Category: Politics

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.

Thanks to the autopsy released yesterday, we know that Terri Schiavo felt no pain after her feeding pump was shut off, but Congress took extraordinary action to prolong her “life” anyway. Angel Raich is a real, living, breathing, walking human being who suffers real pain that can only be relieved by marijuana. The people of California, where she lives, decided that she should be able to relieve her pain, but Congress refuses to let their wishes be carried out in accordance with our Federalist system. Here’s a link to the vote on an amendment to a bill that would have prohibited the US government from depriving Raich and California of their rights. See how your representative voted. DeLay voted against Angel, BTW.

The state of Kerala in South India has been a hotbed of labor activism since it became the first place in the world to freely elect a Marxist government in 1956. There’s a joke about Kerala people (called Malayalees after their language, Malayalam) that goes like this: one Malayalee, two opinions; two Malayalees, trade union; three Malayalees, bandh (strike).

There’s been a labor dispute around two Coca Cola plants in Kerala that’s fallen into allegations of ground water overuse and poison fertilizer (dutifully and uncritically reported by Humboldt County hippie Alex Cockburn in Counterpunch). It was recently settled by the High Court of Kerala, a pretty uncorruptable body:

The Kerala High Court has ordered Perumatty village council (panchayat) to grant a licence for Coca Cola to extract up to 500,000 litres of water a day at its Plachimada bottling plant. The Court overturned an earlier ruling that underground water belongs to the public and the Government must protect it.

The Plachimada Solidarity Committee says the campaign to close the plant will continue and urged the panchayat to appeal to the Supreme Court. Activist C.R. Bijoy, said: “The issue is about who has the fundamental decision making power over the use of natural resources, and it is about the survival of the people.”

Coca-Cola, which produces Coke, Fanta, Sprite, Thums Up and Limca, started bottling in March 2000. At its peak the plant produced a million bottles daily. Villagers allege that water levels dropped sharply and the remaining water caused dizziness, diarrhoea and skin rashes. They allege that Coca-Cola persuaded local farmers to use waste sludge containing cadmium and lead as a fertilizer.

This is one of many protests against Coca-Cola India: Coke is even banned in Parliament. However, the company says that allegations are without scientific basis and that in some areas water levels actually rose after it introduced rainwater harvesting. It cites a number of community and environmental awards as evidence of good practice.

If you’ve read Cockburn’s spin on this saga, you’ll have a different idea about what happened, so you have to choose who’s more credible: a hippie on vacation, or the High Court. It’s not much of a contest as I see it.

Here’s a good example of why politicians need to lie to voters:

As a wonderfully sneaky test of awareness, PPIC asked Californians in a recent survey how much of the state budget is spent on public schools. They were clueless. Only one in three knew that public education is by far the biggest item, sucking up half the budget–very roughly, $50 billion of $100 billion.

Ignorant voters insist more money pour into the schools, not knowing California spends more on schools than the entire operating budgets of each of the 49 other states, including New York.

Here’s reality: The National Education Association (NEA) and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) rank California in the middle on per-pupil-spending. We’re at the comfy median. We do not “under-fund” our schools despite our many troubles.

Why doesn’t everybody know this?

The PPIC poll shows how misconceptions are driven by partisanship in California. Democrats tend to believe (ridiculously) that California’s prisons get the most state money. Republicans tend to believe (absurdly) that social welfare gets the most state money.

People are ignorant in part because our crisis-driven media often lazily push the myth that California is near “the bottom” in school funding. That myth is a product of the education lobby, led by the California Teachers Association, which makes sure California teachers earn the highest salaries in the nation, yet constantly whines that schools are under-funded.

That’s right, stupid.

Amnesty Int’l’s US leader, Bill Schulz, shows some of that old-time credibility that’s the reason we love his organization so much. The course of defending the irresponsible “gulag” remark, he claims support from the paper of record:

Over the past three weeks I’ve had more than one occasion to reflect on the power of symbols. Whether you agree with Secretary Rumsfeld that our analogy was “reprehensible” or with the New York Times that it was an “apt metaphor,” the use of that one word “gulag” had a remarkable impact on the public debate. Amnesty got more media time to discuss US detention policies in the past three weeks than we have in the past three years.

Now that looks like the Times must have taken an editorial position supporting his outrageous comparison, right? But in fact his link goes to a column by Tom Friedman that’s in the archive by now.

Whether Friedman supported Amnesty or not, it’s a lie to say that speaks for the paper. And as Amnesty doesn’t seem to be able to make its point without lying, perhaps there’s no point to be made.

The Times did venture into pro-Amnesty territory in an editorial still up on the IHT’s site:

What makes Amnesty’s gulag metaphor apt is that Guantánamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and secret locations run by the intelligence agencies.

And this point is the one that Schulz tries to make. But this comparison is so weak it essentially applies to any prison: “this prison is only one of many prisons run by the state where people languish in custody for smoking doobies.” An argument can hardly be any weaker than this. Military prisons housing enemy combatants are of an entirely different character than secret prisons filled with a country’s own citizens, generally arrested for thought crimes.

China still has a gulag, America doesn’t.

Daily Kos is embroiled in battle with the witless women’s studies crowd:

So over the weekend, certain segments of the community have erupted in anger over the TBS ad for their reality show, the Real Gilligan’s Island. Apparently, having two women throw pies at each other, wrestle each other in a sexy, lesbianic manner, then having water splashed on their ample, fake bosoms is degrading to women. Or something like that.

…and Baloon Juice is loving it:

Yeah- because the chief electoral woe of the Democratic party is their outright failure to woo the feminist vote and their continuing inability to stop left-wing bloggers from showing contempt for women.

Kos is doing God’s work for a change.