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Thursday, June 16, 2005
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Second Opinion. LAUER: But when you stood on the floor and you said, She does respond, are you at all worried that you led some senators . . .FRIST:
I never said, She responded. I said I reviewed the court videotapes –
the same ones the other doctors reviewed – and I questioned, Is her
diagnosis correct? Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Today Show interview
June 16, 2005
________________________________
"Once again in the video footage, which you can actually
see on a web site today, but in the video footage, she certainly seems
to respond to visual stimuli that the neurologist puts forth."Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005
"I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage
provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does
respond."Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005
An exhaustive autopsy found that Terri Schiavo's brain had
withered to half the normal size since her collapse in 1990 and that no
treatment could have remotely improved her condition, medical examiners
said on Wednesday . . . The autopsy also found that the brain
deterioration had left her blind.The New York Times
Schiavo Autopsy Says Brain, Withered, Was Untreatable
June 15, 2005
"I never made the diagnosis, I wouldn't even attempt to make a diagnosis from a videotape."Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Remarks to Reporters
June 16, 2005
"The diagnosis they made is exactly right. It's the pathology, I'll respect that. I think it's time to move on."Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Interview on The Early Show
June 16, 2005
Dr. Bill Frist demonstrates the use of the Pinocchio 3000,
an advanced prosthetic device for the chronically truth challenged.
Industry analysts predict sales of the device will top $300 million
this year in the Republican Congress alone. [Whiskey Bar]
8:58:44 PM 
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Downing Street Memo: A real reporter shows how it's done
Get up off your knees, Judy!
And Howie, stop looking at your watch!
WaPo, to its credit, posted an online interview with Michael Smith, the
reporter who broke the Downing Street Memo story. Here are the parts I
found most interesting, but you should read the whole thing. It's an
outsider's perspective (Smith says he is "not some mealy-mouthed
left-wing apologist") on the surreality-based community... - Lambert
[corrente]
8:57:46 PM
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Paul Feig: And the Mr. Obvious Award goes to ... Bob
Stevenson, spokesman for Dr. Bill Frist, regarding the autopsy of Terri
Schiavo said on Wednesday, "Having seen the news reports today, it's
clear that the autopsy provides additional medical information on her
condition at the time her feeding tube was removed."
Mr. Stevenson then went on to state that one's skin feels warm when
the sun shines on it, that putting your head underwater makes your hair
wet, and that doctors can't make diagnostic statements regarding a
patient's condition from viewing a videotape.
Nah, just kidding. He didn't say that last one. - Paul Feig
[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
8:50:55 PM
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David Kirby: Bring It On BRING IT ON
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has just upped the ante in the bubbling
controversy over a possible link between mercury, vaccines and autism.
His hard-hitting Rolling Stone article on the Pharma-Political Complex
is a scathing indictment of our business-as-usual society, and his
allegations cry out for a response.
Thank you, Mr. Kennedy. It’s high time that this debate received a
proper airing, even if ABC News, so far at least, seems to disagree.
One year ago, the esteemed Institute of Medicine rejected the theory
that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal might be linked
to autism and other childhood disorders. Opponents of the theory – and
they are plentiful – assumed that would shut the books once and for all
on this disturbing, potentially catastrophic idea.
The opponents, it turns out, were sorely mistaken. They
underestimated the tenacity of some really pissed off parents, who
refused to be dismissed as litigious fruit loops who wouldn’t recognize
scientific evidence if it landed on their front lawn.
Consider this. In recent months, the thimerosal-autism controversy
has begun to pierce a major-media bubble seemingly transfixed on
serving up daily doses of Michael, Martha and the Runaway Bride, while
ignoring the potential poisoning of a generation of American children:
Don Imus – continues to champion this cause on his show “like a dog on a bone,” as they say.
Sen. Joe Lieberman – told Imus on the air that this is “a fight worth fighting.”
Rolling Stone & Salon – published RFK Jr.’s article.
FOX – local affiliates have covered this story with exceptional
dedication, and the Fox News Channel is mulling over a special report.
The New York Times – is working on a major investigation of the controversy
The Associated Press – is also working on a feature.
Montel Williams – will air an entire segment on the controversy on June 21.
The Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church – made news
today by demanding the removal of mercury from vaccines; efforts are
afoot to ask the national church to follow suit.
Generation Rescue – purchased full page ads in USA Today and They New York Times promoting the mercury-autism link.
Unlocking Autism – Is placing a series of hardball ads reminding
George W. Bush of his 2004 campaign statement that thimerosal should be
removed from childhood vaccines, and bearing the tag-line “Giving
Mercury to Children on Purpose is Stupid.”
And so, at the risk of metaphorical overdose, I offer up some friendly
counsel to those who resist this entirely plausible theory: The cat is
out of the bag. The train has left the station. Thimerosal can no
longer be swept under the rug.
I wrote “Evidence of Harm” in order to spark national debate over
this very serious question. But I cannot debate myself. Critics of the
thimerosal theory (and my book) have issued disapproving statements,
posted blistering blogs, and even dropped off anonymous, vitriolic
flyers at my public appearances. But no one will debate me face to
face, at least not so far.
Last month, at the Autism One conference in Chicago, I issued a
challenge to the thimerosal naysayers. Borrowing from a certain leader
of the Free World, I said, simply, “Bring it on.”
So here is the challenge, repeated again. Dr. Julie Gerberding (CDC
Director), Dr. Steve Cochi (head of the CDC vaccine program), Dr. Marie
McCormick (head of the IOM panel that dismissed the thimerosal theory),
Dr. Paul Offit (a leading pediatrician who passionately derides the
theory) or any other prominent person who insists that there is no
evidence of harm from injecting organic mercury directly into the
systems of infant children at levels far in excess of federal safety
limits: Let’s talk. You pick the time, place and speakers. You can even
set the ground rules. All I ask is that you come forth, and let's get
this over with.
- David Kirby (dkirby@nyc.rr.com)
[The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
8:50:08 PM
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Random thought on another class difference. All social classes get some kind of government assistance, but our experiences are different.
If you're poor, government assistance has all sorts of
stipulations--you can't make money but you have to have a job. You're
told to get married but if they find that you have a boyfriend staying
over, they revoke your benefits. You wait in long lines and you get
judged mercilessly.
If you're middle class and you want an FHA loan to pay for your
house or federal financial aid to pay for college, you fill out a
simple application and it gets rubber-stamped through. You may have to
divulge private information, but certainly nothing about your sex life
or anything like that.
If you're wealthy and you want government subsidies to boost your
business and make you even richer, you negotiate it directly with
politicians over drinks, food, music and various other entertainments.
You don't have to divulge shit, not even to the public at large who is
paying for you. In fact, you may even get Dick Cheney protecting your
ass all the way to the Supreme Court.
Just a thought. [Pandagon]
8:49:22 PM
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More on Durbin. First of all, Andrew Sullivan can't read. I assumed he could, but he can't. Billmon, as he's wont to do, nails it: If
the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the smoke billowing from
the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp up on the hill, why
shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's going on in
Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other islands in
the archipelago? Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such
terms, which is why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on
Durbin's reference to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a
certain central European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as
they popped a vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word
for forced labor camp. Strictly on the facts of the case, they
are correct: The American archipelago is just a series of flyspecks
compared to its Soviet predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held
an estimated 2.5 million prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture,
execution, disease or deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the
hundreds of thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a
record for the assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't
think has been matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam. As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.
I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they
should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than
Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern parliamentary democracy.
[Daily Kos]
8:48:23 PM
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What's ABC Up To?.
ABC Bosses Tell ABC News Kill The Interviews With Robert Kennedy Jr.
ABC corporate executives at the network’s highest levels ordered three
interviews with Robert Kennedy Jr. pulled from ABC News programming.
The interviews all centered around Mr. Kennedy’s investigation of
thimerosal, a mercury based preservative, used in vaccines given to
children and believed to be [...]
[Oliver Willis]
5:13:42 PM
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Scotty's defense of "last throes".
E&P has the exchange between Terry Moran and Scott McClellan:
Q Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its 'last throes'?
McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that
are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to
democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free
and democratic and peaceful future. And that's why we're doing
everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi
people as they move forward.... Q But the insurgency is in its last throes?
McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day -- you
have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes
are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions. Q But they're killing more Americans, they're killing more Iraqis. That's the last throes?
McCLELLAN: Innocent -- I say innocent civilians. And it doesn't take a
lot of people to cause mass damage when you're willing to strap a bomb
onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians.
That's the kind of people that we're dealing with. That's what I say
when we're talking about a determined enemy. Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes? McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics. Q What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?
McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist
and regime elements. You're seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in
addressing the security threats that they face. They're working side by
side with our coalition forces. They're working on their own. There are
a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy
in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode. Q Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency. McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President's remarks. I think he talked about it. Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a 'last throe' lasts for? McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve....
[Daily Kos]
5:10:57 PM
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Palast For Conyers: The OTHER 'Memos' from Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
Greg Palast, unable to attend hearings in Washington Thursday, has submitted the following testimony:
Chairman Conyers,
It's
official: The Downing Street memos, a snooty New York Times "News
Analysis" informs us, "are not the Dead Sea Scrolls." You are warned,
Congressman, to ignore the clear evidence of official mendacity and
bald-faced fibbing by our two nations' leaders because the cry for
investigation came from the dark and dangerous world of "blogs" and
"opponents" of Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush.
On May 5, "blog"
site Buzzflash.com carried my story, IMPEACHMENT TIME: "FACTS WERE
FIXED," bringing the London Times report of the Downing Street memo to
the US media which seemed to be suffering at the time from an attack of
NADD -- "news attention deficit disorder."
The memo,
which contains the ill-making admission that "the intelligence and
facts were being fixed" to match the Iraq-crazed fantasies of our
President, is sufficient basis for a hearing toward impeachment of the
Chief Executive. But to that we must add the other evidence and secret
memos and documents still hidden from the American public.
Other
foreign-based journalists could doubtless add more, including the
disclosure that the key inspector of Iraq's biological weapons, the
late Dr. David Kelly, found the Bush-Blair analysis of his intelligence
was indeed "fixed," as the Downing Street memo puts it, around the
war-hawk policy.
Here is a small timeline of
confidential skullduggery dug up and broadcast by my own team for BBC
Television and Harper's on the secret plans to seize Iraq's assets and
oil.
To view the timeline visit www.GregPalast.com or go to the Iraq Timeline Page
[Greg Palast]
5:10:07 PM
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Truth and Consequences. By
an unexpected turn of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant
part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands
which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in
reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past
and you'll lose an eye."But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
1973
Sometimes the truth is so damning you have to speak it for its
own sake -- not to convince or condemn or even because you think it
might right the wrong, but to make it clear you will not consent to a
lie by remaining silent.
However, this is not the kind of behavior you normally expect from a
politician. Even the good ones -- or rather, the less bad ones -- tend
to treat the truth like a scarce commodity, one that has to be strictly
rationed in order to avoid running out all together. Evasion, on the
other hand, is plentiful, and used as freely as a Hummer burns gasoline.
Which is why I did a double take when I saw what Sen. Durban of Illinois said on the Senate floor yesterday:
When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost
hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you
what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:"On
a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee
chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair,
food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and
had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air
conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so
cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with
cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off,
making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees.
The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair
next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out
throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature
unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the
room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand
and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor." If I read this
to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what
Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most
certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their
gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern
for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of
Americans in the treatment of their prisoners. (link courtesy of Talk Left)
I don't know much about Dick Durbin -- he's a solid, dependable
Democrat, but definitely not one of the Senate's show horses. I also
don't recall him playing the role of human rights champion before. So
God help me, when I read what he said I immediately began to wonder
what kind of political advantage he hoped to gain from such extravagant
use of the truth.
(You know you're a cynic when you automatically suspect a politician is telling the truth for dishonest reasons.)
But as far as I can tell, Durbin had absolutely nothing to gain from
this, other than the predictable smears from the GOP propaganda machine
and the cave dwellers of the Neanderthal right. (Actually, in
Limbaugh's case, I think even homo erectus would be ashamed to have to claim such an ape as a distant cousin.)
I have no idea what motivated Durbin to let it all hang out, except
perhaps personal moral outrage and a clear understanding of the
practical risks raised by the Bush regime's debasement of the American
military.
The quote former Vietnam POW Pete Peterson that Durban included in
his floor speech said just about everything that needs to be said about
the latter:
"From my 6 1/2 years of captivity in Vietnam, I know what
life in a foreign prison is like. To a large degree, I credit the
Geneva Conventions for my survival . . . This is one reason the United
States has led the world in upholding treaties governing the status and
care of enemy prisoners: because these standards also protect us . . .
We need absolute clarity that America will continue to set the gold
standard in the treatment of prisoners in wartime."
As for morality . . . Well, if you can't see the evil in locking prisoners of war -- some of them held by mistake,
others only foot soldiers in the Taliban's army -- in 100 plus degree
rooms for 24 hours without food or water, until they shit or piss all
over themselves -- then you're truly beyond redemption. Once you've
reached that point, you can probably justify anything, up to and
including murder.
Unfortunately, according to the polls, that category may include a sizable fraction of the American people. I've speculated
on the reasons for this before, I won't rehash them here. Maybe it's
just human nature to ignore evil when it takes place outside of
immediate eye or ear shot. Solzhenitsyn also wrote about this trait, and how the Cheka learned to use it to its advantage:
There's an advantage to night arrests in that neither the
people in the neighboring apartment houses nor those on the city
streets can see how many have been taken away. Arrests which frighten
the closest neighbors are not an event at all to those farther away.
It's as if they had not taken place. Along that same asphalt ribbon on
which the Black Marias scurry at night, a tribe of youngsters strides
by day with banners, flowers and gay, untroubled songs.
Easier still to look the other way when the arrests take place half
a world away, the archipelago is entirely offshore and the prisoners
aren't driven through the streets in trucks but whisked through the sky
by the CIA's own private airline. Add in the facts that those arrested
are foreign, non-Christian and non-white -- and that some of them
almost certainly are guilty of terrorist atrocities -- and you have the perfect excuse for a nation of Sergeant Schultzes to stick to its "We know nothing" line.
And why not? If the inhabitants of greater Dachau could ignore the
smoke billowing from the chimneys of the invisible, unmentionable camp
up on the hill, why shouldn't we expect most Americans to ignore what's
going on in Guantanamo, or Bagram or Abu Ghraib -- or any of the other
islands in the archipelago?
Conservatives, of course, froth at the use of such terms, which is
why the propaganda machine immediately zeroed in on Durbin's reference
to an extreme nationalist party that flourished in a certain central
European country in the 1930s and early 1940s. Just as they popped a
vein over Amnesty International's use of a Russian word for forced
labor camp.
Strictly on the facts of the case, they are correct: The American
archipelago is just a series of flyspecks compared to its Soviet
predecessor. At its peak, the Soviet gulags held an estimated 2.5 million
prisoners. The number of deaths -- by torture, execution, disease or
deliberate starvation -- has to be counted in the hundreds of
thousands, if not millions. The KGB, meanwhile, set a record for the
assembly-line murder of political prisoners that I don't think has been
matched since, not even by that wannabe Saddam.
As for the central European extremist leader, well, we all know what he did.
I guess that's enough to satisify most conservatives. (Maybe they
should print up some bumper stickers: "America: Still better than
Stalin.") But some of us have slightly higher expectations of a modern
parliamentary democracy. Quantitatively, the case against moral equivalence may be open and shut, but qualitatively
. . . well, it's getting a little more dicey. Compare, for example, the
FBI's account of interrogation methods at Guantanamo -- the one cited
above by Durbin -- with this scene from the Solzhenitsyn:
In this "kennel" there was neither ventilation nor a
window, and the prisoners' body heat and breathing raised the
temperature to 40 or 45 degrees Centigrade (104 to 113 degrees
Farhenheit) -- and everyone sat there in undershorts . . . They sat
like that for weeks at a time, and were given neither fresh air nor
water -- except for gruel and tea in the mornings.
Or this passage from Peter Maass's visit to an Iraqi-run, American-advised interrogation center in Samarra:
One of Falah’s captains began beating the detainee. Instead
of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of
blows. We heard the sound of the captain’s fists and boots on the
detainee’s body, and we heard the detainee’s pained grunts as he
received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging.
Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his
soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence.
With this anecdote from The Gulag Archipelago:
In the silence we could hear someone in the corridor
protesting. They took him from the cell and into a box . . . They left
the door of the box open, and they kept beating him a long time. In the
suspended silence every blow on his soft and choking mouth could be
heard clearly.
And these are just the things we know about. What happens on the
remoter flyspecks in the American archipelago (much less the affiliated
islands of our Saudi or Egyptian or Pakistani "allies" in the war
against terrorism) remains largely a closed book. We know prisoners
have died
in American custody, some appear to have been brutalized before they
died. We don't know how many were murdered. We don't know how many were
subjected to outright torture, not just conditions "tantamount" to
torture. We're asked by the Pentagon and the CIA to accept it on faith
-- blind faith -- that crimes will be investigated and the guilty
punished. But we already know that faith has been terribly abused.
On the other hand, we do know that. We have at least partial
knowledge of life and death in the archipelago. There are still
journalists willing to do stories and news organizations willing to run
them -- Guantanamo even made the cover of this week's Time.
Politicians gutsy enough to defy the right-wing slime machine can still
get up in the Senate and protest. The security services won't drag them
(or us) away.
Exaggerating for political effect is a technique at least as old as
Jonathan Swift. (And it's not always for effect: When G. Gordon Liddy
compared the BATF to the Gestapo, you knew he really meant it.) Still,
quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not even in the same universe as Stalin's paranoid empire.
But if Durban had wanted to be completely honest, he would
have skipped the rhetorical flourish about the Soviets, the Nazis and
the Khmer Rouge, and instead pointed out that if we didn't know better,
we might think today's horror stories out of Guantanamo and Abu Graib
and Baghram were tales told about prisons in El Salvador, Honduras and
Argentina thirty years ago -- or South Vietnam, forty years ago.
And if he really wanted to get reckless with the truth, he could have explained the reasons for that resemblance.
But that's probably more truth than even Dick Durban can afford. [Whiskey Bar]
4:03:41 PM
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If it Quacks Like a Duck . . .. With
the Senate Finance Committee at an impasse on Social Security and House
leaders anxious about moving forward, Republican congressional leaders
have told the White House in recent days that it is time to look for an
escape route. Washington Post
Exit Strategy on Social Security Is Sought
June 16, 2005
"I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,''
Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of
Social Security." The victories he expects in November, he said, will
give us ''two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move
quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.'' Ron Suskind
Without a Doubt
October 17, 2004
[Whiskey Bar]
4:03:06 PM
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The Rise of the Ferengi. Jackasterix
wondered why the memos matter. He shrugged, like a lot of people paying
attention. Most of what was in the memos was already fairly obvious -
namely that at the same time that Bush was saying that war was a last
resort, Blair and Bush had already decided that it was policy.
But what is important is the "busted!" quality of them. Like a wife
in denial catching out a husband cheating - it is the lipstick stain on
the underwear. The thing from which people can't avert their gaze. [BOPnews]
4:01:59 PM
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Fragging Incident. And now we start getting people fragging their superior officers in Iraq.
An Army National Guard staff sergeant has been charged
with premeditated murder in a "fragging incident" that killed two
senior officers at a U.S. base near Tikrit, Iraq, last week, the U.S.
military said Thursday.
Fragging is a military term that means the intentional killing of friendly soldiers by another soldier in a wartime setting.
Staff Sgt. Alberto Martinez has been charged with two counts of
murder in the deaths of company commander Capt. Phillip Esposito and
1st Lt. Louis Allen of the New York Army National Guard, the military
said in a statement.
I wonder if they had just told him he would have to stay in Iraq for another six months. [BOPnews]
4:01:00 PM
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McClellan: If You Opposed The War You Don’t Count.
At today’s press briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan was
asked about the letter Rep. John Conyers sent to the President asking
questions about the Downing Street Memo. The letter has been signed by
112 members of Congress and 550,000 concerned citizens.
QUESTION: On another topic, has the president or ...
[Think Progress]
4:00:10 PM
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Memo's Author Backs Annan.
Memo's Author Backs Annan
Maggie Farley | New York | June 16
LAT - The former Cotecna executive who wrote a memo suggesting that
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his aides assured him that his
company would win a United Nations contract now denies he ever
discussed the contract with Annan, his lawyers said in a statement
Wednesday. I still think Annan will end of being pushed out like
Boutros Boutros-Ghali was. Pathetic, if you ask me.
[The Agonist]
10:48:35 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Michael Mussington.
Last update:
7/1/2005; 6:37:34 AM.
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