Wingnuts And My Uterus

Casey, I thought you were pulling a cruel joke on us. But you aren't.

Just how crazy can this country go before people rise up, throw everyone out, and demand change?

Or are the people of this country that crazy in the first place? I don't believe so, but if they are, I want my own marriage - that to Uncle Sam - annulled immediately. Not divorce, annulment.

And if we can demand that women get married before having children, we can also demand that men not have any sex out of wedlock. It's playboys who impregnate dozens of women, and refuse to care for the resulting children, who are the REAL problem.

Casey,

And don't forget, this is the party of those people who are refusing to give out personal pharmacuetic care to women (birth control!)

**gee...by the way, ain't we blushing today?

Ok..the constitution called for presidential elections every 4 years.

But didn't the constitution call for fair elections specifically--fair and democratic?

Didn't they also give us a FAIR AND FREE Pree to be the watchdog of the government--to help the people know what their elected officials have done and why they should or should not be in office?

Each day, we learn more and more about the election fraud, suppression, and basic undemocratic election system in place in 04.

Each day, we learn more and more about media propraganda, media REFUSAL to tell us news that would have hurt Bush (like Time refused to tell us about Plame). VERY Undemocratic wouldn't you say?

SO why shouldn't we--as a whole movement--say that the 04 elections are NULL AND VOID since they were not DEMOCRATIC and they VIOLATED the law of the land through election and media corruption. IF those are corrupt-then the democracy is already gone; why settle for waiting 3 more years.

I think we should head out and protest in front of tv stations from now until Nov. 2,nd with signs to that effect. Saying HERES the facts, vote for kerry Nov 2nd 2005.

Democracy wasn't intened to be hit or miss, but they selected GWB in 00, they used propaganda and election crimes in 04 why should we let that last election stand? We should have big signs that say that too.

Maybe the strategy of writing to the media isn't quite the right strategy--we should stand IN FRONT of the media bring our own cameras and use the local free access channels and the internet to keep spreading the word.

Besides, the pResident thinks he'll site executive privilage to hide facts about her. If that's the case, he shouldn't have nominated someone who needed to be covered up.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1827428

Posted by Casey Morris at October 5, 2005 12:46 AM

And if the the Congress REALLY wanted to give women full ADULT status instead of the childhood status currently implied because they still have to regulate the uteruses of females (which takes responsible decision-making out of the hands of the very people who have uteruses), they'd repeal the original 19th century law that outlawed safe and legal abortion in the first place!!!

A law, BTW, which I hold responsible for the death of my grandmother who carried a dead and decomposing fetus inside of her for three months before it killed her... and my grandmother, the family, the doctor, and everyone knew the fetus was dead. What's to abort if the "baby" is already dead and the mother's body isn't spontaneously aborting the dead body naturally (miscarriage)?!? The death certificate for the 'baby boy' fetus says "of six months gestation, but carried to term" and the cause of death was "toxemia of pregnancy" (old term for pre-eclampsia). If she had been a cow or a horse, the vet would have performed surgery as soon as he knew the fetus was dead and there were no signs of a miscarriage....

As far as "indelicate" questions put to Ms. Miers... why not? She lacks personal experience, and one wants to know something about how she will make potential life-and-death decisions about other people if/when she's approved by the Senate, and we need to know whether or not she will treat her peers (other women) as adults, and not like children who can't possibly make an adult decision that will affect their own bodies....

And since Nitwit isn't going to turn over papers the full Senate need to see prior to questioning Miers, the only way we can figure out whether or not she would make a good SCOTUS judge is by simply asking questions, indelicate or not.

Posted by: NonnyO at October 5, 2005 06:36 AM

good point nonnyo and goodmorning too!

Well, one conservative senator says he'll fight her nomination.

http://www.rawstory.com/

Maybe we should email him Casey's 'offensive' blog articles for pointers.

Posted by: Suz at October 5, 2005 04:29 AM

One of the DU links was to the below story (and if Garbus was right, withholding papers by pulling the "executive privilege" reason is, in the SCOTUS nominee cases, illegal). There is a photo of Miers with Nitwit the day he was shown the Aug. 6, 2001 PDB memorandum that said 'bin Laden was determined to attack' on the DU blog, too, so Miers is up to her neck in all the stuff that's been illegal in this administration since day one. Sorry for the length of the below story, but I couldn't figure out how to edit it and still have it make sense. It's important to read the whole legal reasoning....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20051005/cm_huffpost/008342

Martin Garbus: Attorney-Client Privilege vs. the Constitution
Martin Garbus Tue Oct 4

During the nomination process of the new Chief Justice the White House, on the grounds of attorney client privilege, withheld documents John Roberts created while working for the Solicitor General. There is every reason to believe they will do the same for the new nominee. It was unconstitutional then and equally unconstitutional with respect to Harriet Miers. But it is even more important now. At least there was some public record to see what John Roberts thought prior to his appointment -- with Ms. Miers there is none.

Clause 2, Section of Article II of the Constitution states the President has the sole power to nominate, but the right to confirm is to be shared by the President and Senate. The Constitution says the President "by and with the ... consent of the Senate, shall appoint ... Judges of the Supreme Court."

As Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper no. 67 the constitutional provision concerning the appointment of Supreme Court justices and other designated federal offices means "the ordinary power of appointment is confided to the President and the Senate jointly." Hamilton refers to the Senate's power concerning appointment as a "concurrent agency with the President." James Madison and the other framers were in agreement.

The Senate's constitutional right to access to information the President has is essential, and thus constitutionally mandated. The Senate cannot exercise its obligation without it. The law is clear -- there can be no meaningful consent if the consenting power has no knowledge of the facts.

The attorney-client privilege cannot override obligations put into the Constitution by the framers. The high court has dealt with this issue before. Chief Justice Warren Burger, on July 24, 1974, denied former President Richard Nixon's claim that executive privilege permitted him to withhold tapes and to refuse to go before a grand jury.

Richard Nixon gave two reasons. His first argument was that the separation of powers protected the Executive from the surveillance of the judiciary and his second that "the valid need for protection of communication between high government offices and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties." His argument was rejected by a unanimous 8-0 Supreme Court." (Associate Justice William Rehnquist abstained).

The Court found that neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the courts. But, the Court acknowledged, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, the Court said "we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material."

The Court noted that normally a privilege does apply in criminal proceeding "to disclose what has been revealed in professional confidence." But, the Court said, the privilege does not apply, absent national security interests" because "one impediment that an absolute, unqualified privilege would place on the way is the primary constitutional duty of the total branch to do justice in criminal prosecutions would plainly conflict with the function of the courts under Article III of the Constitution."

Chief Justice Burger quoted precedent includes a 1953 case:

"It may be possible to satisfy the court, from all the circumstances of the case, that there is a reasonable danger that compulsion of the evidence will expose military matters which, in the interest of national security, should not be divulged. When this is the case, the occasion for the privilege is appropriate, and the court should not jeopardize the security which the privilege is meant to protect by insisting upon an examination of the evidence, even by the judge alone, in chambers." After a full review of the law, the Chief Justice said:

"No case of the Court, however, has extended this high degree of deference to a President's generalized interest in confidentiality. Nowhere in the Constitution, as we have noted earlier, is there any explicit reference to a privilege of confidentiality, yet to the extent this interest relates to the effective discharge of a President's powers, it is constitutionally based." Here too, as in the Nixon case, the claim of privilege conflicts with the Constitutional powers given another branch of government, the legislature. The need for a rule of law, said the Supreme Court requires that the privilege must yield to "develop all the relevant facts rather than uphold the privilege claim, which was in derogation of the search for truth."

Much has been made of the fact that other nominees did not have judicial experience. But they were public figures, governors, senators and academics who had openly expressed their views on a wide variety of areas, including those subjects that would ultimately find their way to Court. Ms. Miers worked for The White House for the last ten years, and prior to that with the State Lottery Commission and prior to that she was in private practice.

Justice Burger asked if there "is a public good transcending the normally predominant privilege of utilizing all rational means for ascertaining the Truth." He found, in the Nixon case, that the public good is served by the denial of the privilege -- that "everyman's evidence" should be made available to the people. That rationale resulted in the denial of the Nixon White House's claim. That same rule governs the Bush White House as well.

The denial of information in the case of Ms. Miers is even more troubling than Nixon's refusal. More is at stake. It is not only that Ms. Miers is replacing, probably for the next twenty years, the swing vote on the Court. A president sits for 4 years -- some justices have sat nearly 40 years. We had had 43 presidents but only 17 chief justices. More important is the setting of the precedent that any President can withhold information about an unknown nominee. The people, and the Senate, cannot be forced to make blind judgments about the most important members of one of the three branches of government. It allows the Executive to totally dominate two of the three branches of government. It makes the future nine members of the Court responsive to one man (or woman). It is not an overstatement to say it is the end of this democracy as we know it.

Ms. Miers' ultimate client, when working for the President, are the people of the United States. Constitutionally, it is to the people to whom she was ultimately responsible, and the Senate, the elected body of the people has the right to know what the President knows so it can exercise its constitutional power of consent.

Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Interesting argument for/against polling. ADS is trying to get people to donate to find out if people want Bush impeached.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/After_pollsters_say_they_wont_raise_1004.html

Casey, here's your bill.

http://www.southernvoice.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=2752

Church ties could shed light on Miers’ thinking
Faith in Jesus has shaped court pick’s personal values

By Michael Grunwald, Jo Becker and John Pomfret
The Washington Post
Oct. 5, 2005

One evening in the 1980s, several years after Harriet Miers dedicated her life to Jesus Christ, she attended a lecture at her Dallas evangelical church with Nathan Hecht, a colleague at her law firm and her on-and-off boyfriend. The speaker was Paul Brand, a surgeon and the author of "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," a best-selling exploration of God and the human body.

When the lecture was over, Miers said words Hecht had never heard from her before. "I'm convinced that life begins at conception," Hecht recalled her saying. According to Hecht, now a Texas Supreme Court justice, Miers has believed ever since that abortion is "taking a life."

I know she is pro-life," said Hecht, one of the most conservative judges in Texas. "She thinks that after conception, it's not a balancing act -- or if it is, it's a balancing of two equal lives."

Hecht and other confidants of Miers all pledge that if the Senate confirms her nomination to the Supreme Court, her judicial values will be guided by the law and the Constitution. But they say her personal values have been shaped by her abiding faith in Jesus, and by her membership in the massive red-brick Valley View Christian Church, where she was baptized as an adult, served on the missions committee and taught religious classes. At Valley View, pastors preach that abortion is murder, that the Bible is the literal word of God and that homosexuality is a sin -- although they also preach that God loves everybody.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to comment on Hecht's recollection yesterday but said President Bush did not ask Miers her personal views on abortion or any other issue that may come before the court. "A nominee who shares the president's approach of judicial restraint would not allow personal views to affect his or her rulings based on the law," Perino said.

Some religious conservatives have expressed deep dissatisfaction with the Miers nomination, grumbling that she has never taken public stands on hot-button social issues. But her friends point to Valley View as evidence that she is cut from conservative cloth. They say she's not a "holy roller" who flaunts her religion on her sleeve but she lives her faith as a born-again Christian.

more... http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9593793/

Posted by: Suz at October 5, 2005 06:43 AM

Good Morning to you, too! :-)

I should be offline because it's raining badly here (flash flood warnings out, and snow predicted for the northwest corner of the state - Yikes!).... but Casey's thread headers have made very good points, and I agree with those points! I'm sick to death of men (and some women) micromanaging women's bodies and legally treating women like brainless idiots who can't make responsible decisions about their own bodies!!!

Nitwit wants to mollify everyone and appoint a woman. That's condescending as hell. Just because she's a woman doesn't mean she's qualified for the SCOTUS post. On the grounds that she's a confidante of Nitwit and part of his inner circle of loyal "fans" makes her uniquely UNqualified. Nitwit's administration is FULL of UNqualified cronies, and the one thing we do NOT need right now is yet another UNqualified crony cluttering up the landscape in DC who will pardon his crimes if/when any resulting law suits get to the SCOTUS in the future, as I'm sure they likely will. Both Roberts and Miers (if/when she's approved) would be ethically challenged if they did not recuse themselves in any cases involving Nitwit or members of his inner circle of cronies who have mucked things up with illegalities since 2000. For Nitwit to nominate Miers is to stack the court in his favor with loyal sycophants, and pleasing the fundies be damned (altho I'm sure that figured in his consideration in a minor way).

(Eeeooww, Miers really thinks Nitwit's the most intelligent man she's ever met?!? Miers needs to get out and meet new people!!! With 'friends' like Nitwit who have her out clearing his land with him, who needs enemies?!?)

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 06:52 AM

Last one out of Indiana, shut the lights...

ohm and here's your reminder to check the front page for the Five Minutes...

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Please raise your hand if you think for one second there will be any relevant questioning of Mier's "views" during her confirmation hearings?

Please raise your hand if you think there will suddenly be anything other than the formalities of going through the confirmation process?

Lot's of nice questions... lot's of smiles... lot's of commending Mier's life work and accomplishments...

This is just another in a long string of explosive issues that have come and gone that are deserving of massive protest from the opposition, and instead we'll get another warmed over procedural hearing, she'll sail unencumbered on to confirmation, and then God knows what.

These confirmation hearings have become a joke, but then again, so how has our government and our country, except I know very few people who are laughing these days.

Confirmed: Just another day at the orifice. Happy Hump Day.

p.s. Vancouver named worlds most livable city, 4th year in a row.

Monkey,

I have been to Vancouver before and thought it was one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. I have seriously talked with my wife and children about moving there if the situation continues to deteriorate in this country. I have gone so far as to search for property via the internet. No surprise, it is an incredibly expensive place to live.

On the subject regarding strict literalists who judge the laws passed by legislatures, let's imagine that the proposed Indiana law is passed by the Indiana legislature. Judges who are strict constitutionalists (and can conveniently ignore The Bill of Rights) can not rule against it as it had already been made into law by a state legislature. Surely knowing how a candidate feels about that proposed law is critical to knowing how they would rule on the bench. The candidates that claim they can't discuss such hypotheticals don't have the courage to stand up for their own convictions. As I said yesterday, ANY QUESTION is fair game.

Karen,

I don't know if it is just me, but none of the quicktime videos on the gallery page will play. Has anybody else had that problem?

Vancouver is such a beautiful city and only 2-1/2 hours north of Seattle. Wonder what the job market is like?

Seattle is known as open-minded but they are passing the most strict laws for adult dancers of any city. I wonder if too many fundamentalist men from the suburbs were frequenting because same articles said none of us in the city care one way or the other. Seattle has four, Portland (smaller) has more than forty. Vancouver BC has a nude beach. (not to be confused with Vancouver, WA!) It could be Copenhagen.

Strange. Most of the other livable cities were in Canada and Australia, then Vienna and Zurich.
The Canadian looney is the highest in 13 years, Canada has an eleven billion budget surplus and in Alberta each citizen is getting a check because of surplus money.

Vancouver named worlds most livable city, 4th year in a row.
Posted by: monkey at October 5, 2005 07:28 AM

Vancouver, Britich Columbia??? Or Vancouver, WA?

I've been to Vancouver, BC years ago, as well as the island across from there via the ferry. It's a beautiful city, and the people are wonderfully friendly! If you've never been there, I highly recommend going when you get the chance....

Posted by: oncall at October 5, 2005 09:05 AM

Hmmm. I know others using both PC's and Mac's have successfully viewed the movies. I just went and looked at two of them myself and it all seems to be working.

Meet me in IRC when you have time.

Texas S. Court Justice Hecht was interviewed this week about Mier's and said when he dated her he found her to be a real tough Girl. Don't know anyone that calls a 60 year old woman a Girl, at least in my lifetime. But Hecht's archiac views of the world seem to mirror Ms. Mier.

In fact Hecht should be called as witness to testify at her confirmation hearing so we can open up the real philospohy of Ms. Miers something I am sure will not be revealed .

I posted on Monday night about Ms. Mier's old law firms close ties to Bob Perry the chief architect of the Swiftboat ads and to Tom DeLay's defense fund.

A letter to the Houston Chronicle editors this morning writes in about a lady named Merrie Spaeth, who has written flowering letters printed in the Houston Chronicle about Ms. Mier. She is described as 'the' principal architect to Swift Boat Liars.

Perhaps it is time to Swift Boat all of these folks. Her background is now starting to look quite scary.

I sent an e-mail to Harry Reid expressing my astonishment about his support for Miss. Miers. I likened his support for her as supporting Hannibal Lekter for local butcher.

Go get 'em, Casey. What a bunch of psychos. And they want to know why people in states like New York and California were talking about secession after the 2004 election!

Between this and the "shoot first" law that passed in Florida, I'm afraid that collective insanity has truly become an epidemic.

Here's the website for people who want to tell the NRA that Shoot First has got to go:

http://www.shootfirstlaw.org

NonnyO

Vancouver BC! It's world class.

Well, according to this Indiana law, the Virgin Mary would be banned from the state...

Well, according to this Indiana law, the Virgin Mary would be banned from the state...
Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 10:06 AM

Yup. People forget she was pregnant before marriage.

On the other hand, if you knew stoning was the punishment for having sex before marriage (let alone getting pregnant), what story would you come up with to avoid being stoned to death...?

I don't usually rely on George Will to support my point of view, but I found this interesting:

washingtonpost.com
Can This Nomination Be Justified?
By George F. Will
Wednesday, October 5, 2005; A23

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due.

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's "argument" for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.

Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 10:06 AM

And, remember, it's men who prize that stupid little piece of useless flesh called the hymen... not women...

Shoot, I forgot the link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/04/AR2005100400954_pf.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/26404/

The Unification of Church and State
By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted October 5, 2005.

Big surprise, and big trouble: Bush's new Supreme Court nominee is a Texas conservative and a fundamentalist Christian.

Uh-oh. Now we are in trouble. Doesn't take much to read the tea leaves on the Harriet Miers nomination. First, it's Bunker Time at the White House. Miers' chief qualification for this job is loyalty to George W. Bush and the team. What the nomination means in larger terms for both law and society is the fifth vote on the court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Aside from that bothersome little matter, the Miers appointment is like that of John Roberts -- could've been worse. Not as bad as Edith Jones, not as bad as Priscilla Owen -- and you should see some of our boy judges from Texas.

Miers, like Bush himself, is classic Texas conservative Establishment, with the addition of Christian fundamentalism. What I mean by fundamentalist is one who believes in both biblical inerrancy and salvation by faith alone.

She is enrolled in the Valley View Christian Church of Dallas, which she attended for at least 20 years before moving to Washington five years ago. Among that church's other members is Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, considered second only to Priscilla Owen as that court's most adamant anti-abortion judge.

According to Miers' friends, she was pro-choice when a young woman, but later changed her mind as a result of a Christian experience of some kind. Those who spoke of this did not know her well enough to say whether it had been a born-again experience or simply a different understanding of theology.

Miers had the support of feminists when she ran for office first in the Dallas bar and later when she became the first woman president of the Texas Bar Association, even though the feminists were aware she was anti-choice.

At that time, the far more conservative TBA was at odds with the American Bar Association and sometimes threatened to withdraw from the national organization. Miers was considered a moderate in that she did not want to withdraw from the ABA, but favored a proposal to change the organization's stance from support for abortion rights to a position of neutrality.

One of Miers' key backers was Louise Raggio, a much-revered Dallas feminist lawyer. The women lawyers groups favored Miers despite her stand on abortion because she was a candidate acceptable to the Establishment, thus making her electable as a woman.

Miers sometimes took women judicial candidates through her very prestigious firm Liddell, Sapp for the obligatory meet 'n' greet and even donated to Democratic candidates. Both these behaviors were well within the conventions of Dallas city and judicial politics, particularly in the 1980s. Dallas city politics are nonpartisan, and rather like Texas tea ("sweet or un?") come in only two flavors -- Establishment or less Establishment. Miers qualifies as ur-Establishment, despite "being a girl," as a few of the old dinosaurs still put it. The slightly feminist tinge to her credentials is a plus, but she is quite definitely anti-abortion.

She ran for city council in 1989 as a moderate, but struggled during her interview with the lesbian/gay coalition. (At the time, it would have been considered progressive to even show up.) The Dallas Police Department did not then hire gays or lesbians, and when asked about the policy, Miers replied the department should hire the best-qualified people, the classic political sidestep answer.

When pressed, she said she did believe one should be able to legally discriminate against gays, and it is the recollection of two of the organization's officers that the response involved her religious beliefs.

Miers' church states on its website that it believes in biblical inerrancy, full immersion baptism, original sin and salvation dependent entirely upon accepting Jesus Christ. Everyone else is going to hell.

I have said for years about people in public life, "I don't write about sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll." If I had my druthers, I wouldn't write about the religion of those in public life, either, as I consider it a most private matter. Separation of church and state is in the Constitution because this country was founded by people who had experienced both religious persecution and state-supported religions. I think John F. Kennedy's 1960 statement to the Baptist ministers should stand as a model of how public servants should handle the relation between religious belief and public service.

Nevertheless, we are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance -- and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to "drive God from the public square."

This division has been in part created by and certainly aggravated by those seeking political advantage. It is a recipe for an incredibly damaging and serious split in this country, and I believe we all need to think long and carefully before doing anything to make it worse.

As an 1803 quote attributed to James Madison goes: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

Molly Ivins writes about politics, Texas and other bizarre happenings.

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
by Bob Dylan

Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good,
They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home.
Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

Well, they'll stone ya when you're walkin' 'long the street.
They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to keep your seat.
They'll stone ya when you're walkin' on the floor.
They'll stone ya when you're walkin' to the door.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

They'll stone ya when you're at the breakfast table.
They'll stone ya when you are young and able.
They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to make a buck.
They'll stone ya and then they'll say, "good luck."
Tell ya what, I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

Well, they'll stone you and say that it's the end.
Then they'll stone you and then they'll come back again.
They'll stone you when you're riding in your car.
They'll stone you when you're playing your guitar.
Yes, but I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

Well, they'll stone you when you walk all alone.
They'll stone you when you are walking home.
They'll stone you and then say you are brave.
They'll stone you when you are set down in your grave.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

I want to hear the magic words from Bush that Mier's is the best and the brightest that the legal profession has to offer. Can't do that.
Also, No documents, no vote. Hatch didn't believe executive privilige applied for Bill Clinton why now? Maybe she should also be asked her views on the breath executive privilige.

"The Democratic National Committee circulated a list of topics that Ms. Miers might have been involved with at the White House that could raise questions about her independence and ability to decide issues important to the administration.

They include, the committee said, the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative's name, the development of the administration position for using torture on detainees from the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the decision to suspend a prevailing wage requirement for contractors working on post-hurricane recovery and the White House efforts last year to respond to new questions about Mr. Bush's service in the National Guard.

Democratic Congressional aides raised questions about what role Ms. Miers might have had in a brief that the administration filed in a case centering on a New Hampshire law that requires parental notifications for women younger than 18 who seek to have abortions. The case is scheduled for argument before the Supreme Court this fall.

Internal deliberations about the case could provide some insight into her position on abortion, the issue that more than any other frames the ideological debate over the direction of the court.

Mr. McClellan suggested that Mr. Bush was likely to take a hard line against any request for documents from Ms. Miers's time at the White House in any of her positions.

"It would be unprecedented to release confidential, deliberative documents of a sitting president," he said. "There is a separation of powers issue here."

Some Republicans on the Judiciary Committee signaled that they would back the White House on the question.

After meeting with Ms. Miers on Tuesday, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, said: "I think that most of the information they are going to have to get from her is going to come in the form of questions and at the hearings, because there is no way that the White House is going to give privileged documents to the Senate. That is just what you call a ruse."

"It would be unprecedented to release confidential, deliberative documents of a sitting president," he said. "There is a separation of powers issue here." - Scott Mr. McClellan

Posted by: Ira at October 5, 2005 10:41 AM

No shiite, and people with a brain know that is a HUGE reason why she was nominated...

Some cover-up to go with that eyeliner?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Some of President Bush's conservative supporters are unconvinced by his defense of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, creating dissension in a Republican Party that until now has reverently approved Bush's judicial candidates.

Conservatives in some cases are expressing outright opposition, some are in wait-and-see mode and some are silent, all bad signs for a Bush administration used to having the full backing of all wings of the GOP when it takes on the Senate's minority Democrats over judicial selection.

"I'm getting reports on both sides," said Paul Weyrich, a conservative leader from the Free Congress Foundation. "Some people are quite enthused about her and other people are very upset. The grass-roots are not happy, I can tell you that."

Miers, meanwhile, is trying to build up support by visiting senators at the Capitol on Wednesday, scheduling stops with GOP Sen. John Cornyn and top Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy.

Bush defended the 60-year-old nominee at a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, repeatedly implying that conservatives should trust his judgment in picking Miers to succeed the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.

While insisting that he doesn't recall ever talking to Miers about abortion, he pointedly said, "I know her heart."

Bush, who emphasized that he's a proud conservative, said he hoped his supporters were listening. "I'm interested in someone who shares my philosophy and will share it 20 years from now," he said.

After a strong push from the president and his White House staff, some conservative groups are coming out in favor of Miers, the White House counsel and longtime Bush friend. "I trust that she will be an excellent addition to the high court and all Americans will be proud of her," said Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition.

And one of the Senate's senior conservatives, Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, was one of the first senators to announce his support for Miers.

"A lot of my fellow conservatives are concerned, but they don't know her as I do," said Hatch, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "She's going to basically do what the president thinks she should, and that is be a strict constructionist" when it comes to deciding constitutional issues.

But many Senate conservatives are withholding judgment, and House Republican leaders have said little to nothing about Miers. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, a Judiciary Committee Republican and a possible GOP 2008 candidate, even invoked a favorite target of conservatives when talking about Miers.

"There's precious little to go on and a deep concern that this would be a Souter-type candidate," Brownback said, referring to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a little-known judge nominated for the court by the first President Bush who later turned out to be liberal on the bench.

"The circumstances seem to be very similar," said Brownback, who will meet with Miers on Thursday. "Not much track record, people vouching for her, yet indications of a different thought pattern earlier in life."

Anti-abortion group Operation: Rescue on Tuesday promised an active campaign to get Bush to withdraw her nomination.

"The president seems to do what is politically expedient, versus what is morally correct," said Troy Newman, leader of Operation: Rescue. "Therefore, if we make it politically expedient for him to do the moral thing, that's what he'll do. The confirmation hearings haven't been scheduled yet, and until they have been and she's been confirmed, I'm very hopeful something will happen that will remove her name from consideration."

Newman acknowledged the consensus among grassroots conservatives was "to wait and see, to trust the administration, trust the president, almost to hold your breath and cross your fingers."

"My position to these leaders is that we cannot afford -- the babies cannot afford -- to wait and see," he said. "We did it with Souter, we did it with O'Connor and we did it with countless others. Now's the time to be vocal."

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, are mostly holding their fire.

"With so much at stake, we shouldn't rush to judgment about this or any other nominee, but even at this early stage of the confirmation process, I will say that I am impressed by what I know about Harriet Miers," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who has not indicated how he will vote on Miers.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

Yup. People forget she was pregnant before marriage.
Posted by: NonnyO at October 5, 2005 10:24 AM

Not to mention that her conception was by means other than sexual intercourse...

And in thinking about this unbelievable law further, where does it end? Fot those children who were conceived by other means (and whose parents didn't seek a "petition for parentage")...are they also banned from the state? Does this mean that in order to live in Indiana, you have to provide proof of where, when, & how you were conceived???

Well, in two days, two states -- Florida & Indiana -- have been eliminated from places I will visit or do business with. (Sorry, monkey...any chance of having an IL monkeyball?)

Posted by: DiAnne at October 5, 2005 09:16 AM

Based on what I know, the influx of rich Asians - particularly the Chinese out of Hong Kong - has created a lot of wealth in the Vancouver area. Whether it translates into job opportunities for fleeing Americans is another story. And just as Americans can't stand Mexicans swamping Los Angeles, Canadians can't stand Americans swamping Vancouver.

I spent only one night in Vancouver. That's not enough. I will need to spend a lot more time there to see if it is attractive enough to justify dumping the United States. It does have universal healthcare (the ONLY way for me to get any healthcare) and a much better governing philosophy in its favor - and the rainy climate and bad commutes big strikes against it.

Moreover, if I am gonna move to Canada, I must ask what I can offer to the Canadian society, as well as what they can offer me. Will I be able to create enough wealth here in the US in time to be considered an "investor" by Canadian immigration laws? Or will my novel be successful enough to let me qualify as an "artist?" (The latter will be extremely difficult to pull off.)

Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 11:35 AM

I've refused to visit, or do business with, Florida since the 2000 election fiasco, when the people voted for Gore but it decided to be a Bush state. That, and the Cuban community in Miami, really disgust the hell out of me.

I need to make sure that the same crap will NOT happen to California - though California is ripe for turning into another Florida.

Well, in two days, two states -- Florida & Indiana -- have been eliminated from places I will visit or do business with. (Sorry, monkey...any chance of having an IL monkeyball?)

Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 11:35 AM

Why throw out the chimp with the blackwater?

Posted by: NonnyO at October 5, 2005 06:51 AM

Right. She's ours paid for and delivered. And my understanding is that because we paid her salary she can not turn around and claim executive privalege. Isn't that what they decided with the Clinton impeachment?

Posted by: monkey at October 5, 2005 10:46 AM

Oh..a little cover-up and also a little safty-net too for if you can't walk the tightrope and apply the coverup at the same time.

Morning, DCPers...

Good to see you all blogging. I am busy trying to secure gainful employment, but I'll be back with you soon.

Keep up the good work.

Casey --

Go baby. I'm with ya.

Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 11:35 AM

The sad thing about doing that is you hurt all the regular people when in fact Florida is really a "purple" state. And Indiana has many beautiful attractions.

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 12:52 PM

Why would I purposely put myself & my family in danger by visiting a state that allows people to shoot others in public??? What if we were caught in the crossfire? Sorry. Not my idea of a good time.

And for Indiana...my daughter does not fit their definition of legal citizens.

My choice.

Posted by Casey Morris at October 5, 2005 12:46 AM

Well, it's official. I crossed the border into the Twilight Zone.

This is a direct attack, yet again, on the rights of gays and lesbians.
Saints preserve us.

Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 01:02 PM

Yes, Florida is a completely different story. Good point there! Especially given the amount of road rage and rage in general. But I do feel bad for the average person in Florida who is just trying to make it day by day.

But Indiana isn't quite as deadly yet. Do we know how the average citizen in Indiana is reacting to this news? If they dislike it, then they will kick the bums out and have the law repealed. Perhaps they didn't realize how extreme those conservatives were.

To those considering Vancouver, BC -

Try looking for property/opportunities on the Sunshine Coast - it's gorgeous there, and it's just starting to boom. This is an area just north of Vancouver - about an hour and a half north of downtown. Lots of very nice towns, etc.

The chamber of commerces in the area have been very active recruiting small business entrepreneurs from Canada and from all over the the US, so a lot of the new property owners are Americans. Where we bought, almost every neighbor within a few blocks is American - many from Texas!! There are also lots of Swiss and French for some reason, maybe due to the proximity of Whistler and other ski resorts.... And of course, there are plenty of native Canadians who are happy to have us.

http://www.sunshinecoast.ca/

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 01:20 PM

Amy,

It's too cold there.

I'll have to avoid Florida, since Madame has convinced me that my family's lives would certainly be more endangered, so I guess I'll have to continue looking for that island somewhere warm!

Ally, it's just not true that Canadians don't want Americans moving there. On the contrary, many small local papers - including the Willamette Week in Portland Or, an internationally acclaimed local weekly - have ads placed by Canadian communities inviting Americans up to live and start small businesses.

Many Canadians are not happy with Bush right now largely because of his messing with the environmental regulations around the Great Lakes area. They don't want to be a tag-along on AMerican foreign policy. They don't want to become the corporate dictatorship that seems to be America today. And they certainly don't want to lose their health care.

But most Canadians still love Americans.

After all, it is those Americans who came to Canada during the Vietnam era, and those who came to teach in the universities during the 50s, who shaped much of the cultural/political landscape of the country. In other words, Canada got a lot of brave, ethical American liberals, and they did great things for the country.

It makes me wonder if America would be a different place today had those two events had not occured....

Actually, Sparrow - the Sunshine Coast has the most moderate climate in Canada. May still be too cold for you, but for the most part, it's even nicer than Vancouver. It's similar to Portland, OR.

This is a direct attack, yet again, on the rights of gays and lesbians.

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 01:08 PM

And when they are done defining what a marriage is, the next thing they will do is the definition of man/woman, as soon as they realize that transgender people exist. (Already, the W regime has decreed that any marriage involving a transgender person is INVALID for immigration purposes into the US. But then, you'd have to be nuts to be transgender AND want to move into the US as we know it now.)

At that point, I will fight as long as possible - but I will get the hell out as soon as I conclude that there is no hope.

My lesbian/transgender themed novel was supposed to end in Los Angeles, as my protagonist and her girlfriend marry there. Now, it will end in London, England, thanks to the homophobic politics of the US. (Thanks to Tony Blair though, I am NOT considering the UK as a destination myself, but my research for the novel has given me lots of ideas on British immigration policies.)

Ok, who wants to take in a wayward Florida monkey?

I'll start the bidding at a nickel, and two AK-47 clips.

The coast is clear.

Posted by: monkey at October 5, 2005 01:38 PM

Geez Monkey,

All of us are bidding a trillion bucks (each) for you!

In fact, if we pool our money together, we could cancel the National Dept and buy the Presidentcy for you.

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 01:34 PM

I understand, Amy, and that's great - to know that Americans shaped modern Canada's intellectual development.

But when things get really desperate and you have Americans lining up to jump the border (like the Mexicans are doing now in California and Arizona), the welcome mat won't be out there anymore.

Canada will welcome Americans. Heck, I do know that Canada needs and wants lots of new immigrants to jump-start its economy and lessen its dependence on the US. But I am sure that they don't want to be swamped with a million Americans in Vancouver (which would outnumber the city's own population!). And overpopulation, as demonstrated here in Los Angeles, is a big headache.

RENO
Oregon woman kicked off flight in Reno over offensive shirt
Oct 5, 2005, 10:37 AM EDT

Oregon woman kicked off flight in Reno over offensive shirt

A Portland woman's flight home was stopped short in Reno, all because the message on the T-shirt she was wearing.

Lorrie Heasley claims it's a freedom of speech privilege, but airline officials say the message brings safety concerns.

Heasley, "There are bigger problems in the country, I can't believe people can be so petty."

Heasley boarded her flight Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, headed for Portland, Oregon with a stopover in Reno. But when Southwest Airlines employees asked her to cover her shirt, her stop over became a stop off her flight.

"I was told that basically that I had to cover my shirt, or I was told if I cover the shirt I can basically stay on the plane."

So she covered the shirt, but during a nap while passengers were boarding in Reno the cover came off. And Southwest employees insisted, change the shirt, or change flights. "I didn't feel that I should have to change my shirt, because we live in the United States, and it's freedom of speech and it was based on the move "The Fockers", and I didn't think it should have offended anyone."

But it did.

The shirt had pictures of members of the Bush Administration, and a phrase based on the movie "Meet the Fockers," but with one crucial vowel changed.

It was enough to cause complaints from other passengers and it's a problem the airline has had to deal with before.

Beth Harbin, Southwest Airlines, "We do get it occasionally. What someone is wearing, what someone is reading, what someone might be saying and it's very much a judgment call. But when other customers become concerned we do have to become involved in that and see what we can do to make everyone as comfortable as we can."

And while Southwest may have kept the peace on it's afternoon hop to Portland, a woman, not afraid to use her freedom of speech will now be using her freedom of choice.

"I most likely wont be flying Southwest Airlines again after this."

Southwest Airlines told Heasley she could take a different flight home if she changed her shirt. She refused and opted to rent a car and drive home.

http://www.krnv.com/Global/story.asp?S=3939788&nav=8faO

Good to see you all blogging. I am busy trying to secure gainful employment, but I'll be back with you soon.

Posted by: Victoria Ellen at October 5, 2005 12:07 PM

Good luck Victoria Ellen... I enjoyed meeting you, and reading your "Diary of a Mad Minnesotan."

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 01:45 PM

Southwest is the most Republican airline there is, according to sources like buyblue.org.

I would rather fly United (with its pension plan termination, and pro-Hastert executives) than Southwest ANY DAY. At least United has a somewhat Democratic PAC.

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 01:45 PM

There's certainly a law suit here.

I remember the disgusting T-shirts during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.... wonder if any of those folks got kicked off of airlines?

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 01:54 PM

In order to find out we'd probably have to pay for pollsters on this one too

Sparrow, perhaps we should all start complaining when we see people on flights reading the bible, or sporting other religious stuff that agnostics and athiests might find offensive. I'm getting really sick of the in-your-face religion.

The problem with liberals is that we're just too quiet, too tolerant, too willing to let things go. But if it's okay to boot that person off a plane, then it's okay to boot someone with a Jesus Saves t-shirt off a plane. I am personally offended by ads for religious dogma.

I recently saw a bumper sticker on an SUV that said "Death to all liberals." I watched as a young mother put her two kids into carseats and drove away. I was nearly sick to my stomach.

Posted by: AllyMcLesbian at October 5, 2005 01:49 PM

I'm glad you're still looking at the 'blue' listings.

But on a philosophical basis, should we care about 100% blue, 100% red, or 50% red and 50% blue?

Even the 50-50 ones could just be covering their bases. YET, lobbys are a huge part of our current democracy.

I think in our discussions with people we have to somehow talk about these issues without it being "Bush did this...Republican's did that..." because I'm concerned that the underlying issues of propaganda, election fraud, and democracy are being hidden while the lobbys (no matter who they contribute to) just keep gaining more and more power. (Although the other concern is the use of Congressmen and their staffers who have "ins" with people being hired by lobbys to take advatage of their access.)

The problem with liberals is that we're just too quiet, too tolerant, too willing to let things go. But if it's okay to boot that person off a plane, then it's okay to boot someone with a Jesus Saves t-shirt off a plane. I am personally offended by ads for religious dogma.

I recently saw a bumper sticker on an SUV that said "Death to all liberals." I watched as a young mother put her two kids into carseats and drove away. I was nearly sick to my stomach.

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 02:00 PM

First response... when we're NOT quiet we're told we're bullies and we just 'pick on' Republicans...it's all "party loyalty".

Second issue, regarding the suv with the threatening sticker, you could take down her license plate number and report her to the police. You could locate her and offer her a ticket to Florida--just give her a new "hippy-do" real quickly before you send her on her way. You could get your own bumper sticker, "Liberal who LOVES the 2nd AMMENDMENT." See if she gets the drift. You could smile and talk to her--make all nice and friendly--hey become her best friend--THEN tell her, "I'm a liberal, so shoot me why don't you!" (sarcasm...)

(Ah...if you only saw her again...so many choices...)

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 02:00 PM

Amy - last week, I flew American Airlines from Dallas to Los Angeles (I was returning from my activities in DC). I wanted to puke when the captain said "God bless you" - he must've meant CHRISTIAN God, one I no longer have any confidence/belief in. Not to mention that there was a previous incidence where an American captain tried to convert his passengers to Christianity, and scared the hell out of them. (He got suspended, at least - after that, I haven't followed the story).

I am not holding the captains' actions against American though, because American has been progressive on gay rights issues (my trip will earn free future trips for Los Angeles Gay Lesbian Center, in fact), and because it is considered neutral based on its political activities.

What do you think of Alaska Airlines and its prayer cards, btw? Every meal at Alaska Airlines comes with a verse from the Book of Psalms.

I would definitely agree with sparrow in taking down the "Death to ALL Liberals" bumper sticker's license plate number. She is another reason why I will NEVER drive the official death cult mascot - a large SUV.

Even the 50-50 ones could just be covering their bases. YET, lobbys are a huge part of our current democracy.

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 02:03 PM

You brought up a very good point. Buy Blue actually encourages its users to patronize companies that have a "neutral" rating due to its lack of lobbying activities on either side of the aisle. That's very important; a company that doesn't want to buy influence through politics, but compete fair and square, definitely has my support.

Since I've been buying quite a bit of clothing lately, I found Casual Corner and Eddie Bauer to fall into this category. Zero political contributions.

I recently saw a bumper sticker on an SUV that said "Death to all liberals." I watched as a young mother put her two kids into carseats and drove away. I was nearly sick to my stomach.

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 02:00 PM

When I read your comment, I immediately thought of this Nanci Griffith song...

It's a hard life
It's a hard life
It's a very hard life
It's a hard life wherever you go
If we poison our children with hatred
then, the hard life is all that they'll know

since I hear inquiring minds want to know...

When I say I got a fair number of e-mails, I mean just that--a reasonable and fair number considering the subject matter, and they were all polite in tone. Nothing nasty, and nothing from DCP regulars. The e-mails were from the wider circle who are sent my posts from various, friends, family members, political types, etc.

They were primarily of the "How would you like someone asking about your et cetera...", which is why I felt compelled to respond on the blog, something I rarely do.

But the overarching reason I responded on the blog, was that an opportunity presented itself in the form of Indiana legislators which demostrate the point perfectly, of why we not only should, but have a compelling and reasoned right to ask what might seem to some, deeply personal questions of the nominee.

It's not just the "If you can't stand the heat get out of the Supreme Court" issue. It's the "If everyone around you is straining to keep secrets by invoking privilege at every corner, what are you hiding? And is what your hiding going to bite me in my civil rights a couple of years down the road?"

Full disclosure is not about being open. It's about the secrets that are being kept.

Posted by: Casey Morris at October 5, 2005 03:19 PM

Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about!

Add Senator Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to the list of Republicans not entirely pleased with President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

Lott, appearing on MSNBC-TV on Wednesday morning, told anchor Randy Meier that wants more information about Miers.

"I need to know a lot more about her, her experience and her level of competence and what is her philosophy. I really don't know this lady and I do think I owe it to my constituents and to my own conscience to do due diligence and find out actually who this person is," he said.

His first impression, however, was not a positive one.

"I don't just automatically salute or take a deep bow anytime a nominee is sent up," he said. "I have to find out who these people are, and right now, I'm not satisfied with what I know. I'm not comfortable with the nomination, so we'll just have to work through the process in due time."

Lott said while Miers may be qualified, she is "clearly" not the most qualified person for the job.

"There are a lot more people - men, women and minorities - that are more qualified in my opinion by their experience than she is," he said.

With all that in mind, Lott said he isn't ready to take President Bush's suggestion that she has the same judicial philosophy as he does.

"I have a lot of confidence in this president. I do think he has picked some really good nominees and like all of us, we make mistakes now and then, and it's our responsibility under the constitution in the Senate to review this nominee," Lott said.

"He's not the nominee, and it's not enough to just say 'Trust me.'"

Thanks, Ally... I'll be around.

Bush's Guard service may affect Miers nomination
A former Texas Lottery official said he wants to talk to senators about the Supreme Court nominee's role in covering up his Bush's record

By Ken Herman
Austin-American Statesman
WASHINGTON BUREAU

Tuesday, October 4, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A former Texas lottery official, who claimed that then-Gov. George W. Bush's desire to cover up his National Guard record helped steer decisions about a key lottery contract, said he wants to talk to senators about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' possible role in that effort.

"If I were to be subpoenaed to come to the thing, I would come," said Lawrence Littwin, who filed a lawsuit after he was fired as the lottery's executive director in 1997. "I would say the committee, I think, would be interested."

Littwin claimed in a federal lawsuit that lottery operator GTECH held sway over the Texas Lottery Commission because former GTECH lobbyist Ben Barnes was involved in helping get Bush into the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

more... http://www.statesman.com/news/content/auto/epaper/editions/tuesday/news_3424a21495f7521000f4.html

Sorry to say, I have to agree with the airlines on the T-Shirt issue.
Regardless of the pictures of the Bushes on the Shirt, which are offensive enough, I have to admit that I would object to obscene language on t-shirts in public as well.
The passenger was wearing the shirt to intentionally offend other passengers- that's her freedom of speech in action. I certainly would not have removed her from the plane for that action. But the fact that the word was mis-spelled on the shirt was the display of obscene language, and if the private company that owns the airlines did not like that language displayed on their plane , I think they had an absolute right to ask the lady to cover it up. There were, no doubt, kids on the plane. An airplane is not like a TV or a radio- we can't flip a button and turn off the wording on a T Shirt. I honestly think it was reasonable of them to request that she cover it up during the flight, and pretty obnoxious of her to uncover it later on.
I know virtually everyone else on here will disagree with me on this issue, so I'm not gonna argue it anymore. But there is something to be said for public decency. Especially in a place that other people cannot vacate if they are offended.
Now I'm gonna get off for the rest of the day. I know I've made everyone mad.

There's no free speech issue surrounding the use of profanity.

The first amendment protect her right to free speech and harassment from the government, not private companies.

Now she, and we, can take out t-shirts and start a campaign to give our patronage to companies that value our business over our apparel, but don't expect the law to help us.

And I am not sure that it should.

Granted that there were any number of disgusting t-shirts around at the time of the Lewinsky matter, but we would have been equally justified in complaining.

But that's not who we are, and I like that about us.

Awww, Monkey.

*blushing at the compliment of a nice ole primate*

Thanks Casey. We need to be above that. Not to mention that if this lady had made some raging Repubican angry enough to start a fight on the plane, the consequences could have been tragic for every passenger onboard.
It's a public safety issue as well as a pubic decency issue.
Now I really am gonna go.

Chaffee is up for re-elecion, Snow and Collins and Specter are supposedly pro choice. We should heat on these folks especially Chaffee that Mier's may be the deciding vote on Roe.

"Some evangelical Protestants were heralding the possibility that one of their own would have a seat on the court after decades of complaining that their brand of Christianity met condescension and exclusion from the American establishment.

In an interview Tuesday on the televangelist Pat Robertson's "700 Club," Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the Christian conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said Ms. Miers would be the first evangelical Protestant on the court since the 1930's. "So this is a big opportunity for those of us who have a conviction, that share an evangelical faith in Christianity, to see someone with our positions put on the court," Mr. Sekulow said."

New York Times

We should put heat on these folks, especially "Chaffee" that by supporting Mier, he may be making selecting the deciding vote on Roe.

I don't see any doubt about it anymore and Chaffee should be defeated in '06.

Yup. People forget she was pregnant before marriage.
Posted by: NonnyO at October 5, 2005 10:24 AM
Not to mention that her conception was by means other than sexual intercourse...
Posted by: madame defarge at October 5, 2005 11:35 AM

I don't buy the story of immaculate conception. That leaves 'alternative means' such as he prematurely ejaculated at the mouth of her vagina and enough sperm got through to make her pregnant and she was still a technical virgin, or his penis was so small it didn't break her hymen during intercourse, or maybe her hymen was one of those stretchy kinds that don't break when a woman first has intercourse. Or maybe she was one of those fortunate few whose hymen was practically non-existent to begin with and could have broken with simple foreplay, or her hymen was so flimsy it broke all by itself long before she ever had sexual intercourse. Those are best-case scenarios if she was a willing sexual partner. There were other biological siblings - at least one brother named James - and a betrothal was as good as a marriage contract in those days, so it's also possible he took what he knew was was coming to him anyway, whether she was willing or not - and, remember, in those days a woman could be stoned to death for being raped as well as for being a willing participant in sexual intercourse. Whatever the real circumstances, love had nothing to do with it, but sex in one form or another between an older man and a younger woman did, and the older man condescendingly still agreed to marry "his" virgin bride - and remember, women have been considered chattel property for centuries (they still are chattel property in many countries, and legally or not, women are still talked about in terms of chattel property in this country, too, by many Freudian slips of the tongue on the part of men). It's doubtful he would have agreed to the marriage unless he was the biological father and he knew it - but it did keep his property from being stoned to death if the immaculate conception story wasn't invented later (the earliest manuscript for the New Testament can only be dated to the second century ACE).

At that time in history love had nothing whatsoever to do with marriage - hence the popularity of the chansons d'amour a thousand years later in the Medieval period - and those tales of loving a woman, often a married woman, from afar and without consummating the relationship, came back to Europe with the troubadors from the Crusades. Eleanor of Aquitaine held many festive parties where troubadors entertained her court with chansons. When Eleanor's father died without a male heir, Eleanor had more land in the Aquitaine than the king of France ruled. She was first the wife of Louis (the VII, if memory serves), went on crusade with him, gave birth to four daughters, divorced him, and promptly married Henry II, Plantagenet who became king of England within two years after that; of a total of eleven children to whom she gave birth, two of her sons became kings of England: Richard the Lionheart (who was gay), and John Lackland, who eventually signed the Magna Carta. Eleanor was a rare woman because she had control of her own lands and fought to keep control of the Aquitaine, in spite of her husbands - she outlived both of thm, even though Henry had had her under house arrest for seventeen years before his death because she had plotted to take his throne for her favorite: Richard.

Marriage was a business arrangement that united two families for financial (i.e., owning land meant wealth) and social status, women were the pawns, and if love eventually happened they were lucky; but love was neither expected nor a prerequisite for marriage, and spouses who did eventually come to love each other were looked at a bit askance because love was such a rare occurance. (If Chaucer's tales are a reflection of society a few hundred years later, the lack of love was made up for if a woman was "bouncy and buxom" in matters of sex - and if a man could please a woman sexually.) It was also quite common for a very young woman/girl to be married off to a much older man who was wealthy and/or her father and husband benefitted mutually by joining lands, with the understanding the husband would wait until she was physically old enough to bear a child without dying in childbirth before consummating the marriage, thus ensuring he would have a son (he hoped) to whom he would pass on his property, and that was more common among royalty and nobility in the upper classes than it was in the peasant classes (peasants, oddly enough, had more choice in matters of marriage and often waited until they were in their 20s to marry).

Some old men didn't wait; Margaret, the mother of King Henry VII was only twelve when she gave birth to him; she damn near died in the process because she was physically too small to safely give birth, and she never got pregnant again although she was married two more times after being widowed the first time at a very young age. What a woman felt about the matter of marriage contracts was irrelevant. The sister of Henry VIII, another Margaret, was married off in a political alliance to the very elderly and sickly king of France; he died a very few months later, and because she had wrested the promise from her brother that she could marry the man of her choice when she became a widow before he shipped her off to France to marry a dying king, she married Charles Brandon, her brother's best friend and the man she had wanted to marry before Henry coerced her into marrying the French king, when Brandon arrived in France to escort Margaret back to England - and Margaret made sure she was well bedded to her spouse of choice before returning. Once they got back to England, Henry VIII ranted and raved and banished them both from court for quite a while before he forgave them. He'd already had plans to marry his sister off to someone else, so he almost didn't forgive them for marrying without his consent, regardless of his promise to Margaret.

Love as a prerequisite for marriage is a 20th century invention. If we were magically transported back in time, even a hundred and fifty years ago, or to colonial America, we would be laughed out of town for even wishing love had anything to do with marriage. Women did have one advantage in those days if they were really lucky: midwives who could give them herbs to induce an abortion if there was no time between pregnancy to recover and safely give birth at an average of every 22-24 months (I can quote birth statistics just from my genealogy research alone that go back some 500 years in many cases). I know the names of two of the herbs, but I'm sure there are others. The whole purpose of wet-nurses for queens and princesses was so that lactation would cease (breast feeding on demand does afford some measure of 'birth control' but the key is 'on demand'), and the queen or princess could give birth every year to ensure a male heir to the throne.... One of the side-effects of the Inquisition and witch hunts was to kill off the midwives who were also usually the only medically trained people in any community and they doubled as doctors, but they knew how to ease labor for women as well as give women the herbs that could induce an abortion if necessary to preserve the life of the mother, or limit the number of children the household could reasonably afford to feed.

Does any of this tie in with the thread topic of the Miers' nomination and the idiocy of the proposed Indiana law? Yes. In Old Norse there is a word for women that translates to "The Peace Weaver." It's an ancient term for women who were given to rivals in order to keep the peace between the men of her family and the men of her husband's family. Chattel property. Women like Miers and Indiana's Miller who proposed that idiotic law have no historical perspective. They have gained what modicum of 'power' they have as a result of the feminist movement that started in the 1960s, and they are the kind of women who, in deliberate and willful ignorance, would put their peers (other women) right back to being the same chattel property that women have been for at least three thousand years of recorded history since the patriarchs (I've not gone into the historical perspective of matriarchal and matrilineal cultures and society that existed before the patriarchs....). Miers, et al., wouldn't have their positions of power if it had not been for the feminist movement and the rights women have gained toward full legal adult status over the last forty years - and women still are not full legal adults as long as that 19th century abortion law is on the books, along with the 'amendments' to Roe v. Wade that have slowly eroded the decision-making about abortion is in the hands of anyone other than the person whose body is affected by pregnancy. And now women like that want to make sure all women have to go backward in time to being absolutely nothing but chattel property again, only to serve at the pleasure of egomaniacal psychopathic men like Bu$h?!?!?

I think NOT...!

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 01:45 PM

LOL. Wonder where she got the shirt.

U.S. general in Iraq: Growing disconnect with Washington
By Pamela Hess
UPI Pentagon Correspondent
Published October 5, 2005

BAGHDAD -- "I don't know if I have the moral authority to send troops into combat anymore," a senior American general recently told United Press International.

He knows what his power means -- that on his word hundreds or thousands of young men would step into danger.


"I'm no longer sure I can look (a soldier or a Marine) in the eye and say: 'This is something worth dying for.'"

He doesn't mean Iraq. There are plenty of bad people here to fight, and plenty of innocents worth protecting.

His moral crisis was that he had been to Washington, D.C.

He had been asked politically loaded questions from both sides of aisle about the war, each questioner seeking ammunition to use for their own political ends.

He was dismayed. And he's not the only one.

"Everything that happens in Iraq is viewed in Washington through a prism of whether it is good for George W. Bush or bad," said a civilian U.S. official, who spoke to UPI on the condition he not be named.

Successful election? "Proof" the invasion was the right thing to do. Car bombs in Baghdad? "Proof" this was wrong from the start.

There is a growing disconnect between Washington and those fighting the Iraq war -- between the people sweating in the desert, saddled with making the policy work, and the people in suits and air conditioning, hoping to be proven right in the end, on whichever side they sit.

"I am seeing signs that are frustrating to me," said Lt. Col. Mike Gibler, an Army battalion commander serving in Mosul whose father fought in the Vietnam war. "There are huge divides, and not only at the senior levels of government. There's a competition for who wants to be the loudest voice to be heard regardless of what they say, regardless of what they know.

"I am seeing a change in our nation's willingness to support this over the long haul," said Gibler.

To many here, that political reductionism is obscene. It degrades their daily work as much as it does the loss of more than 1,900 Americans.

The good in Iraq has been hard won -- it was never a given. And the bad in all its forms -- the car bombs, the ambushes, the rockets, the innocent dead -- is the predictable product of warfare. Even putting aside the questionable post-war planning and rosy predictions, the outcome was always sure to include many, many undeserving deaths.

Once a nation decides to go to war, the consequences will be ugly.

more... http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20051005-022643-9419r

Once a nation decides to go to war, the consequences will be ugly.

more... http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20051005-022643-9419r

Posted by: monkey at October 5, 2005 05:11 PM
But Monkey,

That's EXACTLY why when a pResident says that we're 45 min from nuclear bombs hitting us we believe he wouldn't fix the facts, lie, make believe, pretend or anything else they did.

We trusted them--and the people in Congress also trusted them--and they betrayed all of us!!!

Letter from soldier in Iraq...published in Stars & Stripes...

Cheering for Sheehan
Constantly there are many soldiers who write in praising this insane occupation, even after our own countrymen are presently suffering more than they should from Hurricane Katrina. The excuse that it was the fault of the elderly, the infirmed, the children and the poor because they couldn’t get out of the storm’s fury is sickening because it was not these Americans’ fault.

I just wanted Stripes readers to know that even though you have pro-right-wing free-speech haters of Cindy Sheehan writing in, there also are soldiers like me who don’t go along with their Orwellian agenda. Her son came from her womb, and how dare they say she is dishonoring him. He is a fellow soldier who gave his life defending his countrymen.

Many soldiers don’t agree with what I’m saying, but there are many who do, but know that if they bare their true feelings they will somehow face retribution from the right-wingers in the military who hate them — i.e. disciplinary action, lack of promotion, etc.

If you want to do me harm, go ahead, but remember one little thing: I go out of the wire every day and have been hit multiple times by improvised explosive devices, mortars, etc. I have terrorists trying to kill me every day. Don’t tell me I don’t have the right to speak, because it will be over my dead body if you try to take that right away from me or my countrymen! Right on, Cindy!

Pfc. Leonard Clark
Camp Liberty, Iraq

From Stars and Stripes, Sunday, October 3.
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=31948

DeLay, Successor Blunt Swapped Donations By JOHN SOLOMON and SHARON THEIMER, Associated Press Writers
1 hour, 6 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Tom DeLay deliberately raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 presidential convention, then diverted some of the excess to longtime ally Roy Blunt through a series of donations that benefited both men's causes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051005/ap_on_go_co/delay_money_carousel

Interesting argument for/against polling. ADS is trying to get people to donate to find out if people want Bush impeached.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/After_pollsters_say_they_wont_raise_1004.html

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 06:51 AM

I was a bit startled to see that Zogby's poll last week asked "Are you thinking about leaving the country?"

Isn't that kinda creepy?

Once a nation decides to go to war, the consequences will be ugly.

more... http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20051005-022643-9419r

Posted by: monkey at October 5, 2005 05:11 PM

Thanks for that article, Monkey, I found it informative, and balanced.

What. A. Mess.

Ohmygosh what a day, what a posting. We really have Big Brother upon us, don't we? I participated in a meeting with the IL Secretary of State Police this AM and heard an earful about what technology they have to make sure government is able to monitor and catalog our lives. They were talking about ID theft and fraudulent IDs, but it sure is useful in other areas like making sure someone cannot legally have a child in any state. Someone said they thought all the biometrics and cataloging was a good idea to make sure no one can have a 2d ID or alias to prevent identity theft and other financial fraud, but all I could think of is an abused woman trying to get away from her abuser.

I totally understand Casey's point about Harriet not having to live up to her "most intelligent man's" standards of do as I say, not as I do living, but worry those questions would keep all women from joining the bench. I also hear Ally about what it will take for people to get it. I am wondering why the new today isn't so over the top for people that they are screaming. They aren't. The news is full of flu and no one here even has it yet. It seems to me they are going for the scare tactic because Iraq no longer seems so very scary and it's working...A CNN poll this morning fell out in favor of having the military in our streets in the event of a flu outbreak, what happened to medical care? The CDC has been underfunded and those not willing to fall into religious lock step forced out...they'd rather deal with illness with soldiers, and don't think it will be our accountable US military guys and gals, forgetaboutit. It will be Blackwater, armed to the teath with lethal orders and no military standards or laws they need to live up to.

SPY IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!

A Marine caught with classified material stolen from Dick Cheney's office.

ABC NEWS now!!!

Espionage Case Breaches the White House
Accused Marine Worked in Vice President's Office

Oct. 5, 2005 — Both the FBI and CIA are calling it the first case of espionage in the White House in modern history.

Officials tell ABC News the alleged spy worked undetected at the White House for almost three years. Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, was a U.S. Marine most recently assigned to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

"I don't know of a case where the vetting broke down before and resulted in a spy being in the White House," said Richard Clarke, a former White House advisor who is now an ABC News consultant.

Federal investigators say Aragoncillo, a naturalized citizen from the Philippines, used his top secret clearance to steal classified intelligence documents from White House computers.

In 2000, Aragoncillo worked on the staff of then-Vice President Al Gore. When interviewed by Philippine television, he remarked how valued Philippine employees were at the White House.

"I think what they like most is our integrity and loyalty," Aragoncillo said.

Classified Material Transferred by E-Mail

Officials say the classified material, which Aragoncillo stole from the vice president's office, included damaging dossiers on the president of the Philippines. He then passed those on to opposition politicians planning a coup in the Pacific nation.

"Even though it's not for the Russians or some other government, the fact that it occurred at the White House is a matter of great concern," said John Martin, who was the government's lead espionage prosecutor for 26 years.

Last year, after leaving the Marines, Aragoncillo was caught by the FBI while he worked for the Bureau at an intelligence center at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

According to a criminal complaint, Aragoncillo was arrested last month and accused of downloading more than 100 classified documents from FBI computers.

"The information was transferred mostly by e-mails," said U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie at the time of Aragoncillo's arrest.

Since that arrest, officials say Aragoncillo has started to cooperate. He has admitted to spying while working on the staff of Vice President Cheney's office.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1187030&page=1

ABC now?

On phone....trying to get off.......

Pentagon Analyst Pleads Guilty in Spy Case
Pentagon Analyst Pleads Guilty to Giving Classified Information to Israeli Embassy Official

By MATTHEW BARAKAT Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press

Oct 5, 2005 — ALEXANDRIA, Va. A top Pentagon analyst with expertise in the Middle East pleaded guilty Wednesday to giving classified information to an Israeli embassy official and members of a pro-Israel lobbying group.

Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, said during a plea hearing that he was frustrated with the government and that he had hoped the two members of the lobbying group could use their connections at the National Security Council to influence U.S. policy.

He also admitted giving classified information to a political official at the Israeli embassy, but said the information he received from the official was far more valuable than what he gave.

Franklin, of Kearneysville, W.Va., pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts and a charge of unlawful retention of national defense information. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III set sentencing for Jan. 20.

I believe the gravitationally challenged lady is singing...LOUDLY!!!

DeLay, Successor Blunt Swapped Donations

Tom DeLay and Successor Roy Blunt Swapped Donations Between Secretive Groups

By JOHN SOLOMON and SHARON THEIMER Associated Press Writers
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON Oct 5, 2005 — Tom DeLay deliberately raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 presidential convention, then diverted some of the excess to longtime ally Roy Blunt through a series of donations that benefited both men's causes.

When the financial carousel stopped, DeLay's private charity, the consulting firm that employed DeLay's wife and the Missouri campaign of Blunt's son all ended up with money, according to campaign documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist recently charged in an ongoing federal corruption and fraud investigation, and Jim Ellis, the DeLay fundraiser indicted with his boss last week in Texas, also came into the picture.

The complicated transactions are drawing scrutiny in legal and political circles after a grand jury indicted DeLay on charges of violating Texas law with a scheme to launder illegal corporate donations to state candidates.

The government's former chief election enforcement lawyer said the Blunt and DeLay transactions are similar to the Texas case and raise questions that should be investigated regarding whether donors were deceived or the true destination of their money was concealed.

"These people clearly like using middlemen for their transactions," said Lawrence Noble. "It seems to be a pattern with DeLay funneling money to different groups, at least to obscure, if not cover, the original source," said Noble, who was the Federal Election Commission's chief lawyer for 13 years, including in 2000 when the transactions occurred.

None of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations DeLay collected for the 2000 convention were ever disclosed to federal regulators because the type of group DeLay used wasn't governed by federal law at the time.

DeLay has temporarily stepped aside as majority leader after being indicted by a Texas prosecutor. Blunt who had been majority whip, the No. 3 Republican in the House has taken over much of that role in DeLay's absence.

Spokesmen for the two Republican leaders say they disclosed what was required by law at the time and believe all their transactions were legal, though donors might not always have know where their money was headed.

"It illustrates what others have said, that money gets transferred all the time. This was disclosed to the extent required to be disclosed by applicable law, said Don McGahn, a lawyer for DeLay. "It just shows that donors don't control funds once they're given."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1187117

Holy cow--that's alot of corruption exposed in just one day. Of course, committing that much corruption is just another day at the office for some folks.

Ellen Beth--I agree that those questions could have a chilling effect on women on the bench, but I don't think that the party of God folks are going to let that stop them, and it's not a fight fire with fire thing. It's a "the stakes are just too damn high for me to feel even the least bit squeamish, or even politly circumspect any longer.

You have Attorney's General who think that, in a stunning turnaround, they can subpoena medical record to see if late term procedures were within the law. Funny, I thought the law protected us from people doing that sort of thing on so many fronts, but not any more.

I am just hoping like hell that when it gets to be time to put Ally McL on the bench the they ask her those questions, she will be standing up and saying, "Mind you own damn business. I stand for privacy." and she will be speaking for all of us, and we won't have to even think about these intrusions on our persons any longer.

I don't mind fighting for what I value, but man, I am getting tired of the dishonesty in the opposition's arguments.

Bush plans 'major speech' on Iraq, terrorism
Iraqis to vote October 15 on new constitution

Wednesday, October 5, 2005; Posted: 7:38 p.m. EDT

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. and Iraqi troops are on the offensive against insurgents who want to disrupt Iraq's October 15 vote on a new constitution, President Bush said Wednesday, and he plans to give a detailed speech on the progress of the broader conflict against terrorism Thursday.

Bush will deliver remarks at 10:10 a.m. at a National Endowment for Democracy event.

Bush met with top military advisers at the White House Wednesday, telling reporters afterward that about 3,000 Iraqi troops had done "a fine job" in recent combat alongside American units in western Iraq.

"Over 30 percent of the Iraqi troops are in the lead on these offensive operations. We've got troops embedded with them, and that's an important part of the training mission," he said.

Bush to give greater detail
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush will give a "major speech" Thursday to the National Endowment for Democracy on the progress of the war. The president will address the connection between Iraq and the broader war against the al Qaeda terrorist network "in greater detail than he has before," McClellan said.

"He will talk about how [al Qaeda] is a group of people that have a very clear strategy for driving us out of the Middle East, for creating a safe haven in the Middle East -- a safe haven from which they can plan and plot attacks on the rest of the civilized world and a safe haven from which they can seek to overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East," McClellan said.

McClellan said the address "is not a speech on Iraq," but Bush "will talk about Iraq in the context of the broader war on terrorism."

Bush has tried repeatedly to link Iraq to the anti-terror campaign launched after al Qaeda's September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Though the 9/11 commission found no operational relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq before the 2003 invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, critics say the insurgency against U.S. troops that followed Saddam's overthrow has drawn terrorists into Iraq to fight Americans.

U.S. and Iraqi forces have carried out a number of operations in western Iraq in recent weeks aimed at disrupting insurgent control in the region and targeting al Qaeda in Iraq, the group led by wanted terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. One recent raid resulted in the terror group's No. 2 operative being killed, U.S. officials have said.

Polls show support waning
Polls have found U.S. public support for the Iraq war waning since spring, despite speeches by the president in June and September that White House aides hoped would reverse the trend.

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in late September found that 59 percent of people surveyed considered the 2003 invasion a mistake, 63 percent said they wanted to see some or all U.S. troops withdrawn, and only 32 percent approved of Bush's handling of the conflict.

Bush repeated Wednesday that U.S. troops will leave only when Iraqis are capable of providing for their own security.

"I've told the American people all along our troops will stay there as long as necessary," he said. "We'll do the job. We'll train these folks. And as they become more capable, we'll be able to bring folks home with the honor they've earned."

more...http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/05/bush.iraq/index.html

Avian flu.... yada, yada, yada.... No vaccine anyway...

The common influenza virus mutates, and every year they have to make new vaccines for the newest strain of the common influenza virus because the old vaccines do not work on the newest strains.

WHY all the flap about a "potential" pandemic on all networks? Even PBS is doing a segment on it, and they're showing that idiotic segment from Nitwit about military doing a quarantine of people....

WHY is Nitwit looking for a reason to declare martial law, aside from his megalomania, and the fact that Congress has not reigned him in? Is he trying to get his ratings to go back up by proving he can plan for a "potential" disaster even if he can't handle an actual disaster, like two hurricanes within two weeks?

"Potential" pandemic does NOT mean an actual pandemic, and all they're doing is scaring the sheeples (as usual) which still only proves Nitwit and his administration can still scare people into obeying the grand master of inflicting groundless paranoia....

Three things I am still not afraid of: (1) a 'ter-a-ist' attack; (2) mad cow disease (last three times I ate beef in 1991 made me sick, it is on my food allergy list) and (3) avian flu....

Rove missing from White House events; Word on Hill is that he has been told he's target of probe

President Bush's most trusted adviser, Karl Rove, has been absent from recent White House events, leading those close to a CIA outing case to speculate that he has been told he is the target of an investigation, RAW STORY can confirm.

Rove disappeared from the scene around the time he was diagnosed with kidney stones in mid-September, sources close to the White House tell RAW STORY. At first, the belief was that he was off the beat to recover from his illness.

But his absence at President Bush's press conference Monday where Bush announced that he had chosen Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court raised eyebrows. Rove is usually present at such events.

Word on Capitol Hill is that Rove has received a "target letter," or a letter from the prosecutor investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson telling him that he is now a target in the investigation. To date, no reporters have been able to confirm this account.

President Bush has declined to say whether he would fire Rove if he were indicted. He has said that he would fire any White House staff that was found guilty in the case.

Others, noticing seeming Administration slip-ups -- the response to Katrina and the unexpected groundswell of discontent from conservatives over Miers -- suggest the White House may be distracted with something else.

Rove's absence was first noted by AmericaBLOG.

DEVELOPING TONIGHT....

Cronyism?

Who's next, Barney? Come on and have a laugh. You know you want to.

http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/

Ok, what's our strategy vis-à-vis Miers?

If Democrats collaborate with angry ideological Conservatives, then maybe she can be stopped - but the next candidate (barring the thunderclap of Rove and Libby being indicted, and Bush being named as an unindicted co-conspirator) will likely be a more established (and dangerous) conservative.

On the other hand, if Bush’s candidate is turned back, it makes Bush irrelevant, and a lame duck, that much sooner. And should Fitzgerald’s investigation make Plamegate all the rage, who knows what can be accomplish towards the goal of undermining Dubya’s ability to both pack the court, and undermine Western civilization.

Incitatus was the name of Roman emperor Caligula's favored horse.

~ snip ~

The horse would also "invite" dignitaries to dine with him, and had a house with full complement of servants to entertain such guests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incitatus

Frission in the Republican (NeoCON) ranks?

Cracks begin to emerge in mantle of Republican majority
John Byrne

http://www.rawstory.com/

I though someone said Karl had kidney stones (Big Brass ones !). Figured it couldn't be his heart - that's empty.

I thought I saw where Karl had kidney stones (Big Brass Ones !) Figured it couldn't be his cold, black heart.

Posted by: Matthew Carnicelli at October 5, 2005 08:05 PM

May Fitzgerald's investigation prove fruitful... and while he's at it, can he find out where the spines of the Democrats have been since 2000?

I don't know what our strategy vis-a-vis Miers should be, but I know that the Right Wing strategy is doing a great job right now. Everyone I know is completely shocked that a Bush nominee could be questioned by the Religious Right-but I'm convinced that Bill Press has this one spot on. They don't really question her beliefs at all- they're trying to make her nomination easier to swallow for the Democrats by pretending she just might not be pro-life enough to suit them. This is a Repug con job to end all con jobs- and the news media is aiding and abetting in it all the way. The continuous news today was about how "suspicious" the right is of this fundamentalist Christian lady who has already said she's against stem-cell research. It's all about how they don't Trust Georgy to nominate someone conservative enough- hell, I trust Georgy to nominate a fanatic to the court, and I'm not even a Republican.
It's a scam, intended to woo the Democrats to her side and to help her nomination slide through smoothly. And it will work- half of our Senators are already in love with John Roberts, who showed his colors today with his "slippery slope" comments on the Oregon assisted suicide law. He's as conservative as they get, and so is Ms Meirs.
Rove may not be out in front of the camera- that's because he's busy on the phone talking to Rush and letting Rush know to continue to portray Ms Meirs as a suspicious moderate. They know exactly what they're doing.
I'm so tired of watching our side be duped by the MSM and their bosses in the White House. It's just getting really tiresome.

Posted by: NonnyO at October 5, 2005 08:21 PM

needle in a haystack?

Posted by: Linda Enterkin at October 5, 2005 08:21 PM

Linda, I agree. We certainly have reason to believe they're playing chess.

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 08:24 PM

Guess we need a calcium detector to find the vertebrae....

Posted by: NonnyO at October 5, 2005 08:33 PM

Got Titanium rods here! But let me tell you they're h*ll to get used to!

Linda, the argument on the right is that she is not battle tested, and will wilt when faced with reasonable, sensible arguments from moderate colleagues (because, make no mistake, their are truly no liberal judges on the court, no judges anywhere as far to the left as Scalia and Thomas are to the right) on the Court.

WASHINGTON - New Chief Justice John Roberts stepped forward Wednesday as an aggressive defender of federal authority to block doctor-assisted suicide, as the Supreme Court clashed over an Oregon law that lets doctors help terminally ill patients end their lives.

The justices will decide if the federal government, not states, has the final say on the life-or-death issue.

It was a wrenching debate for a court touched personally by illness. Roberts replaced William H. Rehnquist, who died a month ago after battling cancer for nearly a year. Three justices have had cancer and a fourth has a spouse who counsels children with untreatable cancer.

The outcome is hard to predict, in part because of the uncertain status of retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor who seemed ready to support Oregon's law. Her replacement may be confirmed before the ruling is handed down, possibly months from now.

Roberts repeatedly raised concerns that a single exception for Oregon would allow other states to create a patchwork of rules.

"If one state can say it's legal for doctors to prescribe morphine to make people feel better, or to prescribe steroids for bodybuilding, doesn't that undermine the uniformity of the federal law and make enforcement impossible?" he asked.

The Supreme Court eight years ago concluded that the dying have no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide. O'Connor provided a key fifth vote in that decision, which left room for state-by-state experimentation.

more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051005/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_assisted_suicide

Here's a great commentary about media! It's so simple it's hard to believe they need a cartoon to explain it!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2137697

Matthew- that's the argument, but it doesn't wash. This woman is a religious fundamentalist, and isn't wishy-washy about it. She converted after she was already an adult, which means she's serious about her religious convictions. People who were born into a religious fundamentalist sect sometimes grow up to question some of it's tenets, or to reject some of them altogether. I know, I've been there. I was raised a Southern Baptist fundamentalist, and I still believe most of the doctrine, but not all of it. But those who convert later in life are far less likely to question any of the religion's beliefs- they've left their old ways behind and are willing to swallow every church doctrine whole- converts from other religions are always the most enthusiastic Baptists around. Of course, her church doesn't call itself Baptist, but from what I've read, it's a Southern Baptist clone if ever there was one. This woman is pro-life, she's in favor of the death penalty, she's a Bushy to the core. And she would be AFRAID to let the other court members influence her- she'd be afraid of being punished by God. Rove and Bush know that, and so does the Christian Coalition, that endorsed her today. They're not afraid she'll wilt- this is a con job all around.

Posted by: sparrow at October 5, 2005 08:36 PM

Ditto... Triple lumbar fusion five years ago... which didn't "take" anyway.... I have a feeling I'll never get used to it....

But I'd willingly give the titanium rods to a good Dem with some kind of ethical standards that would allow her/him to stand up to that Texas Mafia in the White House....

Well, get an exray and send it on down the line. Give it to the highest bidder!

No disciplinary review for 9/11 failures of Tenet
CIA director bars accountability review for his predecessor, others

WASHINGTON - Contrary to recommendations, CIA Director Porter Goss will not order disciplinary reviews for the agency’s former director George Tenet and other officials who have come under fire for their performance before the attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

In a statement Wednesday, Goss said a report by the agency’s independent watchdog did not suggest “that any one person or group of people could have prevented 9/11.”

“After great consideration of this report and its conclusion, I will not convene an accountability board to judge the performances of any individual CIA officers,” he said.

more...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9601246/

Posted by: Linda Enterkin at October 5, 2005 08:21 PM

I agree Linda. That's what they are doing, alright.

Even if she's not approved, George can always say he kept his promise to the religious right.

I think George may have sincere intentions on this one, (I am speaking about his INTENTIONS, not whether this is right or wrong,) but I'll bet Rove is itching for a BIG fight over Roe vs. Wade.

I have said it before, and I'll say it again.

Although I hate to give him credit, Rove is brilliant. He ALWAYS manages to put BushCo in a win/win position. ALWAYS.

If Miers makes it in, George has kept his promise to the religious right. If she doesn't, it's the "damn Democrats/liberal baby killin' heathens" fault.

While putting themselves in a win/win, Rove always manages to put the opposition in a lose/lose.

She gets in, the left gets a Evangelical pro-life close friend of George W. Bush on the bench in the highest court of the land for possibly twenty to thirty years. If she doesn't get in, George looks like Mother Theresa while the "beasts" fillabuster the next nominee.

I wonder how much sleep Rove gets a night. He's shrewd.

And, don't worry too much about Rove laying low because he's implicated in the Plame affair. As I said last week, he has recently made a campaign stop to my state, while murmurs of scandal float all around him. Rain or shine, he's preparing for '06, and '08. Calculated, and on time.

I'll tell you what I get tired of...Where is our leadership??????

Senate debates detainee interrogation methods
McCain, Graham sponsor bill to set clear standards for treatment

WASHINGTON - U.S. troops interrogating terrorism suspects don’t know which techniques are permitted and Congress owes it to them to establish clear standards, Senate Republicans said Wednesday, opening a politically volatile debate over the treatment of detainees.

The White House opposes legislation that would impose restrictions on the Pentagon’s detention, interrogation and prosecution of prisoners, arguing that it would tie the president’s hands in wartime.

Despite a veto threat, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., are trying to tack that legislation onto the $440 billion military spending bill. Votes could come as early as Wednesday night.

McCain’s amendment would ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” against anyone in U.S. custody and require all U.S. troops to follow procedures in the Army Field Manual when they detain and interrogate suspects. Graham’s amendment would define “enemy combatant” and put into law procedures for prosecuting detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“Confusion about the rules results in abuses in the field. We need a clear consistent standard,” McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, said on the Senate floor.

Graham, an Air Force judge for 20 years, added: “We have let the troops down when it comes to trying to give them guidance in very stressful situations.”

Opposing the effort, Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, said that requiring all U.S. troops to follow procedures in the Army manual is not practical in the current war environment. “The techniques very upon the circumstances and the physical location of people involved,” he said.

Backed by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., McCain and Graham offered the same proposals in the summer as the Senate worked on a bill setting Pentagon policy. But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., scuttled that bill in part because of White House opposition to the detainee proposals.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9601116/

Linda,

Ever wonder what it is they are REALLY doing while all this scandal floats eerily around?

Truth, I always wonder- and I have to admit that I never cease to be amazed at Rove's manipulations.
He's such a chubby little ordinary looking guy- I sometimes wonder if he's had plastic surgery to make himself look less threatening or lethal.
There has to be a Gary Oldman or a John Malkovich lurking somewhere under all those chins. There just must be.

Cheney urges patience in war on terror
Fight could be decades long, vice president says

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States must be prepared to fight the war on terror for decades to bring peace to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday.

"Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort, and it will be resisted by those whose only hope for power is through the spread of violence," said Cheney. "As the people of that region experience new hope, progress, and control over their own destiny, we will see the power of freedom to change our world and a terrible threat will be removed."

Cheney did not specify how long he believes U.S. troops will have to stay in Iraq, just as other administration officials have avoided providing a timetable. Some military commanders have expressed hopes that substantial American withdrawals could begin next spring or summer, though they have edged away from such comments in recent days.

Speaking to the Association of the U.S. Army, Cheney joined the chorus of Bush administration officials -- including the president -- who have tried in recent days to bolster an American public that has grown increasingly weary of the war in Iraq. He told the audience filled with military members that the only way terrorists can win is if the United States "lost our nerve and abandoned our mission."

He also echoed Bush administration assertions that Iraqi security forces are growing, and are increasingly able to take charge. His comments come just a week after the top commander in Iraq told Congress that the number of Iraqi army battalions capable of fighting without U.S. help had dropped from three to one.

"One of the challenges we faced was that after clearing out terrorists, there weren't always enough trained Iraqi forces to retain control," Cheney said. Now, he said, Iraqi forces control more parts of the country than at any time in the past two years.

Later at the Pentagon, Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who spent the past year overseeing the training of Iraqi forces, said recent public discussion about the combat readiness of Iraq forces had missed an important point: that in addition to the single Iraqi battalion that is capable of operating fully independent of U.S. troops, there are more than 36 army and special police combat battalions that are only slightly less capable.

Petraeus said those battalions can take the leading role in a fight, albeit with U.S. support. He said the number of such battalions is higher than 36 but declined to be precise, saying the exact number is classified secret.

more...
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/10/05/cheney.terrorism.ap/index.html

Posted by: Matthew Carnicelli at October 5, 2005 08:05 PM

I can tell you what my strategy is.

Make an example of her and the ultra right wing supporters for what they really are-heartless monsters that could care less about the suffering and poverty that many Americans endure. Make an example of her by exposing her as a strict anti-free choice woman who will never agree to Roe vs. Wade as the law of the land. Make an example of her by exposing her as a pro torture crony. Make an example of her by pointing out that her inexperience contributed to our President's lack of understanding of the Presidential Daily Briefing warning of Osama Bin Laden's terrorist plans for America. Make an example of her by demonstrating that trusting George Bush when it comes to qualifications of his nominees is ludicrous. It has become obvious in the last forty eight hours that this unknown, previously personal lawyer to George Bush carries the banner for those who will do anything to destroy America in the name of their twisted understanding of Christianity. I personally could care less how we approach this from a political perspective. Senator Reid has been bamboozled by this nomination and his statements of support sicken me. Politics is not the issue here. American freedom is the issue. Reject her with out bringing her to the Senate floor. If Bush nominates another one just like her, do the same thing. Bong them. Filibuster them, and don't quit. Send the message that we don't care about politics, we care about America.

I am listening to Ken Starr give her glowing recommendations-think about it.

I agree OC - we need to fillibuster this unknown judge and keep Rove and the rest of those cronies in the news while we are doing it. WE need to start fighting back because too many of our elected officials aren't doing it for us.

Casey: and there is the veterinarian in charge of women's health.

Did anyone else read the NYT article this am about Miers?

One thing stood out - that she became "born again" right around the same time that she became interested in entering politics as a Republican. I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical. I'm sure she's devout and all that, but I can't help wondering if she mostly got on the literalist-evangelical bandwagon in order to move up in the Republican/christian ranks.

I suspect many Republicans of this sort of convenient religiousness, including Bush Jr. And I think most rational Republicans shudder to think of the consequences of overturning RvW. Morality is one thing, but the cost of raising all those babies out of wedlock would be astounding. These people aren't stupid and they think with their pocketbooks.... I believe Evangelicals have been used.

One thing is clear - Miers's not above changing her mind. She's changed faiths, parties, career paths.... I tend to like that in a person, myself. I look forward to the hearings - should be interesting.

I wish had taken this photo!!

http://tmars.iwarp.com/guerrilla_campaign/theGallery/BushGas.jpg

Playing devil's advocate here for a minute.....

What's the best case scenario if Miers is confirmed?

If she is a devout Christian woman who has no great political loyalties and no involvement/loyalties to the neocon agenda, i.e., corporations....... If she is a sincere, devout Christian woman, I don't think she would hurt middle class America because her conscience wouldn't let her. Roe vs. Wade would probably be overturned eventually though, and I'm not sure about gay rights.

What's the worst that could happen?

She could be a Condi clone, a yes person to whoever it is that pulls Dubya's strings, and civil rights get hurt along and fascism grows
and has carte blanche in the SCOTUS.

I believe Evangelicals have been used.

Posted by: Amy at October 5, 2005 10:27 PM

Amy, would you please explain that statement to me? I also feel they have been used, but am very curious to see why you think so too.

Linda Enterkin
You might be right about the Republican con job but on NPR there was speculation that Reid is conning back - driving a Republican wedge by being rather supportive. They won't want to be in any club that would have them as a member, as Woody Allen says.

Did anyone else read the NYT article this am about Miers?

One thing stood out - that she became "born again" right around the same time that she became interested in entering politics as a Republican. I'm sorry, but I'm skeptical. I'm sure she's devout and all that, but I can't help wondering if she mostly got on the literalist-evangelical bandwagon in order to move up in the Republican/christian ranks.

I suspect many Republicans of this sort of convenient religiousness, including Bush Jr. And I think most rational Republicans shudder to think of the consequences of overturning RvW. Morality is one thing, but the cost of raising all those babies out of wedlock would be astounding. These people aren't stupid and they think with their pocketbooks.... I believe Evangelicals have been used.

One thing is clear - Miers's not above changing her mind. She's changed faiths, parties, career paths.... I tend to like that in a person, myself. I look forward to the hearings - should be interesting.

Ballot and Soul
Democracy needs a revolution every generation

By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
Tribune Media Services

October 6, 2005

“We need a revolution every generation,” Thomas Jefferson said. Now there’s a bit of Founding Father wisdom that hasn’t been worn down to a platitude yet. Democracy is either evolving and expanding or it’s dying. We have to found our nation anew — wrest it from the cynically entrenched — every generation.

Jefferson’s words were quoted at the summit by Paul Lehto, a lawyer from Everett, Wash., who is suing Snohomish County to void its contract with Sequoia Voting Systems on the grounds that the company’s claim of “proprietary trade secrets” and refusal to release voting data from the 2004 election, creating a secret vote count, are illegal in a democracy.

What a radical idea — that the voting process should be open and transparent; that the count should be publicly, not privately, done, and absolutely verifiable. If you know this is not the system we currently have, raise your hand.

http://www.commonwonders.com/

Hey - that posted twice! Sorry about that! Don't know why/how it happened....

the latest conspiracy theory:

http://www.freepress.org/doit.php?strFunc=display&strID=216&strYear=2005

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notified the states of Maryland and Virginia and the District of Columbia today that an airborne form of Tularemia bacterium was detected by air sensors in the vicinity of the National Capital Mall during the weekend of Sept. 24 - 25. Since then, additional tests from these collectors have all been negative.

This bacterium not common, and not usual for DC area.

Thom Hartmann said same bacterium used against Chinese years ago

If she is a devout Christian woman who has no great political loyalties and no involvement/loyalties to the neocon agenda, i.e., corporations....... If she is a sincere, devout Christian woman, I don't think she would hurt middle class America because her conscience wouldn't let her.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 5, 2005 10:28 PM

Truth,

That's a lot of "ifs". Just as George Bush used his newfound religious devotion to bolster his political career. Who can't say that Miss. MIers' devotion wasn't prompted by her desire to be successful in her law firm and at her career. She scares me. I doubt she has any degree of sincerity. I am reminded of the simple saying, "Birds of a feather flock together." Bush and Miers are from the same flock.

TSP - It's not an original thought on my part; much has been written to suggest this, and in fact, I remember reading about some documented evidence that this was the case.

Here's the scenario: Wall Street needed bigger voter numbers to get their agenda through. The Republicans decided to forge an alliance between corporate interests and social conservative ones. As long as it's all been mostly talk, things have gone along smoothly. Republicans used abortion propaganda and anti-gay rhetoric, and even orchestrated some ballot enticements to get the social conservatives to the polls, voting, unwittingly, for the corporate agenda.

But as soon as the evangelical literalists want real action, there's going to be a problem. So the Republicans keep throwing them bones, with no real meat on them.

What Republicans really want is corporate carte blanche. The rest is all just means to an end.

Posted by: oncall at October 5, 2005 10:34 PM

That's scary. To think that a year has gone by, and still, nothing has changed with our voting system. It's not surprising, it's just scary.

Pat Buchannan asked an interesting question toninght. If Miss. Miers is so qualified, how come Bush did not appoint her to an appellate court first?

My answer: Even if they are not qualified to sit on the bench, he wanted to be sure that his nominee conformed to his idea of the role of the Supreme Court. When did qualifications ever matter to George Bush? He wanted an ideological soul mate that he could have in his back pocket for this nomination.

More scary and interesting stuff:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/10/5/153716/970

Here's only one little bit from a very interesting post:

"[Dobson] went on to claim that "I'm getting calls from members of Congress saying 'tell us your take on this, we're not sure what we think of Harriet Miers.'" He then admitted "It was leaked to the media that I've had conversations with Karl Rove and the White House, which is true."

Author Armando listened to James Dobson's show today. Put on your hipwaders before heading over.

My take is that Bush believes that he knows what Miers will do on the Court. It's been fascinating, however, to hear Republicans describe this as a "faith-based" nomination - and mean it in the same way that many critics have used that phrase against Bush Administration policy. I also think that Reid's suggestion of her made her a "safe" pick in Dubya's mind.

Before you even consider a filibuster, you have know whether you have the support of the "moderate" Democrats who were part of the deal to put off the nuclear option - Ben Nelson, Byrd, Salazar, etc. Potentially, if you can draws Miers out on the issue of whether she respect precedent vis-a-vis Roe v. Wade, and demonstrate that she cannot support precedent, it might have some impact on how the alleged choice supporters in the GOP vote (Collins, Chaffee, Snowe, etc).

I continue to believe that Fitzgerald's potential indictments of Rove and Libby, coming on the heels of Delay and Frist, and Abramoff, factor in here. If those shoes drop, and especially if Dubya or Cheney were named an unindicted co-conspirator, all hell will break loose in Washington - and Dubya might well be forced to move to the center.

LOL

Dobson is afraid of losing his most precious sign from God: $

From Dailykos poster Zipper

This might be a good time to mention that anyone who is thinking of moving to Canada might want to consider setting up medical clinics along the Canada/US border....

Posted by: Matthew Carnicelli at October 5, 2005 11:10 PM

Matt,

If the Senators you mention don't have the courage to filibuster this God awful nomination, then things will continue to get worse. I don't think you can disagree with that. We should cut our losses and drop our support of those Senators. I could care less what party they affiliate with when they do nothing to stand up for the principles that the party claims to protect.

Oncall,

All politics is local, and my two Senators - Clinton and Schumer - will likely vote against Miers regardless. I suspect that your guys, Obama and Durbin, will do the same. I would hope that anyone who claims to be a supporter of human freedom would vote against any Justice who would tip the balance towards the extremists. But, beyond that, I'm not clear how much clout we have with the likes of Ben Nelson.

If she is a devout Christian woman who has no great political loyalties and no involvement/loyalties to the neocon agenda, i.e., corporations....... If she is a sincere, devout Christian woman, I don't think she would hurt middle class America because her conscience wouldn't let her.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 5, 2005 10:28 PM

I agree, but sadly, since she was bush's lawyer and all... I'm afraid she has political loyalties and involvment in Con agenda.

But, beyond that, I'm not clear how much clout we have with the likes of Ben Nelson.

Posted by: Matthew Carnicelli at October 5, 2005 11:37 PM

Anytime somebody from the DNC calls or writes I can remind them that supporting Ben Nelson is enough to keep me from contributing to the Democratic Party.

The Dobson I met was very sincere. He may have changed, and/or he may have been duped by the neocons and totally unaware who he has for bedfellows. I honestly feel he is misunderstood by the left, but I don't like the way he threatened some Dem senators last winter to play ball his way or he would have their hides in '06.

I have Jon Stewart on. He is making fun of Dobson and suggesting that he knows Ms. Miers is pro-life because he (Dobson) has been "shagging" her. (Oh My.) (Just thinking back to this time last year. I would not have been able to handle that AT ALL....well, most of ya remember.)

I like Jon Stewart. He can make us laugh at the horrible.

I think the only problem I have with peoples' perception and depiction of James Dobson is that they accuse him of being totally into money and of having an alterior motive. Whatever you want to believe about Dobson is fine, but if he's the same man he was when I met him years ago, he is, at least, sincere in his devotion to his God. Without greed. I don't think he hates gays, don't know if he would be opposed to civil unions for gays. He is someone, I believe, who could and would, if challenged or asked, be very instrumental in developing sex education, psycho-
logical counseling, contraceptives, and other agencies to help prevent unwanted pregnancies.
And, he may not be hard to steer in that direction. He has a huge following, and they make big contributions. There are many well-to- do Evangelicals.

I don't know about Robertson. I don't care for him, but my relatives watch him every single night.

These guys do have power - the votes in the red areas of every state, thanks to Rove and his marriage to all clergy and Republican agendas.

Okay.....

You know what this leads me to suspect? That maybe Bush IS trying to be a sincere devout Christian, but is just either so naive', or
so uneducated as to who the powers behind him are, that he is a sincere devout Christian who is being a puppet for the military industrial complex without knowing it.

How does that sound? Is that way naive' on my part?

This made me laugh. Don't miss the last paragraph.

BUSH GIVES SUPREME COURT PICK ‘JUDGING FOR DUMMIES’

Non-judge to Receive Crash Course in Judging, President Says

One day after nominating a non-judge, Harriet Miers, to the United States Supreme Court, President George W. Bush presented his nominee with a book entitled “Judging for Dummies” which he said would provide her with “a crash course in judging.”

The book, which includes definitions of such basic judging terms as “docket” and “gavel,” will be invaluable in preparing Ms. Miers to serve on the highest court in the land, the president said.

SNIP

http://www.borowitzreport.com/

Frog March!

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The federal prosecutor investigating who leaked the identity of a CIA operative is expected to signal within days whether he intends to bring indictments in the case, legal sources close to the investigation said on Wednesday.

As a first step, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was expected to notify officials by letter if they have become targets, said the lawyers, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter."

Truth Shall Prevail

I believe that someone like Dobson could have been sincere in his faith. The problem I have is that they got so involved in politics.

It's like when I heard a politician say today (can't remember which one) that Miers would be good on the Supreme Court because she "knows right from wrong." But I thought Judges were supposed to review evidence and make decisions based on evidence, not decide what is right vs wrong.

By the way, the church nearest my house has put up a sign that says "sow justice, reap peace."
(Church of the Brethren) I like that.

Court row adds to Bush's woes

· Weakened president seeks to shore up support
· Conservatives furious over nomination for judge

The White House has spent much of the past 48 hours dialling numbers it normally only needs at election time. Those numbers belong to Christian conservatives, otherwise known as the "base" for their unstinting support of the president.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1585751,00.html

(These people are in for life!! Even if the country were to swing back toward sanity, we are stuck with these wingnuts)

'Peace Mom' Cindy Sheehan Returns Home

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) - Peace mom Cindy Sheehan, after wrapping up her tour of the country, returned home Wednesday to northern California where she plans to continue her protest of the Iraq war.

The mother who staged a 26-day vigil in front of President Bush's Texas ranch this summer received a hero's welcome from a hometown crowd attending a fundraiser for anti-war groups.

``I'll be a grieving mom until I die because of the lies that took my son,'' said Sheehan, making her first public appearance in the liberal San Francisco Bay area since the August vigil. ``I plan on keeping this up until the troops are brought home.''

Sheehan's 24-year-old son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, died in April 2004 in Iraq.

She has spent much of the time since speaking out against the war. After the monthlong vigil in Texas, she traveled the U.S. and also met with politicians, including Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-North Carolina.

Last weekend, she was arrested with more than 350 other people after a protest outside the White House.

So, Matt, DiAnne, Indy....

Is that what you see judging as? Making a decision based on evidence? Not deciding between right and wrong?

When my dad did it in his little municipal court room years ago (and I realize the nature of the supreme court and the significance of it's decisions are much more than a little municipal court), he made alot of decisions from his own personal view of right and wrong.

How often does that kind of scenario present itself in the Supreme Court?

Isn't it essentially the moral fiber and character and personality of each person on the bench that molds their decisions in the Supreme Court? I thought Indy said one time he didn't think it should, but I don't want to speak for him.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 6, 2005 12:34 AM

Truth,

Why do you think lady justice is wearing a blindfold and carrying a scale?

I believe Bush put Meir's "out there" to warn if she's not confirmed you will get Luttig,Owens or another Brownie. Meir's is just another Bush pawn.
As far as FLA. goes it's not purple as long as Jeb resides there and we should have realized that last year and gone for other states!

OnCall,

I hate to admit this, but I don't know.

Why?

And what does the term "legislating from the bench" mean?

Help, Help, don't leave me like this, OnCall.
LOL

Ummm. Because she is blind to ____________?

And is weighing the evidence, right?

Al Gore was spoke at a conference today - the full text is available at dailykos (seem to be reading there a lot tonight - ) Sorry for the length of this but the whole speech is very very long - this is only a fraction. It's important reading, in my opinion.

"I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack."

snip

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."

snip

But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."

But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.

And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.

snip

In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don't trust the news media anymore.

Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.

And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.

snip

And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that.

Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad.

snip
But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom."

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 6, 2005 12:34 AM

Stop trying to get attention TSP, and please do not ever attempt to speak for me...I do quite well on my own thank you.

Religion and religiousity are no more a scale by which to guide the lives of all humanity...just look at all of the injustice imposed upon the free will of infinate innocent people throughout our human history at the hands of the pious.

In a letter to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787, Jefferson wrote, "Question with boldness even the existence of a god."

Jefferson’s interpretation of the first amendment in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (January 1, 1802):

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than on our opinions in physics and geometry....The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Free Will is the voice of freedom...religion is hardly in a position to claim to know right from wrong.

Case in point:

The Ten Commandments.

How many Commandments have American voters broken directly or indirectly?

So, if you truly believe in your religion that these are mortal sins...all punishable by damnation, then all who voted for Bush and his policies are going to indeed burn in Hell.

How is that for Cosmic Justice?

Oncall is right, that is why Justice wears a blindfold, so no prejudice or malice can be expressed in legal opinion, but we are all only human and when encouraged by the right-wing fundamentalists and the media to do so, public opinion sways like a pendulum...

In other words...people are sheep.

If she is a devout Christian woman who has no great political loyalties and no involvement/loyalties to the neocon agenda, i.e., corporations....... If she is a sincere, devout Christian woman, I don't think she would hurt middle class America because her conscience wouldn't let her.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 5, 2005 10:28 PM

Remember when Condisleazy did a Freudian slip with "My Husb..." when speaking of Nitwit? She's always had that adoring look on her face when talking about her CIC....

Now, remember back to the day Mier was nominated.... Remember that glassy-eyed, dewey-eyed shy look, complete with beatific smile on her face when she lovingly gazed on "the most intelligent man she's ever met?" (? Or the glassy-eyed looks may have indicated she was on some kind of drugs?) It wouldn't surprise me in the least if Mier became "born again" for the sake of political pull with Georgie, as well as change her pro-choice stance to an anti-choice stance for his sake.

If neither woman is a lesbian, they both have some kind of misguided infatuation with the most unintelligent cretin who has ever ruled this country.... Conscience doesn't have anything to do with their decisions. Condisleazy and Harri will do what Georgie tells them to out of blind devotion and loyalty and "love" for the creature they think admires them, and even praises them in public, but who, in fact, is using them for his own Machiavellian objectives. Karen Hughes isn't much different when she talks about Nitwit in glowing terms, but she seems a bit more pragmatic and has a hubby and offspring to deal with, so she may be a bit more realistic, but her loyalty and devotion to Nitwit are just as unquestioned.

It's that blind loyalty and devotion to the lost cause of Boy Georgie whom they will rescue endlessly that has them caught in some kind of emotional trap. Psychopaths thrive on that blind loyalty and devotion, BTW. It's how they control people whom they praise for rescuing them from themselves. It works on mommy types and abused spouse/girlfriend types who love to rescue lost causes, and it gives them purpose in an otherwise purposeless and/or meaningless life. The women bolster his ego, forego every potential hobby or other interest in life to devote their attention on just one person, make decisions on what they think he wants them to believe, think, or decide - anything to avoid his displeasure... and he uses them for his own ulterior motives....

A few more from Thomas Jefferson:

“In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty; he is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”

“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear....Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue on the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and in the love of others which it will procure for you.”

“Christianity...[has become] the most perverted system that ever shone on man....Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus.”

Stop trying to get attention TSP, and please do not ever attempt to speak for me...I do quite well on my own thank you.

Posted by: Indy at October 6, 2005 02:05 AM

I was not attempting to speak for you, Indy, and my post made that clear.

I was not "trying to get attention" as much as I was asking questions, which is one of the purposes of the DCP. Interaction is a big part of the DCP experience, also.

Please do not attempt to censor or police me on this blog.

Posted by: NonnyO at October 6, 2005 02:07 AM

NonnyO,

I thought about that some myself, that he has the ability to have a "harem" (for lack of a better word)of women who cluck over and around him, kind of lots of mommies.

It's interesting too, isn't it that both Condi and Miers are spinsters, and career women, and both seem to serve "at the pleasure of the President".

Both women never married and have put their career, and their boss nbr. 1 in their lives.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 6, 2005 03:07 AM

Yeah, I admit... the same thoughts occurred to me quite a while ago, and then my jaw dropped when Condisleazy did the Freudian slip about "My Husb..."... and then when that same kind of Condi gaze and Karen glaze was turned on the creepy Cretin by Harri at the announcement... and then the same stats about her (as with Condi) and those 'harem' (eeeoowww!) and 'serving at the "pleasure" of the pres' thoughts ran through the front of my brain, and I'd like to shake that mind-numbing creepy stuff out of my head... but the look on those women's faces... eeeeoowww...! Not even Laura's gaze is that absolutely, dumbly, adoring 100% of the time....

Just makes me want to go bitch-slap those dumbly adoring subservient females and tell them to knock it off and go find a worthwhile hobby to occupy their minds. Wasting their time on a cretin who needs mommy figures to save him from himself is a waste of time... he'll never change and he will always need rescuing from himself. Eeeoowww...!

"Is that what you see judging as? Making a decision based on evidence? Not deciding between right and wrong?"

Right and wrong is a very tricky thing. The wingnuts may believe that they know what right and wrong are, or that the Bible tells them what it is, but the rest of us are a lot less sure. For instance, they think that President Bush is a moral man for overthrowing Hussein, but a lot of people around the world think he's a greater threat to the planet than Hussein ever was. Which group is right and which is wrong?

The wingnuts emphasize "moral clarity", and would expect a Justice to decide a case on such a basis - even if, in doing so, they violate the spirit of the Constitution, and the Founders inescapable commitment to modernity.

So, in my view, if a Judge would decide a case on what the Bible tells her, and not on what an evolving sense of the Constitution should mean, then in my view, she doesn't belong on the highest Court in the land.

Posted by: Amy at October 6, 2005 01:28 AM

Too bad Al didn't start that liberal Cable TV network...

And what does the term "legislating from the bench" mean?

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 6, 2005 12:54 AM

Let me put it this way. If the Supreme Court had decided in the Dred Scott case that slavery was wholly inconsistent with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution - in spite of Founders' acceptance of this "the peculiar institution" in 1787 - and consequently struck it down, that would have been considered "legislating from the bench". People like President Bush want to leave this kind of authority to Congress - even if, in the example of the conflict over slavery, Congress was utterly unable to act, and civil war would eventually be the result.

Bush points to Scalia and Thomas as his ideal of a judge, yet as Professor Karlen pointed out on the Newshour the other night, Scalia and Thomas have voted to strike down more Acts of Congress than any Justices in American history. So, it does seem that they too want to legislate from the bench when the Legislative Branch fails to live up to their subjective ideals. Like most of Bush's rhetoric, it makes you wonder what in the world he's talking about, and what planet he and his supporters think that they're living on.

Conservatives confront Bush aides on Miers
Anger over court nominee boils over in private meetings

By Peter Baker and Dan Balz
The Washington Post

The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection -- Bush called her "the best person I could find" -- was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but "was talking more broadly" about criticism of Miers.

The tenor of the two meetings suggested that Bush has yet to rally his own party behind Miers and underscores that he risks the biggest rupture with the Republican base of his presidency. While conservatives at times have assailed some Bush policy decisions, rarely have they been so openly distrustful of the president himself.

Leaders of such groups as Paul M. Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation and the Eagle Forum yesterday declared they could not support Miers at this point, while columnist George Will decried the choice as a diversity pick without any evidence that Miers has the expertise and intellectual firepower necessary for the high court.

As the nominee continued to work the halls of the Senate, the White House took comfort from the more measured response of the Senate Republican caucus and remained confident that most if not all of its members ultimately will support her. Yet even some GOP senators continued to voice skepticism of Miers, including Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who pronounced himself "not comfortable."

Persistent criticism
"Is she the most qualified person? Clearly, the answer to that is 'no,' " Lott said on MSNBC's "Hardball," contradicting Bush's assertion. "There are a lot more people -- men, women and minorities -- that are more qualified, in my opinion, by their experience than she is. Now, that doesn't mean she's not qualified, but you have to weigh that. And then you have to also look at what has been her level of decisiveness and competence, and I don't have enough information on that yet."

The persistent criticism has put the White House on the defensive ever since Bush announced Monday his decision to nominate Miers to succeed the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor. While Miers has a long career as a commercial lawyer, Texas political figure and personal attorney to Bush before joining him at the White House, she has never been a judge or dealt extensively with the sorts of constitutional issues that occupy the Supreme Court.

Bush tried to defuse the smoldering conservative revolt with a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, and the White House followed up yesterday by dispatching Gillespie, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and presidential aide Tim Goeglein to meetings that regularly bring together the city's most influential fiscal, religious and business conservatives.

"The message of the meetings was the president consulted with 80 United States senators but didn't consult with the people who elected him," said Manuel A. Miranda, a former nominations counsel for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) who attended both.

‘It doesn’t calm the waters’
Weyrich, who hosted one of the two private meetings, said afterward that he had rarely seen the level of passion at one of his weekly sessions. "This kind of emotional thing will not happen" often, Weyrich said. But he feared the White House advisers did not really grasp the seriousness of the conservative grievance. "I don't know if they got the message. I didn't sense that they really understand where people were coming from."

more...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9603946/

Allegations that Americans have tortured prisoners have dogged the Bush administration since April 2004, when graphic photographs of Army reservists mistreating prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad became public. Nine low-ranking soldiers were convicted or pleaded guilty in the Abu Ghraib scandal and their commander was demoted, but Pentagon investigators cleared higher-ranking officers of any wrongdoing.

McCain said Wednesday that intelligence is needed to fight terrorism, but "the intelligence we collect must be reliable and acquired humanely, under clear standards understood by all our fighting men and women." Torturing prisoners not only yields unreliable answers, but also endangers captured U.S. troops and allows "the cruel actions of a few to darken the reputation of our country in the eyes of millions," he said.

"The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don't deserve our sympathy," he said. "But this isn't about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies."

He bristled at remarks by his Republican colleague, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, questioning Fishback's account. Sessions also called it "sort of odd" that Fishback refused to disclose the names of sergeants in his unit who reported similar conduct.

"Captain Fishback is a noble, brave young American," McCain said. "He does not deserve to be disparaged on the floor of this Senate by any senator, and the senator from Alabama owes him an abject and deep apology."

Sessions said the McCain amendment was unnecessary, since those responsible for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib "are being held to account." He said he did not believe he questioned Fishback's integrity, and he said senators who questioned whether abuses were sanctioned by top officers or the Pentagon should consider an apology.

"To suggest to the world that we have as systemic pattern of abuse in the military is not true," he said.

If justice is blind, then I hope when all these Bush and Republican crimes end up in court that they alter each name to "Joe Smith" tried for conspiracy..."Joe Smith tried of criminal intent to _____"

OR better yet...let them change the name to William Jefferson Clinton, and then Bush judges and Thomas won't even look at the evidence, instead they'll put "convict" on auto pilot.

I was all tucked into my bed with the electric bedwarmer on to soothe my aching back during this cold snap when I was shocked awake by the local WCCO station (CBS affiliate) doing a live interview on their morning news with the widow of a man killed in Iraq - I've mentioned him before... so I dashed off a quick, almost coherent note to WCCO:

Regarding the Honoring Heroes story.....

Before WCCO gets involved in a VERY embarrassing situation, you might want to check out the name of the "private security" company the North Branch widow's husband worked for in Iraq. If it's the same one I did a Google search on when I first heard the news story after he was killed, it's DynCorp... a subsidiary of Halliburton - Dick Cheney's company that has all the no-bid contracts in Iraq... and now on the Gulf Coast cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina on another no-bid contract at military bases in MS. The other infamous "private security firm" that is a Halliburton subsidiary is Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), and they are in Iraq, too. After Bush got his PR photo-op act in gear after Katrina, he sent Blackwater (another mercenary company, think they're based out of Virginia) into New Orleans armed to the teeth after Bush declared martial law in Louisiana.

FYI, "private security officers" are mercenaries by any other name... and they make $400-700 per DAY (paid for by US taxpayers), the foreign mercenaries they are hiring from Columbia and other parts of South America and around the world are being paid about a third of that daily salary, and they protect the oil trucks and equipment owned by Halliburton, among other things less lethal than the torture they are alleged to have inflicted on Iraqi prisoners.

The first time I heard the term "private security officer" was when the Bush administration was trying to blame "private security officers" (mercenaries) - instead of regular US military personnel - for the torture at Abu Ghraib when that scandal first broke. I've heard "private security officers" (mercenaries) mentioned in connection with torture at Guantánamo (I've yet to hear about regular military personnel there, so it may be entirely staffed by mercenaries), and I know Halliburton is currently building yet another detention facility at Gitmo. Check out the Frontline (PBS) web site for more info regarding mercenaries, because I watched one of their specials about the mercenaries, and while some mercenary companies provide support services to the US military at an exorbitant daily salary, they may also be involved in the continuing imprisonment and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (all of which is illegal and not in accord with the Geneva Convention, among other international agreements that govern war-time conduct).

It's all very well to "honor" US MILITARY personnel who are honorably serving in Iraq and Afghanistan - the National Guard soldiers are not, after all, responsible for the stupid decisions made by Bu$hCo and Congress to carry out an illegal, unethical, and immoral war for the sake of controlling the oil in Iraq (check out the PNAC web site!) - it could potentially prove embarrassing to WCCO to promote and publicize a woman who's trying to get people to honor mercenaries who are making huge salaries paid for by US taxpayers (mercenaries are certainly making a lot more money than US military personnel). And, who knows? Perhaps the North Branch woman's husband was one of the people who was in on torturing prisoners in Iraq and she just doesn't know it yet....

Please save yourself future embarrassment and check out DynCorp, KBR, both Halliburton subsidiaries, and/or other mercenary organizations like Blackwater, etc., before continuing to promote honoring mercenaries who only went to Iraq for the large sums of money they could earn from US taxpayers....

Sincerely,

Victoria Ellen -

I think you once said you live in/by the Cities. I couldn't find anything on WCCO's web site about the live interview I caught, but if you see anything about it later, you might want to check it out, too. The fact that the 27th Nat'l. Guard troop from MN was just killed a day or two ago in Iraq might confuse people about what should be a major distinction between a US military soldier and a mercenary and they may be "honoring" the wrong people.

The state has just gone through several days of military ceremonies, photo ops with the governor and state congressional personnel because something like 2800 Guard troops are being deployed from different regions of the state right now, too, so they may just jump on the pseudo-patriotic bandwagon and honor just anyone who is/was in Iraq for any reason.

IMHO, mercenaries don't deserve to be honored. They engage in war for the adrenalin and the money.... not for any honorable reasons.

I'll let you know if WCCO answers my email....

Mercenary Territory
by Little Feat
music by Lowell George, Richie Hayward
lyrics by Lowell George

Is it the lies?
Is it the style?

It's a mercenary territory
I wish you knew the story
I've been out here so long dreamin up songs
I'm temporarily qualmless and sinking

I've did my time in that rodeo
It's been so long and I've got nothing to show
Well I'm so plain loco
Fool that I am I'd do it all over again

Is it the style?
Is it the lies?
Is it the days into nights
Or the "I'm sorry"s into fights

Now some kind of man, he can't do anything wrong
If I see him I'll tell him you're waiting
'Cause I'm devoted for sure but my days are a blur
Well your nights turn into my mornings

Well I did my time in that rodeo
Fool that I am I'd do it all over again

Is it love keeps you waiting so long
Makes you say I'll see you around
The forces that be, they just don't see
While your nights turn into my mornings

Is it the style?
Is it the lies?
Is it the days into nights
Or the "I'm sorrys" into fights

It occurred to me this morning as I read through the blog about the complex chess game going on over Miers -- who supports her and why, who doesn't support her and why... In the end, does anyone really believe that the general public can make heads or tails of this convoluted political ramblings? Hell, we've all speculated up the ying-yang to no conclusion and we live this stuff day after day. What about those (i.e., the majority of the people, IMHO) who don't? I think those sheeples just accept the opinion of whichever "leader" they trust, be it Dobson, Lott, Bush, or even Falwell...

Dr. Jerry Falwell, during an appearance in Chattanooga on Wednesday night, said he backs Harriet Miers for the U.S. Supreme Court.
http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_73768.asp

- no matter how far back to the left we swing over the next 50 years, assuming this is just a cycle, we'll have these two zealot wacko wingnut mysogynists on the Supreme Court until they croak

- re prisoner abuse and torture, McCain was a POW himself, so he's the logical one to get involved with having a policy on torture. So why the hell did he support the warmongering party in the first place?!

- just read that 12,000 evangelical women are hitting my city this weekend just as the adult dance clubs are being clipped and the hip young evangelist has just recruited gullible students on the campus and they're pledging celibacy til marriage. This is going to be one town where no one gets laid. Too bad for the sailors, wandering suburban husbands, young bachelors and conventioneers.

Please do not attempt to censor or police me on this blog.

Posted by: Truth Shall Prevail at October 6, 2005 03:00 AM

Just making it CLEAR that neither you nor your religion speaks for me...

Your statement was ambiguous as to my opinion and was as manipulative as a Neocon press conference in attempting to side what you "believe" I think to your argument.

You and Feaux news...

"Some people say..."

Religion and Sprituality are personal things...keep them that way...if you don't believe in pre-marital sex or abortion, then don't do either.

It still does not dismiss the rights of other human beings to make their own choices, no matter how erotic or painful.

Free will.

It's not just for Christians anymore.

Prisoners can soon vote in the UK and the EU.
If that happened in the US, the Republicans would lose. We have the highest incarceration rate of the civilized world and most are minorities.

Indy
I think we are well on the way to theocracy.

Dianne... get 12,000 male students, a kickass sound system, maybe some Dave Matthews or Jack Johnson, a couple a dozen kegs, and hit the streets this weekend...

You gotta fight, for your right, to party.

Truth Shall Prevail

As far as I know, judges are required to give meaning and application to constitutional, statutory and common law expositions of fundamental human rights. They are to weigh evidence against law and make a decision based on available evidence and their interpretation of the law.

Those who make the laws should consider what is for the greater good of the people, they should be elected by the people to do this.

Religious leaders may have a different role, such as to decide what is right and wrong and teach it.

I believe that civil and religious realms should be separate and that their personnel should specialize in the civil and religious areas, respectively.

I also believe that we have lost this in the United States. We are becoming more like Saudi Arabia, less like Canada or Spain. In some countries, religious leaders determine law but I thought we were "liberating" people in those countries. Actually, they want it that way and we're bothering them and in fact killing them.

Elevate the debate.

The Al Gore speech is great.
He is our true 2000 president just as John Kerry is our true 2004 president.

We are not only on the way to becoming a theocracy but we have had two bloodless coups.

Even Seattle, home of Curt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and the 1999 WTO Battle has been neutered.

One Republican member of the Judiciary Committee who met with Miers Wednesday, Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio, said after the meeting that she was "an excellent pick" for the Supreme Court and that he was "very, very impressed" by her, describing the White House counsel as "tough as nails and very independent."

Last email received before leaving for work:

Did you hear about the shrubs planned speech to defend the war?

Here is a cut at the end..

http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20051006050809990001&_ccc=3&cid=842

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush, in Thursday speech, "is going to be directly taking on some of those who argue that we should withdraw from the Middle East and those who suggest that taking the fight to the enemy only causes these radicals to launch attacks."

The president intended to give Americans a newly detailed description of the terrorists' clearly thought-out strategy for dominating the world with their brand of Islam and continued attacks on democracy.

The president was to argue that the fight against them is not to be underestimated and can be compared to the lengthy previous battles against ideologies such as communism, McClellan said.

Monkey

good idea - Dave Matthews even lives here.
My son is leaving for work & Dave Matthews often comes in the bakery where he works. I'll tell him to suggest it (giant kegger next to where the evangelical women are meeting). Maybe they could have it at the Seattle Center, because that's where the convention is.

Monkey

"tough as nails and very independent" - used to be a feminist

a big sellout

I could make more money if I did that too.

BBC will report Bush told Palestinian leaders that God had told him to end tyranny in Iraq

President George W. Bush allegedly told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq - and create a Palestinian State, the BBC will reveal in a program slotted to run Oct. 17, RAW STORY can reveal.

The BBC errantly posted a press release link on their website early, revealing the documentary's contents.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday Oct. 10, Monday Oct. 17 and Monday Oct. 24 British time), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003 to BBC reporters.

Foreign Minister Shaath declares: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

Prime Minister Mazen recounts how President Bush told him: "I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state."

The series charts the attempts to bring peace to the Middle East, from Bill Clinton's peace talks in 1999/2000 to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last August. It was produced by Norma Percy, who produced The 50 Years War, along with producers Mark Anderson and Dan Edge.

Presidents and Prime Ministers, their generals and ministers tell the BBC their accounts of what happened behind closed doors as peace talks failed and the intifada exploded.

DEVELOPING...

WASHINGTON - President Bush is stepping up his defense of his Iraq policy as he faces declining public support for the war and a crucial test in Iraq with the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum.

Aides said Bush would take on war critics directly in a speech on Iraq and the broader war on terrorism before the National Endowment for Democracy Thursday morning.

The address, scheduled for 10:10 a.m. ET, will be streamed live on MSNBC.com.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush “is going to be directly taking on some of those who argue that we should withdraw from the Middle East and those who suggest that taking the fight to the enemy only causes these radicals to launch attacks.”

The president intended to give Americans a newly detailed description of the terrorists’ clearly thought-out strategy for dominating the world with their brand of Islam and continued attacks on democracy.

Bush was briefed Wednesday on Iraq by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. David Petraeus and said he was pleased with the progress in the training of Iraqi troops.

“The Iraqis are showing more and more capability of taking the fight to the enemy,” the president told reporters. “As they become more capable, we will be able to bring folks home.”

He did not offer a timetable.

‘Stay on the offense’
Bush also said he expected insurgents to try to derail next week’s vote on a new constitution.

“We fully understand they intend to disrupt the constitutional process, or will try to do so, as well as stop the progress of democracy,” Bush said. “Part of the way the Pentagon and the folks on the ground are going to deal with it is to stay on the offense, and that’s what’s taking place.”

Senate Democrats assailed the administration’s strategy in Iraq and prodded the president to change it. “We will not accept staying the course,” said Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

In a letter to Bush, Senate Democrats said continuing along the same path in Iraq “could lead to a full blown civil war.”

“He has to tell the American people what the plan is,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del.

Casualty and opinion poll numbers
As of Wednesday, at least 1,941 members of the U.S. military have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. At least 1,513 died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers, including five military civilians.

The most recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll showed only 37 percent of Americans approve of Bush’s handling of Iraq, with 62 percent disapproving.

Bush on Wednesday visited wounded troops at the Army’s Walter Reed hospital, which has received over 4,450 patients injured in Iraq. He visited with 29 and presented eight Purple Hearts.

He said that every time he comes to the hospital, slated to close under a federal plan, he marvels at the courage of soldier patients. “I asked for God’s blessing on them and their families as they recover,” Bush said.

Nearly 140,000 U.S. troops are still in Iraq.

new thread...

Nearly 140,000 U.S. troops are still in Iraq.

Posted by: monkey at October 6, 2005 10:04 AM

And how many Iraqi troops have been trained and are "taking the fight to the enemy"?

Far too few...

Saturday OCtober 1, 2005

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday said U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces were improving daily, downplaying the fact that the number of Iraqi battalions able to fight without U.S. help had melted to one.

"There are an awful lot of people chasing the wrong rabbit here, it seems to me," Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon, when asked about the number of Iraqi battalions that can operate independently.

"The important fact is ... that every day, every week, every month the Iraqi security forces are larger, they're better equipped, they're better trained and they're more experienced. And that is the central fact," Rumsfeld said.

Pentagon officials have said that creating Iraqi security forces able to defend their own country is a prerequisite to an eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. But there are persistent questions about the quality of these forces and the degree to which they have been infiltrated by insurgents.

Rumsfeld said there are 194,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi army troops and police.

One of the few measurements the Pentagon has offered the public to judge the capabilities of Iraqi security forces has been the number of battalions that can go into combat with insurgents without the help of the U.S. military.

During congressional testimony on Thursday, Gen. George Casey, top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen. John Abizaid, top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said the number of such battalions had dropped since July from three to one, out of the roughly 100 Iraqi battalions.

During his briefing, Rumsfeld initially called that fact "irrelevant," but later amended himself. "It's relevance is minimal," he said.

'NOT A SETBACK'

Casey told the briefing that U.S. forces will continue to have to accompany Iraqi security battalions for "a couple of years, for sure."

Casey said the number of Iraqi battalions capable of taking the lead in counter-insurgency operations with U.S. support had doubled since May. He declined to say how many there were in this category, saying that information was classified.

He said it will be "a couple of months" before more Iraqi battalions achieve the ability to fight on their own.

Casey did not explain the reason for the decline from three to one battalions that can operate on their own, but said that "we purposely set a very high standard" for these units.

"No, it's not a setback. I mean, unit readiness is going to fluctuate. And it is such a small number. And at this stage, I'm not concerned about small numbers," Casey said.

"Next year, at this time, I'll be much more concerned about it. Right now, I'm not," Casey said.

Casey also expressed concern about diminishing U.S. public support for the war, as shown in recent opinion polls, suggesting this was exactly what insurgents wanted.

"Look, you guys read the polls just like I do. And this is a terror campaign. And they are trying to create the impression that we and the Iraqis cannot succeed in Iraq," Casey said.

Rumsfeld added that the insurgents "know what they're doing. They're focussing on public opinion in the United States. They're trying to do things that are dramatic and affect that."

"They can't win a battle," Rumsfeld said. "They can't win a war out in the field. The only place they can win is in a test of wills, if people say, 'The cost is too high and the time is too long.'"

Oncall,

Re: our conversation last night.

"After a meeting on Wednesday of the so-called Gang of 14, a bipartisan group of senators who agreed earlier to block filibusters against judicial nominees except in "extraordinary circumstances," several members of both parties said they agreed that so far Ms. Miers "did not set off alarm bells," as Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, put it. If the Republican majority of 55 senators votes on party lines, a filibuster would be the only way Democrats could block a nominee."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/politics/politicsspecial1/06nominate.html