Subject to Change, version 2.0
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Thursday, June 16, 2005
 

Second Opinion.
LAUER: But when you stood on the floor and you said, She does respond, are you at all worried that you led some senators . . .

FRIST: I never said, She responded. I said I reviewed the court videotapes – the same ones the other doctors reviewed – and I questioned, Is her diagnosis correct?

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Today Show interview
June 16, 2005

________________________________

"Once again in the video footage, which you can actually see on a web site today, but in the video footage, she certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli that the neurologist puts forth."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005

"I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005

An exhaustive autopsy found that Terri Schiavo's brain had withered to half the normal size since her collapse in 1990 and that no treatment could have remotely improved her condition, medical examiners said on Wednesday . . . The autopsy also found that the brain deterioration had left her blind.

The New York Times
Schiavo Autopsy Says Brain, Withered, Was Untreatable
June 15, 2005

"I never made the diagnosis, I wouldn't even attempt to make a diagnosis from a videotape."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Remarks to Reporters
June 16, 2005

"The diagnosis they made is exactly right. It's the pathology, I'll respect that. I think it's time to move on."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Interview on The Early Show
June 16, 2005


fristnose.jpg

Dr. Bill Frist demonstrates the use of the Pinocchio 3000, an advanced prosthetic device for the chronically truth challenged. Industry analysts predict sales of the device will top $300 million this year in the Republican Congress alone.

[Whiskey Bar]


8:58:44 PM    

Downing Street Memo: A real reporter shows how it's done

Get up off your knees, Judy! And Howie, stop looking at your watch! WaPo, to its credit, posted an online interview with Michael Smith, the reporter who broke the Downing Street Memo story. Here are the parts I found most interesting, but you should read the whole thing. It's an outsider's perspective (Smith says he is "not some mealy-mouthed left-wing apologist") on the surreality-based community...
- Lambert

[corrente]
8:57:46 PM    

Paul Feig: And the Mr. Obvious Award goes to ...

Bob Stevenson, spokesman for Dr. Bill Frist, regarding the autopsy of Terri Schiavo said on Wednesday, "Having seen the news reports today, it's clear that the autopsy provides additional medical information on her condition at the time her feeding tube was removed."

Mr. Stevenson then went on to state that one's skin feels warm when the sun shines on it, that putting your head underwater makes your hair wet, and that doctors can't make diagnostic statements regarding a patient's condition from viewing a videotape.

Nah, just kidding. He didn't say that last one.

- Paul Feig

[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
8:50:55 PM    

David Kirby: Bring It On

BRING IT ON

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has just upped the ante in the bubbling controversy over a possible link between mercury, vaccines and autism. His hard-hitting Rolling Stone article on the Pharma-Political Complex is a scathing indictment of our business-as-usual society, and his allegations cry out for a response.

Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. It’s high time that this debate received a proper airing, even if ABC News, so far at least, seems to disagree.

One year ago, the esteemed Institute of Medicine rejected the theory that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal might be linked to autism and other childhood disorders. Opponents of the theory – and they are plentiful – assumed that would shut the books once and for all on this disturbing, potentially catastrophic idea.

The opponents, it turns out, were sorely mistaken. They underestimated the tenacity of some really pissed off parents, who refused to be dismissed as litigious fruit loops who wouldn’t recognize scientific evidence if it landed on their front lawn.

Consider this. In recent months, the thimerosal-autism controversy has begun to pierce a major-media bubble seemingly transfixed on serving up daily doses of Michael, Martha and the Runaway Bride, while ignoring the potential poisoning of a generation of American children:

Don Imus – continues to champion this cause on his show “like a dog on a bone,” as they say.

Sen. Joe Lieberman – told Imus on the air that this is “a fight worth fighting.”

Rolling Stone & Salon – published RFK Jr.’s article.

FOX – local affiliates have covered this story with exceptional dedication, and the Fox News Channel is mulling over a special report.

The New York Times – is working on a major investigation of the controversy

The Associated Press – is also working on a feature.

Montel Williams – will air an entire segment on the controversy on June 21.

The Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church – made news today by demanding the removal of mercury from vaccines; efforts are afoot to ask the national church to follow suit.

Generation Rescue – purchased full page ads in USA Today and They New York Times promoting the mercury-autism link.

Unlocking Autism – Is placing a series of hardball ads reminding George W. Bush of his 2004 campaign statement that thimerosal should be removed from childhood vaccines, and bearing the tag-line “Giving Mercury to Children on Purpose is Stupid.”

And so, at the risk of metaphorical overdose, I offer up some friendly counsel to those who resist this entirely plausible theory: The cat is out of the bag. The train has left the station. Thimerosal can no longer be swept under the rug.

I wrote “Evidence of Harm” in order to spark national debate over this very serious question. But I cannot debate myself. Critics of the thimerosal theory (and my book) have issued disapproving statements, posted blistering blogs, and even dropped off anonymous, vitriolic flyers at my public appearances. But no one will debate me face to face, at least not so far.

Last month, at the Autism One conference in Chicago, I issued a challenge to the thimerosal naysayers. Borrowing from a certain leader of the Free World, I said, simply, “Bring it on.”

So here is the challenge, repeated again. Dr. Julie Gerberding (CDC Director), Dr. Steve Cochi (head of the CDC vaccine program), Dr. Marie McCormick (head of the IOM panel that dismissed the thimerosal theory), Dr. Paul Offit (a leading pediatrician who passionately derides the theory) or any other prominent person who insists that there is no evidence of harm from injecting organic mercury directly into the systems of infant children at levels far in excess of federal safety limits: Let’s talk. You pick the time, place and speakers. You can even set the ground rules. All I ask is that you come forth, and let's get this over with.


- David Kirby (dkirby@nyc.rr.com)

[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
8:50:08 PM    

Random thought on another class difference.

All social classes get some kind of government assistance, but our experiences are different.

If you're poor, government assistance has all sorts of stipulations--you can't make money but you have to have a job. You're told to get married but if they find that you have a boyfriend staying over, they revoke your benefits. You wait in long lines and you get judged mercilessly.

If you're middle class and you want an FHA loan to pay for your house or federal financial aid to pay for college, you fill out a simple application and it gets rubber-stamped through. You may have to divulge private information, but certainly nothing about your sex life or anything like that.

If you're wealthy and you want government subsidies to boost your business and make you even richer, you negotiate it directly with politicians over drinks, food, music and various other entertainments. You don't have to divulge shit, not even to the public at large who is paying for you. In fact, you may even get Dick Cheney protecting your ass all the way to the Supreme Court.

Just a thought.

[Pandagon]
8:49:22 PM    

More on Durbin. First of all, Andrew Sullivan can't read. I assumed he could, but he can't.

Billmon, as he's wont to do, nails it:

If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago?

Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.

Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.

As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.

I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy.

Is this really such a hard point to understand?

[Daily Kos]
8:48:23 PM    

What's ABC Up To?.

ABC Bosses Tell ABC News Kill The Interviews With Robert Kennedy Jr.

ABC corporate executives at the network’s highest levels ordered three interviews with Robert Kennedy Jr. pulled from ABC News programming. The interviews all centered around Mr. Kennedy’s investigation of thimerosal, a mercury based preservative, used in vaccines given to children and believed to be [...]

[Oliver Willis]
5:13:42 PM    

AT LONG LAST, AP COVERS DOWNING.

Reps. seeking Downing Street inquiry rises to 122
553,996 signatures
- Newsweek: New 'Pentagon papers?'


[The Raw Story | A rational voice - Alternative news]
5:11:46 PM    

Scotty's defense of "last throes".

E&P has the exchange between Terry Moran and Scott McClellan:

Q Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its 'last throes'?

McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free and democratic and peaceful future. And that's why we're doing everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi people as they move forward....

Q But the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day -- you have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions.

Q But they're killing more Americans, they're killing more Iraqis. That's the last throes?

McCLELLAN: Innocent -- I say innocent civilians. And it doesn't take a lot of people to cause mass damage when you're willing to strap a bomb onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians. That's the kind of people that we're dealing with. That's what I say when we're talking about a determined enemy.

Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.

Q What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?

McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You're seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They're working side by side with our coalition forces. They're working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.

Q Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.

McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President's remarks. I think he talked about it.

Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a 'last throe' lasts for?

McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve....

Seriously, how can anyone defend the mess in Iraq? McClellan had no chance against a reporter interested in really asking the tough question.

 [Daily Kos]
5:10:57 PM    

Palast For Conyers: The OTHER 'Memos' from Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Greg Palast, unable to attend hearings in Washington Thursday, has submitted the following testimony:



Chairman Conyers,



It's official: The Downing Street memos, a snooty New York Times "News Analysis" informs us, "are not the Dead Sea Scrolls." You are warned, Congressman, to ignore the clear evidence of official mendacity and bald-faced fibbing by our two nations' leaders because the cry for investigation came from the dark and dangerous world of "blogs" and "opponents" of Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush.



On May 5, "blog" site Buzzflash.com carried my story, IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE FIXED," bringing the London Times report of the Downing Street memo to the US media which seemed to be suffering at the time from an attack of NADD -- "news attention deficit disorder."



The memo, which contains the ill-making admission that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed" to match the Iraq-crazed fantasies of our President, is sufficient basis for a hearing toward impeachment of the Chief Executive. But to that we must add the other evidence and secret memos and documents still hidden from the American public.



Other foreign-based journalists could doubtless add more, including the disclosure that the key inspector of Iraq's biological weapons, the late Dr. David Kelly, found the Bush-Blair analysis of his intelligence was indeed "fixed," as the Downing Street memo puts it, around the war-hawk policy.



Here is a small timeline of confidential skullduggery dug up and broadcast by my own team for BBC Television and Harper's on the secret plans to seize Iraq's assets and oil.



To view the timeline visit www.GregPalast.com or go to the Iraq Timeline Page

 [Greg Palast]

5:10:07 PM    

Truth and Consequences.
By an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."

But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
1973

Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a lie by remaining silent.

However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.

Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durban of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday:

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. (link courtesy of Talk Left)

I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So God help me, when I read what he said I immediately began to wonder what kind of political advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant use of the truth.

(You know you're a cynic when you automatically suspect a politician is telling the truth for dishonest reasons.)

But as far as I can tell, Durbin had absolutely nothing to gain from this, other than the predictable smears from the GOP propaganda machine and the cave dwellers of the Neanderthal right. (Actually, in Limbaugh's case, I think even homo erectus would be ashamed to have to claim such an ape as a distant cousin.)

I have no idea what motivated Durbin to let it all hang out, except perhaps personal moral outrage and a clear understanding of the practical risks raised by the Bush regime's debasement of the American military.

The quote former Vietnam POW Pete Peterson that Durban included in his floor speech said just about everything that needs to be said about the latter:

"From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the Geneva Conventions for my survival . . . This is one reason the United States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us . . . We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime."

As for morality . . . Well, if you can't see the evil in locking prisoners of war -- some of them held by mistake, others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree rooms for 24 hours without food or water, until they shit or piss all over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption. Once you've reached that point, you can probably justify anything, up to and including murder.

Unfortunately, according to the polls, that category may include a sizable fraction of the American people. I've speculated on the reasons for this before, I won't rehash them here. Maybe it's just human nature to ignore evil when it takes place outside of immediate eye or ear shot. Solzhenitsyn also wrote about this trait, and how the Cheka learned to use it to its advantage:

There's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the people in the neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten the closest neighbors are not an event at all to those farther away. It's as if they had not taken place. Along that same asphalt ribbon on which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters strides by day with banners, flowers and gay, untroubled songs.

Easier still to look the other way when the arrests take place half a world away, the archipelago is entirely offshore and the prisoners aren't driven through the streets in trucks but whisked through the sky by the CIA's own private airline. Add in the facts that those arrested are foreign, non-Christian and non-white -- and that some of them almost certainly are guilty of terrorist atrocities -- and you have the perfect excuse for a nation of Sergeant Schultzes to stick to its "We know nothing" line.

And why not? If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in the archipelago?

Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced labor camp.

Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.

As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.

I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively . . . well, it's getting a little more dicey. Compare, for example, the FBI's account of interrogation methods at Guantanamo -- the one cited above by Durbin -- with this scene from the Solzhenitsyn:

In this "kennel" there was neither ventilation nor a window, and the prisoners' body heat and breathing raised the temperature to 40 or 45 degrees Centigrade (104 to 113 degrees Farhenheit) -- and everyone sat there in undershorts . . . They sat like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor water -- except for gruel and tea in the mornings.

Or this passage from Peter Maass's visit to an Iraqi-run, American-advised interrogation center in Samarra:

One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence.

With this anecdote from The Gulag Archipelago:

In the silence we could hear someone in the corridor protesting. They took him from the cell and into a box . . . They left the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be heard clearly.

And these are just the things we know about. What happens on the remoter flyspecks in the American archipelago (much less the affiliated islands of our Saudi or Egyptian or Pakistani "allies" in the war against terrorism) remains largely a closed book. We know prisoners have died in American custody, some appear to have been brutalized before they died. We don't know how many were murdered. We don't know how many were subjected to outright torture, not just conditions "tantamount" to torture. We're asked by the Pentagon and the CIA to accept it on faith -- blind faith -- that crimes will be investigated and the guilty punished. But we already know that faith has been terribly abused.

On the other hand, we do know that. We have at least partial knowledge of life and death in the archipelago. There are still journalists willing to do stories and news organizations willing to run them -- Guantanamo even made the cover of this week's Time. Politicians gutsy enough to defy the right-wing slime machine can still get up in the Senate and protest. The security services won't drag them (or us) away.

Exaggerating for political effect is a technique at least as old as Jonathan Swift. (And it's not always for effect: When G. Gordon Liddy compared the BATF to the Gestapo, you knew he really meant it.) Still, quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not even in the same universe as Stalin's paranoid empire.

But if Durban had wanted to be completely honest, he would have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better, we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.

And if he really wanted to get reckless with the truth, he could have explained the reasons for that resemblance.

But that's probably more truth than even Dick Durban can afford.

[Whiskey Bar]
4:03:41 PM    

If it Quacks Like a Duck . . ..
With the Senate Finance Committee at an impasse on Social Security and House leaders anxious about moving forward, Republican congressional leaders have told the White House in recent days that it is time to look for an escape route.

Washington Post
Exit Strategy on Social Security Is Sought
June 16, 2005


"I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security." The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us ''two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.''

Ron Suskind
Without a Doubt
October 17, 2004


deadduck.jpg

[Whiskey Bar]
4:03:06 PM    

The Rise of the Ferengi.

Jackasterix wondered why the memos matter. He shrugged, like a lot of people paying attention. Most of what was in the memos was already fairly obvious - namely that at the same time that Bush was saying that war was a last resort, Blair and Bush had already decided that it was policy.

But what is important is the "busted!" quality of them. Like a wife in denial catching out a husband cheating - it is the lipstick stain on the underwear. The thing from which people can't avert their gaze.

[BOPnews]
4:01:59 PM    

Fragging Incident.

And now we start getting people fragging their superior officers in Iraq.

An Army National Guard staff sergeant has been charged with premeditated murder in a "fragging incident" that killed two senior officers at a U.S. base near Tikrit, Iraq, last week, the U.S. military said Thursday.

Fragging is a military term that means the intentional killing of friendly soldiers by another soldier in a wartime setting.

Staff Sgt. Alberto Martinez has been charged with two counts of murder in the deaths of company commander Capt. Phillip Esposito and 1st Lt. Louis Allen of the New York Army National Guard, the military said in a statement.


I wonder if they had just told him he would have to stay in Iraq for another six months.

[BOPnews]
4:01:00 PM    

McClellan: If You Opposed The War You Don’t Count.

At today’s press briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the letter Rep. John Conyers sent to the President asking questions about the Downing Street Memo. The letter has been signed by 112 members of Congress and 550,000 concerned citizens.

QUESTION: On another topic, has the president or ...

[Think Progress]
4:00:10 PM    

Memo's Author Backs Annan.

Memo's Author Backs Annan

Maggie Farley | New York | June 16

LAT - The former Cotecna executive who wrote a memo suggesting that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his aides assured him that his company would win a United Nations contract now denies he ever discussed the contract with Annan, his lawyers said in a statement Wednesday. I still think Annan will end of being pushed out like Boutros Boutros-Ghali was. Pathetic, if you ask me.

[The Agonist]
10:48:35 AM    


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