Month: June 2005

Utah Sen. Bob Bennett is going to introduce some sort of a social security bill without private accounts:

Mr. Bennett said that during a luncheon with other Republican senators at the White House, he told the president of his plans to introduce the bill as early as next week.

“He indicated that I should go forward and do that,” Mr. Bennett said. “And I’m grateful to have him do that even though his own preference would be to have personal accounts included.”

Since the beginning of his second term, Mr. Bush has been pushing to allow younger workers to create voluntary personal accounts funded out of their Social Security payroll taxes. Democrats accuse the White House of seeking to privatize the Depression-era program and have been unified in opposition to the idea.

“I’ve decided that the Democrats have made it clear that they will not back personal accounts,” Mr. Bennett said outside the White House. “And in response to the president’s position that let’s try to get something done, I will be proposing a bill that does not include personal accounts.”

This compromise is necessary because the Democrats are not a serious political party, even if they do throw a great pretend tea party in the basement of the House.

This account of John Conyers’ make-believe impeachment hearing is pretty funny:

In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him “Mr. Chairman.” He liked that so much that he started calling himself “the chairman” and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as “unanimous consent” and “without objection so ordered.” The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along…

The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration “neocons” so “the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.” He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

…but Conyers’ complaints about it are even funnier:

The article begins with an especially mean and nasty tone, claiming that House Democrats “pretended” a small conference was the Judiciary Committee hearing room and deriding the decor of the room. Milbank fails to share with his readers one essential fact: the reason the hearing was held in that room, an important piece of context. Despite the fact that a number of other suitable rooms were available in the Capitol and House office buildings, Republicans declined my request for each and every one of them. Milbank could have written about the perseverance of many of my colleagues in the face of such adverse circumstances, but declined to do so. Milbank also ignores the critical fact picked up by the AP, CNN and other newsletters that at the very moment the hearing was scheduled to begin, the Republican Leadership scheduled an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most Members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing.

In what can only be described as a deliberate effort to discredit the entire hearing, Milbank quotes one of the witnesses as making an anti-semitic assertion and further describes anti-semitic literature that was being handed out in the overflow room for the event. First, let me be clear: I consider myself to be friend and supporter of Israel and there were a number of other staunchly pro-Israel members who were in attendance at the hearing. I do not agree with, support, or condone any comments asserting Israeli control over U.S. policy, and I find any allegation that Israel is trying to dominate the world or had anything to do with the September 11 tragedy disgusting and offensive.

He huffs and puffs like he was a real chairman and not just a Huffington Poster, sad bastard. His fake hearing was held in the basement because he’s not the chairman of a real committee. If his party could win an election, that might change but that hasn’t happened for ten years now. Holding tea parties in the basement isn’t going to change anything.

Here’s the hometown reaction to punk Durbin’s meltdown:

Durbin’s comparison of U.S. interrogators to governments that together killed millions of people makes him look desperate for attention. Well, he’s created a lot of discussion about Dick Durbin. We suspect that was the goal all along.

Perhaps, though, citizens should be grateful. At least Durbin has stopped repeating that odd little joke about President Lincoln–that he must have been Jewish because his first name was Abraham and he was shot in the temple.

We know what Durbin thinks about the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners. So what’s the proper treatment of our coverage-hungry senior senator when he displaces the ever-present microphone long enough to insert his foot in his mouth? Ignore him. That would be torture.

Right on.

This Bush has done crossed the line of human decency:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Gov. Jeb Bush said Friday that a prosecutor has agreed to investigate why Terri Schiavo collapsed 15 years ago, citing an alleged time gap between when her husband found her and when he called 911…

“Between 40 and 70 minutes elapsed before the call was made, and I am aware of no explanation for the delay,” Bush wrote. “In light of this new information, I urge you to take a fresh look at this case without any preconceptions as to the outcome.”

Grandstanding and practicing medicine without a license. Dispatches from the Culture Wars explains:

Virtually all of this is nonsense. It is utterly false that this alleged time gap was “never brought up”. It’s been out there for years, but it’s based on virtually nothing. In a TV interview 13 years after her collapse, Michael said that he woke up and found her around 4:30 am. The 911 call was made at 5:40 am. But was Michael trying to be accurate in his interview? Obviously not. He was recounting that he got woken up in the middle of the night. In another interview, he’d said around 5 am. But there’s one really obvious reason why there was no alleged 70 minute gap between finding Terri and calling 911 – she wouldn’t be alive if he had waited that long. She was without oxygen. If she’d been without oxygen for 70 minutes, she would have been stone cold dead with no chance of revival. The fact that they managed to revive her after multile defibrillations, but with major brain damage, is proof that she was only down 10-15 minutes.

I’d like to see Congress pass another special Schiavo law, to the effect that any politician who tries to exploit this issue is banned from elected office for life. We can start with this Bush character.

They’re kidding,. right?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Halliburton Co. unit will build a new $30 million detention facility and security fence at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 520 foreign terrorism suspects, the Defense Department announced on Thursday.

OK, they’re not and this is the most appropriate response to the calls to shut Gitmo down, right?

Bill Frist just lost my vote:

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday he doesn’t regret using his standing as a doctor to question Terri Schiavo’s diagnosis from afar during the intense national debate over whether to remove her feeding tube.

Frist said he accepted the results of Schiavo’s autopsy released Wednesday, showing severe, irreversible brain damage. But he stood by his statements on the Senate floor last March, when he argued that on videotape Schiavo appeared to respond to her family and doctors.

“Would I do it over again? Yes, I would do it over again,” the senator told reporters. Frist, R-Tenn., said he had only sought to make sure the most up-to-date testing was performed to determine whether Schiavo was truly in a persistent vegetative state, the diagnosis accepted by state courts.

I would vote for Hillary before I’d vote for this buffoon, and I can’t stand Hillary.

The range of reactions on the conservative side to the Schiavo autopsy is interesting. It stretches all the way from Neal Boortz’ sober reaction:

Correct me if I’m wrong .. but when the Terri Schiavo matter was consuming front pages and broadcast news, wasn’t the issue whether or not she was reacting to her parents and watching that balloon floating around her room? She should not be allowed to die, people said, because with rehab she would improve and then her family could take her to malls and birthday parties and such.

Well, the autopsy results are in. [full autopsy pdf] There was no way that Terri Schiavo could benefit in any way from rehabilitation therapy. What’s more, she had no cognitive abilities. In this context the finding means that Terri could not engage in any conscious intellectual activity. She could not participate in or understand conversations. She could not communicate. She never did try to say “I want to live.” She had no awareness or understanding of the state she was in, or of the controversy surrounding her. She could not see, so that rules out those stories of her watching that Mickey Mouse balloon floating around her room. It’s safe to say that she was not aware of her own existence on any conscious level.

…to the rabid hate-mongering of Michele Malkin:

Late last night, I took the time to read the 39-page autopsy report of Terri Schiavo–something which, it is clear to me, most of the callous gloaters on the other side of this debate have not bothered to do. And will never do. These are people who can only talk about the sanctity of life if it’s enclosed in ghost quotes and pronounced with a sneer.

You do not need a medical examiner’s license to see that the report raises many more questions than it answers, though from the (once again) misleading media coverage, we are led to believe that the matters of Terri’s life and murder are resolved. They are not.

Conservatives and Republicans may be many things, but they’re not hive-minded creatures marching in lock-step on this and many other issues. In contrast, I suspect Liberals and Democrats are pretty much on the same page on this issue, not altogether bad since they happen to be right.

I also find it interesting that those who want to denounce the autopsy (or media treatment of it, which amounts to the same thing) tend to be supporters of the scurrilous Intelligent Design movement. I don’t think this is a coincidence.