Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The New Front

Andrew Kohut wrote in yesterdays’ New York Times:

While there were probably more votes of conscience in Congress on the bill than the public thinks, it is also pretty clear that the Christian conservative movement now has the clout on life-and-death issues to do what the National Rifle Association has done for years on gun control. Strengthened by the results of the November elections, the movement can convey to legislators that the intensity of their constituents’ beliefs is more important than the balance of national public opinion. Swayed by this reasoning, more than a few Democrats may be more interested in moving to the right on moral values than in staking out the middle of the political landscape.

One of the first big skirmishes in the culture wars was gun control. It seemed for a long time that the forces of progress and enlightened self interest would dictate that we would enact reasonable restrictions on the ownership of guns. Even the police backed such measures as a matter of self defense. I took it for granted for many years that common sense would prevail. But in the end the right won that battle hands down. It’s over. There isn’t even a discussion about it when a kid gets his hands on a bunch of guns and mows down ten people. Nothing. Just collateral damage, folks. The price we pay for the right to bear arms.

Ron Brownstein wrote today:

Does the “culture of life” extend to the victims of gun violence?

That’s the question critics are asking after President Bush’s contrasting responses to the two events dominating national attention this week.

Although Bush made a special trip back to Washington from vacation to sign legislation offering a new federal right of appeal to Terri Schiavo’s parents, the president and his aides have said almost nothing about the mass shooting in Red Lake, Minn. — the deadliest outbreak of school violence since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo.

The Minnesota tragedy has increased alarm among some school safety professionals about Bush’s efforts to eliminate funding for two major programs meant to prevent classroom violence, including a Clinton administration initiative to help schools hire more police officers.

“It makes absolutely no sense that at a time when we are talking about better protecting bridges, monuments, dams and even the hallways of Congress, that we are going backward in protecting the hallways of our schools,” said Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm.

Bush’s responses to the Schiavo case and the school shootings track with the preferences of two of his core constituencies.

Conservative Christians pressed Bush to intervene for Schiavo, while the National Rifle Assn. and other gun-owner groups generally look to minimize the relevance of political responses to mass shootings.

“It seems callous to talk about politics or to try to push a legislative agenda on the back of this heart-rending crime,” the NRA’s chief spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, said in response to the Minnesota shootings.

I wrote earlier that I had given up on that battle because of the bill of rights. While I think that most sentient beings would interpret the 2nd amendment to mean that members of the militia (a sort of national guard in today’s parlance) should have access to weapons, I came to believe that any “interpretation” of the bill of rights was a mistake. In light of the zealots on the other side I decided that it was best to interpret the bill of rights as literally as possible or risk having these nutcases fool around with the fundamentals.

And they would. As Eugene Volokh said the other day, he doesn’t see the BOR as sacred writ and it’s pretty clear that these radical Republican Theocrats don’t either. Normally, I would agree that enlightened people could look at the BOR and make changes to it as their culture evolved in different ways, so of course it isn’t a sacred writ. But clearly we are not enlightened. I say now, don’t touch it in any way.

The right had a very powerful weapon to gain the support of civil libertarians in the battle over gun rights but they don’t have use of it in this next one. In fact, they are attacking the Bill of Rights and just as fundamentally, the independent judiciary that unholds them this time. And they are being quite open about it. Here’s the smarmy Hugh Hewitt:

WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS, the latest in a string of judicial decrees that run contrary to the will of the representative branch? Here’s one reaction that arrived in my email account an hour after the 11th Circuit chose to ignore Congress:

We are no longer a nation of laws. We are a nation of lawyers. It doesn’t matter how carefully we frame a law. It doesn’t matter what sort of initiative the voters pass. The elite judges do whatever they want. . . .

Lest you think I’m some sort of ignorant red-neck, I have a Ph.D. in History from the University of California. I am deeply troubled by the rise of the rogue courts. Unless
there is radical change–revolutionary change–we are doomed.

I don’t share my correspondent’s pessimism, but I think his anger is very widespread and fuels not only the strong support for Senator Frist’s decision to break the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominees, but also a backlash against any Republican who sides with the Democrats on the coming rules change vote.

The polls don’t support their position in the Schiavo case, but neither did they support the NRA. It’s the zealousness of this constitutncy that will fuel their decision. Right now I am hearing that the zealots want to force Jeb Bush to send in troops to take custody of Schiavo and that he is thinking of doing it. (And BTW, any comparison between this and the Elian case is spurious. The Clinton administration was upholding the court’s decision while Jebbie would be going expressly against it. That’s something that normal people would call a constitutional crisis.)

If Democrats think that moving right on these alleged religious and “life” issues will help them, however, they are wrong. This is much bigger than the gun issue. If the GOP can destroy Americans’ faith in the judiciary as being capable of making unbiased, apolitical decisions, and if they succeed in intimidating judges the way they have intimidated the media, we will see the Bill of Rights radically reinterpreted. (And the big money boys will slither along behind collecting all the money.)

Eric Alterman wrote yesterday:

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

The media, particularly the cable “news” networks, are what they are. Infotainment shows for news and tabloid junkies. (I just saw a story on CNN about a cat that was fitted with artificial limbs. I’m not kidding.) This is a problem.

But it is also a problem that Democrats can’t seem to step forward and take the mantle of straight talking common sense on issues like these. We are intimidated on these social issues because we are buying into the frame the right wants us to use — “the Bible” and “life.” I think our frame for these social issues should be “the constitution” and “freedom.” And from that we defend the judiciary on the basis of the separation of powers (checks and balances)and we defend people’s right to live their lives freely on the basis of the Bill of Rights. Frank Luntz wants to use the symbolism of the constitution for his side and I think we are nuts to let him do it. They treat the constitution like toilet paper and plenty of people will see that if we just point it out to them, particularly if we repeatedly invoke the constitution as the means of protecting their right to live as they choose without interference from busy bodies.

While the Democrats may still be scarred by its alleged association with 60’s libertinism, as Noam Scheiber writes here, the Republicans are revealing themselves to be contemporary radicals who are far more threatening. Scheiber uses the example of Bush flouting the UN as illustrative of how they win even when they are losing. But these issues that affect everyday lives are substantially different. People may be willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on national security, about which they acknowledge that the experts in the government know more than they do. But on issues like social security and medical care they are many degrees more confident in their own experience and many degrees more skeptical of the government’s motives.

During the Clinton scandals, for instance, the Democrats came very close to taking back the congress in 1998 when the GOP went too far with their intrusion into his sex life. The public rejected the sanctimonious moralizing of the Republicans. Middle aged men having extra marital affairs is not shocking, nor is it something that most people believe is a public matter. Similarly, most people see this public spectacle of the Schiavo case for the political stunt that it is.

The problem is that Democrats failed last time to stake out for themselves the common sense argument with which people already agree and run on it. It’s a terrible mistake because this is the very basis of the culture war.

These people want to dictate how you live your private life. They want to tell you who you can marry, how to raise your kids, what religion to practice (and you must practice it) and what “values” you must hold. And they want to use the strong arm of the government to do it. Sure, there are problems in our society. Yes we are living in a fast paced society in which it is difficult to raise children and the world is changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep your balance sometimes. But most Americans don’t wish for others to make decisions for them about how to live their day to day lives, regardless of the challenges. It’s just not the American character.

That is not to say that we have no concept of the common good. Americans once came to a consensus that the government was the most democratic means of helping people to mitigate the pitfalls of capitalism and ensuring all of its citizens a fair shake. But we have never seen it as a means to legislate what people do behind closed doors or when making the most personal life decisions about their marriages, families or their own bodies. We believe that the government is far too clumsy a mechanism for such delicate matters. The individual reigns supreme over himself. All we ask is citizens pitch in for the national defense, the running of the government, social services to help the weakest among us and insure themselves against the risks they must take in a dynamic capitalistic system.

It’s just this simple: The Republican party wants to tell you how to live your personal life while they systematically remove all government cooperation in ameliorating the risks this fast paced world creates. The Democrats want the government to leave you to make your own personal decisions while having it help you mitigate the social and economic risk our fast paced world creates. It is a stark choice. There is no reason we cannot begin to make the affirmative case for ourselves on this basis.

I don’t know who it will be, but I think that the Democrats will win when they find a candidate who can speak in common sense terms to the American people about who we are and who they are. I think people are nervous about these guys but they don’t know if we are any better. They are yearning for some clarity. If we provide it, they will come.

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Welcome To Gilead

Have you heard the scoop on “The Cause USA”? You know, the weirdos with the tape over their mouths that say “LIFE.” Catch has the details.

The Cause USA is yet another organization churned out by the frothing evangelist Lou Engle, a man who has set up quite a cottage industry for himself by praying on teens (INTENTIONAL TYPO ALERT!) in the name of the you-know-who. I got dizzy googling all of the different organizations that have his name stamped on them, but he’s behind The Call, Bound4LIFE and the Elijah Revolution (no, not that Elijah, silly bunny) for starters.

Go over there and read the whole thing. Unbelievable.

As James Wolcott points out, we aren’t seeing any reporting being done on these fruitcakes because reporters believe that they have to be reverent toward all religious fanatics no matter what planet they are from.

Today I happened to hear Bob Franken “reporting” on the scene of the solemn procession in front of the hospice where demonstrators were attempting to bring Schiavo a cup of water, intending to be arrested. Franken, as hush-voiced as a golf commentator on the 18th hole awaiting a crucial putt, described one of the scenes of demonstrators stepping forward and being led away by sun-glassed police as “poignant.”

The scene? A father being arrested with three of his children. Another child, age three, was spared, left to the custody of her mother. The father and three children–all three under the age of sixteen–were gently handcuffed and taken away in squad cars.

There was nothing “poignant” about this moment of togetherness. It was idiotic and irresponsible. If Dad wants to get arrested and spend the night behind bars with Otis the Town Drunk, fine, but don’t drag the kids into it, particularly children that young. Let them stay home with gran’ma as Dad and Mom enjoy a second honeymoon in handcuffs. Franken’s sentimentalizing of this pious photo-op is more proof that the so-called MSM is so cautious about being respectful of religion that it refuses to recognize the raw face of fanaticism even when it’s filling the camera lens. Practically nothing is said about the backgrounds of the nutjob organizers of these sickly pseudo-events, leaving the impression that is simply People of Conscience converging on Florida to bear witness and catch some rays.

Working those refs really gets the job done. If they can put enough heat on the judiciary they’ll own this country.

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Urban Legends

Reggie Graves, a student at Red Lake High School, said he was watching a movie about Shakespeare in class Monday when he heard the gunman blast his way past the metal detector at the school’s entrance, killing a guard.

Then, in a nearby classroom, he heard the gunman say something to his friend Ryan: “He asked Ryan if he believed in God,” Graves said. “And then he shot him.”

*sigh*

Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains:

Thing is, Jeff Weise wasn’t imitating the actual Columbine shooters. He was imitating a pious urban legend (what back home we used to call a faith-promoting rumor) that sprang up in the wake of the Columbine shootings: that shooter Dylan Klebold asked Cassie Bernall whether she believed in God, and shot her when she said she did.

This story, in many variant versions, spread as fast as the internet would carry it. Cassie Bernall—a cute blonde who had a classic conversion-narrative history of turning to religion after dabbling in bush-league wickedness—was hailed as a martyr, and her story has since been repeatedly invoked to push the usual religious agendas. It’s been especially useful for WASP Chinos who want to think of themselves as being cruelly persecuted for their faith, but who are inconveniently short on evidence that this has ever happened.

Trouble is, the Cassie Bernall incident didn’t happen anything like the stories describe it, and the shooters weren’t targeting Christians. As has gradually become clear, the media coverage of Columbine was notably bad, and the Cassie Bernall story was the single most egregious example of slovenly journalism in the whole mess.

[…]

I’m sure Jeff Weise’s behavior will be trotted out as further proof that Christians are coming in for persecution. If I’m right, that claim will be purest codswallop. What this tragic incident really teaches us is that kids who are exposed to non-reality-based right-wing Christian propaganda may subsequently commit horrid acts of violence.

Yes. Despite the fact that Weise was evidently imitating an urban legend, I doubt very seriously that the press will report it that way or that the religious zealots will take the proper lesson from it. They are too busy trying to keep a dead woman’s body alive right now to notice this latest example of their horrible persecution at the hands of liberals, but they will eventually. They must continually gather evidence that liberals are satanically omnipotent or they lose their raison d’etre.

This reminds me of an e-mail I got from one of my trolls:

Michael Jackson is a special case to be sure, but so are the 90 million in Africa who are expected to get AIDS. What is special is that both are, in large part, victims of liberal Democrats. It seems that neither was taught Republican family values and so both embarked into the brave new sexual world that conservatives had long warned against.

Yes, Jackson was born into a very odd and abusive family, and with incredible talent. He was given neither education, love, nor sensible religious values. And, lastly, he apparently was also born with a tendency to be an effeminate, homosexual, pedophile. But perhaps most importantly, he was born into a feminist, homosexual, liberal, tolerant culture which wanted to make room for the entire rich and sophisticated panoply of diverse lifestyles that the liberal mind could cook up. Johnny had two dads, Suzy had two Moms, Michael was boldly liberal androgynous, and it was ok that 10,000 years of human history had been instantly reversed, or so it seemed.

In fact, Mr. Jackson at one point was on the cover of Time Magazine where he was hailed as the liberal symbol of the “New Androgyny”. None other than Elizabeth Taylor testified to his glorious combination of male and female qualities. A raft of feminists chimed in that he represented the death of traditional macho men and the dawn of a glorious, liberated new sexual future. Some men did seem to cringe, but mostly in intimidated silence, at the thought of lipstick and makeup. Ok, so the liberal attempt to rewrite human cultural history in an instant didn’t quite work out as expected, and even liberals seem to have drawn the line at pedophilia, but other aspects of the attack on the traditional Republican family continued unabated. The American divorce rate is 50%, nearly 50% of all American children grow up in broken homes, and we are paralyzed on the world stage about seeming intolerant toward even Africa’s genocidal sexual culture.

But now it may be time for liberals to punish Mr. Jackson for his excessive liberalism. It is hard though. When a priest in Boston (Father John Geoghan) was send to prison for pedophilia, guards noticed that other inmates developed a predilection for urinating on his bed. In time he was then transferred to another prison, for his own safety, whereupon he was promptly stomped to death by another group of very intolerant fellow inmates. Very sadly, there was almost no reaction anywhere to our inability to make the proscribed punishment fit the crime. If Mr. Jackson does go to jail we can only hope the state’s proscribed punishment will be administered, and not usurped by an insane, blood thirsty, liberal mob.

A liberal mob? Yes, a liberal mob indeed, and Hillary Clinton knows this grotesque truth all to well and seems quite happy to exploit it. Convicts are liberal Democrats as certainly as soldiers are Republicans. Her very recent “make every vote count” legislation seeks to enfranchise ex-cons because she knows the concentration of liberalism among ex-cons is as great as it is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It seems liberalism is everywhere: in Michael Jackson, Africa, Hillary Clinton, and in prison. And everywhere it is a horror.

I don’t have the energy to deconstruct this incomprehensible mish mash. (I’m intrigued by the fact that liberals are responsible for the fact that Africans are not taught Republican family values, but whatever.) I think this is a pretty good representation of the cognitive ability of many of the right wing, so it’s pretty clear that we are up against something that appeals to reason are not going to affect. It would be really nice, however, if the media could refrain from enabling their persecution fantasies as they did with the Cassie Bernal story and this Terry Schiavo circus. I’m not holding my breath.

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Whose Family Is It Anyway?

One of my favorite readers (you know who you are) posited an interesting supposition in an e-mail last night that has been obliquely addressed today by Charles Krauthamer. My friend wondered if some of the lizard brain activity on the right surrounding this Schiavo issue might be wingnut parental reaction to seeing their children reject their conservative views. I know that it has been a bone of contention in my family for decades.

Krauthamer says this:

In this case, the loved ones disagree. The husband wants Terri to die; the parents do not. The Florida court gave the surrogacy to her husband, under the generally useful rule that your spouse is the most reliable diviner of your wishes: You pick your spouse and not your parents, and you have spent most of your recent years with your spouse and not your parents.

The problem is that although your spouse probably knows you best, there is no guarantee that he will not confuse his wishes with yours. Terri’s spouse presents complications. He has a girlfriend, and has two kids with her. He clearly wants to marry again. And a living Terri stands in the way.

Now, all of this may be irrelevant in his mind. He may actually be acting entirely based on his understanding of his wife’s wishes. And as she left nothing behind, the courts have been forced to conclude, on the basis of his testimony, that she would prefer to be dead.

That is why this is a terrible case. The general rule of spousal supremacy leads you here to a thoroughly repulsive conclusion. Repulsive because in a case where there is no consensus among the loved ones, one’s natural human sympathies suggest giving custody to the party committed to her staying alive and pledging to carry the burden themselves.

First of all, a living Terri doesn’t stand in the way. Michael Schiavo could have divorced her years ago if he just wanted to move on. He says that he believes he is carrying out his wife’s wishes and will not abandon her to live as she said she would never have wanted to live. The rule of spousal “supremacy” does not lead to a repulsive conclusion at all, even to Krauthamer, who like 87% of the country says he would want his feeding tube removed if he were in Schiavo’s position. In many people’s minds the repulsive outcome is this ghoulish need to force this poor woman’s body to carry on when it is clear that it is nothing more than an emotional crutch for her parents.

More importantly, I think that Krauthamer may be expressing the views of plenty of “conservative” people who want to control their children’s lives long past the time they are legally and morally allowed to do so. That particular kind of control is often the default temperamental style of right wingers. They wish to control everything, particularly the people around them.

Krauthamer goes on to conclude that we have no way of knowing if Schiavo is really braindead (which puts him the same camp as the other Republican doctors who have discarded their fealty to reason for political reasons) but he also rightly says that the Florida courts upheld the law as we know it. His solution is to change the law:

There is no good outcome to this case. Except perhaps if Florida and the other states were to amend their laws and resolve conflicts among loved ones differently — by granting authority not necessarily to the spouse but to whatever first-degree relative (even if in the minority) chooses life and is committed to support it. Call it Terri’s law. It would help prevent our having to choose in the future between travesty and tragedy.

Essentially, he’s saying that parents should have a veto over the spouse in these issues. (If it were the spouse who wanted to use extraordinary measure to keep the patient alive, current law would already suffice.) Therefore, he’s promoting the idea that there are cases in which your “first degree relatives” have the power of life and death over you in circumstances where your spouse disagrees. What a concept.

I had a colleague years ago who was in a terrible car accident and severely brain damaged at the age of 33. He had been estranged for years from his abusive family and had been more or less raised by others to whom he was very close. He was quite wealthy and had left his surrogate family all of his money in his will. He was also unmarried and did not have a living will, although those who knew him said that he had expressed many times that he would not want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures. His estranged family were extremely religious and insisted that he be kept alive at all costs. Being “first degree” relatives they had the right to make that decision. I lost track of the situation after five years or so, but at that time he was still living in a persistent vegetative state. The money ran out and he was put on medicaid. I heard that his family rarely visited.

I know that this doesn’t track exactly with the Schiavo case and that there could have been no legal rights conferred on the adopted family short of a durable power of attorney. It does, however, illustrate why it is important that adults be allowed to create their own families through marriage. For some people their experience with their parents is a joyful, lifelong relationship. But for others, adulthood marks the beginning of their freedom and separation from people who do not share their values. When they marry, their choice of spouse is often in conflict with their parent’s wishes. If people truly value marriage they must also honor the fact that the people involved made a decision to create a new family when they did it. That new family is the one that must take precedence in situations like this.

My right wing dad doesn’t come from the religious end of the spectrum; he’s more of the old fashioned John Birch and racist variety. He doesn’t go along with this Schiavo thing largely because he’s had to face these decisions with my mother (who died of cancer) and now himself. Like many Republicans, he’s remarkably pragmatic about these things. However, if I had married someone of another race or were gay, I think it is entirely possible that he would have easily stepped into a situation like this and demanded that he be allowed to make the decision. He would never have acknowledged that a person of whom he disapproved had the right to make decisions on his child’s behalf. He’s just that kind of man.

I would hate to think that my Dad (who, while he is a political abomination it should also be said has his good points) would have been given any legal standing to interfere in my family for any reason. That would go against my family values in the most important ways I can imagine.

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Just A Bunch Of Numbers

“Just last week, DeLay marshaled a budget resolution through the House of Representatives that would cut funding for Medicaid by at least $15 billion, threatening the quality of care for people like Terri Schiavo.”

DeLay spokesman Dan Allen fired back: “The fact that they’re tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality.”

Yes, the medicaid budget has nothing at all to do with reality. It’s not a “life issue” It’s a process. Sorry. Carry on.

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Vomito

Via TBOGG

I’ve been waiting for this:

THE AGONY OF HOLY WEEK [Peter Robinson]
As Terri Schiavo is being starved to death, reports indicate, the successor of St. Peter is finding it impossible to hold down his food. A young woman, martyred by the culture of death. An old man who has poured out his life combatting it.

Sitio. I thirst.

Posted at 10:24 AM

TBOGG notes

Meanwhile, the Brides of Jesus ponder whether the the Little Black Cocktail Dress will be appropriate for both mourning and wake binge drinking.

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Living Forever

There are many fine articles all over the left blosphere about the social security trustee report written by people far more conversant with the details than I. So I’m not going to weigh in on the particulars except to note that I think I understand why the projected death rates have inexplicably gone down precipitously from last year to this.

Now that we are learning to respect the culture ‘o life (as Dear Leader so endearingly puts it) we can expect that in the future no one will be allowed to have life support removed. The actuaries are simply factoring in the probability that many of the people who could be expected to shuffle off their mortal coil when their brains have liquified will be kept alive by artificial means for decades longer than expected just last year.

Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that their private accounts do well in the market …

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The Poor Dears

Atrios has already issued the call to action on the sensitive, delicate Democrats of the NDN who were swooning over the coarse, indecorous criticism they received for voting for the Bankruptcy bill, so I’ll just send you there for the information.

However, I’d like to make one little suggestion. When you obstreperous partisans write your e-mails you might want to ask them what exactly they mean by this:

“The center [CAP] could have made the argument on the merits, but it chose to do so in a personal way,” said Schiff, one of roughly a dozen lawmakers who attended the meeting.

“The [NDC] wanted to say, ‘We’re all under the same flag here, and let’s not forget that,’” he said

[…]

“The unfortunate thing about the e-mail is that it questioned the good faith of the Democrats who support the bankruptcy bill. Whenever you question the good faith, that’s problematic,” he [Artur Davis(D-Ala)] said. “But I certainly don’t blame John for that e-mail. I don’t think it was authorized.”

“Certainly there is a disagreement over the bankruptcy bill,” he said.

(Oh my stars, it was rude to get so personal and all, wasn’t it? How ill-bred.)

Without upsetting their fragile nerves, when you send your e-mails you might want to ask politely why any Democrat would think that the bankruptcy bill would be good for their constituents who are, after all, who they actually represent. Are they creating jobs by doing this? Are they creating a more dynamic economy? Why would it be “pro-business”, as Democrats define that term, to enable just one business — the credit card companies — to reap ever higher profits while they charge usurious interest rates to average Americans?

If it isn’t that they’ve whored themselves out to such an extent that they are now the credit card companies’ bitches, (pardon my french!) what exactly is the reason they support it?

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Idle Hands

The Poorman has a copy of the House agenda for Wednesday. Our representatives are very busy these days.

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Visual Aids

Via Media Matters, here is a CNN chart showing the partisan differences in the Schiavo case.

WTF? Did Daryn Kagan have her boyfriend design that for her last night while she was changing into something more comfortable?

This isn’t really surprising. Here is one issue about which the media seem to have absolutely no interest in what the public thinks. Usually, they’d be pulling polls out of every orifice to try to explain things. Not this time. Eric Boehlert discusses this in Salon:

Imagine how differently the televised debate would have unfolded over the past few days if journalists had simply done their job and asked Terri Schiavo’s pro-life proponents why an overwhelming percentage of Americans disagree with them about this case. Indeed, polls taken over the past two years show that Americans are adamant that the spouse, and not the parents, should decide on a loved one’s right to die. And in the past week, an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — of Americans polled by ABC News and the Washington Post said that if they were in the same state as Terri Schiavo, they too would want their feeding tube removed.

Just as every judge who has heard the Schiavo case so far has ruled in Michael’s favor, so has every poll taken shown that the majority of the public supports the husband’s position. In survey after survey dating from 2003 to the present, asked who should have the final right-to-die decision, the majority of Americans have answered: the spouse. From national polls (e.g., ABC News/Washington Post, 65-25; and Fox News, 50-31) to statewide polls (e.g., KING-TV in Washington, 67-19; and St. Petersburg Times in Florida, 75-13) to unscientific, interactive polls (e.g., CNN, 65-26; and MSNBC, 63-37), the response has always been the same. A 2003 poll by CNN/USA Today had a similar result: Eighty percent agreed that a spouse should be allowed to decide whether to end the life of a person in a persistent vegetative state.

Which is why it has been so startling to find so few mentions by major news outlets of the recent polls regarding the Schiavo controversy. For instance, last Friday at 11 a.m., a Fox News reporter referenced a poll from earlier this month conducted by Fox that found that a strong majority — 59 to 24 percent — would remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube if they were her guardian. According to TVeyes, a digital, around-the-clock television monitoring service, that was the last time a Fox News reporter mentioned Fox’s own poll. Then again, that’s typical of Fox, which on Friday night’s “Hannity and Colmes” invited six strident pro-life advocates to argue why Congress should intervene on Schiavo’s behalf. No guests were booked to appear on the show and argue Michael Schiavo’s side.

But perhaps even more peculiar are ABC News and the Washington Post, which, like Fox News, commissioned their own poll regarding the matter, and yet, again like Fox, seemed to downplay the findings once the story became a political one. On March 15, when ABC devoted its “Nightline” program to the Schiavo story, host Chris Bury informed the audience, “A new ABC News poll suggests that a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, believe that husbands and wives should have the final say in family disputes over life support. Only 25 percent say parents should make that decision. And when asked, ‘Would you want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo’s condition?’ an overwhelming number, 87 percent, said no.”

The article goes on to show how the papers have ignored this finding as well. It might have been helpful, however, if certain pundits had their assistants and interns google the question because they might not sound so dumb. Here’s what passes for insight on this issue from the media sages, Chris Matthews and Tim Russert last night:

RUSSERT: It becomes this symbol that becomes irresistible to the politicians and then irresistible to the media. And I‘m quite interested to see how this plays out with the voters, with the public. What are they thinking?

And, again, I go back to the point of, I‘m so intrigued as to why a Democratic senator wouldn‘t stand up and say, I don‘t know the specific details of Terri Schiavo. I do know it was heard in court after court, judge after judge in the state of Florida. But I also know that these kinds of issues and these kinds of decisions are being made every day in practically every hospital in every state in the union.

And all of us in our own families have probably been affected by this in one way, shape or form.

MATTHEWS: I can tell you, when you have an Alzheimer‘s victim in your family, like my mom, you know all about this territory. It‘s terrible territory. It‘s murky, morally murky in terms of medical science, and yet, in the end, in many of these cases, where there is a supreme almost diminution of human life, that eventually, you stop feeding, you stop hydrating. These cases happen all the time, as you said.

Let me ask you a question. This is a tough one. Are we living in an era where there is no middle ground?

RUSSERT: That is a great question, because life is filled with complexity and contradiction. We live in middle ground.

MATTHEWS: But these parties don‘t seem to operate in middle ground.

I was thinking, if somebody came on the floor last night and said, let‘s use some common sense here. If this woman is a vegetable, let‘s leave it up to her husband. If she is not, if she has emotional life, let‘s hold back and restrict it. But nobody seemed to be talking about the clinical questions.

RUSSERT: Yes. The phrase we all grew up with, middle America.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

RUSSERT: That represents to me where most Americans really are. They live in the middle. And, on some issues, they‘re conservative, right of center, some left of center. They‘re not rabid ideologues.

Russert wonders what people are thinking even though there have been numerous polls taken in just the last few days telling him that a vast majority oppose the Republican right wing on this issue. There’s no splitting the difference. It’s clear. Even a majority of Republicans oppose it, for gawds sake.

Matthews wonders why nobody makes the common sense argument in this case. But the majority of the AMERICAN PEOPLE already hold the common sense position that Tim and Chris are advocating and the Democrats clearly are on the side of that common sense position. And who is backing this macabre sideshow? The Religious Right and the craven Republican leadership.

Don’t expect these bozos to know that, however. Or care. They are too busy toasting each other’s pumpkinheaded faux-populism to even look into it. Convinced of their intimate connection with the common man, these millionaire pundits proclaim from on high that this is a fiery partisan issue and then bemoan the loss of comaraderie in the senate cloakroom. Apparently, they just don’t realize that the common men and women on both sides of the political aisle hold them both in utter contempt. You want common ground? I think I’ve found one issue even Hinderocket and I can agree upon. Kumbaya.

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