MIERS HOME STATE BOOSTERISM

I found this at Austin Bay's blog:


Ken Rainey is an attorney in Dallas, Texas. My wife has worked with Ken on several legal matters. Ken knows Harriet Miers well and thinks highly of her qualifications. This morning Ken sent an email to two-dozen of his friends (including my wife). My wife suggested I put Ken’s email up on the blog — so you can bet it’s going up. (Yes, Ken gave her his permission.)
Ken Rainey on Harriet Miers:

Several of you have inquired about my thoughts on Harriet Miers. My answer is simple. Of the 110 or so citizens of this great country who have served on the United States Supreme Court, none have been more decent, God-fearing, dedicated, capable or worthy than she.

I imagine that Marshall, Brandeis, Cardozo or Holmes would give her quite a challenge.

THE CROWD MIERS RUNS WITH

USA Today had a background article on Miers and one name popped out at me: Merrie Spaeth. Here are all the Spaeth mentions:

Despite her high-profile career as a Dallas lawyer and a second career as a counselor to President Bush, the 60-year-old Supreme Court nominee keeps personal details to herself like the "Southern lady she is," says longtime friend Merrie Spaeth.

Miers also underwent a more gradual conversion, from Democrat to Republican. Spaeth, White House director of media relations in President Reagan's first term, arrived in Dallas in 1985 and founded a communications firm. She and Miers became friends and co-founders of what Spaeth's late husband, Tex Lazar, jokingly called the "pushy broads' club" — hard-charging professional women on the rise in male-dominated Dallas.

Miers, Spaeth says, was notable for never indulging in backbiting or humorous putdowns — unless she was the target. "I used to joke, 'Hey, you know all the legal precedents from the last century because that's when your clothes were designed,' " Spaeth says. "That kind of thing, she would laugh at."

Soon, Spaeth noted, Miers began to upgrade her wardrobe with "clothes that commanded respect."

I recalled that Spaeth has something to do with the Shifty Vets' smear campaign against Kerry but according to MediaMatters, she has other ties to the GOP:

Merrie Spaeth, a public relations executive who has "helped coordinate the efforts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," was married to the late Tex Lezar, who was Bush's running mate during the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race. (The governor and lieutenant governor are elected separately in Texas; Bush won and Lezar lost.) Spaeth has also said she is close friends with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), who is one of Rove's top clients. [The New York Times, 8/20/04]


So, Meirs is deeply connected to the Texas GOP and that is one of the main reasons Bush nominated her.

MORE SOLDIERS IN IRAQ SPEAK OUT

Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder continues his excellent reporting. Here are some excerpts:

MUQDADIYAH, Iraq - Sgt. Antonio Molina sat on a rooftop in the pitch of night, scanning the road before him with a high-powered sniper scope, hoping an insurgent would scramble out of a car to lay a bomb and give him a reason to squeeze the trigger. He and three other 3rd Infantry Division snipers were dropped off this week at a house on the outskirts of Muqdadiyah, in an Iraqi province that military officials frequently claim is largely pacified.

"Some people don't get the gravity of the situation here; people in the Green Zone are always trying to paint a rosy picture," said Molina, a 27-year-old sniper from Clearwater, Fla. He was referring to the fortified compound in Baghdad where U.S. officials work. "These politicians are all about sending people to war but they don't know what it's all about, being over here and getting shot at, walking through s--- swamps, having bombs go off, hearing bullets fly by. They have no idea what that's like." "As soon as we leave this place they're all going to kill each other," Molina said at a meeting in his barracks recently. His sniper team commander, Staff Sgt. Donnie Hendricks, agreed: "It's going to be a f------ civil war."

Sitting in the darkness, near the edge of a palm grove, Molina looked at the street in front of him. "The reason why they're fighting us is not Osama bin Laden. They're fighting us because we're here. ... They don't want us here. They just want us to leave. I guess that would be a victory for them," he said. "As far as I can see there's not going to be any victory for us." Sabin, sitting next to him, nodded.

"In past situations you've had a good guy and a bad guy and the troops were impassioned, but now troops just want to go home," Sabin said. "I don't feel like there's a cause. I don't personally think there's a reason for this."

RADIO TIDBITS

On Bennett’s show, many fundie callers were upset about Miers. They wanted a real “Christocrat” nominated, someone like Janice Rogers Brown, and were seemingly looking forward to a bitter confirmation fight that they were dead sure they would win. One caller from a previous day was also upset that some conservatives questioned Miers’ qualifications and suggested that this was that despicable elitism at work. A Lutheran pastor called and pointed out that Luther wrote that he would rather be ruled by a wise Muslim than a foolish Christian.

On Ingraham’s show, some callers did complain that Miers wasn’t the best qualified, some complained about elitism among Miers’ critics. Ingraham aired a clip of Brit Hume (I think) claiming that the critics were elitist snobs, as demonstrated by the fact that many of them went to Harvard. Ingraham pointedly rejects the charge of elitism.

On both shows, there were a few callers that took the position that if Harry Reid approves of Miers, she must be bad choice.

Rove’s coalition is crumbing a little more. The fundies, the movement intellectuals, the low self-esteem crowd and the hard-core political partisans all disagree over the choice of Miers.

O'REILLY SMEARS THE 82ND AIRBORNE

I first found this on Atrios, who linked to Gilliard, who linked to Crooks & Liars.

Here's the disgrace:

O'Reilly: General! You need to look at the Malmedy massacre in World War Two, and the 82nd Airborne who did it!

Here's the truth:

On December 17, 1944, near the hamlet of Baugnez on the height half-way between the town of Malmedy and Ligneuville in Belgium, elements of Waffen-SS Kampfgruppe Peiper encountered the American 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. After a brief battle, the Americans surrendered. About 150 of the prisoners of war were disarmed and sent to stand in a field near the crossroads. Peiper and his leading armoured units then continued their advance. A tank pulled up, and a truck shortly thereafter. A single SS officer pulled out a pistol and shot a medical officer standing in the front row, and then shot the man standing next to the medical officer. Other soldiers joined in with machine guns.

ABORTION & SOCIAL SECURITY

I googled "abortion & social security" and found several wingnut/jeebus sites that claim the shortfall in SS is due to the millions of abortions since 1973.


BIZNETDAILY COMMENTARY
(WorldNet)
Abortion hitting social security hard
Posted: February 16, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Editor's note: Business Reform Magazine is your exclusive source for real biblical answers to real business problems. www.businessreform.com
By Steve Marr© 2005 Business Reform

Abortion may have set America up to implode.

Consider this: As politicians scramble to posture on Social Security reform, a key element is being ignored: the effect of abortion on the SS shortfall.
Since Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion, creating an abortion industry, we’ve seen 45 million unborn babies aborted in this country.
An estimated 17 million of them would be contributing to the economy today, paying taxes, and paying into Social Security; but they will not be there.

January 17, 2005
National COGIC leader blames abortion for social security problems
LINK
National Church of God in Christ board member Bishop George McKinney said Social Security is in trouble today because of abortion.
"Part of the problem that we're seeing now with Social Security has to do with the fact that 40 to 50 million people who have been killed through abortions have not taken their role as productive citizens."
McKinney said the Democratic Party's support for legal abortion and gay marriage has cost it support in the black community.

Abortion and Social Security
By Dena Leichnitz
(At Defending Truth)
Yet people seem to be missing the obvious. There is less Social Security money because there are less workers and there are less workers because 45 million people have been aborted since 1973.

SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY — STOP LEGAL ABORTION!
Jan. 14, 2005
Republican National Coalition for Life
American Life League has hit the nail on the head with a full-page ad in yesterday's Washington Times. According to ALL's press release, the ad explains that since 1973, more than 50 million babies have been killed in the womb. "Those are the very babies that, today, would be living, working — and paying into Social Security," said ALL president Judie Brown. She pointed out that "The government is largely responsible for the Social Security crisis. They have continued to fund abortion giants such as Planned Parenthood, which aid in the destruction of human life."

"SLOTS" ON HANNITY & colmes

As I mentioned below, Bennett came on H&C to try to clean up his mess and I'm going to go through some of his statements.

Slots begins by making a false statement:

A caller suggested he was opposed to abortion because he said if there were more babies there would be, eventually, more tax payers and a larger GNP, a smaller deficit.

The caller limited himself to discussing the implications for Social Security and did not mention GNP or smaller deficit. (I have also heard this argument from callers to other wingnut radio shows. I suspect some other wingnut started this meme but I haven't tracked it down.) He claimed on H&C that:

I said you want to be careful with that kind of argument because someone could postulate a situation where child's not likely to be a productive taxpayer.

Bennett did bring up productivity but he disagreed with the caller not because of productivity concerns but because of (1) our ignorance about the economic effects of abortion and (2) an economic analysis could cut both ways and gave the example from Freakonomics:

All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up.

Next, the caller and Bennett agree that they don't believe the Freakonomic thesis: abortion has led to a lower crime rate. Slots then made his egregious statement about aborting all black babies.

Back to H&C, Slots claimed that:

I said make the case of abortion on the basis of life and protecting life.

This is not true, at least based on the transcript provided by MediaMatters and from my own recall. Slots could have made this argument immediately to the caller but he didn't. He first brought up productivity and then moved to Freakonomics. I also listened to his subsequent show and Slots claimed that he had read Freakonomics. If that were true, he either forgot or skimmed the part about abortion not reducing the number of children born. According to Freakonomics, it simply postpones the births and has a neglible effect on total births.


Slots then tells colmes:

There are real things in the real world, and there are people who believe we should take such monstrous steps.

Here he is referring to the forced abortions of black babies. Sadly, I do believe there are some people who have argued for this but I am not aware of any and it certainly hasn't been widely reported on in the media.

Before saying this, Slots gives colmes some of the context for his statements:

But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime. And we've been talking about all these things lately in the context of New Orleans and other things.

As I wrote below, the intial reports of violence in NO were greatly exaggerated and it seemed to be more important to the wingnuts such as O'Reilly than the incompetence of FEMA and Michael Brown. I also recall a number of threads on the AOL Katrina boards that emphasized the violence. Some of them were flat-out racist.

It seems to me that Slots was also wrapped up in the violent urban black meme and that's why he mentioned aborting all black babies. Bennett says we don't know enough about the general effects of abortion on crime or the economy but HE knows that aborting ALL black babies would reduce the crime rate.

Near the end of the interview, Bennett tells Hannity that on his radio show:

We talk about serious things in a serious way.

This is simply a lie. For example, Bennett never once mentioned the 12/03 Guardian Ad Litem report I sent him that refuted the many hateful lies told about Michael Schiavo.

WINGNUTS ON MIERS

(Both Via Atrios)

Originally from Air America:

David Frum, former White House speechwriter, has come down hard against Miers. From his blog at the National Review:
She rose to her present position by her absolute devotion to George Bush. I mentioned last week that she told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. To flatter on such a scale a person must either be an unscrupulous dissembler, which Miers most certainly is not, or a natural follower. And natural followers do not belong on the Supreme Court of the United States.


Also from the National Review:

HARRIET MIERS [John Podhoretz]I am going to assume that this is a classic Bush head-fake gambit. If I'm wrong, I will spend the weekend banging my head against a concrete wall. This is the Supreme Court we're talking about! It's not a job for a political functionary! Posted at 10:40 AM

"FREAKONOMICS" RESPONDS TO BENNETT

Excerpts:

2) Race is not an important part of the abortion-crime argument that John Donohue and I have made in academic papers and that Dubner and I discuss in Freakonomics. It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement. Empirically, what matters is the fact that abortions are disproportionately used on unwanted pregnancies, and disproportionately by teenage women and single women.

4) When a woman gets an abortion, for the most part it is not changing the total number of children she has; rather, it is shifting the timing so those births come later in life. This is an important fact to remember. One in four pregnancies ends in abortion and this has been true for 30 years in the U.S. But the impact of abortion on the overall birth rate has been quite small.

5) In light of point (4) above, it is hard to even know what Bennett means when he says "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Implicit in his comment is the idea that some external force, like a government, is forcing blacks to have abortions. This is obviously a completely different situation than abortion as we know it today, in which a woman chooses whether or not to have an abortion now, and then starts her family later in life, when her situation is more stable and conducive. The distinction between a woman choosing to control her fertility and the government choosing to limit her fertility is fundamental and people often seem to lose sight of that.


7) There is one thing I would take Bennett to task for: first saying that he doesn't believe our abortion-crime hypothesis but then revealing that he does believe it with his comments about black babies. You can't have it both ways.

8) As an aside, the initial caller's statement is completely wrong. If abortion were illegal, our Social Security problems would not be solved. As noted above, most abortions just shift a child from being born today to a child being born to the same mother a few years later.

WHAT "SLOTS" BENNETT SAID

Media Matters has provided the transcript:

From the September 28 broadcast of Salem Radio Network's Bill Bennett's Morning in America:

CALLER: I noticed the national media, you know, they talk a lot about the loss of revenue, or the inability of the government to fund Social Security, and I was curious, and I've read articles in recent months here, that the abortions that have happened since Roe v. Wade, the lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30-something years, could fund Social Security as we know it today. And the media just doesn't -- never touches this at all.

BENNETT: Assuming they're all productive citizens?

CALLER: Assuming that they are. Even if only a portion of them were, it would be an enormous amount of revenue.

BENNETT: Maybe, maybe, but we don't know what the costs would be, too. I think as -- abortion disproportionately occur among single women? No.

CALLER: I don't know the exact statistics, but quite a bit are, yeah.

BENNETT: All right, well, I mean, I just don't know. I would not argue for the pro-life position based on this, because you don't know. I mean, it cuts both -- you know, one of the arguments in this book Freakonomics that they make is that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up. Well --

CALLER: Well, I don't think that statistic is accurate.

BENNETT: Well, I don't think it is either, I don't think it is either, because first of all, there is just too much that you don't know. But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION, DOD BRANCH

The torture of prisoners held by U.S. forces has exposed another area where corruption holds sway. Recently, there have been two reports by soldiers about their superiors not following up on allegations of torture.

The first is from a former captain in the 82nd Airborne:

The Captain told Human Rights Watch and Senate staff that he had contacted legislators reluctantly, believing it was the only way he could get the army to take him seriously. He also said that "I knew something was wrong" as he watched Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on television in 2004 testifying before a Congressional committee that the U.S. was following the Geneva Convention to the letter in Iraq. The Monday morning after Rumsfeld's testimony, he told Human Rights Watch, "I approached my chain of command." Eventually, the captain says, he approached his company commander, battalion commander and representatives of the Judge Advocate Corps (the military justice system), trying in vain to get clarification of rules on prisoner treatment and the application of the Geneva Convention. At one point, the Captain asserts, his Company commander told him, in effect, "Remember the honor of the unit is at stake," and, "Don't expect me to go to bat for you on this issue ..."

The second is from a sargeant in the Utah National Guard:

For Sgt. 1st Class Michael Pratt it would have been far easier to look away. If war is hell, after all, there are going to be some demons. And since hooking up with the Colorado-based 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq in early 2003, the Utah National Guard soldier had learned it was simpler to ignore questionable actions than report them. But the guardsman couldn't look past what he had seen in the Al Qiem Detention Facility. Not after the death of an inmate whom he believed had been abused by a senior officer. Not even as the Army announced that the prisoner had died "of natural causes."
"I didn't contact my chain of command because the only chain of command I had was Chief Welshofer," Pratt said. "I had reported this kind of action to the 3rd ACR chain of command before, and the response was that every time I reported something, the chain of command would investigate me . . . "I believe that the chain of command was complicit with the unlawful activities, that is why I didn't report it to them."

A LITTLE MORE TRUTH LEAKS OUT

General backs off on US troop cuts in Iraq
Warns of strife as bombs kill 60
By Bryan Bender, Globe Staff September 30, 2005

Casey and Abizaid told lawmakers that training Iraqis to take over for US and allied troops remains a struggle.

''We fully recognize that Iraqi armed forces will not have an independent capability for some time, because they don't have the institutional base to support them," Casey said.

He also said the new Iraqi government was recently unable to pay some of the 67,000 Iraqi police because of a breakdown in Iraqi government operations in some areas, such as Fallujah, where the insurgent presence is heavy.

There are ''continuing reports that the Iraqi police and security forces we're training are substantially infiltrated by insurgents," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in questioning Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld responded, ''It's a problem that's faced by police forces in every major city in our country, that criminals infiltrate and sign up to join the police force."
[ANOTHER CANDIDATE FOR QUOTE OF THE YEAR]

However, the top US intelligence official said yesterday that the make-up and organization of the increasingly violent Iraq insurgency remains a puzzle to US officials 2 1/2 years after the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, acknowledged yesterday that no one knows for sure, saying there is a ''feeling that much more could be still done in terms of finding out now what the nature of that insurgency is."

"SLOTS" RECOVERY APPEARANCE

"Slots" Bennett must really be in trouble. He made an emergency "wipe your butt" appearance on Hannity & Colmes.

Here's just one "Slots" highlight:

FLIP: But the problem, I think, on the liberal side, the democratic side is they attitudinize, they condemn but they don't have a program.

FLOP:We don't put liberals down.