1 Boring Old Man

No longer conservative about his religion
Washington Post
By Dana Milbank
November 10, 2009

It says much about the transformation of the Republican Party that even Newt Gingrich is now carrying the cross. When Gingrich came to power 15 years ago, his Contract With America was a document of fiscal conservatism that mentioned God only in passing. When he led the impeachment of Bill Clinton a decade ago over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Gingrich was involved in his own longtime extramarital relationship with a former aide, who is now his third wife.

“Newt,” Christopher DeMuth put it gently as he introduced the former House speaker Monday to a forum at the American Enterprise Institute, is “a politician who in his private life is a seriously religious man but who does not make religious belief an upfront part of his political platform.”

His first two wives might have quibbled with the description of Gingrich as a seriously religious man in private. But after Monday’s performance, nobody will ever again say that he “does not make religious belief an upfront part of his political platform.” His talk was titled “The Victory of the Cross: How Spiritual Renewal Helped Topple the Berlin Wall.”

The former speaker, his eye on a 2012 presidential run, said that as he thought more about the felling of the Wall 20 years ago Monday, he began “to understand a message of faith, a message of salvation, the centrality of the cross in this whole fight.” And it wasn’t just about 20th-century Europe. “I am tired of secular fanatics trying to redesign America in their image,” he announced. Further, he said, “I believe the most important question in the United States for the next decade is: ‘Who are we?’ Are we in fact a people who claim that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights?” Or, are we “just randomly gathered protoplasm — and lucky for us we’re not rhinoceroses — but that in the end our power is defined by politicians and their appointees? Once you decide on this, almost everything else gets easier.” Gingrich is calculating that everything will get easier for him politically as a religious conservative…

Gingrich’s piety hasn’t changed his style, thank God. He was still talking Monday about the “stunningly wrongheaded” elites, about his wish to shut down the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and about President Obama’s decision not to attend the ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling: “It doesn’t involve embracing Hugo Chávez, it doesn’t involve appeasing Ahmadinejad. . . . It doesn’t involve any of the patterns of appeasement and avoidance which are the heart of this administration.”

But Gingrich, a historian by training, supplemented the insults with nuggets about faith. Lech Walesa “wears an icon of the black Madonna every day.” A novena by the late Polish cardinal Stefan Wyszynski created “a countervailing culture of belief to offset the secular culture of the dictatorship.” He spoke of a television tower in East Berlin that, during certain hours, appeared to show a cross because of the sun’s reflection. From there, the speaker turned from faithless communists to godless liberals. “There is a secular-left model of reality which cannot tolerate the thought that state control fails, that tyranny is evil and that a liberated human being whose rights come from God is the centerpiece of the human future,” he said. In fact, he added later, he felt so strongly about this that “I’m trying to get a poster done. It’s going to have a series of Polish crosses that form a cross”…

A man in the audience stood up to say that over the past nine months, the Berlin Wall “is being reconstructed right here” by Obama and congressional Democrats. “At the end of four years, is it not likely that a lot more people will be rediscovering God through tyranny?” “The underlying move toward a secular socialist worldview has been going on now at least since the early ’90s,” Gingrich answered. “The great Reagan Revolution defeated communists overseas, but it didn’t defeat the left here at home.”

Of course, now that Newt and God have joined forces, that could all change.

I think we have the right to object to an abortion ban. But we don’t have the right to insist dissenters pay for abortions they don’t believe in. If we’re "do-gooders," then we’d be better placed to do what Sara suggests and pony up for our beliefs in another way.

How far do you go with that? Should I not have to pay my [considerable] share of the cost of the Iraq war, which I don’t believe in? I think I’d also like to deduct my share of the TARP money that went to CEO’s bonuses, and all of the abstinence-only sex ed programs, and a lot more.

Ralph has good points as usual. The part about our paying for a war we don’t believe in reminded me of what that awful Senator Lieberman said yesterday on one of the talk shows about why he opposes the health bill and how he won’t let it come to a vote when the bill reaches the Senate because it’s too expensive and will cause too much debt.

I claim that we should take the following "high road" because of Ralph’s and Joy’s point. National Defense is a legitimate governmental function. Unprovoked War of Conquest isn’t. Government intervention in a economic collapse is a legitimate governmental function. Bonuses to Wall Street hot-shots isn’t. Government intervention in programs to voluntarily prevent unwanted pregnancies is a legitimate function. Ineffective programs driven by religious ideas is not. A government health program that is "too expensive and will cause too much debt" isn’t a legitimate governmental function. Obama’s health care reform doesn’t portend debt and is a legitimate governmental function. The Republicans abused the government’s programs. Now they don’t want to pass reasonable legislation because they claim it might be abused. The solutions to abuse are prevention and prosecution, not avoidance. They use "projection" much like paranoid people. To me, "I don’t want to pay for abortions" is legitimate. But "I want to ban abortions" is not. "You invaded another country with our National Guard" is abuse of a legitimate governmental function. Prosecute!

Ensign moves out of home on C Street
Town house shared with Christian colleagues had gained notoriety because of Nevadan’s affair
The Nevada Sun
By Lisa Mascaro

Sen. John Ensign has moved out of the C Street house, the Christian home he shared with other elected officials on Capitol Hill that came under scrutiny for its residents’ beliefs and practices and their role in trying to end the Nevada Republican’s affair with a campaign staff member…

As fallout from Ensign’s affair continues with a preliminary Senate Ethics Committee investigation and talk of a possible criminal inquiry by the Justice Department, Ensign decided to move out, not wanting to draw further attention to his longtime home… Ensign apparently was not pushed out, but left on his own. He apologized to his colleagues…

The C Street home became central to the Ensign saga when Cynthia Hampton’s husband, Doug, who was one of Ensign’s top aides at the time of the affair, arranged to confront Ensign there. At that meeting in February 2008, one of the senator’s housemates and friends, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., urged Ensign to end the affair. [Other lawmakers who live at the home were not present.] During that meeting Ensign penned a letter to Cynthia calling off the affair, but immediately afterward phoned her and told her to ignore his note. The eight-month affair ended in August 2008, the senator’s office has said…

But new allegations reported in The New York Times in October reignited the story. The Times reported that Ensign may have knowingly allowed Doug Hampton, in his new job consulting for Nevada companies, to lobby the senator’s office in possible violation of the one-year lobby ban for top staff members.

Ethics experts have said they expect the Justice Department will launch a criminal investigation of the matter, though the agency has declined to say whether an investigation is under way. The Senate Ethics Committee has confirmed it is conducting a preliminary investigation. Coburn’s role was also more fully revealed in the Times story, which reported that Doug Hampton turned to him this year to seek help in obtaining financial restitution and relocation assistance from Ensign. Doug Hampton sought $8.5 million from Ensign, a sum Coburn considered ridiculous. Hampton returned with a $2 million request, and Coburn brought it to Ensign, who flatly refused, the Times said.

Coburn acknowledged to the Times having met with Doug Hampton on business in possible violation of the one-year lobby ban, a meeting he had not realized was a potential problem until asked about it…

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Senator’s Aid After Affair Raises Flags Over Ethics
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and ERIC LIPTON
October 1, 2009

Early last year, Senator John Ensign contacted a small circle of political and corporate supporters back home in Nevada — a casino designer, an airline executive, the head of a utility and several political consultants — seeking work for a close friend and top Washington aide, Douglas Hampton. “He’s a competent guy, and he’s looking to come back to Nevada. Do you know of anything?” one patron recalled Mr. Ensign asking.

The job pitch left out one salient fact: the senator was having an affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife, Cynthia, a campaign aide. The tumult that the liaison was causing both families prompted Mr. Ensign, a two-term Republican, to try to contain the damage and find a landing spot for Mr. Hampton.

In the coming months, the senator arranged for Mr. Hampton to join a political consulting firm and lined up several donors as his lobbying clients, according to interviews, e-mail messages and other records. Mr. Ensign and his staff then repeatedly intervened on the companies’ behalf with federal agencies, often after urging from Mr. Hampton.

While the affair made national news in June, the role that Mr. Ensign played in assisting Mr. Hampton and helping his clients has not been previously disclosed. Several experts say those activities may have violated an ethics law that bars senior aides from lobbying the Senate for a year after leaving their posts…

In the Social Democracy we must become, healthcare reform is absolutely essential. The collective mind simply cannot only be a majority of self interests. Somewhere, the body politic has to recognize the needs of of everyone. So the House of Representatives did the right thing. This time, a little over half of them voted for "us" instead of "me." At least this time, the most were for the most.

The Republicans under the leadership of John Boehner had only one defector from their bloc voting strategy. Now they’re going to ramp up their attacks with their cries of "Socialism," "Communism," "Liberalism," "Obama-ism," "Fascism," "Pelosi-ism," etc. That’s to be expected. Instead of seeing us half-way there, they’re going to look at this as a challenge. The roar will be deafening. They’re aiming for an empty glass.

I was surprised by some of the Progressives. They see the amendment that ruled out government funded abortion as a great loss – the glass as half empty. I call it losing to win. It’s just the way things are. Most Americans don’t want the government to pay for abortions. I’m not even sure I want that myself. Abortion isn’t "medical" in some sense. It’s become a part of medicine because when it wasn’t, it killed people and wasn’t widely available. It’s a desperate solution to a much more simply solved problem. If churches gave out condoms and birth control pills, we wouldn’t need abortion. Neither celibacy nor rhythm got the job done. Abortion and birth control for the poor can be financed privately with the money being spent lobbying. I’d rather donate to that cause than to organizations that proselytize in vain.

It’s like winning a huge battle, but half of your friends were killed or wounded.

36 million more people will be insured or become eligible for Medicaid
There will be a trillion dollars raised to help subsidize this.
There will be multiple measures to help control the costs of Medicare
We will stop subsidizing private insurers in Medicare Advantage
Closes the donut hole
Allows Medicare negotiation for drugs
Includes the seeds of a public option
Prohibits denials based on prior conditions; ends rescissions except for fraud
Funds more education for doctors/nurses
Begins dozens of health prevention programs, pilots, surveys
Creates entities to evaluate and recommend better treatment, cost saving
And on and on.

It’s a massive achievement, but women, mostly poor, paid a price.

From the beginning in the early 1970’s when Roe v. Wade became the lead law, the pro-choice forces ought to have been about building a not-for-profit nationwide Reproductive Health Clinic System that was essentially private, not dependent on any public funds, and not subject to anti-choice votes or legislation. If that had been done, Reproductive Choice would now be so instutionalized it would not be a potent political issue, and it would not be a tool Churches and Bishops could play with in their eternal battle to control people by using sexuality tools.

When we consider all the money womens groups have raised to fund political campaigns of candidates who support choice, and all the money spent lobbying over the years — it would have gone a fair way toward building such a system out that would have been fully private, but as a non-profit could have designed means to serve the poor and the near poor who needed and requested these services. Similarly, Reproductive health is about a lot more than abortion — and if such clinics also offered these services at a modest cost, they could have made small profits to cover costs of service to the less able to pay. For instance, if they only had a small part of the birth control pill market, instead of the profits going to Big Pharm, they could have been re-invested in services.

As Liberals, Progressives, whatever we call ourselves, we cannot expect to create a liberal-utopia in an American Democracy. If we’re honest, that would be something like the socialism they accuse us of wanting. We can, however, pick our legitimate battles carefully and win. The way to do that is to understand the real answer to the riddle: Is the glass half empty or half full?

Which is: Neither. The glass is the wrong size.

I was working on a project all day, but tuned in and out of the news about about Major Hasan. It doesn’t seem all that confusing to me. One thing is clear – he had few connections with people in the world – a loner. He apparently sold his soul to the Army in return for his medical training [which would have begun well before 9/11]. Once in that pipeline, there’s no exit. His life was his work and his religion. That’s all he seemed to have. He was apparently in the market for a wife – one who was as religiously observant as himself. Everyone that knew him reported that he was in a huge double bind. He was opposed to our Middle Eastern wars in general, and personally wanted no part of being sent there. He said it to his colleagues, to his relatives, to an audience of peers, even to the Convenience Store owner where he bought his coffee each morning. He framed it as a dilemma: he was being sent to Afghanistan to kill other Muslims in a "war on Islam."

So he was living in a small barely furnished apartment near Fort Hood wearing full Muslim clothing, spending his days listening to emotionally scarred veterans talk of the horror of war, going to a Mosque frequently, and awaiting deployment to Afghanistan! It sounds like he saw his fate as to either kill and/or be killed by other Muslims, or to kill and/or be killed by other Americans. Yesterday, he made his choice.

Did he act alone? Sure. He did everything alone. Could he be stopped. Sure. Don’t send someone who is that vocal about not wanting to go to war in Afghanistan to Fort Hood with a deployment date. Was he crazy? He had an obvious personality disorder  from the description – Schizoid Personality [shy, introverted, serious, detached, alienated, paranoid], but he doesn’t sound psychotic.

While the monthly change [-190,000] in non-farm payroll employment is the lowest since the first of the year, the overall unemployment is up to 10.2% – not good. I have no clue if this is something that denotes a change, or just the way recovery goes. The problem with economics as a science [?] goes is that there’s some cybernetics with the numbers – the reporting of the indexes itself is a factor in what happens next.

But sometimes, one is fooled, at least at first. This morning, the papers are full of Unemployment 10.2%! yet the Dow Jones is going up, at least for now [10:15AM].

But not for long [10:45AM]…

Looking back over the Niger forgery days and Judith Miller’s place in the piece, I had actually thought of David Kelly before Dawn mentioned him, though in a different context. His story is not so well known on this side of the Atlantic. But what a story it is! Here’s the New Yorker version from 2003. Dr. Kelly was a biological weapons expert and an inspector in Iraq. While there are many twists and turns in the story, the heart of the matter is that he doubted Tony Blair’s case for war with Iraq and talked to a reporter about it. When the article came out, he admitted that he was the source. He was then outed by the government [Tony Blair] and publicly investigated by a Committee of Parliament, a humiliating experience. Shortly thereafter he was found dead in the woods near his home. An investigation, the Hutton Commission, ruled his death a suicide. Since then, there have been repeated inquiries – his computer was seized, his wounds were hardly explanatory, he’d just had lunch with his wife., he was writing an expose`. It’s one of those British mysteries, but this time,  it’s a for-real murder mystery. Dawn passed on this very interesting article [Did MI5 kill Dr David Kelly?] of yet another inquiry. The speculation is that he was murdered because of his questioning the British Intelligence estimates, but there’s plenty more. He’s the British version of Joseph Wilson, though his fate was decidedly worse.

I thought of him when I was looking back over Judith Miller’s story the other day. Miller had consulted with him for her book – Germs – and they became friends. His last email was to her, following the inquiry:

Answering her comment, he responded: "I will wait until the end of the week before judging – many dark actors playing games." But that week never ended for Dr. David Kelly. Within a few hours, of sending the email, he was found dead. For many of us, Kelly’s phrase, dark actors, became a mantra for all that happened in those crazy days. And I am convinced that Kelly was murdered by one of them.

John Dean: Cheney may have given false statements to FBI
the Raw Story
By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
November 3rd, 2009

There is "a lot of evidence" that Vice President Dick Cheney gave false statements to the FBI during its investigation of the Valerie Plame leak affair, says former White House attorney John Dean. Dean told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that Cheney attained "something of a record" by refusing to answer or claiming to not recall the answer to 72 questions posed by the FBI during a May, 2004, interview. "If you’ll recall, former Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman did 150 ‘I don’t recalls’ during his three days before the Senate Watergate committee," Dean said. "This is 72 in less than three hours, that’s right up there." The comparison is striking, because Haldeman served 18 months in prison for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.

"There’s a lot of evidence that [Cheney] gave a number of false statements to federal officials, which is clearly a federal offense under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and it could well be obstruction of justice," Dean said on MSNBC’s Countdown Monday night. Dean added that "it’s not clear why Fitzgerald did not aggressively pursue this," referring to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted the Plame leak case… "It clearly shows in this testimony, as well as in all his other actions, that Libby fell on his sword for his boss," Dean told Olbermann. "His boss obviously felt an obligation and wanted to maintain that relationship of confidentiality." Dean said that Cheney is safe from prosecution, because "he has now gotten himself beyond the statute of limitations"…

I think my closer to glad was left over from my magnum opus post [Cooper’s Conundrum…] yesterday. It makes it easier for people who really know what happened to talk. They don’t have to be so anonymous. They don’t have to worry about being subpoenaed. They can just say what they know into the ether of public opinion and let us work it out ourselves. If I were one of those high ranking State Department Officials or retired C.I.A. operatives, I’d feel a lot more comfortable telling what I know without the prospect of a high profile court case. And then there are always Congressional Hearings.

I’ve reread the interview release enough times now to be used to it. I don’t stop in the middle anymore and go make coffee, or go in the other room and wonder why I’m there. A lot of the looking up for that long post down there was a way of avoiding reading the interview. I still have to remind myself that this man, Dick Cheney, former Vice President, is more than a politician who paints himself in the best light. He’s an actual practiced prevaricator extraordinaire. While emptywheel has the best notion of a boldfaced lie [meeting Judith Miller in Wyoming], lies are scattered everywhere, including the 72 "don’t recalls." But the real lie is in the space between the words – Joseph Wilson was an "irritant." Wilson’s trip was "’amateur hour’ at the C.I.A." – not up to "trade-craft" standards – "lacked detail." Speaking of detail, he could not decipher his own handwriting. The crossed out part might say "the pres," – he couldn’t be sure, "but, in any event, it had been crossed out."

I was kind of joking aroung with that last post, about RINOs, but I think I missed the significance. Limbaugh sort of runs on themes – Operation Chaos, Club Gitmo, now RINOs [Republicans-In-Name-Only]. But then I was waiting for a file conversion that was taking an hour, so I surfed around and ran across this:

I couldn’t stand watching the whole thing, so I don’t know if Beck used the term "RINOs," but the idea was identical. He started off with how people [Republican people] are always claiming to be Reaganites, but many of them aren’t. [next slide] Arlen Specter, Lindsey Graham, John McCain are lined up. They’re not "real" Republicans because they have agreed with or voted with Democrats at some point in their lives. I think I got the gist of things in my brief Beck encounter. It was the same thing Limbaugh was saying. I didn’t realize they were so in sync. I guess they are purifying the party, purging the … I guess RINOs.

Our first big trip after I retired was to China. On those overseas trips, there’s always a meal with some local family, or a visit from someone who has a story to tell. We had two visits with ladies who had been taken off to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. One had left her home in Beijing [her small son went to an orphanage] to work on a farm for five years. The other, Ms. Lu, had been a college student studying English.

When the Cultural Revolution came, classes shut down. Every day, they gathered to hear about the "roaders." In the article Mao wrote that got the whole purge started, he’d warned that many were going down the wrong "road" – thus "roaders." Ms. Lu’s professor was accused of being a "roader." The teacher was brought to the meetings and brow beaten day after day. Later, the teacher was beaten with cane poles. Then Ms. Lu was sent to the countryside to be reeducated, since college students were almost by definition, "roaders." She worked in the fields all day, then went to nightly meetings for more of the same. She got out after two years for an odd reason. Nixon visited Chinja, so all the English students got to go back to school, and work then as interpreters. Her brother stayed 10 years. Since returning, he’s never "been right" and she now cares for him.

Watching Beck, I couldn’t help thinking of Ms. Lu. Looks like Rush and Glenn are starting their own Cultural Revolution, attacking Republican "Roaders" [Wasn’t Beck accusing Anita Dunn of being a Maoist just last week?]. But I reckon this is part of their War on Obama, trying to make sure no one goes "bipartisan." Or maybe they actually think that they can fill their Party with heavyweights like Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and other “non-roaders”…

Dede Scozzafava Screws RINOs
Rush Limbaugh
11/02/2009

RUSH: How about Dede Scozzafava?  You know what?  Dede Scozzafava has just screwed every RINO in the country by showing everybody who they are.  It’s what I say about radio, people say, "Rush, does it matter AM, FM?"  No, no.  Content, content, content, content.  Content determines what people will listen to, and in politics, principle, principle, principle.  Moderates by definition have no principles.  They’re wishy washy. A typical moderate is Lindsey Grahamnesty.  A typical moderate.  They’re all over the place.  They go with the flow.  They think of themselves first.  They are not guided by principle at all, and Dede Scozzafava has just delivered a teachable moment for those who lack a keen sense of the obvious.  RINOs cannot be trusted.  Republicans-in-name-only cannot be trusted.  They aren’t principled.  You vote ’em into office and you’re going to get cap and tax, you’re going to get some version of Obamacare, you’re going to get tax increases, you’re going to get TARP bailouts, you’re gonna get amnesty.