South Dakota has, as we’re sure you’ve noticed, enacted the most sweeping abortion ban in years with a law that should not withstand Constitutional scrutiny (whether the new farther-right SCOTUS will hold that way is anybody’s guess). This editorial points out the obvious: that in a post-Roe world, states would be free to enact whatever level of abortion regulation they wanted, but with consequences. There are, of course, economic ramifications, and among those is the possibility of a tourist boycott.

It occurs to us, however, that the states most likely to enact sweeping abortion bans are in fact that states we probably don’t spend any money in anyway. We Heathen have never spent any money in South Dakota, and we have no plans to, and that’s got nothing to do with their attempts to lay claim to their citizens’ uterii. Are there any reliably Red States with actual tourist attractions? (We’ll stipulate Texas, but take our word for it that we’re not entirely sure how abortion would be regulated here post-Roe.)

(Image from comments at DailyKos.com)

Bill Frist is doing his best to make sure the Senate Intelligence committee does absolutely nothing to investigate Bush’s manifestly illegal domestic spying scheme.

Frist specifically threatened that if the Committee holds NSA hearings, he will fundamentally change the 30-year-old structure and operation of the Senate Intelligence Committee so as to make it like every other Committee, i.e., controlled and dominated by Republicans to advance and rubber-stamp the White House’s agenda rather than exercise meaningful and nonpartisan oversight. […] These are truly desperate and extreme measures to block an investigation of the President’s conduct. Sen. First is literally threatening the Committee not to exercise oversight over the President’s warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. Glenn Greenwald

Doonesbury totally nails the whole “teach the controversy” bullshit the Intelligent Design people push.

Remember that McCain torture-banning bill? Yeah, Bush is insisting it doesn’t apply at Gitmo, so, presumably, they can do anything they want.

At what point did we become a country that actually argues about torture? How did this happen?

Or so says Utah state senator Chris Buttars, anyway. Ah, Utah. What the hell is the matter with you people?

Quoth Digby: “I find this refreshing. These Republicans admit that women give up their rights when they have sex.”

No, really. It’s hard to see as possible with a GOP-controlled congress that refuses to call Bush on his ongoing contempt for the rule of law, but there’s definitely a case for it.

Ohio state Senator Robert Hagan has found an amusing way to fight bigoted GOP initiatives to bar adoption by gays in his state. (Via MeFi)

Our cousin, being a jerk and whining about “legislating from the bench.” Either he doesn’t understand the function of the Judiciary, or he’s being deliberately disingenuous for political reasons. As the aforelinked blogger notes, it’s only “legislating from the bench” if you don’t like the ruling.

The appearance — at a rural junior college not far from the Heathen hometown — appears tied to a promo tour for his book on the confirmation process. Pickering refers to it as bitter and partisan, but presumably assumes no blame for resistance to his nomination based on his actual record. We don’t think he’s a racist, but anyone who did work for the Sovereignty Commission — and who wrote memos in support of anti-miscegenation statutes — shouldn’t expect a smooth glide to the appeals bench.

Josh Marshall presents a compelling case that Dick Cheney is a moral coward.

“http://www.screenhead.com/funny/the-norwegian-blue/might-as-well-jump-the-shark-155461.php“

Sigh. Pathetic. Just pathetic. If it’s all above board, look into it. It sure LOOKS illegal, though, and that merits inquiry. Let’s hope the House isn’t as neutered.

Cheney has asserted that he has the authority to declassify information.

Setting aside for a moment that no statute grants him this power, consider the implications for the Plame affair if it’s true. Could Cheney have declassified Plame’s status before leaking it? Would that make it legal (if, perhaps, even more reprehensible)?

Go check out what happened in Cincinnati. (Via MeFi.)

DHS harrasses Federal employee about his bumper stickers. Madcap hilarity — or something — ensues.

Bush has found another right winger to fill the 5th circuit seat formerly occupied by Charles Pickering. (Thanks, Tom!)

The Brits are already asking Microsoft for a backdoor to Vista’s encryption scheme.

If you shoot somebody when you’re hunting, it’s your fault. Period. When you’re holding a gun, the margin of error is pretty slim (though it’s wider with birdshot than with a deer rifle). This means it’s fundamentally your responsibility where your pellets end up. Josh Marshall backs us up on this with feedback from his hunter-readers. The description from (landowner) Armstrong as paraphrased by Marshall sounds right:

The birds ‘flush’. Cheney picks out a bird and starts following it. In the process he basically wheels around doing a 180. So he’s spun around and is now firing backwards relative to the direction he had been facing. And Whittington was just, for whatever reason, where Cheney didn’t expect him to be.

Which is irrelevant or a lie. Cheney was in a group trying to flush birds, and that means you can’t assume someone isn’t behind you. “Doing a 180” means you need to be very, very, very careful, since that means you have or will end up facing your fellow hunters.

The comments provided by Mary Matalin are clearly just more Republican lies:

The vice president was concerned. He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.

We don’t doubt that Cheney feels bad. He should. The reason he should, though, is that he did do something “he wasn’t supposed to do;” he didn’t keep his field of fire clear. He behaved carelessly. And as a result, somebody’s in the hospital. He’s very lucky — as is Whittington, who could easily been killed; we suspect his injuries are more serious than they’re letting on, though, since he’s in ICU. Hunting accidents are no means unheard of (though in a lifetime of hunting, we’ve never seen it happen), but when one does happen, an honorable man admits his fault — as he does with any accident. So our takeaway with the Cheney shooting is that, well, he’s not admitting fault. Make of this what you will.

Update: CNN has a bit more data. Apparently Whittington was about 30 yards away, and Cheney was shooting a 28-gauge. If true, these bits of data taken together suggest there wasn’t much danger of Whittington’s injuries being fatal (though, as we said, only one pellet needs to get lucky).

A 28 is <b>very</b> small. Most hunters just carry the all-purpose 12-gauge, which (when paired with the right load) can take anything from whitetail deer down to small game like quail or rabbit. Smaller shotguns (16, 20, 28, and .410) use progressively smaller amounts of powder paired with fewer pellets per load. Some people use 20s for birds or other small game -- they are lighter guns, and the recoil is easier to take -- but only very rich people carry 28s. There are no "utility" 28s like the $200 shotguns most of Red America buys at Wal-Mart. These are exclusively hand-made or hand-finished guns, probably over-and-unders, with price tags to match (more than $1,500 certainly; more than $10,000 isn't unheard of). Traditional American shotgun companies don't even make them; you have to go to Beretta or other high-end manufacturers.




That Whittington is apparently doing well (and never even lost consciousness, according to the story above) is the result of the small loads involved, his distance from Cheney (30 yards is a long way for a shotgun; it's hard to take any game at that range), the small gauge of the gun, and good luck.

Barack Obama has a plan to fix Detroit. (Link fixed.)

Slacktivist covers this in two posts:

• First, he notes the cover story in Christianity Today, which makes clear that torture is never, ever acceptable, and that reminds us that things like extraordinary rendition are no better; and
• Second, the endorsement by 86 mainstream evangelical leaders of a call to action on global warming. This isn’t just left-of-center people; it’s genuine red-state evangelicals, too.

“VA Nurse investigated for sedition for letter to editor“

Media Matters points out (as has Olbermann) their little trick in re: Rev. Joseph Lowery’s remarks during Coretta Scott King’s funeral. Lowery made mention of the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, which got a significant amount of applause (23 seconds, according to MM). Fox edited out the applause in replaying the clip, and then made comments about the audience’s lack of response. You don’t get much closer to just plain making shit up than that.

Media Matters lays it out.

Atrios and Josh explore the nutbird landscape inhabited by young GOP functionaries like George Deutsch. Deutsch himself contents that the scientists he was trying to censor have ties “all the way up to the top of the Democratic party” and were obsessed with embarrassing the president. The even scarier bit is in the second piece linked by Atrios:

The coalition government relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a large cadre of eager young neophytes whose brashness often gave offense in a very age- and status-conscious society. One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion.

The DOJ has opined twice in the last four years that the domestic spying program was probably illegal.

Why is this okay? Why do we permit American companies to be complicit in oppression and evil abroad? We think, perhaps, that American companies ought to have to honor the values of America no matter where they operate. If this makes it hard to expand into dictatorial countries, well, we’re pretty sure that’s a feature, not a bug.

Insight is reporting that Plame-outing turd Karl Rove has threatened GOP senators with blacklisting from all White House aid if they vote against Bush in Judiciary Committee proceedings in re: the illegal wiretapping program.

This is what “scared” looks like.

The FISA law Bush has been violating for years was passed in 1978 in response to Nixon’s abuse of power, so it wasn’t operative for Roosevelt or Lincoln or whomever else they’re trotting out.

There’s a great rundown on FISA here — as well as on the arguments brought by the DOJ — if you’re interested.

Watch the Beltway dynamics closely, and you’ll see he’s thrown in with McCain over Obama. Just just the aisle and be done with it, Joe.

Yeah, he resigned. It seems he’s been lying about graduating from A&M.

Read this to find out. Here’s a tidbit I didn’t know: many if not most are there on scant real evidence, as they were turned over to US forces by rival Afghanis with little or no documentation. Don’t like your neighbor? Tell the Yanks he works for Osama!

No, really. More here. Short version: he’s trying to bully Obama, and Obama is schooling him. Whatever he once was, he’s become just another tool of the Administration; clearly, he’s either forgotten who they are, or he no longer cares because he wants that office for himself.

By now, everyone who’s paying attention is aware of the NASA story wherein a 24-year-old political hack tried to get references to Intelligent Design inserted into discussions of the Big Bang, and further attempted to change all references to said Bang to “Big Bang Theory,” etc.

We’ll just point out that it came as no surprise to us to learn that said jackass is an Aggie.

Either that, or he’s a principle-free hack who cares nothing about his country and everything about his party staying in power.

We know this because of this story, which opens with:

WASHINGTON — CIA Director Porter Goss said Thursday that the disclosure of President Bush’s eavesdropping-without-warrants program and other once-secret projects had undermined U.S. intelligence-gathering abilities. “The damage has been very severe to our capabilities to carry out our mission,” Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said a federal grand jury should be empaneled to determine “who is leaking this information.”

Um, Porter? What makes you think AQ doesn’t suspect we’re listening in? Isn’t it pretty much a given than communications would be intercepted in wartime? Don’t they, as a matter of course, have to assume that we might be listening, especially given the very-prosecution-friendly character of the FISA courts illegally circumvented by this Administration? How, exactly, has disclosure of this program damaged our intelligence gathering capability? We see clearly how it’s damaging to your boss, to whom you are indebted politically, and to others involved in the clearly felonious affair, of course. Maybe that’s what you meant to say.

Alas, he continues:

Goss complained that leaks to the news media about the surveillance program and activities such as reported CIA secret prisons abroad had damaged his own agency’s work.

Emphasis ours. Sweet God in Heaven, this hack is whining about the fact that people now know the CIA maintains a gulag system.

But he’s still not done.

“I also believe that there has been an erosion of the culture of secrecy and we’re trying to reinstall that,” Goss said.

An erosion? This Administration is the most secrecy-addicted one in recent memory. They want everything locked up, and everybody in the dark, so that no one can tell what laws they’re breaking. They view oversight as a problem, and behave accordingly; that’s the whole point behind the domestic spying issue — there exists a court to oversee these sorts of surveillance operations, but Bush & Co. decided not to bother with it. The culture of secrecy is the problem, Porter. And you are part of that problem.

(Thanks to Triple-F for the tip!)

And in re: more serious matters than a blowjob, too.

In January, he testified before Congress and under oath that “it is not the policy or the agenda of this president to authorize actions that would be in contravention of our criminal statutes.” By that point, however, he had already approved the warrantless domestic spying plan in direct violation of US law. Q.E.D.

Russ Feingold’s letter prompted the normally lapdog Post to cover this. Let’s see if it goes anywhere. We do, however, wonder just how far these people will have to go before the media actually wakes up and realizes the degree of contempt the Administration has for the rule of law, checks and balances, and the principle on which this country was founded.

Via ThinkProgress.

From NYT via Captain Telescope:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The Bush administration is rebuffing requests from members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for its classified legal opinions on President Bush’s domestic spying program, setting up a confrontation in advance of a hearing scheduled for next week, administration and Congressional officials said Wednesday.

As RN put it, “it’s legal because we say so, and for reasons we can’t tell you.” Er, no.

Quiet Agent, an online job search firm, gives us this gem.

Remember how Bush said all that about reducing our dependence on foreign oil in the SOTU?

Yeah, he didn’t mean it:

Administration backs off Bush’s vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON – One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America’s dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn’t mean it literally.

Fitz thinks they’re holding back on email evidence in re: the Plame affair. Does this remind anybody else of certain gaps in certain tapes?

No, really.

In a talk at Duke Law School, Ben Ginsberg, who was Chief Counsel for both Bush campaigns, said:

Just like, really, with the Voting Rights Act, Republicans have some fundamental philosophical difficulties with the whole notion of Equal Protection.

There’s video. Via MeFi.

Ever notice that the pro-life folks also tend to go apo-goddamn-plectic when we talk about easy access to contraception? Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Just go read this.

Cindy Sheehan was arrested at the Capitol yesterday despite having an invitation to the SOTU because her t-shirt had the number of Americans killed in Iraq on it.

What country is this?

Go read this.

However, the most important question is not the threat, per se, but whether we are at war. If we are indeed at war, the state has a qualitatively different set of options, regardless of the actual severity of the threat. The Bush administration is trying to justify extraordinary expansion of executive power not only because terrorists might hurt us (like hurricanes, or bird flu), but because we are literally at war. War powers aren’t justified simply as a function of the threat posed by the enemy. Congress doesn’t need to prove a threat in order to declare war. A war fought for convenience, greed, or strategic gain is just as much a candidate for war powers as a war fought to defend against a grave threat to the American way of life. One rationale for war powers is partly that when the country decides to fight, for whatever reason, it needs special resources in order to do so. The fact is that we’re not at war on terrorism, let alone against terror. Terrorism is a strategy. Actually, it’s a normative assessment of a family of tactics. In the current climate “terrorism” refers to any political violence the speaker doesn’t like. We aren’t at war with terrorism and we never have been. We were at war with Iraq, and now we’re fighting the Iraqi insurgency. We are engaged in a global struggle against terrorism by Islamic extremists. But we can’t even declare war on Al Qaeda, though the use of force against them has been authorized. We can’t declare war against Al Qaeda for the same reason that we can’t declare war against Columbia drug cartel or the mafia. These groups, however nefarious, aren’t states. If we were to destroy these organizations, new groups with the same mission would take their place. War is a metaphor for any all-out struggle against a serious problem: poverty, cancer, drugs, terrorism… Sometimes we use military hardware and tactics to further that struggle. Sometimes we even fight real wars as part of our strategy. The idea that the so-called war on terror justifies dramatic expansion of presidential power is extremely dangerous. Terrorism is never going to go away. If we accept that we are literally at war with terror, we are signing on to perpetual war for perpetual peace.

It may well be too little, too late, but Alito is so hostile to Privacy that this may be the only answer. Party discipline alone will sustain a filibuster; the GOP majority is only 55, but that would require (almost certainly) the support of Harry Reid — who has said he won’t back a filibuster. What the fuck, Harry? What about Alito don’t you understand? We’ve got enough milquetoasts in the damn party; don’t join Joe Lieberman’s ass-kissing posse, man. Sheesh.

In case you missed it, as we did, here’s the Daily Show’s bit on the taint of corruption.

“Throughout American history, the government has said we’re in an unprecedented crisis and that we must live without civil liberties until the crisis is over. It’s a hoax” (Yale Kamisar at the University of Michigan Law School).

It’s never, ever been true, but it’s frequently used to justify all manner of executive power grabs and egregious tactics, like Japanese internment, no-knock SWAT-equipped drug warrents, and the PATRIOT act. Don’t believe them.

“For one thing, Mr. Abramoff may go down as the first man in American history too corrupt to be a lobbyist.”

From Wonkette Ana Marie Cox, in the NYT today. (Via TMFTML)

This Miami Herald columnist (Robert Steinback) is spot on:

One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn’t win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help. If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden’s attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled. Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat — and expect America to be pleased by this — I would have thought our nation’s sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated. If I had been informed that our nation’s leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas — and call such procedures necessary for the nation’s security — I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them. If someone had predicted the president’s staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marine Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy — and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy — I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy. That’s no America I know, I would have argued. We’re too strong, and we’ve been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.

There’s more. Read the whole thing.

This full-page ad ran in the 12/28 NYT; we picked it up here.

He is unafraid to kick the shit out of Bill O’Reilly.

We’re reposting this from Atrios because more people need to read it:

2005 was the year that the president of the United States declared proudly that he had broken the law repeatedly and with full intention, that he had the power to do so whenever he wanted to, and that he would continue to do so whenever he determined it to be desirable. This declaration was met with basic approval from much of the beltway chattering classes, prominent libertarian bloggers, and just about every small government conservative. The issue is simple: Bush has declared that one man has the right to make the law whenever, in his determination, national security warrants it. While even I can understand the necessity of broad executive powers in emergency situations, we aren’t anywhere close to being in one of those. If Bush decides that personally shooting dissident bloggers or pesky journalists in the head is in fact necessary for national security, then no one can object. The fact that he has not, as far as we know, done any such thing does not matter in the slightest. By conferring dictatorial authority on himself Bush has declared that this is, in fact, a dictatorship even if he hasn’t (yet) bothered using such authorities to the fullest of his claimed ability. It’s a mystery why Russert and the gang can giggle over their little roundtables, essentially ignoring what amounts to a military coup by our own president. He’s asserted the authority of commander in chief over the entire country, and not just the military to which the constitution grants him such authority. Yes, we hope and generally assume that this temper tantrum by our boy king will pass in 3 years, that the his overreach will not have long lasting effects, that the crisis will pass. 2005 was the year the president declared he was the law, and few of our elite opinion makers and shapers bothered to notice, or care.

From here:

The true measure of a nation’s morality is how it operates its secret services.

Sure, it’s really just another way to point out that ethics and honesty matter most when you think nobody’s looking. Everybody plays nice when the lights are on. How you act when you think nobody will find out is the real test, and we’re flunking on that one. Just ask this guy.