Reminder

Link.

An old WWII poster that is still current, if you know what I mean. (And see this too.)

Everything Old is New Again; The Journal Gets with the Program the Second Time Around

First time was Head Start in the 60s. Good idea then and it seems the Wall Street Journal things a program sort of like it is a good idea now:

In Washington and statehouses across the country, preschool is moving to the head of the class.

Florida and Oklahoma are among the states that have started providing free preschool for any 4-year-old whose parents want it. Illinois and New York plan to do the same. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to spend $15 billion over five years on universal preschool funding. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke calls preschool one cure for inequality.

The movement represents one of the most significant expansions in public education in the 90 years since World War I, when kindergarten first became standard in American schools. It has taken off as politicians look for relatively inexpensive ways to tackle the growing rich-poor gap in the U.S. They have found spending on children is usually an easy sell.

It took a well-orchestrated campaign to put pre-K on the top of political agendas -- and new tactics that didn't rely on do-gooder rhetoric. Among those working on the issue are the research director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a billionaire Oklahoma oil man and a foundation executive in Philadelphia.

Their winning pitch: Making pre-K as prevalent as kindergarten is a prudent investment. Early schooling, they say, makes kids more likely to stay in school and turn into productive taxpayers.

The Twilight of the Wall Street Journal

It always gets darker before it gets dark....

It took less than 48 hours after the final purchase agreement was announced for it to become glaringly obvious that Rupert Murdoch does not have The Wall Street Journal's editorial well-being at heart, and that the newspaper is in for a world of hurt under Murdoch's reign.

What was the instant tell? It came in the form of the independent committee created to be a buffer between Murdoch and the Journal. The "Special Committee," as it's called in the merger agreement, had been one of the stipulations put forward by Bancroft family members who owned Dow Jones & Co. and who were concerned about what Murdoch would do to the Journal once he purchased it. The early talk was that the committee would be made up of former journalism all-stars and other heavy hitters who would have the power to rebuff Murdoch if he tried to meddle with the news coverage or insert his lackeys onto the masthead.

So much for that grand plan.

Instead, questions were immediately raised about the Special Committee when Reuters reported that one appointed member was not only a personal friend of Murdoch's, but he also ran a computer education foundation that had received $2.5 million from Murdoch's News Corp. That represented a rather obvious conflict of interest for someone who was supposed to be independent from News Corp. (More on that later.)

Worse, the Special Committee is going to be chaired by a far-right GOP yes man who not only faithfully regurgitates Republican talking points in print for a living, but who in early 2003 predicted the fighting in Iraq would be "relatively inconsequential," and who months later declared that America had won the Iraq war in "a cakewalk."

That's who Murdoch has tapped to protect the Journal's editorial integrity? Good luck. I mean, was Sean Hannity not available?

To be honest, I don't know many realistic media watchers who think some sort of independent board set up to protect the Journal from Murdoch would, in fact, protect the Journal from Murdoch. But the symbolism is rich: Murdoch is such a journalism wrecker the he has to be kept a safe distance from his own newsroom. The fact that the committee itself appears to be such an unserious undertaking, and that Murdoch doesn't care who knows it, simply foreshadows the dangers that loom for the paper.

And sure enough, as currently spelled out, the committee's duties seem to be mostly toothless. The committee will have only a "say" in the hiring of top editors. And as Editor & Publisher's Mark Fitzgerald pointed out last week, "it appears that the [committee's] enforcement amounts to the power to write a report and publish it in the Journal." Fitzgerald also "didn't see any mechanism that would permit a lowly reporter to approach this august committee with a complaint -- let alone any guarantee that the journalist would not suffer any reprisals for being a whistle blower."

The Special Committee members include retired Associated Press chief executive Louis Boccardi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, former Tribune Publishing president Jack Fuller, former Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn (R-WA), and former Detroit News columnist Thomas Bray.

The committee will meet approximately four times a year, yet its members will get paid handsomely; $100,000 annually for their very limited services. Am I the only one who detects a whiff of a pay-off here? It's similar to News Corp.'s unusually generous offer to cover the Bancroft family's bankers and lawyers' fees totaling more than $40 million, which raised doubts about whether the pro-News Corp. advice some advisers gave the Bancroft family was tainted.

It's just another reason why I think journalism pros Fuller and Boccardi ought to think twice before signing on to this Murdoch boondoggle. Both men enjoyed distinguished careers in journalism and boast proud legacies. But accepting Murdoch's six-figure handout for a quasi no-show job? How is that going to add to their resumes?

Adding to the discomfort, Fuller and Boccardi will be answering to Bray, tapped by News Corp. to chair the Special Committee. Bray may not have a national reputation, but for readers of the Detroit News who have been banging their heads against the wall for years reading Bray's columns filled with misinformation, his reputation is well known.

Bray's previous moment in the media spotlight came in 2000, when he was removed as the editorial page editor at the Detroit News. (He stayed on as a columnist.) At the time, the paper's publisher insisted the "reassignment" was a routine personnel change, but conservatives in the press, exhibiting a raw sense of entitlement mixed with old-fashioned self-pity, rallied to the editor's defense. They alleged that Bray had been fired simply because he was conservative, with The Weekly Standard attacking the News publisher for trying to devote "more space to liberal opinion." (Bray himself never publicly suggested his move to columnist had been unfair.)

"He was a dissenting voice from liberal orthodoxy and an all too rare one among major city dailies," then-Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot said at the time. Conservatives went on and on about what an amazing opinion page team Bray had assembled at the Detroit News, although it appears Bray's main claim to fame was that he discovered Tony Snow, who, prior to becoming a Republican White House mouthpiece, wrote a faithful GOP column for the Detroit newspaper.

Yes, Gigot today is the Journal's conservative editorial page editor and yes, Gigot helped select Bray as chairman of the Journal's Special Committee. In fact, to help soften the blow of losing his Detroit News job back in 2002, the Journal's right-wing editorial operation gave Bray a job writing for OpinionJournal.com. And no wonder they wanted Bray on their team.

In recent years, he has wondered why Americans support federally funding any arts programs. He's a vocal critic of affirmative action. He wrote that "[t]ax cutting is a legitimate, even a necessary, tactic in fighting the war against terrorism."

He's anti-union, he ridicules environmentalists, and he's not much of a political prognosticator either. In a June 21, 2006, column, Bray, eyeing Michigan politics, announced, "Gov. Jennifer Granholm, tabbed as a Democratic star only four years ago, is in deep trouble" in her re-election campaign.

Fact: Less than five months later, Granholm won in a rout, defeating her GOP opponent by 15 percentage points.

Over the years Bray has been a dependable "liberal media bias" parrot, claiming the mainstream media are too tough on Republican politicians, and President Bush in particular. He has also blamed the dishonest, liberal media for turning Americans against the war in Iraq and claimed that if Americans were simply told the truth about all "the favorable news from Iraq," they would view the battle differently.

Of course, the Journal's news team, which reports extensively and often critically about Bush and Iraq, would have to be included in Bray's critique of the liberal media. So, if Bray already considers the Journal's news team to be part of the liberal media problem, how exactly is he going to protect its integrity as chairman of the Special Committee?

And then there's Iraq, where Bray has embarrassed himself time and time again. Read this whopper from January 12, 2003, as Bray cheered Bush's war on terror: "While there may be occasional shooting matches on the periphery, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, these are likely to be relatively inconsequential." [Emphasis added.]

Or this lede from Bray's April 13, 2003, column:

There are many reasons for the astonishing military victory in Iraq: a brilliant plan implemented by Gen. Tommy Franks; America's high-tech dominance of the battlefield; the skill and courage of U.S. forces; the moral clarity of the commander in chief.

Even in September 2003, Bray was convinced Iraq represented a victory for America: "In the two years since [9/11], American forces have liberated Afghanistan and Iraq."

By February 2004, Bray, undisturbed by his rash of miscues, declared, "Weapons or no weapons, a good case can be made that Bush still did the right thing" invading Iraq.

More? "The sniping and car-bombing is mighty unpleasant, but it reflects bitter-end resistance by isolated fanatics rather than the roots of a Vietnam-style guerrilla war."

Bray has been comically, and habitually, wrong about the most pressing public policy issue of the day, so naturally he gets appointed to chair a committee tasked with protecting the editorial integrity of one of the nation's largest newspapers, while pocketing $100,000 annually for his duties. Makes perfect sense to me.

Even if Bray's career didn't resemble that of a predictable GOP errand boy, the fact remains that based on his background he has no expertise for the committee he's been asked to chair. Meaning, what does Bray understand about maintaining the Journal's integrity? He traffics in opinion, and sadly, often weak Republican misinformation. Unlike Fuller and Boccardi, who boast a generation's worth of newsroom experience and who are keenly aware of the potential conflicts of interest that arise in the newsroom, all Bray has done for the past couple of decades is blissfully dump Republican spin onto the media landscape.

More Special Committee woes

Amazingly, on a committee with just five members, Bray's appointment was not the only embarrassment. The other surrounded the appointment of Nicholas Negroponte, a well-respected MIT academic who has taken up the gallant crusade of making computers more affordable to needy children around the world. Negroponte, nonetheless, was not the right person for the Special Committee simply because he's not independent.

It was News Corp. that pushed for his inclusion on the committee, despite the fact News Corp. has donated $2.5 million to Negroponte's nonprofit group, One Laptop per Child. That raised an obvious conflict of interest since, according to the merger document, the committee members were to be independent, which was defined as people who "are able to consider and evaluate objectively any issue that comes before the Special Committee and whose judgment is not impaired by any interest in or relationship with the company [News Corp.]." [Emphasis added.]

A News Corp. spokesman insisted that despite the $2.5 million donation, Negroponte was, in fact, independent of News Corp., stressing, "[T]here is no objective standard of independence." (I guess it all depends on what the meaning of "independent" is.) A Dow Jones spokeswoman quickly agreed, telling a reporter for the Journal, "We are confident of the capability of the [committee] individuals to make independent decisions."

This is precisely what journalism pros feared: that the normally intelligent, sane executives at The Wall Street Journal would suddenly lose their equilibrium during unsightly attempts to please their new heavy-handed boss. The fact that the Journal flack was forced to perform what is likely to become a ritual, albeit humiliating, linguistics dance in public even before Murdoch actually purchased the paper, is distressing. Keep in mind that the Journal point person argued, in all seriousness, that a person whose (admirable) foundation had received $2.5 million in donations from Murdoch's News Corp. was still independent from Murdoch and had no relationship with News Corp.

In reality, the Journal's none-too-subtle message was clear: This Special Committee is pure window dressing. We don't take it seriously, and neither should you.

In that case, perhaps it's fitting that Thomas Bray was chosen to chair it.

Link.

Meet Our Leaders; Another Moral Exemplar

Another Republican sexual hypocrite out of control. Florida State Representative Bob Allen (R-of course) is clearly shooting for worst defense of the year after being caught trolling for a same sex encounter. Earlier this month he was arrested at Veteran's Memorial Park in Titusville for soliciting an undercover male officer inside the restroom after offering to perform oral sex for $20.

Allen, who also served as the McCain campaign's co-chairman in Florida, has decided that he would come out of this scandal looking better if he is perceived as a racist rather than a homo. Sweet!

State Rep. Bob Allen told police he was just playing along when a undercover officer suggested in a public restroom that the legislator give him oral sex and $20 because he was intimidated, according to a taped statement and other documents released Thursday.

..."This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park," Allen, who is white, told police in a taped statement after his arrest. Allen said he feared he "was about to be a statistic" and would have said anything just to get away. Allen, who couldn't be reached for comment Thursday, has repeatedly declared his innocence, his intention to fight the charges and his desire to stay in office.

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Real Journalism: People Investigating

Ilona Meagher doesn't have a degree in journalism (although she is working on one, even though she's already proven that she doesn't need one), but she's far ahead of all those D.C. stenographers who wouldn't know a scoop if they were ordering a cone in an ice cream store. As a self-starter, former flight attendant, she has become one of the national experts on the epidemic of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome among our GIs returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

What started as an area of personal interest became a vital book on a major problem facing our combat veterans (which of course the Busheviks would prefer to ignore), Moving a Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America's Returning Troops.

After interviewing Meagher, we recently met her at the Yearly Kos conference in Chicago. She's enthusiastic, impassioned, immersed in her subject matter, and enormously knowledgeable about what she writes about. Now, isn't that what you would expect of a mainstream journalist, let's say, writing for the Washington Post on national issues, but don't get?

If our media is going to be reformed and restructured to remove it from the narrow corporate frame of the mainstream media, which keeps so many issues out of the news because they might make the powers that be punish them by cutting back on tax breaks or not granting favorable regulations, it will come from citizen journalists like Ilona Meagher.

As we noted in our review of Meagher's book:

Like wounded Iraqis, GIs with PTSD are just so much collateral damage to the White House.

What makes Moving a Nation to Care particularly significant is that it is grounded in personal accounts of how many GIs with PTSD arrived at where they are. This is a well-researched book that combines facts, details and personal accounts into a compelling call for assisting our own victims of a fraudulent war.

Ilona Meagher truly supports our troops and cares about their well-being as they return to a country for which the Iraq War has been more faux jingistic sloganeering than real combat.

Unlike Bush, Cheney and the self-serving pro-war, pandering GOP candidates for president, Meagher identified an injustice done to our troops and has sought to do something about it with the power of the pen.

That, our friends, is a true patriot.

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Big Media: Good for Nothing; Not-So-Big Media: Pretty Competent

From GORDON TROWBRIDGE, Washington bureau, Detroit News: Let's please try to stomp out a particularly silly notion before it calcifies into conventional wisdom. In his Monday chat on washingtonpost.com, Howard Kurtz tells a questioner: "I do think in the wake of the Minneapolis collapse that there has been a lot of reporting on how many bridges are deemed structurally deficient and how much money is spent on maintenance, especially in local newspapers and on local stations. But where were these stories before?"

This is a leading contender for "Most Inane Media Criticism, 2007." Stories on deteriorating bridges are a staple of investigative and computer-assisted reporting, as even a cursory glance of resources such as the Investigative Reporters & Editors website or a stroll through Nexis reveal. Since 2001, the Boston Globe, Kansas City Star, WFLA-TV in Tampa, Cincinnati Enquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oakland Tribune and Oregonian of Portland have all published major investigations based on analysis of the National Bridge Inventory, the federal database that was the source for all those stories listing "structurally deficient" bridges in the wake of the Minnesota tragedy. Nexis shows nearly 100 stories from papers such as the Salt Lake Tribune, and as recently as this June in the Honolulu Advertiser. The national media have been on the case too, and for a long time: The New York Times published a piece in 1989, and USA Today a major investigative project in 1994. The list is almost certainly longer than what my 10 minutes of searching turned up.

The story here is not, repeat not, one of a clueless media failing to pay attention to a serious problem because it was unsexy. In fact, the various publishers associations and journalism advocacy groups ought to be advertising the fact that the media were onto this long before it became the cause of the day. Any public official with two functioning brain cells, and any voter with the wit to pay attention, knew of the problem of crumbling infrastructure long before the I-35W disaster. And they knew because hundreds of journalists and scores of media outlets had told them, in big, bold, Technicolor detail. That government and the public failed to pay attention just demonstrates that on this, as on so many other issues, the ability to point out a problem is not the same as the power to solve it.

Link.

Joke of the Day

A joke, yet how true....

Things you have to believe to be a Republican today

Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and
Hillary Clinton.

Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when
Bush's daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did
business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we
can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist,
but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of
international harmony.

The United States should get out of the United Nations, and
our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions
against Iraq.

A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body,
but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting
all mankind without regulation.

The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops
in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time
allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but
providing health care to all Americans is socialism. HMOs and
insurance companies have the best interests of the public at
heart.

Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science,
but creationism should be taught in schools. A president lying
about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a
president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands
die is solid defense policy.

Government should limit itself to the powers named in the
Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring
the Internet.

The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades,
but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.

Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless
you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you
need our prayers for your recovery.

You support states' rights, but the Attorney General can tell
states what local voter initiatives they have the right to adopt.

What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest,
but what Bush did in the '80s is irrelevant.

Link.

Quote of the Day

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."

-- [attributed to] Adolf Hitler

Diebold, Cont'd

If one set out to design electronic voting machines that undermine voter confidence and threaten the integrity and accuracy of the whole election process, it would be hard to outdo those of Diebold Election Systems, if a new analysis is to be believed.

The California Secretary of State has finally released the source-code review portion of its two-month “top-to-bottom” examination of electronic voting systems certified for use in California, and it’s not pretty. “The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes,” the report concludes. “An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting machine. The damage could be extensive–malicious code could spread to every voting machine in polling places and to county election servers.”

And it gets worse. Princeton professor Ed Felten read through the Diebold report, as well as those of Hart InterCivic and Sequoia Voting Systems, and found that some of the problems it identifies are the same ones Diebold claimed to have fixed years ago. “Diebold claimed (p. 11) in 2003 that its use of hard-coded passwords was ‘resolved in subsequent versions of the software,’ ” Felten notes. “Yet the current version still uses at least two hard-coded passwords–one is “diebold” (report, p. 46) and another is the eight-byte sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 (report, p. 45).”

Now, “1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8″ is an improvement over “11111,” Diebold’s last hard-coded security key, in that it employs eight numbers instead of just one. But surely it can’t be among those that inspired California Secretary of State Debra Bowen to recertify Diebold’s machines for use in the 2008 elections. Presumably, “come up with a less laughable password” was a condition of recertification.

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Laff of the Day: A Blast from the Past

I've always loved this meme: we're not allowed to dislike a dislikeable leader because it emboldens "our enemies".

Listen, domestic wingnuts and foreign-born ignoramuses: it's called freedom of dissent and it's you know, a hallmark of democracy which, you know, is what the U.S. supposedly is.

I mean, terrorists are emboldened by our growing public lack of respect for Our Leaders not, say, by choosing to fight terrorism by enabling the Pakistani enablers of terrorism or by pointlessly, needlessly destabilizing Iraq so as to provide the terrorists with a far better training ground than Afghanistan.

The latest idiocy from an ignoramus-for-pay:

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler -- as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.

***

Lt. Gen. Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. His new book, "Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination" (Ivan R. Dee) will be published in November.

What a fin source of insight into how the citizens of a democracy should behave. Now that the KGB is resurgent (albeit under a new name), maybe someone will whack him. And what's with this rank shit? Ex-KGB, whoring in the West? Isn't is inappropriate?

Link.

Essential Reading

Short version (but whole thing should be read anyway): The right to access courts to seek redress is an essential component of a healthy democracy -- which Our Leaders, as haters of democracy, which is to say haters of America -- are long against and continuously work to weaken and destroy. Ditto a system of law generally and more ditto the issue of holding corporations accountable.

Tort reform is simply unamerican.

And in true rightwing fashion, it's a brutal solution, that benefits only the wealthiest, and the underlying problem in fact does not exist.

How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue

Thanks to constant political oratory against "frivolous lawsuits" and "jackpot justice," it is widely known that there's a legal crisis in this country. President Bush never misses an opportunity to call for laws that would bring more "common sense" to a legal system that, he claims, is out of control, wrecking the economy, driving doctors out of their practices, bankrupting small businesses, and costing American jobs. Journalists repeat the charges without examining them.

As a result, the lawsuit issue has moved to the political front burner, and in the past three years, state after state has responded by limiting citizens' rights to sue. Just this year alone, the Republicanled Congress has passed restrictions on class action lawsuits and is steps away from enacting limits on medical malpractice lawsuits.

But is there really a crisis? National data show that the number of civil suits is falling, not rising, and that the average damage award is also going down. Despite intense media hype to the contrary, the number of personal injury lawsuits filed every year has been tumbling for the past decade. Upon closer examination, the stories of ridiculous lawsuits usually turn out to be false or badly misleading. The crisis, in short, appears to be a phantom.

So how do we explain the scary headlines? Who's behind the "tort reform movement," and what are the real goals? Blocking the Courthouse Door will show that the movement against so-called greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible plaintiffs is the result of a concerted and successful campaign by large corporations to get this issue on the table and thus limit their own vulnerability in the civil justice system. They have spent decades, and many millions of dollars, on focus groups and Madison Avenue public relations research. They have funded institutes, sponsored academic research, bankrolled politicians, set up phony "astroturf " grassroots organizations (with chamber of commerce return addresses), and fed copy to all-too-gullible journalists.

For corporations, the self-interest involved is fairly plain. Tobacco companies, no longer able to dodge the bullet of liability for knowingly selling poisons, are making an end run around the civil justice system. If they can't win a class action suit, they'll make suing itself illegal. Insurance companies, drowning in red ink from mismanagement and bad investments in the bond market, hike insurance rates by huge sums and blame malpractice suits. The doctors in turn blame greedy lawyers -- and their own injured patients. And for Republicans, the campaign provides an extra bonus: defunding the Democratic Party. Limits on lawsuits cut into the income of some of the Democratic Party's most generous donors, the trial lawyers, who are often the only source of campaign cash for Democrats in many states.

By exposing some of the dubious characters, corporate chicanery, skewed research, fudged numbers, and bogus journalism that have buttressed the calls for lawsuit reform,Stephanie Mencimer shows who's behind the movement to close the courthouse doors, and how they've successfully persuaded millions of Americans to give up their critical legal rights without fully understanding what they're losing -- often until it's too late.

Link.

And here's the Introduction:

The story of Frank Cornelius would be funny if it weren't so awful.

In the mid-1970s, Frank Cornelius worked as a lobbyist for the Insurance Institute of Indiana, an industry group that was trying to change the state's medical malpractice laws. Back then, doctors across the country were protesting rising medical malpractice insurance rates, which they blamed on escalating jury verdicts in lawsuits filed by patients injured by bad medical care. The doctors staged white-coat protests at state capitals and buttonholed legislators with their claims that lawsuits and rising insurance costs were forcing them to stop delivering babies and to give up their practices.

Cornelius hand carried these gripes to the back halls of the Indiana statehouse. His goal was to win legislation limiting the amount of money injured people could receive in malpractice lawsuits, awards that were generally paid not by the doctors but by the companies that employed him. As he made his rounds, Cornelius told stories about frivolous lawsuits and ambulance-chasing lawyers. He argued that a cap on lawsuit damages would help the state rein in health care costs.

Indianapolis's governing class was persuaded. In 1975 the legislature passed one of the strictest medical malpractice laws in the country. The new law capped all awards at $500,000, including actual losses like wages and bills related to botched medical care, regardless of how much those bills actually amounted to. And legislators abolished pain-and-suffering awards entirely. In the places you'd expect, the champagne flowed.

The new law made Indiana, and Cornelius, early pioneers in tort "reform," an emerging movement led by insurance companies, doctors, big corporations, and conservative ideologues who sought to restrict personal injury and other lawsuits.

Cornelius's work on the medical malpractice bill was just one item in a long and quirky professional resume. He went on to lobby for several years on behalf of a state police group to ban cop-killer bullets, then later moved into journalism and, eventually, to running a car dealership.

But in late 1988, the forty-three-year-old Cornelius fell and injured his left knee. A few months later, he went to the hospital for routine arthroscopic surgery to fix the problem. When he went home, however, he suffered a great deal of pain. He called the surgeon several times that day without reaching him. The surgeon finally called back the next day, told Cornelius's wife, Cathy, to get him a bedpan, and then left on a skiing trip, saying he'd see Cornelius when he got back.

Cornelius continued to suffer, so he consulted another surgeon, who immediately diagnosed him with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a degenerative nerve disorder brought on by an accident or medical prodecure. The condition is so painful that many sufferers desire to amputate the affected limb rather than endure the torture that comes with it, according to Stephen B. Caplin, Cornelius's lawyer.

To deal with his condition, which at that point was still treatable, Cornelius sought care from a physical therapist, who a few months later, Cornelius claimed, accidentally jolted his leg with a current of electricity from an improperly used medical device. The zap rendered his condition incurable and cost him the use of his leg. A year later, Cornelius had surgery to install a filter in his leg to catch blood clots, but the main vein from his leg to his heart was punctured. Cornelius would have quietly bled to death were it not for a visit that evening from his wife, who sounded the alarm. Another doctor intervened to save his life, although Cornelius suffered a punctured lung in the process.

The series of medical mishaps left Cornelius unemployed, a wheelchair user, and dependent on bottled oxygen and a continuous morphine drip to dampen the pain. His medical expenses and lost wages were estimated at more than $5 million should he live to retirement age.

Following the three-word American tradition known as "sue the bastards," Cornelius consulted a lawyer and filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the physical therapist, the hospital, and some of the doctors. That's when he discovered exactly what he'd accomplished back in 1975. The medical malpractice bill he'd helped pass through the Indiana legislature as a lobbyist ensured that he could recover only a fraction of the $5 million in losses the health care system's failures had cost him. In 1990 Cornelius settled his lawsuits against the hospital and physical therapist for $500,000, the most he could get. The experience transformed Cornelius into something of a consumer advocate, and he used his lobbying skills to help Ralph Nader and others across the country campaign against further restrictions on lawsuits. He went on The Phil Donahue Show.

In 1994 he wrote a mea culpa in the New York Times in which he wrote, "I have received last rites from my church. . . . At the age of 49, I am told that I have less than two years to live. . . . All of my suffering might have been worthwhile, on some cosmic scale, if the law had accomplished its stated purpose. But it hasn't." He went on to note that the argument he'd used to persuade legislators to cap malpractice awards -- that it would reduce health-care costs -- had proved to be a sham. Health care costs in Indiana had soared 139 percent between 1980 and 1990, he wrote, noting that it was just about the national average.

Cornelius's public act of contrition couldn't erase the severity of his condition. The daily dose of narcotics prevented him from driving, and the pain left him unable to work steadily, according to Cathy Cornelius, who became the breadwinner for a family of seven. Depression plagued him. His marriage fell apart, and as Cornelius wrote in the Times, "The emotional fallout on our five children has been difficult to witness, to say the least."

On March 1, 1995, Cornelius died, after intentionally overdosing on morphine. Along with his suicide note, he left behind one last piece of written testimony for the Indiana state legislature, which was considering a new bill to restrict lawsuits even further.



For years, the tort reform movement was something of a fringe element in Washington and elsewhere, a special-interest group that popped up every ten years or so when insurance premiums got out of whack. Democrats have historically opposed it, and Americans have never put lawsuits at the top of their list of national concerns. They're far more concerned about education, crime, and Social Security. Even the term itself, tort reform, is largely meaningless outside of Washington and certain legal and business circles. (Tort is the legal term for "injury.") As the famous Mississippi trial lawyer Richard "Dickie" Scruggs reportedly once said, "Most Americans don't know what tort reform is, and if they did, they'd be against it." But when President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry sparred over the issue in front of fifty million TV viewers in the second 2004 presidential debate, tort reform went mainstream, joining the Iraq war and illegal immigration as top issues facing the nation.

During that debate in St. Louis, audience member Norma-Jean Laurent posed a tough question for the Democratic challenger. Laurent noted how Kerry had bemoaned the rising cost of health care for Americans. Yet she wanted to know how the candidate could reconcile this concern with his choice of a running mate who had made millions of dollars successfully suing medical professionals.

The question reflected the ongoing debate over high rates for doctors' medical malpractice insurance. Bush had turned this into a major campaign issue by blaming the problem on greedy trial lawyers and frivolous lawsuits and calling for restrictions on jury awards. It also presented Kerry with a tremendous opportunity. As a lawyer himself, Kerry had a powerful opportunity to deliver a spirited defense of the civil justice system. He could have argued for the good sense of American jurors, who know a frivolous lawsuit when they see one, without needing the heavy hand of Washington to tell them what to do. He might have suggested that people need the legal system to hold doctors accountable for the injuries they cause, which number in the hundreds of thousands every year. Most important, he might have pointed out that malpractice awards had little to do with rising health care costs.

Instead, Kerry simply said, "John Edwards and I support tort reform." Kerry then referred Laurent to his website, where he said she could find a tort reform plan outlining his proposals for limiting lawsuits.

Kerry's dodge reflected just how much success the business lobby has had in framing the nation's conversation about the civil justice system. In putting himself and trial lawyer John Edwards on record as tort reform supporters, Kerry was explicitly endorsing the conventional wisdom put forth by Bush and his business backers that Americans are too litigious, that an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits is driving doctors out of business, and that lawsuits are hindering America's economic progress.

Kerry's office never responded to several requests to interview him for this book to clarify his position, but in truth, Kerry and Edwards did not support tort reform, at least not as it's commonly articulated by its major proponents. In the Senate, neither man had ever voted for a major tort reform bill, and Kerry would go on to vote against a bill to restrict class actions in 2005. Apparently, though, not even the $33 million donated to his and Edwards's campaigns by plaintiff lawyers, whose primary issue is fighting off limits on lawsuits, or the fact that his kid brother is a trial lawyer, could persuade Kerry to rise to the defense of the beleaguered American civil justice system on prime-time TV. And why would he?

Thanks to three decades and millions of dollars' worth of careful marketing by corporations and their paid legions of lobbyists, pundits, and think-tank hacks, it's hard to find an American who hasn't heard the story of Stella Liebeck, the woman who spilled McDonald's coffee in her lap and won a $3-million jury verdict against the company. Poll after poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly support limits on "lawsuit abuse" and believe that out-of-control litigation is just another symptom of the decline of personal responsibility in America.

Persuading Americans that the "litigation crisis" is a myth was a losing battle, and one that would take a lot longer than the brief time Kerry had to respond in the televised debate. Besides, as it's currently packaged, tort reform sounds so reasonable. Who could be against reform?

But the self-described "reformers" Kerry was rhetorically linking arms with are anything but. They are a retrograde alliance of insurance companies, corporate interests, and political operatives -- mostly Republican -- who seek to do away with many of the consumer, worker, and environmental protections established in the 1960s and 1970s. They have manufactured a litigation crisis that does not exist, to support their efforts to limit or even abolish average citizens' right to sue for damages when they have been wrongfully injured. And the legal rights they seek to curtail are things that most people take for granted, at least until they really need them.

It's hard to think of another public policy issue where the reality is so far removed from the myths that dominate the public discussion. Popular culture regularly leaves the impression that justice in the courtroom is alive and well. Movies like Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action suggest that David regularly bests Goliath in the courthouse and that great legal heroes are still fighting the good fight on behalf of the little guy. That impression, though, couldn't be more wrong.

New state laws pushed by anti-lawsuit crusaders and slanted media coverage are partly responsible for pushing jury trials to the verge of extinction, and the trial lawyers who lead them are an endangered species. Sober government data repeatedly show that plaintiffs' success rates at trial are at an all-time low, and they're winning ever smaller amounts of money. The right to a civil jury trial -- guaranteed by the Bill of Rights -- is in serious jeopardy. Personal injury lawsuits, the kind most despised by Bush and his business supporters, are on the decline. Punitive damages awards, which are given only in cases involving really egregious conduct, are equally rare events. The notion that Americans who take on deep-pocketed defendants or health care providers are making out like bandits is belied by numbers showing that plaintiffs in civil cases are taking it on the chin, losing far more often than they win.

Yet the perception of the legal system as out of whack has proven highly resistant to correction by the truth. This is by design. The movement against greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible plaintiffs is the result of a concerted and successful campaign by large corporations (especially the tobacco and insurance industries, but many others besides), to get this issue on the table and limit their vulnerability in the civil justice system. They have spent decades, and many millions of dollars, on focus groups and Madison Avenue public-relations research. They have funded institutes, sponsored academic research, bankrolled politicians, set up phony "Astroturf" grassroots organizations (with chamber of commerce return addresses), and fed copy to journalists. And in 2004, they succeeded in making the issue the stuff of a presidential debate, after having funneled millions of dollars into every one of Bush's political campaigns since 1994.

For corporations, the self-interest involved is fairly plain. Tobacco companies, no longer able to dodge the bullet of liability for knowingly selling poisons, are making an end run around the civil justice system. If they can't win a class-action suit, they'll make suing itself illegal. Insurance companies, drowning in red ink from mismanagement and bad investments, hike insurance rates by huge sums and blame malpractice suits. The doctors, in turn, blame greedy lawyers -- and their own injured patients.

In larger terms, the tort reform movement is just the logical sequel to the war against government regulation. Unable to fully dismantle popular consumer-protection and environmental laws in Congress, corporations have changed tactics and instead gone after trial lawyers and the suits that give teeth to those laws. This has proved to be an effective strategy, achieving the same results without mobilizing political resistance. After all, who can really come to the defense of lawyers?

Tort reform also draws on the ideological backlash against the 1960s-era policies that expanded civil rights and protections for various minority groups and added new legal remedies for people injured by defective products and environmental degradation. The language of antilawsuit propaganda is rich in calls for "personal responsibility." The welfare queen of the 1980s has been replaced by the fat guy suing McDonald's. The movement is populated by people who want to return to the golden years when elderly women who spilled coffee on their laps got sympathy, not punitive damages.

Even so, tort reform for many years had been a hard sell. Most of the companies looking for protection from lawsuits had such dismal safety and environmental records that they were case studies in the need for lawsuits. Tort reform might have remained on the fringes were it not for the beauty of polling data. In the early 1990s, based on polling and focus-group research largely underwritten by the tobacco industry, Republicans discovered that tort reform offered an ideal wedge issue in competitive campaigns. When framed as "lawsuit abuse" and focused on greedy trial lawyers rather than polluting and negligent corporations, it played wonderfully as a populist notion with voters.

As Bush also discovered, it made for a fabulous fund-raising vehicle as the "chronic defendants" in the business world happily anted up to support lawsuit restrictions. Even more importantly, though, GOP strategists realized that by attacking lawsuits and trial lawyers, they had a tremendous opportunity to undermine a principal source of Democratic support. Limit the earnings of plaintiffs' lawyers through caps on damages and other restrictions on lawsuits, and you limit a major source of income for the Democratic Party.

This book is in part about that marriage of corporate desire for immunity from lawsuits and the new breed of GOP politics. It's also the story of how big businesses succeeded in taking bad public-policy proposals, packaging and stage managing them, and selling them to the public through well-paid "experts," gullible journalists, and intensely misleading propaganda -- all to the detriment of the average citizen, who still thinks that if he ever needs the legal system, it will be there for him. Unfortunately, as this book will show, in many parts of the country today, that is no longer the case.

Since 1986, forty-eight states have passed some type of restriction on lawsuits, ranging from limits on lawyers' fees, to restrictions on plaintiffs' access to expert testimony, to caps on noneconomic and punitive-damage awards. Since 1995 Congress also has passed legislation to rein in shareholders' lawsuits and class actions, and it has attempted to grant legal immunity to favored industries, from defense contractors to pharmaceutical companies to gun manufacturers to fast-food chains.

None of these restrictions on civil lawsuits and the power of juries that have come over the past twenty years would have been possible without the complicity of the media. The vast majority of the reporting on the civil justice system has been lazy and gullible. Reporters have bought into the propaganda, the spoon-fed story tips and bogus research generated by the tort reform movement. Respectable outlets like 60 Minutes and U.S. News & World Report have reported outright falsehoods about lawsuits and the legal system, without apology. There are reporters who have questioned the conventional wisdom, but they are few and far between.

In one sense, it's easy to see how it happens. Few newspaper or TV reporters ever cover the civil side of the legal system as a beat, so they rarely understand its complexities. They only report the occasional big verdict, which skews the coverage by suggesting that such events are commonplace, when they aren't. Unlike most Americans, journalists are also frequently threatened with lawsuits, and occasionally sued. The same goes for their employers, which are increasingly the same types of huge corporations that have long backed the tort reform movement.

The truth is that the corporate war on the courts is also a war on journalists. It's an effort to keep the lid on potentially damaging information. Journalists are deluding themselves if they think they can produce important and groundbreaking investigative reporting without the documents and other information that is produced in discovery through private lawsuits. The Catholic Church wasn't about to turn over its files on pedophile priests just because the Boston Globe asked nicely. Most of the documentation on the scandal, including the names of the victims and the errant priests, came into the public eye because those victims sought out lawyers, who then forced the church to come clean under the threat of court sanctions.

Indeed, much of the country's greatest investigative journalism over the decades has relied heavily on information produced in the very private lawsuits that tort reform seeks to restrict. Who can forget the story of the Ford Pinto, where lawyers turned up the written cost-benefit analysis the automaker used to decide whether it was worth $5 per car to prevent passengers of the Pinto from going up in flames? The 1977 story in Mother Jones magazine that turned the Pinto into a national scandal would never have been written without the information produced in those lawsuits.

Only through private lawsuits did the public learn the extent to which asbestos companies hid the dangers of their products -- products that have caused the deaths of more than 250,000 people since the 1960s, with numbers increasing daily. Ditto for tobacco litigation, which forced the release of millions of internal documents from big tobacco companies showing just how much they were lying to the public. All of this litigation produced award-winning journalism, which in turn created the impetus for change for the public good.

The same big businesses that want to put caps on medical malpractice lawsuits also want to limit plaintiffs' ability to request documents in discovery, and they want to keep those documents that are released sealed away from the public view. While they claim to fear the financial implications of litigation, they are just as afraid of the outrage that might occur if the public really knew the truth about how they run their businesses or treat workers and consumers.

In a country with a weak regulatory system, moreover, it's rarely the Food and Drug Administration or the Department of Justice that sheds light on these critical public concerns and generates calls to withdraw dangerous drugs, ban toxic substances, or address rollover risks on SUVs. It's private citizens through lawsuits. In fact, not only do journalists rely on these lawsuits for information, so do government regulatory agencies that lack the resources or the power or the political will to investigate themselves. Oftentimes, the most important function of civil lawsuits, even beyond compensation or justice for injured victims, is their role in unearthing critical health, safety, and financial information about the workings of private institutions.

Perhaps more than anything, tort reform is a frontal assault on the civil jury. It's designed to limit the power of average citizens to set community standards, mete out justice, and to hold wrongdoers accountable in the courts. That's why tort reform, at its heart, is an elitist notion based on distrust of the intelligence and good sense of American citizens to sit in the jury box and make a decision. That same logic can be used to make a case against voting, as voters and jurors are one and the same. With its current emphasis on caps on damage awards, tort reform creates arbitrary limits on a jury's power and vests judges -- some who have lifetime political appointments -- with vastly more authority over the outcome of a trial.

No system of justice is perfect, but the American civil jury system is close to perfect democracy. As a lawyer once explained to me, jury verdicts are like having 100 percent voter participation in elections; except in the case of the jury, the "voters" are much better informed. On a jury, everyone has to listen to the evidence presented by both sides, hopefully by articulate advocates, and then they have to vote. The jury is a tremendously powerful institution, powerful enough to prompt businesses to spend millions of dollars trying to disarm it. The Founding Fathers saw the jury trial as a protection against imperial judges, and the Constitution was nearly scuttled because it didn't include a provision for civil jury trials. (One was later added in the Seventh Amendment.) The French author and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville thought the civil jury was evidence of Americans' great faith in their ability to govern themselves.

In supporting the tort reformers' agenda, Americans don't seem to realize that they are hastening their own exclusion from the democratic process and creating yet another impediment to meaningful participation in public affairs. It's not just the ability to recover financially from a wrongful injury that's disappearing as a result of restrictions on lawsuits. Fundamental constitutional rights are dying a quiet death, as the thousands of serious lawsuits that never got filed are eclipsed by one or two big ones that did. The irony of the tort reform movement is that even as it's convinced Americans that the nation is in the midst of a litigation crisis, it's reinforced their misguided belief that the system will work for them if they need it. Like Frank Cornelius, a great many people have discovered the hard way that this just isn't the case. This book, I hope, will tell some of their stories and serve as a wake-up call about what's been lost -- and what else we are about to lose -- as the nation embraces the corporate war on lawsuits.

And there's more here and here.

The author has a blog, which is to say she's staying on the story, at least to some degree.

And as is not uncommon, the book was begat (as they say) by this article.

Hav-A-Laff! Joke of the Day

I'm so scared this is true. But how can it be when we don't have that evil socialized medicine??

Two patients limp into two different medical clinics with the
same complaint. Both have trouble walking and appear to
require a hip replacement.

The first patient is examined within the hour, is x-rayed the
same day and has a time booked for surgery the following week.

The second sees his family doctor after waiting a week for an
appointment, then waits eight weeks to see a specialist, then
gets an x-ray, which isn't reviewed for another week, and
finally has his surgery scheduled for six weeks from then.

Why the different treatment for the two patients?

The first is a Golden Retriever.

The second is a Senior Citizen.

Link.

Funny, Sort of....

Link.

If They Aren't into Reality, How About a Voice from Beyond the Veil?

David Halberstam, from Heaven, rips Our Leaders new ones.

More Genius from Our Leaders' Far Right Enablers

In early 2005, we were winning in Iraq... and then, I guess, reality intruded or something.

A wingnut hallucinates, his hallucinations being passed off as reality:

What Went Right
How the U.S. began to quell the insurgency in Iraq

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the May 9th, 2005, issue
of National Review.

"Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them." — T. E. Lawrence
It is time to say it unequivocally: We are winning in Iraq.

If current trends continue, our counter-insurgent campaign in Iraq will be fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the British victory over a Communist insurgency in Malaysia in the 1950s, a textbook example of this form of war. Our counterinsurgency has gone through the same stages as that of the Brits five decades ago: confusion in the initial reaction to the insurgency, followed by a long period of adjustment, and finally the slow but steady erosion of the insurgency's military and political base. Even as there has been a steady diet of bad news about Iraq in the media over the last year, even as some hawks have bailed on the war in despair, even as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has become everyone's whipping boy, the U.S. military has been regaining the strategic upper hand.

This doesn't mean the war couldn't still go wrong. "It's not over," says a top officer in Iraq. A key assassination, continued Sunni rejectionism, an inter-sectarian explosion, or something unforeseen — all could still derail us in Iraq. Nor does it mean that our effort is perfect. "I give us a B minus," says an administration official, a tough grader who is nonetheless an optimist. But it does mean that as of mid-April 2005 we are winning, just as surely as we were losing in the darkest days of the dual radical-Shia and radical-Sunni uprisings a year ago.

The basic approach of the Pentagon to the insurgency was right from the beginning. "The strategy was always political as well as military," says a Pentagon official. A counterinsurgency is never about simply killing enemy fighters the way it is — or at least seems — on a conventional battlefield. Insurgents have an endless capacity to replicate themselves, unless political conditions are created that drain them of support. If top policymakers always knew that intellectually, we have had to stumble our way to finding the correct ways to act on the insight.

Based on conversations with administration officials and key combatant commanders, this is the story of how, two years after the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has begun to win the war for Iraq . . .

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE IN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF THE DIGITAL VERSION OF NATIONAL REVIEW. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION TO NR DIGITAL OR NATIONAL REVIEW, YOU CAN SIGN UP FOR A SUBSCRIPTION TO NATIONAL REVIEW here OR NATIONAL REVIEW DIGITAL here (a subscription to NR includes Digital access).

Okay, one simple answer to a simple question: they have no shame.

The Confession of Another Scmuck who Believed Our Leader's Lies

All of these guys have proven that there too stupid to participate in anything involving the commonweal.

Bush's stand on insurance plan contradicts words of compassion

John J. DiIulio Jr.
is Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion and Civil Society, and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2001.

Eight years ago this week, on July 22, 1999, George W. Bush delivered his first presidential campaign speech, titled "The Duty of Hope." Speaking in Indianapolis, he rejected as "destructive" the idea that "if only government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved." Rather, "from North Central Philadelphia to South Central Los Angeles," government "must act in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need." There are "some things the government should be doing, like Medicaid for poor children."

I helped draft the speech and served in 2001 as an adviser to Bush. He has made good on some compassion pledges. For instance, he has increased funding for public schools that serve low-income children. His $150 million program for mentoring 100,000 children of prisoners has made progress. In May, he pledged an additional $30 billion in U.S. aid to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and save Africa's affected children.

On the other hand, poverty rates have risen in many cities. In 2005, Washington fiddled while New Orleans flooded, and the White House has vacillated in its support for the region's recovery and rebuilding process. Most urban religious nonprofit organizations that provide social services in low-income communities still get no public support whatsoever. Several recent administration positions on social policy contradict the compassion vision Bush articulated in 1999.

In May, Bush rejected a bipartisan House bill that increased funding for Head Start, a program that benefits millions of low-income preschoolers. His spokesmen claimed the bill was bad because it did not include a provision giving faith-based preschool programs an absolute right to discriminate on religious grounds in hiring.

That reason reverses a principle Bush proclaimed in his 1999 speech: "We will keep a commitment to pluralism, not discriminating for or against Methodists or Mormons or Muslims, or good people of no faith at all." As many studies show, most urban faith-based nonprofits that serve their own needy neighbors do not discriminate against beneficiaries, volunteers or staff on religious grounds. These inner-city churches and grassroots groups would love to expand Head Start in their communities.

Last week, Bush threatened to veto a bipartisan Senate plan that would add $35 billion over five years to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The decade-old program insures children in families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but are too poor to afford private insurance. The extra $7 billion a year offered by the Senate would cover a few million more children. New money for the purpose would come from raising the federal excise tax on cigarettes.

Several former Bush advisers have urged the White House to accept some such SCHIP plan. So have many governors in both parties and Republican leaders in the Senate. In 2003, Bush supported a Medicare bill that increased government spending on prescription drugs for elderly middle-income citizens by hundreds of billions of dollars. But he has pledged only $1 billion a year more for low-income children's health insurance. His spokesmen say doing any more for the "government-subsidized program" would encourage families to drop private insurance.

But the health-insurance market has already priced out working-poor families by the millions. With a growing population of low-income children, $1 billion a year more would be insufficient even to maintain current per-capita child coverage levels. Some speculate that SCHIP is now hostage to negotiations over the president's broader plan to expand health coverage via tax cuts and credits. But his plan has no chance in this Congress; besides, treating health insurance for needy children as a political bargaining chip would be wrong.

Bush should return to Indianapolis. There, SCHIP covers children in families with incomes as high as three times the federal poverty line. The Republican governor who signed that program into law is Mitch Daniels, Bush's first budget office director. For compassion's sake, the president should compromise on SCHIP - say, $5 billion a year more - and work to leave no child uninsured.

Link.

Professor, please shut up and crawl under a rock. You've done far more harm by supporting and enabling the America-haters who rule us than you'll ever make up for.

And Professor, Bush's acts bely his lies about compassion because they're lies and because there is no compassion anywhere in his family other than for their wallets. "None are so blind...."

Read at Your Own Risk: Yet Another Post About What Absolute PAthological Liars the Wingnuts are

If interested, just go here and, if that isn't enough, here.

Simple Question, No Answer?

The legend that is Atrios has an occasional feature, simple answers to simple questions.

Well, I have the simple question but no simple answer:

Alberto Gonzalez: Is there anything more to his job as Attorney General than being a constant liar?

Rudy: The Walking House of Lies; Republicans Like Him Only Because They Don't Know the Truth

Well, as a sort of New Yorker who knows, I guess I have to help enlighten them, even if they're not reality-based....

A few weeks ago, Gallup conducted a national poll and found that three out of four Republicans (74%) believe Giuliani would make an "acceptable" GOP presidential nominee. None of the other Republican hopefuls came close.

The conventional wisdom suggested that these results, mirrored in other polls, spoke to a key development in Republican politics. Despite Giuliani's support for abortion rights and gay rights as mayor, the GOP faithful apparently no longer consider his social positions a disqualifier in a presidential race.

But the conventional wisdom didn't consider one nagging detail: most Republicans don't know Giuliani's positions on the hot-button, culture-war issues that have driven GOP politics for a generation.

As Eric Kleefeld explained, the new poll from the Pew Research Center found that when Republicans and GOP-leaners "are asked if they can name the Republican presidential candidate who is pro-choice, only 41% could correct name Rudy Giuliani. Among self-described conservatives, the answer wasn't much better at a mere 47% correct."

This is similar to results of a Pew Research poll from June, when fewer than half of Republicans realized that Giuliani has always supported abortion rights.

I haven't seen any data on the subject, but I'd guess that an even higher percentage of the GOP probably doesn’t know that Giuliani supported gay rights and has a record as a thrice-married adulterer, either.

Maybe Republican voters care about this, maybe not. But for every poll that shows the former NYC mayor as the frontrunner, the political world should pause a moment to consider just how many of his supporters appreciate these details -- and how many are likely to hear about them from Giuliani's GOP rivals before voters head to the polls next year.

[more]

How Rupert Stole the Journal

Principal, $30 millions worth to the decadent Bancroft family.

And here's more about that.