Dennis Hastert, Defender of the Constitution:
From ABC News:
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, House Speaker Dennis Hastert is the No.1 individual recipient of money from Abramoff and his clients, with a total of $68,300 contributed to his campaign committee and leadership PAC from 1998 to 2004.
Here's an example of the kind of parsing at which Republican apologists excel when it's their guys under the gun. "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is." Note particularly the focus on the meaning of "in the mix," wondering just what that means. The title of the column? "It's All In the Mix." Andrew Sullivan, as usual, accepts this quite uncritically.
At any rate, I'm glad to see that Hastert has remembered that we have a Consitution. (See Wednesday for the money quote in that post.) From the WaPo article linked there:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) expressed alarm at the raid. "The actions of the Justice Department in seeking and executing this warrant raise important Constitutional issues that go well beyond the specifics of this case," he said in a lengthy statement released last night.
Haditha:
Rep. John Murtha was soundly vilified when he made his statemetns on this incident. Y'know what? It's even worse.
Evidence indicates that the civilians were killed during a sustained sweep by a small group of marines that lasted three to five hours and included shootings of five men standing near a taxi at a checkpoint, and killings inside at least two homes that included women and children, officials said.
That evidence, described by Congressional, Pentagon and military officials briefed on the inquiry, suggested to one Congressional official that the killings were "methodical in nature."
. . .
Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who is a retired Marine colonel, said that the allegations indicated that "this was not an accident. This was direct fire by marines at civilians." He added, "This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be an atrocity."
John Murtha, of course, was just trying to score points. Somehow I don't see the inhabitants of Freeperland falling all over themselves to apologize.
This war was such a mistake from the get-go. But then, most of them are.
The Handmaid's Tale:
When the FDA makes decisions on the basis of politics, you start to wonder just where this country is going:
The last two appointees to head the FDA were closely involved in decisions to overrule the agency's medical reviewers and block the "morning-after" birth control pill from being sold without a prescription, according to court transcripts to be released today.
I think this might provide a key:
Woodcock, the mother of two teenage daughters, testified that McClellan's argument had struck her as reasonable: The easy availability of a "morning-after" pill might prompt some young teens to engage in risky sexual behavior.
Even though Woodcock is a senior official at FDA, she doesn't seem to understand the psychology of teenagers very well. They're going to do it because a) they won't get caught, because b) they're invulnerable and immortal and it can't happen to them. Something like the morning-after pill doesn't provide a motivation.
The Christianists, from the vantage of their own severely circumscribed world view and their appalling attitudes about human nature, will go for the dirtiest interpretation. Tell you anything?
OK, now tie this in with the Christianist war against the HPV vaccine that might save two or three thousand women's lives every year, the US government's gag orders on legitimate prevention methods for HIV (which it just got slapped down for in federal court, and I can't find a link to the story), the Pope's resistance to condoms for disease prevention, and the general assault on women's rights and everyone's personal liberty.
What do you have?
The Republican party. And, if you want to take it to the logical extreme, as does Andrew Sullivan, you have the real "Party of Death."
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