be entertained. I enjoyed the performances. Costner revives the long-dormant “aw shucks” charm that he played to such laid-back perfection in Bull Durham and Field of Dreams . Sure, he’s playing a chucklehead this time out-but he’s a sympathetic chucklehead. Carroll gives one of those “30-year-old midget” turns that belies her chronological age and shows great promise (like Diane Lane or Natalie Portman in their fledgling days). The always excellent and forever underrated Mare Winningham makes an all-too-brief but welcome appearance (where the hell has she been?) as Bud’s estranged wife. Brat-pack aficionados will be sure to recognize Judge Reinhold (remember him?) as one of Bud’s co-workers, and comedian George Lopez gets to fire off some good zingers as a local TV news director. Also featuring a veritable rogue’s gallery of MSM pundits and journalists, in cameos (erm, as themselves): Aaron Brown, Campbell Brown, Tucker Carlson, James Carville, Mary Hart, Arianna Huffington, Larry King, Bill Maher and Tweet…um…Chris Matthews (hey-don’t let that keep you from seeing it-but don’t say I didn’t warn you!)

CSN&Y: Old songs for a new war.

Another film getting swamped in the wake of the summer’s storm surge of superheroes is CSNY:Déjà vu, a timely rockumentary from Bernard Shakey (Greendale). Bernard who? Okay, you probably know him better as the iconoclastic folk-rock-alt-country-“Godfather of Grunge”-cum-antiwar activist-filmmaker (did I leave anything out?)…Neil Young.

Mixing backstage footage and musical highlights from the 2006 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Freedom of Speech Tour with vox populi interviews and analysis by “embedded” journalist Mike Cerre (a veteran front lines Afghanistan/Iraq war correspondent) the doc plays somewhere between Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing and Fahrenheit 9/11.

The 2006 reunion of the notoriously mercurial foursome was spearheaded by Young not so much as a nostalgia tour but rather as a musical wake-up call addressing the Bush administration’s post 9-11 shenanigans, at home and in Iraq. The tour commenced on the heels of Young’s incendiary Living with War album (definitely not on Junior’s iPod).

The reaction from audiences (and music critics) was mixed. Young cheekily employs voiceover actors to read excerpts from concert reviews in the local rags, and particularly seems to take perverse delight in highlighting the sneers and snarks (usually involving ageist references to the band’s senior citizen status). I will give him credit for including some (brief) “warts and all” excerpts from some early shows in the tour, like one instance where the quartet’s rusty pipes are definitely a couple bubbles off plumb. And speaking of falling flat, we also witness a senior moment as a band member takes an onstage tumble.

The most eye-opening moment in the film occurs when the band plays Atlanta, a city usually perceived as a blue oasis in a red state. At first, all appears to be going swimmingly, with the audience happily clapping and singing along with the old “hits”. But things get interesting as the band launches into some more recent material from Young’s aforementioned Living with War album (accompanied by a faux-Karaoke lyric scroll on the huge onstage projection screen, just in case anyone misses the point):

Let’s impeach the President for lying
And misleading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

Suddenly, the temperature in the auditorium seems to drop about 50 degrees; catcalls and hisses quickly escalate to boos, bird flipping and near-rioting. Cerre interviews some of the disenchanted as they stalk out; the outrage ranges from bitching about the ticket prices to threatening grievous bodily harm to Neil Young, should they get close enough. Backstage, the band takes the philosophical high road (with age comes wisdom, nu?)

But all cracks about geriatric rockers aside, it becomes apparent that the one thing that remains ageless is the power of the music, and the commitment from the performers. Songs like “Ohio”, “Military Madness”, “For What it’s Worth” and “Chicago” prove to have resilience and retain a topical relevance that does not go unnoticed by younger fans. And anyone who doesn’t tear up listening to the band deliver the solemnly beautiful harmonies of their elegiac live show closer, “Find the Cost of Freedom”, while a photo gallery featuring hundreds of smiling young Americans who died in Iraq scrolls on the big screen behind them, can’t possibly have anything resembling a soul residing within.

CSNY: Déjà vu is in limited release, but also currently on PPV in some markets.

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Oh Heck

by digby

It looks like the soap opera is going to continue.

I hate this stuff. As I wrote yesterday, I think it’s human nature to be fascinated by the foibles of important people. There’s an industry devoted to feeding it to us and it’s very successful — gossip has probably been part of human behavior since cave days.

But we use this natural fascination with private sexual behavior in the United States these days as some sort of proxy for the public character of our politicians, as if this tells us something so important about them that it supersedes anything else we might know about them. But it’s a fallacy, since we can’t know enough about their marriages or their inner lives, to be able to accurately judge these behaviors. So we end up with some sort of cookie cutter morality that leads us to reject a politician who steps out on his wife, allegedly because he’s shown a propensity for “reckless behavior” or lying, while we accept someone who has lied repeatedly in his public life and shown a propensity for recklessness with public policy, because they are harder to understand. But the truth is that private behavior is not a good guide to leadership. There have been too many examples of fine leaders who led complicated personal lives and too many examples of bad ones who never strayed.

If history judged Richard Nixon and George W. Bush based solely on their marital faithfulness, they would be considered among the best presidents we ever had. It’s not a useful proxy for public behavior, never has been.

Oh, and all the celebrity gasbags deserve to have all of their own private peccadilloes exposed to the world. They have helped create this absurd political test and they are the last people who could withstand the same scrutiny. These powerful people passing judgment on politicians for things they all do themselves is what makes the Village such phony provincial hellhole.

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Wide Stance McCain?

by digby

David Gregory on Edwards: “Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome?”

I think so. And I think John McCain needs to answer for Mark Foley, Larry Craig and David Vitter too. Not to mention himself. Talk about skeletons.

H/T to BB

Tip ‘O The Iceberg

by digby

This is a bad story and it does show that the government has used its wiretapping capability to violate the first amendment, but I have to say that I think Mueller is crying crocodile tears in order to imply that this is the extent of it. I just do not believe that with what we know of the government’s behavior in the years after 9/11 that this is the only — or the worst — incident of the authorities tracking reporters. I’m fairly sure they “took the gloves off” on that since they took the gloves off on just about everything during that period.

We may never know the details of the secret surveillance program that was so bad that even Mueller couldn’t sign off on it, but the idea that the only reporters they wiretapped during that period were covering Indonesia is a little bit hard to swallow.

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Covering Mean Mr Mustard

by digby

That’s the thing about covering John McCain. Someone always wants you to give him the benefit of the doubt.

If you haven’t come across this article on John McCain by a reporter who covered him in his home state for many years, do yourself a favor and read it. It tells the story of a much more complicated man than the mainstream press will admit to and talks about some of the episodes of his past that should have caused him much more trouble in his political life than they did. His POW status has protected him from the problems of ordinary politicians.

And, unsurprisingly, he is a liar a hypocrite and a jerk. But we knew that:

As the story goes, John McCain and his friends wanted her out immediately. And, they figured, they had the mechanism in place to do it. Mecham was gone, but the recall effort was still in place. Why not shift gears and target Mofford instead?

The Democrats didn’t like that one bit and asked the Arizona Supreme Court to consider the legality.

In mid-April 1988, Mofford and some staff flew to Washington for, as one former aide puts it, the “perfunctory wet kiss” meeting with the Arizona congressional delegation. Even in mean old D.C., there’s such a thing as protocol, and the tour was expected to go along without incident.

At 10 in the morning on April 12, Mofford testified before the Senate Energy and Water Development Subcommittee on Appropriations on the topic of the Central Arizona Project.

Now, Mofford had been governor for only eight days. Before that, her main task had been running the state’s elections department. This appearance (there was a similar one, later that day, before the House) had been billed as ceremonial. She was not familiar with the particulars of federal water law. Nor did her staff think she’d be expected to be — just then.

But, apparently, Senator James McClure, a Republican from Idaho, did. After a lot of looking, that librarian and I (actually, it took three librarians) tracked down the testimony from that day. McClure asked Mofford a series of questions that would leave any water expert’s mouth dry. Her staff jumped in to try to answer, but even so, ultimately they had to file an addendum to the testimony.

Word spread quickly about what had happened.

Coincidentally, that very same day, Pat Murphy, then publisher of the Arizona Republic, was also in Washington to meet with the delegation. He and his wife had lunch plans with McCain, and as Murphy recalls, they went to the hearing room where Mofford was testifying, to meet up with him. Murphy had written glowingly of McCain and considered him a personal friend.

As Murphy recounted in an e-mail recently (he left the Republic many years ago, and now lives in Idaho), the incident crushed him. He says it was the beginning of the end of his respect for and friendship with McCain.

“We peeked in the room,” wrote Murphy. “McCain saw us, excused himself, and we three went to the Senate dining room for lunch.

“During lunch, McCain said, almost with mischievous glee, that he had slipped some highly technical questions to [James McClure] to ask Mofford — questions she wouldn’t be prepared to answer or expected to answer.

“Flabbergasted, I asked McCain why would he want to sabotage Mofford’s testimony, when in fact the CAP was the nonpartisan pet of Republicans and Democrats — such as far-left Udall and far-right Goldwater — since its inception.

“His reply, as near as I remember, was, ‘I’ll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance.’

“The lunch continued in strained chit-chat. We then walked back to McCain’s office, where a few reporters, all of them from Arizona papers, as I recall, were waiting. One said there was a rumor McCain had tried to sabotage Mofford’s testimony, to which he said something like, ‘I’d never do anything like that.'”

There was more. Another rumor, later reported in the Republic, held that McCain had brought in a private film crew to tape the proceedings, so that the tape could be used to embarrass Mofford in the recall election. At the time, Jay Smith, McCain’s campaign media consultant, was quoted in the Republic as declining comment; he did not deny the rumor.

He’s always been a jackass. And he still is. This idea that St John McCain really doesn’t want to go negative but is being forced to by his Rovian campaign staff is ridiculous and yet I hear it all the time from the MSM. Anyone who tells the mean, cruel jokes he tells is a mean man. He likes going negative — he just doesn’t like taking responsibility for it because that tarnishes his halo and makes him just like every other nasty Republican. His massive ego can’t accommodate such ordinariness.

He’s very erratic and when you combine that with his temper and his love of war, you get something even scarier than Bush and Cheney. It would be a nightmare if he becomes the president.

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A Good Argument

by digby

… for homeschooling:

The president of a school safety consulting firm said districts like Uniontown Area, which is considering arming its police officers with Tasers, have to take a conservative approach to their deployment and develop a comprehensive policy.

[…]

The school’s director of security says giving the district’s three officers the option of using a Taser is more about providing the safest possible conditions for children, staff and visitors than as a weapon “directed at the students.”

[…]

Although he acknowledged some cases nationally in which officers allegedly have shown poor judgment in using Tasers, Trump said school officials need to be prepared to answer some questions from the public and have a dialogue about how the devices should be used in a school setting.

“The key is conservative use,” he said. “I think we can say, if we can break up a fight in the hallway in a traditional way, then what’s the point (of a Taser)?”

But Witold “Vic” Walczak of the ACLU in Pittsburgh thinks Uniontown — or any other district considering Tasers — is asking for trouble that could lead to calls of excessive force.

Unless a school has a lot of issues with officers using deadly force, Walczak said he considers Tasers “completely inappropriate.”

“The problem we see around the country is police use Tasers when less force would be appropriate,” he said.

The anecdotal evidence of Walczak’s argument has been striking in recent years as news media have publicized claims stemming from alleged excessive force by using Tasers. Many cases involve teenagers.

Last month, a 17-year-old Winnipeg boy wielding a knife became the youngest Canadian to die after being zapped by a Taser. His family is considering a lawsuit against authorities.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in the Charlotte area announced last month that a police officer wouldn’t face criminal charges in the March death of a 17-year-old grocery store worker, who was shocked with a Taser after throwing items at a store manager and advancing toward the officer.

However, medical studies have shown that exposure to a conducted-energy device, or CED, like a Taser, is safe in the “vast majority of cases,” according to a June report by the National Institute of Justice.

Still, the report noted that more data might be needed to determine the effects of CED exposure on small children, those with diseased hearts, the elderly and pregnant women.

Forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht, a former Allegheny County coroner, said he’s not aware of any argument that children would be more susceptible to death from a Taser strike than adults…

“Once you have the Taser and it’s been accepted and legitimized … I see nothing wrong with officers being able to use it on teenagers,” Wecht said

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This is an excellent idea. But I don’t see why it should be confined to teenagers. Why not elementary school kids? They don’t get in line fast enough? Zap ’em. Act up during nap time? Give ’em a jolt. They’ll soon learn not to defy the authorities. teach ’em while they’re young. Once they’ve been “accepted and legitimized” there’s no reason they shouldn’t be used to train kids to behave. After all, they’re benign, harmless and entirely safe, so why would anyone object?

These school police have never had to use deadly force, by the way. Only one of them carries a gun. So, the usual excuse is not in play here. Clearly, they are going to use them on the students.

H/T to BT
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Real Women

by digby

I just noticed this post by Attaturk making note that “I’ve Never Been To Me” was written 31 years ago. And I feel the need to share the lyrics of this epic song so you youngsters will realize just how rich and meaningful the musical experience of the baby boomers really was. If you thought it was all “Helter Skelter” and “My Generation” you were sadly mistaken:

Hey lady, you lady, cursing at your life
You’re a discontented mother and a regimented wife
I’ve no doubt you dream about the things you’ll never do
But, I wish someone had talked to me
Like I wanna talk to you…..

Oh, I’ve been to Georgia and California and anywhere I could run
I took the hand of a preacher man and we made love in the sun
But I ran out of places and friendly faces because I had to be free
I’ve been to paradise but I’ve never been to me

Please lady, please lady, don’t just walk away
‘Cause I have this need to tell you why I’m all alone today
I can see so much of me still living in your eyes
Won’t you share a part of a weary heart that has lived million lies….

Oh, I’ve been to Nice and the Isle of Greece while I’ve sipped champagne on a yacht
I’ve moved like Harlow in Monte Carlo and showed ’em what I’ve got
I’ve been undressed by kings and I’ve seen some things that a woman ain’t supposed to see
I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me

[spoken]
Hey, you know what paradise is?
It’s a lie, a fantasy we create about people and places as we’d like them to be
But you know what truth is?
It’s that little baby you’re holding, it’s that man you fought with this morning
The same one you’re going to make love with tonight
That’s truth, that’s love……

Sometimes I’ve been to crying for unborn children that might have made me complete
But I took the sweet life, I never knew I’d be bitter from the sweet
I’ve spent my life exploring the subtle whoring that costs too much to be free
Hey lady……
I’ve been to paradise, (I’ve been to paradise)
But I’ve never been to me

These were pretty early days in the modern feminist movement, so this wasn’t entirely unusual. But I do have to say that my female friends and I mocked this song relentlessly and with fervor even then. Unfortunately, I could see somebody covering it today and making it a hit again. Things haven’t really changed enough to make it a politically incorrect, laughable anachronism which is really sad.

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The Wilmington Factor

by dday

Yesterday Digby mentioned that John McCain’s campaign has a plan to visit a lot of grocery stores and paint Obama as a “job-killing machine” to even out the economic gap between the two. It may just work. Since the media largely stays out of policy fights, the facts of the issue, that McCain will continue Bush’s war on the middle class and Obama won’t, will be obscured, and McCain telling shoppers how to stretch their dollar could make him appear to be in touch with ordinary Americans’ struggles.

But there is a way to combat this, with a very powerful and straight-forward narrative, a story that happens to take place in the one swing state McCain absolutely can’t lose if he wants a shot at the Presidency.

At a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, Ohio last month, McCain was confronted by a woman about the closure of a DHL air park in Wilmington, Ohio, shuttering 8,600 jobs. McCain talked all sweet to the lady about job retraining and re-education, but basically said that there was nothing he could do to bring those jobs back to Wilmington.

Turns out that McCain’s own campaign manager, a registered lobbyist, had a hand in that closure.

Little known to [Wilmington] citizens, McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, played roles in the fate of DHL Express and its Ohio air park as far back as 2003. Back then, however, their actions that helped DHL and its German owner, Deutsche Post World Net, acquire the Wilmington operations resulted in expansion, not retraction.

In a private meeting Thursday, Wilmington residents will ask McCain for help in stopping DHL’s proposal to quit using the airport as a hub, which could cost more than 8,000 jobs. DHL says that it wants to stay in the freight business but that it can stem financial losses if it can put its packages aboard the planes of a rival – United Parcel Service – before delivering them in DHL trucks. UPS flies out of Louisville, Ky., so the proposed change would render the Wilmington airport unnecessary.

None of that was anticipated in 2003, when McCain and Davis, who was a Washington lobbyist before managing the presidential campaign, first got involved. Several Wilmington civic leaders said that what happened in 2003 created an economic gain for their community, lasting several years.

But because that gain, and now the prospective loss, came from the decisions of a foreign-owned corporation, look for some Democrats and labor to seek to tie Wilmington’s current troubles to McCain.

Essentially, Rick Davis brokered a deal to shift DHL’s operational control to a foreign corporation, who eventually cut the jobs in a cost-saving maneuver. Local leaders worried in 2003 about the impact of a merger on their community, and within a few years that’s exactly what happened. This has become an election-year issue in Ohio, and today McCain had to huff and puff and call for an investigation into the potential layoffs.

But it was clear five years ago that this could be a problem, and McCain’s backtracking clearly belies a major vulnerability. Obama has actually pounced on this, releasing a radio ad today.

July 9, 2008: Portsmouth, Ohio. Here’s what John McCain said about DHL’s plans to eliminate 8,200 Ohio jobs:

“I gotta look you in the eye and give you straight talk: I don’t know if I can stop it or not. Or if it will be stopped.”

But there’s something John McCain’s not telling you: It was McCain who used his influence in the Senate to help foreign-owned DHL buy a U.S. company and gain control over the jobs that are now on the chopping block in Ohio. And that’s not all: McCain’s campaign manager was the top lobbyist for the DHL deal…helped push it through. His firm was paid $185,000 to lobby McCain and other Senators.

Now 8,200 Ohioans are facing layoffs, and foreign-owned DHL doesn’t care.

“I gotta look you in the eye and give you straight talk…”

John McCain, same old politics, same failed policies.

That is pitch-perfect and the best ad of the cycle for the Obama campaign, hands-down. It’s also worth remembering that the election is not about one national campaign monitored by tracking polls, but 51 separate campaigns (the states and DC), all with their own parochial concerns. The Wilmington story will resonate throughout Ohio and probably elsewhere in the industrial Midwest, and it’s clear that the Obama campaign is banking on that.

On a conference call with reporters earlier today, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe made it clear that he thinks this issue will be haunting McCain’s efforts to win this state: “His appearances in Ohio were completely overshadowed by this. And by November 4 in the Cincinnati and Dayton markets this is something that is going to be known by every voter in this area.”

Plouffe also sees an opening to chip away at John McCain’s clean image. “He was there a month ago in this community and was asked a question about this DHL issue and did not say one word about his role in this or the role of his campaign manager,” Plouffe said. “That is the furthest thing from straight talk that we can imagine.”

McCain can visit as many grocery stores as he wants, but on policy, it’s very clear that his actions cost American jobs, indicative of the failed conservative leadership we’ve seen for decades. This is a simple story that fits nicely into the overall narrative Obama has been using already. DHL could be the Yucca Mountain of the Rust Belt.

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Make Republicans Mad

by digby

I’ve been writing a lot about police abuse and one of the things I keep forgetting to mention is that if you care about civil liberties and the threat of the American police state, one of the things you can do about it to become a card carrying member of the ACLU. If you support them, they can continue to do things like this:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion yesterday to hold Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio in contempt for disobeying a court order that would allow women prisoners in Maricopa County to obtain timely, safe, and legal abortions. In addition, today’s motion asks the court to provide additional safeguards for women prisoners seeking abortion care.

“Arizona courts have clearly ruled that prison officials cannot stand in the way of the medical needs of women prisoners,” said Brigitte Amiri, a staff attorney for the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “It’s regrettable that we need to take extra steps to ensure that Sheriff Arpaio follows the law.”

At issue in the original case was an unwritten Maricopa County Jail policy prohibiting jail officials from transporting a prisoner to obtain an abortion unless she first got a court order. In August 2005, the Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County, struck down the unwritten policy, holding that it violated women’s reproductive rights and served “no legitimate penological purpose.” The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld that decision; both the Arizona and the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

In May of 2008, prison officials defied the courts by continuing to enforce the unwritten policy when a woman prisoner, “Mary Roe,” requested transportation for an abortion. When Roe’s lawyer spoke with Sheriff Arpaio’s Deputy Chief, John McIntyre, who had been involved in the original case and knew the court’s decision, he failed to tell her that inmates must be transported for abortion care without a court order. It took the ACLU’s intervention to ensure that prison officials followed the law; still, their initial non-compliance delayed Roe’s abortion by four weeks.

“The courts have already confirmed our position that Arizona prison officials cannot ignore the medical needs of prisoners simply because they do not agree with the decision to end a pregnancy,” said Alessandra Soler Meetze, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona. “Now, given the disregard of the court ruling by Sheriff Arpaio and his staff, it appears that we need to spell out the law more clearly to protect future women detainees.”

The motion asks the court to require the jail to post signs in both English and Spanish informing prisoners of their right to be transported. In addition, all employees would be required to sign a statement acknowledging that they have been informed of the law.

Today’s case is Doe v. Arpaio, CV2004-009286. Lawyers on the case include Amiri and Talcott Camp with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, and Dan Pochoda of the ACLU of Arizona.

“America’s Sherrif” Arpaio is a psychopath. He shouldn’t be anywhere near police power. He’s very popular though in john McCain’s home state and it’s impossible to get him out of office. (Many Arizonans like these creepy, violent types, I guess.)

This action won’t do much to stop Arpaio’s reign of terror, but it’s necessary to protect these vulnerable women’s rights and the ACLU is there to do it. Good for them.

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The Rulz

by digby

I realize that everybody gets excited about sex scandals. It’s human nature. But it’s important to keep in mind that John Edwards didn’t even come close to winning the nomination and this is just another sleazy tabloid story with absolutely no serious significance other than the sickening spectacle of the prurient slavering of the mainstream media now that they have finally found their hook: it’s because he lied to the press about his sex life. How could he???

(Lying to the press about the anthrax killer and WMD in Iraq, well, not a problem.)

Let’s assume that the rules now say that denying an affair to the press is a cardinal offense that merits endless bloviating about dishonesty from a bunch of hypocritical celebrities who protect their “sources” when they lie about torture and war. Fine. But this guy actually may very well be president and they took his word for it:

I’m very disappointed in the New York Times piece. It’s not true. And I’ll be glad to respond to any questions you might have.

QUESTION: Senator, did you ever have any meeting with any of your staffers in which they would have intervened to ask you not to see Vicki Iseman or to be concerned about appearances of being too close to a lobbyist?

MCCAIN: No.
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QUESTION: No meeting ever occurred?

MCCAIN: No.

QUESTION: No staffer was ever concerned about a possible romantic relationship?

MCCAIN: If they were, they didn’t communicate that to me.

QUESTION: Did you ever have such relationship?

MCCAIN: No.

QUESTION: Senator, can you describe your relationship with Vicki Iseman?

MCCAIN: Friends. Seen her on occasions, particularly at receptions and fund-raisers and appearances before the committee. I have many friends in Washington who represent various interests and those who don’t, and I consider her a friend.

QUESTION: But do you feel like, in terms of your relationship with lobbyists in general, you were closer to her than with others?

MCCAIN: No, no.

I have many friends who represent various interests, ranging from the firemen to the police to senior citizens to various interests, particularly before my committee. And I had meetings with hundreds of them and various interests. And that was my job to do, to get their input.

And, obviously, people who represent interests are fine. That’s their constitutional right. The question is is whether do they have access or unwarranted influence. And certainly, no one ever has in my conduct of my public life and the conduct of my legislative agenda.

QUESTION: Senator?

MCCAIN: Yes, sir?

QUESTION: Did John Weaver, who is one of your former top aides — is quoted on the record saying that he had a conversation with her saying — basically telling her to butt out.

Do you not know of that conversation? Do you know why John Weaver would go on the record describing such a conversation?

MCCAIN: I did not and I don’t know anything about it.

Many people, especially in the press, jumped to defend McCain against the evil New York Times on that one and there has been no follow up. But considering how everyone is excusing the flogging of this Edwards story on the basis of the fact that he lied to the press, I’m not sure it’s in the country’s best interest not to ask McCain about this again and talk to the women herself. What if it comes out that it was true after he’s president? Why surely the press will be as honor bound to obsess over it as they were about Clinton and now Edwards, right? It’s not about the sex — it’s about the lying, remember? (They’ve been saying on a loop that John Edwards was a breath away from the presidency, after all and he got about four delegates.)

I personally don’t care who and of these people are sleeping with (especially McCain). Marriage is a very complicated institution and I don’t pass judgment on how others conduct theirs. I think this is all bullshit. But if the media has decided that even a failed politician who has no chance at the presidency can be subject to this kind of scrutiny, then they need to be a little bit more vigilant about pursuing someone who is the nominee of his party and has been very publicly linked to a specific woman by the paper of record, not the National Enquirer. If these are the rules, then this guy is a far more likely subject of scrutiny than Edwards.

Update: I just heard Barnicle say on Hardball that it was only “a matter of time before they ask Barack Obama and McCain — well McCain’s talked about his past — Barack Obama, if he’s ever had an affair.” IOKIYAJM.

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