The Re Collection

On Wednesday, The Tulsa World published the results of a survey (of 752 likely voters conducted April 27-30) on the attitudes of Oklahomans on abortion.

Surprising to me, 75% of respondents said that the statement “It is a medical decision involving the woman and her doctor” most closely reflected their feelings on the issue. Only 17% thought that “It is a legal and moral decision to be decided by the government.”

Some Oklahoma Republicans are trying to override Gov. Henry’s veto on a bill which further restricts abortion in the state. Fortunately, a coalition of medical workers and rights advocates have prevented that from happening — so far — by ONE VOTE.

No survey is going to stop those politicians from persisting in their effort. They are ginned up and bankrolled by radical religious groups, and thus on a mission separate and distinct from the good of their constituents or the state as a whole. But other, more rational representatives need to have this poll brought to their attention every time they seem to be capitulating to the radical right noise machine.

A horrific collection of post-traumatic stess disorder stories. Read and weep.

This collectin compiled by someone who should know: retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Anthony Zinni. His list of the 10 biggest mistakes made before and after the invasion of Iraq, from his May 12, 2004 speech at the Center for Defense Information:

Hat tip to Carnacki at Political Cortex

DNA frees jailed man 18 years later - Crime & Punishment - MSNBC.com

DALLAS - A man who spent 18 years behind bars for allegedly attacking a woman in her home has been released after DNA testing excluded him as the attacker.

“I don’t know how to apologize. I don’t know where to start, but I’ll start with me and ‘I’m sorry,”’ District Judge John Creuzot said Monday as he released Gregory Wallis, now 47. Creuzot was not involved in the original trial.

Wallis was a 29-year-old warehouse worker when he was convicted in 1988 of burglary with intent to commit sexual assault and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

[snip]

At some point these DNA exoneration stories are going to reach a critical mass, one would hope, and changes will be made in the system, including the elimination of the death penalty altogether. But in the meantime, we can all wonder just how many innocent people are sitting in prison, their lives and families irrevocably harmed.

While wondering, hop over to Amnesty or NCADP and show some love.

Hattip to JMBZine.

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: The Death of Shame in our Pundit Class

It is truly difficult to understand how these same people can continue to pompously opine on these matters, and still claim an entitlement to be listened to, without at least confessing their errors. The magnitude of misinformation and deceit in which our country was drowning during that time is difficult to convey. And from the fact that 70% of the country had been falsely persuaded that Saddam personally participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks to the way in which our media mindlessly swallowed and regurgitated outright military fiction such as the Jessica Lynch fantasies, this carousel of shame and deceit is virtually endless.

There are not many episodes in our national history which can compete with the invasion of Iraq in terms of the profound failures of every one of our institutions — failures which allowed this sort of deceit and detachment from reality to persist. But until we identify those responsible and end the influence which they continue to exert over our political dialogue, we will continue to be at risk of following them down these same deceitful, destructive paths.

Courtesy of Think Progress, an appalling list of the lies, attrocities and greed that is the Bush Adminstration.

There was Plame-gate. There was Abu Graib. There was Downing Street. There was Katrina. There was illegal spying.

But some astute people think that the shot Dick Cheney took at a pen-raised quail on Saturday — that landed in a companion’s face — is going to the be the story that comes to epitomize the Bush-Cheney administration as, truly, in every sense of the words, “The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight”.

It’s because this story is a perfect metaphor for this administration’s foreign and domestic policy. It says everything you need to know about Dick Cheney personally, and the way this entire administration operates.

And the press does this all the time: they run with little things that display flaws in character: Al Gore’s “Internet” quote to highlight his weakness for exaggeration; Kerry’s “Voted for it before I voted against it” to highlight his weakness for equivocation.

In this case, we have Cheney and the entire Bush Administration foreign and domestic policy in a nutshell. Especially in Iraq and Katrina.

Read the whole thing for maximux satisfaction.

“Let them eat cake.”

“Apres moi, le deluge.”

You gotta think some radical shift is underway in D.C. when the Moonie rag Washington Times publishes an article that says:

1) Bush is spying on Americans talking to Americans inside the United States, even when neither of the two Americans are members of Al Qaeda or an affiliate.

2) Bush’s domestic spy program is totally ineffective and unnecessary as Al Qaeda stopped using the phones and email a long time ago.

3) The Bush team knows of specific Al Qaeda members in the US at the moment, but because of Bush’s incompetence he has been unable to find them.

Hat tip: AMERICAblog: Because a great nation deserves the truth

On Monday, President Bush attended the funeral service for Coretta Scott King. A blatently political move, since with every breath he takes, our president seeks to undo the lifetime effort and values CSK ever made or had. It wasn’t quite as scripted as his usual public appearances, and things got a little, um, uncomfortable for President God™.

My first thought when I heard what happened was: Somebody in this administration is soon going to be spending more time with his family.

And now this:

Claude Allen, President Bush’s principal domestic policy advisor, has resigned. A White House spokesman told the Chicago Tribune that Allen wanted to spend more time with his family.

I read at Escheton that Claude Allen is African American. Is there a connection between the sudden realignment of priorities at the Allen house, and what happened on Monday? We report; you decide.

From soj at Booman Tribune

What nobody talked about was all the other DSP programs, numbers 2-999. The ones that are not strictly focused on international calls. I’m talking about programs like data mining browser and search engine usage (DSP2), surveillance of peace and anti-war groups (DSP3), data mining emails (DSP4), using JPEN and other “total information awareness” type databases (DSP5), using computers to data mine domestic phone calls (DSP6), passing along NSA information on Americans (illegal) to other agencies like the FBI (DSP7), etc.

The Senate hearings were interesting, that’s for sure, but they were largely useless. Gonzales was there to talk about DSP1 and only DSP1 and since it involves people reasonably believed to be Al-Qaeda terrorists, the Congress is going to do nothing about it. The American people don’t care if the government is spying on Al-Qaeda (even in America), in fact they support it wholeheartedly. I finally figured out why the administration is stumping on the issue - it’s because they’re only talking about DSP1 and it sounds great. Who could really be opposed to spying on “known” terrorists?

DSP1 is just one tiny “tool” used by the administration and it is by far the most acceptable one to the American people. When the New York Times revealed that there were DSP’s, the administration focused on DSP1 and only on DSP1 and framed it in such a way that only petty sticklers to the law could object. This is a war after all!

Meanwhile, some senior Republicans are wagging their finger over the affair, but nothing will come of it. Unless further leaks occur with even more aggregious law-breaking — like something involving sex. With few if any exceptions, they will uphold the king’s perogative.

Digby noted on Friday (during my news blackout while attending the annual Greens meeting) that not one Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee showed up for the hearing to review the confirmation of Karen Hughes to handle public relations for the State Department.

As usual, the Democrats have their heads up their asses at exactly the wrong moment, and miss a golden opportunity to actually communicate something substantial to the American public.

The absence of the Democrats is even more glaring considering just today the New York Times reported that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald called Karen Hughes before the grand jury to testify as to her involvement in the leak-case. Of course, this begs the obvious question: Karen Hughes, did you have a role in leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent?

And, also as usual, the online/grassroots are doing all the heavy lifting. I am continually amazed at how much frustration, neglect and abuse progressive Democrats can take.

Think Progress has a list of questions the Democrats might have asked if they could have gotten it up to attend the meeting. I assume they were too busy with their preparations to lionize John Roberts and didn’t have the time.

Digby, despite his (?) great insight and wicked-good rants, is one of those ever-faithful-against-all-reason Democrats. I just don’t know what it will take for those folks to see the light.

As for Paul S. Sarbanes (MD), Christopher J. Dodd (CT), John F. Kerry (MA), Russell D. Feingold (WI), Barbara Boxer (CA), Bill Nelson (FL), and Barack Obama (IL), I hope they enjoyed their Friday afternoon.

By the way, did I mention that on Friday, I was in Tulsa at the Green Party annual meeting?

Independent Court.org
TPM Cafe’s Supreme Court Watch
Campaign for the Court
Think Progress’ Supreme Court Extra

Update:
The Supreme Court Guide for Activists (a project of The American Prospect)

Feel free to add others you find in the comments

Maxspeak warns about throwing around the accusation”treason” too lightly, and he’s right. But then he says something else worth remembering as this tangled web continues to unwind:

[…] the CIA doesn’t deserve any good housekeeping seal of approval. Its personnel have committed numerous crimes over the decades. These crimes have been in furtherance of an underlying foreign policy directed at destroying or marginalizing secular liberal and radical social movements in the developing world. The weakness of these movements today explains in great part the prominence of Islamic fundamentalism, not to mention an assortment of autocratic, kleptomaniacal regimes. The latter we call our friends, part of the freedom movement, defined as any government willing to play ball with any current lunatic undertakings of the U.S. government. Of course, sometimes they go bad and require U.S. military invasions to set things right.

[…]

Americablog provides an excellent analysis of what we know and don’t know about the leak of Plame’s name (and of course now so much more).

Still pending:

* Who authored the INR (State Department’s intelligence branch) memo, and why and how was it misleading?

* Who leaked the name, ‘Valerie Plame,’ and how did he or she receive that
information?

* Who else was complicit in the worse crime of outing a clandestine CIA
officer? In the lesser crime of revealing classified information?

* What did the Vice President know, and when did he know it?

* What did the President know, and when did he know it?

* Why were people in the White House so afraid of what Joe Wilson had to say?

When I was a teenager, and not allowed to swear or ever express any negativity at home, in my pent-up rage at just about everything, I developed a mega-curse I would rattle off whenever I got the opportunity. It was private, since I knew even then that it was kind of an embarrassing juvenile amalgram of every bad word an overprotected suburban teenybopper might know in the late sixties. However, it got ingrained, and even though I went on to have a better than average swear-word vocabulary, I still find “God-dammit-to-fucking-shit” coming out of my mouth — all one word, in one quick breath — when I am particularly pissed off about some outrage or injustice.

So that’s what I said when I read this.

Billmon has an excellect dissection of the journalistic ethics involved in the Plamegate leak. He even discusses the possible need for an act of civil disobedience if the circumstances involve a government that is performing crimes against humanity.

Of course, that possiblity is strictly theory in this case. He looks at Miller from a lot of angles, but eventually comes back to the original, most obvious conclusion as the most likely. We may know a lot more tomorrow, if Matt Cooper’s “Memoir of a Tool” is in the new issue of Time.

Will Babyface Karl be doin’ the perp walk soon? The left smells blood in the water, just in time to fight over SCOTUS appointment (s). See Huffingtonpost.com, DailyKos.com, americablog.com, among countless others. Speaking of law and order, is Rehnquist gonna retire imminently or not? Inquiring bloggers want to know.

The London Loop blasts last week: previous reports about unsophisticated terrorists and unsynchronized bombs were grossly mistaken. And Juan Cole says ‘not so fast with that highly educated British muslim shit — oh, and Thomas Friedman is still a weinie’.