This is HUGE, especially after all the ink given to this notion that the Evil Clinton Cabal is trying to derail Dean's candidacy for the DNC chairmanship:

Harold Ickes, a leading Democratic activist and former aide to President Clinton, said Friday he is backing Howard Dean to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee -- giving a powerful boost to the front-runner.

"I think all the candidates who are running have strong attributes, but Dean has more of the attributes than the others," said Ickes, who considered running for chairman himself before dropping out in early January. "Many people say Howard Dean is a northeastern liberal, he is progressive, but his tenure as governor of Vermont was that of a real moderate."

Ickes, who is chairman of the political action committee of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said the endorsement was his alone and "does not reflect Sen. Clinton's opinion."

While Ickes would not comment on the Clintons' preferences, he is a close ally and would not be endorsing Dean against their strong objections.

"Senator Clinton is neutral in the race for DNC chair," said her spokesman, Philippe Reines. "She looks forward to working with the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee."

Ickes' endorsement comes at a critical time in the chairman's race and gives Dean almost 50 of the more than 215 votes he would need to win the post.

A search of Google news for "Ickes Dean" yields this amusing result:



The San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian (UK), and MLive are all reporting the Ickes endorsement of Dean, while MSGOP still has their "Anybody but Dean" story up from Newsweek, and that bastion of fake wingnut made-up shit, Newsmax, claimed five days ago that "Bill and Hill Push for 'Anybody but Dean'".

Heh.

Friday Dick Cheney Appalling Insensitivity Blogging:

At yesterday's gathering of world leaders in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the United States was represented by Vice President Cheney. The ceremony at the Nazi death camp was outdoors, so those in attendance, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were wearing dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots. Because it was cold and snowing, they were also wearing gentlemen's hats. In short, they were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event.

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.

Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.

Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.

It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?

No, I think he just didn't give a shit.

Next week we go back to cat blogging, which is far more appealing. But I've had a really lousy day, and I'm going to sleep now. I do have a cute photo of Maggie for next week, though, so try to survive till then.

Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau:

A delegation sent by President Bush to Ukraine's presidential inauguration last weekend included a Ukrainian-American activist who has accused Jews of manipulating the Holocaust for their gain and blamed them for Soviet-era atrocities in Ukraine.

"Big money drives the Holocaust industry," Myron B. Kuropas wrote in August 2000.

The inclusion of Kuropas in the U.S. delegation to Sunday's inauguration of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, which was led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared to be an embarrassment for the Bush administration.

A White House official, who refused to be identified by name, said Tuesday, "We were not aware of his previous statements. Had we been aware of such comments beforehand, we would not have invited Dr. Kuropas to be a member of the delegation."

And I am Marie of Rumania. Again.

But then, Bush knows all about sham elections -- he's in office because of two of them.

International Herald Tribune:

Very early in the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration recognized that a democratic Iraq, even a stridently anti-Saddam one, would not countenance the strategic U.S. goals the war was fought for: controlling the second-largest oil reserves in an energy-thirsty world, and establishing military bases required for undertaking the political transformation of the Middle East to serve American interests. A long-term occupation to secure these ambitious goals was no less tenable.

So even as the Americans proclaimed their mission as one designed to introduce democracy and human rights in Iraq, they fought against demands for early elections even from putative allies like the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They also maneuvered to put into place a self-governance and electoral plan that, through carefully circumscribed United Nations involvement, they thought would ensure that the hand-picked Iraqi leadership would enjoy some legitimacy, with the elections scheduled for Sunday providing an added boost of Shiite support.

But as this blood-stained election shows, the complete breakdown of this plan has been one of the most colossal U.S. policy failures of the last half-century. Indeed, this is not an election that any democratic nation, or indeed any independent international electoral organization, would recognize as legitimate.

For the only time in memory, electoral candidates are afraid to be seen in public and are forced to campaign from underground cells, with many afraid to even link their names to their faces in the media. There are no public rallies where voters might glean some information about candidates' positions. As one voter told CNN, he would prefer to vote for George Michael, since he knows more about the singer than about any of the candidates running for office.

[snip]

The wonder is that the United States, fully aware that holding this election would unleash an altogether new level of violence, chose to push ahead with what was bound to further destabilize the country and intensify hatreds that will take decades to heal.

The ultimate irony is that despite its enormous cost in human life, physical destruction and deepening hatreds, this election will in no way make life easier for the Americans, the Allawi dictatorship or Iraqis. That was the view of most Iraqi, Arab and Muslim analysts at a fascinating closed-door international consultation organized in the fall by the middle-of-the-road Oxford University Center for Islamic Studies. They argued at a minimum for the election's postponement.

At a time when even many developed sovereign governments cannot be trusted to hold free and fair elections without deep outside scrutiny, elections under hostile occupations should be forbidden, since they have no other purpose than to further entrench the occupier's interests.

It was clear to those of us in Baghdad right after Saddam Hussein's fall that no long-term American project there, let alone the brutish attempt to cow Iraqis through massive use of force in civilian areas, would succeed. The limited self-governance plan was particularly a non-starter because of the transparent control the United States exercised over the process in order to ensure the emergence of malleable Iraqi leaders.

In any event, virtually no Iraqis, not even those benefiting from the American presence, see the superpower either as a friend or as a promoter of human rights and democracy. Each U.S.-dictated self-governance milestone has therefore backfired, just like the current election has, generating wider support and bloodier attacks by an insurgency that has grown more effective in thwarting American ambitions.

Catastrophic success indeed. The "success" in Bush's eyes is that he convinced enough voters not to change horsemen in the middle of the Apocalypse. The catastrophe is in Iraq, and will only get worse.

From a diary at Kos:

What you will NOT see on tonight's ABC Nightline!!!
by NewWay4NewDay

Thu Jan 27th, 2005 at 19:19:41 PST

I just came from the townhall meeting hosted by Ted Koppel at St. John's Episcopal Church across from the White House in Washington D.C.
The topic is IRAQ: Why Stay?

The panel consisted of Joseph Wilson, Sen. George Allen (R), and Rep Marty Meehan (D)

There was some good dialogue, but mostly ended up that time was given primarily to the pro-war agenda. There were a few outbursts that will probably be edited out, and one major outburst from a Rabbi Waskau that you will not see because it was during a commercial break.

I am posting this now, so you are aware, and will watch Nightline, but am going to keep adding to this diary continuously until I can accurately describe the event as I witnessed it.

Diaries :: NewWay4NewDay's diary ::

It started out seemingly okay. People were asked to submit questions to producers.

I submitted a question... it was about the effects of Depleted Uranium on our military personnel and Iraqui Civillians, and I wanted to ask what has been done to protect our troops from exposure to radioactive dust particles, and wanted to know if the Veterans Administration is prepared for the long term health effects to soldiers & their offspring caused by over exposure to DU.

The producer told me that since there were no helath experts on the panel, it was not a proper question for the theme of the show, and So, I restructured my comment, and she said it was better and would run it by the executive producer: "As a navy veteran who was deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1991, I am concerned that America is not prepared for a resurgence of Gulf War Syndrome" and that the Veterans Administration is ill-equipped to deal with the long term health issues faced by soldiers who have been exposed to Depleted Uranium".

So, We all sat and waited for the program to begin.

It starts out with a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois (can't remember her name) underscoring that she felt the war was based on a lie etc.

Then Ted Koppel asked if their were any military people who wanted to respond. The first woman who got the mic (I think by accident) was a woman who had lost her husband in the war last year and said she was a part of a group (I think Millitary Famlies Speak Out, but not sure) who gave a heartfelt plea to pull out of Iraq before anymore spouses had to go through what she had gone through.
From there, it started becoming clear that the pro-war people were going to be given more time to speak than people who dissented. The next comment came from a woman who also lost her husband (actually in the same unit as the other wife) and she gave a patriotic speech about how poud she was that he had died for his country etc and that we needed to finish the job of bring freedom to Iraq.

So, it went on this way, with the pro-war side taking precedence.

Then, during the third commercial break Rabbi Waskau stood up and loudly said, "I was invited hear to speak, but then was told I could you would not allow anyone from the religious community to sit in the front row and that I would be allowed to make a comment later if I would take a seat in back. But now I have been told that I will not be allowed to speak at all."
(upon hearing that, I realized that nobody had spoken from a religious/faith based perspective, and wondered if that was indeed intentional).

He went on, "So I will ask my question now during the break so as not to cause embarrassment to you Mr. Koppel"

Ted Koppel said, "Thank you, go ahead"

The Rabbi spoke: "You do not want the religious community to speak beacause we DO see the BIG picture (reffrencng a marine who had spoken earlier saying that people who were for ending the occupation in Iraq di not see the big picture) "We know the story of the Pharoah, who tried to hold back God's people, and that the Pharoah's lust for power was so great that we pushed his army against the Hebrews again and again no matter how many time's he failed... he continued to deny the circumstances until the amry of Egypt was beat down and depleted at the expense of his subjects." (I wish I could communicate the eloquence with which he spoke)... "President Bush is the Pharoah, and he has stripped the American people of basic social services such as healthcare and education in order to arrogantly keep up his holy war. I will no longer stand for the U.S. governmen and the media denying the religious community our voice. The common people of the Untied States and of Iraq and elsewhere are suffering."

Then he said he was done, (there was definitely some applause during parts of his speech) and he was escorted out the church where the Nightline episode was being taped.

Antother outburst happened toward the last half hour when a tall older African American gentleman went up to a mic without permission and siad, "ask Richard Perle about the PNAC... that's all I've got to say... I'm outa here!"

Then, it went on and during the last break their was a similar occurence as to the rabbi's, when an Iraqi spoke loudly saying, there are many Iraqi's here sitting in the back, and we were told we could speak, but have been denied."

Before it went further, Ted Koppel said they would be given a chance to speak in the last seven minute segment.

However, when the show started again, one man was brought to the microphone from another section... not from where the first Iraqi said he and others were sitting. That one man said he was an Iraqi and represented the majority of Iraqi's and he supproted the U.S. freedom fighters, and only a small percentage of Sunni's were angered by the U.S. presence in Iraq. that was all.

Ted Koppel went to the closing statements and let each of the four guest panelists have their say, then started to do his closing.
I was upset that nothing was said about the health of our troops mentally, physically or otherwise.

So, I satrted chanting "GULF WAR SYNDROME" over and over again, very loudly so it filled the church and drown out Ted Koppel.

He replied, "I am sure I have no idea what you're taking about"

and I yelled, "It's about Depleted Uranium!"

Then I shut up, and he finished his closing and it was over.

As I was waiting to filter out with everybody else, I heard one of the Iraqi's, who was very upset, talking to a producer: "This is not what we expected, we were told we would get a chance to speak in the press release you sent us, and you did not give us the chance to say what we came to say."

The producer just kind of appeased him... nodded and stuff.

That's it.

I think they will probably re-shoot Ted Koppel's closing.

I just wanted you to post this so the whole story could get out there... pass it on as you deem appropriate.

I am really feeling at this moment that the media is intentionally trying to appear as they foster "free speech" and "open dialogue", but are actually doing everything they can to keep dissenting views muted and to a minimum.

So I'm passing it on, in case you had any doubts that the concept of the press and media as mere mouthpieces of the Bush Administration doesn't stop at a few wingnut commentators; it's invaded the entire industry, so that the entire mainstream news infrastructure is rotten from the inside out.

Welcome to the Union of Soviet Wingnut Republics.

So as B@B's wingnut cybertrolls, having been unsuccessful in somehow tarring Your Humble Blogger as possibly on the take from liberal groups (which she isn't), they have now moved on to casting aspersions on the relatively commonplace practice of posting a "tip jar" and a link to my Amazon.com wish list, as if progressive interest groups are lining up to attempt to bribe me to regurgitate their views the way the Administration is bribing right-wing journalists to recite their Talking Points of the Day.

If that ain't the politics of desperation, I don't know what is. Yes, in the interest of Full Disclosure, I can admit that my sister sent me a copy of Kitty Kelley's book on the Bush family from the wish list, but that's about the extent of the "gifts" I've taken. And last time I looked, receiving a book as a holiday gift from a family member was still allowed, even for progressives living in the Bush 43 Reich.

But meanwhile, while the insignificant are bashing the insignificant, making preposterous analogies between the Administration bribing journalists to spout the Official Party Line and a blogger posting a tip jar and wish list, in their ever-more-difficult-but ever-more-dogged effort to prop up their ever-more-flawed political messiah, a third so-called "journalist" has been found to be taking cash from the Administration. I haven't blogged on the addition of Maggie Gallagher to the list, because others have already covered it quite nicely, thank you very much. But while each discovery seems to involve less money, indicating that Armstrong Williams is still the champ in this particular ideological lottery, this latest one is particularly satisfying, ocurring as it does at the corner of No Ethics Street and Hypocritical Religion Avenue (cf: Rising Hegemon):

One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged. Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated column, "Ethics & Religion," appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and Human Services to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed.

Responding to the latest revelation, Dr. Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at HHS, announced Thursday that HHS would institute a new policy that forbids the agency from hiring any outside expert or consultant who has any working affiliation with the media. "I needed to draw this bright line," Horn tells Salon. "The policy is being implemented and we're moving forward."

[snip]

Horn says McManus, who could not be reached for comment, was paid approximately $10,000 for his work as a subcontractor to the Lewin Group, a health care consultancy hired by HHS to implement the Community Healthy Marriage Initiative, which encourages communities to combat divorce through education and counseling. McManus provided training during two-day conferences in Chattanooga, Tenn., and also made presentations at HHS-sponsored conferences. His syndicated column has appeared in such papers as the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News and the Charlotte Observer.

Horn, who has known McManus for years, says he first learned about the payment on Thursday. In the wake of the Gallagher story, he asked his staff to review all outside contracts and determine if there were any other columnists being paid by HHS. They informed him about McManus. Horn says the review for similar contracts continues.

Horn insists that HHS was not paying Gallagher and McManus to write about Bush administration initiatives but for their expertise as marriage advocates. "We live in a complicated world and people wear many different hats," he says. "People who have expertise might also be writing columns. The line has become increasingly blurred between who's a member of the media and who is not. Thirty years ago if you were a columnist, then you were a full-time employee of a newspaper. Columnists today are different."

The problem springs from the failure of both Gallagher and McManus to disclose their government payments when writing about the Bush proposals. But one HHS critic says another dynamic has led to the controversy, and a blurring of ethical and journalistic lines: Horn and HHS are hiring advocates -- not scholars -- from the pro-marriage movement. "They're ideological sympathizers who propagandize," says Tim Casey, attorney for Legal Momentum, a women's rights organization. He describes McManus as being a member of the "extreme religious right."

Horn denies the charge: "It's not true that we have just been selectively working with conservatives." According to news accounts, the administration seeks to spend $1.5 billion promoting marriage through marriage-enrichment courses, counseling and public-awareness campaigns.

If it were Bill Clinton trying to finesse this by stating that McManus was paid for his position as a marriage advocate, rather than for his syndicated column, the hue and cry among the wingnuts would be heard from here to Saturn. If McManus wasn't reaching an audience of some significant size, why would the Administration be paying him?

"Dr." Greg Cynaumon, the ex-cop with the phony psychology degree from the mail-order university who currently shills for (and owns a piece of) Corti-Slim also markets himself as a marriage therapist. I wonder when the Bushistas are going to start to pay him? God knows he's reaching a big audience these days.

Seymour Hersh:

We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

[snip]

I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn’t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story.

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that.

This excerpt from Hersh's interview with Amy Goodman is more than I would usually reprint...but believe me, there's more, and it's must reading for anyone who wants to know the truth about what the Bush Administration is doing in Iraq, and to our soldiers. Or, you can go on living in your little dream world and pretend that this war is some kind of noble cause designed to fight terrorists while avenging 9/11 unto eternity, until everyone who is not American is dead, and that George W. Bush is some kind of messiah who will deliver you from fear.

I'll tell you a secret....he's the guy who has delivered you unto fear. He delivered you into fear on August 6, 2001, when he decided that a PDB entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. was less important than clearing brush with Barney the dog. He wants you to continue to be afraid, and so do the neocons around him, for if you are afraid you may not notice that they're robbing you blind and ensuring that we are in danger from angry countries the rest of our lives.

The two big stories so far this week in the New York metro area are Saturday's subway fire, which has knocked out the 8th Avenue local C service, and most of the express A service for the foreseeable future, and the steel cage match between Richard Codey, the acting NJ governor, and one whopping asshole of a morning shock jock.

Some people, who thanks to the relentless fearmongering of the Bush Administration, see terrorism around every corner, believe that the fire in a signal room which knocked out service, was the work of Al Qaeda. I'm not ridiculing such people; I think it's a sad commentary that after three years, relentless fearmongering on the part of the Administration, and a war in Iraq that the so-called President said would make us safe, terror of terrorism has wormed its way into people's consciousness to such a degree that any time something goes wrong, terrorism is the first thing people think of. Yes, there are terrorists, and yes, we may be attacked again, but sometimes Shit Just Happens.

Meanwhile, Mahablog analyzes the way the wingnut Wall Street Journal editorial page has found a way to blame the problem on liberals, at a time when a Republican governor of New York is skimping on mass transit maintenance. But here's probably the best quote from the piece, which probably explains the only partially rational fear that turns a garden-variety switching fire on a cold weekend into a certainty that last weekend Al Qaeda operatives were prowling through the subway tunnels:

To be a rightie is to harbor a sick, irrational hatred all manner of random things -- France, strong women, endangered species, the environment in general, and New York City, among other things. My hypothesis is that righties fear anything they can't control, and they hate whatever it is they fear.

Meanwhile, across the Hudson, acting governor Richard Codey finds himself getting some ink about his minor and nonphysical altercation with a local radio shock jock.

It seems that on Monday, 101.5 AM shock jock Craig Carton said, "'What Governor Codey ought to do is approve the use of medical marijuana so women can have a joint and relax instead of putting their babies in a microwave. Then all they want to do is cook Doritos. Women who claim they suffer from this postpartum depression ... they must be crazy in the first place.'"

Some background: Codey's wife has battled depression, including postpartum depression. She has been open about this, using her experiences to try to educate people about depression. The governor has made mental health reform a priority during his administration, however long it turns out to be, with Sen Jon Corzine planning to run against him.

Codey showed up Tuesday night for an appearance on a program on the station, and confronted Carton. "I said that if I weren't governor, I'd take him outside as a result of the remarks he made about my wife," Codey explained Wednesday.

Now Carton is talking about suing the governor for "making terroristic threats."

Anything for publicity, I guess.

When I posted about the teddybears in straitjackets, I took no end of guff from people who obviously read neither my post nor the article. The wingnuts assumed I was joining the political correctness crowd, and the lefties thought I was hurting the progressive cause by even passing on the information. One can argue about whether plush toys that one doesn't have to buy constitute offensiveness, but here you have a situation in which a shock jock is making nasty remarks about someone's family member, and then screams bloody murder when that person defends said family member's honor. Sure it's free speech, and sure he has the right to say whatever he wants. But in my view, if Carton thinks this makes him a big man because he's poking fun at a problem someone has had the courage to be up front about, he's wrong. It only makes him a punk.

Every now and then the planets line up in a way that has a kind of beautiful symmetry.

Morgan Spurlock's documentary about his adventures as a McDonald's devoté, Super Size Me, is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, and today parts of the lawsuit that started it all has been reinstated:

A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a lower court judge erred when he dismissed parts of the lawsuit brought on behalf of two New York children.

U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet dismissed the lawsuit in 2003 because he said it failed to link the children's alleged health problems directly to McDonald's products.

But the appeals judges said New York's general business law requires a plaintiff to show only that deceptive advertising was misleading and that the plaintiff was injured as a result. The panel upheld other parts of the dismissal.

Steve Gilliard makes a very valid point:

Y'know, the fact that McD's got rid of supersized meals and started offering salads AFTER "Supersize Me" came out may actually work AGAINST them.

Still not sure how I feel about this, but I still never, ever see nutritional info posted in a convenient place in a McD's. They never have the "mandatory" handouts, and the plaque is usually posted high and/or behind the counter. The fact that NYC food banks are trying to get poor folks to eat more (expensive) fruits and fresh produce rather than $1 meals at McD's--and the stated fact that they are doing this to reduce diet-related illnesses in poor minorities--speaks volumes.

For me, well, I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Spurlock for about 20 seconds at last spring's aptly named Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, at which Spurlock's film was the film everyone wanted to see. And if the reinstatement of this lawsuit helps his chances to take home the statue, well, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

First off, let me get this clear: I do NOT support Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in 2008. This is not because I regard her, as the right wing seems to, as some kind of she-demon, with sharp pointy teeth in her vagina and an ability to castrate men just by looking at them. It's because, frankly, she's a DLC sellout, and in no way a progressive.

If Hillary is the nominee, I'll vote elsewhere or stay home, thank you very much.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about Hillary's speech on Monday to New York State family planning providers. There seems to be a great hue and cry in certain corners of Blogistan that in saying "abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women" and "it's important that family planning advocates reach out to those who may not agree with us on everything to try to find common ground in those areas where, hopefully, emergency contraception, more funding for prenatal care and others can be a point of common ground", she is somehow trying to capture the votes of the evangelical right.

Perhaps she is, and if so, she's wasting her time. But like it or not, she is right on the money here in terms of where progressives should be coming down on the abortion issue.

I'm old enough to remember the "Free abortion on demand!" cries of the socialist rallies of the late 1960's and early 1970's, and indeed, abortion rights supporters have been tarred with this brush ever since. This is one reason why the right still thinks women are eager to get abortions at every possible opportunity.

In our unwillingness to even DISCUSS the abortion issue, we're losing a very real chance to stop the relentless march of the fundamentalist right, who give lip service to babies when their agenda is really about punishing women who do not remain chaste. Bill Clinton used to use the words "safe, legal, and rare", and that is EXACTLY where we ought to be.

We know how to make abortions safe. We know how to make them legal. But how do we make them rare? Again, that's not as difficult as it seems, and this is where we have the opportunity to make some headway with moderate voters who may not be comfortable with what they perceive as our view -- that abortion is an easy solution to a problem pregnancy that women enter into blithely.

It doesn't matter that there isn't a woman in the world who hasn't at some point inspected her underwear every morning making bargains with God that they'll save more money, be nice to their mothers, or never, ever have sex again, just please, please, just let her period come. It doesn't matter that the idea of a "waiting period" is something that only someone who hasn't been in this position could come up with. We have allowed the right to paint abortion as something women do as as casually as having their nails done, and it's time to take back the debate and return it to sanity. All Christians aren't murderers just because Paul Hill killed an abortion doctor, and all women aren't looking to have abortions just because some mythical woman somewhere has had three. Just because something is permitted doesn't mean it's mandatory.

This discussion is what I believe Hillary Clinton was doing on Monday.

Perhaps the biggest point of hypocrisy among the fundamentalist Christian right that wants to make abortion illegal, perhaps even a capital crime, is that they similarly want to bar information about contraception. If you needed further proof that much of the anti-abortion movement, particularly the wing that is also pro-war and pro-death penalty, is about female chastity and fear and loathing of female sexuality, there it is.

Here's the position we should be taking, right from Clinton's remarks in Monday's speech:

We should all be able to agree that we want every child born in this country and around the world to be wanted, cherished, and loved. The best way to get there is do more to educate the public about reproductive health, about how to prevent unsafe and unwanted pregnancies.

Where we differ from the fundamentalist right is that we acknowledge that people are going to have sex, and either they're going to have responsible, knowledgeable, protected sex, or else they're going to have unwanted pregnancies -- and unwanted diseases.

Here's what most of the squawking is about:

Research shows that the primary reason that teenage girls abstain is because of their religious and moral values. We should embrace this -- and support programs that reinforce the idea that abstinence at a young age is not just the smart thing to do, it is the right thing to do. But we should also recognize what works and what doesn't work, and to be fair, the jury is still out on the effectiveness of abstinence-only programs. I don't think this debate should be about ideology, it should be about facts and evidence -- we have to deal with the choices young people make not just the choice we wish they would make. We should use all the resources at our disposal to ensure that teens are getting the information they need to make the right decision.

We should also do more to educate and involve parents about the critical role they can play in encouraging their children to abstain from sexual activity. Teenagers who have strong emotional attachments to their parents are much less likely to become sexually active at an early age.

I don't agree with her that moral values and religion go hand in hand, case in point, oh, well, half the male Republicans in Washington. However, she does have a good point about abstinence. Abstinence isn't always a bad thing. If you have a 13-year-old who's already sleeping with her 17-year-old boyfriend because she thinks she doesn't have a choice, that if she doesn't he'll leave her and if he leaves her, she'll somehow cease to exist, that's a problem. I'm sorry, folks, but most 13-year-old girls aren't equipped to deal with the kind of pressure that a horny teenage boy can put on them. Wouldn't it be better to equip them with the ability to acknowledge and articulate when they just aren't ready? And in the rare cases when they ARE ready to make such decisions at that age, arm them with what they need in order to protect themselves?

Abstinence in young teens isn't a bad thing. We're not saying sex is bad and dirty, we're saying that it's something you might just need to put off for a while. You wouldn't want a ten-year-old driving a car, but by the time he's 17, well, you still might not, but he's a lot more ready than he would have been at ten. "Not now" doesn't have to mean "not ever."

We call ourselves "Pro-choice." This means that a teenager CHOOSING not to have sex is as viable a choice as choosing to proceed. Where we differ from the fundamentalist right, though, is that we don't regard that as the ONLY choice.

Let's go back to that example of the 13-year-old. Suppose she finds herself pregnant? Progressives believe that one mistake shouldn't ruin her life. The anti-reproductive self-determination right says it should. We want her to be able to have a safe, legal abortion, along with counseling so she doesn't make the same mistake again -- IF THAT'S WHAT SHE CHOOSES TO DO. I myself don't think that a pregnant 13-year-old should parent a child she bears, but that's just me, and that's a discussion beyond this posting.

I've long felt that the time has come for progressives to couple reproductive self-determination along with gun ownership as a "right with responsibilities." Yes, you have a right to own a gun. You also have a responsibility to both store and use it safely. You have a right to an abortion if you need one. But you also have a responsibility to take the necessary steps to try to ensure you don't need one.

Contraceptives fail. They do. They fail for any number of reasons. One reason is that people don't use them properly. Another is that there are always a certain amount of contraceptive failues. But that's where the "...and rare" comes in. Abortion should be a fallback position only. I guarantee you, that if we can somehow acknowledge that people have sex; that WOMEN have sex, and that it's OK for women to WANT to have sex, and therefore it's OK to PREPARE to have sex, abortion will be so rare it won't even be worthy of discussion.

I think this is where Hillary Clinton is going with this discussion; NOT that she's trying to cave to the anti-choice right.

From the foofarah over Janet Jackson's breast to the fact that Desperate Housewives is the #1 television show in America, we live in a country that is truly fucked up where women's sexuality is concerned. It's OK to have beer commercials with scantily clad, big-breasted cheerleaders, but God forbid that the one square inch that the bikini covers is exposed. The media glorify male horniness, but at the same time, we tell girls not to have sex, anc certainly not to PLAN to have sex. The only way you can have sex and not be a "slut" is to be "swept away" by passion -- like the cover of a romance novel. From that standpoint, the Samantha Jones character on Sex and the City may be the most subversive character in television history. At least until the final season, here was a woman who fucked like a man, and liked it that way. And you can bet your life that Samantha was ALWAYS prepared.

Until we stop socializing boys to get laid, and girls to NOT get laid, we're going to have coercive sex and we're going to have accidental pregnancies, and we're going to have abortions. If the Christian right was truly about ending abortion, they'd welcome this conversation and work with people who are pro-choice to educate people about ways to prevent pregnancy OTHER THAN JUST ABSTINENCE. But they aren't obsessed with babies and with a "culture of life", they're obsessed with punishing the bad girls who can't keep their legs closed. Isn't it funny how they give lip service to the glory of motherhood, but also regard it as a punishment for girls who don't live by their rules?

The following Democratic Senators decided today that the way to deal with someone as utterly incompetent as Condoleeza Rice is to promote her to a higher position:

Salazar (CO)
Lieberman(CT) [he'd vote 3 times Yes if he could]
Biden(DE) [right off the bat]
Dodd(CT)
Feingold (WI)
Clinton(NY)
Feinstein (CA)
Corazine (NJ)
Wyden (OR)
Obama(IL)

Many of these were expected, including Hillary (DLC) Clinton (another reason not to support her on 2008), but I'm appalled at Jon Corzine, who ought to know better, and I'm even MORE appalled at Barack Obama, who so far has shown us nothing but a willingness to be led around by the nose.

Here are the guys you should thank:

Levin(MI)
Dayton(MN)
Kennedy(MA)
Bayh(IN)
Boxer(CA)
Byrd(WV) - a most inspiring, eloquent and emphatic NO!
Kerry (MA)
Durbin(IL)
Reed(RI)
Jeffords (IND-VT)
Harkin (IA)
Akaka (HI)
Lautenberg (NJ)


Of course the wingnuts will go back 40 years to Robert Byrd's long-since renounced and regretted KKK membership), but this tells you where the nads are in the Senate.

(Vote count from Kos.)

I'll bite:

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales's advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Convention, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales's legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law's undoing.

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint."

Legal opinions at the highest level have grave consequences. What were the consequences of Gonzales's actions? The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality - views which he expressly reasserted in his Senate confirmation hearings - inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world.

Michael Posner of Human Rights First observed: "After the horrific images from Abu Ghraib became public last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the world should 'judge us by our actions [and] watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.'" We agree. It is because of this that we believe the only proper course of action is for the Senate to reject Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General. As Posner notes, "[t]he world is indeed watching." Will the Senate condone torture? Will the Senate condone the rejection of the rule of law?

With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

Remember the tastelessly western sendup Blazing Saddles, which around the fart jokes is a pretty incisive satire on racism and bigotry in general? Remember the scene where Cleavon Little puts the gun to his own head and says, "One false move and the n----- gets it"?

That's what the Democratic Party is doing.

If you think you have seen this movie before—"Dean Against the Machine"—you have. Ever since the early days of the 2004 presidential campaign, the country doctor from the State of Ben & Jerry has been the agitating principal of a confused, fratricidal and essentially leaderless party. Then, as now, Dean inspired an outside-the-Beltway, Net-based crusade whose shock troops adored his social progressivism and his fearless opposition to war in Iraq. Then, as now, a party establishment—based in Congress, governors' mansions and Georgetown salons—viewed him as a loudmouthed lefty whose visibility would ruin the Democratic brand in Red States. Back then, insiders coalesced around Sen. John Kerry, who was stodgy but, Washington wise guys thought, a safe alternative. They trapped Dean in a crossfire in Iowa; his caucus-night Scream sealed his fate.

But the 477 DNC members who choose the party chair haven't settled on a leader of the 2005 version of the Anybody But Dean movement. For now, the front-running alternative is former congressman Martin Frost of Texas, a pro-labor moderate with a lifetime of traditional organizing who survived 13 terms in Dallas before the GOP redistricted him into oblivion. He's followed by Simon Rosenberg, a young Washington-based fund-raiser and strategist who claims to be as digitized and Net-friendly as Dean—and yet more popular than Dean among the bloggers, who are emerging as new grass-roots powers in the party. Pro-lifer Tim Roemer is also running.

In the meantime, with the DNC meeting approaching on Feb. 12, party insiders have been conducting an urgent, so far fruitless, search for a consensus Dean-stopper. The Clintons don't like Dean on substance or style, seeing him as too left and too loose-lipped. But they're being careful. Hillary, already eying a presidential run in 2008, doesn't want to alienate the possible winner; she's leaving DNC maneuvers to Bill, whose answer last month was to sound out current chairman Terry McAuliffe about remaining in the job. (He declined.) The Clintons are said to have encouraged a good friend, veteran organizer Harold Ickes, to enter the chairman's race, but he begged off, too. Party leaders approached former senator Bob Kerrey, but he told them he would rather keep his job as president of the New School University.

Read on...

What a load of horseshit. First of all, the "Dean Scream" was debunked by ABC News, but of course it's in the MSM's interest to keep the Legend of the Scream as a Mark of Dean's Derangement alive. Second of all, there is NO other candidate for head of the DNC who really stands for anything other than More of the Same. And you see where The Same has gotten us.

The ridiculous part, however, is that Dean is hardly the raging leftist the media have branded him. He's a centrist Democrat with a fiery, grassroots, accessible style, who just happened to be right about Bush's Iraq war before anyone else had the balls to speak up. They hate him because he was right.

The question about Dean and the DNC is simply whether the party is going to belong to the people or to the Washington insiders, lobbyists and operatives who have made their living off of the party coffers. The netroots proved that when you have candidates in whom people can believe, they open their wallets -- in Dean's case, to the tune of some $40 million. That's hardly chump change.

I'm skeptical about the Great Clinton Cabal that seems to be so popular in the MSM; that "The Clintons" are responsible for all the machinations behind the scenes. It's entirely possible that Hillary is gearing up for a 2008 run, but I'll believe it when I see it -- and I won't vote for her, because she's a sellout to Bush as well. The Democratic Party seems to still have this idea that running to the right is what elected Bill Clinton, and that this is what we need to do again. Au contraire, my friends, it was the sheer force of nature that is Bill Clinton that elected Bill Clinton, and some DLC hack, even Mrs. Bill, isn't going to cut the mustard.

There are some so-called "pragmatic netroots-ers" who see Simon Rosenberg as "Dean Lite" -- Dean without the baggage. From what I've seen of Rosenberg, I could keep an open mind if he ends up being the choice, but with a high degree of skepticism. Tim Roemer is Bush-Lite, and Martin Frost ran against the party he now wants to head up in his most recent failed race to keep his seat. I don't see either of these as viable alternatives for my future support of this party.

There's nothing to be ashamed of in being for working people. There's nothing to be ashamed of in believing that we are part of a world community, not just the biggest bully in the schoolyard. There's nothing to be ashamed of in believing in the Constitution. There's nothing to be ashamed of in wanting everyone to share in the pie that is America without leaving the poor out in the cold. We are right, and the Republicans are wrong. It's that simple. So let's have a DNC head who understands that. Because if you're going to give me just another flavor of Republican, I'm opting out of the process.